John Metcalfe at The Atlantic Cities bemoans that “It’s rare for New Yorkers to bite into a snazzy public-art project that isn’t hiding a marketing hook.” He refers to a marketing stunt that involved a video of radio-controlled aircraft shaped like people that flew and swooped over the East River. On one hand, it was gently mesmerizing and like something from a waking dream. On the other, the video repeated so often in my RSS feed aggregator that I grew blasé and suspicious.

Metcalfe adds that that year-in-a-life of a New York City bicycle video was also a marketing stunt. I got suckered by that one; I posted a link to the video on my Google+ steam.

How I sigh and pine for those simple days before YouTube blew up, when a mysterious maple syrup-scented cloud could embrace and enchant New York City and have nothing to do with selling something.

(link lead via #GammaCounter)

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker on “how the internet gets inside us”:

The digital world is new, and the real gains and losses of the Internet era are to be found not in altered neurons or empathy tests but in the small changes in mood, life, manners, feelings it creates—in the texture of the age. There is, for instance, a simple, spooky sense in which the Internet is just a loud and unlimited library in which we now live—as if one went to sleep every night in the college stacks, surrounded by pamphlets and polemics and possibilities. There is the sociology section, the science section, old sheet music and menus, and you can go to the periodicals room anytime and read old issues of the New Statesman. (And you can whisper loudly to a friend in the next carrel to get the hockey scores.) To see that that is so is at least to drain some of the melodrama from the subject. It is odd and new to be living in the library; but there isn’t anything odd and new about the library.

(link via Library Journal)

According to Google, I listen to indie and alternative music, watch TV online, read books, program, do genealogical research, enjoy history, have an interest in commercial real estate, and spend a lot of time in New York state.

Not bad, Google.

These aren’t results from “Googling yourself” (although that’s usually interesting, too). In this case, Google infers a user’s demographics and interests and stores them in a cookie. You can view your personal cookie ingredients here. How accurate are Google’s guesses for you?

(link via clusterflock)

Google Books, you may need to calibrate a scanner. The whole book is like this!

(link via jwz; screencap of scan via Google Books)

James Gleick, in The New York Review of Books, on “How Google Dominates Us”:

The merchandise of the information economy is not information; it is attention. These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. Attention is what we, the users, give to Google, and our attention is what Google sells—concentrated, focused, and crystallized.

Google’s business is not search but advertising. More than 96 percent of its $29 billion in revenue last year came directly from advertising, and most of the rest came from advertising-related services. Google makes more from advertising than all the nation’s newspapers combined. [. . .] Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at the University of Virginia, puts it this way: “We are not Google’s customers: we are its product. We—our fancies, fetishes, predilections, and preferences—are what Google sells to advertisers.”

(link via YMFY)

TechCrunch lists the most-expensive keyword categories in Google’s AdWords advertisitng service, which you could call the costliest words on the internet.

No big surprises—most are related to money or goods/services to purchase. And those money-related keywords are what make Google money!

1. Insurance (example keyword: “auto insurance price quotes”)
2. Loans (example keyword: “consolidate graduate student loans”)
3. Mortgage (example keyword: “refinanced second mortgages”)
4. Attorney (example keyword: “personal injury attorney”)
5. Credit (example keyword: “home equity line of credit”)
6. Lawyer
7. Donate
8. Degree
9. Hosting
10. Claim
11. Conference Call
12. Trading
13. Software
14. Recovery
15. Transfer
16. Gas/Electricity
17. Classes
18. Rehab
19. Treatment
20. Cord Blood

(link via YMFY)

In the Opinion Pages of this weekend’s Times, author James Gleick challenges criticism of the efforts to digitize all historical texts. He slaps down three common complaints like gnats:

1. “When everything is downloadable, the mystery of history can be lost.” Sentimentalism, says Gleick.
2. Anything obtained too easily loses its value. “It’s a mistake to deprecate digital images just because they are suddenly everywhere, reproduced so effortlessly.”
3. Loss of serendipity, e.g. finding handwritten notes in books? “[M]arginalia are being digitized, too,” counters Gleick.

A book, he concludes, “is like the coffin at a funeral. It deserves to be honored, but the soul has moved on.” I don’t want do agree with that quote, and I mostly agree with Gleick’s points above, but he’s too hasty. He references a world that’s not here yet and may never be, despite large strides made by Google and the world’s major libraries and institutions.

I’ve written before about stuff that’s only available at libraries, not online. Why haven’t these printed materials yet caught the monorail to a digital afterlife? For reasons quite classic: money and red tape.

For instance, researching my family history, I’ve made extensive use of the archives of The Nutley Sun, which are available only on microfilm and searchable full-issue scans within an in-house database at the Nutley Public Library. Why aren’t they online? I asked a librarian and the short answer is that the library can’t afford to because there’s not a big enough demand for researching that title.

Another librarian has told me that, in New Jersey, all it took was one stubborn individual who insisted on using his own proprietary software for digitization—which worked great for periodicals but not at all for anything physically larger—that was enough to scuttle an entire standardized effort to scan the archives of a state’s daily newspapers.

