Looks like the DasBlog 1.8 upgrade went fine, and mail-to-weblog works J

Thanks to Scott, Omar, and the rest!

Nice to see that Kirill Gavrylyuk has started up a blog over at Pluralsight.

Kirill owns the Interop Basic for Indigo, which means he’s responsible for looking at the product holistically and making sure that every feature has a solid interoperability story. He’s been involved with a whole slew of Microsoft XML technologies, so I’m sure he’s got lots of interesting things to talk about.

Keep an eye on his RSS feed. Subscribed.

Wow. It’s been over a week since I’ve posted anything substantive here.

In my defense, there’s been a lot going on. The last couple of weeks have been an intense push to get ACA.NET 4.0 signed, sealed, and delivered. That got done last Wednesday, and then I spent the weekend in Vegas with my friends. Got back this morning at about 3am, so I’m beat.

Oh, and there’s some big news coming from me…can’t quite talk about it yet, but I’m pretty excited about it.

I’ve implemented a CAPTCHA-based validation mechanism in an attempt to cut down on the amount of comment spam that I have to manually delete. Many thanks to Jeff Attwood (for the original CAPTCHA control) and Scott Hanselman (for the hack that easily integrated Jeff’s control into DasBlog).

Scott Hanselman rocks. He took a CAPTCHA implementation originally done by Jeff Attwood and turned it into a workable solution for DasBlog. Rolling this out here is on my list of things to do when I can tear myself away from HALO2 for a few…

I’ve been inundated with comment spam lately. The spam is a bunch of links to various .info domains, mostly relating to poker and pharmies. Judging by the domains mentioned in the spam, I’m assuming that it’s all coming from the same source. I’m also guessing that these are probably being entered manually, given that I’ve turned off access to DasBlog’s Comment API.

I looked up WHOIS records for several domains mentioned in the last spam I got and noticed an interesting correlation. The domains are registered to different people (mostly located in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio), but all of them have Moniker Online Services, LLC listed as the sponsoring registrar. These people run Moniker.com, an online domain registration company.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the “web site promotion” services offered by Moniker.com are really spam sweatshops – cheap offshore laborers employed to write comment spam. I cannot prove this, but I have my suspicions.

Whoever they are, they’re a real pain in my butt.

TechWeb’s running a Readers Choice award contest for independent tech bloggers. Nominate your favorite technology-centric bloggers here.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten reports that some people were having a hard time subscribing to my RSS feed. This should all be fixed now, and there should be no problems with my feed. Turns out my hosting provider was appending a custom header in all HTTP responses, and this header included some whitespace. According to the HTTP/1.1 RFC, this is illegal. As of Service Pack 1, the .NET framework now strictly enforces the HTTP spec and complains loudly about HTTP protocol violations. I talked to my hosting provider, he removed the whitespace from the header, and all should be well again.

So, if you’re experiencing similar problems with your feed my advice is to check with your hosting provider and make sure there are no funky headers being included in your feed without your knowledge.

Full-text feeds are back on the MSDN blog sites. Sara Williams has several clarifying comments here, which explain the reasoning behind the original change and some future plans they have to address the underlying problem. A big “thank you” goes out to the MSDN people, for listening to their customers and responding to our comments.

In celebration of this event, I’m declaring today (9/16/04) International Check-Your-Aggregator-Polling-Frequency Day. If you’re subscribed to a big aggregated feed, knock the polling interval down a couple notches and help conserve a little bandwidth.

After blog mint: Had dinner tonight with Rory, Wes, and Scott. Thanks for the evening guys – it was fun!

A couple people have asked me why I’m such an ardent supporter of full-text RSS feeds. Tonight I thought of an analogy that might help make my point:

Imagine that you’re a lawyer working on an important case. To help you with your research, you’ve employed a couple of paralegals who are willing to work all night scouring the law library for relevant case law while you sleep. Upon walking into your office the next day, you find that the paralegals have completed their task in two very different ways. One has compiled a list of cases that includes the reference numbers and locations within the library where the cases can be found. He also included the first 100 words each ruling for context (not a brief or a summary, just the first 100 words verbatim from the ruling itself). The other paralegal has Xeroxed a four-foot high stack of paper. This stack contains the full text of every ruling on the first paralegal’s list. She hasn’t summarized or briefed any of it, but it’s all there in one place and neatly organized. Who’s helped you be more productive?

If it were me, I’d fire the first guy. Too much latency. Even though the second paralegal has actually delivered more information to me, I expect I’d be more productive because I’d be spending more time reading and less time walking across the library to fetch the books.

