Letters Remain

Tag: blogging

  • Inventive Ways to Control Trolls

    To keep the peace on the ever-expanding Stack Exchange Network of online communities, owners Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood introduced the timed suspension of disruptive users’ accounts. Over time the transparency of the timed suspension process proved to be occasionally inefficient when discussions arose regarding the merits of certain suspensions. This led the administrators of…

  • Taming White House Trolls

    When the Obama administration embraced blogging, sans commenting, on the White House website there were a number of detractors saying that Obama had retreated from his campaign promise of providing a site enabling public discussions. The reasons why are fairly obvious, but Clive Thompson looks at how the WhiteHouse.gov blog could enable commenting and successfully/safely control trolls (the…

  • Obsession and Writing on the Web

    At SXSW 2009, John Gruber and Merlin Mann held a panel on “building a blog you can be proud of, trying to improve the quality of your work, reaching the people you admire, and maybe even making a buck”. The talk, available as a 43f Podcast on Mann’s site, is worth your time whether you…

  • The World of Web Trolling

    The New York Times goes inside the world of online trolls, who “use the Internet to harass, humiliate and torment strangers”. […] Even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section,…

  • Usability Tips for Your Website/Blog

    Tom of I’d Rather Be Writing—the ‘technical communication’ blog—has just written-up twenty usability tips for your blog. I’ve been doing research on what distinguishes good blogs from poor ones, especially by reading “lessons learned” posts by bloggers. I’ve come up with 20 principles I think are worthwhile. Encourage comments Include an About page Keep posts…