I updated my WordPress SVN Trunk installation today and noticed a huge change to the admin screens that had just been committed. The header and footer of the admin section had been switched from basically black to a very light grey color. This change was committed as a work in progress, so people would see it and work towards a final solution.

Fig 1. Old admin header color on top, current SVN version below.

Overall I support this change and think it looks better, but the exact shade of grey in the background didn’t match the gradients in similar UI elements (the dashboard sections and screen options buttons) so I worked out a different light-grey graphic to use as a background that would match. Here is a screenshot of how it should look if this light grey is used in the final WP 3.0 release, I think it is pretty solid and shouldn’t make anyone cry.

Fig 2. WP-Admin with darker but still light-grey heading and footer. Pretty okay.

Click to view full size

I remembered a conversation on the WP UI dev blog where another middle-grey option was proposed but didn’t get a lot of attention. I really liked the darker grey version in JohnONolan’s original mockup so I worked out a full page screenshot using the darker shade of grey that I thought worked better and added them to the trac ticket about the header change.

Here’s the one I think would work the best, dark grey to match the active heading in the sidebar (in this case the “Dashboard” section heading).

Fig 3. Nice dark WordPress Admin screen, how it should be.

Click to view full size

Here is one giant image with both of them so you can compare. Instead of images like this I like to open two versions in seperate tabs in my browser than jump back and forth to decide which I prefer.

Fig 4. Side-by-Side comparison of light and dark grey proposals for admin header and footer.

Click to view full size.

I’m hoping the dark one can get implemented because it has a lot of nice features that the lighter version lacks:

• It is not a big change from the old version, so people will be inherently less upset about it.
• It brackets the whole UI nicely and preserves the high-contrast from the old design.
• It avoids a page where 90% of the chrome matches each other pefectly. I think the dark grey is important to keeping the look neat, and having only one element in the page with that color (the active sidebar heading) make it look unbalanced.

Feedback welcome, what do you think? If you want to support/flame me the trac ticket about it is probably the best place, so that your input affects the final decision.

Now a few months have passed since then and its time to move on. Move on to something other than WordPress events? No. Move on to smaller, more regular, less stressful WordPress events (and hopefully some posts here on my blog about other topics, we can still dream).

We’re going to use the Montreal WordPress Community group on facebook to organize evening meetups about once a month (join the group to get invited automatically). Patrick and the members of Station C have generously offered to let us use their coworking space for our get-togethers. This is great cause its sexy and well stocked with tools, but sad cause its not that big. Hopefully we can keep a healthy level of attendance without exploding.

The first meeting will be this thursday, when we’ll have a presentation and discussion about programming tools and how they can speed you up followed by a discussion of GPL and what it means for paid themes, plugins etc. I also told people to bring drinks and food, so it should be a cool party as well. You can read more about it and RSVP on the facebook event listing.

Today the tickets went on sale (25-30$) which is a huge relief. There’s still lots of work to do organizing the speakers/schedule, sponsors and all the other details, but we’re on our way to a really useful and fun event if I have anything to say about it.

I’ll be doing a talk about whatever is missing from the lineup of speakers who come forward, which reminds me: Would you like to become a speaker? We’re still looking for WP experts to share their wisdom and experience and hopefully some laughs, so get in touch if you think that might be you. Oh yeah, if you’ve got a pile of money and have been hoping for some visibility maybe you’d like to sponsor WordCamp Montreal? It’s the perfect way to make yourself known to an incredibly useful new subsection of the north american technocracy!

This has happened to other sites I’ve been managing (specifically to Global Voices over the years, and I’ve learned a lot about hardening your server and WordPress installation to help solve the problem. The #1 piece of advice is of course KEEP YOUR WORDPRESS INSTALLATION UP TO DATE, NO MATTER WHAT. In the case of this my personal site (as opposed to sites I manage professionally, which I deal with much more carefully, because they are more important) I was doing a halfway version of this by keeping my very old but theoretically still secure copy of WP 2.0.x up to date. This is the legacy branch (current actual branch is 2.7.x) that was supposed to offer long-term security support, but it seems that is no longer the case. I loved having the bragging rights of being the only person in a room with even 100 WordPress users who had such an old but still secure version (well, except David Peralty), but obviously staying secure is much more important.

If you’re still running 2.0.11 I strongly recommend you give up and get on the normal upgrade schedule now, it seems to have been compromised.

