Apparently, reader comment feature is not popular among bloggers. Some evidences:

1. While Radio supports it, many radio themes don't even show it.
2. Most of blogs I visit don't use it.
3. If used, I hardly see any comments.

I think there are two factors that discourage blog comments:

Etiquette – Unlike discussion forums like slashdot that convey the feeling of a public place or neutral ground, blogs are a part of someone's home page and convey the feeling of someone's home.  So posting negative comments on someone's blog is like saying something bad to a party host.

Visibility – Blog comments are typically not displayed inline of a blog.  Only indication I see is "comments [0]" after each blog post.  Out of site, out of mind applies here.  Also, "comments [0]" reads like an empty restaurant, not too inviting.

The reason I am poking into blog features is to identity the ingredients behind blog's popularity that I can apply in my groupware projects.

Last Friday, I updated my XP with latest patches including XP SP1 and IE SSL patch (actually an update of Crypto DLL used by IE and Outlook).  On the average, I install about a patch per week so its not surprising to find my XP behaving oddly after a patch.  With the latest patch, for example, IE stopped loading really small images often used for bullets and spacing.  Large images show up just fine oddly enough.  Annoying.

What really annoys me is that the desktop just freezes once in a while, particularly with Office and IE.  After a few minutes, desktop unfreezes.  There must be some badass synchronization going on like the famous syncronization lock that protected 16-bit Windows code.  Stupid.

Speaking of stupidity, C# syntax is a pretty major one.  C# syntax has these minor differences from the Java that just irritates you at every turn.  While legal dispute with Sun could have been the cause, I doubt it because Anders Hejlsberg, co-designer of C#, also designed Delphi, a proprietary variation of Pascal with similar irritating feel to it.

While I believe small size of blog posts is one of the reasons why blogging is so popular, lack of structure in blog posts limits the range of blogging application.

Typical blog posts are textual and unstructured except for hyperlinks, light presentation markups (i.e. bold, italic), and enumerations (ordered and unordered lists) plus optional title.  They are like smaller versions of web pages which leaves little room for automation and reuse.

One of the reasons for the popularity of blogging is size of information produced and consumed by bloggers: blog posts are usually small in size [<1K].  Based on my experiences, anything larger creates friction meaning they disrupt daily blogging behavior pattern.  When size is small, production and consumption of blog posts become fluid and can easily be seep into daily life.

A worm that exploits one of several recently discovered OpenSSL vulnerabilities has massed 3500 zombie Linux web servers so far.  The worm attacks Linux Apache servers although other platforms, servers, and applications that use OpenSSL are also vulnerable.  The worm's use of P2P technologies for zombie coordination is apparently first of its kind.  Previously, worms used an IRC channel or a Usenet newsgroup as control.  Will RSS be used next?  I doubt it since there are more convenient communication channels available.

CiteSeer is a great source of scientific papers and thesises.  I sure won't miss the days when I had to pored over bad photocopies of research papers and thesises at Berkeley and Stanford libraries. Typos and bad copiers can cause nightmares for equations…

Check out this hillarious Business 2.0 article about a yoga guru with balls like atom bombs.

Later on, Bikram brags about his mansion with servants in Beverly Hills and his 30 classic cars, from Rolls-Royces to Bentleys. He also claims to have cured every disease known to humankind and compares himself to Jesus Christ and Buddha. Requiring neither food nor sleep, he says, "I'm beyond Superman." When you ask how he can make such wild statements, he answers, "Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me."

With balls like that, he should have been in sales.  ROFL.

Aarom Swartz proposed RSS 3.0, a complete waste of time and a lame application of inverse extremism to RSS 2.0.

While doing research on legal aspects of linking and embedding, I came across an interesting court case: Kelly v. Ariba Soft Corp.  I thought others might also find it interesting.