Finally, there’s accuracy of the digitization itself. I recall Nicholson Baker making this point once or twice during one of his laments of the destruction of the library card catalog and/or the original newspapers that get scanned. I’ve run into plenty of OCR glitches and human-made transcription errors. Then there’s stuff that’s flat-out missing from the digital record.

For example, I found a birth record for a distant family relative on FamilySearch.org. It had been adapted from a hand-transcribed copy, which had been made from an original church record book. In order to fit the existing template format for the database, key information hadn’t been transcribed, namely that this family member had been born out of wedlock. I learned that only when I tracked down the microfilm of the intermediary record from which the digital record had been made, scanned it and had it translated from Old German.

I’m all for the world’s knowledge being digitzed but it’s not here yet. Remember those past dreams of a future in which we had robot butlers? And what do we have? Half-assed laundry-folders and Roombas. We’ve got some time yet to go.

Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow published research this week in Science on how search engines are altering our memory.

“Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganizing the way we remember things,” said Sparrow. “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”

(link via disinformation)

Nitasha Tiku at Betabeat delivers my so-far favorite quote on social networking:

The most successful social networks play on mankind’s tendency toward competition and vanity.

In a 2009 article for Datamation about the low-key launch of Google Latitude, Mike Elgan notes that in Google’s business model, we aren’t customers—we’re the product sold to the company’s actual customers, which are advertisers that bring in billions in revenue.

A few commenters point out that TV and radio have employed this strategy for decades. But as another commenter (and Elgan) stress, what’s different with social media is a loss of privacy, whether actual or potential, and whether the user gives up that privacy willingly (e.g. Foursquare and Facebook) or not (e.g. the algorithms that flank your webmail with targeted ads). If I were an advertiser, I’d salivate at the prospect of such plump target-market data:

Over time, Google will likely combine all it knows about you from your Google searches, Google Calendar appointments, purchases via Google Product Search, interests on Google Reader, and conversations in Gmail and Talk — along with your location — and constantly offer you eCoupons, special deals and advice about nearby products and services. Your phone will become like a personal assistant, always ready to offer you what you want before you know you want it. But all those products and services offered will be Google advertisers.

(link via Daring Fireball)

Streaming Netflix content now accounts for more U.S. internet traffic than any other service, including long-time champ BitTorrent, the piratey file-sharing site. As Wired’s Ryan Singel points out, this means that for maybe the first time, paid content comprises the majority of internet traffic.

(link and post title via yesterday’s Waxy.org links)

Detroit. Camden. San Diego. Cash-strapped cities want to close their libraries, scale back their operational hours, or cut their budgets. Do we need libraries?

Of course we do, dumbass.

Like everyone else who loves libraries, I wrote a little thing already on the knowledge, access and media that people with little money, such as students or the middle class, can get for free at their local library. Those reasons should be enough to keep libraries open.

But here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately: Libraries have stuff you can’t find anywhere else. Literally. That’s right: Not even on the internet. (I know, right?)

Simply put, not everything gets scanned. As Google Books digests every book and periodical ever published, the printed word has appeared and continues to appear in many forms other than books and periodicals. Who collects this stuff? Libraries.

Earlier this week, Salon senior writer Laura Miller noted that the main branch of the New York Public Library owns museum-quality printed items like a draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand. But it also collects countless ephemera, including pamphlets, tracts, and lapel pins.

...these are once-mundane objects you’d never find in a museum, but they’re an important part of our written culture and well worth saving. The library collects millions of such items — things, and to store and properly display things, you need a place in the world (preferably climate controlled), not just bytes in the cloud. Every human community creates such materials, and they all need libraries to preserve them.

Yesterday, a friend who’s a university librarian listed some of the things she’d cataloged or ordered that morning for her library’s special collections: a pulpy Ace paperback from 1990, a book about drag races in the 1950’s (self-published by an African American drag racer), a dozen church histories, a dozen archaeological surveys, and an exhibit catalog of photos from the Great Depression. None of these things is ever going to be digitized, she wrote.

Collections like these aren’t limited to big libraries, either. During my genealogical research, I learned that the Asbury Park Public Library holds probably the world’s most extensive collection of printed material on Bruce Springsteen, including “books, song books, tourbooks, magazines, fanzines, Internet articles, academic journals and papers, comic books, selected printed items, and newspaper articles.”

More pertinent to my family’s history, I’ve been tracking down obituaries of relatives who lived in New Jersey. The best source for these is the Newark Evening News, which folded in the early 1970s, but for the preceding three-quarters of the century served as the state’s newspaper of record. (The late journalist and Newark historian Nat Bodian wrote that many considered it “the New York Times of New Jersey.”) Where can one access this resource? Only at a library. In fact, unfortunately for people who live elsewhere or fear Newark, only at the Newark Public Library.

