Pimping Your Pagerank for Profit

The tech blogger Phil Ringnalda is taking heat over criticizing O'Reilly about some questionable link ads on the company's web sites. Tim O'Reilly posted a thoughtful response that shows he's not entirely comfortable with selling ads that trade on a site's Google pagerank, rather than visitor eyeballs.

This is a good discussion for web publishers to be having, because the practice of pimping pagerank is becoming more pervasive. I've received numerous offers to put such links on SportsFilter, a booming sports weblog that recently received a pagerank of 7, but I've ignored them. Most seek to promote junk sites for mortgage refinancing, phentermine, and the like -- the same kind of shady marketers who are hammering my servers with comment spam -- and I don't want to damage the site's well-earned good reputation.

There's also the risk of linking to a site that Google demotes to pagerank 0, which some pagerank kremlinologists believe will adversely affect your own pagerank.

In response to Ringnalda, Andy Baio asks whether he should have discussed his concerns privately:

Did you try to contact anyone at O'Reilly before posting this? It would've taken very little effort to get a response from them before you released the rest of the world on them. Like Anil said, "the blog world likes nothing more than a good old-fashioned pile-on."

I received a similar challenge to my post on Bram Cohen, coincidentally from Anil Dash.

I think Baio and Dash are being excessively reasonable. A personal weblog's a place to think out loud. You can't let fear of being wrong or fear of how others might respond stop you from voicing an honest criticism. If I was afraid of looking stupid, I'd never leave the house.

Nobody likes being called out in public -- just look at how fast O'Reilly responded to Ringnalda. But this is a strength of blogging, not a weakness.

Publishing · Google · 2005/08/24 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Eugene Volokh Considers Gay Sex

Yesterday, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh thrust into the public debate a very long post of turgid prose which rams the argument down our throats that gays are converting people:

If you persuade someone to become a vegetarian, you can be said to have converted him to vegetarianism. He's still biologically an omnivore, but his practices are now different. Likewise, changing someone from (a) being an orientational bisexual who engages solely in heterosexual relationships to (b) someone who is an orientational bisexual who engages solely in homosexual relationships, or to (c) someone who is bisexual both by orientation and practice strikes me as quite rightly called a "conversion."

I am too juvenile a person not to snicker about Volokh's comparison between eating meat and sexuality.

Volokh, a former computer programmer who became a UCLA freshman at age 12 and clerked for Sandra Day O'Connor, is like the anti-John Roberts.

Unlike Roberts, who has been taking the fifth his entire adulthood, Volokh makes regular practice of sharing controversial opinions like this bizarre riff on homosexual conversion, which values a Humpty Dumpty-like fixity of the definition of the word "conversion" over the anti-gay persecution that results from the irrational fear of gay recruitment.

His contrarian outspokenness is a great trait for bloggers (or Internet trolls), but will forever disqualify him from consideration for the Supreme Court.

Politics · 2005/08/23 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Redirecting Sites off a Manila Server

A few Buzzword.Com users set up weblogs on other servers during the extended downtime this month. Ralf resumed his German- and English-language weblog Moorbek on a new site that runs the Antville weblog software, keeping the old version around until he can move the data over, and Julian Harris is now publishing Julian on Software with WordPress.

Manila can easily redirect weblogs to a new address on another server: All I have to do is edit a line in the config.mainresponder.domains table.

The primary disadvantage to moving is that Manila implements a redirect with an HTTP status code of "302 found," which could indicate a temporary move, rather than "301 moved permanently." A site's Google pagerank isn't transferred with a 302 redirect. I'm hoping that UserLand updates Manila to address this issue.

If you had an old weblog on Buzzword and it's now published elsewhere, let me know and I'll redirect visitors to your new site.

Manila · 2005/08/23 · Comment · Link

Syndication is Still Simple

Every time RSS comes up for discussion, someone links to Mark Pilgrim's misleading article about the version history of RSS, making a comment like this:

RSS with its 9 [diveintomark.org] +1 [rss3.org] incompatible versions is hardly a standard for anything. It is a huge pain for a implementer to decide which versions to support.

There are only two significant versions of RSS: RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. These formats have one major technical difference that prevents their merger: RSS 1.0 makes use of RDF, a standard for data exchange, and RSS 2.0 does not, favoring a slightly simpler approach.

There's only one significant version of Atom: Atom 1.0, which recently became a proposed standard of the IETF.

