A week or so ago it was brought to my attention that this weblog Four Starters.com is not reachable by users of the Firefox 3 browser. It seems that Firefox3 uses the stopbadware.org blocklists and people who try to visit our site get to see this:

Stopbadware is designed to stop spammers and other evildoers online, but in doing so it is causing a lot of collateral damage and blocking a site such as ours which has been mostly spamfree for most of the time.
This is a situation where the cure is worse than the pain. An arbitrary and unmotivated verdict is being cast without our awareness and there is very little we can do about it. Kafka could not have written this as well and even though rules of due process have been greatly relaxed in the USA, we didn’t expect the same low standards to be applied to our website.

We have a number of issues with the stopbadware.org process:

1. We are blocked arbitrarily, in the reports posted on stopbadware.org not once does it mention which parts of our website were in question and what they were guilty of. Stopbadware lists Google as the reason we are blocked and Google says it gets the lists from Stopbadware, so we are in an infinite loop. Suppose I have a very big content filled site, how am I supposed to find the offending links without decent reports?
   And if those reports are a work in progress, how about not blocking sites until you have your operation in order? We think we have fixed the problem as far as Four Starters is concerned, but without detailed violation descriptions, we won’t know for sure. I have written a detailed complaint to the stopbadware Google Group.
2. Having fixed any violations we could find ourselves, we have asked our site to be reviewed for reinclusion but this has taken days already without any word. Getting on this blacklist seems extremely easy, but getting out is somewhat more difficult. We are annoyed that Four Starters is unreachable (our traffic is in the basement), but imagine that this is your business’s website that’s in the doghouse.
3. Blocking is also unilateral without notification to us (we had to hear it from people sending us the screenshot) and without possibility for appeal. Seeing as getting off the list is so difficult and slow, the possibility of appeal should reasonably be an option.
4. Blocking a site does not solve any real problem. For phishing sites it may be somewhat reasonable, but in our case the report does not even say that we host badware, no it says that we link to sites which may host badware. Blocking us on that ground seems like shooting a nuke at a butterfly.
   If people do not want to read our site, give them the choice. Firefox does no such thing and cedes the entire site to the spammers.
5. Lastly I do not recognize that badware is a problem, at least not for people who are visiting our site. Most people reading Four Starters have a Mac or Linux based system and/or are computer savvy enough never to go to the bad parts of the internet. So we are being punished because a large part of the internet is stupid. Again this does not strike me to be a sound principle to run a blacklisting operation.

Stopbadware tries to reach a noble goal but currently it is striking out too broadly and in doing so it is doing more harm than good. Furthermore it does this based on an authority which I do not recognize using a process which is broken. If arbitrarily gagging sites is what it takes to fight spam, then maybe it’s not worth it.

I hope that in the following days our ban is lifted and you can read what I have written here.

You might have noticed that Four Starters have been somewhat quiet of late. Year’s end, various personal responsibilities and a confusion about focus all played a role in that.

Last year also marked the start of The Next Web weblog which is a Dutch based startup blog by the guys of Fleck and Wakoopa based in Amsterdam.

Four Starters had come to occupy much of the mission of a startup weblog mostly out of coincidence. Three quarters of our editors have always had a strong interest and some participation in startups. That and us being prolific bloggers, made us a de facto startup blog. This isn’t just true for startups, but many of us also have a strong interest in web development, microformats and photography.

Having pushed ourselves into the corner of startup blog, we felt halfway obliged to cater to the audience we got that way and writing this blog began to feel more and more like work. Especially because we wanted our writing to pass the high standards of quality we would like to read ourselves and not play the quantity/linkdump game some other blogs pass off as content.

Added to that is the fact that our part-time commitment cannot compete with more professional weblogs nor should it strive to do so. A weblog like The Next Web has a broad strategy and employs people to produce content for it.

Relaunch

So we have decided to go back to the core of Four Starters, which is a group of friends combining their English language blogs to write about stuff they think is cool or cool stuff they have done.

