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Lots of invective and rhetoric being written about Google's new Toolbar functionality, AutoLink. Originally I probably wasn't going to write anything about it, it's really such a non-issue, but I'm growing irritated by the number of bloggers—mostly A-listers—who are speaking out against it. I'm not irritated as a knee-jerk reaction in defense of Google, but because most of what I'm reading is just plain wrong.

Quick background: Google's new Toolbar (which is in beta, only runs on Internet Explorer for Windows and which you have to knowingly install to use) has a new function called "AutoLink" which, when manually invoked, searches for certain types of text on a web page and will automagically turn them into links, if there weren't any links there already. The type of text it search for seems to be:

• Addresses. These will create links to Google Maps.
• ISBN numbers. These will create links to the product-specific page on Amazon.
• Shipping tracking numbers.
• Vehicle ID numbers (VINs).

Right off, I have to say I agree 100% with what Cory Doctorow wrote about this on Boing Boing:

It's not a service I'd use, but I believe that it's the kind of service that is vital to the Web's health. The ability of end-users to avail themselves of tools that decomopose and reassemble web-pages to their tastes is an issue like inlining, framing, and linking: it's a matter of letting users innovate at the edge.

I think I should be able to use a proxy that reformats my browsing sessions for viewing on a mobile phone; I think I should be able to use a proxy that finds every ISBN and links it to a comparison-shopping-engine's best price for that book across ten vendors. I think I should be able to use a proxy that auto-links every proper noun to the corresponding Wikipedia entry.

And so on — it's my screen, and I should be able to control it; companies like Google and individuals should be able to provide tools and services to let me control it.

Of all the sites I read, I think this was the lone voice of reason on the topic. Instead, you have people like Robert Scoble and Dave Winer calling this "evil" and a "slippery slope" that will lead to the end of the web as we know it and mass censorship by Google.

I'm not kidding. This is what Winer wrote:

And if links are changeable, is text subject to change as well? Might Google correct our spelling? Or might they correct our thinking? Where is the line?...

What's next? Could they link it to Gmail, and where ever the name of a Gmail user appears in a page, change it to a mailto link so you can send them mail? If you're in the widget business, might they change the links to your widgets to links to your competitors' widgets? (Aren't they already doing that to Barnes and Noble?) Would they add discussion software so that any Internet user can mark up your page with their comments, no matter how inane or immature?...

The AutoLink feature is the first step down a treacherous slope, that could spell the end of the Web as a publishing environment with integrity, and an environment where commerce can take place.

What's funny is that email programs already autolink email addresses and web addresses—often wrong, I might add—in messages I get. And—get this—on any blog with comment functionality on it (like mine), users can already mark up that page with their comments.

(A note on the Barnes and Noble reference, though—yes, AutoLink does link a plain ISBN on Barnes and Noble's site to Amazon. I confirmed it myself. Personally, I find it rather amusing; I know B&N will successfully lobby to get this fixed, so I'm not worried about it.)

And here's some of what Scoble's written:

I believe that anything that changes the linking behavior of the Web is evil. Anything that changes my content is evil. Particularly anything that messes with the integrity of the link system. And I do see this as a slippery slope....

The fundamental building block of the Web is linking. Linking is MY EDITORIAL CONTENT....

My editorial is sacrosanct. Linking is editorial.

Ironically, Scoble runs a linkblog where he reposts other authors' blog entries, with his name highlighted, and adds a "Related" and "Comments" link to other people's writing even as he writes the above.

It's even more ironic that people like these guys who are all about innovation and are outspoken user advocates would come off like this. I see a "slippery slope" all right, but it's going the other way.

How? Well, AutoLink is basically simplifying this process:

1. Highlighting a piece of text on a web page (like an address).
2. Opening a new browser window, going to Google (or MapQuest or Amazon, etc.).
3. Pasting that copied text into the search box, and clicking the search button.
4. Done.

No one should object to doing this, right? Well, the way I'm reading many of these arguments, pretty soon they will be. There's the slippery slope, pretty soon the "content producers" are going to object because you might be using their text to search somewhere else on the web. So, let's ban copying text from the browser. But wait, someone could just retype the text in without copying-and-pasting. Better take away the users' keyboards so they don't infringe on your content.

