Category Archives: Communications, Connection, Internet, Web, Media

Dare Obasanjo: “Don’t fight the Web, embrace it”

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A must read: Dare Obasanjo: Explaining REST to Damien Katz:

There are other practical things to be mindful of as well to ensure that your service is being a good participant in the Web ecosystem. These include using GET instead of POST when retrieving a resource and properly utilizing the caching related headers as needed (If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified, If-None-Match/ETag, Cache-Control), learning to utilize HTTP status codes correctly (i.e. errors shouldn’t return HTTP 200 OK), keeping your design stateless to enable it to scale more cheaply and so on. The increased costs, scalability concerns and complexity that developers face when they ignore these principles is captured in blog posts and articles all over the Web such as Session State is Evil and Cache SOAP services on the client side. You don’t have to look hard to find them. What most developers don’t realize is that the problems they are facing are because they aren’t keeping RESTful principles in mind.

NYTimes on Jon Stewart

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NYTimes: Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?:

Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it’s been “The Daily Show” that has tenaciously tracked big, “super depressing” issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.

For that matter, the Comedy Central program — which is not above using silly sight gags and sophomoric sex jokes to get a laugh — has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news. “The Daily Show” resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Mr. Stewart’s frequent exclamation “Are you insane?!” seems a fitting refrain for a post-M*A*S*H, post-“Catch-22” reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace — an era kicked off by the wacko 2000 election standoff in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and haunted by the fallout of a costly war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

SEO Advice Not Followed Often Enough

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Aaron Wall: Emotionally Engage or Enrage:

Market research, site structure, and on page optimization are important. Doing them well can double or triple the earnings of a site, but when you get into the big fields where people are deeply passionate or interested links are needed to win. And those links are often a reflection of our emotions.

When you look at your site do you find anything that is emotionally engaging? enraging?

As the web gets more efficient and search engines gather more data, those who evoke emotional responses will keep gaining marketshare while bland webmasters fall quietly into the abyss.

If you aren’t linked to by others, you have no chance of being seen or heard.

Of course, there is a chicken and the egg here.

And as Aaron Wall suggests, it pushes us to post content that shouts out to be heard.

February 8, 1996 was “Black Thursday”

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To protest the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a large portion of the Web had turned their site’s background color black. Read about it on Wikipedia and read Howard Rheingold’s thoughts on the historic day.

It’s interesting to hink about the collective action that it represented and to think about that in today’s context. I mean – Yahoo! turned its home page black!

Our Response to Paris Hilton’s Response to McCain Shows Our Biases

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Paris Hilton responded, via a video of her own, to John McCain’s Celebrity advertisement.

How you see her video is completely based upon your pre-existing bias.

Want proof?

If you are liberal you see it as an endorsement of Obama’s plan and as a smack down on McCain:

Open Left: Why Obama’s Drilling Compromise Makes Some Sense

Talk Left: Paris Hilton Strikes Back

reddit: Paris Hilton Responds to the McCain Ad = McCain gets served.

If you are conservative, you see it as an endorsement of McCain’s plan and as a smack down on Obama:

Althouse: Paris Hilton does a pro-McCain ad!

Hot Air: New third-party ad: Obama no longer the biggest celebrity in the race; Update: Her plan’s better than Obama’s, says McCain camp

Either Paris Hilton is a genius, or we are so wrapped up in our own points of view that we look for ANYTHING to reinforce it.

Maybe both is true. But that’s a stretch right? Right?!?!?!

Beyond that, there is literally two takes on reality playing out over the video. And there are no links to opposing points of view – it is as if the opposing view point doesn’t even exist.

Free book on Hyperlinks and their effects on society and business

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This looks like a must read: The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age.