That way we will be writing about more different stuff more frequently and try to show our view and share our opinions on stuff on the internet. Because our interests are still aligned heavily with startups and events, expect to see more of that but also more about photography, programming, music, art and other topics (and I hope strong opinion).

Let us know what you think of this change of direction and what you would like us to write about. We have more than 150 subscribers and we feel we’re obliged something to you for the attention you are giving us.

The conversation sparked by the writing has always been one of the highpoints of this blog so anything which would continue that, would be great.

Posting has been slow because of the holidays and everybody’s respective work and travel duties. There is lots of stuff to report though, so stay tuned.

For the new year we will also be rethinking the focus of this weblog to take the pressure of and make it more fun for us. There are already a lot of techblogs out there, and I don’t think we want to add more to that mix.

If you have any ideas what you like, what you didn’t like and what you would like to see more of, please tell us in the comments.

The holidays have been over for a while now and life has picked up again with a ruthless schedule. Here’s a quick schedule update from us to tell you what is keeping us busy at the moment and where you can expect us the coming year. If I forget something, I’m sure that the rest will add it themselves.

Reinier

Reinier is currently finalizing all arrangements to be able to launch his startup Tipit.to. To say that this consumes a lot of his time is an understatement.

Cristiano

Cristiano used to be our top blogger but he is currently directing more time to his studies. He is currently busy writing academic prose with the hopes of graduating sometime in the future.

Martijn

Martijn has also focused a lot of his attention back to his studies but he (and we) also came to the realization that blogging is not his thing. That is why we decided to part on amicable terms. We wish Martijn well for the future.

Eelke

Eelke has settled into Berlin and is feeling quite at home from what I understand. He has produced some great movie clips on his own blog in the past days. Eelke is pursuing work in the Berlin area, so if you want to hire a great designer there, you should look him up (his new professional site should be up soon).

Alper

I am undergoing numerous changes in my life with a graduation due this Friday, a change of jobs and a new house. In this new life a lot of my time is spent working on experience and promotion for Tipit.to or doing web projects for Boost Company. I do have more bandwidth available and will be putting up a professional site soon.

Events

And to finish this update here is a slightly annotated event schedule for the rest of this year. You can always track us on Upcoming, browse through my contacts for the other Four Starters members. You should be able to find most of us on Dopplr as well (my profile).

PICNIC (25/9 — 28/9) is going on right now. Something of an overhyped event it is hard not to be influenced by it. Reinier is going tomorrow to take a masterclass in pitching from Boris and then onto pitch for a jury. This Friday is a meeting on portable social networks (upcoming) which I’m debating not going to.

FOWA (upcoming) Ryan Carson’s visit to Amsterdam was a great appetizer for the real event in London next month. Cristiano will attend the event and report back for us.

The future of GOOGLE (upcoming) This event should at least be interesting where Dutch ‘pundits’ are going to ruminate about the future of Google. I am positively influenced because it is at Info.nl.

Wikimedia (upcoming) The Dutch Wikimedia conference should be interesting and I plan to attend.

Barcamp Berlin (upcoming) Barcamps are among my favorite events and this promises to be a great one. Because of the subsequent Web2.0Expo event international attendance should be at a peak level. Now just to hope that the venue is big enough to hold all of us. This should be no problem in Berlin, right? Eelke and myself will definitely attend this.

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin (upcoming) Big multi-day conference for everybody into the web scene in Europe. This promises to be jam packed and very interesting with the barcamp preceding it and the web2open event at the same time. Reinier and myself will attend.

BrightLive (upcoming) Obligatory Dutch technojam event. I hope this year sports an improvement with some less commerce and some more substance but still I will probably go.

LeWeb3 (upcoming) is always controversial but I don’t really know if it’s worth attending.

Chaos Communication Congres (site) always looks like a great event to close off the year.

What do you think about these events, any of them must see or must avoid? If you happen to visit any of these events and we’re there drop by and say hello.

Fourstarters is now hosted on a dedicated server. Slow page loading, warning symbols in your RSS reader, and frequent downtime problems should be a thing of the past. Enjoy!

