I took a “sick day” yesterday owing to something I ate, which gave me
some pretty wicked exhaust. Anyone who stood behind me yesterday
would’ve felt like the truck in this United Airlines jet safety video [800K Windows Media]. I’m back in action, and free of dangerous exhaust!
Mark Pilgrim, author of Dive Into Python (Python’s analogue of the “Camel Book”, IMHO), tells me that my prediction from this entry
has been fulfilled. Yesterday, he was in an IRC channel where various
Python programmers were discussing the errors in the Python Marriage
Proposal (not to be confused with Python Enhancement Proposals).
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my$f= $[;my
$ch=0;sub l{length}
sub r{join"", reverse split
("",$_[$[])}sub ss{substr($_[0]
,$_[1],$_[2])}sub be{$_=$_[0];p
(ss($_,$f,1));$f+=l()/2;$f%=l
();$f++if$ch%2;$ch++}my$q=r
("\ntfgpfdfal,thg?bngbj".
"naxfcixz");$_=$q; $q=~
tr/f[a-z]/ [l-za-k]
/;my@ever=1..&l
;my$mine=$q
;sub p{
print
@_;
}
be $mine for @everAwww.
from Russia import bride
In no particular order:
A brilliant audioblog entry [4.1 MB MP3] that explains why audioblogging ain’t all that by Maciej Ceglowski, the guy who came up with the Ceglowski Axiom. I will personally nominate this entry for a Bloggie.
To borrow a Coryism: treat audioblogging as damage and route around it!*
(Yes, there’s a text version, and I have a nicely-formatted one below.)
*
But seriously, folks: audioblogging has its place, but remember that
the written word, especially on the Global Data Network in its current
incarnation, is incredibly useful, portable and fungible.
As broadband expands and as blogging tools
become easier to use, a worldof temptations has opened up to the online
writer. The latest of these has been audioblogging, or posting snippets
of speech. Videoblogging isfollowing on its heels.
At first blush,
audioblogging sounds like a natural extension of onlinewriting. What
better way to convey your own ideas than through yourown words, spoken
in your own voice? Bloggers like Halley
Suitt (http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com), Dave
Winer (http://www.scripting.com), and Adam Curry (http://live.curry.com)
have taken this idea and run with it, mixing frequent audio posts with
their text content. In the highest-profile audio blog post to date,
Winer even announced the cancellation of a blog hosting service –
affecting hundreds of users – in a ten minute audio file (you can hear
it
at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/gems/crimson1/aboutWeblogsComHosting.mp3).
But
before you jump on the audioblogging bandwagon, remember this –
the power of the Web is the power to choose. You make your own trails,
and your own links. You read what you like and skip the boring bits.
And audioblogging takes that power of choice away. Your listeners become
a passive audience – they have no power to skim, they can’t skip
the boring parts, they can’t link or excerpt your post effectively.
Your post becomes invisible to Google and other search engines. And
anyone who has a hearing problem, or a dialup account, or doesn’t speak
your language too well, anyone who is trying to surf your site from the
office, or from an Internet cafe – well, they’re just plain out of luck.
Consider
also this – the average person speaks at one hundred, perhaps one
hundred fifty words per minute. Meanwhile, an accomplished reader can
read ten times faster – up to a thousand words a minute, and
that’s straight-up reading, not even skimming. You’re forcing people to
listen to you at a speed that’s barely faster than the speed at which
they cantype. Why are you wasting their time? Is your voice really
that beautiful?
From the invention of the alphabet, to movable
metal type, to the advent of cheap paper, universal mandatory public
education, universal literacy, the Internet – the modern world has built
on the back of text! This is not by accident! This is not a mistake!
Ask
yourself – is the key to making your site more interesting really to add
rich media? Or is it possible that if you took more care in
your writing, said something passionate, grammatical, interesting, and
pleasant to read, it would actually make more of a difference?
Henry
David Thoreau said “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,
which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved
means to an unimproved end… We are in great haste to construct a
magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be,
have nothing important to communicate”
So what do you have to communicate?
Thoreau
may not have been a big fan of technology, but we can still read him one
and a half centuries later and be pulled in by his beautiful prose
style. Is your audio post going to stand the test of time?
Brothers
and sisters, we deserve better than this, and those whom we write
for deserve better. This is not what we built the web for! For the
first time in human history, you can have anything you write read by
millions of people, whether within days or within hours, and all it
takes is talent, imagination and the discipline to put up something
worth reading. There are no obstacles anymore – so why must we create
new ones? Just because you’re going to be able to do a real-time
three dimensional high-definition interactive virtual reality
fly-through of the inside of your cat – does that mean you should? Does
that mean itbelongs on your website? This is not the legacy we want to
leave! So stop the ridiculous self indulgence, and shut up and write.
And
if you want a copy of this without having to listen through it, by God
you can find one at http://www.idlewords.com/audio-manifesto.txt.
August
31, 2004
I wrote about The Breakup Style of PowerPoint,
in which I talked about how I suspect that office culture and
PowerPoint style is behind the rash of email breakups I’d been hearing
about lately. It’s only fair to also talk about how people use
computers to do the opposite, namely proposing marriage.
Snaggy from the Joy of Tech webcomic writes:
When we heard that Forum member and SuperFan
“angryjungman” was thinking of popping the question, we offered to make
it a very special day by letting him use the Joy of Tech comic as his
proposal medium. After discussing it with Tony and coming up with an
idea, we set out to work. Using photo references, Nitrozac turned the
young couple into comic illustrations, and depicted a cute story line
in which Tony calls his girlfriend over to his computer to read some
code that he has written. The Python code she reads is actually a
proposal, including an ASCII text art engagement ring…
The initial “cliffhanger” comic is here, and if you read the final comic, you’ll find out that she said “yes”. Congrats, guys!
Although I am a programmer by trade and hobby and really like
Python, I’ll probably not opt for this route. The accordion may be
involved, however.
I look forward to reading various critiques of Tony’s Python code on
the newsgroups. Even I, a rather non-pendantic person by programmer
standards, looked at the code and said “Why’d he do it that way?”,
knowing full well that it was writen with Steph in mind, not the Python
interpreter.
In response to Joyce “Troutgirl” Park’s firing over her blog (which I covered here), he’s written an article which concludes with this paragraph:
Ecologists know that life is most interesting, and also most dangerous, at habitat boundaries — where the ocean meets the shore, where the forest meets the meadow. And in the virtual world, where the private meets the public. A healthy ecosystem requires that we colonize that marginal zone. When people get hurt trying to do that — in the right ways, for the right reasons — we should offer them not only our condolences, but also our thanks.
A filet mignon on a flaming sword to you, sir!