Slashdot Mirror
The Rise of the Junkweb and Why It's So Awesome
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Have you noticed your Facebook stream or looked at reddit lately? A huge chunk of what goes by lately are photos with text over them, usually quotes about this or that. 'It's the Junkweb,' writes Chris Brogan. 'Why "junk?" Because the original intent of the Internet was that links were gold, that searchability was key, that this ability to find anything and use resources from wherever was magic. And this new web? The web of pictures with text over them? They're junk. They're a dead end. The picture is the payload.' Facebook and Pinterest are doing what so much of our 'awesome' tech hasn't been able to do well: let the everyperson into this universe. For whatever reason, the 'photos with text' experience gives us that feeling we get when we read magazines. 'It makes the texty text of blogging a lot less stark. It draws our eyes in. It's fast to consume, and it brings an emotional response faster.' Now with the release of Google's Panda search technology, it has been acknowledged that links and pages aren't everything and with Google+ goes the realization that it's no longer a links-only world. who shares is as important as how it's shared. 'I'm spending far more time on the Junkweb than I am on the Smartweb,' concludes Brogan. 'Deny it, if you want. The numbers show otherwise. We are in love with this new method of interacting.'"
I hate the text of photos. People should post the actual text and have a photo with it if necessary. But the text over photo is awful for a whole lot of reasons.
Speak for yourself. Reminds me of how TV dumbed us down. Thanks for making it sound so important.
This is just the result of the technically retarded untermensch getting access to something they don't understand in the hopes that money will be made off their involvement with things they will continue to not understand.
We all know what effect a diet of solely junk food does to one's body. I imagine the effects of a diet solely of junk web aren't too dissimilar for one's mind.
when it's actually funny. I don't have a problem with the medium per se, but content is usually horrendous. Maybe 5% of the time is either stunning or hilarious, but the other 95% is just trash :(
If all you're doing on the Internet is looking at pictures with text on it, maybe you should re-evaluate your goals in life. Like posting on slashdot.
Go to Google Images and search for lolcats.
New Economic Perspectives
Post on text on a picture?
1990's people used to email this crap to each other. stupid pictures and the dumb dancing baby animation
with the rise of facebook and other social networking people share this crap and its more viral. and the sites that carry it found a way to monetize on the junk
Why would anybody be surprised by the ubiquity of these 'photos with text on them'? Lo, such things are truly the chosen of ceilingcat and his blessing is upon them and their remixes unto the 7th generation.
Wikipedia is the #6 most visited website on the internet, and is a textbook example of hypertext: it's mainly text, with some illustrations, intended to be informative, with an emphasis on making the documents hyperlinked and searchable.
I will admit that the idea's been losing some traction outside of Wikipedia, but partly because many people have started pooling their efforts there. Ten years ago I ran websites with information on subjects of interest to me. But today I just edit Wikipedia articles. There's little reason for me to create Trepidity's Ancient Greek Temples Homepage when there's no way it could ever compete with the information Wikipedia already has on them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
U MAD BRO?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I especially "love" the hundreds of pixels tall images which tell some very old joke in many poorly drawn comic panels. Reading the same joke few years ago meant reading few lines of text, now it means scrolling through several screens and trying to understand the ugly graphics. Quite sad.
I am far more concerned about the proliferation of endless pages that are designed only to echo content to gain page rank for some pointless website I have little interest in, or to garner the display of as many ads as possible. Often I will be reading something that I find interesting but when I follow a link in the text - or in the sidebar - I get a page that is an aggregate of pointless links (but has ads) and if I try to click on the link to the original thing that interested me, I get yet another page and so on and so on. There is a massive amount of this dreck out there on the web, and I think its sole purpose is to gain pagerank mostly.
When the internet was academic primarily, there was not much data but it was perhaps a bit more informative, now that we have the commercial internet the bulk of the it seems to be almost devoid of purpose and content.
The LOLCat meme and others like it - endless motivational posters etc - is at least created by someone who thought it was funny and hoped to create a meme that lasts. Its tiring and its jumped the shark IMHO but its far preferable to webpages without meaning or purpose.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I visit Cute Overload several times per day. Pictures of cute critters often doing cute things. Clever text and ... hover text. So pictures and text and more text.
Consider all the visually impaired people who find this junk web even more Junk like than before.
Plus, most of the photos with text on is usually guff. I don't feel rewarded seeing someone write 'ihazcheezburgerz' type quotes over photos of a cat wearing a tuxedo.
