The Usenet Legacy

A decade+ ago, most "online" comments were conceived and birthed in feature-rich, fat-client applications. These were tools that generally offered a rich gamut of functionality: spell-checking, automatic intelligent threading, offline composition, selective content blocks (such as plonking unliked trolls, censoring expletives), automatic notification of certain keywords or topics, alongside a wide breadth of additional capabilities.

You could read and participate in conversations on a massive array of topics, from law and order, to product support forums for a particular vendor's database product, to the seedier side of the alt hierarchy. All using the same client application that you were comfortable with, configured just the way you liked it.

After authoring your brilliant, convincing argument (or your question about what video card to buy or how to call a certain API function) and hitting send, the application would queue it up much like an outgoing email, and when the opportunity arose (when you dialed up to your local BBS), it would send it to your local server via a standard protocol, where it would be shared with a decentralized universe of servers.

Usually your brilliant literary gem would be immediately visible to the world -- limited only by the rate of propagation -- though a small number of newsgroups had post moderation that requiring each new addition to first be approved.

The Advantage of Standards

This standardized protocol, message format, and distribution mechanism allowed for rich client functionality without reinventing it for every single newsgroup. Imagine how absurd it would have been if you used a different set of tools, with a different set of functions, to interact with comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.video than you did with comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.sound?

Just as importantly, the standard message format and transport protocol allowed for very easy indexing and archiving -- easily searchable across time and space by whichever search vendor did the best job. This is how we got the incredible functionality of DejaNews (which was later purchased by Google and rebranded as Google Groups), which managed to reach its indexing fingers back a decade earlier than it was even imagined.

If you do software development, you've probably found newsgroups to be by far the most useful resource to search when looking for answers: While a normal web search will yield thousands of noise responses and pay sites begging for money to see the answer (that they usually ripped from a usenet newsgroup), a quick tab over to the groups will usually immediately find the archive of someone who faced a similar question or problem, and the helpful replies.

Of course Usenet is still around and very much alive, and some sites still use NNTP. Unfortunately the quantity of useful answers has been declining, or at least that's my impression, as more and more conversations are being siphoned off into poorly structured, often unindexed islands of information.

Why is every new web app creating yet another terrible reinvention of a container for discussions? Why are we functionally stepping back 20 years for every single new forum (see Digg, YouTube, Reddit, and others for examples of colosally broken discussion systems that people interact with despite their enormous failures, having no alternatives. There are a few, Slashdot for instance, that are moderately evolved, but it took half a decade to achieve a somewhat usable system, and even then the failings are numerous)?

Worse still, why are so many sites storing conversations and threads in isolated silos of data, stored and communicated in completely non-standardized ways. I can easily find and reference threads that I reminisce reading on a usenet newsgroups 14 years ago (usually for "I told you so!" purposes), yet it's often impossible to find a thread or comment on a modern web forum even if I remember seeing it a month ago.

This isn't an argument for a return to the days of yore, and I'm candy-coated the history and usability of Usenet, but it does seem like a lot of people are continually reinventing the wheel, ignoring the lessons of the past. 

It does seem like the value of each additional piece being added to the global solution set is being diminished or completely lost: Where once we had clearly defined domains of information, clearly deliminated and indexed by topic, with a clear threading organization and meta-data structure (author, date, what other comment entry it's a reply to, and so on) that could easily be interpreted by anyone who understood the NNTP spec, now we're at the point where search engines have to try to interpret a million variations of rendering engines, inevitably losing most context and metadata, and that's only if they happen to even crawl across the conversations in the first place.

Somehow we need to find a medium, taking from the past while incorporating modern technology. Perhaps a new embedded commenting structure should be an addition to Firefox 3.

The Ultimate Goal

• Standard message structure and accessibility for archiving and indexing. Deja News provided an incredible example of the value this brought to the table.
• Standardized authoring tools and structure - a threaded discussion forum has almost exactly the same needs as every other threaded discussion forum. Users spend so much time authoring comments that it is remarkable that we haven't long had a rich <comment></comment> HTML element as a supersized TEXTAREA, supporting all of the nuances and features shared by virtually every conversation site.

On Blogging

Hearing the word "blog" makes me vomit just a little in the back of my mouth.

