Disqus - Latest Comments for samj

Re: On Citizen Journalism, The Degradation Of Society, And Bitchmemes

samj — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:41:17 -0000

These citizen "journalists" play a more important role as eyes and ears of "real" "citizen journalists" at publications like HuffPo & TechCrunch... their output need not be squeaky clean as upstream writers will rely on multiple and/or reliable primary sources.

Re: Citizen journalism: I’ll take it, flaws and all

samj — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:55:51 -0000

With mainstream media working hard to euthanise itself by failing to learn from the dotcom days and erecting paywalls, citizen journalism, even just as a (noisy) information source for the likes of Huffington Post and TechCrunch, is absolutely critical for society. It can be all the eyes and ears we need where it is no longer justifiable to pay to have reporters on the ground. I like Paul's "look at me looking at them" take, and that he's kicked off some much needed discussion, but the suggestion that we should do anything other than encourage and promote citizen journalism (with guidance as to the ethics of journalism) is foreign to me.

Re: Paul Carr's piece is rubbish (and disgusting) (Scripting News)

samj — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:14:41 -0000

Citizen journalists will play a very important role once mainstream media euthanises itself by putting up paywalls, even if only to be the "eyes and ears" of sites like Huffington Post and, dare I say it, TechCrunch. I said to Paul he should be careful what he wishes for as the only thing keeping society on the rails is that some of the scandals see the light of day. Would citizen journalists have discovered Watergate? Probably, but people do need to know how to handle the information they discover and posting photos with [what turned out to be false] speculation is not at all what we need.

Sam

Re: Windows 7 Launch Sales: 234% Better Than Vista

samj — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:13:50 -0000

Your "face off" pitted a major OS release against what was effectively a service pack. Were there any surprises here?

Re: Google Acquires reCAPTCHA

samj — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:16:47 -0000

In supporting reCAPTCHA I was supporting "a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University", not a commercial enterprise (Google or otherwise).

Reminds me of the time I manually entered a sizable CD collection into the free/open CDDB project only to have it "acquired" by Gracenote and locked up.

Sam

Re: VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

samj — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:41:00 -0000

No, it's not at all fair to compare legacy vendors to cloud providers based on market cap. It's like assessing the market share in terms of vehicles on the road by comparing the revenue of Toyota and Tesla - the former can get 10x as many cars on the road for the same price.

Comparisons of Microsoft vs Google Apps revenues are similarly misleading as for each Microsoft user displaced by Google there is a much smaller spend (which is exactly why people are flocking to these services).

Of course this means that the providers have to do a lot more with a lot less (ditto the ecosystem around them), but this also means the agile upstarts are relatively safe from the dinosaur incumbents.

Sam

Re: VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

samj — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:28:57 -0000

In claiming that Amazon don't have a history of 'playing nice' you're implying that VMware does. BS, they're just as ruthless as the next vendor and by "forcing" vCloud down everyone's throats rather than just using it themselves and letting us come knocking I'd say they're even moreso than Amazon.

It'll be a cold day in hell when Amazon adopts vCloud and to be honest I don't think the API is up to the task (at least in its current form), which is no surprise given its lineage. OTOH I'd rather the Amazon EC2 API stay shacked up because it's very implementation-specific and would give them an unfair advantage similar to the one VMware is currently seeking.

Sam

Re: VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

samj — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:22:57 -0000

Sure there will be lock-in for both vCloud and OVF. Users aren't stupid and will quickly learn that they need to use VMware to avoid compatibility reasons just as they continue to reach for Microsoft Word today even though document standards are "open".

Does OVF work for portability today? Not so much. Will vCloud (or whatever they end up calling it) work for interoperability tomorrow? I very much doubt it.

