The McWetlog

Gizmodo’s prank at CES was wonderful: they walked around with a TV-B-Gone turning off televisions at display booths and even during presentations. Many of Gizmodo’s commenter’s aren’t happy about it, but I’m delighted. In too many fields, journalists (including bloggers) are too damn close and cozy with their subjects, because their subjects are also their advertisers. It’s always a good sign to see someone willing to bite the hand that purportedly feeds them. Ostensible displays of independence are always appreciated.

Update: Banned!

Update #2: The point is not to suck up to the consumer electronics industry; if it takes a dumb prank to signal that you’re not completely servile to the industry you cover, so be it.

Update #3: Gizmodo in its own defence:

[W]hen I see some fellow press damning us for the joke, I feel sorry for them: When did journalists become the protectors of corporations? When did this industry, defined by pranksters like Woz, get so serious and in-the-pocket of big business? … Consumer electronics tech journalism is very tricky. Those who strictly cover commercial CE depend on a powerful handful of companies for the very lifeblood of their content. That’s a dangerous position. …

Many of our harshest critics have done far worse than clicking off a few TVs. I’m talking about ethical lapses such as accepting paid junkets to Japan by Nikon, or free trips to Korea by Samsung. Turning a blind eye to Apple’s mistakes when they didn’t make an iPhone SDK and sought to lock down the handset. Stock prices torn downward by publishing incorrect leaked info. Writing about companies that also pay you for advertorial podcast work. All of these examples are offenses from the last year. And I consider those offenses far worse than our prank, because it ultimately it puts the perpetrators on the wrong team. As one reporter put it while chiding me, “Journalists are guests in the houses of these companies.” Not first and foremost! We are the auditors of companies and their gadgets on behalf of the readers. In this job, integrity and independence is far more important than civil or corporate obedience.

Repeat after me: Journalism. Is. Adversarial.

Scoble wonders whether “engagement” can be measured like audience. There’s something to this: some audiences, Scoble writes, click on links more than others. In my experience, when DFL was getting more than its share of coverage, print, TV and radio audiences had much less impact on my traffic than web sites: making Sports Illustrated in 2006 got me one or two comments, at most. But it also depends on the content: both The Map Room and DFL got huge traffic spikes when they were posted to MetaFilter; Snakes on Film got a tiny fraction in comparison. Whether the link resonates with the audience in question also matters, in other words.

I’ve had mixed feelings towards the Weblogs, Inc. stable of blogs — not because I’m hostile towards pro blogging (since I are one myself), but because of the quality issues inherent to how they compensate bloggers. When you pay people $4 $x per post, you’re rewarding quantity over quality, and even in my favourite Weblogs, Inc. blogs (like Gadling) it sometimes shows: a lot of mediocre posts, either weak on content or weak on analysis. You don’t get occasional posts of substance, but a flood of more mundane material. The signal/noise ratio is worse than it could be.

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Meg has lately been posting more and more food-related content on megnut.com — a change I’ve liked a great deal, being kind of interested in the subject myself — and today she’s made it official: her blog is now completely about food, and she’s doing it full-time. Always good to see another blogger trying to make a go of it, particularly when it’s someone I’ve enjoyed reading for years.

John Gruber is going full-time: he’s making Daring Fireball, arguably the best bit of Mac writing on the web, his full-time job as of this week. (Two years ago, he started trying to earn a living wage from the site; now he’s taking the plunge. I’ve been a member since the start.)

You will recall that I’m quite interested in whether people can turn blogging and personal sites into a full-time career — Heather Armstrong’s done it, through advertising; Jason Kottke, who solicited donations (“micropatrons”), had mixed results — because, completely by accident, I’m trying to do the same thing. Almost all of my (puny) income comes from my web sites (mostly The Map Room), though I’m working on other avenues as well. (My so-called “little of this, little of that” business plan.) As I’ve said before: if they can succeed, spectacularly, there’s a chance that I might be able to muddle through.

Here’s hoping that John succeeds spectacularly.

My good friend Jennifer has a new blog, and it’s off to a terrific start. I have this uneasy feeling that she’ll be better at this than I am.