See? It's a fun game.

The arguments almost all object to a third-party tool changing the content of their web pages by adding links. Okay, but what about the many pre-existing toolbars, plugins, extensions, and browsers themselves that already do this? Hell, the ability to do this is even built into the browser—you can turn off images, JavaScript, and stylesheets, and I guarantee doing that will alter the content of many, many sites—I've developed sites myself that depend on JavaScript and/or images, so I'm not exaggerating. This is a ridiculous argument.

In fact, the only good argument I've seen comes from Rogers Cadenhead: the copyright issue. By essentially altering a work (a web page, in this case) that is copyrighted for public consumption, the AutoLink feature may be in fact violating the copyright of that page. That's a reasonable, intelligent argument and is something that should be addressed.

Until then, jeez. C'mon people, like Cory said, it's healthy for the web. It's innovation. Instead of whining about it, why not be productive? I've seen suggestions for an opt-out feature on web pages, that's a good start; make it a META tag.

Or what about this? Make the toolbar smart enough to not change copyrighted pages, only those that are using an appropriate Creative Commons license, or are public domain. How would it know? META tags, again; Creative Commons licenses already embed RDF inside the content, so it's not a stretch.

In fact, this is a good incentive to do something I've been meaning to do for awhile: convert my blogs over to Creative Commons copyrights. I personally have no qualms about toolbars or other software altering my content for a particular user's display, so I'll make it totally legal for them to do so. Within the week.

In the meantime, everyone complaining—take a breath and get over yourselves.

Weight loss update: as of yesterday and today, I've lost 25 pounds since the beginning of the year. That puts me at 203 pounds. Last weekend I finally broke down (under strong convincing from my wife) and bought a new pair of jeans and khaki pants, both a size smaller than I was wearing previously. Gettin' there.

I'm amazed every week at how much growth ORblogs keeps showing; as of right now, there are 605 blogs in the directory, and 18 were added over the past seven days alone. (Check the ORblogs Recent Additions page to keep up to date on new ones.) Oregon bloggers, we're a growing bunch. And kudos to Paul, who developed and runs the site. Excellent work!

This is one of those links that's too wacked-out not to post... Back in the late '60s, Leonard Nimoy—riding high on his Star Trek fame, I'm sure—released an album of music called "The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy." My friend Justin in Portland found the album at a thrift store or something, I've heard part of it. It's pretty awful, but the craziest song on it is "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins."

Yes, you read that right.

What possessed him to sing such a song, we'll probably never know... but what further possessed him to make a video from it—well, it's really too messed up to think about much.

Oh yeah. Not only do you get to hear the song, you get to watch the video too: The video for "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" (QuickTime).

It's crazy how much development is going on around here these days. Downtown, they're just about to tear down the old post office and start erecting a new parking structure. The "Firehall" is ongoing, with a giant plastic bag over the top of it (it's truly surreal). The new building on the corner of Wall and Franklin looks mostly finished. Something's going up on the old Eagle Lodge location, on the corner of Greenwood and Hill. The Old Mill District continues to grow and change. Up north, there's of course talk about the Super Wal-Mart, but good grief, Bed Bath and Beyond is already open, Best Buy can't be far behind, CostPlus and PetSmart are going up. Target is expanding, I hear.

And everywhere you go, residential development is gangbusters. You can't swing a dead cat in this town any more without hitting construction. (Ironically, I work for a builder that's contributing to all this mess. And live in one of their homes.) I know growth and change has kind of been the theme for Bend and Central Oregon this past decade, but right now it seems like there's more going on than ever before. Or is it just me?

And of course the one thing Bend really needs—a mass transit system—is nowhere in sight.

One of my new favorite Wikipedia pages is the Unusual articles list. You gotta love that. Where else could you learn about such things as Heribert Illig, a German historian crank who claims the Dark Ages didn't exist and the years 614 to 911 AD are invented? Or that some guy legally changed his name to Optimus Prime, after the Transformers character? Or that the smallest park in the world is in Portland, Oregon?

