Tuesday July 13, 2004

Don't consider this a blog entry on politics. I find it interesting that at the Democratic Convention only approved bloggers are allowed. According to the article, the same will be the case for the Republican convention. Imagine if Sun only allowed approved bloggers at JavaOne? Approving bloggers sounds like an oxymoron to me.

Isn't "approving bloggers" counter to the blogging culture in general? I thought the idea of blogging was to allow an individual to directly get their own word out, whether it be fact or opinion. There is nothing to stop convention/conference attendees from blogging after-the-fact. I just think that trying to modify the perception of any event (political or not) is counter to the blogging culture. Limiting blogging to the press is a form of modifying perception, IMHO. I blogged here about the value of not funneling information through the press. So what if someone with a different viewpoint flames a convention? It is a viewpoint none-the-less.

Doing my daily news scan, I ran across this article regarding Mozilla takes a bite out of IE. I must chuckle at the title because John Leyden, the author of the article, uses the words "decreased slightly" in the actual article. I don't call that a bite, I call that a nibble or a crumb. Again, trade rags and their use of titles. OK, being a blogger I must admit I am rather liberal in my blog titles, but then again, I am not reporting news.

I must ask myself, what does this data really mean? How accurate are these numbers anyway? Modifying User-Agent has to affect these stats, but how much? Does IE really have 95% of market share or are users simply modifying their User-Agent? How many Mozilla, Opera and Konquerer users change their User-Agent to be IE so the darn web site will render? With regards to the article, are IE users modifying their IE User-Agent to look like Mozilla (to hide their security vulnerability)? Now wouldn't that be ironic?

No matter how you skin the cat, this browser data point is a positive data point in my view. However, its not a trend (yet). I hope it is because ISV's will start to take notice and make my customers life better by supporting web standards instead of Microsoft extensions.