web

Maybe I’m a cliche, but Hype Machine’s “server overloaded” page made me LOL:

The fact that this is a M.I.A. song is less interesting to me than the fact that Hype Williams directed it. Either way, enjoy:

Well, sometimes when you don’t blog for a while it’s cause you have nothing much to say. And other times it’s because your grand desire to say things is getting overwhelmed by your even grander desire to get shit done, and this has been one of those times. Anyway, for those who don’t know: I’ve left Diversion Media to be the co-founder at an early-stage startup. The company is Profitably, and basically Adam Neary, Chad Pugh, and I are going to be building a site that brings automated financial analytics to small businesses.

It’s still early days, and we’re taking on a genuinely hard problem, so unfortunately we’re not fully launched yet. In the meantime, I’m psyched to be helping small businesses. I’m enough of a capitalist to believe the hype about small businesses holding a special role in the American middle class, and maybe my immigrant background has more than a little to do with that. I’m also really excited to be working with accounting—as some people know, I’m actually a bit of an accounting nerd.

I met Adam through the NYC Founder Institute, which I didn’t attend, but a number of my friends did. And I’ll echo here what lots of people are saying: It’s a very interesting time in the NYC startup scene. Among the Rubyists I know, I’m hearing about a lot more job churn than I usually do, almost all of it in a hopeful direction. As to how many of these hit their mark, time will tell.

Seen in the window of a C-Town grocery store. I’m not a foursquare user myself, but is there any point to this? Wouldn’t a grocery store be the most banal check-in ever?

God bless the intrepid souls who go on to Chatroulette! to do video chat with totally random strangers. Without their brave explorations, we’d never get screenshots like these:

The 24 Best Chat Roulette Screenshots

Via New York’s sales & bargains page, I came across Martin Margiela, a label I’m not familiar with but which has a remarkable web site for a fashion label:

They’ve decided to style it after the default Apache directory navigation, complete with the words “Apache/1.1.34 Server at www.maisonmartinmargiela.com Port 80” at the bottom. If you spend any time on fashion sites you’ll recognize this is pretty gutsy, since 99.99% of the fashion websites are these heavy Flash affairs that scroll you through pictures at a pace you can’t control while playing some generic loungy music. As an added benefit the MM site actually has deep links, which I guess might come in handy if I were so into fashion I were bookmarking specific pages.

Of course, I have to imagine the intersection of men who are really into fashion and care about bookmarkability is probably pretty small, and whether or not this unusual fashion site is helping them or hurting them overall, I couldn’t say. In many ways the values of fashion and the values of web are opposed, and not just because the web is built by people with baggy hoodies and messenger bags.

http://bacolicio.us/http://kanyelicio.us/http://taylorswift.com

You realize where this is heading, right? At some point in the future, it’s going to be possible to take any web site on the internet, and then pile on pictures of bacon, Kanye West, Godzilla, Katrina victims, LOLcats, Master Chief, Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, crabcore, and Ron Paul—all by typing in more shit into your address bar. And by “the future” maybe I mean “Tuesday”.

All I know is I’m going to need a kickass bookmarklet to help me keep up with it all.

In 2006, I stumbled across a YouTube video of Stevie Wonder playing “Superstition” on Sesame Street. It’s a sprawling, searing funk performance of the hit single, more insistent and grotty than the original recording on Talking Book. It’s funny to think of how you can get introduced to a musician: I first became aware of Stevie Wonder in the 1980s when he lapsed into easy-listening ditties like “I Just Called to Say I Love You”. It took me more than a decade to dig back into the history and understand his contribution to pop music. I can’t remember having watched this on Sesame Street when I was young, but if I did, I was obviously too young for it to take.

Anyway, I watched the clip once or twice, bookmarked it in my del.icio.us account, then went on my way. A few weeks ago, I was reminded of it, looked it up on del.icio.us, and followed the link—only to find that the video had been taken down.

No big deal: Videos get taken down all the time. But it made me think a little more about “linkrot”, as we call it in the web business. We’ve been making web pages for more than a decade now. A lot of those pages are still around, and their links don’t go anywhere anymore. What can be done about it?

In 1998, Jakob Nielsen wrote an article on linkrot that makes for interesting reading today. He makes two recommendations: First, that webmasters maintain their sites so inbound links remain valid, and second, that webmasters check their outbound links and correct them if necessary. The first, I’d say, remains valid, since you presumably own the content on your own site and should always be able to ensure that inward links to that content are working. But the advice about outbound links is quixotic at best, since an active blogger can easily churn out hundreds of outbound links a year. It’s not every blogger’s job to become a random monitoring service for the entire web.

