 September 3rd, 2010 by Weskimo -
I do a lot of driving during the course of my everyday life, and found myself recalling a few odd ones from recent memory. For example, today I was on the highway and saw a cloud shaped exactly like the profile of the starship Enterprise. A few weeks ago, I saw a 40-50 year old man in a leather vest and baseball cap skateboarding down a busy city street. Like seriously, like a 60km/h zone, he was going 4km/h and using a lane.
So what else is out there? Tell us what you’ve been seeing. What is the Weirdest Thing You’re Ever Seen While Driving?
Note: We will accept ‘while on the bus’ for those of us who are vehicularly challenged.
September 2nd, 2010 by Newbs -
Last week, I declared Kevin Rose, the founder of social media/link sharing site Digg.com and the entire community of that site to be Shameful Humans. I blamed Kevin and his staff for prematurely pushing out v4 while it was still packed with glitches and absent in obvious features, and I blamed the community of Digg for completely overreacting to the changes brought about.
In the intervening week, Digg’s tech has stabilized, things are getting fixed, and Rose appears to be moving forward. The community of his site, however, is not. Each day, I fire up Digg with the hopes of finding amusement and maybe even a story or two to cover on the site, the things I used to find. Instead, what my browser displays each morning is a user-generated catastrophe of nerd rage.
Every anti-Digg and anti-Rose post that can be found is popularized and pushed to the front-page. Significantly worse, the frothing geeks who continue to visit Digg, even though they claim to hate it, see to it that no conversation within any comment section can take place unless it is specifically about how bad the new Digg is.
As anti-v4 push-back continues, it has become increasingly shrill and conspiratorial, with users now claiming sites like Mashable and TIME pay Rose to promote their content. This of course ignores the fact that these users have managed to entirely bend Digg’s system to their will, in direct violation of corporate interest. Someone, somewhere has to be Digging up those stories in order popularize them. Where users used to follow other users, they now more often follow websites, and some sites have managed to work the system better than others. That’s it.
Never have I more greatly appreciated the diligent work of moderators on the forums I visit. If this were any forum on the internet, such users would be banned for trolling, trashing, and abusing the site they are participating in. At a certain point, Digg is going to have to boot these unruly abusers in order to be able to provide any kind of service at all, save as venting ground for unwarranted rage.
Digg has been rendered unusable, not by its leadership, not by the corporate masters the company has supposedly bowed to, but by its own community of spammers who have seemingly nothing else to do than ruin a perfectly good service for everyone else.
[image source]
August 27th, 2010 by Weskimo -
From time to time, you might come across the odd individual who tries to talk to you about the Final Frontier, but something seems off about it. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something about the conversation is nagging at you, just tugging at the thread-like hold you have on your sanity.
Then you realize: They are saying “Track” when they should be saying “Trek”. At first, you think, oh, they must have had a slight pronunciation error, they’ll get it right next time. But they don’t. They never do. They keep on saying “Track”, as if the Enterprise is on a predetermined track around space rather than the epically adventurous explorative TREK that they truly embark upon.
So does this bother you? And do you correct them? Or let them continue to blissfully annoy nit-picky nerds like me?
August 26th, 2010 by Newbs -
Digg is some kind of social media/link sharing mega site founded by TechTV’s Kevin Rose. On August 25, 2010, version four of Digg.com went live. The redesign brought about a wide range of changes both great and small, from a layout cleansing (that looks infinitely better in my opinion), to a refocus on following the activities of your friends and favourite websites rather than the hive mind of the collected Digg community.
The transition has been shaky from a technical standpoint, with Rose and co. re-launching Digg seemingly without adequate preparation. Despite a lengthy testing period, the new Digg has been up, down, and glitchy ever since it went live. The extra click required to hop from your personal stream to the site-wide most popular submissions is also somewhat annoying. Speaking of personal streams, and as a means of being completely self serving, I want to recommend you follow Shufflingdead on Digg.
But this post isn’t just about Kevin. It’s also about the legion of basement dwellers who rely on his site for distraction while their youths slip away. You see, Diggers, like all geeks, are a ravenous bunch of haters. Change of any kind is to be reviled. Digg’s revamp has garnered nothing less than a torrent of whining from its millions of users. A quick scan from this comment page garnered these gems (after the jump):
→ Continue reading Shameful Human(s) of the Week: Kevin Rose and the entire Digg community
August 20th, 2010 by Weskimo -
The ultimate nerd showdown. Star Trek or Star Wars?
This question has plagued our society for far too long. It’s time to settle it once and for all. We at Shufflingdead do not just want to know this. We need to know whether the Force is with us or not. We need to know the value of the Prime Directive. We need to know if these are the droids we are looking for, and perhaps most of all, we need to know how many goddamn lights there are!
August 19th, 2010 by Newbs -
Meet Chris Anderson, he’s the editor-in-chief of Wired. You know, that magazine that’s also a very successful website. Chris recently blasted out a massive article declaring “The Web Is Dead.” It’s a rather dull piece with a stunning headline designed to grab lots of attention here on the highly profitable web. Anderson argues that the “web” part of the internet (that stuff you see in your browser) is quickly vanishing, and being replaced by isolated apps that use the internet but don’t live in the “web” ecosystem.
Chris begins his argument with a graph demonstrating that web traffic has dropped significantly compared to the rest of what the internet is used for. Have a look. Huh. It appears to be a chart of bandwidth usage, demonstrating that the web take has lessened relative to significantly more bandwidth-heavy uses. Hardly shocking. An even funnier thing about that bandwidth usage is that most of what the web has lost appears to have gone directly to video. You know, those moving pictures you watch all of the damn time through your browser on the web. Poor “other” has lost even more ground in recent years according to his chart. I wonder, where do all of those apps and X-Box connections Anderson claims are taking over fit in?
Don’t worry, my fellow interneters. This isn’t the first time a tech journalist has declared a technology, tech company, or tech trend dead a little prematurely. How many times were Nintendo and Apple declared dead during the ’90s?
Chris Anderson is a thoroughly shameful shameless attention grabber. At least the lengthy list of ironies inherent in his argument have given swarms of people something to talk about on this very lively web.
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