Disqus - Latest Comments for qthrul

Re: The chat room/forum problem (& an apology to @Technosailor)

qthrul — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:23:20 -0000

Really interesting read actually.

You'll recall that Facebook already saw the "delete" scenario and attempted to prevent it before the backlash you outline (Feb 2009). Yeah. That went well.

This highlights two things: 1) perception 2) prevention

Perception of the meta, the commentary, the extras, the interaction, the flow, the dare I say.... wave. Who owns the flow? If you added a brick to the wall, does it become your wall? Pick any flawed analogy and start taking notes.

Prevention of the orphaned meta commentary becoming orphaned or all derivatives or resultant items surrounding some corpus of unique content (assuming no edits) or the GUID that pins all things back together.... this is the folly of our software development decisions. Again, playback, and control of the everliving asset with full revision control might be the wave people want but don't know it yet... or might change their minds.

I've been around on Slashdot and Livejournal enough to see this play out a few times. Here's the thing... you don't see Slashdot and Livejournal come up a lot these days? Why? They are the BBS of their times... there is always going to be another one.

What we as users/members/etc of any such BBS must always endure? The learning curve of the software developers that are either just starting or have stolen all the best ideas or refined them.

The nuclear option is to "delete" and it is as old as any angsty teen saying they won't go somewhere or leave their room to interact with others. Would you deny this option?

The best elements of LiveJournal, Slashdot, Digg, DISQUS, and the publishing ease of FriendFeed and Twitter might collapse into something one day... and it seems that Facebook is about trying to get there. Maybe.

This is what happens when you force kids to read The Fountainhead and "pick sides".

Re: Lists and OPML (Scripting News)

qthrul — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:35:34 -0000

As one of the writers I follow put it, sometimes you want to follow the list of those that don't follow a list of certain lists. While tongue in cheek, it's actually an invaluable and (perhaps?) established metric for various dating/match-maker services as possible ephemera for what you like as much as what you don't like. When you consider the rapid stratification possible on any given polarizing issues list in these approaching times of proximity like interaction online, the ability to know what you want to avoid, the ability to squelch, and all of the finer grained aspects -- may become as or more desirable that merely finding what you Like [1].

[1] overt FriendFeed/Facebook reference

Re: danieltenner.com — What problems does Google Wave solve?

qthrul — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:07:47 -0000

This is a solid Google Wave perspective -- very link worthy.

Re: Surprise! Dating site OKCupid finds white guys get the most replies

qthrul — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:29:51 -0000

I guess I should update my profile.

Re: Google Wave’s unproductive email metaphors

qthrul — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:18:42 -0000

Mike -- great encapsulation.

Re: WSJ’s factually challenged argument against net neutrality

qthrul — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:45:19 -0000

"Maybe the tech world has already given up on the WSJ."

Yes. It's probably a great read if you take a series of tubes view of things. Also, the prior art of the WSJ walled garden, and the taste it leaves in tech world mouths, does not engender avid commenting. You can probably double your money on a bet that the lack of numerous comments actually supports some relic in a corner office that scoffed at the idea and concept of /comments/ in the first place.

Re: 20+ Mac Apps to Increase Your Productivity

qthrul — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 20:09:56 -0000

Now I'll be installing these all evening and losing productivity tonight ;-)

Great list!

Re: TechCrunch50 Companies or Founders on Twitter

qthrul — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 11:43:50 -0000

Scott -- here's another way to present this list.

http://tweepml.org/TechCrunch50-2009/

Thanks again!

Re: The unknown story behind CitySourced

qthrul — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:11:00 -0000

Done!

Re: The unknown story behind CitySourced

qthrul — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:17:05 -0000

CitySourced is still my top pick for TC50. I plan to share their story with every municipality that I visit with across the rural US. I'm really looking forward to your video Robert. Nice to see you again!

Re: I have an announcement!

qthrul — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:14:55 -0000

Wow! I'm out of the loop :)

CONGRATS!!

Re: Battery maker Seeo raises $8.6M

qthrul — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:14:56 -0000

SeEo.com perhaps? Or that's some hella good SEO in effect ;-)

Re: Disqus Forks Into Two Products, Launches Revamped Real-Time Comment System

qthrul — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:42:48 -0000

Trolls haz a sad? (everything in the parentheses is an edit... nice)

Re: Why I Am Not Presenting at PodCamp Boston

qthrul — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 01:39:01 -0000

That's a very class act move. Admittedly, I'm not a regular reader here but this stuck out when I drove by and drove home something deeper.

Have you ever heard the phrase "stepping up by stepping aside"?

Just reading this awakened several sports and team building analogies in my head.

Again -- kudos.

Re: Mint.com data: Economy may be bouncing back

qthrul — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:56:54 -0000

In business, focus on top line revenue and hide debt... in personal finance, Mint only the happy accounts :)

Re: ICANN has Rod Beckstrom as new president and CEO?

qthrul — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:58:31 -0000

If you mention ICANN and VeriSign and CFIT in a post you'll probably find sycophants on both sides of the issue showing up in droves. I remember how much domains cost back in the day. I also remember that eventually, ground gives

i.e. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD

There are some very opinionated folks in this matter. Personally, I've invested very little money in domains but on the business side, the impacts from outcome either way are of interest. If you get into IP address allocation and control it gets another group of folks (with opinions) into the mix.

I just find .com/.net/.whatever and things like ENUM to be near non-starters if you approach the Internet from a user perspective vs. academic or rigorous underpinning (IETF) view -- but that's why AOL Keywords were so powerful when they were the first/biggest controlled experience online.

