Two Slashes

One question I hear on occasion is whether I think blogging is a dead medium.  With the popularity of sites like Twitter (*cough*) and the recently-purchased Pownce, I can understand the thought process leading to such questions.

Most recently, the question came up in a discussion on a WordPress development mailing list where contributor Paleo Pat voiced his concern for the medium as a whole after having read an older article on Wired.  (My apologies for the link sandwich there, but I figured every breadcrumb needed to be covered.)

The Wired article essentially states that blogging is dead and that people who contribute or develop them are merely wasting their time at this point:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

The sheer number of platforms available (WordPress, Movable Type, hlscript (and the Justin Frankel/Cockos fork hl--), and Expression Engine, just to name a few) mean that just about anybody with a few dollars in their pocket (to pay for hosting, of course) can get set up with a blog of their own.  And if even the money is an issue, there are even services willing to take care all of the setup for free (a la WordPress, Blogger, and Vox, for starters) at the cost of some level of customization or fine-tuning.

Wired seems to complain that providing easier access and offering more choices are akin to lowering the standards required to put your story online, but I see this as enabling, not hindering.  Why shouldn’t somebody with a few intelligent things to say be able to get their voice out without having to spend three years learning to manage a webserver on the weekend?  Who decided that bloggers should have a diverse acronym dictionary of various web technologies like PHP, CGI, and FTP as mandatory requirements for putting their words online?

Also worth taking a look at are the uses of a blog compared to Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr (as suggested above).  Flickr is a social photography site, not a place to rant about the trivialities of life, which makes that a poor substitute for the real thing.  Also, not everybody is a photographer; while undoubtedly some people will find a level of self-expression and communication through posting and browsing through images, that leaves a huge gap for people to be left out.  Facebook is a social networking site to keep in touch with your peers.  While some people tend to use Facebook as an off-scale blogging platform, “notes” (as Facebook refers to them) are not the real thing, and people tend to ignore them once their friends start cloning the childish surveys that people abandoned MySpace to avoid.  (The ability to post a new note for everything in a given RSS feed is a little amusing, too.) And Twitter…well, let’s just say that this post wouldn’t fit in 140 characters, and that some things are best left elaborated upon rather than compressed to fit such a limit.

Of course there are going to be people aiming to make money from their blog, but that’s just about typical of anything these days.  If you want to make money from your car, you would convert it into a taxi, correct?  Now, look at the number of cabs and compare that with the overall number of automobiles.  It’s a small ratio, right?  I don’t see how blogging is any different.  And on a related note (also mentioned in the Wired article), you’re going to have to deal with people who start riots.  “Insult commenters” are a part of everything, although sometimes they go by different names.  Is the point of a blog to escape them?   No.  You hear about all the people who throw paint at people wearing fur clothes; their statement may be physically destructive, so be happy you’re just dealing with a sharp-tongued snake.

Is blogging dead?  Not by a long shot.  It’s just that times change, and people need to learn to adapt to the available mediums.  Blogging isn’t the expression catch-all it once was, but it still has its purposes.

What do you think?  As usual, comments are invited (encouraged, actually).  If you vote, perhaps explain why you voted the way you did?

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I figured I’d try a different approach for once and see where that got me.

Given the sheer number of products and services we hear about on a daily basis, it’s easy enough to forget the ones that couldn’t quite reach out and make themselves a universally-known (in some cases, literally) entity.  But that doesn’t mean they are any less deserving of our attention.  For your enjoyment, here are some of what I believe to be the most amusing failures I can recall throughout the history of technology.