Full details of how to clean up a hacked site below:

Fixing a hacked WordPress site

In case anyone is curious, here are the main steps I performed to clean up and secure the site:

• Replace all files with a backup from before the site was hacked (in my Dreamhost.com account this was easy enough as they have an automated ‘domain restore’ feature, normally you should always keep a backup of all plugins, themes and uploads somewhere far away from your actual site for this purpose).
• Upgrade all WordPress files to the newest version (2.7.1) and upgrade the site. In this case make sure to delete all old WP files first to make sure only clean files are in the WP directories like /wp-admin/ and /wp-includes/.
• Replace the database with a backed up version (i didn’t have one (idiot!) and had to do extra steps below to secure my dirty database)
• Test all site functionality (upgrading to a new version usually breaks things)
• Test all plugins and upgrade them as necessary (same)
• Go through every folder in my web root and look for any out of place files, anything new or strange is probably a hacker file. Even one of these files can let a hacker back in and let them have full control. Remove any strange files. Sort files by recently updated in FTP, this will usually indicate which ones were added by hackers.

Cleaning up a hacked WordPress database (because you forgot to do automatic backups)

If you didn’t have a clean version of your database from before the backup you’ll need to do some extra steps on your now contaminated DB:

• Look through all the user accounts in the system and change their passwords.
• Check that the setting for ‘anyone can register’ in SETTINGS > GENERAL is ‘off’ (on Global Voices the hackers had turned this to ‘on’ and set it so new accounts were administrators, thus allowing themselves a back door whenever I managed to kick them off).
• Check the setting for ‘upload folder’ in SETTINGS > MISCELANEOUS , mine was set to something insane.

Making sure Google doesn’t punish you for what the hackers did

I actually noticed that my site was hacked not on the site itself but on Google. I know from experience that if you search for my name “Jeremy Clarke” I am always the first result, but when I searched myself (i forget why, I guess I’m vain) I wasn’t even on the first page. This is likely because Google was punishing me for having all those trashy spam links (Google is smart and works all day to avoid these Blackhat SEO Spammers from unfairly altering results). To get things back on track I went through the re-consideration policy using Google Webmaster Tools

• Go to Google Webmaster Tools and claim my site using their verification method (have to create a html file to prove you control the site)
• Use the Request reconsideration link in the dashboard and send Google an explanation of what happened (i was hacked and the links were inserted against my will) and asking to have any locks on my site removed.
• I haven’t gotten a reply or noticed a change yet, but these steps are vital. If you don’t do this Google could continue to block you in results, which will mean less visitors/money/power/whatever you were trying to achieve with a site. I have been in charge of sites that had similar problems before and the reconsideration process is slow but effective at getting you back in the search results.

Once you’ve done this stuff you shouldn’t have any more immediate problems with the hackers but you never know. The only real way to know you’re secure is to have both a complete backup of all files from before the hack AND a full backup of the database. If either of these is still contaminated in any way (remember, just 1 PHP file is enough!) you may be dealing with this more in the near future. Take this time to start automatic backups of both. Good luck!

If you haven’t been and are a blogger/developper in the area you should check it out. If you’re in Montreal there will also be WordCamp Montreal in June but that’s pretty far off and we haven’t come up with many of the details yet. Not sure if I’ll be speaking in Montreal as well but it’s pretty likely ;)

So onto Dashboard Widgets (also referred to as “Dashboard Modules” in at least one place, though the WP code calls them Widgets so I’ll stick with that).

I wanted to add a little box to the dashboard with the currently logged-in user’s avatar and a few links to things they might want quickly. Since WP 2.7 made the dashboard super configurable (you can show/hide different sections and drag them around to reorder them) I figured that there would be some documentation on how to add new ones using plugins. Unfortunately it turned out that not only was there no page on the WordPress Codex to explain the process, but the dashboard code itself (found in /wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php ) was completely uncommented and confusing as hell. Since I spent the day figuring the whole API out I decided to write up a nice Codex page so the next person would have it easier: Voila.

At that link you’ll find an explanation of the function and hook you’ll need to use to add dashboard widgets using plugin (or functions.php in your theme) code. The process is pretty similar to adding sub-pages to the admin section if you’re familiar with that.

