There is a growing trend towards smaller and smaller fonts on blogs (e.g. 0.60em). While it's a simple matter of customizing your local stylesheets, or overriding the font size at the GUI level,it is a bit of a hassle.. Nonetheless, it seems to be a growing belief that using a small font someone implies professionalism or academic worth.

Yet when will the cycle end?

I've described why I blog several times previously, including within my very first blog-style entry back on September 4th (this blog just passed its 4 month birthday). The motivations are the same motivations that have pushed me to post online "papers" for about a decade now: Reputation, a bit of an outlet for thoughts (it is therapeutic), and of course to maintain or gain some namespace in the internet world (which really means PageRank these days), or at least to avoid namespace loss.

The namespace competition is much more competitive these days than it was a few short years ago, with the technical ease of blogging encouraging a lot of very capable entrants. If you're stand still, then you're falling behind quickly.

It really has been an uphill battle trying to get my thoughts noticed, but I'm finally at a remarkable point where I post something -- something written late at night in a brief interlude between ending "real work" for the night and hitting the hibernate button -- and discover that many thousands of visitors have passed through the next day. Often something makes its way onto the meme sites courtesy of one of the readers who thinks it's worth sharing (thank you kindly to those good folks). That's pretty neat, and is very rewarding.

The Reddit Effect

It's especially satisfying given that I seldom spend more than 3 hours on an entry, even on the longer pieces, usually spreading it out over several days. On an average entry -- for instance the spelling entry (which also saw many thousands of visitors per day), or understanding daylight savings time -- I spend approximately 30 minutes, going back on re-reads to clean up the flow. There are also coffee-break length entries like this one.

I usually have the general concept fermenting in my mind for a while, and I type quite quickly so it's really just a process of transcribing it out and dealing with the technical errata (like Radio Userland's propensity for being overly helpful).

To make them a bit more visually appealing, I tend to take a few more oddball pictures during day to day activities than I normally would, but that's fun and is hardly a chore.

Entries are often much more readable after about a week, and if blogs had a wiki-style history you would see constant minor wording changes and paragraph reworks.

The few pieces that have earned considerable attention have been real eye-openers, and in some ways they encourage one to move to the dark side: It's very easy to see, for instance, exactly the type of content that earns a lot of attention, and it would be terribly easy to write pandering pieces, saying everything that the crowd wants to hear, and that which they want restated (which is what many use the popularity-measuring sites for -- to push their own agenda by promoting sites that state their opinion, and by silencing dissenting opinion by punishing those that don't. Look at Slashdot comment moderation as a great example of this).

It has been a great experience, and I greatly appreciate everyone who stops by. Thank you very much for a moment of your time.

While there can be wisdom in groups, there can also be tremendous ignorance in groups. To blatantly rip off despair, inc., none of us is as dumb as all of us.

Never has this been clearer than the past couple of months -- a time that makes one question the real wisdom of the masses, and whether many accolades/ diggs/ arrow-ups/ mods is really a good sign of worthy content, or whether it's just an expression of the ignorance of crowds, or a real-world demonstration of low-value groupthink.

During this period we've heard - from virtually every "news propagation" site, all bombarding the same messages - that Google was releasing an amazing new online office suite. Turned out that it was really just the optional bundling of the Java runtime with the Google toolbar (because bundling is always in the consumers' best interest...).

We heard that Microsoft was buying Opera, and then that Google was buying Opera, both of which were untrue (and both of which are hard to rationalize with reality given both company's commitment to competitive alternate platforms). Both originated at very small sites, and were supposedly based upon "insider" tips and info (let's ignore the thorny legal issues about making such a claim regarding the acquisitions of public companies). They were quickly picked up and relayed by countless other sites.

Many of these completely nonsensical stories gained a sort of "truth through repeated assertion": The more sites picked up the same nonsensical story, the more people used their "votes" to give it more visibility, the more real some completely baseless meanderings on someone's blog or commentary site became. These stories took on a life of their own, and if you debated the validity of them, you'd get a laundry list of links to sites all repeating the same fabrication.

