It's a tired Silicon Valley drum beat: print is dying, blogs and Twitter are the future of news.  Many in the business of blogging like to think that print ad revenues are declining and subscriber bases are shrinking because online media is vastly superior to those dinosaurs.  This is one area where the evidence actually seems to suggest that the bloggers are justified.

However, if you're not so full of yourself that "citizen journalism" seems like a revolution, you can understand the real reason that print is dying: newspapers' shit is all retarded. 

Too many big words, articles that are way too long, and boring stuff like researched facts.  Fuck all that shit, I want my news as it happens, and I don't care how true it is.  Bloggers call this process journalism...whatever.  That's just writers trying to convince themselves that they're serious when they know deep down that their readership is only interested in sensational titles and text no longer than 300 words.  Any more than that, well, shit's all retarded.

The only satisfying part of journalism turning into shinythings.com is watching intellectuals whine about it.  See, I probably should be an intellectual.  I've got a degree in mathematics, I'm a computer programmer by trade, but every time I've knocked an article out of the park for The Register, it's been a great troll.  That's the only way to get by in online media, and even the New York Times knows this.

Take for example, NYT columnist Paul Krugman.  He won a Nobel Prize in economics, and has been writing the same op-ed column for NYT for the past 8 years: "Republicans are the cause of all the world's ills."  Someone who's shit is arguably all retarded has been reduced to trolling to get page views.  And it really works.

If, as a blogger, you're above trolling, then the only other way to be popular is by printing blatant falsehoods.  In 2008, people actually started to pay attention to CNN's iReport because somebody wrote that Steve Jobs had a heart attack. Apple lost 10% of its market capitalization in 10 minutes.  Now that's fucking power.  TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, showing an obvious tell of a manic depressive, keeps going off on Last.FM with lies about them giving data away to the recording industry.  None of it is true, but it brings readers.

It certainly doesn't hurt that TechCrunch shies away from words longer than eight letters.

Print media isn't hurting because it's an outdated business model, print media is hurting because it's boring.  Blogs and Twitter are succeeding because their shit is clearly not retarded.  And you know what?  I love it.  Intellectualism is dying, and the news is now anything we want it to be.

I just can't wait until 4chan figures that out.

I've worked with a lot of engineers around the Valley, some who are genuinely competent and some who can fake it pretty well.  One trend that I've noticed with alot of really good engineers is that they like to swing their dicks around when it comes to implementation.

You start a project with one of these guys, and the first thing to come up is how MySQL isn't going to scale, and how you're going to have to write your own data store.  With that settled, you'll also need your own object-relational mapper, and you might as well make your own web templating language because well, it will fit in better with the architecture.

This, gentlemen, is dick-swinging, and it is the most colossal waste of time for a startup.

Now, it's a well known fact around Northern California that I'm the greatest programmer who ever lived, and I even fell victim to this.  At my last startup, we were absolutely convinced that we were building ourselves into a corner by using MySQL, so we wrote our own data store.  It started off as an RPC wrapper around some magical key/value store in Erlang (parallelism, fuck yeah), and ended up as a different RPC wrapper around BerkeleyDB.  All in all, it went through three major rewrites, and the end product was something that took months to develop and would crash under moderate load.

But hey, it was a cool architecture.

As another small example, again at the last startup I spent a few hours one day writing a feedforward neural network implementation in Java, just to try my hand at implementing an algorithm.  Again, a small waste of time, but it was my attitude toward it that signaled a larger problem: I wanted to see how awesome I really was (answer: pretty fuckin' awesome).

It's not just apartment-bound startups that fall victim to this, either.  Kosmix, which is a well funded science project that's fooled itself into thinking it can be a major player in search, wrote its own data store in C++.  It's basically a clone of Google's GFS because hey, if Google's doing it, then we should too, right?  Who knows how much time, energy, and money was wasted on this thing, but that's all time, money, and energy that could go into making their final product not such a joke.

Kosmix falls to a different sword: they are well funded and assume they have all the time in the world.  Maybe a serious venture round buys you time, but when you spend it all writing a file system that's not core to your product, you start talking Series C, Series D, and so on. 

Fortunately, trench-level engineers aren't concerned with dilution.  Oops.

