Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes. Of course, nowadays I can find this kind of information on the Internet in no time. But, as I said, you never know with the Internet.
And so you don't know with the books.
The great thing about the web is linking. I don't care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can't link in and out of your world, it's not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don't need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent around it if you want to get my point.
Amen.
News organizations have a responsibility that the things they report are indeed true, and if they start bending that rule, why would we give them the benefit of credibility to them in other cases? A recommendation for people working with news is to employ more critical thinking, just as they were taught to be in the first place, and investigate before they blindly republish.
What the fake story about IQ of IE users tells us about ourselves. Good read.
Sarah Lacy has written about how many of the current breed of silicon valley wunderkinds have been conditioned to behave like the movie version of Mark Zuckerberg, eschewing humanity and decency for personal profit and glory. Nothing either she nor I can write will reverse the trend — there’s simply too much money and power at stake. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t loudly call bullshit on those who use words like “disruption” and “revolution” and “democratization” as cynical marketing buzzwords simply to line their own pockets, only to retreat behind the barricades when the going gets rough. And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t mourn a not-too-distant past where technology entrepreneurs created things to make the world a better or more interesting place, not just because they wanted to make a billion dollars.
TechCrunch preaches about ethics... But it's actually a good piece.
I have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both “keep up” with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests. I blog about real life; I talk about the internet. It’s so exhausting to exist on both registers, especially while holding down a job. It feels like tedious work to be merely conversationally competent. I make myself schedules, breaking down my commute to its most elemental parts and assigning each leg of my journey something different to absorb: podcast, Instapaper article, real novel of real worth, real magazine of dubious worth. I’m pretty tired by the time I get to work at 9 AM.
That's the best piece I've read in a while. An essay on the anxiety of living in our times.
The House of Representatives approved a measure on Friday that would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from regulating how Internet service providers manage their broadband networks, potentially overturning a central initiative of the F.C.C. chairman, Julius Genachowski.
The action, which is less likely to pass the Senate and which President Obama has threatened to veto, is nevertheless significant because it puts half of the legislative branch on the same side of the debate as the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in restricting the F.C.C.’s authority over Internet service.
House Joint Resolution 37, which was approved by a vote of 240 to 179, was spurred by the F.C.C.’s approval in December of an order titled “Preserving the Open Internet.” The order forbids the companies that provide the pipeline through which consumers gain access to the Internet from blocking a user’s ability to reach legal Internet sites or to use legal applications.
In other words, the House put a stop regulation by F.C.C. Sounds good, doesn't it? Except that regulation was preventing network providers from censoring legal content.
RSS is dead. Blogs are dead. The web is dead.
Good.
Dead means that they are no longer interesting to the drive-by technorati. Dead means that the curiousity factor has been satisfied, that people have gotten the joke.
These people rarely do anything of much value, though.
Finally a reasonable response to all the voices shouting that “the web is dead”, recently heard at (Microsoft-sponsored) SXSW's panel.
Diversity can be asset in a community. It can also cause friction. In HN’s case, you need only look at a weekly recap of the top submissions to see all the different directions the site is being pulled in. Listed in (totally subjective) order of frequency, you’ll find:
- General tech industry news of the sort that’s much better surfaced by Techmeme.
- VC and funding news of the sort that’s much better surfaced by sites like peHUB.
- Startup launch announcements.
- Promotions for products and services, usually to the chagrin of HN community members.
- Pop science.
- Pop sociology.
- Pop economics.
- Pop psychology and relationship advice.
- Windbag pundit-type blog posts like this one.
- Business advice and war stories.
- Technical HOWTOs, comparative evaluations, etc.
Detailed statistics of supervolatile.com coming soon.
89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
Some interesting statistics about internet usage in 2010.
When the Internet was first opened to the general public in 1992, I was unimpressed. What I saw was exactly as interesting as the brochure rack in the grocery store. Hadn't people read my sci-fi novel "Ender's Game" (1985), where a couple of anonymous kids used something like the Internet to pass for experts and influence public opinion; or "The Worthing Saga" (1978), where millions of people watched superstars play computer games?
Well, probably not. But I was impatient for others to catch on to how much potential there was for public networks to change politics and entertainment.
O. S. Card reflects on the changes that the internet brought into our lives over the past 20 years. I can't resist from noting that he's overly optimistic about the quality of his predictions. This XKCD comic expresses it best: Locke and Demostenes.
