Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Jason Kottke links to a post in Ars Technica with an argument that people shouldn’t use ad blocking browser plugins when visiting their favorite sites.  The argument is as old as ad blocking browser plugins.  And I most often here exactly that side of the story – the site that you love depends on the advertising and by blocking it, you’re effectively closing its oxygen supply.

I don’t disagree, but I find this point of view too narrow.  I think advertising should work for both the site and the visitor.  If we are asking a visitor to take a responsibility, we should also ask the the site owner to do the same.  Because the truth of the matter is that most sites out there are overloaded with advertising.  Most advertising out there is irrelevant. And on top of that, most advertising out there is annoying.  I think if site owners were spending more time selecting an appropriate and relevant advertising, their visitors wouldn’t spend as much time blocking it.

Consider the practical side of this.  From all the people I know who browse the web, everyone (and I do mean everyone) is browsing through a whole lot of web sites.  It’s not one web site, not two, not ten.  It’s hundreds and thousands.  If you look at all those web sites collectively (no matter who the person is), you’ll agree that the majority of those web sites have too much of advertising, which is too annoying, and too irrelevant.  And from the point of view of the site owner, it’s often much harder to fix than it looks.

First of all, most site owners don’t have advertisers standing in queue. So the choice is quite limited.  You get what you get most of the times.  Secondly, there are tools like Google AdSense which help site owners show ads which more relevant.  But with that being completely automated there is just so much control over the results. Most of the times you don’t get to pick the company or ad content.  Thirdly, the fact that not everyone not everywhere is on the web has something to do with ads relevancy.  For example, I live in a small country of Cyprus in the middle of nowhere.  There are probably a total of 40-50 companies here which advertise on Google.  None of those companies have anything that I am interested in.  But because there isn’t much choice, I’ll be shown these ads anywhere I go (every site that uses Google AdSense).

Even being a site owner myself, running Google AdSense block, I am still a supporter of ad blocking browser plugins.  I think the end-user should have a choice. And not only have it, but exercise that choice too.  If someone is getting annoyed by a huge ad block in the top right corner of this site, please, by all means, feel free to block it.  You don’t see it, you don’t click it, you don’t care about it – you just improve my click-through rate.  That’s the parameter I worry about.  I’d rather have 10 people see the ad and 10 people click on it, than have 10,000 people see the ad and nobody click on it.

Once again I’ve noticed that my blogging is getting behind.  Busy at work, lazy, and going through the mood change for the upcoming Christmas holidays – that all has a role to play.  But that’s not the major issue.

Thinking of what am I doing differently these days, I realized that my blogging activity got spread out all over the web, and therefore became less noticeable on my own blog.  I do more of Twitter, which is now integrated with the blog in the form of daily briefs.  I favourite more videos on Youtube, which now notifies the Twitter, and later still ends up in the daily briefs on the blog.  I do more bookmarks on Delicious, which also end up via Twitter in daily breifs.  And there is something else I do, which doesn’t come back to the blog – shared and commented articles in my Google Reader.

Actually, as far as writing goes, Twitter and Google Reader happen to be the only two places where I write at all now.  Once I realized that, I wanted to find a way to pull the comments and shared items from Google Reader into my blog.  But then I doubt if that’s the right approach.  The alternative being blogging and commenting about things not in the Google Reader, but in the blog itself.

I am still undecided on the matter.  Google Reader provides a really good interface for commenting and interacting with other people who read about similar topics.  On the other hand, my blog has more exposure than my Google Reader shared items list, and has better interface for discussions.  Perhaps, I should try and see how it goes.

What’s your take on comments in Google Reader vs. blog posts?

I’ve just upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.7, and yes, it’s as good as they said it would be.  The new interface is looks better, is more convenient, and even feels faster.  Things are somehow closer to where they should be and overall it makes more sense.  However, I am yet to test it on a few non-technical bloggers who I help with blog hosting and administration.

