Our new class website has launched. And it’s a portal.
Google succeeded by being just a search and not a portal. The previous version of this site succeeded by being a private forum, not a portal.
So why have I made us a portal? Read on…
When I first started to become upset about PDEng, I remember that one of the ways I considered “taking action” was to set up a publicly-accessible discussion forum that students could participate in.
I knew that students would (mostly) use it anonymously. I knew that the pages of it would begin to show up on Google, polluting the reputation of the program. This, I thought grimly to myself, would force the school’s hand into either a) asking that the forum be shut down, or b) taking genuine action in acknowledging and fixing the various problems with their program.
But I never set it up, and this is why: How could you ever moderate such a discussion? Whether the intention was to discuss actual fixes or simply moan and complain, how could you draw the line on what’s acceptable? Read on…
Take a quick look at the Download.com Top Downloads. Besides the fact that half the products facilitate piracy and the other half clean up spyware, what do you notice about the list?
All of the programs are highly specialized. They each have one task that they do very well.
And yet, when it comes to internet software, we’ve got bloated packages like Mambo and Nuke. They try to be everything to everyone, and end up frustrating for all. Did I miss something? Read on…
Update: This article is missing its diagrams. I’m looking into recovering them.
Tagging. From del.icio.us it has spread like a worm. “Don’t bother with folders or albums or categories, just tag everything.” It’s chaos.
And Zeldman doesn’t like it.
But wait a second– tagging works because it’s simple enough that people actually do it. It’s straightforward. On the class website I administer, the photo gallery is an absolute disaster area because no one knows how to file anything or even where it should go. So in a system that’s supposed to enforce organization, there’s no organization at all. Read on…
Wikipedia is like the future and the past, all at once.
It’s the future of human information. Services like Technorati and Delicious already let you see what’s important to people… Wikipedia just amplifies the effect. What does it mean when the article for a band that doesn’t even exist is almost as long as the article on Ghandi? Read on…
Every kid has heros. And we never really lose them, we just start calling them something more mature-sounding, like ’star’ or ‘role-models’.
I amazes me when I step into someone else’s world and see their heros, how frequently they’re incredible people who I’ve never even heard of.
There are heros in every niche. Ever heard of Jeffrey Zeldman? Go out on the street and ask 100 people who Zeldman is. If you’re a web-developer reading this, you know that The Z is like the founder of modern web design. Hundreds of thousands of professionals and followers read his website every week. But who beyond the field knows that?
What about Kurt Browning? Out of a hundred people, how many would remember that he’s even a figure-skater, much less a four-time world champion? I know this because my sister skates, and through her I have a small window of exposure to that world.
Both a skater and a designer create a work that is an extension of their own personality. Neither is direct, but in watching a marvelous performance or seeing classy design, it’s possible to get a glimpse at the character of its creator.
So what’s the difference between a figure-skating celebrity and an Internet celebrity?
It’s the accessibility. Sports heros and movie stars have publicists and managers and all other sorts of nasty tangles that keep them away from their fans. Yes, you can write them a snail-mail letter and they’ll maybe reply once it’s been screened. But you can’t really have a decent conversation.
Contrast this with the communication available through the Internet. When I had a question for Paul Graham about a controversial statement he’d made in an essay, he sent me a thoughtful reply a few days later. When I was curious about re-release possibilities for The Neverhood, I shot off a quick email to its creator, who shortly responded.
Both of these guys a millionaires. They don’t need to talk to a first-year student. But I enjoy the correspondence, and I’m sure they appreciate hearing from a fan.
Is there a dark side to all this? Sure. It’s clear that the availability of private contact information on the web is a double-edged sword. What does it mean when Shia Labeouf has a MySpace account? It means he’s suddenly directly accessible to his fans… including the creepy stalkers.
Corporations like Microsoft have discovered the value of having bloggers give them a human face. Perhaps more traditionally aloof figures will make themselves available this way. It won’t be for everyone, but imagine the power as a buzz-machine!
Mike
There’s a wonderful fallacy that marketing executives never tire of. It’s written right on the sign outside every McDonald’s restaurant: “Billions and billions served.”
How can billions be wrong? If an opinion is popular enough, does that make it somehow correct? How about moral relativism? If enough people believe something, does that make it right? As someone who believes in an ultimate authority, I have to answer an emphatic no to both of these.
But what about those who do believe what’s dictated by the trend? What about questions on quality of a fast food meal, where the Bible is silent?
The Internet offers a frighteningly powerful way to see what people believe. It’s called Google.
Google is like a gigantic ballot-box. Each ballot has billions of checkboxes on it, and every time one site links to another site, a vote is cast. One site linking to another site is the former lending credibility to the latter. Sites that already have a lot of credibility have more voting power.
