infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

This week, I finally got frustrated enough with Safari hanging and failing to render plug-in heavy pages that I’m using Firefox as my primary browser. One major problem I’ve encountered is that I have a difficult time accessing the admin screens for my WordPress install in Firefox. When I go to ./post.php, I am redirected to the main infobong.com page. Yesterday, I wound up cutting and pasting links from Firefox and posting in Safari. This post describes the same problem, but the fix didn’t work for me. Does anyone know the fix for OS X? I’m not having the same problem accessing the admin screens for the Semantic Web class blog.

Right now, I’m trying out Deepest Sender, a Firefox plugin that uses the RPC extensions on a variety of blog platforms.  When I was able to access my admin screens yesterday, it has a nice Ajax interface for formatting, so I would like to use Firefox to post. It’s a pity no one has an Ajaxamacated button for inserting footnotes. Deepest Sender also seems to be pretty strict about inserting HTML in its WYSIWYG window; angle brackets are converted to HTML entities, which is frustrating for someone who thinks in HTML.

Since I’m messing around with plugins, I also downloaded the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox, and I must say that the bookmarklet has more functionality. The plugin doesn’t offer users del.icio.us’ tag suggestion interface, which I appreciate when I’m quickly publishing links. OK, now that I’ve alienated all of my media-studies colleagues with geeky browser kvetching, I’ll go back to posting media links and anecdotes about coffeeshops.

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Today I picked up a copy of Vice Magazine’s “Guide to Austin”¹ and discovered that for once I’m ahead of the curve! One of the advertisments at “the front of the book” featured a photograph of a designer calculator watch. I’ve been wearing a calculator watch as a semi-ironic fashion statement for over a year, so it felt nice to see that someone thinks kids these days would think a calculator watch is cool.² The Paul Frank calculator watch looks suspiciously like my Timex 1440, but it costs three times as much. I think my authentic Timex watch is hipper than a designer version, but the young whipper-snappers of today seem to have little regard for authenticity.

1. Although I think Vice is a truly despicable publication, I have to admit that their SXSW compilation last year was quite good and introduced me to a bunch of semi-mainstream bands that I heard a lot over the year. If you can get your hands on the sampler (I found mine in Dobie Mall) pick it up.

2. I do think people in their early 20s are too young to remember calculator watches. My students last year had never seen one before. One student asked, “Did you order that from the back of Mad Magazine?”

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OK, this might be the story I’d give a media studies person if they asked about this whole Web 2.0 nonsense. Tim O’Reilly’s canonical piece is great, but it’s a little too utopian and a little too geeky for the folks in my department. This piece is good at de-mystifying the buzzword, neatly summarizing the concept by saying “the open standards of the web are being repackaged as Web 2.0 for a Wall Street audience.” It’s great that the article points out that Web 2.0 is seen primarily from a business perspective, but I do think that “the read-write Web” has a lot of potential for producing participatory media.

I suppose Indymedia was an effort to bring this concept to activists, but it seems to be a bit of a failure. It’s non-activist audience seems to consist of right-wingers interested in taking quotes out of context to make disingenuous generalizations about liberals and leftists - six years later, Indymedia no longer seems to have the potential to reach new audiences. It’s become more of an Internet version of Deep Dish TV, a distribution system for documentaries for sympathetic audiences. I wonder what an Indymedia 2.0 would look like.

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Since it’s spring break, I’ve finally gotten around to messing around with Pandora, which is a music recommendation system that doesn’t work in Safari¹. It reminds me a bit of the old Firefly project way back when², but it actually plays tracks after you tell it a band you like. It makes some weird choices, though. I told it I liked the Krautrock band Neu!, and, after playing what it thought was a representative Neu! song, it segued into a Fleetwood Mac track. It wasn’t as awful as the Fleetwood Mac I know from classic rock radio, but its selections seem to be slanted toward corporate rock and the generally bad. (When I told it I liked !!!, it played Peter Gabriel’s “Steam.”) I suspect that licensing issues prevent the operation from playing too much indie rock, especially music from smaller labels. For example, it didn’t even recognize the band name Faust. Still, it seems like a useful tool for when I need anything to distract me from the environment around me.

1.I really should dump the native Apple apps and go back to Firefox and Thunderbird full time.³

2.I remember using HOMR in my dorm room via a SLIP connection freshman year.

3.Are these footnotes completely stupid? In the time I spend marking them up, I could probably figure out how to integrate my brain’s little tangents with words instead of anchor tags.

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Over at Cool Tools, Kevin Kelly has a nice overview of “consensus Web filters,” sites that aggregate links that other users have deemed valuable. It seems like this an incremental step from blogs (particularly with tools like Blogdex and Technorati) or community moderated¹ sites like Slashdot. I do agree with Kelly that these sites are great for tracking down interesting content, and clearly I’ve become a heavy del.icio.us² user, but I think they need a cool name like “blog” or “wiki” before they catch on.

