Rapture

Go figure.

There is a well documented effect, first noticed with Slashdot, that happens when a popular website links to a smaller one and the resulting traffic flow cripples the latter. This is called the Digg effect in relation to articles posted on Digg that go down due to the traffic.

I've noticed another Digg Effect, however; a more insidious, information-crippling one. I first had a look at this effect when Digg users posted about so-called "spyware" installed with the PC edition of Bioshock. The article linked to becomes irrelevant in the face of the headline linking to it once the number of Diggs has reached a great enough level. This means that Digg users trying to draw attention to a page can easily render it in more sensationalist terms, draw conclusions loosely based on the facts and generally deceive fellow Diggers simply through the titling of their Digg story.

This is how rumors start, and spread; a Digg reader will always prefer to skim over the summary than to read the actual text included. If I come across more of this borderline yellow-journalism I'll try to post some links here.

You've got the Linux losers always shouting the greatness of their OS (which is basically We pretty much do everything Windows does! We're almost as pretty as a Mac! And we don't get attacked by viruses because NO ONE USES US.) Then the Apple cutting-edge form-factor loving technofanatics. And of course the average, nondescript Windows user.

Windows users tend to be the sheep of the computer consumer market. We buy Windows-preloaded PCs due mostly to their prevalence and so-called ease of use, though I have it that Apple is actually the Wii of the OS's, while Windows is, go figure, the 360. But all of this has been discussed ad nauseum.

This article speaks a lot to the sensible reasons that are barring a more massive Apple switchover. I think the author, as a former PC user and current Mac advocate, deals evenhandedly with us PC users (I do prefer PCs, but mostly for gaming reasons.) He deals well with Apple's image oriented marketing campaign (refer to reason 5.) I think at this point Macs are evenly or even better enabled for office-related material; they lower network upkeep rates due to their low profile and hard-shelled(against viruses) nature, prevent corporate gaming (WoW has lost companies an estimated such and such amount, I dunno, I read a figure somewhere that it hampered efficiency,) and perhaps most importantly have an intrinsic focus on synchronization (look at the relationship between an iPod and its "docking station," i.e. a Macbook etc.) A layperson has easy access to the Mac's office functions without the opportunity to mess the machine up. If Mac costs were lowered, or rather, the performance reqs for OSX (a "classic" mode OSX? I dunno, something less image-oriented,) it would probably see widespread office use, rather than staying in its current 'elite' place.

Just something to think about.

I refer you to an earlier entry about this site, which I will now discuss as it's not 3 in the morning right now.

By Shirky's definition, he finds the table to be the simplest form of social software. This is because the table is conducive to and promotes discussion amongst a group. Using this definition, we can see where current social networks succeed and where they fail. Software that promotes interaction , like Facebook's wall, succeeds; Myspace's profiles fail because owners cannot post on their own comment section. "Poking," not necessarily the coolest function in my opinion, is still conducive to social interaction because it mimics a tangible real-life action. We can see though that applications that add music or share games are more commercial than they are networking tools. Myspace has already been consumed with this junk; on Facebook it is still optional, but the unnecessary clutter is definitely increasing.

Shirky provides great insight to those who would attempt to manage a social network. Social networks cannot grow without easy access to membership but that same principle allows dissidents to enter and undermine the network if they so choose. Networks require defense systems that are operable by the so-called veterans of the network in order to maintain stability. Yet allowing these veterans to use these privileges at the same time grants them powers that can be abused. Look at 4chan ( or don't- many boards are extremely NSFW.) It was created in response to administrative abuses on 2chan, a Japanese image board. Yet the 4chan community constantly cries for more or less moderation. YTMND, mentioned earlier, has the same problem. Wikipedia used to, but the use of bot moderation has limited most vandalism.

Let's take a look at Something Awful, though. (You'll notice alot of the same memes run through these communities, as their members overlap in many areas.; Uncyclopedia and Encyclopedia Dramatica document this particular web niche's adventures. N.B. both NSFW) Anyway, Something Awful's forms are infamously large and of high quality; the members are for the most part literate, humorous tech geeks. They find particular pride in the quality of their community to the point where with minimal social software (basically a forum) they have built a social metanetwork. This is in part because of the member access method they use; it costs 10 dollars to permanently join the forums of "Goons" as they call themselves.

