March 2007

Pseudo viral networks replace web rings

In the early days of the web and the start of the page rank notion links from other sites was the goal. Web rings sprang up like grass in spring and one could find a web ring for lopsided pine trees on the south side of the house. As this happened web users soon realized these networks weren't all that useful for finding information. At the same time the amount of information on the web was blossoming and users time became ever more scarce.

This is all a long way of starting to talk about what is happening here. The site purports to be building a listing of the "100 most prolific bloggers". The thing is the bar is set so very low (1000 posts) that most anybody who has blogged for any length of time would be in the list. Apparently no attention has been paid to the top bloggers. How many posts make up this blog? I'm not sure Dave Winer even knows but it is certainly one heck of a lot more than the 40,000 listed at the top of the aforementioned page.

The ultimate question is what does it matter? Is a prolific blogger somehow better than a non-prolific blogger? What does making more posts really represent? In many cases it represents a lot of pretty poor writing without anything of much interest being said. Most readers would rather have a few well written stories than volumes of the poorly researched and poorly written things that fill up some blogs when the goal is "how many times can I post today".

The ultimate computer case

Reading the RSS feeds tonight an item about wooden iPod cases jumped out at me. Just an hour earlier on the way home from dinner I found my mind wandering to the cool Signature Suit leather cases for Mac Book's and wondering how long it would take to come up with a similar product from a nice brown saddle leather. The Signature Suit cases look great, but I want one that looks like just an old, natural, leather book.

If you can't beat 'em....

Evidently GM is not happy about loosing ground to Toyota in the race to be the car manufacturer in the world. The tactics employed by GM are funny though. Instead focusing on better cars or improving customer service they are rigging the vote of an online, non-scientific, reader's poll for Newsweek. Surely the time devoted to this little Rovian endeavor can't have been better spent improving product.

What is healthy

It has been hard to miss the reports lately that blame High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) for many of our gluttonous ways. I have been swept up in the trend towards avoiding the ills of HFCS. It turns out that as with many fads this may all be a lot of whoop-la over a poor reading of science. The trouble is that High Fructose Corn Syrup isn't really much different from table sugar in it's fructose-glucose ratio. It does have a higher ratio of fructose to glucose than other forms of corn syrup and fructose has been found to have some undesirable health effects but there is a major leap to go from some of those effects to blaming HFCS for the obesity epidemic.

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