Having real people in the meat world comment to me about my "blog" leaves me feeling just a little embarrassed and uneasy: There's just something about the pompous self-importance and imagined sense of influence of the whole "blogosphere", coupled with the cacophony of useless chatter coming from some dubious participants, that makes it a group that I really don't feel entirely comfortable being associated with.

Many blogs (not including yours, of course) feature predominately insipid ramblings, with space-filling content of limited or no informational value. Many of their authors have no particular skill or unique message in the realm that they focus on.

Bloggers themselves often subscribe to hundreds of blogs just to have content to blog about (I'd wager that RSS readers are overwhelmingly used by RSS publishers...), in a giant circular linkfest, all saying the same things in unison. The more accessible the source, the easier it is to "contribute" by making some ancillary comment about how the shed should have a red stripe instead of a blue stripe, the more subscribers, the more references.

Don't think I'm excluding this very blog from these criticisms. I'm very critical of my own works.

Among the "A-list" bloggers, many are the Paris Hiltons of the technology world -- readers (a fanbase primarily consisting of B...Z-list bloggers, as mentioned earlier. Among the general population, especially people and groups of influence, even the largest bloggers have zero influence or namespace) follow them, and link to them, and talk about them...because people follow them, link to them, and talk about them.

People anxiously watch their moves because they don't want to miss anything that "everyone else" is watching. It really is extraordinary.

I've never been discrete about my feelings of this topic: I started this blog by indicating my contempt for blogs in general, commenting that I viewed this more as a mature content management system. It was a halfway point between formal writing and informal writing, where I could "own" my content, easily posting and altering information while making it available for search engines (and perhaps playing the system a bit to ensure that I maintain and gain search engine credibility, which I've gained in buckets).

I don't use an RSS reader, and from that obviously I don't subscribe to any blogs.

Now and then I do browse around some of the few blogs that feature occasionally insightful or interesting or thought-provoking content, or from authors who have inside information (e.g. developers inside a corporation whose software or tools I depend upon, sharing a unique perspective that can be valuable for me), and often traipse back through the history a bit, gaining knowledge and perspective, just as I did before they were called blogs and were just papers and articles that people posted online.

Often these blog-diving journeys begin when one of their posts make it atop the meme or news sites. I got linked on Slashdot yesterday, and of the ten thousand or so visitors referred over, a very large percentage actually felt the desire to go browsing through historical entries, which is something that always makes me feel that I've "succeeded" in my quest a bit.

My opinions on the topic of blogs have hardly endeared me into the blogging community. Even those who fully agree with me are naturally wary of linking this way, lest they play into exactly what I criticize. I don't have a "blog roll", and when I do link to other blogs, which is infrequent, I usually tag it with a rel=nofollow just to be sure to indicate that I'm not giving any link love, and I'm certainly not looking for cheap reciprocity. If my goal was inbound links from other bloggers -- the ultimate goal of many bloggers -- this would be the absolutely worst way to achieve it.

I am not a blogger's blogger.

All of this isn't to say that blogs -- even those dedicated to documenting the most banal of everyday events -- don't have a "right" to exist, or even a very useful purpose. The more information on the net the better, and everyone has every right, ability, and encouragement to post anything and everything online. There are a lot of extraordinary blogs out there, amongst the noise.

The beauty of the internet is that if you don't want to read it, no one is forcing you to. Even if I don't like some blogs, I have no position or right or even moral opening to demand that the person cease its production.

Yet this whole "industry" needs a serious kick in the nads, and a serious correction of perspective. 10,000 readers would give one a significant position in the blogosphere, yet it's less readers than the two-bit journalist whiling away their career writing for the local newspaper in the tiny industrial town I grew up in gets every single day.

All of that was initiated by some of the grandiose pro-blog comments I came across while reading about the incident described in the next section, and some of the anti-blog commentary that resulted (yes, if you read the above with an open mind you will discover that it actually exonerates blogs from some of the criticism they've received).

On Ethics

A bit of a controversy kicked up recently over Microsoft (or its agents) giving out freebie high-end laptops with "no strings attached" to a variety of bloggers (some of whom have been identified, others not).

