Out of the Woodwork

How Open is Too Open?

Wow. Did I really exploit my own baby pictures last week? Just how low will I stoop in trying to attract readers? Lucky for you all that I haven't had any medical procedures which I could exploit for a little shock factor. Then again, who would stoop that low?

(I am, of course, just kidding--Couric's openness brought attention to an important procedure and undoubtably saved lives.)

Tags: blogging personal

Posted at 10:56AM Jan 30, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Personal  |  Comments[0]

A quick word about "A quick word about Googlebombs"

Google has just announced that they have tweaked their search algorithm in a way which "has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs." I'm not sure whether I think that's a good thing or not. On one hand, susceptibility to any artificial manipulation of search results is probably bad. On the other hand, a little light-heartedness is one way that Google has always stood out as a company.

I have no such mixed feelings in looking at how Google announced this change, however. I think it's pathetic. Their blog entry essentially just says that the change is algorithmic and "very limited in scope and impact." Good intro, but how about some details?

Google Bombs worked in the first place because Google's search algorithm assumes that what people say when they link to a page can be used to better understand that page. That idea is an important piece in the search puzzle, and I'd like to understand how their new algorithm changes impact it. Presumably, being "very limited in scope and impact" means that they somehow detect and ignore "bad" context in some links (which match some Google Bomb profile) while still paying attention to "good" context in other links? Again, that sounds good (if my presumption is correct), but why not be more forthcoming with exactly what's being done? We all deserve to know if and how wording around hyperlinks impacts the target URL's status in search results.

I realize that Google is in a very competitive space. Keeping a lead over the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo (if you believe they're leading) requires that Google keep some technical secrets to itself. But the key word is some. There is value in allowing everyone to understand the basics of how a key service such as Google search works. Their core PageRank technology fundamentally depends on us all "voting" with our hyperlinks. And as I've mentioned before, I think that there is an obligation to allow its "electorate" to learn how to best use those votes. That can certainly be accomplished without giving away every detail of their technology. But I think it requires more detail than just telling us that something is algorithmic and low-impact.

Tags: google googlebombs search

Posted at 01:05PM Jan 26, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0  |  Comments[2]

Looking My Best

In today's networked world, we interact with many people who we've never met in person. It's true in my daily work at Sun (where I would estimate I've probably met less than half of the people I deal with by phone and email), and it's certainly true in blogging (where often we don't even know the names or places behind most of our audience). One frequent tip for overcoming this hurdle and making meaningful connections is to share personal touches such as pictures of yourself.

For a while now, I've been meaning to do just that (by adding a picture to my blog's template and to Sun's internal employee directory tool). The first step is, of course, finding a picture. Since my wife is our household historian, I asked her if she could email me a picture of myself. Absolutely, she said--and asked if this one would do:

Very funny.

Then again, maybe she's on to something. Coming from a thirty-something blogger, my writings are hardly earthshaking. But from a three-year-old, they might be impressive. Occassionally.

Tags: blogging personal pictures

Posted at 12:04PM Jan 25, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Personal  |  Comments[4]

Antisocial URLs

Muhammad Saleem is talking about how bad URL structures can clash with social bookmarking services. Specifically, he notes that providing redundant URLs can lead to duplicate postings at sites such as Digg.

To address the situation, he advises that webmasters provide just one URL per page. That's nice in theory, but can be difficult in practice. Special needs often arise (in areas such as metrics tracking and personalization) which can best be met with varied URLs. Yes, there are a whole slew of ways to deal with such things without touching the URL. But there are also a whole slew of complicating factors (such as trying trying to monitor traffic originating outside the browser in RSS readers or emails). Sometimes one URL just isn't enough.

Fortunately, exposing multiple URLs doesn't have to mean sacrificing the idea that one of them is "primary." Just pick the primary URL and use a <link rel="bookmark" href="..." /> element to identify it (as described in the Wikipedia permalink page). Nice solution, isn't it? You get the best of both worlds--purity and pragmatism.

Unfortunately, most web sites don't include this element, and most tools don't understand it anyway. Why hasn't it gained more traction?

Tags: bookmark digg microformat permalink rel socialbookmarking url

Posted at 11:53PM Jan 24, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0  |  Comments[1]

Wikipedia Decides Its Outgoing Links Can't Be Trusted?

