Category Archives: The Internet

“If I were a daily visitor to their site, I sure as hell wouldn’t put up with our ads”

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More truth from The Onion:

Ford Looks Down On Website That Would Let Itself Be Plastered In Ford’s Ads

DEARBORN, MI—Ford Motor Company officials chastised news and commentary website Masthead.com Friday, conceding they were embarrassed to be associated with a publication that would allow the entirety of its award-winning content to be hidden behind splashy, distracting ads for the Ford F-150.

According to the car manufac­turer, Masthead‘s decision to allow the “garish” full-screen advertisement—in which a red pickup speeds across news articles, overrunning them with tire-tread marks until readers manage to find the tiny “close” button—suggests the media outlet has zero respect not only for itself, but also for the amount of work that goes into its astute political and cul­tural coverage.

“They should be ashamed of themselves for letting us come in, plaster our logo everywhere, and, for a measly 50 grand, pretty much destroy the reputation they’ve worked so hard to build,” said Erin Robertson, an ad buyer for Ford who scoffed when Masthead immediately agreed to all of her terms and even sug­gested its creative staff could write articles mentioning the F-150. “Their coverage of the debt crisis has been pretty insightful, but then they cheapen it by allowing us to completely obscure their writing with a video of a truck bounding over sand dunes.”

Ford Looks Down On Website That Would Let Itself Be Plastered In Ford’s Ads – theonion.com

Excerpting policy

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From the Business Insider excerpting policy:

We excerpt others the way we hope others will excerpt us.

What does that mean? It means that if you think our stuff is worth bringing to your readers’ attention, we are honored and grateful. Please excerpt it as liberally as you want. In return, please just give us clear credit, links back, and an incentive for interested readers to visit our site. (Not all readers–some.)

This is an issue I agonise over a fair bit, and it’s interesting to learn that BI are actually somewhat more permissive in this area than I would expect them to be.

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“Linux and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again.”

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Matt Haughey interviewing CmdrTaco:

Matt: What’s your biggest disappointment in the tech world these days?

Rob: The internet is simply not as free as it was when Slashdot began. Government is increasingly legislating away our rights and criminalizing actions that are impossible to regulate. I know it’s inevitable, but it’s still disappointing to witness. The joy of logging in to an IRC chat room in the early 90s, to talk to people who were innovating powerful technologies simply for the sake of it was absolutely intoxicating. To be able to talk to the guy who was responsible for some component of your system. We were all pseudo-anonymous strangers brought together by the technology that we loved, and the belief that an open future was spread out before us. The future will be exciting for my children, but I’m afraid that their technology will come in boxes welded shut at the factory. Their software locked down. Linux, and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again. I hope there are still air cracks by the time my kids are old enough to jam screwdrivers in there.

Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda – interviewed by Matt Haughey – webstock.org.nz

WordPress introduces WordAds

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I’ve just submitted this blog to be considered for the new WordAds for WordPress.com blogs.

We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense.

My blog may get too little traffic or not be focused enough to easily pair the content up with appropriate ads (or the reviewers (hello there!) may simply not appreciate my post about the bad ads on WordPress.com), but I have my fingers crossed.

If you run a WP.com blog with a custom domain, you can apply for WordAds too.

WordPress Users Wales

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WordPress Users Wales logo The first WordPress Users Wales meet-up is on Monday 28th November (6.30pm – 8.30pm) at The Atrium in Cardiff. The evening is free, and you can sign-up on Eventbrite.

Thanks to Pippa and Chris for organising this user group. I think it will become a useful companion to the Cardiff Blogs events for those bloggers who want to get a bit more technical and tinker with the nuts-and-bolts of blogging.

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The Internet is a belief system

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Brad Burnham explains how the Internet is designed to empower individuals, not control them:

The Internet is not just a series of pipes. It’s core architecture embeds an assumption about human nature. The Internet is designed to empower individuals not control them. It assumes that the if individuals are empowered, they will do the right thing the vast majority of the time. Services like eBay, Craigslist, Etsy and AirBnB are built on the assumption that most people are honest. Other services like Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, and Soundcloud assume people will be generous with their ideas, insights and creations. Wikipedia has proven that people will share their knowledge. Companies like Kickstarter show that people will even be generous with their money. This does not mean that there are not bad people out there. All of these companies spend a lot of time and money to battle spam and fraud. The companies are simply betting that there are many more good people than bad. The architecture of the Internet shares this assumption. It could have been designed to prevent bad behavior. Instead its design empowers good behavior.

The entertainment industry does not share this view of human nature. […]

I Believe In The Internet – The Content Industry Doesn’t – bradburnham.tumblr.com

Well said.