They own the paper on microfilm and, crucially for research purposes, indices of the paper’s articles from 1914 to 1972. For every year in that span, the index has three components, in alphabetical order: general topics, people’s names, and New Jersey towns and cities. These indices haven’t been transcribed, scanned, OCRed or otherwise archived. They aren’t online. They exist only as handwritten pages in beautiful hardbound ledgers, each the size of a shoe box. And they’re available only in a library.

I hope not. There’s something to be said for dying with dignity.

(link lead via @sternbergh)

This happened to me this afternoon and I deemed it deserving of my first image macro, starring the Advice Dog meme.

You can view some facts about Facebook usage (they’re astounding if they’re accurate) from Alex Trimpe, in pleasing, easy-to-digest animated infographic format.

(link via Coudal Partners; screencap from The World Is Obsessed With Facebook by Alex Trimpe.)

• someone else’s art, photo or music (unattributed, mostly)
• headache-inducing animated GIFs
• longform blog entries (tl;dr)
• shortform blurbs regarding TV programs, ad campaigns or celebrities
• things to buy, including but not limited to objects and points of view
• “steampunk”
• a link duplicated in 15 other feeds
• photos of partially clothed women

It may be time to refresh.

Check out my best-of-2010 list! Wow, what a year it was!

1. Best movies of 2010
2. Best songs of 2010
3. Best digital cameras of 2010
4. Best rap songs of 2010
5. Best books of 2010
6. Best albums of 2010
7. Best hip hop songs of 2010
8. Best horror movies of 2010
9. Best games of 2010
10. Best PC games of 2010

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, lays down some smack on “threats to the Web’s universality,” namely the walled-off worlds of Facebook, LinkedIn and iTunes.

(link via HiLobrow)

Tim Wu, an author and a professor at Columbia Law School, asks a good question in a Paris Review Daily post this morning: are we cyborgs?

“We don’t actually have wires sticking out of our heads,” I say, “but if you have an iPhone in your pocket and a laptop on your bag you’re pretty close. You’ve already delegated your memory to Google and Wikipedia; Facebook is there to remind you who your friends are.”

Wu makes these points to a group of undergraduates from Oakland University in Michigan who “seem to accept the idea that we are already more machine than man without much resistance[.]”

Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline coined the word cyborg in 1960, soon after the creation of NASA, with a vision of a helper-organism that would free astronauts to explore. In the September issue of Astronautics that year, they explained:

The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.

If man in space, in addition to flying his vehicle, must continuously be checking on things and making adjustments merely in order to keep himself alive, he becomes a slave to the machine. The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.

This original meaning of cyborg has been inverted, and it illustrates a tired point—instead of using technology to free our attention and imagination, we trust our minds and memories to it. We may even favor it over our innate abilities to explore, communicate and remember. It’s part of us, though we remain less cinematic than man-machines like the Borg or the Terminator.

It reminds me that author William Gibson coined the word cyberspace (which shares a root with the word cyborg) to mean a “consensual hallucination” of data. Recently, the Pentagon added its own definition: “a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers.”

So, sure, we’re cyborgs, or at least we’re becoming them. Whether that’s a good thing, we’ll see.

December 9, 2010 Update: Jeremy Hsu wrote a nice article for LiveScience on the cyborgs that walk among us.

Novelist Zadie Smith on Zuckerberg and Facebook, at length (5,500+ words, plus footnotes) in The New York Review of Books. Her take on the site, in short: “falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous.”

In The New York Times, Judith Newman writes of the art of email signoffs (“People go through periods where they try on different closes like hairstyles.”)

I’m all over the board on this for private emails. If I’m familial or kidding, I’ll go the route of “Stay gold” or “Kudos” or whatever.

For business emails, I’ve been favoring the generic “Regards” or “Kind Regards,” depending, recently. But most of my work correspondence is not long enough (or correspondence enough) to warrant a valediction, much less a salutation.

Traffic. Crowds. The weather. Delays. Sitting on the tarmac at LaGuardia for no apparent reason. Huddled masses, yearning for armrest space. Ah, the joys of holiday air travel.

But now I have at least one thing to look forward to: free in-flight Wi-Fi.

Mistake Reports: what a fine idea!

I would like to suggest development of a version of There, I Fixed It for white-collar workers instead of rednecks. My submission: to ensure the production department picks up the correct headshot or logo from the server, append the phrase “USE THIS ONE” to the filename. There: fixed.

I don’t remember why I needed to Google this today, but when you do a Google image search for the word contempt, the first result is from this blog.

It’s a screencap I did of Brigitte Bardot from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film, Contempt, for an ultrabrief entry I wrote after falling asleep while watching it.

(Also interesting: Googling “Godard Contempt” [without the double-quotes] doesn’t reveal the same image among the top result rankings but, on the second page of results, does show one site that stole it and didn’t even bother to resize it from the decidedly nonstandard 336 x 252 pixels I used to use for all horizontally oriented photos on my blog.)

What I want to know is, do I get some sort of commemorative patch for the #1 ranking, or something?