At my current startup, we've got business-focused leadership.  We have a good engineering team, and we don't let our hubris get the best of us.  There are so few instances where a startup will need to write something like a file system, and we're not one of them.

As an entrepreneur, you should be prideful of your idea, now how big you think your compiler-cock is.

Since the most recent death of Uncov, I've tried to lay off the Web 2.0 shit.  However, as a conoisseur of fail, I thought the DiggBar is worth an examination.

DiggBar is a URL shortening service from Digg, the internet's largest community of whiners, armchair political activists, inconsolable Book-of-Steve-Jobs bible beaters, and automatic voting bots.  The long and short of it is this: you can put any address into it, and it will give you a way to view that URL through Digg.com.  For example, http://digg.com/u1hrO brings you back here, except with a Digg toolbar at the top.

There's been a small wave of butthurt over this little scheme, because every link on the front page of Digg.com now leads you to one of these toolbars instead of to the actual content.  So, when a Digg user clicks through, he never actually leaves Digg.com.  They've done some of the stuff necessary so that publishers don't get shafted on the traffic or the PageRank (and still managed to fuck that up), but still, that little bar adds little to no value to the user. 

Then why did they do it?

When an entrepreneur raises any useful amount of money from an investor, he needs to answer to that investor.  The CEO of a company reports to the board of directors, which usually includes the investors.  Every quarter, the CEO must lay out goals and objectives, and for internet companies, these goals and objectives always, always include traffic growth.

Digg has raised 40 million dollars to date.  With that kind of money, investors demand explosive growth.  Since the economy has gone to shit, there's a very slim chance that Digg will see a sale before it needs to raise more money.  As a small company, Digg could have been a very profitable business, but instead they took too much money and made too many expectations for themselves.  I can guarantee you that Jay Adelson (CEO) and Kevin Rose have some demanding goals to meet, and lately, they haven't been meeting them.

Hence the introduction of this DiggBar business.  When a link makes its way to the top of Digg, it gets republished quite a bit.  Now that all these links will land a user at Digg.com, Digg that collects the unique users from this collateral linkage.  And it's working, too.  In a recent interview, VP John Quinn of Digg said that the DiggBar has given them a 20% boost in unique visitors.

This move shows that not only is Digg willing to pull some sleazy shit to increase their unique visitors, but that they also need to pull this sleazy shit, because they need more unique visitors.

Damn.  And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids.

Footnotes.

1. Uncov.com died again.  I never owned the domain name, one of my business partners did.  The registration on it recently lapsed, and somebody picked it up.  It now redirects to a Twitter search for "kevinrose".  If you're the one who bought it, good show.  Thanks for not being a spammer.  I'm not willing to buy it back from you, but if you want to give it to me, I will take you out for a beer to congratulate your achievement.
2. No, I did not get fired from The Register.  My wife and I had a daughter last week, and I am taking some time off.  Not sure when I'll return yet, but I will.  I just need to get my sleeping back on schedule.
   

The greatest hope of internet generation is that you can share your thoughts with everybody in the world.  The greatest letdown of the same generation is that nobody cares.  Still, that doesn't keep us from trying.

Bloggers are good people, generally.  We're self confident in a passive aggressive sort of way, we're opinionated, and best of all, we can type quickly.  But what separates bloggers from each other?  Those who can break exclusive news usually have a good following, but what about the rest of us?  How do you actually get better at blogging?

Not that you asked for it, but this is my advice: read more, write less.  By "read more", I mean books.  Newspapers are useless, because the job of every newspaper editor is to remove any semblance of personality from all of the text.  It's just facts, and facts are fuckin' boring.  If you want to cruise programming.reddit a few times a day and write reactionary articles, fine, live with that crowd.  It's not an interesting place to be, though.  Telling the world why you think DHH is wrong about some programming methodology isn't going to get you a column at Rolling Stone.

Getting on the front page of Digg is not an accomplishment.

Blogarrhea begets blogarrhea.  There's a continuous global discussion on the internet, and if you're not the one who started it, you're just background noise.  People like Paul Graham and Dave Winer never really say anything original, they just enjoy the act of typing.  Graham has been re-writing the same three essays for almost a decade, and Winer, well, Winer doesn't have much to do during the day, and at least blogging keeps him away from drugs and rap music. I guess it's a positive influence.