The upgrade itself was fast and painless as usual – just overwrite the old files with new, visit administration, and click on a button to upgrade the database structure when asked so.  That’s it.  I’ve also scrolled through the Settings section just to see what’s new (a few things are), and that’s about it.

I’ve noticed that there are a few glitches here and there, most of which are related to plugins that I am using.  Hopefully I’ll sort them out soon.  In the worst case scenario, they will be taken care of in the new design that is in the works for this blog.

Some weeks ago, as part of their 10th anniversary celebration, Google presented Google Circa 2001 (yes, I know, I am doing very old news right now – Slashdot, CyberNet News).  Google Circa 2001 is basically the way Google was in 2001, including the web index of those times.  What’s the big deal?  Well, for those of us who were on the web from back then, it provides for a way to see how things were different.

For example, back in 2001 I was better known as “Leonid Mamtchenkov“, not “Leonid Mamchenkov”.  That was due to another spelling in my Russian passport.  Also, my web site looked pretty different from what it is now.  But it was already a blog, even if in the simplest form.  Surprisingly even, I found a few posts that were not migrated to the current archives, or got lost somehow after a few CMS and back-end script changes.  I’ll restore them for historical purposes later on.

Oh, sweet memories …

Imagine my surprise when I looked at “Top Recommendations” area of my Google Reader today and found … my own blog over there.

Yes, I know that these recommendations are based on the feeds that I read.  But still!  Is it the time to celebrate the recommendations technology, which recommended me to me over a gadzillion of other blogs?  Or maybe this is a day of Ultimate Technological Silliness, when Google, a search company that forgets nothing, somehow arrived to the conclusion that I might not be reading my own blog?  These questions remind me of a “half-empty or half-full glass of water“.  I guess a lot depends on the personal perspective…

Looking around the blogosphere, I see more and more bloggers who work really hard on promoting their sites.  They optimize their themes for Google, submit blog to all sorts of directories, share links to their best content via social networks, microblog, and comment all around the web.
Well, that’s all fine.  But here is the questions – can they handle the popularity?

I’ve been thinking about it before, but it came all to me suddenly yesterday and today.  One of my recent posts got submitted to reddit.com and it somehow it went through to the main page of the site, and from there got aggregated via RSS to a lot of other places.  Within 24 hours, my blog received more than 20,000 views.  Compared to an average day, which brings much under a thousand, that’s a lot.

This sounds like a dream come true for any blogger, no?  Well, it is, sort of.  But.  Consider the other side of the story, which is not so obvious from the first glance:

• My hosting company handled the spike really well – no complaints or disconnections.  Not all hosting companies are created equal.
• Commenting form on my blog was broken at the time of the spike.  It was down the whole spike duration.
• There were about 500 comments posted in the reddit.com thread.
• I’ve received almost 100 emails.
• When commenting form got fixed, I got another dozen or so comments, plus another SPAM wave along with it.

If you imagine for a moment all that coming upon you in the middle of the working week, you’ll see a problem.  Who and how should respond to all that?

I’ve spent half a day today talking with my hoster about the commenting form.  Gladly it got fixed (the problem was session misconfiguration on the hosting company side).  Then I needed some time to respond to all those emails. In the meantime I quickly reviewed and approved all comments in the moderation queue.  That pretty much ate my day, together with some things I managed to slide in at work.

Later in the evening, when my family went to sleep, I actually read all the comments and responded to a few.  I also read through most comments at reddit.com .  Can I reply to any of those?  Nope.  That’s out of my resources.  I can’t handle all the traffic that came in.

Can you?  What will happen to your server if you’ll get digged or slashdotted?  How can you moderate all the comments?  How can you handle replies?  What about comments at other places – blogs, forums, and social networks that brought you in the traffic?  Do you have any moderators on standby?  Do you have any monitoring setup (Google Alerts, coComment, etc) for remote discussions about your content?