They emailed some bloggers, covering the gamut of popularity, informing them that they can receive a spanking new $2300USD+ laptop, pre-loaded with Windows Vista. After they were done "reviewing" it -- wink wink -- they could choose to return it, give it away, or keep it (there were variations of the email -- apparently they haven't mastered mail-merge technology -- one implying that the recipient could "borrow" it indefinitely, which is a bit of tax weaseling given that legally the sender was required to log the recipient's tax information of this valuable, taxable gift, and the receiver is to pay the appropriate taxes).

Several of the recipients of this Laptop Loot immediately posted about their great fortune, coming clean about the source, but claiming that somehow they were immune to the long proven and entrenched law of reciprocity. Their supposed objectivity was completely unswayed, we were told.

Other recipients were quiet about the whole affair, or worse made posts indicating that they just "traded-in" for the spanky new laptop. Another claimed that it came from a different source than actuality (just got a laptop from Microsoft and AMD? Say it came courtesy of Acer!)

Critics and pundits have taken up arms on both sides.

Defenders of the bloggers have almost universally fallen to the defense that those who throw stones are just jealous, which is a convenient, albeit very juvenile, retort to virtually any criticism. The alternate defense being that everyone is unethical in every industry, so what's the problem? It's a race to the bottom, baby, so grab whatever you can en route!

Critics have largely exaggerated the whole affair, declaring that the laptop recipients are worse than Hitler. Or something like that.

Few (if any) of the thus identified recipients have any hardware review credibility or experience worth noting, so their perception of the laptop itself is laughably useless (already we've seen some inane, content-free "reviews" appearing), at most restricted to valuable comments like "sure is pretty" or "seems fast". To counter this, some recipients have claimed that the laptop was justified because it allows them to review Vista without all of the trouble and difficulty of actually installing the operating system (or going through the Herculean effort of returning the supposed review unit), clearly indicating their experience level (low to none), not to mention their complete lack of dedication in exerting any effort at all in the pursuit of bringing useful content to their readers. If it isn't as easy as loading their RSS reader and punching in some opinions -- sort of like this entry! -- then they can't be bothered.

Deliver it on a platter, please.

Why do people read these people again? I've had various builds of Vista, and now the gold version, in virtual machines, and on an actual PC, for a good amount of time -- and I'm hardly interested in sitting on the razor edge of Microsoft technology, and surely was long beaten to the punch by pro-Microsoft cheerleaders -- as have many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people who actually know what they're doing, and who aren't crippled with laziness. I have no inside track at Microsoft -- I'm quite antagonistic about them -- yet somehow I manage.

It runs very well, with all features enabled, on the middle to low-end PC I have it on, eliminating any (counterproductive) claim that only a high-end laptop would suffice.

All in all the whole thing is a lesson in how easily people can be bought, and how cynical one has to be about the opinions they find (and perhaps how meaningless those opinions really are), even among the pure and unadulterated blogging community (which, we are told, is supposed to be a superior alternative to the corrupt mainstream media). It is human nature to reciprocate favours, such as a $2300 laptop, but worse still is the inevitable invisible hand effect: If you want to keep this good stuff coming, you know what to do. Bring on the love, baby!

More disturbing is the entirely corrupt sense of ethics espoused by many of their supporters.

Nonetheless, I don't blame Microsoft. They're hardly alone in doing something like this (and like a mistress and a strayed husband -- why blame the mistress when she isn't the one that's married? Why blame Microsoft when they're not the one trying to present an impartial, objective opinion? Microsoft is just trying to sell a product.)

There's an extraordinarily good essay on this topic from a former magazine writer, sharing many parallels with the current situation. He details how the automotive industry used the same sort of coercion to get them to convince you that the new car is a lifestyle instead of just 4 wheels and an engine. He describes the soul-selling corruption that he witnessed among his peers, at the behest of Volvo (although it was hardly the only guilty company). The essay does nothing to sour my opinion of Volvo -- the Microsoft in that case -- but it does make me feel very negatively towards the supposed reviewers who beg their readers' trust. Who are empowered only by their readers' trust (otherwise Volvo wouldn't have wasted the money buying their voices).

I originally found that link from the superb The Submarine essay by Paul Graham.

I also highly recommend the superb book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. I was originally hooked onto that book by Spolsky several years back, and found it extraordinarily insightful about some of the techniques "compliance practitioners" use to get people (such as low level bloggers) to do their bidding.

