lovehatethings

According to Mary Richert (I really don't know who she is, but she probably doesn't know who I am either) of guardian.co.uk, social networking sites are more popular than porn sites. In the article she asserts some criticisms about social networks that I agree with. Most importantly, she states that, in comparing social networks to the antisocial aspects of porn, "there's something similarly antisocial about social networking sites."

My immediate concern is that internet technology has been driven by porn since its inception. Broadband was developed simply as a way to get porn faster delivery times. Porn drove peer to peer applications for almost a decade... let's face it, while many people on Kazaa were downloading Britney Spears songs, other were looking for Britney Spears lookalikes in compromising positions. Bandwidth demands spiked for Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee and, a few years later, for A Night in Paris.

Now I know that with a lovehate topic like web advertising someone is going to expect paragraphs about pop-ups, but really, with the browser technology available today does every really need to see a pop up again? I don't remember the last time I saw a pop up for a poker site or porn but it wasn't too long ago that my desktop would be beseiged by them. I will say that almost as annoying as pop-up ads are the banner or sidebar ads that make noise. Try scrolling through the torrent compiler mininova.org with a smiley banner droning out a constant "Hello?" or a sidebar ad that crackles with a plasma energy burst that sounds like the electric pulses from the Commodore 64's Impossible Mission.

Now that Google is perfecting its "Blog Search" technology, the site can, on a week by week basis, navigate the meme streets and provide the Adsense matrix engine fodder to figure out which ads to show me and when, privacy advocates will start to squirm, and surfers will seek out proxy servers, and the truly paranoid will shut off every cookie and manually fill out form fields every visit back to a site. But what's the real problem here? I've consigned myself to the fact that I'm not going to be able to exist on the web without advertising of some sort. That said, 99% of ads have become wallpaper to me.

So I ask myself, do I really care that Google or any other company is compiling data about me to better target advertising to my browser? And the answer is yes, I do care, but not for the reasons you might think.

I care because I remember the layers of porn popups upon visiting warez sites and ads that were simply reaching for a clickthrough by sheer numbers. I care because I once had to sacrificially frag a Bonzi Buddy in effigy to keep myself sane. I care because I would rather see an unobtrusive column of a few links and text that maybe, once out ten thousand times, should I choose to click it, will actually be about something that I may have a fleeting interest in instead of some peripheral perception of static cunieform.

Let ads line me up in crosshairs. Show me something from a tech store or a blogging service or a social networking site instead of some banal cartoonish test of skill that I'm supposed to strive for in a sidebar. Show me something about Guinness or Jack Daniels instead of St. Pauli's and Bacardi. Pitch me an HDTV or a torrent app instead of an instant messenger add-on that will allow me to send sparkly smileys. Try to tempt me with a some consumer electronics or gadgets instead of mutual funds or insurance. I'd rather at least hold up the facade that at least somewhere in a server wearhouse The Gibson is parsing an algorithm to learn something about me instead of just sitting there cranking out spam into a billion killfiles.

Make no mistake, if I could choose between surfing the web with or without ads, I'd definitely forgo banners and pop-ups and sidebars - oh my! But if I have to live with web ads, I'll take the enemy I know over the enemy I don't.

In the past I have been anything but an apoligist for the tech world's advancements. I crave some of the visions of the future that I grew up with in sci-fi films and televisions. From a teleporter to a self-drive aircar. From a replicator or holodeck to an omnipresent mainframe that serves the needs of humanity... of course somehow these scenarios inevitably turn out bad.

The backbone for all such technology demands an immense mainframe that contains, if not the total, at least a large chunk of academic, social and personal information to dole out upon request. And while I know that, in most dystopian film plots, the archetypal consequence for individuals giving up their knowledge often ends badly, there is a lingering attraction to a tool that at command, whim and request can produce information and content that is uniquely customized to a user within a specific environment.

The first step to such a system has its nascent development in cloud computing, and while part of me is ready to release my kite into the cummulus, another part of me is remembering Twitter's Fail Whale and 404 errors of days gone by.

There is inherent risk that's greater than someone hacking Amazon to steal credit card information or a government website to lift social security numbers. Cloud computing demands that beyond the day to day information necessary to run our lives, we also commit our memory - i.e. writing, pictures, music and emails. And while many of us have copies of pictures in Flickr and stream music from last.fm, are we ready to commit the sole copies of such things to the cloud?

Being a victim of credit card fraud can range from annoying to devastating, but imagine a future where a system crash wipes out the only existing images of deceased loved ones or a child's first birthday. When do we reach that level of trust, not with certain things, but with EVERYTHING? For the skynet to work its magic, and be all it can be, it needs such information. Google, and other Web 2.0 in-browser software, would have us move all of our documents and spreadsheets into the cloud. Through blogs, many people have given up their creativity to the cloud... after all, how many of us keep backups of everything we post? Flickr has, what I'm sure, are the sole copies of at least some visual records of people and places and events. The news is moving from paper to html to rss to xml and soon hard copies will be a thing of the past.

Make no mistake. The sky is getting bigger. The clouds are growing in size and getting more numerous. The sun, however, is becoming infrequent and I can feel a storm coming on. I don't know when the first PCs and Macs will ship without hard drives, but I think we're within ten years. I don't know how soon after that a lightning strike will erase all visual records of someone's Uncle Owen or Aunt Beru, but I'm thinking we're within eleven years. I don't know when all high speed networking will be wireless and paid for through taxes, but I can see it through the rain.