Some lessons I picked up along the way:

• The dashboard API needs some serious work. I might take a whack at it at some point when I’m bored but hopefully it will get cleared up eventually, especially the missing PHPDoc comments
• Right now it’s pretty much impossible to easily or effectively push your sorting preferences onto the default Dashboard Widgets. In the codex article I give an example of how to get your widget to the top of the list for people who have never sorted their widgets, but there’s no easy way to add your widget and say “make all users see this at the top of their screen unless they drag it to a different spot”. This fact is pretty annoying as blogs with many users are likely to have a lot of people who never even see the new widget because there are too many default widgets above it pushing it below the fold.
• I did figure out a way to force your widget to the top of the page but it had the unfortunate side effect of making it trapped there forever regardless of users dragging it around. I don’t recommend this method for publicly distributed plugins (as it will confuse and frustrate users that the dragging is broken) but you can see the code here (wp.pastebin.com link, apologies if it stops working at some point).
• This one is a bit obvious, but writing a Codex article (or any documentation really) is very very useful for acquainting yourself with something. I know more about this process than I would have if I’d just followed the instructions someone else wrote (I also know more about what needs fixing!). Lesson: When the docs are missing don’t just hack around till you have a half-baked solution, look through the source and figure out the best solution and share it with the world by adding to the docs yourself.

Lately GV has been pretty out of control and our server has been crashing way to regularly due to too many visitors or bots. I’ve been working to find all the little holes in the Apache/PHP/MySQL configurations that are causing the crashes when load gets high, but it’s impossible while you’re constantly putting out fires and restarting the servers manually.

I’ve been having frustrating fun with a tool called Monit that helps stop your server from completely crashing by watching it’s system stats and selectively restarting processes or executing whatever command you want. It installs pretty easily on Linux servers (I think it’s in both Yum for CentOS/RH and in apt for Debian/Ubuntu) and it uses text files similar to Apache to set up different status conditions and what to do. The configuration took me awhile to get right, but once the percentages were tuned based on watching it for awhile it has kept the server from crashing even once for more than a minute despite some record traffic related to our Mumbai coverage. If it weren’t for Monit I’d probably still be getting calls in the middle of the night saying the site was down.

You still need to find the bugs in your server configuration, or move to more powerful hardware (what we’re doing), but even if its annoying that the apache needs to be restarted every few minutes in order to not crash the server, its better than having it crash randomly when you’re not around. While you’re still tuning the system, you can have it email you based on certain conditions, so you can see how often a certain status is reached and determine whether a restart is necessary. The manual explains the functions pretty well and isn’t too long.

My advice if you’re setting it up

Setting the reset/exec levels

If you’re setting it up for the first time and you’re not having any problems at the moment you should be careful not to set the percentages too high, or the server might crash before it got that bad. I was giving a Memory/RAM max around 80%, but the remaining 20% didn’t seem to be enough to save the server, it was already to late. Here are my settings for our Apache webserver:

check system server1.globalvoicesonline.org
if loadavg (1min) > 5 for 2 cycles then exec "/etc/init.d/httpd restart"
if loadavg (1min) > 7 for 1 cycles then exec "/etc/init.d/httpd restart"
if memory usage > 65% for 3 cycles then exec "/etc/init.d/httpd restart"
if memory usage > 75% then exec "/etc/init.d/httpd restart"

The ‘exec’ action is running the apache restart command directly, which will clear out all appache processes and restart them, freeing up RAM temporarily. I’m also running two levels of Load checking, which will measure the strain on the CPU. Together these cover a lot of situations that result in crashes, and there are two versions of each, one for bad situations that have gone on for awhile (“for 3 cycles” i.e. 3 minutes) and one for terrible situations that are seen even once (“for 1 cycles”, which is actually unnecessary to write).

You can actually also set up monitoring of specific processes like Apache or other servers, but its been a lot buggier (thinks the program’s not running when it is) for me than the raw server statistics, so use at your own risk.

Alternate Email Formatting for Monit

The default email format template that comes with Monit is pretty hard to read to the point where it’s kind of maddening to recieve messages from it. Luckily they offer a custom mail formatting api so you can make one that makes sense for you. The pieces they give you are a bit limiting but I worked out one that is very short and clear and should even work okay as an sms:

set mail-format {
from: monit@yourserver.org
subject: [$ACTION] $EVENT on $SERVICE
message: $DESCRIPTION
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
Action: [$ACTION] at $DATE from $HOST

–monit
}

Which sends you emails like:

[exec] Resource limit matched for server2.globalvoicesonline.org
’server.yourdomain.org’ mem usage of 71.9% matches resource limit [mem usage>65.0%]
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
Action: [exec] at Fri, 28 Nov 2008 19:35:22 -0500 from server.yourdomain.org

–monit

Which I think is a lot better than the default. Any Monit users out there with a good format I’d love to see what else you’ve come up with.

