Why are the Zuckerbergs here? What are they doing? Follow the lede to find out

Showing all posts about blogs

Why are the Zuckerbergs here? What are they doing? Follow the lede to find out

12 October 2026

Jeremy Stern introduces his fifteen-thousand word essay, published in Colossus, about Meta CEO, and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, with a lede so succinct it must be the envy of any writer:

There they are. The Zuckerbergs.

Ledes, also called hooks, are a brief sentence that entices someone to read a newspaper or magazine article. The longer the piece, the more important the hook.

They were something I struggled with during my extremely short career a freelance newspaper writer. I was fortunate to be working with an editor who helped me out a little.

“Try again,” he’d say, patiently after I sent through idea after idea. The rest of what I’d written was fine, but it took awhile to get the first line right.

But Stern’s lede is a classic.

Even though I know who the Zuckerbergs are (or thought I did; take a look, you’ll see what I mean), I still wanted to read on to learn just where the Zuckerbergs were, and what they were doing there.

But Stern’s Zuckerberg write-up is replete with hooks. Of sorts. As it must, to sustain interest in a fifteen-thousand word long article. Particularly in 2026. But not hooks in the conventional sense.

They’re enticements to continue reading. Subtle — suspenseful even — builds up to the next part of the story. The constant piquing of a reader’s curiosity.

Ledes aren’t seen often in blog posts, though there are writers using them. The environment online is different, the blogosphere another realm. Titles are what matter. A blogger’s primary instinct is to appease the SEO gods. Their favour must be curried. Perhaps then the gods will bestow good fortune on the blogger through favourable placement on a search engine results page.

This is achieved by post titles, not ledes or hooks.

Readers of blog posts don’t necessarily need, or want, to be lured in. They’ve come to read what a blogger has to say. Either the subject matter interests them, and they read on, or it doesn’t, in which case the reader goes elsewhere.

The writer of an article published in a newspaper or magazine, doesn’t always have that luxury. So the lede it is. Build it baby, build it. And keep honing the craft, because sometimes you’re only as good as yesterday’s hook.

AI scrapers are hiding behind referrer spam

8 October 2026

Back in the day, referrer spam used to be a means to trick a website publisher into thinking another website was sending visitors their way.

It’s something I’ve seen often. I’ll be looking through my referrer logs, and see traffic apparently emanating from a website, usually one I’ve not heard of before.

At first I’d be stoked. Someone had found my website and liked it enough to share with their readers. Awesome. And of course I’d fallen for the ruse and gone to the supposedly referring website, only to learn there was no sign of a link to mine.

I’ve never tried to make another blogger believe I’ve linked to their website when I haven’t, so I don’t know what’s involved in engineering referrer spam. But it seems like a lot of trouble to score what might be a single visit from someone who’ll probably never return.

However, there are, or were, some websites posting lists of their traffic sources. This might prompt a visit from whoever looks at that information. This referrer list apparently also, in the past, had the effect of boosting the spamming website’s search engine rankings.

A few weeks ago I noticed a reputable American medical organisation had linked to the front page here. That didn’t seem right. Why would a website for medical professionals be linking to mine?

Of course, they weren’t. But the “visits” kept coming, and increasing. Soon they were linking to all sorts of disparate pages, none of which contain any medical or health related content at all.

It didn’t take long to recognise the pattern of page visit activity though, it was clear another AI scraper was trawling through the content here.

I looked into ways of blocking, or at least keeping the referrer spam scraping activity off my referrer logs, but as ever there really aren’t any effective solutions.

AI scrapers hiding behind referrer spam, whatever will they do next?

Syndicating conversation: bringing comments to RSS feeds

28 September 2026

Vladimir Campos, posting on Masterdon last week:

Catching up on my RSS reader today, I came across really nice posts from @ellane [Ellane], @disassociated, and @dcbuchan [David Buchan], and had the same thought I’ve been having for so long: why isn’t there an easy way to reply to articles when using an RSS reader? rss.chat, created by @davew [Dave Winer], is the closest to that idea I have seen so far.

In the twenty-plus years I’ve been reading RSS feeds, I’ve never once given thought to the prospect of being able to directly comment on them. Mainly, I imagine, because it simply has not been possible. Is not RSS but a glorified push notification, after all?

Like everyone else, if I’ve wanted to respond to something I’ve seen on an RSS feed, I click through to the source website, and leave a comment if there’s an option to do so.

But the notion of commenting on a blog’s RSS feed isn’t all that far fetched. Many of us read blog and website content through RSS, but wouldn’t it be great if we could stay put, in our RSS reading apps, and comment on the posts we see from there?

