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josephdunphy

Last seen: 26 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •




    [ continuing ]




    Lately, as one drops by these sites, which not very long ago were these pleasant, creative quirky places where one got to watch film making become folk art, one finds the creative content beginning to be squeezed out by repostings of commercial content and those pointless hatefests. A lot of people seem to want to take a short cut to being seen in the same place as that creative content, without having to do the work that goes into making such content, and this is badly watering down the content that draws visitors to the site in the first place. Yes, this is merely a new form of an old problem that predates the Web, the "signal to noise ratio" problem that ended up doing in Usenet as a serious cultural presence, one that hotlinking on the Web (or mutual friending, in the case of a social networking site like YouTube) helps the reader evade, to some extent, but it obviously represents a significant drain on Youtube's and Metacafe's resources, one which we, as reviewers, should not be encouraging, even to the small degree that our encouragement matters.

    I can understand why Ms.Nigro (the creator of Draka) and her friends and fans would be excited about her appearing on a well known channel like Discovery, and congratulations to her for getting that coverage. I certainly don't mean to run that down, and if that person up on the TV screen was me or somebody I knew, I'd probably be the king of the geeks getting that news out. "Look, look, you can see when we ..." That's fine, and a few excerpt videos like that, posted by those covered and their friends and family aren't going to kill the YouTube experience. I think. How many of those are there likely to be - and are those the words I'm going to end up eating? Well, maybe, but life is about trying to work out reasonable compromises with oneself and others, as one makes a few highly fallible guess about how things will work out along the way, and the way I'm working out the compromise with myself on this one is as follows.







    I understand the bandwidth consuming nature of video. "We were on TV and would like to show off the footage" is a reasonable thing for a group to want to do on its site, and Youtube offers a site owner a reasonable, affordable way of doing so - by embedding the video of one's fifteen minutes of network fame on one's site. Cool. If I come to somebody's site and see such an embedding, I won't think any less of the site for it. Seeing that won't keep me from linking to the site or giving it a thumbs up. But I'm not going to link to the video, itself. If the site owner wants the extra review, link and traffic from me or somebody else who thinks the same way, the site owner will need to upload an original video, the owner's own original content, even when the owner's own work is the subject of the video, because however understandable the personal horn tooting is, and with however much good will we may accept it, the fact is, it still represents a watering down of the content on the hosting site, which posting additional original video content will help alleviate. In other words, "you broke it, so you bought it, or at the very least, you should be prepared to put down a downpayment", or something like that.




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