1. Also check out this post based on Clay Shirky’s ETech talk on community moderation.

2. One of the sites Kelly lists is Oishii!, which is a front end for del.icio.us. If this gets any more meta, my lame English-major brain will explode.

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It’s great that these old National Archives videos are available on Google Video. I often enjoy watching old educational and ephemeral films. But I do wonder what are the copyright terms of these videos. Are they in the public domain? If they are, can I download one and use it in a found-footage project, or would I be violating Google’s terms of service. While the individual video pages have a button allowing me to download the video to my hard drive, there is little indication about the copyright status of the video. I’d rather see these videos on a non-profit project like Archive.org, which is completely upfront about the copyright status of a given video. I hope that the National Archives didn’t work out an exclusive deal to distribute old videos with Google.

Update: This Ars Technica story offers more context about the project, but doesn’t go into the intellectual property issues.

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Any geeky readers probably already know about MailStamps, but it’s a little hack that returns Mail.app to the pre-Tiger interface. I had forgotten how disappointed I was with Mail.app when I upgraded to Tiger and its bland bubble buttons, but I’m glad I have the old icons back.

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I’ve never been fond of the notion that “power laws” dictate what blogs are read. To be more precise I don’t like the conclusion that most blogs will languish on the far reaches of the “long tail” because network effects lead to a situation where a very small minority of blogs are read by a wide audience and most blogs have only a few readers. This seems to suggest that blogs with a small readership have little influence.

Technorati CEO Dave Sifry debunks that notion in a post about “The Magic Middle,” the blogs that fall in the middle of the blog power curve. Based on his analysis of data about blogs collected by Technorati, he argues that most of the conversation is going on among these blogs. Moreover, this is the area where expert and topical blogs reside. Sitting atop the power curve is meaningless if you’re looking for consistent and targeted information. I’ve long thought this way. A blog about, say, media studies and the Internet, isn’t competing for bOINGbOING’s readers, so why should they be compared in terms of “power”? And why should this be a measure of the blog’s worth?

Sifry defines “the magic middle” as blogs with 20 to 1000 inbound links, which seems like an overly broad definition for a category. (Blogs with 1000 links have to be qualitatively different than blogs with 20 links.) Sadly, Technorati says I only have links from 14 other blogs, so apparently I am still in blog Siberia.

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I think I was already aware of Amazon’s recent introduction of product Wikis, either from talking about them in Don’s Semantic Web class or just browsing the site. But I didn’t really think about what they would do until now. At first blush, a Wiki for each product would seem helpful. With a Wiki, you can read positive and negative perspectives on a product in a single blurb, instead of scrolling through user review after user review. Of course, this could also give undue emphasis on minority opinions, but I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing.

The feature doesn’t seem to be catching on quickly. A glance at the “Most Edited Wikis” page reveals that the wiki with the most edits is the controversial novel A Million Little Pieces with 76 edits. The number of edits per item falls of sharply. An article with a moderate amount of traffic on Wikipedia could easily get 76 edits in a month, so these wikis aren’t particularly active. In addition, the 1839 Wikis available is only a slim slice of Amazon’s catalog, and most of these are Wikis with a single edit.

Finally, it seems like hosting Wikis could present a lot of administrative hassles for Amazon. Do they have an employee managing the inevitable conflicts that will emerge from edit wars and thin skins? And while Wikipedia is not immune from the threat of legal action, because Amazon is clearly a for-profit entity, it could be much more vulnerable to litigation from unhappy authors. Or authors could become “page divas,” constantly monitoring a page and reverting unfavorable edits.

It will be interesting to see how this experiment hashes out. This seems like a better application of Wikis than the LA Times “Wikitorials” debacle, since there’s plenty of information that is uncontroversial about products that could be shared in a Wiki.

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In the past month or so, I’ve started receiving text messages on my mobile. It’s a little weird to me, since I’m accustomed to using technologies like this before most of friends. When I get them, I think, “Oh, do they use SMS? Why not just email?” Of course, it’s always “they” because my phone is apparently unable to display the sender’s identity. I hit the “extract number” and the “extract email” functions, but it invariably fails to identify the sender.

To me, this technology is worse than useless. Walking into the library this afternoon, I received a text message that read only “Busy?” Why, as a matter of fact, I am busy wondering who sent me a text message. My provider charges me for each message I receive, so I wound up paying a nominal fee to waste my time. I set my preferences to automatically delete all incoming messages, but apparently this one went through anyway.

In short, don’t text my phone. I won’t read it, and, if I do, I won’t know who you are. I certainly won’t text you back. From this point forward, I’ll assume anyone texting me is a loser who isn’t techie enough to read my blog, or, even worse, someone who reads my blog and texts me anyway.

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