MySpace this. LinkedIn that. Facebook is the best…etc.

Like others, I think Facebook is cool but is waiting to be obsoleted. I’m waiting for Google’s offering, which should be out in November.

They tend to be more open with their stuff…because they can, and because their entire suite of products benefits from each individual product’s ability to interoperate. What does Facebook benefit from being able to export your data out of the application? Right.

Google wins here hands-down. Making all your own information available isn’t just something they happen to do; it’s part of their mission statement. Google’s just making people look silly at this point.:

You can barely go a day on Digg or Reddit without hearing the cry of poor and declining content quality. It usually comes in the form of, “This place used to not suck so much” or, “Is it just me or is the content here getting worse and worse every day?”. Perhaps it is, but I have a crazy idea:

Stop complaining and submit your own content. Write something. Create something. Comment on something. Tell us what you think. Contribute.

And don’t worry about the stigma of submitting your own content; the whole concept is crap. Nothing limits the quality of what we read more than the idea that it’s socially unacceptable to self-submit. It limits what we see to two groups:

1. Money-seeking spam leeches
2. An extremely small minority who can see through the stupidity of the self-submission stigma.

The first group isn’t going anywhere, so the only long-term solution is to increase the ranks of the second one.

Remember that writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait for it to be found. Artisans have shows and invite lots of people, and academics submit to their respective journals. In short, submitting original content for peer review is crucial in any community that values intellectual progress. And it’s the only way to keep the quality of a site at a consistently high level.

If we as readers want superior content then we need become part of the solution. That means two things:

1. Appreciating quality writing even when it’s submitted by the author
2. Creating and submitting our own material without fear

Speed mostly. It was just too damned slow. Many of my Firefox Quicksearch queries took several seconds.

I’ve moved to Google Bookmarks. It lacks some features — most notably the social element and the ability to share all feeds over RSS — but I’m sure Google will eventually catch up and then surpass Yahoo! in those respects.

So I can still search all my bookmarks (I imported them from Del.icio.us) using the Firefox URL field, but now my queries are instantaneous.

What bookmark solution are you guys using?

So what RSS feeds/websites do you guys frequent? I’m going through a pruning phase and am looking for new feeds to add to my collective. In case you don’t follow the site regularly, here are some areas I’m interested in:

• Alternative News
• Politics
• Technology
• Science
• Religion/Philosophy/Atheism
• Humor
• Prose
• Miscellaneous

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

It’s like Hot or Not, but for network diagrams.

[ Link: Rate My Network Diagram ]

I just found a really cool tool that lets you see who’s looking at your site. It’s called whos.amung.us, and it’s worth a look if you blog or otherwise manage a site.

[ Link: whos.amung.us ]

So in case you’re not aware of the phenomenon, there’s a thing going around where people post a number of their favorite blogs on their site, and everyone they mention then has to do the same.

Well, KuiperCliff just hit me, so now I am going to spread the joy.

1. Dangerous Intersection
2. Steven Harms
3. Zhasper.com
4. Adam Rawlings
5. Jeff Milner

Everyone’s seen the cool little icons/buttons for Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us shown under various articles online. They make it easy for users to submit to their favorite social site by automatically filling in the title of your page. I also think they subconsciously add legitimacy to a web presence. In short, they’re just great to have.

A number of plugins can be installed in your blogging software to enable this functionality, but what happens if you want to use these little jems on your own static content? I wondered the same thing and made my own.

Here’s the code (click the image):

[html]     [/html]

Nothing is worse for systems like Digg and Reddit than repetitive, mediocre content. These networks are designed to magnify the efficiency of the Internet by taking excellent content — regardless of source — and promoting it through impartial democracy.

Ultimately, the goal is to minimize the time it takes someone to get up to speed on the most original/interesting content within a given area of focus, be it technology, politics, or whatever. When done correctly, the concept is quite beautiful.

Spamming vs. Contributing

The system breaks down horribly, however, when these communities fail to understand the difference between submitting original content and blogspamming. Many are confused about what blogspamming actually is: it’s not posting a link to something on your own blog or website (if it’s decent and original, that’s called “contributing”). Blogspamming is actually very specific (I had the Digg staff spell it out for me) — here are the requirements:

1. Find interesting content somewhere on the Internet
2. Post that content on your own website
3. Post the link to your website rather than the original source

This is blogspamming, and it’s every bit as evil as people make it out to be. But it should not be confused with people posting their own original content. That practice, i.e. sharing ideas, is what makes the Internet so wonderful.

The Idea Bazaar

When it comes to sharing ideas, the Internet should be viewed much like a traditional, open marketplace — where people bring the artwork, pottery, clothing, woodwork, etc. for public review. It’s like open-mic night in front of billions of people.

Hello, everyone. Here’s a short story I just finished. I hope you like it…

This is what the Internet is about, and I think Digg, Reddit, and their successors should be more open to this philosophy. We shouldn’t penalize people for offering their own original content to the world just because they submitted it themselves. It’s far more genuine to do that, after all, than to artificially manufacture a third-party submission (which so many people do).

Remember that writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait for it to be found. Artisans have shows and invite lots of people. Academics submit to their respective journals. In short, submitting original content for peer review is an absolute must in any system that values intellectual progress.

Communities that rely on a constant flow of quality content need to adopt a mantra of judging offerings based on only two things: originality and merit. Any would-be resource that fails to grasp this concept (or later forgets it) is doing its users a disservice by discouraging would-be contributors from participating.:

Last Friday I went to my first 2600 meeting. It was, of course, here in New York City — home of the original meetings. The group started small and grew to around 40, which the regulars said was a weak showing.

We pushed through the awkwardness (which wasn’t helped by our being dressed in business attire) and were able to mingle pretty easily. I got to speak with one guy who was something of a regular/leader on a range of topics, most noteworthy of which was a brief discussion of assassins-mace weapons.

The main conversation I had was with a very cool guy who does graphic design and has a background in programming. We discussed all kinds of stuff, including how we both hated those who write HTML but don’t take the time to learn how to do so correctly.

Meetings end in the final group going downtown for dinner, which we did. There it was a bit more difficult to blend in because the group was just a bunch of friends. It was pretty clear to me that they were going to raz us when we left because of how we dressed, but I think they might have a few good things to say as well.

Overall it was a really good experience. I intend to go back for the December meeting.