DISQUS

I disagree. This is more like Blog Commenting 1.1 or maybe 1.2. We are a far off from what I envision for 2.0.

This adds a few nice tools (and is worth Automattic's purchase), but the basic system is still broken. I won't go into it here, but suffice to say that Intense Debate's three main features (threaded replies, import/export, and reply-by-email) hardly solve the real and substantive issues with the entire commenting system. Disqus is no better (and both are arguably worse as "closed" systems).

In fact, I don't believe any new external system needs to be created, but that new features must be implemented in all the major blog platforms. Intense Debate's "reply-by-email" feature may be of some benefit, but it sounds like an atrocious way to move more noise into your email box when most of us are trying to push it out.

I have my own proposal, but the more I began to think about it since last year, the more I've thought I should just make my own plugin for W/P rather than explain it, so that there would be a working model. I wouldn't be surprised to see it as one of the highest used plugins after a few short months and later integrated right into W/P.

Chief problems with comments as they are now (and who's solving these?):

Anonymous comments (and I mean no proof that Lawrence Salberg here is really Lawrence Salberg of Melbourne, FL -- I could have easily posted this comment as Seth Godin and on some blogs gotten away with it, especially if I tried to sound like Seth).

Irrelevant Comments (currently only fixed by manual moderation - and not very well on most blogs (ahem! TechCrunch!)

No quick summary of all comments (clarifications, for/against, add'l info left out of story, raging side debate but somewhat still relevant, etc). So you see a story with 100 comments and you have to READ the 100 comments - all of them - to get the gist of whether people think the original post is good, bad, or ugly.

No separate list of resources. Typically, when you find a good post on "The Top 7 Widgets for Gadget X", you have to scroll through 150 other comments to find links that the original author forgot or overlooked. Typically, you find multiple people crying out in anguish over the same forgotten product ("Hey, what about Imeem???!!!???") so that only adds to the noise that further decreases the chance that the one special gem will get drowned out even further. Why not have all links submitted by commenters automatically listed at the top in a "Other Resources Suggested by our Readers" in alphabetical order, etc.

Okay, so I gave away a few hints on part of my solution, but with the economy tanking, maybe it will help to make someone rich. Or at least busy toying around in PHP.

My opinion would be that AllFacebook shouldn't bother us with more internet noise (i.e. clutter) for stories that aren't really stories. 35,000 "protesters" (as someone above called them) out of nearly 100 million Facebook users is not even a blip on the map. In fact, it's not even 4/100th's of one percent (0.035).

And let's be serious for a minute. These facebook users aren't "protesting" by clicking "Join Group". That hardly requires much effort. Most of them (like many of us) are "guilted" into joining their buddies groups. Remember, the key on Facebook is to be unique as possible while conforming as much as possible. It's the Gen X/Y way. You'd almost have us believe, if we didn't know better, that these 35,000 users (assuming some aren't members of both groups) are out picketing Zuckerburg's house. Of course, we know two things about most of FB's younger users: they are lazy, and picketing requires making a sign. That's tough work for most of them. It requires, like, a day of work, and mad spelling skillz, and, like, it's kinda hot these days, so maybe just click "Join Group" instead. Yeah.

So, save us the click on our RSS feed in the future please (and your own time typing this drivel). When it get's to 1,000,000 "protesters", maybe it will be worth an aside post, but quite frankly, it wouldn't be news until it got to 5 to 10 million.

BTW, I switched to the new profile ahead of time, spent the requisite 15 minutes figuring out what went where. Some people just don't like change. It really isn't a question of whether the new interface is better or not. It really isn't. The people who use Facebook (95% of them) are hardly qualified to make UI decisions. In fact, half of them probably struggled just to sign up in the first place.

Thanks for the "noise" though. Maybe next time you can report on my Facebook group which, so far, has a total of 5 users attempting to limit the size of orders at fast-food drive-thru's. Yes, I feel that if we can double our membership by year end, we will be an unstoppable force that will crush the 20-minute $45 SUV orders at my local Wendy's. Come on, AllFacebook! What's more important? Z-man's new interface or the productivity of America's workers at lunchtime?

Wow. If you can't get Aweber's easy to use form to work, you probably do need to hire a web developer. Definitely don't mess with phpList or DadaMail which will be way above your skillz. Else, I'd surely recommend DadaMail.

There's also MailChimp which is quite good.

But you err when you say the $20/month amounts to server space. That's not so as anyone who has worked considerably with email campaigns can tell you. Aweber (and other's) services come from their incredibly successful delivery rate. You won't get much above 70% on shared hosting using your own solution (unless you have a very small private list) - and you have to be very cautious about not getting yourself shut down.

