infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

• NYTimes: The High Price of Creating Free Ads
  As agencies cook up user-generated content strategies, “companies have found that inviting consumers to create their advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves.”
  (del.icio.us tags: advertising UGC Web2.0)
• MediaShift: What Are You Doing? Doing More Than Just Twittering Our Lives Away
  Check out the comments about Twitter farms at the bottom.
  (del.icio.us tags: Twitter Web2.0 blog)
• German Police Collecting Scents on Protestors
  In anticipation of the G8 summit, cops are experimenting with a technique that uses scent to identify activists. Clearly tahis is a case of patchouli profiling.
  (del.icio.us tags: protest lawenforcement surveillance)

No Comments

• Greater Tulsa Pulling G’s for Growth
  This is old news, but Google is planning a datacenter in the Tulsa exurb of Pryor on the site of a WWII-era powder plant. Check out the Google logo with the Oklahoma state shield as an “O.”
  (del.icio.us tags: google oklahoma sprawl)
• Hutto’s Children: Maddening Structures of Absence
  Hector Amaya discusses the juvenile internment camp near Austin that houses kids waiting to be deported.
  (del.icio.us tags: immigration texas)
• Flaw in Twitter’s Privacy Settings
  Michael Zimmer discusses how applications that use the Twitter API can access friends-only feeds. While Twitter is often mocked as mundane, some users use it share identifying information like locations.
  (del.icio.us tags: Twitter searchengine privacy mashup)

No Comments

In a spirit of grumpiness, I’d like to point you to an Austinist post with a particularly stupid lede. It starts, “Salons here are like coffee shops in New York. It seems like there’s a cute, hip one on every street corner…” Reading this, I wonder if the author has been to the Big Apple. I frequently relent and get coffee at Starbucks in New York because coffee shops are hard to find and New York coffee is often of dubious quality. Friends who have transplanted to the city that never sleeps often complain about how few coffee shops are there. In contrast, Austin seems to outpace the nation in cute, hip coffeeshops. I have no opinion about salons – I’m a SuperCuts kind of guy – but this seems like a redonkulously silly comparison.

A more legitimate gripe I have with Austinist is how frequently the site updates posts after they’re posted. The site seems to re-edit at a faster rate than most other blogs, but what’s really irritating is how it will update a post about an event after the event has taken place. I don’t want to see last weekend’s “Weekend -IST List” reappear in my reader on Tuesday morning. (Yes, this happens.) I presume some editor found a typo in the stale entry and corrected the problem without realizing it would repost the entry.

I would set my reader to ignore updates, but the site often updates posts with relevant information. For example, the site often gives away concert tickets, and I do want to know if a winner has been found. The blog clearly needs to set an editorial policy about updates. A second set of eyeballs should look at posts before they go live, and contributors should not update event posts after the event has taken place. The second rule, in particular, would keep editors from wasting time and annoying readers.

No Comments

• Time Book Excerpt: The Assault on Reason
  Al Gore uses a tacit “strong effects” argument in this piece blaming television for eroding public discourse.
  (del.icio.us tags: technology publicsphere TV journalism politics)
• Broadcasting & Cable: The Groaning of Al Gore
  Responding to Al Gore’s anti-TV editorial, the trade magazine contends that journalism across the board is responsible for the quality of public discourse.
  (del.icio.us tags: TV journalism politics)
• Rough Type: Long player
  Nick Carr discusses _Exile on Main Street_ at length and alludes to Gang of Four in his erudite rebuttal to David Weinberger’s contention that the “track” is the natural unit of music.
  (del.icio.us tags: vinyl technology history)

No Comments

• Foreign Policy: Inside the Digital Dump
  This awesome photo-essay shows how the West dumps toxic computer parts on the developing world.
  (del.icio.us tags: environmentalism technology globalization image)

No Comments

• eboy XV: O’Reilly Maker Faire Poster
  Here’s eboy’s isometric pixel poster design for this weekend’s Maker Faire. I want an eboy poster so bad.
  (del.icio.us tags: art geek)
• BitTorrent in Focus: TV-series are Hot
  Data gathered by SumoTorrent indicates that TV dominates what users download on BitTorrent.
  (del.icio.us tags: bittorrent TVontheWeb TV)

