Articles by “projectphp”
Oh the joy of ordering simple things online.
The Sydney film festival is on right now, and I agreed , against my better judgement, to order tickets online. Gloriously, the festival has chosen Ticketmaster as their fulfillment partner.
Twenty minutes of multiple illegible screengrabs, a frustrating registration process (I want to buy a ticket, why do I need an Flippin’ account?) and a lovely delivery method page that was pointless all combined with my legendarily low threshold for ineptitude and my blood was at boiling point when I finally reached the CC form, where I encountered something so bad it made me laugh.
It was inevitable that, with another PageRank obsessive week in SEO, people would start calling to ditch PageRank, lose the PageRank display on the toolbar etc etc. I believe that all such arguments are flawed, and for a variety of reasons, that I’ll keep to two.
Firstly, there is the problem of measurement. What, exactly, is the problem that removing PageRank, form the toolbar or the algo, suppossed to solve? And what metrics do we use to measure this? Comscore data shows that, despite having over 50% of search, Google increased their market share in August, 2007. The most important metric (market share) seems to favour Google by a wide margin, so i can;t really see that any of this really hurting their bottom line.
Normally, I hate wading in on topics that have been done to death, but on this occasion I feel the need to.
For those that don’t know, Google reduced the PageRank for a number sites, in many cases between two and three the toolbar scores/ranks/numbers. This has caused many people to write a heck of a lot of posts, and make me eternally thankful that Blogs use bits and bytes, not paper (I reckon an Amazon worth of trees would have been cut down otherwise).
There was a time, when I first starting working from home, that I could go all day without speaking to anyone. I used top, at that time, really enjoyed the distraction telemarketers provided, and I had a lot of fun with them (see below).
Nowadays, however, that thrill has long since passed. Luckily, I finally worked out, after about 150 telemarketing calls, how their software works.
I wonder if the internet is dumbing down our expectations, or whether the expectations placed upon web properties is unrealistic, or both.
I am increasingly seeing examples of Internet phenomenon being unfairly compared to an offline “equivalents”. Bloggers being compared to journalists, Wikipedia being compared to an outdated notion of an encyclopaedia and comments compared to formalized civil meetings.
Is blogging filling a new niche, or is it poor jounalism? Is wikipedia filling an information void, or dumbing downb our expectations of accuracy? Are comments a rude, impersonal, untraceable form of public discourse that is bad for society?
Nothing, at least as far as I am concerned!
I often hear criticisms of Wikipedia that just flabbergast me. Take a read of this article, and Page 2 in particular, where you’ll find this rather common comment:
But for all its breadth and popularity, Wikipedia is a deeply flawed product. Individual articles are often poorly written and badly organized, and the encyclopedia as a whole is unbalanced, skewed toward popular culture and fads. It’s hardly elitist to point out that something’s wrong with an encyclopedia when its entry on the Flintstones is twice as long as its entry on Homer.
The background:
Andrew Bogut, Australia’s only “proper” NBA player, recently gave an interview to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Aussie version of the NY Times, in which he said some pretty pointed things about American culture. Some of the comments, it seems, came off as race related (NBA players are predominantly Black[1] after all).
This would, on the surface, appear to be the sort of issue the media usually blows out of all proportion. But they didn’t, as the mainstream American media was, well, quiet.
Where this gets interesting for me is this articles by David Steele of the Baltimore Sun. In the article, David Steele writes:
This is a preview of
Why Old Media Still Don’t Get It (Even When They Kinda, Sorta Do!)
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Read the full post (834 words, estimated 3:20 mins reading time)