I find this sad. By adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to the outgoing links in all articles, the Wikipedia seems to be wavering in its trust of volunteers. Yes, link spam is a problem. And with its combination of high visibility and open authoring, the Wikipedia is a prime target. But why not deal with this problem the same way it deals with other inaccurate and abusive content? Count on the volunteer base to detect and correct issues quickly (and give the administrators tools to lock certain articles which are repeated targets).

Until yesterday, that's exactly how the English-language Wikipedia dealt with link spam. But now the project has thrown up a white flag and said that its volunteers and tools aren't adequate to police the situation. Instead, the equivalent of martial law has been declared and everyone suffers.

The Wikipedia is the closest thing we have to a collective and collaborative voice in describing our world. When an external URL is referenced in a Wikipedia article, it must pass the editorial "litmus test" of all Wikipedians watching that article (who will presumably have high interest and expertise in the subject). With the blanket inclusion of the nofollow attribute on these links, search engines such as Google will no longer use these links as part of their determination of which URLs are most important. So we end up with slightly poorer search results and one less way to register our "votes" for improving them. Sad.

On the bright side, the original announcement does note that "better heuristic and manual flagging tools for URLs would of course be super." Presumably, this means that when such tools are made available, the blanket application of nofollow will be removed. Let's hope that happens. Soon.

Tags: nofollow pagerank search spam wikipedia

Posted at 10:12AM Jan 22, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0  |  Comments[4]

Where to find affinity badges?

Is there some centralized source for affinity badges?

Jonathan has a few nice ones on his blog:

And Deepak has a nice tutorial on using affinity badges, providing these examples:

I like that each set has a consistent style (with complementary dimensions, colors, and fonts to the degree possible). So back to my original question... Is there some centralized source for finding such sets? A "badge directory" of sorts for Sun-related projects (or beyond)?

Tags: affinity affinitybadges badges evangelism marketing sun

Posted at 02:42PM Jan 19, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Potpourri  |  Comments[2]

Hyperlinks as Votes: Time for a PageRank Tune-up?

Treat the hyperlinks in web pages as "votes" for other web pages. Then use a feedback loop so that pages which receive more votes from others have their own votes become more powerful. That's how the PageRank algorithm pushes the best pages to the top of Google search results. Twelve years after Larry Page and Sergey Brin published the initial description of PageRank, Google says it still serves as the core of its technology.

So if hyperlinks are votes, how do we make sure the electorate uses their power wisely?

For one, we need to ensure that people only vote in their own name. Not so long ago, that ideal was effectively violated by blog spam. Automated programs would comb the web looking for any blog where they could post hyperlinks to the likes of Viagara sales. Successfully adding such a hyperlink on a well-known blog would result in a strong PageRank "vote" for the spammer's page. So in effect, the spammer was voting in the blog owner's name (and hijacking his PageRank strength).

This issue was largely fixed in 2005, when Google announced that it would start interpreting a rel="nofollow" hyperlink attribute as a request for exclusion from PageRank calculations. Blog spam can still be a problem, but since most blogging software now adds the rel="nofollow" attribute to hyperlinks in comments, it won't benefit spammers' PageRank standings.

But is just being able to mark a hyperlink as a "non vote" enough? Wouldn't it be nice to have even more control, such as specifying which hyperlinks are positive votes for the referenced page and which are negative votes? That's what some of the Technorati folks are aiming to allow with the Vote Links microformat. It proposes rev="vote-for", rev="vote-abstain", and rev="vote-against" attributes to allow page authors to express their voting intents for each hyperlink.

Still, is even that enough? I wonder why there is no effort to allow authors to control the relative strength of their votes. The Vote Links FAQ has an entry covering this, saying:

Q: Why only for and against? How about something more nuanced?

A: The point of this is to provide a strong yes/no response. Finer-grained measures of agreement don't make much sense on an individual basis; aggregating many votes is more interesting. For example, consider how eBay's user rating system has been reduced to a like/dislike switch by users. The 'Ayes, Noes, abstentions' model has served well in politics and committees, when a division is called for.

I'm not satisfied with this answer. The "interesting" aggregation of simple votes which they mention will sometimes be housed within a single page. For example, thousands of people may give a particular URL a positive response at Digg, but it still just shows up as one hyperlink. The same could be said for other sites with significant user input (such as YouTube, Slashdot, or their own example: eBay).

