The problem with the default reCaptcha output is that it does not validates XHTML 1.0 Strict because the use of iframes. But you can change the code at the recaptchalib.php file (available here). This problem persist at the current version (1.10 at this moment).

Replacing the code at lines #122 – #128 with:

<?php
    return '<script type="text/javascript" src="'. $server . '/challenge?k=' . $pubkey . $errorpart . '"></script>
        <noscript>
            <div id="no_js_recaptcha">
                <object type="text/html" data="http://api.recaptcha.net/noscript?k=' . $pubkey . '" width="500" height="300">
                <!--[if IE]>
                <iframe width="500" height="300" frameborder="0" src="http://api.recaptcha.net/noscript?k=' . $pubkey . '"></iframe>
                < ![endif]-->
                </object>
            </div>
        </noscript>';
?>

will do the trick

I’m not interested in publishing superficial things as I’ve seen over there: I believe nobody will be interested in whether I got up tired this morning, nor whether I had a ham-cheese sandwich or just a jam toast for breakfast. I neither believe it is important to discuss about my which shoes pair should I wear today dilemma (I don’t by the way ).

Internet big bang information era brought us this big wave of shallowness (or excessive ego show-offing) which not only I’m not interested in, but also have buried others which deserve to be read.

I understand other people find exciting to find out what have Nicole Kidman, Brad Pitt o whomever for breakfast. They are famous people and always have a fan legion after them. But I find really pretentious to ever think that what we (common mortals) do in our boring day by day living has any interest for the rest of the people. Maybe our closer friends circle would like to know, but you needn’t to post in on a blog (yes, I know, It’s cool and it’s on fashion to do it so). It’s enough to agree with them to go to a Café or a Pub and tell them face to face

This Internet 2.0, effectively, has brought us an entire Journalist 2.0 generation which mistakes “being a Reporter” with “being a Journalist with a graduate in Journalism” (I already talk about mistaking being the “computer guy” with being a Computer Science Engineer -which seems to be what Spanish Government is doing- in previous post). A generation that doesn’t create original content: doing so takes time and effort and this is old fashioned nowadays.

I’ve seen actual little things to be announced as major breakthroughs. And this tendency seems to be in
rising up. These major minor breakthroughs are announced more and more often, but they’re just noise. The next thing will be announcing new type fonts and colors as high innovation. What I mean it that, nowadays, the container is given more importance than the content. But among all this noise, there are some islands which really interesting and important things which worth to be read.

Today there’s no content: just design. To me, the Web 2.0 is dead.

Update (19:40 – 27th July, 2009): You can read (in Spanish) a better reasoned post about this topic: http://www.asinorum.com/la-crisis-web-20/1442/

Since I don’t use robots.txt I only could think either it’s because of a plugin I’ve recently installed or the cause is beyond my control (not directly related to me), but it’s affecting me anyway. I’m suspecting of WP-HashCash plugin I installed the same day I wrote Bye Bye, Captcha!. It was just this day my site stop being indexed (the mentioned post was written just after installing this plugin and has not been indexed either). In fact, WP-HashCash is in charge of getting spam bots away using JavaScript, and I suspect such javascript might be interferring other spider bots in some way.

The other suspected plugin is Kramer which I also installed by that time, though it’s less likely it is the one cousing troubles. I’ve momentarily disabled both to see what happens.

If someone has a clue, please don’t hesitate to tell.

Update: (12:07 – Jun 09th) I’ve disabled almost every plugin in my system and then pinged Technorati (its support service told me their web spiders couldn’t access my site for some reason). It seems I’m now indexed! The problem now is I don’t know thich plugin was causing troubles (supposing it was one of them). Will keep investigating…

“Defrosting chicken, 4 minutes. Heating food: 2 minutes. Boiling water: 15 seconds”

Time durations are invented, I can’t remember them exactly.

“Wow! How fast!“, I told myself. In those times, latest ’80s, microwaves were not very known, at least in the Canaries, and were more considered luxury stuff. But it wasn’t that what I found hard to believe. I rememeber my mother putting the chicken to defrost on the kitchen sink in the early morning, to start cooking it at midday; if I were to boil water for an infusion it took me at least 3 or 4 minutes in our gas cooker. So, was the advertisement telling the true? How could it be so fast?

