You name it, I don't understand it

Without clicking on them, can you tell which of the following domain names are real?

www.byape.com

www.blobo.com

www.cycloonar.com

www.soso.com

www.hebos.com

www.qobo.com

www.gyroif.com

www.oogle.com

www.omniana.com

www.phooodal.com

None of them should be real because: 1. They’re all incomprehensible; and 2. They were created by a random domain-name generator at this website run by a Danish free-lance graphic and interface designer, Joen Asmussen. And yet, 5 of these 10 nonsense words turn out to be actual web domain names: blobo, soso, hebos, qobo and omniana. (A six, the Google-typo-looking oogle redirects to a page masquerading as Google but which is actually part of something called Searching.com.)

I did this little experiment because it’s always struck me as odd how many websites have names that give no clue as to what they’re for. Think of xkcd (cartoons and stuff), Hulu (TV shows and movies), Miro (video player). I know I’m forgetting many others.

In class a few weeks ago I complimented Cory on the name Second Life because it gave me some idea what the thing was about. He told me that there was a huge fight over the name. A lot of people wanted something more random. He told me people choose fake words for their sites because they want to have something no one else is using and that they can build a unique identity around.

I think this is crazy. Why create a degree of separation between you and people understanding what you are? I think it’s got to do more with fashion than logic. I’m also guessing this practice started with Yahoo.

According to the company’s official history, Yahoo originated in 1994 as the hobby of two electrical engineering Ph.D. candidates at Stanford, David Filo and Jerry Yang. They wanted a guide to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet, but before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations.

Eventually, their lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories ... and the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.

The Web site started out as “Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web” but eventually it received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."

Google, the baby-talk-sounding search engine, got its name from googol, which is a math term for 10 to the 100^th -- that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. According to an answer I found online, googol was coined in 1938 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. In the doctoral thesis of Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (the founders of Google.), they state: “We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10¹⁰⁰ and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines.”

The lesson of Yahoo and Google may be that when you have something that works, or when you’re first to market, it doesn’t matter what you call it. If gasoline were called zippetybipbop we’d still pump it into our cars.

But enough curmudgeoning for the week.

While searching, without success, for someone’s rating of the most incomprehensible real domain names, I came across this posting, pasted in below, on a chat site called Fazed.org. This is someone’s idea of the 10 worst website names ever. You’ll get a chuckle out of the URLs.

1. A site called " Who Represents" where you can find the name of the agent that represents a performer. Its name is:

http://www.whorepresents.com

2. Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views is at:
   http://www.expertsexchange.com
3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at:
   http:// www.penisland.net
4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at:
   http://www.therapistfinder.com
5. Need a generator? There' s the Italian Power Generator company at:
   http://www.powergenitalia.com
6. Looking for a hard-to-find flower or shrubbery? We have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales at: http://www.molestationnursery.com
7. If you're looking for computer software, there's always:
   http://www.ipanywhere.com
8. Are you living in Cumming , Georgia, and looking for a Methodist Church to attend? Well, look no further than the First Cumming Methodist Church at: http://www.cummingfirst.com
9. Are you looking for a fast Art Director for your Video or Film Production? Then go check out Nigel Talamo's work at: http://www.speedofart.com
10. Would you like a vacation at Lake Tahoe? Check out the brochure website at:
    http://www.gotahoe.com

A bewildering trek through MySpaceTV

If you watch MySpaceTV, as I did for the first time yesterday, you’ll find a lot weirdness, disorganization, dysfunctionality, nonfunctionality, and a four-letter word at the top of the page that may explain it all.

Beta.

I don’t remember Jason Kirk using that word when he spoke to us last week, so I was surprised how much of Captain Kirk’s ship didn’t work or was just plain crappy during the hour or two I spent aboard.

I started off by stumbling or being funneled into (I’m not sure which) a brief video featuring three people in an elevator. A young woman asks the guy up front why he is always so tired. Doesn’t he get enough sleep at night? He tells her he was up all night using his super powers. It’s pretty funny, has a surprise ending and lasts only a minute or two. Have a gander.

The quality deteriorated from that point.

The elevator short turned out to be part of a series of shorts, what used to be called black outs, called Elevator. The series is apparently produced by group calling itself Runaway Box, which has another series, about life in cubicles, called Man in the Box.

I must have watched seven or eight Elevators. The humor in most would do a ninth-grader proud. In one, a nebbish with a guitar serenades a comely coworker. They apparently hooked up at a drunken office party, which she obviously regrets. He expresses his feelings in a love song, which includes the line “We boned on the mail room copier.”

In another episode, called "EWF," a couple of guys get into a WWF-style wrestling match in the elevator. The winner directs the utterly confused bystander to raise his, the winner’s, arm in victory, as a referee would. Which he does.

Starting with this episode, I began reading the user comments under the videos, which were sometimes more entertaining than the videos.

Of “EWF,” someone calling himself Alonso wrote: “Man that's awesome.. but I still don't get what EWF is =/>” I have a feeling Alonso won’t be attending Yale.

Someone calling himself or herself (I’m betting himself) THE OFFICIAL SPANKING THE MONKEY MYSPACE PAGE™, commented, “What kind of gay bullshit was that? This elevator crap is lame.”

A number of baffling chain-letter-style comments appeared among comments under other Elevator episodes, like this one from *@(->[J£SSY]<-)@*:

“This is fake. don't read this. THIS IS THE STUPIDEST THING EVER!!! BUT I LOVE MY MOM AND DON'T WANT TO TAKE ANY CHANCES! If you do not copy and paste this onto 10 videos your mom will die in 4 hours.”

I ran into plenty of dead ends in MySpaceTV. One video kept locking up halfway through. Actually four videos in a row froze.

