mediajunk

If you get excited by this detailed poster of the evolution of computer languages (600k jpg) or this complex explanation of how a story filters its way through the blogosphere, then I'm sorry, but you're too geeky even for the internet and I'll have to ask you to leave.

However, you'll probably want to take the "how geeky are you" test or (worse!) the "what Matrix character are you" test on your way out. Just please, please, please don't post your results to your blog.

And if you ever fill out that Friday Five thing, I may have to kill you.

Really.

Nick Clarke, presenter of The World At One on BBC Radio 4, has written an incisive essay on the ill-effects of reality television and the related issues of our obsessive celebrity fixation; the blurring of fact and fiction in contemporary culture; the dumbing-down of that culture; the hyping-up of its language; etc.

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Did you find Clarke's essay a bit depressing? (If you didn't, read it again!) Sorry. For a breath of fresh air, have a look at this wonderful 360-degree photograph, taken a couple of days ago by Roderick Mackenzie from the top of Mt. Everest.

I recently told you about a man who had successfully used his blog to complain about shoddy service from his bank, embarrassing them into apologizing.

It seems like the idea might be catching on: a woman called Marie Griffith has become disgruntled with retail chain Mastercare and has set up a blog in order (so I've read) to launch an onslaught of complaints against the company.

It is tempting to make the argument that blogs are empowering, giving the general public access to a slice of media, however thin. On the other hand, what is to stop disgruntled ex-employees, even competitors, publishing blogs that masquerade as the moans of wronged customers? If there was a proliferation in such hatelogging (hey, I've just coined a term, let's see if it catches on!), could it lead to a boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome, where all such blogs become disregarded?

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The Guardian insists that panic over Google's imminent blog search is unfounded; the search engine will not remove blogs from its main index. Moreover, Neil McIntosh passionately defends the practice of blogging, using as his mantra a rapidly-spreading quote from A-list blogger Dave Winer: "If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the web."

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To follow up the New York Times article that I talked about yesterday, I suggest you take a look at Elaine's Life as a great example of someone who is turning her private life into compelling entertainment. The diary is supposedly that of an 18 year-old girl but, me being the skeptic you know and hate, I'm not convinced.

The writing is excellent and the topics she chooses (losing her virginity, for example) make her diary a page-turner (or should that be a link-clicker?). She certainly gets a lot of readers, judging by her guestbook, but her life has a paperback-romance quality that feels untrue. (I mean, who do you know in real life that loses their virginity on Valentine's day, after following a series of romantic treasure-trail clues to the best restaurant in town, etc. etc.?)

Even assuming (as I know many of you will, sigh!) that it's true, I wouldn't fancy being the boyfriend, even if his name wasn't revealed, though (gasp!) it is.

Dating A Blogger, Reading All About It is an article in the New York Times that will help push blogging closer to the centre of popular culture. It was also one of the most entertaining and well-written pieces on blogging that I've read so far, focusing as it did on the difficulties that are thrown up when non- or semi-anonymous bloggers reveal details (sometimes intimate or disapproving) of people/places/things in their lives.

The New Media section of yesterday's Guardian chose a similar theme, and gave yet another interesting look at the difficulties that are thrown up when high-profile journalists send out their own e-mail newsletters.

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UCLA scientists will soon test an artificial hippocampus for rats -- a chip attached to the brain that will be used to store memories.

If successful, the device will then be tested on monkeys, and could eventually be used for humans with damaged hippocampi. The Guardian article quotes Joel Anderson, a bioethics expert at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, as having an ethical issue with the chip. "If someone can't form new memories, then to what extent can they give consent to have this implant?" he asks.

As far as I know, I don't have any brain damage, but I still wouldn't mind getting an upgrade, like sticking some extra RAM in there. Maybe then I'd remember to pay my car insurance.

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The will they/won't they debate over Google's position regarding weblogs from their main index has swung back into the won't remove camp, following Dave Winer's post about a note he received from a Google spokesperson, in which he is assured that "there's been no consideration of removing weblogs from our index."