Unfortunately, that was a bad omen: Not only cooking would speed up (with the arrival of microwaves): Everything did. People want to do everything quicker. And among this hustle and bustle, one asks oneself why: to save more time? more time to do more things quicker? It’s supposed that, in the end, you’ll have more spare time, but I’ve seen many people having fun in a hurry during their spare time, not knowing very well why, putting the foot on the accelerator all the time…

We live in a microwave society, a more and more vibrating one, of which symptoms are now moving into the blogosphere. If something requires time, few people take the trouble to try it.

The Power of Linking II

In a previous post I mentioned how suggestive is the power of the link and the ego. A good way of promoting your blog is making other people to link you from a popular site or from a news one. Digg is a site that promotes (or penalizes) news in a colaborative way. Not long a go, a Spanish clone of Digg, Menéame and a little later Fresqui went out. At first sight, the former is more popular, though the later is getting closer, as you can see in this comparative profile.

The idea behind Digg, Menéame and similiar sites is interesting: People vote news and when they reach certain amount of them they get published (they go to the front page). This way it’s supposed the most interesting news for The Community go out. The main difference between Digg and the Spanish clones are these allows anonymous votes. Apart of that, they work in a very similar way.

One expects that subscribing to Menéame RSS feed, for example, you could have an up to date incoming interesting and fresh news feed. But, again, the ego, the power of linking and the vibrating competition could drive this system into corruption and to die from success.

When a story is sent, if it’s voted it will get published, and the source site will get many visits, and thus, become popular. Due to the power of the link, to that compulsion of the ego to become popular, to get more attention to itself with some kind of narcissism, many stories are sent to that sites expecting to get more visits. Actually, the story is the least important thing here. In some cases, it even is not a true story. The authors (the senders) want to be voted and visited. But there’s another problem in this shaking environment: Stories must not be duplicate (already sent by someone), so the first in sending it wins (that is: his/her story gets published in the front page, the others discarded).

These causes many duplicate stories. This is not a problem, since the system has filtering mechanisms, but shows the tendency of senders to replicate stories from other sources instead of creating original content. Some of them don’t even rewrite the story (I’m not going to link some examples here, but I’m sure some people will feel I’m talking about them). They simply cut & paste the story and then link to the original source (usually a true electronic newspaper). Is this the up and coming Digital Journalism? To be honest, I then prefer reading the original source (generally written by a true reporter, you know, those who studied for it), rather than a crude plagiarism of a teenager with a strong desire of popularity (which, in case of getting it, would be unfair) and, what is worse, with spelling mistakes (WTF?? if you copy it, at less do it well).

In the Microwave Society things go fast, and if something is not done in 5 minutes, it’s abandoned: it is not worth the hassle. Creating original content takes TIME. And when you create original content and it’s a good one, the rest of those self entitled “digital reporters”, will simply copy you, they will replicate you and, in some manner, takes part of your merited popularity away. Menéame is full of examples of this, links to silly things, stupid video-sketches an other “news”, whilst other good stories remain hidden under surface. Later, some BlogStar (someone considered a guru in the blogosphere) sends the same previously ignored story and this time it reachs the front page. Why did it reach the front page? Is that the proof of the power of someone with popularity and “his/her” community? Some people seems to get really upset because of this.

Giving a glance to this example (in Spanish) and reading comments below we realize that actually the story is the least important thing. We can read comments about how duplicate it is or who really was the first in sending it, but nothing about its content. And what about the genuine story (the one sended first)? Yet again, the comments are not related to the story, but to the power of the Link. They’re about the effect of the publication, and the “menéame effect” (See Slashdot Effect in the previous post).

I found Menéame an interesting social experiment. Many people taking part there denounce state corruption, fraud, deceptive advertising in the media, and so on and so forth… but they themselves use the same dirty tricks in the blogosphere. How hypocritical!

In conclusion…

What cames out from the related post ant this one, from my humble point of view is:

1. Many bloggers are not even interested in what they publish, but in how many visits they will get for publishing that story (and yes, the ego and the desire of popularity are behind this).

2. From the above, we realize that sometimes is more important why a story is published or who did it that the topic iself.
3. Creating original content takes time. Nowadays, few people takes time and effort in the blogosphere (especially younger people don’t). Really original content is poor and scarce.
4. When a story is replicated very much it should be considered important within the community, and the level of replication a measure of impact. Before it was the linking level (PageRank), but today this measure should be the copy itself (and, if I’m true, Google could already be using thins in Google News).

A final suggestion

If you want your blog to become popular, work for it. As stated before, making original content takes time and some effort. It’s hard to maintain a high posting rate creating original content. Don’t try your site to become a news site like Slashdot or Digg. Maintaining that posting rate is impossible. Behind those sites there is a huge commuity of users and not a single person. Communities don’t have ego, they’re a mass of people. Most people read sites like Digg or Slashdot and then jumps to the source of the story. But rarely do they “hook” to the a cut & paste blog. If someone really finds your blog interesting, it’s because it has original content (usually on a topic), or likes you or your opinions (not others ones).

