SoylentNews

This one is for the regular submitters...

When submitting to SN (and previously I guess, /.) what do you use to quickly write up your summaries and insert/check your embedded links? Do you just use the text box on the Submit Story page, or do you use something else offline or online?

Reason I ask - I've been pipped to the post attempting to submit stories a few times now as I'm clearly spending too much time formatting my submission. :(

All thoughts on this and how to improve my workflow greatly appreciated. :)

Well, that was snuck in... The SoylentNews RSS feed now has summaries in it. Yay! I only noticed as I went to check it in preparation for my own effort to build a summaries feed - I don't have to bother now :)

However, whom ever did it, has got the encoding of the <description> tags wrong; You don't escape the html inside, you wrap the whole lot in CDATA tags like so:

<description>
  <![CDATA[This is the summary text complete with <i>HTML tags</i>.]]>
</description>

Or, you do what Slashdot does, and strip all formatting and links out forcing the reader to click through to the main site (not a fan of this, but I can see why as a site admin you'd want to do it).

-Jar

One of today's 'funny' quotes at the bottom of SN pages is:

FORTUNE PROVIDES QUESTIONS FOR THE GREAT ANSWERS: #31
A: Chicken Teriyaki. Q: What is the name of the world's oldest kamikaze pilot?

As a collector of such 'funny' quote lists in my youth during the early days of the Internet, I know that many of these lists are legacy and over two decades old, however in today's enlightened world, many of them are just simply offensive. This one today, is basically 'casual racism' which I'm sure is not something SN want's to be associated with.

I'd happily spend some time cleaning the quote list up (I have a large collection of similar quotes that do not offend) but I have no idea where in the SN backed it lives or even how to get to it. :(

My swimming pool is approx 24 cublic metres in volume. Now, in order to filter the water properly, the books say you must run ALL the water through the filter within every 24 hour period. Ever since I've had the pool, I've run the pump about 12-15 hours a day, on the original advice of the installer.

So, in an ongoing effort to reduce our energy bill, I decide to see if this pump runtime can be reduced, and I dig up the PDF for the pump, a Sta-Rite 5PRD-1B. According the PDF (If I'm reading it right), the pump can shift about 15 cubic metres of water AN HOUR. This means I only need to run the pool about 2-3 hours a day to ensure full filtration? If this is correct, a) my pool installer was an idiot, and b) I've been wasting electricity for years! :(

There's a little graph on page 2 of the PDF that shows the throughput.

Can anyone who knows more about this stuff than I do, confirm my findings?

A little bored this morning, I suddenly had this wonderful idea :)

How about a recruitment poster for SoylentNews?

http://imgur.com/2zzmiYY

You owe it to yourselves to print off hundreds of copies and stick them up everywhere ;)

I came to Facebook quite late having stubbornly refused to create an account as I didn't see the point. I don't have many friends (by choice) and I simply don't care enough about other people's baby photos or daily diatribes about their current diet or fashion based purchases.

I tried Twitter when it was gaining momentum but decided quite quickly that it was broken as a social sharing model. However, it is great as a broadcast medium much in the same way that RSS is or was, but without the high technical barrier to entry. This is borne out by the massive follower numbers any celeb-de-jour can garner on there. The common people have mostly have settled into using twitter as read-only news feed, occasionally throwing out comments of their own in to maelstrom hoping that someone else will bite and reply back but secretly knowing that their tweets will be ignored just like the other 99% of non-celeb/corporate tweets are.

I never had a Myspace account as I'm about 20 years too old, even when it was popular. My understanding of that platform is that it too has been commandeered by the major music labels to provide yet another podium to pimp their artist's wares upon. The common user space over there is now rapidly becoming a wasteland of ill tended, dying on the vine profiles.

I use LinkedIn for work. By 'use' I mean I have a fairly full profile and I connect with people I work with or have worked with in the past and hope to again in the future. Beyond that, I don't think LinkedIn serves a purpose. It certainly didn't help me when I was looking for work, despite putting out pleas to my network. I could live without LinkedIn, and my career wouldn't be affected one way or another.

