Summer holidays invariably mean bored teenagers, who in turn mean copious numbers of new blogs appearing, brimming with angst and senseless ramblings. As opposed to the mature and focused discourse found elsewhere, of course. So perhaps, at this seasonal juncture, it serves us well to mark an exchange on the Crackmonkey mailing list (not linked – if you can’t even find it, you definitely won’t be able to subscribe):
Loki Ambrodious von Esling writes:
Who the fuck came up with the term “blog” anyway? First time I heard it was on some stupid newsmedia show and since then it’s been everywhere.
And Monkey Master and Prince Regent of San Francisco answers:
Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog” to refer to the sort of annotated bookmarks page that robotwisdom.com exemplifies. Peter Merholz (misspelled, no doubt) expanded on the format a little and joked that it was “we blog” instead of “web log”. Both maintain to this day that without regular external links, their terms do not apply.
Lately it’s become snively horn-rimmed hepster talk for a Web site that is ACTUALLY updated instead of one that PROMISES to be updated REAL SOON NOW with a little MEN AT WORK icon. The latest English dictionary updates are reinforcing the notion that any diary or journal magically becomes a BLOG simply by being put up on some fool Web page.
Also, Cory Doctorow uses the word “blog” as a VERB in REAL LIFE with NO SENSE OF IRONY WHATSOEVER. I went to his little boingboing cyberpunk zineola diary once and he was PROTESTING STARBUCKS by BUYING DRINKS AT STARBUCKS and then TAKING PICTURES OF HIMSELF BUYING DRINKS AT STARBUCKS. He’s a born guinea pig for the Amateur Tracheotomist’s Society if ever I saw one.
Yes, Robot Wisdom still rules. Thanks Jorn.
Popularity: 8% [?]
The phrase “September that never ended” means all time since September 1993, according to the Jargon File. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first Internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers’ capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups.
Popularity: 6% [?]
You know how it goes: you’re sitting around with some friends, drinking beer and having the occasional puff on whatever’s going around, and Bob says, “I’ll bet, by 2050, we’ll receive intelligent signals from outside our solar system.” Which gets Alice all spooked, Carol thinks it’s funny, and Dan disagrees loudly in that distinctive bray of his. Now you can test those predictions against the opinions of other (perhaps more sober) people. “By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.” Or, “China will be considered a Christian nation, with at least 33% of its residents identifying themselves as Christians, by the year 2085.” Or even, “By the year 2150, over 50% of schools in the USA or Western Europe will require classes in defending against robot attacks.” You be the judge.
www.longbets.org
Popularity: 7% [?]
Life’s about more than just staring at your screen. It’s also about enjoying the stuff that’s on your screen.
www.ingredientx.com
Popularity: 6% [?]
“Is it fair to accuse the US of destroying [British] national sovereignty?” asks the Guardian, then answers its own question: “Firstly, we cannot fire cruise missiles without US permission. [...] Britain cannot use its nuclear weapons without US permission. [...] The third awkward fact is that Britain cannot expel the US from its bases on British territory, or control what it does there. [...] the policy-determining, war-fighting intelligence on which Britain depends is all American. [...] Britain can no longer fight a war without US permission. [...] Britain cannot protect its citizens from US power. [...] the UK would extradite Britons to the US in future, without any need to produce prima facie evidence that they are guilty of anything.” So yes, it is fair to accuse the US of destroying British national sovereignty.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Should the Internet disappear tomorrow amidst an inferno of legislation and Bush era maladministration, we can still rest in the knowledge that our beloved Net has given us Strindberg & Helium.
strindbergandhelium.com
Popularity: 6% [?]
It’s summer, and it’s too hot to complain about anything. Break open a few bottles of Judas or Duvel, and just have some fun, Belgian-style.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Oh dear. Jakob Nielsen has discovered PDF files, and he doesn’t like them at all. “Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that’s it. Don’t use it for online presentation.”
Now, I tend to agree with Jakob about many things. I, too, dislike stuff that break the user experience. But not to the exclusion of obvious benefits, as in the case of the PDF standard.
For one, it’s Portable. I can generate a page on my WinXP box and read it on my Linux box, mail it to my granny on the other side of the world, or eventually print a copy should I wish to do so.
A lot of Nielsen’s gripes on PDFs appear related to the content of the files: “long text that takes up many screens and is unpleasant and boring to read”. Did anyone think to tell him that content doesn’t come supplied with the PDF creation software?
Bottom line: PDFs are bad when compared to plain vanilla HTML pages. They’re more difficult to generate dynamically, they’re more difficult to search and bookmark, and – yes – they’re more difficult to read. Different to read. Which makes them more difficult to read. You would have these same problems with any type of non-HTML content.
But the advantages granny and I get from using PDFs should and do outweigh these slight disadvantages. We don’t have to swap virus-prone Word documents, or fiddle with layout problems in text files. We can embed images and create hyperlinks, without others being able to change the document.
It ain’t broken Jakob. Don’t fix it.
www.useit.com
Popularity: 10% [?]
Flemish television channel Kanaal 2 is part of the Vlaamse Media Maatschappij stable, a group which mostly features programming media experts might best describe as cultureless crap. Big Brother, Pop Idol, made for television feature film kind of crap. But there’s a market for that kind of crap, and satisfying the market is certainly an admirable activity in a free capitalist society.
But being a professional peddler of crap is one thing, being a clueless amateur who just does not give a damn about its audience quite another.
It doesn’t often happen that I’m interested in watching something on Kanaal 2 or its sister channel VTM. But once in a blue moon I might stumble across something worth watching or taping.
So yesterday I taped Kevin Costner’s The Postman. Yes, I know it’s terrible. But after six years of avoiding it I decided to take a look for myself.
I set the timer on my VCR. Not for two minutes before the movie starts, as I do for programmes on the BBC or Dutch State television. I set it for twenty minutes before the movie starts, having learned the hard way how little Kanaal 2 could care about how true their timing stays to listed schedules.
So how early do you think the movie started? Hell, I don’t know. I know it started before the world was turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I know it started before Costner’s character found a postman’s get-up and became the eponymous Postman. And I sure do know it started early enough for the VCR to miss anything that might have given a clue as to why, where or how the story starts.
So, good going, Kanaal 2. Thanks for not disappointing me, and confirming that it’s not just snobbishness on my part that makes me not watch any of your shows. And thanks for providing a measure against which any amateur media channel can feel pretty professional.
Popularity: 8% [?]
For those moments when you simply have to have a word processor, but you’re too broke to afford Microsoft Office and too lazy to download OpenOffice, there’s Word Up. You’ll need Flash, though.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Feeling left out because your friends get more spam than you do? Then tune in to spamradio, all spam, all the time. “Spamradio is serving up delicious helpings of spam each hour of every day to all who are hungry. Using a complex arrangement of pipes and funnels we turn the junk mail that we receive into a streaming audio broadcast that can be enjoyed from anywhere on the Internet.”
www.spamradio.com
Popularity: 5% [?]