This isn’t really a criticism of Nielsen so much as a sign of how quickly things have changed. In 1998, the vast majority of people who were reading Nielsen were people who were putting content on the web as part of their jobs, whether those jobs were at an online zine or a Fortune 500 company’s investor relations site.

But as has become a truism these days, web media is amateur media, and people now create new content quickly, and then just as quickly they leave it behind. They try out Blogger accounts for a month and then get bored. Or they decide Facebook is cooler than MySpace, so they leave behind an orphan profile, with “friendships” that grow stale and unmaintained.

Anyway, the Stevie Wonder video I bookmarked was this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSC29xl6hno

... but maybe I should’ve just bookmarked this:

http://www.youtube.com/results?
  search_query=stevie+wonder+superstition+sesame+street&search_type=

... which, of course, isn’t one specific video record, it’s a search page. This is less convenient for whoever follows that link, of course: You have to click at least twice to get to a video that can be watched. But it’s more resilient. An individual video can be taken down, but YouTube will probably always have the same video up at a different location.

Such an approach rankles my inner perfectionist, since this screws with the tidy notion that a URI will describe one discrete thing in the world, for some sensible definition of “thing”. Different URIs reduce the sharing aspects of del.icio.us, and make it harder to do a Google Blog Search to see who else is blogging about this video. And two different video records of the same Stevie Wonder performance will have different comments, ratings, and video responses.

But do such things really matter anyway? I almost never read YouTube comments, because all they do is make me depressed about society. And who cares if two different URIs can be used to watch the same video? Whoever followed the link got to watch the video, which is what matters.

In the long term, this approach would rely on YouTube to stay in business for a while, which is likely—but also you’d have to hope that YouTube never changes the URI or arguments of its search page. That’s less likely, because who ever links to a YouTube search page?

In the more general case, it’s hard to imagine doing this in a way that will truly stand the test of time. Say your friend writes something funny about “Iron Man” on her blog and you link to it with a search … are you going to assume she’s going to keep that domain up forever? And what search terms are you going to use to uniquely link to that entry, and only that entry?

Linking strategies notwithstanding, I wonder about the word “rot”, which carries a negative connotation in general usage that doesn’t correspond with what we know about how ecosystems work. When a bird dies and falls to the forest floor, it doesn’t go to waste—its body is soon covered by scavengers like grubs that feed on rotting flesh, converting one form of biomass to another. This is bad news for the bird, but good news for the forest. Ecosystems don’t waste energy, they just keep it circulating in a panoply of forms.

So, at the risk of overusing a metaphor, we have a web full of linkrot. Can we build anything that can feeds on it? Say, a Firefox plugin that auto-suggests destinations when you follow a broken link? After all, there are countless dead links out there, waiting to be harvested.

Back in 2004, when I posted the Unauthorized iPod U2 vs. Negativland Special Edition on eBay, I wasn’t really surprised by the attention it attracted online, but I was surprised by how the facts got shaved down as the idea spread. It’s a fairly complex idea, I’ll admit—to explain it you’ve got to bring in U2 and Negativland and iPods and Island Records and Kasey Casem and Downhill Battle—and more than one entry said that the iPod was a project of Negativland or of Downhill Battle. I wasn’t personally upset by these misattributions, but it did serve as a personal reminder of the way that the accuracy of many blogs is probably a little closer to that of office gossip than of high-quality journalism.

Recently I noticed a different sort of mistake: One of the iPod images was being swiped for a Chinese blog, for an entry on a new edition of the U2 iPod that had nothing to do with Negativland:

It’s easy to imagine how this happened: This blogger wanted to pass on an Apple press release but also wanted to spruce it up with some pictures, so she entered “U2 iPod” into an image search engine and stumbled upon this photo. Not knowing anything about the Unauthorized iPod U2 vs. Negativland Special Edition—if there’s been anything written about it in the Chinese language, I’m not aware of it—she blithely included it in her blog post and never gave it a second thought.

I find it amusing to imagine some random reader of this blog seeing the unfamiliar band name in the iPod display and maybe doing a little Googling on the subject. And since discovering this, I’ve been trying to figure out if this dynamic can be exploited more generally, to dupe image-swiping bloggers into carrying subtle political messages on their own blogs … nothing comes to mind, alas. But maybe I’ll come up with something.

Ten-sided continues: We’ve been writing for almost a month now, and in our more-than-50-entries we’ve been hinting at lost loves, past crimes, and strange inventions. Two more months to go …

why the lucky stiff, one of our ten illustrious writers, has just put together Fictohedron, an alternate to reading Ten-sided through the Turbulence site.

Cool features include: Bayesian analysis to see what novel words are showing up with higher frequency in Ten-sided blogs, and when you click on those words they’re highlighted in entry text … A healthy sign of an easily remixable work, I’d like to think.