This same sequence of events played out among the Riya-fanboyz, many of whom blanketed the meme sites and blog ranks with unsupported claims that Google was buying Riya. In that case, if you followed the "source" back to its origin you would find two bloggers, each pointing to the other as the source of the rumor. Given that the vast majority of bloggers get their "news" from other blogs, this is hardly surprizing.

This is such a predictable event now that you can guarantee lots of hits, and good frontpage action on the meme sites, by simply sticking to the tried and true and claiming that Google is doing X. What is X? Whatever you want it to be. Whether it's running movie theaters, releasing an ultra-low margin PC against any common sense, amazingly building an entire operating system against all precedent, or continuing the Google Office Suite rumor (which includes such hilarious pearls as "GMail's WYSIWYG is 90% of Microsoft Word") -- Savvy bloggers and small-market "news" sites know that it's a sure thing to just imagine up whatever ridiculous concoction one can invent involving Google, and it'll quickly disseminate across the web, earning tens of thousands of links (glorious pagerank), reputation, and traffic that one can redirect to one's own personal projects and businesses.

What starts as baseless, or barely-educated, speculation quickly turns into reality as it propagates.

I've picked just a few of the most known nonsensical stories that took the community sites (both the editorially controlled like Slashdot, and the true community sites like Digg) by storm over the past months, but there have been countless others where someone posts unsupported anecdotes or personal attacks and it quickly jumps to the front page, eagerly given credibility by, in all truthfulness, the clueless: You don't have to know what they're talking about, or even bother reading the supporting "evidence", to help promote a site on these community sites. On some of them nefarious groups have been busy script-creating accounts and voting up their own stories, not even waiting around for the ignorance of anonymous, detached groups to do its thing.

There really isn't a point in all of this, but to say that readers need to consider most of the group think sites more akin to the World Weekly News than the New York Times. While there will be occasional gems, there is a tremendous amount of noise as well.

Do you constantly have co-workers, friends and family sending you interesting and fascinating links, leaving you asking where they find them? Do you wish that you had the chops to be a promiscuous link propagator, letting everyone know about the funny hamster dancing Star Wars baby with a bad translation?

Just a few sites are all you need to get the best of the current memes, giving you a lot of source material for endless link emails. Soon enough you'll be a link Jedi, saying "That's ancient news. I saw that three hours ago" to coworkers.

http://www.slashdot.org

Slashdot is a technology focused site that's been around for some time, and it still holds a lot of influence (Slashdot's demise has been greatly exaggerated). While Slashdot is split into sections (for instance a section dedicate to Apache), anything meme worthy will appear on the front page as well.

Slashdot content generally comes from the users (including anonymous cowards) submitting "stories" with links of interest. Stories often consist of multiple links, sometimes just a Google search. A small editorial group at Slashdot selects from the submissions those that they think would be interesting to the community, either relegating it to a single section, or cross-posting to the front page. Due to this process, and a queue of sometimes dubious "news", Slashdot tends to be one of the slower disseminators of fast-spreading information, and you generally won't find chest-beating "we're great!" type stories.

One of Slashdot's greatest assets is the well-proven commenting system, with a user-moderated scoring of each post from -1 (usually indicative of a troll) to 5 (either a great karma-whore pandering to the group think, or a truly insightful post): You can usually glean some additional information, or at least get the lay of the land, by reading comments above a threshold of 3 or so.

http://www.digg.com

Digg is a relative newcomer that, while supposedly technology focused, is more often than not covering general interest links. It has gained mindshare very quickly.

Similar to Slashdot, Digg is split into sections (for instance hardware), again with the concept of a front page containing the best of all of the sections.

Also similar to Slashdot, Digg stories are courtesy of the users. Unlike Slashdot, though, all of the stories are posted immediately, and there is no editorial control at all (beyond dealing with user-reported spam/abuse type submissions). Instead it is up to the users of Digg to promote (by "Digging") those stories that they think are good, or ignore (or reporting as spam/abuse/etc) those that they think aren't. Web 2.0 content democracy in action, although there have been high-profile instances of people gaming the system, automatically creating hundreds of users to digg their own submissions right to the front page. With its rise in popularity, the number of spam stories on Digg has dramatically increased as well.

