Live and Direct

Hey folks,

Here's an unintended consequence of the snow -- today is our Time Warner Global Broadcast, which is pretty much a big team rah-rah meeting with video simulcasts in offices all over the world.

Because
of the snow, a lot of folks didn't come into the office today, so they
needed some warm (or even slightly cool) bodies to fill the seats for
the Dulles studio audience.

So, I went. I brought my laptop and my camera.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but it was pretty heavily stage-managed -- they even handed out noisemakers.

Okay, so they may not be the most interesting photos. But let's see you try to get Anderson Cooper to moderate your team meeting.

Thanks -- Joe

Snow Day

Hi folks -- we seem to have survived, yet again. Around here, we only
got about 2 inches of wet, slushy snow (you know, the kind that's
really fun to shovel):

Yes, I know you can still see grass, but at least there are tiny little piles where they had to shovel the walks.



Around here, 2 inches is more than enough to get the schools
closed, which means you can usually see a lot of kids around the
cubicles, though it's pretty quiet here today.

The northeast is supposed to get hit a lot harder today, so be careful out there.

Oh, and remember kids -- you have to make at least a token attempt
to clean the snow and ice off your car before you jump on the highway.
It's not my fault you're five foot nothing in your Ugg boots, yet
bought a 10-foot high Canyonero SUV with a roof rack.

Thanks -- Joe

Watch What You Say! (Again)

Hi folks -- seeing as how we've gone several whole weeks without
a story about how putting the wrong kind of information on your blog
can get you in trouble, here are two news stories to remind us:

* The Wall Street Journal has an article reminding us that it can be iffy putting 'Too Much Information' on Facebook (the outrageously popular college-oriented community site).



"Too much info" can include photos of recreational drug use, underaged drinking and detailed schedules of your precise location (the better to stalk you with). The article is specific to Facebook, but it also serves as a general reminder to the rest of us.

* I found this next story on Blog Herald (which is running really slow right now); it's a different angle on the perils of college blogging and comes from the Marquette University School of Dentistry, as detailed in this news article from the Marquette Tribune.


It tells of a second-year dental student who was suspended for blogging -- not for drink, drugs or sex, but for slagging
professors and fellow students in his personal blog (which is gone,
though you can get another perspective on these and other issues from
the blog of MU PoliSci prof. John McAdams.)

Again,
since Marquette is private, the school can do this -- the grounds are
violation of the code of conduct for harassment. Whether they should do
it, of course, is a completely 'nother matter.

Thanks -- Joe 

Didn't We Just Do This?

Hi all,


The overnight weather forecast for the DC Metro area is 3-6 inches of snow and wintry
mix (which is nothing at all like party mix).  It's not going to get
here for a few more hours -- guess the storm has to finish hiding blogger John's lawn, first.

Monday's
snow was supposed to be 2-4 inches, though we barely even covered the
grass. I am interested in seeing what happens tomorrow.

Oh, and winter doesn't even being for 2 more weeks. Fun.


Talk to you. -- Joe

Guest Editorships and Open Systems

Hi everybody,

(Warning, this is going to be a long
entry.)

I happened to stumble upon a Journal entry
by Robin (of These
Are the Days of Our Lives...), which kind of took
me to task about the direction I've taken the whole Guest
Editor thing.

Actually, she
flamed me pretty good,

but I don't mind [Update: Okay,
I see that it's tongue-in-cheek, except with more naughty words than
one would expect for that sort of thing.] I would, however, like a
chance to talk about some
of
the questions she (and some of the commenters in her entry, as well as
others) have raised.

(By the way, if anyone has a
rant or complaint about me, my blog, or Journals in general,
feel free to send it to me as well as post it to
your blog -- it's the only way that will guarantee that I will see it,
and I won't get mad. Honest.)

Okay, so about the
Guest Editor

thing. As you recall, it's the primary way we're featuring blogs: I
ask

someone to be Guest Editor and pick their favorite blogs and do a blog

entry about them, and then I point to the Guest Editor's blog
entry.

I do this because I am 1.)
incredibly lazy and 2.) relying on the
collective wisdom of Journalers and bloggers to find
stuff, on the theory that many eyes are better than two (or four, in my
case.)

Now, there are several complaints and
concerns about this, which I hope I am characterizing
correctly:



* It's been months since I asked; why haven't I been
picked yet?
The answer, unfortunately, is
simple math: Guest

Editors' (or Editors') picks are once a week, and we've only been
doing

them since June, so we've only had 23 Guest Editors so far. There are

close to 100 more people on the
ever-growing list of

people who've expressed interested in being a Guest Editor -- even if

you subtract the people who don't want to have anything to do with me

or AOL any more after the ads debacle, that's still a lot of people,

and we're only able to feature one a week.

