Inventing the Future: sign me up – not!

My boss has blog on blogger, which I gather is now owned by Google. Hard to believe that the “Don’t be evil” folks have a hand in this monstrosity.

I tried to post a comment on my boss’s blog. But it only lets registered users post comments. OK, so I signed up.

Well, it’s not just an assignment of a username and password. They want to sign up bloggers so that they can claim they have some large number of content creators. OK, fine. I had to pick a color scheme, and enter some personal information, including my email address. I created a single blog entry for myself, with a little rant very much like this one. Then I tried to leave the comment I originally set out to make.

No soap. I tried several times, using several browsers. Now this was getting annoying. These folks were messing with my train of thought, and my son was wanting attention. I guess these folks have things spread over different servers and the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. Maybe tomorrow, if I haven’t lost interest by then. It’s a computer for crying out loud. Why should there be any noticable propagation delay?

OK. Retreat. Just post a comment by email. Ha! It asks not only for my email address, but that of a friend as well. No way.

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About Stearns

Howard Stearns works at High Fidelity, Inc., creating the metaverse. Mr. Stearns has a quarter century experience in systems engineering, applications consulting, and management of advanced software technologies. He was the technical lead of University of Wisconsin's Croquet project, an ambitious project convened by computing pioneer Alan Kay to transform collaboration through 3D graphics and real-time, persistent shared spaces. The CAD integration products Mr. Stearns created for expert system pioneer ICAD set the market standard through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. The embedded systems he wrote helped transform the industrial diamond market. In the early 2000s, Mr. Stearns was named Technology Strategist for Curl, the only startup founded by WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. An expert on programming languages and operating systems, Mr. Stearns created the Eclipse commercial Common Lisp programming implementation. Mr. Stearns has two degrees from M.I.T., and has directed family businesses in early childhood education and publishing.

5 Comments

  1. Monica
    December 24, 2004 at 10:13 am

    <em>Ha! It asks not only for my email address, but that of a friend as well. No way.</em>

    That’s annoying. On the other hand, if you really want to post the comment, this is the sort of thing that mailinator.com was made for.

  2. Stearns
    December 24, 2004 at 11:08 pm

    Yes, nothing is impossible if you put enough effort into it. But I’d sure like to see less barriers to communication instead of artificially introducing more. There’s SO much potential in blogging and computers in general — potential to both lower and to raise barriers.

  3. John
    December 26, 2004 at 8:25 am

    I had the same experience when I wanted to post a comment on somebody’s blogger blog. I ran into another road block– don’t remember what it was– but it was the same kind of deal.

    I know one impetus is to prevent comment spamming. I’ve worried about that at wetmachine, but for whatever reason we’re still below the radar. Nevertheless I’ve got it in mind to improve this site to make it more welcoming.

  4. mtness
    March 11, 2005 at 7:36 pm

    Hi this is just a test comment.

    If the comms here is as easy as you hope;-)

    I like wetmachine, can’t wait for it to appear as a croquetspace!

    but that is a different story.

    Kind regards from

    mtness

  5. mtness
    March 11, 2005 at 7:37 pm

    test passed succesfully!

    you’ve been bookmarked.

Comments are closed