Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Happy (Belated) 5th Birthday to Loosely Coupled

  I started blogging on January 29th, 2003 . We've been a little heads down trying to get Notches to launch and I completely forgot to write about this, but I've now been blogging for over five years. I talked last year about my motivations for blogging, and they definitely continue to hold true even if I've been somewhat inconsistent in my writing. Jeremy Miller has a great post about the virtues of blogging ( via Rob ), and I think I've covered all of them (except the whole getting fired thing). So far, I've written over 1,000 posts - some of them good, I think, and some of them trivial - which somehow amounts to a post every other day. Wow... really? Much of this has come in bursts and there have been dry spells, but that still amazes me. More importantly, there's been nearly as many comments. So, once again, thanks for listening and making this a worthwhile and rewarding experience. Posted Feb 23 2008, 02:11 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Personal, Blogging, Slashstar, Site News

• What exactly is "User Generated Content"?

  There's an interesting discussion going on over at CenterNetworks , with Allen calling out Mike Arrington and co. for giving Digg the award for "best user-generated content". Allen says that Digg doesn't belong in that category (which he includes Wikipedia, your blog, and Flickr), but rather as a "UGC aggregator". Obviously, this is all semantics, but I think saying that there's no "content" being generated on Digg, del.icio.us and similar sites misses the point a little. Digg does more than aggregate content - it also filters and ranks the content. As Steve Gillmor would say, there's a lot of attention metadata generated by the users of the site. It is this "content" which separates Digg from being indistinguishable from a set of links, and I would argue that there's a lot of value in that information. Some of the discussion there also focused around the amount of effort put into the generation of content. For example, one commenter... Posted Jan 22 2008, 04:02 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Web 2.0, Business, Blogging, Social Behavior

• Scoble, Facebook and Data Ownership

  I've sort of ignored the whole Scoble/Facebook fiasco, with people arguing on both sides who "owns" the data. Jimmy Gutterman misses the point a bit , because Facebook has already opened up the social graph through the Facebook Platform API. What they don't expose - and why this script resorted to screen-scraping - is any contact information. He paints this as a "lock in" issue, but I doubt that's their primary goal. We already complain enough about the spam we get on Facebook, and I would hate it if someone in my network shared - accidentally or on purpose - that contact information with spammers. So, yeah, I think what Facebook did is a good thing, which seems to be the majority sentiment. Mike Arrington said Plaxo flubbed it and Jeff Jarvis agrees . Loren Feldman called Robert Scoble a corporate spy . Allen discussed how we should approach the data ownership problem . Dare says Facebook is right - since Scoble did not enter any of the contact information... Posted Jan 09 2008, 11:08 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Copyright, Privacy, Blogging, Law, Facebook

• Creating a better 404

  Jeff Atwood rants about the typical 404 page , saying "the average internet user has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. To them, it's yet another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak." Jeff lays out 5 ways to make the 404 error page better. Drop the 404 Yes, the HTTP response code is 404, but there's absolutely no reason that ever needs to be shown on the actual page. Error codes aren't helpful . A simple explanation of the problem in plain English is all that's required. Any 404 page that has the characters "404" on it, if not already an outright failure, is already well on its way to becoming one. Automatically notify you of the 404. Repeat after me: it is not the user's job to inform you about problems with your website . If you require the user to click a button to notify you about a 404, or if you require the user to fill out a broken link form, you have utterly failed your users... Posted Dec 31 2007, 08:33 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Software Development, Blogging, Design, Programming, Slashstar

• Security implications of MyBlogLog vs. BlogRovr

  According to a TechCrunch story , Citibank is putting a warning message up for users of comment and blog tracking services. As it turns out, there is a known issue with the coComment plug-in and, though I'm not familiar with the service, it sounds like BlogRovr also has a browser extension. Since I use MyBlogLog here, I want to re-emphasize that this message above doesn't apply to this service. MyBlogLog works by saving a cookie to your machine under the @mybloglog.com domain. When you go to a site that has included the MyBlogLog JavaScript, it can interact with that cookie and know who you are. The MyBlogLog tracking script does have some logic for tracking clicks within an IFRAME (to handle Google AdSense clicks). Since Citibank doesn't include the MyBlogLog script on their page, it doesn't interact with the service. When you're here or on any other blog that uses MyBlogLog, the service doesn't even know you were on the Citibank page much less being able to track... Posted Nov 27 2007, 03:22 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Security, Blogging, Slashstar, Site News

