loose wire blog

The Toolbar Community

I’m really intrigued by the return of the toolbar. Only now it’s not a toolbar. It’s more of a ribbon that appears in your browser on certain sites. Facebook started it but have oddly put it at the bottom of the screen:

Facebook Connect, which I was so rude about yesterday, extends this idea.

NYT has just launched its own TimesPeople (above) which allows you to see what friends who are also registered with the service are recommending.

The whole idea, of course, is to keep eyeballs on the site in question by building a community around it. If I get suggestions from people I like/trust then I’m more likely to read them than if the NYT recommends them.

Facebook Connect takes this a stage further. Instead of the community being within the site itself, it’s an external community—on Facebook—that moves with the user. In essence it leverages the Facebook community you already have so third party sites can profit from that: If I like something on a Facebook Connect site, then my Facebook buddies will all trot along and read it.

All this is a good idea if you are a website. Media sites like NYT are fighting the mobility of information—the fact that it’s just as likely I’ll read a NYT piece off their website as on it. (Either through an RSS reader, or because someone has cross-posted it or part of it.) What all websites want to do is to keep their readers within the site, and building a community is a good way to do that.

The toolbar is a useful way to do this, since the technology now is available to do this pretty well (TimesPeople’s bugginess aside) without the user having to install anything. If you don’t want the toolbar you can get rid of it easily.

Facebook’s own toolbar is also pretty unobtrusive. Facebook Connect is more intrusive, at least in its introduction, but has received mostly positive reviews. Once signed in you’ll be able to see your friends who are on the same site, and their friends, and hook up with other Facebook users who are on the site. Privacy is an issue here: Do you want your boss to see you pop up on a celebrity site in the middle of the workday?

That aside, a pattern for the future emerges pretty clearly: media companies believe they’ve found a way to differentiate themselves from smaller outfits—blogs, basically—and to build on their volume of content by encouraging communities within their walled gardens. NYT may be big enough to do this: If I visit the NYT site to read a story, I would consider it a useful service to see a list of stories recommended by my NYT buddies.

But it’s still a pain to have to build yet another community around you for each site that offers the service. This is where Facebook Connect comes in. Don’t build a new community; just bring your Facebook community with you.

Community companies lke Facebook are happy to help them build that because they are not creating content themselves, and they have found there’s not enough within their sites to monetise sufficiently. So they have something media companies want to buy—readymade communities of shared interest who can act as recommendation engines to make their websites more sticky.

Facebook etc are so much more powerful and monetisable, in short, if they’re not wedded to the website. That for now means other websites, but of course down the road it could mean physical space too. Think Facebook on your location-aware iPhone able to find books in a shop recommended by your friends, perhaps?

Whether my Facebook community is quite as transferable as it may seem is the question. I have a lot of good friends on Facebook, but I’m not sure our interests overlap that much. In fact, I’d say I’ve got several overlapping online communities of friends and acquaintances, some better suited to others for this kind of thing. My twitter community is little different to my plurk community, to my LinkedIn community and my Facebook community.

Still, TimesPeople is an interesting start.

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Updater Fever

I sometimes wonder what software companies—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, they’re all the same—want from their customers.

I spend enough time with novice users to know how confusing using computer software can be. Especially online: It’s a scary world out there (they’re right to be scared) but these companies, which should know better, make it more so. By trying to hoodwink into using their products they are undermining users’ confidence in using computers in the first place. If they keep on doing this, expect more people to use computers less—and certainly to install less software, or experiment in any way online or off.

Take what just happened. I use Windows Live Writer to blog: it’s an excellent program, by far the best things Microsoft has done in years, and today it prompted me that an update was available. I duly clicked on the link to download the Writer beta installer:

Only, of course, it wasn’t the installer but The Installer From Hell:

Prechecked are six programs, none of which I have on my computer right now. There’s no single button to uncheck those boxes, and most novice users may not even know they can (note the confusing text above it: “Click each program name for details” and “Choose the programs you want to install”—nothing to explain to novices that these choices have already been made for you, and how to unchoose them.)

