Hanker for a Hunk o' Cheese

Every year at DunDraCon, xomec and I go across to Whole Foods and lunch alfresco on the fruits of their prepared foods section, finishing up this exercise in yuppie Bohemia by splitting a wedge of Stilton. This year, Greg Stafford joined us, and took a tiny morsel of Stilton just to be sociable -- he didn't like blue cheese, or his doctor had given him some farcical warning about cholesterol, or whatever.

Greg eats the morsel ... "Oh. You don't often encounter something you taste quite that far up into your nose."

Greg tries another, somewhat larger morsel... "I think I can feel it behind my eyes, now. I'm going to try for my ears, next."

One delicate slab later ... "It worked! It's going up my Eustachian tubes! It'll be in the roots of my hair, next! No more ... this has to end here!

Cheese · Food · 2007/02/20 · 1 COMMENT · Link

A Comment on Robert Scoble's Lovemaking

Robert Scoble this morning:

... Kathy Sierra is one of the best bloggers out there. She makes love to us with every post.

It'll be interesting to see how his commenters respond. Techbloggers don't often attempt to channel Barry White. I know I'm being obnoxious, but I have to ask whether Scoble would whip out that metaphor for a male blogger of his affection.

In the name of science, please expose yourself to the following hypothetical Scobleizations and let me know which one makes you the most uncomfortable in your workplace.

... Eugene Volokh is one of the best bloggers out there. He makes love to us with every post.

... Jeff Jarvis is one of the best bloggers out there. He makes love to us with every post.

... Dave Winer is one of the best bloggers out there. He makes love to us with every post.

From my experimentation, I think this only sounds natural when you try it on a blogger with a French-sounding name:

... Loïc Le Meur is one of the best bloggers out there. He makes love to us with every post.

Robert Scoble · Kathy Sierra · Love · 2007/02/15 · 21 COMMENTS · Link

Launching 16 Weblog Communities with WordPress MU

I enjoyed running Buzzword.Com when it hosted 3,000 free Manila weblogs from 2004-06, but Manila couldn't handle that many blogs on a single Windows 2000 server and I found that Frontier and UserTalk were too idiosyncratic for my tastes. I couldn't be a good UserTalk programmer unless I worked in it exclusively. I do most of my work these days in Java and LAMP.

WordPress MU, which runs on LAMP, has the easiest installation process of any blogging platform I've ever seen:

1. Create a new MySQL database user with access to a new database.
2. Create the database.
3. Unpack WordPressMU in a web directory.
4. Load an installation URL in a browser.

In 10 minutes, I had the thing up and running and was working on the server's first blog.

Wordpressmu · Manila · Lamp · 2007/02/13 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

Barack Obama 1, John Howard 0

I haven't started paying much attention to the presidential race, but I was impressed with how Sen. Barack Obama handled harsh criticism from Australian Prime Minister John Howard regarding his position on Iraq.

Obama, who gave a speech opposing the war in 2002, has introduced a bill to prevent President Bush from increasing troop levels in Iraq and to remove U.S. combat forces by March 31, 2008.

On Sunday, the conservative Bush ally played the terrorists-love-Democrats card on a news program, singling out Obama in particular:

If I were running al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats

In response, Obama called his bluff:

We have close to 140,000 troops on the ground now and my understanding is that Mr. Howard has deployed 1,400. So, if he's ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest he call up another 20,000 Australians and send them up to Iraq.

That puts the issue exactly where it should be, given Howard's dire prediction of catastrophe for Australia and the West if the U.S. withdraws. If the war's so important, why hasn't Australia sent more than a token commitment of troops?

Politics · Australia · Barack Obama · Iraq · 2007/02/12 · 57 COMMENTS · Link

Obama Loses TechCrunch Endorsement

A lesson to all presidential candidates courting the Web 2.0 vote: Don't get snippy with Michael Arrington.

After Arrington reported that the My Barack Obama social networking site was displaying a racist user-created group in a find-a-group tool, Obama new media director Joe Rospars lamented that he was playing gotcha instead of covering "the real story."

Arrington's response:

This isn't Washington DC politics, and you shouldn't assume I have some racist or other bias against your campaign. We're a tech blog and I pointed out what looks like a rookie mistake on your site that caused some embarrassment. Most of our readers (me included) are going to be inclined to be on your side. But Obama just lost my vote, because of you.

Politics · Michael Arrington · Barack Obama · 2007/02/12 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Victory Declared in the Battle for Wargames.Com

The National Arbitration Forum just released its decision in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. World Readable c/o R.L. Cadenhead, the domain-name dispute in which the film studio tried to take Wargames.Com away from me because it owns a trademark related to the 1983 film WarGames and the upcoming sequel WarGames 2: The Dead Code.

