Big Questions Online: The Online State of Nature.
”I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.” I think we hoped in the early days of blogging that open discussions would inoculate against ignorance. Instead, like-minded individuals seem to congregate in flocks, pushing their beliefs to extreme levels. This can be seen in a beneficial niching of interests and hobbies, but also in the dangerous isolation of belief systems or political philosophies. We humans desire to be right, right without the effort of questioning our basic belief systems, right as if rightness were one of our appendages. It’s easier to seek those who agree, than to look at difficult issues and analyze them. Esp. when introspection runs up against how you were raised, and how you were educated. I see so many teens and 20-somethings on Facebook who profess the philosophy of Captain Morgan over anything substantive or worthwhile. Ignorance is celebrated, education is reviled.
Extending further — we watch television, read books, view movies in which characters come up against crisis, and then undergo a change of character. It’s a basic writer’s technique for any work of fiction — required, even — yet it’s not an accurate representation of what happens in real life. People in reality can change, but they’re slow to do so — if they do so at all. Yet we expect others — friends, business associates, celebrities, our political leaders, our religious leaders — to go through crises and change for the better. How often we’re let down on this point! We need “Seinfeld” back again ... a group of people who *never* progress, who show clearly that we need to change ourselves in order to not be miserable self-centered individuals.
I find it all a funny combo of ignorance and naivete, and the need to shout it all from the rooftops [I’m looking in a mirror as I type this phrase]. We all fall into the abyss from time to time, but the sheer number doing it these days is astonishing.
I recommend writing drafts of posts or comments, and then stepping away from them for a period of time.
As I should have done before writing and posting this.
CNet: How Apple’s Ping dings Twitter, Facebook.
Spiegel Online: Will Russia’s Bloggers Survive Censorship Push?
”With so many of their media sources controlled by the state or government-friendly oligarchs, Russians have turned to their bloggers to keep informed and give voice to their grievances and concerns. But many of those in power are now seeking to impose rigid limits on online freedom.” The internet’s like water ... it finds the nooks and crannies, and escapes most political control structures.
Expression Engine Blog: Twitter Timeline Plugin and (n)Oauth.
Ajaxian: Raphaël 1.5 Released.
Can’t compete with Flash until you have a GUI, dudes. Exciting to see, nonetheless.
paper.li: Read Twitter as a daily newspaper.
Dig WP: Pimp your wp-config.php.
Good article for WordPress users.
Mashable: Gmail Add-on Makes E-mail Smarter.
See social profiles in Gmail. Firefox add-on.
CNet: Use Gmail to make VoIP calls: Hands-on review.
Call quality will be my deciding factor.
BruceClay: The Danger of Dismissing Social Media’s Value.
”First of all, I think that Fry has forgotten that blogging is part of social media.” Many do nowadays, sadly.
Wall Street Journal: Flash Back: Demand Up in Engineering Specialty.
”At the same time, the supply of such engineers remains low. It is particularly difficult to find Flash engineers who have both an artistic and computer-science background, say executives. While there are many Flash designers with experience in artistic elements, few are trained in areas such as power and battery management, they note.” Sounds like a great big, fat opportunity to me.
Wall Street Journal: Get Ready for Ads in Books.
I was afraid of this. Bleah.
Mashable: Philadelphia Tax Code Sparks Big Controversy with Small Bloggers.
Ye gods, don’t let NM know they can collect gross receipts on internet ad revenue. Next thing you know, we’ll have to register our blogs as businesses.
Meme generation, and thoughts about the old blog.
I’ve been noticing an effect here on the blog. You all know I work hard to be ‘first’ to a particular kind of eclectic story ... and you all notice I don’t seem to get any cred for it. My dominance as a meme generator ended in 2004, but most significantly in the months after Twitter opened the floodgates. My thousands of unique visitors a day dropped to below 500 within six months. In the last few months, a pattern has been becoming all too clear to me, a pattern that has been gradually becoming more clear since that time:
There’s now a social aspect to news.
I’ve seen this effect over and over again now. Being first to a story does not matter as much as posting a story when the social conversation is peaking. The story’s only important now when everyone else is talking about it. Even folks who I know read this blog regularly, will pick up and post a story I’ve reported days before from another source than mine - when it’s peaking in popularity. I felt it was a stab in the back, until I realized the importance of the social buzz. Folks seem to feel safer forming opinions and expressing opinions within a group environment, where the consensus can be built from multiple sources. Most importantly, however, building consensus opinion is now entertainment.
I was discussing this with Brian Tercero (Santa Fe’s Twitter powerhouse and Wordpress MU master) at a party the other night, and he suggested watching Twitter trends and perhaps delaying posts until trends peak to maximize reach. Traffic has never really been my goal, reputation and authority are ... but Brian laid out convincing argument that popularity, social trending and authority are now inextricably linked.
My ‘00’s romanticism of how weblogs should influence people is no longer accurate, nor is this ‘old school’ romanticism effective. This has been niggling at the back of my brain for a while, but this romanticism got laid out on the road and run over a couple of times Saturday night.
