Tim Hardy

Ross Mayfield reflects:

What was unique about social software and it’s design principles was how it didn’t emphasize tools, but practice and an understanding of social context. Too much of Web 2.0 is not just made of white people, but an alphabet soup of supporting technologies that mean nothing without communities, networks and even real business models. As the market we helped found continues to froth, commentary on new business models based on power laws matters even more.

Joel Spolsky is more succinct:

When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.

I want to believe I’m immune to advertising. I distrust it. When it’s clever, I distrust it even more.

An advert for a product I might buy triggers me to put on my tin-foil hat. The voiceover man is a liar. The headline is untrue. They’re trying to steal your money. Don’t even trust the smallprint.

But when the product is not something I might buy the advertising message slips into my unconscious unchecked and unnoticed.

Years later, when I’m finally in a position where I need something like a washing machine, I have a set of prejudices formed and honed by all the adverts I’ve seen without noticing. I think I know something about the product. Overwhelmed by choice, I fall back into the refuge of illusory knowledge. I choose something that seems familiar even though the source of my information about it is utterly unreliable.

Rackspace have high-profile advertisements every month in Linux Format. Their services are overkill for my needs so I’ve never considered them as a host for my own personal webspace. But when asked to find a hosting company for a friend’s business, guess which was the first company I called? I had skimmed over their adverts without reacting for twelve months but when I needed a product of their calibre I discovered part of me had been paying attention.

Advertising on the web behaves differently with its expectation of an instant clickthrough. Online adverts are used more like a point-of-sale displays near a shop checkout, inviting an impulse buy. Surfers must buy now before they get away.

Because of this advertisers are obsessed with clickthrough rates and the possibility that these can be spiked. These anxieties give rise to a market exploited by companies like BlowSearch that claim to beat click fraud.

This model is fundamentally flawed. It ignores the cumulative effect of thousands of unclicked adverts on future purchases. It’s too crude and gives rise to irritating flashing banners and other short-sighted attention grabbing schemes that make people install ad blocking software because nobody can concentrate on what they’re reading when someone is shouting BUY MY STUFF NOW! at them.

This insistence on instant purchase reflects a fundamental lack of faith in the persistence of the web. It’s an anxiety that surfers may never revisit this page and see this billboard again so their custom must be won now and in this instant or be lost forever.

I do most of my browsing via RSS because I’m sick of the way adverts clog up the sites I want to read. Now adverts are coming to RSS. You can’t escape them. Popularity is expensive and revenue must be found to pay the bandwidth bills.

So until someone finds an alternative way of funding websites, I hope at least advertisers will learn to relax a little, stop worrying about clickthrough and stop shouting. The web’s not going away. It’s part of our world now, for better or worse, like television or radio.

Subtle adverts will win customers in the long term without alienating them in the present.

Michael Hampton, producer of the Bad Behaviour anti-spam plug-in for Wordpress has posted a convincing attack on the rel=”no follow” code proposed by google and implemented by MovableType, WordPress, Blogger, Flickr, and Slashdot.

This code gets added to any links left in comments on a site and is an instruction to search engines to ignore the link.

The supposed benefit? It stops link spammers from gaining google ranking from your site. The major side-effect? It breaks the structure of comments and links back-and-forth with which weblogs maintain their position in search rankings.

The post effectively dismantles any claims about the effects of rel=”no follow” on link spammers, showing how in fact it is likely to lead to an increase in spamming attempts. Its only effect will be to make blogs drop lower in search results.

If I’m looking for information I’d rather read a post written by an interested individual who has taken time to research it for themselves than a press release reprinted verbatim by a lazy hack or marketing copy that deceives to sell. People who complain about “blognoise” in search results are misguided. If you keep find irrelevent blog posts about someone’s new diet when you’re looking for something else, then learn how to use a search engine. Taking blogs out of google won’t make poorly constructed attempts to search the internet any more precise.

There’s a nonofollow plugin for Wordpress that removes rel=”no follow” from comments after a configurable number of days, allowing you to reward your true readers with a splash of googlejuice but giving you time to dump freeloading Texas Hold-em and his Viagra-toting buddies.

There are better ways to stop spammers. Michael is working on a real-time DNS-based blacklist to monitor the open proxies used to hammer websites with link spam so you can block any comments, pings or trackbacks sent via these anonymising machines. A Wordpress plug-in is now available.

Look at the source of this image and you’ll see that there is no image. The picture on your screen is created by a data:URL that holds encoded instructions for how to create it.

(Microsoft in their wisdom built a browser that plays fast and loose with web standards and never bothered to implement rfc 2397. If you’re looking at this in Internet Explorer it won’t work. Try using a better browser).

This little hack has no particularly use in standard webdesign but it can be very useful when writing greasemonkey user scripts.

(And, no, greasemonkey doesn’t work in Explorer either. What are you waiting for? Get Firefox.)