It’s not as if Microsoft is trying to sell us smack. This is free software. But it’s very damaging in ways only someone who spends time with real people can understand. Even when the software is installed for example, you get this last little twist of the Knife of Befuddlement:

This might not seem like much, but if you’re an ordinary user, finding your home page all different and your search engine altered to something else can be as disorienting as coming home to find someone’s moved your furniture and the cooker is now in the bathroom. Well, not quite that much, but you get the idea.

Of course Microsoft’s not alone in this. Even Google’s been playing the game, and Yahoo! tries to bundle the toolbar in with pretty much every piece of software that’s ever been downloaded--which also alters the homepage, and default search engine, and probably moves the fridge around as well.

The problem is that the more these companies try to fool us, the easier it is for real scammers to scam us—because what they both do starts to look very similar.

Take this scam that I came across this morning. A splog (spam blog—a fake blog) had used some of my material so when I tried to access the page to find out why, I instead got this believable looking popup

This without me doing anything other than clicking on a link to a blog. A graphic in the background appeared to be checking the computer for viruses, and of course this window is nigh on impossible to get rid of. Try clicking on the red cross and you get this:

Try to get rid of that and you get this:

And then this:

It’s obviously a scam (it’s adware), but it’s darned hard to get rid of. And to the ordinary user (by which I mean someone who has a real life, and therefore doesn’t see this kind of thing as intrinsically interesting) there’s no real difference between the trickery perpetrated by these grammatically challenged scammers, and the likes of Microsoft et al, who try to inveigle their software and homepage/search engine preferences into your computer.

Either way, the ordinary user is eventually going to tire of the whole thing and say “enough!” and go out fishing or, if it’s that time of year, wassailing.

Let’s try to avoid that.

(And yes, the latest version Live Writer is good, though don’t use the spellchecker. Just a shame that it’s made by Microsoft.)

Is New Media Ready for Old Media?

I’m very excited by the fact that newspapers are beginning to carry content from the top five or so Web 2.0/tech sites. These blogs (the word no longer seems apt for what they do; Vindu Goel calls them ‘news sources’) have really evolved in the past three years and the quality of their coverage, particularly that of ReadWrite Web, has grown in leaps and bounds. Now it’s being carried by the New York Times.

A couple of nagging questions remain, however.

1) Is this old media eating new media, or new media eating the old? On the surface this is a big coup for folk like ReadWriteWeb—which didn’t really exist three years ago—but look more closely, and I suspect we may consider this kind of thing as the beginning of the acknowledgement by old media that they have ceded some important ground that they used to dominate. This, in short, marks the recognition of traditional media that theses news sources are, to all intents and purposes, news agencies that operate on a par with, and have the same values as, their own institutions.

2) Is new media ready for old media? I have a lot of respect for ReadWriteWeb, and most of the other tech sites included in this new direction. But they all need to recognise that by participating with old media they need to follow the same rules. There’s no room for conflicts of interest here: Even the NYT has reported on potential conflicts of interest for Om Malik and Michael Arrington (here’s a great piece from The Inquistr about the issue, via Steve Rubel’s shared Google Reader feed.)

The thing with conflicts of interest is that they’re tough. It’s hard to escape them. And it’s not enough to disclose them. You have, as a writer (let’s not say journalist here, it’s too loaded a word, like blogger), a duty to avoid conflicts of interest. Your commitment as a writer has to be to your reader. If your reader doesn’t believe that you’re writing free of prejudice or favor, then you’re a hack. And I don’t mean that in a nice way.

Which means you have to avoid not only all conflicts of interest, but appearances of conflict of interest. Your duty is not just to disclose conflicts of interest, and potential conflicts of interest, but to avoid them. If that means making less money, then tough.