I first spotted the news a few days ago on Metroblogging Portland: Google in The Dalles. Then my wife read about it online this morning, and now it's on Slashdot. Sounds interesting, but it seems like kind of a random place to plunk down a data center (if that's what they intend to build). Well, it's better than Medford or Umatilla, I guess.

I wonder if this means The Dalles will be the next technology nexus in Oregon?

...yeah, right.

This article from the Wall Street Journal online is actually rather remarkable. It compares and fits blogging with mainstream journalism, and is maybe the fairest take on it I've seen.

6. It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM [main stream media], and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you've lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you're over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web. [emphasis mine]

There are blogs that carry political and ideological agendas. But everyone is on to them and it's mostly not obnoxious because their agendas are mostly declared.

7. I don't know if the blogosphere is rougher in the ferocity of its personal attacks than, say, Drew Pearson. Or the rough boys and girls of the great American editorial pages of the 1930s and '40s. Bloggers are certainly not as rough as the splenetic pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who amused themselves accusing Thomas Jefferson of sexual perfidy and Andrew Jackson of having married a whore. I don't know how Walter Lippmann or Scotty Reston would have seen the blogosphere; it might have frightened them if they'd lived to see it. They might have been impressed by the sheer digging that goes on there. I have seen friends savaged by blogs and winced for them—but, well, too bad. I've been attacked. Too bad. If you can't take it, you shouldn't be thinking aloud for a living. The blogosphere is tough. But are personal attacks worth it if what we get in return is a whole new media form that can add to the true-information flow while correcting the biases and lapses of the mainstream media? Yes. Of course.

Astute readers will notice that I now have Amazon related links (books, actually) on some entries (spun out of my Amazon's Web Services post). Hopefully they're not too intrusive; I have them limited to a max of three results right now, and they'll only show up on blog entries that I specifically keyword.

All done with Amazon's web services. It's not completely automatic, since I have to keyword the entry, but it beats looking up items by hand. Using the web service interface is extremely easy; simply build a URL and send the request to Amazon, and you'll get XML results. I'm using the excellent Snoopy PHP class for the communication piece, and PHP's built in XML parsing (using expat) to extract the information I want from the XML.

Some tips, after trial-and-error: Use a "Power" search in the Amazon request, especially if you have multiple keyword sets. An example might look like:

Power=keywords:(web services) or (xml) or (http programming)

The regular "Keyword" search turns useless after four or five words, it seems, and the "TextStream" search returned totally random results.

I played around with have the results sorted by rating ("reviewrank"), but dropped this because I was finding that older editions of the same book (hardcover vs. paperback, for example) might have a higher rating, but not actually be available. By dropping the sorting entirely, Amazon returns surprisingly relevant results.

The results can include images, all hosted on Amazon's servers. Use them! They come in three sizes.

And finally, pick your keywords carefully. Or you'll get some weird, totally unrelated items.

The February issue of Discover Magazine has an interesting article about Project Orion: a project that was developed during the '50s and '60s to build a spaceship that was as big as a skyscraper, weighed eight million pounds, and was propelled by—get this—nuclear bombs.

While Discover's article was good, focusing more on the people and policies involved, Wikipedia's Project Orion page is excellent, and delves much more into the hard science. It sounds on the one hand totally insane and on the other hand perfectly logical and obvious. But you gotta wonder at the audacity of a design that would have required 800 (or more) nuclear explosions just to lift the ship into Earth orbit 300 miles up...

Interestingly, an Orion ship is a major plot point in one of my all-time favorite science fiction books, Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. A great book, probably the best alien invasion story out there, period—Niven and Pournelle simply rock. What else can I say? I totally recommend it. It would make a perfect movie, done right, but if nothing else, read the book.

One huge spelling mistake that's been driving me crazy lately—and I'm seeing it everywhere, literally everywhere, even this article in the Bulletin today—is spelling the word "lose" as "loose." How can people continually misspell such a simple word? Worse, why didn't the editor of the newspaper catch this?

lose: verb. Inflected forms: lost, losing. Meanings: to bring to destruction — used chiefly in passive construction; to miss from one's possession or from a customary or supposed place; to suffer deprivation of; part with especially in an unforeseen or accidental manner; etc.

loose: adjective. Inflected forms: looser, loosest. Meanings: not rigidly fastened or securely attached; having worked partly free from attachments; having relative freedom of movement; not tight-fitting; etc. As a verb: Inflected Form: loosed, loosing. Meanings: to let loose; to make loose; to cast loose; etc.

