One feature I really like in any blogging tool is the ability to paste in an image and have it be included without having to save somewhere on disk first. Let’s see how that works.

If you’re reading this, and you see a completely unrelated photo above, then it all worked.

I don’t know what the spammers are up to, but I have a couple of guesses.

Some of the spam is targeting certain kinds of common comments. There are a lot of posts on the internet about the Xbox 360′s Red Ring of Death problem, for example. A spam bot that searches for blog posts that mention this, and then post a spam comment that’s written from the perspective of a user who had the same problem and found a solution makes for a comment that is hard to tell at a glance whether it’s spam or not.

And there’s other spam that really is commenting on what I wrote, but not in a deep or useful way, and which links a personal blog which links to spam. Again, there’s no way to tell at a glance if it’s spam or not. If it’s autogenerated, those bots are smart. But I think it’s more likely that some spammers are simply employing users, somewhere labour is cheap, to write spammy comments.

And in that case, of course the spam passes the Turing Test, because it is written by humans.

Unfortunately for bloggers, it means every comment needs to be scrutinized. It takes time to them, click the links and make sure it’s valuable before approving it. But I don’t think this is something we’re going to be able to automate. It’s become part of the cost of blogging.

I get real traffic of folks talking about Designer, but every few days it shows up somewhere odd.  Like this:

martin cu boulder co satellite 923 0592983 sengage adobe livecycle designer impaired driving my husband is an immigrant and we are homeless debbie sanford Ossicular chain game release what to wear to a wedding shower free sex picrures

Obviously this is spam.  But does it mark some sort of popularity milestone that our product name is showing up in random bits of spam?

Google pulls the RSS feed as a result of a ping being sent when the post is created, but then when the article is updated, they apparently don’t fetch the updated content (or at least not right away), so Google Reader users will continue to see the old content.

If you posted an article and it got a bit of attention, there will be links pointing to it. In this case, you really don’t want to delete that item and post a new one, because those links will go 404. Depending on the extent of the change you’re making to the original post, you could either add text to the original post and post a new item with a short message saying “There’s an update on this available here” with a link back to the original post, or you could post the update information in a new post and update the original with a link to the new post.

I think the latter is probably preferable, so users reading offline have the new content available to them, although it would tend to fragment comments. Some commenters would comment on the original article, but since the “thread” of the original article now ends at a different post, others would comment there. If this is an issue, make the newer post nothing more than a link back to the original to encourage users to comment there.

But you always need to post a new article to flag that the original was updated, even if you only posted it a few minutes ago, or some users are going to miss out on the updates.

(If you find yourself doing this a lot, consider using your blogging system’s ability to schedule posts – have your post go out in 3 hours time, so you have those 3 hours to edit before it goes live).

There are sites that tell you how to write your articles for Digg, including such gems as Make A List and Make up outrageous statistics.  I’ve commented on the list aspect before.

I’m breaking (or, I guess, following) rule #2 now:  Write about Digg.  But it does seem to work.

And that’s the problem – they all seem to work.  They work really well.  Being on the Digg front page gets you a lot of traffic, and all you need to do to get on the front page is tailor your content for Digg.

I’m sure this wasn’t the intention when Digg was created.  It’s supposed to be a way for users to submit existing web content, and then for other users to vote that content up so more people see it. 

But we’ve got techniques on Digg like cliffhangers (having the summary end with a colon so you need to click it to see the interesting bit), and ”pictures included” (which seems to be a big draw – hey everyone likes pictures) and people making up top n lists of simply irrelevant things (seriously – make up a list of the top 7 songs with the word ‘tomato’ in them, and you’ll get traffic).

Here’s my point: 

User-generated content works, but user-submitted content does not.

Millions of users around the world are generating content.  Digg could be a great system for finding them, but it’s turned into something much less useful.  Users who have figured out the system are using it to promote their own sites or blogs, at the expense of everyone else.

We need a new site that’s different from Digg in two significant ways:

1. Users can’t submit stories.  The site needs to include sites based on some criteria other than users submitting it.  I have a couple of ideas here.  There’s my LongTail site that randomly presents articles that you have to decide on without knowing who wrote them, and I think that works pretty well, but we need something more people will use.

2. Top content is per-user.  The idea that I’m going to like the same content as every other Digg user is just wrong - But there are other people out there who will have similar likes as me.

Most of the good links I find these days, I find through the blogs I read.  I use Google Reader, and when I see an article I think is interesting, I click the Share button.  I’ve never given out the link to it (until now), but this leads to the possibility of using Google Reader or other blog data, or attention data from a browser, as input.

Sounds good until you remember that this, again, gives users a way to submit content.  Unless we’re only going to take content from people we trust, we can’t take any data that users submit.

So either we’re only going to take trusted content, which can lead to an echo chamber sort of effect where only a small number of links make it “into the circle”, or we need some sort of efficient content triage for all new content posted to the Internet.

The LongTail site is currently throttled to just one post per minute, because it doesn’t get a lot of users, and frankly pulling every new piece of content posted to the Internet all the time is just more work than my little server wants to do.  But imagine if this were hosted at Google, and if there was some incentive for users to help triage the content.

And maybe that’s where Google has a unique capability again.  It’s in their interest to drive good content, and especially, good content monetized with AdSense.  Would offering users a tiny percent of revenue generated from pages they triaged be possible?  And would it help?

I was going to add CAPTCHA to comment posting, but I came across this interesting plugin called WP-HashCash that basically makes your client do the CAPTCHA work rather than making a human do it.