I used to be lucky enough to be one of select few bloggers on the BCS (British Computer Society) website. I had to submit a handful of written work to prove I could type more than a couple of sentences without collapsing into netspeak and emoticons. Unfortunately the BCS did a major website update a while back (when the logo went green in colour for those who keep track) and they not only demoted the blogs to the backend of the site but they also took away the self-publishing pages. This meant that any submission had to be emailed in and 'approved' for publication. I felt that this was no longer 'blogging' and as I didn't get paid add content to their website I decided to quietly stop writing for them.

Which brings me rambling to my point; Social media for me is broken. Once the clamouring masses get access to any social media platform, the celebrities and the corporate drones follow, ever eager to make another buck by selling their products to the witless idiots that follow them. This in turn makes pages hits go up, and the social media platform feature-set gets refreshed around this celebrity-centric surge, leaving those of us who do not care for mass idolatry struggling with a platform that no longer fits our needs or wishes.

Google+ was good; it was starting to develop into a social platform that encouraged the sharing of ideas, the dissemination of interesting information around obscure but fascinating topics, and the meeting of minds with common interests. This uniqueness is slowly fading away as the masses jump on board and demand their Jersey Shore and Britney Spears pages so they can slavishly follow them. Google are a company that wants to make profit like any other company, so they will provide the features that the masses want. This leaves those of us with high brow discussion tastes looking for another raft to nail our flag upon.

In the main though, I know that I am part of a minority, and I came to terms with this fact many years ago. What I want, is rarely what anyone else wants, leaving me with two options; Keep looking for the next-best-thing that may suit my needs, or just post endless streams of LOLCats and funny videos like everybody else.

[Cross-posted from http://www.jaruzel.com/]

Google are evil. There, I've said it. We all think it and it's time we spoke up about it, and tried to do something about it. Why is Google evil? Because they control what you think, how you live your life, and the decisions you make whilst living it. Surely not! I hear you cry. Well, let me explain...

It's all down to one simple thing: Information. As the old adage goes, Knowledge is Power. Google control the Knowledge, and therefore have all the Power.

Let's start at the beginning...

When the Internet was young, it became quickly apparent that some sort of index would need to be created, so that people could find things more easily. The First Era of Search provided only static lists of links to pages, which became quickly out of date for obvious reasons. Paradoxically, these lists were also published in dead-tree format and made available in all good bookshops. For a brief period in the mid 1990s, being given a 'Big Book of Internet Links' as a Birthday or Christmas gift was a great thing, and had us rushing to our monolithic Windows 95 machines to try out some of the more obscure links listed within. These static lists were basically the only way early Internet users could find information that wasn't stored on the major news or brand websites. In the mid 1990s, big information sites like such as Wikipedia had yet to exist, and even the venerable IMDB had not yet left Cardiff University for its permanent home at imdb.com.

The problem with these static lists was that a select few controlled what was listed, and in what order or prominence. If the elite few didn't agree with or didn't like a site then it never got listed. To not be listed in the early days, was the death knell for websites. No matter how you look at it, free service or not, this was censorship. Think of it akin to a Librarian hiding books in a Public Library because they personally didn't agree with the content or subject matter.

The Second Era of Search is where this all changed. It ushered in a new concept; The search index. What made these systems different is that they wandered around the web recording what they saw, and made that information available to anyone who asked via a few choice keywords. Type in 'Dancing Hamsters' and you would be rewarded with a page of links to other pages containing dancing hamsters. Exactly what you wanted. No filtering, no censorship, and no promotion of your local government's or a global corporation's elite dancing hamsters.

It is important to note that Google was not a pioneer during the Second Era - they came late to that party, long after Yahoo!, AltaVista, WebCrawler and Lycos had already pitched their successful search engine tents.