Hey, I almost forgot: in addition to Valentine's Day, today is also Oregon's birthday: it was admitted into the Union on February 14, 1859, the 33rd state. Just random facts. Move along.

Maybe Mark Jen was the tipping point: even CNN has picked up on the "fired for blogging" meme. Read their article here. Kind of a puff piece, but does delve into some First Amendment issues.

But employee and non-employee bloggers don't have the same legal protections.

Workers who rant or rave about bosses online — whether it's done on the company clock or at home — generally don't have a strong defense.

In most states, employees who don't have a contract are considered "at-will," which means they can quit at any time and for any reason. Conversely, employers have the right to fire them at any time and for any reason, except for well-known exceptions like race, age or gender.

So whether a supervisor discovers an underling ridiculing his thinning hair at the company elevator bank, at a local bar after work, or on the worker's personal blog doesn't matter. In either instance, the boss can turn around and say, " 'We don't need you. Why don't you go work for someone else?' " said Margaret Edwards, a partner with Littler Mendelson, a national law firm that represents employers.

Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco employment lawyer, says there's a false sense that employers can't punish their workers for voicing personal opinions — on their blogs or anywhere else. "People mistakenly believe that the First Amendment protects them in the workplace, which is generally not the case," he said.

...has to be this one: Letourneau to wed former pupil. This is just one of those things I have a hard time understanding; this woman should have been kept in jail. For the rest of her life.

Happy Valentine's to everyone. So far this morning it's looking to be a nice day (yet here I am stuck at work...), so here's hoping it's nice for everybody.

And if you're looking for something a little bit different today, I wrote up some Beer Valentines ideas over on The Brew Site blog. Enjoy!

I've been playing around with Amazon's web services because in my quest to make money off my blogs (quixotic? I don't know yet), I thought it would be interesting to implement book recommendations based on keywords pulled from individual blog entries.

What got me thinking about this is that my Amazon associate links have already generated three orders from books I've linked to (two from The Brew Site and one from here), which kind of surprised me since I haven't had the Amazon affiliation for very long. But I don't really want to spend all my time writing about books just to generate clickthroughs—seems to go too far on the "shill" side of things—so I figured I go more the route of the Google AdSense ads: automatically generating results from content.

The web services are pretty straightforward, though I have to wonder why the PDF documention you can download is over 400 pages long. Holy crap! Instead, I did a quick read through the HTML version they have and picked up enough in a half hour to get started.

So, you might start seeing Amazon recommendations appearing on the individual entry pages. It'll be an experiment; if I don't like how they work, I'll pull them.

It's kind of hard to imagine what Elektro, the Oldest U.S. Robot looks like until you actually see it. What's crazy is that it was created sometime during the '30s...

Back in 1939, Elektro was able to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke. It used a 78-rpm record player to simulate conversation and had a vocabulary of more than 700 words.Thousands of people enjoyed Elektro at the New York World's Fair in 1939.

I don't know, but it kind of reminds me of the robot from "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Weird.

I'm not sure if people are stupid, ignorant, lacking in a proper education or some combination of those, but the following example should illustrate my point. At work today I was talking with a co-worker about education (her son is in second grade and learning history) and the name Susan B. Anthony came up. I asked, "You know who she was, right?"

"Uh, someone famous—I know she was on a coin," was the reply.

Pretty bad. I'm always highly disappointed when I run into this type of thing at work... I should know better by now.

What's worse, though, is when I asked another (female) co-worker the same question:

"I know she's on a coin."

Ug.

Gee, it sure seems like the way to quickly get famous online these days is to get fired for blogging.

Well, I posted too soon. Tonight's blogger get-together has been cancelled, too many people had something come up. Hopefully we can convene next week or something.

