chuggnutt.com

A few link-worthy items that caught my eye but that I can't squeeze a full post out of (yet)...

The Real Oregon: a new(ish) blog subtitled "Oregon for the eccentric traveler." Looks promising, with travel tidbits about Oregon that seem pretty interesting to me.

How a $2 bottle transformed the wine industry: Charles Shaw wine (AKA Two (or Three) Buck Chuck) turns five. Who'd'a thunk it? And for the record, I rather like the wines.

Burst Culture: A bit of brilliance from Warren Ellis that's been making the rounds online. Pretty much ties in with ideas I've been having about the web and blogging, and giving me stuff to think about.

So have you been exposed to lolcats yet? If not, check out here and here. I can't help it; they make me laugh. I mean really, really laugh. Especially the random ones.

Okay, I've pretty much become addicted to the show with zefrank. I can't help it. It's compelling. And funny. And smart. And for embedded online video, it just works. Go watch. And then go watch a bunch of the archives.

I've been exploring YouTube a bit more lately and just thought I'd point to some of the videos I've found that amuse me...

• Crazy Cat Pinky - the cat in this video wigs out and I actually laughed out loud.
• This Place Sucks - Superfriends - the classic Superfriends/Office Space mashup.
• Deadwood Swearing - nothing but two and a half minutes of swearing edited together... even if you know Deadwood, this might be kind of surprising...
• Ryan vs Dorkman - A really well-done lightsaber duel between two goofy looking guys... really good amateur choreography and great lightsaber effects.

I've been seeing lots of referrer hits from MySpace on my site lately, so I thought it was apropos to point to this article on Kuro5hin: MySpace: A Place for Dolts. It's just too funny not to, and it's full of great soundbites.

You see, when you sign up for MySpace, you instantly have your first friend. You're immediately best buddies with the most popular person on MySpace: Tom. Now, to understand the stupidity of this, you have to understand that this is a social networking mechanism; if I'm friends with John and John is friends with Sally, then Sally is syllogistically my friend, and if I visit her profile it will tell me just that: "Sally is in your extended network". But if EVERYONE is friends with Tom, then there might as well not be an extended network feature at all, and he is defeating the purpose of his time and his website. Basically what I'm saying is, Tom is a dumbshit.

But there's a reason why none of this matters. There's a reason why he wins even though he programs in Cold Fusion (I have yet to meet someone who uses Cold Fusion and isn't a complete moron), even though he has no sense of style or ergonomics, and even though he's lazy as hell: he gets an enormous amount of money from the website. Movies, bands, dating services, clothing companies, non-profit organizations, and even the US Army advertises on MySpace.

Ah, you gotta love cynical internet rants.

See also Movable Type Rant, a pointer to another great Kuro5hin piece.

I got this really nice comment on my restaurant post last month, where I reviewed Zydeco, Anthony's and Mercury Diner here in Bend:

We just wanted to say Thank You! to Jon & Andrew. Thanks for your great reviews of our restaurant. We're glad to hear you've enjoyed your experiences with us and that you're excited about passing on some input to future guests. We look forward to seeing you at ZYDECO kitchen & cocktails again soon.

Sincerely, Christy & Robert Kabakoff and Steve Helt

That is one of the reasons why Zydeco is a great restaurant, and it shows that the owners are smart and web-savvy to Google themselves and aren't afraid to join the conversation. Contrast that to Shannon and Simone's poor experience with Kanpai.

Not hard to figure out why I'll go back to Zydeco in a heartbeat but won't bother trying Kanpai.

David Sklar, a PHP programmer/author I respect, has a post on his blog on the Google Toolbar controversy. Sklar joins the voices of reason on this, few and far between though we may be. It's a good post, worth the read, but I think his opening and closing sentences are the kickers:

Why do folks who want the freedom to remix content as they see fit get their digital dander up when other people remix their own content? ...

The most important issue is recognizing that we all have to give up the control over our content that many of us demand of Big Media Corporations.

That's the key, I think; of all those crying foul over the Toolbar, almost every single one that I've read is entirely hypocritical in that they don't want the Toolbar to change their content even though they themselves engage in exactly this same thing with other people's content.

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.

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. :)

Going through my site's logfiles, I figured it's about time for one of those navel-gazing site-analyzing posts. I've noticed some trends along the way, I think.

By far, the most search engine hits I get are from Google; over the past 30 days, I clocked 2,617 hits from Google, nearly four times more than Yahoo at 763 hits. In fact, the top ten search engines are:

I'm a little surprised by the amount of variation there.

The trends I've noticed are in the breakdown of what people are searching for from each site. Most of the Google searches are for free Palm ebooks, Matrix names, and variations on those themes; it seems that people are using Google to find specific types of information, knowing the parameters of what they're looking for—targeted. The other search engines, on the other hand, seem to better reflect pop cultural references and more general searching. Among Yahoo searches, for instance, I see such phrases as, "boba fett" (number one), "kermit the frog," "dell dude," "a-team movie," and so on. Same for the others.

So I'd guess that in Google searches, when they find me I'm near the top of the lists for what they're searching for and the users are looking for specific things. On Yahoo and the others, though, it looks like people are more into browsing on vaguer searches, and clicking through on links that look interesting, but may not be relevant. The conclusion I'd draw from this (not surprisingly) is that Google users are power users, and the search engine people go to who want to really find something and get the job done, whereas Yahoo users are more casual, not so worried about the results, but they'll do in a pinch.

And of course, the best part of this whole entry: listing some of the best/worst search phrases people have actually typed to get here. All verbatim.

• thongs in public
• what's your name
• purple flowers
• jones green bean casserole soda
• van helsing absinthe
• donner party cannibalism
• heroin
• green bean soda
• white trash sex
• pong is a violent game
• twas the night bush
• green bean casserole soda
• ugliest picture
• topless rotten
• skinsuits
• donkey brew
• if you had a male tiger what would you name it
• snoop dog fir shizzle
• frog master
• fett ass
• cracker ingredients
• beer mugs carved in pumpkins
• what is the proper way to charge cell and cordless phones
• on the sierra nevada summerfest beer label what mountains are featured
• is there a formula for figuring out when thanksgiving day will be
• how do i clean vomit from couch
• check out my wife
• turkey soda
• where is it snowing in the united states november 11, 2004
• donner party beer
• emachine turns it's self on
• halloween hooch drink

A couple of links I found interesting. First is to All Consuming, "a website that watches weblogs for books that they're talking about, and displays the most popular ones on an hourly basis." Kinda cool. The other is to an article on Kuro5hin titled "Raising the Humble Chicken," which is kind of random but good. I grew up with chickens; if we didn't live inside the city limits, I think I'd try to convince my wife to let me get some.

Great rant on Kuro5hin titled "Why your Movable Type blog must die". Made me laugh. Worthy of Dennis Miller during his ranting heyday.

You are all pretentious twats

Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky. Most of you think that you're writing original content and that you're making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licences, just because it's the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.

Of course, I can't claim to be much better as a blogger than some of the caricature portraits in this rant, but at least I don't use Movable Type. :)