Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Howard Rogers on February 27, 2008 at 3:56pm

Your recommendations are your affair, of course, and fine in that context. In this context, however, they look like excusing the vandals -and, indeed, putting the burden of blame onto those harmed by the vandals.

I didn't come here to debate 'blog tag' either, particularly since denial of service attacks and spam are not things it's possible to actually debate meaningfully. I merely posted here to explain that a petition for me to 'come back' is pointless; and that comments like yours and Stew's similarly miss the underlying point by a wide mile.

Having done those two things, I will go back to the obscurity from whence I came.

Permalink Reply by Stew Stryker on February 27, 2008 at 7:24am

Howard,

Pardon my ignorance (really, not being sarcastic) about the OraNA feed. I thought I read from someone (who I assumed knew better) that you could narrow the subscription down.

I was really trying to sympathize with your action of closing your blog (the "deserve the punishment we get" part), not tell you to do more work.

On the other hand, if you see an unsafe driver on the highway, wouldn't a reasonable person give the idiot plenty of extra leeway? Or should you continue following as closely as you normally would? Don't you modify your behavior to protect yourself against email spam? I'd be surprised if you didn't using tools like spam filters in email, disposable addresses, private personal address different from your "commercial" address.

So if you're willing to make an extra effort for that, then why reject making some effort to just get the RSS feeds you want?

Finally, now that I understand why you closed off from the world, I think the idea to write more posts to encourage you to come back is ludicrous and counter-productive.

To be clear, I'm not faulting your withdrawing your blog, just questioning your statement about OraNa.info. Best of luck no matter what your decision.

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Permalink Reply by Howard Rogers on February 27, 2008 at 1:19pm

Of course you take avoidance action in the sight of a dangerous driver. Which is precisely what I've done, of course.

"making some extra effort to get just the feeds you want" is again very short-sighted. What about those people reading OraNA on work PCs that are locked down with group policies so tight that no new browsers, RSS readers, Firefox plugins etc etc can be installed? Forget about me and what you assume my choices are: the issue was (and remains) how the behaviour of others affects large numbers of people in the aggregate, many of whom have situations and capabilities substantially different from those you (and others) simply assume 'ought' to apply.

Your "making some effort" comment is, intentionally or otherwise, simply a way of excusing the spamming/denial-of-service consequence of the '8 things' pranksters. Which is to seriously skew priorities, I think, and to point the finger in an approximately 180 degree wrong direction.

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Permalink Reply by Boneist on March 16, 2008 at 4:23am

Whilst I believe your decision to remove your site from the Oracle community is your right, and I understand your reasons for doing so, I can't help but think that your actions so far are akin to toys being thrown out of the pram. Your vehemence is - in my opinion - totally over-the-top for the supposed "crime" that was committed.

But ok, you got angry and that's fine. But why keep participating in the community you've stated many times you're withdrawing from? You would sound far more ... professional if you retired gracefully, instead of taking pot-shots at every opportunity because people dared to say they miss you and your contributions.

As for OraN aggregator; if you didn't like the newspaper you were currently reading because it ended up more full of adverts than actual content, wouldn't you just switch papers? Or perhaps read one of the free papers that seem so prevalent these days (or at least in London they are! I get accosted twice on the 30 second journey from my office to the train station, and the amount of papers left on the train at the end of the journey is astounding!).

I'm interested to know if you still use OraN to read people's blogs. I personally use http://www.livejournal.com to set up the rss feeds and read them - easy to be selective, but no extra browsers, plug-ins etc needed. And you can set how many entries you want to see per page!

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Permalink Reply by Tony Andrews on April 3, 2008 at 10:14am

Meanwhile, of course, the blog tagging has quickly petered out and OraNA is back to normal. But I'm probably missing the point...

Permalink Reply by Howard Rogers on April 3, 2008 at 1:54pm

To Boneist: When I point out the many errors of fact and inference in your contribution here, no doubt you will say I'm merely taking "pot-shots". (Great idea to belittle the reply before it's even sent, by the way. Not so sure it's a legitimate part of rational discussion, though). But here goes anyway.

I was never "angry". I've explained the feelings I had about the whole thing in one or two places at some length. "Agahst" is nearer the mark. Amazement that supposedly technical people working in the IT field could ever think the generation of an expontentially-increasing flood of traffic a good idea, defintely. Anger, no.

As for your newspaper analogy: you fail to appreciate, I think, that if you poision the well of one aggregator, you posion the well of them all. You can't just stop reading OraNA and switch to some other aggregator, because a flood of '8 things' posts affects them all, pretty much equally. Your analogy simply doesn't apply, therefore.

Besides which, it seeks once again to avoid the moral hazard here: other people screw things up, so it's down to me to change the way I read blogs? No. The blame is on those that do the screwing up, not those who are the victims of it. The moral requirement is on others to not screw things up in the first place, not on me to respond when they do.

So once again, your last paragraph simply misses the point. I know what an RSS feed is. I know what an RSS reader is. But that is not what I chose to read OraNA's feeds with, and I don't appreciate having my choices taken away by thoughtless acts of vandalism on the part of others.

As for your comment about retiring gracefully. It is you that have written here a month after I last posted anything. It is you that re-open the issue by getting most of the facts about it wrong, not I. It is you that choose to descend to the depths of characterising me as a spoilt, angry child, not I.

Whenever I see people posting things that suggest 'blog tagging' was an innocent pastime, it's all blown over, no harm done, get over it and if you can't get over it, it must be because you're behaving like a spoilt child, throwing toys out of prams and getting angry, I will respond to point out the ridiculousness of that characterisation.

Stop posting this sort of stuff, in other words, and you won't ever hear from me again. Keep posting it, however, and I will keep pointing out your errors of fact.

