Pogue is one of my favorite writers, and I hate to see him become the latest to take up the net’s equivalent of an Andy Rooney “kids these days” rant. I agree with Gina at Lifehacker—David couldn’t be more wrong. Here are the facts as I see them:

1. People are jerks. Not all of them, but many. What Pogue calls “online etiquette” never existed—or if it did, it was just like regular etiquette: something some of us aspire too, and others ignore and mock. People were jerks on Bulletin Board Systems in the 80s and on USENET in the 90s, and people are jerks on web forums now.

2. More people, more jerks. I’ve watched many a USENET newsgroup and web forum grow from a friendly community of 10-20 people to a semi-friendly community of 100 to a cruel, vindictive pile-on of 300 or more. It’s not that large groups can’t work—just that the larger the group, the more controls you need to keep it constructive. When a group outgrows the controls in place, it fails to be a community.

3. Anonymity isn’t the problem. While people have been arguing since the 80s about the lack of face-to-face communication sending common courtesy out the window, people in online communities have proven time and again that it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve seen anonymous communities that work just fine, and plenty of non-anonymous ones that were overrun by jerks.

4. Maturity matters. One thing Pogue is probably correct about is that sometimes younger people have a greater tendency to be jerks than those a bit more mature. This isn’t an absolute rule, but obviously most of us become more graceful at dealing with society—online or offline—as we gain experience. Sites that have a younger audience need more controls to stay on topic. Needless to say, some younger folks are more mature than some older folks. That’s why I emphasized maturity rather than age.

5. Content inspires community. Quoting Gina’s comment at Lifehacker:

Also, netiquette in public forums has a lot to do with the content around which the community is centered. Lifehacker’s posts set out to help folks, so in kind, our readers want to help us and each other back. Digg is a popularity contest of oneupmanship. Gawker is all about making fun of things, so its readers mock each other and it right back in the comments. Karma’s a boomerang.

The secret to healthy online communities is probably some combination of social responsibility, consequences, and a feeling of community, all of which depend on the size of the site, its content, and how the community is controlled. Are there moderators? Do they deal quickly and fairly with problems? Are there automatic controls to prevent some of the more obvious problems? Or are the moderators so outnumbered that they represent a tiny voice among the thousands? When Pogue looked at digg—an explosively popular, poorly moderated “peanut gallery” where the value is in the links and their rankings, and the discussions rarely add much value—is it any wonder his worst fears were confirmed?

What Pogue has probably noticed is that, as his writing presence grew from a tiny thing read only by techies to a mass-audience phenomenon, he’s getting more and more emails and comments from jerks. It’s easy to look at this and think that people everywhere are losing their manners—as my quotation site grew from zero visitors to hundreds of thousands, I’ve had the same thoughts more than once. But now that my wife and I run several different sites, we’ve learned that the smaller ones have less jerks, and different sites attract different sorts of audiences.

Also, as I’ve run my biggest site for 12 years, I’ve seen good and bad behavior come and go in cycles. If I had to make a guess at an overall trend for today, I’d say it’s positive. At 150,000 visitors a day the site still attracts plenty of jerks, but I’ve been surprised at people’s good manners lately. Even most of the people who dislike the site are communicating it with better manners these days.

Don’t take my word for it, or David’s. Find some good communities and stay away from the bad ones. Give humanity the benefit of the doubt. If you run a site, enjoy and encourage the valuable comments from visitors and ignore the jerks. I for one will wait until I’m a bit older before I start ranting about how much nicer people were in “the old days.”

• See also: Endless September (Wikipedia)—a reminder of another of the many occasions when online etiquette was declared dead.

[via Lifehacker]

• Undo close tab—It’s amazing how often this comes in handy.
• Duplicate tabs—This creates a duplicate of the current tab, complete with back-button history. Very useful.
• Open selected links in tabs—Select a block of text containing links, right-click, and instantly open every link in a tab. I use this every day with some of my site maintenance tasks.
• Drag and drop reordering of tabs—I don’t need this often, but it’s a cool feature.
• Display unread tabs in red—I tend to open tabs in the background for later reading. This feature highlights the ones I haven’t read yet. It also changes a tab’s title text to red when the page has updated, great for web applications.

Along with all of those features, it solves my original problem: you can set whether the hotkey closes the window when there is only one tab open.

This is an essential plug-in that completely replaces Tab Browser Preferences. It works well on both my PC and MacOSX laptop, and I have yet to experience any kind of crash. I know some of these features are going to be included in Firefox 1.5 without an extension, but until then Tab Mix Plus is very handy.

I’ve been upgrading my local installation to SpamAssassin 3.1, and in the process I have updated my SpamAssassin Configuration Generator tool to work with version 3.0 and 3.1.

This tool is an easy way to create a SpamAssassin configuration file with some common settings. It has been linked from the documentation page for SpamAssassin for some time, and embarrassingly hasn’t worked with the current versions for the last year or so. As of now it’s finally up to date.

For those working with SpamAssassin 2.5x, the old version is still available.

• 10% are not really sure what “spam” means, and 3% have never heard the term. No wonder spam still works!
• 9% have never heard the term “adware”, and 15% have never heard the term “phishing”.
• Only 13% have a good idea what “podcasting” is.
• Only 9% have a good idea what RSS feeds are. (Even less than podcasting!?)

Considering those statistics, this Weblog usability study comes as no surprise. Most participants (typical internet users) had no idea how to distinguish between a weblog and a “normal” site, and none of them had any idea how to subscribe to a weblog or feed.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with typical internet users—on the contrary, I think they’re right. Why is there a distinction between a weblog and a normal site, and why do just about all weblogs copy the design and navigation scheme Slashdot was using in 1999? Why do we spend time trading jargon like “trackback” and “podcast” instead of educating people? Something to think about.

