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The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

We start by going to the help form in Internet Explorer, and noticing a small problem. As we bring the cursor up, the box for choosing the category of the problem being reported suddenly lengthens until it goes off the end of the screen. The little arrow appears at the bottom, the one which one would use to scroll to the right on an oversized page.



But one only has one cursor to use. Normally, not a problem, but it will be this time, because ... continued

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

( continuing ) ... the moment we bring the cursor down near the arrow in the lower right hand corner of the screen, the box goes back to its original length, and the arrow for scrolling vanishes.



Selecting the category, using the form in Internet Explorer, becomes a physical impossibility ... ( return to help forum )









Aside: If you didn't understand the reference in the title, look up the entry for Tantalus in the Perseus Digital Library, and note the punishment mentioned by Ovid.

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

The acceptable use policy at Stumbleupon as it stood on Friday, Nov.13, 2009, the day the aforementioned staffer at Stumbleupon sent that message about the action he had taken in response to those unspecified violation of the rules.



See anything on this list that I could reasonably be said to have violated?

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

The acceptable use policy at Stumbleupon as it stood on Friday, Nov.13, 2009, the day the aforementioned staffer at Stumbleupon sent that message about the action he had taken in response to those unspecified violation of the rules.



See anything on this list that I could reasonably be said to have violated?

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Private Message from CH, the same moderator who publicly thanked me for my report, privately informing me that I've been blocked from posting in the SU forum in response to unspecified violations of the rules.

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, "Does anybody really like the New Format" thread in Stumbleupon group, and documentation of abuse of moderatorial authority on the part of a Stumbleupon staffer.

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, "Does anybody really like the New Format" thread in Stumbleupon group, and documentation of abuse of moderatorial authority on the part of a Stumbleupon staffer.

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, "Does anybody really like the New Format" thread in Stumbleupon group, and documentation of abuse of moderatorial authority on the part of a Stumbleupon staffer.

Mildly amusing

Photoessay with a few videos of some of a hate-filled "peace movement" protest. I have seen much the same in Chicago. This is why I lost interest in the anti-war movement. It really wasn't about peace, anymore. The antisemitism is never that far below the surface, something that, as a Jew, I'd have to be crazy to ignore. Watch one of the demonstrators screaming "go back to Europe"; do we all remember what was being done to the Jews in Europe, that made so many eager to leave? Political Correctness is about double standards; notice how so many "liberal" demonstrators, while screaming about imaginary "ethnic cleansing", see nothing odd about the endorsement of the real thing when somebody speaks of expelling Jews, apparently not just out of Tel Aviv, but out of Los Angeles as well! Please explain - to advocate limits to immigration from the Middle East into the West would be unforgivable racism, but calls for an absolute ban on the reverse are enlightened ... because ... ?

Video of a demonstrator who claims to be Muslim and pro-Israel; I know nothing about him other than what I saw of him on the video. Some of those who responded weren't very happy.

He does sort of have a point ...

Discussion of points raised in blogs

What I like, what I don't like, and the ever present but seldom directly asked question of why you would care.

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

We start by going to the help form in Internet Explorer, and noticing a small problem. As we bring the cursor up, the box for choosing the category of the problem being reported suddenly lengthens until it goes off the end of the screen. The little arrow appears at the bottom, the one which one would use to scroll to the right on an oversized page.



But one only has one cursor to use. Normally, not a problem, but it will be this time, because ... continued

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

( continuing ) ... the moment we bring the cursor down near the arrow in the lower right hand corner of the screen, the box goes back to its original length, and the arrow for scrolling vanishes.



Selecting the category, using the form in Internet Explorer, becomes a physical impossibility ... ( return to help forum )









Aside: If you didn't understand the reference in the title, look up the entry for Tantalus in the Perseus Digital Library, and note the punishment mentioned by Ovid.

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a photo:

Screenshot, Friendly advice re: recent Job Listing thread in Stumbleupon group on Stumbleupon

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ali haider alvie posted a photo:

leblur posted a photo:

this is the inside of the pops bottle. i've never seen a photo of the inside so i thought i'd see how it would look. i shot this really quick so i'm not sure how i managed get everything so symmetrical (considering i was shooting with a holga) but i though it was pretty cool ...

Ebn Hassan Wahba posted a photo:

VisualAssault posted a photo:

Drippy2009 posted a photo:

You had pulled back just a little more to capture that perfect reflection of the splash??



I like this one tho I think it's a little 'busy' in the detail around the splash.



Strobist Info :

Vivitar 285 & Vivitar 283 linked with home-made push button trigger, set to minimum power fired with a green and a purple gel through a diffuser made from a 'frosted' plastic folder.

urbandispute posted a photo:

Panamint Valley



Map location

mccannta posted a photo:

I love this shot with the vanishing point perspective and the huge, deep sky. I am right next to Interstate 15 South, just past the Nevada/California state line headed home to SoCal. The area is Ivanpah Dry Lake, it's really hot and freakishly flat.



There is no funky PS processing on this, just a bw conversion and an increase in contrast. The sky was that deep from a circular polarizer I used on my lens. Other than that, what you see is what I got.



ViewLarge

rowjimmy76 posted a photo:

agueda1959 posted a photo:

Mar Menor (Murcia).

dldp

nlwirth posted a photo:

Please View Large On White



This one is dedicated to one of the truly best photographers I know: Ian (Gray Flannel Images). His long exposure work expresses a harmony, beauty and sense of zen-inspired wonder that I not only admire immensely, but also find great inspiration from.



F/7.1 // 30 second Exposure // ISO 80 // No Filters - Just Loads of Fog

Paval Hadzinski posted a photo:

rattybill posted a photo:

The famous "crack" in the subway at Zion...actually there are many various cracks in this area of the hike, though this is one of the longer and more prevelant ones.



