on the rise of trollblogs

I don’t know Robert Scoble at all, other than meeting him and drooling over his tablet PC at Gnomedex a couple of years ago, but I read his blog pretty faithfully, even though he works for the Borg. He’s a smart, insightful guy, and I read him for the same reason I read Seth Godin and Bruce Schneier: when I’m done with their blogs, I always feel smarter and more enlightened. These guys make me want to have a deeper understanding of the issues that affect all of us who make our livings on the Internets.

Over the weekend, Robert wrote a post about unsubscribing from memeorandum that really resonated with me. In his words:

Reading Dave Winer this morning
made me realize I’m just falling down a dark hole. It’s the same hole I
was in in the 1990s when I posted about 100,000 items on various
newsgroups: in a group the writer is in control, not the reader.

I miss my RSS reading. Reading RSS makes me smarter, not snarkier.
Why? Cause I choose who I’m going to read. Pick smart people to read
and you’ll get smarter.

Hint, the smartest people in my RSS are usually the least snarky. Why? Cause they could give a f**k about all the traffic.

Why is all the snark going on? Cause everyone wants traffic. Why did
I call this the John Dvorakification? Cause he figured out in the 1980s
(yes, he’s been at this so long) that if you attack a community
(particularly the Apple one) that everyone will get all up in arms and
will start talking about the attack. That translates into traffic.
Traffic = advertising dollars.

Trolling online is nothing new, but trolling to drive traffic to your blog and make money is definitely on the rise. I first noticed this new trend a few months ago when this guy obsessively attacked blogging.la for weeks, with copious links back to his own blog, where he did little more than bitch about what other people were doing. I’m sure it was a coincidence that the people he was complaining about all happened to be high-traffic blogs, right? I’ve also noticed a disturbing increase in blogs which try very hard to be sarcastic and acerbic, but just end up being cruel and mean . . . and of course draw a lot of links from the widely-read bloggers they target.

So why do these people do this? In a comment on Scoble’s blog, reader billg said:

Ah, Grasshopper, you have learned the secret of Talk Radio. If you
make half your audience Mad As Hell while the other half wear a
self-congratulatory Ego-Boosting Smirk, then they’ll all tune in
tomorrow.

An awful lot of blogs — especially political blogs — draw traffic
this way. Their comment sections have all the attributes of a bar
fight. Maybe we ought to christen them “Talks Blogs”.

Bloggers should never censor their opinions because they may be controversial; the whole point of this medium is that we all have the ability to express ourselves on a relatively equal footing, and we can learn a lot from each other when we disagree about things. But bloggers who stir up controversy where there is none, or intentionally attack other bloggers for the sake of generating traffic to their blog are just like UseNet trolls and should be plonked accordingly.

Scoble includes a few examples of people who make him feel smarter when he’s done with thier blogs. I just cleaned out my bloglines subs, and I’d like to add a few new blogs. If you’d like to share a blogger who makes you feel smarter (not just someone you always agree with, or who you find entertaining, or who you want everyone to read just because. Try to be honest, please – they challenge you and make you feel smarter) when you’re done reading, please leave it in the comments.

a few thoughts on the oscars

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Quick thoughts after the Oscars:

Best. Opening. EVAR.

I loved Jon Stewart, even if most of the audience didn’t until halfway through. This crowd takes itself very seriously, and they tend to sit on their hands for the new guy. Lighten up, jerks! It’s a party!

I can’t comment on the winners, because I didn’t see many of the films. I don’t know if anyone got robbed, or if there were any Marissa Tomei moments. As far as I can tell, the winners deserved it, but I also know that it’s really about being nominated.

I fucking hated it that they kept cutting winners short when they tried to give speeches, so they could do yet another stupid montage about how great movies are. Yeah, we know movies are great. If we didn’t think movies were great, we wouldn’t be watching. Most of these people get this chance once in their lives; give them the respect they’ve earned and more than 40 seconds to enjoy and share it, jerks. (That’s a different group of jerks than the jerks I was referring to in my first paragraph. You know who you are . . . jerks.)

