Control and Web 2.0 Don’t Mix

Yuck, two dreadful pieces of news from TechDirt. They are interesting, I think, because they demonstrate what a struggle it really is when these new technologies hit mainstream use. There are some real issues to wrestle with!

The first story is perhaps good news, about vindication. A school in NJ today decided to settle out of court for $117,500 with a student who had been suspended for blogging critically about his school.

Second story I’ll just repost verbatim from the original story:

…from the blame-it-on-the-web dept…
All but 400 of the 3,000 students at a San Antonio high school didn’t show up yesterday after somebody posted some messages on MySpace saying some kids were going to show up at the school with machine guns. This sort of stupidity is nothing new, but apparently, since it went out over a web site, the clueless school administrators want retribution, saying MySpace should be held “accountable”, with the district’s lawyers deciding if they should file a lawsuit. An administrator says that letting kids post unmonitored messages is “asking for trouble” — so should all these kids’ phone conversations be tapped and their face-to-face conversations be monitored as well? MySpace and other internet services aren’t creating these problems and aren’t to blame for them; they just make the spreading of information (sometimes known as communication) quicker and more efficient.

Please, do us all a favor and try to tell one person you know who is less web-savvy than yourself about this story and how inane it is. Blogs enable some serious work to be done in the world, and the only thing worse than people saying “blogs? isn’t that just people writing about their cats?” would be “blogs? is that like that MySpace thing that kids use to say they’re going to shoot up the school?”

According to the original story on San Antonio’s WOAI.com News one school district official says, “This particular web site has been a pain for all Bexar County schools for a long time now, and it just seems that the owners of MySpace-dot-com should be held accountable.”

What if said post had been made on Blogger-dot-com or on En-dot-Wikipedia-dot-org or any other stinkin’ place in the world that is no longer a one-way means of communication? Terribly sorry Mr. school district official, if this giant shift in human communication has the entire Bexar County school district frightened then maybe you should sue. But I hope you know what you’re getting into!

Not to only make light of such things; I don’t know what the answer is. But for an educator to be so provincial as to so completely miss the boat about the last 3 years of the web is a real disservice to the young people he is supposed to be preparing for the world around them.

If you need a reminder about the seriousness of blogs, or a shot in the arm to remember their potential, go visit my friends at The Committee to Protect Bloggers.

Ps. Dear dumb kids, stop posting things like that.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Introductions to Blogging, RSS, Tagging Posted

So, in the spirit of being more accessible to new users, I have finally taken the time to post some introductory articles here and link them from the sidebar. Now when visitors to this site look on the side, one of the first things they’ll see is:

Introductions to:

Please do check out the intros and share any suggestions for revisions. Readers of my old blog may remember that I had posted there introductions to wikis and podcasting as well. For now at least, I’m just going to concentrate on these three items on the list. The field of Web2.0 tools is so huge that I need to specialize to some degree. I’ll keep reading and posting about various weird tools, but what I really want to be doing with clients is setting them up with the life-changing pyramid of feeds, tagging and blogging.

Feeds can be set up to automatically deliver information on any subject and items of interest can be tagged into your social bookmarking archive. This information then makes great fodder for blogging. It’s a beautiful system, really.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Nerd Community Assistance Needed

Spammers can be a frightening bunch sometimes, not just an annoyance. The good folks over at Pingoat have taken a firm stand against their service being used to spread spam, and now they are paying the price. If there is anyone with the skills and resources to help them, they sure deserve some help. Here’s their blog where they describe the problem.

What is going on, you ask? Whenever anyone creates new online content (like blog posts) you want to ping the major search engines and other interested parties to say “hey, come look at what I just put up, you should re-index my site now!” Spammers, unfortunately, end up flooding ping services with rapid fire notifications of new content that’s really just crap intended to get you to look at ads. It’s usually all automated. For example, Ryan King of Technorati and the Super.c.ilio.us satire blog told me awhile ago that some spammers fill their blogs by having Google News alerts emailed to a Blogger post-by-email address. Then they run Adsense around it. Yuck!

How important is pinging? Well, Dave Winer just a few months ago sold one of the oldest ping services, weblogs.com for $2 million. That’s not a lot of money by some standards, but it really is a lot of money.

So Pingoat has been trying a variety of ways to exclude spammers from their service. It’s been a messy but valiant effort. Now it appears that some one is unhappy with what they’ve been doing and has attacked their computers. Possibly with an army of zombified computers sending continual messages to them and inserting malicious code into their servers. I don’t really know the specifics, but if it’s something you think you might be able to help with then you should check it out. They appear to need resources more than advice.

I only use Pingoat as a back up or for pinging for someone else one ping at a time. I use Feedburner’s Pingshot service to automate my own pinging. It works great and is one more reason to use Feedburner for all your RSS and other needs.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Self-Submission: Spam or Not?

One of the things I often do after making a post to this or any other blog is to tag the post in both Furl.net and Del.icio.us. I make sure to include tags like viagra, texas-hold-em and *&% expansion with every post. Just kidding.

But seriously, do you think that tagging your own blog posts into social bookmarking databases is a form of spam? I don’t. Here’s what I emailed to someone who accused me of spamming Furl after my last post.

People do ask me all the time, is it ok to bookmark my own blog posts? I think it is, and here are a couple my thoughts on the subject:
*if services like Furl and del.icio.us are collaborative databases, why wait until someone else submits my posts to the database? Doesn’t it sound like a good idea to make the post as findable as possible?
*in del.icio.us at least, you can see that no one else has bookmarked a new post I submit, so the only thing that would lead you to click through would be your own interest relative to the title.
*Most importantly: I try to title and describe the posts I submit to Furl and del.icio.us as accurately and usefully as possible. I also make posts that offer real value to readers. So when you see a post of my own that I put in the database, you’re not deceived into clicking through it, or being pointed towards something that’s of no use.

Does that seem fair?

What do you think?

Googling for Creative Commons & Open Access Content

Interested in information and images that you can reuse for your own purposes with no fear of looking like a thief? Google has just added a function to its Advanced Search page that allows you to effectively search only items online that have been posted under a or licence. This is very cool, and an important nod to the paradigm of information sharing.

Found via the awesome group blog LifeHacker.

Speaking of Creative Commons, you might be inspired by these short films about the phenomenon:



That reminds me, I’d better add a Creative Commons badge to my site!

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,