Q.: You write from 10AM til whenever. Is research a separate activity?
William Gibson: I don’t regard research as a separate activity. From anything. Everything is research. Relatively little great stuff turns up for me as a result of deliberately looking. Life is crowd-sourcing. In a good way.
Q.: The reason I ask is that research tends to wander off into the weeds so easily, especially on the internets.
Wililam Gibson: But they hide the good stuff *in the weeds*!

(via William Gibson’s blog)

I recently realized that I can improve the humor and bite of my Facebook postings by merely omitting any emoticons I’d planned on using.

Google is more than a search engine; it’s got a bunch of handy built-in tools accessible merely by using certain keywords in a regular Google search. Don’t most people know about these? If not, there’s a list of them here. Applications and websites exist to do the same things as these shortcuts but I prefer Google’s because they’re “self-contained” in any browser with internet access. My top-three most-used are these.

1. Dictionary Definitions
   
   Example: define: lenticular
   
   I use this feature constantly at work because unlike my Mac at home, there’s no dictionary application I like on my Dell. (If you even think of suggesting Word’s built-in dictionary/thesaurus, I will punch you in the neck.) If you use this feature without the colon, you only get the first definition if there’s a list of them; I prefer using the colon to get (typically) a bunch of definitions from various sources.
2. Weather
   
   Example: weather cleveland
   
   Much more efficient than slogging through a variety of screens at weather.com. Gives you the current weather, condition, wind and humidity, as well as the highs/lows for the current day and the following three days, plus graphical representations of the condition.
3. Unit Conversion
   
   Example: 3.60 cm in inches
   
   I used this one just a bit ago to determine the face-size of a watch I was considering buying. (It’s 1.41732283 inches, in case you were curious.) Many units are represented, so you can even do cooking conversions: 8 tablespoons in cups. And I appreciate that Google can convert numerals from Arabic to Roman: try 2008 in roman.

Happy Valentine’s Day! This Candy Heart Generator is big fun. (Although my candy background urges me to tell you that these chalky treats are rightfully called “conversation hearts,” a phrase I wrongfully assumed the New England Confectionery Company had trademarked.)

I enjoyed the challenge of the six-character limit for each heart’s two lines of text. My most successful coinage so far, as determined by the amount of laughter it elicited from O., is this:

ANAL
PIR8

The Zogby/463 Internet Attitudes Poll released today reveals that “One in four Americans say the Internet can serve as a substitute for a significant other.”

This intrigued me. I certainly dedicate enough attention to the Internet for it to be considered a significant other. But I’d never really hung out with the Internet as anything more than a casual acquaintance. So I posed some statements and questions to the Internet via Google and culled its answers from among the top search results. What follows is our conversation, edited for style, clarity and length.

Jason

So... How’s it going?

Internet

You know what I’m going to say to that? Fantastic. What could be better?

Jason

Well, want to get dinner sometime?

Internet

I get a lot of, ‘We should hang out’ or ‘Let’s get dinner some time.’ I get it so often that when I hear it now, I usually just brush it off as someone else trying to get nice.

Jason

O.K., how about a movie?

Internet

If you look at market studies, home theater systems are a phenomenon on the rise. More and more, people are starting to reserve space in their homes for an ultimate entertainment experience.

Jason

All right, let’s stay in and watch a movie on DVD.

Internet

Let’s watch The Wire, O.K.?

Jason

I’ve never seen that. Is it any good?

Internet

Yes it is. I think it might have legs.

Jason

Should we get some pizza?

Internet

I’m usually a Pizza Hut girl, but guess what? Domino’s has an Oreo cookie dessert pie, so this girl is going to cheat with the competition!

Jason

You are starting to freak me out.

Internet

Can you prescribe me Chlorpromazine? The trendy antipsychotics don’t agree with me.

Jason

Maybe we should just be friends.

Internet

But friends shouldn’t treat other friends like that. You’re not too friendly when you act like that.

Jason

I’m going to go now.

Internet

Talk to you lata!

Jason

Yeah, I’ll call you.

Google is the Mad Libs of the 2000s. Here’s the current Google-abuse game making the rounds at work: in double-quotes, Google “[your first name] was arrested for”. Hilarity ensues. For example, the top-10 things Jason’s been arrested for are:

1. punching a man who he thought was after his girlfriend.
2. public intoxication and drug possession in Des Moines.
3. an unthinkable crime: murder. It didn’t make sense. Jason was a respected Navy officer.
4. misdemeanor battery after an altercation with a tow truck driver in September.
5. bootlegging, and fined $1,500.
6. underage drinking in Greenville, North Carolina last week.
7. embezzlement.
8. beating Joumana¹.
9. felony theft.
10. for Brian’s shooting. He was handcuffed to a railing and left to die until Nikolas found him.