Due to the lack of editor-lag time-delay, Digg is a good place to find very quickly spreading information. Unfortunately it also suffers from a severe case of group-think, and it's pretty evident at this point that quite a few content providers and bloggers know exactly what to write to elicit a hearty digging: Many of the "front page" entries these days are clannish "Digg versus Someone Else" type stories, and more and more it's focusing on itself rather than the original goal, becoming primarily a banner for the bored to rally behind. Several highly-ranked front page stories have been completely ignorant, mistake-laden misdirections, but given that anyone can Digg, with no proof of any effort (like actually reading the linked site), they get promoted to the front page.

The comment system on Digg is truly terrible, and the general quality of comments is even worse.

Despite all of that, occasionally Digg is good for wildfire spreading news, and can serve as an entertaining diversion.

http://www.reddit.com

Reddit makes no claims to being a technology focused site, and the links are general interest. It has been gaining popularity, albeit nowhere near the levels of Slashdot and Digg.

Using a relatively minimalist interface, Reddit is similar to Digg in that it lets users submit links which are immediately published, and the user community can vote up/down stories, possibly right to the front page. To the best of my knowledge, Reddit has no categorization, and instead is just a lump of links with minimalist titles.

Reddit's comment system is barely used at all, but it's quite a good foundation if a community did evolve.

Reddit definitely needs some work, and some major gaps in the platform and infrastructure are readily apparent. Nonetheless it's a great place to scan for interesting new links, even if you do have to go by a barely useful title to decide if you want to follow it. I expect great things of Reddit when they start doing associative analysis. e.g. I don't care what every artificial account and loyal herd member thinks, but I would like if it could correlate people who "think like me", giving me a personalized frontpage based upon the selections of people who've shown similar tastes to me.

http://del.icio.us/

Delicious is a community bookmarking site where users can host their bookmarks (presuming they aren't something they want to be private), categorizing them through keywords.

Through the power of numbers, the growing trends and popular links can easily be determined. You can even look at what links are popular for a given keyword, for instance concerning Microsoft or SQL or .NET.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

StumbleUpon really doesn't fit in the same category, but instead works as a toolbar for your browser in which you can thumbs up or down pages, as well as provide page reviews, as you're browsing. You can then "Stumble" around to interesting pages that other users enjoyed. Interesting tool, although it seems that a large percentage of stumbles lead to humorous Flash movies.

http://www.plastic.com/

Plastic isn't really a meme site or link propagator at all. Originally the work of a couple of http://www.suck.com (which was a great site) alumni, Plastic is like Slashdot but with a better community, more editorial original content (rather than just link propagation), and a good comment system. You won't find link-of-the-days at Plastic, but if you just want some interesting discussion it's a good place to look.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/

Kuro5hin is again very similar to Plastic, which is again very similar to Slashdot. Again it focuses more on original content and commentary over link propagation.

http://www.boingboing.net/

Slashdot run through a blog. You'll find many of the same stories that you find on the other meme propagation sites, but often with a nicer package.

http://www.technorati.com/pop/

Technorati's "popular web topics". Most blog content is just someone repeating what other blogs have said (and so on), so Technorati senses that and makes a popular listing. Seems suspiciously like a convenient place to put some affiliate links for books and movies.

http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/

The Technorati popular blog list -- Know who's getting the link love right now.

There are others, such as Fark, SomethingAwful, among many, however they're often not safe for work, nor are they appropriate for the sort of memes that you'd want to mass email to all of your friends.

Hopefully this list has provided a good starting point in making you a meme kung-fu champion, emailing and IMing the interesting links faster than your friends.

Getting back into the flow after the holiday break.

In addition to branded software, yafla also provides consulting and custom software development (in the Greater Toronto Area), which has kept me extremely busy over the past while. That's an area of the business that I haven't really written about (primarily because I keep client project and platform details strictly confidential), however I have a case study where the client is interested in getting their name out there, and the need - and from it the solution - are really interesting and noteworthy, so I might start working it in.

