Todd Jordan carries on the discussion of “why is it not cool to submit your own content to link sharing sites?” Here’s my answer that I left as a comment:

Submitting links to your own works is the “of course my kid is the cutest” problem. Let me explain …

Content sharing sites thrive because of the signal-to-noise ratio: high quality, low volume (compared to “the web at large”). As you point out, nobody has time to visit every page on the web. Social link sharing sites (Digg, Stumble, etc.) work because someone else’s effort (submitting a link) results in your being able to visit a subset of the web, presumably of hand-selected better-than-average quality.

So, of course you’d want to submit links to your own stuff, because, you know, it’s better-than-average, right?

WRONG. Of course your kid is the cutest. But, if other people also think your kid is cute, maybe you’re on to something.

If everyone starts submitting links to their own stuff–intsead of someone else who also thinks your stuff is worth sharing with others–then these social link sharing sites’ signal-to-noise ratio will plummet and finding the worthwhile links amongst the crap will make them less useful and usable.

If you can’t find at least one or two people who think your content is worth submitting somewhere, then maybe you have to just accept that maybe it is, indeed, crap.

Tags: blogging, social media

I love it when I can go against the angry mob!

Marten & Jonathan: Good for you! Take those bits closed-source, make customers pay for the functionality, and use that money to hire talented QA engineers. Let companies pay for the stuff and demand actual timely bug fixes to the real problems that linger in the MySQL code base.

Of course, I wholly expect that 18-24 months later, you re-open the source for these products, once they’ve been polished up. The companies will be pissed, but we all benefit from higher quality products.

Look around, folks … this is the cycle we’ve observed many times of open source software. The fact that Sun is making these changes now is a good sign for MySQL’s longevity as a technology and product and that is only good for the open source community.

Tags: Sun, MySQL, open source, business

One of the many blogs I read belongs to Trading Goddess, who seems to find some of the best pictures to use with her blog entries, like this one:

Being an American who only speaks English and has a juvenile sense of humor to boot, I got a good chuckle out of this picture. Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to find out what this actually meant (it couldn’t really mean what I thought it meant, could it?) and Wikipedia comes to the rescue. It turns out, “Kiek in de Kök” is “an old German language nickname for towers, mainly those which were parts of town fortifications.”

So, the next time you ask someone, “what’s cooking,” you might just be asking them for a Kiek in de Kök. Watch out.

Tags: humor, German

del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since April 7, 2008 at 09:00 AM:

• Planning for Ubuntu 8.10ish – The Intrepid Ibex
  The next release of Ubuntu after Hardy Heron will be Intrepid Ibex. Seriously, WTF?
  Tags: news, linux, ubuntu
• Bug 439858: swf mozilla plugin – no youtube
  Linus files a bug about Gnash, looking to enable his wife to get Rick-rolled. Awesome.
  Tags: bug, funny, gnash, flash, youtube, linus-torvalds
• the exploding newsroom > Blog Archive > 5,000 reasons to build a New Jersey Facebook app
  Star Ledger offering $5K bounty for the “best” New Jersey-oriented Facebook app. Interesting idea, not sure if I’m interested, though.
  Tags: blog, media, news, newjersey, facebook
• Shoot the Rainbow – a photoset on Flickr
  Skittles vodka. Mmm. Tasty! Shoot the rainbow.
  Tags: flickr, images, vodka, skittles, rainbow

After Callum let me know that the Linux binary of the character counting plugin for Pidgin worked on Fedora 8, I decided to spin a RPM built on Fedora 8 proper. After a bit of reading and hackery, I have produced a x86 RPM for Fedora 8. Here’s the source, which includes the patch and the .spec file, as well as the RPM:

• pidgin-convcharcount-plugin-2.4.1.tar.gz
• pidgin-convcharcount-plugin-2.4.1-1.fc8.i386.rpm

I’ve also spun a new Debian binary, as well:

• pidgin-convcharcount-plugin_2.4.1-1_i386.deb

And, if you’re looking for the Win32 binary, you can still get it off this page.

I’m glad so many of you out there who use Pidgin find this plugin useful. Thanks for all the positive feedback.

Tags: Pidgin, Twitter, Fedora 8, RPM, Debian