100 ISO

F/22

1 Second Exposure

jdevassy posted a photo:

a photo from the ground floor of a govt housing bldg.

Fil & Sonia posted a photo:

See it in black... 'Flowing in Antilope Canyon' On Black

The navajo guides in Antilope Canyon throw sand on the walls to help tourists take nice pictures: many thanks to my lady Navajo guide!

Drippy2009 posted a photo:

Playing with lighting, trying for the perfectly lit drops. Spout behind looks perfect so I guess this hit a droplet from the spout and splashed outward.



Dropping into plain water didnt work for me so these are clear drops into black dyed water, Vivitar 255 with Yellow gel handheld on left side and manually fired into white background.

mark mullis posted a photo:

rogers park chicago il

Shutterfever posted a video:

This man was trying to arrest us for taking photographs in a public place. An uninformed police officer had given him the instruction.



----



“Someone” has had the audacity to whine to Flickr about some of the comments made under this video. Flickr immediately assumed a supine position and deleted all the comments, not just the ones this person felt offended by. Well, complainant, how about this for offence: You cannot prevent people having an opinion of you. Do you think it will help your cause if you try to silence them? And here’s the really bad news: This video is out of your control. And mine too. The actions of the guard have angered many, to an extent we could not anticipate. The clip has made its way memetically to dozens of web sites, is stored on tens of thousands of hard drives, has been heard on a hundred thousand radios. The more you complain, the more attention you draw to yourself. Instead of trying to hold back the tide, you could learn from this experience. If you don’t see the lesson, let me help you: You cannot push people around without them pushing back. Think carefully before your next move.



I now expect to have my stream deleted, having criticised Flickr. Seems they put more value on a passing troll than on paying [thanks, Stoke] customers.

rjseg1 posted a photo:

After the rain, looking west on Addison from the El stop.



In Explore, April 1, 2009.

amras_de posted a photo:

«» – | + − · × ÷ ≈ ≠ ± ≤ ≥ ² ³ ½ € † # * ‰ § ¢ $ ¿ ¡ ∞ ‣ • 〈〉 … → ↔ «» – | + − · × ÷ ≈ ≠ ± ≤ ≥ ² ³

Optical Art



«» – | + − · × ÷ ≈ ≠ ± ≤ ≥ ² ³ ½ € † # * ‰ § ¢ $ ¿ ¡ ∞ ‣ • 〈〉 … → ↔ «» – | + − · × ÷ ≈ ≠ ± ≤ ≥ ² ³



Optical Art ist eine Stilrichtung der Malerei, die um 1960 aufkam. Mit Hilfe von geometrisch abstrakten Formmustern und Farbfiguren sollen im Auge des Betrachters Bewegungs- und Flimmereffekte hervorgerufen werden, die zu optischen Täuschungen führen können.

Wichtigste Vertreter der Op-Art waren Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Jesús-Rafael Soto, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Julian Stanczak, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Julio Le Parc, Youri Messen-Jaschin, Agam und sind, in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Volker Bussmann, Wolfgang Ludwig, Almir Mavignier.



de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op_Art



«» – | + − · × ÷ ≈ ≠ ± ≤ ≥ ² ³ ½ € † # * ‰ § ¢ $ ¿ ¡ ∞ ‣ • 〈〉 … → ↔ «» – | + − · × ÷ ≈ ≠ ± ≤ ≥ ² ³



Op art, also known as optical art, is used to describe some paintings and other works of art which use optical illusions. Op art is also referred to as geometric abstraction and hard-edge abstraction, although the preferred term for it is perceptual abstraction. The term "Op" bears resemblance to the other popular movement of the 1960s, Pop Art though one can be certain such monikers were invoked for their catchiness and not for any stylistic similarities.

"Optical Art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing."[1] Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made in only black and white. When the viewer looks at them, the impression is given of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibration, patterns, or alternatively, of swelling or warping.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Op_art



«» – | + − · × ÷ ≈ ≠ ± ≤ ≥ ² ³ ½ € † # * ‰ § ¢ $ ¿ ¡ ∞ ‣ • 〈〉 … → ↔ «» – | + − · × ÷ ≈ ≠ ± ≤ ≥ ² ³

Doug Watt posted a photo:

jan-willem wolf posted a photo:

RJIPhotography posted a photo:

monitorpop posted a photo:

oschene posted a photo:

fs999 posted a photo:

Pentax K10D • Sigma 17-70mm f:2.8-4.5 DC Macro

Montmartre - Paris - France

At first, I didn't care for this site in the least, writing of how I had always "hated those javascript things that leave beads or something else hanging off one's cursor" and even, if you can imagine this, gentle reader, questioned the merit of Pollock's work. My eyes were waiting to be opened, as they soon would be.













Trying out the software on this page, I found that I was, indeed, far too harsh in my initial appraisal. As I created the masterpiece you see above if you're reading this on my blog, I was intrigued by the way in which that Jackson Pollock look (that those truly in the know have come to appreciate) was best achieved was for me not to linger, but to race my mouse around so quickly that I couldn't think much about what I was doing, sending the cursor careening around the screen far more quickly than my eye could follow, or would want to, splashing color as it went.



First black! Then green! Or would it be red? With each tap the color would change, one would never know what to in advance, and the more I embraced the fact that I had absolutely no idea of what I was doing, the more Pollock-like my efforts became. I had arrived. I had found myself as a painter. Fascinated as I was by the power of such a fearlessly randomised aesthetic, I pondered the possible course of my life as a newly made artist, in this brave new world to be made by our love of such unpredictable beauty, a love which I'd let touch everything I did, for that is the path to greatness. Tenure would surely be close at hand.













