March 23, 2004

Like the nipple ring

The firestorm brew­ing over Type­Key is raging to new heights.

There was some­thing about the whole bru-​ha-​ha (aside: who remem­bers Wolf3D) that reminded me of an event being blown out of pro­por­tion.

Burn­ing­Bird brings up the point that has been nag­ging me, why do we need reg­is­tra­tion at all?

I doubt that every­one really needs a SSO for all the blogs they com­ment on. Maybe we should all have the “remember me” boxes turned on in our var­i­ous soft­ware (aside: I’ll turn it on later today and/or tommorow).

Reg­is­tra­tion may keep out spam­mers, but:

  1. Spam­mers will find ways around, under, over, and through com­ment registration.

  2. MT ships, out of the box, with a fea­ture that turns all links in a com­ment into redi­rects, thus negat­ing the Google advantage.

So this is, at best, a tem­po­rary set­back to spammers.

No, the ulti­mate reason, and desire, by folks for a com­ment reg­is­tra­tion system — whether its cen­tral­ized, decen­tral­ized, left-​of-​centralized, or what­not — is that folks want a way to kick com­menters off their site.

What­ever their rea­sons, some of which may be valid, some blog­gers want to restrict com­ment­ing access, and that’s not right in my book.

So why the mam­mary ref­er­ence in the title? The tech­nol­ogy behind Type­Key is just like the nipple ring — its the high pro­file, oft-​discussed topic that is get­ting all the atten­tion while bigger issues remain.

If we want to reg­is­ter to voice our feed­back, have our views fil­tered, or cen­sored, then why have blogs at all… the tra­di­tional media and their Web sites have been/are doing this.

One of the things that sets blogs apart from the reg­u­lar media is that there are two seper­ate spaces on each page.

  1. The arti­cle space — This belongs to the blogger(s), it’s their place to parade their thoughts, opin­ions, links, etc. I can write what­ever I want in the “article space” and there’s noth­ing you can do about it, or is there?

  2. The com­ment space — This belongs to the audi­ence, and there shouldn’t be any­thing that the author can do about it. It’s the audience’s free-​for-​one, free-​for-​all spot to cog­i­tate, com­ment and contradict.

Filed under: Technology,Web design

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