Category Archives: Blogs and Internet

Oh. My.

Geoffrey K. Pullum has had enough.

No, what I discovered a year ago was that what displeased me the most was dopiness. Asininity, dim-wittedness, doltishness, dullness, dumbness, foolishness, idiocy, nescience, witlessness, pig-ignorance, senselessness, stupidity, — to capture it in a word, the kind of sheer knuckle-dragging moronic lack-wittedness that makes you think you would rather be listening to Vogon poetry.

What I discovered about myself was that the pain of seeing the dopey things posted by some commenters (not you) outweighed all the pleasure of doing the blogging.

A brilliant idea: injecting low-tech graphics into a woefully constrained communications channel: kottke.org collects the best examples of sparktweets.

One more casualty of the SEOing of everything: witty headlines. (I differ with Jakob Neilsen on this point.) David Wheeler attends a copy editors’ workshop. I have no problem with mundane headlines for hard news stories. But for a magazine article about cooking, what’s wrong with a little kick?

A recent column by David Alan Grier gives a mixed review to citizen science and related activities. He speaks well of the CubeSat, at standardized design for experiment packages to be designed by students and launches into space; he also likes the BOINC framework for harnessing household computers to solve computationally intense problems. But his praise for generalized crowdsourcing of research is tempered:

Citizen science may not be able to make major changes to scientific institutions, but it should be able to occupy some niche in scientific practice. As we have seen in other activities that attempt to coordinate the contributions of the general public with the Internet, these efforts have a way of disciplining work and overcoming gross inefficiencies associated with mass labor.

Mass labor, especially when it is a volunteer effort, can prove to be remarkably resistant to discipline. Volunteers are prone to follow their own inclinations no matter how much guidance a professional scientist might offer. One of the major citizen projects devoted to recording biodiversity claims to offer a global perspective on flora and fauna, but its volunteers have shown a remarkable propensity for collecting images from the world’s wealthy shopping districts and resorts. Pictures of Yellowstone can be of great interest, but they are of little use when you hoped to see images of plants found in Yaoundé.

I’m inclined to agree. Doing science is not the same thing as snapping a photo with a smartphone or checking in at foursquare. Perhaps the sweet spot for this approach is the application of what we might call semi-skilled knowledge work: trained observation and transcription. As examples, consider eBird and the related projects from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Distributed Proofreaders component of Project Gutenberg, or my own new volunteer project, the North American Bird Phenology Program.

Telescope, n. A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic’s Word Book (1906)

Sweet profile by Lydia DePillis of Greater Greater Washington’s David Alpert.

Interesting early buzz in Jim Dwyer’s “About New York” column for Diaspora*, an open-source distributed social networking platform. The project is a reaction against the centralized uniformiarian approach of Facebook. Explains Raphael Sofaer, one of the four NYU student founders,

.”We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.”

Gillian Andrews makes some thoughtful remarks about usability, “web literacy,” and human foibles in response to the Facebook login/ReadWriteWeb flap.

Interface designers aren’t helping. Most URL bars now resolve into search results. This may seem like a good UI solution, but it is a catastrophic mistake from a literacy perspective. URLs aren’t just how we get to a page; they are involved in how we judge its content, accuracy, point of view, and most importantly who owns it.

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The funny thing about the patterns in these misunderstandings is that they predate the Web…. Fans have been writing letters to the heroine of Romeo and Juliet at least since the release of the first movie in the 1930s; they arrive by the mailbag in Verona, Italy every year, despite the fact that if you’ve read through to the end, Juliet clearly isn’t in any state to write a letter back.

Yahoo! will be shuttering GeoCities later this year. We’ll have to decide what to do with Coffee Contact; it’s not like we’ve been actively maintaining the site, but it would be good to keep the content available online somewhere. I wonder whether I’ll be able to keep my .geo-suffixed Yahoo! user ID.

I really didn’t intend this to become the Facebook Sux Blog, but I have to spread the link karma to Matt Labash’s jeremiad (via Arts & Letters Daily) and Mike Booth’s video satire (via Gleeful Gecko).

I told him he was a very sad man, that collecting Facebook friends is the equivalent of being a catlady, collecting numerous Himalayans, which you have neither the time nor the inclination to feed. “You have obviously never been on Facebook,” he said. “It’s so much worse than collecting cats.”

So, David, enough already.

Dollar for dollar, schaden for freude, watching the missteps of Facebook management is more fun than tracking the misadventures of a certain jailbird hotel heiress. Marshall Kilpatrick’s most recent post is titled, “Facebook Management Has Lost Its Grip on Reality,” and I’m inclined to agree.

Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing…. We’d argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.

Facebook appears to forget that it’s just one of many ways people use the internet. It’s wildly popular today, but just as people have used other social networks in the past – they have other options for social networks to use in the future.