Blogger is still the default way that a lot of people create their blogs, mainly because it’s the first result in Google for “blog” (no conflict of interest there, eh?)… but by people I mean spammers. The Blogger platform is to splogs what a motel room is to vibrating beds. Before Google took over, using the Blogger bar could actually transport you someplace interesting. Today you get a splog with a bunch of random keywords, mixed in with Chinese characters.
There’s a reason for that, it’s because Google only bought Blogger for the same reason it bought Feedburner and Youtube, as a platform for pushing ads. Blogger was a great blog platform for 2003. By 2010 standards it’s a bad joke. While WordPress has long ago passed it, Blogger remains basically the same. A new update rolled out a mix and match widget layout which is exactly the sort of thing that makes it easy for spammers to set up shop, while making it look trite to serious bloggers.
But luckily Google had a new solution. No, not a solution that involves making Blogger a better and more competitive platform in order to attract serious users. No, Google rolled out an automated spam detection algorithm which is supposed to automatically find spam blogs. Now I had done my part in reporting spam blogs. Not a single one of them was ever deleted. My blog though was flagged and deleted. So naively I tried to find out how to get it back, well with Google’s renowned commitment to customer service, as it turned out there was no actual way to do that, except by hanging out on a help forum run by a few brownnosers promoting their own blogs, who if you beg them a lot, might agree to pass on your request to someone who actually works for Google. And then you can wait around for a few months and hope against hope that your blog will be restored. By then actual spammers have created 376,001 new splogs on Blogger.
Congratulations Google, you killed Blogger. Hope the Adsense revenues are worth it.
Like a lot of huge dot coms who expand by going on shopping sprees for promising companies and then kill them, the way Microsoft killed Hotmail, Yahoo killed Geocities and AOL killed ICQ, Google has its own category. Google is a dot com serial killer, its properties like Blogger, Feedburner and YouTube attest to the truth of that.
But hold on a minute, you might answer, Youtube is more popular than ever. And it is. Mainly because it’s the default way most people watch video online. Google’s massive servers insure quick delivery and they’ve kept up enough of the old YouTube interface that it’s actually usable. But let’s take a look at the difference between the old YouTube and the new.
The new YouTube pops up ads every time you try to watch a video. It pops up full page video playing ads if you just go to the site. It pops up ads if you breathe in its vicinity. It shoves videos at you that you don’t want to see from every single direction. And here’s the kicker, most of the videos are the sort of thing that used to cram up Google Video, before Google turned YouTube into the new Google Video. Conspiracy theories, video game clips, porn, pirated movies and clips of nationalistic arguments between people in countries that don’t use our alphabet. That’s also why YouTube’s comments section have become legendary for their stupidity. Because the Google Video demographic has migrated to YouTube.
And YouTube has gotten clunkier, the flash upload feature rarely works, browsing through someone’s uploads is now a pain, and the custom backgrounds make the place look like MySpace. Maybe because it is MySpace.
Thanks Google. You killed another great company.
The fascinating thing about Twitter is that for something that is represented as the future of media and the internet, it is incredibly primitive. The design may be the same glossy Web 2.0 stuff, but the actual functionality screams of BBS’s. There are the manual hashtags and id’s in an age of social media where you expect to have it all done for you. And the entire site’s functionality screams Web 0.5 Where is the monetization. Where are the videos. Where is the comments sections. Where are the smiling photos of Twitter employees pretending to have fun.
But the simplicity is the key to Twitter’s success, functioning as a global bulletin board. The ugly truth is that the key to success isn’t just simplicity, Google does a lot of unsuccessful simple things. It isn’t just functionality, just about every social media site has that. Twitter’s key to success is that it goes back to the pre-history of the web. To the internet as it was before everything got reduced to glossy icons with drop shadows, before e-commerce was a word and monetization was the key to everything.
Twitter is the internet as it was when it was exciting, but adapted for a mobile media generation. It’s limitless and constrained at the same time, a combination that made browsing the internet a lot more interesting in 1996, than it is in 2009.
As usual Ron Paul always manages to be his own worst enemy.
Just when his Fed Audit drive seems to be headed somewhere, Ron Paul announced that he’s going to vote against the actual amendment, because it might actually have more teeth in it than he wanted. But that’s because lawmakers want Fed transparency. Ron Paul wants to audit the Fed because he thinks it’s an arm of the Bilderberger, Council of Foreign Relations and Lizard People Conspiracy.
Then just when his economic message of fiscal conservativism (of course the real Ron Paul stacks bills with earmarks for his own district making him a hypocrite) seemed to be resonating, Ron Paul never one to miss a chance to discredit himself, went on television to explain that the underwear bomber was only angry because of our occupation… oh uh Nigeria. Which we’re not actually occupying. But that’s okay, I doubt Ron Paul could find Africa on a map, let alone Nigeria.