No Comments

• Iraq: A defense of the Pentagon’s internet clampdown
  An Army officer anonymously explains some of the reasoning behind blocking YouTube and MySpace.
  (del.icio.us tags: military war myspace YouTube)
• flickrvision (beta)
  It’s like Twittervision for Flickr!
  (del.icio.us tags: Flickr googlemaps mashup neato)
• fortuito.us: Some Community Tips for 2007
  Matt Haughey says the term “User Generated Content” makes
  “members of your site feel like dutiful robots, crapping content that you convert into cash.”
  (del.icio.us tags: UGC Web_publishing)
• Ask Alex: Getting a Communication Ph.D.
  This is good advice for anyone contemplating a Communication or Media Studies Ph.D.
  (del.icio.us tags: media_studies gradschool academic)
• Black and White: 1958
  “African American high school girl being educated via television during the period that the Little Rock (Arkansas) schools were closed to avoid integration.”
  (del.icio.us tags: race TV education history image)

No Comments

I’m still wrapping up the semester, so it’s going to be a while before I have anything remotely resembling a thoughtful post, but I had the idea to post a list of blogs and whatnot I’ve given up on.

• Diesel Sweeties
  I used to think this comic strip was charming in its skewering of indie rock and other subcultures, but I think it’s getting stale. This comic will definitely go in my “TVontheWeb” folder, but I’ve bid it goodbye from my LiveJournal friends. Besides the author was a condescending jerk when I wrote him a fan email years ago.
• bOINGbOING
  I’ve been reading bOINGbOING since picking up the print magazine in high school, but the blog started ruining the fun of blogging a few years ago. While it used to be links that Cory and Mark dug up from the bowels of teh Internets, now it seems to be a filter of offbeat links its huge user base submits. It seems like any internet meme eventually finds its way to the site, making it the Top 40 for Web geeks. I feel lame posting a link to this blog that has been or will be on bOINGbOING, so I’ve decided to stop reading it.
• Slashdot
  A few weeks ago, Sean remarked that he was surprised that Slashdot was even still around. At the time, I think I had just deleted it from my reader. Part of my lack of interest in the site is my waning interest in Linux as a user, but I think that it posts far too much non-news both about computers and geek culture. I know the links are geared toward prompting discussion, but, these days, it doesn’t even prompt reading, which is too bad because I’ve learned a lot over the years from reading the site.

There are more feeds I’ve dropped, but these are largely people I know personally and don’t want to call out publicly. I find it hard to say “no,” whether it’s to people or information sources, and I’m working right now to shed a lot of wasted effort both on- and off-line.

No Comments

• Military puts MySpace, other sites off limits
  Out of the fear soldiers might reveal sensitive information to the enemy, soldiers are barred from using DoD networks to access sites like YouTube and MySpace. I’m sure this will be great for morale.
  (del.icio.us tags: censorship military YouTube myspace)
• User Generated Content Is About Efficiency And Growth, Not Exploitation
  TechDirt uses the example of NYC’s MetroNorth online lost-and-found system to argue that with Web 2.0, everyone comes out ahead. But when businesses use UGC, does everyone come out ahead equally?
  (del.icio.us tags: UGC Web2.0 transportation NYC)
• Design Observer: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface
  This handy list of typography tips is largely geared toward print design, since none of your Web readers are going to have Frutiger installed.
  (del.icio.us tags: typography design print)
• Calif. Web site outsources reporting
  It’s worth pointing out the difference between “outsourcing” and “offshoring” here. Newspapers are outsourcing when they hire a stringer to cover the city council meeting; they’re offshoring when they hire writers in India to watch them online.
  (del.icio.us tags: offshoring journalism India globalization stupid)

No Comments

• NCTA: HBO’s Zitter Says DRM Is Misnomer
  HBO Chief Technology Officer Bob Zitter doesn’t think the doublespeak in “Digital Rights Management” goes far enough and wants to change the name to “Digital Customer Enablement” or DCE.
  (del.icio.us tags: DRM intellectualproperty TV cable)
• Austinist: Friday Night Lights Still On, and Staying Here
  Yay hooray! NBC has ordered twenty-two more episodes.
  (del.icio.us tags: austin TV TVnetworks)
• GigaOM: Joost gets $45 mil from pals, partners
  TV-on-the-Web is teh hot.
  (del.icio.us tags: TVontheWeb p2p)

No Comments