http://www.good.is/post/at-this-vending-machine-swapping-is-
the-new-buying?utm_campaign=daily_good2&utm_medium=email_daily_good2
&utm_source=headline_link&utm_content=At%20This%20Vending
%20Machine%2C%20Swapping%20is%20the%20New%20Buying

Yuck! Well, I’m here to tell you how to solve this hobgoblin by giving you some information about the question mark “at the end.”—the one that I’ve highlighted in black. For that is not a question mark for the title of the article, but rather the gate to server world.

If you look at the above url, you’ll notice a few things you’re likely to recognize. This domain is unusual for not being a “.com” but other than that, the title of the article is pretty clear. You can read it out loud, “At This Vending Machine Swapping is the New Buying.” But see, that’s a title, not a question. That question mark is the end of the URL and the beginning of a bunch of variables that programmers and publishers can use mainly to see where you came from. I was in my mail program when this article popped up, I clicked on the link, and this URL was sent to my browser, letting the good people at Good Magazine know that I arrived on their doorstep from out of an email they sent to me.

But look, copy only the portion up to the question mark and Voila, the URL still functions perfectly:

http://www.good.is/post/at-this-vending-machine-swapping-is-the-new-buying

Some people prefer to automate this process a bit by using URL shortening services such as bit.ly or goo.gl or, my favorite, is.gd, and I do use them for Twitter. But when sending along an article to a friend, I consider this bad etiquette. In a way, it takes advantage of trust and removes information from the receiver which would otherwise give them a choice to spend their time on your missive or not. Consider the difference here:

Hey,

Thought you would appreciate this article from Good Magazine:
“At This Vending Machine Swapping is the New Buying”
http://www.good.is/post/at-this-vending-machine-swapping-is-the-new-buying

Hey,

Check this out:
http://is.gd/1OgsZz

You see? There’s no context. The second message reads like an imperative. But, people are busy. People may not be more or less likely to go to the link you’ve so generously shared if it’s shortened, but if they put it away for later, chances are they’ll forget it. Instead, the context of the title might be enough to spring something to mind later and they’ll seek it out of their inbox. Besides which, I can’t help but think that courtesy and clarity in email are two things worth striving for.

Publishers!: You should note for yourselves that bad URLs are likely harming your readership. URLs like the first one above often just break in email programs when people try to share them. It’s why URL shortening services exist, but they are not a panacea. Ask your webmaster (are they still called that?) how a reader can land on the site, your URL variables then register with your server, and afterwards direct the reader to a new copy of the page with a nice URL that people can more easily share. It’s not hard to do. (Particularly savvy web masters will use javascript to dynamically update the URL without ever making the reader think they’ve left the page!)

For instance, if the act of signing up for war could be considered altruistic, certainly the opportunity for altruism disappears the moment you’re “in the shit.” Not so. Consider some stories from David Axelrod’s “The Evolution of Cooperation.” In it he talks about how British and German troops “regularized” their firing on each to such a degree that injury could be easily avoided by both sides. “These rituals of perfunctory and routine firing sent a double message. To the high command they conveyed aggression, but to the enemy they conveyed peace.” (on Page 86) Peace in the midst of gunfire! We are a bizarre species.

Frankly, even the author of the Techcrunch article made some questionable statements that sound like typical journalistic hyperbole: “The pursuit of ‘now’ is conditioning us to expect information as it happens, whether it’s accurate or developing.” In other words, you can have it now with a greater probability that it’s wrong, or you can wait and it will be more accurate. Since when are accuracy and immediacy mutually exclusive? I’m sorry, but I happen to think that being present at an event is kind of critical. But that sort of conundrum is just the sort of drivel that established mainstream media ventures want the public to believe—”Fair and balanced”—it is a perspective that distinctly benefits them. The author of the article goes on to point out that, “Fact checking is a vital part of the news business and is ultimately what separates amateurs from experts.” Right. Because the mainstream news always does it’s fact-checking. Yes sir, the pros are always on top of the story and they’re always near the story too! And when you consider their track record, it’s hard to argue with them, right? Right?

Ali G must be laughing in his fake grave to hear this rubbish. The news media have always been slanted and especially so when it is commercially driven. When the bottom line matters more than the facts do, the business turns to making a fuss, not reporting the news, because making a fuss gets ratings. Worse still, the making of a fuss is monolithic, given over only to those with the means (i.e. communications systems) to decide what the news is going to be. With twitter, at least you can gather the facts for yourself and make your own judgement rather than having someone make the judgement for you.

Don’t be fooled. News is a business and businesses have PR wings. The mainstream media would have you believe that they are the de facto organization they are because they are relevant and because they do the hard research. The truth is that they are sensationalist in order to get ratings, and research costs too much money to do well. That makes them irrelevant and inaccurate more times then they get caught. If the mainstream media ever did it’s job, why in the world would we need Factcheck.org or The Sunlight Foundation?

via Techcrunch

Update

Apparently, someone from some show called the “Daily Show” out there agrees with me (and he’s a LOT funnier about it).

