Chuggnutt!

Month: June 2007

  • Top hated internet words

    Not surprisingly, I had to comment on this.

    Topping the list of words most likely to make web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard” was folksonomy, a term for a web classification system.

    “Blogosphere”, the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; “blog” itself was third; “netiquette”, or Internet etiquette, came fourth and “blook”, a book based on a blog, was fifth.

    “Cookie”, a file sent to a user’s computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while “wiki”, a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth.

    I can only really get behind two on this list: “blogosphere” and “folksonomy”. I’d never heard of “blook” until now, and I’ll continue to pretend it doesn’t exist.

    I hate “blogosphere”, and I hate more that I’ve actually used it in conversation and writing. “Blog” I’m good with. I love “blog”. “Blog” is succinct, and people pretty much know what it means. “Blogosphere”, on the other hand, is just… is just… yeah. How about just “online community” instead?

    I thought “folksonomy” was dumb the first time I saw it, and I continue to pretend it doesn’t exist. Fortunately, its use seems to have dropped off significantly.

    “Wiki” I like, too. Great word. Even better than “blog”, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t get the the hate here.

    “Netiquette” and “cookie”? Seriously? Man, those ships have sailed. Like, back in 1995.

  • Zombies!

    Over the past week and a half I read through two zombie novels: Monster Island and Monster Nation, both by David Wellington. Now I’m the first to admit that I’m not a true aficionado of the zombie genre; aside from Stephen King’s Cell, I can’t think of any other books I’ve read, and I’ve only seen a handful of movies. That being said, I really enjoyed both books. They’re well-written and entertaining, real page turners. If you don’t mind the squick factor involved with the cannibalistic undead, of course.

    But then, you know, zombies. If you pick up a book subtitled “A Zombie Novel”, I’m guessing you don’t mind that so much.

    But the more interesting aspect to the novels were what drew me to them in the first place: the author first published them online on a blog, in serial format. In fact, he’s publishing all of his (recent) novels online first, in the same way; it was based on the success of these blog novels that he landed a brick-and-mortar publisher to put his words to paper. That’s cool. That’s really cool.

    More and more, that seems to me to be the future of publishing.

    Oh, and Wellington just had the third novel in his zombie trilogy published: Monster Planet. I’m debating whether to read it online first, or wait for the library to get the hardcopy in.

  • At World’s End

    Finally got out to see “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” back on the first weekend of this month, and I quite liked it. I really liked it, I thought it was fun and supremely escapist with excellent action sequences and truly excellent special effects. A perfect summer blockbuster, in other words. And I think it capped the trilogy nicely, while being open-ended enough to credibly be able to do a fourth movie (if, as Johnny Depp has famously said, the script is right).

    In fact, I already know what the subtitle of the fourth movie should be: “Drink and the Devil.” At least, that’s from my working notes thus far. :)

    And as I was thinking about it, it occurred to me that something I’d read elsewhere was true: the “Pirates” movies really are the “Star Wars” movies of this generation. (I’m talking about the Original Trilogy, of course; the Prequel Trilogy doesn’t come close.) That’s a tricky thing to pull off; I don’t think it can be done intentionally. The “Matrix” movies might have come close, but ultimately they collapsed under their own weight.

    I won’t go into some sort of pedantic nerdly comparison essay between the two; suffice to say that the “Pirates” movies I can go back and watch again and again and still enjoy, like the Original Trilogy. That’s good stuff.

  • Mahalo

    The tech and “Web 2.0” section of the blogosphere is all a-twitter over the alpha launch of the new “people-powered” search engine, Mahalo, by Jason Calacanis (of Weblogs, Inc. and Netscape-relaunch fame). I’ve been checking it out a bit, and have some comments…

    There’s definitely no mystery under the hood, technology-wise, here: it’s simply a locked-down wiki software. MediaWiki, in fact, the same wikiware used to run (and developed by) Wikipedia. Pretty smart, actually, because there’s no reinventing the wheel going on, and MediaWiki provides a really slick platform overall. Plus, it’s not like his other endeavors have been built on developing new tech—they have, in fact, been people-oriented and built upon existing technologies, which is what he seems to do best (and is successful at it).

    On the other hand, this is not a new idea: Mahalo is “guide” driven, by people who filter through the best results for top search terms and build pages for them. I can’t help thinking that this makes it just another About.com (at least, from the early days of About.com—a clone without all the cruft that About.com has accumulated over the years), or, even more apt, just another Open Directory Project (which pretty much has been doing the exact same thing for years).

    So I’m kinda split. I guess the real question is, “Would I use it?” And generally, the answer is no… since they’re only covering the top search terms, and not the esoterica that I’m often searching for (for which I primarily use Google), I don’t see it happening. I like the concept, though.