Robert Scoble’s blog post this week on Has/How/Why Tech Blogging Has Failed You made for interesting reading. He makes a lot of good points - definitely worth thinking about, whether you’re a tech blogger or, really, just a blogger of any kind - but it’s his analysis of what’s gone wrong with commenting on blogs that really resonated with me most:

Our commenting systems really suck. I didn’t realize just how badly they sucked until I started using FriendFeed. My comments here are gummed up with moderation, with spam filters that only sorta work, that don’t have threading, and have many other problems ranging from needing to be signed into, to not working on mobile devices very well, to requiring you to enter weird numbers or do math just to be able to post a comment.

What does this mean? Only the most motivated will leave comments. That’s usually someone with an axe to grind. I’m so tired of those kinds of conversations “Scoble, you’re an idiot.” Hey, I already know that, remember my conversation with Jurvetson and Williams? Why can’t commenters be nice, the way they probably would be if they were face to face? That’s cause we’ve failed you. We haven’t moderated jerks out of our commenting system so now no normal person would go close to anything resembling a modern commenting system.

As if to bear out his point, David Edelstein blogged at NY Magazine about the online reaction to his less-than-entirely-positive review of The Dark Knight. It’s easy to say that he should just ignore the comments entirely; after all, he’s a professional film critic and the commenters hadn’t even seen the film, so their personal attacks on him had very little grounding in reality. But obviously he couldn’t just ignore them - Edelstein felt the need to reply, to justify himself. And I really can’t blame him; I’ve been there myself (albeit on a much smaller scale!). After the initial indignation and urge to defend my opinion, I eventually had to just let it go and accept that writing anything on the Internet invites criticism. While that can be useful - and obviously I’m not saying all criticism is ungrounded - it’s important to be able to separate that which is actually justified from, well, abuse.

Eventually, you just have to accept that if someone is ranting and raving about what a complete idiot you are and how you should be banned from writing anything ever again, they’re unlikely to change their mind - but you also don’t have to care. (Unless they’re your editor, in which case, er, you probably will have to.)

But what does it mean for the Internet, and for Web 2.0, if virtually all discussions of anything online get derailed? If all comment sections become places anyone with any sense wouldn’t dare to tread - and writers are afraid of writing anything even remotely contentious for fear of the reaction? If we’ve failed by letting things get to this point, how do we rectify that?

I wish I had an answer.

I’m sure my attention span is getting shorter. Any film that clocks in at over 90 minutes (or, heaven forbid, longer than 120 minutes) will start to try my patience, and I’m only willing to give new TV shows a couple of episodes to prove themselves before I’ll move on to something else. The whole “instant gratification generation” thing definitely applies to me. So Joss Whedon’s newest project - an online series entitled Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog - couldn’t be more perfect. There are only three episodes, and the first one, which went live today, clocks in at under 14 minutes.

Starring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion, Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is pretty much what the title suggests - the musical adventures of a would-be supervillain. Er, so why am I writing about this on an IT-related blog? Well, it’s interesting because of the method of distribution. Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog owes its existence to the Writers Guild of America strike; Whedon decided to produce something completely independently of the studios, and distribute it over the Internet himself. But unlike, say, LonelyGirl15, Whedon has a plan for turning Dr Horrible into a legitimate commercial entity - the three episodes will be published over the course of this week, and will stay available until July 20th. Then they’ll be removed from the free site, but you’ll be able to pay to download the episodes from iTunes, and a DVD containing all the episodes plus extras will be available shortly too. The Dr Horrible website seems to be suggesting that there’s merchandise on the way, too, and there’s a Captain Hammer tie-in comic available through Dark Horse.

Obviously, the difference between Whedon’s project and other Internet dramas like LonelyGirl15 is that Whedon has already been around the block - he’s worked in TV and film, he knows how that works, and with Firefly, he knows what the power of a loyal fanbase can do. So it’s not surprising that this seems to be a much more professional enterprise. But it’s maybe the first indication that the Internet might become a really and truly viable distribution method for entertainment in the future, and that’s really exciting.

