Re: can someone please explain what this blog tagging this is all about?

<hjr.pythian_at_gmail.com> schreef in bericht news:e2155c85-cf44-4528-9eed-0b86fb581856_at_e25g2000prg.googlegroups.com...
> On Jan 14, 2:50 am, Frank van Bortel <frank.van.bor..._at_gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> hpuxrac wrote:
>> > As many times as HJR has changed things and ditched all of his old
>> > content there are still at times useful articles and postings out
>> > there.
>>
>> > However it looks like now both the ( old site as of just a couple of
>> > weeks ago now ) and new and improved site are both offline and
>> > unavailable. There's some kind of message about oracle blog tag
>> > spamming?
>>
>> > Sorry I just don't understand. There was a lot of excitement several
>> > years ago about oracle blogging but much of that excitement ( and
>> > quality of postings ) kind of has dropped off the ege of the world.
>>
>> > I don't use any of the news readers ( whatever they are ) and/or
>> > aggregators ( whatever they are ) just have a couple of url's I check
>> > out from time to time ( limited ) as well as cdos.
>>
>> > So any of the background info related to what is going on and why
>> > people might be taking websites and content offline would be
>> > appreciated.
>>
>> > Thanks
>>
>> Nope - I'm baffled. Both with Howard's behavior and with
>> this Oracle blog spamming - looks to me if you do not want
>> to be in, don't - a simple as 1-2-3.
>>
>> --
>>
>> Regards,
>> Frank van Bortel
>>
>> Top-posting in UseNet newsgroups is one way to shut me up
>
> I must say it's this attitude I find bewildering.
>
> You're on a train, reading. Your neighbour is wearing an ipod. He
> decides to turn the volume up so that the sksshh-sksssh-sksssh of the
> beat disturbs you. You politely ask the person to turn their ipod
> down. They refuse to do so, saying 'it ain't that loud, mister. What's
> your problem?'
>
> So much for hypotheticals. Let's consider real blog aggregators. Blog
> aggregators take feeds from many people's blogs. Visiting one site
> lets you see the totality of what's going on in the Oracle 'blogging
> community' with one quick overview. Very useful, very functional.
> Unfortunately, aggregating things together means that what for an
> individual blogger is one trivial little post gets aggregated together
> with everyone else's trivial little posts and suddenly it's not a
> trivial little problem any more. Suddenly, there's a mountain of
> collected posts generated by this "game", driving out almost any other
> information.
>
> Blog aggregators work by showing new posts at the top of the page. As
> new posts arrive, old posts get shunted downwards... until they fall
> off the page altogether. Because of the sudden influx of '8 things'
> posts (shorthand for the blog tagging pyramid scheme's posts), one of
> my blog posts went onto the front page of OraNA and disappeared off it
> in slightly over twelve minutes. If it happens to my posts, it happens
> to others' too. So now OraNA isn't a great overview of what's
> happening in the Oracle blogging, but is instead swamped with 'me-too'
> posts from people who have chosen to participate in the pyramid scheme
> known as blog tagging.
>
> That is a loss of functionality. It is inconvenient to me. It is
> disruptive to me. If it is inconvenient to me and causing me
> disruption, I am fairly confident that it will be inconvenient and
> disrupting to others. Lots of others. But maybe not you.
>
> So I wrote to about 4 or 5 of the people who had 'passed it on', each
> to about 8 others, to ask them would they mind contacting their 8 and
> asking *them* not to pass the thing on further as it was damaging the
> aggregation functionality. One of them replied that it was his blog
> and he'd do what he liked. Besides, the people running the blog
> aggregators were 'skimming' his work, probably to their financial
> advantage not his. Another replied that as he didn't use OraNA
> himself, it didn't seem like much of a problem. The others didn't
> respond at all.
>
> So I blogged about it, simply pointing out that if things went
> according to the quite open plans of the devisor of the tagging
> "game", by round 4, there would 4096 me-too '8 things' posts. I didn't
> demand anything. I didn't call anyone anything. I simply pointed out
> the maths and asked whether people would please stop 'passing it on':
> by all means post 8 personal things about yourself, but don't
> encourage 8 others to do the same, on and on, because to do so would
> be to cause damage to the aggregators. For this I was accused by one
