InfoPoo
It’s pretty funny seeing an idea go horribly wrong. It’s even funnier when someone thinks ‘I can do that’, and totally ignore the fact that the marketspace they’re shooting for has room for just the one player, and that player is in that position not due to technical brilliance, hard work, a flashy interface, or even a particularly useful piece of functionality, but due more to sheer dumb luck.
Such is the relationship between InfoQ and TheServerSide. InfoQ’s idea is to basically take TSS, and make it usable, useful, and relevant. The end result? The deafening sound of a silent and mostly indifferent world.
There’s something pretty embarrassing about seeing entry after entry boasting that ignominious ‘0 comments’ stamp of shame. One might well wonder, what went wrong? Why does this site, to put it bluntly, suck so much ass?
There are a variety of reasons for this humiliating performance. The look of the site for example is too cartoony, but that’s just icing on the shitpile. The problem really is with the content. The top level subjects seem to be less ‘here’s what relevant to subset X of the IT landscape’ and more ‘here’s random stuff that’s better suited to blog categories’. As a potential user, I have no interest in Ruby or .net, but that’s fine, they’re at least alternatives to Java, so the domain space is at least similar. SOA and Agile though….omgwtfbbq. How do these relate to the other categories? The community divisions mean that an entry has to be either in SOA or Java, but not both. Nevermind that SOA is still a rampant cloudfest, which results in the hilarious but likely unintended consequence of all SOAP related entries being filed under SOA.
By far the worst culprit though is the Agile section. ‘Patterns for Daily Stand-up Meetings Published’ might sound like some kind of dirty joke you’d read about here, but sadly, it’s a real entry. The agile posts in fact are almost all about a prolific crowd that thrives on hunting out penises and gobbling up as much as possible. They’re in fact a set of genetic mutants, where any trace of a gag reflex has been long since eliminated. What next, ‘Agile sex in parking lots for TDD fuckstainwanktitshitnipplearsebandits’?
Even more hilarity of course can be found with the odd ‘oops’ moment. For example, they had posted the fact that ThoughtWanks is fucked, and owes VC’s a ton of money, then within a couple of minutes pulled the story. Later on that day they posted a rather biased piece about it from a ThoughtWanker instead. Just so you all know, ThoughtWorks DOES owe a fuckload of money, they obviously won’t be shut down due since nobody wins in that case, but it wouldn’t be surprising if a few top level people suddenly decided to leave to ‘focus on family’ or for the VC to add in more people that actually know how to get their money back. It’s pretty easy to hunt down an ex-TWer who has jumped ship and who’d happily reveal how much trouble they’re in.
TSS is where it is due to dumb luck, nothing more, nothing less. It happened to be the only venue at the time that served up content of that sort, and through some freak accident of nature, the average readership for some reason ended up with a few IQ points higher than JavaLobby. Poor InfoQ thought it was some kind of winning recipe, and proves day by day now it really, really, isn’t.
July 19th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
first?
July 19th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
Awesome! What a privelege to be biled by Hani. You know Hani really loves you when his arguments are weak. :) If anything InfoQ is proving day by day that it is a winning recipe and I’ll explain why.
Let me address a couple of points raised in the post:
—- Comment counts —-
A community takes time to grow. It wasn’t until 3 years into TSS’ life that it started regularly getting lots of busy threads. InfoQ on the other hand ONLY LAUNCHED JUNE 8 and already has had a number of really good threads with a number of posts. But perhaps what’s more important than the quantity of threads but the quality of them. Just look at some of the people posting in some of our interesting threads. Along with the usual Java community leaders (Rod Johnson, Gavin King, Ron-Ten Hove, Mark Hapner, Jason Carreira) we’ve also had people like IBM Chief Architect Rob High, and other people who are bigger names in the Ruby and Agile space.
Here are some of our best threads with lots of HIGH QUALITY comments:
http://www.infoq.com/articles/ESB-Roundup-Part1-Defining-ESB
http://www.infoq.com/news/amq
http://www.infoq.com/news/RedHat-Sued-Due-to-Hibernate-3-O
http://www.infoq.com/news/OpenJPA-to-be-released
Yes we have lower comment counts today, but that doesn’t mean the site isn’t growing and vibrant. There is a certain critical mass you need to achieve to get discussions, and I expected us to get to that critical mass near the end of the year, but we seem to be getting there faster than I expected.
—- Content and Communities —-
Hani, here I think you completely missed the point on a number of levels.
