Glenn Beck has decided Net Neutrality is the tool of the devil.

Thank god that we have a functioning techsphere, which serves as a factual counterpoint to nonsense and propaganda. The lack of any such objective source in the political blogsphere is basically the reason that I started geekblogging. Still, sometimes, the political stoopid finds you, no matter how far you run.

In a nutshell, this is why network neutrality matters.

Post from: meta BLOG

Glenn Beck’s crusade against Network Neutrality

My friend Abbas Ali, who is one of the lead programmers for the open-source Coppermine gallery project, writes with mild frustration about the seeming shortage of talented PHP programmers in India. He cites a number of reasons, one of which is a lack of good trainers:

Unfortunately in India you need a trainer for learning programming languages. No one is willing to learn on his/her own. As soon as a student goes to university, (s)he starts to search for training institutes. There are very few training institutes offering PHP courses and I will say none of them are good (at least in Nagpur). The sole reason is that the trainer himself/herself is not adept at PHP.

This is surprising to me. Certainly the vast majority of programmers in the US I know are self-taught, especially the web-centric ones who sling PHP and SQL code around all day. The availability of numerous and inexpensive training manuals (notably the O’Reilly series) seems to foster a DIY mentality towards picking up a new language, though neraly everyone has of ocurse had at least one programming ocurse in college even if they aren’t formal CS majors (and few are). Are there no such eequivalent resources available in the Indian market? Or is there a cultural difference at play here? Either way, it seems like there’s an opportunity of some sort to rectify this situation. There’s a vast amount of PHP and SQL based web application development going on, especially around the Twitter and WordPress ecosystems. Then again, James and crew over at WPMU.org are also always trying to recruit talent, too, so I wonder if the problem isn’t limited to India.

In fact, looking at my own example, my own knowledge of these technologies is pretty basic. I have written two plugins, one of which makes some vey nominal SQL calls and the other which is just a few simple PHP functions strung together, leveraging the hooks and wordpress API. I doubt very much that I’d come close to a “talented” PHP programmer of the sort Abbas’ company and others are looking for. Perhaps the depth of PHP knowledge is shallow overall and deep in only a few places, in which case Abbas has hit upon an observation that is truly global. If the depth of PHP and SQL knowledge could be increased across a broader swath of the talent pool, would we see an explosion of even better apps?

It certainly feels like there isn’t much technical innovation going on in the web right now. The only person out there in the tech punditsphere who actually gets his hands dirty and tinkers with code is Dave Winer, and he has built some really elegant things. Also I was really quite impressed with Joe Moreno’s URL-shortener solution. These sorts of things require broader knowledge than just PHP and SQL, such as DNS mapping. Most of the new sites that spring up covered by TechCrunch seem to be simple ideas implemented cleverly, but nothing really innovative seems to have come down the pike since, well, Twitter. Is the web industry stagnant for lack of talent overall?

Post from: meta BLOG

a perplexing paucity of PHP programmers

Building on the venerable Recent Posts plugin by Ron and Andrea, I have created an extended version that offers a lot more user control over output, including gravatar support. The basic features are:

• excludes posts on main blog (blog ID = 1)
• excludes first posts (Hello, world) on user blogs (post ID = 1)
• option to show gravatar support (24px). Gravatar links to posts by user on their blog.
• option to show post excerpt. User can specify excerpt length with extra argument. Option to capitalize 1st five words of excerpt for readability.
• option to show post author name
• option to show post date
• option to show post comment count
• all dispay options can be selectively toggled on or off using a single bitmask parameter, permitting very flexible and customizable usage (256 possible configurations!)
• numerous other display and formatting options can be easily edited in source code using global vars

The argument list:

• $how_many: how many recent posts are being displayed
• $how_long: time frame to choose recent posts from (in days)
• $optmask: bitmask for various display options (default: 255)
  • 1; // gravatar
  • 2; // date
  • 4; // author name
  • 8; // comment count
  • 16; // blog name
  • 32; // post name
  • 64; // post excerpt
  • 128; // excerpt capitalization
• $exc_size: size of excerpt in words (default: 30)
• $begin_wrap: start html code (default: <li class=”ahp_recent-posts”>)
• $end_wrap: end html code to adapt to different themes (default: </li>)

To use the bitmask option, simply add the numeric codes for the display options you want together. For example, suppose you only want gravatar, post name, and date – then the bitmask would be 1+2+32 = 35. Using a bitmask in this way, you can turn on or off any combination of display options above, using only a single function argument.

The latest version (0.6) of this plugin is at WPMUDEV with a more complete description, installation instructions, screenshot, and sample function call. You can see also see the plugin in action at Talk Islam, under the sidebar section titled “Recent Journals”.

screenshot of AHP Recent Posts plugin for WPMU

Post from: meta BLOG

AHP Sitewide Recent Posts plugin for WordPress MU

Michael Arrington advises bloggers to turn down venture capital buyouts of their blogs. I don’t think hi advice – sound as it may be for the bloggers at his level – really has any bearing on blogs in the long tail, which is of course where most blogs (and Techcrunch readers) are. While I don’t have much comment on the dynamics of money and politics that he describes, the following did leap out at me as somewhat relevant to bloggers of more humble station:

When you stop seeing other blogs as people you admire and want to discuss things with, and start to see them as your competitor, your brain shifts and you stop linking the way you had previously.

Luckily, the newbie bloggers are there to fill in the links when they’re needed. That’s why, if you are a mid-level blogger, you are likely courted by the bigger blogs looking to get your support. If you know what’s going on and are willing to play the game, you can see your blog rise very, very quickly. Choose the wrong blog, though, and you may find yourself alone and lonely in your forgotten blog.

As an aside, when I see a young but promising blogger, I’ll start linking to him or her constantly to build them up (others, like Winer, Scoble, Jarvis and Rubel did that for me). The goal is to help move them up to a position of influence as quickly as possible.

The problem here is that even if every A and B list blogger were to pick a handful of blogs to promote, the result is simply vaulting those blogs into the B and C list. An ecosystem develops in which the top tier relies on the second tier as a filter for news, info, and blog topics, and the second tier relies on the third, etc. so that you have a constant filtration system going on. By the time the process completes, you have only homogenized news at the top tier (which is where the vast majority of blog readers spend their time).

There really is no way for a truly diverse churn of ideas to filter to the top because of this structure. What’s needed instead is for the long tail to become more self-organizing. One of the strongest tools in the toolbox are blog carnivals, which operate as a link exchange. I took the idea of a blog carnival further, actually, and launched a “real-time” carnival for the Muslim blogsphere called the Carnival of Brass. The point here is to use social bookmarking technology from del.icio.us to create a “badge” that adds new links constantly. I describe the idea in more detail in the Carnival of Brass FAQ and there is no reason that a similar system would not be effective in the techsphere, otakusphere, or any other niche blog community.

Ultimately, a newbie blogger (like yours truly) isn’t going to make it to the big leagues without an A list sponsor. And that solution doesn’t scale. Rather than chase after the A list traffic, and the big money at the top, the best route to blog success is to grow your audience from within your niche, mining the long tail for eyeballs. Slow and steady over a period of years will definitely bring results, and perhaps not a windfall valuation but certainly incrasing and steady income from ads and affiliate programs. That’s the reality for most of us, though watching the blog gods up on Olympus certainly makes for fine entertainment.

Post from: meta BLOG

blogging for dollars

At RWW, they ask whether WiFi will someday go away. I think that WiFi is in no danger of going away, but the ubiquitous web access is already on our doorstep and it’s called WiMax (everyone, chant with me: Xohm. Xohm. Xohm.) The future of web access will be 802.11n in the home and office (assuming it ever gets out of draft!) and WiMax everywhere else.

That said, Xohm is being designed explicitly for the embedded market, so it is possible that our toasters, TVs, and car keys will ultimately be WiMaxed instead of Wified. It really depends on the pricing model, and thats something we just cant predict how will play out yet. WiFi will probably always have an advantage in cost.

I tend to think of wifi and wimax as complementary technologies, however, in much the same way that commuter rail is complementary to a subway system. One is a heavy mover, with high capacity over long distances. The other is a short distance, low capacity transport. The analogy holds pretty well when you look at WiFi and WiMax as well.

UPDATE: hey, neat. I won the Comment of the Day at RWW for my comment. Thanks, Richard!