One video supposedly had six pages of comments but wouldn’t let me past page 2.

During one video an ad for Colgate MaxFresh popped up in front, offering me the opportunity to “Choose Music’s Max Fresh New Sound!” It wouldn’t go away no matter how many times I stabbed the close-window X.

Weary from trying to negotiate the “user-contributed” content, I ventured into MySpaceTV Primetime, which links to material from past and present network TV.

I started at the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and was surprised to read, in a box on the left, that the program is “108 years old” and living in “BEVERLY HILLS, US.” This may explain why it wouldn’t play.

Continuing down memory lane, I clicked on McHale’s Navy, which also was identified as 108 years old and living in BEVERLY HILLS, US. McHale played, but I quickly lost interest in the plot, which had the crew of the P.T. 73 sewing sarongs.

Still in a military mood, I moved on to the classic Irwin Allen submarine nonsense Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Yes, same age and hometown as Alfred and McHale.

This time I clicked the program’s “pics” link (empty) and then its “profile.” In the profile I found this surprising message in large letters in a box:

“Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is in your extended network.”

The same page told me Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is “single” and a “Capricorn.”

Which gave me an idea.

I would set Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea up with McHale’s Navy.

Unfortunately, when I clicked McHale’s profile link it just returned me to the MySpace Primetime start page.

I guess I’ll never know if they’re compatible.

No soy envidioso de su teléfono celular

I take a beginning-level Spanish class four mornings a week. One day in class last week, la profesora asked who had a telephone with them. “¿Quién tiene un teléfono?” is how she phrased it, if I’m remembering the sentence and constructing it correctly, which is doubtful.

Probably everyone in the room had a phone, of course. A couple of my traditional-age compañeros (classmates) produced theirs and I -- no linguist but ever helpful -- eagerly withdrew my little Samsung flip phone from my pants pocket.

La profesora set the three phones on separate unoccupied desks and proceeded to ask people, in Spanish, por supuesto (of course), which phone they wanted. We were working on demonstrative adjectives (this, that, these, those) last week, so depending on how the phones were arrayed some people said they wanted este (this one) teléfono, some ese (that one), and others preferred aquel (that one over there).

“Nadie quiere tu teléfono,” la profesora commented as she handed me back my phone later, Spanishing the obvious. (Nobody wants your phone.)

There is nothing wrong with my phone, which I got free from T-Mobile two years ago. The problem was that it was matched up against a couple of models two or three times its size and with conspicuous keyboards of some type. It wasn’t so long ago, I seem to recall, that having an especially compact phone was a status symbol, not unlike having a star on one’s belly if one were a Sneetch. Times change, and I guess I’m behind them como siempre (as always).

I learned a lot about mobile phones this past week, and not just that mine is less than chic in multiple languages. I won’t bore you with my notes from Tuesday, when Charlie Nooney, head of MobiTV, told us all about telephone TV. To me the most amazing thing revealed that night was that Dr. North has never been inside a Wal-Mart.

Instead, let me bore you with notes from the assigned reading and the guest speaker we had in Thursday’s Social Dynamics class. Because many of you aren’t in that class. And because we had 63 pages to read and didn’t discuss any of it.

Our high-octane guest speaker was Travis Boatman, vice president, Worldwide Studios, EA Mobile, which is part other the video game goliath Electronic Arts. If Mr. Boatman is as fast with a game controller as he is when talking he must be invincible on Xbox.

He told us, rápidamente, that in 2006 there were 26 million video game consoles sold worldwide and 208 million PCs but nearly a billion mobile phones, which makes the cell phone the “most ubiquitous (can you have degrees of ubiquity?) software platform on earth.”

“Apple made the iPhone because it realized it would be killed by cell phones,” he said. Mr. Boatman also said he would not bet against Apple in the impending device wars because it will be many months before competitors like Nokia will even be able to catch up to the iPhone.

By far the most popular game for play on cell phones, he told us, is -- get this -- Tetris, which I figured had long since entered the public domain, like Santa Claus or napalm. Not so. There’s a company that owns it, TTC, which stands for The Tetris Company.

Our reading came from Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective by Annenberg’s own Manuel Castells, et al. Among many other things, I learned that early in the 20^th century industrial, workers would often save up money for years to buy a timepiece. They did this not so much because they needed a watch but because it was a status symbol.

The phenomenon was said to be akin to what researchers have found lately in China, where migrant workers sometimes save for year to buy a cell phone. A key difference, of course, is that timepiece only required winding. With the cell phone, you are continually pouring more money into the thing in the form of minutes.

The researchers calculated that the Chinese migrant workers spend one-fifth of their total income on cell service, and lousy service at that. Then as new cell phones come out, handsets become outdated in a couple of years and customers are compelled to update their phones with expensive new ones.

Estas costumbres extranjeras, no las entiendo. (I can’t understand these foreign customs.)

Keep teasing me, I like it

Forgive me for playing again. See if you can spot the point where I depart from reality. And yes, I do begin in that realm.

* * *

January 8

Hey, I got an e-mail from Reunion.com. Let’s see what they have to say.

Check it out! 5 Searches for Ed Cohen So Far! Is it a classmate? High-school crush? Best childhood friend? Former neighbor or long-lost family member? Find out who.

(Link clicked)

Become a Premium Member to see the 5 people searching for you. Get alerts when new people search for you. See who visits your profile. Email other Members. A 1-year Premium Membership is only $5 a month. Or choose a 3-month Premium Membership for $12 a month.

