loresjoberg
When all you have is a hammer, a nail, and 95 theses, everything looks like a church door.
February 6, 2010
Tweet of the day
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January 27, 2010
Apple’s latest . . . marketing mis-step
AdRants has a bit of fun with Apple’s choice of name for its latest rapture-of-the-nerds tech device:
Apple Introduces New Feminine Protection Product: The iPad
According to an explosion of tweets following Steve Jobs’ announcement of the iPad, the device’s new name isn’t going over so well:
– For now the iPad’s really exciting, but wait until they release the iTampon
– iPad: You only need to plug it in once a month
– Wow – its the iPad. Wonder if it comes in 2 sizes (maxi and mini)
– I guess it’s Apple’s “time of the month”
– The Apple iPad: for all your heavy (work) flow days
– Our little iPod has hit womanhood
– To recap: the iPad will come with an iRag (to keep it clean) + some iBruprofen (to keep it working smoothly) + iWings (protection plan)
H/T to Virginia Postrel, who wrote “And so the jokes begin…Apple needs more female marketers”.
Update: Francis Turner sent a link to the official announcement photo.
More serious coverage of the new product from The Register.
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December 15, 2009
November 20, 2009
Tweet of the day: “Killing a story”
FakeAPStylebook:
When a story is killed it is worth 45 experience points and drops one item from Treasure Table B.
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November 17, 2009
Is your avatar racist?
For some reason racism is a hot topic at the moment. And not just ordinary racism, online racism seems to be the particularly irritating bee in a lot of bonnets. First, there’s the Twitter matter:
What happened? Last June a thread with the hashtag #thatsafrican became a trending topic. Here are some tweets that appeared with the hashtag, cited by the blog Afrolicious:
#thatsafrican when your last name when your lst name is OD too hard for teachers to pronounce
#thatsafrican if your son is the leader of the free world
#thatsafrican when your mum negotiates the prices of sneakers at footlocker. 99 dollars. come oooon!
#thatsafrican when your ringtone is african queen by 2face. haha!A journalist from the Huffington Post, David Weiner, published a piece “#Thatsafrican — when Twitter went racist?” shortly after the topic was removed from the Twitter stream. He said:
The debate is already raging over the appropriateness of the trend. Is it self-deprecating humour? A cover for racists? Something only Africans and African-Americans can joke about? Something no one should be talking about?
What’s more, it brings into question the role of free speech on Twitter and the company’s role as moderator, or lack thereof. If a popular trend on Twitter is deemed racist, what action is required on the part of the company.
Twitter is not — and cannot be — responsible for what its millions of users post every day on the service. Any hopes that it could do so are technologically unreasonable. Anyone can join Twitter, and there are no particularly difficult hurdles to clear in order to get an account. So Twitter posts can’t be policed in real time, and they can’t be pre-screened through restrictive membership requirements . . . they can only be removed after the fact.
Racism is a particularly difficult topic for Americans, in spite of the last 50 years of improving racial equality. Any conversation that veers toward race-based topics becomes potentially volatile and divisive. In the real world, visual identifiers like skin colour can still cause trouble between individuals. You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue online . . .
On one of my hobby-oriented mailing lists, someone posted a message about a new list covering basically the same topic of interest, but this new list “serves to highlight modeling achievements either personal or hobby-wide amongst minorities and/or people of color”. Ideally, the invitation would be ignored by those to whom it didn’t apply, and followed-up by those to whom it did. But we don’t live in an ideal world:
“This kind of thing is highly inappropriate. We have more than enough politically-inspired, politically-correct nonsense already. I suggest you post your comments elsewhere – perhaps on liberal blogs. Not appropriate here.”
“Weak man. who dies and made you god?”
“Wow. Just wow. Yours is the post that is inappropriate. Bone-headed, really. And completely off-topic for this list. There was nothing political or inappropriate about the original post.”
Okay, so perhaps the discussion dies down now, right? No . . . now the real trolls come out to play
“I hate to break this to you, but the Nam generation may not exactly of had your best interests at heart educational wise. Only the finer dept. stores frequented by northern tourist would have black and white water fountains while the Woolworths down the street did not.