I do know this. When I have to suffer a blackout, I feel, sadly, lost without a TV or my computer. My content has disappeared and now I have to spend time reading books, which, in a cloud world, will soon not exist off of my computer... well, at least I'll be okay until the batteries on my Kindle 2010 run out and my iPod nano version 10 (which has been broken to countersink into my forearm and run off of bio-electical energy) shorts out my nervous system. I suppose I can pick up a piece of charcoal from the barbeque and scratch some renderings of the circling wildlife that's coming back to claim a world where all knowledge has been shorted out by a failed surge protector.

While I love the concept of cloud computing, it's going to take a lot of convincing to get me to let go of the kite string that keeps my information grounded.

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Muppet_Wiki

I cannot even add to the sheer brilliance by a catchy line or two... pass me the Snuffleupagus pills.

T.S. Eliot promoted the idea of the literary canon. The concept that there were works that should be read by an educated individual to create a standard template, and in order to claim the rank of "educated". Some of the more esoteric aspects of the canon theory implied the idea that works (in true Elaine Benis assurance) were either "canon-worthy" or not, even as they were being written. While I never believed that canon theory needed to be extended to ridiculous levels. There still seems to be a certain belief that literature contains a bunch of "must-reads", just as film contains its "must-sees" and music contains its "must-hears". And while I suppose the canon can be applied to just about subject where so-called expertise can be expressed, I'm starting to wonder if the concept (as it pertains to the leviathan-like stature of the worldwide web) should be cannonballed out of existence.

Is there a canon of websites? Places that anyone who considers themself a web afficionado must visit on a regular basis to be considered "webjucated"? Must my web travelling habits include occasional visits to The Onion, Rotten Tomatoes, You Tube, Wikipedia? Do I lose any web geek cred without regular trips to io9, Ars Technica, Cnet, Engadget, Lifehacker, 1up, Slashdot, Sourceforge, TechCrunch or Digg?

Is there any piece of the web that has outlasted the transitory nature of the medium? Novels, short stories and poetry and rather constant. I haven't yet seen a story on Digg concerning a press release for Finnegan's Wake 2.0 or rumors that Prufrock is finally coming out of beta. Is there a website that contains content that is always enjoyable to go back to and remains unchanged? Many people have the ability to devote hours, days and weeks to re-reading novels on repeated occasions and enjoy them in unique ways each time. Does a website contain this same quality? I'll admit, that even years later, I can return to some of the early homestarrunner and Strongbad shorts and laugh as much as ever at Fluffy Puff Marshmallows and Trogdor the Burninator, but, other than content created as sheer entertainment, it's hard for me to think of an non-updated site that I will go back to over and over. And even with this, I would argue we are increasingly engrossed in the web than any single novel in spite of its transitory and unfinished quality.

While I would not say that, with regards to the web, the dissolution of the canon concept is tragic, there is an aspect to a wide-ranging common experience that I see becoming lost. The blog has made it easy for anyone to publish. I wish I could say "even though most shouldn't", yet that wouldn't only be antithetical to my populist belief in the medium, but the nature of the medium itself. Where Eliot's canon came from a few hundred years of white male Euro-centric writers, the demographics of web creators have blown that parameter wide open. And with this acknowledgement I pose two questions: will we ever have another William Shakespeare? Does anyone care?

If Bill was competing with hundreds of millions of playwrights instead of a relative handful, would his work have shone through the rest or would it have drown in a sea of obscurity? Does the web, as a medium, have the ability to create a wordsmith superstar or a "canon-worthy" podcaster? While I love the web's diversity, I am often frustrated by it's magnitude. While I clamour for the fresh and new, I still find myself with an inexhaustible list of bookmarks.

It seems the "suggestion" phenomenon is the latest attempt at a solution to navigate through the ocean. By data and trend and mathematic formula StumbleUpon wants to suggest what sites I might like, Digg wants to tell me what everyone else thinks is cool, the Internet Movie Database wants to aggregate films by previous users preferences and Apple's Genuis wants to emulate Pandora's ability to recommend not only what music I may like, but how my existing music should be organized. While the power of suggestion can be a great tool in sifting the through the dreck, it does have an insidious limitation: how is one supposed to be shocked anymore? Can I find a song that blows my mind through suggestions of music I'm already used to? Will I pick up a film that offends my senses but makes me see the world in a new way if the suggestions come from what I'm already comfortable with? And how does one find the truly inventive on the web when the recommendations come from a social demographic that, while admittedly more diverse than Eliot's "educated" society, has become relatively narrow in its own focus. Bloggers of a feather flock together. I love that we are canon-free but mourn the loss of greatness found.

The story as told through the plot of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster...

In 2008, a Googlygirl with a small California mountain view, possessed by the spirit of a Yahooan, escaped a bubble just as it exploded. As this happens a meteorite falls from the sky containing InterEx, the monster responsible for her planet's destruction. At the same time, Mozilla and Safari emerge from hibernation and not only attack Webia, but each other as well. Chrome, along with her twin priestesses, attempt to convince Mozilla and Safari to stop fighting each other and to team up to fight the InterEx monster. At the same time, the Googlygirl is being hunted by a group of assassins who want to Cuil her so that her enemies can take over her homeland. Then, just when the only living assassin is about to kill the Googlygirl, InterEx crushes him by knocking over a pile of boulders on him. Mozilla, Safari, and Chrome finally drive InterEx off. The movie ends with the Googlygirl going back to her home land and Mozilla and Safari watching Chrome swim back to Mountain View. 

Worth1000.com offers up an archive of mashed up advertising images that describe what products are really like.

So simple, yet so cool an idea for when you see an awesome tee in passing and want to try to find it.

Tshirts at pleasedress.me!