Not So Relevant

by somethingcommon

I will keep this short: For the time being, this will be the last post on Not So Relevant. There are various reasons for stopping this blog. Over the last couple of weeks I tried to write them down several times but it did sound stupid each time.

So thanks a lot for stopping by, reading the articles - maybe you even found some useful information -, and some of you were even adventurous enough to subscribe to the feed. Much appreciated! The domain is paid for the next four years already, if I remember correctly, so the articles will still be up on the net for quite some time.

Bye.

P.S. Spread OpenID needs a new editor!

Everyone loves social media services and everyone loves data portability. Or at least, it seems so. My feed reader is chock full of articles on those topics (well, that simply means I read the wrong blogs or at least I have a very narrow view on what’s going on in technology these days, right?). The latest darlings of the early adopters and social media evangelists are FriendFeed and Disqus.

Fragmented Comments

If you don’t know already, FriendFeed is not only a lifestreaming service but users can comment on friends’ blog posts, Flickr photos, and other shared items in their lifestream. There is also a WordPress plugin available which shows comments from FriendFeed to the related posts on your blog. Disqus is a blog commenting system which aggregates all comments made by one user in a single place. While blog owners can run Disqus on their own blogs, comments are not part of the blog system, e.g. WordPress or Movable Type, anymore. So both systems allow people to comment on blog articles while the discussion doesn’t necessarily has to take place on the respected blogs.

So essentially comments can be spread over various and often disparate networks and services. Blog posts can be digged, stumbled upon, and mixxed. Other blog authors can send pingbacks and trackbacks and all those systems offer the opportunity to leave comments. If this happens to you as a blog author you have problems keeping track of the discussion which originated from your blog.

Who Owns the Comments?

So how does this relate to data portability? Well, over the last few days a discussion has emerged about who actually owns comments. If you comment on my blog, do I own the comment or do you own it? It’s my blog, but your ideas, thoughts, and words. Currently I am free to edit or even delete comments. And if I decide to delete an article all comments made on the article will be deleted as well. And if I discontinue the blog all comments will also disappear.

So are FriendFeed, Disqus and similar services a solution to preserve comments? Should they be portable from my blog to any system and service that can make use of them? My first thought was “Sure, I write the comment, I own it”. I still think it should be that way but does it make sense? Are comments worth anything if the original post is deleted? Hardly. Who could ever understand what you were referring to? Also if every commenter could edit or delete their comments at will (because they own them) conversations could become pointless. Commenter B refers to commenter A, but later commenter A deletes their comment. Bye, bye discussion.

While I am an advocate of data portability, the question of ownership of comments shows that not everything we wish and hope for will really work in reality. I really like FriendFeed a lot (more than I initially thought I would) and haven’t made a final decison on Disqus yet. Also I don’t have any problems if comments appear on various services but I don’t think it makes sense that comments are owned by commenters.

What’s your stance on this? Do you know any other scenarios where data portability doesn’t make sense?

Eventually I updated my WordPress installation over the weekend. I am always hesitant updating it because I usually do something stupid and it ends in a mess. Yeah right, I’m an expert in technology. But it was about time for the update. I was still running version 2.1.2 and the growing number of reports about WordPress blogs being hacked made me quite nervous, to say the least. However, in the end updating was a breeze.

People visiting the blog will notice a new theme (the old one is not compatible with WordPress 2.5.1). It’s very clean and the sidebar is clearly separated from the content. I made some minor changes to it like adding xFolk, hAtom, and hCard microformats to the loop and changing colors of headings and links. It’s also possible to comment with OpenID now. So if you have one, use it please. OpenID comments are whitelisted - until spammers use it, of course.

Unfortunately special characters like German umlauts got messed up but I only corrected them on the last few articles. If you notice any other glitches, please report them. Thanks!

Since last week there is one less excellent German tech blog to read: Martin Weigert of zweinull.cc is writing for netzwertig.com now and is quitting his own blog. zweinull.cc was one of the very few serious tech blogs in this country which was started only 14 months ago and quickly gained popularity and acceptance among the more tech savvy crowd. It’s probably fair to describe it as a German Read/Write Web, i.e. tech news without copying press releases and a healthy dose of opinion. It was certainly a must read blog and will be missed.

Some people might argue that Martin is writing for another blog - netzwertig.com - now and nothing will change. That’s good, isn’t it? Well, I am not sure. netzwertig.com just launched one month ago. It belongs to Swiss blog network Blogwerk and is run by Andreas Göldi, Marcel Weiß, and Markus Spath. The three guys are well-known in the German speaking blogosphere because of their own blogs. They are certainly three respected voices. Andreas Göldi ran Beobachtungen zur Medienkonvergenz, writing about the convergence of media and (internet) technology. His blog was also part of Blogwerk. Marcel Weiß is still running neunetz.com, a blog similar to zweinull.de but with stronger opinion. While the aforementioned guys are probably fairly unknown to readers abroad, Markus Spath should also be known in the English speaking blogosphere. Besides running his own blogs live.hackr and Museum of Modern Betas, he was also writing for the German edition of Blognation.

Now Martin is joining them and suddenly netzwertig.com is THE tech blog here. While some smaller blogs cover similar topics - Thomas Frütel’s Webmaster Blog comes to mind - there is no real competition to it anymore. Marcel has reduced his posting frequence on neunetz.com already and Markus’ blogs are focused slightly different. Don’t get me wrong (it’s my week of negativity anyway), I like netzwertig.com a lot so far but I am wondering if it’s really healthy for the blogosphere here. It will be more difficult for smaller blogs to gain similar acceptance because netzwertig.com has all the attention and admittedly the competence.