On Jan 14, 2:50 am, Frank van Bortel <frank.van.bor...@gmail.com>
wrote:

I must say it's this attitude I find bewildering.

You're on a train, reading. Your neighbour is wearing an ipod. He
decides to turn the volume up so that the sksshh-sksssh-sksssh of the
beat disturbs you. You politely ask the person to turn their ipod
down. They refuse to do so, saying 'it ain't that loud, mister. What's
your problem?'

So much for hypotheticals. Let's consider real blog aggregators. Blog
aggregators take feeds from many people's blogs. Visiting one site
lets you see the totality of what's going on in the Oracle 'blogging
community' with one quick overview. Very useful, very functional.
Unfortunately, aggregating things together means that what for an
individual blogger is one trivial little post gets aggregated together
with everyone else's trivial little posts and suddenly it's not a
trivial little problem any more. Suddenly, there's a mountain of
collected posts generated by this "game", driving out almost any other
information.

Blog aggregators work by showing new posts at the top of the page. As
new posts arrive, old posts get shunted downwards... until they fall
off the page altogether. Because of the sudden influx of '8 things'
posts (shorthand for the blog tagging pyramid scheme's posts), one of
my blog posts went onto the front page of OraNA and disappeared off it
in slightly over twelve minutes. If it happens to my posts, it happens
to others' too. So now OraNA isn't a great overview of what's
happening in the Oracle blogging, but is instead swamped with 'me-too'
posts from people who have chosen to participate in the pyramid scheme
known as blog tagging.

That is a loss of functionality. It is inconvenient to me. It is
disruptive to me. If it is inconvenient to me and causing me
disruption, I am fairly confident that it will be inconvenient and
disrupting to others. Lots of others. But maybe not you.

So I wrote to about 4 or 5 of the people who had 'passed it on', each
to about 8 others, to ask them would they mind contacting their 8 and
asking *them* not to pass the thing on further as it was damaging the
aggregation functionality. One of them replied that it was his blog
and he'd do what he liked. Besides, the people running the blog
aggregators were 'skimming' his work, probably to their financial
advantage not his. Another replied that as he didn't use OraNA
himself, it didn't seem like much of a problem. The others didn't
respond at all.

So I blogged about it, simply pointing out that if things went
according to the quite open plans of the devisor of the tagging
"game", by round 4, there would 4096 me-too '8 things' posts. I didn't
demand anything. I didn't call anyone anything. I simply pointed out
the maths and asked whether people would please stop 'passing it on':
by all means post 8 personal things about yourself, but don't
encourage 8 others to do the same, on and on, because to do so would
be to cause damage to the aggregators. For this I was accused by one
of throwing my weight around ("When I signed up to my blog I didn't
realise I had signed your terms and conditions"), another said simply
that I was just being "grumpy" and a third simply said, "Chill dude,
you'll have an aneurysm". As if this has anything to do with my
emotional state or a desire to dictate to others!

That is precisely the "it ain't loud, mister" response I would expect
to have to put up with on the train, but had hoped I wouldn't have to
put up with from members of a supposed "community" of bloggers.

You tell me Frank: if I don't "want to be in" (which I don't), tell me
how, simple as 1-2-3, I "don't". That's like saying, if you don't like
the white noise coming from the earbuds of the guy sitting next to
you, don't listen! But the fact of the matter is that the choices of
others have impinged on the functionality of a website I use. Their
actions have **taken away** my choice not to participate. Whether I
like it or not, OraNA gets flooded with these posts, and I can't opt
out of that.

Oh, considerate members of the Oracle blogging community have said I
could learn to use an RSS reader: you can filter those, after all. (As
if I didn't know about RSS readers already!) Trouble is, how do I
install an RSS reader on a SOE PC? Or on a friend's PC? Or on a PC to
which I don't have rights to install anything? No problem: Firefox has
a reader built-in. Great... so what do I do if I don't use Firefox? Or
my SOE PC dictates IE6 and nothing else?

This is the "if you don't like the noise, mister, sit somewhere else"
school of nuisance management. It's **my** fault for being there, and
the solution is for **me** to move, even though the noise and buisance
is being made by someone else! No thanks: all these workarounds assume
too much and miss the "moral hazard" of making the victim take action
to ameliorate the consequences of the actions of the perpetrators.

I thought of starting my own blog tagging game. I'd start with a post
that went something like this: "Post 8 personal things about yourself
and pass this note onto 8 other people. Bill Gates will donate $1 for
every time this note is passed on to another group of 8 people". What
would happen then, Frank, do you think? This, too, would be seen as an
innocent bit of fun? A game to enjoy, nothing to worry about? I don't
think so. When you get those sorts of posts in your inbox, you call it
spam. The Oracle community has just indulged in a giant bit of
spamming. I'm told by Tim Hall that it's not spam at all because it's
not written by anonymous commentators on a blog but by the blog
authors themselves. I'm supposed to believe this makes it alright, but
to me, it makes it much worse.

So what about my behaviour don't you understand, Frank? If I find
train travel noxious, abhorrent, noisy and unpleasant because of the
behaviour of my fellow, but inconsiderate, passengers, would you be
surprised if I started driving in to work? I find what has happened
pretty unpleasant. I find the attitude of those involved in what you
quite correctly call 'blog spamming' abhorrent. I simply don't see why
I should, or should be expected to, continue to make my work available
to such a community. That's unfortunate for the many who haven't
engaged in this round of spamming, but then perhaps those people
should make their voice heard. Passive acquiesence in the vandalism
perpetrated by a few gets you a slum with no nice amenities, after
all.

I have been told my action is disproportionate, but the people saying
that don't (it seems to me) appear to appreciate the scale of what has
just gone on here. Like you, they shrug and say, 'don't like it, don't
read it'. To them, it's trivial, so my response seems completely way
off beam. But I see a site has been vandalised and a mode of behaviour
condoned which, in any other context you care to mention, would be
condemned as a pyramid scheme, spam, a virus, a distributed denial of
service attack -call it what you will, but those involved with the
Internet generally do not take kindly to things which propagate
exponentially with a seemingly benign payload.

I won't make my material available to a community that thinks
generating and encouraging exponential traffic growth is a game and
that so long as it doesn't affect them personally, it can't be that
important. Simple as that.

No, it isn't.