If you aren’t thinking about those things while promoting your blog, you are in for a big surprise…

More and more people spend more and more time online. I wish more and more of them read RFC 1855 which covers netiquette guidelines. This document is more than 10 years old, but most of the points that it discusses are as valid today as they were back then. Some are even more important today than they used to be. Another good thing about this RFC is that it has theoretical directions combined with some practical advice.

A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we call these “flames”) even if you are provoked. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get flamed and it’s prudent not to respond to flames.

Reading this document won’t make you wise enough to avoid all the mistakes of online communications, but it can seriously minimize them.

Paul Graham wrote yet another excellent essey – “How to Disagree“.

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.
Many who respond to something disagree with it. That’s to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there’s less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you’re entering territory he may not have explored.

He then proceeds with identifying a hierarchy of disagreements.  In his view, the forms of disagreement are:

• DH0: Name-calling.
• DH1: Ad Hominem.
• DH2: Responding to Tone.
• DH3: Contradiction.
• DH4: Counterargument.
• DH5: Refutation.
• DH6: Refuting the Central Point.

Paul’s post reminded me of something – a course of formal logic back in college.  One of the things that course covered was a list of fallacies, which are often used in arguments either intentionally or not.  Of course, the complete list of fallacies is much longer and will take more time to memorize and understand.  But, if you wish to win and rule online (and offline) arguments, you should at least get familiar with those.

Paul organizes hist list of disagreement forms into a hierarchy. He says:

Indeed, the disagreement hierarchy forms a kind of pyramid, in the sense that the higher you go the fewer instances you find.

It would be nice to see a similar, hierarchy organization for the longer list of fallacies.   Which ones are the most frequent in online discussions?  Which ones are easier to create and why?  How to recognize and respond to them?

I have just upgraded this blog’s WordPress version to recently released 2.5. I waited for this moment for a long time. WordPerss 2.5 brings quite a few improvements such as better administration (new interface, tag management, easier uploads, improved post editor), speed improvements, security enhancements (prepared SQL queries, password strength indicator, better hashing for passwords), and more.

But, as always, I was a bit worried about the upgrade path. My blog uses a heavily customized theme, plenty of plugins, and resides on a web host to which I have very limited access. It also contains more than 4,000 posts and numerous comments and attachments, which makes bakups and restores a lengthy process.

Now that I’m done with the upgrade and everything seems to work just fine, I have to say that this was the easiest upgrade so far. I didn’t need to fix one single thing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everything just went through OK and simply worked.

Oh, and the new WordPress is every bit as good as it was promised and expected, and even better than that. I love the new administration. The Dashboard is much more useful now and makes more sense even out of the box, not to mention all those plugins which will appear in the next few days. I like the way the post editing has been modified (although I am still waiting for a better date picker). Especially nice to see how easy permalinks editing has become (forget the old slugs, now you have the full URL in front of you). Media management (uploads) is indeed much improved with some extra functionality, such as progress reports, multiple file uploads, thumbnail management, galleries, etc. Also, there is a way now to manage tags, which were getting out of control. In short, it’s great!

A big thank you is due to everyone who made this release possible, so – Thank You. And, for those of you who are waiting for something to upgrade, wait no longer!

Back in December of the last year, when the Russian company SUP bought LiveJournal, I wrote this post, in which, among other things, I said that it wasn’t a very good thing for LiveJournal.  A few things happened since then, which confirmed my worries.  But the biggest of them is unfolding right now.

SUP removed basic (free) accounts from the registration form.  They have also introduced plenty of annoying advertising to existing free accounts.  Lots and lots of people got really annoyed with that.  In fact, there even was a boycott with some users not updating their diaries for 24 hours, while others going as far as deleting their diaries (no worries yet, since there is a way to restore the diary).

If you missed this whole story, here is a CNews article in English and here is a Lenta.ru article in Russian which cover the basic story.  For more, check numerous posts on the blogosphere.

Most of the people I know, saw it coming.  And this is surely not the last incident in this story.