I’ve heard only great things about past Wordcamps (they’re all over the place, there’s one in Toronto in October and a New York one on the same day!), and I’m deeply honored to be able to represent Global Voices and all the amazing people that make it a reality at the SF meeting. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be, let alone be the one speaking.

If anyone is in the area and into Wordpress you should check it out, if I know you and you’re from SF drop me a line, I’ll be in town for a few days.

Despite what seems like a clearly good motivation and practice, some people have big issues with this, likening it to a pathetic practice called ‘splogging‘ (spam blogging, wikipedia link). In the Wordpress IRC channel (a chatroom, #wordpress on irc.freenode.net) some guys got pretty upset about the idea and I had a debate with them about copyright and aggregation of blogs (aggregation means getting content from varied sources and showing them toghether). This resulted in ‘markr’ posting a lengthy critique of VwV’s aggregation practices on his blog, HERE.

Most of his arguments stem from misconceptions about VwV or about copyright law, but some are sincerely just expressions of his dictatorial attitude towards content. I left the response below as a comment on the post, but am reprinting it here for posterity and for those who read my blog and not his (note: his full response is viewable on his page, only the parts I wanted to respond to are below. Skipped parts are mostly him telling the story i told above).

WARNING: This isn’t for my casual readers. It’s long, detailed, political and there are absolutely no lolcats anywhere to be found.

Hi markr,

My name is Jeremy Clarke (homepage simianuprising.com), I am the developper of the Voices without Votes site and the anonymous person mentioned in this post. I’ll respond to some of the points made above, but first I’d like to make some general comments.

First, I’m glad that I and VwV sparked a debate and are making people think about the limits of copy control and aggregation in the modern blogosphere. In the ‘web 2.0′ context, borders are being redefined and we should all pay attention and act carefully.

Second, in the referenced IRC conversation and in this email I was/am speaking as myself, Jeremy Clarke from Montreal Canada, and not any of the organizations that I do or have worked for. I do not represent the views or opinions of Global Voices, Reuters or any of their parents or subsidiaries. I represent myself as a developper, author and copyright scholar (I recently finished a B.A. In Communications, where copyright law in the U.S. and Canada were among my primary fields of study).

Third, I think you are being paranoid. As a developper for Global Voices and Voices without Votes, I have never once encountered any exploitative or even commercial intent among my superiors, co-workers or the many volunteers who power our reporting. We hope only to create a resource for people looking for ways of entering foreign blogospheres and understanding the people who inhabit them. This involves linking to, quoting and summarizing a plethora of content from around the world, as does any journalism (and especially meta-journalism in the way that GV performs in reviewing what citizen journalists are doing). We have a deep respect for all bloggers and are all bloggers ourselves.

Their site was apparently ‘okay’ being sponsored by Reuters though with WordPress having had ’sponsored’ themes that word isn’t as clean.

Your allusion to ’sponsored wordpress themes’ is either pointless or dishonest. The referenced shady phenomenon is when a theme is distributed to the public for use on blogs around the web with links embedded in them. The means of this scheme is to create false links to the theme ’sponsors’ from the blogs who use the theme, with the goal of fooling Google into thinking the sponsored site is popular. This is a form of link-spam similar to the original goal of comment spamming with links. The phenomenon started being heavily criticized by Automattic and the WP community because themes were being redistributed with added links being the only change. VwV and in fact any aggregated blog has absolutely nothing to do with this phenomenon, nor are sites who’s CONTENT is sponsored in any way similar to THEMES that are ’sponsored’ in the spammy sense.

If you take my work and display it on your site then you are not simply giving me an extra link back – you are stealing my work because you intend to use my work to boost your site.

How about if I link to your site and paste into my post a two line quote from it, in a <blockquote>, with your name as the source of the quote? Am I exploiting you when I do that? I think that anyone with a head knows that short quotes (like the truncated intros to posts that we display on VwV) do not break copyright law nor should they.

Without the ability to quote information or prose for reference and journalism it would be insanely difficult to have a discussion as a literary community. In actual copyright law this idea is enshrined in the principle of Fair Use in the U.S.A. and Fair Dealing in Canada. In both cases quoting or copying (in part or in whole) for the purposes of research and comment is protected. This is useful both for aiding researchers and commenters by not requiring them to ask permission (which is difficult and often impossible) and for stopping copyright holders from excerting undue control over their works (e.g. to quelch criticism). Knowledge is a public good in the U.S. and it’s dissemination and use is protected (in Canada this is not explicitly stated in law, but the Canadian Supreme Court’s discussions of the Fair Dealing clause expose it as a priority).