First of all, content on InfoQ is NOT forced into only one community bucket, we have had a number of news posts and content that were tagged to combinations of communities, such as Ruby and .NET, or Java and Agile, or Java and .NET, or SOA and Agile. These have been quite commmon!
Second, the communities on are SUPPOSED TO BE DIFFERENT, and not necessarily be related. We are trying to serve the different distinct communities in the enterprise software space, while allowing people to PERSONALIZE to the specific subset of communities they are interested in. You don’t care about Ruby and .NET? Then just un-check the boxes on the left and you will not see any Ruby or .NET content on the site or in your RSS feed. Yes, your RSS feed is also personalized to your online preferences, even if you’re unregistered!
InfoQ has been a learning experience for me as a Java guy too. The Agile, Ruby, .NET, and SOA communities are completely distinct from ours and are quite different. SOA covers topics for integration architects in large enterprise, Ruby is for your Rails Ruby and Rails folks, Agile is for project managers, .NET is for .NET developers and architects, and the Java community on InfoQ is for us. We are all quite different.
What’s great about InfoQ can serve them all to the unique subset interests of each person. InfoQ can also easily scale to new topics and communities as they emerge, unlike other sites.
A majority of our users are using the personalization features of the site and have turned off at least one of the 5 communities. Some only have ONE community turned on. As far as I’m concerned, this is GREAT, and is exactly what we hoped for.
Oh and speaking of the quality of content, we’ve had some great ones, check out some of our stuff:
- The Brasilian National Healthcare system Case study (large scale Java implementation)
- SOA Anti-patterns
- Rails Performance Problems
- Agile DSL Asset Management
- Real World Rules Engines
- and more…
InfoQ is putting out more articles every week than any other technical community. We’ve also got 50 video conference presentations and interviews ready to go, which is more than TSS has put out in the last 2 years combined.
—- Is InfoQ a losing recipe? —-
Again, we’ve only been around for a month and a half and we’ve already had over 60,000 unique visitors, we’ve had hundreds of incoming links and positive mentions on blogs, and our traffic and visitor counts are increasing every week. We are growing faster than I had hoped, but it takes time for the world to know about you, and it will take time for InfoQ to grow. TSS took 6 years to get where it did, and I would say that InfoQ, after only a month and a half, is already as trafficked as TSS was after it’s first 2 years…
What makes me happiest about the whole thing is that we are really doing something new and unique, and we are serving communities that have never had this kind of content and community. There isn’t site covering Agile the way we do, or for the Ruby or the SOA commmunities. InfoQ can serve them all in one place while allowing people like you to personalize to the subset of content you want.
Oh and by the way, you forgot to link to InfoQ.com in your post. :) http://infoq.com
July 19th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
first..dang it.. alrite third…
July 19th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
Wow, you know I visited InfoQ for the first time today… sure I’ve heard of it before but never really visited the site till after this bile… So Hani you are actually generating traffic for the site just by biling about it. Anyway, pretty nice for an infant site.. only time will tell.
July 19th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
> By far the worst culprit though is the Agile
> section… The agile posts in fact are almost all
> about a prolific crowd that thrives on hunting out
> penises and gobbling up as much as
> possible.
Wow, I’ll have to look into that porn link you hit on our site! lol
Fwiw, here’s the good link: http://www.infoq.com/agile/
July 19th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
Wow…you’ve hit something today.
People are snapping left and right…
BlogBully Obie is the first
July 19th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
Good post!
July 20th, 2006 at 12:24 am
Been to infoQ. Never heard of it before. Wont want their RSS feed button polluting my firefox bookmarks toolbar.
(I thought that 70+7=77.. Math is reeeeeally tougher than I thought!)
July 20th, 2006 at 1:33 am
Can’t say too much about the site. It may provide value to some people but I’m too busy to add it to my regular reading schedule yet.
The “agile” cult bothers me for some reason. I can’t quite place my finger on it but it repulses me. It could be that the only people I’ve run into who practice it have been consultants who do a very good job at talking but fail miserably when it comes to delivering things with real code.
Maybe it’s the word “agile”? It sounds too feminine for me. Like a gentle gazelle hopping from place to place. I’d rather be the cheetah/lion that catches the gazelle and rips its throat out, but that’s just me.
July 20th, 2006 at 4:42 am
In ways, I read InfoQ in preference to ServerSide BECAUSE of the zero comments on each article.
