Links for 2007-09-03
- Joel Spolsky talks about the lack of value that anonymous comments (or maybe comments in general) offer the blogger Allowing people to post without registering has been considered insane for online communities for a decade at least, and I've argued that comments are unnecessary because people can post on their own sites. But I'm not sure I'd go as far as Joel...
- Post one: A protest that the state of the art in tagging hasn't progressed enormously in the last four years. Now here's a confession. I spent quite a lot of last year working around tags and I'm just a bit unsure how much of it I can talk about. It's all very aggravating. The project didn't launch.
- Michael Cross talks about the problems getting the Ordnance Survey to open up its data for public use The Ordnance Survey has a great opportunity to support creative work around geo as well as new business opportunities by more liberal terms for opening up its data, but chooses not to explore them. It is aggravating.
- Bob Truby's Brand Name Pencils is a strange but fascinating little site full of information and pictures of practically antique pencils Fascinating in and of itself, but also a sample book of fascinating design approaches. You could do a lot worse than choose a few of these colours schemes and type choices for your blog's look and feel.
- I have a freaky name doppelgänger in the US asking very sensible questions on YouTube Hearing other people say, "Hello my name is Tom Coates" who aren't, you know, me... Strange.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
You want to try being Phil Edwards... (17 of the first 100 are in fact me, which is better than I was expecting).
→ Posted by: Phil at September 3, 2007 9:30 AM
Re: Comments on blogs.
Perhaps there is a tipping point at play here, I'm perfectly happy with the quality of comments on my blog but I'm 'small fish' in this large ocean.
→ Posted by: snowgoon.myopenid.com at September 3, 2007 10:39 AM
Openstreetmap.org is trying to get around Ordance Survery with community generated maps. It's growing fast, and you don't even need a GPS device to help anymore, you can trace the streets from license free aerial photography, so everyone go and help now!
→ Posted by: ts0.com at September 3, 2007 11:17 AM
I agree that anonymous comments can be of limited, or at least highly-variable value, but high traffic sites complaining about the oh-so-terrible problems of high traffic sites is a bit unseemly.
"Woe is me! I get so many anonymous comments! And I have too much PageRank! And my advertising revenue is so high! What will I spend it on? Wah!"
And anyone who has seen a "diamond in the rough" anonymous coward posting on Slashdot should know that anonymous communications allow insiders to speak freely (in just the way that you can't about tagging).
I like that your site allows multiple methods of signing in, but while I'm still on the other side of the fame-o-graph, I'm going to allow them. I need all the traffic I can get.
→ Posted by: Jemaleddin at September 3, 2007 2:43 PM