A three-member panel of arbitrators denied MGM's claim on the grounds that I established my legitimate interest in selling wargames at the domain:

The picture that emerges from this material is of the Respondent, having seen Complainant's WARGAMES movie as a teenager in or about 1983 and having developed a professional interest in computer programming and wargames, to the extent of writing about them, creating them and publishing material on numerous websites, registered the disputed domain name in 1998 with the idea of one day using it to sell wargames over the Internet. That idea remained in abeyance for six years until Respondent began to prepare to open his online store. Meantime the domain name resolved to a website which, inter alia, contained advertising links which most likely generated PPC revenue. By the time Complainant complained by letter of September 7, 2006, preparations to open the online store had advanced sufficiently to enable Respondent to advance his plans and to open the store on September 14, 2006.

Complainant rightly submits that what Respondent did after receiving the letter of September 7, 2006 cannot be taken into account in determining legitimacy. However, the speed with which Respondent was able to open his online store after having received that letter lends support to Respondent's contention that much work by way of preparation to use the disputed domain name for the purpose of selling wargames over the Internet had already been done by the time that letter was received. The sworn statements mentioned above cannot be dismissed as ex post facto attempts to concoct a defense to this Complaint. Indeed, they explain the acquisition in 2004 of the sales and use tax permit and the subscription to the Drop Ship Source Directory as being related to Respondent's intended online wargames store.

In its complaint, MGM found several things to make me look like a cybersquatter obsessed with the film, including a joke I made in Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours:

The quote "Shall we play a game?" is from the 1983 movie War Games, in which a young computer programmer portrayed by Matthew Broderick saves mankind after almost causing global thermonuclear war and the near-extinction of humankind. You'll learn how to do that in the next book of this series, Sams Teach Yourself to Create International Incidents with Java in 24 Hours.

MGM also cited a Red Herring interview:

That Respondent recalls where he first saw the WARGAMES film demonstrates the degree to which the film imprinted on his mind, and helps to explain his fascination and continuing references to MGM's film.

When first contacted by MGM in September, I was certain that I would win a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) case if my ownership of the domain was challenged. I didn't know much about the UDRP, having never been involved in one of these disputes in a decade of web publishing, but I understood that it existed to stop people from grabbing domains to profit on somebody else's trademark. I got Wargames.Com to sell wargames.

The more I learned about the UDRP, the less confidence I had in winning. Most disputes end in victories for trademark holders and there's a huge number of ways that domain owners have been judged to have acted in bad faith.

Where domain owners are concerned, the UDRP's a strange game where the only winning move is not to play.

This battle has been four months of stress-induced, take the whole gallon of ice cream out the fridge eating -- people are starting to ask my due date. The next book I write will cover how domain name owners can protect themselves from a UDRP grab. I asked my book agent to shop two different proposals depending on the outcome.

The first proposal: How I went to battle with a ginormous corporation and saved my domain.

Thanks to my attorneys Wade Duchene and Brett E. Lewis, I don't have to write the other proposed book: How one of America's most beloved film studios hurt my feelings, kicked my ass and took my domain name, and what you can do to avoid my sad, sad fate.

Udrp · Domains · Gaming · Movies · 2007/02/06 · 30 COMMENTS · Link

Searching for Ways to Move Up in Google

A year ago the RSS Advisory Board moved to its own domain, losing all Google juice associated with its old site. Because the search term RSS is enormously popular, we've found it difficult to attract search traffic and build a decent Google pagerank. It took nearly a year to crack the top 100 for that term on Google; we're currently up to the 80s.

I've been using this experience to learn the arcane art of search engine optimization (SEO).

The first SEO technique I undertook to make Google happy was to add my sites to Google Webmaster, a free tool that shows you how Google's discovering and indexing your content. Once you verify your site's ownership by adding a meta tag to the home page's header, you can view search query stats and page rank information, create sitemaps and find out the errors Google encountered while crawling your site. This week, Google added a killer new feature: Link reports that count incoming links for each of your pages and list all of those links.

Next, I developed an XML sitemap for rssboard.org and a user-friendly site index and error page.

Creating these features taught me that I've been making a huge mistake on my weblogs by duplicating content over multiple URLs. My weblog entries can be read at a short URL, long URL, date-based URL, tag-based URL, and archive URLs -- all of which were indexed by Google. Publishing as many as a dozen copies of the same content triggers Google's duplicate-content filter, downgrading most of these pages into the "omitted results" index that Google refers to in messages like this:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.

I'm correcting the problem by removing most of these URLs from Google's index by adding a noindex, follow robots header to duplicate pages with my publishing software:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

Users can still request these URLs as they navigate a site, but the only ones stored by Google are an entry's official URL and current tag pages. When I use a shortcut URL, I redirect it with an HTTP header that tells Google it's a permanent move:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

Though it's tough to quantify whether SEO techniques are working, the board's site has risen consistently (but slowly) in the rankings.

Rss · Seo · Google · Pagerank · Sitemaps · 2007/02/06 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

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