Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Paul Boutin reviews the Starz-Real movie subscription service.  

The excellent Hacking Netflix weblog is covering all this stuff. 

Revised proposal to clarify the RSS 2.0 spec re HTML in descriptions. 

Gizmodo: "I would be afraid to walk naked in front of it." 

Morning coffee notes 

I'm getting an unprecedented amount of email, most of it from people who want to host the sites, but don't know anything about Manila. They seem to think these are static sites that live in the file system. They are not. Some of the press reports have also made this mistake.

All the time I spend addressing the needs of random people outside the community, is time I'm not spending helping people in the community. So I'm choosing not to spend time on these offers, when I get offers from people who understand what a Manila site is, I'll pursue that. I'm still waiting for Rogers to get a very simple transition server up and running. Hurry up guys.

Sometime in the future we may have some kind of ethical code that says that when there's an outage, professional publications wait until the outage is cleared before calling out the flamers at Slashdot.

I remind people I'm just a person, and I have a complicated life already. Regardless what the press says, it's still true. I had two doctor's appts yesterday and one today. I may need surgery. This isn't a life-threatening illness, but it's not a fun thing either. Moving on June 30. So there are other things on my mind, believe it or not.

There are a couple of memes that are travelling around the net. First that somehow you have to be careful of what you say or I won't export your site. It's not true. I've been doing this for over 25 years. Much of that has been spent on the connection between the First Amendment and technology. I'm the last guy you have to worry about in this way. The second wrong meme is that I should have or could have given more notice. Putting a note on Scripting News wouldn't have been notice. I've tried to communicate with free-hosting users through this site many times. It doesn't work. Most of them don't read it. Email wouldn't have worked either because most of the email addresses are dead, and had I sent them, the outrage would have been about spam (read the Register article for an idea). Spam filters of course would have stopped most of the messages that had email addresses that hadn't gone out of date. The only other choice would have been to somehow modify the content displayed on their websites. I wasn't going to do that. Also it wasn't technically an option, since the server couldn't handle the load. (Again these are all dynamic sites, not static ones.)

One of the things I learned is that just because a site is dormant doesn't mean it's not getting hits. The referer spam problem on these sites was something to behold. Search engines still index their pages, and return hits. They were mostly dead, in the sense that most hadn't been updated for several years. I had to find out quickly who was there and what were they using the sites for. I had to get other people mobilized to host their sites. I'm getting sick. And I'm moving on June 30.

One of these days in this weblog world kindness may be part of how we deal with each other. I think some people should condemn the flamers, but don't. They shouldn't get any support. Calling this outage murder, or saying I'm psychotic, well, this is so over the top, but instead of condemning this, a couple of people have councelled me on how to deal with it. Well I don't accept that. I won't deal with hysterical people. I'm not running for president, I am not a corporate executive, and I don't tell bedtime stories to adults unless its for fun and they're friends. I can tell you what it feels like to be me, but I don't know how it feels to be you. I'm willing to listen, up to a point, but unless your site is hosted on weblogs.com, I don't understand why you're hogging the microphone right now. I believe so strongly in the weblog world, that we should be grounded in truth. I think a lot of people participating in this dicussion are not grounded in truth, deliberately so, openly so. Shame on you, I say.

One thing is gratifying, the weblogs.com users have uniformly been patient, supportive, gracious, and just plain nice. The people who are behaving badly are people on the sidelines. This is a great community, I've been serving them for four years for free, and surprise, most of them get that and appreciate it. We'll get through this, it's just a corner-turn, we've done lots of them in the past. And when it's all over we'll be friends, I hope.