Category: Uncategorized

I took a “sick day” yesterday owing to something I ate, which gave me
some pretty wicked exhaust. Anyone who stood behind me yesterday
would’ve felt like the truck in this United Airlines jet safety video [800K Windows Media]. I’m back in action, and free of dangerous exhaust!

A brilliant audioblog entry [4.1 MB MP3] that explains why audioblogging ain’t all that by Maciej Ceglowski, the guy who came up with the Ceglowski Axiom. I will personally nominate this entry for a Bloggie.

To borrow a Coryism: treat audioblogging as damage and route around it!*

(Yes, there’s a text version, and I have a nicely-formatted one below.)

*
But seriously, folks: audioblogging has its place, but remember that
the written word, especially on the Global Data Network in its current
incarnation, is incredibly useful, portable and fungible.

AN AUDIOBLOGGING MANIFESTO

As broadband expands and as blogging tools
become easier to use, a worldof temptations has opened up to the online
writer. The latest of these has been audioblogging, or posting snippets
of speech. Videoblogging isfollowing on its heels.

At first blush,
audioblogging sounds like a natural extension of onlinewriting. What
better way to convey your own ideas than through yourown words, spoken
in your own voice? Bloggers like Halley
Suitt (http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com), Dave
Winer (http://www.scripting.com), and Adam Curry (http://live.curry.com)
have taken this idea and run with it, mixing frequent audio posts with
their text content. In the highest-profile audio blog post to date,
Winer even announced the cancellation of a blog hosting service –
affecting hundreds of users – in a ten minute audio file (you can hear
it
at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/gems/crimson1/aboutWeblogsComHosting.mp3).

But
before you jump on the audioblogging bandwagon, remember this –
the power of the Web is the power to choose. You make your own trails,
and your own links. You read what you like and skip the boring bits.
And audioblogging takes that power of choice away. Your listeners become
a passive audience – they have no power to skim, they can’t skip
the boring parts, they can’t link or excerpt your post effectively.
Your post becomes invisible to Google and other search engines. And
anyone who has a hearing problem, or a dialup account, or doesn’t speak
your language too well, anyone who is trying to surf your site from the
office, or from an Internet cafe – well, they’re just plain out of luck.

Consider
also this – the average person speaks at one hundred, perhaps one
hundred fifty words per minute. Meanwhile, an accomplished reader can
read ten times faster – up to a thousand words a minute, and
that’s straight-up reading, not even skimming. You’re forcing people to
listen to you at a speed that’s barely faster than the speed at which
they cantype. Why are you wasting their time? Is your voice really
that beautiful?

From the invention of the alphabet, to movable
metal type, to the advent of cheap paper, universal mandatory public
education, universal literacy, the Internet – the modern world has built
on the back of text! This is not by accident! This is not a mistake!

Ask
yourself – is the key to making your site more interesting really to add
rich media? Or is it possible that if you took more care in
your writing, said something passionate, grammatical, interesting, and
pleasant to read, it would actually make more of a difference?

Henry
David Thoreau said “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,
which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved
means to an unimproved end… We are in great haste to construct a
magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be,
have nothing important to communicate”

So what do you have to communicate?

Thoreau
may not have been a big fan of technology, but we can still read him one
and a half centuries later and be pulled in by his beautiful prose
style. Is your audio post going to stand the test of time?

Brothers
and sisters, we deserve better than this, and those whom we write
for deserve better. This is not what we built the web for! For the
first time in human history, you can have anything you write read by
millions of people, whether within days or within hours, and all it
takes is talent, imagination and the discipline to put up something
worth reading. There are no obstacles anymore – so why must we create
new ones? Just because you’re going to be able to do a real-time
three dimensional high-definition interactive virtual reality
fly-through of the inside of your cat – does that mean you should? Does
that mean itbelongs on your website? This is not the legacy we want to
leave! So stop the ridiculous self indulgence, and shut up and write.

And
if you want a copy of this without having to listen through it, by God
you can find one at http://www.idlewords.com/audio-manifesto.txt.