This method keeps out the scum and keeps the servers maintained. It is a perfectly reasonable answer to Shirky's problem of how to filter through the motives of users that try to join. No one is willing to pay 10 dollars just to be an asshole to some people on the internet. However, this solution does not speak to larger social networks, where the aim is to establish a community of millions. It works on Something Awful because the forums were of high quality when the pay-to-join was instantiated. Social networks, starting out, do not have the inertia to suck in members when they ask for money. They must be maintained through passive advertisement.

I would say the best way to deal with the "jerks" who try to join is to provide a niche in which they can exist amongst themselves. Categorizing users by motive leaves the user to decide upon joining what 'mask' they wish to don; if there were but a better way to be sure of motive then upkeeping social networks would be much easier. The best plan is to have a separate place for these would-be subverts to go; one that is more attractive to them. Unfortunately they usually enjoy most to molest the stablest or at least most easily victimized communities. I guess that it's good that community rings like 4chan, SomethingAwful, ytmnd and the like exist; they give the potential trolls a home in which to take pride. Funny, though, that even these trolls get trolled...

Anyway, I can't possibly hope to discuss all the points Shirky brings up. I'll sort of summarize from him here by taking his Three Points to Accept and his Four Things to Design for

Three Points to Accept:
1.You cannot completely separate technical and social issues
Me: Basically, he's saying you can't govern a social network without touching on both realms
2.Members are different than users
Me: This is just Veterans vs. Trolls; how do you separate the two?
3.The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations
Me: You must use moderation towards the majority's benefit if such a conflict cannot be resolved to both sides' benefits

Four Things to Design for:
1.Handles the user can invest in
Me: If a person's avatar isn't dynamic and does not store their actions, what will tie them to the network?
2.You have to design a way for there to be members in good standing.
Me: Veterancy has to be acknowledged to track motives
3.Barriers to participation
Me: SomethingAwful's payment; Facebook's network email verification in example
4. Spare the group from scale
Me: When niches overlap, conflict appears. The greater the sampling of a population, the greater the diversity of opinion.

Just some ideas for those who would create a social network (maybe a good idea in today's atmosphere; estimated value is enormous for the popular sites.) Yet the profitability may lie in those very same applications which I deemed inconducive to social interaction. Check out this guy.

It seems, according to this article, that social networks are being used as more of a canvas for entrepreneurship than a business model itself. The applications that clutter Facebook (as Wired agrees they do) are just stores on a virtual mall front; Facebook is the boardwalk on Senior Week and its applications the walk's cheap gimmicks. No doubt about it, social networking on massive scales requires great upkeep funds, and taxing the populace that uses it causes unrest. Perhaps the apps will become necessary to sustain the social environment. This could end up being a good thing, as capitalism often drives out great quality. Yet Facebook may fall and become another Myspace, riddled with crap, overloaded by the numerous attempts to harvest its potential.

Why does it seem that this pattern occurs everywhere on the internet?
1. A good idea is born
2. Users flock to said idea and it grows popular
3. Corporate interest is generated
4. Idea is shackled by chains of corporate interference
5. Users flock to next good idea

Just wanted to add to my previous post. I had delineated a pattern that I see occurring all over the web, where companies end up ruining web sites when they try to make a profit off of them. Now imagine how much more profitable those companies would be if, rather than destroying a site with payment methods, they instead improved the functionality of the site through their influence? Passive cash generation still works, and sometimes it's better for a company to run a web site well and have lots of people visit it rather than trying to leach out a profit as soon as possible. It's about web influence, and that's what will matter with these companies in the future.