If you want to keep that company, do so, but like programming, writing is so much better when you value elegance as well as functionality.

Which brings me to my second point.  Write less.

For the last two months, I have been working my way through a pile of books: everything ever published by Chuck Palahniuk (tl;dr: the guy who wrote Fight Club).  I'm almost done, a book and a half to go.  Chuck likes to do these writers' workshops, and somebody once asked him what he does when he's stuck.  He knows where the story needs to go, but just doesn't know how to get it there.

Chuck's response: "Did you ever go into the bathroom and try and take a shit when you didn't have to go?"

Whenever I sit down to write a post here, it's because I really have to take a dump.  Incidentally, sometimes when I write for The Register, it feels like I'm really trying to squeeze one out.  If I end up dead from an aneurysm, that's what happened. Setting a post-per-week quota for yourself is like setting a lines-of-code quota at work.

Don't write just because you want to spend some time on the pot.  Do it because you really have to go.

There's a blog post that snakes through the programming community every three months: the one about only hiring programmers who program in their spare time.  It's always the same person who writes it, too. 

He's a sequentially numbered employee at a company with a well-tracked ticker symbol, and his only outlet of authority is sweating down some poor sod in a windowless interview room, asking questions about sorting integers in linear time.

The truth of it is, after a day of writing JUnit tests to achieve the corporate-policy-mandated code coverage metric, you don't need to go home to a Haskell compiler.  You need to go home to a tall drink and a depraved presentation of human sexuality.  Corporate coding sucks, and if there's no vice to counteract it, you'll be dead of an aneurysm by age forty.  They'll find you on the toilet, pants down, your copy of Design Patterns unceremoniously splayed open on the floor.

Programming isn't a glamorous job, and pretending that it is won't make you any better at it.

I've been studying some techniques for decompressing the tension built up by JBoss and WebSphere in my personal lab for quite some time now.  I'm not a corporate coder anymore, but when I was, I studied ways to make it easier on the head.  I'm now ready to share my results with the scientific community.

Drinking

Alcohol is the most obvious medication because it's cheap and readily available.  Parked on the couch, racing your way to the bottom of a highball glass of Chivas Regal is a fantastic way to forget that the hour you spent in a meeting watching two type-A personalities fiercely debate Scrum versus XP is one hour less of the life you wanted.  The downside is that one drink usually leads to three or four, and you waste the drunkenness on an early sleep because you need to get up early the next day and do it all over again.

Alcohol interrupts your sleep, and if you're going to stay sharp at work, you need a good rest.  If you're one of the damned souls like me, you get vicious hangovers, to the point where swimming in drink for a night isn't even worth it, if you're going to spend the next day wishing that you'd died of alcohol poisoning.

That being said, at some time in your programming career you need to go to work with a severe hangover, out of sticking it to the man by way of martyrdom.

Drugs

Here's where the process gets dicey.  When you wear a button-down shirt to work, you're not the usual type of person who ends up in county lock-up on a possession charge.  Marijuana is certainly a better option than alcohol in every way, shape, and form, but like it or not, it is illegal.  There are some exceptions here in California, but you're still rolling the dice  Getting pinched could mean getting fired.

The scary shit comes as rocks or powders.  Again, being the khakis-and-necktie crowd, nobody really expects you to be shooting black-horse heroin in the shower.

There is a convenient edge case when it comes to drugs, though.  Prescription painkillers, when used appropriately, really take the edge off of reality.  Again, you run the risk of upsetting John Q. Law, so make sure it's legit.  While they make for good entertainment in the evening, there's a real possibility that you can get addicted, and once a vice starts interfering with your work, then you're fucked.

Strippers

If you're the type that easily takes to strippers, you had better come ready to peel of the cabbage: this vice doesn't come cheap.  There's also a simple but unrelenting set of rules you need to learn to keep from getting your ass kicked by a bouncer.  It's the kind of thing you'll pick up as you go.

