My favorite thing to do after an Apple event is read the coverage. It’s usually a mixture of disappointment and “this will never work” followed by Apple making billions of dollars off it. Mashable provides my favorite example of a group covering all their bases today so they’ll have been right from the beginning in the future.
I sincerely hope Arthur Brisbane’s question of whether or not the New York Times should challenge “facts” (his quotes, not mine) is an art project. If not, there’s no more damning an article written that explains everything that’s wrong with traditional media.
Vanity Fair created a great response that I will not endeavor to outdo.
Whose job is it to decide what words look strange and what words just look fancy? And at what point does an exotic extra consonant become distracting?
Dear Sarah Palin,
I would like to show you something you wrote yesterday. I added my own emphasis for clarity.
As we approach 2012, there are important lessons we can learn from all of this. First, we should never entrust the White House to a far-left ideologue who has no appreciation or even understanding of the free market and limited government principles that made this country economically strong. Second, the office of the presidency is too important for on-the-job training. It requires a strong chief executive who has been entrusted with real authority in the past and has achieved a proven track record of positive measurable accomplishments. Leaders are expected to give good speeches, but leadership is so much more than oratory. Real leadership requires deeds even more than words. It means taking on the problems no one else wants to tackle. It means providing vision and guidance, inspiring people to action, bringing everyone to the table, and with a servant’s heart dedicating oneself to striking agreements that keep faith with our Constitution and with the ordinary citizens who entrusted you with power. It means bucking the status quo, fighting the corrupt powers that be, serving the common good, and leaving the country better than you found it. Most of us don’t see a lot of that real leadership in D.C., and it’s profoundly disappointing.
You quit early. Shut the fuck up.
Sincerely,
Travis Walters
I often read through the Starcraft 2 Mac Technical Support forum to see what the state of things are for the Mac. Today I came across this post in a topic on OS 10.6.7. I haven’t updated to 10.6.7 because I’d read elsewhere that the update caused Starcraft 2 to become unplayable on some machines. Why I check to see if my Macbook Pro can play SC2 when I play it on my PC anyway is a post for another day.
The very first line by AtomicBanana struck me. “TL;DR: Mac OS X 10.6.7 update makes SC2 unplayable on MacBook Air.” After reading “TL;DR” for probably the thousandth time, it occurred to me that in old media we’d call what came after “TL;DR” a headline.
This image serves no purpose other than to show a piece of cool artwork.
The evolution of writing on the Web amuses me. We consolidated our writing styles to make things move quickly and get right to the point. Efficiency is key. We dropped all the rules and now we’re realizing some of them were important. We inefficiently add “TL;DR” wherever we need a head or subhead because we didn’t design a special place for headlines in comments or forums. The only improvement is that this special type of Web headline can go at the beginning or end.
Of course this isn’t really meant to be a headline. It’s the product of a certain segment of Generation Y hellbent on making the rest of us look bad. “Too long; didn’t read” is there to summarize a post so someone can guess what was said and reply with their own opinion without having to read.
I hope bringing grammar rules back even if in a broken roundabout way catches on. We might be able start using punctuation again. Until then:
TL;DR blogger realized TL;DR are headlines at the top or bottom of text.
This fantastic ditty has a some pretty awesome lyrics, specifically at the 1:33 mark.
Girl I turn that thing into a rainforest
Rain on my head, call that brainstorming
Hi, Wired. Please don’t clutter Wikipedia with ads. Thanks. Also, I can get to Wikipedia by myself. You’re supposed to provide me with stuff I can’t readily find on my own.
Is the statue Dave Hansen? Did the man on the right just walk into the shot?
Anyone who knows me, knows how much I loathe Kia Country. An audible gasp could be heard by anyone close to me when I saw this. This might go down as one of the worst days of my life. Blocked!
Here’s a group that doesn’t understand irony and enjoys hemorrhaging money. “A WordPress for new orgs: Knight gives Bay Citizen, Texas Tribune $975,000 for open-source CMS”
Just let that sink in.
The idea is that they’ll develop a framework that’ll cost an estimated $15,000 dollars to customize that integrates social media, SEO and ad networks.
Sounds like they’re creating the WordPress of WordPress.
If you want an example of an ideologically entrenched person stubbornly accepting reality without fully understanding it and thereby degrading the authority of the institution for which they write, check out this antagonistic column from the Columbia Journalism Review.
It begins with an illustration that doesn’t make sense because it implies a single puppet master controls the Internet. That’s patently ridiculous and would immediately dissuade any sane person from reading the text that follows. The text goes on to espouse several myths, chief among them that if you put keywords in your story it’ll somehow make it to the top of Google’s results list.
Cleverly, the headline is “CJR Column Mentions the Simpsons.” And, if you search for “Columbia Journalism Review Simpsons” this article arrives first! Good for them. However, if you search for Simpsons, this article is nowhere to be found.
It’s almost like just mentioning something is irrelevant. It’s almost as if clear, concise writing with an audience in mind gets you listed. It’s almost as if your audience would want to type in “Columbia Journalism Review SEO” and expect to see the Columbia Journalism Review’s take on SEO.
“In the beginning was the word—and the headline writer, who worshipped at the church of the active verb alongside the layout artist, who defined the significance of a piece based on where it sat on the page.” Maybe lighten up on the God complex, and then realize that your opinion on importance may not reflect reality.
This SEO story isn’t listed on Google by typing in “SEO” or “Simpsons.” Why? There are a number of reasons. One might be that attacking the Internet on the Internet is a bad idea. Another might be that the website isn’t updated every day. (The Daily Blog is apparently the Weekday Blog.) Yet, ultimately, it’s probably because the story is factually misleading, doesn’t have a right to be three pages long and because CJR’s print circulation is so print-centric that reading online is blasphemy and CJR has made no attempt to collect an online audience.
