Learning from Dave Winer

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Even if you never read a single thing Dave Winer wrote in his 439 years of blogging, it's worth taking time to study his ideas about comments on blogs (he doesn't allow them).



"...to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog.... The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you're looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones.... That's what's important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment."


The important thing to notice here is that Dave does not see blog comments as productive to the free exchange of ideas. They are a part of the problem, not the solution. You don't have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else's thoughts. That's not freedom of expression, that's an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they'll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you'll move up in PageRank, and you'll have influence and your ideas will have power.


When a blog allows comments right below the writer's post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody ... nobody ... would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words. Look at this innocent post on a real estate blog. By comment #6 you're already seeing complete noise. By #13 you have someone cursing and saying "go kill yourself." On a real estate blog. #18 and #23 have launched into a middle eastern nuclear conflageration which continues for 100 posts. They're proving John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory every day. Pathetic. On a real estate blog. Lockhart Steele, is this what you want Curbed to look like? Really? It's not fun, freewheeling freedom of expression, yay first amendment!. It's mostly anonymous hate speech.


OK, that's an extreme example... or is it? I don't know how many times I've read a brilliant article someone wrote on a blog. By the end of the article, I'm excited, I'm impressed, it was a great article. And then you get the dribble of morbid, meaningless, thoughtless comments. If the article, for example, mentions anything in anyway related to Microsoft, you get some kind of open source nuclear war. If the article mentions web browsing in any way, there's always some person without an outbound filter who feels compelled to tell you about how he uses Opera, so he doesn't have this problem, although, frankly, I could care less what Anonymous uses. He's not even human to me, he's anonymous. What web browser he uses doesn't amount to a hill of beans. It's not a single bean. It's not even the memory of last week's huevos rancheros. It's just noise. Useless noise. Thoughtless drivel written by some anonymous non-entity who really didn't read the article very carefully and didn't come close to understanding it and who has no ability whatsoever to control his typing diarrhea if the site's software doesn't physically prevent him from posting.


Dave is absolutely right. The way to give people freedom of expression is to give them a quiet place to post their ideas. If other people disagree, they're welcome to do so... on their own blogs, where they have to take ownership of their words.


I'm really losing patience with anonymous posts, "anon", "anon for this one," people who don't even have the energy to sign their messages with a made up name and leave the whole signature blank. Frankly if every anonymous post disappeared from the Joel on Software discussion group, the overall quality of the conversation would go up, way up, and the discussion would be way more interesting. Try this as an experiment: read through the last few dozen topics on the discussion group, and imagine that all the "anonymous" and signed-blank posts just disappeared. Would the quality of conversation be higher? Would that be a place you'd be more likely to want to spend time in?


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(Via Joel on Software.)

Harry Potter Will Conjure Up Big Sales, Despite Piracy

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A few weeks back, Michael Moore's latest film, Sicko, was released and fared pretty decently at the box office, despite being available on P2P networks -- a situation one hyperbolic article described as "every film maker's worst marketing nightmare." That's a story that's played out time and time again, as the mere availability of pirated content hasn't held back the sales of legitimate content. Now, stories about the latest Harry Potter book being available on file-sharing networks are starting to come in, ahead of the book's release this weekend. This news isn't being met with the same level of media freakouts as when a reporter discovered Sicko online, with even the CEO of Barnes & Noble saying it "won't sell a single copy less" of the book despite it being available for free online. The biggest reason for this is the inconvenience of the pirated copies: they're huge PDFs, reportedly of low quality. To approximate the book-reading experience, users would have to print out all the pages, which could be time-consuming and expensive, while reading the book on a computer screen or monitor wouldn't be a lot of fun for many people. This draws parallels to other forms of piracy: for instance, while most new movies are available for free from file-sharing networks, plenty of people still want to pay to watch them in a theater, for a variety of reasons. Certainly there are people who will overlook any amount of drawbacks to get free content; chances are they wouldn't pay for legitimate content anyway. But there remains a large market of people who are perfectly willing to pay for content -- so long as content producers can provide them with sufficient value.

(Via Techdirt.)

Speaking of Secure Programming

in

A few months ago, while we were still in the thick of finishing off the book (Secure Programming with Static Analysis) and hadn’t yet started focusing on selling it, Brian and I recorded and interview with Informit’s new OnSoftware podcast where we talked about software security and the kind of material we cover in the book.



Well, months later the book is finished and now the interview we recorded is available for mass consumption through iTunes as either a video or audio podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast series on www.onpodcastweekly.com or link directly to our episode at http://media.podhoster.com/peachpittv/05_SOF_ChessWest_01.mp4.


Secure Programming with Static Analysis has gotten some nice attention from other sources, too. Gary McGraw recently posted the forward he wrote for the book on his Justice League security blog http://www.cigital.com/justiceleague/… and SANS has a nice interview with Brian up at http://www.sans.edu/resources/securitylab/brian_chess.php. I particularly like the part in the SANS interview where Brian takes credit for all the typos in the book ;-).

