Doc Searls mentions trackback and that it still confuses him. I was in the same boat until I started playing around with it. There has to be a better way to describe it. The easiest I think of is calling it a kind of automated comment that gets posted to a blog post you reference. I think it’s a great idea, and agree that someone will find some way to abuse it eventually (though I hope no time soon).

What I wonder is if anyone has started looking at trackback data to see how stories are linked and how quickly some things spread across the net.

Phil Ringnalda writes about Dave upgrading the weblogs.com machine and finding someone crawling it.

I’m trying really hard not to think about how Dave was seeing a heavy load during the changeover because someone was crawling all over the Radio discussion group. Whether he meant radio.userland.com/discuss/ or radiocomments.userland.com/discuss/, in either case if I were crawling it, it would be because of all those juicy email addresses, sitting out at the end of /profiles/$ URLs all over the place. I’ve always thought those were fat enough targets to be well worth writing a special purpose crawler. (Note for the irony impaired: I’m not actually a spammer, or a writer of email harvesters.)

I hate to break it to you, but they’ve been crawled a bunch (and I know I’ve griped about it a few times here). They grabbed one of my addresses and I’ve gotten span from it. I personally think Userland needs to start encoding email addresses anywhere it prints them out on a web page (or find a way not to print them out at all, I personally don’t trust the endcoding thing).

Blaise Pascal: “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.” [Quotes of the Day]

A bit over a year ago I posted about a book titled Northern Gothic, by Nick Mamatas (I still highly recommend it). He recently started up a blog to follow his experiences getting his next book, Move Under Ground, published. I’m hoping someone picks it up soon, because it sounds pretty damn cool.

Oh yeah, he’s even got his own fan site, check it out to find out where else you can read his work.

Bandai has announced the web site for their upcoming release of Please Teacher (originally known as Onegai Teacher). This is a release I can’t wait for. I really liked this show a lot.

Ugs, I just watched the trailer though and I don’t think they got the voices right at all. And I really don’t think it gives a good feel for the show. It makes it seem much more like your typical ‘boy marries sexy alien schoolteacher’ type show. Which, IMHO, it isn’t.

Well, I’ve know I’ve been a bit quiet lately (not sure about the others. I know Lyn’s been busy with school, what’s up with the k-chan? hmmm?). I’ve been trying to catch up on a few things I’ve downloaded. The show that’s currently making me go hmm is Stratos 4. This was one of those shows I started watching and found myself enjoying, even though I wasn’t sure that it had a ton of substance. Now, over the last few episodes there seems to be some interesting plot stuff coming into play. The one issue I have with the show is it seems to keep trying to have this light breezy feel to it, and more and more the stuff behind the scenes is anything but. I’m really wondering how well they are going to be able to merge the two feels.

Oh, and what’s up with the talking cats?

Thanks to Wil Wheaton I’m now a worshipper of TROGDOR!!

Damn you Mr Wheaton.

Well, it looks like the weather finally started to get a clue. Spring starts in less than a week and we’re finally seeing weather more fitting of the season. It’s 49 out and it’s only 9:30ish. I just got some coffee and sat out on the doorstep for a few minutes. I think I’ll be back out there later on my laptop if the weather stays nice.

This took a while for me to write, because I seemed to have so much I wanted to say, but kept remembering other things as I wrote it. I hope it doesn’t ramble too much.

Jason from Goldblogger responded to Chris Pirillo’s post about his site (it’s in the comments) (Hey Chris, have individual archive pages, it makes it easier to link :)). I wanted to say a little bit more about the subject. First off, I have no problem with people making some cash from their web site. I know I am an Amazon affiliate (though only one person buys things through it much). Why did I do it? Why not? At first I was just giving links to Amazon for books I was reading. But I figured since I had the links there already why not just make them affiliate links. Once I move my hosting off to a site where I have to pay I may ramp up the donation begging a little. But that’s because I’m unemployed and hosting isn’t free. As I mentioned in the comments on Chris’ blog, my problem was more with the tone of the site. Jason ends up sounding like one of those late night salespeople on an infomercial, and that is what turned me off initially.

Some other random thoughts. While he is correct in saying that there are bloggers out there making money, they tend to be the exception. I tend to break blogs into a number of categories in my head. There’s the personal blog. Where a lot of people have a little donation box up, but don’t pull in much. The goal is usually to help cover hosting charges. To me, this is the big difference, people are getting into blogging because they like the idea of it. They aren’t getting into it to make some cash. In a lot of ways it is similar the open source movement. One thing that always appealed to me about it is that people are writing software because they want to (or because they don’t like how the current tools work). Recognition matters more than money. And while that recognition may lead to money, it’s not the driving force. I think what this site fails to recognize is the mindset of a lot of the people who helped create the net. It reduces it to purely a way to make money.

The other kind of blog popping up lately is the developer blog. These tend to be connected to a product or company. What makes these useful is that they can provide information. In the software industry people are frustrated with waiting for when the next bug fix is going to come out. Most of the time they don’t even know if the company is even addressing it. Look at what Dave Hyatt is doing with Safari. I love being able to read here and there about stuff that is being fixed with it. I hope that once the product comes out of beta we’ll still hear from him. But even in this case, the value of the blog is in customer satisfaction. Which hopefully will translate to real dollars for the company.

Oh well, that’s enough rambling for now. It’s an interesting topic, even if I don’t agree with goldblogger.

Samuel Goldwyn: “You’ve got to take the bitter with the sour.” [Quotes of the Day]