Web Media

This decade has seen a lot of absurd arguments: obvious problems that bigcorps try to spin out of the way.

I'm confident that the most absurd one of all is that "Net Neutrality Laws are Unnecessary".

The notion that companies who sell internet connections to the public will all 'do the right thing' and not selectively censor and/or slow internet traffic that they: a) Disagree With, b) competes with their other business unit is utterly ridiculous nonsense. Of course they will. It's more profitable for them to do so.

A while ago -- at approximately the same time -- Facebook and Digg both started using a 'Navigation Bar' plopped at the top of all their outgoing links. Anyone who will remember the late 90's on the web will find this tactic familiar. Why is it annoying? Because it steals traffic, that's why.

Back in December, Chrysler purchased a full-page ad in many US newspapers 'thanking' Americans for bailing them out (to the tune of half a million dollars, no less). This was very unpopular: it provoked widespread outrage, and nowhere is that more obvious than the blog entry of it where many commenters have expressed their anger.

More companies are using live 'pop-up' chats to drive sales and provide a more personal customer experience with their audience. The first site I noticed to do this was Rackspace. One of the companies I've worked for recently implemented this on their sites, and I've had the chance to observe things from the rear. It's a really useful tool. Really. But it has its downsides.

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After over a month of working on it in the little time I could spare, I've finally readied the new Shadowlife.

I thought about it for months, and I kept coming to the same conclusion: Wordpress was too limiting, and it was too difficult to add the features that I wanted to add. Now I have the opportunity.

So what's new? Let's see...

• A better image gallery
• Real 'pages' with better information
• A new theme (though, I really did like the old one)
• Reorganized Taxonomy and image categories
• Better tagging

To go along with my previous posts on non-text web media: Why podcasting is a waste of time and Video blogging also being a waste of time I thought I'd cover this topic, which is almost an intersection between the two. Oddly enough... if it's done right it's more useful than both.

Podcasting is an even worse waste of time than vblogging is the podcast. Imagine a vblog, but without the ability to fast-forward and rewind with visual clues, where two thirds of the content is devoted to useless yammering (one third at the start, and one third at the end). Through in some (lots of!) grainy audio, and you have a podcast.

A while back, I made a remark about the insane steps necessary in order to embed a youtube video into a site.

That's changed now: as the embed code is freely available for videos that haven't disabled embedding.

Having to enter your username and password to an external site in order to embed their videos is insecure, inane, and just stupid.

So, now that I can, I'll be putting up the post I *wanted* to put up: later todaytomorrow.

A very public debate about ad-blockers is back in the news, and among others the New York Times has weighed in with a pretty hefty opinion. Along the way, several sites have threatened to block firefox users because 'they block ads'.

If you *want* users to re-use your content, don't make it insanely difficult to do so:

This was going to be a post entitled Which Car Would You Buy with two youtube videos: one of a Kia Rio (low-end, cheap car currently sold in North America, and the other of a chinese-made piece of crap: the 'Brilliance BS-6'.

But to post videos from youtube to your blog is an annoying, hassle-filled procedure. I'll outline the steps:

1. signup at youtube.com (not so bad, but still: why couldn't I use my google account?)
2. click on 'post to blog' once I'd logged in