DRM - Daniel’s Random Mutterings

Social bookmarking has attracted quite a lot of hype over the last couple of months. Digg’s founder on the cover of Businessweek, now Reddit being acquired by the Wired people. As with any successful market, a lot of me-too applications spring up all over the place.

Together with this success, though, I have the impression that there are an increasing number of complaints and growing criticism levelled at the social bookmarking phenomenon (I’ve also contributed some of my own). There were several related discussions about the quality of posts making it to the front page of Digg, about elitism of regular Digg contributors, and people abandoning social bookmarking sites. Some of the criticisms against Digg that keep coming up are that only a few Digg contributors appear to control which posts make it to the front page, and that cliques keep digging each others’ submissions and/or systematically digging down other people’s submissions. That, coupled with a high volume of ego-based submissions (people submitting their own Blog entries to Digg) make the value of the shared space somewhat dubious. The collective filtering approach does not appear to be working.

What would be the components of a better social bookmarking or sharing site? I don’t know! If I did, I’d build it and get my mug on the cover of Newsweek (or at least the German edition of MAD Magazine — I’m really not picky). But I’m thinking about it.

I’m furious! I came across a site today, technorepublic.com, that reproduces my entire Blog entry “Video Blogging using Django and Flash(tm) Video (FLV)” (which was on the Digg front page and has been linked to from a large number of places) without my permission. This guy has the audacity to copy and paste my entire posting (with apparently some minor reformatting) to his Blog. The Blog is, of course, littered with AdSense and other banner advertising. Oh, and to add insult to injury, the images contained in the posting are linked from my server. So I get to pay for the bandwidth, while he gets the AdSense revenue.

The site contains no contact information that I could find. A more thorough analysis of his site reveals that almost all Blog entries are lifted from a large number of sources, including a recent posting from Guy Kawasaki. Of course, technorepublic.com doesn’t credit most of his sources. Not only that, but his site claims “Copyright 2006 TechnoRepublic.com”. What a laugh!
Especially annoying is that he rips off a lot of Blog entries written in the first person form. So now he has a Blog claiming “I just added Flash-based (FLV) video blogging support” (no he didn’t! I did!) or “Ever wondered how you draw a ribbon in Adobe Illustrator? A while ago a reader e-mailed me with this question.” or even “Blog reader Curtis Thompson asked me a very good question a few days ago:” (the last one taken from the posting by Guy Kawasaki, the other from a designer’s extremely cool blog).

I’ve been following the GPLv3 debate as an interested bystander, have formed an opinion on the matter, which I’ve kept to myself, though, not being an active contributor to any GPL projects. I just read this post by Glyn Moody to linuxjournal.com (”GPLv3: What the Hackers Said“). While it contains some of the same familiar argments from both sides, it’s still a good and informative read, as it contains a few issues which I had not previously seen expressed this clearly. What I found most interesting is the following quote from Greg Kroah-Hartman about the Kernel developers’ position, which I had not previously seen voiced:

Also, please note that the DRM issues have changed over time from being very broad (which was at least admirable), to being explicitly targeted at only the Linux kernel. Now the license is worded to try to stop the “tivoization” issue.

This is the where a bootloader or bios determines if the crypto signature of the kernel is acceptable or not before it decides to run it or not. This means that only “approved” kernels that come from the company will run properly on the hardware.

Now this kind of restriction pretty much _only_ affects the kernel, not any other type of program. This is because only if you can control the kernel can you ensure that the system is “secure”.

I blogged about Valleyschwag before (see the archives). I quite liked the service: A surprise package of IT goodies from the states. Despite some hassle with customs, a number of duplicate stickers, I enjoyed the service.
Now, following a major hiccup with the last VS package, it appears that Valleyschwag is now dead as a doornail.

After a posting announcing “big changes afoot” and announcing a Valleyshwag “store” on Oct 3rd, nothing more was heard from Valleyschwag headquarters. No reactions to all the negative remarks about the new “store” model. Nothing. Despite pages upon pages (8 pages so far) of comments asking for a response. This from a group of guys (and gals) who were previously ultra-responsive, providing excellent cusomer support.
It seems that Valleyschwag has become a victim of its own success. Collapsed under its own weight and didn’t manage to turn itself around.
Well, it was fun while it lasted. I got a couple of cool t-shirts and a few nice caps. Plus lots of stickers from valley companies.

Tags: valleyschwag; dodo; roadkill

Thanks to this blog entry: My Top 10 Best Wordpress Plugins, by John Chow, I am just exploring the Wordpress Related Entries plugin for Wordpress.
If you’re reading this entry on its own page (as opposed to on the main page), it should give you a list of related posts below the entry.
So far, I like what it’s doing. I haven’t explored enough yet to know what it bases its “related” decision on (other than the fact that it needs a full-text index). There’s a lot of comments on Mr.Wasabi’s page and I’m a bit confused whether it honors Technorati tags, for example.
On thing I discovered about the installation: Whatever I did, the related_posts() call kept ignoring the parameters I passed it and simply dumped the titles of the related entries in a single row. No matter which parameters I gave. In the end I just edited the related_posts PHP script itself and plopped the values right into the script. That appears to work.