After all, if you are basing your install off the simple script install, I personally think you are already way out of your league. That just installs the things (which isn't difficult anyway). It's the setup - the right setup - which can be very tricky.

Then you have to worry about CAN-SPAM, batch processing, script time-outs., etc.

To say Aweber is "junk" because you don't know how to put a form in your WP sidebar is, well, to me, quite laughable (and possibly libelous). They aren't your web designer. I see you have hardly customized this theme at all... maybe it's time you be a bit honest and get some help from a friend. Trash-talking a successful company whose services you barely understand seems a bit rogue.

Wow.... this is stunning. School officials printed out parts of your personal blog and placed it in.... your child's school files???

It's no wonder that I rage on about the massive and excessive power that we, the public, have given public schools. It is not an education issue (and hasn't been for many years). They believe that THEY are the caretakers and representatives of any child within their grasp.

Here we have, quite clearly, a case of a child with special needs. And while I'm glad that Judi has invested and is investing quite heavily, both in time and money, in her child by yanking them out of that school and putting them in a private school more suited to her child's needs, it is unconscionable that public school employees keep thinking (and think to this day probably) that what Judi has done is the wrong thing. They think they know what is best and that you, the parent, are a fool.

What is truly sad is all the many others left behind by otherwise good parents who just have no idea.

This has happened and will continue to happen because we, as a society, give the public schools this power. I recently saw a short 2 minute news clip about the 17 girls who were pregnant up north. Guess who the media interviewed on the clip? One 16-year old girl who had a baby last year (and who warned how difficult it is) and... wait for it... some school officials! Apparently, our society believes, inherently, that it is the school's job to ferret out whether or not there was a "pact" for the girls to get pregnant. Guess who was not interviewed on the clip? The parents of any of the 17 girls! Hilarious as much as it was tragic. Folks, read John Taylor Gatto's stuff and ask yourselves - quite seriously - if you really think you are giving your child the best opportunity in life by leaving them in any public school.

When you parents go to the school system and ask for them to take your kids for after school programs, for them to teach them sex ed, to create programs for special needs, to promote every cause known to man.. you are giving them power. And reducing your own to the point that, like Judi here, when you do need to make a stand on behalf of your children, you will find yourself up against a tyrannical regime with very little real support on your side.

Thankfully, the public school system is dying. Private schools and homeschoolers have led the way and are once again returning authority to the homes of children. The tragedy will be the remaining children, particularly those like Judi's daughter, who get left behind as the publik skool system dwindles over the next 20-30 years, and who don't get the proper care and attention that one would otherwise expect (based off all its false self-proclamations).

Judi, you must be a very nice person. Because I can tell you that if I had my children in public school and that school had printed out my personal blog and placed anything, anything at all, from it into my child's file, those school "officials" (what a dumb word we use to describe these useless bureaucratic dolts) would literally have to go into the witness protection program.

Not to crush your dream, but you aren't missing much. I've seen dozens of launches - close, far, and in-between, and while they are always interesting, I honestly get a bigger thrill of parking next to the fence by the airport and having the 737's come in for a landing right over my head.

If you must go, you should make it count. Try and see a night launch - far and away better (and less likely to be scrubbed). The main viewing area is about 2 miles from the pad and requires a pass to get in -- usually pretty easy to obtain from folks in and around KSC. They have a limit of about 5,000 people per launch. A lot of other cars will pull over en route on near the two closest causeways and up by the Port, but will be farther (though not by much...).

A very few people get to be real close (less than a 1/4 mile), incl. some of the bigger press units. NASA saves those spots for visiting dignitaries, congressmen, etc... Not a real good chance you could ever get in there. My dad, who works for NASA, has only been at that site once and I think it was just for some odd reason if I recall.

BTW, let's hope we never witness a shuttle smoke plume like that picture you posted. Also, test launch date for the new Mars rocket is less than a year. The full thing should be really exciting in the next 4-5 years. It's going to be like the Saturn V... huge and dwarfing the Shuttle.

Except that it's been demo'd by MS for over a year, with no "in the wild" date on the horizon. Instead of using stuff like this to crush the competition, MS continues to release lukewarm software (Office 2007) and lose ground to Google - all the while getting sidetracked trying to steal Yahoo.

All the cool stuff at MS could be crammed into a small separate company. The suits running MS are running right into the ground. Vista, largest European Union fine ever, IE8 standards issues.

