Slashdot Mirror

Shame on you for making me remember the Jon Katz era of Slashdot. As I recall, it eventually got so bad that turning off Katz stories became an option for users built into the site.

'This is the only website I've ever had to block a submitter on, and kdawson the ONLY author I've ever had to block on any website because every submission I read from them annoyed me or was blatantly complete bollocks.'

You must be new here:

http://www.theobvious.com/archive/1999/03/25.html

Evan Williams and his team, of Blogger fame (bought by Google last year), developed a 'Plogging' app called Pyra back in 2000. Work on it got halted when Blogger started to take off, but I remember trying out a beta version and it rocked. There's a little info still around on Pyra, but not much, and people seem to miss it; the Pyra.com site is now just a brochure for their company, which was also called Pyra.

I guess the market just wasn't ready for this app in 2000. Credit to Williams and his team for their vision, I guess!

There was this great article i remember reading on theobvious.com around like five years ago or something. It's, um, here.

It basically suggested Microsoft started this whole "my"-in-computing craze for the same reason that products for very small children often contain "my" in the product title, as in "My First Sony". They want their products to appear hyper-ultra-unthreatening, so they encroach things in vocabulary that would make a small child feel comfortable. Apparently hoping to make windows-users feel like they are in some sort of comforting, embryonic state while using it.

Actually, now that i think of it, Windows XP/Longhorn's interface really, really has the motif of small child's toys. You know? The kind of colorful, rounded, chewable look you get becuase the toy manufacturers want to make the baby notice it, and becuase they want everything large and rounded and plastic so the baby can't swallow it. Maybe Microsoft's idea of "user friendly" is "it treats the user like a four year old"..

Please, take a look here for your own conclusion

This takes you right to the article: http://www.theobvious.com/archive.html?110700
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I highly recommend you use this link to read the article instead of the one provided.
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Some more good rants on this topic:

Ellen Ullman in Salon - The Dumbing Down of Programming
Peter Merholz in Stating the Obvious - Whose "My" Is It Anyway?

This article on Katz is rather interesting.

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GroundAndPound.com News and info for martial artists of all styles.

As a non-geek who usually (for a variety of work reasons) writes in Microsoft Word, some members of this community have been trying to drive me off the site ever since I arrived. Often, their attacks have little to do with what I think or write, mostly to do with the fact that I'm different, an outsider, a non-programmer who made different technology choices.

My main objection is this: In most Katz articles, the primary topic is Katz himself. Sometimes there's a secondary topic, but once you strip out all the self-congratulation, Katz says very little of substance about that topic. As Rogers Cadenhead said in this March 1999 essay:

Katz, like most journalists of any stature, considers himself a central element of every story he writes. Count the number of personal pronouns he uses in a typical Katzdot piece and the number of times he makes himself the subject of a sentence. If they were a trigger in a drinking game, you'd have a guaranteed recipe for morning-after hangovers.

Interesting comment. I'd moderate it upward if Slashdot was giving me the option.

Your posting echoes some of the things I wrote about a few months ago for Stating the Obvious.

Drop me an e-mail.

Most of my friends who I have recommended the Matrix to saw it and their first reaction after leaving was "I want to see it again". Not only are the visuals sometimes too much to handle, but the underlying concepts are so much deeper than the vast majority of mass media, the viewing public is not geared to have to _think_ to understand a movie.
Star Wars is about as mass media as they come, understandable and appealing to 8 or 80 year olds. Thus diluting the message and lowering the overall impact of the film. If given the choice at this point there is not question which movie I would want to see again....Matrix.
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But to me, that is another place, one never experienced by the vast majority of people, and cyberspace is, increasingly a different reality, a virtual one, as the Matrix suggested. The virtual world is very much a place where things originate, develop and take shape -- continuously.

Feeling the groove, getting in the Zone, becoming One with whatever you do. This feeling is present and achievable in nearly any environment. You can get there coding,writing, reading, or playing hoops. That point where you cease to think and just move with the moment often without realizing it, it just is. Saying that the vast majority of people don't feel it is silly. I've had the same sense of "zoneness" playing Quake as I have playing football, and I would assume it can be attained knitting or kayaking or whatever.

Jon, decent article, try not to be so coy I spent several hours going from one to another, returning late at night for several nights. I was trawling through one of the last around midnight one night, tired and not really focusing, and I came across a lengthy and impassioned essay accusing a writer of self-interest and other short-comings and arguing that he didn't belong on a particular website. The piece struck me as angry, almost bitter, and I didn't like the writer being described either.....It wasn't until I looked at the piece more closely that I realized that the website was Slashdot and the writer was me.
if it's the same article you mentioned before, which I've read, you must have been smoking something particularly nice because the name of the article is "The Katzdot Effect".

The interactivity that he inspires here should suffice for you, no matter that, amidst the genuine wisdom I see on /., there is often a lot of crap to wade through. Katz's time belongs to him, and if he should choose not to spend more time amongst us on these pages, I can understand. But I would say that a Katz-less interactivity isn't really as valuable as one that includes him; he's just one human being, and he probably doesn't have the time and energy to spend on being more hands-on here.

On second thought, maybe a Katz-less interactivity isn't really interactive at all. He just comes down from the mountain bearing his zeroes and ones; then he zips off elsewhere. Sending e-mail to him is a hit-and-miss proposition if you don't keep it trivial.

"Ever got the feelin' you been cheated?" -- Johnny Rotten, to the crowd, to Malcolm, to himself, after a disastrous 70's US Sex Pistols gig and tour.

(And Katz, if you're reading this, the ball remains in your court; I'm still curious to read your non-bleary-eyed take on the "guilty bystander" e-mail message.)

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