Obama Support: Just a question, if you can deal with it.

Something I've often found strange is the way in which some can argue a point at length and with passion, and at the same time ignore its simplest implications. For the last seven years, much has been said about the Bush administration's alleged shredding of the bill of rights, and I understand that some basis for this has existed in fact. If so, then the implication of this is that the office of the presidency has become far more powerful than the founding fathers ever intended, and dangerously so. Civil liberties are supposed to be a natural outgrowth of the system, not a gift to be granted or denied on the whim of any one man.

That having been said, what do we now see a large chunk of the democratic party ready and eager to do? Fast track somebody with a very limited political past into that dangerously enhanced office. The question for the would-be supporters is this: how much does one really ever know about somebody, until he has established a track record of performance? Without that, what does one have to go on? A platform? The discarding of those on attainment of office has been the stuff of bitter jokes longer than most of us have been alive. Some nice speeches? Good writers are easily hired. The fact that he's a passably good looking black man who can hold a crowd's attention?

If that's all it takes, then maybe I should add a second question. Is this the presidency of the United States we're talking about, or the presidency of somebody's high school student council? Because if our standards of choice are something so superficial as how fashionably beddable a candidate is, I think our electorate might be taking that collective trip back to high school, and not even back to senior year at that, at a time when the stakes are a lot higher than those represented by the choice of next year's prom theme.

The usual overwrought and factually unsupported charges of racism may now begin.

Rooting out nofollow and asking for a little assistance

Recently I wrote about the unhappy surprise of discovering that a number of social networking sites that I had established presences on used "rel=nofollow" tags on their homepage links, explaining why this practice is unethical. I was even more unpleasantly surprised to discover, as I read this post on Tips 4 blogspot, that said tag is automatically entered in the links on visitor posts to Blogger. As I discovered by quickly unrendering the redirect used by a number of Typekey equipped blogs, Typekey seems to do this, too.

The good news is that as the owner of this blog, I seem to be able to remove those tags by taking them out of my template, which I just did. I do appreciate civil feedback on this blog, and am more than glad to show my appreciation by doing my part to help give your site a boost. All I ask, other than the obvious "please don't leave spam", including the barely disguised Bravenet guestbook variety, where somebody says "great site" on one's post about architectural preservationism and then links to his discount pharmacy page (just how much Xanax does America need) is that you please keep my journal in mind when you start installing a few links of your own.

Getting people to notice a new blog is very difficult, and there is something a little discouraging about going to Technorati and noticing that all but one of the references to one's blog appear on one's other blogs. Nobody knows you're there, so nobody links to you, so nobody finds you ... chicken, egg ... you know the drill. The fact that I'm not really very far to either the Right or the Left probably doesn't help, either. A bushite (bushie? bushwhacker?) who visits a neocon site where the virtues of torturing prisoners are being extolled knows within seconds that he is among his own. He settles in, he's at home, and already starting to network in less time than one needs to fry an egg. Knowing what a Centrist blog is about, on the other hand, takes time. Maybe this is one reason why one finds so few of them. With your help, at least there can be one more of them that isn't completely invisible.






ADDENDUM: On posting my thanks to the blog where I found the suggestion, I found rel=nofollow appearing in the links in my post. The problem has not been fixed at all.

Spiders on Drugs

Vital information for the kids of today in this instructional video from apeman888

Keep an eye on these sites ...

... and I don't mean that in a good way. If you recently visited one of my mashable sites, you might have noticed that the list of social networking sites I have in that left bottom sidebar has grown shorter. There's a good reason for that.

I've started posting to my StumbleUpon blog. If you haven't used Stumbleupon, then I'll start by saying that any brief description fails to explain it. It's a site for sharing links and reviewing the sites linked to. That doesn't sound like much, does it? But it is. One installs the toolbar, clicks on the Stumbleupon icon (next to which is the word "stumble"), and is instantly transported (yes, there's the cliche you were waiting for) to a random site that fits into one of the areas of interest one has listed in one's profile. A lot of these are really good sites, places you'd never hear of, and a lot of them are really creative and different (yes, more cliches, wow do I stink). The sites are natural conversation pieces, and where one finds conversation pieces, one tends to find some sort of conversation, and that's one place where community begins - something which Stumbleupon encourages, providing options to review other member's blogs and to link to them by becoming their fans. There are a few twits, but they seem ignorable enough, and so far at least, the crowd seems friendly and if I've known them too briefly to comment on how bright they are, at least they have generally good taste, and that, at the very least, is something. (Third cliche. I'm on a roll - and there's the forth).

