Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on Sep 20th, 2011
Ok Zuckerberg. LOVE the new Subscribe feature. (I’m one of many, many who couldn’t seem to find the time to draw a ring around any Google+ circles.) Not quite sure, however, if I’m comfortable having you and your Facebook minions determine exactly what constitutes a “Life Event” for me and my “friends.” So, I’ve been […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on May 18th, 2011
In the same way Google uses page rank to determine what shows up in your search results, Facebook uses something called an edge rank to determine what shows up in your newsfeed. Whenever anyone interacts with any object in your newsfeed, Facebook creates an “edge.” The ranking of this edge is broken down into three […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on May 15th, 2011
Call me old-fashioned. Until this morning, I looked to the front page of the L.A. Times as my arbiter of important news. Instead, I’m met with “Complete Edition Inside” and this cheesy mug of a kid with a pineapple growing out of his head. Now, I know the Times is struggling and they’re tweaking their […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on Jun 29th, 2010
Ok, Facebook freaks, start copying all your precious personal tidbits and paste them somewhere. That 4-paragraph-long list of favorite movies, copy-n-paste. That 3-page note about the meaning of life, copy-n-paste. That funny thread from your high school boyfriend that made your knees knock again, copy-n-paste. Get ready to rebuild your profiles because Google is gunning for […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on Jun 26th, 2010
Who do you really want in charge in Afghanistan? Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings has created the kind of stir that political journalists love: his treatise on surly Stan McChrystal changed the course of history. Undoubtably, McChrystal should have done a better job managing his image. Army generals probably aren’t allowed to Tweet, but some […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on May 15th, 2010
I was shocked to read in the L.A. Times this morning that bloggers and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly are making an issue of Supreme Court designee Elena Kagan’s sexual orientation. Times columnist James Rainey makes some excellent points about how mainstream media outlets such as both Times (New York and LA), NPR and the Associated Press […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on May 11th, 2010
It’s easy to get caught up in the world of stumbling, embedded links, widgets, dashboards and page ranks. But, published literature and the blogosphere share a common treatise for writers: good writing is good writing. If a writer is on target, concise and appealing, his audience will fall in line. Many blog postings from 2005 […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on May 11th, 2010
As print readers dip into their periodical of choice, they are enticed by catchy titles and headlines of nearby stories, chapters or sibebars. In his Social Theory and Social Structure (1949), sociologist Robert K. Merton called this phenomenon of discovering one thing on the way to another the “serendipity pattern.” In “A Better Pencil,” Dennis […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on May 11th, 2010
So when a writer is paying attention to the Google algorithm, is his creativity hampered by the damper factor? When otherwise creative copy is subjected to the cruel hand of the optimizer, does it lose its zing? Many bloggers contend that SEO will be the death of the interesting title or the creative headline. There […]
Posted in Chaos and Miscellany on May 11th, 2010
Inherent in Google’s search algorithm, in fact, the very thing that differentiates Google search from competitors is something called the damping factor. After being frustrated by the Alta Vista and Yahoo searches that returned unsatisfactory results such as “Bill Clinton Sucks” jokes as the best result simply because a site with hundreds of Bill Clinton […]
