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Blogs ยป Archive for April 5th, 2006
digg: anti-social software?
It seems that digg, the popular tech news site that relies on its community to promote links to its front page, is somewhat ruthless in its tolerance for other types of communities, in particular forums.
Forum administrators beware! Apparently if someone on a forum starts a thread that says “digg my link and I’ll digg yours”, the domain for that forum is likely to be banned by digg. That’s right: no warning, no request to remove the thread. Just banned. And without any warning that this might happen in their Terms of Service.
Is this reasonable in your view? Or should the domain being dugg be the one that is banned? Should forum moderators perhaps be given a grace period to remove the thread? And if so, how long should that grace period be?
Thoughts?
Sun Developer Days 2006: Day One
Sun Microsystems is winding up a tour of Australia and New Zealand with the final stop of its Sun Developer Days 2006 conference today and tomorrow in Melbourne. Fellow SitePointer Lachlan Donald and I were there today to take in the Java vibes, and as with most free conferences there was a great deal of variation in the quality of the sessions we attended.
Sun Developer Tools, Bob Brewin (Sun)
In his keynote, Mr. Brewin spoke chiefly about the push Sun is making towards Ease of Development (EoD) across the entire Java platform and the set of Sun developer tools. Key examples of this included the new language features in Java SE 5.0, the release as a free download of Java Studio Creator, and the Java Persistence API, which is set to replace entity beans in EJB 3.0. This is all old news, however, and Brewin looked like he’d delivered this keynote fifty times before. Though some of the improvements being made to the Java landscape may be inspiring, this session was not.
Changing the Landscape of Software Development, Simon Ritter (Sun)
Mr. Ritter’s keynote essentially covered all of the ways Sun is fostering open source development with Java. Again, …
You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby… Not.
As fun as it is to pontificate about microformats, structured markup and the semantic web, in the past week two item have brought home to me how far the leading edge of web thinking is ahead of ‘Joe in the street’.
The first was an article by Dave Siegel at XML.com.
The Web Is Ruined and I ruined it. Some people say I’ve ruined the Web, and to them it’s true. Web pages can’t be seen as easily by search engines and those with low-end machines have a hard time getting much out of my site. On my personal site, I don’t even put ALT tags just to send a message to those surfing without images. My life is visual. I love museums. How would you like to visit the Louvre with images turned off?
Dave is one of the web design’s true pioneers and his ‘Creating Killer Web Sites‘ was one of the early bibles of web technique. To relate him to the current web landscape, if Tantek Celik is ‘Mr. Box Model Hack’, then Dave Siegel was ‘Sir. Table & Spacer Gif’.
The article is a very interesting but slightly depressing read, not because Dave is championing spacer …
