Orcmid's Lair |
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2004-05-14Blogger Reloaded: Whose Blog Is It?This note is inspired by the high barrier that anderbill had to overcome to be able to comment on one of my posts. [Editorial disclosure: I was left so honored by what Bill said to me in an e-mail that I invited him to post it. I am even more honored that he went through the pain of doing that.] It may be that Bill's experience is a breakdown in the user interface for first-time commenters, I can't be sure yet. This blog entry is where I will check that out. Meanwhile, I do suspect that we are seeing a case of agenda shear (my term for it, coined just now), something that I have been attentive to since reading great examples in Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear. The agenda shear that I sense here is also related to who thinks they own my blog (whether or not justified by it being provided as a free service). The scrutiny is further merited by virtue of the recent bravado around Blogger Reloaded being the result of an user-experience-centric design effort. Looked at another (more-cynical) way, it could simply be encouraging sign-ups without concern for churn and retention. I can easily imagine the meeting around a conference table when it was said that authoring and comment simplicity can be handled later, first we need the registrations. That's enough for this note, but I do want to suggest the dimensions of the analysis: 1. Whether it is possible to (find out how to) comment easily, in which case I will feel like the guy who spent $5,000 to cure his halitosis only to learn no one liked him anyhow, or if the unspoken Blogger agenda is to induce people to register for Blogger sites, and make that effortless at all other costs. 2. Whether I can keep blogger from possessing my blog forever. I am nearing my 2,600th post, and it seems that I can't stop them from archiving all of it on their server even when I want it frozen. My concern is that a misadventure could lead to my entire blog being corrupted on the server where I host it, since Blogger has write-access to the entire orcmid/blog directory. I am struggling to not edit blog items (partly because my feed sends complete entries, in response to complaints about summarized feeds) and because it is apparently considered bad manners (a topic to be explored further elsewhere). So this is one that I will expand, if at all, by self-commenting and more attention to cross-linking.
Comments:
It's me orcmid, really. OK, my Blogger site option to allow anonymous comments is working. The thing about it, of course, is that I am not allowed to say who I am or provide anything else (click remember-me, provide links to my own wonderful weblog and photos of the wife and kids, etcetera, etcetera). So there is a way to comment by a single diminutive link-through from the page that comes up when you elect to make a comment. This is, of course, too anonymous except for those people strongly bought-into conspiracy theories and notions that the Department of Homeland Security (DoHC among the cognizant, not to be confused with the illuminati) really cares what blather they post somewhere.
Bill was right. The Blogger comment facility is crap (my interpretation). The only way not to be anonymous in making a comment is to be a Blogger user. You can't just register as a visitor, as I do on many other blogs. Instead, you must create a Blogger weblog to be able to comment using some sort of identified persona with a record on the Blogger site. I guess it accomplishes track back of a sort too, since it assumes the bloggiverse and BlogSpace are co-extensive and so of course we Blogger-droids only want to communicate with other Blogger-droids. Rooty, toot, toot. And yippy skippy too.
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OK, I can come up with all sorts of interpretations of how this came to be that way. Or simply chalk it up to incompetence rather than manipulation, malice, and life too long in an echo chamber. All of the above?
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