Nerd Attention Damage

Asides, , ,

I would like to award the prize for the Most Damage Inflicted to the Geek/Nerd World in the Past 5 Years to Michael Lopp, author of the seminal Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder in 2003. No article more effectively romanticized an inability to do one thing at a time, and do it well. On the bright side, Digg and Bloglines should probably give him stock. Need an antidote? Spend 10 minutes collecting everything you need to work on a problem, and unplug the internet for 2 hours. You’ll finish in 30 minutes.

Browser Stats

Uncategorized

I’m at An Event Apart in Chicago and Eric Meyer just said that browser statistics were “worse than useless.” More specifically, the only browser share numbers that matter are the one for sites you run, not what the web at large uses. Here’s our browser breakdown from 115 million visits to WordPress.com:

  1. 62.46% – Internet Explorer, sub-breakdown by popular request
    1. 64.10% – Version 6.0
    2. 35.17% – Version 7.0
    3. 0.28% – Version 5.5
  2. 30.74% – Firefox
  3. 3.83% – Safari
  4. 1.78% – Opera
  5. 0.52% – Mozilla

Just for fun, the operating system breakdown:

  1. 90.36% – Windows
  2. 6.73% – Macintosh
  3. 2.19% – Linux
  4. 0.03% – PlayStation Portable

Grey Followup

Uncategorized

On the bright side, last week’s hatchet job in Techcrunch generated some great blog posts. For whatever reason they don’t show up as links on Techcrunch’s page, but here’s some of the better ones:

To summarize some of my responses:

  • I have no problem with people making money from Open Source, in fact I think some of the most successful OS projects have profit motives aligned with user motives.
  • Related: I have no problem with Pligg being sold. I think it’s better than them selling links in the software.
  • It is possible to make money while giving your users something they want and provides value rather than something they never asked for. (Think of selling a hosted version vs. selling paid links meant to spam search engines.)
  • The fact that I made a similar mistake in the past gives me unique perspective into both sides of the issue.
  • The developer blogroll links in WordPress are nothing like the links being bought and sold for the intention of spamming search engines, but regardless they have been replaced with links to WordPress resources instead of individual contributors.
  • Duncan said “Money is money, no matter how you make it.” I could not disagree more.
  • While anyone can do almost anything with WordPress under its license, that doesn’t mean we have an obligation to promote folks who we feel are doing so in a way which is not ethical or in the best long-term interests of the community.

Turkey Update

Censorship,

The folks responsible for blocking WordPress.com in Turkey have issued a press release, here’s some snippets.

As it is known by public, the entry of the publications to Turkey of the blog service named “woldpress.com” that gives the opportunity of opening free site to internet users is interrupted with the judgement. This judgement is applied on 17.8.2007 and thus the entery of worldpress.com service and the publications of all sub-sites which takes service from this service to Turkey is interrupted.

aI wish they had blocked worldpress.com instead. They seem proud that they blocked all the sites instead of just the ones that they consider illegal under Turkish law.

The reason of this suspention, is that the limitlessly enable to illegal publications of the mentioned blog service, not taking to notice about the suspention of the applications and ignoring the judgements that are given by the Turkish courts related to the suspention of known sub-sites. The free and uncontrolled opportunities provided by the mentioned service are directed baleful people to this service and in a short time wordpress.com is returned to the voice and publication center of separatist-disastrous ideologies, private hostilities, illegal targets.

As far as I know, we never received any notice from Turkish courts about anything, only barely coherent threats and bully-attempts written much like the above.

Thus before ABOUT 17 TÄ°MES we have appealed to the mentioned site administration for the suspention of the unlawful publications , but the site administration did not take any caution about these publications.(one of our applications is published in their sites) Thereon about our applications RELATED WITH THE SUB SITES THAT ABUSE OUR CLIENT’S PERSONAL RIGHTS the Turkish courts have given numerous judgements for the closing of the illegal sub-sites which are broadcasting under WordPress. These judgements are delivered to the center of the mentioned firm in USA and to the agency in Turkey, this time the suspention of the illegal publications according to the judgements of the Turkish courts is asked. BUT, IN SPITE OF THE ALL WRITTEN AND ORAL APPLICATIONS, THE MENTIONED FIRM AND ITS AGENCIES ARE NOT AFFILIATE OUR REQUIREMENTS AND THE JUDGEMENTS OF THE TURKISH COURTS AND THEY INSISTED ON APPLYING.

Just to clarify when they said they contacted us 17 times, that means that they would blast the same email to multiple address and when they didn’t get the reply they wanted they sent the same message over and over again.

In addition to some blogs they complained about, their main request was that we block the name of their client being used by any blog hosted by our site, much like you can’t write “democracy” on blogs hosted by MSN Spaces in China. I’m going to skip some bits to the threat at the end:

There is a lesson which all blog services and internet service providers should take from this judgement. Blog services, especially the ones that give free service, should be careful about the sites that are illegally active through their firms. These services should not remain insensitive to the complints that they receive and especially to the judgements. It is certain that the services which behave opppositely will meet with the same enforcement that WordPress met.

So if you don’t disallow certain words being used on your blogs, you’ll be punitively punished through our state-controlled ISP. Today those words are “Adnan Oktar.” Who knows what they’ll be tomorrow.