Have you read TSS comments these days - they read like infantile dribblings most of the time, which is a shame as they used to have some sort of intellectual content contained within.
Which is a bit like the BileBlog actually.
July 20th, 2006 at 5:23 am
Of course, such a blog will make people look at the website, it drives our curiostiy. I think that is the value of the BileBlog, it is a funny critisim to catch our attention. But I do not think that the author (Hani) really believes that such will make us turn a blind eye on the subject material; rather, to open our eyes and not look on with blind faith in the workings of others. Seriously, why such a heavy defense on the website? I don’t care about excuses and when someone goes on the defense presenting their ‘resonses’ of why it is so only tells me that they are in-fact quite weak.
I thought that the tone of this bile was actually quite mellow, seemed more like a slight acid reflux or a bit of burping than real bile this time. Floyd be happy
July 20th, 2006 at 7:42 am
Yo! Wassup! I iz the shizzle. Oh yeah baby! I have figured out how to add jars to my Maven 2 repository! Head on over to my blog and check out how easy it is, fools!
http://jroller.com/page/RickHigh?entry=adding_oracle_adf_jar_files
Schiz!
Slip me some skin!
Rick
http://www.arc-mind.com/images/arcmind.jpg
July 20th, 2006 at 9:18 am
Despite the criticism of InfoQ, TSS seems to be completely down at the moment while InfoQ continues to serve requests (0 comments and all).
July 20th, 2006 at 10:59 am
Woo, Floyd Marinescu’s response is at the image of infoq (in french, you would hear infoarse - or infodick depending on the accent of the speaker): a boring pile of crap. Just the look of the site makes me flee… and all that shitload of buzzwords2.0 make me cry my mother! I went back straight to my prefered funny-smelling TSS. Oh and just in case you wonder about where do all those unique visits come from… try to compute what is the audience of the sites that have posted a link to this dung (yes, even Ajaxian… I know!) and you will understand.
July 20th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
<>
I have the same reaction to the Fragile nitwits. For me it is partly because of the attempt to present themselves as custodians or, worse, owners/inventors, of the long-standing knowledge and behaviors of the developer community. Partly it is the amount of dishonesty involved in presenting themselves as innovators when, in fact, they have very little new to say. Partly it is because of an odd moralistic twist to many of their public statements. Partly it is because of the sheer marketing/bullshit flavor of so much they offer.
‘Patterns for Daily Stand-up Meetings Published’
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA - ah, God, let me catch my breath.
‘Patterns’. HAHAHAHAHAHAH Oh, it’s been ‘Published’ ? Like all important research work, I suppose ?
That might be it in a nutshell. Here’s this stupid little turd talking about really simple stuff that literally every team of human beings has dealt with successfully - gee, we need to talk with each other - and he wants us to pretend he is doing Work of Serious Value. Perhaps he is preparing to offer his services as a ‘Daily Stand-up Meetings Best Practices Consultant’. We need that.
That kind of nonsense is par for the course in the bullshit-ridden world of business. Still, when you talk (privately !) with such salesmen in many areas, they are able to appreciate the superficiality and see the humor in what they do.
My impression of these Fragile idiots is that they either 1) take themselves far too seriously to even consider the thought that all their babbling is no more than their latest lame way to make money or 2) realize that, even in a world awash with bullshit, what they have to offer has so little value that they cannot afford even to hint that they know it … any crack in the wall will bring it all down.
Either way, it makes the Fragile people an unusually detestable group of fucktards.
July 20th, 2006 at 2:42 pm
Its a funny turn of events - being biled by Hani is now a compliment - which in turn causes Hani to bile about stuff he really shouldn’t (and he knows it).
There’s no doubt in most folks minds that InfoQ is going to eventually take the whole TSS crowd (atleast the smart ones) unless InfoQ really starts crappin on itself.
I do agree that InfoQ needs to pick between .NET & Java - the two don’t mix. Folks on both realms are not going to take a site seriously if its playin the fence - eventually it will loose out.
July 20th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Fragile AJAX for SOA 2.0 with Ruby! You heard it first at infuckU!
Down with TSS!
July 20th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Sony said: “I do agree that InfoQ needs to pick between .NET & Java - the two don’t mix. Folks on both realms are not going to take a site seriously if its playin the fence - eventually it will loose out.”
Sony, the whole point about InfoQ is that we don’t need to pick, we give YOU the choice to pick. Just uncheck the .NET Box and you won’t see any .NET content.