Anyway, we were assigned to take a look at this girl Danah Boyd. Well, she looks girlish, but she's still like 30 years old so I guess she's not in the league of our class. She's written some pretty cool papers, but I like this one the best. Read it now? I wonder- if this depth perception issue is supposed to hamper girls' performance gamewise, should they still have a handicap in non-twitch gaming? In example, will a female inherently be worse off at Counter-Strike, but have a level-playing board in an RTS scenario? It'd be fun to do research in this area, but god would it be hard to set up controls and find a good group of people to perform this experiment on.

You'd need a large group of both boys and girls, all with no prior video gaming experience, but with the same amount of drive (that's what Boyd meant by the socialization aspect- males are inclined to want to fight/win in video games, so it seems) to beat the games at hand. Not sure how you'd act out the experiment perfectly either. Everyone has their own learning curves. I guess you'd just need a large enough sampling that the extraneous variables would filter out.

Perhaps video games themselves aren't the best way to test this. Maybe depth-perception oriented tests would more suitably find our answer. Yet, would this really answer the question of why the world's gamers are very predominantly male?

Marketing-wise, such research could have a great impact on the video game industry. A smart publisher would ask its developers to design towards not a girly aesthetic but towards a female-oriented gameplay, taking into account the research's findings. Not to say games shouldn't cater to both males and females always. I just believe that the market for female gamers has yet to be fully exploited- though successful efforts are finally starting to be made.

So let's take a look at three of these so-called "social networks": we'll try the ever-popular MySpace, the more refined, gentlemanly Facebook, and the horrible, dirty cur that is Bebo.

We know from Little Miss Boyd that there are distinct class associations with Facebook and Myspace. I won't even ascribe a class to Bebo. If you called it low-class, that would be insulting the low-class. It really is a scumhole. Facebook is supposedly the sort of mainstream, clean site. God forbid. Myspace, Boyd said, was for the edgier types. I think maybe just the types that like prefab html and gaudy color clashes.

Although each site developed with slightly different protocols about how to network people together, the trend has been towards each adopting one another's methods. After a feature has been integrated successfully and received well,

Myspace has several unique features. One big one is the Bulletin board, through which people may shout out to their network about various things. This is poorly implemented and used primarily for spamming stuff that no one really needs to hear about. Although this is also accomplished through apps in Facebook, Myspace allows users to rank their top friends, which is useful because it does not organize friends in any sort of network scheme. Instead, a user's friends are listed in simple list fashion, and may reach in the hundreds of thousands. This impairs actual friend networking- no way exists to organize friends by say high school or college. In comparison to Facebook, social interaction is impaired; users cannot post on their own walls and there is no way to organize events. Groups are subscribed to but people rarely utilize this function for actual group activity. However Myspace has extensive support for bands to share their music and has been used for this purpose. Perhaps this adds to its edgy appeal.

Facebook is very focused on the networks by which people are organized. Networks allow control over privacy settings by blocking out people from networks that you have never even met. Social functions may be arranged via events and Groups with common interests can use this ability to come together. This function is actually utilized; parties, socials, fundraisers and other events are often made through it. The picture tagging function records these events and albums document a person's travels. Walls allow public interaction and messages private. Privacy settings are extensive. A person's profile is highly dynamic and can show what they're doing at the moment, what their interests are, and other personality aspects. Important to note is the presence of applications, which can expand the functionality of Facebook almost infinitely.

Bebo is apparently the third most popular social networking site; still it only occupies about 1% of social network users in total. Bebo allows a lot of the functionality that Facebook apps accomplish automatically. Apparently users can share quizzes, youtube videos, and games. HTML skins are available to customize a user's page. Authors can share books and bands music; people can subscribe to the bands as groupies. A whiteboard exists to draw upon. Users may blog just as on Myspace and have people comment on it. Other standard functions exist, such as messaging one another and minimal grouping implementation.

Edit: FORGOT TO REBUILD MY SITE. Whoops.

The deal of the video game century came out a few days ago, the Orange Box, a fifty dollar expenditure that came with 3 new games and two old but high quality ones. Personally I love it, it's awesome, lots of people have it, they did a really good job. But I want to address mostly the title in it Half-Life 2 Episode 2.

