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Auqakuh1123

Listed below are comments made by Auqakuh1123 between Tuesday, 21st July 2009 and Saturday, 25th July 2009.

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Nuts County 3:45pm on 25 Jul 2009 @54, moroccogreen

I laughed hard enough that Lilt came out of my nose.

And I'm not even drinking Lilt.
Nuts County 3:44pm on 25 Jul 2009 @17, Zootmac

Obviously, women have heard Sven is in town and are now flocking there in droves in the hope of a quick fumble behind the bike sheds.
Nuts County 3:40pm on 25 Jul 2009 irony
1502, from L. ironia, from Gk. eironeia, from eiron "dissembler," perhaps related to eirein "to speak" (see verb). Used in Gk. of affected ignorance, especially that of Socrates. For nuances of usage, see Anywhere Outside of America.
Wikipedia - a flawed and incomplete testament to the essential fallibility of human nature 4:02pm on 24 Jul 2009 I'm very sorry but didn't the last two blog posts cover exactly this topic and couldn't this post have been just added to one of those two as a comment?
Liberty, wikipedia and a voice for all 3:43pm on 23 Jul 2009 I've always been a fan of H2G2. :)
the web is...? (Video) 7:52pm on 22 Jul 2009 More seriously...

The web is a clamour of voices with ears wide shut.
the web is...? (Video) 7:51pm on 22 Jul 2009 The web is communication.

I win. :p
What was my goal when I came up with the idea of creating a free encyclopedia for everyone? 7:48pm on 22 Jul 2009 @2:

"I'm looking at the Wikipedia homepage, which proudly states: 'the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.'

"If this is no longer the case, that Jimmy (understandably) thinks that not everyone has the ability or should be able to edit an encyclopaedia, then they might want to change their mission statement..."

Ah, but read more carefully: there is a distinction between -can- and -should-. It is quite true that anyone can edit a Wikipedia article (provided vandalism hasn't run rampant on said hypothetical article), but -should- anyone edit that article? No, obviously not, because not everyone has the requisite knowledge to do so.

There are many things I can do. But I definitely shouldn't do all of them. Same principle applies here.
Liberty, wikipedia and a voice for all 6:31pm on 21 Jul 2009 I'm always intrigued that when collaborative knowledge stores are mentioned, Wikipedia is always the first on lips. Everything2 was a major forerunner, and it's node-based structure hasn't been repeated often... which is sortof a shame, as it's a fascinating (and sometimes very intriguing) way of doing things, allowing everyone to write and everyone to put up opposing (and sometimes rather silly, for comic relief) variations on the same theme.

Not to mention that browsing Everything2 is much more fun: on Wikipedia clicking the random button only occasionally turns up treasures, but on Everything2 you can go from dog to why Americans are ironically challenged in just a few steps...
The Blog Is Dead.....oh no it isn't, oh yes it is... 6:12pm on 21 Jul 2009 RE: 15. At 3:29pm on 18 Jul 2009, Dan Biddle

As a web designer (and, more critically, developer) myself, this is a subject very much of interest to me.

I feel in some ways - and very frustratingly - that the end user often comes onto the web looking not for the new, but more for a kind of mirror they can hold up to themselves. When they look at the news - and even more so, opinion pieces - they seem to want to know that people agree with them, that people are on "their side" on any given issue, and that they're part of a strong group.

These groups then tend to interact very poorly. A good example of this - although unrelated directly - is religion vs atheism. You have any religious topic and the religious folks and the atheists with very few exceptions will pair off into groups and anything the Other says is wrong because they're the Other, not because the argument is poorly constructed or just doesn't ring true. It's frustrating for debate and frustrating when moderating.

This then ties into my earlier point: blogs are great because you only have to moderate your own discussions. It's easy to care about what you write, because you wrote it; the users are not the only weak link that has damaged forums over the years. The moderators tend to become more and more jaded, more and more prone to taking extremer measures because they've seen all the bickering they ever cared to see in the first place.

To use a horrible analogy (I can't stand analogies but can't seem to avoid them either), they hold the mirror up and find it isn't half as cloudy as they'd prefer.

Blogs allow everyone to stick inside their own niches. Only the argumentative are likely to venture onto a blog run by someone completely opposite their own viewpoint.

The danger of this fragmentation is that we all end up more distanced from each other ideologically, which seems fantastic for diversity but I think in the long term leads only to a -lessening- of diversity - because, as with your search engine comment, the groove becomes a trough and it becomes all too easy for many people to just lazily roll on into it and settle.

Search engines, too, bother me more and more. I personally do not use google as it doesn't offer me enough choice. I prefer clusty - a metasearch engine. For those who don't know, it searches all of the major search engines and then collates the data into groups - clusters - under seperate topics. Searching for elephant may get you "African elephant" and "Asian elephant" and "Elephant welfare" and so on. I feel this is a much better way to do it as... well, I don't like the mirror held too close, if you see what I mean.

I think if the web really must be a mirror (argh! analogy!), everyone should stand just a little further back.

But yes - I feel that the same tendency is applied all over the web. IRC, for example, is and has been falling to the wayside for years because it's too "unexpected" for the end user. You never know who you might meet. ICQ, one of the forerunners of the instant messengers, originally had good ways of finding -new- people, not people you already know... but for some years has been moving away from that model to more of a way of getting at people already in your particular groove or trough... thus ensuring people aren't exposed to people -too- much in opposition to themselves.

Hence my remarks on fragmentation.

...that was longer than I originally intended. Perhaps I should've just blogged about it and linked. ;)

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