(Doesn’t hurt that Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is also really, really good, of course.)

It’s funny how far the Internet has come in the last few years. Web 2.0 is now practically old hat, so ubiquitous are its features, and most websites nowdays even seem to look the same, or at least conform to the same styles - clean lines, tabs, slickly integrated advertising and plenty of space for users’ comments (think Amazon’s latest makeover, for example). But while I was researching an article for Micro Mart this week, I came across several corners of the Internet I’d almost forgotten existed.

Like Usenet newsgroups, for one thing. Nowadays, they’re hosted by Google Groups (which has archives dating back to around 1981) so they’ve been slightly updated, but essentially, they’re still out there - and thriving. Since the advent of social networking and, actually, before that, the arrival of cheap and easy-to-use forum software, I’d imagined that newsgroups would have been abandoned; mere ghost-towns now, with tumbleweed whistling through them. But I was wrong. They’re alive and well.

Less alive and less well but nonetheless present and accessible are all sorts of ancient websites, built during the 1990s when services like Homestead, Angelfire and GeoCities let anyone and everyone create their own personal homepages. Imagine the absolute worst MySpace profile layout you’ve ever seen - it’s a delight compared to what most of these sites used to look like. (And I should know; I built several, and they were all embarrassingly terrible.) The templates provided by Homestead et al were pretty awful, but they were nothing compared with the monstrosities that people with the barest knowledge of HTML could come up with. The old adage of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing definitely applies here; we’re talking animated blinking gifs, pop-ups, frames, tinkling wav music files, hit counters and garish background images. The text usually came in colours specifically selected to hurt your eyes most when viewed against the patterned backgrounds, with line breaks in odd places and hyperlinks in yet another contrasting colour.

Shudder.

Say what you like about social media and user generated content, but at least the Internet looks nicer nowadays. And though some of the worst sartorial fashions of the last few decades seem to be making a comeback (neon legwarmers? Really?) we can at least be grateful that Facebook maintains its nice, calming blue template no matter what.

It makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it? In another 10 years, what will still be around, and what will we look back on and cringe?

(Edited: how did I manage to type “days” instead of “years”? Oops!)

Never one to drop a story before I’ve completely chewed the life out of it, I went to check on the Faceparty situation, and found a message from the administrator in my account. After some blather about a new webcam service, it says this:

“There have been rumours and press stories saying we are deleting everyone over 36. This is not true (as you should notice by browsing and seeing people over 36). Nobody has been deleted because of their age, but we have deleted 7 million accounts for hundreds of different reasons… most importantly to get all the spammers, fakers etc out. Our plan has been working really well, and we’ll soon be opening our doors again to those who got deleted by unavoidable accident.

If any of your friends were deleted by accident, you can apply to have them re-instated in the Gossip section, under the thread “Friend Deleted?”.

All for now,

*hugs*

Admin x”

While it’s true that there do still appear to be lots and lots of members over 36 on the site, that’s really not what Faceparty announced about its policies. Is this some rapid backtracking, then?

I’ve written in the past about the impossible demands people have been making of social networking sites, forcing them to somehow make sure that sex offenders and paedophiles can’t contact children on them, and I’ve always said I wasn’t sure how anyone could ever expect to enforce something like that.

Well, it looks like Faceparty has found a way:

In the last 2 months, Faceparty has been deleting a lot of profiles from the website. This has been due either to new legal requirements, violations of our terms of service, the non purchase of your account by the new company who is running Faceparty.com, or any of the following reasons. Information on refunds is also on this page. Please read this page in its entirety.

Over 36 years old?

New government legislation means we need to check older users on the sex offenders list. This legislation is based upon checking email addresses against a government provided list. Faceparty has never insisted on validated email addresses and can therefore not participate in this new scheme. Having discussed the use of our website with the home office and the police, and further some pretty serious crimes caused by older users, we were left with no option but to terminate a huge amount of accounts, and without notice, immediately. We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which - we can only delete all to make the site safe and we apologise for that. However, we are following the law and you cannot think we are wrong for doing that.

