Wikipedia's Rank Decision

Wikipedia has placed nofollow on all external links, based on my spot check of random entries such as Gregorian calendar, MacGuffin, and Albert R. Broccoli. This change was made with little if any discussion, though there appears to be an effort now to decide whether it should be rescinded.

If this becomes Wikipedia policy, several million external links on 1.2 million pages will no longer contribute to Google's ranking algorithm, and Wikipedia's own pages will get a boost, as Phil Ringnalda describes:

Previously, if you were a certain well-known encyclopedia written as a wiki, you would generate a lot of PR just by having half a million pages, and that PR, along with any from external links, would be distributed around the site by internal links, and would also be distributed to any external sites you felt were important enough to link from your encyclopedia articles.

Now, as a byproduct of antispamming, every single bit of PR that each page has to distribute will be distributed only internally, to your own other pages, since all external links are nofollowed. Net result: you are more popular than before, the sites that you pretend to call important are less popular. You will tend to come out higher in search results, they will tend to come out lower.

I'm guessing this change was motivated by a desire to avoid spam abuse, but the practical effect is a huge site that shares none of the benefit it receives from 139,000 pages that link to its site.

Wikipedia · 2005/02/03 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

The Meek Shall Inherit the Press

The White House official who briefed reporters on the speech said Mr. Bush would take detailed positions on Social Security in coming weeks and months, but only to the extent that doing so would help Congress move forward. The official, who spoke before an auditorium full of journalists, insisted on not being quoted by name. Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said the goal in not allowing the use of the official's name was to keep the focus on Mr. Bush.

Can anyone imagine an auditorium full of webloggers, told not to quote a public official by name, being docile enough to honor the request like the Times, Washington Post, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Detroit Free Press, and many other papers?

Atrios identifies the official as White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett.

Politics · Journalism · 2005/02/02 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Jacksonville: the Worst Coast

Philadelphians headed for this town are excused if they confuse it for home. Not because of the landscape, of course; this place lacks anything approaching charm.

You know your city has a bad rep when someone from Philadelphia calls it charmless. It's like being a singer booed off the stage by Ashlee Simpson.

Now that Workbench has begun to attract random abuse about Jacksonville, I'm feeling some civic responsibility to defend the Bold New City of the South, the First Coast, the place Where Florida Begins, or as one local dubbed it: "Just Barely Florida."

However, I would prefer for the world to believe the media digs and encourage the steady tide of new Floridians to beach themselves someplace else.

So Tony Kornheiser is right: Jacksonville is a foul-smelling city where we celebrate our wedding anniversaries by scrounging the doublewide for shoes and taking the cousin-wife out to Hooter's.

Forget what you heard about smooth beaches, year-round golf, and a nine-month summer that begins in two weeks. Those are lies spread by malicious yokels who lure unsuspecting tourists deep into the pines to re-enact their favorite scenes from Deliverance.

Jacksonville · 2005/02/02 · 19 COMMENTS · Link

The Revolution Will Be Podcasted

Thank you for providing a podcast of the weekly Democratic address. Where do you pick up the MP3? I asked the governor's staff where I could find it and they were unable to tell me.

I started this project after fruitlessly looking for an official source. As far as I can tell, my podcast is the first attempt to distribute and archive the opposition party's weekly response on the Web.

I pick up the audio from one of several streaming radio stations that run the speech each Saturday. One place you can hear it is C-Span Radio, which broadcasts the president's speech and the Democratic response beginning at around 2:50 p.m. Eastern.

A week after I began doing this in January, I received an e-mail from a staffer at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who is working to set up a multimedia server for stuff like this.

I also have communicated with Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid's war room, a new "rapid-response" communications center for Senate Democrats that includes its own television and radio studio.

I've offered to help one of these groups produce regular podcasts, because it's frustrating watching Democrats struggle to get their message out without the bully pulpit of the White House, control of Congress, or its own house organ.

Politics · Podcasts · 2005/01/31 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Linger, Oh Linger, Heffelfinger

The highlight of attending NFL Experience, the Super Bowl event near Jacksonville's Alltel Stadium, was seeing Hall of Fame exhibits on loan from Canton.

Until I saw the Birth of Pro Football display, I didn't know the first pro player had the Dickensian name of Pudge Heffelfinger.

A standout at Yale, in 1892, Heffelfinger earned $500 ($10,200 in today's dollars) to play one game as a ringer for the Allegheny Athletic Association, a cheat that wasn't confirmed until 70 years later.

He was the first pro, the first contract holdout, and the first Maurice Clarett, leaving school to play for independent clubs like Allegheny. Yale fans tried in vain to convince him to stay with the odd chant "linger, oh linger, Heffelfinger."

