It's not just about PageRank. It's about being authoritative and original. CmdrTaco can post a thousand stories on Linux, but I'd trust Linus' word on the matter over his any day. I think it goes to a natural aspect of society, apart from the Internet. Improving incrementally on someone else's idea garners you less attention and respect than breaking new ground.
Furthermore, linking to other sites is not "bad". Relying other people's ideas such that you need to link to their site is what you should minimize.
One of Nielsen's points is that commenting on someone else's comments doesn't really add value to your site in the long term. It becomes part of a kind of conversation, a web of context that doesn't make too much sense by itself. Readers have to follow the trail in order to piece together the whole story. (Your post references this blog post, which references another blog post reprinting an original article from The Architect's Newspaper.) Over time sites go down, links go bad and it becomes impossible to piece together the whole story.
It also undercuts your authority to say "here's what I think about what somebody else said". If you want to be a leader in your field, you don't comment on other people's ideas, you let them comment on your ideas. Google bases their entire PageRank algorithm on this principle. Getting people to link to you is far more important than you linking to them.
That's not to say you shouldn't give credit where it's due. If someone else's article inspires you to write something related, it's only fair to mention that, but leave it for the end as a reference. OTOH, if your article relies too much on someone else's idea and only incrementally improves upon it, you might want to reconsider posting it entirely.
You make the mistaken assumption that "troll" is name-calling. It's not a good thing to be, but considering that it is a moderation tag, it's a fairly direct and matter-of-fact assessment, not an insult. This is the part of your argument where you assert that calling someone a troll is true/correct/justified.
It's only an insult if misdirected, slung in the face of a disagreeable comment in the course of an actual discussion. This is where you draw the distinction that the other guy was being mean.
What would be your morally superior way of making that statement? Don't make the statement at all. If someone is a troll, then others will see it without you needing to point it out. Think of the hounded celebrity who lashes out at the paparazzi and gossip columnists: who ends up looking worse for it?
Frankly the entire layout makes your in-depth blog look really, uhm, lame. I've got a lot of little comments that don't add up to a real point, but they may help you in the future:
I don't know why you've bothered to use AJAX for something as simple as website navigation. Why do I need a "Loading/Done" notification?
Search bar doesn't seem to work but why do you need a search bar in the first place?
Dividing the articles up like you do is annoying and doesn't convey that the sections are part of a single narrative.
Clickable things are not clearly defined, especially on the front page, where I had to move the mouse around a lot to discover that "(more)" was a link.
At least on my browser, the text is too big for the fixed-width nav bar. Taking it down two notches looks good.
A lot of the content is just plain rubbish, sorry. The commentary isn't particularly insightful and the writing is somewhere between bland and incoherent.
"I just read a blog entitled Top Ten Things Ten Years of Professional Development has Taught Me." That's exactly the sort of thing Nielsen says not to do.
Sorry if that sounds harsh. I just started with one little thing that bothered me and it blossomed into a bunch of things. I didn't feel like it would help you if I tried to pull punches.
I don't think that's the whole story. As another post jokingly pointed out, kids don't pretend to write mortgage checks or prepare for retirement. They pretend to kill each other. I think it's an inborn instinct for kids* to compete with each other violently. In the wild, it would invariably have led to the smallest and the weakest children being killed, saving resources for the children who are a better investment from an evolutionary perspective. Sibling rivalry serves a vicious, but necessary, evolutionary purpose.
* Boys especially, owing to the suspected mildly polygynous nature of prehistoric humanity.
This, and all other forms of CAPTCHAs, are ultimately vulnerable to some poor bastard in India or Africa or wherever sitting in front of a computer and filling out the form manually for a few cents.
kripkenstein was seemingly defending the act of transcribing and sharing the chords to popular music. His post mixed it together with the fair use rational you're talking about, which was confusing. I was actually asking an honest question to get him to clarify the point.
> You realize that I didn't call anyone any names, right?
Yes, I do. "When he called me names, he was being mean, but when I called him names, it was true!" is simply the boilerplate formation of your argument. For example:
"When [the first AC] called [the second AC] [a fanboy], he was being mean, but when [the second AC] called [the first AC] [a troll], it was true!"
Even if you're right, it's pretty lame point to make.