Really Simple Syndication

RSS, for anyone unfamiliar with it, is an initialism of Really Simple Syndication.

RSS is a format that allows a website or blog to republish, or syndicate, its content to a separate channel. Someone reading a blog’s RSS feed (or channel) is able to see the blog’s content without the need to visit the website where the content was originally published.

The RSS feed for disassociated can be found at disassociated.com/feed/ but if you type that URL into the address bar of your browser, what you see may not make much sense. Subscribe to that feed in a RSS reader such as Feedly though, and everything will be far more coherent.

The beauty of subscribing to multiple, maybe hundreds or more, of websites by RSS, means the person reading all that content can stay in one place, their RSS reader, without needing to visit numerous blogs individually. Think of RSS as centralising the blog reading process.

Content pushes through to the RSS reader soon after a blog publishes a new post, in the same way for instance, a photo or video appears on the page of someone you follow on Instagram.

Interactive RSS feeds are possible

Dave Winer, who played a significant role in developing web syndication technologies such as RSS, thirty years ago, recently launched RSS.chat, a social network built on RSS, where participants can chat in real time. If RSS technology can power a social network, surely then it is possible to comment directly on RSS feed posts.

For this to happen though, there needs to be significant cooperation between the parties involved in publishing RSS content, and those facilitating the means with which to read same, says Winer:

There has to be cooperation between the products that generate the feed and the ones where you read the feed. And cooperation has never been the priority for the developers.

Developers of blog publishing applications generating RSS feeds will need to make provision for comments to be appended to existing RSS posts. Producers of RSS readers will to add an option that lets a subscriber write a comment, possibly a “reply to this post” button. And that’s just for starters.

Winer though says he is working on a system that achieves these requirements:

My approach is going to be to provide products that do both ends, and then, if it becomes popular, the others will compete.

RSS comments a boost for RSS, blogging?

I’m all for people who read my website via RSS being able to comment on posts from their RSS reader, even it there are still a few things to think about.

Moderation and spam filtering, among them, even though that sounds obvious. Many more issues are covered in this in-depth post by David Buchan. But there would be answers to most concerns that RSS commenting might raise.

I’m hopeful, along with Winer, that RSS commenting would catch on. Who knows, it might generate more interest in the syndication format, and even blogging, although that seems like a big ask with the way things are. But I look forward to finding out.

RELATED CONTENT

blogs, RSS, self publishing, technology

Get your website a pixel on the Pixel Area blog directory

25 September 2026

My thanks to Oleh Providnyk for adding disassociated to his Pixel Area project. Pixel Area is a blog directory, or blogroll if you like, solely for personal and independent websites/blogs.

Instead of a text listing though, linked websites are represented by a square block, called a pixel. A quite large pixel, granted, but that’s beside the point.

Each “pixel” has its own grid coordinate, and mine, for instance, can be found at X31 Y2.

It’s a little like the Million Dollar Homepage, created by Alex Tew in 2005, but Pixel Area is strictly non-commercial. That’s not where the retro connections end though. Pixel Area also has neighbourhoods reminiscent of GeoCities. I’m in the Raster Flats, and am happy to call it home.

There’s ten-thousand pixels all up available, plenty of room should you wish to submit your website.

RELATED CONTENT

blogs, design, open web, technology

Personal websites, not fun anymore?

22 September 2026

Winnie Lim:

It takes spiritual energy to create, maintain and produce personal projects. At the core, these projects exists because there is a belief in some sense of shared humanity. I write because I believe someone out there resonates with my experiences. But when everything starts to be about speed, utility and power, life becomes a dehumanising experience.

It’s always disconcerting to read these sorts of posts, all the more so when they’re written by someone who’s been around for a long time.

Lim has been publishing online since 1996. I’m surprised I’ve not seen her work sooner, though maybe I have, one of her archived sites, defragment.me, seems like it sounds familiar.

Maintaining a website is probably far more challenging today, than it was in earlier days. I have the feeling the people who host my website do far more than I realise when it comes to keeping the experience for myself and visitors smooth.

RELATED CONTENT

blogs, self publishing, technology

Everyone has a book in them, more so bloggers

4 September 2026

I’ve been reading Josh Ellis’ blog for a couple of years maybe, since finding a link there on Dense Discovery once. Ellis has been at it since 2004, so achievement unlocked. In his latest post, he ruminates about writing a book. Acquaintances of his have made the suggestion over the years.

I’ve had the same. “You blog; you should write a book,” people have said to me. And, in the recesses of my HD I have a WIP manuscript sitting there, waiting.