And in regards to Tony: yes, I think you have rather missed the point.

In the first place, neither you nor I can say, for example, whether the blog tagging "petered out" precisely because I made such a fuss about it. I know about a dozen people, for example, who did NOT "pass it on" to 8 others because, according to them, they'd read my thoughts on the topic and thus realised the consequences of doing so. Maybe rather more than bothered emailing me did likewise. Who knows?

And in the second place, just because your bruises heal pretty quickly, that makes it ok for me to beat you up in the first place, does it?! No, I don't think so.

That is, just because you can now look back and say, 'oh it didn't amount to much in the end' doesn't make a deliberate attempt to generate an exponential flood of traffic round the Oracle and non-Oracle blogosphere legitimate, trivial or a matter of no concern. Neither does the dissipation of those effects 3 months later mean that causing them in the first place was OK.

Permalink Reply by Tony Andrews on April 4, 2008 at 2:26am

(Replying to this because it doesn't appear to be possible to reply to any of the subsequent posts)

Howard: do you really think this blog tagging nonsense (it certainly wasn't something I particularly wanted to read) could possibly have gone "exponential" in the Oracle community? How many bloggers are there in the community that are sufficiently esteemed to be tagged - 100 to be generous?

Most of these people blog on a daily basis anwyay, often about their cats or new mobile phones as much as about Oracle in some cases, and for many their blog tag post just replaced whatever else they might have written that day. Blogs are somewhat frivolous in nature, they are not Oracle Documentation.

I knew prefectly well I was "missing the point" in my last post: I believe virtually everyone misses the point except you for some reason. Calling blog tagging "vandalism" and "thuggish behaviour" etc. is like calling a rag week procession that disrupts traffic a bit a riot or a civil war.

Permalink Reply by Howard Rogers on April 4, 2008 at 4:50am

I have no idea where this reply is going to end up, either, but this is to Tony.

Whether I believe it "could possibly have gone "exponential" in the Oracle community" is beside the point. It was explicitly designed in the first place to grow *beyond* the Oracle community. And it was explicitly designed as an exponentially-growing self-propagating "meme". That it didn't do what its designers explicitly and deliberately (and quite openly) wanted it to do doesn't make me look on it any more kindly. And as I've replied first time, neither you nor I are in a position to determine WHY it didn't do what its designers wanted it to do... and maybe, just perhaps, I was instrumental in foiling their ambitions.

Fact is, in any case: it was designed to go exponential. It was designed to go out of the Oracle community. It did cause a large spike in traffic. It did flood OraNA and other aggregators with traffic. It did cause technical posts to be swept away in a matter of minutes. And those facts are unarguable. My response (withdrawing my material, not participating in forums etc.) was a response to those facts, not whether someone's ambitions were realised or not.

I agree a lot of Oracle blogs are about cats (or wallabies). No problems with that at all. Indeed, one of my main points all along has been that people could have posted their 8 things at any time and in any fashion and done no harm at all. Indeed, more attention would have been paid to the content of such posts had they come in ones or twos than in a flood, and we'd all have been richer for the experience. But because they came in an artifically-generated tidal wave, they merely caused inconvenience to many and reduced their meaningfulness at the same time.

Those that post about their cat, in short, do not usually go on to then ask 8 other people to post similarly. Posts do not usually get flooded out of Orana in less than 12 minutes, thanks to a an attempt to *deliberately* generate a flood of traffic. That they did in this case indicates that something unusual was afoot, I think. This wasn't just the usual cat post. This wasn't just the usual 'here's something about me' personal stuff. It's simply blurring one distinction too many to suggest an equivalence otherwise.

As for your last comment, where you state that "Calling blog tagging "vandalism" and "thuggish behaviour" etc. is like calling a rag week procession that disrupts traffic a bit a riot or a civil war." No, it's not. It's like calling a rag week procession a major traffic disruptive event. Which it is, and blog tagging was disruptive to the blog aggregators, and that's a matter of fact, not opinon.

But then it comes down to motive and intent. Those that engage in a rag week procession are doing it for charity, usually. And they give advance warning, usually, and the police accordingly clear the roads and do their best to *minimise* the disruption to those who are not part of the student body, usually. There is thus no comparison with those who deliberately set out to create a 'self propagating meme', designed from the outset to create an exponentially-growing flood of traffic that was never intended to be contained within the Oracle community, and without giving any warning whatsoever to those whom it would affect. Nor is there any comparison with those who, thinking it all a bit of a lark, participate unthinkingly and, in the case of some, uncaringly as to the consequences of their participation.

Your analogy is flawed, in short. It seeks to equate charitable fun carried out with full civic awareness and consideration with disruptive, destructive damage that had no intrinsic merit and quite explicitly sought to achieve nothing except the propogation of yet more 'noise'. As one who has been inconvenienced by rag week and smiled benignly on it (indeed, participated in it when a lot younger), and as one who was majorly inconvenienced by the blog tagging crapola, I can spot the difference; and I use words like..

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Permalink Reply by Howard Rogers on April 4, 2008 at 4:56am

..."vandalism" with due care and deliberation accordingly.

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Permalink Reply by Aman.... on April 13, 2008 at 7:48pm

I am late in this discussion and from the last one too. But yes without any shadow of doubt,I do miss HJR and his site. More than site , its his presence which I miss. Sites come and go but a person should not which happened here. I don't know whether I should take part in saying that he is right in doing that but I know this that if we call all it as a community and one member of family is upset about some thing, some other fellow member's , it wont make a big deal if we do something/anything to calm him down. We never think like that when we have one in the family angry right?
But I guess its not me who have to take decision or force mine.
Yes I say wholeheartedly, I miss HJR!
Aman....

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