Actually it's fairly common, I believe. TFTP does stand for Trivial File Transfer Protocol. It's specifically designed to be simple and easy to implement.
Yeah, extrapolated it means that only 8% of all transactions... You need to crack a statistics textbook. Look up "margin of error" or "confidence interval". With a sample size of 12, these guys proved diddly-squat.
Did no one notice that they tried this for three months at "about a dozen" Best Buys and only one agent took the bait? I'm sorry, but this is very far from evidence of systemic problem.
As one reddit user put it: "we stuck a computer loaded with temping pics in front of a dozen minimum wage employees and only one of them copied it."
The monthly service fee for the contract is padded to offset approximately $200 for a new phone every two years. (The iPhone plans cost the same as AT&T's normal "Nation" plans plus unlimited smartphone data.) It doesn't matter if that $200 goes to pay for the manufacturing cost of the phone or if it's pure profit. It's money leaving your pocket either way.
You realize your entire argument boils down to "When he called me names, he was being mean, but when I called him names, it was true!" Even if you're right, it's petty and childish.
Actually the iPhone plans cost the exact same as their "Nation" plan for the same number of minutes plus SmartPhone Connect Unlimited, which is effectively the same thing.
iPhone plans (the image name is actually "plans_nation.gif")
Right, $499 doesn't sound that bad for a PDA, but PDAs don't come with 2-year contracts. (About $1940 for 2 years with the cheapest iPhone plan.) Many have commented on various PDA-ish features that the iPhone is lacking, most notably support for 3rd-party apps as you mention.
My personal conspiracy theory is that AT&T is scared that someone would release a VoIP over WiFi application, cutting down on billable minutes. Others have pointed out that the iPhone doesn't have user privilege levels, so there may be a security concern. Finally, there's just the fact that Jobs is a control freak. Any application that doesn't conform to his guidelines would ruin "the experience". One wonders how the multitude of external accessories that are bound to follow will affect the experience.
People who throw around the word "fanboy" left and right in an empty attempt to devalue sound comments are just Ballmeresque, foaming-at-the-mouth trolls. Except that he didn't limit his troll comments to just those people. He opened his post by denouncing "Gizmodo-troll types", presumably because of Gizmodo stories like this one and the Gizmodo readers themselves.
Regardless, taking offense at name-calling while dishing it out yourself is really bad form even if it isn't downright hypocritical.
The iPhone is also quite obviously very expensive. Price is a key factor in deciding whether or not a product a worthwhile purchase. It may have superior features, but it's pretty close to a middle-of-the-road product in terms of value. It's not so unreasonable to say that it might be pretty good, but in order to be a good value for its price, it needs to be even better (or cheaper).
Also, FYI: If you want to claim the moral high ground on name-calling, then you might want to reconsider labeling people who disagree with you trolls.
Only very few people would be in a position to do something sensible with an SDK, other than mess-up their iPhone. Meh. I doubt those people will even bother trying to screw up their phone. The people who know what they're doing write the apps and release them to the rest of us. Even as a programmer myself, I haven't ever bothered to code for my PDA. There are enough well-written applications out there already.
Unless you've got some info I haven't seen, I rather doubt there will ever be an SDK for precisely one reason: VoIP. A phone that can handle Skype calls as easily as normal calls is pretty much AT&T's worst nightmare. The iPhone is the first AT&T phone that has WiFi. For previous phones, like the Nokia E61, AT&T demanded that they remove WiFi functionality, so we have the Nokia E62 in the US. I'd bet that in exchange for allowing Apple to include WiFi, Apple promised not to allow third party apps that might actually use it.
Quite strangely, my AllOfMp3 login/pass doesn't work. If click forgot my password, it finds my account just fine and emails me my password, but I can't log in with it.
All useless to the general public. Apple probably sold more iPhones in the first 90 minutes than there are people who need those features. That's why not having the SDK is such a buzz kill. Only a fraction of people need any specific feature, but pretty much everyone is going to find something lacking out of the box. Why not let those with the inclination and ability to fix their issue for themselves?
I believe it was under FOIA. The point is that if it took 40 years to bring stuff of that magnitude to light, then it Roswell doesn't seem that much more heinous that it should stay hidden for 60 years. Even still, you can take your sample from those that have been uncovered by outsiders instead.
