DeWitt Clinton

You may remember a popular website where one guy collected and posted the 10 worst album covers of all time? If not, go check it out — they are pretty funny. Yesterday Fark linked to the Sun, which was running it’s own version of the worst album covers ever. The only problem is that the Sun didn’t do any work — it is almost exactly the same list as the first guy. The is no chance that even a single one of those album covers would have ended up on two lists on their own - those albums are just too obscure to be found by anything other than a one-in-a-million chance at a fleamarket or boot sale. Absolutely blatent plagiarism of the list and the scans of the albums. Who cares? In this case, not even the author of the original list. But people should care, even about little stupid things like this, because in an age of Web 2.0 and Creative Commons licensing, we need to be extra vigilant about attribution, as that’s sometimes all one gets for their hard work.

I want to clarify what I said about Atom 1.0 before. The specifications are very good, and I don’t mean to imply otherwise. In fact, I somewhat wish Atom 1.0 beat RSS 2.0 to market. But it didn’t, so that makes you wonder who really benefits from it now. Not that there can’t be two side-by-side syndications formats — we’ve lived with plenty as is. But while Atom is clearly better, is it good enough to get people to change? I’m not sure. [Update -- since I wrote that paragraph I've started talking to/working with a bunch of people in the Atom community. They definitely know what they are doing, and are very well organized. More on this soon.]

A week or two ago I was following a heated email thread that all started when someone forwarded a racist quiz that asked you to identify the ethnicity of the terrorist in various incidents over the past several decades. The “point” was that all of them were young Muslim men. Of course, the quiz left out all of the rather numerous counterexamples. Even a quick study of a list of 20th century terrorist incidents show us that there are just as many white and/or Christian terrorists as Arabs. From groups such as the FLQ, IRA, ETA, and the FALN, to individuals such as the Unabomber, Baruch_Goldstein, Timothy McVeigh, and Eric Rudolf, the world has all-too-many examples of sick behavior from all nationalities and races. Racial, ethic, or religious profiling will not protect us against terrorism. Then again, if you, like the rest of the American mainstream media, refuse to refer to a guy like Rudolf as a terrorist, then the semantic sleight-of-hand may very well prove you right simply via the tautology.

Are search engines indexing blogs the way they should? Stephen O’Grady explores this. Blogs are a little tricky to keep track of. The homepages are frequently dynamic, always a moving target. The best links into a blog are the permanent links. But it is a challenge to keep track of which links belong to which individual site — in other words, you’d want to make sure that blog posts boost the PR of the whole blog, but not necessarily of the whole site (for some sites that host multiple blogs). I frequently notice out-of-date snippits of unto.net appear for keyword searches — if you clicked directly through via the search engine, you wouldn’t always find the keywords you were looking for. Those searches should take you directly to the post itself. But the index doesn’t always know which matches up with what… Dedicated blog searches, such as IceRocket, do a much better job with that, but they typically only can do keyword/date relevance, not relative PR-like weighting. Since the best, most topical, and most timely content on the internet is coming out of blogs, it would be in the best interest of the broad-web search engines to look harder at solving this problem.

As of last week, Gmail lets you change the From address. I like Gmail a lot — though I would rather send and receive email with a unto.net address if I had my choice. Now I can. Very nicely done. And if Gmail supports IMAP (which they say they won’t do because it doesn’t follow their label model, but I bet they do someday anyway), I will probably go back to using Mutt for the majority of my email. Having something as rich as Gmail as my remote web interface would be very nice.

Every once in a while I borrow images to cut up and remix for this site. For most posts I try to use photos that I took myself or art that I create from scratch, but there isn’t always time to do that for every article. And not all of those borrowed source images are CC licensed or public domain. The right answer is “don’t do that ever.” In practice, I link the image back or give explicit credit in the text. Remixing is a good thing, I think — the “original” top-ten worst album cover list couldn’t exist without it — but you should probably always get explicit permission, and when you don’t (’cause you know you won’t even ask) make it easy for people to find the source, and for the source to find you if they need to. Oh — and rule #1, don’t charge money for, or profit off of (via ads), other people’s work.

The biggest problem with “-isms”, such as racism, is the hurt it causes, both to the target and to overall health of a society. But the other problem is how stupidly innacurate it is. This really clicked for me in a synergistic way one Saturday night, years ago, as some friends and I walked around our small college campus past the fraternity-esque row houses and the groups of screaming, stumbling, and rowdy party goers. My impression had been that Williams was just a school full of big drunk idiots, and that my friends and I were a small minority of outsiders amid a school of unruly frat boys. But as we walked on back to the quad I noticed that the lights in most dorm rooms were still on, that there were groups of people sitting and chatting on their stairs, that the computer and science labs all had late-night occupants, and that everywhere around campus, alone or with friends, there were people going about their lives in quiet, unobtrusive ways. So in reality the drunk idiots were in the small minority, though you would never know it by a superficial glance. And that is always the case — the smallest minority, if they are loud and obnoxious enough, will always tend to dominate the perception of the whole, even if you are inside the group in question. This has never been more evident than today, where very small numbers of suicide bombers and terrorists are poisoning the image of Islam, or a tiny handful of fundementalist crusaders are undermining all of Christianity. From a few thugs in the hip-hop community to a cadre of criminals on Wall St., the actions of vocal minority invariably alter perception of the whole. This trend continues simply because it is easy for that deranged minority to kill a bus full of school children, to start wars halfway around the world, and monopolize the newspaper headlines, And this will always be the case — it is an unavoidable truth — the most vocal sub-group, no matter how small, will always dominate the view of the rest. And in this way it is incumbent on each and every observer to look beyond the most attention getting member of a group, and to understand that you may never be able to see the true character that lies behind.

Have you tried Gaim Encryption? If you are concerned about privacy, you probably should try it. It transparently encrypts IM communications between clients that support it, no matter what the protocol. It is sad that we still depend on so many unecrypted and insecure channels for communication these days. Most web surfing, email, IM, and phone calls just fly across the wire with no security. That may have made sense 20 years ago when the CPU cost of encryption was prohibitive, but these days CPUs spend 99.999% of their time just idling — why aren’t we using public-key algorithms on everything? I personally think the web would be so much better off if https/ssl was the default on everything… Dare to dream. (I just chatted with Stephen for a bit over Gaim-encrypted Google Talk/Jabber — works like a charm, and absolutely transparent to the user. Gaim encryption rocks. Install it now if you run Gaim — there is is no downside it seems.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 by DeWitt Clinton and is filed under meta. You can bookmark this post at del.icio.us. You can digg this post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.