The new server:

And take a look at the insides:

Update: For some reason Wordpress is so fragile that moving the installation to a new server broke almost every plugin we had installed. The site is functioning all right and we are working on getting everything back to work.

A small schedule with interesting events during this summer when Four Starters hits the road. Add your own in the comments if you have them.

Guido van Rossum — Python 3000

July 5th Guido will be visiting his old employer CWI in Amsterdam to present the state of Python 3000 and other things. I will be attending.

O’Reilly and friends — Web 2.0 expo

July 10th Brady Forrest and Jen Pahlka will be doing an European tour in July to get a feel for the European Web 2.0 community for the Berlin Expo.

I would like to extend their invitation to meetup to all readers of this blog. It will be nice to show a strong presence of European Web 2.0 activity. Four Starters and Tipit.to will of course be represented.

OpenCoffee — Delft

OpenCoffee Delft is up for a revival in the next couple of weeks. Watch out for an announcement here soon.

Further away (in distance and time):

Barcamp Cologne

August 17-19 there will be a Barcamp in Köln. This is pretty close to the Netherlands and it looks like a cool place to show and tell about cool stuff and meet old friends. I got an invitation from some German guys at Reboot who will be present (Upcoming page).

dConstruct and Barcamp Brighton

September 7-9 dConstruct looks to be an excellent event and with a Barcamp following it, it’s a great combi. I’ll probably drop into London a couple days earlier to visit Cristiano and other friends from Imperial College and maybe grab an OpenCoffee.

It does look like most Barcamps are filling up really fast mostly with local people (e.g. Barcamp Brussels). I discussed it at Reboot and it seemed like a good idea to set apart a small allowance of places for international visitors. People willing to travel should be rewarded for their efforts.

Yesterdaymorning dreamhost had some scheduled downtime. Unfortunately fourstarters didn’t survive it. For some reason one of the plugins decided to throw a tantrum, and our shiny theme depended on IT, and trying to set it all to rights led to an ever expanding disaster.

Turns out PHP, Wordpress, Themes, and Plugins aren’t really a stable ecosystem, and we aren’t guru enough to fix it.

We will be moving fourstarters to a dedicated box as soon as I get a rack set-up. Should be a week or two. In the mean time this cruddy look is going to have to suffice until then.

Part 3 of All Transactions are based on Trust will be posted late tonight. Thank you for your patience!

The bad wifi connection at The Next Web conference prevented me from giving a live review of The Next Web conference, but in the end I managed to create some nice photographs. For stories I will have to forward you to the many people who wrote extensive reviews of the conference. I personally really liked Deborah Schultz’s talk and Dick Hardt’s 30 minute adaption of his Identity 2.0 speech. For me the award of best speech would go to Deborah as Dick’s talk was basicaly a repeat of his OSCON speech.

Interesting articles on The Next Web 2:
ReadWrite
The Next Web official website
Dutch Cowboys - Dick Hardt
Dutch Cowboys - Deborah Schultz

Below are the photos that I made:

Yesterday the first Open Beer in Delft took place and it was something of a succes. Turnout may have been low with five people attending but new people were met and interesting conversations took place.

I talked to Redmar Kerkhoff who I already knew from a previous Barcamp Amsterdam and who also studies at DUT. Redmar is all over the place and we talked about graphics programming, intelligent devices, Ruby on Rails and Erlang.
I also got to talk with our other attendee Bart, who has a website (Where was it at again?) and who installed the wireless network at De Plataan.

A lot of people either could not make it today or were otherwise detained but that is not a loss to the format as there is enough interesting stuff to talk about with the people who were there. I didn’t even get to talk to Reinier because he had to leave early.

So let’s see what this grows into with some consistent attention. Next edition is next Friday and will probably start some 15 minutes later.

If you guys have any websites of yourself that you want to plug or have anything to add, put it in the comments.

Just to remind everyone. Late this afternoon, we will have the first version of Open Beer Delft. A networking event for web professionals and independents in the greater Delft area.

Besides the launch of this event, we will use today to formally launch this weblog.

Time and place: 18.00, het Klooster (Vlamingstraat 2)

Read the original announcement.