3 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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I’ve gotten some feedback about my previous praise and defense of the Autolink feature of the new Google toolbar. This will be my last word on it - eventually, the market will speak and it will stand or fail on its own. The criticism of the toolbar feature (and the criticism of me and other Google defenders) comes down to a few salient points, none of which carry much weight with me.
- No one has the right to change the form of content placed on the web by a content creator. Supposedly, its Evil for Google to add links to content that were not placed there by the “content creator”. This is, for lack of a better word, bunk. Or at least it’s not Google’s fault. If a content creator really thinks client-side processing destroys their creative vision, there are a number of options available. They can create a PDF. Or put pages up as big images. Or stick to paper. We browsers have changed content for years through the use of color and font and alternate style sheets. Firefox is replete with extensions that change content as it is rendered. Google has other features that change content, by highlighting search terms on pages and by caching pages in case they go off-line. And I certainly hope no one making this argument has a pop-up blocker installed.
The key to all of this is that the changes are client-side (Google’s not changing any pages for the web at large, just for users that invoke their service), single-user, and not based on fraud. There are in fact services that do this, unbeknownst to users (by superimposing ads, for example). That is Evil because it is fraudulent, not because it changes content.
Most importantly, Autolink only works when invoked by the user. You have to download and install the toolbar. Then you have to go to a site containing the kinds of information the toolbar can autolink. Then you have to click the Autolink button. If it’s the first time you have used the feature, you get a popup box explaining what it does, which you have to acknowledge. Only then does it superimpose links. Don’t believe me? Go get yourself a copy of the toolbar, and check out this post with it installed. Here are two of the types of information Google autolinks:
- Addresses: my favorite Argentinian restaurant is Palermo Viejo, located at 1359 Bardstown Rd. Louisville, KY 40204
- ISBN: I just finished Marvel 1602, by Neil Gaiman, ISBN 0785110704
No autolink unless you click the button. It’s all within your control, and everyone else sees the page as I wrote it.
- The functionality is not harmless. This is usually a response to a claim like the one I made, that the feature is useful to its users and harmful to no one. Inevitably, someone responds with “Yeah, what about B&N? I bet they don’t agree.” True, the ISBN autolink goes to Amazon, so in theory, if you clicked the autolink button while on a B&N page, you’d get a link to B&N’s competitor. This could mean a lost sale to B&N if they’re not competitive, but in that sense, it’s no different than a price scraping service like PriceGrabber. It doesn’t turn search results on BN.com into Amazon links, but does make comparison shopping easier. I still don’t see this as a big deal.
- It’s a slippery slope to Google/MS/evil bogeyman domination. Even those who accept this service from Google can’t bear the thought that Microsoft might do it (with some M$ abbreviations thrown in for good measure). If Microsoft follows the rules Google has, and makes it single-user, user-invoked, transparent and non-fraudulent, then good for them. I’d expect that Yahoo!, MS and every other search provider would do a similar thing. Because at bottom, all Google has done is take a specific subset of searchable information and add easy links to search results for that information. All the Autolink searches are already available as Search by Number searches.
Now, someone someday may take this Non-Evil technology and use it for Evil. If they do, they should be criticized. Google, however, is acting for Good, not for Evil. Slippery slope arguments make very little sense in a non-legislative setting, and they amke none at all here.
Smarter people than me are all over this issue. See Yoz Grahame here, here and here. And, lest you think Google is hypocritical, here are at least eight (as of this writing) services that scrape and reformat Google’s own content.
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3 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Dan Gillmor is still upset about the new Google Toolbar. And he’s still wrong. What gets Dan upset is the Autolink feature added to the toolbar in version 3, which adds links onto pages that contain certain types of information, links to specialized searches that Google already provides. Dan doesn’t like it because he thinks Google is acting too much like his arch-nemesis:
What Google isn’t taking into account is that its market power, and the tendency of users to accept the default — to eat what’s on the plate someone puts in front of them — will tend to create Google’s version of the Web, not the users’ version. We all hates Microsoft’s Smart Tags idea because it gave more, unearned power to Microsoft. Google doesn’t have that same dominance, but it has enough to worry about.
Whatever Google’s perceived market power, it doesn’t have the power to force anything on anyone. If you want the Google toolbar functionality, you have to download it and install it. Look at the download page for the toolbar beta and ask yourself if any of the features are hidden, if anything about what Google is doing is hidden. Answer: no, of course. Autolink will be useful to the people who download and install the software and use it voluntarily. What Dan seems to be suggesting is that companies with market power shouln’t be able to provide services to their customers that the customers want. Why should I be able to download and install an extension for Firefox that auto-links plain text, or that opens redirect links directly (i.e. not the way the website designer intended) or that takes a web user straight to a map page from highlighted addresses, but I can’t install a toolbar in Internet Explorer from Google that does pretty much the same thing?
