It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I thought I might do a little update on what I’ve been up to for the none of you that visit this site 🙂 My buddy stungeye and I have launched another web product, this one is specifically designed for mobile phones. At QRB.ca, you can build mobile landing pages with location specific directions for events, locations, or attractions. This is perfect for tourism, small and medium sized businesses, or event planning. Think of how many out of town guests will appreciate knowing where they are and how they can get to your wedding, or tourists in town trying to find the local attractions. It’s perfect for mobile advertising campaigns as a destination page for mobile ads. Anyway, that’s enough spiel! It’s free to try out!

It’s a funny thing, the Internet. Online communities can become like mobs, united in opinion and righteousness over an idea. At midnight last night, the forumers at ytmnd.com launched a raid on the ebaumsworld.com forum, massively posting on their forums and generally causing a ruckus. Why? Well, it’s complicated. I think to start with, you should check out this flash show (warning, contains explicit lyrics). The gist of it is that Eric Bauman is accused of stealing other peoples creative works, slapping a ‘hosted on ebaumsworld.com’ watermark and making loads of cash. So it seems that many are unhappy with his apparent piracy, and when an image created on the ytmnd.com site was ‘stolen’, the above stated righteous fury took over and mob mentality ruled.
It’s an interesting phenomenon though when you think about it. Is it not akin to the villagers taking up the pitchforks and torches and going to slay the monster that lives on top of the hill? Is electronic vigilantism an ethical and moral way of dealing with the ‘lawless’ internet? I know there are other types of vigilante’s out there who take it upon themselves to target child pornographers, and some record companies seed p2p networks with bogus mp3 to stem rampant downloads, so the question is do the ends justify the means? Did they break the law, because technically, the were committing a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on another server. Is this kind of thing something we’ll see more of in the future? As online communities draw together and split apart, will ‘opposing’ forums be seen as the battlefield of the future?

** UPDATE **
I’m a moron. Please disregard this post. I’d delete it if I didn’t have strong view on censorship.
** /UPDATE **
I was browsing digg.com, trolling for news stories, trying to get my fix. Digg is social link propogation website, relying on individuals to submit new links and users to ‘digg’ it or not. Sites that are dugg enough make it to the front page and the vast, unseen lurkernet. I’m a link junky, and digg provies my fix with its digall page. This is the melting pot where all new stories get dumped; From here a meme is ya’d or nay’d. I clicked on a link that I guess I shouldn’t have, and unfortunatley (or maybe fortunately) I since cannot find. The page took me to a site which said ‘entertainment.com’ in the URL (going to that url directly is not what appeared on my screen), and congratulated me on having a virus. Since I clicked that link, the behaviour of my firefox has changed. It seems as if the stylesheets are messed, or something’s not rendering correctly. At first I thought google had changed their page because the ads didn’t appear in shaded boxes. But since going to other sites show the same effect, I can only conclude that I do, indeed, have a virus.
So why am I writing this? I’m not terribly upset, as I’ve wanted to do a clean install of my computer for a couple weeks, and I can probably live with the changes and I’m too lazy to figure out what’s wrong. I don’t want to bash digg.com, as I’m very happy with it as it was quickly adopted into my ‘must read’ site set for each day. I guess I just want to point out a flaw in the digg.com philosophy, much like the controversy lately with Wikipedia, that allowing unfettered access to changes opens us up to all sorts of potential griefing. Is there some way to figure out if someone is trustworthy or not? Or are we always doomed to have at least one soldier in the battle take the bullet or step on the landmine?
Digg is an interesting conception. In the ‘geekosphere’, rarely has any website ever come close to challenging the venerable ‘slashdot.org‘ in terms of cutting edge, geek-centric news. Digg though has seemingly done so in a time frame that is in scope with popular internet memes. Also, a recent infusion of capital can only mean that soon more people then just geeks will know about it. The only question, as with any niche website, is how well will it fair once the vacous eye of the general public focuses on it?

Way back in 2004 in a slashdot thread about the IPO of Google, I predicted a couple of future endeavours that google would roll out when they became steeped in cash:

Well, we don’t have the network computer yet or processing time on the GoogleOS, but google will soon release it’s Google Base.

I’ve joined a group blog: Everything is Ablaze. Maybe some group blogging will light a fire under this old tired ass. My first post – nothing too exciting.

Bruce understands. He see’s where we’ve gone wrong, but ordinary people would probably mock him. Your average Walmart shopper would probably stare blankly if recited his piece on our culture of materialism. Why is it so hard to convince people that they desperately need to change, or it’s game over man, game over?

pass it on

For many years, a large part of my online life has been devoted to an online forum, a discussion website focused around an excellent gaming server for a fantastic video game. A demo, no less. One level, over and over again, hour after hour, day after day. There was something about it though, that made it such an enthralling time consumer.

Continue reading Death of a Forum →

Today I went to google and found something new: a link to photo management software called Picasa. I can’t explain how pleased this made me – this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. You see, my family and I bought my mom a digital camera for her birthday (or was it xmas?) last year, and I’ve never really been able to successfully teach her how to use all the software with it. She has been quite pleased with it but hasn’t really been taking full advantage of the potential, and so after months of frustration Google comes out and recommends some software for the management of your photos. Well you guys already know that I trust google… and lo and behold, it’s pretty awesome. Right away I’ve got this beautiful thumbnail collection of all my photos organized by date. I’m telling you, if you have a lot of photos it’s well worth your while to check out the program.

Shameful, I know, but I’m going to be echoing Wally’s blog once again because he’s found something really nifty and cool. I’ve mentioned in the past a tool I use to keep track of noteworthy URLs: Spurl to track them and del.icio.us to display them. Enter Extispicious, a cleverly designed category display tool.
This is my noosphere.
This is Wally’s.
If nothing else, you should start using those tools because I tell ya, it’s damn handy to go back and find a URL that you thought was interesting but can’t remember anymore. Plus it’s portable! No need to worry about emailing links to and from work. 😉