We, the United States of America, your top quality supplier of the ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for our 2001-2008 interruption in service. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service outage has been located, and the software responsible was replaced November 4.

Early tests of the newly installed program indicate that we are now operating correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional on January 20, 2009. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage.

We look forward to resuming full service and hope to improve in years to come. We thank you for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

It boggles the mind a little when you think about how young the Web truly is and how much the world has changed due to one innovation:

Almost precisely 17 years ago, a young British researcher from Cern, the European organisation for nuclear research, gave a presentation in Texas on a technology that was to change society dramatically. That same month, the Cern newsletter announced it to the world: it was called the World Wide Web.

It’s hard to imagine life today without it.

Click through to read the rest of the article, which is an interesting look at the “open web” versus command and control structures. Here’s a sample:

The web succeeded too quickly to be controlled. It conquered skepticism by existing. But imagine that we had had a chance squarely to consider its likely benefits and dangers. In place of what we have today I think we would have invented a tamer, more controlled web and a different underlying network on which it operates. We would restrict openness of access, decrease anonymity and limit the number of actions that a network participant could perform.

The benefits would be undeniable: it would cut down on spam, viruses and illicit peer-to-peer file sharing. But at the same time, it would undercut the iconoclastic technological, cultural and political potential that the web offers, the ability of a new technology, a new service to build on open networks and open protocols, without needing approval from regulators or entrenched market players, or even the owners of the web pages to which you link.

So… I’ve been messing around trying to get Pandora working well for me. I set up a channel and added several song / artist seeds. Then I started thumbing up or down the songs that Pandora suggested for me.

The problem is that now it seems that the only music Pandora plays for me is the stuff I thumbed up, with very little in the way of new music.

What am I doing wrong? Should I un-thumb some of the stuff I previously thumbed up? Add more artist or song seeds? Clear everything out and start over?

Or is Pandora just confused by my admittedly picky listening preferences?

If anyone has suggestions, let me know. And here’s a link to the channel in question, if you’re curious.

Registration finally opened for WordCamp 2008 in SF, and I’m all signed up.

Are you going to be there? Let me know!

Winston Zeddemore: Ray. If someone asks if you are a god, you say, “YES!”

ZDNet’s new Social Media blogger Jennifer Leggio posted an interview with Twitter’s Biz Stone this weekend.

What does that have to do with GhostBusters? This:

Q. Finally, the big question seems to be… is Twitter considering a paid model?

A. No. Not for the usage we are talking about now. It is very important that Twitter remains free for people to remain connected. Some people are suggesting a paid model so that we can improve the service but money is not our issue; we have plenty of money. It’s about getting the right architecture in place and boosting reliability. We want to keep it free.

Biz. Please. Right now, Twitter is a God. Do you realize how lucky you are that people are BEGGING you to take their money? Shut up and take it.

You don’t have to roll out a SLA and a full suite of fee-only tools for the paying customers. Start small. Let people pay $25 a year to have a little icon next to their photos (al la Flickr Pro). They will do it gladly and it won’t eat a lot of development cycles.

You’re not going to be in this spot forever. Take advantage of it while you can.

Roughly 10 months and 3,000 Tweets ago, I signed up for Twitter. Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I’ll pick up my 500th follower.

Every time I see that number, I’m a little surprised. I always though I’d be one of those people with a relatively small Twitter following. I’m even more surprised at the gap between the number of people I follow and my followers. I know that the conventional wisdom for many social media folks is that you should follow back everyone who follows you, or nearly so. And for many months, that was my practice. But as the number of people on my follow list crept over 200, I found myself throttling back more and more.

If this were all about just random people and social chat, none of this would be particularly noteworthy. However, in my new job, a not-insignificant number of the user group managers I support are on Twitter, talking to each other (and to me) there. This isn’t just about fun chat anymore, it’s a part of my real work. I need to make that aspect of my Twitter-life a priority.