¹ Which isn’t as bad as beating Joumama. Ha ha! [back]

I only today caught up on last Sunday’s New York Times Style Magazine, a seasonal supplement I read if I have time. Mainly I avoid it because it angers me that I will never have a salary large enough to be considered among the magazine’s demographic, people who can relate to articles with leads that begin like this: “When the architect Annabelle Selldorf designed her dream kitchen in her weekend home in East Hampton....”

I felt better reading a one-pager in it by Alexandra Jacobs, an editor for The New York Observer, who writes that she “abohor[s] music’s slow seepage into every nook and cranny of American life,” particularly when she’s dining. Aside from taking a position I disagree with, and it being a trend piece that seems to base its trend on something that happened only to the author and a few of her friends, her article contains the most winceworthy simile I’ve read recently:

While entertaining, he simply summons a station of streaming commercial-free indie rock through his computer, like a school of salmon over that great river of the Internet.

Like a school of salmon? This phrase brings the author’s whiny enterprise to a halt. It doesn’t seem to have been made in jest (although possibly ignorance, in that venerable mainstream media tradition of being five years behind on general knowledge of technology and pop culture).

It’s so bad, I’ll conclude with this photo of a salmon striving to justify its small existence, much like Alexandra Jacobs writing.

I remember when I was a kid, it drove me nuts to hear a new song I liked on the radio, then not have the DJ mention its name or who sang it. Usually those guys wouldn’t shut up, breaking into chatter during the song’s outro, most often when I was trying to record a clean copy of the song on my one-deck Panasonic boom box.

I’ve found now, with the search powers of the internet, that it’s easier than ever to track down any song, even one that I only know a vague phrase from. For example, I enjoyed a particular pre-movie tune played at Film Forum one recent evening, so I scrawled down a sentence of the lyric in my Moleskine: “If you’re ever gonna kiss me, it had better be tonight.”

When I got home, I Googled the lyric in double-quotes with the added word lyrics. Once I got the name of the song, I plugged it into the iTunes Music Store and listened to a few of the 30-second samples to find out which version of the song I’d heard; this particular song was a standard and recorded by a number of people. I solved the mystery in a few minutes, whereas in 1986, I’d have had to wait until the weekend for the American Top 40 to have Casey Kasem tell me who was responsible for the marvelous composition I’d heard days earlier, probably “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” by Billy Ocean. That’s the progress of technology for you.

The song, by the way, was “It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Sta Sera),” a Mancini composition originally from the Pink Panther soundtrack, although the version I heard and appreciated was by Buddy Greco, with half the lyrics in English and half in Italian. I like it because it reminds me of They Might Be Giants’ cover of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” another gleefully chugging jitterbug of a song.

• “It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Sta Sera)” by Buddy Greco (1.8 MB mp3)

An article from late March in the St. Petersburg Times of Florida, “The Endangered Joy of Serendipity,” by William McKeen, quickly became a meme, which is internet-speak for “a herd of nerds write about it on their blogs.” So here goes.

As might have been expected, the author, who is chairman of the University of Florida department of journalism and apparently the age of your dad, was taken to task for bemoaning the evaporation of serendipity in a world of music downloading and web sites that have “replaced human conversation.” He sealed his fate as a fuddy-duddy by championing libraries and bookstores as enriching places in which to browse and discover unexpected but engrossing detail. In short, he wrote, “Technology undercuts serendipity.”

Duck, buddy; the nerds zinged back, steaming that the internet can quickly and easily lead you off on crazy and unpredictable paths of serendipitousness. It’s the best for that, in fact, they seemed to suggest.

Both sides have valid points and here’s what I think:

1. Most information on the internet is one big circle jerk. The most popular blogs aren’t content generators, they’re content aggregators. A site or story gets linked to by Boing Boing or Fark, and lickety-split, other blogs link to it, and then still other blogs link to those blogs, and so on. The most popular information reigns. Now, nowhere does it say that information discovered via serendipity must be unique. But to me it should at least be unexpected, and not something that 1,001 white people are already dissecting.
2. Media other than the internet still have the upper hand in serendipity. McKeen chose some unfortunate examples to illustrate his point; libraries are always the death knell for arguments like his. “Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better,” fumed Steven Johnson in his blogged response. I’m reminded of Nicholson Baker’s report on the library that had embraced its new computerized reference system so fully that it disposed of its card catalog by tying each card through its punch hole to the ribbon trailing a helium balloon, then released and spirited away by the wind. However, the introduction of McKeen’s article wasn’t mentioned by any of the rebuttals I read because it’s correct: print versions of newspapers are better than online versions at finding unexpected information. And I said unexpected. I agree that, say, The New York Times online or Google News are fine briefs on what’s news. But until screens get larger and technology more robust to display more than an average of 1,000 words per screen, I’ll prefer the newsprint version of the paper, where my eyes can dart here and there, picking up words, phrases, names, photos and illustrations of interest, where I can skim two stories and move onto a third, jumping to the last few paragraphs where I may find an engrossing cache of description or detail, in the time it takes to scroll one screen of one article online.
3. I don’t know about you, but the internet is killing my ability to focus and concentrate. I flit from site to site, unable to digest anything more than a few hundred words of text. And how much knowledge do I retain? Little. My home internet connection has been down lately and I’ve found myself jittery from lack of surfing. But I soon moved on to cutting into that pile books accumulating on my bedside table and found myself more attentive and comfortably engrossed. Concentration can inspire serendipity.
4. Which brings me to the point that there’s still plenty of value to browsing books and bookstores for information. Despite the strides of Amazon.com getting sample pages and searchable versions of books online, I enjoy paging through books, reading author quotes on the jackets and then skimming books by those authors, grabbing books I remember reading about or just because I like the cover design. Seeing what other people are reading or asking the store’s staff for recommendations can also be beneficial.