Ballmer needs to go and a real tech maven needs to be brought in. Maybe the guy in charge of the Live Mesh. Someone who *knows* that Office and Vista are NOT the future of M/S, but stuff like this - and XBox.

@Rob: I think it means you don't value your content and want to protect it. Should someone copy it and decide to use it, it will only make your case that much more difficult to win in court later. You don't need a copyright in every post - just the footer of your website (on every page). See Jake's blog (or mine and thousands of others) for an example.

@Jake: Only thing I'd add is that, technically, it's better to leave the original copyright year in place and add the new year as a range of dates. As you do on your blog correctly. @2003-2008 Jake McKee. All Rights Reserved. Or it can be shortened to @2003-08, etc.

Newsweek used About.com as an example. Let me just laugh outloud for a moment. HA HA HA.... Okay, sorry about that. No, actually, that wasn't enough laughing. GUFFAW SNORT CHUCKLE!

Isn't About.Com going under or something? Didn't I read that recently that they are having financial problems.

Yes, we can all find nice-and-neatly packaged encyclopedic information at hundreds of sites. I like to nod (respectfully) toward the original CompuServe and friends. Useful at times. I occasionally get a little info from About.Com. But I never get the full answer I'm looking for there. Don't know what iTunes is? Mahalo and About.Com are great starts. Want to hack your Ubuntu Linux to play iTunes? Better find some UGC somewhere or else.

Today's UGC, if it isn't extremely temporal or base, is tomorrow's moderated and polished general information and all those sturdy sites.

Newsweek and its old school media pals believe, in their heart of hearts, that all information must be edited and packaged by professionals. And every week, some Joe Schmo from nowhere does something somewhere via UGC that out does anything we've seen before from the best journals, magazines, and television shows. They all have their place in the world. Despite the fears of the old school media, no one in the blogosphere and other UGC-mediums is advocating (or believing) that both can not peacefully coexist - each serving a worthwhile purpose. Yet, on the other side of the tracks, they probably have plans to assassinate Matt Mullenweg thinking their subscription rates will return to pre-2000 figures. They continually spew out nonsense (like this Newsweek article) that makes them look, well, suicidal.

Hey, bottom line: If they want to edit, package, and polish information in slick glossy magazines, all well and good. I haven't read a Newsweek magazine since 1987 (in high school) but I am a news junky. What magazines have I read since? Economist. Rolling Stone. Mother Jones. Wired. (and I'm a right-wing extremist). But those mags offer insight that I just can't find in Snooze Week with their little required book review column, their little required A/P world news beat, etc. Where's the insight? Where's the break throughs? I'd have to read 100 Newsweek magazines to get a really solid unique perspective. Else I wouldn't know if I was reading Time, or U.S. Snooze and World Distort. Who could know?

But I read a new and unique story every day on a blog somewhere. Or, for those that have the patience to watch videos (not me), they see something interesting on YouTube or some other video source. I just discovered winelibrary.tv. That guy is nuts and is super entertaining to watch - and I don't even drink Wine or care about it. I'd hate to see the twisted wreckage of Newsweek staffers even trying something like that. It would be like watching George Bush do the Salsa. (Sorry, El Presidente, love ya anyway!).

If N/W is going to keep hiring these dorks who don't know kuh-rap about the internet and think they can put their head under the covers for a few minutes and then write about their insights with any intelligence, they are going to be out of business soon. Ziff-Davis Media just bit the dust. Why? Because they have done nothing interesting for nearly 10 years as the net has gotten more interesting. I think every other issue was "25 Ways to Speed up Windows". What? Let me guess... uh,... defrag my hard drive? I saw that same "tip" about 50 times over the past 10 years when I flipped through it and left it on the shelf.

Let me know when Newsweek hires John Dvorak from Ziff-Davis Media. Maybe I'll actually visit their website.

Wow. This was very interesting. I've been waiting for an excuse to try Picnik and have to admit I was a bit skeptical at first. After all, when you have Illustrator, Photoshop, and Fireworks installed on all your machines, you have to kind of wonder about the purpose of an online editing tool. Not to mention, my photo library tools all have similar tools built in to them as well.

Turns out I practically subscribed right on the spot. Very handy. I will be surprised if Flickr (uh, Yahoo) doesn't buy Picnik out in the next six months. They should. In fact, the only reason I didn't subscribe was that I noticed at the last moment that one of the prizes was a subscription to Picnik itself. A-ha! I'll wait at least one day and hope for the best.