• (Swatch) Internet Time - If there’s one thing we definitely have enough of here on Earth, it’s time zones and ways to tell time.  Time zones, 12- and 24-hour time, daylight savings time…  Alright, listing that is boring, and having to take all of that into account while talking with people on the other side of the world is like taking a needle to your eye.  Swatch, being the omniscient corporate entity they obviously were, decided that all of this could be resolved with the introduction of an arbitrary standard called Internet Time.  Internet Time divided the day into 1000 equal parts of about a minute and a half apiece and was designed to be consistent across the globe to eliminate the need for time zones.  However, when you take into the account the fact that this was introduced just as the Internet was becoming mainstream, the issue with scheduling things in “blips” with people who have no idea what you’re talking about makes you look like a fool to the majority of the world, there’s no standard for writing the day (just the time), and the fact that ‘@’ was (and still is) most often recognized as part of an e-mail address, it’s not hard to see why Internet Time never made it to the big time.  (Sorry, pun intended.)
• Cuil - I wrote about Cuil once already, and I got quite a bit of feedback both here and on Twitter about it.  But for those who aren’t in the know, or haven’t seen my previous post about it, Cuil was touted at one point as the Google-killer, the end-all-be-all to searching.  Backed by some venture capital and a few of the genius minds who helped shape Google, Cuil was supposed to redefine what a search engine was.  Instead, it ended up showing just how pointless it was to try and humiliate Google right out of the starting gate.
• Microsoft’s Seinfeld Ad Campaign - Microsoft insists that the ads were intentionally about nothing (after saying that they were supposed to be a longer marketing campaign), but if that were the case, why were they produced in the first place?  I’m sure Jerry Seinfeld has plenty enough to do without helping Bill Gates try on shoes.  The only reason I can think of for this travesty even ever being unveiled was because Bill had some random “Things To Do Before I Leave Microsoft” list which was topped by making a pointless ad campaign with Jerry Seinfeld.  Well, Bill, now that you’ve got your wish, “What pointless thing would you like to do today?”
• Online Currency - Just as with Swatch’s idea of converting everyone to a unified time platform, several companies thought the way of the future was to develop “online currency” that could be used as an alternative to the real thing.  Get some credits for visiting a website?  No problem.  Viewing an ad?  Why not?  Want to buy something or send some money to that far-off relative?  Why not send them some e-money rather than worry about things like exchange rates, especially since retailers accept this mock currency as a legitimate form of payment.  It sounds like it might have been a good idea, had they put some thought into why they sounded just like they were illegally printing their own money and then corrected it.  I think I’ll stick with Paypal, as at least they keep my currency in US dollars.
• Lively - It’s curious enough that I should have something from Google on this list, but Google never expected to be knocked onto their backside when they launched their answer to Second Life with little fanfare and little reason for anyone using Second Life (especially those investing in the game) to make the jump.  Lively shuts its doors at the end of the year (so it’s not dead yet), but being the top performer in one area doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be the greatest elsewhere.
• The Phantom - An apt name for this ghost of a console, The Phantom is perhaps the precursor to the downloadable content now available from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.  In short, The Phantom was designed to be a console that acquired games over the web, eliminating the need for pressed disks, cartridges, and whatever other physical delivery method you can think of.  Unfortunately, the product never reached fruition, and the only part of their work to make it to market was their excuse for a keyboard.
• Windows ME - Alright, so it’s probably unfair to have two items by the same company on this list, but I really think that Microsoft managed to outdo themselves by even bothering to ship Windows ME.  Having spent several years living having to deal with this monstrosity, I can tell you that Microsoft should have thought ahead and given everyone prescriptions for headache medication with every license.  Between ME and Vista, I’m beginning to believe that Microsoft’s business model is to release a stable, usable operating system as a quick follow-up to versions that create plenty of uproar.  (See ME v. XP, Vista v. Windows 7.)
• Disposable (”Rental”) DVDs - What does fruit have in common with a DVD?  If you said that they both can rot, you’re not far off.  Who would have thought that people didn’t like the idea of paying for movies that expired like produce?  (I’d like to add that this idea seems to come up quite often; while The Register reports that the idea was spawned earlier this year, I distinctly recall Disney running a pilot program a few years ago.)

Do you have any other failures you’d like to bring into the limelight?  Is there something I’m forgetting, or do you think one of these is more worthy than the others?  Or, alternatively, is there something you believe to be one of the greatest developments since sliced bread?  Leave a shout in the comments and vote for your favorite.

(Also, I do believe I owe some thanks to The_Ugster for a suggestion or two.)

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Over the past few days, some of the more popular postings that seem to appear on Digg end up having to do with Google’s search suggestion feature.  While the intentions of these suggestions are entirely noble, they can also be used both to prove the skewed nature of today’s society and the inherent “security” that people seem to derive from their use of the Internet nowadays.  Interested, I decided to do a few queries of my own and see what they resulted in (images linked so you can peruse them at your own leisure and discretion; they’re screen captures directly from Google):

• “Why shouldn’t…”
• “Is it possible for…”
• “Where in the world…” *
• “Who can…”
• “Is this a…” and “Is this an…”

I suppose, in a sense, this is a reasonable way to gauge the intimate levels with which we as a culture seem to have lifted from the Internet.  Some of the types of search queries that are suggested are of the same caliber as those one might ask privately to someone such as a counselor, and many are quite surprising.  Other queries also suggest what some of the common thoughts and concerns of the public are; given that the U.S. presidential elections have just ended, it’s not surprising to see that a few of my images mention the candidates, voting, or the current economic instability.

The mere fact that people are willing to accept the advice of complete strangers, without qualification or question and as found by a search engine with little more intelligence than a walnut, and trusting enough to ask these questions of a headless, emotionless entity in the first place suggests both that people are too insecure with themselves and their peers to confide their deepest secrets in other human beings and that they believe that the research they glean for their issue from the Internet is the best help they can get given this insecurity.

With all of this in mind, it’s not hard to connect that this blind trust, if you will, is perhaps one of the reasons such problems as spyware and phishing even exist.  If people were trained not to have this trust, but instead more of a distrust for machine and what comes out of it (and as a result of this training, develop an attraction to the warmth and individual attention that defines humanity), we would be able to eliminate a vast majority of the “evils” afoot.  Such training might even teach people enough about their privacy that they won’t turn their social networking profiles into flagrant and public advertisements of their misdeeds.  (If such training were to include the repeated usage of my favorite quote (”Trust is a weakness.”), I would be impressed.)

As kids, there’s no doubt that one of your mother/stepmother/grandmother/guardian’s favorite things to say was, “Don’t talk to strangers.”  The computer, although at this point a staple of nearly every technologically advanced household, may not be an intelligent and sentient being to talk to, but people forget that their computer has conversations of its own.  And, based on some of those Google suggestions, it’s telling everyone some of the things you might not want publicized at any cost.

* Alright, I added this one mostly as a joke.  Interestingly enough though, the top result is NOT what I was expecting.