Floyd
July 20th, 2006 at 8:13 pm
> .NET & Java - the two don’t mix. Folks on both
> realms are not going to take a site seriously
> if its playin the fence - eventually it will loose out.
This is just bullshit. For example, have you known about SmartNavigation feature in ASP.NET? I haven’t. Well, it may not be important now when the same thing can be done with Ajax, but 5 years ago a similar feature would be welcome in, say, Struts. Or viewstate that is makes its way into JSF?
If you use only one technology, you may be inventing something already invented by others.
July 21st, 2006 at 8:15 am
Might as well pick .NET to cover, Java’s jumped the shark anyway.
July 21st, 2006 at 8:20 am
>Fwiw, here’s the good link: >http://www.infoq.com/agile/
>Posted by Deborah Hartmann on July 19, 2006 at
Here is a brilliant article I found on the site by Deborah: http://www.infoq.com/news/Teamsize-Studies-Small-is-Best
entitled “Studies Concur, Small Teams Are Best”
Wow what an amazing discovery! Hani, you’d better stop writing the bileblog and programming that portal and voting in the executive committee–you need to reconsider your entire world view now that infoq has revealed this mystical truth about our universe.
While you’re at it, you might want to try fasting and holding your poop too. I heard the Buddha called in and withdrew his stupid “nirvana” idea as soon as he saw this article on infoq.
I mean if only Gandhi and MLK had known this and fired the slackers from their giant unwieldly freedom-fighting, civil-rights mongering teams Im sure the world would be a better place today. Alas, they perished in haste, their dreams unrealized, without the solace of an infoq.com and a resultant better world.
idiots.
July 21st, 2006 at 7:08 pm
Looks like you need an advertisement category now Hani - is this a service you’re selling or just a favour?
July 23rd, 2006 at 10:10 pm
I’ve checked out the site, and yes, it does suck. There it way too much Ruby, .Net, SOA bullshit within my click-reach, and I consider it a waste of god damn space for such stories to be viewable on the first page of an enterprise IT site. When will people realize the fact that programmers do not use AOP, as it is advertised, won’t come accross SOA unless they are forced and won’t touch Ruby with a ten foot pole unless they must? We might be interested in coding annotations, if you really have to go “under the hood”, we might be interested in hearing JBoss Seam, perhaps if you really must talk about JSF. EJB3 has brought about so many changes that is already radically changing how we are coding up enterprise apps, and we would like to hear more about it, more than the one weenie article you’ve put up there, which happens to be a useless glossary.
You know, there are some big differences within the IT world, and since I know which side I like, I propose two party system for IT-java world.
We, the EJB3 friendly, Linux shell-loving, Ant hacking, design making, document writing, text based plan people with expertise ,will be the conservatives, the right wing.
Agile cult with their extreme anal programming, Ruby loving, ThoughtBlows following weirdo crowd can form the left wing, liberals of the IT world, who would like to listen to everyone, please everyone, can’t make the hard choices, and must need constant parental supervision inside or outside projects, to save them from themselves.
I would then appreciate if fellow travelers would simply label a site “left wing Java-IT site” from now on, to communicate which side of the fence it is standing on, so next time I won’t have to spend 50 seconds to look at it, or even have to spend the finger energy to click on its link, to show me the unwanted content.
Thank you, God bless you all, and God bless Enterprise World of Java.
July 23rd, 2006 at 11:49 pm
Wow, you really sound like an ass Fragile Agile. Can’t say I’m in your camp either. Maybe you would do better in your “IT” group and leave software engineering to the big boys?
July 24th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
Thoughtworks is in trouble? News to me. But I thought whats his face had patterns and some such.
July 24th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
Yea Fragile Agile sounds like a twat. Go invade some one’s privacy or repress your religious guilt by making arbitrary social laws, conservative prick.
InfoQ may suck but.. well, that’s about it.
July 28th, 2006 at 11:21 pm
InfoQ is Renamed as the POOQ. You are desi hai Dhanji. Naa sulla nee notla petta, or Mere land in Dhanji’s mouth.
Dhanji, you sound like a , what agian? Twat? You Pu—!
July 29th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
TSS is on it’s death bed as Java retreats into COBOL legacy land. Any monkey could put up a website to beat TSS at this point.
Pretty funny comment about Javalobby though. As usual, yeseterday (Friday) was another round of circle jerking about a non-death of java article that was perceived as a “death of java” article by the subhumans over there.
July 30th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
Hani is a viral marketer now, cool.