On Hiatus

I'm going to take a one-year break from this blog to pursue other projects.

New posts should resume in 2020.

- J

Back from the Break

I’ve taken a month off from posting, and now I’m back at it and will resume posting a meditation/rumination about every five days.  

I wish I could say that I’ve built up a backlog of material, or am returning with a fresh sense of purpose – but no, just took some time to put my mind on other things, and it’s going to be as random and unstructured as before.

On Hiatus

I’m taking a month off from posting –it’s been five years and 500 posts, so I’m due for a break.   I’ll resume in January.

Comment Moderation

I've been meditating lately on the topic of comment moderation, chiefly in regard to blogs (though obviously, not this one, as comments are disabled due to its nature), and chiefly, because the notion of comments seems to be of questionable value.

Originally, the value of providing site visitors with the ability to provide feedback was done with the intention of getting bug reports: a link is broken, the graphics don't load, and so on. Site visitors would help the site owner maintain the site, and would also provide some helpful suggestions along the way. I don't sense that's the value of comments anymore. Site owners are expected, and rightly so, to maintain their own content, and since the Web has settled down quite a bit, the problem of outbound links constantly breaking is no longer a major issue (and there are utilities that will automate the task of finding them).

It seems to me that the chief value of comments in social media is giving site visitors the opportunity to contribute to the conversation. A "good " comment suggests a revision to the content of the page that will ultimately improve the quality of a site, or suggests a point of view that the author may not have considered. I'm generally glad to get these comments, though there are still a handful of kooks and trolls in the woodwork who are either amusing themselves or trying to provoke an absurd reaction.

Sadly, the reaction I get when I post such a remark to another site is generally less than grateful. It tends to be along the lines of "how dare you disagree" - or at best "gee, thanks" from someone who doesn't intend to consider what I've attempted to contribute. That could be in the nature of blogs, in which entries are dated and, once a person clicks "post," they feel that their job is over, and that the content will be preserved as written as a historical document, regardless of any errors or omissions. Which is probably the reason I seldom bother, anymore.

The majority of comments I see on blogs are flattery - which say "what a good post you've written," and add nothing at all to the topic. My sense is that people like to get praise as a reward for their work, and consider the praise of others to be a credential for their ideas, which is probably the reason that so many posts have a long queue of hollow praise in which any substantive comment is well buried.

When a company does this, it flows from the same spring, but my sense is that companies are more cautious than people, and people are more critical of companies. A corporate blog that contains only positive comments (and excludes any unflattering remark) seems untrustworthy and disingenuous. I don't think that it's any different when it comes to personal blogs, but we're more forgiving of vanity when it comes to individuals.

In blogs where comments are accepted, I've taken to rejecting comments that contain only hollow praise. There was a brief period of time when it seemed to me that people were posting positive remarks without even having read the blog entry, because they expected that I would be eager to publish praise of myself - and because most blog comments contain a link back to their sites, flattering others can be an effective form of self-promotion.

The problem is that, when you weed out all the spam, there doesn't seem to be very much at all left over. In my "convenience sample" of the comments I've received in the past week, 72% were either outright spam, or "good post" spam. Looking around at the other blogs I follow, including a number of topic-driven blogs, I have the sense that the proportion is much higher - though admittedly, these are only the "approved" comments, after the authors have decided to weed out comments they didn't feel merited posting (though if they consider hollow praise to be worthwhile, I'd have to question whether their judgment is worth considering).

It may be a while before I get around to coming to a firm conclusion on whether this practice is worthwhile - but for now, I'm lumping hollow praise in with the rest of the spam. I expect a few people may feel offended at being ignored, but if they have nothing of value to say, and are just looking to get a link to their site by flattering me, perhaps it's not high-value traffic anyway.

And so, my sense is that I have more thinking to do and more data to collect - and the topic of comment moderation is to be continued ... sometime.

Slow Going

Still working on my reemergence, and it's still going slowly. I've let go of the notion that I need to resurface with a lot of material all at once, and just put things online in bits and pieces and let it grow over time.

And so, I did the same ill-advised thing most people do, even though I know better: I worked on the cosmetics (look-and-feel) while procrastinating on the important things (content). The result: a basic template with a clean, reserved design. Just enough attention to avoid looking sloppy, not so much as to be overbearing and narcissistic. It seems too conservative, too "not enough" - but then, I prefer that to the opposite extreme.

I'm still working, mostly behind-the-scenes, on getting content together. So far, I've come up with three kinds of content I'd feel OK with having online under my own name:

• Pedestrian Studies - My reading notes and research on boring topics like marketing, strategy, operations, management, and such
• WebDev Resources - Various resources for Web development on the LAMP platform, which I did for a decade or so
• PERL Scripts - A fair collection of scripts that I wrote over the years, that I feel I could put online so people can steal and adapt my code (the way I did with other peoples' code when I was learning the ropes)
• Random Crap - The various goofy little self-contained things that I've put together, either for my own amusement or as finger-exercises.

The task of rounding it up, sanding off the rust, and getting it ready to put back online has turned out to be much more than I expected. It may be realistic to predict I could have enough to go online by the end of the month.

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Ventured

It's been a month now, and I don't seem to have made much progress. I've done a lot of thinking and a bit of prep work, but haven't posted anything as yet.

The thinking has been along the lines of "what would I be comfortable putting online under my own name?" That's been tough. I feel pretty safe about the "professional" stuff - notes and research on Web development, marketing, strategy, and the like. But it's all so painfully boring to me. The problem is that the topics that I enjoy, and that draw an audience, are all in the category of "ammunition for the enemy" category, and I figure I will need to

remain anonymous in order to be myself in those regards. How ironic is that?

The prep work has been along the lines of sorting through (literally) thousands of files containing information I have online in other places, or took offline at some point, or never put online in the first place. There's an awful lot of it, and much of it is old - and I tend to be fussy. I look at something I wrote last week and felt pretty good about, and suddenly think it needs more "work" before it's ready to be put online. Nothing ever seems quite good enough. Another bit of irony is how people who half-know me see me as a "Type B" personality.

Eventually, I'll either beat things into good enough shape to be put online, or I'll loosen up a bit and just do it.

Recalled to Life

My goal for 2010 is to resurface on the Internet, which includes reopening my personal site, getting hooked into social networks, and starting a blog. As you might have guessed, this is my attempt at #3, and as the absence of content implies, it's slow going.

I've been active on the Internet since 1993, though you'd probably never know it, as I went underground about five years later. I've operated several Web sites, contributed to discussion groups, joined and participated in communities and discussion groups ... all anonymously. I probably have half a dozen active pseudonyms, and a lot of others that have gone quiet.

"Why the masquerade?" you might ask.

The answer is simple: if you put yourself out there, speak from the heart, and let your "real" self be known, you're going to get raped. And it's not just dealing with the occasional stranger with nothing to do and a burning need to treat another person like a doormat - that's easy enough to tolerate and deal with, as those people don't matter. The worst is when people you know and trust do it to you. Your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, and even members of your family will grab some snippet of what you said somewhere, possibly in a casual and candid moment, and use it to beat you down.

And what with companies sticking their noses under the tent, it can be used to beat you down in a more direct way, to threaten your financial future and the income on which your family depends in order to manipulate and control you, even when you think you're off the clock. I realize this all sounds very "big brother" - but we all know someone who's been called on the carpet, possibly even handed their hat, over something trivial.

And so, for over ten years now, "Jim Shamlin" has been a ghost and a shadow in the online community. Maybe it's stupid of me, at this point, to think that it's worth going back to the water. Time will tell. But it also means that the process of resurfacing is going to be slow, the content limited, and my steps cautious.