Monthly Archives: August 2011

Bridge

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Bridge is a story about four animal characters trying to cross a bridge, but ending up as obstacles to one another in the process. The moral behind this story revolves around how there are often disagreements or competing paths in life, and the possible results of pride, obstinance, and compromise.

Bridge by Ting Tey
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Mac ‘n’ Cheese

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Mac ‘n’ Cheese is an animated short directed and created by four students at the Utrecht School of Arts in the Netherlands. This roughly two minute animation took about five months to make, and about a bajillion peanut butter sandwiches.

Synopsis: When you find yourself running scared and running out of energy, there’s only a few options left to outrun your opponent through the southern desert. Stopping at nothing, watch these two guys wear each other out and rip through boundaries hitherto unbroken. Enjoy the ride!

macncheese.nl
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Accessible to all, but still rare

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James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, puts it rather elegantly:

We’re in the habit of associating value with scarcity, but the digital world unlinks them. You can be the sole owner of a Jackson Pollock or a Blue Mauritius but not of a piece of information — not for long, anyway. Nor is obscurity a virtue. A hidden parchment page enters the light when it molts into a digital simulacrum. It was never the parchment that mattered.

Historically, the two main types of obstacles to information discovery have been barriers of awareness, which encompass all the information we can’t access because we simply don’t know about its existence in the first place, and barriers of accessibility, which refer to the information we do know is out there but remains outside of our practical, infrastructural or legal reach. What the digital convergence has done is solve the latter, by bringing much previously inaccessible information into the public domain, made the former worse in the process, by increasing the net amount of information available to us and thus creating a wealth of information we can’t humanly be aware of due to our cognitive and temporal limitations, and added a third barrier — a barrier of motivation.

(via Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance – niemanlab.org)

Fascinating article.

I do a lot of curation, here and on other blogs, but I’d like to start doing it in a more structured manner – adding more context, building a bigger picture, etc.

An algorithm that spots fake reviews

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Determining the number of fake reviews on the Web is difficult. But it is enough of a problem to attract a team of Cornell researchers, who recently published a paper about creating a computer algorithm for detecting fake reviewers. They were instantly approached by a dozen companies, including Amazon, Hilton, TripAdvisor and several specialist travel sites, all of which have a strong interest in limiting the spread of bogus reviews.

(via Ferreting Out Fake Reviews Online – nytimes.com)

Ironically, it seems that machines may be better at detecting fake reviews than people.

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The correct use of Instagram?

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I have a friend, whom I won’t name, who takes the most amazing Instagram photos. They’re stunning, every bit as good as anything shot with a DSLR. And that’s because they are shot with a DSLR. Which sucks.

[…]

There are a lot of places to showcase great photography online. Flickr, Picassa, Smugmug. I fully expect to see lots of awesome, highly processed shots of Fireworks on those sites on July 5 and July 6 and, Hell, even July 10. But on Instagram if I’m seeing fireworks shots a day or two later it’s a little jarring. Moreover, if everyone starts using it the way my friend does, it’s going to kill it. Instead of a window, it will become an archive.

And to be clear, this has nothing to do with the gamification features on Instagram. Sure, everybody loves to get their own little hearts and stars. But who cares how many likes somebody else’s stuff gets? Ultimately, it’s not about that.

(via Cut It Out Instagram Cheaters! – gizmodo.com)

I agree completely. I have followed even worse offenders, who seemed to think that Instagram was a good place to share other people’s photographs, uncredited.

My Instagram pictures were all generated on my iPhone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that my Instagram pictures are all photographs.

For me, a great Instagram picture is an interesting scene, an unusual perspective or detail of something otherwise mundane (joel_hughes does this brilliantly) or something timely (this morning, bondomatic has been posting pictures from a hot air balloon).

Though my recent Instagram pictures have been particularly dull, I won’t be tempted to spice them up with DSLR shots any time soon.

The correct use of ‘blog’ and ‘blog post’

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I’m sure for some this is a point of pure pedantry, but it bugs me nonetheless. Let me clarify:

  • A blog is a particular type of website that contains many blog posts.
  • The verb use ‘I am up updating my blog’ is appropriate, but not ‘I am writing a blog’. (Technically, I appreciate you are writing a blog, but it is more likely you mean to say ‘I am writing a blog post’ or ‘I am blogging’.)
  • A single entry on a blog, like this one, is a blog post (or simply a post, if you prefer).

You are very welcome.

Is human communication to blame for the London riots?

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In its coverage, the Daily Mail quoted one tweeter, AshleysAR as follows: “Ashley AR’ tweeted: ‘I hear Tottenham’s going coco-bananas right now. Watch me roll.”

However, AshleysAR’s full, unedited quote on Twitter reads: “I hear Tottenham’s going coco-bananas right now. Watch me roll up with a spud gun :|”.

Suddenly the tone of the message becomes markedly less sinister. Ashley later threatens to join in with a water pistol.

Despite the claim of Tottenham MP David Lammy that the riots were “organised on Twitter”, there is little evidence of their orchestration on the site’s public feeds.

Looking back through Saturday night’s postings, DanielNothing’s stream offers some promise of substantiating the theory with his comment: “Heading to Tottenham to join the riot! who’s with me? #ANARCHY”.

But it is followed soon after by: “Hang on, that last tweet should’ve read ‘Curling up on the sofa with an Avengers DVD and my missus, who’s with me?’ What a klutz I am!”

(via Is technology to blame for the London riots? – bbc.co.uk)

How long before we have another Twitter joke trial farce?

Internet access CAPTCHAs

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Site administrators use CAPTCHAs to prevent automated scripts from performing certain functions, such as creating an account, sending email to a distribution list, or participating in a discussion thread.

That’s fine, as far as it goes. But, frankly, I’d also like to see certain people on the Internet prevented from doing certain things. You know, like: logging onto the Internet.

And so, a modest proposal: Internet Access Captchas, built right into browsers, designed to greatly reduce the overabundance of youtube commenters, MySpacers, and bloggers.

via Internet Access CAPTCHAs – defectiveyeti.com

Yes please!

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