Episodic content is a business model wherein a company saves money/resources on developing new models/engines etc by extending a game's life through smaller installments of a game they have already released. Instead of making new enemies and weapons and updating the entire engine they release new maps with new scripting that provide varied gameplay and scenarios not previously encountered in the first part of the game. They then sell these 'episodes' for smaller amounts of money, but thereby hold the interest of the gaming population and roll in more dough. Of course this seems like a smart move, but there a few problems as I see it. (Tom Sennett and I had a conversation about this so some of this may be his speculation as well.)

1. Episodes need to be released on a timely schedule or their small size is bunk.
Valve has a serious problem with this. Rather than releasing new episodes say, every two months, it took several years to get out both Episode 1 and Episode 2. After long release periods like this, an episode's short length is inexcusable. Valve took their time to develop their engine even further, so that they could integrate longer draw distances, new shaders etc. This is not how episodic content should be working. Valve is still successful because of the massive gaming community they have addicted to their games and the high quality of their episodes, but a startup game would struggle to break in if it only released episodes and only after long periods of time.

2. The initial investment of time and money into making the engine and the first textures/models etc.
Half-Life 2 episodes are bought in such high quantity mainly due to the original adventures. If a company decides to pump out only an episodic model of content, if their first episode does not get picked up by the gaming populace then they will have lost a substantially greater amount than if they had produced a full game. They basically made all the content of a full game, except they were planning on spreading it across months and selling many episodes. If the first episode is unsuccessful and they decide not to make anymore, all they have is the measly sum from the first episode, which might have sold at $20 tops. Other companies sell their one-sot games for $50. Do the math. Case in point: SiN Episodes. The first episode failed to sell. The next one is now not really on the horizon.

3. The difference that grows between the programming team and the art/game design teams.
Unless you have programmers who are very multi-talented, they will only be necessary for the first stage and the first episode. After they code the engine, besides small upkeep tasks an episodic game developer would no longer require the programmers to work on their project. Money would be better spent on modelers and level designers to produce the new content for the episodes. Who then pays the programmers?

My tentative solution to all 3:
Programmers should form consulting companies, separate entities from game developers. The game developers would only have maybe 2 programmers on hand for the sake of integration and upkeep. The game developer would hire these rogue consultation programmers to work hard for a short period to create an engine and the gameplay that is wanted. After schooling the developer's programmers, they would leave the developer to pump out the rest of the content and move on to the next developer. In this relationship, programmers would be the brute force of the gaming world and game developers the creative powerhouses.
Downsides:
Programmers are notoriously good at coming up with cool ideas on the fly and thus adding to the project as a whole. Without a serious interest in the game's outcome, this source of creativity may be diminished.

Another solution:
Game engines are actually fewer than people perceive. Many are adapted across consoles and used for dozens of games. Take the Source engine for example: Steam, the console used to sell games directly to customers, offers a wide variety of first party and third party game releases centered around the engine. Another widely used variant is the Unreal engine; developed for Unreal Tournament games but used in a variety of different game applications. The upcoming CryENGINE2 holds promise for shooters and has been adopted by several developers. The Havok physics engine is well-known and utilized. Other engines exist of course (Doom3, etc.)
What I'm trying to point out is that the tendency is towards engine unification. If a game engine were made, so well documented and expansive and adaptable and flawless, this engine would be priceless and become the standard. The new place for programmers in the video game world would be either to join the engine's developer and work for them or to specialize in implementation of this engine.
Downsides:
Working from the same canvass may produce games that all feel the same.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

Take this news with a grain of salt.

As awesome as Google's "plan" sounds, I cannot help buy have my doubts whether any of this is actually in motion at all. This article was dugg up to the top rather recently, yet it has a 2005 post date. 2 years is an enormous expanse of time in technology-terms, and Google is definitely more powerful today than those 730 days ago. Yet there is not even an article on wikipedia about any sort of Google datacenter.

What happened?

