Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

This is an angry post written in uncov style. I may submit it over there if it’s sufficiently full of bile and vitriol.

Digg: the little news aggregator and home for moronic comments that could. I’m finally giving up on it, yet not for some presumed lack of Kevin Rose fanboy love. This particular train has fallen off the mountain and into a septic tank for people’s pet issues of the day. Issues generally include the legalization of pot, minor political scandals or community butthurt over restricted Ubuntu drivers.

All of these elements essentially distill YouTube with a focus on poor-ass headlines, misleading summaries, and a PageRank whoring link pointed to some Blogspot drivel that some high school kid thinks is hot crackers. Recently popular stories just parrot content produced by Gawker Media or Weblogs Inc. (an AOL production!) properties. As much as you may disagree with Denton’s practices, there’s a key difference: both of these companies pay people to write, and it’s certainly a different quality standard.

One of the best investments I’ve ever made with a half hour has been the Digg Stupidity Filter, which is basically an inbred regular expression that’s hosted on somebody else’s ~$13 per share server. Unfortunately, even this bastardized contraption is unable to cope with people that insist on pushing out “Top Three Hundred and Twelve+ Ways to Enable Beryl and Cry Yourself to Sleep” to the front page. Lists of absolutely stupid Firefox tweaks are the prime offenders here, but you might see similar content from Mashable!!!!omglolone authors. What ever happened to people reading informed reviews and opinions, instead of regurgitating bullet points? If I wanted that, I’d go sit through an executive slide deck - one created in PowerPoint and not Zoho Office.

The main problem I have with Digg is not the blind subservience to the brilliant economic policies of Ron Paul. It’s the encouragement of a brain-dead social networking community of conspiracy theorists, and the resulting mass media coverage only gives these halfwits some semblance of legitimacy. Deep down, every “power user” is really a 4chan bandwagoner whose love for cannabis knows no bounds. If you can’t be a real hacker, come to Digg where the next best thing is to be a script kiddie. You, too, can crack WEP with the assistance of Google Video.

Where were these idiots on the Internet before the advent of easily-accessible comment boxes? I mean, Geocities had its fair share of numptees back in the day, but I continue to be astonished at new lows of mouth-breathing twits. As the ease of vomiting into a <textarea> increases, it’s probably inevitable that we’ll see more and more loser-generated content. I just wish there was a production version of StupidFilter available that didn’t require tweaking makefiles. While I’m perfectly competent at compiling and running a C++ app, you won’t get major traction from the Rails evangelist crowd until you make a plugin.

Digg’s biggest problem, bar none, isn’t the roving masses of morons continuing to patronize its impeccably validated HTML. The Digg audience are dangerous because they’re just smart enough to use something like Firefox with AdBlock. They’re just trendy enough to try and run Linux, even if they don’t understand what the command GreyWizard54 posted actually does. So when you’re a Web2 company whose primary income is based on people clicking on ads, you can’t go with a conventional Microsoft package. The lucrative “text JOKE to 99999″ ads festooning the borders of MySpace won’t work either. Digg is the perfect target market for mail-order Russian brides; it’s just too bad nobody there will ever see your wares.

From Mashable: America’s Got Talent… on MySpace.

WHAT IS THIS GOD WHY.

Seriously, I’d have a hard time thinking of a worse combination of words. Any takers in the comments?

(If you’re reading this from the front page, click through to see the horrendous image that accompanies this post.)

If the future of social bookmarking and Internet news is indeed Digg, then there is something seriously wrong with the collective attention span of the public. I’ve spent probably an hour in total tweaking my Yahoo Pipes “Digg Stupidity Filter” RSS feed, which performs the following functions:

Removes idiotic stories from the general Digg feed: any meta-stories about Digg itself, pictures, Ron Paul, Huckabee, impeachment, or stories with two or more selected punctuation marks in the title. Removes any story without a lowercase letter. You’d be surprised how much more readable the site is. Takes some cues from the Digg Asinity Filter and removes some ridiculously biased “blogs”. Updated 2008-03-11 to remove Top X lists.

All in all, my biggest problem with Digg these days is the creatively-named lists of content. Because most people trying to make a quick buck off Google AdSense are lazy, and their readers suffer even more from the Deadly Sin of sloth, an article that’s guaranteed to attract views generally involves

1. WordPress, Ubuntu, or Google
2. A craftily-named topic guaranteed to draw these fanboys with a unique number

This is what reading Digg lists makes me feel like.

So an article liberally sprinked with ads, offering “17+ Ways Ubuntu Users can Improve Google PageRank with WordPress,” is the standard fare on Digg these days. The problem is that these lists only contain minor commentary and find creative ways of stretching the definition of their number.