• The Intense Debate Experiment

  As some of you may have noticed, I've been trying out Intense Debate on this blog. Though the Intense Debate homepage advertises that you can import your existing comments, I haven't found a way to do so. As of now, this means I need to show all of my existing comments. In fact, right now I'm showing the Intense Debate code above the built-in comment form for Community Server. Interestingly, since I've installed Intense Debate, I've found more of you still use the built-in form despite showing up after the ID form. Given that they have the ability to export comments, I may remove the built-in form soon. I'd still need to write something to import back into Community Server, but given the comment volume here that's something I'm willing to risk. I'd much prefer to outsource the entire comment system, but unfortunately that's not an option until I can figure out how to import. I also appreciate that Josh, one of the co-founders, reached out to me after... Posted Nov 27 2007, 11:40 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Blogging, Slashstar, Site News

• Radio Silence

  I'd like to apologize to all for the complete silence here over the past month or so. As some of you may know, I recently got married. Things were predictably busy leading up to the wedding and then we went on a wonderful honeymoon for 2 weeks in Italy (Capri and Positano). For those of you interested, you can view the photos from the wedding . (Unfortunately, Pictage requires free registration, but I will post the full images elsewhere once we get them). Cal Landau , our wedding photographer, took some amazing photos, don't you think? I also posted a few honeymoon pictures on Flickr and Picasaweb , but still need to sort through them. (We took nearly 2,000 photos!). In addition, we're nearing an initial public launch for Notches and have been in heads-down development mode the past few weeks. It's been a long time coming, but it will be exciting to be able to get the first pieces of our vision out there. You can expect to hear a lot more about what we're building here... Posted Nov 08 2007, 02:32 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Personal, Blogging

• The Case for Freeing the WSJ Online

  An interesting article in Business Week about opening up the Wall Street Journal Online in the wake of the sale to Murdoch. For The Wall Street Journal Online, going free will come at a high cost. The daily financial newspaper is one of the few major publications to successfully charge for access to most of its online content, earning roughly $79 a year from each of its nearly 1 million Web subscribers. Once incentives and other free offers are taken into account, some analysts estimate that the paper will bring in more than $65 million this year from WSJ Online subscriptions alone. But soon-to-be owner Rupert Murdoch seems willing to sacrifice that revenue in return for the possibility of earning many millions more from online advertising. In an Aug. 8 earnings call for News Corp. ( NWS ), which plans to acquire Journal publisher Dow Jones ( DJ ) for $5.6 billion, Murdoch said both companies are debating making WSJ.com free, though there are no concrete plans yet. "I think it would... Posted Aug 25 2007, 06:44 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Rants, Web 2.0, Blogging

• Distinguishing between a platform and a destination

  Charlie says that "the whole idea that you have a main site is dead". I couldn't agree more - I strongly believe that platforms are the future of the Internet. One clarification I'd like to make in this whole discussion is Facebook is both a destination and a platform. It's important to understand that these are discrete things - something can be a platform without being a destination and vice versa. Clearly, Facebook offers a nice API for integrating your code into theirs, but this to me is not what makes Facebook a platform. MySpace, iGoogle, and a plethora of Web 2.0 portals allow you to "embed" your code - Facebook just allows you to do it more seamlessly. If anything, these are all simply platforms - or rather, vehicles - for traffic. Of course, as Charlie and myself and countless others have said, traffic does not give you a business model. On the other hand, Facebook is getting flak for not being open enough with their data . As Fred says, being open... Posted Aug 21 2007, 06:15 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Software Development, Web 2.0, Business, Blogging, Entrepreneurship, Startup, NextNY, Notches

• Professional bloggers get journalist rights

  On August 1st, a congressional panel voted to protect journalists from having to reveal their confidential sources, and explicitly included "professional bloggers" in the category ( via Lena ). This is definitely a step in the right direction. Ultimately, I believe it should be a functional test - if you act like a journalist, you deserve the protections reserved for journalists - regardless of what medium you are publishing into. This is especially important since newspapers are on their last legs and many journalists are learning they can make more money publishing for themselves. Posted Aug 17 2007, 06:37 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Intellectual Property, Blogging