Somewhere in Ron Paul’s militia addled brain, he assumes that everyone who wants to bomb America, is in it for the same reasons as him. To him an Al Queda terrorist is the same as Confederate artillery firing on Fort Sumter.
A Federal Appeals court has just banned the use of tasers against offenders who don’t seem to present a threat and might be mentally ill. On the surface this seems like a good ruling, taser happy cops long ago became part of the national dialogue. We’ve seen cops taser little kids, taser grandmas and most often and most abusively, taser people who aren’t immediately complaint.
But there’s a reason I’m not celebrating the ruling and that reason is very incredibly simple. Because being tasered is better than getting shot.
Let’s take a look at the case that the Federal Appeals court dealt with
In the summer of 2005, Carl Bryan, 21, was pulled over for a seat-belt violation and did not follow an officer’s order to stay in the car. Earlier, he had received a speeding ticket and had taken off his T-shirt to wipe away tears. He was wearing only the underwear he’d slept in because a woman had taken his keys, the court said without further explanation.
During his second traffic stop in Coronado, he got out of the car. He was “agitated … yelling gibberish and hitting his thighs, clad only in his boxer shorts and tennis shoes” but did not threaten the officer verbally or physically, the judges wrote.
That’s when Coronado Police Officer Brian McPherson, who was standing about 20 feet away watching Bryan’s “bizarre tantrum,” fired his Taser, the court said. Without a word of warning, he hit Bryan in the arm with two metal darts, delivering a 1,200-volt jolt. Temporarily paralyzed and in intense pain, Bryan fell face-first on the pavement. The fall shattered four of his front teeth and left him with facial abrasions and swelling. Later, a doctor had to use a scalpel to remove one of the darts
That sounds awful I know, and it is. But here’s the thing, Carl Bryan wasn’t shot. And he could have been.
People have been shot by cops for behaving in a mentally unstable way around police officers, especially if they were making violent motions. And it’s easy enough for cops to interpret Carl Bryan’s thigh slapping that way. It’s happened before.
Carl Bryan was injured by the taser, but he wasn’t killed. And he could have been. Tasers allow cops to default to a non-lethal weapon, because given a choice they will often use lethal weapons. Banning tasers just means that when confronted with a Carl Bryan, the officer is more likely to reach for (best case scenario) nightstick or (worst case scenario) service pistol.
The officer’s training tells him to enforce compliance. Mentally ill people often won’t comply, won’t acknowledge and will flail around in ways that make conventional methods of restraining them difficult. Police will then either call for backup and swarm the suspect. Or they’ll take him down the hard way. If the situation escalates, firearms will be used. Make no mistake about it.
It’s a bad system, but until we reform the situation so non-compliance doesn’t equal police violence, then taking tasers off the table doesn’t do the Carl Bryans any favors. It might actually get them killed.
James Cameron’s last two movies, Titanic and Avatar, are both indefensible on the script level and on the performance level. But they’re also widely praised. Titanic and Avatar both have Rotten Tomatoes scores of 83 (which is an interesting coincidence), but over a decade after Titanic first came into theaters, you’ll find few critics who would be willing to defend it.
That’s because Titanic was a bad movie with cutting edge special effects. Just like Avatar is a bad movie with cutting edge special effects. And it’ll probably take a few years before the people hailing Avatar wake up and realize that, guess what, it’s a bad movie with special effects that used to be cutting edge.
Star Wars the Phantom Menace benefited from the same reception, as even major critics like Ebert, confused Lucasfilm’s ability to create a CG world, with a great movie. The same praise about changing the nature of films that is being lavished on Avatar now, was being lavished on Star Wars The Phantom Menace. But The Phantom Menace wasn’t a great movie, it was an FX reel with bad bluescreen and greenscreen acting. Avatar is the same thing except it throws in 3D into the mix.
It’s easy for people overwhelmed by a CG world to be impressed by the movie, but it’s no different than being impressed by the set design in Titanic. The landscape is not the movie, and Cameron or Lucas spending a lot of money to create imaginary worlds, does not make their movies good. It just makes them expensive.
Writing a first post for a blog is always a challenge. After all the first post sets the template for the rest of the blog’s future posts, which means by writing it, you’re actually breaking the mold, or actually making the mold, or getting involved with things that are moldy anyway. And once you begin molding, where does it all stop?
Soon before you know it you’re locked into a single type of post, the type of post everyone expects you to keep writing. And that is how writer’s blog sets in as you first set your eyes on that great empty white space where your words are supposed to go. That empty white space that you could turn into anything or leave as nothing at all.
Paper, real or digital, is a metaphor for life. The choices we make in our life transfer on to the paper. The posts are the way our lives interact with that long series of tubes that we’re busy shoving our mold into, or is that the other way around. Once a word is said, it can’t be taken back, especially on the internet where everything is archived and rearchived, stored, assembled and pops up again on some random site that does nothing but try to sell you a handbag.
And that’s just how it is. The words come, the whiteness is gone and hopefully some stray shred of meaning comes of it all.