Possibly the worst offender in this category is Mashable. It’s a social networking blog, and doesn’t necessarily appear on Digg on a regular basis. Yet still, Pete Cashmore’s authors can’t go two pages of content without posting “9 Great Games For The iPhone” or similar low-content lists.

Anyone who’s seen Idiocracy can tell what these lists essentially entail: dumbed down news for the proles.

To illustrate the scope of the problem from a technical perspective, here’s the main regular expressions that I use to filter some of these items. (Case insensitivity is not possible on Yahoo Pipes, or at least hasn’t functioned correctly when I’ve tried it.)

(The)?([0-9]*|One|T(wo|hree|en)|F(our|ive)|S(ix|even)|Eight|Nine)? \+?((b|B)iggest|(c|C)oolest|(m|M)ost|(p|P)eople|(g|G)(uy|reat(est)?)| (t|T)hings|(w|W)(ays|eird)|(r|R)ules|(k|K)iller|(e|E)ssential| (u|U)seful|(l|L)e(ast|gal)|(f|F)avo(u)?rite|(s|S)igns)

So, will people stop this nonsense? On my next post: The Top 4 (And More!) Reasons Why They Won’t. kthxbye.

When having one of my brief IM conversations with Phil, the subject of the atrocities committed in today’s modern music came up and. Both Phil and I have musical interests that can be represented in the following Venn diagram. Members of the jury, Exhibit A clearly indicates that while Jake may be a poor judge of music, he does know something truly awful when he hears it.

Thus, Phil and I have decided to collaborate on a project called the !grammys, which is read as “notgrammys” using a Borat Sagdiyev accent. These awards will be given out to the truly horrible songs being shoveled as “top 40 hits” to an unsuspecting public. There is no actual prize awarded.

With this, I give you a preliminary set of awards. The following content is for parody purposes only and you should be ashamed if you take any of this seriously.

Worst Rap Song: Crank That (Soulja Boy) by Soulja “DeAndre Way” Boy
The ringtone-esque “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” was actually nominated for Best Rap Song in this year’s actual gramophone-esque awards, which I can only presume was the result of a sordid backdoor three-way affair between Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group; Jimmy Jam, Chairman of NARAS/The Recording Academy; and a major corporate sponsor - let’s say Lowell McAdam of Verizon Wireless, since his company charges approximately 2.49 and 2.99US for a thirty second snippet of the song in question. In any event, it’s safe to assume someone and someone else conducted a Lemonparty with a third participant, eventually achieving a remarkable feat of bribery, collusion and flexibility under extreme duress.

original image by Johnthan “Sesshomaru” Speed, used under CC license.
Actually, Johnthan has a fairly good rant about the Grammys which you should check out.

What Soulja Boy brings to the table is a completely illogical entrée of sexual positions set to a horrific steel pan background track. It’s impossible not to wholeheartedly agree with the parents expressing moral outrage this time. Children going around imitating a song that advocates super soaking a ho’ or completing a robocop is more than the usual moral decay that politicians harp on about.

Observe that in a four minute track, DeAndre Ramone Way is capable of humilating a girl in three unique erotic positions: none of which can be found in the Kama Sutra, and all of which require climax to be effective. Even Shiva would be exhausted, and using Cialis is just cheating. To be accurate, Soulja Boy cranks off in or on that ho’ nineteen times, or sixteen if we assume that background vocals are firing genetic material independently.

For pedantic listeners wishing to debate the number of cranking transactions, it is presumed that the segment mentioning roosevelt refers to the urban dance move. This implication is based on the fact that nowhere else in the song features a sexual encounter in a wheelchair. Also noteworthy in this definition is that a ho’ must be involved in the transaction at hand, disqualifying the two alternately accepted definitions of the verb.

original image by Travis S., used under CC license

If one believes that a song can be judged by its quality of listeners, then consider that Soulja supporters have posted the following text of what is presumably their own free will:

HEY I FINK THE SONG IS GREAT

i love dat song and i love soulja boy.

Calm the heck down people! Of course kids are going to know what these words mean at the right age. They will find out eventually. I happen to think it’s better than the kids dancing killing somebody or robbing a store.

Apart from the aneurysm-inducing application of poor logic in the last contribution, we can already determine that ebonics make a prominent placement in the track without even consulting the lyrics. These aren’t typical Jay-Z Umbrella-style chyeah callouts, though. “Crank That” is truly engineered around the core principles of

• Segmentation into thirty second clips, for ringtones, and
• Alluding to sexual innuendo, yet maintaining ability to be censored for radio play

With these two qualifiers, it becomes significantly easier to understand the obnoxious repetition and call/response structure of the track in question. Ho’, a word that when combined with nappy-headed ruined Don Imus, can easily be interpreted as “Oh”. The action of cocking on a partner’s bitch ass is likewise fairly easily removed, and fails to interrupt the act of catching DeAndre at a local party.