Update 7/27/05: Keith Robinson writes about some of the same issues and the RSS issues in particular.

[via SEW and Digital Web]

I agree, and this is half the reason I don’t run any ads in RSS feeds. The other half of the reason: as I wrote about in Making Money from Content Sites last month, the devoted readers are far less likely to click on ads than the random searchers. And clicking on ads is all that matters, since the current options for RSS advertising (i.e. AdSense for Feeds) pay strictly by the click.

In short: it seems to me that ads in feeds not only annoy the last people you’d want to annoy, they also make little to no money due to lack of clicks. That last part’s just a theory, so I’d love to hear from anyone who has made money using ads in RSS.

Since I make my living from web advertising, I certainly have nothing ethically against RSS ads, and I personally don’t find them terribly annoying—I just doubt they’re a viable profit source right now, and I’m not sure they’ll ever be.

They seem to be planning full RSS (or Atom?) support, but for now there are only about 10 feeds you can select from. Along with the BBC, Wired News, and Slashdot, I’m very pleased to report that they’ve chosen my Quotes of the Day as one of the feeds. It is using RSS, as you might have guessed, and someone at Google was nice enough to email me to let me know they’re using my feed and warn me that it might bring me some traffic (bring it on!)

As Jeremy pointed out, Google has taken a tiny step toward becoming a “portal” rather than a mere search engine. It will be interesting to see where they go from here.

This is interesting and a bit spooky: the Google toolbar tracks every URL you visit, but this goes one step further by passing everything you view through Google’s servers. When I installed it, I had to agree to some lengthy legal language to that effect.

Experimenting briefly with the Accelerator turned on, Internet Explorer and Firefox do seem a bit faster, but with a broadband connection it’s nothing to write home about. Beyond the obvious privacy implications and the marginal speed increase, the main reasons I won’t use this long term have to do with prefetching:

• As a web user, I don’t want my browser filling my bandwidth with requests for pages it hopes I’m going to click on. I don’t always click on the obvious things, and I’d rather keep some bandwidth open for background downloads, other browser sessions, and streaming audio.
• As a webmaster, I’m concerned about the effect of widespread use of prefetching. For example, if my site is the first result on Google for a term, thousands of browsers are going to be loading my site in the background even when the user clicks on a different result. This costs me bandwidth, confuses my statistics, and could cause trouble with advertisers who are paying for real pageviews, not automated ones.

Regardless, this is very interesting and I can’t wait to see what becomes of Google’s latest “beta”. Google is getting dangerously close to becoming the world’s largest ISP.

Obviously Microsoft is willing to spend some of their billions to get this search engine noticed. I’m not sure how many people will use it over Google, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it. Currently my sites get most of their traffic from Google, about 1/4 of that amount from Yahoo, and MSN runs a distant third. The results at MSN are wildly different, though, so some sites will benefit more than others.

Also, Douglas at Stopdesign is impressed that MSN is using reasonably standard XML and CSS for the new site.

Yes, spammers will keep spamming. Eventually, three or four years from now, they’ll notice that their spam links are having less effect, but they’ll still do it—the fact remains that it’s little to no work for the spammer, so if even one person clicks on a link it’s still worthwhile. Just like email spam.

Many people have complained that this is only a good thing for Google—it just helps them sort out different types of links. Of course that’s true, but an advantage for Google is an advantage for all of us. If Google has more information about links, they can improve their search and ranking algorithms. We’ll see less spam in search results, even if we see just as much on our weblogs.

I’m not going to support the attribute on any of my sites. I monitor them daily and quickly remove any spam that gets through, so spammers already get no benefit here, and I want legitimate comments to get the benefit of their links. The biggest benefit for the web at large will be that there will no longer be thousands of abandoned weblogs out there that can be freely spammed with links that won’t be removed for years.

One more thing: as Scoble said, it’s amazing that Google was able to get their biggest competitors, and several other companies, to agree on this and implement it within a few days. Why can’t we see this kind of cooperation in the world of Instant Messaging?

• The Importance of User Feedback

More recently, when I clip the same item, it would appear like this in the Clippings list:

• URL: <a href=”/preview?siteid=554355&itemid=106″>The Importanc

Needless to say, this isn’t an improvement. I verified that it’s a Bloglines bug by trying it with a different username and a different computer. So I reported it as a bug. I also found another user talking about it in the Bloglines forum, so they know about it. (Did you know they had a forum? Try to find a link to it on their site.)

I’m sure Bloglines will fix the problem soon, but in the meantime I just want the feature to work, so I tried to fix it myself. I noticed that the problem appears first in the “Clip/Blog This” pop-up form. You can edit it there manually, but I want clipping to be a quick two-click process.

To make a long story short, I found a solution. There’s a Firefox extension, greasemonkey, that lets you add JavaScript extensions to pages to change their behavior. I wrote a quick one-line script, installed it with the plug-in, and now it works!

I love the idea of being able to fix broken web sites without waiting for their developers to do so. Greasemonkey was inspired by this extension that Adrian Holovaty made to solve problems he was having with a specific site, AllMusic. Now anyone can do it with a simple script rather than writing a whole browser extension. Excellent!

I wrote up a detailed article on how to do this at The JavaScript Weblog. If you have Greasemonkey installed and just want to fix the Bloglines bug, here’s a link to my script, just click on it and select Tools | Install User Script and you’re done.

Update 1/17/2005: This is no longer necessary, as Bloglines has fixed the clippings bug.