The author can wax poetic all over it. I think it's worthless garbage. So much so that I now filter my facebook stream and have it hide anything posted by friends that has the word "Shared" in it or "Liked" in it.
I personally look at this new trend as proof that Facebook has jumped the shark like MySpace did. so the next big Exodus is about to happen to the next social website service....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I didn't know the pictures came first...
I usualy block users who post a lot of lame images with text. I noticed a reduction in my Facebook usage since this fenomenon started...
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
Obviously the poster is referring to magazines like People: the feeling that it is so vapid, I want to throw it across the room. I am looking for an experience more like that of Scientific American and National Geographic. I'll stick to text, thanks. (Note the relative scarcity of pictures on Slashdot.)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Just hit "important only" on your mother's feed (and other spammers), so that all their beautiful photos with text do not show in your feed!
I'm not sure invention of the new catchphrase "Junkweb" was necessary. It's subjective after all - one man's junk is another man's treasure. I'm also not sure the new phenomenon of text-on-picture is all that big a deal - when people get sick of it, the trend will die out. I'm old school by most measures - born in the early 70s, grew up on a Commodore Pet and later C64, remember Gopher and Telnet, etc. But I think the stuff getting floated on Reddit is pretty funny, and it makes me laugh.
If there's anything worth talking about at all, it's not the rise of something someone calls a "Junk Net," it's how the utopian promise of the Internet - liberated conversation, connection, and access to information - has been somewhat diluted by lots of other stuff, and as more and more people have gotten connected their tastes have swayed the general trend of what's on the web.
I've got a forum that runs on Usenet era technology (http://dictatorshandbook.net/ and it's not exactly been a blistering success. People find usenet and even the web-based front end to it to be too "texty" and dry. They want pictures and LOLcats and stupid memes. OK, fair enough - that's not the audience I'm trying to attract, and the folks that are interested in educated conversation about dictators will probably enjoy my site and its text forum while everyone else will go bugger off.
So if there's an issue here, it's just that increasingly people go to the internet not for information but for entertainment, and the companies have teed up to make that happen - look at the ipod ferfucksake, now I can watch TV in bed! YAY! I think this is a failure of society over all, not of technology.
Fact is, there are good, knowledge-intensive sites out there. Go hang out on them if that's what you want. And if you want a good laugh, enjoy the latest meme. It's all good.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
instant gratification generation, and the people that have never heard an analog modem. I'm not even 35 and if I feel this cynical, I cannot imagine how some of my seniors reading this must feel (even in re: to the way my generation views tech)
Get over it. It's just a Facebook use-case bug. When you click "share" to share an image, the poster's comments don't get shared with it, so the only way to caption an image is to photoshop the text directly onto the image.
Well, sure. But that's not a new problem. Images with text stamped into them, or text that simply *is* an image for the sake of some artsy "web design"/Flash horror have been around for ages. If it's worth it, then someone takes the time to associate a text tag with the image on a web page. If it's really worth it, then someone re-creates the equivalent of lolcats/ICanHasCheezburger with a sophisticated database. If it's not worth someone doing that, then let it languish in dark, unsearchable corners of the intertubes. It's no loss.
Maybe I missed the whole "why it is awesome part" but this trend, IMO is one of the worst things to happen to the internet. We have turned much of the net into the cover of a fucking trapper keeper. Fuck that. It started off decently enough, much like rage comics... but quickly devolved into being more like visual "dear diary" entries, much like rage comics. Once again: Fuck that.
And to think that cat hungry for cheezburger started us down this road....
This story is from the "lowest-common-denominator" dept.
Maybe it should have been "Lolest-catty-demoninator"?
It's not just a bunch of text, it's a square with some words in it!
If this subject interests you, here's a post that got a lot of attention earlier this year: Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus shun HTML, causing the infographic plague.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Blah, blah, blah. I made up this new word - JunkWeb. Bleh, bleh, bleh. And here's what it means. Blah, blah, blah. I sure do hope the word catches on so everyone will think I saw this 'new trend' first.
Just curious about the consequences for web accessibility. Thanks.
Film at 11.
Since time began, the educated scholarly class have looked askance at the behavior of the mass of humanity with disdain.
The heathen, clogging up our wonderful invention with meaningless amusements when they could be educating and improving themselves.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This article needed more haughty sniffing.
"Text On A Picture", and b3ta has been bitching about it and LARTing n00bs over it for years.