As the song progresses past the unreasonably mass-marketable chorus, listeners are dragged forward to the slurred outro of the first verse. The first three lines are possible to interpret without the aid of a street-savvy teenager, but the fourth provides a confusing and frightening shock to upper class, likely-monocle-wearing citizens.

You catch me at your local party
Yes I crank it everyday
Haters getting mad cause
“I got me some bathing apes”

original image by EverJean, CC licensed

Individuals who are not attuned to urban culture might incorrectly construe bathing apes as a racial or sexual reference, when in fact it is neither. In a complete about-face from the song’s other incomprehensible inferences, bapes are allegedly a Japanese brand of sneaker that might be preferred by Entourage’s Turtle.

No truly awful rap song would be complete, however, without a catch phrase. In Crank That’s case, cranking is the predominant activity, but YOOOOOOUUUUUUUUU is the gift that keeps on giving - the shaft.

It is my pleasure to award Soulja Boy the !grammy for Worst Rap Song.

Don’t all stampede through the comments section at once, now.

It’s time for one of my favourite angry posts on the Social Utility That Could.

Facebook recently announced a new developer policy for applications publishing content to the Mini-Feed (which filter up to the global News Feed depending on quality.) The News Feed is the default page upon login, while the Mini-Feed is the area on your own profile, where people can see the recent things you’ve been up to - like changing your “Looking For” status to “Random play.” I no longer have the “random play” option myself; apparently at some point in the past, my employment or affiliation with the IBM or RIM networks triggered a flag that says that since I’ve worked for the man, I apparently no longer can openly advertise my desire to engage in non-committal, promiscuous activities.

Either that, or it read my “Male at the University of Waterloo” details, and summarily decided that my interests could not possibly contain meaningless, playful contact with the opposite sex. I’m amazed I wasn’t forced into looking for “like-minded friends who enjoy a spot of anime, ramen noodles and debating .999=1.” Instead of “random play”, I have to settle for the much less scandalous “networking” option, which my good friend Phil promptly mocked:

Networking is now an option in looking for?! Christ what’re you gonna do walk up to a chick and be like “hay can i interface w/ ur data p0rt lol if u get wut i mean kekeke”

I would not be surprised if someone at UW has actually tried this as a pickup line, although a much more likely attempt would involve LOLcats or the ORLY owl.

The long and short of this new Facebook policy is that applications can no longer report passive actions, such as users receiving new posts on their installation of SuperFunLuckyHappyWall. (Now with bonus Zwinky!) Observe:

Rather, the new policy indicates that only actions taken by a user should be published. So if you posted a new Happycat using Internet Meme Generator 2.0, then it’d be fair game to see “Jake posted a new Happycat image macro” in the Mini-Feed. This should hopefully help clear up the state of items such as “Forty-seven (47) of your friends sent a Wet Willy to one another.” Facebook’s not naming names, but the two biggest offenders are Slide and RockYou. It should be a bit more pleasant to see things cleaned up.

As an aside, you can still find my favourite applications to block if you’re interested in improving your experience.

Lil’ Mama has been usurped, and the new contender for worst song in the world is one by DeAndre Ramone Way (no, I’m not joking - his real name is DeAndre), in which listeners are instructed thusly:

Soulja Boy off in this hoe
Watch me crank it
Watch me roll
Watch me crank that Soulja Boy
Then superman that hoe
Now watch me YOUUUUUUUUU
(crank that Soulja Boy)

Then later on, after we’ve heard the steel pan backing track for a while, we continue the exploitation of women for entertainment. Why hasn’t someone gotten offended about this and made a big public stink?

I’m jocking on your bitch ass
And if we get to fighting
Then I’m cocking on your bitch ass

This only serves to reinforce that the Urban Dictionary definitions of “superman” are indeed what DeAndre is referring to.

(Note: I actually had to search for a good ten minutes, and then edit significantly, in an effort to bring you lyrics that Weren’t Written Like This, Because The Target Audience Of This Song Capitalizes Every Word. It’s The Same Audience That Thinks The Future Of Technology Is “I Can Watch YouTube On My Cell Phone And Download Ringtones.”)

