Chuggnutt!

Category: Online

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • lolcats

    So have you been exposed to lolcats yet? If not, check out here and here. I can’t help it; they make me laugh. I mean really, really laugh. Especially the random ones.

    Invisible sandwich

    I've been hit

    Jesus Christ it's a lion GET IN THE CAR!

  • Bend Bulletin’s RSS feed

    Jake first found and posted this: the Bend Bulletin has their own official, bonafide RSS feed. It’s about time! That means I can finally take down my hacked-up RSS scraper feed for them.

    So, this is official notice that I’m deprecating my Bulletin RSS hackfeed, by implementing a redirect to the official feed, and then I’ll be killing off the script entirely. So all three or so people who were using it, be warned.

  • Disposable literature

    Writer Charlie Stross has a blog post entitled Why the commercial ebook market is broken that’s a really good read and puts forth a thought I hadn’t really considered before:

    My take on ebooks is that they are — and should be seen as — the cheapest form of disposable literature.

    “Disposable literature.” I like it. I should probably point out that this isn’t meant to be derogatory; rather, Stross is using it in the same sense as for mass market paperbacks: cheap, portable, easy to mass-produce and replace.

    I’m not sure I have more to say about it at the moment… I’m kinda letting the concept roll around and ferment in my head a bit.

  • On a podcast…

    So my friend Brian of BuzzTouch Designs has a regular podcast, each show lasting a few minutes (not super long, like some) and touching on local happenings—and on yesterday’s “episode” I was the guest star. Or interviewee. Or something. Basically, Brian called me up and we did an interview (I was in my “Brew Site” persona) on the topic of beer label art.

    I had fun doing it, and actually thought it turned out okay. (Not a slam on Brian—I just wasn’t sure how I’d sound myself!) You can listen to the show here.

  • wikinovel

    I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I don’t quite get how this is going to work: Publisher launches its first “wiki” novel. It’s:

    …a Web-based, collaborative novel that can be written, edited or read by anyone, anywhere thanks to “wiki” software, the technology behind Web encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

    The novel, “A Million Penguins,” went live on Thursday and its first lines are already being written, edited and rewritten by enthusiasts on www.amillionpenguins.com.

    Penguin, which embarked on the project with a group of creative writing and new media students, says it is using the novel as a test of whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a “believable fictional voice.”

    So, are they planning on “locking down” chapters as they’re finished? Because there’s really nothing stopping anybody from going in and changing, well, everything at any point, if it truly is open like Wikipedia. Suddenly chapter three makes no sense because chapters one and two are now telling a different story.

    Cool and interesting experiment, though. I might have to play around with it.

  • Links

    Just a collection of links to things I like and/or found amusing recently.

  • Stump Wikipedia

    I think we should start a new game: “What Can’t You Find on Wikipedia?”, or, alternatively, “Stump Wikipedia”. Seriously, they have over 1.4 million articles now, and it keeps going up. Is there a ceiling?

    Although you have to stick to real subjects… you can’t punch something in like “nitrate waffles” and expect a legitimate response. (See Googlewhacking if that’s the game you want to play.)

    Of course, the irony here is even if someone were to find such a subject, that person or another could immediately create a new article for it… thereby negating the point.

    So how soon before Wikipedia becomes sentient?

  • Akismet

    I’ve started using the spam-killing service Akismet to handle comment spam on my three blogs. That, and instituted a basic moderation system for comments. I can’t say as I’ve been dealing with as much comment spam as some people, but I just got sick and tired of dealing with the problem myself and decided to offload the work.

    So far Akismet is pretty slick, though I’d guesstimate that it has only caught 50% or so of the spam comments I’ve received since activating it today. I’m hoping it gets better.

    It took a little bit of work to integrate it into my custom software, but I was able to crib a PHP class someone else had written and get it all integrated fairly smoothly. If you’re running one of the standard platforms like Movable Type or WordPress, though, there already exist handy plugins that you should just be able to drop into your blog directory.

    So if there’s any comment weirdness over the next few days as I monitor the activity and work out the kinks, bear with me. If you post a legitimate comment, it should show up right away, unless it was incorrectly flagged as spam. That’s where the moderation comes in; I’ll make sure to approve legit comments ASAP.