Club Troppo

Well it’s not that beautiful, but then lots of bird’s tails are not that beautiful. But make a few simple evolutionary rules and somewhere amazing things happen.  Like this website on accommodation in Chester that thinks that if it republishes Paul Frijter’s post on engineering solutions to climate change, that it will (presumably) work it’s way up Google’s rankings.  Presumably there’s some method in it. Anyway, it even acknowledges where it plagiarised the content so I guess you can’t complain.

While it’s very unedifying when people are stirred up, I enjoy the odd ‘meta’ discussion, or at least thinking about what the right principles are for discussion in the blogosphere. So I was intrigued to see them eloquently expounded in Crikey today – by virtue of the publication of an email to Crikey.

From: Peter Faris QC
Sent: Tuesday, 7 October 2008
To: ‘Jonathan Green’
Subject: How to deal with hate comments on a blog

Jonathan,

I have changed my mind — I do not think is useful for me to do a Crikey blog. This change of mind is propelled by the comments on the Crikey pages in response to my Henson piece.

The two or three serious, on-topic comments are swamped by a deluge of personal abuse. A good number of the comments are hate comments.

I am as thick-skinned as the next commentator, probably more so, but there is no point in having dialogue with people who have a visceral hatred for you personally. The dialogue necessarily goes nowhere.

I am a long-time blogger. I have been through all this before. That is why I have shut down the comments on my personal blog. People can read it or not — if they dont like it, too bad.

Crikeys venture into online comments whether from published articles (like mine) or from actual blogs will raise these issues.

As I say, I am not being sensitive to the hate comments — its just that by inviting or allowing such comments the debate gets nowhere. I would be very happy for a comment which attacks my argument and demonstrates that I am wrong. Healthy debate is important. The problem with hate comments is that they are neither healthy nor a debate.

Whilst I dont care, Crikey will find that some contributors will not want to expose themselves to this sort of hate and abuse by writing for Crikey. And if they do, they might sue Crikey for publishing defamatory comments.

There are no satisfactory solutions. I went through all of this on my blog some years ago.

The possible solutions are these:

1. Some form of censorship. (Continued)

Congratulations to Andrew Leigh who has scraped onto the list of the top 50 economics blogs.

This came as a feed from The Austrian Economists where one of the five bloggers was excited to come in at 38.

Marginal Revolution was on the top, followed by Econbrowser and then Paul Krugman. Can’t be bothered working out the methodology, these things are too suss in my opinion. On the score of “links to” over the last 90 days, Marginal Revlution scored 57, Econbrowser 47, Krugman 46, The Austrian Economists 9, Andrew Leigh 7.

The man behind our main line of anti-spam defence is hanging up his hat.

Indeed, I am hereby officially announcing that I will no longer support, maintain or further develop Spam Karma (beside some very occasional, very limited poking, until the transition to a self-maintained project is completed).

Luckily he’s relicensed the code under the GPL, which means others may and can pick it up and run with it.

Why is he giving it away? Firstly because of the soul-sucking nature of engaging in an arms race with spammers:

Much as I love the challenge and excitement of coding an anti-spam filter and thinking up new tricks to defeat parasitic life-forms of the web, I just dont have the time anymore. And to be honest, if I did have the time, I probably would have other challenging, exciting new projects Id rather tackle. Im fickle like that.

I can certainly relate to that.

I can relate even more to the next reason:

Wordpress.

I will really try to keep that one short, because I could probably write a novel of that. And it wouldnt be a very interesting read.

In a word: Wordpress kinda sucks nowadays. Its retarded upgrade rate makes it nearly impossible to keep up, in turn making it a constant security threat on my servers. And each time I finally cave in and install one of those mandatory security upgrade, it also installs 600 Ko of other theme compatibility-breaking fluffy crap that I never asked for in the first place. Usually setting the ground for the next cycle of security-exploit-rushed-upgrade. To sum up, its become incredibly bloated and tedious to support. Replacing it on my own servers is very high on my list of things to do (which means somewhat in the first 1000 items).

Having no interest for Wordpress anymore, I have thus very little interest for Wordpress-related development.

Preach it brother.
(Continued)

My abiding and irrational loathing for Wordpress has at last yielded fruit.

Wordpress thrives in the classic shared hosting market, where the LAMP stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — is almost universally installed. It’s free, fairly user-friendly, well-marketed, widely used, has oodles of third party plugins and themes. My only objection to Wordpress is that it’s rubbish¹1. Har Har: Yes, I realise I’m saying this on a Wordpress website. Sometimes the poor workman doesn’t get to choose his tools. [↩].

But that’s not my point today. What Wordpress has given me is the impetus to think, and think, and think some more about what blogging software is and what it should do. The dozen or so computer types who follow Club Troppo have seen my sketches in this direction before. Starting with a pre-history of blogging, I moved through a call for a “next generation”, through to consideration of the various interested participants in the world of blogging software. Later I returned to the topic of Wordpress to complain about its architecture, then foreshadowed this post with remarks about a PHP performance benchmark.