RSS should help me quickly access the information that's interesting and quickly discard the stuff that's not. Abbreviated feeds help me don't help me in either case. I hate getting enticed by a short summary of an article and then click out elsewhere to read the rest of the text -- the context switch is distracting. It breaks my concentration. It also incurs latency -- I have to wait for the page to load. If I'm disconnected, I'm left completely hanging and unable to read the rest of the article. If the full content had already been previously downloaded into my aggregator, I'd have none of these problems.

Unless the content of an abbreviated feed provides a useful summary of the item it links to, it’s not very good at helping me discard stuff I don't want to read. Abbreviated feeds are based on a flawed assumption: that the first n words of an entry will be sufficient for me to make an accurate decision as to whether or not I want to read the rest of the article. If everyone wrote perfect abstracts of all their entries then perhaps this wouldn’t be a bad way of doing things, but blogs just don’t seem to work that way. Most of the bloggers I read are like me – they’re essayists. Also like me, they don’t always get to the point right away. Even though RSS offers a “summary” or “description” tag, there are very few bloggers out there who are disciplined enough to actually use such a feature effectively. These are blogs, after all, not academic papers. Blogs just aren’t written such that the first 100 words of every post convey a concise summary of the rest of the content. Regardless of whether this is “good writing style,” it seems to be a characteristic of the medium. I doubt that this will be changing any time soon.

The beauty of full-text feeds is that they present a vast amount of information with effectively zero latency.  Because all the content is downloaded in the background, when I get around to reading it in my aggregator it comes up instantaneously. I didn’t spend five or ten seconds waiting for that article to load only to find out that I wasn’t interested in it – the aggregator wasted its time, not me. I have the full text of the article right there in front of me -- I’m reading all the parts of the article that I think are interesting, not just the first 100 characters (or a summary of all the parts the author thought was interesting, but didn’t quite do it for me) that an abbreviated feed wants to expose me to. It comes down to the fact that I can skim out interesting parts of articles faster than my browser can open them. Full-text feeds let me consume more interesting information in a smaller amount of time, and that’s what an aggregator is all about in the end.

Coming soon: ramblings on how the bandwidth problem that full-text feeds cause might be addressed, to the betterment of authors, readers, and content providers alike…

I feel a little guilty about the vehemence with which I expressed my dissatisfaction over the recent changes to blogs.msdn.com’s RSS feed. I don’t pay for that service, so I really don’t have a right to bitch that loudly. Scoble says it’s a bandwidth issue; I can see how that would be a problem.

There are two problems here: one, the RSS distribution model doesn’t scale to Microsoft proportions. Two, the main feed on blogs.msdn.com is very large, exacerbating the problems inherent in RSS. The first problem is really tough; the second problem is easier to solve.

What about getting rid of the massive main feed? It’s big and only getting bigger. I doubt that there are many people out there who are interested in everything that comes across it. However, the main feed has a certain “all in one place” appeal to it that makes people willing to fast-forward through the stuff they perceive as noise to get to the stuff they care about.

I suggest replacing the main feed with several smaller feeds, organized by MS business unit. For example, put the DevDiv people on one feed, the Office folks on another, and the Windows people on a third. DPE people could have their own feed, too. That way, I could subscribe to just the portions of MS that I’m interested in.

In the worst case, people will subscribe to all of the feeds in which case they’re no better off than now. However, I don’t think a lot of people would actually do that. Most people probably are only really interested in a particular business unit inside of MS, and would only subscribe to that feed. This would reduce the bandwidth being consumed and increase the signal/noise ratio for everyone.

The current solution is a horizontal partitioning of the feed (more people, fewer words). I think a vertical partitioning (fewer people, more words) would be much better.

Update: I can't spell 'partitioning' to save my life.

Over the weekend, blogs.msdn.com made a big change. I think somebody accidentally turned the SuckOTron 6000 up a few notches.

Suddenly, there are no more full-content RSS feeds. Everything’s down to about a 100 characters and a super-irritating “read more” link. HELLO, MS: THIS IS BOGUS. GIVE US BACK FULL-CONTENT FEEDS PRONTO. YOU HAVE JUST SERIOUSLY DECREASED THE USABILITY OF YOUR SYSTEM FOR THOSE OF USE WHO READ BLOGS IN AN AGGREGATOR. This sucks. This really, really, sucks and you should put things back to the way they were.

In the blogosphere, there is hardly anything more irritating that an abbreviated RSS feed. The WHOLE PURPOSE of an RSS aggregator is so that I don’t have to open my freaking web browser to 100 different pages. By having the content right there in my aggregator, I can skim an entire article in the time it takes to open up a new web browser. By not including full content in the RSS feed, you take away some of the productivity gains that RSS offers.