I wondered where one would hang a piece as this. I imagined it hanging in a campus library stocked with scholarly works such as these articles (1 and 2) which I wrote with a little help from the Postmodernism Generator, while off in the background one could hear the faint notes of music such as this drifting in from a concert hall across the quad. Huddled over, I would be busy producing enduring works of scholarship such as these, racing through my day because I'd know that a new play by Bryn Magnus of the Curious Theatre Branch would soon open, and I had not yet partaken of recreational pharmaceuticals in sufficient bulk to fully appreciate Bryn's writing. There is a knock at the door. Is that? ... why, yes, it is!



My beloved Lucretia has taken time from her labwork to drop by with a few words of encouragement and a cup of her homebrewed espresso, lightly fermented and seasoned with just a hint of kelp; I smack my lips and savor the briny caffeination. I don't know how I'd get through my day without her. The delicate scent of orchids and overripe durian rises from the gardens below, gently teasing my nostrils, as ...













I shall never know what was to come, for the shorting of my keyboard from the drool accumulating on it has roused me from my reverie, and I have lost my train of thought. Alas, no bathtub full of sea urchins to greet my weary bones at the end of a long day tutoring, no academic recognition of my computer generated brilliance, not even Lucretia, for she is but a dream. But I still do have this lovely, lovely painting and the inspiring thought that I live in a society that would salute the work of a visionary like Jackson Pollock and all that work such as his represents and really, shouldn't that be far more than enough?



Posted December 16, 2007 1:45 am ... More reviews of Jackson Pollock are here.

I don't even know what this blog will be about, yet. Let's work on that.

Let's start by repeating what I posted to the Yahoo developer network blog in response to the mention of the possibility of Mybloglog being closed by Yahoo, because nobody quite saw it on that blog, other than me:

"Mr.Yeh, let me tell you how this looks from a user's point of view. I've just invested a certain amount of time into creating communities for my blogs, linking to them, and encouraging visitors to sign up for them, if they wish to be notified of updates. That's time out of my day that doesn't get paid for by Yahoo with anything other than a service that you're now telling us might get shut down really not very long after I've taken time to link everything together, meaning that my time might very well end up having gone to waste.



How does that make this user feel? REALLY ANGRY. Betrayed. And totally unwilling to ever try another Yahoo service if you go ahead with this, no matter what that service might be, because I'm tired of this garbage. How much of my uncompensated time got eaten up this summer because your ever so delightfully whimsical CEO decided to kill Geocities, leaving us to scramble looking for replacements, because ... tee hee hee ... Yahoo decided that an FTP server was one of those luxuries its users didn't need, meaning that we had to do our downloading by hand, one file at a time? But hey, who cares? It's not like our time is worth anything, right?



Except maybe to us. You know, those lowly users without whom Yahoo would have no content onto which to stick its advertising, outside of a few newsfeeds one can pick up elsewhere. Seriously, if all that you people are going to offer in the long run is AP feeds, then why wouldn't visitors just go to the AP homepage or to some real news site? Why bother with Yahoo?



My own personal position - and I really, seriously doubt that it will be a unique one among your user base - is that I'm really tired of having my time put to waste because your company feels like flaking out, so tired that if you do this to us one more time - as you say you might be about to - I will never submit another piece of content to another page on your server ever again, outside of those I or one of my friends moderate, and that I'll start pushing to have those moved elsewhere. Enough is enough. Yahoo is either going to choose to be a credible hosting service or it is not.



If not, you're going to end up with the user base you deserve, and your stock prices will reflect the change, especially after some of us write to a few of your investors and explain to them why the quality and quantity of the content on those servers has started to drop, and why advertisers are wandering off. I hope that wasn't too vague. If it was, be sure to send a message to the corporate acquisitions office at Microsoft, and I'm sure they'll be able to explain it to you.



Posted by: Joseph Dunphy at December 26, 2009 3:02 AM

I posted, and then looked at the blog the next day, and instead of this passage

"so tired that if you do this to us one more time - as you say you might be about to - I will never submit another piece of content to another page on your server ever again"

saw this passage

"so tired that if you do this to us one more time - as you say you be about to - I will never submit another piece of content to another page on your server ever again"

It's subtle - nothing more than the removal of a single word - but this is enough to create the illusion that I don't know how to conjugate the verb "to be" ... which I do, by the way







I am

you are

he, she, it is

we are

they are







Aside from the political convenience of having an angry critic appear to be illiterate, which anybody who has been following my blogs will know that I am not, this simple deletion of a single word takes a comment about something that Yahoo's staff has said that it might do, and transforms it into something that contains a clearly inaccurate statement about something that said staff has said that it will do, an inaccuracy that can be seen for what it is, merely by reading the page. This is a very effective way of quietly smearing somebody who has expressed some very reasonable anger.



Yes, a little subtler than the usual Yahoo managerial response, that of simply deleting the remark and sending a threatening message, subtle enough that even I found myself wondering if I had just done a poor job of proofreading. Over a week passed without my being able to clarify anything, because any attempt on my part to post produced an error message stating that I had posted too many times, already, even though I had only posted to that blog one time, that I could remember. I believe that this was the first time that I had ever posted a comment on that blog, but I could be mistaken.



Finally, I was able to reply to this comment

I agree MBL had some potential, but it's been neglected for years. It doesn't really DO anything. Sure, the stats are solid, but the rest is just pointless. Communities you can't even post in? Ever heard of CMF Ads? They have a great forum. BlogCatalog has a better widget. Even BC has forums. The MBL widget is just another script to dump in your sidebar and forget about.

writing

"It doesn't really DO anything."

Sure it does. It ties all of one's content, no matter where one has posted it, into one tidy, easy to follow bundle. It provides an easy way for users to be notified of new posts in the locations which they find to be of interest.

