Category: Blogs and Internet

Telescope, n. A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic’s Word Book (1906)

Sweet profile by Lydia DePillis of Greater Greater Washington’s David Alpert.

Interesting early buzz in Jim Dwyer’s “About New York” column for Diaspora*, an open-source distributed social networking platform. The project is a reaction against the centralized uniformiarian approach of Facebook. Explains Raphael Sofaer, one of the four NYU student founders,

.”We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.”

Gillian Andrews makes some thoughtful remarks about usability, “web literacy,” and human foibles in response to the Facebook login/ReadWriteWeb flap.

Interface designers aren’t helping. Most URL bars now resolve into search results. This may seem like a good UI solution, but it is a catastrophic mistake from a literacy perspective. URLs aren’t just how we get to a page; they are involved in how we judge its content, accuracy, point of view, and most importantly who owns it.

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The funny thing about the patterns in these misunderstandings is that they predate the Web…. Fans have been writing letters to the heroine of Romeo and Juliet at least since the release of the first movie in the 1930s; they arrive by the mailbag in Verona, Italy every year, despite the fact that if you’ve read through to the end, Juliet clearly isn’t in any state to write a letter back.

I really didn’t intend this to become the Facebook Sux Blog, but I have to spread the link karma to Matt Labash’s jeremiad (via Arts & Letters Daily) and Mike Booth’s video satire (via Gleeful Gecko).

I told him he was a very sad man, that collecting Facebook friends is the equivalent of being a catlady, collecting numerous Himalayans, which you have neither the time nor the inclination to feed. “You have obviously never been on Facebook,” he said. “It’s so much worse than collecting cats.”

So, David, enough already.

Dollar for dollar, schaden for freude, watching the missteps of Facebook management is more fun than tracking the misadventures of a certain jailbird hotel heiress. Marshall Kilpatrick’s most recent post is titled, “Facebook Management Has Lost Its Grip on Reality,” and I’m inclined to agree.

Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing…. We’d argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.

Facebook appears to forget that it’s just one of many ways people use the internet. It’s wildly popular today, but just as people have used other social networks in the past – they have other options for social networks to use in the future.

A collaboration between students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and the Cedar Rapids, Iowa Gazette has launched the demonstration project News Mixer, as reported by NU staff. News Mixer is a local news site powered by Facebook Connect, which provides the authentication mechanism; comments made by a reader of news stories appear in that member’s Facebook newsfeed. The experimental News Mixer provides three levels of structured commenting, from short quips to long-form letters to the editor. It’s assembled from open source tools—Wordpress, MySQL, Trac, and Django—as recorded in the project’s blog, Crunchberry Project. The project is one of the early fruits of a new program of scholarships to Medill for talented programmers and web developers, granted by the Knight Foundation.

Terry Teachout’s advice to professional theater companies hoping for a national review includes some good reminders about basic web site design:

If you want to keep traveling critics happy, make very sure that the front page of your Web site contains the following easy-to-find information and features:

(1) The title of your current production, plus its opening and closing dates.

(2) Your address and main telephone number (not the box office!).

(3) A SEASON button that leads directly to a complete list of the rest of the current and/or upcoming season’s productions. Make sure that this listing includes the press opening date of each production!

(4) A CALENDAR or SCHEDULE button that leads to a month-by-month calendar of all your performances, including curtain times.

(5) A CONTACT US button that leads to an updated directory of staff members (including individual e-mail addresses, starting with the address of your press representative).

(6) A DIRECTIONS or VISIT US button that leads to a page containing directions to your theater and a printable map of the area.

The one thing that RCP‘s front page is lacking, and I will fix it on the next update, is the opening and closing dates for the current show. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to repeat the street address of the community center.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a new recruiting video online. No fancy drills with firearms, no freehand rock climbing, no jumping out of helicopters; but some impressive photography nonetheless.

Adam DuVander nails it:

It’s like Facebook is a cruise ship. There’s a facsimile of everything you’re used to getting elsewhere. It is easy to enjoy the many Facebook-approved activities. But the Facebook ship never docks at any ports of call.