As an aside - both the survey component and yaflaColor are currently broken (as of this writing). Both have been updated to .NET 2.0, and for some reason my third-party host has an issue where helper assemblies are being locked by an outside process, possibly due to synchronization issues with the NAS. This should be resolved shortly. I've let them sit broken for the day simply because they're non-critical and it lets the 3rd party solve the problems on their end.

[The static location of this piece can be found at this address]

How Ridiculous

Rediculous - Results 1 - 10 of about 3,800,000 for rediculous.

It is ridiculous that such an obvious misspelling has become so prolific (correctness by repeated assertion), yet it's a great example of how contagious an incorrect spelling can be: Given that language is largely learned by example, it is inevitable that an endless exposure to malformed spelling will eventually infect the language of others, gathering a widening net of victims.

This is more of a problem now more than ever, given that many of us have supplanted - or entirely replaced - the professional writing in our lives (newspapers, books, professional papers) with the amateur writing of bloggers and forum posters: The "good" influences - carefully authored, carefully edited professional writing - have given way to carelessly hashed-out entries by time-pressured bloggers and marginally-literate forum posters, in a domain where the accepted rules of netiquette strongly discourage pointing out spelling or grammar mistakes.

Those who point out errors in grammar or spelling are quickly marginalized as "Grammar Nazis". Ignorance rules the day, and the social pressure encouraging good spelling and grammar has dramatically declined.

English Is Non-Trivial, But Spelling is Standardized

English is a very difficult language, with a tremendous array of conflicting influences, and a byzantine array of specialized rules and conditions.

It is, for instance, very difficult to conform to all norms of grammar given that many of them are subjective and conflicting (and many self-appointed gurus have themselves made embarrassing errors). I have absolutely no doubt that this entry, for example, has over a dozen real or subjective grammar problems: From the incorrect placement of a comma, to the overzealous use of a compound adjective, to the use of a colon where a dash would suffice.

I certainly make no claim of perfection. Where I find that I've made an error (and I heartily welcome emails to this effect), I try to correct them as quickly as possible.

Nonetheless, spelling is standardized (with minor regional variations), so unless one is intentionally trying to extend or adapt the language, some effort should be exerted to check the standards references to ensure that one's usage is conformant, just as one would ensure that their CSS or HTML was compliant with the pertinent standards.

The Cost

The impact of the continued exposure to incorrect spelling and grammar can be extraordinary to observe. I've seen people corrected dozens of times, yet rediculous is so ingrained in their mind that they just can't break the habit. Soon enough other participants are perpetuating the misspelling, with the forum slowly diverging from correct English into some bizarre forum-localized lingo-ignoramus.

It might seem harmless, but this incorrect spelling starts infecting their professional writings (emails, instant messages, documents, signs, business cards - a domain where the laissez-faire attitude of the online world isn't acceptable), making them look ignorant and careless. That's if the fear of the same hasn't discouraged written discourse altogether (which is sadly very common. I've encountered plenty of professional acquaintances who avoid the written word like the plague).

It can even reduce the comprehension efficiency of written materials, as the reader's brain tries to rationalize the correct spelling on the paper with what they have stored in their memory cells.

It reduces general literacy.

If a reader's first exposure to analagous (analogous) or ancilliary (ancillary) are in a hastily written blog entry or forum post, naturally they're going to adopt the incorrect variant, perpetuating it to other entries and posts. Like a virus the misspelling infects new victims.

Of course it should be noted that language is indeed a "living" thing, and it does evolve and change over time - the English we speak today differs greatly from the English of yore - but the sort of ignorance that I'm describing has nothing to do with extending or adapting the language. Instead it's simple contagious laziness.

Showing Regard For Readers

Good form or not, I am regularly going back and rewording old entries for improved clarity and readability, and occasionally even to correct spelling mistakes that made it under the radar (I have some eagle-eyed readers that very helpfully point out some of these errors. Rather than being irritated by the "grammar nazis", I am very appreciative to have the extra sets of eyeballs).