So, for these ‘news sources’, the issue is going to become a more central one. Of course, the question will grow larger as these outfits move mainstream. But it may become more pressing for the carrier of the news, not for the provider: Who, say, accepts responsibility for errors and conflicts of interest? NYT and The Washington Post, or the carriers of the news? I’m sure there will be lots of caveats in the small print, but if material is on the NYT website, I think a reader would assume it reflects that paper’s ethical standards. If you’re in doubt, think of the recent United Airlines case.

That story’s reappearance started on Google News, and then was picked up by Income Securities Advisors, a financial information company, which was then picked up by Bloomberg. The technical error was Google’s, in finding it on a newspaper website and miscategorising it  as new, but the human error was in the ‘news source’, which saw it and then fired it off to their service, which is distributed via Bloomberg. Who is to blame for that mess? Well, the focus is all on Google, but to me the human element is the problem here, namely the reporter/writer who failed to double check the source/date etc of the piece itself.

The bottom line? It’s great that old media are recognising the quality of new media. What I want to see is this rising tide lifting all boats. Old media needs to not only grab at these news sources out of desperation but learn from their ingenuity, easy writing style and quality, and these outfits need—or at least some of them need—to take a cue from old media, take a look long and hard at themselves and ask themselves whether they could serve their readers better by shedding all conflicts—real, potential, or perceived—of interest.

The Splog Thickens

I was amused, and somewhat perplexed, to read on BuzzMachine yesterday about a bizarre splog—spam blog to the rest of us—which copies text and then converts it to synonyms. Jeff explains: 

New splog tricks

In my ego searches, I just saw a splog that copied text of mine but ran it through ridiculous almost-synonym replacements. I’m assuming this is done to fool Google into thinking it is original content and perhaps to fool the text cops folks like the AP hire.

I still can’t quite work out what the function of this is. But I did come across another one on one of my own ego searches. It took me a bit of time to figure out where it came from. (It’s from Betsy Weber’s blog.)

Here’s the splog text, with the original in italics first. My questions:

• How the hell does group become “Washington entranceway”?
• and member become “sorority girl”?
• I kind of like the fact that loose wire blog has become “Unfixed Twist Blog” and the WSJ has become the “Commodity Exchange Annual”;
• But somehow which you can see here became “which her philander play against hither”.
• And the last two paragraphs are so full of weirdness I don’t know where to start.

Join the New Screencast Group on Facebook

Clique with the Untouched Screencast Colligate in reference to Facebook

Are you addicted to Facebook like I am? I recently joined and find myself checking my Facebook page daily! Facebook is a great way to keep up with friends all over the world. Anyone can join Facebook for free.

Are them addicted up to Facebook freak out on You double sideband? Yourselves before heaped and decree myself checking my Facebook serve weekly newspaper! Facebook is a severe want as far as bear in cooperation with friends under the sun the people. Anyone heap up build up Facebook so footloose.

I was excited to see that Amit Agarwal from the Digital Inspiration Blog recently started a new group in Facebook all about Screencasting (link will not work unless you are a member of Facebook). I'm excited to learn and swap tips with fellow members in the group. I'm in very good company - I know expert screencasters, Beth Kanter and Long Zheng have joined the group. Plus, technology expert Jeremy Wagstaff of the Loose Wire Blog and Wall Street Journal is in there too! Remember Jeremy? He wrote a great directory of screencast resources which you can see here.

I was chafing over against run in that Amit Agarwal off the Radical Direct communication Blog previously started a fashionable Washington entranceway Facebook all nigh about Screencasting (deduction plan not lick excepting alter are a sorority girl re Facebook). Ba'm fidgety into go into training and trading tips with fellow members fellow feeling the peer group. Ba'm in very noble cohort- I savvy technical expert screencasters, Beth Kanter and Unrelenting Zheng force twin the collect. And, craft informed in Jeremy Wagstaff re the Unfixed Twist Blog and Commodity exchange Annual is ultra-ultra there inter alia! Think back Jeremy Yourselves wrote a commanding business directory upon screencast capital goods which her philander play against hither.