"The MBL widget is just another script to dump in your sidebar and forget about."

Which is what I think it should be - a convenient, labor saving tool that does what it is supposed to do, with a minimum of effort and drama for the user. Not everything needs to be a chance for somebody to post. If I wanted my blog to have a guestbook, I could easily give it one. What I don't like about Blogcatalog, among other things, is that using it effectively forces me to give my blog a guestbook, one without comment screening, whether I want one or not.



Posted by: Joseph Dunphy at January 14, 2010 1:23 PM

Again, my comment was mangled, so quickly in this case that automatic machiniery had to have been involved. This time I had carefully proofread, triple checking my work - this was no typo. What I had written is not what appeared, and I immediately had a question

Is there some kind of weird swear word screening program in use on this page? I ask, because I typed"It ties all of o n e ' s content, no matter where o n e has posted it"



(spaces introduced by me in an attempt to prevent a repeat of what just happened) and got



"It ties all of o n e ' s content, no matter where be has posted it,"



That's not cool, and this is not the first time I've found myself unpleasantly surprised in this manner, on this very page. What o n e types is what should end up being seen by those reading o n e ' s comment.

Posted by: Joseph Dunphy at January 14, 2010 1:49 PM

I must say, though, that if this is an accident, it's a strangely convenient one, one that looks a little too well designed. If one wishes to argue that Yeh has a right to keep my remarks from appearing on his blog, I will actually be quite supportive of that argument, but to post a distorted version of what a respondent wrote and attribute it to him is defamatory, absolutely underhanded behavior. I could not even credit it with what, under these circumstances, would be the faint virtue of originality, because I've seen this game played before, by a school newspaper editor intent on punishing a candidate in a student government election for having written a harsh rebuttal to a previous editorial, meaning that I am not even compensated for my aggravation by being left with a halfway decent story to tell after the fact.



Programming a virtual booby trap into one's system to do one's dirty work for one, wouldn't lift such conduct to a higher moral plane.

Originally published on "Just In: Joseph Dunphy's Newsblog / Connecting to Digg" on February 16, 2008. The post begins:







"Yet another blog from he who could fill out the ones he already has a lot more? Perhaps, but like any good would-be engineer, I'm being cautious. Well nourished and in good spirits as I enjoy a plate of that fine brisket Wordpress shares with new users who read the TOS







but at little wary, as I pass my mac and cheese serving over to the next user to the left. Is that bacon in those collards? Oh, well ...







In my "Keep an eye on these sites" post on Monday Never Comes, I mentioned the annoying habit a number of sites had, Digg included - that of sticking "rel=nofollow" tags on the homepages links of its users. Digg still does that, but it doesn't stick such links on the linkbacks given to those who blog its articles. Discovering this left me a little more inclined to use my membership their site, but I soon found another annoying habit of theirs. In order to "blog" an article on Digg, one has to give Digg the password for one's blog. Not that I'm saying that Digg or one of its employees would put that password to bad use, but long before I had ever heard of the Internet, I had already seen supposedly respectable, trustworthy individuals in positions of far greater authority engage in conduct far more scandalous than a little hacking. No, I'm not going to name names, but we are talking "obstruction of justice" - as much comfort as may be found in the thought that a man must rise to the occasion when others depend on him, real life is far less comforting, and sensible men will prepare themselves for that reality.







I don't believe that Digg or - more to the point - any rogue employee of Digg - will misuse the password for this blog, in fact I think that's highly, highly unlikely, and if I didn't, I wouldn't dream of filling out that form. HOWEVER, if somebody at Digg does do so, and this blog is vandalised or so misused in my name that Wordpress has to delete it, all that I'm going to lose, arise from this introduction and maybe a few decorative touches to be added later, will be the excerpts uploaded by Digg and links to places where I discuss the articles excepted. Further, since I am not going to share that password with anybody but Digg, if it is misused by somebody at some company which is in possession of it, there will be little question left as to at which company that person works, meaning that the buck in this case would be likely to stop very quickly.







Were that to happen, I would be mildly ... ummm ... "physically loved" ... but the offending party and his employer would be far more deeply so, and very little material original to me would be lost. Mainly, what would occur would be that Digg's pagerank would be infinitesimally decreased, because all non-nofollowed links from my sites to theirs would suddenly be cut. While the reverse would be true as well, I wouldn't be losing anything in this regard that Digg and its employees couldn't take from me without possession of the password for this blog simply by deleting my account there, an action that wouldn't pose the danger to Digg's corporate reputation that a misuse of confidential information would, and wouldn't raise the issue of possible federal prosecution - system intrusion is not viewed as gently as it used to be.







Really, then all I'm trusting Digg and its employees to do, as I hand them the password to this blog whose sole purpose is to be an interface between my sites and theirs, is to not choose to do harm to themselves without purpose. While anybody old enough to have a past knows that rationality or even sanity is not a given, to anticipate it in others certainly represents a far shorter leap of faith than does the presumption of good will, and doing things this way does, at least, limit the damage that a rogue company (or employee) can do, meaning that any damage caused by a misplacement of faith will be contained, at least to some extent.







I hope that Wordpress is OK with this. I suspect that they are, as Digg does have a "Wordpress" option under blogging, but if not, they have my e-mail address, and on the first word I see from them indicating that they are not happy with this use of their system, I will cease and desist without further argument and find a use for this space that they will be happier with, as soon as I can. As I've heard of no Digg related scandals, I suspect that there is no real danger, but I hope that any admin reading this will at least appreciate the fact that I gave the issue enough thought, that I made a point of structuring the incentives in such a way to minimize the risk.







