We are still working on the issues with slow pages loading here and I apologize to readers who visit this blog and experience a page loading delay. I’ve spent a lot of time on this (more than I wanted to, for sure), but I’m not giving up until the page loads almost as fast or as fast as it did before we switched to Wordpress (which might be too lofty an expectation, we’ll see). If this means that I need to rewrite and/or optimize some queries inside Wordpress then I am planning to do so.

I’ve already removed queries that we don’t need to be dynamic like the archives and category and traced the remaining issues down to some suspect MySQL queries — a table join in particular inside Wordpress 1.5 that is showing up frequently in the mysql-slow.log

I wonder how many others who have more than 1,500 posts and 800+ comments have had to deal with this issue?

The Wordpress support area has a couple somewhat older threads about this, but there’s not really any definitive solution that I’ve found yet. I wonder if Matt has any ideas?

In the process of changing blog scripts. More on this to be explained later, but some functionality (like the search) is going to be broken for a little bit, sorry, while I get the 1566 entries dumped and ported to the new database.

The ruling is in about whether bloggers have the same protections as those in major media in the highly controversial Apple trade secret lawsuit and the decision is against the bloggers. sfgate.com:

He said the trio would appeal the judge’s ruling. Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said the ruling affirmed the company’s view that “there is no license conferred on anyone to violate valid criminal laws.” The case has been widely watched in the fast-growing world of Web logs or blogs, Web sites that contain articles or diary entries and that recently have propelled stories into the mainstream. Kleinberg, however, ruled that no one has the right to publish trade secrets that only could have been provided by someone breaking the law.

The deep throat(s) that leaked the Apple trade secrets definitely have to be nervous now. I wonder if the surprise factor really cost Apple much money in the terms of sales, but the leak most certainly will have repurcussions against the employee(s) who broke their NDA. What a mess.

Is this why the quality of Vonage calls lately has been spotty? I’m talking to a few people and halfway through the call they say “you’re dropping.” Had this happen more and more frequently the last couple weeks.

Vonage has selected VeriSign NetDiscovery(TM) Services to help develop the capability for law enforcement to legally intercept calls on its Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)-based digital phone services. Vonage is not presently subject to the requirements of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), but is voluntarily complying with its provisions through this relationship.

I can see the need to be able to listen in on the alleged bad guys, but this will just give services which aren’t voluntarily complying with CALEA a boost as bad guys will just jump to them. Therefore, this just invades the privacy of the rest of us good people. As a Vonage business and residential customer I give this a thumbs down. Whatever you do, Vonage, don’t let your quality suffer because our loyalty to your service ends there.

Another broken service to report on today is PubSub LinkRanks which has clearly become the victim of some sort of exploit and has been in this status for several weeks. StumbleUpon.com which I mentioned earlier today, isn’t even resolving now. Hopefully both these services will be back working again soon.

Author Shelley Powers asks: Where are the women of blogging?

When we women ask the power-linkers why they don’t link to us more, what we’re talking about is communication, and wanting a fair shot of being heard; but what the guys hear is a woman asking for a little link love. Hey lady, do you have what it takes? More important, are you willing to give what it takes? Groupies and blogging babes, only, need apply.

Her piece is firmly planted tongue-in-cheek, but after reading it rather self-consciously I started to look around to evaluate how many women were linked on this blog. Looks like at best I’m severely female link intolerant (or should I say “impotent” to follow the tone of Ms. Power’s piece). We do have a couple female contributers to this blog but they don’t post very much. Can’t say that’s my fault as I’ve encouraged them to do so. Certainly they could — and should – link up as many women as they wanted. 

Ms. Powers doesn’t really get into the reality that women, generally speaking, tend to be a jealous lot. Without trying to be sexist here, I would say significantly more jealous than men on the whole. Let’s look at the bloggers BBN referenced. If Scoble was going into a linking frenzy over say Halley Suitt, what would Maryam think? Heck, she made him (nicely, I’m sure) add a disclaimer to his recent post about looking for someone to share a room that it must be a guy. I’ve seen Winer link to women (lest we forget his regular linking to that #1 podcasting couple Dawn & Drew). Gillmor or Kas Log? Don’t read them that often. Mark Jen has made what: 10 blog posts in his life? Rubel? If it will give him a scoop or angle of some kind, then I’m sure sex wouldn’t matter. Time? Read the magazine, not the blog. Never paid much attention to the sex of who Tim Bray links to, but he links to some mighty interesting people, places and things.

Finally, after all this male blogger and self-analysis I analyzed Shelley Power’s blog, herself, and what did I find?

Apparently at least one woman doesn’t link either, look at the blogroll on her page … er, wait, there is no blogroll. In fact, there are no links anywhere on this page save for self-references. Doh!

It’s not news saying Scoble is often blinded by the RSS/blog light and he even calls himself a “marketing weirdo” so I’m relatively certain he won’t take offense to this commentary. I, too, am a blog/RSS proponent but I can’t go as far as he goes on a lot of the evangelism, especially considering his recent thesis:

Here’s my thesis: companies that have lots of bloggers will end up making better products, will end up having better marketing and PR, will end up making more profit at the end of the day, and will be more likely to have more than one “hit product” and will be more likely to last 100s of years.

