A quick history lesson:

March 26th Kathy Sierra (original post here), a Blogger Of Technological Issues, was threatened “with violence and sex” (sic). And then they sent death threats. The comments and images that were posted about her were a sure sign that someone had too much time on their hands. Now, whether or not they were actually meant as death threats or were simply someone going too far and crossing the line into bullying and unpleasantness is not up for discussion here. And it would be churlish for me to suggest that Ms Sierra was being oversensitive as it was understandably very upsetting for her (although I don’t get the impression from what she wrote that it crossed the line into sending intimidating personal emails or harrassment outside of a public forum of the kind that Rachel North recently suffered.)

March 27th The BBC post a news item on their technology news page about the incident.

March 28th Tim O’Reilly, a Blogger of Technological Issues calls for a Code of Conduct for bloggers, saying that it could be time to “formalise blogging behaviour”. In other news, Dragon, a Blogger of Not Much In Particular, slams his head against a wall in despair although this largely goes unreported by the mainstream media.

April 10th Tim O’Reilly, a Blogger of Technological Issues, publishes a Draft Blogger’s Code Of Conduct which is also reported by the BBC and which more or less says that blogs should come with a content advisory warning. This is hardly original and, in fact, some of us were putting content warnings on our blogs over two years ago although I doubt it’s exactly the sort of thing that the earnest, do-gooder Mr O’Reilly was hoping for. On the plus side, his version comes with a cute little sheriff’s badge too and isn’t American-centric in anyway, whatsoever, at all, no it isn’t, honest guv.

It strikes me as timely that this should all happen during the Easter period, a little under 2000 years since one man stood up and said “Hey guys! Let’s all be nice to each other!”. Let’s have a quick look at what we’ve learned in the intervening two millennia? Are we being nice to each other? No. Are we united in peace, harmony and vegetarian goulash? No. Have we stopped being materialistic and take only what we need while sharing with those less fortunate and more hungry than ourselves? Have we bollocks!

Let’s take a moment and assess the situation.

32AD: One man stood up for what he believed in and told people that being nasty was wrong and that they should love their neighbour. Then he got nailed to a tree for his trouble. A religion sprang up around his teachings and has subsequently become the dominant religion of the world. This didn’t stop people from carrying on being nasty to each other.

2007AD: One man stood up for what he believed in and told people that being nasty was wrong and that they should love their blogging neighbour.

A brief glance a the trackbacks and comments on his draft code see most people (mis)quoting Treasure of the Sierra Madre (see new slugline at top of page), Rage Against The Machine (”Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”) or the Spice Girls (“If you wannabe my lover…” “Who do you think you are?”). I’ll add to that list a paraphrased Monty Python quote: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very silly boy!” It doesn’t look like many people are taking the idea at all seriously and, in fact, most are ridiculing Timbo quite openly.

Still, could be worse. He could have been nailed to a tree.

S

So I’ve been thinking about Twitter some more. I’ve been thinking a lot about the applications of social networking technology this week including why corporations would encourage staff to blog, what the hell myspace is useful for and, obviously, why do we twitter.

It occurred to me later on that one useful application of twitter is, for example, to use it as a way of maintaining a training diary on a blog. So I signed up to mess around and see what can be done and what can be exported. Some of the data is exposed through XML but the main feed that would be useful includes both my entries and those of anyone I’ve added as a friend. This is less than desirable and I would have to write exception loops when parsing the XML to filter out my posts. On the other hand, a simpler solution would be to not add people as friends. I don’t want to add a “badge” because it’s either a prestyled flash badge or a css customisable javascript one. Anyway, I will investigate.

One of the things I deliberately did was make sure that my entries didn’t go into the public timeline. But while looking at the various people scratching their arses and idly wondering if people like them, I had another idea. So I set up another twitter account, one I can have fun with. One that, suprisingly, is still available. One that I really hope I can be bothered to keep updating every now and then.

You can view that one here.

I’ve bought it - have you?**
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It’s charidee time once again and Mike is calling for submissions to an ambitious (but easily achievable) project in aid of Comic Relief. The idea is simple: to put together a book of humourous posts from UK blogs and get it published for sale before this Friday. So if you know of any funny, well written posts that you’ve written or have read elsewhere, send them to Mike before 6PM tomorrow, Tuesday 13th March. More details can be found here.