Did they teach you that the “Montgomery Bus company” and one other interstate travel company were the only 2 that ever had Jim Crow.
It was a few rednecks and societal snobs, nothing more.
Your living a lie while empowering a political base that feeds on unrest.”
From that point on, Godwin’s Law is almost certainly going to go into effect quickly.
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November 3, 2009
Being “a bit boring” is part of his shtick
Colby Cosh looks at “Frygate”:
I realize I’m late to the party, but I didn’t find out until today that the remark which made Stephen Fry melt down was that his tweets were “a bit boring.” Really? Look, we all adore Stephen Fry, especially those of us who are ungainly, neurotic, and a little old-fashioned, so I hope someone will explain to him gently that he is a bit boring — not only his tweets, but just all-around. QI wouldn’t have a premise in the first place if it weren’t somewhat difficult to be interesting; Kingdom was served with rather overgenerous lashings of scenery and mopeyness; and Fry’s impeccable gadget reviews, considered strictly as entertainment, would try the patience of anyone who doesn’t add up the grocery bill in hexadecimal. Being just a little boring — presenting the perpetual risk that he might go on just a little too long about number theory or the battle of Stamford Bridge — is essential to the unostentatious delightfulness of Stephen Fry, just as a soupçon of boringness is essential to the charm of a warm woollen sweater or a newspaper comic strip. (OK, bad example. No newspaper comic strips now being printed possess any charm at all.) Nobody needs Stephen Fry to be a source of unpredictability or chaos. I would argue that any institution whose merits are obvious and whose utility is uncompromised is, by definition, a bit boring. Volvos? Boring! Vin Scully? A little boring at times! Oatmeal cookies? Lovely, if they’re the sort of thing you’re into, but they don’t exactly send anybody’s pulse racing, do they?
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October 31, 2009
Twitter evolution
When I first heard of Twitter, I didn’t get it. The benefits were not clear, and the drawbacks — following everyone else’s dinner menus, lunch dates, appointments, and daily routine — seemed like a minor purgatory for me.
At the last company I was working for as a full-time employee, it was mandated that managers join Twitter and (at a minimum) follow the other managers/team leads. After a few weeks, I branched out from the mandate and started following other, non-work related, Twitterers. It’s been a great source of potential blogging material, providing me with useful and interesting links. 140 characters doesn’t seem so limiting, now that I’ve discovered how useful even that short a string can be.
What Wired characterizes as “mob rule” is actually a very useful service. I now wonder how I managed to find blogworthy material without it.
Last August, the people who putatively run Twitter — the small crew that three years ago launched the world’s fastest-growing communications medium — announced a relatively minor change in the way the site functions. The tweak would have a small effect on retweeting, the convention by which Twitter users repost someone else’s informative or amusing message to their own Twitter followers. Retweets start with RT, for “retweet,” and usually cite the first author by user ID. And, importantly, retweeters often add a word or two of commentary about the repeated content.
But there was a problem: Twitter itself didn’t invent retweeting; it was created by Twitter users. In a blog post explaining the changes to retweets, the company’s second-in-command, Biz Stone, called them “a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.” The good news, he said, was that Twitter was building retweets right into the site’s architecture. The bad news was that Project Retweet didn’t make any provision for the commentary that users might like to add.
It didn’t take long for Twitter users to respond: How dare Twitter mess with . . . Twitter. A self-described “social, search, and viral marketing scientist” named Dan Zarrella posted a passionate cri de coeur, writing that Twitter was about to “completely eviscerate most of the value out of retweets.” That night, Zarrella created a Twitter hashtag — another grassroots Twitter convention, which lets users group their conversations — called #saveretweets. A few tweeters liked the plan, but the general consensus was summed up by one user skilled in Twitter’s uncompromising brevity: “Very bad plan we hates it.”
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October 21, 2009
Can Twittering be sufficient cause for arrest?