I find a couple things wrong with this proposal:
1. Lawsuits
Expect there to be lawsuits abound if Google put this plan into motion. Claims of monopolizing will definitely abound. The author says ISPs would be untouched but I think Google would definitely crush them in the end with this plan and catch a ton of flak for it. Caching all that video/images/etc I think would begin to have some legal consequences, especially in instances where the content downloaded is copy-protected. If Google put itself in between a Steam user and Valve, they could cache any games, intentionally or not, downloaded to the user.
2. Caching
Caching is definitely not a perfect solution. Just because Google would have basically limitless storage space in each of these does not mean that getting web pages would be faster. Maybe marginally for often-used sites, but the trend has been for web pages to pump out content faster. Caching will work best only for image-intensive sites.

But hey, if it did work, I'd be all for a faster, more reliable Googlenet

I find this article kind of hilarious. A major fashion cornerstone, popular for selling overpriced Italian shit, is outright rejected any kind of Elite status in Second Life due to its horrible excuse for a 3D environment. Irony abounds in this example of how RL reputation doesn't translate to the virtual world. Companies are going to have to appeal to a new generation to garner respect in these internet circles.

Check this out. With Facebook now valued at 15 billion... christ, if you ever make a successful website, HOLD OUT before you sell. Damn there's a lot of money in that...

If you ever want to kill time and/or brain cells, head over to Break, Collegehumor, or Ebaumsworld if you're truly internet trash. All of these sites are basically repositories for the internet's most hilarrrrrrrrrrrrious videos, most of which involve fireworks, video games, scantily clad women or sometimes all three. Want to make a hilarious video? Play Blue's Clues with those items and see what you come up with.

If we take a look at Break we can see most of its content is videos, with the occasional picture gallery or new joke. Their videos are almost 100% user-submitted, with Break paying up to $2000 per video depending on its popularity. A friend of mine had his video bought for $400. However the story behind his video reveals one of the weaknesses in Break's system. He submitted a video for review, only to find that same video posted by a different user make it to the front page. In other words someone resubmitted his video and was paid for it. Break cannot verify the true owner of a video just by looking at it. However, once my friend proved it was his the financial situation was worked out and he was paid. If you want to see him in great pain, check out this link which has CLOSE TO A MILLION VIEWS. The funniest part of the video is this figure. Go look at Break's submission policy to see how they definitely reward the funniest submissions. In this way Break rakes in a large portion of funny videos over its cheaper competitors. Break uses flash-based video players embedded in its pages. Their money is made back by their advertisements, which are pretty prevalent but not too visible. By the way, Break was once called Big Boys. Apparently a gay porn site sued them. Alright, that was a lie.

Collegehumor is surprisingly more mature than Break in its content. Content is very focused to the college-age population and so all of the jokes center around College-related topics. Content is updated in smaller amounts than at Break, with funny articles and pictures thrown in with the regular video submissions. However they still have a large video database that's pretty fun to peruse. They do not pay people for submissions; they simply highlight on the front page the staff's favorite ones. Let's look at their basic policy:
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1. DO NOT submit any illegal material, including underage sex pics, bestialty or anything like that.

2. DO NOT submit scanned pictures from magazines or other sites; these are copyrighted material!

3. DO NOT submit pictures unless each person in the picture wants it to be on CollegeHumor.com

4. DO submit pictures that are awesome!
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Wow. Good stuff. I wouldn't guarantee every submission there is original though, because they don't scan them very well. Collegehumor has corporate sponsors and because of their audience it is very easy for them to find willing advertisers.

Alright, now Ebaumsworld. This place is almost as bad as Bebo. Granted it's funny enough, but it's really horrible. Poorly designed, with spelling errors made in every update. Ebaums infamously steals material from other sites and then brands it with the Ebaums logo. This happened to ytmnd several times and has garnered Ebaumsworld a lot of disrespect. Ebaums updates pretty much daily with several different formats of media. They do pay for submissions, but only through their various contests. They advertise to bring in revenue, with popups, too, making them more obnoxious than Break or Collegehumor.

So now you can waste your life away trolling another 3 sites that will devour your free time.