My topic today is a discussion of how and why I think shared hosting is doomed. Let me start with a chart which I think will attract no argument²2. About the charts: All charts in this post are illustrative, not data-driven. So YMMAPWV. [↩]:

(Continued)

It used to be that the daydream of every programmer was to write the next great Unix shell or the next great text editor. Nowadays it seems to be writing the next great web framework.
(Continued)

The more assiduous of those in the Tropposphere may have noticed Fred Argy by his absence in the last few weeks on this blog.  Fred went to hospital for an operation and is recovering well.  I’ve just spoken to him and wished him well.  I hope he’ll be back to his usual thoughtful best on Troppo in a few weeks time.

“Loose Coupling”. Don’t snigger, because loose coupling is one of the most important ideas in software development: that program A should be able to use program B without caring about how B does its job.

Coupling has parallels everywhere in every day life. The economic theory of price signals is one — how firms allocate resources is, in general, supremely unimportant to the buyer. All the buyer knows is the price. Loosely coupled economies are flexible, with individual firms able to connect to each other without having to bear the costs and complexities of knowing how their suppliers and buyers do business. They can stick to their knitting.
(Continued)

Hillary is hopping into Obama any way she knows how. Jonathon Chait takes up the story.

The morning after Tuesday’s primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a memo titled “The Path to the Presidency.” I eagerly dug into the paper, figuring it would explain how Clinton would obtain the Democratic nomination despite an enormous deficit in delegates. Instead, the memo offered a series of arguments as to why Clinton should run against John McCain–i.e., “Hillary is seen as the one who can get the job done”–but nothing about how she actually could. Is she planning a third-party run? Does she think Obama is going to die? The memo does not say.

The reason it doesn’t say is that Clinton’s path to the nomination is pretty repulsive. She isn’t going to win at the polls. Barack Obama has a lead of 144 pledged delegates. That may not sound like a lot in a 4,000-delegate race, but it is. Clinton’s Ohio win reduced that total by only nine. She would need 15 more Ohios to pull even with Obama. She isn’t going to do much to dent, let alone eliminate, his lead.

That means, as we all have grown tired of hearing, that she would need to win with superdelegates. But, with most superdelegates already committed, Clinton would need to capture the remaining ones by a margin of better than two to one. And superdelegates are going to be extremely reluctant to overturn an elected delegate lead the size of Obama’s. The only way to lessen that reluctance would be to destroy Obama’s general election viability, so that superdelegates had no choice but to hand the nomination to her. (Continued)

Guest Post by Dan Walsh of Kwoff.com.au.

For some time I’ve straddled two digital worlds. My ‘hi geek’ dual monitor setup allows me to read my daily dose of Crikey on one screen and the constant stream of tech news from Digg.com on the other. One world is determined by an editor, the other by the wisdom/madness of crowds. I love both, and cant live without either.

I know I’m not alone.

Australians are serious contributors to, and consumers of, ‘Social News’ sites like Digg. They produce no actual content but act as a digital index that ranks submissions based on votes. Anyone can vote and people can submit whatever they like – blog, picture, video, mainstream news etc. The result is filtered content, ‘wheat from the chaff’ style; it helps sort through the deluge that is online content.

Equally, Australians have taken to new media sites such as Club Troppo and Crikey in droves, our online participation rate is high. Telstra bandwidth issues aside, we are excellent digital citizens.

However, the two worlds arent currently mixing all that well. If i try and apply Australian issues to offshore Social News sites we simply do not rate. Unless Kevin Rudd calls Barack Obama on a gold plated Iphone it doesnt cut thru.

Stephen Mayne and I spent some time discussing this earlier this year and lured Greg Barns on board to help us launch a local Social News experiment called www.kwoff.com.au.

The site has been up for the last month and has attracted some interesting items, users and content, but has a way to go. Club Troppo readers represent Australia’s digital ‘Upper Class’ and we’d love to see you throw a couple of suggestions/brickbats at us.

We hope to evolve the site as we try and position ourselves in a field of similar services, somewhere to the side of MySpace and slightly overlapping Facebook and Del.icio.us (note: i’m an avid del.icio.us user and think it serves Australian users well).

The exciting array of blogs and ezines that have arrived in recent years provide an original, alternative to mainstream news here in Australia. However, they can be hard to find for the uninitiated and time starved. Mainstream news sites, often variations on an AAP theme, provide the easy first and last option for many Australians. I’d like to blur the line between the two.

Social media can present a view of both worlds to those without the time to spend the day searching for interesting online content. Gems can be found on mainstream news sites but many more are buried in the blogosphere, Flickr, YouTube and the like. Collectively we hold the key.