For what, I’m not wholly sure, possibly forty-eight hour days. I continue to rein in my impulse to write/publish though. For now. Like Ellis, I too fear anything I might get published may end up in a bookstore bargain bin. What a way to go.

But Ellis wasn’t just pondering the notion of writing a book; he has written a book, called Jaunty Hair. Congratulations Mr. Ellis, and achievement unlocked again.

Blogging for twenty-plus years however, is not his only claim to fame, Ellis has been writing a column for the North Dakota Burke County Tribune for over twenty-years.

Perhaps then I should shelve my ambitions, as a mere blogger, to write a book, given I lack the appropriate gravitas. Even if I did write a few articles for the Sydney Morning Herald, back in the day.

But here’s the thing. Ellis didn’t so much write a book, more so he realised he already had; in the form of twenty-plus years of blog posts and Burke County Tribune articles.

He complied a selection of his past works, and there was Jaunty Hair. It was a great idea. This is what I mean when I say everyone — well, specifically everyone who has a blog — has a book in them.

There’s a book publishing idea for bloggers, particularly those with a considerable volume of work behind them. The idea of curating previous of my blog posts — which I would refer to as a collection of essays — and publishing them in a book, is appealing. How about you?

But in a sense, publishing a book seems at odds with what I’ve been doing here, online, all this time.

Because there I was, back in the late 1990’s, embracing the web, and believing it would bring about the end of print. In my defence, I wasn’t the only one. Thankfully though, this paperless eventuality did not, or is yet to, come to pass.

Still, there is an allure to seeing one’s name on a book, on a bookshop shelf, even it is bound for the bargain bin. I may yet dust off the aforementioned manuscript, and feed it into a printing press.

When those forty-eight hour days arrive…

WordPress.com Education, supporting, encouraging younger bloggers

21 August 2026

WordPress.com Education, is an initiative launched earlier week, designed to give school students across the world resources to setup and maintain their own blog:

This isn’t a stripped-down classroom version of WordPress.com. The Student Plan includes plugin support, 6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync. Students learn and build with many of the same tools they’ll encounter working with WordPress professionally.

The student plan, which includes everything that comes with the free WordPress.com blogs, together with the subscription personal and premium plans, is free for the first year.

For sure, WordPress has its naysayers, but anything that encourages people, particularly school students, to give social media a rest, and engage more fully with the web, can only be a good thing.

Getting started as a blogger, which is the main thing, is simplified with out-of-the-box products like WordPress.com. Once someone has reached a certain level of proficiency they can always look into other options for publishing blogs and websites.

Webmentions, easier said than done?

27 July 2026

I like the idea of Webmentions, a protocol informing a blogger, website owner, that another blog/website has linked to them. Similar to pingbacks, Webmentions aren’t just another tech-gimmick though. In 2017 they were adopted as a recommendation by the W3C, the international body publishing standards for the web.

They’re also favoured within the IndieWeb/SmallWeb communities. So far, so good. The drawback however comes in their implementation.

It’s not a simple case of adding a few lines of code to a template, or, where available, installing a plug-in (something I aim to keep a minimum). The process requires jumping through a number of hoops, something, I gather, that ends up deterring a number of people.

Webmentions sound ideal for people who enjoy tinkering with their websites, but remain on the back burner here for the time being.

RELATED CONTENT

blogs, IndieWeb, SmallWeb, technology

fLaMEd fury speaks on Wonders of Web Weaving podcast

23 July 2026

I wrote about the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast on Monday, and I’m back. A couple of days ago, an interview with New Zealand/Aotearoa IndieWeb blogger fLaMEd, of fLaMEd fury, was posted.

FlaMEd has been online with a personal website around the same time as I have — the late 1990’s — so the show made for fascinating listening. Tune in if you get a chance.

Kristoffer Tjalve, Elliot Cost, discuss Internet Phone Book, on Wonders of Web Weaving podcast

20 July 2026

A new edition of the Internet Phone Book is in the works, and co-publishers Elliot Cost, and Kristoffer Tjalve (also a Tiny Awards organiser), recently spoke about the esteemed directory on the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast.

There are a ton of podcasts out there, but I take time out to tune in to Wonders of Web Weaving, hosted by James’ Coffee Blog, when a new show is posted.

Production is refreshingly straightforward and stripped back. Absent are ads, as is the seeming requisite chessy/generic intro/outro music, and conversation starts without delay. There’s a rawness seasoned podcast listeners may not care for, but to me this is part of the charm.

Sometimes glitches even make it into the final cut. On one occasion, someone’s connection dropped out part way through, which was simply acknowledged instead of being smoothed over in post-production. Re-wilding the web in true IndieWeb/SmallWeb fashion…

« older posts