Internet adventures

Another reason why I might sometimes be slower than I’d like…

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Sometimes Internet Explorer will just freeze up for basically no reason at all and I have to wait for it to finish doing a bunch of shit on the hard drive. I just lost the webcomic post to this. I hadn’t done much work on it but I HAD done some… it doesn’t help that Blogger’s “draft” post editor STILL doesn’t have auto-saving drafts…

(Is there something wrong with the New York Times site or something? Because after struggling on a page there for a while, slowing the computer down to worse than a crawl, IE just up and quit, without giving me a warning message from Blogger or even an error screen from Windows. Might be an IE issue…)

The post time on this post is on Tuesday PT, just before midnight. I say that counts. Even if it actually goes up at 2 AM.

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So I don’t have the results of the Golden Bowl, or the final college football rankings, and the NFL Lineal Title hasn’t been updated, neither has the college title really, and the webcomic post is going to be delayed until at LEAST tomorrow (Wednesday), and I should come clean and figure out the reason all these things, plus myriad schoolwork and my job hunting, are late.

I’ve long figured, in my own mind, that checking all my myriad RSS feeds shouldn’t take too long. I mention my RSS reader from time to time on my webcomic posts, and I am of the position that having an RSS feed will greatly accelerate the day I review your comic. I may well be reviewing Sluggy Freelance this week if it had an RSS feed; instead it could take a month or more.

Well, webcomics aren’t the only thing on my RSS feed – I have eight or nine feeds on sports alone and those are just the ones still updating. (One of them has an odd little problem; it seems IE7 can detect the items on there, but isn’t detecting new items, not even slotting them in the old items’ slots.) I have plenty of other feeds as well, covering more topics than you can shake a stick at, and many of them are blogs. Ideally not only would most of them be short, I could read at least some of them at home, and not waste time I could be spending doing stuff that actually requires an Internet connection.

Commonly, however, they often link to longer articles. Or I could get stuck reading a bunch of stuff I’m not interested in, or doing a lot of scrolling through the feed. And on both the posts and the longer articles, I’m often moved to comment, or at least look at the comments, and that can involve as much effort as writing a blog post.

One thing I like about Irregular Webcomic! that’s almost as novel – maybe more, for its impact outside webcomics – as its structure is its RSS feeds. Yes, I said feeds, plural. One feed contains just a link to the comic, with a list of themes it’s in. Another feed contains the comic itself, and a third feed contains the comic and its complete annotation. I don’t have much use of the lesser feeds for a webcomic, but imagine if Blogger allowed readers all these options.

Blogger allows you two choices of feed, “short” (first paragraph or 255 characters, though I suspect strictly the latter, with no paragraph breaks or images) and “full” (entire posts). The choice of feed is a philosophical choice: you could be on the side of making sure people trigger your hit counters and see your ads, or you could make it more convenient for them to read your blog as long as you’re giving them a feed. But believe it or not, some people may prefer a short feed, if they have less interest in the topic and don’t want to commit too much time to reading a bunch of crap they’re not terribly interested in, and scrolling past all of it.

If I had to quibble with any feed’s decision on how much info to put in their feed, it would probably be Sports Media Watch‘s short feeds. I always click on anything SMW puts up, even if it’s something I read already in a place like Awful Announcing and I don’t need to know anything more. But I can imagine how the topic might be just a little too geeky for other people and they don’t want to dwell on it too much. If something doesn’t interest them in the title and first sentence, skip it. (And Paulsen has pretty short posts. AA would benefit from a short feed, for that matter, even though I wouldn’t use it.) Conversely, there are some things I’d rather see in short-feed form that publish as long feeds, yet I can see how people would be interested enough in the topic to want a long feed.

So anyway, that’s been my chief distraction: too many feeds to check. I haven’t been able to follow webcomics without feeds, and I haven’t bothered to fix feeds that aren’t working, and I dread it when I add a new feed, which I do sparingly. And it all monopolizes time from other stuff. Even the semi-frivolous business of Da Blog has fallen by the wayside to the almost completely frivolous business of checking stuff.

I may re-prioritize some of my feeds and re-organize my folders to clear out some of the cruft and most frustrating stuff, and I’m going to try to focus more on more important stuff… but I’ve told myself that before. The problem is that checking feeds is relatively low-intensity, so it marks good rest time, but I just need to reduce the time it takes somehow.

So. If you want to stick it to Microsoft with the exception of your operating system, click here for the Random Internet Discovery, which I may have more to say about later. And I guarantee at least two posts on Wednesday. Of course, that’s contingent on me getting enough sleep now…

(And I have a serious beef with Buzzcomix. It’s one thing to have your site suspended twice in a little over two weeks, but to not even have a channel to let people know what’s going on, especially when the old site had a forum…)

Double dose of the Random Internet Discovery of the Week! Yay!