Just checking the fine print here…that $5 a month is for a year, paid in advance, or $60, and it’s nonrefundable. Same goes with the three-month membership, $36. No thanks. Anyone searching for me through Reunion.com can track me down some other way if they have half a brain. If they have less than that, I’d just as soon not hear from them.

January 15

From: Reunion.com Updates

Ed, Someone Visited Your Profile Last Week. Latest Visitors Include: a 50-year-old female living in Mentor, OH, who attended Brush High School. Be the Next Member to be Reunited with Someone!

That’s the right high school, close to my suburban Cleveland hometown, close to my age. What they don’t realize is I hated my high school and most of the people who went to it.

February 1

Ed, this Super Bowl Sunday, Get in the Game! Few of us will ever play in the Super Bowl, but you can score your own personal touchdown by reuniting with old friends and lost loved ones. Five people have viewed your profile in the past week. Find out who!

February 18

Ed, another three Members viewed your profile last week. At Reunion.com we Reunite thousands of people each week, but countless other Potential Connections are missed. Don’t be among The Missing. This could be the Opportunity of a Lifetime, a chance to establish a Vital Business Connection based on a Past Friendship, or you could get a Second Chance with an Old Flame. Become a Premium Member now!

March 4

Ed, you still haven’t become a Premium Member – what are you waiting for? Another six Members visited your profile page last week, including three women ages 25-30. Some of these women are Seriously Hot. You should see their Profile photos. Oh, but you can’t because you’re not a Premium Member. Become one today. It takes only a few seconds.

March 22

Ed, we have Potentially Life-Changing News for you: The 50-year-old female has posted pictures of her children, and one of them was born in the winter following your graduation and bears a striking resemblance to…you! What do you remember about that Party After Commencement? Do you have a Long-Lost Son? Check out the Extensive Visual Evidence today and begin to prepare your defense for an Eventual Paternity Suit. It all starts when you become a Premium Member.

April 10

Ed, being a writer-editor (professional), you know about the Pulitzer Prizes and the Peabody Awards. But did you know that you’ve won one of these awards? It’s been known to happen that Pulitzers, Peabodys and free-beverage prizes in the Monopoly game at McDonald’s go unclaimed because the winners aren’t aware that they’ve won. Make it easy for the Selection Committee to find you through Reunion.com by claiming your Premium Membership now.

September 20, 2024, Cortex-Direct Transmission to Citizen 499211934~439d989#kj&1

499211934~439d989#kj&1, as you know the 2008 class of the Annenberg Program in Online Communities has been called the Greatest Generation of Online Innovators in the history of the Chinese United States Republic. Earlier this week Reunion.brain announced an agreement with Gapplezon to recognize the Outstanding Media Innovator of the first quarter of the 21^st century with a Gapplezon I-Life Extension Module. You could be that innovator who gets to live 10, 20 and possibly even 30 minutes beyond the Federal Age Limit. To be considered for this honor all you need to do is activate your Premium....

The subscribers shall keep things free, to a limit

If you remember a few weeks back I was fretting about the fact that almost everything on the Internet is free. This is what comes from a lifetime of being told that if a deal seems too good to be true (sub-prime mortgages, 99 cent laser vision surgery), it almost certainly is. I talked about how it seemed unrealistic to think that ad sales alone could support everything useful or entertaining that could be provided to us through a website.

I feel better about the prospects of enduring free-dom, if you will, after listening to Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, last week on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation. I already sent around the link to the program, but here it is again.

Anderson explained that we can get so many things online for free because it’s so cheap to do business in cyberspace. And it’s getting cheaper all the time as the prices fall on inputs like bandwidth and storage.

OK, cheap is one thing, but can you really give people something of quality online for nothing? Not exactly but close. Anderson described an online business model called “freemium,” which is shorthand for “free to most, premium for a few.”He gave the example of Flickr, the photo storage and sharing site.

Almost everyone who uses Flickr opts for the free basic membership. But the site offers additional features -- designed to appeal to serious or professional photographers -- for a subscription. Those subscribers, though a minuscule share of all Flickr users, pay the freight for all of us freeloaders and, presumably, supply a profit to Flickr’s owners and investors, too.

Anderson said this is the opposite of the old-fashion free-sample strategy – you know, where a bakery gives away 1 percent of its muffins in the form of free samples, or a department store lets women spritz themselves with 1 percent of the perfume, in the hopes that this will help move the other 99 percent in inventory.

Freemium, on the other hand, is giving away 99 percent of the product in hopes of selling 1 percent. This is possible only because it’s so cheap to provide many services online compared with, say, the cost of baking muffins or concocting, bottling and shipping perfume. As Anderson put it, “Offering a Web service to an individual, the sort of casual user, is so close to zero that you that can really round down.”

The problem with freemium thinking is it works only when your operating costs are puny. Moving digital bits is cheap and easy, at least for now. Moving atoms, in such forms as carpet or cars or milk, is expensive and complicated. Moreover, sites like Flickr, MySpace and Digg, whose founder, Kevin Rose, was a guest on the same Talk if the Nation as Chris Anderson, all get their content for free from their users and from the acquiescence of other sites in permitting reposts. Bakeries, department stores and other business that deal in goods don’t get their content for free.

Neither do service-oriented businesses like news organizations, universities or doctor’s offices. Money has to come from somewhere to pay the salaries of people with professional expertise. It’s hard to imagine any of those industries developing a premium service so desirable that it could be priced so high that if only 1 percent of customers bought it, the other 99 percent of us would be able to get our service for free.

Microsoft, why must you task me so?

See this line?

I hate this line. I want to annihilate this line, but I can’t.

This line represents a bad user experience to me.

