January 2006 Archives

New update (Feb. 4): Gilles de Robien takes his initial decision back and turns it into a 6 months suspension (compared to a permanent revocation). This reversal comes after two weeks of campaigning on French blogs (which led to the exposure of this affair in mainstream media) and the quick recognition by the ministry that the initial sanction was totally out of proportion.

Important update (shamelessly copied from Dangeureuse Trilingue's post about the Gardfielddgate):

In a press release of 2006-01-20, the Minister of Education, Gilles de Robien, announced that « given [Garfieldd’s] record of service, the Minister will soon take a decision that is more commensurate with the civil servant’s misconduct » (my translation). In plain English, that means that Garfieldd’s dismissal can be expected to be reversed and commuted into a lesser sentence. Considering that M. de Robien signed off the dismissal only a very short time ago, the blogs’ mobilisation might well have had an impact on this. Anyway, let’s stay tuned, and hugs to Garfieldd.

This is one post I won't have to write: Blogs and institutional homophobia in France. Go read it. I think this story is just unfolding as a potential national scandal revealed through blogs. It has already generated hundreds of posts and comments in just a couple of days. Homophobia has certainly played a role (because had it be a woman, or pics of women in panties, no one would have dared to bring pornography on the table). But I tend to see this more as a giant clash between the old rusted French institutions wrapped in their cult of secrecy and the boundaries of freedom of expression that individuals are expanding through their blogs.

We call our ministry of National Education the mamoth. It clearly deserves its nickname, and it's rigid as a fossile. Welcome in the era of personal publishing, old France!

P.S. another one in English: Fired for… Blogging?

Over at the DrunkenBlog, the drunkenbatman gives a final farewell to trackback. He joins Tom Coates, Jeremy Zawodny and yours truly in thinking that TrackBacks are dead. I silently killed them months ago, oh the joy of not wasting time cleaning up thousands of spammy pings everyday! I agree with Drunkenbatman that TrackBack Extreme™ is not there yet, even Google's link: feature isn't that good of an option since it takes ages for this information to be updated in Google's index. From what I see here, determined people are used to come and manually link to their post in the comments of the relevant entry, so all the joy is not gone while we're waiting for Puppies Extreme™.

This said, I would not necessarily recomment everyone to get rid of TrackBacks on their blog. It depends if and how badly one is hit by spam, basically one needs to balance the benefits of having TrackBacks and their inconvenience (time, mainly, but sometimes reputation when your blog runs listing of offensive spam before you can clean it) of manually handling them because the design makes them inherently insecure and prone to abuse. Sure you can take some counter measures, like running your site under mod_security (often a good idea) or moderating all TrackBacks a priori but those are still time-consuming and not completely spammer proof. Eat your own TrackBack food and decide for yourself!

Toni Schneider quits Yahoo! where he was heading the Yahoo! Developer Network to become the CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com that was formed last fall by Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of WordPress. "Automattic is poised to become a leading provider of blogging services" he writes. I wasn't too far off when I wrote in a few predictions to watch WordPress and others from the Open Source movement jump in the blogging service arena and compete head to head with Six Apart and alike. Another confirmation, and closer from home (Paris!), Olivier Meunier has published the roadmap for DotClear 2 (it's in French, but I will get back to it in the following weeks, as DotClear is really set to become the European challenger in this space).

I'm used to report phishing when I get one in my mailbox. Last Thursday (Jan 5) I received one attempt disguised as an eBay email asking me to verify my identity. I went to eBay.com, only to discover that they've removed all practical means to report such abuse. In order to report a security issue to eBay, you have to go through a registration process, which is utterly ridiculous.

So I reviewed the source of the email, did a whois on the phisher site, found that it was hosted by Telefonica in Spain and reported it to the abuse address listed on the IP range in the whois. Today I received confirmation from Telefonica that they shut the site down. Kudos to them for this, and taking the time to reply to me! eBay should thank them too, they care more about the security of eBay customers than eBay itself, apparently.

Speaking of phishing, I just discovered this anti-phishing group (heh, I see eBay has a prominent place on the sponsors list). Also Netcraft has an anti-phishing toolbar. I've tested neither of those, but I think that if there was some internet-scale way to submit a suspicious email and get the providers co-operate a bit, phishing attempts would not fly long before being caught and stopped.

The above graphic shows visits, page views (excluding of RSS feeds), bandwidth and hits on this blog for the past 123 days (from Aug 31 to Dec 31, 2005). I couldn't do more this year because Google killed Urchin and left my host TextDrive in limbo, depriving thousands of customers from their stats. I resorted back to the excellent Summary to crunch the logs I could retrieve on the server from 2005. Anyway... Here are the main figures:

The audience has been growing well month after month, the best one being December 2005 with 266,713 pages, 489,106 hits, 44,802 unique hosts, 212,312 visits and 4.7GB of data served (from my two blogs aggregated). My English blog home page currently runs at 1,698 views/day and the French home page at 1,984 views/day and both aggregated attract a daily average of 6,371 visits, 14,633 hits, 7,666 page views, 3,021 downloads (mainly RSS feeds which currently run at a daily 1,776 hits for the French posts, 884 hits for the English posts and 302 hits for the linksblog).