Perhaps the larger lesson to be learned is that the physical world is no better or worse at serendipity than the one online. It’s just that it’s now often a lesser or forgotten option, perhaps because it requires effort and often direct human interaction. There’s still something to be said for non-text based serendipity: walking down a street you haven’t before, checking out a new shop or restaurant, heading out into the city with no purpose in mind, just to see where you may end up.

There is additional internet network-naming nerdery going on within wi-fi distance of my home computer, referencing the four-armed Hindu god of wisdom. I’m Argo, as you will recall.

The internet stuff is spooky.

Kurt Vonnegut, November 5, 1995

If Murakami were so inclined or Cortázar alive, I’d want him to write a story about an internet that forgets, a living mind.

On this internet, blogs would shed entries as they aged alongside their author. Some text would grow small and indistinct, but certain passages in desert places would glow like embers in a dying fire. Language would be forgotten, sentences would decay, meanings would invert. Some passages would mesh and recur as dreams, while others would advance in time as déjà vu. Florid details of youth would be compressed into dry generalities. Searches would lead to inaccuracies and dead ends.

The internet now never forgets. It’s sometimes referred to as a hive mind, but other than its general unreliability for accuracy and penchant for trivia and frivolity, it’s like no mind I’ve ever known, expanding infinitely into distant inky reaches.

I keep getting these damn “You Win 1-Liter Coke Product” caps on the 20-ounce bottles of Coke products I drink for lunch. But the thing is, at least in Manhattan, there appears to be no such thing as Coke in a one-liter container, which if my math and memory are correct, would be about the size of those glass bottles all soda used to ship in.

The best part about this was that just now, when I Googled for availability details and subliminally mistyped “one-liter Pepsi.” Half of the top-ten results referenced the following quote from 2004 that contains more detail than I sought:

Retired rapper and Beyoncé fiancé Jay-Z has ‘the biggest dick you will ever see in your life, but boring,’ according to U.S. mag Ozone. For their November sex-themed issue, the hip-hop mag asked people to spill the beans on famous people they’d shagged. And spill they did. While Jay-Z is supposed to have a penis ‘like a one-liter Pepsi bottle... It could block the sun,’ the mag’s informant says he’s boring in bed and ‘screams like a bitch when he busts.’

I think this is my new favorite penile simile, narrowly edging the Lenny Bruce classic, “like a baby’s arm with an apple in its fist.”

My high-speed internet was finally activated today. What a long, irritating trial that was.

I ordered DSL service from Verizon soon after I moved in October and after three postponed activation dates, threats from myself, speaking with managers and receiving pleading “please give us another chance” letters, the service was switched on December 24.

Naturally, there was something awry with my telephone jack, which necessitated a service appointment. The technician bailed on the first scheduled appointment on Tuesday without explanation, then showed up today and fixed it. Props to my super, Rodolfo, for letting the guy in with my spare set of keys. I wasn’t about to wait around my apartment “between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.” for some jackass techie to maybe show up.

I still had to spend a half hour on the phone after work today with a patient tech service rep because the CD-ROM Verizon supplies Mac users to configure the modem doesn’t work under the Tiger operating system. (It claims one doesn’t have administrative access privileges, even if one is the sole user and therefore administrator of one’s computer, as is my case.) I had to configure all of the name/password stuff and networking preferences manually.

I hooked up my Airport Express and nerdily christened my new wireless network Argo. Soon after viewing some pornography online to ensure the connection was working, my Mac stubbornly refused to locate the wireless network, although if this is a true and persistent problem, it will be the first that hasn’t been Verizon’s fault. I can still surf the web if I plug my Ethernet cable directly from my PowerBook into the modem, so now it’s just getting the wireless bit up and running, and I’m set.

I can honestly say I missed the internet the past two months at home only for checking the weather, directions and movie show times. I admit it was a pain to compose blog entries at home, then cart them to work for uploading during my lunch break. But on the whole, I spent most of my no-internet wilderness time reading books. Although as an omnipresent and all-knowing reference oracle, I welcome the ’net back into my home life.

Gah! Banana Republic’s website doesn’t work in Safari? How hard can it be to write code for one of the most standards-compliant browsers? What will all those thin WASPs and Asians with their PowerBooks do when they want to online-order something form-fitting and expensive, made of the finest Italian cashmere?