Because it doesn’t involve any human intelligence, a smart spam bot developer will be able to break it – but until they do, it makes for easy comment posting and no spam.

If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a new service dedicated to blog advertising.  That link right there?  I’ll get paid for putting it on my blog, because it’s an “opportunity” that the site lists.  Bloggers can scan available opportunities and pick ones that they want to write something about, if they’re willing to put the link on their blog.

Because many blogs have good PageRank with Google, a link from an established blog is worth a lot more than an ad, because you’re (presumably) more likely to click a link that it looks like I wrote, than a link that’s obviously placed there by an ad engine.

I can see readers being upset with bloggers who “sell out”, who start talking about online poker and vacation resorts simply because they’ll get paid to do so.  And eventually, Google will figure it out and lower the PageRank of bloggers that do so.  I believe their algorithm already has the mechanisms in place to do this.

But here’s the other side of PayPerPost:  If I’m already going to write about something, like VoIP, then it really doesn’t hurt to scan the available opportunities and see if anything matches.  That’s what happened with the VoIP article I just linked to there – I wanted to post about my experience with the Cisco phone at work and Rogers Home Phone at home (and my revelation that I’m 100% VoIP now), and hey, I can get paid to do it.

This is really nothing new for writers – there has always been the opportunity available to sell out.  Product previews and ad money comes more easily to magazines that write positive articles about iffy products.  Some bloggers will sell out, but I predict that the best blogs will not.

I will occasionally pick opportunities from PayPerPost – maybe even let them inspire me to write about something I might not have otherwise written about.  But it won’t be selling out.  If I don’t have something to say (that’s about as relevant as what I usually say, which admittedly is a pretty low bar), then I’m not going to do it.  They don’t pay that well.

I also recently took all the ads off my main blog page.  It was looking messy.

(I don’t try to make a living off blogging – this is definitely a hobby, and if it pays for an XBox game every few weeks then I’m happy – and tinkering with ways of getting paid for blogging is part of what this blog is about.. that’s part of the reason I don’t consider this selling out.).

Or am I just rationalizing?  What do you think?

Problem is, even though I work for Adobe and have access to the best tools on the planet, I’m just not a very good visual designer.

But I’m going to try.

I want to keep the same basic layout – links and stuff on the right, content in the middle. One thing that I’m undecided on is the whole fixed width vs dynamic width issue. I like the fact that today, if I post a wide code snippet or image, you can just make the browser window wider and the whole thing resizes; but I also like the more predicable look of a fixed-width content column, which is what so many templates use.

So I think for my first attempt, I’ll try keeping the articles dynamic, the blog posts static, and post anything that needs the width as an article.

There are a lot of great themes in the WordPress Theme Viewer, any of them catch your eye?

It’s still ugly, mind you, but that’s more because I’m a crummy designer than a lack of mastery of the tools.

I need to master that Web 2.0 curved border effect, though, before it’s not cool anymore.

This means readers who subscribed to my old blog via Bloglines (all 21 of you) just aren’t seeing anything I write anymore.  (No big loss ) But this is a pretty basic thing that an aggregator should be able to do:  Follow along when an RSS feed says “I’ve moved, and here’s the new location”.

Here’s how it works:  The aggregator connects to my server and sends something like this:

GET /dottext/RSS.aspx HTTP/1.1
Location: www.stevex.org

What it gets back is:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Connection: Keep-Alive
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2006 00:13:03 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 175
Location: http://blog.stevex.net/index.php/feed/

<html><body>The requested resource was moved. It could be found here: <a href=”h
ttp://blog.stevex.net/index.php/feed/”>http://blog.stevex.net/index.php/feed/</a
></body></html>

The 301 status combined with the Location: header tells the agent that’s fetching the feed that the feed has moved, and where to find it.  The HTML content that’s return is supposed to be shown to the user if the agent is unable to understand the 301 response – but really, there’s not much excuse for not understanding a 301 response.  (It looks like Russell Beattie has run into the same problem with Bloglines, although he puts it a little more bluntly than I do).

One of the services that standards bodies provide is certification.  I wonder if RSS Certification wouldn’t be a good thing for the industry.

Certifying both feeds and aggregators would help to ensure reliable interoperability, something that I think we’re really lacking right now.  A few examples:

 – Google Desktop doesn’t follow 301.
 – Bloglines doesn’t follow 301.
 – Many servers generate funky RSS (like the recent iPhoto issue).
 – I frequently get little flurrries of RSS items marked as “new” that aren’t really new.
 – Not everyone shares the same idea of what an OPML subscription list looks like.

There are validators, but they’re completely optional. 

I worked at JFL Peripheral Solutions for a few years on TWAIN drivers (among other things), and the lack of certification had shown itself to be a problem in that industry as well.  Scanner manufacturers would test their drivers with Photoshop.  Everyone lose in this scenario – the scanner manufacturer wins in the short term because they saved a few bucks on their driver, but in the end they’re slowing the growth of their market.  The consumer loses when they try to scan with anything but Photoshop.  Software developers waste time trying to hack their software to “look like Photoshop” to the scanner driver.  And so on. 

An aggregator “seal of approval” from the RSS Foundation could mean a minimum level of guaranteed compatibility.  A server tool’s equivalent “seal of approval” would mean that any aggregator bearing the seal would be guaranteed to work with it.

Of course our industry sucks at this sort of self regulation, so I don’t hold out much hope that it will happen, but if some of the industry leaders could pull something like this together, it’s hard to argue that it wouldn’t be good for absolutely everyone.