Two interesting chapters right off the bat:

Seth Finkelstein’s concise description of PageRank and some of the interesting societal issues it raises: Google, Links, and Popularity versus Authority

David Weinberger’s passionate arguments and assertions that links are good: The Morality of Links

It’s important to speak out

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louisgray.com: Seeing The Web’s Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking

Why does everything suck?: Does Anonymity Lead To Social Anarchy?

Sexism Runs Rampant on Reddit (and maybe the rest of the social web)

Wha, that last link threw you a bit? Why is that? Is it that we are more comfortable confronting racism then sexism? And has the Presidential campaign reflected that? Why?

How we go about fighting racism and sexism, while protecting free speech is confusing territory.

I figure the best way is by speaking out loudly, and clearly.

PS – Make a donation to the Thomas Jefferson Center for free speech in George Carlin’s name.

What does it mean when our media re-writes itself?

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Boing Boing decided to un-publish, remove from public view, Violet Blue related posts.

What does it mean when our media rewrites itself?

NYTimes: Link by Link – Poof! You’re Unpublished

Boing Boing on the matter.

Violet Blue (NSFW) on the matter.

There are quite a few fellow bloggers who have linked and commented about this – but without more info, it is just conjecture and I don’t wish to add to any of it.

However, I do want to stress the importance of the de-linking – note that the first two pages of Google search results on this subject don’t point to Violet Blue what so ever. You would think they would, but they don’t.

As Rafe states – links are currency on the Web. When we reach a certain level of influence, we’ve earned a responsibility, whether we want to own up to it or not. When we don’t live up to that responsibility, we lose credibility.

Boing Boing, in my book, has lost some.

Related:

Jeff Jarvis: Media is Singular (about time folks come around to this)

Politico: Media hype: How small stories become big news (what happens when new media take on old media mores or old media takes on new media mores or… well.. see above)

Technorealism? Social Software thought of the week

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I had a GED, was struggling with homelessness, and was a telemarketer at Sears Product Services selling maintenance agreements. But I had access to Compuserve, AOL, and Usenet via dialup accounts work and at home. For me, the Net was an important route to a new life – a career I love – software engineering.

You would think that I would be a techno-utopian. A true believer that the Web, the Net, will be a tool that will help lift humanity out of its troubles by helping us be better informed and connected.

And I was for a while there. But time and experience has tempered my enthusiasm with a recognition that human nature is a hell of a lot more robust then we give it credit for. That, as Dave Rogers might say (and has I think), that technology may change what we do, but not who we are.

Now, for me, recognizing that, doesn’t eliminate my belief in the Web’s potential to enrich our lives and be an instrument of tremendous positive change. But it does force me to ground it – the Web is a reflection of who and what we are, the good, the bad and the ugly. Whenever I recognize successful social software it reinforces this to to be true to me.

What brought about this round of reflection?

Author and blogger Nick Carr wrote a provocative cover article for this month’s The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.

It’s worth a read. It’s over the top for sure. But maybe it needed to be so in order to draw attention to the fact that all is not as rosy with the Web’s potential as we’d like to think.

This same discussion has cropped up again and again, only to be dismissed by not only the digerati, but the mainstream media.

An example, in the wake of the publishing of David Shenk‘s “Data Smog”, back in 1997, a small discussion formed around similar concerns, that some branded as a movement called Technorealism. Read Newsweek’s put down of the discussion – labeling it as not worthy to have. As “glorifying the obvious”.

If it was so obvious, then why so much vehemence and venom in the face of it?

Related:

Kevin Kelly: Will We Let Google Make Us Smarter?

Andrew Sullivan: Google is giving us pond-skater minds

Rebecca Blood: Is the Internet making us stupid?

Burningbird’s RealTech: Timing

Infothought: Nick Carr: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, and Man vs. Machine

AKMA: Au Contraire

Publishing 2.0: What Magazines Still Don’t Understand About The Web

Slate: David Shenk: Was I right about the dangers of the Internet in 1997?

NYTimes: Excerpt: Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut

Small Pieces Loosely Joined

the cluetrain manifesto