Bloggers and media organizations are filing amicus briefs in the Apple suit against rumour sites (my take on which is here). Paul McCleary writes, in his excellent summary of the case on CJR Daily, “One can’t help but notice that in a certain sense, Judge Kleinberg and the media types seem to be talking past each other.”

In his March 11 ruling, which is being appealed (hence the amicus briefs), Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James P. Kleinberg ruled that Apple could go after the rumour sites for their sources. Kleinberg ruled that the question of whether the rumour sites constituted journalism was irrelevant. From his decision:

But even if the movants are journalists, this is not the equivalent of a free pass. The journalist’s privilege is not absolute. For example, journalists cannot refuse to disclose information when it relates to a crime. […] Whether [O’Grady] fits the definition of a journalist, reporter, blogger, or anything else need not be decided at this juncture for this reason: there is no license conferred on anyone to violate valid criminal laws.

In other words, your obligation to obey the law is not affected by your status as a journalist, so whether or not you’re a journalist is irrelevant.

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Comments — which on my Movable Type install are only enabled on The Map Room at this point — went blooey a bit. At the outset, I tried enabling TypeKey registration and moderating unregistered comments: TypeKey logins would be posted immediately; otherwise comments would wait in a moderation queue until I approved them. Except that didn’t work: TypeKey information wasn’t passed on, and all my test comments were moderated. A bit of checking led to a possible cause: my MT install is on mcwetboy.com, but The Map Room is on mcwetboy.net — the authentication system uses cookies, and cookies cannot normally be passed between domains. I’m sure a hack could be worked out eventually, but I lack the l33t sk1llz, and I’d already spent the better part of Thursday getting this far.

So I decided to leave things unauthenticated, but bolstered my spam fighting with the following tools: DSBL, which checks comments against a blacklist of open proxies; and Real Comment Throttle, which limits the number of posts from any IP (since spammers routinely attack with multiple IPs). I’ve set a limit low enough to catch even a small-scale spam attack, but high enough to allow my usual comment volume. I still close comments on entries older than 45 days, and now comments are force-moderated on entries older than 10 days.

My spam-blocking is not as absolute as it would be with TypeKey, but it’s quantitatively better than it was before I upgraded. (I should also mention that MT-Blacklist works much better on Movable Type 3.1x than it did on 2.6x.)

All my other plugins seem to still be working, including CloseComments and RSSFeed. A tip if you’re upgrading: delete your old MT-Blacklist. Having both Blacklist plugins running can lead to some strange side effects, including multiple e-mail notifications and forcing every comment to be moderated, regardless of your settings.

The shot heard around the blogosphere: Jason Kottke has quit his job to work on his web site full-time, and has started a three-week campaign to raise enough funds to do it for a year. The idea of making a living from blogging is not new, nor is a fundraising drive — Andrew Sullivan raised nearly $80,000 that way a couple of years back. What’s new is that Jason is soliciting donations, but not advertising, and his focus will be creative and personal rather than, say, journalism or commentary. It doesn’t look like it’ll be limited to blogging, either, but a return to the personal web site — which is something that I still practice around here in the non-McWetlog areas of mcwetboy.com, but is not often seen elsewhere.

Some bloggers are skeptical if not outright hostile: their attitude is, who does this Kottke guy think he is, asking for $30 so he can play with his web site. Apart from working for the Man (and that Man’s name is usually Denton or Calacanis) or generating massive advertising revenues all on your lonesome doing political commentary, blogging isn’t usually seen as a job. Personal web projects even less so. A substantial portion of web opinion doesn’t like the thought of web site owners earning any income at all, whether from ads or fundraising drives, but they’ve usually got day jobs or are otherwise financially secure, and can afford their notions of financial purity.

This news is particularly relevant to me. Though not by design, I’m spending most of my time working on personal web projects. And to my surprise, some of them — The Map Room in particular — are earning revenue. Not enough to live on, but right now, with employment insurance benefits exhausted and few employment opportunities for an editor/writer in a small town who’s semi-disabled (in that I can’t physically handle manual labour or even being on my feet all day), it’s all I’ve got.