Furthermore, does Google really have market power, anyway (and to reiterate, I don’t think it matters a bit if they do)? Wired has an interesting article in this months issue (not online until March 1) pointing out that for all the hype about Google, Yahoo actually leads Google in virtually every metric, and Google’s share in the “favorite search engine” race is narrower than one might think. In any event, with Yahoo, MSN and a host of other competitors on its heels, Google can hardy exercise monopoly power. It’s time to stop looking for tech boogeymen and start asking whether a service the company proposes to provide gives value to users or keeps others from providing competitive value to their customers. In this case, Google is offering a product which is useful to some and interferes with the economic activity of precisely no one.
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3 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Another day, another useful Google feature. Today it’s the Google movie: operator. First, to make it most useful, search for something (anything, really) on Google Local, and check the Remember this Location. This will place a handy cookie on your machine so Google knows where you are. Now, the movie searches. If you search for movies or showtimes, the top link will be to a list of movies showing in your area, along with plot summaries, stars, ratings, etc. Or search for movie:showtimes to get there directly. Cinemas with online ticketing via Movietickets.com have handy links for purchasing tickets to specific shows.
To get showtimes for specific movies, try movie:Million Dollar Baby. You can also find movies by searching for movie: followed by an actor, director, producer or plot.
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3 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Now, this story about Sprint is funny. Seems a woman who wasn’t paying her cell bill on time received a collections call from the carrier. She missed the call, but called back the number that showed up on her Caller ID, which she recognized because they had called her before about her unpaid bill. She dialed the number, and got this message:
Pay your Sprint bill or your service will be shut off. It’s that simple. If you don’t pay your Sprint bill, you might as well take your Sprint phone and throw it in the trash. Even a person with your limited intelligence should be able to figure that out. Go ahead - write a check. Hang up the phone, write a check, jerk.
So she called Sprint’s customer service center to complain about Sprint’s collections department, and got the run-around:
"I played it for about 2 or 3 people, and they said they couldn’t hear it, and they were more concerned about me paying my Sprint bill," Tosa says.
So she called a local TV station to complain, and when the TV station called Sprint, they got the real story. The Sprint customer had mis-dialed by one digit, and reached a small business owner with a toll-free cell number, one who has received and logged more than 8,000 calls meant for Sprint over the past 2 1/2 years. At a cost of more than $1,000. He originally called Sprint to try to work out the problem, but they just told him to change his number (which he didn’t want to do because it was printed on tens of thousands of the maps he sells). So he got upset.
"I’m in the map biz," Woodworth says, "and my phone number is printed on my map, and there are several tens of thousands of them out in the field with my phone number."
Woodworth says since Sprint wouldn’t help him, he got fed up and decided to record the insulting out-going message on his voicemail.
He explains, "My objective was to get them to call Sprint, and light a fire under them to get Sprint to do something."
It looks like the fire has been lit. Sprint officials tell us they’re in the process of changing their collection department phone number.
Of course, the irony here is that none of this would have happened had not Sprint’s customer and public-relations skills been nearly as bad as they appeared to Ms. Tosa to be. They could have changed their collections phone number two and a half years ago when the problem arose, or they could have treated their customer with some respect when she called to complain, without forcing her to go to the media to get some relief.
Via Engadget
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3 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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A couple of follow-up thoughts on late native son Hunter Thompson. First, Ann Althouse asks whether the NYT is justified in comparing HST to bloggers. Specifically, here’s what the Times wrote:
[T]his early work presaged some of the fundamental changes that have rocked journalism today. Mr. Thompson’s approach in many ways mirrors the style of modern-day bloggers, those self-styled social commentators who blend news, opinion and personal experience on Internet postings. Like bloggers, Mr. Thompson built his case for the state of America around the framework of his personal views and opinions.
The comparison is not without some justification, as many bloggers (including this one) do include personal experience with commentary and objective recitation of facts. Where the comparison falls flat is the inference that this style is something that started with Thompson, and it didn’t. Essayists have for time immemorial done much of the same thing. Thompson’s gonzo journalism was different because it documented and glorified a particular kind of lifestyle that the public has some interest in, but is unlikely to participate in directly. I could write up my experiences at the 2005 Derby in a style that mimics Thompson, but it wouldn’t be “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” and it wouldn’t be “gonzo.”
Author Warren Ellis put forth some of his thoughts on Thompson to his email list. As I said in my earlier post, this is particularly interesting because there is a good bit of Hunter S. Thompson in Ellis’ creation Spider Jerusalem. Ellis’ thoughts seem pretty close to the mark:
Hunter Thompson waited until his young wife left the house, and then shot himself in the head with a pistol. He must have been quite aware that either she, or his son, there in the house with his grandson, would find his corpse. Dead bodies don’t lay neatly. They splay, spastic and awful. There is often shit….
