The coming war against microspam

Off the cuff:

as microformats diffuse throughout the web, malevolent uses will inevitably rise.

if you imagine that microformats allow you to use the web as a database or as a file store, you can begin to see the parallels to the malware, spyware and viruses that have wreaked havoc upon every operating system and storage device that there ever has been.

thus it will become important, perhaps at some later juncture, to consider the importance of fighting microspam in the microformatted ecosystem.

i don’t know how, i don’t know what that fight will necessarily look like, but i do know that it’s coming and that we ought be ready when it comes.

to this day, humans have not irradicated the common cold. nor is it likely that they’ll prevent or end the onslaught of a contagion like spam. thus as with the great potential that the lowercase semantic web brings, it is also our responsibility and charge to begin to think about how we might prevent its abuse.

Reminiscing about Nintendo and Sega

Mario vs Sonic by Michael Dale

Watching Google and Yahoo! compete is like watching Sega and Nintendo back in the day when it was SegaCD vs Super Nintendo (wow, now I get to date myself with “obscure” references to old skool technology!). Oh yeah, and meanwhile Microsoft is pricing itself out of the market, just like NeoGeo did.

With Google’s more staid bundle of desktop-cum-web applications being the talk of the town, Yahoo!, (represented by upstarts Flickr and Upcoming) not wanting to be upstaged, has launched its own cross-application barrage of new features.

It’s funny, because I use many of Google’s services but I actually like Yahoo! better. I mean, maybe it’s because they actually come to my events or because I’m friends with many of their WebTwenny staff or because if I were reincarnated as a web app, I’d want to be Flickr… I dunno.

It’s like I used to have a SegaCD but I still always played my Nintendo because it felt like it had a heart. It was about more than just the game. It was subjective for sure, but you can’t really rationally argue against intuition.

Maybe that’s the key to Robert’s question… and my criticism. Google has a ton of blogs and newsgroups, but I just don’t connect with them the way I do with the blogs, services or people of Flickr and Upcoming… I mean, I know there is, but it just makes me wonder, “Gee Tinman, is there really a heart in there?“

Bad Behavior Misbehavin’?

A couple weeks back I installed Michael Hampton’s for WordPress. Seemed to have a attracted a lot of positive comments while I’ve been drowning in spam, so I figured, what they heck.

Well, it turns out that this is a pretty heavy duty solution that can bring some unintended consequences.

For one thing, forget about going directly to your WordPress blog from your Gmail account. Bad Behavior blocks the Google proxy.

And, as Tom Raftery and I discovered, forget about showing up on TechMeme.

Though you can edit BB’s whitelist.inc.php file to ignore TechMeme’s IPs (70.86.131.10, 70.86.46.66, and 82.165.180.34), Tom hasn’t seen any success yet.

With Akismet’s recent nap, I’m going to leave BB running for awhile longer with the IPs whitelisted and see what happens. Unlike Tom, I’m not that concerned about getting on TechMeme, but it is kind of a bummer that we haven’t found a simple and reliable solution yet.

The yin-yang of FOO and Bar

Tantek and Chris -- photo by Tara Hunt

Much has been made of the supposed sibling rivalry between FOO and Bar, owing to BarCamp’s origins last year as “an open alternative to FOO“.

What I think often goes missing from the story is that the original BarCamp was planned, organized and executed by a small scrappy group of upstarts, only one of whom had previously been to FOO Camp (and who ended up being invited back last year anyway). It wasn’t anti-FOO, it was just different — with different goals and a different raison d’etre.

In fact, I’ve personally reached out to the O’Reilly folks on a number of occasions to try to coordinate our events better and to even ask for favors. On the whole, they’ve been as gracious as anyone with as much going on as they’ve got and personally see no reason to chide them for focusing on their own business interests.

And I think Dave Weinberger‘s post is therefore useful in that he recognizes the value of socially engineered social networking while acknowledging the benefit of the “unbarred” model:

There’s value to an invitation-only party, but it’s not the only sort of party we need. That’s why I’m so happy that the original FOO Camp spurred the invention of unbarred BAR camps that are structured like FOO but are open to anyone. There’s a place for both.