> of throwing my weight around ("When I signed up to my blog I didn't
> realise I had signed your terms and conditions"), another said simply
> that I was just being "grumpy" and a third simply said, "Chill dude,
> you'll have an aneurysm". As if this has anything to do with my
> emotional state or a desire to dictate to others!
>
> That is precisely the "it ain't loud, mister" response I would expect
> to have to put up with on the train, but had hoped I wouldn't have to
> put up with from members of a supposed "community" of bloggers.
>
> You tell me Frank: if I don't "want to be in" (which I don't), tell me
> how, simple as 1-2-3, I "don't". That's like saying, if you don't like
> the white noise coming from the earbuds of the guy sitting next to
> you, don't listen! But the fact of the matter is that the choices of
> others have impinged on the functionality of a website I use. Their
> actions have **taken away** my choice not to participate. Whether I
> like it or not, OraNA gets flooded with these posts, and I can't opt
> out of that.
>
> Oh, considerate members of the Oracle blogging community have said I
> could learn to use an RSS reader: you can filter those, after all. (As
> if I didn't know about RSS readers already!) Trouble is, how do I
> install an RSS reader on a SOE PC? Or on a friend's PC? Or on a PC to
> which I don't have rights to install anything? No problem: Firefox has
> a reader built-in. Great... so what do I do if I don't use Firefox? Or
> my SOE PC dictates IE6 and nothing else?
>
> This is the "if you don't like the noise, mister, sit somewhere else"
> school of nuisance management. It's **my** fault for being there, and
> the solution is for **me** to move, even though the noise and buisance
> is being made by someone else! No thanks: all these workarounds assume
> too much and miss the "moral hazard" of making the victim take action
> to ameliorate the consequences of the actions of the perpetrators.
>
> I thought of starting my own blog tagging game. I'd start with a post
> that went something like this: "Post 8 personal things about yourself
> and pass this note onto 8 other people. Bill Gates will donate $1 for
> every time this note is passed on to another group of 8 people". What
> would happen then, Frank, do you think? This, too, would be seen as an
> innocent bit of fun? A game to enjoy, nothing to worry about? I don't
> think so. When you get those sorts of posts in your inbox, you call it
> spam. The Oracle community has just indulged in a giant bit of
> spamming. I'm told by Tim Hall that it's not spam at all because it's
> not written by anonymous commentators on a blog but by the blog
> authors themselves. I'm supposed to believe this makes it alright, but
> to me, it makes it much worse.
>
> So what about my behaviour don't you understand, Frank? If I find
> train travel noxious, abhorrent, noisy and unpleasant because of the
> behaviour of my fellow, but inconsiderate, passengers, would you be
> surprised if I started driving in to work? I find what has happened
> pretty unpleasant. I find the attitude of those involved in what you
> quite correctly call 'blog spamming' abhorrent. I simply don't see why
> I should, or should be expected to, continue to make my work available
> to such a community. That's unfortunate for the many who haven't
> engaged in this round of spamming, but then perhaps those people
> should make their voice heard. Passive acquiesence in the vandalism
> perpetrated by a few gets you a slum with no nice amenities, after
> all.
>
> I have been told my action is disproportionate, but the people saying
> that don't (it seems to me) appear to appreciate the scale of what has
> just gone on here. Like you, they shrug and say, 'don't like it, don't
> read it'. To them, it's trivial, so my response seems completely way
> off beam. But I see a site has been vandalised and a mode of behaviour
> condoned which, in any other context you care to mention, would be
> condemned as a pyramid scheme, spam, a virus, a distributed denial of
> service attack -call it what you will, but those involved with the
> Internet generally do not take kindly to things which propagate
> exponentially with a seemingly benign payload.
>
> I won't make my material available to a community that thinks
> generating and encouraging exponential traffic growth is a game and
> that so long as it doesn't affect them personally, it can't be that
> important. Simple as that.

I run a 'blog-collector' as well, and surprisingly, most 'me tagged too, eight things' hits are comments on these blogs, not the blogs themselves.

Shakespeare Received on Mon Jan 14 2008 - 14:23:31 CST