dive into mark

Google is sending cease-and-desist letters to people who host Google-to-RSS converters. That lasted much longer than I thought it would. As usual, the article wanders off into the same old tired BigCo/LittleCo/Can’t We All Just Get Along territory the minute the reporter comes into contact with the usual suspects. And people wonder where I get my inspiration.

It’s so depressing to see a whole new crop of newbies fall for this shit. It’s like sitting on the sidelines in a high-traffic tourist trap, watching The Creepy Guy At The Bar hook starry-eyed blondes who will eventually know better, but haven’t yet developed the internal warning system that makes the rest of us gag on his recycled pickup lines. BigCo Bad. LittleCo Innovate. Hey baby, you wanna come back to my place and help me Stick It To The Man? Of course I’ll still link to you in the morning. It’s just depressing. I try not to think about it too much.

In other news, the W3C has a link checker. It announces itself as W3C-checklink/3.9.2 [3.17] libwww-perl/5.64. It does not respect robots.txt and is therefore banned in .htaccess with the rule

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^W3C-checklink
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

There is another permathread brewing about the role of the backchannel. A backchannel is a conversation among audience members during a presentation, or any other unofficial discussion during a meeting. I have had backchannel discussions during face-to-face meetings, conference calls, and (most often) during presentations at conferences. Usually it takes the form of IRC, although any real-time collaboration tool would work. The point is that some people are having a secondary off-the-books conversation, generally talking about the people who are having the primary on-the-books conversation.

I can not be any clearer: I wholeheartedly support this. Despite hysterical objections from the usual suspects, I have seen the benefits of the backchannel firsthand. At ApacheCon last fall, Ken Coar announced during the initial keynote that there were IRC channels set up for the conference (one for each presentation room, and a main one for the conference in general). When I presented, I went so far as to put the address of the IRC channel on my first slide, to remind people where they could talk about me behind my back for the next 45 minutes. A friend in the audience forwarded me a copy of the channel transcript afterwards, and I discovered that several of the best questions came out of discussion in the backchannel.

There are people who know, and there are people who raise their hand and ask questions out loud, and they aren’t necessarily the same people. But if these people get together in real time, a question gets asked that otherwise wouldn’t get asked, and it gets answered, and everyone benefits. Real-time is important; after the presentation ends and everyone shuffles off to the next one, it’s too late.

The downside is that if the presenter is boring, people will use the backchannel to talk about something else. And if the presenter is an idiot, they will get skewered in real time. I’ve seen this too, at the same conference, when a non-technical presenter from one of the conference’s sponsors gave a lunch talk about their newfound commitment to open source. It quickly became clear that he didn’t know the difference between copyright and patents, and he kept tripping up on acronyms like J2EE and GPL (which he repeatedly called GLP). Don’t talk to me about your newfound commitment to open source if you can’t even spell GPL. He got viciously skewered in the backchannel, and he deserved it. At least lunch was good.

In other news, can you describe syndication in 10 words or fewer? Fewer, people, fewer. Not less. From The Elements of Style: Misused Expressions:

Less refers to quantity, fewer to number. His troubles are less than mine means His troubles are not so great as mine. His troubles are fewer than mine means His troubles are not so numerous as mine. It is, however, correct to say, The signers of the petition were less than a hundred, where the round number, a hundred, is something like a collective noun, and less is thought of as meaning a less quantity or amount.

Since we are counting a precise number of words, it is 10 words or fewer. Anyway, here’s how I would describe syndication in 10 words: Smart bookmarks that tell you when your favorite sites change. Never mind that iCab had this smart bookmark feature years ago, using the amazing but underappreciated features of HTTP. Never mind that it conflates syndication with how a particular class of aggregators works today. Never mind that there’s more to syndication than that, especially if you’re syndicating full content or non-site-specific things like Google search results. Doesn’t matter. It identifies a problem that many just-better-than-novice web surfers have (now that I’ve bookmarked it, how do I know when to go back to it?) and proposes a solution. A fucked up solution advocated by lipstick hippies in a pathetic attempt to overthrow the tyranny of the evil BigCo browser manufacturers, but a solution nonetheless. What do you want in 10 words or less?