Comments on: Bloggery Doesn't Pay

By: Brian 'Psychochild' Green

Brian 'Psychochild' Green — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 03:56:16 +0000

Talked to a friend that works at one of the websites. Guess AOL was being a big mysterious, but the ultimate goal was to get things back in order. Some people were posting more than their contracts allowed, driving up costs. They’re going to start enforcing contractual limitations on the sites.

Nothing drastic, just some people getting worried since the AOL bureaucracy lurched into action before explaining itself. Being the blogosphere, people took things out of proportion. Imagine that!

Have fun.

By: nerd gone bad

nerd gone bad — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:10:34 +0000

Wow – I haven’t heard of any of these sites. I get all my news right here – cool

By: Apache

Apache — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 04:21:24 +0000

bandwidth is a lot cheaper than it used to be. we used to have five figure bandwidth bills back in the day

By: Brask Mumei

Brask Mumei — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:27:10 +0000

The problem with http:// clashes is that the real bandwidth hogs seem to be forums and comments, ie, dynamic stuff you can’t cache blindly. Most caching schemes are fixed topologies, ie, have everyone in a physical neighbourhood share a cache. This doesn’t work with net content as the 0.1% of people hitting the website are scattered geographically so LtM is unlikely to be in my neighbourhood’s cache as I’m the only one there hitting it. What you need is adaptive caching that is website specific, sort of an implied mirror. Hitting LtM would send not the content directly, but a (signed) mirror site to interact with. I guess I answered my question of why this isn’t done…

As mentioned earlier, the answer to this was USENET, which I still use, but does suffer with a lack of immediacy and temporal coherence. Mind you, an enforced hour lag between posts is an effective flame retardant…

By: Angstrom

Angstrom — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 06:04:48 +0000

Brask: HTTP, theoretically, handles this Just Fine via cache control headers. Content distributors, ultimately, *don’t want* the internet at large caching their content for (possibly illusory) control reasons — the ability to modify content after posting, the ability to un-post something, the ability to track hits and gather advertising metrics for page views… The reasons are endless.

Even Akamai, the old grandad of distributed publishing networks, goes fairly far out of their way to ensure content providers retain the control they’d have if their content was on their own servers; this curtails some of the things they could do to further mitigate the immense bandwidth load they’re under.

Unless there is a fundamental mindset shift in the content production side of things, distributed content publishing is going to remain a tool for the Free Information nerds and for small authors, and be largely ignored by medium and large distributors.

(Content creators apparently get no say in this.)

By: Anticorium

Anticorium — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:22:14 +0000

Obvious question: Where is our peer-to-peer web hosting solution?

We had Usenet, and then we decided we were just too damn good for it, is where.

By: Brask Mumei

Brask Mumei — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:14:39 +0000

Obvious question: Where is our peer-to-peer web hosting solution? There isn’t any practical reason why a popular site should have higher bandwidth costs than an unpopular site – can’t it just act like a tracker and dump a hash-code for me to pick up at the closest cache?

Bittorrent is a god send for indie sites as you don’t have to worry about being too successful. But when this happens to plain text blogs? I remember LtM got hit with ridiculous hosting fees, but that was like a decade and enough fibre to wrap the earth a few times ago.

By: Krones

Krones — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:34:18 +0000

The hefty Second Life coverage no longer inundates the main page and there is a RSS feed that filters out all the Second Life content. It’s been “fixed” that way for months now. SL still remains to be one of our most popular categories on the site.

So many MMOG scandals to report on! Every blog post should strive towards a Pulitzer Prize yellow journalism caliber. Watch out Jennings, the bird killing may come back to haunt you one day.

To those who continue to support Massively, thank you.

By: Athryn

Athryn — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:42:24 +0000

I dropped Massively a while ago as well, mainly because it seemed like it was more a Second Life promotional tool than anything else. And Wowinsider recently pissed me off with it’s fearmongering post about someone with an authenticator getting hacked. When the story was proved to be less than accurate, instead of posting a retraction they put in a “well you’re still not entirely safe” excuse post.

By: John

John — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:38:28 +0000

Massively could use a pairing down. I dumped it from Reader a month or so ago. I found it to be tiresome, whinny, and mostly trolling – yellow journalism (??). Also, nothing grates on my nerves more than a blog post that ends with the desperately seeking ad revenue: “what do you think?”, and because they also didn’t seem to accept replies from addresses in the mailinator domain, try as I may, I could not tell them.