Unless plans changed when I wasn't looking, the Bend/Central Oregon bloggers are getting together again tomorrow, Tuesday the 8th. It's at the Cascade Lakes Brewery Lodge (upstairs!) on Bend's westside, starting at 7pm. I don't know yet if I'll make it, but I know a bunch of the others will. Cheers!

A bit over a year ago I blogged about the PHP Cruise. Well, this year there's another PHP conference organized by the folks at php|architect, though it's not a cruise this time: php|tropics!

It's in Cancun, Mexico, from May 11 through 15. Now, if I only had a few grand lying around and could convince work that it's a business trip...

According to this article in the Bulletin, a woman in Prineville gave birth to a 14 pound, 1 ounce baby. Holy c-section, Batman! Still, as big as that is, it doesn't quite beat the 16.7 pound baby born last month. And then for some bogglers check out these Guinness World Record entries for heaviest births.

Watching the various debate about Google's nofollow initiative has been enlightening. Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a way to fight comment spam on weblogs, but predictably it took no time at all for people to figure out how to game the system. Also predictably, anti-nofollow support launched equally quickly.

I won't use it. At all. Why? Mostly because it's such a non-issue (it won't do a thing to comment spam), but a large part of the reasoning is that I won't be held hostage to what I can write and link to by any one search engine or technology. Nor am I going to let the ranking alorithm of one search engine make me do its work for it, especially if PageRank is broken like some people believe.

It's a misnamed attribute, actually. Google says links with it "won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results," but the "nofollow" label makes it appear that Google won't actually follow the link itself. Not so. Google will follow the link, it just will not confer ranking.

More bothersome is the fact that other search engines (Yahoo and MSN, notably) have signed on to this. Why bothersome? Well, because Google's PageRank algorithm is supposed to be a Trade Secret, and theoretically other search engines' technologies are Trade Secrets also, so who knows how the others will actually implement processing of this attribute? Will they choose to actually not follow such links, allowing sites to potentially drop out of their indices? There's no guarantees. But if they're all similar to PageRank, and PageRank is broken, then they may all be broken and this won't fix things.

Oh well. My various megalomaniacal rantings won't change things in the world at large, so I'll stick to what I can do on my own site. :)

So there's supposed to be a new Wal-Mart Supercenter coming to Bend. The Bend.com story is here. It'll be located at the northwest corner of the intersection of Highway 97 and Cooley Road, and is supposed to be a gargantuan 200,000 square feet in size.

I can't say I'm thrilled. Why?

• Bend and Central Oregon already has more than enough box stores, including two Wal-Marts.
• Likewise, Bend already has plenty of grocery stores (for those who didn't know, Wal-Mart Supercenters include groceries). Buying groceries from Wal-Mart seems way too sketchy to me.
• It will make a bad traffic situation at the north end of town 1000 times worse.
• It will always be crowded, making it too inconvenient for quick stops. Combined with traffic, this will make it far more trouble than it's worth.
• It will be ugly. Remember the hooplah that surrounded the building of the driving range at the north end of town?
• That north end of 97 is already a stripmall, boxstore eyesore. I don't even like going there (well, except for Food 4 Less, but even that's not totally convenient).
• It will drive smaller local companies out of business. This will happen.
• While it will supposedly create 400 new jobs (according to what I heard on Z21 news), these will be barely minimum wage jobs (according to the Bend.com article). That can't be good for people who need living wage jobs (especially in this area) or the local economy.

Now, I used to go to the Wal-Mart at the south end of town. It did the job, but I don't get down there anymore. It served its purpose. But I really see no reason for a Supercenter to be built. None at all.

Woke up this morning to find 116 notices of trackback spam littering my inbox. Out of the blue, and I notice that a whole bunch of other weblogs got hit today, too. It appears some spammer finally wrote a script to exploit trackback. Ah, well. It was easy enough to fix; do a quick mod to my add_trackback.php file, redirecting bad traffic, and a quick SQL query on the database to clear out the offending spam, less than 10 minutes. Gotta love having absolute control over my system.

Well, it's that time of year again: In one of the strangest (yet surprisingly most effective) promotions ever to grace marketing, it's Free Beef Month at Les Schwab!