I imagine some fans of the Republic use the now sassier-than-Safari Firefox, which is compatible. And since this incompatibility was first discovered in October, Banana Republic has added the hopeful tagline, “We’re working on supporting Safari. Please check back soon.” But, here we are, three months later, and still nothing for Safari.

Humorously, there’s not a go-no-further warning when I try using the still-supported Internet Explorer 5.2 for Macintosh (Microsoft is officially abandoning the browser this Saturday, citing competition from Safari). However, the site doesn’t work under Explorer either—clicking items for details and potential purchase brings up a curiously blank page.

Among the 40 messages awaiting me in my Inbox upon my return from Thanksgiving vacation this morning was this spirited attempt at spreading a worm via a zipped attachment named list.zip. Here’ the email’s text:

From: Department@cia.gov
Subject: You visit illegal websites

Dear Sir/Madam,

we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites.

Important:
Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.

Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison

++++ Central Intelligence Agency -CIA-
++++ Office of Public Affairs
++++ Washington, D.C. 20505

++++ phone: (703) 482-0623
++++ 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., US Eastern time

Illegal websites? I wasn’t aware there was such a thing here; this isn’t China, after all. I suppose the content on a site could be illegal, like if someone’s abusing trademarks, selling bootleg Disney sweatshirts or spreading viciously libelous rumors about Lou Diamond Phillips, but a site itself being illegal? The worm authors could have cast a wider net with a subject-line like “You visit porn websites” or “You visit cretin Flash-animated sites that your Mom and coworkers email you links for.”

Also, the phone number is a legitimate one for the CIA’s public affairs/press relations office; when you call it, a recording says, in effect, to just delete the damn email and stop bothering Steve. Ha ha!

Bruce has the wrong email address. I got this from him on my Hotmail account:

hey mate good news about the little one. hope she doesnt have your looks??? we could be right behind ya, planning for this time next year. hows things going in swansea? ros and i bought a place in papamoa, areyour olds still there? are you home for xmas?

take care mate hi to viv

Bruce

With the “mate”s and “olds” (parents), I wonder if this message hurtled to me from down under. I see that at least one Swansea is in southeastern Australia (there’s also one in Wales, one in Canada and a few in the U.S.) and Papamoa is a popular retirement city of white sandy beaches in New Zealand.

Internet access was down most of the day at work, a connection issue with Verizon’s end of our T1 line. A few people left early to “work from home,” they claimed, implying they were stymied without the internet. Our receptionist was edgy because she always checks her horoscope first thing each morning online; fortunately, I had picked up a tabloid paper on the way to work, so I leant it to her, and after reading her day’s fate, she was less jittery.

I hadn’t fully realized how much I used the ’net until it wasn’t there. It was the minor web-based things I immediately missed, like updating my blog and reading those of others, which I often do over my morning coffee if I arrive to work early.

But as my work day began, I went through Google withdrawal. I regularly use it as an all-purpose spellchecker (I type "laise fairee" and Google pipes up: Did you mean: "laissez faire"), as well as a fact checker and especially a White Pages. Several times I needed to call a company where I only knew its name and the city in which it was located. Normally, I would track it down on Google in five seconds. Instead, I had to call the oldschool (xxx) 555-1212 information line, like in the good old days.

I never thought I’d miss perusing the Yahoo! News over lunch at my desk like I nearly always do, which made me realize the internet is my sole source of hard national news Monday through Friday.

Email to and from addresses outside our company was down, too, so I uttered many phrases over the phone along the lines of, “Can you email me that? Uh, I mean, could you read me that over the phone and I’ll write it down?” Most of my job is crafting mighty prose in Word and talking to people on the phone, so I didn’t miss email too much, but I do like it for conveying simple, quick facts. None of this “1,001 word message” or “infinite re:” bullshit that would be better served by a minute-long phone call. Still, I find a surprising number of businesspeople opt for email where a call would get the job done more quickly; apparently, the internet has stunted them to human-to-human communication.

Since in-house email was working, a coworker of mine in the production department and I amused ourselves by rapid-firing each other random photos from our computers’ Pictures folders, since we couldn’t send each other idiot internet links to photos like we usually do. She sent me one of her boyfriend dressed like Tyler Durden and acting crazy inside a Salvation Army thrift store, which was good, but I think I won the contest with this photo of what would appear to be a young Jerry Orbach dressed in a space-age leisure suit.

Penis-related email subject from my spam folder or PJ Harvey song title?

1. You Come Through
2. She Knows
3. It’s You
4. Permanent Size Growth
5. Beautiful Feeling
6. Make It Bigger
7. Meet Ze Monsta
8. Bigger is Better
9. Man-Size
10. Size Does Matter
11. This Is Love

PJ Harvey Song Title: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11
Spam Subject: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10

If you correspond with me via email, you may have noticed I’m not the sort to forward chain letters, photos of cats, conspiracies quickly debunked on Snopes (a.k.a the “Urban Legends Reference Page”), or links to idiot Flash animations.