(Via Vaeros.)

Last Harry Potter leaks online

in

Cory Doctorow:
The new Harry Potter novel -- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- has hit the Internet days before its publication. The publisher spent a reported $20 million on keeping the book secret. Was the money well-spent? As Bruce Schneier points out, the kind of person who downloads a series of photos of the pages of a giant novel is also the kind of person who'll line up and buy a copy the night it comes out.

Me, I'm just glad to finally know what happens who dies at the end of the final Harry Potter novel -- SPOILER ALERT! Select the text below to read it.

The publishing industry.

Seriously, though. With the last book, the publisher was so freaked out about ebook "piracy" that they refused to release an official electronic edition. The result? Fans made their own electronic text in 24 hours. And other fans translated the book into German in 45 hours.

That'a a lot of fan-energy, sitting out there, looking for ways to love these books. Surely there's a smarter way to deal with that kind of love than attempting to suppress it?



Four days before it hits bookstores, I've got a copy of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." I downloaded it from a link posted at the Bittorrent file-sharing site the Pirate Bay.

But hold on. It's not as sweet as it sounds. What I've got is not really the book but a series of photographs of the book -- someone has meticulously snapped shots of each page. Some who've discussed leaked copies say that they've seen only Pages 1 through 495. But the copy I have includes all the pages; I could, if I wanted to, tell you the very last line of the very last Harry Potter book right now.


Link,
Link to Deathly Hallows torrents on The Pirate Bay

(Via Boing Boing.)

Neocons on a Cruise: What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren’t Liste

in

Amazing story of a reporter who joined the crazy cruisers from the right wing nuts of "National Review". She starts with : "Is he your only child?" I ask. "Yes," she says. "Do you have a child back in England?" she asks. No, I say. Her face darkens. "You'd better start," she says. "The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they'll have the whole of Europe."

read more | digg story

BREAKING: Reid To Force All-Night Filibuster On Iraq Withdrawal

in

Moments ago, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that in response to conservative obstructionism, he plans to force war supporters to physically remain in the Senate and filibuster Iraq withdrawal legislation.


Reid accused conservatives of “protecting the President rather than protecting our troops” by “denying us an up or down vote on the most important issue our country faces.” He said that if a vote on the Reed/Levin Iraq legislation is not allowed today or tomorrow, he will keep the Senate in session “straight through the night on Tuesday” and force a filibuster. From Reid’s speech:


Republicans are using a filibuster to block us from even voting on an amendment that could bring the war to a responsible end. They are protecting the President rather than protecting our troops.


They are denying us an up or down — yes or no — vote on the most important issue our country faces.


I would like to inform the Republican leadership and all my colleagues that we have no intention of backing down.


If Republicans do not allow a vote on Levin/Reed today or tomorrow, we will work straight through the night on Tuesday.


The American people deserve an open and honest debate on this war, and they deserve an up or down vote on this amendment to end it.


UPDATE: Watch the video:



Screenshot


OpenLeft, Firedoglake and others have also called for Congress to call the conservatives’ bluff and force them to filibuster the Levin-Reed Iraq bill.


Read Reid’s full speech HERE. Bob Geiger has more.

(Via Think Progress.)

Webb Rips Graham As ‘Politician Trying To Put His Political Views Into The Mouths Of Soldiers’

in

This morning on Meet the Press, Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) took Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to task for spouting “support the troops” rhetoric while failing to take action to safeguard the long-term health of the military.


This week, Graham was among a handful of right-wing Senators who prevented the passage of an amendment sponsored by Webb that would have required soldiers to be given more rest at home after being deployed overseas. During the vote, Graham disingenuously claimed that if Webb’s bill passed, it would be “the greatest politicization of military action in the history of the country.”


This morning, Webb fought back. “The traditional operational policy has been if you’re gone for a year, you get two years back. We’re now in a situation where the soldiers and the Marines are having less than a 1 to 1 ratio.” Webb said. Turning to Graham, he added, “And somebody needs to speak up for them rather than defending what this President has been doing.”


“May I speak!” Webb said, as Graham tried to interrupt him. “This is one thing I really take objection to,” he said, “is politicians who try to put their political views into the mouths of soldiers.” Watch it:




Webb’s amendment would have required the Bush administration to provide at least a year of rest for every year that a member of the Armed Forces was deployed overseas. The amendment provided three years of rest for National Guard soldiers. In the vote to end the filibuster, 56 bipartisan members supported Webb’s amendment, less than the 60 needed to end debate.


This morning, when Graham tried to claim that he’s a qualified voice to speak on behalf of all soldiers because he has been to Iraq, Webb countered, “You go and see the dog-and-pony shows.” Webb scolded Graham, “Don’t put political words into [the soldier’s] mouth.”


Digg It!


UPDATE: Commenters Ann and Katy note Webb’s son has served in Iraq, but he refused to bring that into the debate this morning.

(Via Think Progress.)