How can
we remedy

this -- can we have multiple Guest Editors each week? Possibly -- I

will look into it; however, please know that coordinating all this is

not easy. It's just me doing all this.

As I've
mentioned several times before, we're working on additional ways to
feature bloggers -- the Face Wall on the Journals Main Page is one
of the newer ones, and I'm hoping that the partner
ping stuff that went up with the R2 release will help us
build ways to automate displays of newly created or
updated blogs...but, I also understand that being a Guest Editor or
Editor's Pick carries a status or cachet that other
features do not.

* If there are so few
Guest Editor slots available, why did you waste two around Thanksgiving
with your own picks?
I

apologize for this one -- due to both the timing of the ad banner

fiasco (which kept us pretty busy, as you can imagine) and the

logistics of the short holiday week, I couldn't guarantee that I could

coordinate everything with Guest Editor candidates on time, so I

decided to put up what essentially amounted to filler (though I hope
it

was decent filler).

Despite what I said earlier
about the Guest

Editor being created out of sheer laziness, there is still a lot of

work involved, from outreach, asset gathering and management, art

creation, authoring, and publishing to Journals main, this blog, the

boards and the Alert (which I also failed to send out last week, sorry
Brandi).


* You've missed out on so many good AOL
Journals! Why are you wasting time letting people feature non-AOL
blogs?
Okay,

this is a pretty controversial one and I know a lot of you will

continue to disagree with me on this, but please hear me
out.

First off, I tell Guest Editors that they have
the editorial freedom

to pick whatever they want (well, okay, within the bounds of decency
--

I'm not an anarchist). Telling them to limit their picks to AOL

Journals would like me being forced only to talk about how you

shouldn't use a 3rd-party
FTP client

because the AOL in-client FTP tool is so great (which it isn't -- it's

older than dirt and a pain to use) or that you shouldn't use the great
Firefox
browser because it's not AOL's. It's not honest, and it's not
right.





Similarly, if I tell a political blogger Guest Editor that they can't
feature PowerLine or Daily Kos,

just because they're not AOL blogs, even though that may be that

person's favorite, bestest blog ever, doesn't seem right. (And yes, I

know that neither PowerLine nor Daily Kos need the extra traffic since

they're pretty dominant already -- this isn't about pimping blogs for

pageviews, though.)

As you hear time and time again,
blogging is about relationships -- if your
relationships include non-AOL blogs, why shouldn't you be able to
highlight those blogs?

From a practical perspective,
there's a very big blog world

out there, and AOL needs to be a part of it. The more we participate
in

the blogosphere, through meaningful interaction (and remember,
blogging

is all about relationships and interaction) the more the blogosphere

will pay attention to us. (And not just because AOL gets a writeup on
the ad thing in BlogSpotting
or because we do a blog
survey that gets picked up in the blog
press.)

Keeping the raw numbers in mind, there are a
lot -- millions -- more non-AOL blogs than there are
AOL blogs -- that's a lot of new potential visitors
and commenters to your Journal out
there.

Now,

please don't take this as a slam on the AOL Journals community. Part
of

the reason why the Web and the Blogosphere works is that it is
open. The blogosphere would be a completely
different place if Xanga
people couldn't interact with Blogger people who couldn't
link to LiveJournal
people...you're going to hear more about "Web 2.0"
in the coming days, but it's about this -- closed systems stagnate --
open systems thrive.

The AOL Journals
ecosystem to date has been pretty closed.
I know it's comfortable, but it can also be
cramped -- I've had to work really
closely with the Guest Editors to make sure that we see new
Journalers featured, instead of the same names over and over
again, which is a very real risk (and another type of
complaint I'd gotten early on).

A final point I'd
like to make about this goes back to the first
Guest Editor's picks, where all of the
picks were non-AOL blogs. Perhaps that was the wrong foot to setoff
on, but I'd asked for Dan's
picks and I had to keep my word, and it's not his fault that
his primary blog reads were off AOL.

However, I saw
the following sentiment a bunch of times: "You SUCK
for featuring non-AOL blogs, but ohmygosh PostSecret is
soooo cool."

Now, largely
because of the Journals
exodus,

I'd opened up the possibility to have non-AOL bloggers make Guest

Editor picks -- I don't want to close off any possibilities, though as

I said before, we've got a long list of people who want to be Guest

Editors, so I don't see it happening anytime
soon.

Whew, that

was a pretty long one. I had originally planned to talk about a blog

entry floating around today on how to get more
visitors, but that will

have to wait until tomorrow.

In any case, if you
have any ideas

as to how we can better feature AOL Journalers, both
here and via other

methods, please let me know in comments or
mail.

