A decade of blogging

alternateorg on February 17, 2010

On March 18, 2010, this blog will be 10 years old. I haven’t been the best blogger, and I haven’t written this site alone, but over the years, it’s always been a place I wouldn’t feel right about not having on the web. This graphic is a testament to all the work I’ve put in with various people to keep things going. Here’s to 10 more years.

Some images weren’t available in the Wayback Machine, so that’s why there are a few broken images in there. View full size on Flickr.

Automattical

alternateorg on February 15, 2010

My last post was pretty obtuse because I wasn’t yet ready to blog about blogging, but the reality is, I now work for Automattic, the makers of WordPress.

The thing about blogging is that it really works best when you’ve got, you know, something to talk about. And blogging about how you have nothing to blog about is like just about the most boring thing I can think of, so I haven’t been doing much of that lately. But now the platform on which my job rests is this platform of self-expression that has followed such a strange path from where it began to now. When can you say blogging started? When Blogger was invented? When someone built the first GeoCities page about their cat? It’s really hard to pinpoint when blogging began, but it’s easy to point to it today and call out how important and world-changing it’s been.

At any rate, I really do hope to be blogging more here, on this domain that I’ve co-owned since 2000. I actually have been blogging quite a bit over at my band’s blog, so you can go there and read some stuff about making music, if you want.

MPAA Infringes Copyright

alternateorg on December 4, 2007

I rarely get the impusle to blog anymore, but I’m working on that. The first item to inspire such behavior is from Boing Boing today:

The MPAA’s “University Toolkit” (a piece of monitoring software that universities are being asked to install on their networks to spy on students’ communications) has been taken down, due to copyright violations. The Toolkit is based on the GPL-licensed Xubuntu operating system (a flavor of Linux). The GPL requires anyone who makes a program based on GPL’ed code has to release the source code for their program and license it under the GPL. The MPAA refused multiple requests to provide the sources for their spyware, so an Ubuntu developer sent a DMCA notice to the MPAA’s ISP and demanded that the material be taken down as infringing.

I can’t say I’m surprised but I can say I’m amazed. If this were any more ironic, my head would explode.

Flick Off!

alternateorg on August 30, 2005

Since Tai currently works in the digital identity field and since I worked in it just over a year ago, digital identity articles are always interesting to me, especially when they include such staples for me as Yahoo! and Flickr.

“If Flickr really forces me to join Yahoo in 2006 in order to still use my account, I will quit 24 hours before the deadline,” wrote Thomas Müller, a Hamburg, Germany-based artist who shows more than 1,400 photos at the site. On Wednesday, Müller created a protest group, Flick Off, that has attracted almost 400 members.

I seriously don’t get that. Sign up for a stupid fucking Yahoo! account and shut the hell up already. It’s Flickr’s product, not yours, maybe if you’d been asked if you cared one way or the other, you might have some griping to do, but christ. Do I find it a little sad that Flickr thought it a good move to delete your pictures in 2006 if you don’t sign up for a Yahoo! account? Yeah, I do. You should have the choice to federate your two identities, or keep your Flickr identity stand-alone, but you shouldn’t be forced to do something with an account that you aren’t comfortable.

If this was maybe an online banking account issue, or something a little more secure and important than personal photo sharing, I might see a desire and a strong reason to stir things up and talk on Wired.com about how much of a baby you are. But Flickr? Yahoo? Not a big deal. Suck it up and choose a Yahoo! ID.

Now if this was MSN doing this.. I’d probably have canceled my Flickr account within minutes. But that’s just me.