I received three separate reader emails today asking why I don't "allow" comments on this blog. Each desired the ability to add their voice regarding a post (the Fanatics and Zealots post), but unfortunately the infrastructure just isn't there. These certainly aren't the first, and I normally average about one similar request every other day.
Three in one day, however, demands some sort of formal reply.
As I've mentioned previously, I don't use the Radio Userland comment system because it's terribly slow. While I've rolled my own comment system, until I feel that I can automagically prevent spam to a degree that doesn't necessitate me babysitting it around the clock, I'm not going to enable comments. I also don't want to force moderation on all comments, as the delay until posting tends to irritate some readers (who view it as a form of censorship). And then, of course, I will be forced to censor some comments on occasion, and that'll build even more of an angry mob.
In any case, at this point I'm not sure if I'm ever going to enable comments. Not only is the industry moving away from comments (because of the spam problem), but everyone with an opinion has the ability, and the power, to post on their own blog (creating a new one if necessary - there are plenty of free services) their opinion about another blog's content. To make this option even better, some aggregators, like technorati, let you see all of the blog postings that are related to a particular blog or blog entry.
The ability to comment, with the freedom to comment without any censorship ability of the original author. Seems like an ideal situation. Call me an idiot from the freedom of your own "house", so to speak.
A JoelOnSoftware post from a few days ago led me to a recent Jakob Nielson piece on weblog usability. Jakob, as you probably know, is considered a usability expert, and his works are often used to buttress and justify design and user interface choices (such as what Joel did for his redesign). Of course Jakob has his detractors too: Those who believe that he's preaching the obvious, doing so from a pretty shoddy soapboax no less.
Personally I've enjoyed reading Jakob's work. Even when they're painfully obvious it helps bring usability to forefront.
One of his weblog usability points I'm not so sure about, though - 2. No Author Photo (I'd link to the specific point but Jakob doesn't use internal anchors). The reason I'm on the fence about it isn't that I fear my ghastly image getting out (in fact I've posted it before. That one is a couple of years old), but rather that I think it is too vulnerable to people's innate tendency to stereotype - I can say firsthand that I've gone to a couple of blogs and have put the author's words into the voice of a certain strata of society and personality types based upon their picture, usually based on former coworkers or schoolmates. I know I should be reading the words for what they are, along with the proven history of the author, but instead I'm subconsciously imagining someone abrasively going against the grain just to be trouble, because that's what I remember about someone they resemble.
It just seems like an irrelevant piece of information that does more harm than good.
So I put it to you, fair readers: Are pictures-of-the-author on blogs beneficial or detrimental?
Ross Mayfield tells us in a blog entry that Microsoft is about to announce a major Software-As-A-Service strategy, and that this will represent a "break from the past" (with his entry titled Turn on a Dime).
I faintly recall Microsoft talking about this before. In fact, various factions of Microsoft have been pushing this idea since at least back in 1998. Software as a service is pretty much an obvious dream of all software vendors.
(Bill Gates speech from 2001 includes the statement "There is just no doubt that having Microsoft viewed as a company that can provide operational excellence is critical to our shift to software as a service, and we're putting in place the infrastructure and the team to make sure that that happens.")
Of course having a pie-in-the-sky idea is one thing, but actually making it materialize as a viable, continuing business is quite another. Just look at Sun's rentable grid computing experiment - a year on, and not a single customer. Microsoft has actually been at the forefront of a lot of business ideas, but it generally gets drowned out by the overwhelming success of their core, traditional products, to the point that people forget they were doing it.
Couple that with the fact that Microsoft's service strategy has some problems. For instance MapPoint Web Services was in the web service mapping game long before Google maps, but it was made irrelevant by the high cost of entry.
Today's big announcement from Microsoft, among some other tidbits, was the demo and public release of a beta of Microsoft Live, which you can of course read Scoble busting a vein about. I would love to say that it's remarkable, but it doesn't seem to be - At first glance it barely differs from the whole Excite @ Home portal concept that hit the floor with a thud 6 years ago. It looks like Excite (@) Home + a greatly scaled down version of Konfabulator in a limited, IE-only, heavyweight shell.
Portals are dead, and if this is the great revolution Microsoft can deliver, then Microsoft truly is in serious trouble. Microsoft has done some amazing things, and they have a lot of amazing people, so when they're doing a supposedly huge strategy shift to take on Google it should be extraordinary. It shouldn't leave you searching around trying to find where the good stuff is hidden. Weak excuses that they "can't show the best stuff yet...you just wait!" rightfully raises the B.S. detectors of most grizzled software development vets (because we've used that lame excuse when we've under-delivered)
Of course, as is standard for these sorts of things, Microsoft is also trying to get the community to create the content via a cheap-labour contest (which Google has been a great exploiter of) - Expend the effort and trouble to add to their somewhat weak launch list of "gadgets" and you too could be entered into a draw to win an XBox 360! Woo! I'm always amazed at how cheap such firms can be about an element of their strategy that is so enormously critical.
Microsoft biggest announcement today was vapour, and "coming soon" betas. What a disaster (it isn't that it's a terrible solution that they've built, but rather that it's just so underwhelming coming from the largest, most powerful software company in the world. Expectations are so much higher, especially given the emphasis put on this strategy). I'll reiterate that 2006 won't be the year for Microsoft (and I'm a Microdroid by some accounts).
The weather was spectacular, and it was a perfect night for trick-or-treating. My 2 1/2 year old and my 7 month old son were dressed as cow-girl and cow-boy respectively (cow-person), with wonderful getups put together by my wonderful wife, and we did a little tour of the neighbourhood. A great time was had by all, and there was a wonderful turnout in my neighbourhood.
Well that's only partly true - our house actually only sees a couple of stragglers. There's a circumvention street that goes around behind us, and it always seens some great participation. On my little strip of about 9 homes, only two of us actually turn on our lights and actively welcome the trick-or-treaters...so no one journeys down here. A bit of a shame as it's a wonderful event.
I have to wash my hands after writing that title.
The rise of heavily-scripted, dynamic, content-rich web applications might open the browser wars on a new front - speed.
While the front-runners (I'm thinking of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera) are very similar in features at this point, the performance delta for script heavy sites is remarkable (by a factor of 5x or more). Even the laughably trivial yaflaColor shows a significant performance difference between the browsers, with Opera providing a smooth, consistent operation (e.g. sliders move cleanly, with a smooth colour transition), Firefox trailing behind a bit, and Internet Explorer lagging far behind, with a clunky, unpleasant interface on all but the highest performance client PCs. This pretty much mirrors some of the numbers found on the browser speed comparison (where Internet Explorer yielded a "60" on their script test, with Opera 9 zooming past with a "13" - the lower the number the proportionally better).