After listening to Janice Rohn from YellowPages.com talk to class the week before spring break, I started thinking about bad user experiences I’d had online. Honestly, I couldn’t think of many, outside of my feckless attempts to enter virtual worlds earlier in the semester. But in those cases the villains were out-of-date hardware or drivers, not inhospitable websites. Or at least not entirely inhospitable websites.

The line above didn’t come from any website or virtual world, though. It came from Microsoft Word 2007, the program in which I composed this and past posts.

I was taking notes in class on my laptop some weeks back, running Word 2007, when I wanted to divide one section of the notes from another. I held down the hyphen key until it made a dotted line halfway across the page. When I lifted my finger off the key and hit enter, the dotted line turned into a solid line extending from one margin to the other, just like the one above.

I wasn’t exactly shocked. Word is always acting like it’s smarter than I. Anyone who has used the program is familiar with its habit of turning successive single lines of type into bulleted items, whether you want them bulleted or not. I’ve talked with many PC users over the years who feel as I do, that Word should mind its own business.

I can usually outsmart the impertinent bulleting, but when I tried to move text from below my intrusive line to above it or to get rid of the line altogether, I couldn’t. I tried all combinations of backspace deleting, forward deleting, cutting-and-pasting copy, pasting it into a new file – no dice. I even tried changing the color of the line to white. It stayed black.

As a last resort I turned to the Help files. Or rather I would have turned to them, except Help was nowhere to be found.

In previous versions of Word, Help was a pull-down menu on the far right of a row of pull-downs that started with File and Edit. But in Word 2007 – in fact, in all the Office 2007 programs – there are no pull-downs, just bunches of buttons grouped under tabs. And there’s no tab for Help.

It was only after talking with a Microsoft Office expert in my office that I found out where Microsoft had hid the Help files in Word 2007. Hid is right. They’re accessed through a small circle with a question mark positioned at the far upper right of the screen, directly below the X that closes the file or exits the program. The question-mark circle is blue and it’s set against a background of lighter blue.

What were they thinking? This redesign could only have come from the same geniuses who replaced the “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” pull-downs in Internet Explorer with a star and the add-bookmark function with star and a + sign.

I think I know what’s going on here. When Microsoft, or any software maker, comes out with a new version of a program, they intentionally make it look different. The thinking seems to be, who would pay to upgrade to a new version of a program if it looked exactly like the old version?

I’ll tell you who would, I would.

I like new features, but I hate having to relearn how to navigate a program. Most industries understand this. On cars they don’t yank the turn-signal activator off the steering column and move it next to the heater controls just to differentiate this year’s Malibu from last year’s.

Websites understand the value of convention, putting things where people are used to finding them. They want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to get what they want. They know that if they frustrate users, users are likely to jump ship to a user-friendlier alternative.

Having built a virtual monopoly in office software for PCs, Microsoft doesn’t have to worry much about a competing word processor with more easily removed lines stealing its customers. We’re pretty much captive at this point.

So what's the lesson from all this? Nothing profound. User experience may always matter, but it matters a whole lot less in the absence of competition.

What I've Learned So Far

I’m sure I’m not the only person whose eyelids did that cash-register ch-ching thing in class last week when David Pollock told us that companies will pay big money for people like us. People who know how to drive eyeballs to a website, that is.

I was mentally depositing my first obscenely large paycheck when I started to think about what our friend the venture capitalist assumed we knew or would know by program’s end. Has anything I’ve learned so far made me more of an expert on eyeball attracting? Maybe.

What you see below is a partial list of what one APOC student, me, has learned at roughly the midway point of his first semester. For the handful of you who are taking all three courses this semester along with me, almost all of these should sound familiar. The rest of you will be baffled occasionally or continually.

Add items to the list by posting them as comments.

What I’ve Learned So Far

If a tree falls in a forest and the tree isn’t in the top three search results, it didn’t fall.

A book with an ape’s head and the word “nutshell” on the cover can be surprisingly devoid of mirth.

You are not likely to create the next Yahoo or eBay, but there are a number of three-legged voles out there who are dying to network. If you don’t monetize them someone else will.

So what if there are already five social networking sites devoted to crippled voles. None of them allows users to upload photos and none is in Hindi. Seize that niche!

You can maintain order in a community through Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft, but either way some people are going to feel they've been schafted.

People who lead Second Lives for 40-60 hours a week … must not be enrolled in a full-time graduate program. Paradoxically, they may be teaching in one.

If you plan to launch an SNS, an MMOG or even a simple MOO or MUD, you’re going to want a developer who can express it in UML first and who can compose a thorough PRD (XP is for hippies). That way when the OOP is done you can be reasonably sure that the XML will work with the MySQL and connect to any APIs. IMHO.

If you don’t like something you see on a website, send the site host or ISP a notice-and-takedown letter stating that the material is infringing on your copyright (even if it isn’t). You can be sure the material will be down in a jiffy.

Ruby on Rails is not slang for a drug addiction.

The Tragedy of the Commons is a social model, not that Carl’s Jr. in the back.

Before you ask a venture capitalist for a million dollars, shave. Especially if you plan on showing a little leg.

You can generate good “buzz” for your product if when combined with another product it makes a geyser.

If Britney Spears kills herself tomorrow, don’t get on an airplane for a few weeks.

If you can use the word “granular” in a sentence without mentioning sugar, people will think you are tech savvy.

If you are notified that five people have been searching for you online and you are willing to pay $60 to find out who they are, there may be hope for subscription-based Web services.

The more difficult it is to join an online community (entry costs) and the more ritual there is involved with being in the community, the tighter-knit that community is likely to be. Sort of like Judaism.

A programmer is likely to be pleasantly surprised to learn that you have an STD.

Television and air conditioning destroyed civic engagement in this country. The Internet is just here to dance on the grave and maybe set up a webcam.