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If you’re interested in fancying yourself a Jackson Pollock and creating your own work of “art”, have at it. There’s something more profound I need to get to.

This post (link courtesy Awful Announcing) takes a look at how the blog market could be affected by the present recession. It’s mostly written from a sports blog perspective, especially paid sports blogs, but it has implications for everyone else who blogs, paid or not, employed by a third party or merely doing it themselves, whether for fun or profit.

It takes an interesting perspective: Although some, like the blog collective Gawker, think ad revenue is likely to decline in the current recession, the post itself talks to several bloggers and draws its own conclusion based on a study, and they seem to all agree that the recession could help blogs. Some people might decide that, needing to cut costs, the Internet might be one of the first things to go, but AA’s own proprietor suggests the Internet might be one of the last things to go, because it has become so important to job searches – and thus could increase in importance to many people. Some of the bloggers talked to suggested that the blog population could rise as newspapers cut traditional journalists, making room for cheaper bloggers, and as laid-off workers of all stripes look for new lines of work.

Regardless of whether it becomes Great Depression II, this could be one of, if not the, most important recession in our history.

If some of these reactions are true, this recession could greatly accelerate the rate at which the Internet becomes the chief way people get their news, information, and entertainment. At the moment, the Internet is big enough that “old media” – newspapers and TV – are concerned about the impact of losing their audience to it, but not big enough that they’re comfortable with making money off it. If it ever can get that big – and this recession could greatly hasten the day that it happens – newspapers and television as we know them could become as antiquated as the telegraph.

And as the Internet and blogging grows, it has the potential to change the very way we live. We may well look back on the first decade of the new millenium as a time of great flux and transition, when the Internet was still in its relative infancy, or at least childhood and was still taking shape, still taking the form that would shape the twenty-first century. One thing I neglected to mention when I listed a number of ideas I have and might like to work on was a book coming out of my continual wonder at how dramatically the Internet has already changed our lives, and how it holds the potential to change our lives even more, affecting everything from the  news to entertainment to politics to even the very underpinning of our economic system. I had been thinking about holding off on writing it until I had enough of a name that I would have any credibility whatsoever, but recent events – not least of which being the coming recession – have convinced me that right now is a unique moment in history in the evolution of the Internet, and “the fierce urgency of now” – to borrow a phrase from our president-elect – would seem to dictate that I get such a book written in the next couple of years, and preferably starting as soon as possible.

There’s supposed to be a second part coming out today, “focus[ing] on reactions from bloggers who blog as a hobby (i.e. for free) and from readers whose blog-reading habits may be affected by the economy,” and the post elicits reactions from anyone that would fall in either or both of those categories. I’ve sent this post to the blogger in question, but I want to hear from anyone that would have a voice in all of this, anyone who might use the Internet on a regular basis as an outlet, from YouTubers to webcomickers – not to mention, if possible, any advertisers who I imagine count for a significant amount of revenue. Send an e-mail to mwmailsea at yahoo dot com, or if you want to take it directly to him (and his second post encourages it), use the address on the sidebar of that page.

Time set for Golden Bowl Selection Show, for real this time, plus Random Internet Discovery

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And it’s a doozy: 6 AM PT tomorrow morning. I was hoping I could get it in at 6 PM PT tonight, after one of my finals, but I got Distracted ™ and had no chance of getting set up before 6 anyway. I pretty much know two of the first-round matchups at this point, so I only need to finalize the remaining six games, and could work late into the night to do so. (The first stage of the selection process worked pretty much as I expected, with four at-larges being fairly obvious and the fifth being a head-scratcher of relative mediocrity. Ohio State fans may be somewhat disappointed with their seed though.) All eight games will be revealed, at once, at 6 AM PT.

UPDATE: Okay, forget that, it’s delayed again, an unexpected issue came up and I’m in no mood to write it anyway, no later than 2 PM PT.

Also, in place of having a webcomic post tonight, I’m giving you the Random Internet Discovery a day early, with more weird, wild, and wacky art than you can shake a stick at.

The timing of NBC’s Panthers-Giants-to-Sunday-Night announcement is curious. Was NBC and the NFL going to go with some other game if the Bucs had won on Monday night?

I think I’m done with Sports Watcher for the foreseeable future…

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According to Wikipedia, MegaVideo wants to replace YouTube as THE place to get video online. However, it restricts how much video you can view before having to wait an hour if you’re not a paying member. And it does this based on people’s IP addresses, not by putting a cookie on your computer or even by tracking non-paying members separately.

If you’re creating a situation where people on a shared network using one IP address – say, at a school, or at a WiFi cafe – can be cut out through no fault of their own, and end up competing to get the most video out of the IP address’s 72 minutes, you’re going to have a hard time going after YouTube.