What, then, is the problem? As I started posting reviews, I would sometimes have cause to link the review that I was writing to relevant outside source material, sometimes commentary on one of my sites, sometimes not - and noticed that the system was inserting these tags into my links:

rel="nofollow"

That tag tells the search engine spiders to ignore the link. Some bloggers have been putting that tag to use in the comments section for their blogs in an attempt to dissuade spammers from posting comment spam, by removing the search engine boost the homepage link attached to their comments would give to their sites. This, of course, is futile, as it ignores the reality that nothing seems to dissuade spammers, who've been submitting comment spam to moderated guestbooks for years, even guestbooks with clearly posted notices that "all comments are screened before they appear", meaning that nobody other than the soon to be annoyed site owner will ever see the spam. The spammers hit, anyway; spamming is not economically rational behavior in practice. These same bloggers ignore the fact that they are harming somebody, and I'm not talking about the spammers. How about those who do take the time to think out and post legitimate comments to their blogs and are now, for no good reason, being denied the benefit of those links? Is that really fair to them? That little boost is what gets a lot of new sites and new blogs going. But we're in the middle of a fad, and reason is going to have little impact on the Groupthink.

Stumbleupon seems to have followed suit, which is a little bothersome, but not quite what I'm complaining about. This morning, out of idle curiosity I checked the code for the page on my Stumbleupon site on which I get my one and only linkback to my homepage (I use my mashable site for that), and found that link, too, had the rel=nofollow tag. Stumbleupon's management had been playing me and many other users as well, by offering a linkback that wasn't really a linkback at all.

As I explained in my not altogether unfavorable review of Stumbleupon, posted on their own site, the problem with that goes well beyond the fact that my other sites are seeing no significant benefit from their association with my Stumbleupon site, while my Stumbleupon site has certainly been boosted in the search engines by the fact that those other sites link to it. Having to relocate my pages after the plug pulling incident at Internet Trash I mention over on my main page and then having to regain the visibility that I had lost gained me a little practical experience dealing with issues of search engine optimization. One of the lessons I learned the hard way involved the severe drawbacks of having some of my pages link to some of my other pages, where the links are not reciprocated; creating "terminal pages" as I call them. I found that the terminal pages would soar in the listings, staying high for a long time, at the expense of the nonterminal pages, which would plummet; as if the spiders, on finding their way to the terminal pages, would get stranded there and forget where they had been previously. I soon started making a special point of not designing my sites that way. Now I find that while I wasn't looking, Stumbleupon slipped in a little code that had the effect of causing me to do just that.

I came back with a measured punitive response. I have enjoyed using Stumbleupon, seeing some real value in that site, so I'm not going to shun it or urge others to do so, but I'm also not going to be a sucker and continue reciprocating what I was never really being given. Blogger allows its users a lot of freedom in the design of their blogs and the writing of their posts, and one of the freedoms it gives is the freedom to tailor make one's links. If you unrender this site and take a look at my links, you'll find that every link I have to Stumbleupon has that same rel=nofollow tag that I was so displeased to find Stumbleupon putting to such sneaky and really almost unheard-of use. The linkback to the user's homepage is sacred. A provider should not touch that, ever, because aside from the inherent sleaziness of seeking to gain a consideration that one is sneakily refusing to reciprocate, one has the fact that the gain in visibility for one's sites in general is the only way one is repaid the time and work one puts into posting to these sites. For them to fail to respect this, especially in the way they did, then, is unethical and for me to overlook this particular breach of ethics would be foolish. Where I could not reciprocate with rel=nofollow tags of my own, I removed the link to Stumbleupon altogether, and resolved never to link to that site again from Tribe or anywhere else where one can not edit the HTML used for the establishment of external links.