On Bias

No one is unbiased. Even something like Visual Studio committing hari kari, taking some work out with it, can make me anti-Microsoft in completely unrelated matters for a period, often unfairly. On the flip side, if their tools help me achieve a particular result with gusto, I might be prone to suddenly thinking the brown Zune with "squirt" technology looks like a mighty nice MP3 player.

This is the case with all of us. We're human.

I've written about bias and blogs before, so I won't retread all of that.

One thing that I marvel at, however, is seeing that some of the lucky laptop recipients have explained that they can't be bought by Microsoft, because they I(HEART)Microsoft already: Their position is already so pro-Microsoft they couldn't possibly be swayed further. They're gonna love it anyways!

Again, I have to ask: Who reads the postings of that sort of person? I'm deadly serious. Why would you read the opinion of someone who would declare (explicitly or implicitly) such a confused outlook on reality? I share the same feeling about those who can't possibly see any good in anything Microsoft does (or big oil, or Republicans, or the UN, or whatever).

If you are in technology and you think this is teams that you are playing for (e.g. Linux or Microsoft or Apple), and you don't directly work for and get paid by one of the aforementioned teams, then you've taken a seriously wrong path somewhere. If you are getting paid, then you'd better be wearing a "Hi, my name is and I work for " nametag, and you'd better realize how entirely impossible it is for you to be any more than superficially unbiased. And no, softball criticisms aren't going to fool us into thinking otherwise.

If you aren't getting paid, then you should NEVER declare your fealty to a technology camp, or fool yourself into thinking that you have to pick. You don't. Don't do yourself, your employer, your clients, and your users a tremendous disservice by myopically aligning yourself with interests that don't necessarily correlate with your own.

Seth talks about the manipulation and gaming of blogs and meme sites, which I mention because the same topic -- opinion swarming & vote stuff, is one that I've written about previously, and I remain very interested in observing it in action. 

I started blogging on September 4th of last year.

I had an internet presence prior to that (content that received several Slashdot mentions, along with a half-decent number of inbound links), but I didn't put up content with the regularity of a blog -- largely as a function of the hassle involved -- and I didn't have RSS, Atom, or any other feed technology (and thus wasn't aggregated into other feeds).

It was just a random hodge-podge of random pages prior to putting it into the structured form you see today.

All-in-all the past year has been a very, very rewarding experience: A very credible number of people visit, and from a search-engine perspective the results have been extraordinarily successful. Strange seeing several dozen people a day from my hometown coming by just because I happened to mention it in a blog entry.

To quote from a September 4th entry-

The question I am pondering, then, is whether the only way one can remain internet credible (in search engine terms) is to integrate heavily within the blogging community, quid-pro-quoing endless links and trackbacks, ingratiating oneself with other bloggers, posting meaningless comments about every posting every other blogger makes (which they will of course do in turn). It's a sort of super-pyramid scheme, but with no bottom level.

Thankfully I've never had to quid-pro-quo or ingratiate to maintain PageRank. In fact I think I've maintained a fairly antagonistic approach to many of the popular blogs and bloggers, and I've seldom resorted to inventing "material" out of mentioning other blogs.

Which brings up an interesting topic - I was chatting with a peer about blogging and the effort/reward ratio, and they asked if I felt that I had "succeeded" in this venture: Sure, they pondered, I'd gotten a lot of mentions, along with a couple of heavily visited pages, but overall I still sit quite low on the list of bloggers. My Alexa rankings stink (though I should mention that Alexa rankings are laughably useless outside of the top internet sites. Alexa ratings are culled from users utilizing the Alexa or A9 toolbars, which is a vanishingly small number of users, clustered into certain demographics. Just a couple of users occasionally visiting with the toolbar has an absurdly large impact, so if I wanted to shoot up in the rankings, I'd just recommend the toolbar every month. As a case-in-point, at one point I noticed that my Alexa ranking had jumped considerably, but became suspicious that a disproportionate number of visitors visited the webstats page...which of course only I visit. I realized it was me that was inadvertently impacting the rankings when I had installed the A9 toolbar, so I removed it), and I'm not even among the top 1000 bloggers (by one metric I'm #5,269).

I have something like 118 bloglines subscribers, versus say 21,000 for someone like JoelOnSoftware (bloglines is only one of many aggregators, and Joel has far more subscribers overall, but it's a metric that is meaningful in a relative sense).