That's my thinking behind the creation of this interface. I'll leave out the usual sincere hope that you'll enjoy your stay, because this is more a place you'll be passing through, maybe a lot should you become a regular reader and I become a more regular poster, which at some point in the near future, I expect I will."







End of post. So went the thinking, when I found myself confronted with what I felt to be Digg's highly unreasonable request for my password, as a condition for blogging one of their articles. Yesterday, on looking in on that blog and the one and only article I blogged used to used it to blog, on Digg, I found that the linkback to my blog, and to the blogs of the others who had blogged that same article, were missing. I never received any notices of the removal. Digg seemed happy to hold onto a link it was no longer reciprocating.



I might as well have not bothered setting up the newsblog; Digg ended up dealing with me, as it did with others, in bad faith. The remedy, at this point, is a simple one - I'm going to recycle the "newsblog", changing its name (and its password, you can be sure), deleting all posts currently there as I put it to a new use, and replacing all links to Digg with links directly to content, when such links aren't deleted altogether. I'll still visit digg.com, because I gain some benefit from doing so - it's a rich source of good quality links - but the fact that I have a membership there will become so irrelevant, that I doubt that I'll ever log back in.



Which brings us to the basic problem with Digg - its staff has foolishly structured the incentives it gives to its users in such a way as to leave most of us with little, if any, good reason to want to remember that we are users. Where is the love for those who make the site work, to the benefit of the company and the rest of its users?



After what I just told you, you should be able to see why somebody might not want to blog any more articles on Digg.com, itself; this costs that site a source of its traffic. But think of the people who really make the site work, and why one might not want to be one of those people. Let's say that one submits four different posts, and that they're good posts, but somebody - a well connected somebody - gets his friends together, and buries all four of them. As I understand the TOS at Digg, one would lose one's account, and find that there was no way of appealing this possibly malicious act of "community moderation" (read "mob rule"), no chance for somebody's common sense to override the mindless application of a formula. The votes are in and one is gone, and that's that.



This hasn't happened to me, but I am told that it has happened to others and really, where is the surprise? If one choses to be active on a site where mob rule is a reality, and one doesn't wish to become to next victim, one does well to have a mob of one's own. Having assembled it, one had better keep it busy, if people are to remember that they're part of it at all, and not go wandering off. Infighting within such a system, then, is no historical accident, but merely the inevitable outcome of the perverse incentives put in place by the system, which only act to reinforce the natural, petty human jealousies that have so often been seen on the Internet, for so long.



Is somebody submitting more interesting links than one, and worse still, seem a little more intelligent and articulate, stealing the attention that one knows should be coming one's way? Then just gather a few friends together and have him silenced. Or maybe his political point of view is gaining adherents at the expense of one's own, one feels, and the pages he is sharing are helping to accelerate that trend. One could respond to that by rethinking one's thoughts, or articulating them better, or at least look for somebody who had - but why work that hard? Just bury him into oblivion, ending the problem and reaffirming one's friendship - if one can call it that - with the other members of the floating lynch mob, with this triumph one has shared with them, at somebody else's expense.



It's a system built to be abused, and that's a shame. I hope that Digg will rethink its choices, but I seriously doubt that this will occur. If you've been to the Ravine, you've probably seen some links to pages about a former Digg user called "Zaibatsu", and the treatment he received. More about him, later, but I think you'll find that it isn't encouraging reading.



"In other words, Joseph - Digg, a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there?" As cliched and derivative as that sounds, yes, that's the conclusion I've drawn, at least for the moment.



YMMV

A discussion (of sorts) between a user (me) and the owner of a service (Larry Halff of Ma.gnolia) on that service's homegroup on Flickr:









Me, five days ago: "I was wondering if anybody else was having this problem. I recently got my invitation message to join the new Ma.gnolia - which is very cool - but when I clicked on the link, I found that I couldn't connect to the page one goes to, to accept the invitation. I tried going to Mr. Halff's page - and couldn't connect to that either. Finally, I just tried going to Ma.gnolia itself - and couldn't connect to that, either. Not in Firefox and not in Internet Explorer - most recent releases of both.



Yes, I cleared my cache, ran Spybot and rebooted. No change. Very frustrating, and leaving me wondering if the problem is with the site or with my connection."









Larry Halff, four days ago: "Hi Joseph, I haven't seen any other reports of problems getting to the site. Perhaps it is your connection? Do you get any particular error message when trying to access Ma.gnolia?"









Me, four days ago: "Just that usual one when one tries to go to a site that doesn't exist? I've since been able to get through, though, and start up my account, but run into a few frustrations along the way that I should mention.



Monk is coming on, though, so this will have to wait. First things, first. "









Me, four days ago:



"1. The button on the sign-in page isn't visible in Internet Explorer. It was visible in Firefox and Chrome, however.



2. On going directly to Ma.gnolia from the place where I got my new OpenID and trying to sign up, I found myself on this page, where I was presented with this request:

"Please enter your invitation code below"

As my invitation letter contained nothing of the sort, I guessed and used the string following the .gnolia.com in the url for my invitation page. The system didn't seem to share my enthusiasm for this idea, and I got nowhere.



Clicking on the link, again, though, once I was logged into Open ID on Chrome seemed to work just fine. So, the system did work in the end, but it had a few bugs and at least one quirk: one's screenname isn't one's screenname.



What one enters as a screenname becomes one's id, and what one enters as one's "real name" becomes one's screenname. Not a huge deal, but it will leave a few people scratching their heads for a second."









Me, four days ago: "Uh oh ... now, this is a problem. Having just created a group, I went to start a discussion - and found that I couldn't. That feature doesn't seem to exist in the new Ma.gnolia. Is that a permanent change, or am I missing something?