Keep in mind,

it doesn't have to just come through me. For example, maybe we do some

kind of Journals passaround, where everyone does an
entry that links to

5 of their favorite blogs (AOL and non-AOL), and we find some way to

spread these around (kind of a combination of a blog carnival and the

Halloween trick-or-treating that you guys just
did.)

Just thinking out loud, let me know your own
ideas.

Thanks -- Joe

Tag: Guest Editor's Picks

Porn Comment Spammer Is Back

Hi folks -- a few folks have written me to let me know that our
porn comment spammer is back.


This one is the same one we've seen before, except he/she is being
extra annoying, as he/she is throwing in a lot of
additional whitespace around the text, which
is:

Looking for HOT Guys and Sexy BI Females in my
AREA!
I am a 20/F/Pics. View my ADULT Pics profile below!

[URL Removed]

I haven't
included the screen name because the spammer can create a new one
pretty easily.



Why does the spammer do this? It's probably because he/she thinks that

doing this will help increase the search engine ranking of their silly

affiliate porn site, not knowing or caring that
comments in AOL Journals use
the NOFOLLOW tag, which means that your major search
engines (like Google) that rely on links to determine relevance
will skip those links and therefore won't
help your search engine ranking, you big spamming
dummy.

The

tech team is looking at different rostering methods and other measures

against comment spam. (I will talk more about that in a
minute.)



In the meantime, Journalers can use the "Block This Screen Name"
button

to block the screen name and delete all comments by that screen name.


By the way, if you accidentally
block someone from commenting, here's how you manage
your block list:

* When signed in to your
Journal, click the blue "Edit Journal" button.

* In
the section marked "Manage Your Journal Settings", click "Manage
Permissions."

*

This will show you a list of screen names which are blocked from

commenting to your Journal.  You can add screen names, and
also

unblock them.

Now, getting back to the problem of
comment spam:

It's a problem all over the blogosphere, not just AOL Journals. In

fact, to date, we've been pretty "lucky" that we've only had a few of

these clowns.

Different blog providers use different
methods to try to block comment spam -- for example, Blogger and others use
image verification (also known as a CAPTCHA)

-- it's a basically squiggly letters and numbers that machines can't

read, but people can, to try to block automated spamming
robots.

Image

verification works, but it's not a silver bullet -- there are ways

around it, including offshoring low-wage humans to defeat it.






Also, it can be pretty hostile to
visually-impaired humans

(especially with the squiggly lines -- if you've ever asked yourself,

"is that a 6 or a G?" while looking at one of these, you know what I

mean.)

Like I said, all sorts of different folks are
working on

ways to beat spam commenters (though if that isn't bad enough, there
is

also a problem with spam blogs, or splogs, which are
blogs

created specifically as link farms, to try to do the same thing as
spam

comments. This has also been a problem for Blogger/BlogSpot, which is

kind of ironic, since the spammers are trying to raise their Google

pagerank, and Google owns Blogger/BlogSpot); I've seen some instances

of it on AOL Journals/AIM Blogs, but not too many as
yet.

Thanks -- Joe

Fun With Paper

Hi folks -- I'm in the
process of going through a bunch of my old bookmarks (for reasons I
will get into in a later entry -- not trying to be cryptic, it's just
not crucial to the story right now).

I found a couple of links that involve doing interesting things with paper.

* Dollar Bill Shirt
This Web page tells you how to fold a shirt out of a dollar bill. (I don't recommend you trying to wear it, though, except in the privacy of your own home or certain parts of Europe.)

It's off the Money Origami Web site, which also tells you how to make rings, eyeglasses, a Christmas tree and more. I haven't tried any of those yet, but I am now pretty good at making the shirts:

Actually, it looks more interesting when Darth Tater is holding it (it's life-size in this photo, too, at least on my monitor):

FYI, the sleeves are the tricky part -- it involves some sort of diamond fold that I'm sure has a proper origami term, but I don't know what it is.

If you want to share your own dollar shirt photo
(or snake, spider, tree, etc.), feel free to blog a pic and leave your
URL in the comments. Or, if you prefer, you can mail your completed
artworks to me -- also note that these instructions work with larger
denominations, too.

* Paper CD Case (GIF; site may be slow, see link below for alternates):
Here's a quick and dirty way (actually, it's not at all dirty -- it's pretty slick) to make a CD case from your standard 8.5" x 11" piece of paper.

It
works with any similarly sized piece of paper -- I'm partial to glossy
magazine pages, myself -- and is great when you need to protect a CD
you just burned or otherwise need to transport.

Some folks have also taken it a step further with a customizeable, printable template that lets you print out the track names, title, cover art, etc.

No picture included, since it's not all that interesting to look at.

Thanks -- Joe