I found myself even more curious than before - who else was doing this? I've recently established presences on a number of social networking sites with the intention of putting them all to use. Most are still sitting idle because I have a lot of sites and haven't had time to get to all of them, yet, but I wanted to make sure that I'd didn't miss an opportunity to claim my own name on these sites before somebody else did. I'd much rather be the user "joseph_dunphy" than the user "joseph_dunphy_69260" or something like that, as the latter is just ugly, and when one's name is as common as mine is, that becomes a real concern. I thus had a major incentive to establish myself quickly, which I did, but having done so, I then was faced with the question of what each of these sites would be for. I don't want my blog at Wordpress to be a clone of my journal at Blogger. I want each of my sites to have a purpose and a character of its own. This one, for example, which I finally gave a less generic name to last night ("Joseph Dunphy's Soapbox / Blog to Come" - what was that) has evolved into the place where I go when I feel like commenting on politics or the directions that American popular culture has been moving in (closely intertwined subjects, those) and choose to pretend that somebody other than me will care. As the site counter at Yahoo 360 (the previous location for this blog) racked some thousands of hits in its few months of existence at the old location before I switched over here, I guess somebody must, but ... yes I'm digressing, and there's another cliche.

I really need to get slapped. So, as I piece it together ... Multiply is where I'll post my photos of places of worship and write about any and all things Jewish, Imeem is where I'll post most of my short stories and pictures of the parts of Chicago that maybe aren't always considered the best places ... and I find out what Stumbleupon has done, I find that I'm wondering who else has put my trust to bad use. No sooner do I start unrendering site source code and looking, than I find a number of sites doing what Stumbleupon has done, and I am much disappointed by the list. I expected better. These are some I've found so far:

1. Googlegroups. What was that about "not being evil", guys?
   
   
2. Yelp. That hurt.


3. Digg


4. Mag.nolia


5. Youtube


6. Metacafe


7. Vimeo

A few of the sites I'm involved with that had enough class to not do this include

1. Blogger. Yes, It's a Google enterprise, just like Youtube and Googlegroups, but as is the case with Yahoo, Google's different divisions seem to function almost as if they were little companies in their own right, some good and some not so good. Blogger, so far, has seemed to me to be a very good one for the most part, and nothing that happened today undermined that view.



2. Imeem. I am delighted for no particularly logical reason. Little experience there, yet, but something felt good about the place. I don't know why, so don't take that seriously just yet.


3. Flickr


4. Yahoogroups. One does get rel=nofollow in the group descriptions, but not in urls posted to the lists, at present.


5. Tribe. Very limited formatting options, but an interesting looking collection of communities that puts out a lot of striking, original photography.


6. Wordpress


7. Livespaces (MSN)


8. Mashable


9. DeviantArt


10. Uber


11. Squidoo


12. Vox


13. iLike


14. Bakespace


15. Opensource Food


16. Livejournal



17. Librarything. A mixed performance. They do insert rel=nofollow into the "also on" links, which is very much not cool given the fact that those are most of the outbound links, but they didn't seem to do this to the homepage link back to Mashable.



18. Twitter


19. eBay. No homepage link, but one can place outbound links on one's blog, which eBay doesn't seem to be tampering with at all.


20. IGN. Haven't used it much and the homepage link is in a slightly out of the way location, but the code for the homepage link looked fine.


21. Mog


22. Multiply


23. Veoh

Break.com I wasn't able to put into a category, because the programmers have used some strange non-html Stylesheet coding that leaves me, so far, unable to find the code for my homepage link using my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of the subject. I'll try to find out what the status of that is sometime in the next week or two, but if I remain confused at that time, I'll just assume the worst. In the case of those sites which I've determined aren't honestly reciprocating the links they've been getting from me, I've already removed feeds from those locations on my other sites, and as with Stumbleupon, inserted rel=nofollow into my remaining links to those places. I will still make some use of them, contributing a little content at each, but these are going to be very minor, secondary efforts, the sites on the second list definitely being a much higher priority.

I do take some pleasure in the fact that this time, the good guys outnumbered the bad guys. Most of the sites I was looking at, in this at least, did right by their users. I'll keep those Googlegroups in place, as they have been very reliable, experiencing little if any downtime and serving the essays I've posted to them at a good speed, and those little essays are still relevant for the blog posts to which they are attached. Certainly, they are a wonderful source of traffic, if Google's traffic counters are to be trusted - the Googlegroups / Dejanews archive is a popular resource and deservedly so, and probably a great many of my visitors did their searches there. However, what Googlegroups will be getting from me, henceforth, will be synopses, teasers, call them what you wish, with the actual essays they refer to being posted to some of the better behaved sites. The more one is willing to give, the more one should on one's way to getting; Googlegroups gets something out of my participation, it merely doesn't get everything, and this is fitting.

