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:
PLEASE DON'T COMMENT HERE. If you go to the trouble of becoming one of those elite folk (e.g., a Google-droid) who chooses to work throught the comment procedure, do not comment on this entry. This is the one that I didn't know was posted, as the result of failure-mode behavior. There is one with a later time stamp that should be used. I'd point you at it but I don't know how to get off the comment page and find links without losing my work (!?). [Geek moment: Ahh, Internet Explorer has a File | New | Window menu selection. Relief. Of course, I am doing all the markup here by hand because the Post a Comment window doesn't re-use the blog editor (making lots of notes on what not to do whenever I do anything like this.]
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