Entertainment Weekly describes the album, which is actually titled Souljaboytellem.com:

”Crank That” is diverting enough for three and a half minutes, but most of his debut, Souljaboytellem.com, is a teenage wasteland filled with monotonously looped chants and agonizing blunt-force beats. At least he owns a cool domain name. D

What’s even more ridiculous than the song? Watching the obligatory meta-tastic music video on YouTube, which is like looking into an M.C. Escher illustration: it involves a record executive looking at Soulja Boy’s music video on a simulated YouTube site. Yes, thank you! People watch videos online! I don’t need to see a frame and five stars and a faux progress bar to know this.

If you’re actually going to listen to this song, check out the Kosha Boy remix (there’s even the Fiddler on the Roof!)

And while musicians lament the state of the industry, where ringtones are the target market, Soulja Boy has the following to say:

“When I did my album, I went into the studio (thinking), ’I gotta have each song on here where it will be good as a single,”’ he says. “I believe I came out with an album full of singles, so I’m good.”

One of my most frequently visited forums is a site called Red Flag Deals, which is a bargain-hunting site targetted specifically to Canadians. I’ve learned about a few different money-saving techniques or hot specials on the forums, specifically the American Express Gold 2% Cashback credit card and the ongoing Rogers retention thread.

As you can imagine, I’m always up for deals and promotion codes - in fact, whenever I visit an online retailer’s checkout, I search for “$retailername code” or “$retailername coupon”, which usually yields at least a 5-10% discount for three minutes of looking through search results. If there are no active codes, I’ll usually go ahead with the purchase anyway, but the availability of discounts usually significantly increases my loyalty to the retailer. NCIX, for example, offers pricematching on computer parts if you can find a comparable store selling it for less.

This tendency to want to get deals, however, made me decide to join a Facebook group for free movies from Cineplex properties. Essentially, you have to join the ironically-named SCENE program, then you can redeem two promotional codes for points - the total value of which comes out to two movie tickets. I’ve received similar promotions through corporate and marketing events before with similar values, so it’s not completely out of the ordinary. I expect I’ll actually have to pay something next time I go to the theatre anyways, and I already did give them something I consider equivalent worth: my personal information, or as much as needed to get the account created.

What really gets me, though, is the tendency of people to “Internet White Knight” on behalf of their companies, and completely failing in the process. I only really joined the group to troll a purported employee, who claimed that redeeming these codes was fraud and that we’d all be under police investigation. The statement was so ridiculous, because it was so unwarranted: does a high schooler really care about their employer that much, to risk alienating customers and accusing them of illegal activities? Talk about misdirected priorities.

When you say things online and then immediately note your conflict of interest, you have to be explicitly clear that you’re not speaking on behalf of the company. You also shouldn’t use the “I work for” reference unless it’s warranted, and preferably keep your mouth shut unless you’re a direct stakeholder in the project.

Andre Vrignaud, who works for Microsoft, dealt with this issue earlier this year when he commented - from personal experience - that a PS3 price reduction was imminent; the gaming blogs picked the story up as “MICROSOFT REVEALS SONY’S PLANS.” With that, the Internet lost a greatly insightful viewpoint on the console business, since he now has to be significantly more careful about commenting on competitors. Andre actively tried to indicate that it was his personal opinion being published. So what happens when you don’t make that statement?

It’s impossible to expect complete impartiality from employees, but at least give it a try.

In a continuation of my blocking Facebook feed pushes line of discussion, there’s a way to find out which application caused the action to appear. Most well-behaved applications will link to their Facebook descriptor pages, but some of them do not.

If you’re a developer or technically inclined, you should vote for this bug on Facebook’s Bugzilla site to encourage transparency for applications - the ones from RockYou are the most ridiculous offenders right now, embedding external links directly onto the News Feed.

For now, here’s how to block applications and prevent them from polluting your news:

1. Click the leftmost icon in the feed entry. The image below is a standard application item, which is much easier to track down. This technique is really intended to work on applications that don’t link back to their source.
2. The News Feed page appears, displaying all entries on the page related to the application. You now have two options:
   • Find the application ID number in the address bar; it’s the number after ?app_id=. Add the ID to the end of this address:
     http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=
   • Or, find the application name in the News Feed title. It will be the word (or words) between All ____ Stories.

     Once you have the application name, you can search for it from the applications directory.

3. Once on the application’s page, click the Block Application link (underneath Report Application, on the right side of the page.) You’ll be asked to confirm the block. Once this happens, you shouldn’t see any more stories about users adding or interacting with the application.

Whoever designed the “templatized feed push” action at Facebook for developers should be put on notice. My wall today is cluttered with ridiculously inane application pushes, and most of them link back to Slide or RockYou home pages - enabling them to track people’s referrers from the links. What’s worse in the matter is that there doesn’t seem to be any easy way to block them right from the feed.