The Cone of Uncertainty illustrates how it is difficult to make accurate estimates about software development when you first start out but that it gets easier after a couple of iterations. The Cohen of Uncertainty is me at the entrance to any virtual world.

Anonymity is for Wusses

You’ve probably seen that cartoon of the dog at the keyboard with the caption, “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” If not, here it is.

I’m here this week to give all those dogs online who refuse to identify themselves a rap on their collective snout.

No, I’m not talking about less-than-beautiful people (example at left) who post personals with, shall we say, imaginative self-descriptions. I’m talking about Internet anonymity and accountability.

Earlier in the week I went online looking for information on a dermatologist I’d seen back in Reno. I needed the address and phone and fax numbers for his office so could get my medical records transferred to the health center here at USC.

I found the doctor all right, on a page of Citysearch, which is like Yelp or Yahoo Local, a directory of local businesses with user comments. But here’s something else I found: a user comment that began, “This is the worst customer service you could ever get.”

The entry went on to complain about the phone manners of the receptionists and the tone of voice, manners and attitude of the doctor. An “extremely unpleasant experience” is how the user summarized the visit. It was signed “anyasmdp,” whoever that is.

And that’s my point.

If you’re going to criticize someone by name, you should have the guts to give your name. But that’s not the convention on the Internet. Search the comments on blogs, news groups, reader forums, you’ll see almost nothing but aliases. Why?

I’m can see why you might want a handle like Krang the Karnivorous when you’re marauding around some virtual fighting world. Or if you’re engaging in some form of virtual infidelity, the motivation for adopting an alias is obvious. But what about everywhere else?

Back on the Citysearch site, just above the rant from “anyasmdp,” the doctor posted a response. Technically it was a second review (five stars). I know it was the doctor because she used her real name as her user name. Incidentally, this wasn’t my doctor but his wife, who shares the practice. Also, I clicked on “anyasmdp,” and the profile page it linked to didn’t provide any further identification.

The dermatologist wrote that she remembered the anonymous poster’s visit. She flatly denied the allegations and mentioned that the patient in question refused to pay to be seen.

Obviously I can’t tell who is right in this dispute. But the flame made me think of our friend Greg Markel, the search-engine-optimization expert, and his illustration of brand-reputation management on the Internet. If you recall, he described how important it was not only to have one’s name show up high in search engine results but that you don’t want negative comments to be the first thing the reader sees.

I wondered how much damage that anonymous Citysearch comment would do to the dermatologists’ practice. Probably not much. In the high desert of northern Nevada there’s enough skin cancer for an army of dermatologists, and Nevada has a severe shortage of physicians. But I also thought about how much it would cost to hire a Greg Markel to do his spider-charming if the situation were different.

Uh, yes, you in the back, waving your arm furiously...

“But what if the complaint is legitimate? Then the more hits the comment gets the better informed the public is about a bad doctor.”

I say the same comment could have been left but with integrity by signing it (warming: self-righteous statement coming down in 3, 2 . . .), which is why I always use my real name when I leave comments online.

It may not matter if you’re a dog online, but in most contexts it’s the responsible thing to wear your dog tag -- that is, identify yourself. That goes double if you plan on doing you-know-what on someone.

Hello to the Boys in the Truck

I have to admit I was a little taken aback in class the other week when our guitarist/vocalist/search-engine-optimist friend, Greg Markel, told me I was in surveillance denial.

This came after I asked him how Google or any other search engine could possibly rejigger its search results to match my interests when it would have no idea that I was the one doing the searching.

A bemused grin creased his rock ’n’-roll face. He said search engines know all about me because they track where I go after I log in.

Heh-heh, I thought, I don’t log in, smart guy. I just type stuff into the search box and go.

At this point I do not imagine you are nodding in agreement, and I now know why.

Earlier this week I launched Firefox browser and when my Yahoo home page materialized I noticed over on the right side the greeting, “Hi, edwardcohen.” It didn’t take long for me to figure out what was going on. If you log in to Yahoo Mail – or, I assume, similar services – you stay logged in, even after you quit the browser. A surveillance team in a panel van across the street awaiting your return.

I don’t know how I feel about this.

On the one hand, it’s harmless, right? What is Yahoo going to do, blackmail you by threatening to make public how much time you’re spending at www.sexwithreptiles.com (note to squatters, this domain name is still available)? Let them try it once, and when word gets out a billion people will switch to another search engine overnight.

On the other hand, I can’t help feeling that I am somehow being made a tool for The Man.

Which is why I initially felt a perverse pleasure when I Stumbled Upon the site BugMeNot.com. (More about why I’m capitalizing stumbled upon in a bit.)

BugMeNot helps you supply disinformation to sites at which tell-us-about-yourself registration is compulsory. You just type go to BugMeNot, type in the address of the nosy site, and BugMeNot provides you one or more user name and password combinations that have proven to work. The site claims to have accumulated bogus log-ins/passwords for -- get this -- 208,523 sites. For example, to get into the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com), try annoying@sogetthis.com and the password “annoy.”

These log-ins let you bypass all of that rigmarole of typing in registration information and then waiting for a confirmation email. And you don’t have to worry about the site deluging you with spam or selling your address to spammers.

Note: BugMeNot says it doesn’t give away log-ins for pay-content sites or pay-content areas within otherwise free sites. So you’re really just screwing the free sites out of marketing data they would find useful in selling ads.

And that brings me to why I said I was initially delighted to find BugMeNot. Since then I’ve been reconsidering. Do I really want to make survival harder for sites like the nytimes.com and IMDB, which provide immense amounts of quality information without charge?( For more on this debate, check out these comments at the journalism site Poynteronline.)