The Lemon's visual history of the internet is proving popular for tongue-in-cheek statments such as this:

They will probably soon have something to say about aggregators, the latest fad -- which I attempted to explain a few weeks back. Meantime, Blogging Headline News is a decent example of an RSS-driven portal, from Australia.

I'm curious to know whether you think aggregators are useful, or will they simply add to an ever-increasing digital deluge of useless information?

As well as SARSwatch, the blog devoted to tracking news about the virus, blogs offer an insight into the spread of the world's latest scare, and life in some of the "danger regions".

New Zealand's National Business Review magazine has just published the first of a three-part series of articles discussing the blogs of individuals in China who are posting about SARS. Despite its alluring (to me, anyway) title, the article only mentioned one blog -- that of Joycelen, an American living in China, who complains about the atmosphere of panic:

One of the better Chinese blogs that I've found myself is Wangjianshuo's -- which has a nice, neat layout and one section devoted specifically to SARS, who notes today, for example, that:

The first blogs ever to come to prominence were those of New Yorkers who documented the 9/11 strikes. More recent fascination with Salam Pax's diary suggest a pattern that may continue with blogs from SARS-infected areas: the weblogs that most capture the public's imagination are those with first-hand -- "authentic" -- accounts of what are otherwise heavily mediated events.

An article in The Register has created much consternation about Google's apparent plan to relegate blogs to a seperate tab in its search (like "Groups", the tab you click to search newsgroup content).

The move has not been officially announced by Google, although the CEO Eric Schmidt has stated that the search engine will soon offer a facility to search weblogs. Uh, okay -- but you can already search blogs using Google, just as you can search any other web content. The Register has interpreted the CEO's remarks to mean that blogs will thus be removed from the main Google search engine; users wishing to search blogs would, based on "precedent", have to click on a separate tab.

The Register claims that bloggers "are likely to welcome their very own tab as a legitimization of the publishing format." Really? From what I've read on their sites, bloggers are not keen on the idea, pointing out inherent anomolies, such as:

• Google will have to "decide" (by re-writing its site-crawling and -ranking algorithm) which sites are blogs and which aren't, though the distinction isn't always clear. Some sites are part-blogs, while some non-blogs are powered by blog software such as Movable Type.

• Putting blogs into a separate search could be interpreted as treating their content as less relevant than the content that exists on other sites. Isn't content simply content? Isn't it the user who ultimately decides whether information returned is relevant to his/her query?

• While anyone can publish a blog (thus, runs the argument, blogs tend to be full of inane drivel), anyone can publish a non-blog too. Just because someone has chosen the blog format for his/her site, doesn't necessarily mean that the site isn't informative or entertaining (or vice-versa). Consider bloggers such as Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, or Irish technology journalist Karlin Lillington. Some blogs are devoted to watching a particular social/cultural trend or phenomenon -- such as the Google Blog.

It seems that such a move would serve to lose Google some of its previously hard-earned trust. The following comment, from user Kackle to the Webmaster World forum, would hardly have seemed possible a year ago:

"The question for Google isn't whether blogs are worthwhile or not. It's merely a question of what sort of arrangement will sell more ads.

Anyone who hasn't figured out that Google is an ad agency has not figured out much at all."

I wouldn't go that far, but I do think that removing blogs from regular Google searches would be a bad move. But maybe I'm just biased?

I spoke too soon: Salam's back!

Allegedly...

A friend of mine once claimed, when I had said that blogs would allow the creation of fictional identities, that all identities are, in fact, fictional!

Still, we seem to get excited when certain blogs are exposed as out-and-out fictions (in this sense, having "no connection with any actual persons, living or dead"), and even more excited when we hear of blogs that may or may not be fictions (remember Salam Pax?).

And so, the saga continues: this time it's the blog of Isabella V., purportedly an anonymous heiress on the run from her wealthy family and an arranged marriage. "Many conclude that the site is probably a hoax," says Wired News, "but who cares, it's a good read."

Um, is it?