You cannot access the Screencasting group without being a member on Facebook. But, it's painless to sign up for Facebook. Click here to register. And, if you join, feel free to add me as a friend!

You cannot access the Screencasting dig up except existing a belonger wherewith Facebook. Unless that, ego's Mickey Mouse so do a tour in behalf of Facebook. Go as of now up bound. And, if number one knit, glance freely in contemplation of figure out you now a playmate!

Hope to see you join Facebook and in the Screencasting group to share your tips and tricks! Now I have an excuse to go into Facebook while at work. ;-)

Hope into smell subliminal self link up Facebook and in the Screencasting detail up to quantum your tips and tricks! The present hour Better self buy an breast-beating up to talk Facebook lastingness at advanced work.

So could someone explain the point of these? There are no ads on the page—it’s a WordPress.com blog, so there can’t be. And, more importantly, what kind of synonym engine are these guys using?

I’m off to register unfixedtwist.com and, while I’m at it, numberoneknit.com.

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » New splog tricks

Technorati Tags: splogs,synonyms,buzzmachine,spam,blogs,blogging

Filtering Communications So They Don't Drive Us Mad

A dear friend was supposed to drop something off around 11 pm last night. I turn in around that time, so I just nodded off. Luckily I didn't hear her SMS come in around 1 am. But I could have. I consider the phone the primary communications device--if someone has an emergency, that's how they're going to reach me--and so you can't really close it off. But how do you filter out stuff like my ditzy friend SMS-ing me at 1 am to tell me that after all she's not going to drop something off?

In short, how can we set up filters on our communications channels so they don't drive us mad?

One is not to give out your phone number. I keep a second prepaid phone around and I give that number, and that number only, to people I do business with. That phone gets turned off on weekends and evenings. I often don't answer a cellphone call if I don't recognise the number; if it's important enough, I figure they'll SMS me first, or else they'll already be on my contact list.

Another is to confine and contain online. I don't accept contacts on Facebook unless I've met them in person (and like them.) Everyone else I point to LinkedIn. I've noticed a lot of people are now following me (and everyone else, it seems; I'm not special) on Twitter so I've scaled that back to 'public' observations.

Indeed, Web 2.0 hasn't quite resolved this issue: We've been campaigning to bring down those walled gardens, but we've failed to understand that garden walls (ok, fences) make good neighbors.

Email is still a burden: I'm still getting a ton of stuff I didn't ask for, including press releases from UPS, just because I once complained to them about something, and stuff from a PR agency touting posts on a client's blog (that's pretty lame, I reckon. What would one call that? "My-Client-Just-Blogged Spam"?)

One way I've tried to limit incoming stuff is through a page dedicated to PR professionals. I then point anyone interested in pitching to me to that page. I'm amazed by how few people who bother to read it, but I'm also amazed at how good the pitches are by those that do. (And of course, I then feel bad that I don't use their painstakingly presented material.)

I like this from Max Barry, author of Jennifer Government, who gives out his email address but says If you put the word "duck" in your subject (e.g. "[duck] Why you're an idiot"), it's less likely to be accidentally junked. What a great idea.

Then there's simple things that help to keep the noise level down: Subscribe to twitter on clients like Google Talk and you can turn it on and off just by typing, well, on or off. (You can also turn on and off individuals, so if scoble is getting a bit too much for you, just type 'off scoble'. I've always wanted to be able to do that.)

I'd like to see more and better filtering so we don't have to succumb to the babble.

Stuff I'd like to see:

• Phones that change ringtone or volume after a certain time unless they're from some key numbers.
• SMS autoreturns, that say "The person you sent this message to is asleep. If you need to wake him/her, please enter this code and resend. Be aware that if the message is not urgent or an offer of money/fame/sexual favors you may face disembowelment by the recipient."
• Oh, and while I'm at it, the ability to opt out of Facebook threads if they lose your interest.

