In the ‘better mail than jail’ department, Gary Short writes about me: “At the end of the day though, he’s not actually done anything useful, in short he’s a celeb. Famous only for being famous.”

Usually when I get posts like this it’s like an early warning system. So, I need to look back over my posts to see whether I’m getting off track. Indeed I am. Looking back I see my posting has been condescending, too challenging, and sometimes just mean sounding. Heck, even Dave Winer told me off.

Sorry, blame it on the jet lag.

Happy third birthday to Technorati!

Paul Montgomery’s post “Clone the Memeorandum API” is sure to get onto Memeorandum in a few hours. The thing is he thinks the algorithm that Gabe Rivera developed for Memeorandum is fairly simplistic.

Oh, Paul, you sound a bit like Tim Bray tonight!

If only developing quality software was so simplistic. You might not know Gabe, but I do. He’s a former compiler writer. Used to work for Intel. He’s one smart cookie. His algorithms might be simple to explain, but they aren’t so simple to implement. For instance, do you know how he filters out noise? What happens if I link to a political blog? Why doesn’t that show up on Memeorandum? Ever consider that one? I’ve talked with Gabe about it. The algorithm he wrote takes care of it.

Doing Memeorandum took him more than a year. Are you a former compiler writer? Expect it to take longer then and not work as well.

I want to see a “personal Memeorandum” too, though, just to be clear. But thinking that it’s a simple problem just denigrates Gabe who took more than a year off of work — without pay — to implement Memeorandum.

The other thing you need to know is that opening API’s increases a systems’ POTENTIAL insecurity quite a bit. So doing so must be done with great thought. Lots of threat modeling. Lots of testing. Not easy stuff. I bet that turning on an API will require Gabe to do even more work than he’s already done.