On the subject of montages: putting The Day After Tomorrow in with movies like All the President’s Men, Network, and Schindler’s List? Are you serious? I hope someone got seriously laid, like eleven times, for including that. Otherwise, what the hell?

I am so glad that they didn’t go out into the theatre like they did last year.

I loved this thing that George Clooney said when he accepted his Oscar:

"And finally, I would say that, you know, we are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it’s probably a good thing. We’re the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn’t really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects. This Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters. I’m proud to be a part of this Academy. Proud to be part of this community, and proud to be out of touch."

I, too, am proud to be out of touch.

The anti-DVD crap was really stupid. I’ll be sure to watch movies in theatres when people shut the hell up in them, and it doesn’t cost me twenty-five bucks before I’m even in my seat. And don’t even get me started on how shitty most movies are, man.

I really liked the interstitial stuff they did for each category.

Ben Stiller nearly stole the show; it’s a draw between him and Meryl Streep and Lilly Tomlin’s brilliant tribute to Altman.

Altman made me really happy, I’d love to work with him someday, because even if the final project isn’t perfect, I get the sense that you learn a lot and have a lot of fun when you work with him.

I was really bummed that Ang Lee didn’t thank or acknowledge his actors.

I didn’t know that Paul Haggis is a Scientologist. What a damn shame. Oh well, Crash is still a great movie. And as long as we’re talking about spaceship cultists, Tom Cruise is still the most overrated actor in history. In fact, I chalk up War of the Worlds‘ magnificent .000 batting average to his being in that film. Couch-jumping, Katie-Holmes-ruining, shoulda-stopped-at-Risky-Business and you’re not fooling me with Born of the Fourth of July hack.

I loved the campaign ads. Does anyone know if Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert wrote them?

Jessica Alba needs to eat about fifteen sammiches. Come on, girl. I know you’ve still got some Nancy Callahan in you.

Jennifer Garner was teh hot. Even when she’s slipping on her dress, she manages to look amazing.

I loved it that the Wallace and Grommit guys brought little ties for Oscar, and the March of the Penguin guys brought stuffed emperor penguins.

The performance of "It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp" is probably my favorite moment in Oscar history, and I agree with Cinematical’s Martha Fischer who said, "Nothing, ever, will top a
giant marquee in front of an auditorium of rich, white people that reads "IT’S HARD OUT HERE FOR A PIMP." (As
Kim said, "Have there ever been that many black people at the Oscars at one time?")" The only thing which topped that performance was the acceptance speech, from the highest bunch of guys I’ve ever seen on television, including the Cheech & Chong marathon a few years ago.

ABC cutting off the acceptance speech from the producers of Crash, the Best Picture Of The Year, is absolutely un-fucking-forgivable, and completely classless, tacky, and horrible. What are they doing? Making sure Jimmy Kimmel starts on time? One of the lowest moments of the entire show, almost as bad as cutting off Martin Landau when he won for Ed Wood. I hope the television critics lay off the fashion snark and lay into ABC for that. It was the one moment in the show when I was actually pissed off.

This is the first year in a long, long time that I’ve really looked forward to watching the show, and it’s the first year in a long, long time that I really enjoyed it, other than the cutting them off in the middle of the Crash speech thing. I hope they have Jon Stewart back next year, and I hope they’ll do fewer stupid montages.

(photo from flickr user wannabehipster)

mt with plugins vs. typepad: which do you prefer?

Okay, I’ve rebuilt the entire old WWdN database, and made significant progress on the relaunch of WWdN:2.0. I owe a HUGE debt of gratitude to Mike Pusateri, who pulled the entire WWdN databse, pre-fuck-up-by-wil, including all the comments and everything, and put it into a 38MB text file for me to import back into WWdN. Thanks to some help from Movable Type support, I was able to put the old entries back online, and add the WWdN:iX entries to the pile. (Don’t bother looking at WWdN; they’re not in a public directory, yet.)