And, finally, a way to turn down friends and contacts from my communication channels without them knowing. A great service, in my view, would be one that appeared to authorise their requests to be your buddies, but didn't. Call it faux-thorising.

Technorati Tags: facebook, privacy, communications, web 2.0, pr, email, filters, filtering, sms spam, phones, sms, cellphones, ringtones

The First Casualty

The discovery of three suitcases of negatives belonging to Robert Capa has raised hopes that, once and for all, the authenticity of his famous photograph of a falling Spanish Replubican soldier will be settled. Some believe the photo was staged (Philip Knightley, in particular, has made it an article of faith), as this piece from Reuters highlights:

Still unknown, however, is whether the famed 1936 photograph of "The Falling Soldier," which shows a Republican soldier at the moment a bullet strikes him down, is among those in the three battered cases, some now held together with black tape and known collectively as "the Mexican suitcase."

Lingering questions about whether the picture might have been staged could be answered by the negatives, which are said to be in very good condition.

In fact, the truth behind this picture has already been established with some degree of certainty, and actually offers some salutory lessons we could still absorb in this New Media age.

Robert Whelan, Capa's biographer, has written extensively of his search to authenticate the photo. His PBS version is here, in which he establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that the photo is real; the man's name, the place, and the way he died. But, intriguingly, some bits are left out of that account, perhaps for reasons of space, and appear only in this version [PDF], which I found on an Italian photographers' website. (It seems to be a revised version of a piece Whelan wrote for Aperture magazine.)

It turns out the truth is somewhat murkier. There seems little doubt the man had been shot, and that he was dead when the photo was taken. The semi-closed position of his left hand suggests this, since anyone intentionally falling would reflexively open it to catch his fall):

 

Whelan assembles other evidence to identify the place, the person and the actual incident.

The photo wasn't staged, but the fact that the man was standing on the hillside, with Capa about to photograph him, was. Hansel Mieth, another Life photographer, wrote to Whelan that Capa and the soldiers had been "fooling around. We felt good. There was no shooting. They came running down the slope. I ran too and knipsed.” And although Capa denied to Mieth that he had asked them to stage the attack, he had "implied that he felt at least partially responsible for the man’s death - a feeling that he naturally did not wish to make public, and so he altered various details in his several accounts of the circumstances in which he had made his photograph."

If shown in context with the other photographs in the batch, it's clear that Capa had been asking them to stage certain manoeuvers for him to take photographs, and that their activities and shooting had attracted the attention of an enemy machine gun.

In some ways the photo must have been agony for Capa. On the one hand it became not only his most famous shot (even more famous than his Normandy landing shot) but also the defining icon of war. But the truth is that it was of a man standing still on a hillside in good humour, obliging a photographer, unaware he was in enemy sights.

So what are the lessons?

• The truth matters. Some have suggested it doesn't matter whether the photo was staged. It does. This kind of thinking has always confused me; when I investigated a story about Internet photographs of rape victims from the Indonesian riots in 1998, a lot of those hosting the alleged photos said it didn't matter; what mattered, they said, was whether the rapes occurred. I couldn't disagree more; what matters is whether the reader/viewer can be sure that what they're seeing/reading is what it purports to be. This is even more important now with the Blurring of Branding, where we are as likely to get our information from individual-run blogs as we are from big media.
• The truth is always murkier than we imagine it is. I would have thought Philip Knightley, who wrote The First Casualty about war correspondents, might have dug deeper on this, given the book has gone through countless revisions. Whelan's work on Capa is by contrast a model of tireless investigation and I believe that he's gotten as close to the truth of this photograph as we could hope to get.
• Staging anything is dangerous. Capa may have felt partially responsible for his death although he may not have really been so. But anyone who has been in a situation where they've moved an ornament, asked someone to pose in a doorway, encouraged a guerrilla to check out the next hill against his better judgement, must know the feeling: any kind of interfering may lead to unforeseen consequences. The best, the only, course of action is never to interfere and never to suggest to a subject, whether as a journalist or photographer, to do anything they weren't about to do anyway. Capa carried that burden for the rest of his short life. Any journalist, citizen or otherwise, must be aware of that.