The other seven versions of RSS identified by Pilgrim are older versions of either 1.0 or 2.0.

An implementor of syndication publishing software can support RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0 and ignore their older versions. All three formats are stable, and code that produces RSS can easily be adapted to produce Atom 1.0. I added Atom support to an RSS-feed PHP script in a half-hour.

Rss · 2005/08/22 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Casting a Dark Horse as the Sixth 007

James Bond producers are searching for a new actor to play the role after dumping Pierce Brosnan this week.

Media favorites for the next 007 include Hugh Jackman, Heath Ledger, Jude Law, and Clive Owen. I imagine they'll pick someone from this demographic: Top-of-the-marquee actors under 40 from the U.K. or Australia who can handle a black-tie dress code.

British bookmakers have Owen as a 4/5 favorite, but some of their other choices are so odd you have to wonder at the collective intelligence of the gamblers placing the bets. Goren Visjnic?

As someone who became bored with the Bond movies around the time Timothy Dalton took over, I'd love to see them do something bold with the franchise, casting a black actor in the role.

A color-blind casting call opens up some interesting possibilities. Black actors can lead blockbuster action movies, as proven repeatedly by Will Smith, but he was born in the wrong country to be considered for the role. An American Bond would go over as well as an American Robin Hood.

Brosnan's choice for successor is reportedly Colin Salmon, the actor who played MI6 operative Charles Robinson in the last three Bond films.

My pick: Idris Elba, the 32-year-old actor who played Stringer Bell on The Wire. Born in London to parents from Ghana and Sierre Leone, Elba was incredible in an odd role -- an erudite Baltimore drug dealer trying to turn dirty money into clean businesses -- and he wears a suit like he was born in one.

Television · Movies · 2005/08/21 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

RSS 3.0: Please Pass the Fork

Jonathan Avidan has announced RSS 3.0, a one-man attempt to fork RSS 2.0.

As far as I can tell, this is Avidan's first involvement in syndication. He's passing over three groups -- the developers of RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom -- without making an attempt to work with any of us.

RSS 3.0 is pitched as a better-specified version of RSS 2.0, but it drops a bunch of elements and makes changes to several others, so it's more than a spec rewrite.

Avidan also claims it will make Atom better, which would be a neat trick, since that format just became a proposed Internet standard after an arduous, two-year development process. I'm guessing that its creators would burst into tears at the slightest mention of a second version.

I don't know why RSS offers more forks than a picnic, but I wish I could use the RSS Advisory Board to simplify the situation. A new person trying to figure out syndication shouldn't have to learn three formats just to make an educated decision about which one to support. Correction: Four formats.

Slashdot founder Rob Malda thought RSS 3.0 was front-page news yesterday, which gives me hope. I've been working on an incredible new format I call HTML 5.0.

Rss · 2005/08/19 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Never Wrestle with a Pig

One of my friends is looking for archived versions of Rush Limbaugh's show from the years he was abusing Oxycontin. He figures there has to be comedy gold in the shows where Limbaugh was pontificating under the influence.

Earlier this week, Limbaugh made a statement about Cindy Sheehan that's so bizarre we should be talking relapse:

Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real, including the mainstream media's glomming onto it. It's not real.

He subsequently denied calling her a liar, in audio that Rachel Maddow gleefully broadcast on her Air America show this morning (two-minute clip attached). Jerry Springer broadcast it also, Media Matters is doing the same, and Al Franken will undoubtedly air the same clip at noon.

Liberals spend a lot of time debunking false statements by over-the-top conservatives like Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, and I sometimes worry that we're just making them stronger. Anyone who cares already knows that they have an estranged relationship with the truth.

Whenever someone on television angrily denounces Coulter, she visibly brightens. Check out her reaction to Alan Colmes on Crooks & Liars. It's the Seinfeld dirty-talking episode all over again, prior to the point where Jerry kills the mood by asking, "you mean the panties your mother laid out for you?"

The laboriously detailed corrections that Franken devotes to Limbaugh remind me of the days when I would get into flamewars on Usenet. I can recall spending hours drafting a point-by-point rebuttal to someone's post, believing that the information I had gathered, coupled with the strength of my reasoning, would prove to everyone that my antagonist was a total stupidhead who sucks big rocks.

Podcasts · Politics · Radio · 2005/08/19 · 35 COMMENTS · Link

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