Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Renaming hooker street–after General Fighting Joe Hooker–would be a grave mistake.

I have beef with Lorelle’s linkfarm, but today’s How to stop content theft is actually a good resource for you WP lovers. Protect your content!

In a three-part rant about peer-to-peer technologies (1, 2, 3), Mark Cuban demands that peer-to-peer technologies “die a quick death” in order to”speed up [his own] internet connection.” He suggests that “Google Video is a far better solution for audio and video distribution than any P2P solution” and that cable companies “charge for upstream bandwidth usage.”

Guess what–I already get charged for all the bandwidth I use, either up or down. When Verizon strings a fiberoptic cable to my home, I’m getting a certain amount of fixed capacity into the greater internet at large. If I want to trade a little upstream capacity for greater downstream capacity, that’s my call! Have you ever noticed that downloading over http is typically slow because there are 100s of clients and 1 host? If I download the same information over bittorrent, I can sustain 12Mbs because everyone is a server–including me. Distributed protocols, such as the ones powering Amazon Dynamo or bittorrent, are more efficient, cost effective, and fault tolerant than single-server models.

Reactions around the blogosphere indicate that Mark Cuban’s thoughts on P2P are nonsensical rubbish. Mashable calls him “a guy who does not understand how P2P works, and yet he wants it shut down.” Ars Technica notes that “if users who are currently saturating their connections with BitTorrent start saturating their connections with Google Video content, the end result is more or less the same.” And a slashdotter comments, “Just imagine how fast the internet would be if there were no content to view. After P2Ps gone, get rid of all these freeloading websites, emails, etc. and it will be blisteringly fast.”

My guess is that billionaire Mark Cuban has a slow, shared cable internet connection at home, the modern equivalent of a party line. This might lead him to confuse his own slow internet connection with a greater systemic problem. What he should be complaining about is why Verizon hasn’t strung fiber in his area yet.

I got a lovely email just now threatening me for being a notorious spammer:

Your doing it to drive up your Google Rank is pitiful, though I’ve informed Google of your attempts to game their system. Further evidence of scraping will be dealt with through the legal system. Perhaps a note to [your employer] will be of use as well.

I sent back my reply, which indicates that no I am not a spammer, thank you very much:

I’m terribly sorry you are experiencing web scrapers, but honest-to-god it’s not me. I wrote a plugin a long time ago for Wordpress called “WP Autoblog” that can take an RSS feed and import them as a series of posts. The posts get branded with attribution like “Post by XYZ and software by me” which you’re probably mistaking for something I’m actively a part of. I wrote the plugin to aggregate some of my family blogs (ericback.com, elliottback.com) together into a single feed, but it quickly became abused by spammers so I pulled it. You can read more here.

All this in spite of people making photo-aggregators, sitewide tagging, and making Planet sites. I can’t believe how much grief a hacky Wordpress plugin has given me over the years. Hopefully as it gets more and more out of date, this query count will start to drop from 400k (not that much) to a few hundred. Then I will smile.

Valleywag is saying that Mahalo needs another $20M, even though it already received that sum just 6 months ago. Give me $3,000,000 a month and I’ll be able to come out with a site that barely gets more interest than my own. They have a nice design and front page, but there’s no way they can displace Google with human-edited search results.

It’s cute that you can add MahaloToDo to your post (please write an article about Asps), but not particularly useful. It’s also cute that one of their subject-matter teams is playing video games.

Ah, so that’s where the money really went. That and looking for ” Vanessa Hudgens Nude Photos,” their most popular search term. That and that their content is basically just a hand-built keyword aggregator that you could automate and build out with a cheap cluster of servers and simple algorithms.