So this is a HUGE step toward relaunching WWdN, and now I find myself at a bit of a crossroads. I’d like to solicit some advice, if you don’t mind, from the bloggers who still read me.

When I return to WWdN: 2.0, I have a couple of options: I can domain-map WWdN to TypePad, so you’re visiting wilwheaton.net, but I’m managing the content from TypePad, or I can switch back to MT 3.2, and hope to mimic as much of TypePad’s functionality as I can via plug-ins, while duplicating the super-easy WYSIWYG editor with ecto, and something as-yet-undiscovered for Linux.

The thing is, I’ve grown to REALLY like the TypePad interface over the
last several months. The WYSIWYG editor is hawesome, and adding new
sections to the right side of my blog (like the synidcation buttons, the book and music recommendations, advertising, etc.) is as simple as clicking a few
links and pasting a little bit of code. I really like how easy TypePad
has made everything for me; it’s allowed me to put my energy into
creating content that hopefully doesn’t suck, rather than mashing away
at annoying code that never seems to validate, anyway.

And that’s where this post comes in. If you’re an MT 3.2 user, what are your must-have plugins? If you’ve used them both, is MT 3.2 more or less useful for managing enclosures (for the RFB) than TypePad? Have you been able to make MT 3.2 act as sort of a CMS, the way I’ve described above? (Please don’t bother telling me to use WordPress or Drupal or whatever CMS you totally love. I’ve done a lot of research, and I’ve determined that it’s going to be MT 3.2 or TypePad.)

There are some changes coming with the redesign that I think you’ll all like: no more lame fixed-width fonts and cells, a mobile version, better integration of things like flickr and technorati, and some of the really cool things that we’re doing with metroblogging.

I’m still working with my friend on all that stuff, so the re-launch of WWdN isn’t going to happen right away (surprise), but I can at least see the soft glow of a new and super-cool website on a distant horizon.

technorati favorites

Technorati added a new service to the already useful search, explore and watchlist functions they offer, which allows users to create a list of their favorite blogs. Though WWdN dropped out of their top 100 when I hosed the database back in September, I was still invited to participate in a "featured favorites" thing, with people like Arianna Huffington and David Sifry.

You can see which blogs I chose here. If you’d like to add WWdN:iX to your own list of favorites, you can use the handy link over on the right side there, where you can also add my blog to several different RSS readers.

All this stuff will be built into the redesign of WWdN, which should be finished and launched shortly before Duke Nuke’Em Forever ships.

jon stewart pwns larry king

Kingstewart
In case you missed Jon Stewart on Larry King the other night, Crooks & Liars has video and a partial transcript (but you really need to see or hear it, because a lot of the way Jon Stewart talks is lost in the literal written tranlsation.) Larry King made several feeble attempts to create controversy, and Jon Stewart kicked him square in the nuts each time. Witness this exchange:

KING: You don’t want Medicare to fail?

STEWART: Are you insane?

KING: No.

STEWART: You’re literally asking me if I would prefer
— yes, Larry, what I’m saying to you as a comedian I want old people
to suffer, old and poor people to suffer. That is — that is — what we
want is — what seems absurd to me is the length that Washington just
seems out of touch with the desires of Americans to be spoken to as
though they are adults.

Nice try, Larry; too bad Jon didn’t go for it. Maybe you can team up with Nancy Grace for a two hour Aruba Special to get back on familiar, more comfortable ground.

That question was just one of several "gotcha" attempts which failed
spectacularly when Jon refused to take the bait, and instead turned the
ludicrous question back on Larry King, who of course had no response other than this painful frozen half-smile that was equal parts fear and lothing. When Larry King wasn’t completely controlling the tone and content of the show, you could feel how uncomfortable he was. Jon Stewart was so funny, and so quick-witted, and so smart and so insightful, if Larry King wasn’t trying so hard to create controversy where there was none, you’d almost feel bad that he wasn’t able to keep up.