January 19th, 2010 this onewant Don’t hype me. All the services I see advertised on the web are long on hype and closing the deal, but I usually can’t tell what they’re offering. Ridiculous. This isn’t personal because I think most people don’t bother to read the post before responding. They just read the headline and maybe skim the body and then start writing. Makes it really hard to ask a question that might be even slightly off the beaten path. It hasn’t always been this way. And if you read the other comments in this thread, you’ll see almost everyone else has been doing it, even people like Stan and Hanan who have been longtime contirbutors here. They didn’t answer the question I asked. They told me what they do. But what I’m trying to figure out is how far we are from services that can actually solve the problem I’m posing. Creating an archive of our work that’s independent, affordable, and long-lasting. So like I said, this isn’t about you — it’s about *us* — how are we ever going to work together if even a simple question can’t be heard.
January 4th, 2010 Here’s another quick bit to remind people that nothing that Scoble says is of any particular worth. If you read any Scooby at all, then you know that he is obsessed with pointless lists. This one though is perfect as an example of the fact that Scoble’s opinion is essentially worthless. In the article Robert states that he has a database of 11,000 tweets that he has favorited since June 2009. Let that number bake into your noggin for a bit. Eleven thousand tweets favorited, not just merely seen by his account. That implies that Robert must have put at least some minimal thought into the content. Now let’s do some math. By my calculations, there were 214 days from beginning of June 2009 until the end of December. If we assume that Scoble monitored Twitter every single one of those 214 days then that gives us 51.4 tweets favorited per day. If we then assume that Robert maintains a twenty-four hour a day vigil, favoriting tweets like some sort of New Media Douchebag machine, then that works out to 2.14 tweets favorited per hour. I keep stressing the “favorited” part of the equation, because it’s important to remember
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January 4th, 2010 While I was in the midst of my latest attempt to prove that a man can be powered by ethanol alone, Betanews ran an utterly retarded opinion piece by Joe Wilcox titled: The world doesn’t need an Apple tablet, or any other. There is much that is fundamentally wrong with Joe’s piece, but I don’t want to talk about that. Fortunately I don’t have to talk about Joe’s errors because the tech punditards sallied forth en masse In a precocious bit of blogorrhea titled: Robert springs to the defense of the tablet platform. Sadly, he also demonstrates that what Robert Scoble understands about technology could be written in twenty-four point font on the back of a postage stamp; with room to spare. Robert’s attempt to defend the maiden honor or the tablet takes the form of a litany of successful tablet computing devices that have already succeeded in the market. Items he refers to include: - A touch-screen Point of Sale terminal
- The touch-screen interface of his “Oh aren’t I so much better than you people” 2010 Prius
- The touch-screen interface of a gas pump (ironic given the above example)
- Some touch-screen shit in a Chinese taxi cab
Anyone else notice the pattern here? Robert has conflated a touch-screen interface with tablet form-factor computing. Here’s a clue Scooby: Lots of devices utilize a touch-screen. Some have been successful, some not so much, but merely possessing a touch-screen does not make a device a “tablet computer” you fucking ignoramus. Seriously, go back to hawking cameras. Hell, some of them now even have touch-screen interfaces. Your vast experience with tablet computing will serve you well.
December 30th, 2009 Gods know I hate TechCrunch. Fuck, they’re probably responsible for at least a third of the material for the Angry Mac Bastards podcast. But yesterday, TechCrunch and Erik Schonfeld sank to an abysmal new low. Whatever the motivation, the article is reprehensible. Seriously, how dare a jumped up tabloid like TechCrunch criticize DeviantART. It’s true that a large chunk of the material on DeviantART is, to be honest, crap, but so what. At least the people posting there are trying to express themselves artistically. I’d rather see a billion more gay, furry, S&M, Picard/Kirk fan-fiction stories than one more piece of textual feces shat forth from the keyboards of the pretentious twats at TechCrunch.
December 18th, 2009 Everyone’s favorite cranky old jackass Dave Winer is all a’flutter about WordPress and Tumblr implementing the Twitter API in a post titled How open standards are created. The meat of his post is a bunch of typical Winer bullshit about how wonderful it is that WordPress and Tumblr have implemented the Twitter API (which is true) and how that fact may well make the Twitter API and open standard. I’m going to ignore, for the time being, the patent absurdity of Dave’s assertion. Last time I checked, for something to be an “open standard” it had to be both open, which The Twitter API hardly is; and a standard, which I don’t think being used by yourself, and two blog hosting companies qualifies as. It’s not really that that irks me about this piece. What bugs me here is something that Winer does incessantly, and really chaps my ass. He completely misuses and conflates two different technical terms. To quote: If Facebook were to implement the Twitter API that would be it. We’d have another FTP or HTTP or RSS. No, Dave we wouldn’t. The Twitter API is just that, an Application Programming Interface. FTP, HTTP and RSS are
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December 9th, 2009 Nothing warms the cockles of my dark heart more than seeing the “Old Media” shiv “New Media” in the kidneys. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1dyRFhRHbY Hat tip to Lauren Feldman at 1938 Media for the link
December 1st, 2009 The other day I noticed this bit of fluff from everyone’s favorite ex-camera salesman, Bobby Scoble: Dying career: traffic helicopter pilot. On the surface, there isn’t rally much to say about the piece. It’s the usual tripe where Scooby takes “2” adds it to “B” and comes up with “yellow.” In this case he takes an Associated Press article about how advancing technologies are replacing the venerable traffic helicopter and lurches off into yet another manic rim-job for the next-big-thing. Now, I could rant about how mind-fuckingly stupid you would have to be to rely solely on crowd-sourced traffic updates, but that isn’t really what I want to focus on here. What I want to do is use this as an example of how gob-smackingly stupid you have to be to pay the slightest attention to the New Media Douchebags, even more-so if you are a company taking business advice from these twats. And why, you ask, is it so bad to heed the advice of the NMD’s. Here’s why my chum. These douchenozzles, who claim to understand “the end users,” have their heads rammed so far up their insular, Silicon Valley asses that you would have
Continue reading Why Ignoring New Media Douchebags Is the Best Decision You Can Make
October 29th, 2009 A while back in one of the Angry Mac Bastards podcasts I postulated that Scoble’s Twitter favorites can’t possibly be of any worth, since he can’t possibly be paying the slightest attention to what he favorites. Consider the numbers that he states in the linked blog post. 7,000 favorites in two months? By the most generous math that comes out to 116 favorites a day. Now go look at the list of favorites on that blog post. At the time I’m writing this, there is only one tweet out of the twenty there that is even arguably not marketing chaff. I seriously doubt that will change.
July 15th, 2009 Is Mike Arrington a Dick? For the first time since matter coalesced from the energy soup that followed the Big Bang, the answer to that question has changed from “yes” to “no.” For, you see, Mike Arrington has managed to transcend the bonds of mere dickdom and has risen to new heights of douchebaggery. It’s not even the fact that Phlegminton chose to publish the stolen Twitter documents that has my spleen up. I mean, it’s Mike Arrington, did anyone think that he wouldn’t Adding insult to injury, Mucosal Mike’s justification essentially boils down to, “if we don’t publish, someone else will, so we might as well get there first.” As my friend John Welch is fond of saying, that is seventh grade logic. Just because Billy is going to hit a puppy doesn’t mean you’re morally justified in kicking a baby. So, in order to calm down I’m going to go back to that mental image of Arrington being greeted by the Fox News Rape Demon. Enjoy the eternal sodomy you chump, at least it won’t try to shake your hand.
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