Awesome – one of my posts on WS-Addressing got a link in Peter Coffee’s recent eWeek column. And on my birthday, no less J

I just realized that yesterday was my one-year blogoversary, which means I’m now entitled to post the self-congratulatory one-year blog retrospective. Funny that a little more than a year ago, I’d never written anything in a public forum. Now, 472 posts and a little over 2 million hits later, here we are. And it all started from this…

Actually, the way I got into blogging is sort of funny (well, to me anyway). I got started reading blogs because of Brian Jackson. I’d been an avid reader for a couple of months but didn’t write anything because frankly, I didn’t think I had anything to blog about. Around that time, I was trying to convince the powers-that-be to let me go to Chris Sells’ XML DevCon. The deal we struck was that I could go, but I’d have to do something to communicate what I learned there back to the members on my team. I thought, what the heck, I’ll blog my conference notes so everybody back at the ranch could read about all the cool stuff I was hearing about.

I went to the conference and took copious notes, and posted them to a temporary proto-blog up on Blogspot. The first night of the conference, Chris sent out some mail asking for anybody who had been blogging the conference.  So, in a burst of hubris bolstered by a couple of free conference beers, I sent Chris a link to my notes. A couple of days later, Chris posted an aggregated list of conference-related blogs up on his web site. Suddenly, there was a link to my work up on http://www.sellsbrothers.com, and that was about the coolest thing ever. Had it not been for that link, I probably wouldn’t have kept up with the blog after the conference ended. So thanks, Chris J

Over the last year, I’ve found that I really enjoy blogging. I’ve always loved technology and always like writing, and blogging lets me combine those two things into something I find I really enjoy doing. Hard to believe it’s been a year already – I doubt that I’ll be stopping any time soon.

Here are my top five personal favorite posts, in no particular order:

• Unusual Inspiration
• On the Etymology of Kool-aid Drinking
• Indigo and Star Trek
• Music History (on iTunes and album-as-art)
• Transports, Channels, and the office mailroom
• XML and comparative religion

Ok, that was six. I’m done now.

…for putting me on this list. The other members of this list are all great contributors to the .NET blogging community, and it’s an honor to be included with them.

I’ll do my best to live up to them J

On a whim, I decided to install the new bits of RSSBandit and give that a try for a few days. I’m still not quite ready to retire SharpReader, but I like some of the innovations that RSSBandit has built. Search folders are awesome, as is the ability to flag items for followup. And tabbed browsing inside the aggregator just kicks ass.

Two nice-to-haves that come to mind: first, I wish the tree of feeds would remember its expansion state. I don’t like that I have to re-expand my categories every time I start up. Also, I’m not a big fan of the forced alphabetical arrangement. I took a stack-based approach to organizing my feeds in SharpReader, with the most interesting blogs at the top of the stack. The fact that RSSBandit forces alphabetical ordering makes me adapt my workflow to the tool, and I think that’s not the way software should work.

It’s Friday, and I’ve been in a silly mood all day. Anyway, two new feeds in my subscription list:

SqlDiva – a.k.a Mrs. XML a.k.a. Melissa Demczak a.k.a DonXML’s wife. BTW, I think I’m going to have to start referring to DonXML as DonXml in order to bring him into compliance with BCL naming conventions (speaking of which, shouldn’t we also refer to that as the Bcl?)…

www.spankboogy.com – I noticed this one show up in my referrer logs. I followed it because I thought it was a funny domain name – little did I know that I’d find fellow Avanade-r Adam Wengert on the other side of that link. Adam’s a friend of mine from Chicago, and was one of the guys who really helped me get my start at Avanade. Nice to see him entering blog space.

Ok, off to pick up Kill Bill vol 1 on DVD.

Mike Wood’s entry into the blogosphere has already been formally announced by BTJ, but it’s worth mentioning here, too.

As Avanade’s Central Region .NET practice director, Mike was my grandboss when I worked in Chicago. Sadly, now that I’m in Seattle I don’t get to interact with him much anymore, but it’s nice to see him in blog space.

Subscribed!

Update: Looks like Mike's going to be blogging the 2004 Mobile DevCon in San Francisco -- looking forward to some interesting stuff from that!

Three cool things about Sylvain Duford:

1)      He’s the MS Regional Director for Ottawa

2)      He knows a lot about BizTalk

3)      He’s the Enterprise Integration practice director for Avanade Canada, which makes him my coworker (in a distributed sense).

