Make this your house; be one of us

Although I know I'll probably be offended by Livejournal's most recent Dreamwidth Recruitment Drive when I've had time to figure out what exactly this trackback/pingback/Facebook thing is, I haven't taken the time yet to learn if this is what'll drive me off of here. It's been producing some effects anyway. The main thing is this existence of stuff coming from ``pingback_bot'', which seems to whatever their notification scheme is.

Anyway, I found Friday morning that there was a ``0 Comments'' note on my weekly humor piece. I hadn't seen that before; this was the notification that the piece was linked to by something I never heard of before. The essay included a reference to Tivo and the notification was that the RSS feed ``tivo_in-blogs'' linked to it because there was indeed a mention of Tivo in it. (I suppose there's going to be such a pinback to this too, now.) Friday evening there was another pingback, from ``tivo_in_lj'', an obviously radically different organization hostile to the first.

I am vaguely offended to have this ``0 Comments'' thing clinging to a post (it feels like I should be doing more about it). And I really don't get the whole pingback thing from the whole Internet of putting up [ ... ] and words drawn from the thing being pinged back to, in a link to whatever page does the reference. But mostly I'm fascinated that apparently someone feels so passionately about Tivo as to grep all the blogs in existence for any mention. Kibo would be able to explain the motivation, I'm sure. And now I'm wondering what other secret words out there are ready to make pinging virtual ducks drop down.

Trivia: Among the entertainment enjoyed by Serb, Croat, and Bosniak negotiators at the Dayton Accords peace talks in 1995 was watching America's Funniest Home Videos. Source: The World's Banker, Sebastian Mallaby. I feel strangely reassured that warring parties will come together to watch cats fall off things. It implies YouTube may be the greatest force for peace ever as long a nobody reads the comment threads.

Currently Reading: Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement.