The article below was posted by me to the Google Pages
Creator Group. If you haven't tried out Google Pages
as a hosting service, my advice is "don't". Google Pages
has adopted the unique practice of forcing its users to
use one of a limited set of templates for creating their
homepages, resulting in what some have called "the prefab
look". One solution to this prblem has been to build
redirects into the homepage, to take the browser to
one of the .html files one is allowed to upload.

Google's response to this has been to redesign it system
in order to sabotage the redirection code its users have
installed, leading its users to adapt the code, which
Google then deactivates through further modifiatons, if
past postings in that forum are to be trusted.

As I asked over there, don't we all have better things to
do with our time? This all seemed more than a little
adolescent, even by Internet standards.



-------------------------------------------------
post begins
-------------------------------------------------



At least one other homepage provider I know of offers
templates to its users (Angelfire comes to mind), but no
other user I have ever heard of tries to force its users
to make use of them.

On the off chance that somebody from Google is reading
this: OK, guys, at some point you're going to want to
make money from this Googlepages project of yours, in
which you have invested so much time and money. With 100%
dead-on certainty, you will not be able to do so by turning
the free service into a paid service. There are too many
free services in existence to which your users can switch
over, and the quality of your editor is not competitive
with what is available from even the least expensive paid
sites. Your only option is ad revenue.


There are two very different kinds of webmasters. There
are those who are motivated enough to try to improve on
what they've done in the past, however good or bad that
may be. Then there are the unmotivated sorts who will throw
any slop on the screen, say something clever like "it's
not just good, it's good enough", and then never be bothered
again because they just plain don't care. However more
numerous the latter may be than the former, if you end up
with only the unmotivated types on your server, your
revenue stream will be nil, because you won't have
anything on the Googlepages site that anybody
will want to see.


For those who do care enough to be bothered, who do try
to grow creatively, whether they're rank amateurs like
myself who would just like to be a little less rank or
talented artists sharing what they've created just for
the joy of creation, the kind of creative straightjacketing
represented by those templates is a deal breaker, one
which your investors should look at with particular
interest, representing as it does the driving away of
revenue enhancing opportunities, pursued with no rational
business objective in view. When a provider screens sites
for "offensive material", this may represent an undue
limitation on the writer, but one can at least say on
behalf of the provider, that there was a purpose to the
limitation - the provider didn't want to scare off
advertisers. Is there any advertiser, anywhere, however,
who is going to be upset that a site didn't look
prefabricated, and if so, why haven't any of the
other providers seem to have encountered this curious
individual, yet?


While you maintain a niche in the market as expansion
space for sites hosted on other providers that have
treated their users with greater respect, I'm sure that
you've noticed that diskspace is getting steadily cheaper,
allowing diskpace allotments to rise; at some point,
the whole concept of "expansion space" is going to become
severely dated. When you take a look at just how many
Googlepages links are to be found on forums, to material
intended only for temporary view, you may find that "at
some point" is not so comfortably far in the future
as you may like.


Think about it, guys. Or don't. Your choice to make,
your gain or your loss, and either way you'll be getting
precisely what you deserve, because you will be making a
free and informed choice that you will have the resources
and opportunity to act on. There is something to be said
for the concept of market discipline, don't you agree?


-------------------------------------------------
end of post
-------------------------------------------------




As some of us keep saying, there is a difference between
Corporatism and Capitalism; Capitalism has no problem with
the concept of the market being the proverbial two way street.
At this point, while the glut of free website providers isn't
as great as it was before the severely predictable dot-bomb
collapse of the 1990s, it's still fairly impressive, with
far too many providers chasing too few sites where the
webmaster shows any sign of having made an effort at all.
Supply and demand favors the webmaster, not the provider.

Further, as one of the people I've webmastered for pointed
out in his blog's goodbye post a few hours ago, we should
consider the nature of this industry, sustained as it is
by the fee gifting of creative material from its "customers";
who stands to lose more from the loss of the relationship?
The vast majority of the "customers" of these services stand
to lose nothing more than the chance to give their work away
for free; the providers stand to lose their livelihood. This
means that even if somebody were to successfully create a
trust, leaving the "customers" with a "take it or leave it"
choice regarding something like GP's template fixation, almost
all of the "customers" would be very capable of shrugging,
and walking away from the whole childish affair.

This means that even were the industry to speak with one
voice, its leverage would be only as great as its users
fooled themselves into believing that leverage to be; all
they would need to have power in this relationship would
be for them to recognize its presence. But even this is
not the case, as one can see simply by doing business with
any of the providers of the sites you see associated with
this group. When I began with a very, very crude, plain text
site (which I've gradually been improving), while I haven't
always been happy with everything that everybody has done,
I've never had to doubt that when I worked on giving
my site at Geocities a better look and feel, that Yahoo
was supportive of my wish to do so. Lycos encourages the
celebration of such efforts, and Bravenet practically
chearleads for them, having offered some impressive
assortments of tools and toys for is webmsters in the past.
Googlepages is the only provider I've ever seen fight to
enforce a standard of mediocrity.

Is this because the people at Bravenet, Tripod and Yahoo are
wonderful human beings? They may well be, and sometimes
they've given me cause to suspect this of them, but also
they're going to do this because doing otherwise is not
a smart way to do business. Even if the users get resigned
to accepting that their site will look like c**p - and as
we've seen, there is no reason for them to feel that way -
their visitors aren't going to let themselves get resigned
to looking at c**p. If the Internet doesn't come through
for them, there are always books, there's always TV (gasp!),
there are always things offline that they can divert
themselves with. There are also sites aplenty at the paid
providers, most of which are free to visit, so to sabotage
the look and feel of the users' sites is to sabotage one's
own ad revenue, of which, at this point, Googlepages has none.

The real question, then, is not why every single free
homepage provider that practically anybody has head of
refrains from imposing templates on its users as GP does,
but why GP insists on them. Personal issues would seem to
clearly be involved, as they sometimes are online. But,
as many providers before GP have learned the hard way,
one can't get past the reality of market discipline through
sheer stubbornness, in an industry as non-essential as this
one. One can, however, be fooled into thinking otherwise
long enough for the financial buzzards to start circling
overhead, especially when the local culture encourages
one to be so blind as to allow this.

If you visit the Google Page Creator group, located at

http://tinyurl.com/ycdjpe

I believe that you will that the loal culture not only
encourages such blindness, it practically demands it.
"Do you realize you're lecturing the most powerful Internet
Company on Earth" sermonized one of the Internet's many 18
year old "persons" who feels obligated to share the benefit
of his many years of experience with people who know the
world a bit better than he does. Do the math. When GoPlay
(one of the dot.coms mentioned to our little friend) bit the
dust, he would have been somewhere around 12.

Dubbing the reasoned argument you see above a "rant", which
I suppose is to be expected of somebody who came of age
under the system of self-esteem based education, this little
boy (who turned out to be one of the local cabal leaders) then
proceeded to lecture me on the dangers of talking like an
adult. If this sounds like it's about to turn into a
discussion of the latest netloon I've met and why I'd enjoy
smacking the little punk around, it's not. Note that I've
left the little punk unnamed. The point is to point to the
kind of culture that is developing among GooglePages users,
and by implication, the kind of feedback that Google is
going to get on its latest mismanaged project.

Google has succeed in surrounding itself with a culture of
cowardly, literally adolescent yes men who are going to tell
it that everything it is doing is wonderful and brilliant,
whether this happens to be the case or not. "Do you realize
that you're lecturing the most powerful ..." as if rich
people never did anything unreasonable or stupid, or as if
the growth of the current major dot.coms during the 90s was
a result of much more than a late 90s era fad of buying
"hip" stocks as a fashion statement, a little detail that
anybody old enough to remember the late 90s would know.
One really has to wonder if these little buggers know which
century they're living in when they say things like that,
but aside from the reactionary looniness of saying that it's
not our place to talk back to rich people, one has the reality,
already pointed out, that Google has very little experience
hosting websites and no history of making money doing so.

The responses that followed were a trip, in a very telling
way. We had our callow youths responding to the reminder
that Google had yet to line up even a single advertiser for
its webhosting service with the observation that people
would later choose to put advertising on their own sites -
apparently not getting that under that arrangement, the
website owner and not the provider sees the revenue. Imagine
talking with children who don't know that they're children,
and then picture those childen getting to create the consensus
view of reality. What you're going to get is the kind of
insane hothouse environment I've written about in the
past, in which the community groupthinks its way into pure
lunacy; I literally had one of these idiots tell me "in
his humble opinion" that if I wanted to make a page without
using templates I should get a paid site.

As I've pointed out before, and anybody can easily see just
by looking, almost every free website provider other than
Googlepages allows one to do just that, and in the case
of the ones you see me doing business with, have been doing
so for most of the history of the Web. Reality has departed
the discussion, leaving us in the realm of cultish
groupthink, at exactly the point at which Google, needing
to shake a fixation, is in desperate need of hearing a little
sense. What we have, instead, are people more or less going
"woo-hoo! bad service rocks!"

Following one's fixations to the point of one's own undoing
is the easiest thing in the world, both on an individual and
organizational level; were things otherwise, the world would
need far fewer twelve step programs and debt restructurings than
it has. Ego feeding is as much an addiction as alcohol, and
when one is surounded by those feeding one's addictions,
seeing the need to get past them is going to be difficult,
especially when those feeding them do so with the sense of
determination found in those acting out of the most venal
motives. One of the more vocal opponents of increasing the
flexibility of the Google Page Creator, somebody who has
gone so far as to lodge a free-associating attack against
somebody who wanted to insert meta tags on his homepage on
the basis that meta tags could be used for redirection, and
for bypassing those templates, has a page that makes the
venality of his own motives all too clear.

His site consists of nothing more than his homepage,
with one nondescript photo and a little forgettable "hi,
I'm here" text on it; I think it might very well be the
most pointless lack of talent put on display on a website
I've ever seen. As I say this, I do so without any claim
of being a geat artist myself, but there is such a thing
as at least making an effort. The only effort this gentleman
was making was in support of a fight to ensure that nobody
would be allowed to outshine him too terribly much. In this
way, an obscure man's egotism feeds that of a much less
obscure company, but not in a way that serves the company
particularly well, because the user's very negative form
of validation comes at the expense of that which would,
at some point, make the company's investment pay off.

As a Jew, I've often wondered why we have the reputation for
business sense that we do, espeially when I've seen some of
the atrocious investments I'e seen family members make, but
I think I'm beginning to understand. As a Jew, I will not
hesitate to call people on the manipulative games they play,
and really almost anytime other than Shabbes, I won't be asked
to; on Shabbes, business is verboten, anyway, so there are
no hustles to shoot down. Popular Christianity (as opposed to
the real thing), with its customary rejection of practicality
as a concern, tends to promote the development of an
ettiquette so baroque and so rigid as to preclude any kind of
open communication or clear thought. The native ability is
there, it is merely suppressed until the person possessing
it rejects all that he believes, leaving himself free to act
but without any moral compass guiding him as he does act, and
without the check that the prudent skepticism of others might
offer for his ambitions, being in place. The results are toxic.

In business, in real life, people arrive with different agendas,
and if you'e willing to say "scr** the rules" and see what's
really happening in front of you insted of seeing what you're
"supposed to see", and just project the logical consequences
of the actions people will take in reaction to their agendas,
fairly often you can see the future because it's contained
within the present. Think of it like this: somebody picks up
a ball and throws it to you. You reach out and catch it. In
order to do so, you had to know where the ball as going to
be before it got there. Does this make you a prophet?

No, because the ball, very deterministically, follows a
predictable arc. It's just a ball, and can't do anything
other than follow those very mechanistic laws of motion
that are plugged into our very instincts. What is sad is
that so many people allow mindless convention to overrule
good sense, that very often people will themselves follow
a reflex arc of responses just as predictable as that ball's
path through the air. Follow their stereotyped responses,
and you wll know where they will be. Reject those rules
that have no basis in anything but maniplatively conceived
convention, and you will reclaim your freedom to be the
one taking action, instead of the one action takes place
through the use of; it's the difference, at a baseball game,
between being the batter and being the bat; which sounds
like a role worthier of a man?