It’s getting to the point where I have to identify myself as a blogger when the media asks after my occupation; otherwise, they think I’m making my fortune breeding snakes (which, let me tell you, is much less lucrative than blogging, if you can believe it).

Jason’s aiming for one-third to one-half his former income. Right now I’m making about one-eighth my income as a reporter (which was a pretty paltry income to begin with) and one-sixteenth my income as a government drone. My goal is to increase that. Fortunately, living out here is pretty cheap and I’m not living alone, so I don’t need to generate vast sums.

My current plan, such as it is, is to keep plugging away at The Map Room while building up my other projects. Neither Ankylose This! nor Gartersnake.info get much traffic right now, but they only launched last September. Critical mass is still a way off. Eventually, they might do all right, and combined, I might earn something resembling a living.

So I have a vested interest in Jason’s success. If he can succeed, spectacularly, there’s a chance I might be able to muddle through.

If nothing else, a web populated with self-sustaining personal projects would be a very interesting place.

Jesus. Came back from helping Venetia with her projects for a few hours to find more than 130 comment spams, posted within the space of an hour, waiting for me on The Map Room. Removed them. Movable Type 3.12 is starting to look persuasive: you can hold comments by unregistered users for review before they’re posted. That was by far the worst comment-spam attack I’ve yet faced; I can only hope that the nofollow plan makes them give up before the killing starts.

And then came a PayPal phishing expedition that I’m ashamed to say I nearly fell for, until I realized that it was sent to my Map Room address, which was never registered to them. A look at the raw source of the message revealed that the link was phony. It’s probably safe to say that an e-mail that begins, “Your account has been randomly flagged in our system as a part of our routine security measures,” is a scam.

Spoofed e-mail tutorials from eBay and PayPal, for future reference. Learn ’em good, folks.

My three or four readers may be wondering what the TrackBack link at the bottom of each post is for. It’s where you’d normally expect a link to leave a comment — Karen Traviss wanted to leave a comment thanking me for this post, and discovered that that’s not what the TrackBack link was for. So it occurred to me to try and write a brief primer.

TrackBack is a remote commenting system. Let’s say Reader A reads a blog post by Blogger B. Instead of leaving a comment on B’s post, A goes to her own blog and writes an entry that links to B’s entry. A’s blogging software goes through her entry, finds the link to B’s entry, and figures out where to send a TrackBack ping. Sends the ping to B’s server. B’s blogging software receives the ping, which contains an excerpt from and link to A’s blog entry. Depending on how B has configured her blog, that excerpt and link might appear beneath B’s entry. Essentially, A’s blog is telling B’s blog that A is writing about B, and B’s blog makes a note of it. It’s a way of tracking debates or conversations over many web sites: “These people have linked to this entry, and may have something more to say on this subject.”

These TrackBack tutorials do a much better job of explaining it:

• Movable Type: A Beginner’s Guide to TrackBack
• How TrackBack Works
• What Is TrackBack?

Does that help? It’s worth noting that not every blogging tool supports TrackBack. Movable Type does — hell, they invented it — but Blogger and LiveJournal don’t. (So, for example, Karen Traviss couldn’t send a TrackBack ping from her blog.) But now that the company behind Movable Type has acquired LiveJournal — and, if you want to see TrackBack in action, see how many there are for that post! — who knows?

Nominations for the 2005 Bloggies — the weblog awards — are now open. Am I wrong for wanting to be nominated? I think The Map Room would do well in the topical and possibly best-kept-secret categories; and DFL might be a good fit for the topical, tagline — you have to admit, it’s got a great tagline — and possibly even new categories. (Since I’m Canadian that might be another possible category, but both blogs are international in focus.)

I have no shame, but at least hardly anyone will read this here.

The comment spam problem has taken a new turn recently: it’s gotten so bad that it’s taking down the servers hosting the blogs they’re polluting. In response, some hosting providers are disabling comments and even blogs system-wide.

Here’s a recent e-mail from my own hosting provider:

We have seen a significant increase in weblog comment spam lately. Movable Type installations seem to be the worst hit, but Greymatter is also affected. The increase in comment spam has been causing a lot of server instability. We have begun blocking connections from the IP addresses we have found to be the origins of most of the spam, but that will most likely only work temporarily. We request that everyone with a weblog application installed please do what you can to reduce the likelihood of your site being a target. Install any applicable anti-spam plugins or disable comments on your weblog altogether. Let us know if you have any questions.

More on how bad it’s been getting from Ben Hammersley and Reid Stott.

So the upshot is that even if your own blog is protected (hint: MT-Blacklist) or is otherwise unaffected by comment spam (no comments, or uses Blogger), and even if your web site doesn’t even have a blog (but others on your server do) this has an impact on you.

The Movable Type team has concluded that the bulk of the problem is a bug that causes page rebuilds even when a comment is filtered. In a nutshell, every time one of Movable Type’s scripts runs, the server does some work. Every time a new entry is made or a comment is made to an entry, a script runs and several pages are rebuilt. That’s a lot of server activity and a lot of rebuilds if you have a lot of comments. The problem is that there’s too much activity even when the comments are blocked. A fix is coming. (See also this and this.)

Apart from the hit to the shared servers on which my sites are based, which should not be minimized, my blogs are relatively unaffected. On this blog, comments were disabled on new entries in July, and since then I’ve shut off the older comments in stages. DFL’s comments have long since been closed; even so, it, like Ankylose This!, uses Blogger, which has a method for filtering URLs to prevent the presumed boost in the Google rankings (it’s believed that you score higher in Google searches the more pages link to yours, which is the whole premise behind this comment spam nonsense).

That leaves The Map Room, which is protected by MT-Blacklist. And I automatically close comments on entries older than 45 days — which helps, because it’s older entries that are usually targeted. Still, it gets its small share of comment spam, which I excise as soon as I can.

I appreciate that many, many bloggers have it much, much worse.

John Bruce, who wrote a very smart online essay called The Sociology of Model Railroading (see previous entry), also has a well-written blog, where he makes a point of covering everything but trains — and politics. (With a couple of exceptions in each case. The latter I can understand: I’ve been turned off by blogs that would otherwise be interesting were it not for the toxic political views. But not the former.) So he covers academic politics, workplace issues, questions of faith, personal experiences, and fiction — sometimes I’m not sure whether an entry is part of a longer work of fiction or a personal experience. Anyway, it’s interesting (albeit unclassifiable) stuff — exactly what a personal blog ought to be.

It figures that, on the day before the end of the Olympics, Blogger would decide to throw errors at me when I try to publish new entries to DFL. Blogger has gotten a lot better in the last year, but sometimes it falls back into old habits: it breaks, it doesn’t tell you what’s wrong, and it takes forever to resolve it. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if this downtime takes until after the Olympics are over to be resolved.

I’d forgotten just how upset I used to get when Blogger went down. I moved this blog and The Map Room to Movable Type for a reason. I really, really, really don’t like it when a service goes down and I don’t know what happened or how long it will take to be fixed. I have enough points of failure as it is, with my ISP’s DNS server constantly going down and my web server constantly rebooting — even a more reliable Blogger is, as it turns out, still not reliable enough, especially for time-sensitive material such as DFL.

Update 11:57 PM: Still can’t publish.

Update 7/29 8:44 AM: It’s back. As usual, it’s better to sleep on it and let the problem get solved than hyperventilate in front of the computer — and my six or seven readers.

I’ve got a Kinja digest of some of my favourite blogs — including, I must confess, my own. Kinja launched last week; it’s got some shortcomings (and beta-related bugs), but it’s promising. Anyone can make a Kinja digest of their favourite feeds.

The Map Room has made Fimoculous’s list of blogs of the year (via Anil):

27) The Map Room — I love niche publishing, especially when it’s a niche worth adoring. A site all about mapping? I’d probably pay for this.

This is as good a place as any to mention that I’m in the process of switching The Map Room over to Movable Type at the moment, which means rewriting the template and other tinkering activities. Hopefully the delay in posting new links won’t be any more noticeable than the usual delays in posting that have plagued that blog of late. (Two words: day job.)

Be careful what you put on your wish list. You may actually get it.