Um. Well, I think some people would think they’re wrong for doing that. This part of Faceparty’s announcement is interesting, too:

Unfortunately some of the creators of accounts who were deleted, of an older age group, have been creating new accounts with a younger age (which means that government legislation classifies them as a sex offender by lying about their age on the Internet, even though most who have done this may have done so with good intent and purely to be a part of a site they love and without any intent to manipulate younger users)

Really? Is that actually the law? Anyone know?

I’m baffled. Read their whole justification here.

The First Post is reporting that Stephen Fry has been having a bit of a rant about the BBC’s iPlayer. According to him, it’s too easy for people to download and keep programmes broadcast online, watching them on devices not supported by the BBC and for longer than the BBC intended them to be available. Here’s part of the quote:

“There is this marvellous idea the iPlayer is secure. It’s anything but secure. The BBC is throwing out really valuable content for free. It shows an incredible naivety about how the internet and digital devices work. … The BBC is making a lot of enemies giving away free programmes to an internet that everyone else is trying to monetise; at the moment, it’s relying on the fact you have to be slightly dorky to record from the iPlayer; but, believe me, that will change. It will soon be the work of a moment for my mother to get an iPlayer programme off her computer and on to her iPod, iPhone, or whatever device she chooses.”

Which is all probably true, except, here’s the thing: we’ve been able to record and keep programmes broadcast on the BBC to watch in our own sweet time for donkey’s. It’s called “owning a VHS player”. Digital video recorders (DVRs, or hard disc recorders) allow you to do the same thing; it’s hardly a problem specific to the iPlayer.

You could mentally insert a rant about TV licence fees here, too, if you were so inclined.

My blogging muscles are twitchy today because, well, mostly because I’m the contrary type, and today a group of LiveJournal users are having a blogging strike. Or, more accurately, a LiveJournal-using strike. It seems a large number of LiveJournal’s userbase is angry over a couple of recent decisions made by LiveJournal’s new management, the Russian online media company SUP.

One of these decisions was to discontinue creation of “Basic” accounts. To backtrack a bit - LiveJournal, as the name implies, is a blogging site. Users can create blogs, and also join blogging networks by adding other bloggers as “friends”. When the service was created, its founder promised that there would never be advertising on LiveJournal, but since then the company has changed hands twice, and advertising has, inevitably, turned up. When the ads were introduced, there were three levels of account types: Basic, which was free, had no adverts, and had only the most basic of features available; Plus, which was free, had adverts, and had more features available, and Paid, which, er, users had to pay for, had no ads, and had advanced features. The idea was that the new Plus level would be attractive to users because of the additional features, for which they would accept advertising being placed on their blogs. At the time, there was controversy over this decision - but nowhere near as much controversy as the news that the Basic account, as of March 12th, was being discontinued, and all new accounts would have to be either Plus or Paid.

The reasoning behind this move seems fairly obvious - all accounts will now generate revenue for LiveJournal, one way or another. Since existing Basic accounts aren’t being forced to upgrade, you might expect little resistance, except in doing so you’d be overlooking something fairly important: LiveJournal users create new accounts all the time. LiveJournal communities can be created by any user at any time, and these too will presumably now no longer be ad-free (unless someone wants to pay for them), but even setting communities aside, people create new blogs for new interests, or just because they want a fresh start, all the time. It’s not a case of not being able to miss what you’ve never had, because it won’t just be new users who are affected by the loss of a Basic account - existing users will either have to stick with the account they’ve got, accept that they’re going to see advertising, or pony up the cash to get rid of them.

Even so, I know what you’re thinking - so what? Aren’t we all used to advertising nowadays? Well… yeah. But that doesn’t mean anyone actually likes it. Plus, the fact that LiveJournal didn’t actually announce this change via its usual News channel but instead left it to one staff member to leave a comment on an already much-commented-upon News update didn’t go down well with users - if you’re subscribing to a News feed for a service you use, wouldn’t you expect a major change to the terms and conditions of the service to be reported there?

