Eleven Years as the Dark Humor Man

Exactly 4,200 days ago, I began Cruel Site of the Day, a demented parody of Cool Site of the Day and other award sites. I had just left an interactive TV startup in Denver that went broke the day our product launched and was starting my own web development company in Pekin, Illinois, a town outside of Peoria where the air smells like corn, marigolds and hopelessness.

As Wall Street was making overnight dot-com millionaires out of a bunch of insufferably precocious twentysomethings like Marc Andreesen, I was a new parent struggling to become a ten-thousandaire. Peoria has its charms, like the Giant Bikini Woman, the gondola sandwich and the first mass production of penicillin. But Illinois is Fargo-the-movie cold, and as it turned out, the Rust Belt wasn't the best place to become an Internet mogul.

So on April 1, 1996, it was easy to channel my resentment into a site that mocked the chirpy optimism of people like Glenn Davis, the creator of Cool Site of the Day, who was constantly in the press saying things like this:

I view the Web as I view life, with the sense of wonder of the little boy that I carry inside of me. When he says, 'that's cool,' I listen.

Somebody needed to make the case for the other side:

The World Wide Web is a great thing, putting a wealth of sports information, entertainment trivia and explicit pornography at your fingertips. ... However, there's something wrong with a medium that loves itself as much as the Web does. We're being turned into a planet of Steven Seagals. As an antidote to all of this unhealthy positive energy, Cruel Site of the Day presents a daily link to the world of the perturbed, peeved, pensive and postal. It's brought to you by Rogers Cadenhead, a web developer who began examining the issue of self-love in his early teens.

Today, thousands of people bottomfeed the web to amuse, anger and appall an audience, led by Fark and Something Awful. Even Glenn Davis was lured to the dark side. After Cool Site of the Day was taken away from Davis and his second venture, the web development community Project Cool, was bought and imploded by JupiterMedia, Davis told the New York Times in 2002 that he had quit using the web entirely and had "lost our sense of wonder."

You can probably see where this is going. I'm announcing my retirement from the dark humor and wacky Internet link business. Cruel.Com will be adopting a new format on Nov. 1 that's not powered by bile and can be visited without peril to your immortal soul. The site has grown into a 3,750-member community of users who have posted thousands of links and comments, and I'd like to see that continue under a new web publisher if a deal can be worked out. I even have an unused domain that's well-suited to the purpose: ridicule.net.

But for me, I'm making my last cruel site the one that convinced me the project was worth doing, a few weeks after the launch when traffic was non-existent. The David Spade Escapade, archived on my server with the permission of the author, explains why Spade will never be welcome in the state of Montana.

Publishing · 2007/10/01 · 37 COMMENTS · Link

Randy Charles Morin and I are going to propose the RSS Profile to a vote of the RSS Advisory Board next Monday. The effort to draft a set of best practice guidelines for RSS 2.0 has been 18 months in the making. If you see any issues that should be addressed before the vote, or there are changes you'd like us to consider, let us know on the RSS-Public mailing list.

Rss · 2007/09/27 · Comment · Link

BlogRush Offers Link Sharing Service for Blogs

As an experiment, I added a BlogRush widget to the sidebar of Workbench and several other sites this morning. BlogRush is a new JavaScript-based blog headline exchange driven by RSS. Here's how it works: Headlines that might be of interest to readers appear in a box like this one, headlines from my site appear on other member sites, and we all get an enormous boost in traffic, a slobbery cover story in Wired and obscene wealth we can lord over others. Or at least the BlogRush founders do.

BlogRush is viral -- your headlines appear more often based on how many hits, clicks and member referrals you attract. The site's just six days old, but the marketing gimmick's bringing the Orlando-based startup a ginormous amount of traffic. On Alexa, BlogRush has passed Slashdot and is threatening TechCrunch.

The BlogRush widget only displays the first 40 characters of a headline, including spaces, so a lot of the headlines it displays are cut off or misleading. Although the service suggests that you write headlines with this limit in mind, that's too much to ask. A better solution would be to create a BlogRush namespace for RSS, so publishers who wanted to write shorter headlines for the service could define them in their RSS feeds, like this:

<item>
  <title>'Kid Nation' Contestants Rip Into President Bush</title>
  <blogrush:title>'Kid Nation' Stars Rip President Bush</blogrush:title>
</item>

I've never found a widget I wanted to keep around for long, because their providers always have trouble ramping up servers fast enough to avoid slowing down the sites that belong to the networks. But some of the headlines BlogRush has found for the Drudge Retort widget have been interesting, which is either dumb luck or good context-based filtering. I'll follow up this post in a week or two with details on how much traffic BlogRush generated for my sites.

Javascript · Blogging · 2007/09/21 · Comment · Link

'Kid Nation' Contestants Rip Into President Bush

You know things are going bad for the president when he can't escape his problems on reality TV. The CBS series Kid Nation gave each of its 40 contestants, children aged 8 to 14, a chance to answer the question "Who are some of the worst presidents and why?"

Here's the response that Sophia, a 14-year-old Florida teen, posted on the CBS web site:

I think George W. Bush takes the cake. The planet is disintegrating, we’re fighting an unnecessary war, millions are without health care, the school system has gone down the toilet, the country is billions of dollars in debt, the world seems to be headed on a path towards destruction, and America’s hypocrisy is mocked by many nations. I think that merits recognition.

