Pop Loser

I Am an Article on the Internet

I am an article on the internet that you repost on the internet.

Interesting article—I’m referring to myself—about the death of bookstores and print media you just posted. Way to stave off the inevitable end in a gesture whose irony you seem to be only vaguely aware of. Put it on the “I Know the Difference Between Irony and Sarcasm” fan page! Related: “Stop Using the Word ‘Random’ Incorrectly” group!

Giving Up

Paul Miller is giving up the internet for a year because, well, I don’t really know. I once gave up the internet for three days. It wasn’t all the enlightening and really just made it hard to find baseball scores.

Now I want to see the internet at a distance. By separating myself from the constant connectivity, I can see which aspects are truly valuable, which are distractions for me, and which parts are corrupting my very soul.

Um, yeah.

Hilariously, Harry Marks has decided to “give up reading.” [via]

Now I want to see words at a distance. By separating myself from written language, I’ll be able to see which aspects of reading are truly valuable, which are distractions, and which ones give me explosive diarrhea.

Social Web c. 1997

The modern social web as it would have looked in 1997. They even limit the transfer to dial-up speed, which is funny and infinitely frustrating.

With the launch of the new Delicious (and, more to the point, the elimination of several awesome features), people have started flocking to Pinboard. Again. But the real loser here is probably Magnolia. [via]

Rhapsody bought Napster. Unfortunately no one knows what those two things are anymore.

Will Facebook Music kill Last.fm?

From Wired’s DJ Shadow interview.

I just think that the internet has been sold to us as our savior. As a means to create a new economy, as our spiritual salvation, whatever. Everything is supposed to be bigger and better online. But what I think people have lost sight of — and I don’t think the internet has done a good job of self-evaluation in this respect — is the massive shift between the brave new internet world of the late ’90s and now. Its early philosophy seemed to be one where everyone was an individual whose opinions were respected. A decade later, everything is corporate-owned, advertising is incessant, and the diverse opinions of internet commentary are often shouted down. Now there’s much more online groupthink.

The new Delicious. It’s like web 2.0 all over again.

How the internet transformed the rave scene.

We were using the Internet in 1994-95 to communicate to our fans in the Midwest about our events. We stopped doing flyers and were able to announce events in the mid and late ’90s one day before — even hours before — and get hundreds [or] thousands of people.

Coming soon: Dot-everything.

The problem with having a serious discussion on the internet. I am amazed. And somehow not surprised.

The guys who founded YouTube have purchased Delicious from Yahoo! I’ve been using Pinboard since the Delicious “sunset” debacle, and it’s been great. No idea if I’ll move back or not.

Friendster is deleting a bunch of user profile data, including photos, blogs and comments, at the end of May. Keep on keeping on, Friendster.

Slate is redesigning their news aggregation page again, which isn’t so terribly interesting, but this paragraph from NJL caught my attention.

You can almost measure the quickening pace of aggregation by tracking Slate’s evolution: at first a basically weekly magazine that actually published page numbers on stories; then a daily morning summary of the latest news; then Today’s Papers’ replacement, Slatest, which updated three times a day with summaries of what Slate felt were the 12 most important stories of the moment.

At some point, I’d like to sit down and try and remember all the different ways I’ve read news online.

(Source: readability.com)

I’ve been reading this piece from the New Yorker on whether or not the internet is good for the last two days (maybe Instapaper isn’t helpful at all). I’m still not done, but other people have started linking to it, and I felt pressured to post it now instead of waiting another two days. (Sadly, I think I need to read it again. Also, it seems my New Yorker subscription ran out. Fuck.)

When the electric toaster was invented, there were, no doubt, books that said that the toaster would open up horizons for breakfast undreamed of in the days of burning bread over an open flame; books that told you that the toaster would bring an end to the days of creative breakfast, since our children, growing up with uniformly sliced bread, made to fit a single opening, would never know what a loaf of their own was like; and books that told you that sometimes the toaster would make breakfast better and sometimes it would make breakfast worse, and that the cost for finding this out would be the price of the book you’d just bought.

(Source: tumblr.com)