Symphonious

I discovered one of our client's company blogs1 tonight because they mentioned they'd just upgraded to EditLive! 6. Reading through the backlog I discovered they've found a clever way to reduce the impact of form spam that I hadn't come across before2 - only accept the submission if it uses multipart/form-encoding not just a plain post. Like most techniques it won't work if everyone does it but it's another interesting way to differentiate.

I do have to wonder why spam bots aren't all just using an embedded browser these days though3 - there seems to be a huge number of ways that they get caught out needlessly.

Anyway, I noticed in their support history there's a feature request I can solve for them easily via our plugin architecture. If someone could throw a squishy toy at me in the morning to add it to the list of LiveWorks! article ideas that' be great4.

1 - note the first cool use of blogs - learning about your customers↩

2 - note the second cool use of blogs - learning interesting stuff that may or may not be useful in the future↩

3 - watch the comments for the third cool use of blogs - I'm sure someone will have additional insight on this↩

4 - note the fourth and most cool use of blogs - using the inherent delay as a reminder mechanism5↩

5 - also, footnotes are cool and I just haven't used them enough lately↩

The antileech plugin so far has done nothing towards actually blocking content and frankly doesn't really show a lot of promise that it ever will, however it has been interesting seeing where my content pops up. One that looks rather odd to me is dcomments.com. Frankly it looks just like a splog but it doesn't have any ads or links out to other sites. It does however republish all my content without any extra comments and has the absolute minimum of linkage back to symphonious.net. In fact, regularly through the site the term "Symphonious" is used but linked to their version of the content - the only link back is labelled "Original article here", right about an Add Comment button.

What the site claims to add is the ability to view RSS feeds in a news reader (the old type, not NetNewsWire) - essentially an NNTP gateway. The add comment function seems to be in debugging at the moment because it just displays some JavaScript popups with "Check 1" type messages and the comment never actually appears.

There are a few things that really count against dcomments.com and make it look even more like a splog:

• It claims to be publisher opt-in based, but I didn't opt-in and they still republish every entry on this blog. Most likely they don't have any verification mechanism.
• They don't provide a simple way for authors to have their blog removed. The contact page lists a few mailing lists, but no simple email address to send complaints to.
• Every page, including pages where essentially the only content is taken from my blog, is labelled "© 2006 -2007 dcomments.com" and they never mention what license my content is under.

Overall I don't really mind dcomments.com reusing my content, but they also aren't putting any real effort in to benefit blog owners by driving traffic back to them and appropriately acknowledging them. It also shows just how fine a line it is between being a value adding service and a splog. With some minor tweaks to make the author of content clearer and drive move traffic their way instead of locking users in, dcomments.com could move well away from that line and be a useful, if exceptionally niche, service. Right now though, it takes a lot of faith in the good-will of mankind to not label them a splog.

I suppose I should be happy but I'm not sure I am. It appears that my blog has moved from the insignificant long tail to the worth spamming and leeching long tail. Like every blog, I've always seen comment spam coming in, but I'm not seeing targeted comment spam picking out the posts with the best page rank and focussing on them. I'm also suddenly seeing splogs leeching my content.

For the most part, I don't care what people do with my content so I reported them to Technorati (who said they'd look into it and then did nothing) and went back to ignoring them. Unfortunately, it turns out they're not just sending track backs to my original post, but also to everything I link to which is going too far for me to ignore. So I'm trying out AntiLeech - no idea if it will work or not but it's worth a try. If my posts suddenly just claim that you're a splog please let me know.  I'll be super careful to avoid blocking any of the Planet aggregators that wind up publishing my content - they're a very useful part of the blog ecosystem so don't panic if you're a planet administrator but please do let me know if I mess it up and cause you any problems.

Apparently someone told bloggers that adding pictures to your posts helps make things easier to read. Unfortunately, what they forgot to mention is that the pictures should actually be part of the message or at least tangentially related. Take for instance this post by Joel Spolsky about UI design and alarm clocks. Scattered through the article are pictures of random buildings, including for some unknown reason one with a sign reading "Cemetery for Soldiers' Dogs". Wouldn't pictures of alarm clocks make more sense? What about a frustrated old woman? A sleep deprived man? All these things would actually relate to the content and perhaps enhance the message the post is trying to make. Buildings however only distract from the actual message - particularly quizzical things like a cemetery for soldiers' dogs.

Of course, Joel isn't the only one, his post is just what pushed me over the edge to blog about it. It doesn't matter how cool you think the shadows or reflections are, if the image isn't related to the actual content it's just wasting bandwidth.

It's been interesting watching the blog adoption cycle here at Ephox. For a long time I think I was the only person actively blogging, and just from the positive effects of blogging that I'd experienced other people got interested. Our CEO was pressured into getting back into blogging again1, the engineering team started up an internal blog to share some of the cool stuff we found which never really took off and then the CEO started an internal blog2 which has helped the rest of the company get more of a grip on where he's going. Andy started a blog and we had a couple of hires who had blogs lying dormant that they were then pressured into getting back into and suddenly there was a critical mass of people blogging - enough to have a conversation between us on the blogs.

Once you hit that point things really start to change. All of a sudden you can talk about work and not feel like it's an echo chamber and noone cares. We started seeing people posting reflections of changes at work, their first month etc and all of a sudden we were getting a better insight into what people were thinking and how they felt about work. We're a company that talks pretty openly and communicate well, but because blogs are written it makes reflect on what they feel and lets them get it all out at once. That provides a new perspective on things and lets you get a much better understanding of what the company's doing right and wrong.

A lot of people feel threatened by the openness of blogs because they think the company's dirty laundry will be exposed. While that does happen to a degree, more often it's the good things that come out when they otherwise wouldn't be mentioned. A couple of recent entries have been great like that: Suneth talking about how Jack and Andy have helped him, I'd been concerned that I wasn't finding enough time to make sure that Suneth was coping - turns out I wasn't needed which is good. Rob's post on good management is another important one. I only realized when I was over in the US office recently that they didn't get to see all the good things that come out of the management work that Brett does and how critical it has been to keeping the engineering team together through some tough challenges and in continuously improving our practices so that we consistently generate great code and can move forward faster. I've also mentioned previously how glad I was to see the chairman of the board commenting on blog posts.

The key things I've learnt so far:

• There's a certain critical mass of bloggers within a company that starts to make blogging really useful for the company to learn about itself.
• Internal only blogs don't work as well as public blogs. You feel bad if you don't update your personal public blog because everyone can see that - you don't care so much if it's internal only.
• Group blogs don't tend to work. Again, you don't feel bad if it's not updated so it tends to wind up being ignored.
• Someone needs to push the bounds a bit and post what they really think about the company. Once one or two people do that, things start to really open up and become honest instead of treating the blogs like a marketing exercise. That's when you really learn the important things.

So if you're working with Ephox and don't yet have a blog, I really encourage you to get one. I can set one up for you on people.ephox.com in about 5 minutes if you want - just say the word.

1 - though he still neglects his blog too much↩

2 - the contents of which I'd suggest should just go on his public blog3 ↩

3 - yes these footnotes are basically just here to prod you Andrew…↩