Funding open source projects

jwz asks: Jeremy Zawodny's blog: Which Open Source Projects Would You Sponsor?. I'd probably give money to projects that are attempting something technically difficult, or taking on the beast of Redmond head-on. Much of the internet runs on open source. Most of the internet and internet related technologies derive from open source projects of the past.

Trackback whinging from The Register

In Blog noise achieves Google KO, The Register whines:

The humble weblog has finally achieved dominance over Google, the world's most-used search engine. Originally intended as a tool that allowed people to publish their personal diaries, weblog software has swiftly evolved, accreting several "innovations" that have had catastrophic consequences for Google. If you've never heard of the "Trackback", or ever wanted to know, then we have bad news: you're about to become acquainted, whether you like it or not, dear Google user.

The Register's take is that trackback (which is a defacto standard for registering links to/from web pages) is evil because it screws up Google results.

Google works its magic in part by ranking pages higher which are linked to by other pages that themselves talk about your search terms. Basically, instead of taking a page's words as the sole determinant, Google also takes into account what other pages write about said page.

This is all well and generally good, except that it can lead to some interesting games by people trying to increase their "pagerank" by concocting other pages to link to their page.

Trackback is a scheme that evolved in the weblog community, but has been sorely lacking in the web for years: how do I tell who has linked to my page? One can analyze server logs and look at the referrers, but that's not real time, and many weblog sites don't provide any real log data. Trackback provided a way for bloggers to see who's linking where, and open up the circle of discussion.

Trackback could be really useful to content providers like The Register since most tools which utilize it are automatic. If I link to a random page using Movable Type, one of the things the tool does is to see if there are any trackback URLs available to ping. If there are, it does it (or provides me a list to select which one to ping).

Of course, I've come to learn that content providers are rarely interested in such things, especially since it would only be useful in analyzing who reads what and provide valuable feedback to advertisers.

The Digital Imprimatur

I started working my way through The Digital Imprimatur by John Walker and it's a good read. I don't necessarily agree with all of his points but it's certainly thought provoking. Walker founded Autodesk in the 1980s.

The Register

Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka:

The problem here is one (ironically) of register. In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn't. You can have a private gathering, but it isn't necessarily a secret. All these conversations have different implications, different tones.

Most people have, in the back of their mind, the belief that what they say to their friends, they would be happy to say in public, in the same words. It isn't true, and if you don't believe me, tape-record yourself talking to your friends one day, and then upload it to your website for the world to hear.

This is the trap that makes fly-on-the-wall documentaries and reality TV so entertaining. It's why politicians are so weirdly mannered, and why everyone gets a bit freaked out when the videocamera looms at the wedding. It's what makes a particular kind of gossip - the "I can't believe he said that!" - so virulent. No matter how constant a person you are, no matter how unwavering your beliefs, something you say in the private register will sound horrific, dismissive, egotistical or trite when blazoned on the front page of the Daily Mirror. This is the context that we are quoted out of.