The Information You Want

I watch the following TED talk by Eli Pariser a while ago and I’ve watched it a couple of times.  Take a little over nine minutes and give it a listen.

In some ways this is very much related to a post I made over two years ago about newspapers. When I go to Facebook, it continually keeps showing me the Top News, and the first thing I do every time is click the link for Most Recent.  To me, Most Recent is better because I go to Facebook fairly often and seeing month old news that I didn’t think was interesting enough to comment on a month ago is useless to me, even if 97 other people feel it is comment worthy.  I use Most Recent and I read all the news back to my last visit.  If something is interesting, I comment on it or Like it, and if I comment on something Facebook is kind enough to inform me if other people comment on it too so I can go back and continue to participate in the discussion no matter how old it is.

Over in the new world of Google+, Tom (yeah, that Tom, everybody’s friend from MySpace) has had lots of interesting things to say, but among them is this entry about how right now Google isn’t giving you control over how your content is filtered.  Largely it’s time based, but popular topics do (or did) rise toward the top, so my feed was filled with people like Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day and Tom, people who post and then get hundreds of comments within minutes, and my actual friends were buried.  They adjusted that, so I get less of a flood from popular people and see a more linear timeline, but sometimes I’ll see things out of order and I can’t tell why one item is considered more important than the other.  And that, as the video above states, is the problem.  At least, Google+ needs Facebook’s Top News and Most Recent options… at best, they’ll give the users a bunch of options and allow you to create your own custom feeds, and not just based on circles, but also based on circles.  I’d like to be able to push to the top not only popular topics, but ones in which more of my circled people are participating.  A topic with nine thousand comments by strangers may be important, but it’s not more important than a topic with fifty comments of which thirty-five are from people I have in circles.

I don’t mind if there are filters on content, but I want to be able to get at those filters and make adjustments, or sometimes remove them entirely and view them in a simple sorted order (like by date).  The only issue is when, as I said in my post about newspapers, the content creators actually make the content in a way that doesn’t allow certain filters or sorts – if you update a news story rather than posting a second story, the original story isn’t available to be read anymore, depending on how you do your update.

Hopefully, the trend will swing back toward user control over the algorithms that filter our content.  I don’t like the idea of other people (or worse, program code) decided what I should see.

16 October 1998

Well, this is the end of my plan. I may start it up somewhere else someday, but for now, this is the end.
…all good things.
—–
Trivia Answer: Before Val Kilmer was in Top Gun he was in Top Secret!

6 October 1998

I’ve been messing with my bot lately… and no, that’s not some sexual mastabitory thing. It’s an Eggdrop IRC bot, a Win95/NT port of a Unix bot. In any event, it normally runs in a DOS window. I got tired of seeing that stupid window on my taskbar, so I got one of those TrayIt programs that will allow you to minimize any program to the System Tray… but it sucked, it was eating up all the memory. So I whipped out VB5 and wrote a small program that called the bot to a hidden DOS window, then unloaded itself. This makes the bot run like normal, with no extra overhead, but there is the drawback that I can only see it running in my Task List or on the IRC server. No icon, no nothing. The only way to kill it is to either access it from IRC (either DCC chat or Telnet login) and give it the .die command, or end the task from the Task Manager. So for the last 2 weeks I’ve been trying to figure out how to embed a DOS window into a VB form. That way I could make a one form program that can minimize to the system tray that runs the DOS window on it, with a few buttons for starting and stopping the bot (perhaps even a small telnet embedded window for doing all the commands).
After reading a bunch of those “Hardcore” VB books I have come to the conclusion that they are a bunch of morons. Not stupid, mind you, they do know their stuff. They write great programs and bits of code, but when I buy an “Advanced VB Programming Techniques” book I expect to find a book that shows me the advanced features of the environment and language, and new tricks of the code. Instead, I get a book full of code that totally ignores the current environment and functions, where the author totally starts from scratch and essentially makes his code non-Object Oriented because I have to use 20-30 of his small functions to use one of his advanced ones, most of which are simply replacements for existing functions included with VB. It’s a crock of shit.
Now I’m considering just starting from basics myself and learning what is needed to write my own bot for the Windows environment. I think it would be easier.
—–
Today’s Movie: Anything by Andy Sidaris. Starting way back with “Malibu Express” in 1985 up to the recent “Return to Savage Beach” in 1998, Andy has had a way with film that few other directors have. Sure, they are straight-to-video schlock, but it’s the way he does it. In any other movie, the guns would look real and do real things. In any other movie, the fight scenes wouldn’t look staged. In any other movie, when the large breasted Playboy Playmate heroine says, “Wait here and I’ll change into something more appropriate.” it means the camera will either stay here or do a time-lapse and she’ll return in an actual fight-appropriate outfit instead of having the camera follow her into the bedroom, watch her change (maybe have sex with someone) and put on a thong or something leather to take down the bad guys. These are truly bad movies, but you gotta admit, beautiful often naked women, guns and explosives, ninjas, bad acting, and laughable story lines make for great popcorn munching fodder.
—–
TV Highlight: I thought I was going to hate Hyperion Bay (WB, Mondays, 9pm) when I read about it. I mean, come on, I didn’t like Mark-Paul Gosselaar in Saved By The Bell (the original or the college years) or any of his movies (although I haven’t seen Dead Man on Campus yet), so I didn’t think I’d like him here. But I watched the first episode because I always give any show one chance, and then I watched the second, and now the third. I’m hooked.
—–
Trivia Answer: Tim Robbins. The movie in question was “Fraternity Vacation”. And if you didn’t catch the other hint in there, I put the “Top Notch” in CAPS on pupose because Tim Robbins was also Merlin in Top Gun. More trivia than you cared to know.
Trivia Question: Speaking of Top Gun and Tim Robbins, what Top Gun costar would later appear with Tim in a movie about love and… Albert Einstein??