March 2005 Archives

Following what will (at best) be considered as a colossal error of judgment from Matt Mullenweg, who ran a link farm (aka "search engine spam") on wordpress.org, Google has responded by removing from its index more than 160,000 dummy pages of pseudo articles published on wordpress.org and nullified its PageRank. This last punishment is, as dr Dave says, the equivalent of getting spanked publicly on Times Square with everybody watching. "Unlucky in cards", indeed. [Update: Google has reinstated the PageRank of wordpress.org after the site was cleaned up.]

I have a personal take on this subject, simply as a neighbor of wordpress.org (both sites are hosted by TextDrive):

If that's true it's really ironic to see WP's main developer involved in SEOs dirty tricks, knowing that some of those guys are responsible for all the shit-load [Ed. i.e. comment spam and referrer spam] that hit our sites and decrease TxD servers availability. Justifying this by "the money is helping to cover his costs and hire their first employee" is clearly not enough. Why not sell heroine on the streets then, it might be even more lucrative? The end does not justify the means.

And that's  also bad for TextDrive.

"Do not attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" as the adage says. Here I'm more inclined to think about a big error of judgment.

See also Suw Charman's take on the Wordpress linkfarm furore.

Update: Matt has written a long answer and a short summary:

I guess the problem with a long piece is many just skim it, and the more words there are the more chance there is for the meaning to be lost. I’ve given a lot of thought to putting things as succintly as possible: Knowing what I knew then, I would probably make the same decision; knowing what I know now I wouldn’t even consider it. Not thinking through all the ramifications was a big mistake. So was not having more community dialog from the beginning, which would have caught this earlier. I am extremely sorry for both, and it won’t happen again. Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive. Amazingly, WordPress has gotten more donations in the last 4 days then it has in the past year — what an incredible community.

It's good to see that the WP community was supportive.

The nice folks at 37Signals who already gave us Basecamp and Ta-da list, are teasing us with a preview of Backpack, their next web application. Looking at the name and others' comments, my bet is on a personal storage space, "a place to put stuff. Thoughts, files, ideas, lists, you know, stuff." as Justin French puts it. Those guys are set to give web applications their lettres de noblesse and I love that.

Or am I? According to Paul Graham, to start a startup you have to be:

Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.

Damn, I turned 39 today. Too late! I guess I'm stuck to the "conventional working life" of a corporate drone then ;-).

And yet another web publishing system: Symphony, "The biggest thing to hit web publishing since the keyboard." A pretty bold statement for something that exposes its users to WYSIFUC! At first sight (I haven't tested it beyond the online demo) this isn't going to ease my authoring pain (plus I'm not buying the XSL argument, at least not without an excellent XML WYSIWYG editor that even my favorite pointy-haired manager could use without loosing his latin).

Really, WTF with old school text editors? Some people say I'm exaggerating when I say that HTML did drive us at least ten years backwards in terms of GUI, but we had WYSIWYG text editing with Mac Write 21 years ago. Why can't we have something decent in the browser today?

Let's continue this way and the next thing I'll know is that we'll be having our web pages "typed in HTML in India"...

P.S. There is one really funny bit in their requirements:

Why doesn't Symphony support Internet Explorer?

Internet Explorer is filled with security problems and is not standards compliant. By supporting standards compliant browsers only, we can allow some funky stuff like the use of pseudo elements and attribute selectors to minimise on unnecessary <div> and <span> tags to save on file-size and also concentrate on proper, semantic code. Internet Explorer also doesn't support PNGs, an open standard image format.

A colleague asked me what I think of podcasting. Why do you want to start polluting my ears when we're obviously not finished with occupying the eyes? Try papercasting.

Can't wait for nosecasting, once one of those pre-bubble companies that tried to sell internet-enabled-odor-making devices catches the hype wave. Really Smelly Syndication™ will be a lot of fun!

Spotted on Avions de ligne, Boeing is about to license Movable Type for 10,000 of its employees (about one third of its workforce). This will be a nice experience after the pseudo-blog of its VP of marketing.

John Robb, who's been publishing his blog under his name for quite some time, gives wannabee bloggers some controversial advice, i.e. Don't Blog in Public:

Open note to people who are thinking about writing a public weblog:  it will, in the vast majority of cases, impair your chances of getting your next job.  If you do start one, don't put your name on it (anywhere).  If you do, it will likely cost you economically for the rest of your life.

His stance sounds quite manichean to me and as usual the issue isn't just black and white. Of course you need to be careful about your publications because the internet has an awfully long memory, but I remain optimistic about the positive side of blogging, such as increasing your visibility, your network and get new opportunities. I've experienced all of that since I started this blog, so my experience is the opposite of what John depicts. Plus I'm an engineer, I belong to one of those technical communities where communicating with your peers is a necessity, part of the normal (even expected) behavior, and there is no mystery why they are over-represented amongst the "oldest" bloggers. Doing that anonymously would be counter-productive, if not ridiculous.

Surely, there are things I've published here (and probably more on my French blog, which is more personal than this one) that can irk some visitors, but then they are not likely to be the kind of people I want to do business with anyway. Being upfront and open is a conscious choice for me, or more correctly a natural trait of my personality, and I see no reason why I should act differently in public wether it's face to face or on the web. Or may be I'm just fed up with the "politically correct" world of faceless masks with corporate suits, and the blogs are a new haven where I can breeze some fresh oxygen. Something tells me I'm not the only one looking for a change to the conventional wisdom that to be happy, you'd better remain hidden.

The above graph represents the number of hits that have been turned down by my host (TextDrive) through ModSecurity, before they hit my site in the last 7 days. Those hits are mainly link spams of three sorts: comments, TrackBacks and referrer spam (the latter seems to be the most prominent, comment spam counted for 336 hits and only 6 TB spams in the past 7 days). I'm quite please to report that in the past two months, only 9 comment spams and 2 TrackBack spams, all posted manually, have found their way to this blog, only to be removed in less than 10 minutes and granted a place in my host mod_security rules to the benefit of thousands of other hosted sites in the farm. I'm quite confident that all of the automated spams have failed their target.

As far as I can see, the biggest pain of automated spam is its scale, currently equivalent to DoS attacks. But automation is also its main weakness because it makes things easier to screen for patterns and block those attacks as soon as it starts hitting one site (and you can setup honeypots as automated traps). By sharing the same rules among a web farm, you protect all sites hosted there. Take this one level up and by sharing rules amongst hosts in real time, the internet community could make the game significantly harder (and costlier) for spammers. This will eventually be done by the agile hosts out there. It's still an arms race, but why would the spammers always have the biggest weapons?