Yet I am thankful for every single reader, and the success of this blog is worlds beyond what I imagined. More important than quantity is quality, and some of the feedback leads me to believe that a great group of people have decided to drop by every now and then (even though many don't use feed readers, and just added it to their bookmarks for a once-a-month browse. That's the same technique I use for most blogs). Sure, complimenting your readers is a suspect activity, and is often driven by egotism above all else, but I really mean it: I couldn't have asked for a better readership.

And perhaps this will come off as cheap or like sour-grapes (which it most certainly isn't -- I set out expecting an occasionally accidental search visitor, and never anticipated the success this has seen), but there are some pretty easy ways I could have modified the message a bit to build and maintain a much greater blog presence, but that wasn't my goal.

I could...

• Blog more frequently. As it is, with two pre-school children, it's ridiculously difficult finding time to get posts in, but sometimes I just have to get a thought out there so it's a great exercise.
  
• Blog a more consistent message. No thanks. One of the things I love about this is that I can blog about a .NET video codec one day, Wikimedia on Windows the day after, HTML compression the next, SSIS packages the next, and my opinion about work environments after that.
  
  Occasionally I hestitate, wondering "will the people who subscribed after {X} hit the front-page on Reddit really care for this?" -- for instance when putting up navel-gazing entries like this -- but then I realize that's getting caught in the classic trap of limiting oneself to a narrow range of topics. With readers and browsers, people can just hop past things they aren't interested in, and while I'm sad for anyone who unsubscribes or /dev/nulls this blog, that's preferrable to diluting it to a serve-everyone-but-really-noone message.
  
• Blog a more generalist message. I certainly don't mean to be elitist with some of the entries, but it's the nature of the beast that some of them aren't going to entertain or cater to generalists or technical tourists. Compare this to almost all of the top blogs in this space -- apart from a couple of very rare exceptions, most seldom venture outside of the realm of easy, accessible observations and pondering. The "colour of the shed" sort of entries that everyone can add their voice to the chorus with their opinion.
  
• Blog towards retention. This is really achieved by keeping a general, accessible, non-threatening topic going, consistently pounding the same theme, or by creating controversy and debate where none really exist, but it's also built by minimizing the number of outbound links, and maximizing the number of internal links. This has never motivated the way I author posts, and if I lose a small percentage of users with each outbound link as they go off exploring Wikipedia or Seth Godin or anything else, that's something I'm very happy about. Having said that, the number of internal links seems to be increasing on here as of late -- as I've built a larger and larger volume of content, it just seems like I'm a pretty good resource to reference!
  

None of these techniques are secrets, but they're only acceptable modus operandi if your primary goal is, well, blogging. That isn't my primary goal by a long shot, and I have no ambitions of becoming a professional blogger. Instead I'm motived to talk to, and hopefully influence -- and maybe even impress -- intelligent and influential people.

In the coming few months (or more correctly weeks) I have several very, very exciting things that are going to come out, including the most exciting and innovative web idea I've ever had. It's only going to get better.

But I'll never compromise the message, and I'll never let metrics and stats give me misdirected motivation.

The Wall Street Journal Mention

Last Wednesday I was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal (right there on the front of the second section of one of the world's most prestigious newspapers), being referred to as the "world's pre-eminent domainologist" (an article that has been referenced in countless other sources now, including some errant attributions, such as the Toronto Star -- my hometown paper -- seemingly making me a Verisign employee, which of course I'm not). 

Apparently -- or so my wife tells me, given that I don't listen to or read anything that involves me in any way, and even when she talks about this stuff I cover my ears and basically repeated "LaLaLa"s to drown it out -- it was a well-written, humorous piece. While I apparently played the part of a fringe, bit-player, my name does appear quite early in the article, and that's pretty neat to me.

The mention doesn't bring me monetary rewards, and it really doesn't contribute to my professional success in any measurable way (though it's very neat being mentioned, and it was a hugely fun process working with Lee to get the raw material and provide some basic quotes, I'm not really in the business of domain names, and it isn't really a hobby of mine -- being attributed in such a way isn't really something I really want to leverage), but it is yet another weird, discordant mention in mainstream media.