Right, that’s my job done with only purchase of said book left to do. Nope, not submitting anything - 1) I’m a miserable old fucker so posts here will be humourless rather than humourous, 2) I’m publicity shy (especially after that incident with the call girl and the wombat) and 3) I can’t stand being rejected and if Mike “Simon Cowell” Diva doesn’t find my submission amusing, I’ll probably have to do something drastic like, I don’t know, start taking the Daily Mail as a regular newspaper.

I happened to glance at the Wordpress blog on my admin page when logging in just now and noticed the headline: “Wordpress 2.11 dangerous, upgrade to 2.12″

My first thought was that “dangerous” was a codename although it would be entirely out of keeping with the Jazz related codenames of the past. A quick scan of the post and it turns out that a malicious cracker (by which I mean what most people would call a hacker and not one usually prefixed by ‘Jacob’s Cream’) had managed to gain access to the download files of the latest version and altered a couple of files so that they would permit remote php execution.

So first things first, if you have upgraded to WP 2.11, you might want to not take any risks and do a new upgrade to 2.12 which has been entirely validated. Of course, this probably won’t affect many of you because I guess most people are still considering the move to 2.1, let alone a minor subsequent bug fix release.

And the next thing: isn’t it depressing that there are people in the world with nothing better to do with their time than just be anonymously malicious and fuck around a load of complete strangers for little to no apparent gain. Words fail me.

I haven’t really got into the whole MySpace thing. It reeks of “sellout” to me. Perhaps it’s techy/blogger snobbery but it’s a subculture that’s not quite niche enough for me to be into. On account of, you know, the world and her dog having a myspace page. I quite frankly don’t feel the need for one. MySpace is where I am, the square metre or so around my physical presence which, if invaded by uninviteds gets a punch on the nose. Unless you’re my wife, my son or particularly cute.

Should I be concerned, therefore, that I found myspaces for TheThe, Foetus, Alexander Hacke, Neubauten, Lydia Lunch, Skinny Puppy, Jarboe et al? Or should I just get with the program?

This is the last one, I promise.

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There’s an old psuedo-philosophical riddle you might know: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound”? I keep asking myself something similar like “If a blog post is written and gets no comments, was it worth writing in the first place?” or “If a blog is written but is just full of shit has no theme, is it worth persisting with it?”

Thanks to the kind person at UKNetMonitor who commented somewhere below and let me know how many incoming links they’ve tracked to my site, I know I have readers. Thanks to StatCounter I know they’re mostly intereted in my my m00bs! But the real reason I’m metablogging at all is because I feel directionless when it comes to this blog. Perhaps that’s a reflection of my life or, more likely, it’s simply that I just talk about irrelevant shit most of the time and why should I be any different on the blog. If you want to persist with this introspective, metablogging rubbish, press the red button on your control there’s plenty more after the jump.
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About this blogging thing…

A blog is like a box of chocolates - wait, no, that’s not right.
A blog is like a ferrarri - um, no, no it isn’t.
Hang on, I’ve got it - blogs are like joss sticks - they stink. Hmmm, close and possibly true but not really what I wanted to say. Let’s see…
Blogging is like playing games. Ah ha! Yes. This is very true but Jeff Freeman has already covered that one and much better than I can. How about this:

A blog is like a plant. It needs watering and feeding otherwise it will wither up and die.

Wow, that almost sounds coherent and meaningful. The coffee can’t have kicked in yet. But what does it mean?
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I’m having an existential blogging crisis. I have coffee but no cigarettes.

The question isn’t so much “should I carry on blogging”, although I ask myself that quite a lot, it’s more “in what manner do I carry on with this blog?” This question arises because I look at the number of comments I receive, the number of incoming links and the number of returning visitors to find that, well, the numbers are quite low. I actually know why this is or, at any rate, have a damn good idea why this is. More on that later. What I don’t know is why the people who keep coming back do so in the first place.

I want to ask anyone who falls into that category why they come back but I hesitate because I feel that doing so will come across as a blatant compliment grabbing strategy which it isn’t. Obviously I’m not going to necessarily doubt anyone who says “because you’re really funny” (although I will probably tattoo a note onto my arm saying “do not trust this person’s judgement”) however, I’d expect most of the responses to be of the “you comment on mine, I come to yours” or “we’ve got similar tastes in music/films/games” etc.

This is exactly the sort of reason metablogging blows chunks. It can seem too much like an exercise in vanity. And this is only Part 1!

Anyway, before I ask you to ask me quesitons a la Mike and Gordon, tell me what your thoughts are. Or not. Perhaps leave a witticism in the comments or a random thought.