The outcome of this is that some of the highest ranking sites on the Internet are blogs. Blogs are constantly linking to each other. Wonder who the most important Matt is in the world? The top 6 are all high-profile bloggers. Matt Damon’s IMDB page clocks in at #8.
If bloggers have the most Pagerank, what does that make them? It makes them the voters in the vast democracy of Google. As we vote for each other, our Pagerank goes up, and as we vote to non-blogs, their Pagerank rises.
But what’s the problem here? Suddenly Google isn’t necessarily reflecting what is accurate; it’s reflecting what is believed by the population… of bloggers.
This can have a tremendous amount of impact. So valuable are the opinions of Google that there’s a whole site for them: Googlism.
Case 1: Try googling the travel-planning company Orbitz. What a mixed-bag this is! We’ve got a scathing review by Maddox, a Paul Graham posting on Lisp, a New Architect case study, and a couple pages about the short-lived Orbitz beverage.
How is someone looking to book a flight supposed to process this? Looking at search results isn’t like checking the BBB. But not everyone knows this.
Case 2: Google Paypal. Ouch! How do they stay in business? Links #2 an #3 are both blistering reports on the company’s practices. And not just single pages, as Maddox’s was, they’re whole communities full of mis-treated customers and tattling employees.
How do companies deal with that; knowing that potential customers are viewing this? On the one hand, it’s great that genuinely problematic companies can be strong-armed into cleaning up their act. However, what about embellished or slanderous reports?
I haven’t got the answer; it’s just one more of those new things that the Internet has brought about.
What’s the lesson here? Google can tell us many things, but as with any resource, the source must always be subject to scrutiny.
Mike
On a lark, I checked my briefly-used GMail account to see what it had accrued in my absence. Of those unfiltered, what I noticed were a large number of spams that followed this general formula:
did you hear abot that little device for decoding all the channels that Myles got last week he says it works real good and he is watching all thes ppv movies and sporting events for nothin…LOL…i thought ya right but it actually does work. check it out if you want at this place [link] but if you dont want thats fine as you can stop by and tell us to not tell you anymore [link]
To be fair to Google, I had deliberately seeded that address to fish for 419ers, the baiting of whom was a hobby I briefly considered engaging in. Several ‘dead’ address books were signed as a wealthy Australian surgeon, with a fat portfolio ready for his retirement.
So… I never knew anyone named Myles, and neither did my Australian alter ego. It’s an interesting approach to spam, because not only does it appear to be in compliance with the CANSPAM regulations, by including unsubscription verbiage, but it’s also actively attempting to defeat statistical analysis without including an obvious body of ‘innocent words’.
Phrases like “last week”, “real good”, and “stop by” probably give this message the green light under current filtering schemes. And frankly, I’m not sure if I want messages that look like [block of informal text + link] to be filtered, because I get a lot of those.
What does the Ultimate Iron-Clad Spam Filter look like? I think what it does is crawl the email for links, visit those sites, and then analyse them for spamminess. Probably even keep a certral index of ’sites that spams link to’, the inclusion of a link to which is the ultimate damnation for a message.
As I’ve written previously, blocking spams by source-IP is not an acceptable solution. However, I think blocking them by destination may just be the silver bullet. Yes, a spammer can buy up 200 domains to rotate through his spams, but when the first couple folks report the mail as junk, they’ll be quickly flagged. And that assumes that the actual text of the site is clean enough to not get flagged by the content-based filter.
Paul Graham suggested that the spam of the future would look like “Hey, check this out: [link]“, but it’s interesting to see that they’re actually beyond that; they’re using harmless language in the actual body of the message in order to couteract the inherent spammyness of including a link.
There may be radically other solutions in the pipe, however, such as the vicious Project Honeypot, which I’m a participant in, having donated a subdomain and installed a honeypot here. Spammers must have nightmares about their harvest bots going awry and scooping up those innocent looking honeypot addresses.
Mike
I’m a licensed owner of Windows XP. It didn’t come with my box, I actually went to a store and bought it. At the time, I was developing a project in Visual Basic, and complete compatibility with XP was one of the design requirements. Win98 and I had good times, but the relationship just couldn’t last. Read on…
Some time ago, I purchased a piece of clothing in support of my favorite web browser. I’ve found that, in an age where everyone and their mother has a PDA or phone, wearing something like this is still a broad announcement of my geekhood to the surrounding environment.
At the same time, it’s a sort of secret code, like tracing a fish in the sand. It’s amazing how wearing it to social functions causes the Wired the reveal themselves to me. Of course, this effect comes in different forms. I spoke with a computer science girl recently who picked up a Google shirt at a trade show and said that it’s the biggest guy-magnet she’s ever discovered. (Although, as she said of females in computer science: “For them, the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”)
On an unrelated note, it came to my attention that a classic Penny Arcade addressed my same DSL frustrations with a little humour and without slandering any particular company.
But then, they slander companies and individuals all the time.
Mike
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