October 2001 Archive Page

Which is real and which is fake? The website behind curtain number one?  Or the website behind curtain number two? Read about The Yes Men, who use a fake World Trade Organization website to trick the organizers of an international conference. (See: "Evaluating Online Sources.")Parody? Activism? Lies?

"Live, from Florida State University, it's Writing a Novel in Real Time. At least, that's what Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler is trying to do with his Inside Creative Writing program that launches Tuesday." (Wired)

Digital cameras are great, because you can preview the shots immediately, and delete the ones that aren't any good. "But if a photographer is focused on getting three, four or five pictures to the news desk as quickly as possible, he is not just getting rid of the rubbish; he's not entering the alternative viewpoint into the process."  --Digital photos "endanger the past"BBC)

Digital cameras are great, because you can preview the shots immediately, and delete the ones that aren't any good. "But if a photographer is focused on getting three, four or five pictures to the news desk as quickly as possible, he is not just getting rid of the rubbish; he's not entering the alternative viewpoint into the process."  --Digital photos "endanger the past"BBC)

Like the dystopian autocracy depicted in George Orwell's novel 1984, Microsoft has a policy of eliminating "offensive" words from its official dictionary. (A Slashdot poster asks, "Do we really want to trust Microsoft to make decisions on our behalf regarding our use of language?") --Bowlderlized by MicrosoftNY Times -- registration req'd)

• Charging that Microsoft has started hijacking browser users who mistype an address (users are sent to a Microsoft page rather than shown a generic error message), Yahoo! has started doing some hijacking of its own. 
• Microsoft has started excluding non-MS users from parts of its website (which, thanks in part to the hijacking described above, regularly ranks among the most visited sites on the Internet.)  
• My favorite company, Jupiter Media Metrix, is bought out by its own closest rival in the fuzzy world of custom Internet research (which permits companies like Microsoft to hijack users and then sell ads based on inflated traffic reports).

Battle for Internet Dominance

"Boilerplate was a mechanical man developed by Professor Archibald Campion during the 1880s and unveiled at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition." A remarkably convincing fake website by Paul Guinan. --Boilerplate: Mechanical Marvel of the Nineteenth Century

:  I have no idea how useful this article really is -- it's a classic case of "I found it on the Internet." (A few posters have evaluated this article on MetaFilter.) --"Real" Deal about Nuclear, Bio, and Chem Attacks

What's up with public high school students? "They've had careful self-esteem training since they were 2. They're told exactly what to feel about everything and they have to be happy all the time," says researcher Elinor Burkett. --School Daze in AmericaWash Times)

The Disney Channel airs a cartoon that comments on file-swapping software. An insightful real-world teenage morality tale, or corporate brainwashing? --Disney's Peer-to-Peer PressureWired)

"Who says we aren't a nation of readers? Shucks. Before you can use a new electric skillet, you're supposed to read its 12-page manual." Marti Attoun --My On-and-off Struggle with Instruction ManualsCS Monitor)

"MS Word has no right to be a standard for document preparation, since it's clearly less efficient (for most purposes) than readily available alternatives," fumes Allin Cottrell.  --Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient

"Students need the wonder, awe, and delight which comes from the adventure of confronting the unknown, unfettered by knowledge and common sense. Then learning is wonderful, awesome, and, delightful." [Many of the links on this site are broken, but the message pretty much keeps me going. Comments? --DGJ] --Nothing Matters

"It's like these sci-fi nerds can't handle the real world, so they hide in a fake one," says sports fanatic Scott Moreland, whose online fantasy-football team, DaJerseyJintz, was 4-1 at press time. --Walking Sports Database Scorns Walking Sci-Fi Databasesatire from The Onion)

E-mail messages, voice-mail recordings and other electronic traces of people were routinely preserved by computer networks or telephone companies... These e-relics often captured a moment in time that is both beautiful and chilling to the people who discovered them. Ariana Eunjung Cha --Salvaging Electronic Last WordsWashPost)

"New research reveals that 40 percent of Web surfers will visit a news or information site more often if its pages load faster." Excuse me, but... duh! I guess you should ignore the August 2000 press release in which Jupiter advocated these "expensive enhancements." --Fast And Efficient Web Sites Will Drive Greater Customer Retention Than Expensive Rich Media Enhancements...Jupiter Media Metrix)

Microsoft a monopoly? Pshaw. "Microsoft sees themselves as a small fish in a big pond. The pond is all information that could potentially be digitized in the universe. Just some insight into where they're coming from." Zimran Ahmed --Belly of the Beast Revisitedwinterspeak.com)

The anthrax scare will likely encourage greater use of e-mail. "If you’re connected to the Internet—and, duh, you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t—probably your e-mail-to-snail-mail ratio overwhelmingly favors the former." Steven Levy --The End of Snail Mail?MSNBC.com)

"Traditionally, each company has had to design and implement all of the services it wanted to offer its website users. This approach leads to incredible waste, unprofitable websites, and lowered usability..."  [Jakob Nielsen is talking about e-commerce, not personal home pages.] --The End of Homemade WebsitesUseIT.com)

(satire from The Onion) "Have a long history of experience in the field you're applying for and glowing recommendations. Either that, or print your résumé on really nice, heavyweight ivory paper." --Job-Hunting Tips

"The Apostrophe Protection Society was started in 2001 by John Richards, now its Chairman, with the specific aim of preserving the correct use of this currently much abused punctuation mark in all forms of text written in the English language." --The Apostrophe Protection Society

There's way too much information online.  What really matters to readers is quality, not quantity. Gerry McGovern --The Need for Editors on the Web

Metadata "collects critical information such as heading, summary, author name, date of publication, classification, keywords, etc.... Without metadata a document is left floating in a cyberspace filled with 550 billion other documents. The chances of it being found by the right person at the right time are greatly diminished." Gerry McGovern --Why Metadata is Important

"Coming very near the bottom of an official list of religions put out by the [U.K.] Statistics Office, Jedi Knight is known by the code 896. Heathen comes in at 897. Followed by Atheist at 898 and lastly None with 899." Kieren McCarthy --Jedi Knights Achieve [Sort of] Official Recognition as ReligionThe Register)

"[T]he Internet story has come to an end." Reuters --Silicon Alley Reporter Magazine Closes (Wired)

"a cybernetic process whereby people in power deepen their dominance by using online communication to negotiate for the consent of the subjugated." Mike Dorsher --Hegemony Online (UWEC)

"The Argument: A dying human being is like an automated spacecraft leaving the Solar System and entering interstellar space. Do we leave this world and arrive at another world?" Poetry by Jonathon Vos Post --Valedictory on Software

MIT will offer its courses online for free: "This 'OpenCourseWare' initiative represents a radically different approach to digitizing, marketing and globalizing education." --Brave New World for Higher EducationTechnology Review)

(CNet) :"Sometimes they were raw, sometimes they were pretentious and sometimes they were flat-out wrong--I'd dare say that many times it was all three combined!--but the information was fresh and real and unmediated by any intervening institutions." Charles Cooper --When Blogging Came of Age

(SiliconValley.com) "Via e-mails, mailing lists, chat groups, personal Web journals and non-standard news sources, they received valuable context that the major American media couldn't, or wouldn't, provide." Dan Gillmor   --Webloggers Offer View Media Can't

Of course, you can't trust everything that you find on the Internet.... weblogs and e-mail chains are also responsible for spreading hoaxes: "Is it true, for instance, that Osama bin Laden profits directly from sales of gum arabic, a food additive? Or that radio DJs are forbidden to play more than 150 popular songs now?"  Village Voice --And the Banned Played On