Read more on the event from David Knighton, who was also there on Saturday and found something I wish I had seen: Pat Tillman's locker.

Sports · Jacksonville · 2005/01/31 · Comment · Link

Podcast Support in Weblog Pinger

When a new weblog entry contains an audio enclosure, you can ping Audio.Weblogs.Com, which in turn notifies a lot of services that monitor the site, such as the podcast directory GigaDial.

One gotcha for anyone else working on Audio.Weblogs.Com notification: the site's XML-RPC server is at audiorpc.weblogs.com, not audio.weblogs.com, which I finally discovered when I read the documentation.

Update: Referring to this code as my pinger sounds disturbingly like my twanger.

Xml-rpc · Php · 2005/01/30 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Democratic Podcast: Long Road Ahead in Iraq

Skelton's a good choice to speak on the weekend that elections occur in Iraq, because he was one of the first in Congress to recognize that the Bush administration's planning for post-war Iraq was not sufficient to the extreme difficulty we would face.

He wrote letters to President Bush in September 2002 and a few days before the war began, and in the first warned of many problems that continue to hound the American effort to stabilize the country:

Planning for the occupation of Germany and Japan -- two economically viable, technologically sophisticated nations -- took place well in advance of the end of the war. The extreme difficulty of occupying Iraq with its history of autocratic rule, its balkanized ethnic tensions, and its isolated economic system argues both for careful consideration of the benefits and risks of undertaking military action and for detailed advanced occupation planning if such military action is approved.

Specifically, your strategy must consider the form of a replacement regime and take seriously the possibility that this regime might be rejected by the Iraqi people, leading to civil unrest and even anarchy. The effort must be to craft a stable regime that will be geopolitically preferable to Saddam and will incorporate the disparate interests of all groups within Iraq -- Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurd. We must also plan now for what to do with members of the Baath party that continue to support Saddam and with the scientists and engineers who have expertise born of the Iraqi WMD program.

The transcript of his radio speech on Saturday:

Good morning.

I'm Congressman Ike Skelton of Missouri, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Tomorrow the Iraqi people will hold free and fair elections. Despite a number of serious mistakes by the Bush administration along the way, these elections are both the culmination of the progress we've made and a critical reminder of how far we have left to go.

The United States has made an extraordinary commitment in Iraq because the price of failure there is unacceptable. The fact that the Iraqis are holding elections is an accomplishment. It's a testament to the sacrifice, the professionalism and the courage of the 150,000 American and coalition troops who are backing the Iraqis' desire for self-determination and whose presence in Iraq will be necessary for some time to come.

Despite the best efforts of our troops and their Iraqi counterparts, Iraq still faces a violent and persistent insurgency fueled, in part, by economic disorder and ethnic division.

When the elections are over, the outcome will likely not be completely representative of all ethnic and religious groups. The Shia will likely control a significant majority of assembly seats with considerable Kurdish participation. The Sunnis, on the other hand, are likely to be under-represented and may denounce the legitimacy of the new government.

If they do, it will be tempting to question what we could have done differently for the last two years that would've yielded a better outcome. What if the United States hadn't disbanded the Iraqi army? What if the administration had listened to commanders like former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki who called for a larger force for post-war stabilization? What if the reconstruction funds appropriated by Congress had been spent more quickly to provide more economic opportunity for the average Iraqi?

I raised questions such as these and others before the war started in two letters to the president. These are critical questions, ones the administration should've considered before involving us so deeply in Iraq.

But now we must use the elections as a building block for a new, permanent representative form of government in Iraq. These elections are only the next step toward that goal.

This new transitional government must then draft a constitution, hold new elections and find a way to bring those disaffected by the elections, particularly the Sunnis, into the political process. This will be a challenge, but one that can and must be accomplished.

At the same time, we must continue to build up the Iraqi security forces. But we must not be lulled into a false sense of confidence by the large numbers of police and soldiers the Bush administration suggests have been trained.

While the majority of Iraqis who are serving are doing so bravely, there are still only a small number of fully capable forces. They will continue to rely on the American military for advice and support for the foreseeable future.

Providing capable security forces loyal to the Iraqi government is a long-term effort. It's a critical piece of the success of the government there and of the eventual withdrawal of our troops.

On Iraq's election day, all who support freedom should stand in support of the free Iraqis who will help choose a government. It's a great day for many. We must also continue to thank and support our troops, who have helped make these elections possible.

But we must be under no illusions about the outcome of these elections and the amount of hard work yet to come. Iraq may yet become a viable representative government, but we still have a long, long, hard way to go.

I'm Congressman Ike Skelton of Missouri. Thank you for listening.

Politics · Podcasts · 2005/01/30 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Read More Entries