Post from: meta BLOG

WiFi and WiMax

ma.tt responds to Anil Dash by pointing out that WordPress is fully open source:

WordPress is 100% open source, GPL.

All plugins in the official directory are GPL or compatible, 100% open source.

bbPress is 100% GPL.

WordPress MU is 100% open source, GPL, and if you wanted you could take it and build your own hosted platform like WordPress.com, like edublogs.org has with over 100,000 blogs.

There is more GPL stuff on the way, as well.

Could you build Typepad or Vox with Movable Type? Probably not, especially since people with more than a few blogs or posts say it grinds to a halt, as Metblogs found before they switched to WordPress.

Automattic (and other people) can provide full support for GPL software, which is the single license everything we support is under. Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the “open source” one doesn’t allow any support. The community around WordPress is amazing and most people find it more than adequate for their support needs.

Movable Type, which is Six Apart’s only Open Source product line now that they’ve dumped Livejournal, doesn’t even have a public bug tracker, even though they announced it going OS over 9 months ago!

I think that this gets to the heart of why WP is so successful. WP vs MT is almost a case study of the Cathedral vs the Bazaar. Were Six Apart to fully embrace the open source model, as WP has done, they would of course lose the revenue stream from licensing, but the absence of that stream hasn’t exactly inhibited Automattic ($29.5 million in the latest round…). Matt alludes to the MT3 debacle, which really was a betrayal of MT’s until-then loyal userbase. It came down to simply money; in an era where the best things in (computing) life are free, Six Apart seems determined to charge. And that’s been the thing holding them back. Technology alone isn’t enough, you have to address the user model. That is what MT has failed and seems to continue to fail to do.

Post from: meta BLOG

why did MT lose and WP win?

Does Mike Arrington have a stake in Valleywag? At TechCrunch, Arrington issues a dire warning that Valleywag (a Silicon Valley gossip rag) will drive someone to suicide soon enough:

Today I read all the sordid details about the alleged sexual encounter between a notable technology visionary and a woman who appears to be looking for as much publicity as possible. Where did I read it? On the Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag.
[...]
A lot of people I know read Valleywag, and say it’s fun to hear all the gossip. But all of those people change their tune the first time the blog turns on them and includes them in a rumor. An example: TED founder Chris Anderson, distressed over the publication of the TED attendee list, recently wrote to Valleywag owner Nick Denton that he “didn’t think [he’d] be on the receiving end” of Valleywag gossip. His email was promptly posted to the site.

Most of the gossip is harmless. Much of it, though, isn’t (like the sex incident above). Celebrities have had to live with this kind of nonsense for decades, which explains why some of them pull out of society entirely and become completely anti-social. Perhaps, some argue, they bring it on themselves by seeking fame.

But for people in Silicon Valley, who are not celebrities and who have no desire other than to build a great startup, a post on Valleywag comes as a huge shock. Seeing your marriage woes, DUI or employment termination up on a popular public website (permanently indexed by search engines) is simply more than they can handle. They have not had the ramp up time to build resistance to the attacks.

The suggestion that web entrepreneurs are more emotionally fragile than Hollywood celebs is pretty weak. The reason for Valleywag’s success is not because Nick Denton is out to getcha. It’s because prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs – like Michael Arrington – keep reading Valleywag, sending them tips and gossip, and blogging about it.

Arrington goes on to observe the obvious, that tragedy is good business:

So how long will it be before Valleywag drives someone in our community to suicide? My fear is that it isn’t a matter of if it will happen, but when. Valleywag and Nick Denton, though, will likely look forward to the event, and the great traffic growth that will surely follow.

Emphasis mine. I think that it borders on libel to suggest that Denton would “look forward” to the event, though obviously he won’t mind the traffic. But all of that traffic exists because, as Arrington observes, there’s a market for it. Is Denton to blame, or the people who Valleywag writes about themselves, who seem all too eager to eat their own? As Anderson found out in the anecdote above, no one thinks they will be on the “receiving end” of Valleywag’s gossip. As they say, pride goeth before the fall.

Arrington must be making good on his promise to suck up to Denton, because his post at TechCrunch just gives Valleywag all that much more power. He complains that “the valley was a much nicer place to live and work before the days of Valleywag” – but whose fault is that?

Post from: meta BLOG

TechCrunch (hearts) Valleywag