Internet

Thoughts on blogging 3

This entry was posted in Writing and tagged blogs Internet writing on by

It’s a full week since my last post. I’ve been busy, adding volunteer work with the Museum of Printing to my schedule and getting back to regular singing with the Exeter UU choir after a summer break. During that time, I’ve been thinking about what blogging (especially this blog) accomplishes and how I might reach more people.

Blogs were once a bigger part of the Internet. It’s easy to set one up, and as long as you don’t do things that will upset the hosting provider, you can say what you want. People can follow it in a variety of ways, and they don’t need to hope the software will declare it worth seeing. That’s not what people want now. They want to have everything in one place, they subscribe to much more than they can read, and they trust the website to decide which items they’ll see. Then they’ll gripe about The Algorithm, but these sites are just giving them what they want. They don’t want the responsibility of being active readers, but they don’t want a big corporation’s software making their decisions for them. What do they want?

A lot of them don’t want in-depth reading. They want a flow of input which they’ll passively absorb. People are reading less long-form material than they used to. Even a 1000-word blog post is too much for many. Still, the written word is vitally important. That’s the best place to record facts and explore ideas. Building and keeping an audience is hard, and sometimes it’s frustrating to see which posts work and which don’t. For a while, my most popular post was a piece of fluff on why the New York Times excluded some words from Wordle and not others. I eventually deleted the content.

I keep a blogroll in the sidebar to link to blogs readers might find interesting, especially if they’re by people I know. That used to be an important way to find blogs, as well as building the search rank for ones a lot of people liked. Google tweaked its search algorithm to give little weight to blogrolls, so many people gave up, but they still help people to find material they’ll like.

RSS feeds are a good way to track blogs, especially ones with irregular schedules, and many blogs have one by default, but not as many publicize their feeds. Maybe I’m just an old Neandertal longing for the old, decentralized Internet, but it had something which the big social media sites don’t have as much of: control over what you read.

I’ll keep writing and obsessing over my readership statistics. Some people will keep reading, and hopefully they’ll find something of value.

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The hidden secret of digital music

This entry was posted in Music and tagged Internet music publishing on by

Last weekend I came across a YouTube video on a resurgence in CD sales. It made me realize how many people are unaware of any part of the music business outside streaming. The commentator talks about CDs as having the appeal of “no subscription, no registration, buy it one time, play it forever.” There’s a mention of Spotify, but no hint that it’s possible to buy and download music that you can move from device to device and keep playing without depending on DRM.

In fact, a lot of companies sell DRM-free music downloads. Back in the early days of the Web, users who wanted unrestricted music files battled companies who didn’t want copying. The companies had to concede that they’d sell more music without copy protection than with it. Today you can buy music in the antiquated but widely supported MP3 format, or in higher-quality formats such as FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and AAC. I buy a lot of music on Bandcamp and Presto Music, and I download them so that I’ll still have the files even if the companies drop the albums or go bankrupt.

Buying music helps to support artists. Streaming sites tend to pay very little per play, and Spotify is one of the stingiest. I like Bandcamp because most of what I pay goes toward individuals and performing groups who created the albums. Presto also offers streaming, and I use it to try out music; it pays a much better rate than most of the big streaming services.

I also have a ridiculous number of CDs. It wouldn’t surprise me if I have the largest collection of C. P. E. Bach on CD of any individual owner in New Hampshire. I’ve digitized some of them so I can play them in my car. My collection of purchased audio files will never catch up with it, but it’s growing steadily.

Why buy rather than stream? To support the musicians. To have the assurance that the music will always be available. To be able to play it even when you don’t have a good Internet connection. To have the satisfaction of owning rather than renting.

Standard Reader and the Decentralized Web

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged Internet standard.site technology on by

Thanks to Debbie Ohi, I’ve found a reader for sites that use Standard Site lexicons. Appropriately enough, it’s called Standard Reader. It’s still rough, but I like what it’s aiming for. You can search for publications from various sites and subscribe to them. Once you have some subscriptions, your recommendations are based on them and nothing else.

Supposedly you can log in with an existing Bluesky account. I couldn’t figure out how to do that. The first time I tried to register, I got a Captcha with incomprehensible instructions. The second time I got one that made sense. Here’s what I’ve subscribed to so far.

  • Debbie’s Blatherings – by Debbie Ridpath Ohi
  • Aaron Ross Powell
  • Standard.site
  • Atmosphere Community
  • Connected Places

Supposedly I can change my handle to my own domain, and there ought to be a way to add my site to the index; I haven’t figured that out either. Some of the tools I’ve seen are tied to Bluesky, which they shouldn’t have to be.