I chose the building shot of NYC. After adjusting the color and the exposure, I chose to crop out the left side. I liked the tall buildings and the lines it gave. After cropping it, I decided to increase the contrast to make the lines more noticeable and give some strength to the power of the buildings. To do that, I had to rotate the picture to get inline as the angled shot didn't do much for me.

Then, I reread your instructions and noticed you wanted a "bad ass" variation of the original shot. So, I went back and toyed with the exposure, contrast, and saturation a bit more.

I like the final version I came up with. It's a very warm, retro, high-contrast image of the buildings that still gives focus to the strong lines and shadows of the buildings, creating an almost art-deco look, but not looking too cartoonish.

My only difficulty was on the rotating. I have to blame the camera lens (what 'ere it was) on this, not Picnik. There is a noticeable barrel distortion that becomes more apparent when you crop and rotate the image trying to get the building lines to parallel the image edges. A more advanced program like Photoshop could have fixed this, but in keeping with the spirit of the Picnik experiment, I left it alone. I couldn't tell from Picnik's documentation (which seems to consist mostly of a blog and some Ajaxy window popups) whether or not the premium version included such a feature.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/88567532@N00/17604...

@Daryll: I'll play you on S/C anytime. I assume you know SC II is finally on its way out. Check out Blizzard's site. Terran rules!

I'll take doors number two and three. I'll leave off my first experience with online communities (from way back in the dialup bulletin board days) as I'm getting too old too recall the details, plus things didn't turn out that great. I'm going for positive here.

First, one of my favorite stories about the power of community groups.

About two years ago, I found out I was working side-by-side with two guys who ran an online gaming forum that had about 130 members. About half of them were local to our area, and the other half were scattered throughout the country. They used the forum as their primary communication vehicle to plan game times and discuss strategies. The forum at that time had over 50,000 posts. They had been doing it for years (and are still doing it). Through their teamwork, they had become one of the most feared gaming "clans" in their respective gaming worlds.

I still want to interview the head of the clan so I'm holding back a few things here. But I discovered he was married, held a decent job, had two small children, but spent probably 20 hours a week playing video games and managing his "clan". He didn't seem to realize that he had accomplished so much that others only dream about. Just an average guy, but he had mastered the art of the fine balance between control and community. They had strict rules for participation and required certain commitments. But what impressed me most was that the average age of their members was in the mid 30's. In other words, these were not kiddies. Most of them didn't have MySpace profiles and none of them have Facebook (or even care about it).

What inspired me by getting to know these guys was that they had, by creating a community, accomplished real activity (winning major tournaments). Some of them had never even met in person. Most didn't have blogs. The founding four members never intended to grow some big forum or become an "online community", per se. In fact, when I mentioned what they had, in effect, done (and how it could be used as an example to others in different spheres of life besides gaming), they hardly understood what I was babbling about. In essence, the technology that enabled this to happen was invisible. As far as they were concerned, what they were doing wasn't much different than a few guys meeting at the local arcade every Saturday 20 years ago.

Now to Part III - I do, in fact, have a vision of how I'd like to see communities change the world. Or more accurately, perhaps, how I'd like to see communities (particularly online communities) change THEIR world.

I think the key ingredient missing in so much of the fabric of social networking is the isolation of one group to each other. You join one space but you aren't on another. Everyone seems desperate to belong, but you can only belong to so much. While there are mashup websites which will spin all your social network profiles into one huge web page, I still think we are missing the boat.

The internet IS the social network of our society. I see a future where everyone has their own domain name - not just bloggers and tech pundits. But everyone. Blogging platforms are making this easier for the average Joe. Blogger and WordPress are great starts, but they still cater to the tech folks, the writer types (ahem!), the self-aware, the creative media folks, and quite often, the lonely. What about the framing contractor who works 70 hours a week. Where's his blog? When does he "read" anyone else's blog? Not often. If ever.

I'd like to see two things to change this and I think we are on the very real cutting edge of this happening.

First domain name setup has to be easier. I know plenty of people who can't manage a GoDaddy registration (much less a renewal). Granted, I make good money handling this for them, but this has got to change.

Second, we need built in (click and point - to use an Apple motto) self publishing and it has to be all around us. You buy a HD video camera and you hook it to your USB port. It should prompt you "Would you like to put clips of this on salberg.org?" and automatically choose clips that it thinks may be interesting based on mathematical algorithms of action and sound.

You get in your car and almost hit someone and your vehicle should say, "Would you like to comment on what just happened?" and it puts your voice rant right up on your website.

