Wandering Thoughts archives

A picture of what university IT is like

I've written before about how university IT is peculiar and convoluted. Now, courtesy of the UC Berkeley Campuswide Information Strategic Plan 2004-2005, comes a lovely description of this complicated environment: its Campus IT Plan: Critical issue 5: Governance, funding, structure section. (Other sections of the report are also interesting; I've got some reading to do.)

I'm pretty sure you could reuse that section more or less as-is to describe the University of Toronto. And probably most (or every) decent-sized university, because the forces operating on all of us are pretty much the same no matter where you are.

(Some of the forces, such as splintering of budgets and local IT becoming just one part of a group's larger budget, probably also apply to companies too.)

A sort of additional discussion of these issues is where I found the link, in Behind UC Berkeley's network. (The hat tip for that link goes to Slashdot.)

Network security for universities is one of those convoluted and politically charged issues, partly because a lot of people are going to rationally see security as an overhead that they'd like to trim out of their budget if at all possible. (And let's face it; security is an overhead.)

People are social

People are social. We like to show off, to talk, to be heard, and by extension to share. There's every sign that "look at me" is a core human drive, along with its kissing cousin "look at this".

This sounds like an obvious thing, but then a number of people turn around and wonder why there are so many people using LiveJournal (and in a prior era, making homepages on GeoCities). The former explains the latter: we blog because people look, or they may look.

(And I suspect we often stop blogging because people don't look. This puts the LiveJournal drama over friendslists, friending, and defriending in an interesting light. Is the much-derided friendslist actually a crucial ingredient in LJ's success?)

There's another aspect of this: open source. People often wonder what drives people to work in open source, but I can think of a simple explanation: "look at this". People show off what they create (ask any parent with kids), and programmers create programs.

(This leads to a neat explanation of a lot of drama around credit, open source project ownership, and so on. You're not showing off if your name's not on people's minds. Also to consider: are developers attracted to popular projects as a way of more efficiently showing off?)

A corollary: for many programmers, the people they are showing off to is their fellow programmers, not the users of their programs.

(I doubt any of this is original to me; I just feel like putting it down right now.)

The spread of syndication

I read a lot of webcomics, and it's turned out that there's pretty much only three sorts of them these days: ones that update every day, ones that have an RSS feed, and ones that I don't read. This is just an anecdote, but it's an illustration of how far syndication has wormed its way into my life.

It's all the more startling because I haven't been using syndication for very long; less than a year so far. I can actually pinpoint more or less when I started, because it was this LiveJournal entry by Dave Jones (a Linux kernel person) that pushed me over the edge into trying out a feed reader myself. By June 5th I had built my own version of liferea and installed it and was getting hooked.

By now, syndication has spread far enough into my life that I'm usually grumpy if a website doesn't offer a syndication feed; it's pretty much become my preferred way of getting updates. (Only usually; I have not yet gotten to the point where I want an RSS feed of, say, the weather forecasts. Some websites are not good fits for syndication.)

I'm wary of sweeping proclamations, since I'm given to strong enthusiasms for new geegaws; my current infatuation may wane in a year or two, like some of my past ones. Still, doing my best to look at it objectively, there's a number of things for which syndication is a clear win; this suggests that syndication isn't just a passing fad, unless it gets replaced by something even better. (I'd rather not go back to the old way of polling websites to check for updates, for example, and having software keep track of what I've read and not read is awfully handy.)

This isn't to say that the syndication world is a very evolved place right now; it's not. There's a lot of rough edges, the software is usually pretty primitive, and I maintain that we don't know what really works and what the best ways to do a lot of things are. The basics are in place, but then the basics of Usenet were in place in 1984 or so; it still took another five to ten years before Usenet really got refined. (Hopefully syndication can evolve faster than that.)

But even in its current state, even in the relatively short time I've been using it, it's still managed to make a definite impact on my life. I'm a bit startled by how much of an impact; I certainly didn't expect this back in last June.

I do wonder if my experiences are atypical. Possibly I'm enough of an impatient information junky that syndication and feed readers are a natural fit for me, and other people will be finding them less compelling. (I care because I'm selfish; the more people hop on the bandwagon, the more websites are likely to make me happy by offering syndication feeds.)

The problem of the growth of syndication feeds

Sam Ruby has a problem: he has too many feeds. Specifically, he has a comment feed for every blog entry, and too many robots and abandoned aggregators are pulling them, over and over again, despite the feeds effectively being dead. (See his entry for his solution.)

Sam Ruby isn't alone in having this problem; anyone with a lot of flexible syndication feeds is going to encounter it sooner or later. (Even if you have only a few human readers, some search robots love syndication feeds. Even if you try to tell them to bugger off via nofollow et al.)

The more I've thought about this, the more I think that it's actually a social issue: we're so early in the syndication revolution that everyone is still figuring out how to organize things. Over time all of this will get solved; we'll work out what feeds are useful, users will form definite expectations of how sane feeds are organized, and there'll be 'good feed reader seal of approval' (social) standards for how polite feed readers should behave.

Some of this development will be technical, such as figuring out how to mark comments in feeds to clearly group conversation threads and link them to parent articles (there is a 'Feed Thread' draft RFC in progress, eg here). And anything that automatically mass-pulls syndication feeds is going to need to get much smarter about detecting overlapping feeds. (Failure to get smarter will result in mass lynchings.)

WanderingThoughts avoids some of these problems because I decided that the auto-discoverable feed for an entry should be the main feed rather than comments on the entry. While each entry does have a comments feed, people have to feed it to their aggregator more or less by hand, and the same holds for the various aggregated comments feeds. (In theory you can have several autodiscoverable feeds on a page, but I don't know if anyone handles that well yet.)

For annoying spiders that like to crawl my syndication feeds, I now use a blunt hammer; selected user agents get 403 responses on all requests for syndication feeds. I am optimistic that they will someday take the hint.

An obnoxious RSS feed trick

I suppose it was inevitable, but the marketers have definitely arrived; the otherwise excellent In The Pipeline's syndication feed now has banner ads. Animated banner ads at that. I find this especially irritating because the feed is already a partial text feed, which means that I'm going to visit the website anyways (because I have to). Adding animated banner ads on top is just adding insult to injury.

I honestly don't know why marketers still keep doing this. Everyone with three brain cells to rub together has been reading about the declining banner ad clickthrough rates for years, partly because people hate them. There are surely good, useful ways to add advertising to syndication feeds waiting to be discovered by clever people. Animated banner ads that take up half of each entry are not one of them.

In this case, the only result the ads achieved was to get me to spend about three quarters of an hour figuring out how to block them. If In The Pipeline's content was any less interesting, I might have just stopped reading; I dare say that there are other readers (less stubborn or less attached) that already have.

(It would have been faster, but the embedded Mozilla bits that my liferea uses don't seem to use any of the usual things that the Mozilla engine has for blocking bad content. In the end I had to resort to 1997 technology in the form of /etc/hosts entries, although I'll be installing a Privoxy instance soon. One of the fun complications is that In The Pipeline's syndication feed is served through FeedBurner, which rewrites all of the URLs in entries, thereby neatly obfuscating where the images were really coming from. If anyone else is in the same situation, you want to block atdmt.com, or at least spd.atdmt.com, spe.atdmt.com, and mir.atdmt.com.)

Update: In The Pipeline has now not only removed the ads but has switched to a full text feed from a partial one. I'm very happy at this development.