What we can do is extrapolate a trend based on the samples we do have for the length of time that a cover-up stays hidden as a function of the number of people involved and the magnitude of the thing being hidden. For example, the CIA released secret documents recently revealing that repeatedly violated their charter spying on domestic targets, tested drugs on US citizens, and tried to assassinate several world leaders back in the 60s and 70s. That's pretty heinous stuff, so you'd think they'd try as hard as they could to cover that up.
This requires appendages with fine enough motor control to manipulate small objects in a precise manner, which pretty much rules out any sea creature: Sea creatures need flattened, webbed appendages in order to swim, and those wouldn't be very good at fine manipulation. Fish-people ain't gonna happen. Apparently you haven't heard about the octopus that can open jars. Remember that even for us humans, we have these things called "tools" which enable us to manipulate objects in ways that our natural appendages cannot. In fact, the introduction of these "tools" was crucial for our development as a species. It even seems likely that our fine motor control actually evolved as a result of the tools we used, rather than the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just about PageRank. It's about being authoritative and original. CmdrTaco can post a thousand stories on Linux, but I'd trust Linus' word on the matter over his any day. I think it goes to a natural aspect of society, apart from the Internet. Improving incrementally on someone else's idea garners you less attention and respect than breaking new ground.
Furthermore, linking to other sites is not "bad". Relying other people's ideas such that you need to link to their site is what you should minimize.
One of Nielsen's points is that commenting on someone else's comments doesn't really add value to your site in the long term. It becomes part of a kind of conversation, a web of context that doesn't make too much sense by itself. Readers have to follow the trail in order to piece together the whole story. (Your post references this blog post, which references another blog post reprinting an original article from The Architect's Newspaper.) Over time sites go down, links go bad and it becomes impossible to piece together the whole story.
It also undercuts your authority to say "here's what I think about what somebody else said". If you want to be a leader in your field, you don't comment on other people's ideas, you let them comment on your ideas. Google bases their entire PageRank algorithm on this principle. Getting people to link to you is far more important than you linking to them.
That's not to say you shouldn't give credit where it's due. If someone else's article inspires you to write something related, it's only fair to mention that, but leave it for the end as a reference. OTOH, if your article relies too much on someone else's idea and only incrementally improves upon it, you might want to reconsider posting it entirely.
- I don't know why you've bothered to use AJAX for something as simple as website navigation. Why do I need a "Loading/Done" notification?
- Search bar doesn't seem to work but why do you need a search bar in the first place?
- Dividing the articles up like you do is annoying and doesn't convey that the sections are part of a single narrative.
- Clickable things are not clearly defined, especially on the front page, where I had to move the mouse around a lot to discover that "(more)" was a link.
- At least on my browser, the text is too big for the fixed-width nav bar. Taking it down two notches looks good.
- A lot of the content is just plain rubbish, sorry. The commentary isn't particularly insightful and the writing is somewhere between bland and incoherent.
- "I just read a blog entitled Top Ten Things Ten Years of Professional Development has Taught Me." That's exactly the sort of thing Nielsen says not to do.
Sorry if that sounds harsh. I just started with one little thing that bothered me and it blossomed into a bunch of things. I didn't feel like it would help you if I tried to pull punches.I don't think that's the whole story. As another post jokingly pointed out, kids don't pretend to write mortgage checks or prepare for retirement. They pretend to kill each other. I think it's an inborn instinct for kids* to compete with each other violently. In the wild, it would invariably have led to the smallest and the weakest children being killed, saving resources for the children who are a better investment from an evolutionary perspective. Sibling rivalry serves a vicious, but necessary, evolutionary purpose.
* Boys especially, owing to the suspected mildly polygynous nature of prehistoric humanity.
This, and all other forms of CAPTCHAs, are ultimately vulnerable to some poor bastard in India or Africa or wherever sitting in front of a computer and filling out the form manually for a few cents.
s sing-Data-Entry/Data-Entry-Solve-CAPTCHA.html
From another post above: http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Data-Proce
kripkenstein was seemingly defending the act of transcribing and sharing the chords to popular music. His post mixed it together with the fair use rational you're talking about, which was confusing. I was actually asking an honest question to get him to clarify the point.