Regardless of your opinions on the particular cause, the recent arrest of a protest organizer should cause concern. Harry A. Valetk looks at the case from a legal standpoint:
“SWAT teams rolling down 5th Ave. … Report received that police are nabbing anyone that looks like a protester. … Stay alert watch your friends!” Pennsylvania State Police arrested New York social worker Elliot Madison last month for being part of a group that posted messages like those on Twitter. The arrest took place in a Pittsburgh motel during protests at the Group of 20 summit. In all, almost 5,000 protesters demonstrated throughout the city during two days, and about 200 were arrested for disorderly conduct.
But Madison wasn’t among those protesting on the street. Instead, published reports say he was part of a behind-the-scenes communications team using Twitter to “direct others, specifically protesters of the G-20 summit, in order to avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse.” A week later, FBI agents spent 16 hours in Madison’s home executing a search warrant for evidence of federal anti-rioting law violations.
This isn’t, at least based on the initial reports, a criminal mastermind perpetrating some atrocity . . . this is someone trying to help others falling afoul of legal entanglement. If it turns out that he was attempting something that is clearly illegal, then the courts will sort it out — but that isn’t what appears to be the case here.
Presumably, officers believed that Madison violated this statute when he warned other protesters on Twitter about “impending” police apprehension. But this prohibition assumes that the warning is given to fugitives or others committing a crime. Can we make this broad assumption about an entire group of protesters? Not likely. And, even so, the statute specifically allows warnings to bring that individual into compliance with law (e.g., a motorist warning a speeder about a speed trap).
Still, it seems this arrest is really about speech — what you can say to others during a public protest. Can you warn others online by saying, “Hey, don’t go down that street because the police have issued an order to disperse”?
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October 1, 2009
Twitter lists
I’ve been using Twitter for the last few months, and I’ve actually found it rather useful. Useful, in the sense of providing me with a wider range of information, which often leads to something blog-worthy. But the down-side is that for every new Twitter account I follow, I increase the ‘noise’ in my Twitter feed, making those gems sometimes harder to spot.
John C Abell looks at a new feature under trial for Twitter to allow grouping feeds together into lists which can be shared with other users:
Twitter is trialing a method to sub-categorize the people you follow into “lists,” making it possible for the first time to systematically organize — and recommend — feeds you follow.
Once rolled out to everyone Twitter lists will make allow you to create dynamically-updated timelines of your favorite news sites or opinion makers, celebrity administrative assistants, congressional Republicans and all those guilty-pleasure spoof accounts. If you’re already a somebody, you may be able to bestow upon some unknown a bit of Oprah-like fame.
The lists will be public by default — the better to increase viral discovery of an account you might like because your friend likes it — and can be made private. This is the nearly best of both worlds, but we always think that services which convey one’s thoughts and leanings and predilections and intentions ought to be opt-in, since failure to drop the curtain can cause inadvertent embarrassment or eliminate what would have been a competitive advantage.
I like the idea of lists, but I’ll have to wait to see how they’ve implemented this (it’s not available to my account yet).
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August 6, 2009
Twitter under DOS attack
Twitter users have been unable to access the site for most of Thursday morning, due to a Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack:
The extended silence in a normally noisy Twitterworld began around 9 a.m. Twitter later posted a note to its status update page saying the site had been slowed to a standstill by an attack.
In a denial-of-service attack, hackers typically direct a “botnet,” often made up of thousands of malware-infected home PCs, toward a target site in an effort to flood it with junk traffic. With the site overwhelmed, legitimate visitors cannot access the service.
“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial-of-service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users,” co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post. “We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”
Update: Service is back, intermittantly. More background on the attack here.
August 4, 2009
California looking for all kinds of new sources of income
Neil Gaiman has some issues with the California tax department (individual Twitter messages, in sequence):
It wasn’t identity theft screwing up my credit rating. Twas the idiot state of idiot california deciding I lived there & wasn’t paying tax.
I know that California is bankrupt and stupid, but ohhhh the stupidness and ohhh the cupidity. Twerps.
They decided I lived there & wasn’t paying tax & took out a Tax Lien; then cancelled it when we yelled, but it lives on in the credit rpt.
Right. I just spoke to a nice man who pretended he wasn’t in India who said he’d get onto fixing it. We shall see what happens.
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