Tag: Internet

Did you mean stupid?

est.

Apparently Ashley Cole’s lawyer is demanding answers from the Oligarchs of search, Google Inc. over his
client’s representation in a Google search of his name (type in ‘Ashley Cole’ and google offers the suggestion Did you mean ‘Ashley Cole gay’):

Shear (Cole’s lawyer) has now asked Google to explain this anomaly with their search engine, telling Pink News: “I am keen to find out whether the decision to automatically include the term ‘gay’ to the keyword ‘Ashley Cole’ was an editorial decision or one made by a computer based on the volume of searches for ‘Ashley Cole’ linked to the word ‘gay’.

Arghh, ofcourse it’s automatic. Does this guy honestly think there is some dude sat in Googleplex looking at the typed searches and going ‘now lets see?….this person typed studip, did he mean stupid? Yeah that’ll be it’

Maybe if he used google to find out:

Please note that our spell check feature is completely automated, and we cannot make manual changes to individual suggestions.

Ofcourse if anything this is just likely to perpetuate the problem, especially as the newswires are picking up on the story.

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The Top Ten Design Mistakes

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So Jacob has listed another top ten. This time concerning what mistakes bloggers make. The suggestions are sensible and helpful, list a biog, post an author photo, irregular posting frequency…etc.

Most of the suggestions make sense, but I can’t but help think that the suggestions are a little robotic in their nature. In my opinion blogs and blogging are not so much type of website, more a reflection of the users of the internet. Surely by rationalising the users, we are rationalising the diversity of content, which seems to me to be the selling point of the blogosphere. A democracy of content production where the best/worst/strange/obscure/funny bubbles to the top regardless of who, where, why and how that content got there.

Ofcourse accurate listing, tagging and understanding of content helps it bubble up much easier in the frantic semantics of the blogosphere. But damn it some of the best stuff comes from the absolute nutters with only a very basic understanding on FrontPage 98. If we scrub out the websites of Comic Sans fonts, badly marked up, fusia backgrounded, frankly horrific navigation are we not taking out some of the soul of blogging?

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