Several of the other kids also ripped into Bush, including one nine-year-old who said he's read Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

Via Rafe Colburn

Politics · Television · 2007/09/20 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

Five of My Favorite Blogs

Bored with what his RSS reader has been feeding him, Kent Newsome is rebuilding his reading list from scratch using the recommendations of others. He's asked me to suggest five blogs, which is a good excuse to pimp some sites I follow that deserve a bigger audience.

Retrospectacle, a blog by neuroscience postgraduate student Shelley Batts, consistently finds great stories in science before the mainstream media. She won a blogging scholarship last year and answers questions I didn't realize I wanted to know, like why do fireflies bioluminesce?

Sharkbitten is Todd Smith's blog on Americana music, a genre of earthy, blues-inspired rock that claims Johnny Cash, Neil Young, Todd Snider and Tom Waits, along with Smith's own Doc Wheat. As someone who doesn't turn on the radio any more for fear I might hear music, I appreciate Smith's search for life beyond the monotonous same-song dreck on FM. He's also a fellow Jacksonville local whose wife is the Tiger Woods of kindergarten teachers.

James Robertson's Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants has become one of my favorite tech blogs. Though he writes a lot about Smalltalk as part of his job as product manager for Cincom Smalltalk, and I no speaka the language, Robertson's an incisive observer of the tech industry who finds interesting nuggets on other sites without obsessing over every tiny tempest that gets the Underoos of other techbloggers all bunched up.

Self Made Minds by Al Carlton and Scott Jones covers how to make money publishing web sites. The subject matter is baldly mercantile, but it's not shady get-rich-quick stuff. There's a brisk business these days in buying fixer-upper web sites, improving them and selling them. If you'd like to figure out what your own sites might be worth and whether you're missing revenue opportunities, this is a good place to start.

Jeff Rients writes the best blog on the planet about roleplaying games and comics. Some people might shudder at that recommendation, but I spent every weekend during my teen years as a dungeon master -- and not the cool kind. Rients digs up obscure, bizarre and unspeakably horrible old games and comics, obsessing over things like the origin of the bulette and one panel of ROM SpaceKnight issue 24.

I could go on, because I've been engaging in my own effort to look outside the usual suspects for infotainment. But these five bloggers are a good start. To steal a favorite saying from Rients, everything they touch turns to awesome.

Blogging · Jacksonville · 2007/09/20 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Weblog Pinger Extended with MySQL Database

I've added a MySQL database to Weblog-Pinger, my weblog update notification class library for PHP, so that it can track ping attempts and keep from hitting the same server too often.

Some notification services reject pings sent too frequently. When I was the king of pings for six months in 2005, Weblogs.Com rejected pings sent more frequently than once per half-hour. If you try to ping Ping-O-Matic too often today, you get the error message "Pinging too fast. Slow down cowboy. Please ping no more than once every 5 minutes."

The Drudge Retort uses Weblog-Pinger to send a ping to Ping-O-Matic, Technorati and Weblogs.Com whenever a new story hits the front page or site members update their blogs. Until this release, I haven't limited the frequency of pings.

Perhaps as a consequence, I'm having trouble getting Technorati to index the Retort. I ping the site and get back a successful response, but Technorati last accepted a Retort post 155 days ago and the Drudge Retort page on Technorati claims the blog doesn't exist.

It looks like Technorati is intentionally ignoring the pings in the mistaken belief that the Retort is a splog (spam blog). Technorati did some spring cleaning in March to detect and remove more splogs, which are a huge problem in the blogosphere. Technorati's a useful tool to find responses to your weblog posts and let other bloggers know you've linked to them. Being omitted from the index is a revoltin' development.

Weblog-Pinger, which is open source code released under the GPL, won't send a ping more than once per five minutes to any server for any URL.

Programming · Php · Mysql · 2007/09/19 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Matt Drudge Vants to Be Left Alone

Portfolio magazine blogger Jeff Bercovici thinks a recent magazine article drove Matt Drudge off the radio:

Matt Drudge is quitting his radio show, and, while he won't say why, I have a guess. Could it be that the secretive internet news czar feels overexposed after his recent profile by Philip Weiss in New York magazine? Although the piece was a write-around, Weiss was able to create the feel of an interview by quoting extensively from Drudge's on-air musings.

I emailed Drudge for comment but, big surprise, haven't heard back. Meanwhile, a rep for Premiere Radio Networks says it had nothing to do with the New York story: "He departed the radio business to focus on his website and other endeavors."

Weiss, in spite of being snubbed in his interview requests, used Drudge's radio show and old court documents to dig deep into his personal life.

If you read the piece, you'll see that Drudge has become much more publicity averse and reclusive in the last decade. Even Andrew Breitbart, a longtime pal who edits the Drudge Report in the afternoons (along with his own news site), told the reporter he hasn't spoken to Drudge in a year.

Twenty four hours after the story hit the web, Drudge removed the link to his radio show from the Drudge Report, according to Rego Park, a blogger who follows his career. Around 10 days later, news broke that he was quitting and a new host had been hired for the 325 stations that air Drudge's Sunday night show.

Journalism · Radio · 2007/09/11 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Read More Entries