I wrote above that I Stumbled Upon BugMeNot, and here’s why: On the recommendation of a friend I've installed StumbleUpon, which is a browser plug-in that helps you discover new Web pages. You just check off various boxes of categories that interest you (satire, technology, politics, etc.). Then when you press the Stumble button on the browser it takes you to a new page it thinks you will like.

Another button lets you give the page a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, which supposedly helps fine tune the selection of future destinations. I’ve discovered all kinds of cool stuff.

But wait a minute. Tracking of preferences? Fine-tuning of content? This sounds a lot like what Greg warned us about.

Sure enough, as Wikipedia explains, StumbleUpon uses the knowledge it gains of user preferences to deliver targeted advertising: “A small proportion of the 'stumbles' users come across (typically less than 2%) are sponsored pages matching their topics of interest. For example, those signed up for photography will occasionally see an ad related to photography.”

So it's tough to escape from surveillance on the Web. But you tell me, isn’t it all still a bargain?

I'll Take That Free Hamburger Now

Here’s my idea: We’re going to open a chain of fast-food restaurants serving hamburgers, french fries, shakes and assorted other tasty, health-endangering foods. We’ll keep the bathrooms sparkling and inspect our kid’s-meal prizes to minimize the lead content.

I know what you’re thinking: That market is saturated -- ever heard of McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King? But here’s the difference: Those places charge for their food. We’re going to give it away.

Uh … OK, and how are you going to make any money?

Isn’t it obvious? We will be deluged with customers day and night -- advertising! We’ll sell ads on the restaurant walls, the floors, the tables, the crew uniforms, the parking spaces, the bags and wrappers – every inch of the place. Companies will pay big money to have their messages exposed to the kind of traffic that will be moving through our restaurants day and night.

Does this idea sound ridiculous or just familiar? A little of both?

Here’s why it should sound familiar:

Think about all the commercial sites on the Web. Now take away the e-commerce retailers like Amazon.com, eBay and Best Buy, the places where money is actually exchanged for goods and services (usually goods). Almost everything you have left -- Facebook, Yahoo, NYTimes.com, WebMD, etc. -- is pursuing the model of our revolutionary burger joint above.

A key difference, in case you don’t see it, is that it costs the same amount for the Times to produce a story that’s read online by one person as one read by 1 million. Not so with giving one person a free hamburger versus 1 million people.

But the idea is the same. The free-service sites are saying, Here’s something we know you need or enjoy. We’ll give it to you for free. And the way we’ll make money is by bringing in more ad revenue than it costs for us to provide what you came here to mooch.

I want to say a few things about this.

First, life is good in this matrix, and I don’t want to leave. I love getting stuff I want or need for free. I remember back when I started using MapQuest (Google Maps, etc.) and thinking, something isn’t right about this. Why am I being given unlimited free access to something so useful, something I’d happily pay, well, something to use?

I was forgetting about television. This same business model brought us old-fashion over-the-air TV. Fifty-some years ago companies started sending us hours and hours of occasionally entertaining and informative programming at no cost -- other than the cost of a TV set, which eventually became affordable to most households. The commercials, in aggregate, not only covered the cost of production and transmission but made network executives, actors, directors, investors and others rich.

What I’m wondering is, can this model be sustained forever on the Web?

What if traditional ads go the way of the woolly mammoth? As Professor Schaff alluded to last week, traditional advertising –the “Hey, everybody, look at this and buy it” kind – is ridiculously inefficient. Advertisers could wise up and devote more effort and money to viral marketing, word-of-mouth and search-engine optimization. This could make Prof. Schaff very rich.

I also wonder if we’re not already in a house-of-cards scenario. Many of the ads I see today in the margins of sites like Facebook point to websites that, like Facebook, provide something for nothing, paid for by ad dollars. And many of the ads on those sites take you to other sites doing the same.

It will be interesting to see how long we can continue to get good stuff online for nothing, other than the nuisance of ads in our peripheral vision. Maybe forever. But if our sugar daddy, display advertising, takes a shine to something else, I don't see how.

All Are Welcome, Some May Enter

“There is no there there,” the writer Gertrude Stein famously observed in her autobiography, which is curiously titled “Everybody’s Autobiography” (1937). She was talking about Oakland, Calif., where she’d gone looking for her childhood home. She couldn’t find it. I don’t understand why this quote is so well known, possibly because I haven’t read the book.

At the risk of stealing from the dead, let me state that there is no there here, either, and I don’t mean Ms. Stein’s ancestral bungalow. I mean There, capital T, the Massively Multiplayer Online Game. It’s no longer here, on my hard drive, because I uninstalled it.

If you have been keeping up with your reading assignments, dear classmates (Hint: Don’t look for them under “assignments” on the wiki) you know that There is “a world of unending leisure and pleasure” with a “melon and aqua color palette” and “cheerful, perky font.” Or so gushes Betsy Basket, who, my guess, is not a person at all but an avatar who skips around gum-drop land in blue-checked gingham.

“There” wouldn’t let me into its utopia of sensibly priced brocade dune buggies. First it didn’t like my browser. Then, after unpacking approximately 80 billion files onto my hard drive, it wouldn’t let me past the log-in page. No, it recognized my user name and password as valid, it just wouldn’t load.

A message suggested I check to see if the domain itself was down – as if anything so cheerful and perky could ever be down. (It wasn’t.) The next suggestion was to go to the help page. This turned out to be a list of queries from other hapless souls whose symptoms didn’t match mine. The registration confirmation email had included a link to a “Live Help,” page, so I clicked on that. It loaded a page divided into two categories: Abuse Issues and Billing Issues. Billing? Nobody said anything about paying.

