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Hello, Are you still blogging?

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I cleaned out my news reader subscriptions this morning[1. I use NetNewsWire on my Mac PowerBook and Reeder on my iPad, with the data being coordinated through Google Reader online] and found that of about 30 blogs I dropped, most of them hadn’t been updated in over a year, or even since 2006 in a couple of cases. Are people getting tired of blogging? (For that matter, are people getting tired of tweeting? I hardly ever do it any more…) To lay a motivational foundation, I was cleaning out my subscriptions because I now read them on an iPad and it has been taking me nearly a couple of hours a day to read them, so I needed to cut a lot of duplicates—seeing the same information several places, in blogs that are just “repeaters.”

Ten reasons my buddies might have quit blogging (remember, I call blog posts “articles”):

  • Too much time goes into writing a single article
  • email inbox is over 1,000 and need to catch up
  • too busy reading other blogs
  • watching video more than ever – still haven’t seen all the TED videos
  • iPad doesn’t provide an easy way to write for the blog (get a keyboard!)
  • 400 podcasts stacked up and no longer commute to work so I can’t get through the backlog
  • don’t have anything original to say and got tired of repeating what others were saying
  • started tweeting and then I didn’t even have enough time for tweeting
  • quit blogging for {pick one} summer/trip/vacation/religiousholiday and just never got the energy to start again
  • got a real job. (Whatever that is…)

Hmmm…the balance to be struck is between consuming and producing, I think. And consuming is far easier than producing.

Are hungry searchbots eating your small web site alive?

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I work with a dozen or so clients at any given time, and in the last three (or thereabouts) weeks I’ve noticed that some sites on small servers with limited capacity are being “eaten alive” by spidery searchbots. And not just the usual suspects—Google, Yahoo, MSN—but by specialized searchbots that exhibit a kind of behavior I haven’t seen very much before. It used to be that web site owners prayed for the searchbots to come by, and searchbots by and large were sparing in their examination of pages, not hitting a site very hard at all, but building an overall image of the pages on the site over a long time. [1. Illustration: “Spider & Crossbones” pirate flag]

But times are changing rapidly! Even a site with very little human traffic may be suddenly and catastrophically overwhelmed by searchbot traffic. [Read more…]

Google and government requests for data or removal

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Google receives requests, including court orders, from many countries, for data or for removal of information on the various services it provides (search, YouTube, etc.).

They’re experimenting with putting up a page that shows the number of requests they’ve received, and (partially) the action they took, for the most recent six months.

You can view their map and click the pushpins to see country-specific data. For China, it says

Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.

Isn’t it interesting that rather than saying “removal requests” Google used the word “censorship” in this case?

To read more about legitimate (legal) requests and requests that do not have the force of law behind them and may simply be trying to intimidate a web site owner, visit the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.

 

The Open Net Initiative seeks to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance.

Boomers gotta answer their own questions

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{File under Boomer tales}

Robert Reich, who is, like me, surfing the advancing wave of Baby Boomers, suggests that we can (and maybe are the only ones who can) solve our own problem. [April 9, 2010]

More specifically he recommends allowing more immigration and the increased payroll taxes that immigration would bring with it. (Don’t confuse immigration with illegal immigration.) [Read more…]

Secret courts, secret orders

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Cory Doctorow posted a BoingBoing article about a recent National Security Letter requiring the Internet Archive to reveal user information to the FBI. In case you’re not familiar with this process, certain government agencies can issue these letters under the PATRIOT act, which require you to disclose information about your online users, and you can be required not to disclose even the existence of the NSL to anyone else – not your board of directors, not your employees, not even your dog. You can tell your attorney, otherwise this would violate due process of law because you would be denied legal representation. EFF stepped into this[1] as legal adviser to the Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle. The legal grounds on which they contested this was that the Internet Archive is a library (recognized by the State of California) which is exempt from these requirements under US law. The provisions apply to providers of Internet communication services (such as ISPs, duh, by definition).

Regardless of how you feel about government agencies having unchecked access to this kind of information — If you ran an online service that promised “we never share your information with anyone else” – what would your reaction be to an NSL requiring that you give up something like IP addresses, or physical address, or other information about a user of your service, without informing anyone? Would you be happy telling your users that you never share their information?

[Read more…]