Re: can someone please explain what this blog tagging this is all about?
From: Maxim Demenko <mdemenko_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:41:32 +0100
Message-ID: <478BC8FC.5080104@gmail.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.
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:41:32 +0100
Message-ID: <478BC8FC.5080104@gmail.com>
shakespeare schrieb:
> <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 > >
What proves, that HJR theory about 8**4 is not(fully) applicable to social networks (as of systimestamp), which doesn't minder the weight of his concerns however...
Best regards
Maxim Received on Mon Jan 14 2008 - 14:41:32 CST