Sam (who'd rather no particular vendor enjoy an unfair advantage by having their native standard "forced" on others)

Re: Danish Woman’s One Night Stand Video Is a Government Hoax

samj — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:45:32 -0000

They have just this second (~10:30am CEST) made the video private following a rash of comment censorship. The last comment I read was something like "come back in 15 minutes and you'll see this comment is gone". Seems these people prefer to rub salt in their own wounds - once the cat's out of the bag on the Internet it's kinda hard to put back in.

So, did anyone grab the video itself? You can do this in Safari by grabbing the URL from the activity window (it'll likely be in FLV or if you're on HQ then H.264 format) but unfortunately I was using Chrome at the time.

Sam

Re: srs.li now supports rel="shorturl" and friends

samj — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 09:35:53 -0000

Thanks for adding rel=shortlink support. I'd suggest dropping rev=canonical (which has been widely criticised) and rel=shorturi (which doesn't really exist). The rel=shorturl guy(s) are still flogging the horse so you can make your own mind up about that.

Sam

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

samj — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 04:50:15 -0000

Domains are usually short enough to be used as is (e.g. http://dell.com/az93 or http://microsoft.com/win7) and the result is clearly a much higher quality link that tells the reader something about the content before they click.

Regarding 3rd party tracking, what is the use case really (beyond feeding the egos of people whos egos don't need feeding). I realise that there are marketing benefits for the few of us who are in that industry but the cost of creating millions of links to each resource (rather than one or two - the canonical and short links) are many and not always obvious. I found today that browsing a twitter search for new content was almost impossible for example because my browser's colouring of visited links was broken.

Incidentally Wordpress blog software will be including shortening services (perhaps using wp.me) in its stats module soon... these will presumably capture stats as well, thus solving the problem.

Sam

Re: Twitter is a Twademark. Tweet: Not Yet, Maybe Never

samj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:57:37 -0000

Yes, just recently (in May), but that doesn't make it enforceable. More on that point soon...

Re: Twitter Updates Officially Become Tweets

samj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:56:32 -0000

Thanks for noticing and documenting this guys - it may well end up being the smoking gun that keeps "tweet" in the public lexicon where it belongs.

Re: Twitter is a Twademark. Tweet: Not Yet, Maybe Never

samj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:38:44 -0000

"retweet" is not trademarked but it would be covered by a successful trademark of "tweet" anyway.

Re: Twitter is a Twademark. Tweet: Not Yet, Maybe Never

samj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:38:00 -0000

So far as I can tell Twitter were NOT the ones who "really promoted this word" - the grassroots community and media did and until very recently Twitter used the term "updates" and distanced themselves from the term "tweet". The real question now is not whether they get to have "tweet" (it was never theirs to trademark) but whether they get to keep "Twitter".

Sam

Re: Twitter is a Twademark. Tweet: Not Yet, Maybe Never

samj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:35:26 -0000

Doug,

Indeed it is unfair that Twitter have allowed rampant abuse of their trademark and are now taking action when it's too late for others to change. Fortunately for you your book isn't dependent on Twitter accounts or APIs - otherwise they could just turn you off like they did for @retweet (though not necessary in compliance with their own terms of service).

IANAL but you may be well advised to stand your ground in this instance, and in any case your book is in a different class and simply references Twitter - imagine if it were not possible to write books about Ferraris for example, or Microsoft software?

Sam

Re: Twitter is a Twademark. Tweet: Not Yet, Maybe Never

samj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 04:34:18 -0000

Twitter has more to worry about than "Tweet" - as Michael astutely pointed out below the Twitter trademark itself looks to be on very shaky grounds and their behaviour around it doesn't help one bit.

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

samj — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:45:29 -0000

I'm not sure it needs a PhD student, rather some common sense and a bunch of eyeballs. But yes, it's a good idea. I was actually thinking of whipping up an I-D for rel=shortlink but there's not enough hours in the day.

