Free the Presidential Debates

Barack Obama and John Edwards have both written letters this week calling on presidential debates to be released under a Creative Commons license.

Edwards' take:

The Creative Commons license terms offer an easy way to ensure that the networks' rights are protected. Much of the content on my own campaign web site is available under just such a license.

Commercial constraints are severe enough in their effect in diluting the substance of our campaigns. Limiting access to long-form televised debates makes matters worse.

I didn't expect a copyright licensing issue to get this kind of attention, but Creative Commons has become an effective lever to pry open content that should rightfully be shared. There's a rising expectation among the public that we should be able to reuse and remix material like this -- C-Span responded to the same pressure in March by allowing non-commercial reuse of the videos it produces at Congressional hearings, federal agency briefings, and White House events.

Politics · Creative Commons · 2007/05/04 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Make Google Happy: Weed Out Duplicate Content

I spend a lot of time these days trying to master search engine optimization, the practice of making Google's great and terrible algorithm give you the love you never received from your emotionally closed off, impossible to please father¹. A commercial venture like Wargames.Com, which I'm running as a bootstrap with no advertising budget, would be utterly hopeless without search traffic.

Towards this end, I've created a sitemap for each of my sites -- an XML file that tells Google and other search engines where to find new and updated content. Here's the Wargames.Com sitemap, which lists the URLs of each of the store's products along with the date the pages were last edited. (Have I mentioned that large-scale combat simulations make an excellent gift for Mother's Day?)

The process of creating these maps taught me that I was making a huge mistake in the design of my sites: Offering the same content on multiple pages, all of which were indexed by Google.

A lot of sites make this blunder. You can see an example from The Onion fake news site with this search. A column by Ben Tiedemann explaining why he blogs has been picked up a bunch of different times by Google.

Google's algorithm aggressively hunts down duplicate content, relegating it to a supplemental index where it gets no love at all from searchers. Another Google search shows that all but one copy of the blogger column are considered dupes.

If you want to maximize a page's prominence in Google, make one copy available to Google and hide the rest by adding the following header to their pages:

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

The noindex keyword tells search engines not to index the page, and follow says the engine should crawl the page's links to find other pages.

If possible, you also should redirect URL requests so that each of your pages is loaded at its main URL, which for The Onion appears to be links in the form content/node/number. A page that can be loaded a bunch of different ways will be bookmarked at each of those different URLs, reducing the amount of Google juice it receives for being linked.

Employing these techniques on Wargames.Com has produced search results that are a lot more likely to be useful, reaching specific product pages. I'm not seeing an uptick in sales yet, but the Google results for the site were so useless 90 days ago I was afraid the other search engine optimizers would find out and make fun of me.

P.s. Just kidding, dad!

Seo · Xml · Google · 2007/05/03 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Mystery Solved: House is Like Holmes

It took me two-and-a-half years, but I finally figured out that the Fox medical drama House has patterned the title character, an arrogant doctor who solves sadistic medical mysteries, after Sherlock Holmes.

Beyond the similarity of the names Holmes and House, both feature characters who are arrogant and addicted to drugs (Holmes abuses cocaine and morphine; House takes Vicodin for a leg ailment). They're both incredibly difficult to get along with and have only close friend and confidante -- Holmes has Dr. Watson, House has Dr. Wilson.

In an overt nod to Holmes on this week's episode, House was shopping for a cane when he put a curled Baskerville pipe in his mouth. (You'd think a guy whose patients regularly develop excruciating maladies from exposure to exotic toxins would have the sense not to do that.)

A House fan site runs down all of their similarities, which include another obvious clue that I missed: House's house has the address 221-B.

My favorite connection is that both characters love lowbrow culture. Holmes is a regular reader of "agony columns," melodramatic Dear Abby-style advice features for the lovelorn and desperate, and House is a regular viewer of General Hospital who once used the pseudonym Luke N. Laura.