Four fantastic WordPress logos

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WoodPress logo For my recent post about the terrible quality adverts appearing on WordPress.com sites I created a nice high resolution blue glossy version of the WordPress logo. Then I was inspired to make a few variations.

They’re made avaliable here as 1000x1000px PNGs, with transparency, under a CC BY-NC-SA licence. Feel free to share and enjoy, but please remember to give credit (to Foomandoonian), ideally with a link back to this page.

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Low quality advertisements are damaging WordPress.com

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A shiny WordPress logo, ruined by obnoxious ads. It’s been nearly two months since I switched halfblog.net from Posterous over to WordPress, and I’ve been generally very positive about the change, with some reservations. The truth is, I don’t think I will be recommending it so strongly to potential new bloggers any longer (as I have done at Social Media Surgeries).

The various reasons probably justify a separate blog post, but one concern is looming particularly large right now…

The low-quality on-site advertising WordPress uses to support free blogs.

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Amazing! Its genuinely awesome paragraph, I have got much clear idea concerning from this article.

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Spam comments word cloud I had a typical spam comment on my logo design post from yesterday:

thank you for the wonderful posts its my glad to see such a nice resource…

Deleted now, of course.

I had a second comment (on my post about an orb weaver spider I saw, which actually gets pretty good search traffic), only this time the spammer dumped his entire spammy payload in a single comment.

I’ve deleted the original comment, but am reproducing it here for, um, posterity?

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The Common Crawl Foundation

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Common Crawl: 5 billion web pages indexed, ranked, graphed and the data made freely available.

Today […] we have an open repository of crawl data that covers approximately 5 billion pages and includes valuable metadata, such as page rank and link graphs. All of our data is stored on Amazon’s S3 and is accessible to anyone via EC2.

Common Crawl is now entering the next phase – spreading the word about the open system we have built and how people can use it. We are actively seeking partners who share our vision of the open web. We want to collaborate with individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits.

(via Common Crawl Enters A New Phase)

It seems like you could do pretty much anything with this data, including getting a head start making your own search engine. Blekko have a cool Grep the Web section which is full of ideas for the kinds of information you could discover if you had access to such a database. Basically, any kind of semantic analysis.

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The Social Graph is Neither

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A brilliantly written deconstruction of the ‘social graph’, which Maciej Ceglowski argues is neither a graph, nor social. Essential reading for social media types.

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.

Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?

The Social Graph is Neither – pinboard.in

Helipad.me: Turn your Facebook fan page into a proper website

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Every small business that uses Facebook as their main presence online should take a look at Helipad.me.

An example of s site created by Helipad.me This service builds you an attractive and useful web page for your business that pulls your news items, photo albums, status updates, videos and customer information directly from your existing Facebook fan page. At present they only have one template design (in four colours), but I imagine they’ll be quick to expand this and add some customisation features, like the ability to upload company logos and re-arrange the content.

This is a great idea for small businesses who won’t have to worry about managing another website, but will give them a presence on the open web for non-Facebook users like myself. If the day ever comes when they want leave Facebook behind, they’ll already have an established, ranking domain to build up from.

Why Klout thinks you are ‘special’

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Klout style matrix One of the most fascinating metrics Klout produces is your ‘style’. What could be an interesting insight into the character of a user is instead written in much the same way as a horoscope. I imagine most web users would get a nice ego stroke reading whichever short description happens to apply to them.

I’ve reproduced the list for convenience. Skip to the bottom for my other thoughts on Klout. (Spolier: I think it’s really bad news.)

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Using A/B testing to find story ideas

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I’ve been reading In The Plex, recently, so naturally I’ve been thinking a lot about how to use data in interesting ways. This post appealed:

Earlier I read this post via Hacker News on testing startup ideas. It got me thinking about whether or not you could do something similar in your newsroom. I’ll call it A/B Testing for News Coverage™.

via Using A/B testing to find story ideas – andymboyle.com

In a nutshell: Write some spec articles, run AdWord campaigns for them, see which ones are most popular. You could get the value of this without running any ad campaigns though. All webmasters – especially those with newsy content – should pay attention to their analytics to learn what content has proved popular, what searches brought readers in, and be on the look out for spikes of interest in particular topics.

When I clicked through to read this blog post, I was expecting it to be a post about A/B testing fiction story ideas. Imagine a kind of choose your own adventure story where the author writes the opening of the story, then two or three different continuations. The most popular branch becomes canonical, and the author continues the story from there.

I doubt that’s an idea that’d appeal to many authors, but some variation of this could be a fun experiment.

Wales Blog Award finalists, by blogging platform

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I was curious to break down which blogging platforms this years Wales Blog Awards finalists used.

A pie chart showing which platforms the 2011 Wales Blog Award nominees use.

