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05/15/2002
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Lately it seems that many of the old-time weblogs (arbitrarily defined as those starting in 1999 or earlier, a cutoff date picked so as to include my own) are running out of steam. I'm not the only one posting fewer entries than I used to, and of course some people have vanished entirely. (Never believe a weblogger who says they're only taking a break; most are taking a break until death releases them). In a way, this saddens me, although I know the web continues to evolve. Soon everyone will think that weblogs are personal journals or the home for political opinions from right-wing jerks (and left-wing jerks, for that matter) instead of links with commentary. |
| 01/27/2002 | Blogger Pro is finally out. I took a quick look, and most of the features don't look all that compelling to me (of course, as I'm happily using my own home-rolled CMS, I'm not the target market anyhow). I suspect the best feature is the priority access to servers, since it's hard to see how service on the free servers will get better any time soon. And most of the people who sign up for Pro will be, I'll bet, the same ones who donated money back when Pyra needed donations. Still, I wish them luck with this plan. |
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12/18/2001
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I see that the President of Blowhardistan has nominated his cronies for Bestest People In the Universe medals. Rah. |
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12/15/2001
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Yes, I have posts in the new Google usenet archive. No, they're not interesting enough to bother with. |
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12/13/2001
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I've noticed that this time of year sites about polar exploration and Antarctica start to appear in my weblog. |
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11/20/2001
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"Webloggers" has made the painless and inevitable transition from karass to granfalloon. |
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11/07/2001
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Each morning, as part of updating my journal, I look at the weblog entries that I made one year and two years ago. Based on this, it's starting to look to me like the half-life of a web page is about two years, at least for web pages that I'm interested in. That is, after two years half of the links in my weblog are broken. |
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10/13/2001
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If the recent spate of anthrax cases is really terrorists targeting news organizations, I would expect some webloggers to start getting envelopes containing flu germs. |
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09/15/2001
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I may have to stop reading some weblogs for the time being. |
| 09/12/2001 | I wasn't expecting much traffic yesterday, but it turns out that I got an early burst of hits. That's because for a while my Wanted Page was coming up high on Google searches for "World Trade Center Photos", before the major news sites started posting them. |
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09/12/2001
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The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon puts a new spin on the place of weblogs in the new media picture. Contrary to what some folks would have you believe, weblogs were not much of a source of news, except for a few isolated examples where webloggers in New York posted eyewitness reports. Radio and television did a much better job of keeping up with the news, and in fact the majority of weblog postings I saw were just recycled news from major outlets. But what the weblogs did do was provide a decentralized news source. At a time when all of the major sites (CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, etc.) were unreachable due to overload, nearly every weblog could still be loaded. Once again, distributed networks prove easier to keep running than centralized ones. |
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08/04/2001
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I am vastly amused when people whine about free services on the Internet shutting down. Perhaps this is just another aspect of the entitlement mentality that seems to pervade too much of the USA today. Folks, nobody owes you voice mail, email, connectivity, searching, or anything else for free. |
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07/22/2001
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Another milestone - in just a bit over two years, I have now posted 2000 entries to my weblog. That's a lot, but the web doesn't seem to be running out of interesting places, even though I personally spent a while in the doldrums recently. |
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06/29/2001
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Well, after 2+ years the Larkfarm weblog may not be on hiatus, but it's certainly on an indefinite slowdown. Basically, out of all the things I do, the weblog is currently returning the least pleasure for the amount of time that it takes. So, it falls off the bottom of my to-do list most days. I'll probably still post the occasional item, but it may be a while before I get back to multiple entries every day. |
| 06/16/2001 | I've dropped the listing at weblogs.com for Larkfarm -- which has the side effect that Larkfarm doesn't appear in secondary sources such as the Subhonker filter either. So it goes. There are two things that led me to this point. First, I just don't care to encourage the notion of central servers holding personal information on a "trust us" basis. It's a bad idea whether we're talking about Microsoft HailStorm or Userland's refusal to prevent email addresses from being used for spam. Second, frankly, I share the conviction of many in the weblog community that Dave Winer is a jerk. I'm tired of his endless bloviation and don't wish to do anything to support his little mini-empire. You can still pick up the news of Larkfarm updates from Linkwatcher if you want. |
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05/25/2001
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This Kaycee thing is all over the weblog world recently. If you don't know about it, well, just go click around at random, you'll find it. I want to talk about something else, or rather to make a prediction: now that this story is poised to hit the major web (and possibly print) media, we are going to see some bloggers point to it in the future as an example of the fact that weblogs cover news before "the media" can get to it, and that therefore we're on the cutting edge. This, of course, is hogwash. The only reason this story hit the blogs first is that it all happened in the blogs. Meanwhile everything from the current brouhaha in the US Senate to the Dalai Lama's latest visit hits the real media before it gets to the blogs. News-oriented blogs are parasites, not opinion leaders. |
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05/13/2001
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A lull in blogdom due to more Blogger problems. Repeat after me: single points of failure are bad, and trusting a critical part of your process to a server that you don't control is bad. This applies to Blogger just as much as it does to Microsoft's HailStorm initiative. |
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04/23/2001
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Weblogs that poach links from other weblogs without attribution piss me off. |
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03/31/2001
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Between Northpoint's DSL service cratering and a Blogger upgrade that seems to have had some "issues", it's been a bad day or two as far as fresh content in the blogs I read. Just a reminder of how fragile this whole Internet thing really is. Yeah, yeah, it'll heal itself and route around the damage -- but if these two minor parts of the puzzle can cause noticeable outages, what would happen if a major part was lost? |
| 03/13/2001 | It's hopeless. With the publication of the latest blogging story in the Louisville Courier-Journal, I've decided that it's no longer worth the battle to try to rescue the word "weblog" from becoming a synonym for "diary". We need a new word for links-with-commentary. |