Examples of these three-line messages:

1. Someone got a new post on their FunWall.
2. Someone scored higher than someone else on a quiz.
3. Someone is “like” someone else.

To save you all from having the most inane actions being pushed to your wall, I’m collecting several direct links to block the most annoying and idiotic applications from finding out anything about you. Applications that you’ve already restricted or blocked can be found from this page. I’ll update this page every time I find a new offender.

Note that these apps may not all push updates to your wall, but I’m sure you’ll agree that most of them are annoying as hell. You’ll still have to minimize them on your “friends’” pages, unfortunately.

Application: Likeness
What It Really Does: In an astonishing circlejerk of vanity and nepotism, apparently you’re similar to someone else.
Company to Blame: RockYou
Block It: I’m like the Angry Pirate!

Application: Causes
What It Really Does: Armchair activism at its finest.
Company to Blame: Project Agape
Block It: I support not hearing about your crap!

Application: Glitter Text
What It Really Does: Cheapens the clean design of Facebook.
Company to Blame: The developer isn’t visible. Perhaps they’re embarrassed about their creation, or perhaps they got banned for turning the site into Bling City.
Block It: hAy GuYs ThIs Is CoOoOoL!!!!!!!!111lollerskates

Application: Top Friends
What It Really Does: Makes the site like MySpace.
Company to Blame: Slide
Block It: Tom is not my friend.

Application: SuperPoke!
What It Really Does: Lets you virtually bitch-slap people, along with many other ridiculous actions.
Company to Blame: Slide
Block It: Jake has dropkicked Slide.

Application: HOT or NOT
What It Really Does: Remember when you’d rate people on a 1-10 scale that wasn’t “number of beers to drink before sleeping with this person”?
Company to Blame: HOTorNOT.com
Block It: I’m hot ’cause I’m fly. You ain’t ’cause you not.

Application: Moods
What It Really Does: Brings LiveJournal to Facebook.
Company to Blame: Some jerks at Berkeley, apparently.
Block It: I’m just a kid, and my life is a nightmare / I’m just a kid, and I know that it’s not fair (guess the song for mad shame!)

Application: Nicknames
What It Really Does: Nickname your friends and bring inside jokes to more than just Group Officer titles!
Company to Blame: A few Brandeis alumni. Yeah, I had to look up what the hell Brandeis was, apparently it’s a college in Waltham, MA.
Block It: I bestow upon your the nickname of ‘Pank’.

Application: FunWall
What It Really Does: You’re one click away from having all those Flash and MP3 embeds blare out of your speakers. Also, YOOOOOOUUUUUUTUUUUUBEEEEE VIDEOZ OMG LOL!
Company to Blame: Those Slide bastards again.
Block It: There’s nothing “fun” about Goatse on your profile.

Parents Beware: What Kids Post on Social Networks Could Cost You Your Job is an excellent fearmongering title for all WASP-y parents in the States. It combines the scare tactics of involving “that there MySpace site”, which people have heard has been sued for allowing child predators to roam freely.

From standard news reports, one would think it’s like being dropping your child into a zone of no-good older men; possibly something like a pit full of defrocked priests. I think the biggest dangers coming from MySpace are as follows, where “OR” is an inclusive OR.

• Blowing out your speakers because somebody embedded an auto-starting Lil’ Mama and Avril Lavigne remix (this IS the most horrible song in the world) OR
• Searing your retinas because somebody decided that they’d not only use yellow background and black, blinking text, but that they’d embed seizure-tastic YouTube clips in about four different places OR
• Screaming over your monthly bandwidth allowance because somebody thought it’d be a good idea to link to a 5000×5000 BMP file as their background image… in every table cell.

Never mind the court decision over the sexual assault case where the parents sued MySpace: the judge actually pulled a Dr. Phil and bitch-slapped their poor parenting:

“If anyone had a duty to protect Julie Doe, it was her parents, not MySpace,” the court ruled.

So why do I bring up this specific case of fearmongering? Aren’t there enough idiot news channels, like Fox, doing reports on 4chan and other Internet memes? Well, it’s all about who they quoted in the article.

Many families are getting hurt according to internet safety expert Parry Aftab.

“I’ve represented a lot of parents who’ve come to me when they have been fired, they’ve been demoted, or they’ve been called on the carpet because of what their kids posted online,” Attab[sic] said.

Internet safety expert, huh? Where have I heard that name before? I believe it was attached to a post called “KILL IT”:

That’s right! She was the one Something Awful absolutely ruined for having zero credibility!

People, do your research - Digg will go absolutely enraged over this, not realizing that this woman is the equivalent of Jack Thompson for Internet safety.