taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Politics: California AG forwards anti-P2P screed on behalf of the MPAA.

However, the metadata associated with the Microsoft Word document indicates it was either drafted or reviewed by a senior vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America. According to this metadata (automatically generated by the Word application), the document’s author or editor is ’stevensonv.’ (The metadata of a document is viewable through the File menu under Properties.)

Sources tell Wired News that the draft letter’s authorship is attributed to Vans Stevenson, the MPAA’s senior vice president for state legislative affairs. MPAA representatives have issued similar criticisms of P2P technology in the past. Stevenson could not be reached for comment.

Funny: Humorix: Feds Unveil Practical Method To Combat Spam. ”If a spammer
has access to a list of millions of clue-impaired users, they won’t need to bother sending spam to anybody else’, Thullweppon argued.’ (thanks to Kenneth Porter for the link!)

Tags: anti, california, document, metadata, mpaa, politics, president, spam, stevenson, vice, word

Some vague web musing: while reading Cory Doctorow’s “Metacrap” essay on metadata, I noticed this:

Certain kinds of implicit metadata is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is.

He’s right, of course — that’s how Google works. But while reading this, it occurred to me that this implicitly rewards websites that consist of small numbers of large pages, instead of high numbers of short pages; if your site has a page for ever sub-heading (think of a Linux HOWTO document here), and a linker to your site links to the page that’s relevant to what they’re talking about, your Google ranking will be lower than if you keep the document all in one page and use named anchors.

Personally, despite what Jakob Neilsen thinks, I prefer the all-in-one page mode myself. It’s quicker to download (overall), easier to print or read offline, and I’m not afraid to use a scrollbar. Interesting to see Google (accidentally) recommends it too ;)

The rest of the essay is spot on, in my opinion.

BTW, Cory also writes for Boing Boing, one of the coolest mags I used to read back when, and now a top-quality weblog.

Tags: cory, document, essay, google, linker, metadata, number, page, site, web