It’s easier said than done, though. On the one hand, I’ve built connections to a bunch of people on Twitter that I value, and I don’t want to give that up. I also want to have a broad range of voices in my Twitter stream; that’s part of its value. On the other hand, I need to keep the noise level manageable. I just don’t have the bandwidth to follow 500 people; I have to get my work done. I can’t spend all day glued to Twhirl or hitting reload in the browser.

The net result is that right now, I don’t generally follow back new followers unless I already know them or unless they’re part of the Adobe ecosystem, and that I’ve dropped a bunch of people I used to follow – mostly the ones I never had any real interaction with.

Whether I’ll stick to this policy as time goes on, I don’t know. Considering how flaky Twitter has been recently, and how fast the early adopters get bored with their shiny toys, things could be completely different in 6 months. For now, though, that’s the plan.

I’m not sure if I have gone over to the Dark Side or to the light, but as of last night I’m the owner of a Blackberry Curve 8310.

Setting the BlackBerry up is kind of a pain, especially since my old Cingular SIM card needed to be replaced by a new AT&T card. I had to call to activate the phone, then go through three different setup procedures to get my BIS account and associated email activated. It’s not a very user-friendly process and had me seriously wondering what I’d gotten myself into.

Once that was all done, though, things got easier. I love the over-the-air install, and already have three 3rd party applications running on my Curve: Twitterberry, the Gmail client, and a multi-IM client called WebMessenger. I still don’t really know how to use all the features of the Curve, but I’ll learn.

On a side note — switching SIM cards, while not a Blackberry-specific issue, brought to light exactly how unorganized and messy my personal address book management has become over the past few years. I run Thunderbird on my desktop and my laptop, and neither of those address books is complete or up-to-date, with some more key data living only on the SIM that I can no longer use.

No matter what I do for a PIM solution next, it’s going to involve a bunch of tedious manual data entry to bring all the bits and pieces of contact info I’ve accumulated together. I’ve got to figure out how to minimize that. I’ve even found myself wondering if this might be a good job for Plaxo (I’ve heard that they are not a grubby spamhaus anymore).

Thoughts?

The AP reports today that despite Microsoft’s repeated insistence that it really, truly is going to stop selling Windows XP in June, Steve Ballmer did not slam the door on the possibility of yet another life extension for the OS.

I can’t help thinking that as far as Microsoft is concerned, XP is the evil zombie that won’t die. They can shoot as many Windows Vista bullets as they like at it, but popular demand keeps driving XP relentlessly forward.

Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests has made some very interesting discoveries this Sunday night.

Here’s the high-level issue:

Some enterprising hackers have put together a scheme whereby they hack a number of blogs, so that they can create their own network pages and links back to a few select blogs, to pages that are not easily visible. It takes advantage of the organic and real page rank of all of the sites in question, and probably makes some bucks for the hacker involved.

Why is this bad for *you*?

Other than the knowledge that someone is profiting off of your back, what can happen is that if you’re running Adsense, Google might notice all the hidden text and penalize you and pull you right out of the Index.

It’s unclear right now what exactly is going on — for example, whether this is a possible WordPress exploit, or something at the webhost level — but if you have a WordPress blog, please click through to Tony’s article and do a little checking to make sure your blog is not one of the affected.

UPDATE April 8: More on this. Upgrade now!

…if you are running any version of WordPress older than 2.3.3, you need to upgrade now. Seriously. WordPress 2.3.2 and older have security holes that are being actively exploited by hackers to inject spam links into blogs which are not maintained.

Late last night, my food blog got Stumbled.

Holy crap. I thought the traffic I was getting from Alltop (the orange band) was nice. I had no idea.

Nothing looks different out here, but WP 2.5 is running now. That was pretty easy.

The new admin interface will take a little getting used to, though. I like most of the changes, but I do kind of miss having the ‘”Categories” option to my right when creating a new post. It’s not a showstopper, though. I’ll adjust.

I’ll probably upgrade sometime this weekend.