Note also that in both cases a ‘trasformative’ work is seen as more deserving of protection than a mere duplication (there are several other considerations as well, including intent, competition and finance).

I checked one blog from this site – it had the word Copyright in the sidebar and on every single post. Yet the site it was being displayed on did so under a CC license. Another blog had no copyright information but the same CC license was being used. It was a blanket license with no regard to the incoming work.

This is an interesting point: If a part of VwV is aggregated post snippets (with the other part being long, original analysis posts, in blue at the top), then can VwV honestly license itself as Creative Commons?

The answer, if you look at the site for a few seconds, is clear. VwV cannot say that the linked articles are CC, but they can mark the ORIGINAL CONTENT as CC, as we have done in the footer of our site, which clearly says “Original Content [cc]” (we use an image cc badge). We are not making any claims about the linked articles, which belong to their owners.

Note also, as in other parts of this situation, that the posts are not displayed on our site. So even if we DID say that all content was CC VwV, that license would only be applied to the links we have made and to the categorization work we have done to the links (organizing them into countries and issues). Our selection and organization would be CC, the things we selected are not. Just like Leonard Maltin does not claim copyright over the films he reviews in his books, but just the review and rating.

of the 10 or so links I checked, not a single one was a WordPress blog. This means that (a) WP bloggers are not very good at global issues or (b) the incoming links in the dashboard would give them away.

This is so paranoid I can’t believe you wrote it down (it’s also a logical fallacy). Do you really think that even if we were as sleazy as you imply, we would actually make decisions on that basis?

You are completely and insultingly wrong. We are linking to non-U.S. bloggers talking about the election. If you have WP blogs you’d like to submit then please do, we welcome all submissions. In fact, we prefer WP blogs because they allow easy access to Category-based RSS feeds by default (unlike Movable Type/Typepad, which make it mostly impossible).

My money is with the latter.

You should be more careful with your money.

I also checked to see if these blogs had a notice that they were proud to have been selected to have their work shown on a site sponsored by Reuters. They had no such information. So the bloggers involved have no clue at all that their work was being taken and displayed elsewhere.

This is both logically flawed and irrelevant. They can very well know we are linking to them and not have a badge promoting us, the idea that lack of a badge proves ignorance is just silly.

The site owner will argue that the blogger gets a link and gets traffic. As the blogger is not being told about their work being shown elsewhere they are not in a position to make a judgement are they? So that argument is nonsense and used to justify their actions.

We don’t need arguments about benefits to the linked blogs to justify our actions – our actions are protected by law and by common sense – but the fact that most blogs want traffic and links and that we provide traffic and links means that in pretty much all situations it is not only a justified and legal relationship, but also a symbiotic one, so both parties benefit without either being hurt (please give me a real way in which we hurt someone beyond your sensibilities about controlling your content and we can talk about it, but so far you’re just giving me theorical arguments promoting control and copyright maximalism for it’s own sake).

The web is made up of links and most of them do not involve permission on the part of the linked.

Whoever set this up wants more work, they want this site to enhance their reputation and they are currently using the work of others to do that. So saying there are no ads and therefore no gan[sic] is at best disingenuous and at worst plain lying.

Please note that one said there was no intention of ‘gain’ in creating this site. My personal claim is that there is no ‘loss’ to anyone, and no one has given me an example of ‘loss’ that would somehow make any ‘gain’ we receive ill-gotten.

I’d also like to note that if you think ‘using the work of others for gain’ is wrong, you should start with bigger fish like Digg.com and Google News.

The fact that the aim of the site was to raise awareness and do good is of no importance.

Correct. It’s just a nice bonus, and it’s why I work for Global Voices.

It’s still wrong to take without knowledge.

I think we’re having issues with the word ‘take’ maybe?

Fact is that Reuters have strict usage policies on their output (”All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.”), so why is a blogger of less importance?

Very true. Aren’t you proud of us for having a CC license on this work instead?

Luckily for the world, the copyright notice that Reuters uses (good find btw, the part about ‘framing’ is pretty hilarious, I guess i’ll have to take down my laminated copy of their front page from my window) in no way supercedes the rights granted by Fair Use/Dealing, so anyone is free to quote from or reproduce their content for the purposes of comment or critique just like they can with any copyright work (see: Google News).

