Bloggasm

We’re not always nice when talking about Chris Matthews, but in the Youtube video below you’ll find him at the top of his game:

So you know Mark Cuban? The billionaire who is being considered to join the Yahoo board?

Well he just came out with the fucking dumbest grand idea on how Yahoo can beat Google: Pay the most popular sites on the internet $1 million each to remove themselves from the Google index.

So what happens after Google just decides to get rid of “no-follow” tags and no longer gives you a choice whether to be indexed? There goes $1 billion! And do you really think that the New York Times and CNN will give up their biggest traffic source for a lousy $1 million, giving their competitors a huge edge?

Everyone working at Yahoo probably has palm prints on their foreheads after reading Cuban’s post and watching their future careers go down the drain.

I just received this by email:

The Second International Conference on Religion and Media will be held in Tehran and Qom, Iran, from November 9th to 12th, 2008. We cordially invite all media researchers and scholars, representatives from diverse religious traditions, professionals and students involved with the subjects of the conference to attend and submit a paper. Further information could be found at conference website: http://www.religion-media.ir/

A few scholarships are available to partially subsidize the costs of participants with selected papers.

Sincerely,
Mahdiye Tavakol
Conference Coordinator

Well, it certainly seems to have an impressive website. Still, can’t help but wonder if this is a way to lure atheists like me into their country so they can chop my head off.

Hey Jonah,

You know that “MIT study” that you cite in your column titled “Why we need nukes and Gitmo“? You know, the one that says that homeless people supposedly have twice the global footprint than average? You do know that that wasn’t an MIT study at all but instead was a class project done by a bunch of MIT undergraduates? And that it included in its calculations the carbon footprint of the entire US infrastructure and just basically divided it by the number of US citizens, rather than actually determining the carbon footprint of homeless people?

If you ever need someone really good at Google searches to fact check your articles for you, you can always forward them to me.

Take care,
Simon

In the video embedded below, Stephen Colbert shows a shocking bit of humility by replaying one of his own bloopers from his early network news days:

Kenneth,

I just read your article about Polar Bears, and came across this line:

“In October 2007, NASA announced the results of an in-depth study of Arctic sea-ice melting and found that what has caused the unusually large melting seen in the last eight years was not greenhouse gas-induced global warming.”

Wouldn’t you say this is fairly disingenuous, considering that “greenhouse gas-induced global warming” was never once mentioned in the NASA press release you cite? A person reading that paragraph in your piece would think that the NASA study addressed green-house gases and concluded that they had nothing to do with the ice melting. The press release does not really address what is causing the wind patterns, and whether they have been caused by green-house gases. In fact the release attributes the patterns to “Unusual atmospheric conditions.”

How familiar are you with the cause of wind patterns? How familiar are you with the effects of atmospheric temperature on wind?

What do you have a degree in?

Why do you cite mostly news reports in your study, rather than peer-reviewed literature?

–Simon

When discussing the connectivity and overall power of Web 2.0, it’s hard for internet evangelists to refrain from getting a little starry-eyed and at some points downright hyperbolic. We are young Clark Kents watching the Fortress of Solitude rise quickly around us, amazed at how the mammoth structure connects and solidifies in mere seconds.

Perhaps this is why we gathered around the intertubes to watch Clay Shirky’s speech on harnessing the collective power of Web 2.0. It’s because he so eloquently patted us on the backs and told us bloggers, Wikipedians, and twitterers to Go Forth! Speak! Change the World! We nodded our heads, as we so often do, at the assertion that until only recently media was a very passive entertainment. This old form of media did much to amuse but little to quench our desires to build.

As is often the case, tech writer Nicholas Carr has burst our bubble. In a post titled “Gilligan’s web,” he attacks what he calls Shirky’s “liberation mythology” by addressing the very anecdote that Shirky used to illustrate his point: Gilligan’s Island.

To recap, Shirky spent a good deal of time in his speech talking about his (wasted) days sitting on his couch and watching the shipwrecked group try and fail to get off the island over and over again. This time spent watching, he implied, was utterly unproductive and at the end of the day he had nothing to show for it.

But as Carr documents, Gilligan’s Island, the very show used to epitomize old media, has become a plentiful destination in Wikipedialand, the very kind of media that Shirky is deifying:

Not only is there an entry for the show itself, but there are separate articles for each of the castaways - Gilligan, the Skipper, the Professor, Mary Ann, Ginger, Thurston Howell III, and Eunice “Lovey” Howell - as well as the actors that played the roles, the ill-fated SS Minnow, and even the subsequent TV movies that were based on the show, including the 1981 classic The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island. Best of all is the annotated list of all 98 of the episodes in the series, which includes a color-coded guide to “visitors, animals, dreams, and bamboo inventions.”

But this is only a lead-in, Carr’s own anti-anecdote. He uses it to “underscore the symbiosis between the pop-culture artifacts of the mass media and so much of the user-generated content found online.”

Shirky’s main problem, Carr posits, is that he makes it seem that before the advent of the web, we were slack-jawed television addicts, unable to take our “cognitive surplus” and put it to good use. That’s just plain hogwash.

The nerds among us were certainly busy. In sixth grade, for instance, I didn’t even have an email address. Instead, a group of my friends got together and formed a “publishing company” called Strange Comix. We each had our own comical superheros, our crude drawings, and our pulpy plots. We took these and shared and collaborated and produced dozens of stapled-together comic books.

Other people got together and produced demo tapes of their bands, or shot short films using hand-held cams, or formed book clubs and discussed their favorite literature.

Yes, the web provided an avenue to amplify all this — those short films became youtube videos and those book clubs became lit bloggers — but the cognitive surplus was certainly already there.

So what does this mean? In some ways, it indicates that the web might make us less active. Take the book blog, with its open comments section and opportunities for discussion about literature. Could a hearty debate in a comments thread ever come close to the real-world discussion you’d find in a book club? By being glued to our computers and inputing all our “cognitive surplus” into the web, is it sucking up the cognitive surplus that might go into painting murals or practicing with your band? Do the online donations you make to Barack Obama even compare to putting on your shoes and going door to door to tout his message?

Maybe, maybe not. All I can say is, the half hour I spent writing this post has kept me away from my daily workout. I will pay for my Web 2.0 evangelizing with my flabby thighs, and perhaps my poorer health isn’t necessarily worth the creation you’re reading before you right now.