August
31, 2004

In response to Joyce “Troutgirl” Park’s firing over her blog (which I covered here), he’s written an article which concludes with this paragraph:

Ecologists know that life is most interesting, and also most dangerous, at habitat boundaries — where the ocean meets the shore, where the forest meets the meadow. And in the virtual world, where the private meets the public. A healthy ecosystem requires that we colonize that marginal zone. When people get hurt trying to do that — in the right ways, for the right reasons — we should offer them not only our condolences, but also our thanks.

A filet mignon on a flaming sword to you, sir!

Last night while cruising del.icio.us for new links before going to
bed, I noticed a link to Joyce “Troutgirl” Park’s blog entry on how her
employer, Friendster, fired her for blogging. Being too tired to blog,
I made a note to write about it in the morning and got scooped by Cory
Doctorow in Boing Boing and Jeremy Zawodny in his own blog.

(The moral of the story: the early bird may get the worm, but the night
owl gets the nice juicy field mice.)

Here’s the entry in its entirety:

[See the update below] This isn’t the first time I’d heard of someone being fired for what they’d written in their blog. Heather “Dooce” Armstrong
wrote some less-than-kind words about her coworkers in her blog, which
prompted one of them to email every vice president in the company,
pointing them to the offending entries. In her case, I think her
company had a fairly strong case for firing her, even though she’d “made sure not to mention specific places, persons, or events by name”.

Mark Pilgrim was — in my
opinion, I am not a lawyer nor a human resources specialist, and so on
— unfairly fired for posting an article about how he’d overcome
addiction. The article in question now appears at a special site, AddictionIs.org.

When she was fired, the higher-ups cited two blog entries:

• Friendster’s switch of technology — from JSP/Tomcat to PHP.
  Hardly a secret, and it doesn’t take much to figure out what platform a
  web application is running on. Yes, it started a few flamewars in
  programming circles, but that was the fault PHP and Java zealots and no
  had negligible influence on how Friendster was perceived. It was widely
  remarked at how much faster it ran under the new code.

  All this may make no sense to you if you’re not a programmer; if you’re
  not, consider this analogy: an employee of a cab company blogging about
  their switch from Ford to General Motors cars.

• Her
  mentioning that John Udell, after having read her post about
  Friendster’s technology switch, had mentioned the rewrite in his column.
  As a person who gets paid to make sure that his company gets mentioned
  in tech press, I think that getting covered by Udell is a good thing.

In spite of the fact that everything she’d written about the company was a matter of public record, Friendster’s new CEO, former NBC President Scott Sassa
(ah, a television exec — I’m beginning to see the source of the
stupidity) saw fit to fire her. The firing is especially stupid in
light of the fact that Friendster’s business is about divulging
information about yourself.

Since my displeasure with Friendster’s move is far, far greater than
its utility to me (my blog remains my most powerful social software), I
have decided to cancel my account with Friendster. If you feel that you
too would like to leave Friendster, click here to cancel your account.

(Jeremy Zawodny has posted a screenshot of Friendster’s account-cancellation page.)

C’mon, free market! It’s time for invisible hand to do some pimp-slappin’!

Side note

I’m in an unusual position here. One of the major factors in my hiring
was my blog. In fact, during the weeks I was being interviewed, our CEO
Elliot Noss told several Tucows employees to check out my blog, particularly the entry about the New Girl, which was getting tens of thousands of hits at the time. Boss Ross
and Elliot read my blog often, and Elliot often comments on my articles
when he passes by my desk (which is quite often — I’m in the dead
center of the middle aisle).

The fact that we make a blogging tool also makes it pretty hard to fire someone solely for blogging.

When I signed my employment contract, Ross simply said “keep on
blogging what you blog; just don’t give away any company secrets”, and
as of late, Ross has suggested that I blog about what’s happening in
here more.

As for not bad-mouthing my coworkers, well, that goes without saying.

I’m quite busy right now, and even my thoughts during downtime are
filled with concern about this week’s tasks, as you can see in the
photo below:

Dude, it would make a killer photo. Just don’t drive it anywhere near a biker bar.

Wordcount is, according to its “About” page:

“Accordion” is the 31,327th most-used word, just behind “prewar” and ahead of “finery”.