 September 3rd, 2010 by Weskimo -
In an effort to stem the bleeding of Anglican church membership nationwide, Halifax-based Anglican Rev. Lisa Vaughn has asked cellphone, laptop, and technological gadgets in to receive a special blessing this weekend.
Vaughn says in an interview “It’s not just about please don’t let my cellphone drop calls today. It’s about, you know, help me to be the best Christian, the best person I can be in my conversations, in my communication.”
Personally, I’m not too hopeful of her chances of increasing attendance too much with this initiative, but I am a little curious. If I had her bless my Xbox controller, would I be playing with the Holy Fist of God on my side?
[source]
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 30th, 2010 by Newbs -
We reported earlier that things over at social networking/link sharing site Digg.com got a little wonky with a recent site redesign. When Digg v4 launched, there was an uproarious user protestation due to a wealth of bugs, absence of features, and what was seen to be the “selling out” of Digg to large sites and corporations.
Most of the tech problems have gone away, and founder Kevin Rose has promised fixes for most of the missing features. Unrest regarding selling out, however, has burgeoned into full-on revolt. On the new Digg, users are encouraged to follow other users, who are able to auto-submit entries from their own websites. Large sites with strong Digg followings already in place have been able to dominate.
Hilariously, that has never been more true than today, with legions of Digg users subscribing to the feed for Digg competitor Reddit, and voting up that site’s posts (which link to Reddit, and then on to the actual web page of interest). Essentially, Digg has been transformed by its own users into a massive advertisement for its rival.
The image to the right is a screen shot of the most popular entries on Digg today. Every single one of them is a link to Reddit. The comment section of every one of those, as well as just about every other entry on Digg, is filled with anti-Digg, pro-Reddit sentiment.
Reddit has been kind enough to respond by putting a shovel in the hand of their mascot, and starting a help thread for new users.
I’ve seen plenty of mass-user reactions before. I’ve seen community revolts, forum invasions, and 4chan topics that evolved into real-world protests. I don’t recall ever seeing so many users of a site so valuable or popular manage to screw things up so badly for that site’s owners.
August 27th, 2010 by Newbs -
Maybe he’s sick of seeing his old company’s glory days slipping away while the market cap of ancient rival Apple passes them by. Maybe Google’s near-monopoly makes him jealous. Or maybe he’s just trying to horde as much cash as possible before giving it away to charity (as he has pledged). Whatever the case, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed a suit against Apple, Google, AOL, Facebook, ebay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube.
Allen contends that his company, Interval Licensing, owns patents on some of the core features found in the services of the companies listed above. Allen claims to own patents on things like giving internet viewers suggested products based on what they are viewing, among other obvious and widely used website features.
Allen’s suit lacks a specific dollar amount being sought. Although, considering the company’s he’s after, Allen surely wants a lot of money. Perhaps even all of it.
[source]
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 22nd, 2010 by Newbs -
SFGate.com is reporting that there is a growing trend among unemployed morons to accept virtual money in exchange for doing real work.
Their article tells the story of 28 year old Amanda Dorsey, who has been willing to check search engine links and other dull and repetitive tasks for CrowdFlower Inc., which pays her in the currency of TinierMe.com. She’s supposedly a writer, which leads me to wonder why she isn’t spending her time not making money blogging. Her in-game avatar has gotten a couple clothing items out of the deal.
Another example SFGate provides is of Tina Wang, a recovering back surgery patient who has spent her time off judging search results on eBay to earn “Swag Bucks.” Wang can get about 450 Swag Bucks during a seven hour shift, enough for a $5 Amazon gift card.
|
|
Comments