Television · Books · 2007/05/02 · 1 COMMENT · Link

NBC Buys RSS-to-Email Service R-Mail

The largest email-based RSS service was sold to NBC Universal this week, an event that's curiously absent from the tech press. Randy Charles Morin's R-Mail was purchased by the entertainment network for an undisclosed amount.

The service has 50,000 users, 100,000 subscriptions and sends out more than 50,000 e-mails per day, according to DMW Daily, though I suspect a zero's missing from the last figure. When I wrote about R-Mail last August, it had 20,000 users.

R-Mail makes it possible to receive web site updates by email for any site that offers an RSS or Atom feed. I didn't realize that reading feeds by mail was so popular until I offered subscriptions to users of the Drudge Retort. Within a few weeks, more than 600 people were getting each news update from the site in e-mail.

Morin, a member of the RSS Advisory Board and a longtime advocate of RSS, began R-Mail as a personal project to suit his own needs. He turned it pro when the site grew by 15,000 users over a 90-day period in 2006.

Normally, you'd expect an RSS startup that attracted more than 45,000 new users in a year to get the attention of TechCrunch and the other sites that obsess over Web 2.0. But while Michael Arrington was wishing for somebody to launch a blog-to-email startup and covering the launch and fire sale of a small RSS-email service called Zookoda, he completely missed the one that grew into a successful business.

Rss · Business · 2007/04/27 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Politics Is Not a Team Sport

The novelist Andrew Klavan has written a completely insufferable ode to himself for being conservative that's getting a lot of praise.

The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don't have to lie. ... This is leftism's great strength: it's all white lies.

I wrote a response for Watching the Watchers that addresses the need of too many Americans to treat politics like a sport in which your team rox and the other team sux.

Politics · 2007/04/25 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Doctor Has a Beef With Health Claims in Food Ads

Freedhoff began his career as a family physician, but switched gears and started the Bariatric Medical Institute in Ottawa, Canada, because he "quickly became frustrated prescribing medications for conditions that could be controlled with lifestyle changes. ... It's much more fun to stop drugs than to start them."

He recently spotted the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada recommending red meat as a healthy food:

I'm not aware of any study that has demonstrated any significant health benefits with red meat consumption.

On the contrary, I'm aware of many studies that have demonstrated the dangers of red meat consumption -- from breast cancer (in post-menopausal women, intake of just 60 grams per day increased their risk of breast cancer by 57 percent), to colon cancer (people who ate the most red meat were almost 40 percent more likely to develop colon cancer), and diabetes (for every increase in the number of daily servings of red meat there was a 26 percent increase in the risk of developing diabetes).

Health · 2007/04/23 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

I Take Abuse According to RFC 2142

I was told Friday that Buzzword.Com has been added to a blacklist at RFC Ignorant because the domain doesn't have an abuse email account. Somebody wanted to report a spam blog on my server, and when he couldn't send mail to an abuse account here, I was turned in for RFC reeducation.

RFC 2142 requires that web sites and other servers take mail at several standard mailboxes, including abuse@domain for complaints, postmaster@domain for issues regarding mail servers and webmaster@domain for web servers. According to RFC Ignorant, all domains that might be abused must have an abuse account that takes mail.

It is ... a widely-held misconception that <abuse@domain> only needs to work for Internet Service Providers. Instead, it should work for any "organization" for which e-mail (or other abusable Internet) service exists, whether that service is provided to one user or one million.

Because an abuse account is likely to get a bunch of spam, I was hoping to put an autoresponder there that tells people to use a web form to file complaints. But that violates the RFC:

... sites are welcome to suggest "better/optimized" methods of communication, but they must acknowledge that the complaint will be acted upon, as submitted to the main abuse@domain address.

RFC Ignorant's approach is obnoxious but the point's valid. You can't run a service like a free weblog host without being attentive to complaints.

After dealing with this and spending most of the day on spam problems on my weblog and e-mail servers, I decided that my plan to run 16 WordPress MU servers was completely insane. I've consolidated all of them down to a single host, Buzzword.Com.

Wordpressmu · Spam · 2007/04/21 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

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