I mention this frustrating episode because this is not an isolated incident. Overwhelming circumstantial evidence now indicates that I am not welcome in virtual reality. Who is? Substantial experience in computer gaming seems to be one prerequisite along with a computer no more than a year old.

The first unwelcome mat I encountered was at Second Life, which I downloaded some weeks ago. This reportedly fantastic – dare I say remarkablized – virtual world displays on my computer as a muddle of gloomy silhouettes, like some dreadful intermediate phase between Picasso’s blue period and cubism. Our esteemed instructor and Second Life cofounder Cory Ondrejka diagnosed the problem as an outdated driver for my graphics card, but a search online uncovered no available updates. So I may never get to tie up at Radio Shack Island or experience other destinations I hear tell are neat-o.

The explorer moves on.

World of Warcraft warned that it would take 38 hours to download its 16 gigs onto my hard drive. But an hour after starting this process, I had barely received 3 megs. A message said I apparently had a firewall in the way. I was ushered to a page that, worryingly, promised instructions on how to disable my defenses. None of the virus protection software listed , however, matched what I had (newly) installed on my machine. Goodbye. I was only going to advocate for truth and reconciliation anyway.

VMTV actually downloaded and opened on my laptop. I entered and patiently listened as Zach and Jen (I’m making up their names) explained how to walk and talk and teleport and shop. For the next hour or so I roamed VMTV looking for someone to talk with or something to do. I saw only two avatars. The first was a comely blonde in a white bikini. She stood behind a lectern looking as confused as I was. And by “I” I mean my blond male avatar in a red hoodie. I typed “Hi.” She ignored me.

About an hour later I found myself repeatedly walking into the closed door of a shop on a deserted city street. Someone typed into my conversation rectangle, “You can’t go in there.”

I typed back meekly that I was new in these parts and wondering where everybody was.

“Do you have a car?” the mystery typist asked. I typed no.

“Do you have any money?” I located a button in the lower right corner of the screen that informed me I had 1,000 of something. I disclosed this information.

Just then I got the idea to turn Red Hoodie around and see if someone was there. I was startled to find that there was, a guy wearing some kind of creepy cat mask. He didn’t type anything more. He just stood there staring at me. I started to wonder why he had asked about my car and money.

More staring.

I suddenly and irrationally had this sense of impending … I don’t know … homosexuality. I hurriedly found the exit arrow in the bottom right corner of the screen. A second later I was back on the familiar green rolling hills of my Windows XP default desktop.

I’m probably going to have nightmares about Creepy Catman tonight. Best that I uninstall his world too.

Friendster or Foester?

Some people have asked me to explain why I call this blog Thus Spake Shibboleth.

Actually, that’s false, no one has asked me to explain it, but bear with me for a few paragraphs.

The “Thus Spake” comes from “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” an orchestral piece by Richard Strauss that is much better known as the theme from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Good film, but I’ve never understood the ending.

Shibboleth is a word I had neither heard nor seen before I came to USC but now encounter daily. It appears in that ominous Shibboleth Authentication Request Processed message I get -- and I assume everyone else gets – from the USC server when logging into a password-protected area like Blackboard or email. The term actually predates email by about 3,000 years and has a number of different meanings, only one of them related to computer security. Wikipedia can explain further.

So, what I have here is a geeky title worthy of small talk during a break at a Star Trek convention. But after my first two reflections postings and what I’m about to describe this week, people may think I should change the name to Curmudgeonly Complaining.

Am I a curmudgeon, or worse? Thursday night Professor Dmitri Williams called me a Luddite because I hadn’t watched TV in three weeks and for other reasons, one of which I’ll get to in a sec. But, c’mon, would a Luddite have a blog? And just look at all these nice hyperlinks I’m embedding this week, including that one for people who don’t know what a Luddite is.

Did I have it coming from Professor Williams? You be the judge.

I’m sitting in his Social Dynamics of Online Communities class and our learned professor asks if we know who Dank and Martha are and why we should care about them. D & M were in our readings from last week. They’re two people on Second Life who got into a huge fight because Dank’s make-believe dog ate Martha’s beautiful-but-poisonous make-believe flowers, which resulted in Dank’s pooch “dying” in make-believe pain.

So I say, “They’re two people who obviously have way too much time on their hands.”

And Professor Williams replies, “Welcome to the next 12 months of this program.”

I hope not. I can’t be the only person who believes that online communities can be so much more than the fun and games, self-promotion and virtual panty gifting afforded by the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Second Life.

Actually I know I’m not alone because I just read about Bryant Choung. He’s a software engineer who in an interview with Wired magazine a couple of years back said he thought social networking sites seemed like a good idea at first, but their usage often devolved into “an attempt to get as many fake friends as possible.”

Annoyed by a deluge of friend requests from virtual strangers, Choung launched a social-networking parody site called Snubster. There people can list people and things that bug them. Several similar sites exist, including Enemybook. One of our assignments this past week was to register at some smaller social networking sites and have a look around, so I chose those two.

Both of the sites have their droll elements. Enemybook’s add-an-enemy form asks whether you are adding this person or thing because this entity killed your (choose one): family, friend, buzz or dog. But Enemybook is in many ways just another kind of social networking site. Its home page, for instance, invites users to “see who lists you as an enemy and . . . become friends with the friends of your enemy.”

As we’ve learned in one of our classes, new communication media inevitably spawn a backlash. These parody sites are more of a countermelody than a backlash, but they serve as a call to imaginative and technically savvy people to push online-community building beyond the adolescent level at which it seems to have plateaued.

That will be one of our goals when we tackle our final projects this fall, I suppose. At least it will be one of mine.