The great thing about the Second Era was competition. With so many usable search indexes to choose from, the search providers had to stay honest, or wither on the vine. If you felt that Yahoo! wasn't serving up the page that you were pretty sure was out there, you could hop on over to Lycos or AltaVista and try the same query there and check for different results. Keeping users loyal to a single search provider was very important, and this was achieved (in the most part) by providing accurate, unbiased results. When a provider broke this cardinal rule (usually due to having been purchased by a parent company that over-exerted its new influence) that provider very quickly found itself out of favour with the Internet user base at large and thus found its very existence threatened.

Enter The Third Era of Search, where Google finally joins the fray and commercialisation of the Internet and the ever growing cost of bandwidth has eaten up most of the other search providers. The Third Era saw an effort to head off the young upstart of Google, where the few remaining established search providers started bolting on ever esoteric features that distracted from the core search service, which just left users lost in a sea of irrelevant options and pseudo walled gardens. During this phase Google stuck to its design guns and kept its site simple and clean (although there was iGoogle, but that was never the default experience).

At the end of the Third Era, there were only two relevant search providers still standing; Google and Microsoft, and Microsoft only survived by setting MSN, and later Bing, as the default home page on every new Internet Explorer install. Despite this, Google now had most of the search provider market, and that's when it turned evil.

We're now in the Fourth Era of Search, Google has the market sewn up, and have leveraged what they know about the information on the Internet and more importantly, what they know about the users of the Internet into a whole raft of services; News, Maps, Images, YouTube, Mail, and the newest poster child, Google+.

All of these services are free, and there is a saying that goes something like this: If you are not paying for the product, then you ARE the product. When using Google services, this could not be more true. Every query you enter, every result you click on, every page you visit, Google is tracking you. A profile is being built reflecting your habits, your interests, your secret vices. All this information is then used to tailor what type of Internet you see.

For example, at its most base level and an actual recent search experience of mine, if you are in the UK and you search for linux from scratch, you'll see as the first result a .co.uk, and as the second result a .org. The .org is actually the site you'll be wanting, as it's been around for years, and is linked to by many other sites. However, the .co.uk result is listed above it, because Google knows you are in the UK, and feels that prioritising UK websites above all others makes the results more relevant to you. Whether or not you think this is a good thing is down to personal preference, but in this instance, the co.uk result is a dummy blog site with placeholder text that has been around (at time of writing) for less than a year, and clearly is not in use yet.

Google believe in Personal Search. This is where they tailor each result set to the user posing the query. They have extensively expanded and improved their algorithms to enable them to do this. It also means that they have the ability to hide or promote any site they choose to. If Google wanted to hide any reference to the Arab Spring or champion Julian Assange they could do so quite easily (and they do for some things), and you would be none the wiser.

Therefore, in short, Google control the Internet to such an extent that it should be called the Googlenet. They are the gatekeepers of the web, and can manipulate who sees what information. If they decide a site or page should be buried, it becomes a trivial task for them to exclude it from all results, or just your results, or even just the results displayed in your country. This gives them an unthinkable amount of power. If there was a country trying to exert the same sort of control over people in the real world, the United Nations (and in particular, the US who've always fancied themselves as the World Police) would be up in arms against that nation. Back in cyberspace however, it's just accepted because Google makes the Web oh-so-convenient. All it takes is a small tweak to Google's algorithms and suddenly everyone is seeing pages claming that Iran is secretly pointing nukes at the USA, or the USA is murdering suspected terrorists all over the world in secret torture camps. If enough people read the same 'facts' it becomes assumed that those 'facts' are true - this is classic group-think.

Google are a commercial entity. They exist to make money, and to use that money to make even more money, and they are using you to make that happen. It is not in their interests to provide an un-biased service. At some point they need to be held accountable for the way they manipulate the presentation of information on the web - until then we all need to remove our Google tinted glasses once in a while, and find our information another way.

[Cross-Posted from: http://www.jaruzel.com/]

So, I'm watching my SoylentNews Karma value slowly creep up...

How does this compare to the Karma values on /.? (My /. karma has been at Excellent for so long, I have no idea what the other value keywords are...)

Any ideas?

This was me over at /.:

UID #804522 - http://slashdot.org/~Jaruzel