2002-05-27 18:43 UTC I declare the experiment a success
Yesterday I dissed some of the funniest, most interesting, most insightful, and most topical Web logs of the Mozilla community. I wanted to see how easy it is to influence the content of other people's journals... and especially, how easy it is to get people to link to your Web log.
The results were more than I hoped for. All four responded, as I expected -- but more than that, all four dedicated an entire entry to rebutting my comments!
Blake responded with a lengthy counter strike, in which he used my nickname 9 times! Furthermore, he even highlighted two spelling mistakes in my passage, that I would have missed if he had not pointed them out to me. I was especially happy to see that Blake announced that I have added new functionality to my Web logging software. (I can now edit the contents of posts without having to poke at the database using mysql.) I wanted to boast about this, but I couldn't find a good way to broach the subject... Blake neatly solved that problem for me.
However, I should at this juncture note that my editing features are present merely to correct spelling and markup errors -- not to change the semantics of the content. Markup errors like, for example, the multiple escaping that has crept into Blake's links (&, anyone?). And you won't find me deleting existing posts, as Blake has; indeed my Web log does not have a Delete feature, and I have no plans to add one. Also, content persistence doesn't mean spelling mistakes cannot be fixed -- the two mistakes Blake noted have been corrected and the edits annotated.
Not to be outdone, mpt's entry also had two links to my log. Matthew also linked to his RSS feed, which I had not noticed when I incorrectly said that only Pavlov and I had them. It is amusing, though, that mpt missed the sarcasm in my post. He is usually on the ball (see the last three links of the entry).
Hyatt's response was brief but to the point. Maybe that is because he is the only one of the four who actually realised the intent of my comments... he frequently posts controversial comments with apparently no other reason than getting people to link to them.
And finally pavlov... His response was the most useful of the four. In response to his post, I have added a link to the W3C Validator which appears after I have submitted a post, so that I can easily check the validity of my markup. He also helped me fix my HTTP headers. And I was most impressed that Pavlov was the only one of the four to use my permalink fragment identifiers... even though I explicitly told mpt that he should make them available in his post!
Thanks for participating, guys!