But that’s not to say I don’t appreciate the funny and strange stuff the web has to offer. This girl I work with frequently forwards me weird links and I always try to one-up her with my own. We usually fire off a minimum of two and sometimes as many as eight daily, usually before work or during lunch, lest you think I shirk at work. Some are “global,” while many are NYC-based (we’re a selfish bunch). They range from groans or quick, one-off laughs to genuinely handy or inspiring deposits of information.

A lot of the best links originate in that best-of-the-best weird-links depository, Boing Boing. I get a lot of mine serendipitously through link-farms such as del.icio.us or from top-secret sources. I decided to pull my three favorites from each month of this year’s first half. I typically have a disproportionate number of Boing Boing, Flickr and Wikipedia links, but I’ve attempted to under-represent those here. Have fun and enjoy ’em while they work.

January

1. Photos of girls eating sandwiches. Is it just me or are these strangely erotic?
2. Make deadly weapons out of office supplies. The “60-second shiv” made me laugh out loud.
3. A New Yorker profile of Johnny Carson. From 1978.

February

1. A cat gnawing on a hot dog. “Smelly cat, smelly cat/What are they feeding you?”
2. The life of a Times Square McDonald’s bathroom attendant. This locally based group of merry pranksters rocks. Check out more of their escapades, including mass subway de-pantsing, on their site.
3. Take better digital photos at night.

March

1. Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974. I am suddenly not hungry. Maybe that’s how Weight Watchers works.
2. Create your own comic strip.
3. What song was #1 when you were born? And what does it mean? (Mine’s Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle.” My god, what a weenie song that is.)

April

1. The New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Strangely addictive. The inspiration for my popular blog entry, “95 Years Ago.”
2. Express Train. Travis Ruse takes one photo a day in NYC’s subway system.
3. Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey. Remember these? From Saturday Night Live? Ha ha!

May

1. Photoshopped romance novel covers.
2. Random live webcams. Select the “Display Mode” menu at the bottom of the page and change it to “Animation of last snapshots.” Marvelous.
3. Baby’s first T-shirt. Warning! Not-for-Republicans-style humor!

June

1. Rejected “Love Is...” comics. Warning! Not-for-Mom-style humor!
2. Stuff On My Cat. Self-explanatory.
3. John Doe, worldwide. Steve, a previous boss who’s British, says “Fred Bloggs” instead of “John Doe.” And I thought it was just him.

Before yesterday, I had never been phished. Now that I have, I understand why people like my Mom are leery of ordering stuff off the Internet.

It starts with an email. Lord knows how these cretins knew I had just used PayPal to order something off eBay (they better not be in cahoots with the seller or heads will roll). But the email, shown as being sent from update@paypal.com, is very official-looking, with the PayPal logo and type styling. (In retrospect, however, I notice that the wording is a bit Engrish, namely “Please update your records in maximum 24 hours” and not one but two sentences beginning with “Failure to update...”)

Gosh, I better update my billing records quickly. If I don’t, I might not get that CD I just ordered, featuring two of my favorite one-hit-wonder songs from the ’80s: “Major Tom (Coming Home)” by Peter Schilling and “The Promise” by When In Rome. You can understand my concern, I’m sure.

Clicking on “Please click here to update your billing records” links me to an official-looking PayPal page where I’m not asked to log into my PayPal account in order to correct my supposedly faulty billing information, but I am asked to key-in every last shred of my personal details, including the aforementioned Mom’s maiden name, as well as my credit card info.

But what’s this? That web address doesn’t have the word PayPal in it anywhere: “http://80.53.195.18/icons/pp/update.htm?...” Let’s try going to the site from which the page is originating, the obfuscated http://80.53.195.18.

Jiminy Crickets! Why, that’s not PayPal at all, but a site belonging to some Polish hackers. I’d insert some joke here about Polish hackers if their ruse hadn’t been done well enough to likely trick an unassuming novice computer user.

May 4, 2005 Update: Today’s Onion has a story about President Bush’s identity being stolen “when he responded to an e-mail from paypal783@hotmail.com asking him to comply with PayPal security measures by entering all 12 of his credit-card numbers, his Social Security number, his passwords, and his personal identification numbers.”

May 12, 2005 Update: According to an Associated Press story today, “Next week Denver-based First Data Corp., one of the country’s largest electronic financial transaction companies, plans to release survey results showing 43 percent of adults have received a phishing contact. Five percent of those adults gave up personal information.”

There’s something calming about the fact that Bill Gates gets four million emails daily (mostly spam), according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and as reported in an AP news story today. Microsoft has “special technology that just filters spam intended for Gates” and has, literally, according to Ballmer, nearly a whole department that ensures “nothing unwanted gets into his inbox.” Dang.

The revelation of Plain Layne is amazing, particularly after reading Pattern Recognition. It combines all the elements of a great thriller: sex, deception and the Internet. “In short: Anais Nin, I’d like you to meet William Gibson.”