[T]he numbness, in part, comes from now finding that he was the kind of man that’d let his family find him like that. I have a personal loathing for suicide. It’s stupid and selfish and ugly and cowardly and reeks of weakness….
But how you leave the stage is at least as important as how you enter it. And he left it alone in a kitchen with a .45, dying in — and wouldn’t it be nice if it were the last time these words were typed together? — dying in fear, and loathing.
I’d argue that the degree to which the deceased relied on chemicals to support himself is in itself a sign of some weakness, as well.
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3 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Here’s an entertaining list compiled by the editors of Mobile PC of The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time. Note to whippersnappers: the first 21st Century gadget is the iPod at #12. Some favorites:
- Gadget invoking the most nostaligia: #65 Mattel Football II, 1978
- Oldest Gadget: #60 Abacus, 190 A.D.
- Most significant gadget (personal opinion here, folks): # 42 & 59 H4 Marine Chronometer, 1761 and Sextant, 1731
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3 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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It’s old news by now that Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist, took his own life over the weekend, which in hindsight should surprise precisely no one. I disagreed with most of what Hunter Thompson wrote about, and have never quite bought into his Great American mythos, but he did certainly have a way with words. He is also directly responsible for two developments I did like. First is the rise of heirs-in-style like P.J. O’Rourke, who is like Thompson, but with substance. The second is Warren Ellis’ creation in the Transmetropolitan graphic novels, Spider Jerusalem, who was either based on or channeled Thompson. Jerusalem is more likable in his ascerbic way because he lives in a fictional society that has a lot more worth criticizing than did Nixon’s America.
It is also worth noting that Hunter Thompson is truly a creation of Louisville, in more ways than one. He was born here circa 1939, grew up in the Highlands, and raised his first measure of hell at Male High School. He is more famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell’s Angels, but the piece of writing that really put him on the map was neither of those, but the first true gonzo piece The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, published in Scanlan’s Monthly in June 1970 and based on the writer’s virtually indecipherable notes from his adventures at the 1970 Derby.
Today’s Courier-Journal has pretty good coverage, including a couple of reprints from 1996, when Thompson was feted at Memorial Coliseum on the 25th anniversary of Fear and Loathing. First is a fairly straightforward account of the festivities, including the obligatory Thompson weirdness:
Thompson’s childhood friend, Gerald Tyrrell, who runs a local literary agency, The Dickens Group, recalled wild times with Thompson; read from his first two published works, Open Letter to the Youth of Our Nation and a poem, The Night Watch; and spoke of Thompson’s lust for knowledge.
Thompson, holding a drink in his black-leather-gloved hand and watching from the side of the stage, unleashed a fire extinguisher on Tyrrell and several other people who paid him homage.
Far more entertaining, however, is reporter Jeffrey Puckett’s attempt to track down Thompson for an interview:
I promised myself this wouldn’t happen. But here it is, long after dark, and the man I’ve been trying to interview for two days was last seen, awash in alcohol, driving a rented car in reverse up Broadway, heading who knows where but making pretty good time for a substance abuser driving backward.
For good or for ill, Hunter Thompson is a native son.
More roundup of opinion at Michelle Malkin’s blog.
One last note: AP reports that Hunter Thompson was 67, but the math in the 1996 C-J coverage would indicate he was actually 65. Maybe he lost the two years in a drug-addled haze.
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3 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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I apparently have a thing for the 1600s. I’m in the midst of slogging my way through Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World), a three-volume, umpteen page prequel of sorts to his Cryptonomicon, which encompasses everything from…well, let’s just say it encompasses everything. In the middle of that effort, which is made decidedly more difficult by the presence of eight years worth of cumulative children, I picked up Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602 over the weekend, a graphic novel that places a number of the heroes from the Marvel comics universe in Queen Elizabeth/King James’ England. Both works are fascinating, but each really requires the reader to bring to the work a base of knowledge to enjoy the tale(s). The first half of Quicksilver really requires a base of knowledge about Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Robert Hooke, John Wilkins and Christopher Wren. Marvel 1602, on the other hand, does a good job of laying out the history, but requires one to have a base of information about Marvel’s Silver Age from the 1960s (Fantastic Four, Dr. Strange, Nick Fury, X-Men, Spider-man, Daredevil, etc.)
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3 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Whew. According to The Gender Genie I am actually a male. Specifically, I had a male score of 585 on my submitted text, and a female score of 315. That’s a relief.
Thanks be to Michele (she’s a she, by the way) for the link.
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3 years, 6 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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As I indicated in a previous entry, I have established a new blog/directory for Kentucky bloggers at kyblogs.com. If you are a Kentucky blogger, please head on over there, and be sure to provide information about your blog if you would like to be included on the blogroll and directory. Now to get started on the clickable map of the Commonwealth.
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