So long as it isn't the notorious sort of mention, somehow it all works into my grand plan of world domination. Bwahahahaha! <rubs eyebrows>

Origins

It all began with a couple of emails from Lee. He indicated that he was from the WSJ, and was interested in talking with me about an article he was considering. After some difficulty finding a common point of availability, we finally chatted in person. This was around Wednesday of the week before.

That evening Lee recorded an initial phone interview, indicating that he had come across my article from back in March, and knew that it had seen a lot of success (for those who didn't see it, it was an article that took off like wildfire across the net, seeing front page action on Digg, Reddit, and mentions from numerous `A-list' bloggers. Quite a few of the entries on here have seen wide "link-love", but the domain name entries absolutely blew all prior -- and following -- records away, seeing close to 100,000 visitors a day for a period of time, still maintaining a lot of incoming interest).

Given that he hadn't come across similar research (he did ask if I knew anyone else doing similar research, perhaps probing to see if I was just a sub-eminent domainologist, and perhaps I would defer to a great authority), he decided to base his article on information I provided, both in the initial article and numerous follow-up queries he asked me to run.

One particularly exhaustive query took around 20 hours of runtime.

All in all it was a lot of fun, and from my end was nothing more than a couple of very brief phone interviews, and then some randomly kicked off queries and emailed results.

What a WSJ Mention Gets You

Despite the fact that the article in question provides limited personally identifying information (and while it's accurate, it is a bit misleading for some. For instance I'm not in New York City -- I'm actually here in a suburb of Toronto -- and the article of course apparently doesn't mention this blog), the immediate effect of the article was dozens of phone calls from people across the US -- and the world -- asking for my opinions on business ideas, asking if domain names people held were good ones, asking if I was interested in partnering on some project or other, asking how to get access to the raw data (see the comments in the main entry -- there's a link to the fax forms), and asking how I ended up being referenced in a WSJ article.

This blog also saw a lot of activity because of the article, with a number of people coming here after searching up obvious terms like "Dennis Forbes domain name". I'm still seeing WSJ-related search activity today (maybe hermits are just adding the issue to their apartment newspaper mountains).

I've received requests for radio interviews (I've done a couple of those before, and it isn't my favourite genre: I'm too full of self-doubt when it comes to accuracy, and mortally fear the possibility of saying something incorrect in response to an adhoc question. In such an instance I'd rather say nothing until I can verify, with certainty, that what I'm saying is correct. I haven't been "blessed" with the arrogance and confidence that allows some to make the most absurd of proclamations with zero self-doubt or hesitation), and have gotten requests for, and responded to, several email interviews.

All in all a very entertaining process, and it was interesting to take part in it. It has me looking for my next angle for media exposure.

How To Become The World's Pre-Eminent Domainologist

Of course Lee was being facetious when he assigned me with this title, and really I found it gut-busting hilarious when I heard it myself.

The original domain name article actually came about because I needed a medium-sized database to demonstrate high-performance database operations. While I was indeed curious about domain names, ultimately I requested access purely to have a large set of data to demonstrate some index-backed operations. I was shocked when I discovered that one could actually acquire a copy of the zone file. 

I really haven't been poring over zone files for years, amazingly reading trends and consistencies from streams of raw data.

After receiving the data, I saw that it really was interesting and entertaining, so in a single night I threw together the original article: Right after getting my credentials from Verisign, I downloaded the 850MB compressed file, extracted, imported and cleansed it, and then ran some humorous queries to see if it yielded interesting results. Seeing some of the answers, I thought it would be good blog fodder so I tossed an article together and put it online.

Over the next week I only had a free moment here and there, so I belatedly put up a follow-up article, in my haste skipping many of the tests that I had promised (for instance the English language queries, which I only finally finished at Lee's request).

My interest was short-term, and my technique was mostly driven by the biggest bang-for-the-buck queries that would yield interesting blog material, while allowing me to save my time for my family and my profession (in that order). I wasn't really sitting there month after month anxiously watching streaming domain name data, inferring complex patterns like a savant. Instead it was a couple of low-hanging fruit queries against the imported dataset, writing up the results when it was unexpected or entertaining.

Of course then the material seemed to be exhausted (the follow-up article saw much less attention), and my personal curiousity waned. The database then sat and collected bitular rust.

It's a marvel that it didn't get deleted to free up room for my prime-number database, or my ridiculously expanding set of digital pictures.

