josephdunphy

This is the other new location, this one being hosted on Scribbld. If you're going to link to individual posts, this is a better choice, because InsaneJournal doesn't let us carry the customization we apply to our blogs over to the individual post pages.

You're going to notice a few changes. I'll still be stumbling, and blogging about the pages I stumble, but there was some subject matter on my old blog - the one you're on at the moment - that I didn't feel fit in well with what I wanted the blog to become, which was a journal focused on these quirky art and science pages I was finding, for the most part. Some people do spread rumors, so drama is something that sometimes has to be dealt with, but mixing it in with the interactive art pages, or worse - not getting to writing the reviews of the interactive art pages because I'm too bogged down with dealing with somebody who's gone into hysterics over the fact that I've accurately reported a bug in the help forum - does a lot to spoil the experience for me. As it does for my visitors, I suspect.

But now, the community is dead. A lot of beautiful work died with it, and I'm not saying that's OK, but now that people are scattering, I wonder how much I have to worry about the stumbletrolls, any more. Do I even need to bother to answer much of their nonsense, at this point? Even if I do - I've long since spun off a site for that kind of thing, so I can send any such commentary over there. If I need to. Which I probably won't.

Politics - I had a place for that, so that's gone. Likewise for reviews of web services, pages about a community building event I've managed, etc. The new blog looks funny and swiss cheesy (if that's a word) with gaps put into the text, where I've excised posts, but it's a pleasant kind of funny. Pleasant. That is the word, and it's one I'm going to enjoy getting to use.

If you want to follow me, thank you for your interest, and these last two links will tell you where I'm going to be. Again, as for posting here - I don't claim to be the best blogger on the planet, but I do the best I can. If I accept forced mediocrity, then I'm not doing my best. Think about it - even Twitter lets us choose our own backgrounds, now. I'm not promising to never post here, again, I'm just saying that right now, I can't imagine why I'd want to do so. But we'll see.

Expect to see most of the old material on this blog cleared away, soon, regardless, as much of it lead up to posts that were just deleted by the account change.

If somebody is able to read this, and is able to contact MySofia, would you please tell her that at least some of her pages live on in the Internet Archive, and can be found through this redirect url?

is.gd/MySofia [is.gd/MySofia]

If you haven't heard about this yet: you only have until October 24 to save your blogs. I am not joking.

This article gives us some useful information about a terrible decision that shows, once again, that Stumbleupon just doesn't get it. Not that Stumbleupon is unique in that. Social networking sites, in general, don't get social networking, because they still don't understand the difference between a customer and a user.

That "small, albeit passionate, group of users that were using these bells and whistles" isn't just another handful of users, they are the few who have bothered to use the service as it should be used, and made a real effort, making Stumbleupon into a place worth visiting online. Failing to serve them is not like failing to carry a breakfast cereal that a few people really love. It's more like ... well, let's think about how this industry has been working. Or not working, lately.

People share creative content - for free, for the most part. This content draws in visitors, off of whom a service makes money in a variety of ways. So, really, a user isn't exactly like a customer in a store, who, as some would say, is being given free merchandise, and so has nothing to kick about when the merchandise turns out to be bad or is snatched back without reason. A user is more like somebody putting on a show, and so Mr. Leibowitz' wisdom, if one wishes to call it that, is something akin to a decision by a TV network to stop worrying about serving those "celebrities", of whom there are so few, and focus more on serving the broader base of people waiting to audition.

It's positively politically correct in its anti-elitism, and an absolute recipe for failure. Take a good look at the blogs of those who like this decision, and you'll see their motivation - they would rather have other users dragged down to their level. They're cheering for enforced mediocrity, and they're being indulged. I'm amazed that anybody would invest in a company that would work like this, but not really surprised that the company, itself, would do this. I've seen how petty and childish management can be, and didn't expect much more out of them. Did you notice how I pretty much stopped blogging here in 2008?

If you are seeing this, please pass the word around. Somebody is bound to lose work, and that is very bad, but at least we can reduce the number of people who will be hurt by this.

People need to know about this, if it is true.

Hi, again. I've switched my profile back to the old view, just now (Nov.22, 2009), but SU will switch it back on me in a few weeks so, no, the problem has not been solved, contrary to what you might have heard.

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.





Note added, March 16 2011: What a wonderfully honest system Stumbleupon has! Note the date of next two reviews, and the date on which those uncredited discoveries were made - all on the same day, and I'm posting this in the morning. To believe that somebody other than me made those discoveries, one would have to believe that in the few hours that have passed, that somebody has discovered those sites, himself, and then deleted his own membership, just to create confusion. I've sent a report of this and another failure to attribute into the staff, but if they do the right thing and fix this, it will be a first.

There is a substantial amount of background to this story, as those following this blog might know. This is not a matter of my getting annoyed by a brief system misfire. This is a matter of my getting angry because of a pattern of petty harassment and outright sabotage of my account apparently by a specific Stumbleupon employee, who, already having taken credit for some of his work, has continued in his misconduct over a period of several years, in retaliation over the fact that some of his friends lost an argument in which they had raised some unusually silly points. In children, such behavior would have been responded to with a timeout, a long time ago. At Stumbleupon, it seems to be accepted from the employees - I have messaged one of the company execs with details backed up with screenshots, and years later, the employee is still allowed to run wild, the exec having not even deigned to reply. One does eventually get tired of having to ask "what now?", every time one logs into the system.

This is why I had stopped blogging on Stumbleupon, as long as I did. I've recently begun moving my blog to this new location on a server run by a company that so far, seems to be run far more professionally than SU, or at least in a far less petty and childish manner. As for social bookmarking, there is always Diigo; this profile belongs to me. All the posts you see will eventually find their way to new locations, but I will be making an effort to separate the creative and fun material from the reviews of web services and political sites. As for this location, I don't know, yet, but I'm certainly not being given much of a reason to invest much more effort.

Local photography in Chicago

excellent oil painting site by George Ceffalio, whose work I've seen in the real world, at art fairs in the Chicago area.