.

I'm referring to a blog about Posterous, not a blog by Posterous, created in response to Posterous' continuing insistence on trying to steer the direction of conversation on the Posterous Spaces announcement post away from the sensible conclusion that Posterous Spaces was a disaster, by blocking many of the comments that weren't supportive of the spin that Rich Pearson wanted to put on events, and by trying to get those who were open about the bad experiences they had to take those experiences to private e-mail, while leaving the the fanboys to kvell mindlessly about the latest non-accomplishment. Since only one view - far and away the minority view - would be heard in public, the illusion of a supportive consensus would thus be reached.

I am deeply disappointed in Posterous for employing somebody who would stoop to that. The new blog, which I've named Posterous Watch, and hosted over on what I'm sure must be one of Posterous' favorite platforms, is a potential group blog. If Posterous starts performing and behaving better, getting its rogue or not really rogue employees under control, and nobody ever feels the need to post there after this, that's fine. I'd rather post about interesting or pleasant things than about somebody's low ethics or unprofessional behavior, and I'm sure I (and anybody else posting) can find other things - posterous related things, in fact, to post about on the new blog. How about the bookmarking and discussion of interesting posts on Posterous?

But if the sleaze we've already seen is a sign of things to come, then Pearson, et al. need to learn that they're not going to get to control their press. In that case, the blog will continue to be what it has started out being about - equal time for those who'd like to talk about Posterous' failings, both technical and ethical. Given that my non-Posterous sites do see several hundred thousand hits per year, and I intend to link to the new blog extensively, I suspect that it will be read. As I explain in "What is this blog about?", I am looking for co-writers who are willing to honor the purpose of the blog (shills and fanboys need not apply), so this might be a chance to get a little extra traffic for your blog.

We can talk about that. No contact options, yet, but that will change soon.

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Continuing from my previous post ...

Note: As I'm editing this, I find that the system is removing the links which I'm entering for some reason. No problem, really - you can see an unmangled version of this post here, on the mirror to this blog hosted on what (at the moment) would appear to be the far superior Typepad. (Update to note - replacing the imageshack urls with shortened urls, created on tinyurl.com, ig.gd, bit.ly and ow.ly, and removing the http from the highlighted text in the link, seems to have solved the problem, for now)

A day later, some of the functionality has returned, after Posterous' ill advised decision to mangle its own system, for the sake of being able to do a press release, but that functionality is far from being back to normal. The navigational problems mentioned yesterday remain in place, unresolved. But this is not to say that Posterous and Rich Peason have decided to do nothing about them. Far from it. Rich and company appear to have done a creative artwork, an alleged screenshot that supposedly showed how easily one could find one's way to one's own blog in the new system, something which, if you recall, many of us found that we couldn't do in Firefox, on this system that now carried a publicly posted warning against the use of Internet Explorer, which was said to not be supported by Posterous at that time. Mr. Pearson wrote

Just a quick update that we rolled out the first of a series of fixes to make it easier to manage posts. The screenshot below show the default "list view" that now appears for all the Spaces that you own or contribute to. Drafts will appear at the top of this list as will comments and those that need moderation. On the right, you can see a familiar way of editing and deleting posts. We're still working on the ability to tag and autopost from this view as well. On the top right, you'll see the ability to switch between the list view (the one we just added) and the expanded view (the old one). https://skitch.com/suyashsonwalkar/f3b96/posterous-spaces More to come to make tagging, auto-posting and adding/editing pages

I found this a little odd, and replied with a few brief comments, all but one of which were blocked by whoever was watching the company blog at the time.

(Note 1) Looking at the two pages on which I find a "create a post" button, I see nothing that looks at all like what was posted over on skitch. I'm screenshotting the top of those pages, now.

(Note 2) "Looking at the two pages on which I find a "create a post" button, I see nothing that looks at all like what was posted over on skitch. I'm screenshotting the top of those pages, now." And now I've screenshotted the bottom of this page, and the top of the page at skitch, for later documentation.

(Note 3) The screenshots I referred to ... What I'm seeing in my account:

imageshack.us/photo/my-images/690/posterousspacesscreensh.jpg
imageshack.us/photo/my-images/155/posterousspacesscreensh.jpg

What I saw over on skitch

imageshack.us/photo/my-images/84/posterousspacesscreensh.jpg

and what was to be seen at the bottom of this page, when I posted my previous remark (which still hasn't appeared on the page), to show that I did screenshot the page that Rich linked to

imageshack.us/photo/my-images/823/posterousspacesscreensh.jpg

Click on each of the images at the other end of each of the links, and you'll see an enlargement of the image. There would seem to be a little bit of a discrepancy between what Rich is showing, and what I can see on my own account. I was wondering if Rich could explain that.

