Blogging Software as Religion

John Hiler wrote an interesting roundup of the various blogging software that is out there. One of the problems with such roundups, of course, is that people are often looking for very different things from blogging software. Hiler’s piece is still helpful, though, because I think he’s pretty clear on what he wants and, therefore, what his criteria is.

I don’t agree, for example, with his assessment of the advantage of a database-driven site over a flat-page oriented site,

Why didn’t Hosted Weblogs ever really catch fire? I’m sure there are lots of opinions, but here’s my take: database-backed sites are just more complicated than their static cousins. You have to have more hardware and software backing them up, and they’re harder to figure out for designers who aren’t comfortable with programming.

That’s not to say that database-based dynamic blogging software isn’t a hot area: in fact, half of this survey is dedicated to Weblog Community software which falls in that category. It’s just that dynamic sites tend to work best when they promote community features that tap the power of having a database: comments, site tracking, community interaction…

Okay, on the first part I think he’s absolutely right. Database-driven systems are more complicated. But a database-driven system should give you a hell of a lot more than “comments, site tracking, community interaction.” Frankly, some database-driven systems don’t give much more than that, and I question what the point is of using a database system for such sites.

People already know my view of Conversant, but Movable Type is also headed in the right direction with more useful metadata features such as categorization and other features. It still can’t do everything I would need, but it’s a good system.

The odd thing is that people are apparently not happy over what Hiler had to say about their favorite blogging software. Hiler wrote today that,

Umm… some people take their blogging software pretty seriously. I am finding it helpful to think about each flavor of blogware as a separate religion faith. Depending on what software you’re using, you’re either a believer… or a heretic condemned to blogging hell.

How pointless is that? Blogging is not a one-size fits all activity, and there are as many different things people want out of weblogging as there are software packages.

For example, as much as I love Conversant, if all you want to do is make an update or two a day to a weblog and don’t care about comments or more advanced features, then Blogger or Blogger Pro is probably a better fit. Its limitations, on the other hand, caused me to abandon Blogger after just a couple months.

The more ways of updating a weblog, the better.

Protest Against Saudi Arabia on July 25, 2002

There is a protest planned for 10 a.m. July 25, 2002 in front of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington, DC, which is at 601 New Hampshire Avenue, NW.

I live a long way from Washington, DC, or I’d show up.

The actual issue that they’ll be protesting is the continued refusal of Saudi Arabian authorities (with collusion from our idiot State Department) to allow an American citizen to leave Saudi Arabia.

Amjad Radwan, 19, was born in the United States — her mother is American, her father Saudi Arabian. The whole family moved back to Saudi Arabia when she was a child. Her mother later divorced Amjad’s father, and tried to regain custody of Amjad, which is just about impossible under Saudi Arabia’s legal system.

But now Amjad is 19, an adult, and an American citizen. She would like to leave Saudi Arabia which is not exactly known for its egalitarian treatment of women. But here’s the problem, under Saudi Arabian law, adult women like Amjad cannot leave the country without permission from either their father or husband.

Amjad’s father so far will not allow her to leave and the idiot U.S. State Department has said that they will respect Saudi law — so even if she should find a way to reach the U.S. embassy and step on American soil, the State Department will do nothing to help this American citizen leave Saudi Arabia.

If the United States wasn’t so blinded by its pro-Saudi Arabian foreign policy, it would simply close its borders to all non-diplomatic Saudi Arabian citizens until Amjad is allowed to leave. But of course our entire Middle Eastern foreign policy is predicated on coddling this corrupt dictatorship.

It’s also surprising that this case has not received more publicity. You’d think that an American woman held against her will by a mysoginistic dictatorship would be a sensationalistic front page story. Maybe this protest will garner more attention for this poor woman’s plight.

The Problem with Salon Blogs

So Dave Winer formally announced the Salon blogs deal. Essentially Salon is just acting as a host for Radio weblogs. Download Radio for free for the first 30 days, kick in $39.95 after 30 days if you want to continue.

It’s an interesting experiment, but one that I doubt will succeed for two reasons:

1. Salon isn’t going to be around for much longer. In fact while the deal makes sense from Winer’s point of view, what is Salon getting out of it? In the best case scenario, a lot of traffic for which they can’t sell advertisements (or just wait for all hell to break loose if they try to sell ads). I suppose this is not much worse than Salon’s other crackpot ideas, but I don’t see what the upside is for them, unless Winer’s footing the bandwidth costs and kicking back part of the $39.95 to buy Radio.

2. Radio isn’t a very good blogging tool. Before you pounce on me there, I paid my $39.95 to buy a license a copy of Radio and use it regularly — it is hands down the best product I know of to do RSS aggregation. I use it to track hundreds of RSS feeds and love it.

But the problem with using Radio to edit a blog is that the program ties you down to one machine. You can view your weblog anywhere you can find a computer with an Internet connection, but you’re pretty much stuck to updating the blog from a single machine. A few years ago I don’t think anyone would have cared. Today it feels like a real pain in the butt. Maybe I’m the only person who regularly uses three or four different machines.