Google’s Blogger is the clear winner, powering exactly 50% of the blogs up for awards. The rest are evenly split between the hosted WordPress.com service, and the self-hosted WordPress.org version. Only two blogs used some other platform.

Only 13 of the 28 blogs in the list use a custom domain name.* Others are content to use the free subdomain provided by their host.

Of the blogs that ended up winning, 60% used Blogger, with the remaining 40% split evenly between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.

All the nominees are listed below. Category winners in bold.

Blog Platform

Best Community Blog
Rhuthun / Ruthin – rhuthun.blogspot.com Blogger
The Photon Blog – photonicanglesey.blogspot.com Blogger
We Are Cardiff – wearecardiff.co.uk WordPress.com

Best Entertainments & Music Blog
Movie Waffle – moviewaffle.com WordPress.com
Cat on the Wall – catonthewall.net WordPress.org
Motown Junkies – motownjunkies.wordpress.com WordPress.com

Best Food & Drink Blog
Cardiff Bites – cardiffbites.blogspot.com Blogger
What Kate Baked… Blogger
Pint of 45 – pintof45.blogspot.com Blogger

Best Lifestyle Blog
Where Are My Knees? – wherearemyknees.blogspot.com Blogger
Dyfed Wyn Roberts – dyfedwynroberts.org.uk Misc.
Chic & Cheerful – chicandcheerful.net Blogger

Best Photo Blog
Cardiff Arcades Project – cardiffarcades.wordpress.com WordPress.com
Circus Clouds – circusclouds.blogspot.com Blogger

Best Political Blog
Carmarthenshire Planning Problems and more – carmarthenplanning.blogspot.com Blogger
Caredig I Natur (CIN) – caredig.blogspot.com Blogger
Radical Wales – radicalwales.org Blogger

Best Sports Blog
Ffwtbol – ffwtbol.com WordPress.org
The Foot Down – thefootdown.co.uk WordPress.org
Cardiff Skateboard Club – http://cardiffskateboardclub.com/ WordPress.com

Best Technology Blog
This Is My Joystick – thisismyjoystick.com WordPress.org
Apptacious – apptacious.com WordPress.org
TechBeast.net – techbeast.net WordPress.org

Best Welsh Language Blog
Hen Rech Flin – henrechflin.blogspot.com Blogger
Sion Dafydd – siondafydd.wordpress.com WordPress.com

Best Writing on a Blog
I Saw Elvis In The Woods – isawelvisinthewoods.blogspot.com Blogger
Modern Haiku – mordenhaikupoetry.blogspot.com Blogger
Mike Jenkins – Welsh Poet & Author – mikejenkins.net Misc.

People’s Choice Award & Best Blog (overall winner)
Ffwtbol – ffwtbol.com  

I think Blogger is a great choice, but I’m a little stumped why so many are serious enough about their blogs to seek awards, but are unwilling to spend the £5 to £20 to get a proper domain name.

* UPDATE 2011.10.28 Amy Davies pointed out to me that she does use a custom domain, cardiffarcadesproject.com, as a redirect.

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Posted in Web

Google Chrome 15 adds gesture animations for OS X Lion

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I just uploaded this short video comparing the new gesture animations in Google Chrome with those in Safari.

In this video, I navigate through three pages, then use gestures (finger swipes on my Magic Mouse) to show how the animations look. Safari makes the navigation direction (forwards or backwards) clear, while Chrome adds confusion to what should be a really intuitive gesture.

Chrome has also added the little page-bounce animations you see in other native Mac apps when using a touch device, and even used the same linen texture for the empty space.

No, you do not have ‘a Tumblr’

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The 2012 Obama campaign is now on Tumblr, and I have a big problem with them:

HI, TUMBLR.

It’s nice to meet you.

There are lots of reasons we’re excited to be launching the Obama 2012 campaign’s new Tumblr today. But mostly it’s because we’re looking at this as an opportunity to create something that’s not just ours, but yours, too.

We’d like this Tumblr to be a huge collaborative storytelling effort—a place for people across the country to share what’s going on in our respective corners of it and how we’re getting involved in this campaign to keep making it better.

My problem is not political, it’s a grammar niggle.

The Obama campaign does not have ‘a Tumblr’. Tumblr is the company and the blogging platform they run. Tumblr is the sum total of all the Tumblr blogs. They have a tumblelog, or a Tumblr blog, or just a blog.

Likewise one doesn’t have ‘a Twitter’. You use Twitter, you are on Twitter, you have a Twitter page or a Twitter feed or a Twitter profile, but Twitter is the company and the service.

See also: The correct use of ‘blog’ and ‘blog post’, wherein I correct Mr. Stephen Fry.