Friday Fishwrap has an interesting commentary on Netflix policy of “throttling” DVD shipments to people who are heavy users in favor of first-time or light users of their service. Interesting; I agree that it sucks, but I can kind of see the light users point of view, too. If you wanted to get a DVD occassionally and can only get crap because some people turn around so many, you’d also be pretty peeved.
I haven’t been in Friendster for a while, so I logged in a futzed around to see what they’ve upgraded lately. You know what’s stupid? Blogs on Friendster. That was really dumb addition, because the people who wanted a blog already had them set up outside of Friendster, where everyone can see them. No one wants to log into Friendster just to read a blog. What they should have done instead is set up more robust competition for Evite. That’s a feature that would actually made sense inside Friendster. You already have many of the people you want to invite to a gathering already connected. If you could create an invitation that would go to their e-mail and let you customize an invitation, like Evite does, they could have crushed evite. Kinda dumb.
I haven’t done the MySpace thing. I think I set up an account so I could read my friend Chi’s blog, but other than that, I have to much to do to keep track of social networks.
2019 update: I clearly was not predicting the rise of Facebook, was I? I had pieces of it – event planning, micro-blogging, social connection.
I’m astonished. I just tried to visit the Old Navy online store (where I’ve bought lots of clothes in the past!) and I got this message:
We’re sorry, but we do not support the version of the browser you are using. Our site works best with the following browsers:
PC users
Internet Explorer 5.5 and above
Netscape 7 and above
Mozilla (including Firefox) 1.0 and above
Mac users
Netscape 7 and above
Mozilla (including Firefox) 1.0 and above
We’re working on supporting Safari. Please check back soon.
Wow, that’s so unprofessional; I can’t believe they do that. We don’t even do that at work, and we’re not as huge of a retail outlet as they are.
Two articles on the subject of blogging showed up in today’s Arts and Letters Daily about how the “Upper ranks” of bloggers are dominated by white males. One article says that it’s so and calls for greater diversity. The other article says it’s so also, but claims that it’s the case because women and minorities either don’t hold forth with opinions (wow, they must not know the women I know) or aren’t skilled enough to use the web (wow, they must not know the minorities I know.)
Both of them are wrong, because they’re both making a stupid assumption that isn’t true — there is no “upper ranks” or “A-list” or “top tier” of bloggers. They both throw out the premise like it’s an accepted fact, without defining what the hell this “top tier” is. Do they measure that by traffic? By cross-links? By name-recognition? Number of comments? They never say. One lists the “top 100 bloggers” but never says who determined who that is, or how.
Sure there are some bloggers that talk a lot about each other and link back and forth to each other and a lot of that group are white men. But the idea that they’re somehow important, or that there’s some sort of heirarchy amongst bloggers is ridiculous. It implies that all bloggers are doing the same thing for the same reasons, or that there’s some standard by which we determine who’s who.
“Steven Levy’s minimum prescription for joining the ranks of Alpha blogging: “You have to post frequently . . . link prodigiously,” and, like one technology guru he describes, spend two hours daily writing your weblog and “three more hours reading hundreds of other blogs.”
Why? Why the hell is that the standard? That’s just ridiculous. Hell lots of sites get lots of cross-linking and comments, but a lot of them don’t have nearly the traffic numbers that I do. Of course on my site, most people are just here to look for the lyrics to plastic jesus and they end up reading my journal on a lark, but still, my numbers stack up to some big sites. But here’s a challenge — if you’re reading this, comment.
This is what happens when the mainstream media tries to define something that it’s already behind the curve on. Here’s a tip people: shut up until you catch up.
I will say this — between these two articles, this is some of the worst writing I’ve read on the web recently. Most blogs examine ideas more thoroughly and intelligently than these two pieces do, and that’s truly a sad state of affairs for “mainstream media.”
How’s that for a woman expressing an opinion, National Review?
I have found a new place to spend unearthly amounts of time reading and writing and amusing myself no end. Like I needed another place like that.
I love technology. Technology is the best. I pity the Amish. And people from the olden days. They had no technology. They must have been very sad. And bored. Maybe this is is why the Christians hate gay people. Because they don’t know how to use the technology, and therefore are bored and sad and have to take it out on someone. I recommend they get better computers, and take it out on the Amish, instead.
Indianapolis Downtown, Inc. provides a list of 22 spots where you can get wireless internet access, some of it free and some for a fee. On the other hand, wi-fihotspotlist.com lists 36 wireless locations in Indianapolis. It’s not clear from this list which services are free and which are paid. So an IndyScribe wireless outing/control panel training session is in order! Woo hoo! We are such geeks.
We have one of those high-tech bathrooms here at work where everything is automated. The toilet flushes by itself, you wave your hands under the soap dispenser for soap, and under the faucet for water, so you never have to touch anything unsanitary. Which is really cool, except when the technology breaks. For a while now there’s been one toilet that keeps power-flushing for quite a long time after you step out of the stall. Today while that was happening, the faucet I used wouldn’t shut off either, perhaps in solidarity. I waited a bit for the soap to chime in, also, but apparently it doesn’t have anything to say.
Basically, mythtv.org is an open source TIVO/ Replay TV program. You port your cable hookup through a PC equipped with a TV tuner card ($100) and a decent sized hard drive, set up the open source software on the PC, and connect the PC to a large monitor or TV & stereo. Then you use the software to record your favorite programs. There’s a web interface that lets you set our programs remotely, say, from work.
I had to delete Willy Wonka from my friends list, because he put 189,000 people in my personal network, and that was just too ridiculous to look through all the time. Now I’m just down to a manageable 989 real people who are actually friends or friends of friends, and who are people I might actually be able to meet.
Still, you are not on there. What’s up with that? My dog Spike is even on Friendster.
I now have 16,9903 people in my personal network. I’m sure this has something to do with the fact that Willy Wonka added me to his friends. Everyone is friends with Willy, because as Sammy says, he makes a groovy lemon pie.
2019 update: Ah, those halcyon days when social media was a toy we could play with and not a tool that would destroy democracy.