I do this primarily to ease consumption by readers: While the initial entry might have been rushed when too little time was available - but I thought the information or perspective were useful for someone - the entries live on and see far more traffic over time than at the outset. A correction here and there, and the refinement and rewording of a paragraph or two to make it more clear and concise, takes me a few moments, yet it saves dozens or hundreds of readers time in the future (and improves their comprehension of the content).

I consider the effort very worthwhile.

Furthermore, I try to run all entries through an up to date spell-checker before the initial publishing. To make the process more palatable, I have trained the spell-checker with all of my domain-specific terminology (the false-negative rate of spell-checkers is one of the primary reasons most people avoid them).

I don't want to appear ignorant by misspelling a common word, and I don't want to save myself a little time at the cost of every reader's time. I also don't want to pollute the vocabulary of readers with believable misspellings.

Industry Solutions

Just as one eagerly sticks a W3C validation banner on their page declaring their compliance with some level of specification, it would be intriguing to advocate a "spelling and grammar" standard mark. One that simply declares that the author actually cares, and does exert some effort to meet some minimal level of correctness in spelling and grammar. It would be a public sign indicating that they are open and thankful for comments and corrections regarding the same.

Furthermore, it would be advantageous if the major search engines - including blog aggregators and search engines - allowed one to refine results by grammar and spelling, optionally scoring academically correct content higher in the results. While sloppy spelling is no guarantee that the content isn't of value, there is a noteworthy correlation between the care and concern put into the spelling and grammar of an entry and the value of the actual content contained within: If someone couldn't bother spell-checking their entry, the factual content of their entry naturally has to come into question as well.

In the forum and blogging world, it would be beneficial if more tools supported convenient and efficient automatic spell-checking (the fact that no major browser has incorporated native TEXTAREA spell-checking thus far is a travesty. Any of them could have a killer feature if they simply added Word-like squiggly underlining of suspect words, with easy alternative corrections). As it is, many tools have nothing at all, and the few that do often host a ridiculously unintuitive, hacked-in partial solution.

Let's clean up English on the internet.

[TRAFFIC NOTE: This story, one of the few general interest posts I've made on here, has appeared on reddit, sending quite a few users this way. For those who've actually read this far, if you found this entry interesting I would appreciate if you could give an arrow up to it on reddit. Alternately if you think this is a dud, please give it an arrow down. Thanks!]

I've been noticing something interesting with Google lately - While the rankings of this site have been increasing, the number of search engine hits against blog entries has actually been dropping: A week ago several entries in this blog were among the first page results for a number of terms (albeit less common terms), whereas now they've virtually disappeared. Given that other parts of the site are still seeing significant search engine directed traffic (in fact more than ever), it clearly isn't anything site-wide.

What I suspect is that Google has started identifying content as blog/not blog, as has long been anticipated, and if it's perceived to be the former then it is de-valued a degree. Identification could be as simple as checking for a synchronized RSS, or elements like calendar controls and the like. If it looks like a blog, reads like a blog...

There is a legitimate reason for that sort of segregation: The promiscuous linking of bloggers has drowned out `traditional' content, so much so that many searches were going to blog entries that happened to mention something in passing, even in a content-free, largely useless manner, making the use of search engines a frustrating, less-effective exercise. Discussion groups have been flooded with commentary about evil bloggers polluting the Google rankings (blaming bloggers for what is, in essence, a search engine problem).

Naturally Google's first step was to give bloggers a `home' (the Google blog search), and step two, I suspect, is to start cleaning up the search results.

If this is true, on the one hand I'm happy about it - it means that every search result isn't going to return every random MSDN blogger that's highly ranked just for being a part of the conblogation, but on the other hand it punishes those who use a blog format as a content management system of sorts.

Anyways, because I like appearing in the search results, I've created a new category and have started checking off "best of" posts. Through the magic of two XSLT transforms against the RSS of that category, and a bit of customization, it's now being replicated in non-blog-form over at http://www.yafla.com/dennisforbes/index.html. I've SEO'd the path and file names, and of course set appropriate titles on the documents (given that it's a single item per file I can do this), so content will definitely see more seach love over there. The layout is a bit ugly right now, but given that it's just a templated, dynamic transform I'll clean that up when I get the time.