I’ve been pointed to a new “social network” called Glogster recently. It’s a site about making multimedia posters.
Do you remember when Facebook opened up to everyone? How we all said “Oh my god, finally. It’s like someone took the actual good parts of Myspace and did something with them”?
This is the opposite. Glogster rounded up all the worst parts of Myspace, the obnoxious colors, garish backgrounds, unreadable text, diatribes written in comic sans, autoplaying sounds and videos, without anything else. It’s all glogs (as they call them), all the time. Graphic. Blog.
It’s CS4 for morons.
These are the first few glogs I ran into, just hitting the “next” button.
Everything on this site is Flash based. The images, the text, the sound, the video. One hundred percent bad Flash.
The thing that amazes me most is I’ve NEVER heard of this site in the three years it’s been up. I know I don’t see everything on the net, but this is so bad, and a social network so artificial that word of it hasn’t even spread to Encyclopedia Dramatica. Think about THAT for a minute.
It turns out beyond being a major crazy player in the Tea Party doesn’t do it these days to get traffic. You have to manipulate the SEO too. I know, shocking, right?
Now it’s one thing, of course, to use normal meta tags. Only these aren’t meta tags. Mark Williams, writer of the “colored people letter to Lincoln” and leader in the Tea Party Express, has done the same thing you see on shady shady websites. Text hidden by Javascript or simply slapped down to size 1 font blended with the background, with clearly politically related text like “Buy Adobe CS4″, “Windows 7 Ultimate License”, and “Download Macromedia Software.” Yes, they’re sales/piratey terms, spamming up the page. BEFORE the actual content. Really. Header image, SEO bait, crazytext.
Naturally, Mark Williams has not responded to the questions about why he feels the need to do this, and why he doesn’t consider it unethical.
Edit:In the interest of fairness, I’m finding out if this was intentional, or if it was a hack. This could be someone attacking his site, him setting up an “I’m a victim of the liberals!” play, or a genuine attempt to get more traffic through deceptive keywords. But we’ll find out soon! Well, probably not, because I think the odds are a declaration of “It was an attack!” is assured, no matter what it was.
That’s the only logical explanation. Also the internet, paper, written language, audio, and facts elude him, as proven by his debate last night with John McCain. I’m sure some of the highlights will hit the national news rounds quickly, but if you didn’t see it (IE, don’t live in Arizona and had something to do on a Saturday night), John McCain went after him for the “Free government money seminar!” informercial. The one he’s starring in. Hayworth’s response was effectively “You’re making that up, I did no such thing.”
The man looks, sounds, and acts like a cartoon villain. How did he ever get a congressional seat in the first place? I can see how he got a radio show, those are the requirements, but not a congressional seat. Also, how did a crazy Republican manage to LOSE a congressional seat to a Democrat in Arizona, and what business does he think he has running for senate?
You know, not that long ago when I’d never seen it before, I saw chocolate honeycomb on sale. I thought “Hey, that looks good. Huh. Honeycomb? Weird. I guess it might be like that waffle stuff they use in kit-kats, but honeyish. But I’d feel bad.”
Why? Because I’d be eating someone’s home of course.
Fortunately, I learned it was just molasses later and now enjoy it.
Well, okay, maybe not. Two are. One is a ska band that forgot the brass, one is hipster-core indie.
Point is, all the freecreditscore.com bands suck hard, and one really needs to turn the autotune off.
The upside is that marketers picked these four bands, and that means emo and indie might be on the outs. Marketers, afterall, can only be counted on to be behind the times. Even when they’re trying to be retro, they pick the wrong decade.
Exception for the Kia Soul commercial with the hamsters and Black Sheep for picking something from the best era of hip-hop and doing it in a disturbingly well put together way. I mean, that animation is way too good, and the whole concept is just so far out there that it works way too well. And then some idiot on YouTube claims the song rips off Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice, but that’s my own fault for reading the second dumbest thing on the net.
The dumbest, by the way, is the comments section on Myspace Video. Take the dumbest community on the net and give them an option to access the dumbest format, and…
No, I’m not thinking about it. Have the video instead.
There’s lots of ways to rent textbooks, and hopefully more digital options, because seriously, Coursesmart.com is awful. The online version contains intrusive watermarks and horrid proprietary formatting. You can’t copy and paste normally, when you use the copy/paste commands on the interface there’s random spaces inserted in the text, you can only print 10 pages at time, and when you click “next page” you end up at the bottom of the next page rather than the top.
To get an offline version of the book you have to use proprietary software and formats once again. Watermarked, time-limited PDFs are neither complex nor expensive to automate, so why stick with the shitsoft?
Oh, and there’s this failure of the digital medium. “Actual size” doesn’t work well particularly when you can zoom in and out of text and images. So, which is right?
Neither! Or either! Or both, if you change the zoom level and your resolution and the size of your monitor works for the demonstration!
I never thought I’d really learn anything from MSNBC’s weekend programming that would be of use. You know how it is, right? Lots of sensationalist fluff pieces about various kidnappings and murders combined with 12 straight hours of Lockdown a day. Okay, aside from some prison terminology and culture, and the “holy shit, prisons in the rest of the world treat you like a human being because they’re not for profit” realization of the international episodes, you don’t pick much up.
Turns out, though, that sometimes things you didn’t expect to need in your life are useful. Today, I had to take a birdbath.
A birdbath, in prison, is where you don’t want to use the communal showers, so you use your sink, usually with some tubing if you’ve got it to direct water onto you. If not, a cup, some rags, whatever you’ve got does the job. I had some washrags and some towels, which I set on the floor beside my shower.
Why, you ask? Because somewhere in the last day, a clog went vesuvian. I can tell by the lint and hair that stuck on the bodywash scrubber thing, which is about a meter off the surface of the tub, and these were on the upper half. The rest of the tub was laden with stubble that had made it down a sink drain, and hair that had made it down…well, I guess any drain. So, “YUCK” is the keyword here, and as much as I wanted to clean it, I had class in an hour. No time to properly clean a tub that bad. Not to mention the potential a clog still lurked, waiting to come up any of three possible exits in the house, or to simply not let the shower drain properly, thus submerging my feet in nastywater.
Oops.
So today, I took a birdbath. Getting the soap and water on is pretty easy, frankly. Getting the soap off, that’s the part that takes time. You don’t really feel particularly cleaned, but hey, next time I’ll get a stool and go full Japanese bathhouse on it. Today I made due, and I did pretty well.
Tomorrow, though, I’m going to scrub like I’ve never scrubbed before. After drain snaking the shower, of course, to remove what clog may be left. Ick.
Today in communications class, we went over some of the things that interfere with listening. Noise, distraction, interruption, glazing over.
“I always wonder what people are thinking about when their eyes glass over”, she asked, possibly rhetorically. But I knew. I always know. It’s always the same.
Pie.
…just me? I remind you cheesecake is actually a type of pie.
