Year: 2007

Categories
Stuff

Let’s get down and creepy

Via Vestal Design a new YouTube video that stresses Think before you post:

The moral of this Public Service Announcement is clear: everyone on the Internet is a pedophile, especially the local ticket-taker…In reality, this ad is much more about fame than about privacy. Assuming this girl has become some sort of Internet sensation, then these scenes represent the dark side of being a modest celebrity unprepared for fame.

I’ve long been an advocate of teaching ‘safe internet’ in school, where kids would learn not to click that link, open that image file, play that dubious online game, or post pictures of themselves online seminude, complete with address and phone number. But scaring the shit out of kids doesn’t strike me as an effective teaching tool. The scarier you make the environment, the more intrigued the kid.

 

Now, I know you’re all dying to know: today, mine are peach.

Categories
Social Media

Sex and DIGG

Melinda Casino points to this longish, well documented essay, Why are there so few women on Digg by Academic Pointillism. The author is a Digg subscriber who wonders at the lack of women participating in the site.

One of the possible reasons given for the lack of women is that many of the stories are male centric. I checked today, and found about half the stories interesting and only one really being male centric. The one I found most interesting is the site with the babies swimming and not because I’m into the maternal thing, but because I found the photography to be really excellent (the site has since been taken down–see below). There was also a fun Google images game that reminds me of a Flickr game that Scott Reynen created.

Other reasons the author gives have to do with sexism, racism, and homophobia in the comments, as well as objectification of women. She has a couple of suggestions, one of which–get more women involved in the development of the site and how it’s architected–I can get behind completely. By women, I mean women in technology–not marketing, not human resources.

What was said about Digg could be same about Slashdot, as well as the sites like Techmeme, Tailrank, and Megite: it’s rare for a female voice to be heard in any of these environments.

I can agree with some of the author’s opinions, but not all. Objectification of women is an issue, but I think the idea that women can’t go online and express a strong opinion without getting sexual and violent threats has been badly overplayed lately. Is it a problem? Yes, but not as pervasive as others. I think women’s biggest problem is we’re not heard, or when we are, not always given equal respect. There’s few things that will discourage a person more than feeling like we’re not heard, and I include getting dismissive and demeaning responses in the ‘not being heard’ category.

Then there is the question: are women as interested? I find sites like Digg and Slashdot to be occasionally interesting, I tip into Metafilter from time to time, I rarely read mailing lists, and only read the tech sheets once a day to see what the artificially inflated stories are. I just have better uses of my time. Now, I don’t know if I’m representative of women (or older techs) or not–all I can do is give anecdotal data.

Regardless, it’s a thoughtful, well researched, and objectively detailed writing and I’ll do my little bit to try and get this on to the tech sheets.

Update

The Academic Pointillism post has been dugg.

Categories
Culture

Nigerian sight and sound

Dare Obasanjo posted music videos and photos from his recent trip home to Nigeria.

The music is both English and Yoruba, the language of the Yoruba people, and one of the languages spoken in Nigeria. English is the official language. Dare referred to the music as Nigerian hip-hop and R&B. The first video definitely has a hip-hop feel, including some objectification of women. Most of the music he linked, though, seemed more R&B and without the angry edge I’ve come to associate with hip-hop.

The photos are from his Dad’s birthday celebrations. I’d sure love a description of the outfits–the native ones are exquisite. It looked like in some of the photos that the material used in several outfits was the same, so I wondered if there were specific associations with the fabrics and style of outfits.

Dare is well known and respected in tech circles, but what might not be as well known is that he’s the son of Olusegun Obasanjo. Nigeria is in for some challenging times in the near future, and it’s good to see Dare back home.

Categories
Writing

More Mark

I prefer the preface in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

NOTICE
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narra- tive will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR,
Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.

EXPLANATORY
IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Categories
RDF Technology

Accessibility, Microformats, and RDF as the Bezoar stone

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Really nice writeup on the conflict between Microformats use of abbr with hCalendar and accessibility:

The datetime-design-pattern is a way to show a readable date (such as “March 12, 2007 at 5 PM, Central Standard Time”) to humans and a machine-readable date (such as the ISO 8601 formatted “20070312T1700-06”) to the Microformat parsers. When crossed with the abbr-design-pattern, the result is this.

<abbr class=”dtstart” title=”20070312T1700-06″>
March 12, 2007 at 5 PM, Central Standard Time
</abbr>

As you may have guessed from the previous examples, screen readers expanding the abbreviation will try to read the title element. JAWS helpfully attempts to render numeric strings into human-readable numbers, so “1234” is spoken “one-thousand two-hundred thirty-four” instead of “one two three four.” Given a title value of “20070312T1700-06”, JAWS and Window Eyes both try to read an ISO date string never intended to assault human ears:

Twenty million seventy-thousand three-hundred twelve tee seventeen-hundred dash zero six. (JAWS 8 on IE7: MP3, Ogg)

I particularly liked this article because it provides details as to exactly how the concept in question is being rendered in screenreaders. You’re not left to guess, based on some vague, “Doesn’t work with screenreaders”. It really gives weight to the authors’, Bruce Lawson and James Craig, concerns.

I can’t figure out, though, why RDF always gets slammed whenever discussions of this nature arise:

Some have proposed using custom attribute namespaces for Microformat data, but the Microformats group is strongly opposed to this, and for a simple and valid reason. Microformats are intended to be “simple conventions for embedding semantic markup in human-readable documents.” Opening the floodgates to custom DTDs and namespaces would quickly raise the complexity level of Microformats to that of RDF, greatly reducing its adoption and therefore its relevance.

Here I was, tripping along on a well presented argument defining a tricky problem when, bammo: it could have been worse, it could have been RDF.

It’s as if RDF has become the bezoar stone of metadata–people invoke RDF to draw out all the evil.

“Ohmigod, an asteroid is going to hit the earth and we’re all going to die!”

“It could have been worse. It could have been RDF.”

“You’re right. Whew! I was really worried for a moment.”

First update

We’re going to be coming at you with …AAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHH!… custom DTDs! The horror!!!

Damn near stopped my heart with that one. You want to be more careful, Tom.

Second Update

Here is the first entry of the microformats discussion thread on this item. It gets quite interesting as the thread progresses.

I’m not making any editorial comment on the thread. Nope, not a word. Not a single word. I’m just going to sit back and play with my triples.