Only the comment marked "note 2" in the above list was approved, Rich, or whoever was handling the comments for the post creating the illusion that I had talked about taking the screenshots without posting any such screenshots, publicly. Having then acted to keep the general public from seeing something that really didn't support what he was saying, Pearson then acted as if he were actively seeking that which he had just hidden.

@Joseph - this seems like a bug. Can you please send in the screenshots to help@posterous.com so we can understand what is going on and fix it

Or, Rich, you could just follow the links in the post which you just blocked, and see those screenshots instantly, but that's not really the point, is it? The point of this is to get me to take this to private e-mail, instead of discussing this out in public, where the discussion is making the company look almost as bad as it has been. Lying about the capabilities of a rightly criticised system, and then blocking the evidence that one has done so, for the sake of manipulating public opinion? That's terrible - not completely unexpected in this industry, any more, but still terrible. So, whether Pearson likes it or not, I'm going to put those screenshots out where everybody can see them, because while this is, perhaps, not the greatest scandal of our age, it remains a moral issue. One simply should not do business in that way.

And sunlight remains the best disinfectant.

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I'm also considering the possibility of shutting down this blog. As I wrote in a comment on the company blog, which Rich has decided to not let you see

"As a user, I have to ask - am I going to have to relocate, again, just for the sake of somebody else's marketing ploy? Do you see why somebody might say "this is more trouble than I'm willing to put up with, just to give away content"? As a blogger, I find that I'm spending more time cleaning up other people's messes than I'm getting to spend doing any actual blogging, just because people in the industry really seem to enjoy acting like absolute, total ... richards. Think about it. What's the nickname for Richard? Yes, they've been acting like richardheads, and it would be so nice to be able to blog in a place where the staff did otherwise. A breath of fresh air, really.

Please, be bold. Break new ground by acting like your users' time is worth something. Techcrunch might not sing your praises if you do so, but we will. Honest."

You know, I'm not being paid to write this thing. You might notice that the link to the copy of the blog homepage at 001webs.com is dead. As you can see by following the link to the other copy of said homepage at scriptmania, this is not because of any offensive content on that homepage. Said page is gone because 001webs is run incompetently, and the company has lost my homepage over and over and over, forcing me to write to them about this problem and re-upload the same pages, over and over and over. Eventually, I decided that I'd had enough, went looking for a new provider, and found one. I created a new page at this location, hoping that the url would not prove to be ironic.

I then wrote to my former provider, and got this response from the owner

"Hi Joseph,

don't really understand why you took this personally, you did so from the start.

It's a struggle for us to fight all the spammers that sign up. We have people trained to delete them and only them, it seems that somewhere something is not yet  clicking as it should.

001Webs Admin" 

Uh, huh. How about because you gave me your word that you were going to put an end to these deletions, and we are now on letter 18 in this conversation, Cristian? Meaning that I had to resurrect my site or ask you to resurrect it, how many times? How much patience is enough, and have you ever heard of a saying that ran something like "a man is as good as his word"? Note the unapologetic attitude. I could rebuild my site at the old location, again, and it would just vanish, again, so why bother?

Having created the new homepage, I then set out to update the appropriate links, replacing the url for the old (and now non-existent) blog homepage on 001webs with the url for its replacement, and found myself thwarted by the system on Posterous as I tried to do so. Please remember that name, if you're reading this, because I wouldn't want to foster any misunderstandings - the system at Typepad, where the twin to this blog is to be found, worked wonderfully, as it almost always seems to. The only place where I had the problem I'm about to discuss was at Posterous, and Posterous wasn't about to let me talk about the problem on the company blog.

"I found a replacement service, created a replacement homepage, and then tried to realign my links. I succeeded in this in every location except for one: Posterous. I found that your system won't let me edit the links in my blog sidebar, either in Internet Explorer or in Firefox, forcing me to leave a link in place that goes nowhere. Better still, when I go directly to the posterous homepage in Firefox, while logged in, I find no sign of a path to the blog management page. Navigation has gone from being difficult, to being a nightmare, with nothing but frustration waiting for the user who manages to find his way through the maze you've made of our control panels. Just finding the button needed to make a new post took a lot of looking through a not at all intuitive interface."