Re: ICANN has Rod Beckstrom as new president and CEO?

qthrul — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:21:26 -0000

I had read speculation on this from a few weeks ago (http://ff.im/49MY1) and with the recent other coverage regarding the CFIT vs. VeriSign it makes for an interesting Summer for the registrars.

Re: The 8-Hour MacBook

qthrul — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 03:21:25 -0000

A solid +5 hours was the end result

Re: The 8-Hour MacBook

qthrul — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:07:06 -0000

Yep. It looks really really close to 7 hours so far with slight variations after a 100-97% charge (8h to 7h is quite a variation) but I have this set to the lowest usable brightness and I am not crunching or compiling (that's the next test) or doing any kind of heavy visual -- the unit is silent.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcuthrell/3623836852/

Enjoy.

Re: The 8-Hour MacBook

qthrul — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:19:37 -0000

Screenshots coming up shortly... I've got the LCD dimmed, auto brightness turned off, 10.5.6 appears to have the removed the energy settings dialogs for certain hardware and 10.5.7 didn't put them back either (and not on this unit)

i.e. http://www.flickr.com/photos/krema/3113608893/

I'm 30 minutes from a 100% charge... the "Calculating..." made 6 hours show up at 34% battery charge so I am guessing numbers should come with a grain of salt. Be back in a bit.

Re: The 8-Hour MacBook

qthrul — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 15:02:14 -0000

I picked up the 13" (2.53GHz/4GB) yesterday... it's better than my Air but it also weighs a lot more. So far it is looking like 4.5 to 4.75 hours but I haven't been doing an endurance run on it either.

Re: How Verizon and AT&T may use “wireless neutrality” to drive Sprint and T-Mobile into the ground

qthrul — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:23:38 -0000

I'd like to see the authors of this article approach the topic again without the implied assumption of cost basis having a direct correlation to pricing for Internet traffic.

Hint: pricing is born of what the market will bear

Indeed, you'll find that if you explore the notion that Internet traffic (inter-carrier traffic) vs. intra-carrier traffic and the eventual model of inter-handset traffic and task/offering specific radios then the pre-hand wringing here over a data plan charge is slightly myopic.

Lastly, please consider that the majority of uses for handsets might be on the private backhaul reseller picocell market and/or MVNO market, femtocell per carrier market, or the increasingly common use of WiFi due to the inabilty of the 3G network to anticipate growth and demand (see: AT&T).

Re: As if iPhone users didn’t hate AT&T enough already

qthrul — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:44:41 -0000

Epic photo.

Epic.

:)

The pre-pre-pre-plan to pre-announce a pre-plan to be at HSPA 7.2 Mbps by 2011 is telling. It's telling me that my iPhone use on WiFi will likely increase.

@peter -- Verizon is actually renting excess capacity on their wireless fiber backhaul network so if they can follow a "build it and they will come" why can't AT&T?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Verizons-UltraRel...

Answer: AT&T might not want to have Verizon tout how AT&T uses a Verizon powered network

It is said because users don't care how it works, just that it works.

Re: On Trolls

qthrul — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:01:08 -0000

Ahhhh.... thank you for the reminder!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/130654/how-d...

The SO commenting system was covered in Ben Metcalfe's Core Conversation at SxSW 2009 that was attended by Kent Brewster (who I think mentioned the SO model). The topic and conversation was around the subject of how to /deal/ with trolls.

There seemed to be some indication that the SO commenting system was actually being developed as a project to address this concern overall... but I did not investigate further.

Re: On Trolls

qthrul — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:44:27 -0000

IRC (yeah...)
Usenet (yeah...)
Slashdot karma/sorting/thresholds
LiveJournal hierarchy/screening/IP monitoring/etc...

Digg digg / buried / sorting / thresholds

By comparison... so many great things were thrown out the window with blogs and article pressing websites that have multiple authors. I've complained visibly to numerous sites about their horrific commenting systems. All of them reflect one of two attributes that lead to failure:

1) Lack of human editors, moderators, or whatever you want to call the list mom function and responsibility

2) Overt and closed silo registration

When I think of great commenting systems I used to think that running your own show on Wordpress was the right way. Having been my own sysadmin and serial upgrade lackey for many years now I'm inclined to say: forget it. I criticized DISQUS and other outsourced comments services. Now, it looks pretty good. Then again, I gave up on contributing to my own blog and just shifted to commenting. So, now I've gotten very very finicky about what I consider to be the lowest friction method.

As much as it pains me to suggest this... Digg might be on to something. How they monetize this or pull out a squelch algorighm method is up to their developers. A Digg+DISQUS amalgam would solve 80% of the problems with the remaining 20% left to human interaction to curate or archive or stop the comments.

At the same time, I'm also of the opinion that Wikipedia should put up their mechanisms as an overlay to all commenting systems for revision control, article cache and injection to a PURL, and sustaining things that matter. While I'm not clear that 2008-era tech blog coverage and comments concerning a $0.99 iPhone application will shift the human condition to a new pax romana for all world conflicts, the methods for software with installation coupled to a best practice is just sensible.

We're not there yet. I don't know if we'll get there or be somewhere else.

What I do know is that the squelch has to be on tap and ready to be turned up like the magical spam filters that most email users today take for granted --- with all the periodic questions and complaints about why something was "missed" or something else was "flagged".

Trolling on blog comments is something akin to fuzzing software for weaknesses... only the fuzzing is against a community of the one and the many in attendance. It is an interesting problem.

Between Akismet and various other Wordpress lacking features not envisioned (i.e. bandaidware) there will have to be some method for assigning the same methods that BBS, IRC, Usenet, and prior art brought to their own troll ridden communities.

p.s. the fact that I've had my comments eaten by TechCrunch "moderation" isn't lost on me either in that I also realize that moderation isn't perfect and I'm pretty far from being a troll...