Are you tired of having your personal life exposed through Google? Now Google is offering an easy option, as reported by Onion Network News: opt out. Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village
Youtube was supposed to be one of Web 2.0's shining examples of user-generated original content. In a world (in 2005) when everything worthwhile was already online and fully consumed, Youtube was supposed to provide us with a new outlet to both create and consume. I know it is hard to recall Youtube's original intent as a creative landscape, but keep in mind that the site's slogan was and is "Broadcast Yourself". Most of us don't broadcast ourselves, or watch broadcasts of other selves. The last time I fired up Youtube, I was looking for a free way to stream James and the Giant Peach. Any cute skits or beautiful shorts I discovered thereafter were barely bonuses; they were just tasty little incidentals to be quickly forgotten. Most people go to Youtube to view unoriginal creations- movie, TV and music clips or mashups thereof. Youtube's most viewed videos of all time are music videos like "7 Things" by Miley Cyrus and Rihanna's "Don't Stop the Music". My little sister uses Youtube as a combination DVR-Itunes-Pandora player. Nothing original seeps in unless I send it to her myself- and then it's usually just a video of a cute animal, not a creative work. Ah, but Youtube does have some high-caliber producers of original goodies! People who put on elaborate comedy skits with costumes, professional lighting and substantial editing. People who pull in millions of views. People with whom Youtube has formed profitable, advertising-driven partnerships. These people are broadcasting themselves. But they aren't like "us". They are all from Hollywood.
Wired's Gary Wolf gives a detailed look at Craiglist. This is truly a remarkable story of a business that is not in it to gouge consumers. Quite the opposite. Consider the eccentricities of the founder, Craig Newmark:
Newmark's claim of almost total disinterest in wealth dovetails with the way craigslist does business. Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview. The axioms of this worldview are easy to state. "People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day," Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging.
Flickr is a private company. Therefore, it is free to censor photos and comments, which it apparently does with pride and gusto. Flickr is a private company, of course, so it is no subject to any legal argument regarding "free speech." At some point, however, after tens of millions of people adopt Flickr as their photo and comment community, it does seem to function like a government. But, again, Flickr is a private company and it can do what it wants. We have the same potential problem with many private entities that now control the flow of huge amounts of information (e.g., Google). It will be interesting to see how this situation evolves, especially to the extent that these private companies seek to distort the flow of information for private gain or for capricious exercise of power. It's not like it hasn't happened before--think of the mass media. But also consider the telecoms: one increasingly hot angle on this issue is net neutrality.
Over the past few weeks, we've had a lot of trouble with this website running slowly. Yesterday, we figured out the source of the problem: a WordPress plug-in for "popular posts." Removing that plug-in sped up the site immensely. That is why that "popular posts" navigation feature no longer appears. In return, the site should pop up on your browsers in a second or two now, instead of 15 seconds. WordPress is a fantastic (and free) blogging platform and many of the optional plug-ins are slick, but once in a while we run into a plug-in that doesn't play nice with the platform. Bottom line, our load times should now be a lot less taxing on your patience.