Tag Tuesday

Last night, we hosted Tag Tuesday at the AOL offices in Mountain View.  It was a good get-together; Edwin Aoki talked about tag spam, and Kevin Burton talked about TailRank.  Naturally, my laptop battery ran out, and when I got home, I discovered that my DSL had crapped out so I couldn't blog.  Oh, the horror.  So, just some quick drive-by notes.

Do meta-tags (tags applied to tags or tag-url tuple instances) make any sense?  It's tags all the way down...  Kevin Marks commented that co-occurrences of tags are good enough for most purposes.  Need to think about that one.

Kevin's TailRank beta is a "meme finder" as opposed to an aggregator.  It uses OPML subscription lists to help filter information based on what you and your friends are interested in -- and he's working on getting some kind of automatic sync-up going.  Seems like this would benefit from Ray Ozzie's Really Simple Sharing initiative.  There's a problem here, though -- the whole point of this is that you don't have to explicitly subscribe to feeds, but if nobody explicitly subscribes to feeds, where will the interest data come from?

Now, I really like the concept of mobile.tailrank.com.  I really don't want to manage a set of subscriptions for my mobile device and it really can't handle the set of subscriptioins I have on my desktop.  But something that automatically filters interesting news, with input from my desktop subscriptions, seems like a natural win for a mobile service.

Oh, and we had a smooth and uneventful Journals update this morning.  Fortunately for Joseph the Intern.

Neat site statistics service

Clearly, John ate a bit too much turkey over the holiday and let his LinkRank slip a bit.  PubSub's Site Stats is a neat service that includes data from AOL Journals and many other places, and presents the information in summary form so you can see how many people link to your blog.  Just put your URL in the box and bookmark the page for later:

http://www.pubsub.com/site_stats

Stamping out brush fires, one by one

An update to Joe's update of  today.  The Patch: Problem identified; it was of course a typo; re-release should go out soon.  Again, what you'll get is exactly what's on beta.journals.aol.com/(screen name)/(journal name) right now, so there should be no more surprises.  Knock on wood.  Character Set:  Problem identified (see below) and we think we have a full fix, which will need a bit of testing, so that should go out a bit after the patch.  Archive Counts: Still working on it.  Ad Banners: We're listening to suggestions and doing some brainstorming; note that whatever we come up with has to pass muster with executives.  I'm  hopeful, though.  Jason Calacanis has a great post about the situation on his blog.  I couldn't agree more, and I know that people at AOL are listening.

OK, so now for the geek update.  The character set encoding issue?  Well, basically, the major technical update  in this release involved moving to a new web server and servlet engine (Tomcat).  Unfortunately, we discovered too late that Tomcat by default decides that HTML form data is encoded in ISO-8859-1.  Also unfortunately, Journals uses UTF-8 throughout. For most common English characters, the two encodings give the same bytes; it's when you start speaking French (or talking about your re'sume') that you run into differences.  So the problem here is we didn't test this enough after the switchover and got caught by surprise.  The solution involves setting the encoding to UTF-8, but doing it in the right place is a bit of a problem -- if you set it AFTER the servlet engine starts reading stuff, it ignores you.  Personally I think it should throw an exception if this happens since encodings are, well, kind of important, as we've demonstrated over the past couple of weeks.  In any case, the solution we're looking involves a servlet filter similar to this one. More generally, we need to figure out how to add this as a general, automatic test so that it's just not possible to skip it -- and so that we'll be alerted within hours if some other configuration change breaks things, hopefully weeks before we make that change to the live production site.

106 Miles to Chicago

Jason Calacanis is on a mission:  To find or create an AOL executive blog.  Go, Jason, go!

Elwood: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses.
Jake: Hit it.

-- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080455/quotes

What's happening, and a preview of the new patch

Joe's done a good job of explaining what happened this morning; in technical terms, we pushed out a change, it gave us a surprise, and we hit the metaphorical Undo button.  We're trying to figure out what went wrong now.

The interesting thing (from our perspective) is that the change was pushed out first to beta.journals.aol.com, and it works fine there.  Which means that if you want to see a preview of the change, you can view your blog on beta (use "beta.journals.aol.com" instead of "journals.aol.com" in the URL) and take a look.  My personal opinion?  Might help a little, but we need to do more.  (The release also includes a fix that will, hopefully, resolve the entry saving problem for anyone who still has it.)

In other news, the Washington Post story "You've Got Ads" came out this morning.  Some reactions from the blogosphere are here.  The press release from AOL got some facts wrong about ads on blogging services; I can't comment beyond that since that's an official communication and this blog is highly unofficial.  But, when AOL issues a press release that says the sky is green, I don't think it's against our communications policy to simply note that, looking out the window, the sky looks awfully blue to me.

Those Banner Ads

It's been a long two days stomping out the brush fires ignited by our last install.  And on top of that... the banner ads.   Oh, the ads.

Quote:

I was never happier to be a part of this than I was last Friday, when I got the chance to be guest editor.  In the span of a weekend, I heard from a lot of people that I didn't know before, and discovered a ton of creative journals that I did not know existed.  And then, just two days later, it all disappears, thanks to the inconceivable way that the higher ups of this company thought they could just walk all over us.  Unbelievable.  I have never encountered such a swing, from high to low, in such a short time.  It's incredibly sad for EVERYONE.  And for the life of me, I cannot fathom how NO ONE at AOL has the decency to at least address the situation.  What are they waiting for?  The damage has already been done-there are folks that won't be coming back even if the ads disappear now. -- Jim

Personal opinion, as a blogger?  The ads suck.  The communication about the ads?  Not so good.  And the release problems?  Also not our finest hour.  So, I'm feeling pretty down overall.

Now then... Given that the situation is what it is, what can we do about it?  A dialog would be good.  People are commenting on Joe and John's blogs and grouping and writing petitions and emails, which is great.  I'd suggest one additional thing:  Post your opinion on your blog.  That's what they're for, right?  And when you do, one more technical suggestion that might possibly help with the dialog.  Tag your post by adding this snippet at the end:

Tag: AntiJournalsAds

What this will do:  When you click this link, you'll see a list of all blog entries and other stuff tagged the same way.  More to the point, anyone at AOL can do the same thing and see what people are saying in one place.  Note that you don't have to use Journals to make this work.

(If you choose Viewas [HTML], you should see this: <a rel="tag" href="http://technorati.com/tag/AntiJournalsAds">AntiJournalsAds</a>.)

I'm assuming here that the posts are actually anti-ads; if you want to post in favor of them, feel free to create a ProJournalsAds tag.  I'm not holding my breath.

Aside from that, we are all working to get your feedback to the right people.  We'll see what happens.  Personally, I'd love to do some revenue sharing between content creators and us; I think this is a case where everybody could win by taking smaller pieces of the pie while growing the pie.  That won't happen quickly, though, for technical reasons.