Watching the principals in this petty drama play their role,
we can watch it plot unfold into the future with something
close to inevitibility under the rules generated by the
choices each insist on making. The bulk of the user comunity,
under their poorly chosen leadership of undermotivated 18
year olds (!), insists on negotiating as if from weakness,
where market reality offers them a position of strength which
they reject. Google chooses to not be responsive to reasonable
concerns until it is confonted en masse by the very users who
greet it with the above mentioned mystifying cowardice. The
only logical conclusion is that none of the many undesirable
features of Googlepages (including the 100 file limitation)
will be corrected, because as Google management will likely
point out, there will have been no demand from the customers for
an improvement. Ironically, this will be because, as now,
an integral part of the culture than has developed among GP's
consumer base has been a refusal to speak directed and openly,
out of the fear of a negative reaction from that company, as
if they were the only show in town.

Googlepages, so mislead by its timid user base, will slowly
deathspiral by driving off the very people whose sites would
generate ad revenue; slackers can be tempting to listen to,
because they make so few demands of those in seeming power,
but having retained them as a matter of effective preference,
one is then stuck with the reality that they don't make many
demands of themselves, either. The dreck one sees on the entry
pages will be matched by the the even riper and more fertile
dreck one will find oneself seeing in the interior of many
of the sites, where templates won't be an issue, perversely
validating this unwise policy in the eyes of an administration
that will, as admins are wont to do, look only upon that
which is, and not consider that which might have been.

The practical import of this for somebody who wants to
design a site is clear - back way far away from this provider.
Bad things are already happening over there, and as the
pathologies of the local subculture are self-reinforcing,
attracting as they do those who manifest the characteristic
vices of the cabal in greater measure, what is bad, now, is
only likely to become worse in the future. We keep hearing
from the true believers that this service is only in the beta
stage and is going to get better; take it from somebody
who's been online for a length of time the Cabal ocver on GPC
would be hard pressed to conceptualize, much less match -
that's NEVER how a situation like this ever plays out. A
suit will back off on a power play because perceived
customer or user demand forces him to take that risky career
move, one that doesn't make him look strong; in all of the
years I've been around, I've never seen an admin back down
from a position because everybody gathered around and hugged
him, not even once, and yes, I've seen it tried. Often.




My point of view on such things tends to elude those who want
to see everything in simplistic pop christian terms of
unconditional "niceness" vs. unconditional "meanness". Like
most of those who have taught, I don't believe in being either
nice or mean. I believe in being fair. From a certain point
of view this means that, as a teacher, I've taken it upon
myself to destroy literally hundreds of lives, if, in fact,
not already a few thousand, and that I've done so without
remorse; maybe a few regrets, but I work to suppress them.
I still remember a student from one of the high schools I
subbed in (after my PhD coursework was done) telling me that
this wasn't going to be like that movie "Stand and Deliver",
after watching me tutor a number of students in a chaotic
class. I shrugged, and told him what so many have had so much
trouble understanding - "kid", I told him, "it doesn't matter
to me whether you learn anything or not. The only thing that
matters to me is whether or not you had an honest chance to
learn. Once that chance is given, wherever you end up is where
you ought to be, and how can that not be for the best?"

Yeah, I sound like a coldhearted b**tard, but one of those
little paradoxes that maturity helps one embrace is that
kindness always contains a little cruelty. Think about
what the world would look like if nobody ever was allowed to
fail; think about the stoner down the hall realizing his
life long ambition to be a brain surgeon, and you getting
to be his patient. Does my academician's wickedness still
sound so evil, or merely necessary?

As in school, so in the market. Destruction is only tragic
when it is unnecessary. When, as with that student, we
speak plainly with others and there is no collateral
damage, the only ones being hurt being those who have
truly freely chosen to walk down the path that leads to
what we might see as being their own undoing, we should
embrace their fall with no more sorrow that we accord the
chaff that is cast away from the wheat; if a company
belongs in a position of influence, there should be no
need to coax it into listening to reason. As with the student
who is to respond to the offering of insruction, we should
rejoice not in their success of failure, but in the presence
of their opportunity, however they may choose to make use
of it, because the dysfunctional companies must fall to
make way for the good, as the irresponsible student must
fall so the responsible one may find his way clear to claim
the role of leadership to which he was born.

This is why, when our callow young fool referred to my
article as a rant, why he didn't get it at all. To rant
one must feel some sort of emotion, some connection to
the subject and recipient of the rant, and I felt none.
Passion is wasted on a moment so ill defined as that,
especially when the stakes are so low. I simply did as
a teacher would do and opened the path to self-judgement,
for better or for worse, lacking the basis for passion
in that initial moment, until our little boys stumbled
into the trap tradition constructed for them, and which
I merely laid out in the open.

Convention isn't always an unworthwhile thing; the question
is, who created the convention and to what purpose?




So much for Googlepages, if this is the path that the
company wishes to walk, and if the rest of us have the sense
to walk away without a fight when the fools take control of a
piece of virtual real estate like GPages. Our instincts as
developed in the real world offline serve us poorly because
of one basic difference between virtual and tangible real
estate - physical territory can neither be created nor
destroyed, but the virtual landscape exists and vanishes
at our will. If, in society, the civilized members were
always ready to surrender any physical territory where
the undesirables held the upper hand, the sane and civilized
majority would find itself squeezed within a tighter and
tighter boundaries until it could no longer be a majority;
indeed, that's largely what happened during the 90s, with
many going a little bit crazy because they couldn't find
any sane surroundings to live in. But there is nothing
to keep us, as we retreat online, from creating more forums,
more sites to gather at, and to make our places of retreat
expand, even as the places we retreat from, in losing traffic,
gradually get dismantled, fading away. Imagine what retreats
would look like in the real world if, as we retreated from
a marauding horde, we could make the lands around us expand
until they were vaster than the territory we gave up.

Our instinct to fight to hold onto territory, then, one
which inclines us to fight the loons and the cabals where
we meet them, as sensible as this is offline, is pure folly
online. All we accomplish by fighting on these terms, aside
from a diminishment of our own plesure in life, is to give
content to dicussions that would otherwise lack them owing
to the mindlessness of the participants, perversely giving
life to that which would die of its own accord, if ignored
at the proper time, after it has been allowed the chance to
define itself in the eyes of all reasonable onlookers.

One strategy I devised was something I called "drop and walk",
back in my closing days on Usenet. I would dissect the
arguments of the kind of idiot who used to get my blood
boiling, and then, having left him with no logical route of
escape, walk off leaving him to fume without a response. In
the short run, this would cost me the esteem of the regulars;
in the long run, the lurkers were always watching, which was
the thought I always had in mind as I did this. Even so, the
thought of the flammage I didn't see and was leaving
unrebutted bothered me until one day I asked myself a simple
question - "If I met these people fact to face, how long
would I want to talk with them? How would those I hold in
regard, regard them?" These were not difficult questions;
I was dealing with the dregs of society who, like a poorly
performing company, were trying to bluff their way into a
perceived position of power, in the hope that perception
would become reality; the game only works is, as with
GPage's customers, we are so weakminded as to agree
to play it according to somebody else's rules.

In doing that, we give the prdictability to our own actions
that others desire, in the form of their choice becoming
that which is acted upon, and not that which is acting; we
surrender our freedom to those who will put it to ill use.
How much more prudent to remember that which we desire and
why, os that the objectives we pursue are our own.

This is why trolls like the ones in that forum maintain the
hypocritical divide between their own barely masked aggression
and their indignation over your refusal to be unconditionally
"nice" with such passion - because when you say "no" to that
uneasonable demand and stop caring about those who've forfeited
your concern, you're destroying the emotional impact of the
scorn of these little men, and in scorning them in the greater
measure your acceptance of your own rightness gives you,
setting yourself free. Once you've done that, the more they
scream the funnier they look, and it comes to you that that's
how they look to everybody else. Before, you knew that, but
know you KNOW that - the truth has registered emotionally,
and in your black little heart, it has set you free.






That, then, is my assessment of said provider and the community
that has grown up around it, and how it might best be engaged.
Think of it as a cesspool. Very useful, because the s**t has
to gather somewhere; at some point, you do have to hold your
nose and look in on it, but you sure as H*** don't want to go
for a swim or hang around in there. You do your business and
you get out, and that's what I'm doing.

I set up a blog, but word on the virtual street seems to be
that Blogger starts acting funny if a site on it sees much more
than seven hits per day, so there isn't much room for growth.
Given the spirit of "yay! it's garbage!" that the passive/
aggressively timid fan club greets Google with, in one area,
I wonder if their other services see the same response. I'm
guessing that they won't fix thst, either, so at some point
I'll cut my connection to both locations, probably very soon.

A thing that could have been more simply said, perhaps,
but what we do can be at least as much about our views of
our actions, as it can be about the actions themselves.




Joe Dunphy