Don’t know how this one slipped by me. I’m looking forward to what he has to say – I don’t know very much about BizTalk beyond the basic role it plays in EAI architectures, and I’m looking forward to learning something.

Blog here. RSS here. Subscribed.

When I started this blog last July, I wrote almost exclusively about techie stuff. Lately, as the American presidential campaign heats up, I’ve developed a growing interest in politics. Specifically, I’ve really been eating stuff on the geostrategic implications of the Iraq war and, as a result, I’ve been blogging about it.

Now, according to my logs, I’ve got at least a few readers. And I’m assuming that most of you come here looking for technical stuff, and might not be interested in my left-liberal views on politics. I hope that my recent political posts have not decreased the signal/noise ratio to the point where it discourages you from reading the non-political stuff that I might have to say.

So, out of respect for the “.NET or nothing” crowd, I’ve created a new “politics” category. Anything that I have to say that might be even remotely construed as politically controversial will henceforth be categorized as such. If you’re not inclined to read such things, they will be clearly marked for ease of ignorance.

To those of you who are kind enough to subscribe to my blog, I ask this: does this work for you?

The blogosphere just got a whole lot smarter: Pat Helland has a blog on MSDN. RSS feed here. Check out his first post on services and systems. Great stuff.

Subscribed!

Paul Boutin over @ MSN has a good introduction to RSS and aggregators here. I’m posting this primarily because my mom reads my blog from time to time, and this easier than explaining the whole RSS thing myself. Hi, mom… J

[Via Scoble]

I saw this in my DasBlog event log today. I’d never noticed it before:

Pinging Weblogs.com failed: Thanks for the ping, however we can only accept one ping every half-hour. It's cool that you're updating so often, however, if I may be so bold as to offer some advice -- take a break, you'll enjoy life more.

What I want to know is this: does Dave Winer get these messages too? He posts a heck of a lot more often than I do…J

Seen on KentC’s blog: “Intra-company blogging: what is it good for?”

Several months ago, I was one of the people championing intra-company blogging inside my company. Given the global (and thus distributed) nature of our company, we thought internal blogs might be a good way to create a distributed sense of community within the ranks of our consultants. We already have a pretty active set of Exchange public folders, so I got pretty good at the “why blogs are different than public folders” speech. My basic thesis was that public folders are a “pull” technology, oriented toward request-response messaging patterns between people. Public folders are a topic-centric medium; you read a public folder post because it’s about a specific topic you’re interested in. In contrast, blogs are a “push” technology enabling pub/sub messaging between people. Blogs are centered on the individual; you read a blog not because it’s apropos to a specific topic, but because you’re interested in what one person has to say about a variety of subject matter.

Anyway, after going through several rounds of red tape, we got clearance from our PM to start up a blog server that only the people on our project could access. I considered this a minor victory – it wasn’t what I had really hoped for, but it was better than nothing. Our blog server was intended to be a sort of “pilot project” – if it was successful, they’d think about rolling it out to the entire company. Not surprisingly, this experiment was a miserable failure for several reasons:

·         The community was too small. There’s an inertia to any blogging community. Unless you have a critical mass of people in the community, it’s hard for that community to grow. People feel like they’re talking to themselves.

·         The community was physically proximate. Blogging is a great way of connecting people who don’t see each other on a regular basis. In the pilot, everybody who was blogging saw each other for 8 hours a day. As a result, there wasn’t much new for people to talk about.

·         The blog was really hard to access. One of the conditions for our pilot project was that it had to be isolated from the company-wide intranet. As a result, the only place you could access people’s blogs was at work – when you were sitting right next to them. Plus, because it wasn’t available on the company intranet, you couldn’t access the blog via VPN from home.

·         The blog was really hard to post to. Due to the access restrictions imposed, you could only post to your blog from work. When you’re at work, you’re doing things more important than blogging. Personally, I find the best time to blog is when I’m at home in the evening watching TV. By imposing access restrictions on the blog server, it was impossible for people to post to their blog when they had the time and motivation to write something.

As a result, our little pilot project experienced the new-and-shiny phenomenon: a big spike of activity at first, followed by rapid decay into nothing. I don’t think we proved anything about the value of intra-company blogging, just a lot about how not to roll out a blog server.

My advice for companies considering intra-company blogs: If you’re considering setting up an intra-company blog server, don’t pilot it – just do it. The amount of time and investment required to set up a blog server is minimal, and a full roll-out is really the only way to accurately determine whether blogging is right for your company. Worst case scenario: you take the blog server off the network after a few months. You’re not risking capital investment for blog software (it’s all free), so why not just do it?