Technorati Tags: journalism, new media, citizen journalism, media, truth, robert capa, photography, photojournalism, accuracy

Stumbling Into the Future

Listening to Mark Anderson's predictions for the coming year on the BBC World Service with Peter Day. A lot of his stuff is spot on, and what I've been thinking (a lot less coherently):

• Small portable computers -- he's talking about the Samsung Q1, but he could also be talking about the Nokia N95 of the Asus Eee PC. He says that there's research showing a 7" x 9" screen is the optimum size for users to absorb and handle information. I haven't seen that, but I think there's definitely a sweet spot there, at least for users on the road (where we tend not to need to handle large amounts of data, instead focusing on what's next up the pipe -- that meeting, that story, whatever. What I think will be most interesting, though, is when the screen can adapt to the situation or environment -- a foldable screen that can fit your seat size, expanding when you need it to something much bigger. 
• Revolt by users over privacy issues. I think ex-Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, as ever, is through his dabbling with a Plaxo screen-scraping tool, finding out before the rest of us that what we thought was our data, isn't. (This isn't strictly true; Facebook does allow you to export your friends' data via a third party app called FriendCSV.) Anderson's point was that people don't like things like Facebook's Beacon, which monitored users' activity on participating websites, but I think bigger will be people's growing realisation that all the time they've spent on Facebook isn't easily transferable. 
• Pervasive Internet: It won't be a big thing. It'll just be there, a place where we store and find stuff. A key element in this is flat rates for cellular data. It's beginning to happen, but I still get a real shock when I see my cellphone bill. Speed is also an issue.

Of course, he said all this much better, and understands the wider context (oil prices, that kind of thing). But it's good to know someone who charges $600 for a newsletter to the likes of Bill Gates isn't that far off in his thinking from a minnow like me.

Technorati Tags: scoble, plaxo, mark anderson, future, 2008, mobile computing, cellphones, mobile data, pervasive computing, facebook, privacy

The Inanities of the Visionary

I have a lot of respect for Doris Lessing but her recent remarks about the Internet reveal an ignorance and lack of understanding that is depressing and unbecoming of such a literary giant. Here's what she said in her acceptance speech for the Nobel prize for literature:

We never thought to ask how will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging.

Frankly, I'm not sure Ms. Lessing knows what blogging is. And I am also one of those people who are concerned that the Internet is changing our society in ways we haven't thought through. But it's certainly not killing reading, learning and writing. In fact the opposite: the Internet is actually offering us so much information, and so much knowledge, the problem now is being able to judge what is important and what is not, and to retain a sense of mystery about the world.

If we can look down from heaven on any point of the globe via Google Earth, if we can look up any fact on Wikipedia, if we can communicate with any person in any country via voice for free via Skype, if we can listen to any radio station on the planet (and watch 100s of different tv channels) or read more or less any newspaper, if we can read tens of thousands of different books for free via Project Gutenberg, not to mention hundreds of thousands of excellent blogs, I can't really see what is "inane" about the Internet.

Ms. Lessing is concerned that amidst all this online inanity, books will die. Of course books won't die. Books as books (pbooks) won't die. They come in a form that has proved perfect for their content. They will also be available as ebooks, too, and in forms we can't yet imagine or create.

The point is that writing will continue. Online it may be shorter -- but not always -- and it may be interspersed with other media. But I would say that there are more people reading and writing now than any time in history. As Ms. Lessing herself says, according to The Guardian's Maev Kennedy:

She contrasted her experiences in Zimbabwe and other parts of Africa, where people were hungry and clamouring for books even though they might have no food, where schools might not have a single book and a library might be a plank seat under a tree.

