MOTU

Posted by Richard at September 8th, 2007

Dear Firefox:

It’s hard not to appreciate everything you’ve accomplished in the past few years with your Four Hundred Million Firefox Downloads and all (even if some rumors are circulating that they aren’t all unique users). But as you’ve gotten more popular, you’ve become, well, different. Back before I was on Flickr, or you know, del.icio.us, it was all cool. But my needs have changed, baby, and you’ve not really kept up. I’m tired of needing to add plugins to get you integrate natively with hip, well-established Web apps, and your recommended plugin buddy Scribefire’s inability to work with my new locally hosted WordPress blog was the last straw.

So, yeah, I’ve met someone else, and I’m sending this to you from his native blog post editor. Yes he’s younger and edgier - and apparently built on your source code (with all the flaws and strengths that might entail). Granted, he doesn’t get along well with Clipmarks (and yeah, I’ll always remember the way you and Clipmarks worked together). And no, he doesn’t organize all my local bookmarks as nicely as you do. But let’s face, hon, he’s got a native mediabar, built-in del.icio.us integration, a built-in Web clipboard, and the ability to let me drag and drop my photos into Flickr. But it’s not fair to blame him. I know you’re trying to avoid feature bloat, and you have to keep a whole lot of people happy, and things just haven’t been good for the two of us for a while now.

So I guess this is it. I think I’ve already gotten most of my stuff out, but you can do what you want with the rest of it. It’s been a great five years (and you know Safari never meant anything to me, ever), and you will always be installed in a special place for me. I hope you’ll remember me as fondly as I will you. Please continue kicking Explorer’s ass - I mean that.

Sincerely,
Richard

PS: I’ve not really told him about the Zoho plugin yet. So if that doesn’t work, maybe we can stay friends on the side? But I’m not pushing.

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Tags: pbds720

Posted by Richard at September 6th, 2007

Pandora.com is not new by a long-shot, but since none of my 30-something friends seem to have heard of this site, I’ve decided to proselytize for it. The site seems to be good at digging around in that part of your mind’s underwear drawer that secretly knows what you’re really in the mood to hear at any given moment, and then it plays it for you and then it shows you where to buy it. It even drops hints about why you might like two seemingly different songs. (Like, who knew I was such a sucker for extensive vamping?)

Of course, critics justifiably criticize the site for not making their “genome” more public and give users more control. For instance, maybe instead of creating a station around The Smiths or Richard Thompson and hoping for some subtle harmonies and the aforementioned vamping, I want to just tell Pandora to build me a station around harmonies and vamping (harmonic vamping? vampiric harmonies?). However, weaknesses in the functionality don’t obscure how brilliant both the site and the underlying database are. A similar “genome” metaphor would be useful in a variety of arts/humanities teaching situations, especially when the said genome can be made explicit as a teaching tool, something that would have been almost inconceivable (at least for meaningfully wide distribution) before the birth of interactive Web sites.

Posted by Richard at September 6th, 2007

I found a link to Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on Phillip K. Dick a few weeks ago (via Paul Di Fillipo at the Inferior 4 + 1), and thought about it after our class session last week. I thought it was a good place to get things rolling.

Will the future just be more channels for delivering the same b.s., or will we keep changing at such a pace that the b.s. won’t have a chance to coagulate? Will changing the way we communicate actually eventually create a usefully democratic media, or will we all just be reading Gawker? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

clipped from www.newyorker.com Although “Blade Runner,” with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized elite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life.