Just one of a number of comments I've posted about the problem, which the company has opted to keep the public from being able to see, including this one

"As a user, I have to ask - am I going to have to relocate, again, just for the sake of somebody else's marketing ploy? Do you see why somebody might say "this is more trouble than I'm willing to put up with, just to give away content"? As a blogger, I find that I'm spending more time cleaning up other people's messes than I'm getting to spend doing any actual blogging, just because people in the industry really seem to enjoy acting like absolute, total ... richards. Think about it. What's the nickname for Richard? Yes, they've been acting like richardheads, and it would be so nice to be able to blog in a place where the staff did otherwise. A breath of fresh air, really.

Please, be bold. Break new ground by acting like your users' time is worth something. Techcrunch might not sing your praises if you do so, but we will. Honest."

These are excerpts. I held onto the entirety of my comments, which I'll repost in another location, later (but not much later), but yes, this sums up the problem. I'm spending so much time dealing with the drama and insanity of the companies that I'm dealing with, that I find that I have little time left to do any blogging, which is what I'm putting up with the drama to do, in the first place. As I wrote in response to somebody we all know and love, over on the company blog

"Oh, and Rich ...

I notice that you commented an hour ago, meaning that there has been time for my earlier remarks to be seen and processed. You seem to be under the impression that you'll be able to keep them from being seen.

In this, you are quite sadly mistaken. I'll just post them elsewhere, as an illustration of the way in which Posterous has engaged in censorship on its company blog in order to stifle criticism of what is obviously a marketing driven move that has served its user base poorly. Hype is no substitute for functionality."

(No, this blog is not the location I was referring to) How crazy is it, to destroy basic functionality, just in order to be able to do a press release? As things are, on these terms, at the very least, I have to cut all links to this blog, and let it drift, because otherwise, I'm left with webring navigability issues. 

So, while I'm thinking of finding a replacement for this blog, I'm also thinking of just giving up. Between having to start again from scratch, because a company will just delete its entire service without telling its users, first ("tee hee hee!"), or having to do damage control on my reputation because some admin - the people who are supposed to maintain some level of sanity - is off spreading rumors in retaliation for my evil decision to wear a blue shirt on a wednesday, or whatever one of these guys has decided to get worked up over - I don't have time to do what I'm here to do. That's why there are as few posts on this blog as there are, and that's ridiculous. There should be some reasonable expectation of professionalism when dealing with supposed professionals, and online, no such level ever seems to be met.

There are a few places where, to some extent, those expectations are being met. Maybe, what I need to do is retreat to those locations, and let sites that I've found to be poorly served by the staff die, instead of trying to replace them, because sanity, in this industry, seems to be very much more the exception than the rule,  responsibility and integrity being concepts that scarcely seem to be remembered, at all.  

.

I'm wondering if this blog even still functions. More about that, later - maybe here, maybe somewhere else.

Yes, it's a general question, but looking in the help center, I found nothing very helpful, and I've already burned away more than an hour on this nonsense. Honestly, I'm starting to get a little angry. This should be a straightforward function on Vox, and it isn't. Should I post this to ... where?

I'm in a group I've just created, and see a notice that the group has no photos, as one would expect. Would I like to add one? Sure. Go to your library and add one, I'm told, being given a link to my own library. I go there, find an image, click on "share" and find absolutely no option for sharing the photo to a group.

Fine. Is there some other option? I go back, and look at the page I was on before I went to that remarkably useless share page, which seems designed more to help promote Vox than to help the user - note that all of the options given involve the posting of content outside of Vox. Is there anything useful there?

Apparently not. As I watch a morning that I had intended to walk out into start to turn into an afternoon, I finally get around to trying the edit screen

and find what I'm looking for at last. What I've found is that the Vox system won't provide us with an option to add photos to a group if one clicks on "photos" instead of on "edit", on one's main screen - and I was supposed to know this, how? I was just supposed to know it, that was all. OH! – and look at all of the beautiful red x’s (exes?) that posting these screenshots have left on my main blog page on Vox, where those last two links are to be found.

Though an easy solution to this problem could be found ...

... at which point everything return to normal, or at least to what passed for normality.

