dolorous googling

Yesterday I joined my friends Krishnan and Sandhya in taking their nephew Balaji (and their daughter Subhadra) on a tour of some of San Francisco’s famous landmarks: the Golden Gate Bridge, Fort Point (where we saw a couple of dolphins), the Presidio, Japantown (Peace Plaza), University of San Francisco, and, of course Lombard Street (or the crooked street as K. called it). Our first stop, after they picked me up in front of GGU, was supposed to be Mission Dolores (or more properly Mission San Francisco de Asís). I remembered roughly where it was down in the aptly-named Mission district, but I decided to google it to be on the safe side. The weird thing is, Google maps places the Mission Dolores a little over a block away from its true location at 16th and Dolores streets on a small back-alleyish street called Dearborn (link). I was moderately suspicious and surprised but I figured the almighty URL aggregators knew what-for, and I was in a hurry to get to BART on time to meet my friends.

tags or elements

Finally a web-meme I can get into! Over at Mother Tongue Annoyances (a blog) I found the following meme (link) tacked on to the end of a funny rant on Henry “Dick” Miller:

A simple, two-step approach for generating your own, fully personalized, 21st century, Web 2.0-based reading list:

1. Make a list of the top three books that have influenced your life, and make a note of the authors’ names
2. Visit Literature-Map, plug each author name into the text box (one at a time, naturally) and generate a cloud of related authors. That ought to keep you busy for a while!

Thanks for playing. Have a nice day.

OK. Easy enough. My three life-changing books, off the cuff, were:

• Voltaire, Candide. [map]
• Joris-Karl Huysman, À Rebours. [map]
• Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop. [map]

The first thing which struck me was the name juxtaposed to Voltaire’s, i.e., Scott Adams. In Paris, I once stayed at a hotel on the quai de Voltaire (across the Seine from the Louvre), and that key was named so because the building in which Voltaire spent the last years of his life and in which he died, then housed a café on its ground floor. I ate a lovely breakfast there, with strong coffee, croissant, and plum preserves. On the other hand, I once taught a Java class for a cohort of masters students from Pacific Bell, before it morphed into SBC and finally lapsed back into AT&T. Knowing that the author of Dilbert had worked there for years, I asked each student on the first night of class to introduce themselves, give any programming experience, and tell me the best story they knew about Scott Adams when he worked there. The only memorable story was that one of the students knew the woman engineer that the character Alice was based on. Go ahead and check out the maps for each of my three chosen authors. I did and enjoyed the fact that I had read works by about 50% of them.

monetize your buzzword

On Tuesday, I went to a brown bag talk (reviewed) at work. I hadn’t heard that Jakob Nielsen was going to be visiting our campus, but, after Richard told me, I looked forward to hearing from the guru of Web page usability. According to the forwarded email, Nielsen would be discussing his Alertbox column of July 9, 2007, provocatively entitled “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings”.

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

My initial reaction was what does he consider his Alertbox if not a blog? A regular (bi-weekly) column listed in reverse chronological order. It seemed to hinge on his definition of a blog as something scattered and not very well thought out. I opine; you pontificate; he bloviates. It’s a little like the poor craftsman blaming his tools. There are plenty of good, great, mediocre, and horrible blogs out there, but it’s not a blogs-generic problem. And, not many blogs are linear for that matter. That’s what folksonomic tags and cross-referential links are for.

web two oh twiddles, lit crit yearns

Qualis artifex pereo. Short, sweet, and to the point:

With the rise of the web, writing has met its photography. By that I mean, writing has encountered a situation similar to what happened to painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do, that in order to survive, the field had to alter its course radically. If photography was striving for sharp focus, painting was forced to go soft, hence Impressionism. Faced with an unprecedented amount of digital available text, writing needs to redefine itself in order to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance.

[Kenneth Goldsmith Writing Crisis V.1.0; via Ron Silliman’s mini-posting.]

class divisions during wartime

I was folding in some old favorite blogs into the blogroll in the right column, when I came across a link to an article on Jonas Söderström’s blog. The following paragraph really caught my eye:

A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because the division in the military reflects the division in high schools. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it's not the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace. The officers, many of whom have already received college training, are using Facebook. The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can't help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage.

[danah boyd. 06/24/07. “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”; see also her blog entry on apophenia; via Blind Höna entry]

When I first heard about the MySpace and YouTube bans the military had put in place, I wondered if they would be stationing MPs in front of Internet cafes like they used to do at bars. In the 17th century, it was coffeehouses in Europe that were considered dangerous. I guess any places, virtual or real, where folks congregate these days are danger zones.