Also - if we will have discussions, will they be taking place in an all text environment, like the old Ma.gnolia, or will graphical content be allowed? I ask because I've just created a Mathematics group, but Math done in plain text becomes notoriously difficult to read, very quickly. I'm trying to decide whether I should focus my efforts on the Math group, or delete that and spend more effort on subjects that do lend themselves to plain text (eg. philosophy, literature) when posting to Ma.gnolia or moderating groups, there."









Me, today: "I see that you don't want to respond. I'm not surprised. After all, not counting your own personal associates, I was the only user of the old Ma.gnolia to post to the Ma.gnolia wiki, as I did in this post, and yet never got a reply. Obviously, Larry, you don't really value your users' input, which leaves us with the question - why do you ask for it? You did invite us to sign up for that wiki.



OK, whether you value that feedback or not, you're going to get some now. Right now, you and Ma.gnolia are associated with maybe the worst data loss incident in the history of the Internet. One need only google your own company name and see the search suggestions that come up to see just how much of an impression that crash made - it is what your company is now primarily known for, with multiple versions of "Ma.gnolia crashing" being suggested before any more flattering combination. It's a public relations nightmare.



Having been over on the new Ma.gnolia, I found that so few of the old users had returned, that even with the connection problems delaying my entry into Ma.gnolia for a few days, when I went to set up my groups, I had no trouble claiming names as common as "Chicago" and "Mathematics". As I looked around, I kept seeing the same names, over and over, with a frequency that would have been considered unusual even by small town standards. Accept this and come to terms with it - most of your old users aren't coming back.



This is more than understandable. Let's face it - by your own admission, you did mess up. Some of these people lost thousands or even tens of thousands of bookmarks and the commentary that went with them, I understand. Getting hit that way twice would be a hard one to take, so who can blame them, if those who suffered those losses should be a little risk averse at this moment. So, where does this leave you?



You need to get a large number of new users so excited about what you have to offer them, that when they remember what you're best known for at this moment - the January crash - that they'll be willing to forget that for a moment. If you do not succeed in doing so, then I sincerely hope for your sake that you're independently wealthy, because with what appears to be maybe a few dozen users at present, Ma.gnolia isn't going to produce enough income to keep a gerbil fed, much less a full grown man.



Oh, and Larry - I've seen your photostream, and having been poor, myself - I don't believe that you'd adapt to the experience, very well. Your tastes aren't just expensive, they're reliably expensive. After the third week of trying to find yet another way to make rice and beans interesting - and wondering how much longer you'd be able to afford the beans - I suspect that somebody would end up trying to talk you off of a bridge. Worse still, the Tech industry being what it is, odds are that you'd have to settle for the Bay Bridge, because the Golden Gate would probably be booked up a few months in advance, and nobody wants it to come to that.



So, what do you have to offer?









At present, you either don't offer the option of creating discussions in the groups we've set up, or you've somehow made that option a hard one to find. I do remember that the option wasn't a difficult one to find at the old Ma.gnolia, and you say that the new one is little more than a re-release of the old, so I'll conclude that you just removed it.



This leaves Ma.gnolia with much the same feature set - and thus, now serving the same market - as Simpy, with a few significant differences. Simpy is easy to log into - enter id, enter password, click and proceed. With Ma.gnolia, now that you've eliminated the option of logging directly into the site, one must instead go to Verisign or some other OpenID provider, log in there - and then, at least in the case of Verisign, log into Ma.gnolia using the same window! Having attempted this in Chrome, because your login doesn't work in IE - the choice of 80% of those surfing the Internet - I found that Verisign kept logging me out in Chrome. One is left needing two accounts instead of one, just to log in, and maybe the need to set up more, as one tries to find which browsers have been ignored by Ma.gnolia, and which by the partners with whom we're forced to deal, if we wish to enter our accounts, at all.



Simpy offers a button that one can put on one's toolbar, allowing one to use it with far greater ease than one can use Ma.gnolia. Oh - and Simpy has never lost its users' data.



In Ma.gnolia's favor, one does find a much prettier interface, and easier to read text, but in a Simpy vs. Ma.gnolia competition, will that be enough to make many people choose Ma.gnolia? Count the number of truly ugly and highly successful social networking sites out there - I think that you know that the answer to that question will be "no". Yet, go up to the average Simpy user, and ask him to give you an honest, instead of a tactful answer to a simple question - when was the last time you used your Simpy account?



Some contrarian or another will probably write in to say "I use mine every day, and so do lots of other people" - but take a look at the Simpy homepage. One sees little other than spam. Simpy has become the virtual equivalent of a trash strewn vacant lot, still alive only because its creator seems to love it, and doesn't have the heart to get rid of it. Conclusion: In a head to head competition with a known failure, Ma.gnolia would come out the loser.









As a prospective returning user of your service, how should I view this? Ma.gnolia doesn't have much to offer me at this point. Yes, it still has groups, but of the discussion-free simpy variety; bookmarks are pooled, but no opportunity for public interaction with the other users is to be found. To use a group like that isn't community building, it is parallel play - pointless. So let's pretend that the feature doesn't even exist, for the moment, because it might as well not.



This leaves us with the forced one paragraph per review format, which leaves Ma.gnolia, functionally, on a level with the far more reliable and well funded Delicious, and considerably behind Faves - which, by the way, also offers a toolbar. Nobody is going to get excited, other than the usual few yes men, because everybody will have better, more competitive, and more reliable places to be.



Let's say that I'm one of the few people who disregards this, and continues. What happens to me when Ma.gnolia folds? If I'm lucky, I'll get advance notice. If I've built up a real presence there, this will leave me spending the next few days in the most tedious possible way, moving bookmarks by hand. If I'm unlucky, I lose my work. Again.