It was also mentioned by party host and occasional commenter ‘Eric of Santa Fe’, that one of the main reasons he frequents my blog is for Santa Fe news ... Santa Fe ‘flavor.’ I’ve gotten away from that a bit, and it needs to be restored.
So I’m going to be doing some experimenting here, watching my stats a little closer to see what trends within the blog. This blog is really an extension of my own wide-ranging curiousity, shaded a bit by what I know certain readers enjoy reading.
I picked up “The Four Hour Workweek” the other day, and though I have doubts about the ethics behind some of it (my brain screams ‘con’ at some of the chapters), I cannot deny the author’s contention that maximizing effectiveness is the way to go. This blog is not at all effective. In fact, it’s almost a living fossil, a coelacanth. Time to change things up a bit, narrow the focus, play to my strengths. I need to take into account how you all are absorbing your information.
Should I echo posts in Twitter? Use Twitter as a sideblog of sorts? Focus more on longer narratives? Local color? Emphasize art more than tech? More/less photography? Show you how I’m remodeling my house? Deemphasize politics? Add video? Do a podcast? Do all these things? None?
Let me know, if you have time in your busy days, what you come here for ... what you’d like to see here. I know what I’m planning to do (it’s a surprise), but I’d like input. I’m interested.
SpyreStudios: 10 Great Tips for Writing Better And More Comprehensive CSS.
Nice tips. Nothing earthshattering here, but I thought I’d add that 99% of my CSS problems are fixed by simplifying. When I start frantically adding classes to fix niggles, it’s a sure sign I need to clear out the cruft and pay attention to heirarchy (using the cascading properly). Otherwise, things devolve fast. And test against your browser kit from the get-go (esp. if backtracking to IE5’s).
spoongraphics: A Handy Guide to Image Resolutions in Print Design.
I need to knock up something like this blog post for some my clients. Specifically so they understand that trying to upload a 300dpi image is just plain wrong.
line 25: Beautiful Mac App Web Design Showcase & Trends.
Hmmm, yes. also heavy Illustrator vector illustration. Know your gradients!
NY Times: Technology Leads More Park Visitors Into Trouble.
”‘Watch Donald get gored,’ she said as her companion hustled toward a grazing one-ton beast for a closer shot with his own camera. Seconds later, as if on cue, the buffalo lowered its head, pawed the ground and charged, injuring, as it turns out, Ms. Hayes.” When I first visited Yellowstone in ‘73, I was watching an elk from a little too close. My sister yelled at me to step back, when an extremely overweight woman suddenly pushed to get by me to take a snap with her little film camera, and almost knocked me into the beast’s feet. The elk (with a towering rack of antlers) spared both of us, but it was damned close to ending badly.
The woman then waddled back to her vehicle (her husband never got out to look at anything), revved the engine, and took off to the next sightseeing spot on their whirlwind tour of the park.
I don’t think the tech is to blame, in other words. Stupidity goes down to the bone.
Macworld: HTML5 raises new security issues.
Somewhat ironic, after all the anti-Flash rhetoric.
Lifehacker: Top 10 Facebook Fixes.
I wasn’t aware of quite a few of these. Just FYI.
NY Times: What ‘Fact-Checking’ Means Online.
”But if the Web has changed what qualifies as fact-checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects.” Only if we let them. But then, there’s a complicating factor ... see this previous post.
NY Times: Night of the Living Tech.
”Last week, Wired magazine proclaimed, ‘The Web Is Dead.’ Yet evolution — not extinction — has always been the primary rule of media ecology.” As I was telling folks at a party over the weekend, Twitter and Facebook are starting to mature. The new technologies that will replace them either already exist, or are in development right now.
I’ll add that doesn’t mean one should wait for the ‘next big thing’. I waited on Twitter, and lost the early adopter ‘mojo’. I think a better model with new tech today is jump in with both feet and dog paddle until you understand the service.
I’m fascinated with how different vertical markets are adapting these services to work for their sectors. Everyone’s busy categorizing themselves, and then building power bases within those categories. Niche marketing, personal branding (don’t yell, E) ... and yet, to be an individual social media powerhouse, you need to have a strong foundation, rooted in a vital social community. Can’t be an influential personality without a strong base of follower support. Here’s a quote for you - “No personal brand is an island.”
I’ll be thinking more out loud about this over the next week or so.
The Independent.UK: Hollywood questions ‘The Twitter Effect’.
Okay ... first, Hollywood looked at Twitter, and tried to get a direct, measurable dollar figure out of the service. That didn’t work. Next, they valued it for ‘buzz’ and assumed there would be relatively unmeasurable but obvious payoffs. Now that looks like it is a false assumption. So what *is* Twitter good for? Seems like Hollywood thinks: ads.
Sanaroo: Users don’t care about your (web) design.
“When working on a new design it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that every person who will visit the site is also a website designer. In turn, we convince ourselves that all visitors will pay careful attention to our design and will analyse every aspect of a page and assess how beautiful and original (or not) your design is. This is wrong!” But they certainly will let you know if they can’t figure it out, or dislike your interface — they won’t visit.
John Nack on Adobe: Adobe & Typekit team up on Web font delivery.
Serendipity. I was just perusing the Typekit site yesterday. This may tip my hand.