If in a very disappointing kind of way. At least, though, the hard decision of where to begin as I start to flesh out my new sites just became a lot easier.

Which brings us to the present

Given the logic of the circumstances, as explained in that preceding post, I can't say that I was very surprised to discover that I had, indeed, been right. A few days ago, Yahoo announced the closing of its 360 profile and blog service. The author of the deservedly unpopular announcement tried to avoid using the word "closing", assuring the reader that the blogs and friends networks would be moved to some nebulously described global profile service that nobody outside of Yahoo had seen any trace of, leaving any reasonably attentive user with the question "exactly what is the functional difference between 'closing down a service' and 'relocating the contents of the accounts on that service to a new service' - isn't that a little like arguing that Yahoo! Photos is still with us because so many of the images from there ended up on Flickr" - which is not to say all of them. The move to Flickr, from what we could see looked far more solidly planned, and still ended up with a sizable number of users complaining about images that were lost in the move. History had left us with no reason to think that our blogs would far any better, and the loss of work would tend to be far greater, so some of us, myself included, decided that a move of this magnitude was a thing best done by hand.

I looked at a number of services, but was stunned by some of the choices I saw system administrators making. Consider, for example, multiply.com, a popular choice, one offering many tools for the user, but my understanding is that one can't screen comments before they appear on one's multiply profile. That was just asking for trouble, so I moved on - but found that the much-praised Wordpress had its own annoying feature - one couldn't modify the eye straining font size without the letters overlapping each other. At another location - I stopped looking before I even started, because the owner was a fairly well know outsourcer, and you've already seen what I've had to say about that practice, raising the question of just how long my relocated blog would be allowed to stay. So this went, until I finally just decided "to H*** with it", and began relocating my Yahoo 360 blog to a new location here at Blogger.

I still do see the virtue of having more than one active blog on more than one server - this incident should serve as an excellent illustration of why that is - but eventually one does say "I've spent enough time doing this" and takes a few shortcuts. Maybe I'll use the place at Wordpress as a photoblog - visitors seem to enjoy those, and one can keep the eyestraining text to a minimum. You may have noticed that the look and feel of this blog has changed in the course of the move, which is inevitable to a degree since Blogger and Yahoo 360 use different templates, but I've also replaced backgrounds, substituting the wood page background you see for the blue smoke background I used on 360. I hope you'll find the look more restful.

(If for some reason you actually want to know what the old look was, you can see it on this post in the footnotes to this blog. A link at the bottom of that post should bring you back here).

I might put the blog that comes with my account under the new Yahoo service to some use - assuming that there will be such a blog - but I can't very sensibly ignore the fact that Yahoo, for no compellingly good reason, decided to break every single link to every single member's blog, putting the not inconsiderable amount of work many of us put into promoting our blogs to waste. How does one respond to such a position rationally, aside from noting that those who've done an injury once, and done it casually, ought to be expected to be equally casual about doing it again, especially when the logic the injury is done under is so conspicuously lacking in coherence. The Yahoo 360 team is dissatisfied with the level of activity on the current service, so they're going to break every link to it - how can that do anything but reduce the level of activity seen?

The answer is to assume that one is likely to see more of the same, and design one's sites in such a way as to minize the damage done by the expected inconsideration. One might note that my blog at Lycos serves as an annex of sorts for the Urban Backpacker's Quarterly, the articles there being expansions on points made on that other journal of mine here on Blogger. Hardly anybody is going to link to my Lycos blog (Joseph Dunphy's Notebook) because of this; if I resume blogging activity on Yahoo, I will be approaching my blog (at its new location on a new service) in much the same way, as an add-on to this and other blogs of mine. That way, if Yahoo flakes out on me again, all that I have to do is reload the affected posts to a new location, and edit some of my own links.

As for those "return to your post" links on my Googlegroup that will now take you to what will be a defunct Yahoo 360 url - sorry about that, but Google has configured its system in such a way as to thwart any attempt on my part to fix that. The posts are over a month old, so I can no longer reply to them on the group, and so I can't upload good new links to replace the soon to be bad old ones, as much as I wish I could. The best I can do is learn from the experience, and try to route the return links through pages which, unlike Googlegroup posts, can be edited indefinitely far into the future. This might look a little sloppy, but we are left with a choice of annoyances, are we not?