Just by chance I ran across a weblog the other day where the author noted he was switching from Radio to Movable Type because of the inability to update anywhere.

It’s really a shame that all of the time and effort that was poured into Radio didn’t go into making Manila a kick-ass CMS. I wouldn’t have been interested in that either, but I bet Userland could have garnered a lot of of the folks who left Blogger for Movable Type (which is the other big switch I’ve noticed, with people finally getting fed up over Blogger and Blogger Pro’s limitations and downtime).

Why People Dislike Dave Winer

Dave Winer still can’t understand why so many people have an intense dislike for him,

About a year ago talking with John Robb I lamented that I get so much hate mail. John said “Dave you’re a rock star.” I didn’t like that answer, but he was right. With thousands of readers, there are a couple of dozen who think I write just for them, and they hate me and what I say, and express it constantly and in great volume.

No, Dave, the reason they dislike you so much is your longstanding habit of attacking your own customers when they point out bugs and other problems with Userland software.

Normal users do not like being told to go to hell when they try to report bugs or complain about longstanding problems with software that never gets fixed before Userland moves on to its next project-of-the-moment.

But rather than look at his own business practices, Winer prefers sychophantic nonsense like “Dave you’re a rock star” to explain away the animosity.

And the sad thing is that Winer has created so much stop energy of his own, that people are moving on to other software packages simply to develop a relationship with companies who know how to provide decent customer service.

Most companies would look at the numerous Radio and Manila blogs that say something like “We’ve had it with Dave, we’re moving our blog to Movable Type” and step back to try to figure out what they’re doing to drive people away. But Winer simply chalks it up to abusive people who just hate him because he’s a rock star.

Developing an Impossible Vaccine with Animal Research

The Scientist recently published a long look at the development of a vaccine for staph infection — a vaccine that as recently as the 1960s was considered impossible to develop by most reputable authorities.

Without going into too much detail about the chemistry of it all, for a variety of reasons researchers in the 1960s concluded that the outer layer of the staph bacteria lacked polysaccharides.

In fact, the staph bacteria do contain polysaccharides. Researcher Walter Karakawa demonstrated this and then went on to develop a vaccine for staph that takes advantage of this. The vaccine has proven relatively successful in initial human tests on people with compromised immune systems, and should prove to be a boon in the routine protection of surgical patients against staph infection (patients are currently given antibiotics, but the staph bacteria has increasingly developed resistances to many antibiotics).

From that discovery Ali Fattom of Nabi Biopharmaceuticals worked to develop a vaccine for staph, which again many researchers said was impossible even if staph did contain polysaccharides. The major factor in Fattom’s proving that a vaccine would work was his development of an animal model of staph in mice. When Fattom looked back at previous efforts to locate polysaccharides he found that researchers had never created an animal model for the disease. According to The Scientist,

This brush with termination [when his vaccine project was almost cancelled] marked a turning point, for it convinced Fattom that he needed to demonstrate with an animal model that antibodies against polysaccharides protected against infection. This had not been done earlier because the NIH and Univax [who had both done polysaccharide vaccine development] researchers did not develop an animal model. [NIH vaccinologist John] Robbins’ goal had been to get the vaccine into the clinic quickly and safety, not to research the molecular basis of virulence. So animal model development had been deferred.

. . .

In 1996 Fattom finally developed a mouse model in which a reasonable innoculum caused infection. With this model he was the first to demonstrate that conjugate vaccines protected against lethal injections of Staphylococcus aureus. Knowing he would need corroboration, he then invited Jean C. Lee of Harvard to test his vaccines in her endocarditis model with rats. A year later the results were just as predicted — the vaccines protected Lee’s rats. Now, at last, skeptics started to come around. Maybe the vaccine would work.

And work it apparently does. A clinical trial of the vaccine in dialysis patients found the vaccine cut the rate of staph infections by 57 percent. The vaccine should perform even better in routine pre-surgical administration since the patients in that clinical trial had characteristics such as diabetes and high uric acid levels that inhibit production of white blood cells.

The vaccine is still undergoing further clinical trials, but barring any unforseen events should reach market within a few years. Not bad for a few people armed just with a hypothesis and some mice.

Source:

Impossible vaccine tames Staphylococcus aureus. Tom Hollon, The Scientist, 16[14]:24, July 8, 2002.

Activists Release Mink in Finland

Animal rights activists were the main suspects in the release of over 1,000 mink from a fur farm in western Finland in the early morning hours of Monday, July 22.

Somebody broke into the farm between midnight and 4:30 a.m. and managed to release a third of the 3,000 mink.

Finland is a major source of mink pelts, producing 2 million in 2001, and there have been a number of such animal releases over the past several years.

Source:

Activists work: more than 1,000 minks released on fur farm in western Finland. Canadian Press, July 22, 2002.