In a way the Internet is the solution to this kind of problem; in some ways it's easier to bring knowledge to people and institutions via the Internet than by bringing them books. Or, failing that, bringing them the single biggest repository of free, community-based knowledge in the world: Wikipedia -- printed out, or put on a CD-Rom and given via a refurbished $100 PC. I don't think that the One Laptop Per Child idea is necessarily the correct way to go about it, but I do believe on the whole the Internet has brought people in the developing world closer to knowledge than any physical library ever has.

I'm sad that Ms. Lessing, who has been considered a social radical and has written some great science fiction, has not seen the Internet for what it is: a great leveller, redistributor and repository of information and knowledge.

( PS I just looked up dorislessing.com and dorislessing.co.uk: the first is up for auction (and sports a picture of a young woman in white with a white laptop in a white chair; definitely not Doris Lessing) and the second redirects to a radio and TV tuning website where you can tune in to dozens of radio and TV stations. Meanwhile anyone online wanting to know about her can find it on Wikipedia. It all seems somehow fitting.)

 

Nobel prize winner Lessing warns against 'inane' internet | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Books

Technorati Tags: doris lessing, lessing, nobel, internet, future, wikipedia, gutenberg project, OLPC, skype, google earth

Sleazy Linkers Lose An Ally

Seems as if there's a bit of a groundswell building against internal links, which I got all upset about a few months ago. (internal linking is where you place a link on a word like, say, Google, but instead of actually linking to Google you link to another page on your own blog about Google.) Amit from Digital Inspiration points out that

Valleywag, the Silicon Valley gossip blog that everyone hates but still reads, always practiced excessive internal linking but good sense prevailed at Gawker and they have suddenly changed that habit.

Amit also points to Shane at the Daily Telegraph, who is complaining about the same practice. Etre.com points out how brazen TechCrunch are at doing it, but points out that Mashable and Engadget continue to do so.

I find it personally annoying because I tend to drag links into PersonalBrain or elsewhere and expect a link that says 'Flock' to go to Flock. But it's also dishonest, like putting an EXIT sign over a door in a shop which instead goes into another part of the shop. It's against the principles of the net, and, frankly, tells me that something is wrong in the state of Web 2.0 if this kind of thing is considered acceptable or even good practice.

What to do? Maybe a name-and-shame list until these recalcitrants start respecting the intelligence of their readers?

A Lesson from Valleywag - Good Linking Etiquettes | India Inc.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: techcrunch, valleywag, web2.0, sleaze, links

Software That Plays Tag

This week's WSJ.com column (subscription only, I'm afraid) is about Jiglu, a sort of automatic tagging service you can see in action somewhere on this blog:

If you're a writer, you hope your words will be etched in stone for eternity. If you're a blogger, you're happy if someone stumbles on your writings a few days after you posted them. Blogs, partly because they often consist mainly of commentary on things that have just happened, and partly because of the way they are structured (most recent postings first, making it easy to ignore everything you wrote before), are a transient medium. Rarely is a blog post treated as permanent. We write, then we forget.

The problem, I conclude, is that amidst all the writing, and despite the power of tagging

Blog posts, left to themselves, tend to have a short shelf life.

Briton Nigel Cannings thinks he has the solution to this: automatic tagging. He sees value in all those old blog posts of mine (he may be the only one) and reckons all that old content out there is a repository of wisdom that just needs to be sorted out better. Tagging it ourselves, he thinks, just isn't enough because we don't always see what we've written in a broader context. "Manual tagging is the first step" to sorting and storing blogs and other online content better, he says, "but it still relies upon people understanding themselves, whatever they've already written about, and how their content fits in with other people's content."

More at Loose Wire - WSJ.com.

Technorati Tags: tagging, jiglu, tags