something quite unique happened. Evan Williams (CEO of Obvious, co-creator of Blogger) put Odeo up for sale: Obviously: Looking for Odeo’s new home. He followed up with an interesting piece on his weblog about the lack of a marketplace for websites. It’s a very interesting development - Odeo isn’t a runaway success, but it’s not a failure either. It’s a marginally successful site that could, in the right hands, become a very good if not great site.
The traditional approach to unloading a property like that is to hype it beyond recognition until some big company can be goaded into buying it. But that wouldn’t serve Odeo well at all, and so Williams is charting an alternative path. As Anil Dash implies, that Williams has “Thank you” money is both refreshing to see and, ultimately, good for the web and the future of the industry.
How Matt Haughey Beat Google. I think his first conclusion is the most important one, and furthermore it’s something that a lot of people get wrong, even today. This first conclusion is that Google Answers didn’t have a healthy community to leverage - and getting a good reputation in an active community is a much better incentive for something like question-answering than money.
How to keep blogs from scaring the hell out of people. I guess the question for people trying to sell blog services to companies is whether they’re out to impress their client or actually sell something.
accomplished something quite notable today: he managed to subtly get goatse (SFW) into the New York Times. [via Boing Boing. I may be the last one to post this, but still, worthy of note…]
The Blog Cycle. A fun summary of fights within weblog communities and several normal objections. My favourite is “the technology is boring” - a comment so completely beside the point. Blogs aren’t interesting because of the technology, they’re interesting because of the writing.
Google has created a big stir among the webtelligentsia by releasing a beta of Version 3 of the Google Toolbar. The issue? Google has added an AutoLink feature that, on command, adds links related to certain kinds of information on the page. Many people have noted that AutoLink looks a lot like the Microsoft Smart Tags “feature” that was introduced, and then withdrawn (with some exceptions), in 2001.
At the time I was solidly against Smart Tags. I wrote, “To link or not to link, and to what, is an editorial decision, period. And the decision to do so rests with the people involved in the editorial process, and nowhere else.”
For some reason, though, I’m having trouble getting quite that upset by AutoLink. So the question for me, really, is why that might be. What are the key differences between AutoLink and Smart Tags that make the difference?
First, AutoLink doesn’t “just happen” - a user has to first download and install the Toolbar, and then click on a button to make anything happen. Smart Tags, as I understood them in their original form, would have worked automatically. There might have been a preference to toggle somewhere, but once that was done it would systematically add the links to every page the browser displayed. AutoLinks is not comparable at all in this respect.
Second, I think the web has changed in the intervening 3.5-4 years. As Jason points out very effectively, there are now many client-side modifications that are provided to web pages, from pop-up blockers to word highlighting and features built in to many Firefox extensions. Because a user has to explicitly choose which page for this to act upon, it doesn’t seem very different than these other user-specified modifications.
Third, though related to these, is the argument that Anil Dash makes, that once material gets to one’s personal computer, they are free to “rip, mix, and burn” it as they see fit. Anil draws the loop even tighter - if you complain about AutoLinks on editorial grounds, you are really sharing political ground with the RIAA and MPAA, who would also propose that users have no rights over the information that enters their personal media environment.
I won’t go quite that far, personally, and I still think Smart Tags in a browser is a bad idea - the explicit step required by AutoLink is a big deal for me. I would also prefer it a great deal if Google provided a simple way to designate alternate information providers for their AutoLinks. Overall, though, I think AutoLink is an interesting feature, and that ultimately, there is a free speech link to all of this. Just as the solution for potentially objectionable speech is more speech, not to prevent speech, the solution for users who are concerned by this is to provide more such options, not to foreclose on the first viable option that’s available.