I’m still working on publishing this blog to the ATmosphere, as the network of AT protocol services is called. A lot of this stuff is still at the experimental level. Some of the approaches being taken won’t scale up; you can have a list of a thousand sites, but not a million. Better discovery tools will be necessary, and their maintainers will have to defend them against spammers.

Returning to the decentralized Web

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged Internet standard.site technology on by

The original idea of the World Wide Web was decentralization of information. Anyone with an Internet connection can set up a website. Others can link to it so that people will discover it. Somehow, though, it’s lost its way. Big “social media” sites dominate it. They let you find a lot of people you know or are interested in in one place. But this advantage comes at a price. On most of these sites, the software controls which posts you see and who is recommended to you. They’re more vulnerable to government censorship than smaller, more agile sites. People complain about them but keep using them.

It’s getting worse. Some countries are banning social media access by young people. There’s talk of legally requiring people who post to these sites to disclose their identity. This will discourage the expression of dissent and intimidate people who want to discuss problems they aren’t even comfortable telling their own families about.

The solution has always been there. It’s decentralization. Blogs and forums hosted on the creators’ own machines or for a monthly fee on a server. The RSS and Atom protocols let you subscribe to most of them without handing them any information. The main problem is finding the ones you’re interested in. Some work is now being done on a set of lexicons built on the AT protocol called standard.site, which will help with discovery and identity.

A lexicon is a schema for metadata; standard.site lets you publish information about your website in a way that lets it be aggregated. If you create a record for your website, it includes at least the name and URL, and it can include things like an icon, a description, and labels. What you do with a standard.site record once you’ve made it isn’t clear to me; I assume you need to submit it to an aggregator that lets people search for sites that interest them. There could be lots of aggregators, catering to different interests. If the idea catches on, search engines might use them to improve the relevance of their results.

There are some client applications for standard.site, but I’m still looking for one that I’m comfortable with. Ironically for a discovery aid, the name makes finding information difficult; a search on “standard.site” turns up mostly irrelevant results.

If you know more or have other ideas for decentralization, let me know.

Strange domain stuff 4

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged China Internet on by

Recently I got two emails concerning the use of the name “McGath” in Chinese domains. It’s very strange. Here’s the first, which I got on April 25, 2026:

(If you are not the CEO, please forward this message to your CEO since this is urgent. If you consider this has been sent to you in error, please ignore it. Thanks.)
Dear CEO,
This is a formal email. We are the Domain Registration Service company in Shanghai, China. I have an issue to confirm with you. An application was received by us from Yahui Ltd on April 25, 2026. They desire to register “mcgath” as their internet keyword and Chinese domain names (mcgath.cn, mcgath.com.cn, mcgath.net.cn, mcgath.org.cn). But after checking it, we find this name conflicts with your business name or brand name. To resolve this issue better, it’s necessary to send this email to you and verify if this company is your distributor in China? Best regardsFrank Liu
General Manager

The message came from 163.com, which is a Chinese email service often used for temporary addresses. It’s suspicious that the message doesn’t name the domain service which allegedly is contacting me. If this was an attempt to trick me into anything, I can’t tell what it could gain from me. I replied saying I have no business presence in China. On April 27 I got this mail:

To whom it concerns,

We are the company who submitted the application to register “mcgath” as Chinese domain name and internet keyword. We intend to register the Chinese domain names “mcgath.cn” “mcgath.com.cn” “mcgath.net.cn” “mcgath.org.cn” and internet keyword “mcgath” and have submitted our application. Currently, we are waiting for Mr. Frank Liu’s approval. These CN domains and internet keyword are very important for us to promote our business in China. Even though Mr. Frank Liu advised us to choose another name, we will persist with this name.

Kind regards

Lisheng

Even though my surname is unusual, I don’t own it and can’t stop anyone else from using it. However, I can’t think of any honest purpose for this. While I know little about the Chinese language, I’m pretty sure you can’t even pronounce the name properly in the Chinese phoneme set. Maybe they’re planning to squat on the name in the hope someone (like me) will buy the domain? I can’t grab up every possible domain that contains “mcgath.” A worse possibility is that they’re planning some impersonation scheme outside the reach of American lawyers. I can’t do anything about it before it happens, and it seems like a strange way to set up a scam.

All I can say right now is that I have no control over or connection with those domains, and I’m not responsible for whatever they do with them.