It’s ok to “copy” and link a story, but it would be much better if you comment on it and show your point of view (this is the original content you can contribute) instead of just cut and paste it with no more added information. When you comment a story from your blog, you should link it and, if possible, send a trackback. An summary of your post will appear as a comment on the source story blog. That’s the way the blogosphere builds up. People who read the source story will read your comment and, if they find it insteresting, will visit your blog. So you have your link.

About blogs

Personal Blogs usually tell day by day livings and personal matters of their owners. People usually read them because of the emotional hook these things have, for the voyeurism and the gossiping on the live of others. Emotional hook is like a very powerful drug. TV programs with little or none actual content, but with a strong emotional charm (e.g. Big Brother, Soup Operas, etc) keep people in front of the box. Morbo and emotions thrills people and almost freezes them, keeping them interested in, usually boring, other people lives.

There’re blogs like these programs, which also hook people. Many unknown netizens read others dull lives almost day by day, like watching soup opera. From time to time, some of them through their disgraces to the cyberspace. But, when there’s no news to tell, the simple fact of making a sandwich, describe the new clothes you bought just today, or any other boring fact of the day by day living are published on thousand of blogs everyday.

On the other hand, there are news blogs, or specialized ones focused on one (or a few) topics, usually hobbies or thougs (my blog is one of those). The idea behind them is we published about our hobbies expecting other hobbyist opinion in return. ¿Do you like Bonsais? ¿Are you a ZX Spectrum nostalgic, like I am? ¿Play Role Games? Create up a blog and publish about it, what you think, what you like and what you don’t, and read other’s blogs with the same preferences. Welcome to the blogsphere…

Google and “The Power of Linking“

A blog with no readers, unless written for therapeuthics purposes (for ranting?), is useless. Who wants to write and not to be read? When you’ve post several times, and your friends and colleagues have stopped writing comments in your blog, comment silence appears, and a new question arises: Is anybody reading me?. Tools like Google Analytics, or maybe your own hosting ones might be useful for you to have an idea about the amount of people visiting your site.

What could you do to make people read you? How important is your blog?
I’m sure you already suspect the answer: The more poeple refer to your blog, the more it’s commented and, in short, the more popular it becomes, the more important you blog is. In the Internet, popularity and linking comes toguether, and your blog will be not an exception. Google itself, gives more importance to pages linked more by others (it’s well known PageRank algorithm does exactly that: counts how many pages link to your one and gives you an importance number).

And then, the strugle for being linked arises. Perversion begins: Many people pay for it, and there even are companies which manages linking farms (fake pages with lot of links to your site, to increase the PageRank popularity index). Google has already warned it will downgrade those pages, and its related linking farms.

However, thanks to PageRank, other concepts have been perverted too: If your blog gets lots of links, it means Google will take it into consideration (no dubt, mane people has referred to it), but this does not imply it will be more visited. Of course, a very linked blog is more probably to be visited, but there is a moment in which this won’t be necessary. If you’re really interested in a site, you won’t arrive into it from another one, you get directly throught it (e.g. via a bookmark). For example, I usually read two news sites:Slashdot and its homologue Spanish version Barrapunto. If you’re linked by one of them, it’s because you blog really have something interesting to tell. Be ready, because the torrent of visits will probably block your site. It’s the so known Slashdot effect.

If you’ve get through here, then I’m happy for not get you bored. You probably know most of this already if you’ve been into the blogosphere.

But let’s go back to our main topic: Do Slashdot or Barrapunto really need to be linked? No. Not now. Because they’ve achieved the most difficult: They have a big and constant audience, which read them almost daily. They come up when there were almost no news sites. There were no competitors. Today, a huge amount of blogs struggle for popularity, for being known and linked. Because, don’t fool ourselves, we all want to be listened, to be read, if we have a blog…

And why? Excuses (and not answers) made to this question tends to be apparently logical: “Because I could put some advertisement”, “Maybe someone will buy it and I’ll strike it rich”… But beneath those ideas usually hides something less evident: When the desire to be known and popular becomes an obsession, an obsession to drive the masses and to be, in some manner, famous and popular what’s after that is the ego. Always the ego.

And yes, with this post I’ve prepared the ground to my next one…

To be continued… (stay tunned).