The customary act of a user, at this point, is to post some self-deprecating remark about how the service needs to understand how stupid its users are, and work with that, but I'm not going to write anything like that, because this is simply absurd. There is a difference between being intelligent and being psychic.

How, precisely, was the user supposed to know that Vox would set its system in such a way as to disable the sending of photos to groups, unless one reached the photo using just the right path, and how would one know which path to take? Once one is there, one should be there, and free to do what needs doing, whether one has found the right sequence of hoops to jump through or not.

This is what Vox really needs to work on - making its system more intuitive, more user friendly, and better documented. Creating a help group, instead of sending users to wade through a mass of documents, and having an employee watch that group, might not be a bad idea, either.

Mirrored:   Here,  on  "Mostly Evil"

I noticed that my review of the Art Institute of Chicago no longer appears on the review page for that institution, when one follows the link from my profile:

http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-art-institute-of-chicago-chicago#hrid:zg9soVdtNckIz6mUkkedGw

Normally, following such a link from a personal profile on Yelp, one would expect to see the user's review at the top of the page, and, following the links from my other reviews to their respective review pages, I find that Yelp's system still seems to work that way. So I am, to say the least, curious.

Is this a bug? If so, why does it only seem to have affected this one review of mine and nothing else? If not, and Yelp really did remove that review from the Art Institute page, why was it removed?

Let's make that one star, now that they're going to shut down Geocities, without having bothered to send any of its users any e-mail about this. Most of us, with sites on that service, found out by reading stories like this:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-Web-20-and-SOA/Yahoo-Demolishes-GeoCities-10-Years-36-Billion-Later-785579/

The fun part is that Geocities, pre-Yahoo, had an FTP server! That would been very helpful, right now, a much easier way of recovering content than unrendering individual pages and cutting and pasting the code to files on one's own disk. Yahoo has seen no need to reactivate that server, or even to construct any software to use for transferring Geocities pages to their paid server, telling users to cut and paste, and then FTP their newly constructed pages up to their new location. On a server belonging to the same (expletitive deleted) company.

More than a little evil, and one reason why I chose to move my material to the server of a completely different company. Quoting the article cited above as it quotes the new CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz

"The best candidate for focused investment and renewed innovation are those products that generate the majority of our traffic and corresponding economic value. These include the homepage, sports, news, finance, entertainment, mail search and mobile."

One might note the absence of the remaining sites hosting user generated content in that list, such as Flickr. Yahoo's new future is going to consist primarily of taking stories off of the AP feed (see first five products in Bartz' list). Which means that your content really isn't safe on Yahoo, which will soon be offering you little that you weren't getting out of your local newspaper, anyway, raising the question of why one would bother to visit their site, at all.

Yahoo's contribution to its users, most of whom are on services it had nothing to do with creating - eg. Flickr, Yahoogroups (formerly eGroups), Geocities, Jumpcut, Upcoming, Delicious - has primarily consisted of taking over companies that were functioning decently enough before they arrived and slowly running them into the ground or shutting them down, altogether. It didn't even invent its own search engine. Altavista did that, the biggest change after the Yahoo takeover being that link searches no longer worked properly.

I hesitated to give Yahoo an overall rating before, saying that it was more like a cluster of many little companies than like one large one, making generalizations difficult. Perhaps, but a pattern does seem to emerge after a while. The web would be a far better place today, had this company never been.

Did anybody at Yahoo ever stopped to think that maybe one of the reasons why they're having more and more trouble getting new users to subscribe to the services they offer is because so many of us, with good historical reasons, having come to the conclusion that posting content to Yahoo is a lot like throwing it out?

References: original review 

The Institute no longer has a free day. It has raised its ticket prices, during an economic downturn, no less, when many have found themselves without work or the hope of finding it in the near future, if ever. In doing so, it denied the newly destitute one of the few simple pleasures they had left. One can get in for free for two hours, maybe - not worth the trip, for that. One would spend more time travelling than one would spend in the museum.

I deducted a star for the lack of class shown by the timing of that change. In hard times, the Institute's word to the outsourced professional and middle classes has been "we don't care. go away." Something I hope we'll all remember, someday, should circumstances change and they, once again, come to us all with palms outstretched, asking for our financial help, as they had so many times in the past, before opportunity became an ever scarcer privilege, almost entirely reserved to the very young and well connected when it was to be had, at all.

As we have seen, our charity would be better invested elsewhere. Art is worth caring about. This museum isn't.

References: original review