1. Everyone that is allowed to follow the clubhouse can see its postings (including @ posts to the clubhouse).
2. Any member of the clubhouse can DM the clubhouse account privately and anyone in the clubhouse will see it.
3. Any member of the clubhouse can publicly @ the clubhouse

Obviously, this is not as fancy as a clubhouse could be. For instance, only one person would get the privilege of receiving DMs on a device. With most systems (like Tweetie for the iphone and ipod) that’s a fairly moot problem (since you can switch between accounts with relative ease and see DMs that way). But it would be a good way to create a somewhat cloistered area for casual semi-public messaging. I work on a collective novel over at Jelly Halo right now and despite the great things PBworks have set up, there isn’t a communication system that would be as “collected” in one place as this method would.

Here’s what my toolbar looks like in Safari on my Mac (looks about the same in Chrome on my Dell).

What’s happened is that these are all what are known as bookmarklets. Rather than just bookmarks with URLs that take you somewhere (some page you like to visit a lot); these little babies have javascript in them and actually do something to the page you are on. Say that I’m on the New York Times looking at some article about a new discovery about the brain. I got it because someone else emailed it to me. Well, the first thing is that this really might not be a good time to read the article, so clicking “Save for later” is a bookmarklet that adds the page to my queue of articles over on laterloop. Laterloop will keep track of your reading queue, let you check items off as you read them, and it will do so in your feedreader of choice or on your iPhone. Get those (possibly important) articles out of your inbox and into your reading queue and then when you really do have some down time, read the queue. Very handy.

However, you might also want to pass this particular article along to some folks who you know also might want to see it. Personally, I’m a firm believer in thoroughly reading what I forward. The value of the network depends on how much we fact check and filter. But sometimes the source is enough and that’s what the Sharethis bookmarklet will do for you. It generates an inline dialogue box that lets you share the article with friends in innumerable ways (email, delicious, friendfeed, facebook, ust to name a small few).

The list of handy bookmarklets goes on. “Post to Delicious” will let you track your bookmarks online at delicious.com so you can get to them from any platform or machine. Todoist is a fantastic to-do tracker that I’ve raved about before—their delegate bookmarklet will let you turn pages and online email items into to-to items in your lists. And is.gd will take horrendously long URLs (like mine) and make them bite-size for posting to something like Twitter or just making your emails easier on the eyes.

For starters, the site has all the trappings of a me-too effort that is easily three years late to the game.  Among its competitors I would count Amazon, Last.fm, Pandora (my favorite), Finetune, Imeem, musicfilter.com as well as some other fronts (i.e. besides the web) like iTunes and music magazines (remember those?)  Then to make matters more difficult for themselves, thefilter.com is going to filter everything!—music, movies, web video and tv.¹  And the thing is, most of the sites that I’ve listed above actually get it wrong anyway.  Seriously.

Itunes manages to predict lots of things that I like but have heard before.  The same goes for last.fm.  And I have used the heck out of both of those sites.  But its a simple fact that my own regular explorations of blogs and sites and rss feeds (and listening to what my sister likes) allows me to find tons of more stuff than any recommendation engine.  Except for one.

Pandora.com that can actually recommend music I’ve not heard of before on my own and the clear difference is in methods, with last.fm and iTunes and all the rest using the “neighbor” model (people who like what you like also like…) and Pandora actually employing a lot of DJs to catalog tracks. They call it the music genomeproject and it’s brilliant. Until computer algorithms are good enough to actually analyze the sound files and not just people’s listening habits, foraging new frontiers is going to be very hard for them.

The filtering process is becoming a truly necessary component of the web and what is really going to continue to drive new customers to the long tail and the frontiers but this neighbor filtering process is just not up to the task.  Tastes evolve and not necessarily at the same rate in the same direction.  None of the examples I’ve listed of these filters that use the neighbor system have introduced me to anything.

Of the nine movies that thefilter.com wanted me to rate in order to join (a poor usability decision, by the way) I had seen three.  That just doesn’t bode well for the site.  Nor does the fact that it is a series of lists of music that I have to listen to and rate.  So, let me get this straight; filtering is good because it makes it easier to hear new things, you just have to do a little work first.  There’s no way you could, say, import a playlist of mine from iTunes?  Sorry, but thefilter.com is a day late and a dollar short.

What’s strange is that these two sites have chosen very different methodologies for gathering all your friends into one place. Friendfeed.com, on the one hand, let’s you create a feed into which you import your accounts. I mess around on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Del.icio.us, and I have two blogs ¹. So I pulled them all into one feed and voilá!—with merely one pretentious French word, I have my own personal feed. Nice.

Socialthing, on the other hand, let’s you put in all your account information for various sites and then updates your “lifestream” with all the activities and buzz of your friends on that site. Socialthing is still in beta right now, but if you’re really interested in getting me an account, ask nicely and I’ll give you one of my invitations.

The truth is, I like both sites. Friendfeed.com wins hand-down for being plugged into the most services. But I think Socialthing is right on their tale. Not that it matters. Really, Socialthing is for the online wallflowers and Friendfeed is for the attention junkies. Think of one as email and the other as broadcast. You can create a friendfeed and give it to anyone. That’s a nice thing for us social butterflies. Socialthing on the other hand is a little less loud. You have to log in to the site, and you don’t have to wait on your friends to figure out what “feeds” are before you can subscribe to their goings-on. I think for me, for the time being, both will serve a valuable service. And like a lot of social sites, it depends a lot on where your friends are on the I-have-my-own-blog-I-just-found-out-about-myspace scale.