For the programmer or IT professional, strippers are an excellent choice.  You usually show up to the gentleman's establishment with a bit more money than any of the other clients, so you'll be Mr. Popular.  Just be respectful of what's going on: it's not so much a smut show as it is a first hand demonstration in a loosely regulated free market.  The dancers are there to make a buck, and don't you forget it.

Tobacco

Tobacco is a great vice for the programmer because it's a performance enhancing drug as well as an escape.  I recommend either cigars or smokeless tobacco to avoid the growing anti-cigarette movement.  A cigar is gangster, and chewing tobacco is stealth.

After putting down a nice stogie wrapped in Connecticut shade, you'll feel like it's time for action.  Nicotine is a fantastic stimulant - better than caffeine.  If you're the work-from-home type, smoking a cigar twenty minutes before you start will send you on your way in a hurry.  Avoid the dregs, though: don't buy a cigar in any place that sells gasoline.

Chewing tobacco is often overlooked.  Yeah, you say it's more of a staple with the Nascar crowd, but that's really just a stereotype invented by the Nascar crowd, designed to keep you damned hoity-toity folks from driving up the cost of a can of chaw.

The key part about dip is that you can do it at your desk.  Spit into an empty Coke bottle.  Nobody will come by to bother you.  Plus, think of how authoritative you're going to be at a meeting when you start it off by lipping a fat digger out of a tin of Skoal.

Just Keep It Within Reason

You can judge any vice on two dimensions: how good is it, and how likely is it to interfere with your work.  Once a vice becomes more than a vice, you're going to wish you were that guy who goes home to code Haskell.

However, there is a convenient side-effect to the addictiveness.  If you are aware enough to see your vice getting out of hand, it's probably time to quit your job.

Just don't do anything illegal.

If you're running an online business and have hired a consultant who tells you that you should have a corporate blog to "better connect with the community", fire that consultant.

If you have a corporate blog that is only marginally more interesting than a press release wire, you're wasting your time.

A corporate blog should serve only one primary purpose: distribution.  And I'm not talking about building brand recognition by getting people to read your blog.  Nine times out of ten, the text on your corporate blog is a chore to read.  Even Google fails this - their pathological cuteness and lame humor comes off as contrived.  It's not funny.  It's irritating.

Anyway, how does a blog get you distribution if you're not concentrating on branding?  PageRank.  You can and should use your blog for link-building and search engine optimization.

A great example of this is Mint.com's blog.  Mint is a personal finance web product that competes with desktop apps like Quicken.  Mint publishes longer articles about personal finance to their blog, and have several thousand readers.  That alone is interesting, but not mind-blowing.  The trick is that their content is useful.  It's basically a magazine about personal finance without the advertisements.  Social media picks up on Mint's content, and it gets a lot of inbound links.

Mint takes gross advantage of those inbound links.  That's the whole point.  At the bottom of every blog post is this little nugget:


A-ha, I see what you're doing there.  Mint is juicing their PageRank with the popularity of the blog.  If you're a personal finance website, chances are you want to optimize for some of these keywords.  And it's really working for them.

If you use Google's Keyword Tool to estimate the traffic for these keywords, find Mint's rank in the result page for each of them, and then multiply keyword traffic by the distribution of clicks for the top results in Google, you'll see that Mint is raking in at least 100,000 uniques per month from Google for these keywords.

If you hire a writer to post on your corporate blog, you could be seeing this kind of traffic, too.  By "writer", I don't mean "Peggy in accounts receivable who majored in English thirty years ago".  No, I mean someone whose words are worth reading.  A decent freelancer will run you 50 cents per word.  A good length blog post is 1,000 words, and you should publish at least once per week.  5 posts like this per month will cost $2,500.

Now let's compare that to buying traffic from Google by bidding on these keywords.  A really, really conservative estimate of a bid price for keywords like this is 10 cents (but good luck ranking with that bid, cheapskate).  To buy 100,000 uniques would therefore cost you $10,000 per month, and you don't get the PageRank.

Of course, the success of this strategy isn't as quantifiable as buying ads, but eventually you'll see traffic throughput.  Any writer worth his salt will be able to game social media sites like Digg and Reddit, which will bring in the backlinks.  All you need to do is figure out what keywords to optimize for, and put them in the blog template.

Every day I'm hustlin'