Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Google: Preventing comment spam. Bravo! 

My narrative of how this came to be, why it's important, including patches for Manila so it supports the new protocol. 

To quickly see how it works, do a View Source on this page. The rel="nofollow" attributes on the anchor elements tell the search engine not to add to page rank for the pages pointed to. This also satisfies a long-time user feature request for a way to point to something without bumping the target's rank. Scoble spotted this first, and says he'll now point at things he otherwise wouldn't.  

The cool thing about the anti-comment-spam initiative that's coming together is that it is a coming-together. For once the companies are working with each other to solve a problem for users. Yay! Now we need more of this and we need it in a more timely fashion. Remember when you're firing salvos at each other that there are users and developers around, inventing new stuff, and doing their work, and they're the reason you work so hard, not your competitors. Last time it got so bad that one company went out of business, the other got convicted of antitrust, and everyone got flushed in a stock market crash. Keep the focus on solving problems for customers, for real, don't just pay it lip service, and everything will work out well. 

Today's song: "My name is MacNamara, I'm the leader of a band." 

Seymour Hersh: "In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran." 

Sitting in the kitchen talking with my father about Bush's plan to "save" Social Security. I ask hey what do you think? He wants to go even further, to cash in all his future Social Security payments, now, at a reasonable discount. "I'm guessing that would amount to about $200,000," he says. "Then I would take the money and invest it in Europe where it would be safe from the Bush shenanigans, like budgetary deficits. There are probably tens of thousands, if not millions, of people who want to do the same." 

Interesting puzzle from GM. More or less approximates the route I took from west to east. I even saw one of the billboards, but I don't remember where or what the word was. I thought it was weird enough to remember it. Anyway, this is the kind of thing the blogosphere should be able to solve in short order. 

Jay Rosen's paper for the Webcred conference. I have to read this carefully because I'm the first to tear him to bits respond to the paper at the conference. I'm actually going to write my own brief, combining my various blog posts with a closer that ties it all together, explains how blogs and pros relate to each other, in the real world, not in never-never land. 

Just booked my hotels in Boston. I'll be staying in town after the conference, through the 27th. After that, I really don't know what's next. Maybe I should look for a job. Probably not. Heh. Anyway, I do want to spend a few weeks writing software, lots of ideas came from the meeting with EchoDitto last week, and I did promise to ship an open source outliner built from the Frontier codebase. Maybe some random place in rural New England, or maybe back to Florida. I have noticed that it is incredibly cold here.  

I had a phone talk earlier today with John Palfrey at Berkman about the conference at Harvard on Friday and Saturday. As usual we see eye-to-eye on the goals, there will be some distractions for sure. I will try to see the discussion taking place broadly, on the Web, not just in the room. I don't expect to make converts of the professionals in the room, and I will try hard not to air past grievances. The goal is to gain a better understanding of what credibility means in journalism, now that both pros and amateurs are doing it. How can we all gain from the new competition.  

Thursday is Not One Damn Dime Day in the USA. 

Inside the new Airbus 380, unveiled yesterday in France. 

Jon Udell interviewed Adam Bosworth on last week's Gillmor Gang which I heard yesterday driving north on the Jersey Turnpike. Adam talks about a distributed query system that, to me, sounds a lot like Gnutella.  

FeedReader runs on the Pocket PC. 

Paolo: "I have decided that vintage iPods are cool." 

Speculation that Technorati and Feedster are fodder for Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. Yesterday I read that Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, are destined to be aquired by Yahoo, since Microsoft and Google both have blogging tools.  

TidBITS review of last week's MacWorld Expo in SF. 

Frank Paynter finishes his review of people at the Harvard blogging conference with the letters T through Z.  

Doc Searls: "Apple is the Microsoft of music."