There’s another reason many LiveJournal users are on strike today, too: it recently emerged that SUP was removing certain interests from its reports of its users most popular interests. Mostly, these interests related to either fanfiction or homosexuality - it’s not clear why, exactly, SUP chose to purge those interests from its reports, but it’s being presumed that it’s to appeal to advertisers. Again, that might not seem like a particularly big deal, but you’d be underestimating the fervency with which people actually use LiveJournal - SUP probably never expected anyone other than potential advertisers to even notice that the reports had been doctored, yet outraged posts are popping up all over the blogosphere on the topic. And considering that, last May, several LiveJournal users found their accounts suspended without warning because they had listed interests in these same categories, it’s not surprising that there’s a small scale riot going on.

Actually, that might be overstating the case a bit. What’s actually happening is that many LiveJournal users have decided to boycott the site for the day. They won’t read posts, they won’t post content, and they won’t post comments, in the hope that the drop in traffic will signal to LiveJournal’s owners that their recent conduct has been deemed unacceptable by its users. The argument goes that if people can’t sign up free, ad-free, then they’ll go somewhere else; that SUP has fundamentally failed to understand LiveJournal’s business model, which relies upon a great amount of content being posted, much of it by free users, in order to attract traffic … and without traffic, you can’t serve many adverts.

I’m kind of torn about where I stand on the whole thing. I’ve had a Basic LiveJournal account for years and years, although I occasionally pay for a period of paid time, and I’m quite happy with the basic feature set so long as I don’t have to see adverts. I do see adverts on my Gmail account every day, and on almost every single website I visit, so I’m sure I could cope with seeing them on LiveJournal, but, y’know, I’d rather not. And I certainly don’t agree with the censoring of interests, even if it’s just in annual reports designed to attract advertisers. But I can’t help feeling that a one-day strike - on Good Friday, too, which is bound to be a slow day anyway since most people are off work and probably out and about, away from their computers - probably won’t do much good.

It’s like online petitions, in a way - how much good do those ever do? There must be a more effective way of registering displeasure - but other ways, like sending letters or e-mails, take more time and effort. So I guess I’ll be on strike today. Not that anyone will notice, given that I generally post about five times a month on LiveJournal anyway…

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian ran a story about an Australian food critic who had been successfully sued by a restaurant. The restaurant claimed that due to the critic’s negative review, it had lost business and been forced to close as a result; it argued that this constituted defamation.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened, either; there was a similar case in Belfast earlier this year.

Quite frankly, this situation seems pretty ridiculous. It may be that these cases are the end of this nonsense; but haven’t they set precedents now? Couldn’t anyone who feels his or her business has been harmed by a negative review sue the reviewers? (Or, more likely, whoever published said review?) Whether the product in question ever would have shifted many copies might turn out to be irrelevant, if manufacturers can manage to scare the critics with the legal system.

What does this have to do with IT? Well, lots. Sort of.

Any industry, IT included, has good bits and bad bits; without objective reviews, how are consumers ever to know the difference? Hewlett Packard recently admitted it was apprehensive about incorporating user reviews onto its product pages, in case customers gave their stuff bad reviews. All of this smacks of insecurity; or, worse, refusal to accept that a product is truly bad, choosing to utilise the fingers-in-ears tactic instead.

If it were possible to stop reviewers having their say about your products, doubtless lots of companies would do so, and anarchy would reign, with customers forced to rely on ever more uninterested computer shop staff for their info. But more realistically, considering that the Internet exist, could the voices of the critics ever be silenced?

Well … no. You just have to look at how well music piracy has been prevented to see that. Some companies might have a go, but they’d only shoot down the heads that peek the highest above the parapets; and eventually, it’ll become a fruitless exercise, or a court with some sense somewhere will rule that it’s silly.

Pity about that food critic, really. Especially if the food really was that bad.