Obviously, no page should be able to artificially inflate the importance of its own hyperlink votes (e.g. rel="I_represent_1_million_votes--honest"). But why not allow pages to determine the portion of their fixed PageRank contribution which is passed along to each of its hyperlinks? So a Digg page, for example, might choose to give 10% of its PageRank voting value to an item getting 2000 Diggs and only 2% to another item which got just 200 Diggs. Search engines could then benefit from the internal ranking systems of sites (such as digg) without having to understand their internal details. And we could all benefit from a more finely-tuned hyperlink democracy.

Tags: google microformats nofollow pagerank search technorati votelinks

Posted at 09:08AM Jan 18, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0  |  Comments[8]

Lag Marketing

Could Facebook "grow up" to be a LinkedIn competitor? Alex Iskold thinks so. It's an interesting possibility, and reminds me of trends previously seen from the likes of Apple and Linux.

Basically, the idea is to reach your market before they are your market. Step one: build popularity with starving college students (where there is little or no profit). Step two: wait for those students to age into powerful and affluent corporate workers (providing significant profits, if they still think highly of your company/product). Apple did it consciously with discounts at college bookstores (encouraging more student ownership of Apple products) and to college IT purchasers (encouraging more Apple machines in computing labs and thus more student use of Apple products). Linux and other open source projects did it unconsciously by providing free software to technical students with an itch to tinker.

Per our formula, financial benefits came later. The students eventually graduated, and a portion of their increased income and corporate influence went to the benefit of vendors such as Apple and Red Hat. If Iskold's theory plays out, the same could soon happen for Facebook (given its enormous penetration into social networking for college students).

I think there is an obvious message here for Sun and anyone else looking to build up communities. A little foresight and patience goes a long way.

Tags: facebook linkedin networking social web2.0

Posted at 10:19PM Jan 16, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0  |  Comments[0]

Tagging Formats: Why Not Follow Search's Lead?

Why is there so much argument over the need for a tagging standard? Of course we need a standard. It just doesn't have to be a new one. We have a ready-made standard in existing keyword-to-content systems: search engines.

How is tagging so different than searching? About the only difference I see is that they're done in reverse order. Instead of proposing keywords for a not-yet-found piece of content, tagging applies keywords to content up front. Great. Both are useful. Both are important. And both should share one syntax for keywords.

Since search came first, it gets to set the standard. So if you want to see how tagging should work, just look to Google's search form. It's space-delimited, spaces can exist within quoted items, and quotes can exist within items if they're escaped. There you go--the tagging standard wars are settled. The settlement just happens to predate tagging itself.

Tags: format search standards tagging

Posted at 04:45PM Jan 15, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0  |  Comments[0]

What Can We Learn From NetBSD's Problems?

"The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance." These words came from project co-founder Charles M. Hannum in an August email. It's sad to see such talk directed at one of the pioneering open source projects. I hope that the issues Hannum raises can be fixed and NetBSD returned to a healthier state.

At the same time, I wonder if other projects can learn from these observations and avoid running into similar problems. Hannum ends his note with a list of eight steps which he believes must be taken for NetBSD to regain its way. Some are fairly specific to their project, but others are not. In particular, I think the first three are worth highlighting:

1. There must be a strong leadership, and it is not the current one. The leadership must honestly want NetBSD to be a premier, world class system with leading edge features. The leadership must set aggressive goals, and actively recruit people to make them happen.
2. There must be no more "locking" of projects. Just because one person is supposedly working on a problem, that doesn't mean you shouldn't. If there ideas are dumb, or even just suboptimal, do it better! If there is no progress, hop on it. Don't wait for someone else.
3. The project must become an *actual* meritocracy, not what I call a "volumetocracy". Right now, the people who exert the most influence are often the people who produce the least useful product. Indeed, they are often people who produce little more than fluff (e.g. changing line-ending whitespace!), and often break things.

There is clearly some NetBSD-specific background behind these observations, but I think the core ideas are applicable to other projects. There must be strong leadership (preferably down to an individual level, as noted elsewhere in his note). There must not be any detrimental "locking" of projects (which he believes can arise from having too much of a "corporate mentality"). And there must be promotion of a true meritocracy.

Those sound to me like important lessons for any open source effort. And given that Sun is establishing itself as the largest open source contributor in the world, I'd say they're also important lessons for us as a company.