> You realize that I didn't call anyone any names, right?
Yes, I do. "When he called me names, he was being mean, but when I called him names, it was true!" is simply the boilerplate formation of your argument. For example:
"When [the first AC] called [the second AC] [a fanboy], he was being mean, but when [the second AC] called [the first AC] [a troll], it was true!"
Even if you're right, it's pretty lame point to make.
OK, so how would you feel about watching a comic on TV, memorizing all his lines, and posting a video of yourself doing his act on YouTube?
Actually it's fairly common, I believe. TFTP does stand for Trivial File Transfer Protocol. It's specifically designed to be simple and easy to implement.
No octoparrot yet, but the intrepid scientists at Oscar Mayer have discovered the reclusive Octodog.
Did no one notice that they tried this for three months at "about a dozen" Best Buys and only one agent took the bait? I'm sorry, but this is very far from evidence of systemic problem.
As one reddit user put it: "we stuck a computer loaded with temping pics in front of a dozen minimum wage employees and only one of them copied it."
The monthly service fee for the contract is padded to offset approximately $200 for a new phone every two years. (The iPhone plans cost the same as AT&T's normal "Nation" plans plus unlimited smartphone data.) It doesn't matter if that $200 goes to pay for the manufacturing cost of the phone or if it's pure profit. It's money leaving your pocket either way.
You realize your entire argument boils down to "When he called me names, he was being mean, but when I called him names, it was true!" Even if you're right, it's petty and childish.
Actually the iPhone plans cost the exact same as their "Nation" plan for the same number of minutes plus SmartPhone Connect Unlimited, which is effectively the same thing.
iPhone plans (the image name is actually "plans_nation.gif")
Nation Plans
SmartPhone Connect Unlimated
Right, $499 doesn't sound that bad for a PDA, but PDAs don't come with 2-year contracts. (About $1940 for 2 years with the cheapest iPhone plan.) Many have commented on various PDA-ish features that the iPhone is lacking, most notably support for 3rd-party apps as you mention.
My personal conspiracy theory is that AT&T is scared that someone would release a VoIP over WiFi application, cutting down on billable minutes. Others have pointed out that the iPhone doesn't have user privilege levels, so there may be a security concern. Finally, there's just the fact that Jobs is a control freak. Any application that doesn't conform to his guidelines would ruin "the experience". One wonders how the multitude of external accessories that are bound to follow will affect the experience.
Regardless, taking offense at name-calling while dishing it out yourself is really bad form even if it isn't downright hypocritical.
The iPhone is also quite obviously very expensive. Price is a key factor in deciding whether or not a product a worthwhile purchase. It may have superior features, but it's pretty close to a middle-of-the-road product in terms of value. It's not so unreasonable to say that it might be pretty good, but in order to be a good value for its price, it needs to be even better (or cheaper).
Also, FYI: If you want to claim the moral high ground on name-calling, then you might want to reconsider labeling people who disagree with you trolls.
Unless you've got some info I haven't seen, I rather doubt there will ever be an SDK for precisely one reason: VoIP. A phone that can handle Skype calls as easily as normal calls is pretty much AT&T's worst nightmare. The iPhone is the first AT&T phone that has WiFi. For previous phones, like the Nokia E61, AT&T demanded that they remove WiFi functionality, so we have the Nokia E62 in the US. I'd bet that in exchange for allowing Apple to include WiFi, Apple promised not to allow third party apps that might actually use it.
Quite strangely, my AllOfMp3 login/pass doesn't work. If click forgot my password, it finds my account just fine and emails me my password, but I can't log in with it.
I believe it was under FOIA. The point is that if it took 40 years to bring stuff of that magnitude to light, then it Roswell doesn't seem that much more heinous that it should stay hidden for 60 years. Even still, you can take your sample from those that have been uncovered by outsiders instead.
What we can do is extrapolate a trend based on the samples we do have for the length of time that a cover-up stays hidden as a function of the number of people involved and the magnitude of the thing being hidden. For example, the CIA released secret documents recently revealing that repeatedly violated their charter spying on domestic targets, tested drugs on US citizens, and tried to assassinate several world leaders back in the 60s and 70s. That's pretty heinous stuff, so you'd think they'd try as hard as they could to cover that up.