This doesn't sound like a very good deal to me, and even if I were inclined to overlook that and plow on ahead, I'd be left with this thought - everybody else has just had the same thought, or will, soon enough. Even if I disregard my own best interests in order to be altruistic on behalf of a total stranger, what are the odds that enough people will make the same choice to keep your company alive and my work from going to waste? In this case, the generous odd man out gets badly hurt by his generosity, a thought that should deter most people from being charitable in that manner. Think of it as a variant on the Prisoner's Dilemma.



If this sounds cynical - Larry, what have you done to earn our charity? The downgrading of that feature set wasn't an act of G-d, it was a choice, one that you made, that set in place the perverse incentives that promise to keep your company from recovering unless, to put it bluntly, you succeed in finding yourself a bumper crop of idiots, or unless you have a lot of favors to call in. Maybe about 10,000 of them. Choices have consequences, and they should, when they're informed ones, freely made.



If you don't care enough about us to give us better choices than these, ones that don't involve us climbing out onto a creaking limb and hoping for the best - why should we care about you? As for the idiots - I don't doubt that you'll find a few, because they're always there, but for how long are people going to want to read what they have to write, or want to follow their links?



But it's your choice."









Me, today: "I'm going to unsubscribe from this group, now, and put my Ma.gnolia account and groups into mothballs. React to that fact, however you wish, even if that should mean killing my account. As it is, my account is nothing, and I refuse to be upset by the thought of losing nothing.



If, at some point, you decide that you'd like to start treating your job like a job and make Ma.gnolia into a place worth using, send me a message. I'll see it, eventually, and might even care enough to log back into Ma.gnolia. Until then, I have stuff to do."













End of discussion, at least so far and yes, I did unsubscribe, once again feeling a little foolish for having defended a provider. I'll talk more about that, later.



A number of us really wanted to give this guy a break. I'd even started writing a pep talk, thinking (after Ma.gnolia's reappearance almost failed to appear before the end of summer) that Halff needed a little encouragement, when what he really needed was a good, hard rhetorical kick in the posterior. He just doesn't seem to care about the people who rely on him, and that's just wrong.

Note: I've deleted a small amount of profanity that was present in the material I've quoted, replacing it with roughly synonymous nonprofanity in parantheses, because I've decided to move toward making my own pages a little more family friendly. No profanity softening was present in the original text.



I posted the following response to this article, posted under the title "Yanked Off Yelpers: How To (Urinate) Off Your Most Passionate Users in 7 Days or Less", in which the author (Sarah Browne) wonders out loud ... read it for yourself.

"Everybody (and rightfully so) is ready to jump through hoops to keep their Loyal Customers purringly happy. Everybody that is, except Yelp. SFGate reports that the online review site yanked ‘an undisclosed number of accounts after finding that the business owners had swapped positive reviews with other business owners. Yelp also regularly deletes reviews it believes are phony. The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can’t they review it?” Because they're gaming the site? So, we have support for those who filed a nuisance suit in order to bully a free service into letting them use that service, in a misleading manner, posting ad copy as if it were a series of spontaneous testimonials. As is all too often the case online, the word "fraud" is the first one to come to mind, and continues to be as we come across the reply written by "Brian Smith", to which I attempted to reply, myself: "If you write a negative review on yelp on there site, you will be banned. So much for freedom of speech." Pardon me - bull. Let's take a look at the review page for Yelp on Yelp: http://www.yelp.com/biz/yelp-san-francisco#hrid:TkMMI0BVBb9we_Dr3cvXMQ We find this review, dated May 5 of this year, from Rick G: "yelp (slurps). They delete what anyone flags. without question. no contaction the author to question the review. just a message to tell you someone flagged it and its gone. thanks for your hard work but its not needed. don't get creative; but stay within the small minded guide lines that only a hillbilly could comprehend. you (slurp)!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i used it', are you going to delete this. or will you flag it and then send me a email telling its been deleted already. you don't appreciate my work i don't appreciate yours." Doesn't sound very positive, does it? Yet Rick G.'s profile is still up http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=cmbLhf-Jrq_fIxxlSWO8zA I guess these censorious mods need more than four months to oppress their users? One might note that it hasn't been updated since that review, which could mean that Rick walked off in a huff, or his account was locked. "It must be the latter", somebody might write. Yet, if we take a look at this comment from Mashimaro M, who gave Yelp one star "Often times, it seems that if you are a "PAID SPONSOR" you get the special treatment and if not, well, good luck for your business because you will be at the mercy of Yelp's selective listings. That's not what I call a "fair and unbiased" forum for reviews." and go to his profile http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=JNeqH3WpciaKrVZiy0hu6w we find that he has posted reviews as recently as last week - even though his one star review also was posted on the fifth. So, I'm guessing that more four months are needed by the operatives of the evil Yelp empire to silence their users? I wonder how much more. Let's go back more than a year, to when Sarah Y. posted these kind words in her one star review: "Yup, judging from the other reviews and lots of PM's in my inbox, Yelp is definitely on the decline. When things grow, they die. Yelp now sides with the business owners who can pay to have negative reviews removed. Wonder why your review doesn't show up in the search? What a joke. Ultimately, GOOD FOR THEM, they're trying to make money. The users are just unpaid peons doing all the grunt work. ;-) You can't fool people forever, Yelp." Yet her profile and review remain in place http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=zD1T8JFx3O1Rf9aNu49rpQ and looking at the former, we find her last active on February 26 of this year. But these all come after Mr. Smith posted his remarks. Perhaps Yelp used to be ever so sinister, and has since cleaned up its act? Fine, let's go back to January 25 of 2008, well before Brian posted, when Jobby J. wrote "Too many secret handshaking (sphincters)." and also gave Yelp one star. Looking at his profile http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=5-JGKdS4zpoz7SpxnACPKg we find that he was posting just last month. Conclusion: Smith's claims would not seem to be supported by the facts, but that won't matter, because most people won't take the time to do what I just did. As for why the Yelp staff won't let their "most passionate reviewers" post ad copy on what is supposed to be a review site, maybe I'll let that one comment on itself.

