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It's nice, sometimes, to have the big guns like John Dvorak on your side. He doesn't much like the Web 2.0 fetish, as I don't, and never have. His point is one worth meditating on: Microsoft itself, the Big Kahuna, tripped over its own feet recently and lost the use of its WGA ( Read more... )

I support a small, semiprivate phpBB forum that has recently been under attack from user-list spammers, who register bogus users in the hope that search engines will spider user lists and raise the rankings of the Web stes cited in their bogus user profiles, which are almost invariably for ( Read more... )

Time was, I could read my Web stats at the end of every month and get a good laugh out of them. But for some reason, it's been a dry season on the search term front. See earlier entries here and here. I don't have much to hold up to that. Why? Why? I publish more and more words ( Read more... )

(I'm snowed in here north of Chicago while a blizzard rages-what month is this again?-and have some time to continue a thread begun yesterday.) I avoid blogs (and especially blog comments) where incivility prevails. It's a bad use of my time trying to dig out useful insights from the ( Read more... )

Mike Reith sent me a link to a nice article in the New York Times about the radical bad manners that prevail in the blogosphere. It's gotten bad enough so that Jimmy Wales and Tim O'Reilly are trying to bring about the return of blogger civility by devising a Blogger's Code that ( Read more... )

I'm away from broadband most of the day here in Chicago-away from my laptop, for that matter-and thus I don't have time to write elaborate entries. But last night before hitting the sack I was reading up on the Free Companies, which were the wandering groups of mercenaries of the 14th century ( Read more... )

I'm in Phoenix for a couple of days, meeting with my Paraglyph confreres and giving a short presentation on POD publishing to the Arizona Book Publishing Association. After dinner last night I was catching up on my aggregators, and found a short article that nails precisely why young people ( Read more... )

Without a lot of discussion in the media, a century-old Supreme Court decision may be going down in flames. The Dr. Miles decision is under review, and may fall under the Roberts court. Is this good or bad? As always, it depends heavily on whose ox you're standing in front of, but the truth is ( Read more... )

Reader Dan O'Connell sent me a note suggesting that the sorts of things that Wired described corporations revealing online (see yesterday's entry) are minor or self-serving at best, and that there are things that today's corporations would rather die than reveal online. The most intriguing of ( Read more... )