Sam

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

samj — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:21:22 -0000

We should strive to make URL shortening invisible. DNS queries (esp for CNAMEs), TCP handshakes and HTTP requests are all very expensive and also all very unnecessary. On the other hand, fixing WordPress, Drupal or whatever CMS it is you're using to generate its own links and host them at the root is surely going to be the better/faster/cheaper way to accomplish this goal. Sure if you want to be fancy you can get your own domain but it's going to hit your performance and cost you more in the process (that is, only really necessary for long domains).

I think more to the point, before we go about declaring "$solution has solved all the problems with URL-shorteners" we need to assess the proposal thoroughly (look how far rev=canonical got before being reeled back in).

Sam

Re: How to fix URL-shorteners (Scripting News)

samj — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:01:22 -0000

Whoa, HTML redirects are far more expensive than HTTP and URL shorteners already add significant overhead... I'd be interested to see what kinds of delays this adds (I suspect that real world tests would show it's actually *worse* for performance than the status quo).

My strong preference is to stick with the same domain and compress the path and query string as much as possible. For example:

http://samj.net/2009/08/twitters-tweet-trademar... -> http://samj.net/1a

That way your user agents are saved at least one recursive DNS query (with CNAMEs it's two), a TCP 3-way handshake and a HTTP transaction and can get everything done in one go with keep-alive. In that case the performance impact would be negligible, and you can still do your tracking.

Whatever the mechanism we should definitely advertise the result using the rel=shortlink standard.

Sam

Re: Be careful when naming your Twitter application…

samj — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:01:08 -0000

Looks like it's not going to happen:

Twitter's "Tweet" Trademark Torpedoed
http://samj.net/2009/08/twitters-tweet-trademar...

Sam

Re: Twitter Responds to "Tweet" Trademark Issue

samj — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:27:33 -0000

Not so fast:

Twitter's "Tweet" Trademark Torpedoed
http://samj.net/2009/08/twitters-tweet-trademar...

Sam

Re: Loose.ly coupled 140-char message network (Scripting News)

samj — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:49:08 -0000

An "activity stream" is full of "status updates" or just plain old "updates" is it not?

Even if we don't equate "microblog" (essentially just a space-constrained blog) with "activity stream" (which might include other information such as friend requests) the term "update" works for me.

Remember for a blog it's a "post" so we could always reuse that too...

Sam

Re: Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem (Scripting News)

samj — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:16:18 -0000

Nice post Dave.

So I've been thinking some more and figure the best way to drive adoption is to encourage developers [including those of both Twitter clients and Twitter itself] to run their own shortening services on their preferred platform (or within the client itself). I've already made source code available for Google App Engine but they could use whatever they like.

Developers could then do their own performance improvements (e.g. whitelisting and caching) and would have only themselves to blame if something went wrong (I've lost count of the number of times I've been aggravated by a Twitter client because its default shortener was slow or out of action). Where sites don't advertise shorturls they could just manufacture their own too which would be a branding opportunity in itself (think http://twt.ie/abc123 rather than http://bit.ly/abc123).

I don't think we're at the mercy of Twitter here (though their support would obviously help a LOT) so let's see what we can do about driving adoption.

Sam

Re: Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem (Scripting News)

samj — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:41:19 -0000

Dave,

So I was thinking about the #shortlink bootstrap problem and while adding 5-10 million Wordpress.com blogs is a big shot in the arm we've still got a long way to go yet (and as you so elaborately explain, we're often working against commercial interests).

I figure that the most perforant way to resolve the shortlinks is via the HTTP Link: header (recently reincarnated in an Internet Draft by Mark Nottingham) but doing a HEAD and then falling back to a GET and/or a 3rd party service is expensive, especially while we're still building adoption. If huge sites like wordpress.com are happy to jump on board though this could be significantly reduced with a temporary whitelist (that is, only use this mechanism for sites we already know support it). Said whitelist could be maintained in the DNS (if clients are to consult it) or in web based shorteners like http://rel-shortlink.appspot.com/

All in all I think we finally have a sensible solution to the URL shortening problem...

Sam