Man, I’ve read hundreds of blogs about Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales’ proposal for a blogging code of conduct and the feedback wasn’t kind. It, even, looked a lot like a mob because the feedback was so consistently anti the proposal.

Anyway, I was just reading my feeds and saw that Tim O’Reilly responded with a lengthy post.

That’s how to respond to a mob. Take on their concerns head on and remain calm. Thanks Tim. I’ll think about what you wrote more today and will be watching the comments on both his reaction post and here.

Ahhh, I keep hearing Steve Ballmer’s words “developers, developers, developers.” Google is holding a developer day on May 31. I thought I’d see this kind of effort after Vic Gundotra started his job at Google (I always assumed he’d run a new developer evangelism effort after his non-compete agreement with Microsoft ran out). Speaking of which, I gotta reconnect with Vic. It’s been too long since I talked with him. Vic, you out there?

When you host your stuff on a Web site that’s free and that you don’t control some nasty crap can happen. Yesterday MySpace started blocking Photobucket stuff.

My blog is hosted on WordPress.com and I have the same issues the MySpace folks are seeing (the free service where my blog is hosted right now, which is different from the software that you host on your own servers).

The thing is when a company is hosting your stuff for free they need to see some way to make money off of the service. This isn’t going to be free with no ads forever and ever. And, it certainly would piss me off if I worked on WordPress.com if someone came along and made money from my user’s photos and videos.

If you want to avoid these issues there’s really one choice: pay for your site’s own hosting and build your own traffic. One reason to join services like MySpace and WordPress.com is that there’s a built-in level of traffic — the home page on WordPress.com regularly drives hundreds, if not thousands of visitors to even new sites every day. If you go off and build your own site you don’t have those advantages, but you’ve got to live with when they pull down parasitic services, which is what Photobucket is.

This will chill investment in parasitic services for MySpace, though.

What do you think?

Oh, and I’m very happy with the deal I’m getting here at WordPress.com. Yeah, I can’t run every gadget, or do advertising, and there are some other limitations, but overall the service is really great.