Welcome to the new location. Yes, this did used to be "Joseph Dunphy's Blog to Come". I hope you like the new location, but I should tell you that the Urban Backpacker's Quarterly will be the main site for my blogging for a while for a few reasons, one of which is a simple desire on my part not to think about politics for a while. Yes, I know, we're about to replace Bush, so what a strange time to start ignoring politics, but to be realistic - how likely are we to see him replaced by anything better? Wake me up when the circus is over and all but one of the clowns have left the stage.

Shifting emphasis over to other blog, maybe temporarily

First posted on my Yahoo 360 blog on Friday August 24, 2007 - 11:22am (CDT)

This blog will be going on a temporary hiatus of sorts. I'll leave it up as long as Yahoo allows me to leave it up, but until certain issues get resolved, I'm going to do my posting elsewhere, probably most on my journal over at Blogger (The Urban Backpacker's Quarterly). Rumors about the closing of Yahoo 360 are floating about, and these rumors seem to have some basis in fact. Maybe not a conclusive basis, but enough to warrant some concern. Consider, for example, this quote from an article about the Yahoo! Photos closing from TechShout

"In closing Photos, Yahoo is adopting a major tenant suggested in an internal memo by Brad Garlinghouse, a senior vice president at the company, which was leaked to the press in November. In an article dubbed the Peanut Butter Manifesto for his description of Yahoo being spread too thin, Garlinghouse called for a number of the company’s products to be eliminated as way to help revive growth and restore focus. There was no word whether Yahoo planned to close other products. In his memo, Garlinghouse had mentioned redundancies involving bookmark services Del.icio.us and myWeb, and Yahoo Groups message boards and Yahoo 360 social network service, among others."

"Now, Joseph", somebody will probably write, "Techshout is just a website, and as you've said yourself, anybody can put anything he wants on a website". True, but this is very far from being an isolated report of rumors that Yahoo has to know are going to tend to induce a little panic in its user base on 360, because the relocation of a blog is going to result in far more upheaval for the user than the relocation of a few photos. Think of the links broken, the comments lost, the massive efforts that would merely go into cutting and pasting to code for the posts at the old blog into the archives at the new. Users have to be expected to have questions about such rumors, and what are they to think when their providers stubbornly refuse to answer those questions? When I wrote to the Yahoo 360 team to ask them about these rumors, the team did not respond to my query. Others have reported being stonewalled in the same way on their 360 blogs, and one can see, just by reading the comments on the Yahoo 360 team blog, that still others, in asking the simple question "is Yahoo 360 about to close" or variants on it, don't get replies from anybody other than fellow users.

One might well ask why the fellow users feel qualified to post on the subject, as not a one of them seems to work for Yahoo; the blind are volunteering to lead the nearsighted. As for Yahoo's refusal to say a word, they would have to be unusually clueless to not understand that, while in case like this one can remain silent, one can't possibly fail to answer the question being asked of one. Silence will be read as an affirmation, because if one could squash a false rumor that is starting to hurt one's business merely by having a few employees saying "it isn't true", why wouldn't one do so? The only reasonable user response, under such circumstances, is to assume the worst and act on that assumption until he has a factual basis for doing otherwise, especially when one can read reports about an upcoming Yahoo product called "mosh" that would push Yahoo 360 further in the direction of redundancy, like this one on TechCrunch.

I'm hoping that Yahoo 360 will stick around. If I'm given some real reason to believe that it will - and no, handholding from another user does not qualify - then I'll probably start posting to this blog again, but until then, I'll do what I can to minimize my prospective headaches, and that is going to include sending my next few posts to where they are least likely to evaporate. Namely: HERE.

Where should I be after I escape Chicago?

Originally posted to my Yahoo 360 blog Tuesday August 14, 2007 - 07:49pm (CDT)

Mystery resolved ...

You Belong in Paris

You enjoy all that life has to offer, and you can appreciate the fine tastes and sites of Paris. You're the perfect person to wander the streets of Paris aimlessly, enjoying architecture and a crepe.

What European City Do You Belong In?

And this seems to be a pattern ...

You Should Learn French

C'est super! You appreciate the finer things in life... wine, art, cheese, love affairs. You are definitely a Parisian at heart. You just need your tongue to catch up...

What Language Should You Learn?

I can already hear somebody saying it: "generations later, your DNA is still your destiny". Or part of it at least, in this case. Sorry, bubbe. I think I'll go make myself some chicken soup.