Note also that the only reason we don’t have Mainstream Media sources like Reuters in the site is because they are categorically not blogs, otherwise they would get the same promotion and links from us as the blogs we are linking to. We think blogs are MORE important, that’s why we link to them.

Strange that the parent site does acknowledge contributions – http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/for-bloggers but that this site only links to ’some’ – http://voiceswithoutvotes.org/blogs/.

Every post that is displayed as ‘aggregated’ (i.e. full content unnavailable and all links lead to their site rather than to inside our site) has the name and link of the originating blog displayed prominently. The list you are referring to at /blog/ is the list of feeds we actively watch, and does not include sites from which we only aggregated a single or couple of posts. This is a technical differentiation who’s goal is to avoid strain on our server resources.

Be assured: every post we link to has the site of origin prominently displayed and linked.

Here’s what should happen.
The site asks blogger for permission to use certain posts.
The blogger is then being acknowledged as the owner of their work.
The blogger knows that certain posts will be getting a wider audience so may actually produce better posts.
The blogger gets the chance to set their own license.
The blogger gets the chance to link directly to the other site.
The blogger gets a buzz from knowing their work is deemed to be good enough to be added.
The overall project gets more links, more traffic, more visibility.

This is pretty much exactly what we have done, for exactly the reasons you state. If they know we are listening, they will talk more often, for longer, and more carefully. If we tell them they will want to link to us, which is good for both parties. We also encourage people who we want to aggregate to use specific categories to help us aggregate their content more efficiently. We’ve had some great responses!

Total cost of the above? “Hi, I’d love to use some of your posts on our site…”

Unfortunately this is not the case. Many people do not respond or respond so slowly that the election will be over before we hear from them. Because there is no ill-effect from proceding anyway, we don’t wait. We also don’t want to have our own free speech stifled because a blog owner doesn’t understand copyright law and causes a pointless ruckus for no reason.

Make a proper contributors page – hardly a lot of work but makes people feel even better.

This is obviously a responsible idea, but would just result in an impossibly huge list of blogs. We chose to highlight the biggest ‘contributors’ and let the linked posts of others speak for themselves on the archive pages where they are shown.

It would probably enhance the site and the person behind it even more.

There are dozens of people behind this site, but thank you for the advice on how to enhance myself.

I’d like to share a few final thoughts on the state of aggregation in the modern blogosphere:

I understand that you are upset about spam blogs (“splogs” as the kids call them: blogs automatically generated by farming content off real blogs with the intention of tricking Goggle or making add revenue). You got upset about VwV in the context of splogs and, in the IRC conversation, I made some comments that could be construed as defending splogs (which is not and was not my intention).

Splogging is an obnoxious form of exploitation and opportunism like all forms of spam. Finding your content randomly stolen and used by some script-kiddie with no link to your site or reference to you is a frustrating experience and is obviously wrong, both because it is a very explicit violation of your copyright and because it obviously does nothing good for the world in any way. It fills the internet with confusing garbage hoping to make a penny per thousand blogs it rips off.

However, as I said in the IRC, construing VwV as ANY kind of spam is to be completely blind to reality. VwV is a carefully moderated and written site, a dozen people are actively working to keep the quality of the aggregated links high and to write original content about non-english blogospheres (most of them are not being paid for this, they are volunteering because they believe in the project). We carefully attribute all posts with their blogs of origin and show them differently from our original content. The only thing that VwV has in common with a splog is that it uses aggregation.

As content producers we have to have a more nuanced view of our copyright and our content than merely “copying is always wrong unless i said so”. Aggregation is a valuable, valid and loved part of the blogosphere.

Sites like BoingBoing, Digg, Metafilter and Slashdot all survive based on the value of creating links to other parts of the web along with quoted text or photos. Imagine if BoingBoing.net was forced to get permission before posting a link to a steampunk watch site with an example photo of one of their watches, it would be a nightmare, and it would stifle people’s ability to point to each other without jumping through hoops and being told no for no good reason.

No one finds linking with quotes a problem in the cases above, and I think that by the same token it is in no way a problem with VwV. The splog ecosystem is annoying and wrong (as well as pretty much unstoppable), but it will not be helped by trying to stop legitimate sites for using cosmetically similar means to shuffle visitors through the web. You’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater, try not to be so defensive and life will seem less stressful.

Jeremy Clarke

http://simianuprising.com