Edit: Ironically, the plugin shows no related posts for this post. It seems to work OK for the other entries, though.

I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned this before in my blog, but I am a very impatient person.
Just this morning I found a link on the Digg homepage that sounded quite interesting. The link sent me to a person’s blog entry which gave me a brief summary of the information (from which, in fact, the Digg summary was copy/pasted — OK, this dude added his blog entry to Digg). This blog entry contained a link to another person’s blog. Which told me more or less the same thing the previous blog posting did, along with the link that “Joe has more info on this” — you guessed it: Sending me on to yet another blog.
Now some reblogging and referencing is fine. It’s what the Web and Hypertext are all about. But sending people on a hunt through a chain of four or more blog postings, one referencing the other, hunting for that elusive snippet of information? No thank you! This is not “social bookmarking” or “collaborative filtering” or whatnot. This is three guys sharing a brain. Parrots.
Someone, somewhere, caused this problem by writing a “how to drive traffic to your blog” posting containing the following pearl of wisdom: “If you find something interesting in someone’s blog, add a blog posting about it on your blog, leave a trackback link and link to it from your blog.” What a f****ng idiot! Never mind the poor readers who might actually be interested in the information you’re referencing and now are having to follow this thread of links across multiple levels and layers of comments and indirections. After all — hey! More eyeballs for everybody’s Google ads.
Imagine if news programs worked like this:

Steve Pavlina recently blogged about top stupid mistakes of the newly self-employed. His list includes:

• Spending too much money
• Spending too little money
• Being too formal
• Failing to focus on value creation
• … and several more

To his list, I would add another mistake: Confusing business revenue and personal spending money. It’s probably a truism, but business (and business revenue) tends to fluctuate. It’s tempting to look at a successful month and extrapolate how much moolah you’re making. That’s a sure recipe for desaster, though.

I’m a bit more conservative in my approach. I budget for my business. I have an overview over how much I spend. You should budget far enough ahead to be able to take into account the payments which don’t come very often but which amount to a sizeable sum. In Germany, and with the kind of organization I’ve chosen (a GmbH — similar to a Ltd. or LLC), you need to file your annual tax returns and income reports. This costs money if you want it done right. And I want to make sure it’s done right, so I’d rather pay someone to do it who knows what he’s doing.

Book Review: The Adsense Code - Joel Comm

I’ve just finished reading ” The AdSense Code“, by Joel Comm. Subtitle: “What Google never told you about making money with AdSense”. Was it worth it? Well… I’ve got mixed feelings about this book.

Joel’s goal is to explain how to make the most money out of Google AdSense advertising. He does this mostly by explaining how to “tweak” your ads so that they blend in with the page contents, how to position the ads on the page for optimal results and how to perform some search engine optimisazion (SEO) to make sure your site appears relevant to Google and attracts visitors. For Joel, visitors == people to click on ads.

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I just added Flash-based (FLV) video blogging support to my Django-powered travel portal site, trogger.de. The whole process is surprisingly simple and straightforward and can be done entirely with free (FLOSS) tools.

The video publishing workflow consists of the following parts:

• A Django model to store our video and associated information
• An upload form where the user can upload a video
• Converting the video into a format usable on the Web
• Extracting additional details
• Playing the video in the Web browser
• Making the player a bit friendlier
• Advanced features

Following this simple workflow, trogger.de allows users to write and submit a blog post. Once that’s submitted, the user can add one (!) video file to it. When later viewing the blog entry, the attached video is shown in the browser.
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[Warning: Bad language and Grammar Nazi rant coming up]

Pet Peeves In Grammar, #34: Not knowing the difference between “to allow” and “to allow for“.

Guilty party: Rita Mulcahy, in: PMP Exam Prep, fifth edition.
This book is full of sentences such as this one: “Using one-time estimates also allows for a quick calculation and proof that you understand those concepts.” No, it bloody well does not! It allows quick calculations, it does not allow for them. There’s a sentence like this on almost every page. This absolutely drives me up the wall!

If I allow something, then I permit it; it is part of the functionality, or at least I do not prevent it from happening. The word processor application allows changing the page layout. If I allow for something, then I make provisions for a certain event occurring and I take this into account. If I go for a long walk, I should allow for some rain.

Granted — when you buy a book by an American author, you should allow for some linguistic incompetency (’He looked out he window.’ WTF?). But bloody hell! This is the fifth edition of this book. Don’t you people have proofreaders in the States?