Posts tagged internet
Sprinklers Are Evil
Well, they are!
Why the Internet Loves Cats
A cat, if it decides to love you, will do so only on its own terms, and, as that Viennese study showed, the more you let it come to you, i.e., the less you need it, the better loved you’re going to be. The reason the lolcat says “Oh hai” is because he only just noticed, and certainly doesn’t care, that you caught him serenely occupying ur nouns, verbing ur other nouns. He doesn’t worry about you or what you think; by his living in your screen, you can love him, but there isn’t a prayer of reciprocation. Thus is the Internet cat the realest cat of all.
A good, if not completely satisfactory, explanation of why the Internet loves cats.
Posted with BlogsyThe Costs and Profits of Spamming.
Spamming isn’t very lucrative. Brian Krebs, a security reporter, notes that while businesses spend $40 billion per year for anti-Spam technology, the estimated revenues of most major spammers hover at around $150 million in a good year. In the bell curve of spammers, however, most end up on the side of making very little.
Bottom line: nobody profits from spamming.
To be fair, no internet access drives me pretty nuts too.
(via Reddit)
Even Silicon Valley Is Getting Sick of All the Internet
Stuart Crabb, a director in the executive offices of Facebook, naturally likes to extol the extraordinary benefits of computers and smartphones. But like a growing number of technology leaders, he offers a warning: log off once in a while, and put them down.
In a place where technology is seen as an all-powerful answer, it is increasingly being seen as too powerful, even addictive.
The concern, voiced in conferences and in recent interviews with many top executives of technology companies, is that the lure of constant stimulation — the pervasive demand of pings, rings and updates — is creating a profound physical craving that can hurt productivity and personal interactions.
Wow. You know something is wrong when the people selling you online experiences are getting a bit sick and tired of it.
(Source: The New York Times)
Some Current, and Future, Journalistic Resources as suggested by Dan Gillmor
…But I’d also experiment with some ideas that could break new ground in other ways. For advice on how to make these work, I’d pick the brains of some of the folks I’ve worked with at the Harvard Berkman Center for internet and society and in the broader technology world, as well as people in journalism. Examples (third parties have already created or are creating some of these):
• “Anonymice Tracker” – an open and publicly searchable database of every story quoting anonymous sources, annotated in various ways (for cross-tabular purposes) such as whether a story was based entirely on such sources, as well as quoting the reason(s) given for granting anonymity.
• “Feedback Zeitgeist” – semantic analyses, including visualizations, of correspondents’ email and forum/comment posts. I suspect this could be extraordinarily illuminating once we had some data baselines.
• “Error Notifier” – a system whereby anyone who signs up receives an automatic email notification (assuming he or she was actually looked at the original posting or column) of any error in what I’ve written.
• “PubEd Submitterator” – borrowing the second word from BoingBoing, my favorite blog, which relies on its readers for tips on what to show to the rest of us. The main purpose would be to get help finding the best critiques.
• “Goof Tracker” – a reader-fed database of what they believe are errors of fact and whether they’ve been corrected. I understand that the newsroom has its own non-public database, and I believe there should be some public listing of this kind. I also recognize the difficulties of making this work, but it’s worth a try.
You’ll have noticed that most of these ideas, as well as my must-do list above, share my conviction that the audience should be an integral part of this process. The readers and other constituencies should participate, not just read, by saying what they know and believe, and by adding data where we can create structured input systems.
Dan Gillmor proves his awesomeness once again. Some very interesting ideas about the role of audience, internet, and how they relate to modern online journalism are raised here.
And it is awesome that he is a fan of Boing Boing.
(Source: Guardian)
