Bitchy Rants

Real Estate: Stuck in the digital dark ages

This post on TechCrunch, about regional real estate website Redfin enjoying more access to real estate data thanks to court judgments, really makes me scratch my head.
Not about Redfin, or lawmakers, but the real estate industry: its strikes me that attempting to restrict the circulation of real estate data is directly contrary to the goal… »

Oprah’s the savviest Twitterer yet.

I was reading about Oprah’s first tweet over on Sean Percival’s blog, when a cynical idea came to me. I’m reposting my comment from there:
Good grief. Could not the same flack that did her background have helped her out with some basics? Caps? “Hi Twitters?”
Or: Perhaps this was a carefully orchestrated first post designed to… »

Blog Names - Argh

Dear Everybody - please title your blogs with something useful. Seriously - I’ve been digging through the feed prospects that TechWatching and WheelScore have turned up, and for most of them you can tell absolutely nothing from their titles. For example:

“Steve-o’s Blog” - about what?
“Just Another Blog” - I have no reason to follow this… »

The Big Digg Disappointment

I long appreciated digg; if not for its content, then for its algorithm’s ability to dynamically sift through the huge volume of submissions and deliver that content. Today we find out digg’s algorithm relies at least in part on human moderation.
What’s the significance (to me)?

Digg isn’t an agnostic platform, its as editorial and mod-driven as… »

Google’s Doing It Again: Jaiku dying on the vine?

Google has an annoying habit of making acquisitions, and then letting those acquisitions die on the vine as (presumably) the talent behind them is employed elsewhere in the Googleplex. The seminal example is DodgeBall,,
who’s founder’s public departure from Google lead many to question Google’s ability to successfully integrate their purchases into their core proposition.
More recently,… »

Australia Censoring the Internet: mortgaging a nation’s future

At heart, I’m a libertarian: I am firm in my belief that the ills that accompany unfettered access to self-expression and communication are outweighed by the benefits - that the abdication of personal responsibility that seems endemic in our society is a call to community action and education - not an invitation to governments to… »

Coding Horror on Registration Keys

After bitching about incompatible power supplies earlier today, I thought it would be appropriate to point readers to Coding Horror’s take on the aggravation of registration keys. The use of commonly mistaken characters in keys (”O” vs. “0″), excessively long keys, clunky entry forms, etc. all make registration keys more evil than… »

Another Tag Silo - Twitter Hashtags

A few days ago, I riffed on how the failure of user-powered tagging was what was driving the need for a semantic web - that jumbled, discontiguous tagging implementations had created a plethora of tag city-states who’s inability to talk on a “national” level had reduced the tagging movement to a curiosity.
Today, another entrant in… »

Power supply standardization

Over the weekend, a friend was relating how a co-worker fried a terabyte RAID array by connecting it to the wrong power supply. Which got me thinking about how lame the entire hardware industry has been in implementing power supplies, plugs, and adapters.
Given that most hardware uses the same electricity in similar volumes, why is… »

The Failure of Tagging is what’s driving Web 3.0

Tagging is the dream that everyone more or less forgot about.
Tags - little topical keyword snippets that were supposed to herald the start of a new, exciting web of user-classified content. By appending your blogposts/photos/videos/user-generated-content (ugc) with a few simple keywords, the web was expected to “self-organize” into an organic, emergent user-powered taxonomy that would… »