If MS's OneNote can do it without twitching, it won't be long before every browser will be able to do it. To me, the only limitation is the present.
I've created many text-over-photos images. Most get used in slide shows, but I have shared a couple via social media. In my opinion, they convey a stronger message than text alone, or even alongside an image.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
It may be just me, but I had no idea this existed. I am not on FB, G+ or any other social network. My phone is not "smart" and I still think I want a dumber one (B&W display that I can see in sunlight would be nice. I have no need for video or photo on my phone, but I would love it if I could have a clear conversation on it in somewhat noisy environment). I still treat internet as mostly a search and entertainment vehicle. Is that why? I am just not aware of existence of this text with pictures thing. In my everyday internet use I just do not see the crap that most people see. Then again, I don't watch TV and am really lost when people discuss commercials or TV show characters. I don't put much effort into avoiding the shit, just make a conscious decision to do it and it just gets done. Try it, your life will get a whole lot simpler and you may actually see human being next to you (in your life or on the subway). I recommend it. It's like a toilet flush of your mind.
++++AWESUMZ!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
What a stupid fucking article. "Junkweb". Are you kidding me? Most people are really fucking stupid. They do stupid things. End of story.
Of course, the guy who wrote it is "President of Human Business Works, helping (mostly larger) companies with customer acquisition and community nurturing by amplifying the human digital channel". Even his job title/business(?) is bullshit.
I don't respond to AC's.
Because the original intent of the Internet was that links were gold, that searchability was key, that this ability to find anything and use resources from wherever was magic.
Um, no. The original intent of the Internet was to allow computers to communicate. The above quote doesn't even describe the World Wide Web. What it does describe is GOPHER. Why should anyone take seriously the comments of someone who obviously has no clue about the subject of which he speaks?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The point of images with text over them is to provide an expressive context for the words. Words by themselves are dry, with the only indication for tone available the punctuation at the end of the line.
Punctuation is ridiculously limited! There are whole ranges of emotions and nuance that can't be captured with a period or a bang, sarcasm for example! Many times I've watched someone be sarcastic in text and have it totally miss the mark, because they fail to express the tone required to indicate sarcasm!
When we talk face to face, we use nonverbal queues to provide context for the words we are saying, image macros (not junkweb, they're called image macros and have been for years) are the face saying the words, the expression and the nuance, and this makes it so much more engaging than simply typing the words and ending with a period.
bend like the reed
What? I didn't understand you!
Here, let me illustrate with a picture.
That's not really new, I remember JWZ commenting on his webcollage xscreensaver hack, noting how much of the web is really just images of text.
AccountKiller
OK, people like to put the caption in the image sometimes. There are some apps that do it for you. It's in a lot of places, and you can sort of suss out a certain shared style among the people that do it. This isn't a "web". It's a meme on the web. It may or may not have staying power. You may or may not like it. You may simply use it as a marker to guess certain things about what kind of a site you just stumbled on. Whatever. It's NBD. The Economist is not going to replace paragraph after paragraph of analysis and commentary with a picture of Ben Bernanke pseudo-aged and the words STUCK RECORD superimposed on it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
had beta technology that would search photos for certain graphical elements. IT was pretty cool. Anyways, I'm sure someone will create an app that figures out the text, and then display that in a searchable field.
The demo I say, that had 200 pictures of flowers in BLOB fields and do something like: Select * where image = 'Rose"; color "Red"
It would return the picture with the Red rose. (not exact syntax).
Shame they could figure out how to market their superior database tech against Oracle.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
With Junk Food and JunkWeb we convince both the body and the mind that they're getting all the nourishment they need without giving them any at all. Clever. You developed a way to use neither part of your existence.
With the development of OCR technology, pictures with text will no longer be a dead end. They will be searchable.
It's junk, period. It's not awesome. I guess I am not part of the "we" who are in love with it.
nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger
'Why "junk?" Because the original intent of the Internet was that links were gold, that searchability was key, that this ability to find anything and use resources from wherever was magic. And this new web? The web of pictures with text over them? They're junk. They're a dead end. The picture is the payload.'
Everything is junk that doesn't conform to the "Original intent of the internet?" Seriously?
Speak for your self - aside from demotivational posters, I have no sympathies for LOLCAT style data presentation. Give me a plain-text backed PDF my desktop search can handle. I'm tired of holier than thou articles from intellectually 12 y.o. girls.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.