Those who appreciate and have a sense for this duality — of there being both privilege in being invited to anything exclusive and those who, at the same time, can question what they have to offer and why they made the cut — get why both FOO and Bar can and in fact, should, co-exist. At FOO Camp, someone else invites you and you wonder why; at BarCamp, you invite yourself and over the course of a weekend prove why you did.

What I think Tim is still missing out on, however, is that the is very at odds with the competitive angst and jealousy that spurs events like (no offense Robot Robert, but why define your event by what it’s not? i.e. BarCamp isn’t an “unconference” — it’s an “ad hoc gathering” as it says on our homepage). And, Tim, I’d humbly suggest that you consider your own advice:

Stop worrying about what Winer thinks.

The way I see it, a year out, FOO and Bar represent the very yin and yang balance of openness and proprietariness that the open source community and its offshoot industries have struggled with since their inception (which has also been well documented in Markoff’s Doormouse). While one does not need the other to exist, that they both exist, espouse different organizing and ownership models and appeal to different people on different merits is what’s important. This is the reality and benefit of creating non-zero-sum economy where network effects and community rule the day. It’s not one other other, it’s both for one another.

BarCampEarth starts tomorrow!

BarCampEarth tshirt v2

So it is upon us… in a very short amount of time, BarCampEarth will commence, with simultaneous events happening around the world (with many more coming in September!). Taking part this weekend:

Whoa how far and wide our community has grown in a year. Believe it or not, I have a draft saved in my blog from August 24, 2005 titled “Bar Camp Worldwide”. I got as far as linking to an image and writing this line:

So it’s been suggested that Bar Camp spread outside of Palo Alto. In fact, it’s been suggested that it spread far and wide, from the West to the East to across the pond.

How prescient is that?

And now we even have a theme song (thanks Derek!).

Well there you have it. Forty some-odd camps later and it’s come full circle.

So if you happen to be in the Bay Area, you know where you’ll be this weekend:

BarCampStanford

Todd Davies has put together a tremendous time, starting off with a BBQ today at 6pm. I expect to see you there!

P.S. Shirts will be for sale soon soon! Thanks Miles!

Trying out Contribute

So I thought I’d give Contribute 4 a testdrive. Believe it or not, you edit live, in the page — like directly where your blog post is going to end up. Rich formatting works, the whole nine yards.

I’m not sure what I think about this, though, since this is a very Dreamweaver-like model of the web… where everything has a URL and doesn’t end up scattered around the web as RSS.

Still, a fascinating take on website design, composition and blogging!

Coworking at the Hat Factory

The Hat Factory

Teh Space has a new website a new name: , owing to the building’s heritage as …well… a hat factory.

Still located at 801 Minnesota, it’s also pulled in some new anchors to flesh out the regular crew and replace Tara and me as outgoing an anchor while also starting to charge a very reasonable $10/day for Day Trippers.

As for , well, it’ll likely resurface somewhere else in the city sooner or later. Essentially after the conclusion of our four month experiment, we’re looking for a nesting ground for that has additional facilities, like a conference room and whiteboards, is somewhere downtown (South Park) and that also isn’t imposing on someone’s home. We’re excited that there’ll ultimately be more than one space in the city for folks to choose from depending on their needs.

As we’re seeing increasing pick up in other areas like Boston, Paris, New York and elsewhere, the outlet for the modern mobile independent is good.

Converting SEC Edgar Filings into hCard

Joe Pezzillo of pinged me that he’s shipping a new version of his web mining tool called that can convert SEC Edgar Filings into the hCard microformat:

So, introducing SEC Form 4 Info to hCard Format, a new ready-to-run solution included with Anthracite. It’s a set of three Anthracite documents and an Automator workflow to tie it all together. The latest form info is scraped from the SEC, a particular filing type is extracted, and then all those filings are harvested for contact information which is then converted to the hCard microformat. You can use Technorati to convert these hCard pages into Apple AddressBook .vcf files, I’ve seen it work with my own eyes! It’s pretty slick, if I may say so, and I know that many customers (and soon-to-be-customers) are going to like this, too.

Oh, and I never thought I’d be in the position to say this, but, a note to potential would-be review requesters (I’ve only had two to date): adding support for either or in your product greatly increases the chance that I’ll blog about you! Huzzah! (Of course, having a good product helps a great deal as well).