The keyword, perhaps, is "attempted" - that reply has not, as of the time of this writing, yet appeared on Ms.Browne's blog. Let's see if it ever does.

Yes, it's a general question, but looking in the help center, I found nothing very helpful, and I've already burned away more than an hour on this nonsense. Honestly, I'm starting to get a little angry. This should be a straightforward function on Vox, and it isn't. Should I post this to ... where?

I'm in a group I've just created, and see a notice that the group has no photos, as one would expect. Would I like to add one? Sure. Go to your library and add one, I'm told, being given a link to my own library. I go there, find an image, click on "share" and find absolutely no option for sharing the photo to a group.

Fine. Is there some other option? I go back, and look at the page I was on before I went to that remarkably useless share page, which seems designed more to help promote Vox than to help the user - note that all of the options given involve the posting of content outside of Vox. Is there anything useful there?

Apparently not. As I watch a morning that I had intended to walk out into start to turn into an afternoon, I finally get around to trying the edit screen

and find what I'm looking for at last. What I've found is that the Yelp system won't provide us with an option to add photos to a group if one clicks on "photos" instead of on "edit", on one's main screen - and I was supposed to know this, how? I was just supposed to know it, that was all. OH! – and look at all of the beautiful red x’s (exes?) that posting these screenshots have left on my main blog page on Vox, where those last two links are to be found.

Though an easy solution to this problem could be found ...

... at which point everything return to normal, or at least to what passed for normality.

The customary act of a user, at this point, is to post some self-deprecating remark about how the service needs to understand how stupid its users are, and work with that, but I'm not going to write anything like that, because this is simply absurd. There is a difference between being intelligent and being psychic.

How, precisely, was the user supposed to know that Vox would set its system in such a way as to disable the sending of photos to groups, unless one reached the photo using just the right path, and how would one know which path to take? Once one is there, one should be there, and free to do what needs doing, whether one has found the right sequence of hoops to jump through or not.

This is what Vox really needs to work on - making its system more intuitive, more user friendly, and better documented. Creating a help group, instead of sending users to wade through a mass of documents, and having an employee watch that group, might not be a bad idea, either.

Mirrored: Here, on "Party of One"

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a new topic:

The previous administrator left, so I am now running a group I never expected to be offered. It's called "the Void". You might call it "the spirit of postmodernism".



My predecessor might be elsewhere, but his vision will live on.

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a reply:

Not as hard to click on, but something I'll use sometimes ... green smiley, something which I think looks nicer against a white background than the standard yellow smiley.



You know, this thing:

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a new topic:

This will be useful later, but a transparent 1 by 1 .gif can be very difficult to click onto on a photostream, so I'm giving myself a few links so I'll be able to get in.

Blank space for formatting text here on Flickr:



http://www.flickr.com/photos/joseph_dunphy_blog/3105986719/







Blank space which I've used on Stumbleupon, for use elsewhere.



http://www.flickr.com/photos/joseph_dunphy_blog/4030773713/

The Abyss / Joseph Dunphy posted a new topic:

Stumbleupon will soon be switching from its V3 format to its V4, forcing this change on all of its users in early December whether they want it or not, I'm told. Let's take a look at the impact this highly unwanted change will have on my blog, currently on Stumbleupon, but soon to be re-started elsewhere, to a large extent because of this.

I've set up an account for commenting on livejournal, so that when I encounter livejournal users who have interests in common with me, and have written about subjects that relate to those mentioned on the Abyss (my Stumbleupon blog), I'll be able to post comments. Having done so, I've decided to use the livejournal that comes with this account to comment on those sites, and add a little supplemental material along the way.



It will be an eclectic mishmash of desert photography, astronomy, physics, kosher Japanese cooking (yes, kosher), haikus, Mathematical logic, minimalistic photography and other subjects, with a continuing emphasis on that which is most basic, most austere and simple. Here, less will be more.

As I go wandering through Blogger, I'll sometimes find blogs whose content will tie into what I've been talking about on my Stumbleupon journal, which I call the "Abyss", even if Stumbleupon doesn't seem to agree. Dropping my to comment will be natural, and perhaps the discussion will become interesting.



This blog is for discussing those discussions, and those blogs, which, as I said, will exclusively be ones that I've found on Blogger.

Elsewhere, I have a blog I call the Abyss, located on Stumbleupon, on which bookmarking serves as the beginning for essay writing, which I’ll be doing on a variety of topics, some scientific (physical sciences, esp. mathematics, physics and astronomy), some philosophical or artistic, but with continuing themes of emptiness, austerity, restraint and simplicity. Less [...]

content to be added later

No, having had the (cough, cough) pleasure of dealing with users many times in the past, I think that's a...

It seemed to me to be a more positive way of getting involved in the exchange of ideas that the...

Speaking as a user of Uber, I'd purely love to post to my blog and give them a little of that traffic that Uber says it needs to live, but I can't. This is what I see when I try to log in.



http://www.imagechicken.com/viewpic.php?p=12249...



Nothing. During this period when Uber says it desperately needs us to post, it posts a notice that it is moving "to a new home", and then takes our sites offline for what has been a few days, now, with no timetable given for coming back online. They almost seem determined to self-destruct.

That closes on something that comes uncomfortably close to being a call for a chain letter, at least as it sounds to me. Pay it forward might not be a bad idea in the real world, when it's practical, but I wonder if one might want to be a little careful about encouraging it online.