Forget Twitter. Life is twitter. Typing is for the geek in all of us. We have to get to the place where ALL of society can participate in this great conversation. As long as only the folks who can (or need) to take the time to post (type) thoughts and ideas at later times - and who have laptops and podcasting studios and know the difference between and XML feed and Quicktime video... as long as these are the types who running the conversation, the conversation becomes, not surprisingly, about them and their lives. Hundreds of millions of others are left out. Maybe in some sense that is the way it needs to be right now. Every person in the world who has no email address (or perhaps worse - an AOL email address) can't be considered, perhaps rightly, as equal to the conversation we are currently having (like this one for instance) as someone more technical.

But over time, this needs to change. I've done a lot of studies of email responses over the years. I purposely send out emails occasionally to "bait" people into responding. Most don't. And yet, when I see them in person, sometimes a half-year later, they will bring it up and comment on it. Sometimes with very interesting and intelligent comments. When I ask, "Hey, why didn't you just reply?", I get a lot of answers. But lurking beneath those answers I get the same feeling I've had for two decades when dealing with non-computer types - they feel a sense of guilt and dirtiness for being even geeky enough to read emails frequently, for even admitting that they sometimes enjoy those pesky machines in the corner.

Notice: No one thinks this way about television anymore. Not about radio - no way. Not about going to meetings at the local library or church or neighborhood community center. Or the bar. Most people feel free to express themselves and get involved at those venues.

But on the computer, on the internet, it remains a vast and technical landscape, run by geeks mostly for geeks. (I'm using the word "geek" in a liberal, non-threatening way here: substitute techie or smart guy/gal if it makes you feel better).

My dream then, is this: To see the next "killer app" on the net that becomes and is completely available to everyone (no signup for $19.99/month), is built-in to every hosting account (Apache/Windows) and enables the easiest transition to community involvement for the layperson. Forget blogging. I'm talking about conversing. We tend to view it as the same, but the rest of the world doesn't. They'll communicate all evening in someone's living room with a cold beer in their hand, but they'd sooner have their nose hairs plucked then to get on the computer and type a "blog post".

We, the blogging world, need to remedy that. We need to promote tools and methods that bring average people in to this conversation. And we need to shun those tools that exclude them. I think we unconsciously are doing that (i.e. promotion of feed readers, email subscriptions for blogs), but I haven't seen much that purposely says "Let me go overboard to get the rest of the real world involved".

Tenth!

Not quite as good as First! But I'm in. For now. I'm scared about the next five days though. Is this like Survivor? Do the trust exercises get crazier until we just fall apart like little school girls weeping uncontrollably?

See? I'm showing my distrust already. I'm not off to a good start, am I?

Wow. Perfect timing. I just spent twenty minutes last night telling a friend about your point at BlogOrlando and you just go ahead and type it all out the next morning. Very convenient.

That point resonated with me fairly well and I've thought a lot about how I've made the all-too ready jump to call someone 'odd' in some way when I've certainly got my own share of oddities from other's points of view.

And in business, blogging, and relationships (of any kind) this is a very destructive way of maintaining (or building) them. Somehow, I think we all know that intuitively in our hearts, but it takes a gentle rap on the head from a friend (or fellow blogger!) to remind us of that.

Now, if I can only get out of this swamp so I can get to Level 40 so my rogue character can buy a mount soon. Woops! Did I say that out loud?

Ooops... I meant "block entire countries", not "blog entire countries"... ha ha... although there is a subtle twist in that error. Blogging entire countries? I have a local directory that I manage here in Brevard County Florida (brevarddirectory.com) that folks in Thailand, among other places, like to "submit links" to, despite the obvious locality of the site. It gets a lot of international traffic from western countries (probably would-be tourists to Brevard), but some countries should go - how many Ethiopians are surfing the net checking out restaurants in Brevard County, Florida? I really think I'd be okay in "blocking entire countries" for some sites - and helping my traffic stats be a little more meaningful, too.

Couldn't we reverse this? I particularly would like at least two of those countries from seeing my blog - China and Pakistan. There can't really be anyone there who is THAT interested in my blog - and I'd probably have only a tenth of the spam I get now. I found a script to block a single IP address - but I'd like to blog entire countries. Before anyone says I'm narrow-minded, let me capitulate to that charge - but I have lived overseas. But if I'm getting 20-30 spam comments/day from one country and NO real comments in a month - sorry, they'll have to go. Yes, its very totalitarian of me, but once a good script for TypePad or Wordpress comes out that is "plug and play", I won't be the only blogger doing it.