Tags: bsd netbsd opensource unix

Posted at 06:00AM Jan 12, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Potpourri  |  Comments[0]

Green Reproduction

I just learned a new word: ecosexual. Linda's latest post on the Conversations Squared blog introduced me to the term, and a quick Google search (to see if she had coined it on the spot) led me to some interesting follow-up material. Most interesting of that bunch was a "Beware the Ecosexual" article, which talks about how any true ecosexual would "also belong to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a group of people dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth."

Kind of funny. But on a more serious and personal note, I have had thoughts somewhat along these lines cross my mind. To me, the realistic threshold number for children isn't zero. It's two. If you and your mate together produce two offspring in your lifetime, you'll have a neutral long-term impact on the world's population. Have less and you'll have a reducing impact. Have more and you'll have an increasing impact.

Now please don't think that I'm judging anyone who has or plans to have three or more children. I certainly realize that human lives are measured in terms far beyond carbon footprints and landfill growth. It's just one factor that we might each want to consider in a very important decision. No matter how good you are about carpooling or turning off the lights, it's bound to pale in comparison to the lifetime environmental impact of having one more or less person on earth (especially with the footprint of our lifestyles in developed countries such as America).

Tags: environmentalism

Posted at 10:26AM Jan 11, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Potpourri  |  Comments[1]

See Java from Space, Part 3

I wouldn't have guessed that I could milk a whole trilogy out of my little Java-on-the-roof bit, but people just keep chipping in. This time it's Alexis, who sent me this close-up view:

Alexis said the picture has been sitting on his hard drive "for ages" and can't remember its original source. Perhaps it was part of the "gag" which Steve mentioned as the original source of the rooftop logo? Hopefully someone who recognizes it can chime in.

Tags: java logo

Posted at 09:47AM Jan 09, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Kitsch 2.0  |  Comments[1]

See Java from Space, Part 2

If you'll recall, I left off yesterday wondering how I might get up to visit the giant Java Logo on the roof of one of Sun's buildings. Rama has been kind enough to offer some assistance. Excellent.

Now I just need to find jumbo versions of a few key supplies and this:

...will become this:

Tags: google java maps simpsons

Posted at 05:11PM Jan 05, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Kitsch 2.0  |  Comments[2]

Microsoft's Mandated Achievements

A GameDaily feature on Microsoft's "Achievement Points" program for gamers has gotten a lot of bloggers' attention. Robert Scoble, for example, believes Microsoft will eventually extend beyond games and use as a secret weapon against the likes of Google and Yahoo.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First the basics, courtesy of the GameDaily article:

In 2005, the marketing folks at Microsoft had a brainstorm. The Xbox 360 console had just been released and, to sell more games, they decided they would start doling out "achievement points." Play enough games, collect enough points, and you could cash them in for ... nothing, nothing at all. What a concept!

And (emphasis added):

Here's how the points system works: Microsoft mandates that every developer of Xbox 360 games "hide" 1,000 achievement points in every retail game and 200 in every casual game. Players earn points for certain successes in the game. The more challenging the task, the more points are added to the player's profile -- or Gamerscore -- which is visible to anyone who cares to look.

Appealing to users' competitive nature and vanity is fine. But mandating that developers put these points into anything that will run on your platform? That sounds a lot like old behaviors which got the Redmond folks in trouble. If they do try to extend these vanity points beyond gaming, I hope the strong-arming will be left behind.

Tags: games microsoft

Posted at 03:37PM Jan 05, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Potpourri  |  Comments[0]

See Java from Space

Question: see anything strange in this picture?

Time's up. It's a satellite picture of Building 14 in Sun's Santa Clara campus, which just happens to be decorated with a huge Java logo. Don't believe me? See for yourself with this view of our Solaris Registrations Map.

Next question: what's it doing there? Has Sun been getting marketing tips from The Colonel?

Nope. I got the real story from Steve Wilson: "It's been up there since Java Software moved out of [Cupertino] to [Santa Clara]. There was a big all hands with a gag that had Rich doing a video feed from the roof of SCA 14. It's still up there."

Last question: where can I rent a big ladder next time I'm in the Bay Area?

Tags: google java maps sun

Posted at 10:59AM Jan 04, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Maps  |  Comments[2]