Category Archives: Blogs and Internet

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.

A collaboration between students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and the Cedar Rapids, Iowa Gazette has launched the demonstration project News Mixer, as reported by NU staff. News Mixer is a local news site powered by Facebook Connect, which provides the authentication mechanism; comments made by a reader of news stories appear in that member’s Facebook newsfeed. The experimental News Mixer provides three levels of structured commenting, from short quips to long-form letters to the editor. It’s assembled from open source tools—Wordpress, MySQL, Trac, and Django—as recorded in the project’s blog, Crunchberry Project. The project is one of the early fruits of a new program of scholarships to Medill for talented programmers and web developers, granted by the Knight Foundation.

Terry Teachout’s advice to professional theater companies hoping for a national review includes some good reminders about basic web site design:

If you want to keep traveling critics happy, make very sure that the front page of your Web site contains the following easy-to-find information and features:

(1) The title of your current production, plus its opening and closing dates.

(2) Your address and main telephone number (not the box office!).

(3) A SEASON button that leads directly to a complete list of the rest of the current and/or upcoming season’s productions. Make sure that this listing includes the press opening date of each production!

(4) A CALENDAR or SCHEDULE button that leads to a month-by-month calendar of all your performances, including curtain times.

(5) A CONTACT US button that leads to an updated directory of staff members (including individual e-mail addresses, starting with the address of your press representative).

(6) A DIRECTIONS or VISIT US button that leads to a page containing directions to your theater and a printable map of the area.

The one thing that RCP‘s front page is lacking, and I will fix it on the next update, is the opening and closing dates for the current show. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to repeat the street address of the community center.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a new recruiting video online. No fancy drills with firearms, no freehand rock climbing, no jumping out of helicopters; but some impressive photography nonetheless.

Adam DuVander nails it:

It’s like Facebook is a cruise ship. There’s a facsimile of everything you’re used to getting elsewhere. It is easy to enjoy the many Facebook-approved activities. But the Facebook ship never docks at any ports of call.

I started a single-user wiki (an oxymoron?) to collect my reading notes from Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions. I’m not sure how much will come of it, but it’s good to futz with a different medium.

And I started a tumblelog for more frequent mundanities.

Clive Thompson on Twitter, Facebook’s News feed, and the rise of online “ambient awareness.”

On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog!

I am not this guy, either:

• David Gorsline, member of Facebook Poland

Via kottke.org, Merlin Mann explains why my blogging will always be mediocre:

2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?

I’ve got just too many categories in my sidebar.