Of Meat and Men

At 9:30 this morning I think achieved Hank Hill-level boring middle-agedness. Later in the day I gained the official designation of “Yeast Scholar.” I think it’s instructive, and germane to this course, to examine the relative satisfaction I derived from each.

I stood in my bedroom this morning, grinning at my laser printer as the second page of a four-page document rose smoothly up into the output tray. I pumped my fist like Tiger Woods sinking a long birdie putt at Augusta National and would have shouted “Wh-hoo!” but for fear of waking up one of my apartment mates.

For many months this printer had forced me to feed it one sheet of paper at a time. If I actually loaded a stack of paper into the supply slot, the glutton would suck down most or all of the sheets together and screw up everything.

But now I, a man who has never so much as used a washroom in an ITT Technical Institute, had tamed the rapacious LaserJet 6L. Best of all, this was not some take-it-apart-and-put-it-back-together-and-see-if-that-works act of desperation (a specialty of mine). I’d fixed it methodically, using replacement parts and an instructional video ordered from a site thoughtfully named Fixyourownprinter.com.

The parts and instructional CD arrived on Friday, which was the same day I launched my career as an adventuring “Pastamancer” in the Kingdom of Loathing. I liked the Monty Python-esque character names and storylines of this site and the intentionally minimalist graphics. But let’s face it, unless you’re 10 years old, fetching meat for an owl so he can glue the head back on his action figure will never be as rewarding as vanquishing balky feed rollers and pressure pads in your very own word-printing machine. Am I right, men?

I have some suggestions for the Kingdom site, and, mind you, this is 122 pieces of meat talking. The letter/number requirements for the user name and password seemed ridiculously restrictive (Is this NORAD?). And the type for the menu of links at the top of the screen (“character,” “inventory,” “skills,” etc.) must have been set in something like 6 pt. Way too small. Adjusting the type-display size using my browser controls didn’t affect those words.

The type could have been larger at Magnatune, too, but at least there the browser’s type-size adjustment worked. The radio playlists of full-length cuts were a welcome feature. So many music sites give you only samples. Magnatune would do well to further subdivide its music, though. For example, folk and roots rock must have been lumped in with pop or rock or some other category.

Lastly on this week’s Web explorations was xkcd. (Can we be any more obscure with the site names?) Some nice nerdy toons here. Hit the “random” button to explore. I expected the “next” button or the forward-arrow button to take me to the continuation of “Pod Bay Doors,” but neither did. And when I clicked on “RSS Feed” or “Atom Feed” (whatever that is), my Firefox browser took me to a page of XML code.

* * *

For the second week, I have no idea if this is what our instructors are looking for by way of a reflection paper. I hope so. Being a former newspaper reporter, I found the readings on the future of newspapers on the Web to be fascinating and thought-provoking. I read for hours and hours and can’t wait to discuss that material.

The Global Shift. That's Shift, with an f.

I couldn’t help but wonder where the Aspen Institute’s wiki was (say that three times fast) when I ran into the following analogy by Richard B. Adler, “rapporteur” of “Next Generation Media: The Global Shift.”

In describing Craig Newmark’s altruistic reasons for keeping craigslist noncommercial, Adler writes, “In this sense, Newmark is spiritually closer to Dorothy Day of Hull House than to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com or Bill Gates of Microsoft.”

The problem with that is, Dorothy Day is not of Hull House. That was Jane Addams. Dorothy Day was the cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

I went looking for a mechanism to submit my correction but in the appendix found only notes and biographical information, along with directions on how to order other reports. The “contact us” link on the home page delivered an impressive two full screens of names and hyperlinks but nothing about errata.

The cumulative effect of this week’s readings and online investigations was to remind me that the Web is far from a finished product and not always hospitable either.

In the ink-and-wood-pulp Los Angeles Times that arrived in a plastic bag at the foot of my apartment stairs this morning, I read about a virtual bank within Second Life called Ginko Financial that apparently vamoosed with some amount of participants’ real money (as opposed to the Linden Dollars the avatars carry). Linden’s reaction was to order all the remaining banks to liquidate pronto and leave the world.

I signed up for Facebook a few years ago when I was writing an article about college students using the site, but I never went beyond registration. Re-registering for Facebook and for some other sites like it (MySpace, Friendster, etc.) reminded me of why I hadn’t plunged in originally: I didn’t understand the point of participating.

I still don’t. The sites speak enthusiastically about reconnecting with friends and business acquaintances, but I don’t think I’m the only person who already stays connected with the people with whom I want to remain connected. And vice versa. I found hardly any familiar names among those registered on these sites, leading me to wonder, if nobody I know is using these sites, is there any reason I should?

From one of the sites I sent friendship invitations to five people. These were ignored by four of the five. The only one to respond was my daughter, age 22. Yes, I do have friends, but they either don’t know about these communities or they don’t consider them to be worthwhile.

If these social networking sites want to penetrate the calcified consciousnesses of more-mature people, I suggest they make it obvious what the advantages are of participating. Providing real-world examples would help. So would a video-style demo of how to develop and design a worthwhile page.

The same goes for Second Life. After choosing the attributes for my avatar and being told I’d completed all initiation tasks successfully, I was left to wonder, “Now what do I do?”

Actually, although I haven’t traveled anywhere yet in Second Life (where’s the door?), I just received a communication from someone inside. “Fatapussy Farrjones” has invited me to join her(?) group. As she explained(?) in an email, and this is cut-and-pasted verbatim, “we are a Publc Relations Group= we provide to find friends for all lands and new/old groups in SL... you can call Gen. Manager Fatapussy Farrjones for more informations.”

I haven’t called.