I disagree that companies with “lots of bloggers” will do all of these things. The company still is a singular company and has a singular product voice, as already mentioned by a commenter, no matter how many employees or shills for the company who blog. Personally, I would rather see one very high quality group blog per company/product than hundreds of mediocre to occasionally interesting shilled/employee blogs.

It’s OK, IMO, for someone as big as Microsoft to have an official Office blog and OneNote blog and Windows blog, etc, but having a department with every developer, tester, etc having his own company-based blog is just confusing, not helpful for the customer who has to try and determine where and when to receive the information/help h/she needs.

One of Microsoft’s toughest challenges is the overwhelming amount of information at its disposal and maintaining this information in a logical structure. IMO, Microsoft has failed overall at providing fast, simplistic paths to information their customers need. Sure, in some cases this doesn’t apply, but in many cases it does. Microsoft has so much going on that sometimes it can be incredibly difficult to figure out what, where, when, how, etc.

So blog segregation by department/product/service doesn’t really help but hinder this problem, because now you have a bunch of different people potentially giving much of the same information. If every blog had new, different information than that potentially would be helpful, but we both know of the hundred bloggers there would only be a handful at best providing new, useful, helpful information to existing and prospective customers and the rest would primarily be entertainment vehicles.

Lots of subpar bloggers are excess noise and require filtering (like what Robert does with his 1000+ RSS feed filtering). Since this is highly subjective as to what’s good and bad, numbers alone won’t have much bearing on a product’s success or longevity.

Most blogging today is the equivalent of visiting any major publishing house’s slushpile: in many cases it isn’t even as bad as most unsolicited manuscript quality, it’s raw, rough draft quality. Sure, every once in a great while some outstanding material rises from the slush pile, but ask anybody in the publishing industry how often that turns into a bestseller, much less a work that will last for generations.

Also, if a company produces a good, useful and/or entertaining product and has excellent customer service to back it up and is priced competitively than *that* can increase its longevity. But blogging alone, no matter how many people in an organization do it, isn’t going to have a significant impact on the longevity of a product/service on the web any more than a combined advertising plan with TV, radio, print and traditional web advertising. Especially if the product and/or service sucks and/or it is in a market where the saturation point is high.

Put simply: no amount of signal will help a noisy product.

As for this comment by Scoble in the same blog post:

>>Phil: blogs won’t cure cancer but maybe a blogger will. Either way, you’ll probably hear about it on a blog first.
>>
Robert - Just heard over the weekend (on the radio, not on blogs, BTW) that a recent PEW study showed that TV is still the #1 way that people receive their news. Radio was #2 with 18%.

Therefore, TV and radio presence are still very important parts of the puzzle and currently blogging and RSS have almost nil to do with either of those platforms.

With this said, I’d still like to see more worthwhile integration of TV with RSS, like what could be done with the TiVO API or MCE 2005. Imagine being able to kick back in a picture-in-picture and read the news and blogs, watch a movie, download content and make/receive calls (via skype or Vonage) all with only a remote.

This started as a comment reply to Scoble but grew so long that I decided to post it here. Not edited, may contain errors, pensive but perhaps not completely well conceived and ready for it to be turned into swiss cheese by insightful readers. In two words: draft material.

Sourcebank the search engine for developers, eh? Hmm.

Is this the largest blog-related lawsuit to date? Pardon the pun, but wonder how will this one shake out? Nick Denton has rolled the dice on hosting via Gawker, albeit for “only two hours”, a stolen sex video from Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst. See Gawker’s disclaimer:

Gawker is a gossip site. The site publishes both rumors and conjecture, in addition to accurately reported information. Information on this site may contain errors or inaccuracies; the site’s proprietors do not make warranty as to the correctness or reliability of the site’s content. Links to content on and quotation of material from other sites are not the responsibility of Gawker Media.

I’m not a lawyer, but I seriously doubt this disclaimer will protect the hosting of the video by Gawker because it doesn’t matter if it was for two days, two years, two minutes or two hours, if there was no consent here on Durst’s part for the release of this video. I’d guess that the upstream hosting providers will fare better in this one. One thing that does stand out is the $80 million dollars price tag for a look at Durst’s privates (no thanks), and I suspect this is more about money and exposure than family jewels being exposed. We’ll see, er, I mean thank goodness most of us didn’t see.

Carl Franklin who recently added a new show called Mondays to his already successful, long running .NET Rocks show targeting developers is now working on a third show; this one a daily podcast called The Daily Commute:

-Available every weekday morning before work
- 15-20 minutes tops
- News for nerds of all ilks: Developers, IT, DBA, Managers, etc.
- Headlines only with shrinkster links read aloud and on the site
- No mindless drivel or self-indulgence

Franklin’s show will compete with already established Andrew McCaskey who has been doing the daily SlashdotReview show. He says there will be no ads, but we’ll see what happens if he starts tearing up bandwidth.

If by chance you are reading this, Carl, then please do not have a Microsoft bias in this new show! Count at least this listener out if that’s the format. Apache is on almost 70% of the servers domains (thanks for correction, Jeremy) on the web so there is clearly another development world — and interest — beyond and besides Microsoft. A show like what Carl’s doing could be really cool if it isn’t slanted to any one platform.