Then Lee called, I fired up the database -- to my surprize I still had it -- and the rest is history.

On Making A Hugely Popular Blog Entry

Populism has seldom been a goal of these entries, but a couple of entries, not to mention observations of the meme sites, have given me some insights into what are some elements that increase the probability of an entry taking off. Let's just say that I'm the World's Pre-Eminent Meme Site Popularity Assessment Expert (WPEMSPA, aka Wimpy-Sumpa).

• Obvious topic, and easy consumption - There is a general inverse correlation between number of words in an article/entry relative to its popularity on sites such as Digg and Reddit, not to mention blog references. This certainly isn't universal -- I've come across some incredible essays on those sites -- but the easiest pages to get widely linked include a relatively significant amount of graphics, or a very limited amount of text.
  
  Note the predominance of "top 10" style entries, where readers don't even have to read the summaries, instead deriving impressions based only on the list positions.
  
  Bloggers love to reference these sorts of articles because it saves time "RTFMing", allowing them to skim and post summaries of dozens of stories they've seen across the web without the hassle of actually reading them. Generally the only lengthy articles that get widely linked are those from sites such as the NY Times, or by long known industry figures such as Paul Graham, because people can skim and just assume the rest of the content, presuming that the author or publisher assures them that the rest must be half decent as well.
  
• Everyone can relate - Almost everyone, including the non-technical, has contemplated the idea of creating the next .COM success story, jetting around in their own personal 737. Many have visited a registrar, desperately punching in combinations in hopes that by some amazing coincidence no one ever bothered registering cars.com and similar low-hanging domains. They heard the get rich quick stories, so they want to get rich. And quick!
  

That's about it. Create entries covering everyday topics, and populate it with easy to digest graphics, and summaries that give cursory linkubators comfort that they're linking something interesting.

Enjoy the endless incoming traffic!

For close to two months now, I've been rather negligent of this blog. The reasons are numerous, however the following is a list of the primary causes.

• My wife is back to work as a laboratory scientist, now that maternity leave is complete, so "free time" (if such a thing exists with two small children) is getting squeezed entirely out, and...
  
• ...Professionally I've been extraordinarily busy, pursuing some new business avenues and opportunities, making it very difficult to allocate time to finishing articles-in-progress. 
  
  A partial motivation in maintaining a blog/original content system at the outset was to get some "cheap" (if the time dedicated to creating content was valueless) PR to drum up some consulting/software development customers, however that necessity has largely disappeared (and it was only intended as a fail-safe anyways. I never had to actively look for clients, instead relying upon business contacts and word of mouth. I've actually had to turn away most blog sourced  business due to a lack of capacity). Furthermore, as a PR vehicle for 360notes.com, I think the product itself will earn far more attention than any pimping in these entries ever would.
  
• Lastly, but certainly not least, the incredible success of the DNS entries makes everything else almost seem anticlimactic.
  
  I remember when I first started posting online papers, getting giddy to see that a half a dozen people read them in a week (and I carefully did reverse-IPs to see where they came from, following every referral back to the source), which I knew by downloading and looking at the logs every 15 minutes. As time went on, however, and readership increased, the "dose" required to have any motivational effect inflated, such that having several thousand distinct viewers (e.g. 10,000+ "hits", however nebulous that metric is) in a given day starts to almost seem like a failure (I see newspaper articles gushing about whatever human interest blog of the day caught their eye, and it makes me cynical seeing that they only have 600,000 visitors in a month. "That's only 20,000 visitors a day!"). It's strangely discouraging to think that new efforts will yield only a small portion of the attention the disposable DNS entries did.
  
  I'm completely over the "hit craving" stage that most bloggers/original content producers go through, and almost entirely disregard the stats. From this perspective, and hoping that I can find a small amount of available time, I'm going to finish up some long-in-the-making articles, along with some other content that I've been wanting to explore. Through it all I promise to disregard the stats.

Thanks for reading along, and have a fantastic day and week ahead!

Dennis

Before I go about possibly reinventing the wheel, I thought it worthwhile to ask: Could anyone point me to .NET / Windows server modules for SXIP 2.0 and/or OpenID? They're both fairly trivial identity solutions, so if I can't find one I'll implement one or both. Not only for personal needs, but because I can see some uses for them in client projects.

Thank you kindly.