Over the past 4 months of 2005:
- 41.2% of visits came from France, 37.3% from the USA, 2.44% from Canada, 2.32% from Belgium, 1.7% from Germany (top 5 on a total of 141 countries according to GeoIP).
- The OS split is (visits): 43.4% Windows XP, 20.2% Macintosh PPC, 10% Windows 2000 and 7.3% various Unices (6.9% Linux).
- The browser split is (visits): 16.2% MSIE 6.x, 15.4% Mozilla Firefox 1.x, 1% Safari. Safari RSS counts for 1.6%, NetNewsWire 2.x for 8.33%, NewsGator Online for 1.62% and SharpReader 1.41%.
- 157,493 unique IPs made 783,519 visits (583,410 one page visit). Known robots payed 167,131 visits (note that Summary includes RSS aggregators into robots, so it's not just search engines, Google visited 23,665 times while Yahoo! accounted for 99,437 visits and MSN only 3,153. NewsGator made 14,055 visits and Bloglines 10,500 visits).
- the top 10 search phrases are, in order: padawan, je t'aime, journée mondiale contre le sida, joyeux noel film, hi ive a new mail address, flash text editor, charme, gandi, tinymce, contrat de nouvelle embauche.

Today, i.e. exactly 3 years and one month after the launch of padawan.info, I have published 862 posts that gathered 1043 comments on my English blog, 1148 links on my English links blog, and 535 posts which received 2378 comments on my French blog. The ratio comments/post is still significantly higher on my French blog (4.4) than on my English one (1.2), up from respectively 2.6 and 0.74 comments/post in the first year respectively (so the conversations are improving on both blogs, but the fact that the French are more vocal and my French blog more personal and political than the English one still need to be factored in).

Quite some improvement compared to the stats from my first blogging year.

My CV has been downloaded 200 times in the past four months, but I'm not going to disclose how many job offers I've got in return :-P. However, and that will conclude this post, this blog has been a terrific networking tool and I'm amazed at the number and richness of the connections it allowed me to get (blogs do favor networking in meatspace real life). It landed me a book deal with the first professional editor in France (my book on business blogging, titled Blogueur d'entreprise, just got out yesterday!). Another key event in 2005 was when the entire top management of a certain company discovered that I had a blog, 2 years and 7 months after I started it :-P (it was part of my big experiment, and a very interesting moment indeed). For one more year, I can say that blogging is good for one's career.

This is a first for this blog but here's the best blond joke I've ever seen. Enjoy!

I've just moved this blog to a new server, which hopefully will have a better uptime than the previous one (crossing fingers until they bleed). I had some glitches during the move, so if anything looks weird^* on your end, please let me know.

(*) apart from the look & feel of this site, that is ;-). Long overdue redesign in progress.

IMHO there's something missing from Jason Calacanis' predictions for 2006. In a list of 20 predictions, he writes:

10. Half of the indie blog search engines will shut down, go out of business, or just stagnate as the major portals take over this space.

10.B No blog search engines will be bought in 2006 because every major buyer has already built one.

11. Half of the indie RSS readers will shut down, go out of business, or just stagnate as the major portals take over this space.

11.B No RSS readers will be bought in 2006 because every major buyer has already built one.

Paraphrasing him, here's an easy take at what's missing for "Blogs 2006" :

Half of the blog software vendors will shut down, go out of business, or just stagnate as the major portals take over this space.

No blog software vendor will be bought in 2006 because every major buyer has already built (or bought) one.

Google bought Blogger, Yahoo! did Yahoo! 360, Microsoft did MSN Spaces. Six Apart snatched Live Journal, but LJ is already stagnating (I don't know what the stats for TypePad are). What are the expansion (or exit) possibilities for blog software editors? Basically:

• Aggregate "eyeballs" for ad revenue / mindshare / white label licensing / selling out to a major portal (less and less viable), that's the Six Apart model. There's potential in white label licensing to media, portals and hosts. Hosts could be tempted to buy a blog software editor (and, may be, watch Nokia buy Six Apart, unless they finally decide to honor the plural form of Lifeblog compatible providers on this list).
• Develop and sell a software, like ExpressionEngine (pMachine, branded more like a CMS), or Movable Type (Six Apart) or Traction (Traction Software). Those who are targetting mass blogging will badly suffer as Open Source contenders such as WordPress and DotClear continue to release new and better versions (if Six Apart continues to slow down Movable Type in favor of TypePad, it will just confirm this trend). Those who are targetting corporate blogging (like Traction) may have some slack, provided they abandon their variable "per seat" licensing model that all CFOs universally hate.
• Make viable open source products: watch WordPress and other free blogging software secure funding and offer both installable and hosted versions (wordpress.com is already there). Companies will finally be able to create blog farms with free software that vendors software didn't allow them to do, and the white label revenue stream will decrease as corporations are less and less afraid to integrate open source software (especially on the web).

I know I'm missing a lot more (I just used Jason's list as an easy way to tackle the blog software space). What are your predictions for blogs in 2006?

Or happy new year of the dog, as Nurri & Adam reminded me (last year was the year of the cock, and no one has answered my little joke about the French rooster).

Bonne et heureuse année, my friends.