With all the same strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. “All politicians are the same” would make senators Joseph McCarthy (anti-communism crusader) and Bernie Sanders (an actual socialist) the same. You can see how easily this view breaks down.
The process for political change
1: Advocate for the least worst options at the city, county, state, and national level, even if that means convincing someone you like to run and helping them get on the ballot
2: Vote for the least worst options at all levels
3: Watch as the least worst option gets a little better with each cycle
This has been broken for the last 40 years or so because people keep saying “bluh bluh, all politicians are the same” instead of working to change things. It will only get worse if you refuse to take action.
The problem I have with sites like ReadWriteWeb, Lifehacker, and TechCrunch is that they’ve increased the post volume to a level that I can’t process. Hundreds of full 300 word articles every day is just too much. I used to turn to them to keep up on the various technology industries, but now I have to rely on filters like TechMeme and Reddit.
I still haven’t decided whether this is actually a problem. It feels like one. It seems weird to rely on an aggregator’s semiautomatic summary and not the sites themselves. What happens if any of the aggregators finds itself taken over by voting mobs like Digg was? You would only see the stories a special interest wanted you to see.
You can tell a blog is past its prime when every post is unsettlingly familiar. Sometimes it’s the niche. Maybe they went too narrow, or maybe the niche sputtered out. Maybe the blog is so old that the writer doesn’t know he’s on the 20th variation of the same nugget of wisdom. You’ll see it on most internet marketing blogs in the form of the bi-monthly “Use membership sites to make money” post. It’s always the same, even if the words are different.
And some things are just plain tapped out. You might squeeze more life out of an old subject, but it’s rarely worth the time. It’s why I couldn’t make the blogging blog thing work. All the ideas I had were repeating themselves or contrived to the point of uselessness.
The only blogging advice you should ever need:
- Blogs are a platform, not a business model
Everything else flows from this realization. The blogging bubble was much like the Internet bubble. All one had to do was whisper “blog” into the ear of a fool with money and call themselves a blogging guru. Things like Facebook and Twitter were kind enough to distract people with walls and streams while the bubble popped, so it only led to disappointment when people realized it–unlike the ruined fortunes of the Internet bubble.
Blogging isn’t dead. It’s just returning to its natural state.
From the ‘who’s really shocked?’ department.
It’s one of those stories that repeats through history to the shock of those who live through it. Police get better body armor, criminals get better bullets, and so on. It’s always a good idea to assume your opponent will take your technology and use it against you.
Pirates of centuries past used the ships, weapons, and other technology of those they targeted, and it’s not much different today. This is true whether you’re talking about piracy on the high seas or network security.
This post on link building has a lot in it, but this was what stood out to me:
There is no white. There is no black. There are only hues of gray. To think any different is to subscribe to discrimination – to believe one way or the other is to be ineffectively forced into a mindset without appropriate judgement of another.
This post is not about white or black. That subject is dead (like SEO). This post is about this or that. Yes or no. Right or wrong. Rarely do these answers exist eplicitly to us – rarely are they imparted to us correctly in the form of outside opinion.
There are various molds of SEO, and because of that, one situation or the next will inform inherent biases, strengths, and weaknesses that should be used descriminately to analyze every tweet – every blog post – and every piece of advice you receive. Very often what you perceive as this or that – white or black – is because it’s good for them. It’s because their situation has informed that dichtomized view that informs that this is right. That isn’t. Do this. Not that.
There is a “heaven and hell” view of the SEO world that is informed by the institutional structure of its advice. Most of what you hear is purely described as “white hat” by the people with the biggest audiences. And because they have the biggest audiences, they are forced to sticking there. And perhaps they got there because they’re “white hat”. Or perhaps they have the liberty to use white hat because they have the biggest brands because they’re in front of everyone because they speak white hat. Or perhaps they got the biggest brands because they’re white hat, and the biggest brands affinity for white hat got them the biggest audience.
I think the white/black dichotomy reflects the myopia that’s all over the SEO world. There’s rarely a case where one thing or another is right for everyone. It’s true for diets, exercise routines, operating systems, and programming languages too.
You’ll even find the same myopia running around in just about any domain of knowledge. People still go on about which command line editor is objectively superior.
- Go to the tags page
- Open a tag you’re interested in
- Follow the links in the tag introduction
- Follow links you find
- Repeat
This is the lost art of searching the web. Back before Google’s PageRank, we had to find stuff based on things we had already found. Directories helped, but only if you knew what you were looking for. All search engine spiders did was automate this process. And with marketers increasingly taking over SERPs, we’ll have to rely on this ancient technique until engineers find a way to defeat human ingenuity.
Not that I mind this way of finding stuff. 
There was a TV channel, in the before-time of the primordial Web, that took aim at geeks. It had call-in shows, interviews with great minds of industry, and showcases of talent. That channel was TechTV.
And it died. TechTV died before G4 bought it up and tore it apart, but the purchase and gutting helped the globally connected community of geeks move on. And move on we did–it was a renaissance of design, interactivity, and technology.
The channel was good fun to watch, but it didn’t leave much of a void with things like YouTube, Revision3, and Penny Arcade TV following in the wake of its death. Sometimes death is essential for progress. Old ideas die with their supporters and their mediums to make space for fresh takes and new channels for getting ideas out.
And we’re about due for another renaissance.
One thing is certain when you discuss Linux in public: someone will chide you for not using the “proper” term, whether that’s GNU/Linux or something else. I don’t know the exact motivations of each person, but they’re very irritating.
Most people mean the Linux ecosystem when they say Linux. That’s a normal evolution of language: a word for something specific becomes a more general term. “Linux” is easy to say and easy to remember, so it became the standard term.
Fighting against a logical and useful evolution of language is always a losing battle. One can drill down with qualifiers (Linux kernel, Linux boot loader, Linux DE, etc) if they’re one of the tiny minority who mean the kernel when they say Linux.
The rest of us will proceed happily along meaning the ecosystem of applications, tools, and people when we say Linux.
