Linked List: June 16, 2010

Wednesday, 16 June 2010

Brian Ford:

It’s all fairly subjective, but my experience on the one website (Newsvine) where I ever had to deal with a significant number of comments is that, like gardening, successfully moderating comment threads is a ridiculous amount of work and — if you’re not serious about it — you’re going to fail.

Derek Powazek on Comments ★

Derek Powazek:

But your right to post to someone else’s site rests with that someone else. This is so painfully obvious, anyone who doesn’t get it must simply have an axe to grind. It’s like assuming you have the right to go inside any house you can see from the street, and pee on the carpet.

I differ from John in one way. I get the sense from his post and his comments elsewhere that he sees no value in comments at all.

Not quite. It’s not that I dislike comments in general, or view them as useless. They can be useless. They can be excellent. I’m continually impressed by the quality of the comment threads on Hacker News, for example. It is true, though, that I seldom read the comments on sites that offer them.

To restate my thinking, it’s not that I haven’t included comments on DF because I dislike the concept of comments; it’s that comments would not fit with what I have in mind for DF as an experience. Same goes for frequent use of images. I certainly don’t think images are “bad”. They just don’t fit with what I have in mind.

Ian Betteridge on Comments ★

Ian Betteridge:

And to my perspective, comments preserve a centralised, egotistical model of web publishing that’s entirely against the fundamental principles of a truly distributed web. Rather than encouraging writing responses and linking, they encourage you to reply on the “original” post. As Dave Winer once put it, they convert web pages into something much more like a mailing list.

Matt Drance on the Nokia X5 ★

Matt Drance:

The X5 is clearly a low-to-midrange model that complements the much more interesting N8, and Nokia has always been a volume player. What’s truly remarkable is the communication: why make such a confused, tainted announcement at your own event?

Indeed, the N8 looks competitive, or at least interesting. One more thing Nokia could learn from Apple: let your high-end phones turn into low-end phones as they get older and obsoleted. That way they’re guaranteed not to distract attention from the new high-end models, and they serve as a stable, known target for third-party developers. What do iOS developers have to do to support Apple’s “new” $99 iPhone? Nothing.

iTunes 9.2 ★

iOS 4 and iBooks 1.1 compatibility.

Doreen Marchionni:

When I talk to editors about my online research on journalism-as-a-conversation, they often ask if that just refers to story comments. It doesn’t. Conversational journalism as scholars, audiences and journalism-reform advocates think about it generally is highly proactive — engaging ordinary citizens on stories before or during the reporting process, for instance, not after a story has run.

BP Chairman Says Firm Cares About ‘The Small People’ ★

Stay classy, BP.

Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-Playing AI ★

One step closer to HAL.

Good Question From Charles Ying ★

Of course, because “open” always wins.

Another Microsoft ‘Yes/No’ Dialog Box ★

It’s like a reading comprehension test.

Update: It’s even worse, because in IE7 the actions for Yes/No were the other way around. (Via David Williams.)

Another Killer Headline Regarding the Nokia X5 ★

From Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing.

From the WSJ’s Interview With J.K. Shin, Samsung’s Mobile Division President ★

WSJ: Do you plan to align with a specific operating system when you launch smartphones?

Mr. Shin: Samsung is the only company that has offered smartphones using a variety of operating systems. That is our strategy. Since the market wants various kinds of mobile platforms, I think it isn’t appropriate to offer only one operating system. We will leave that up to the customers to decide.

What I hear: “We don’t know what to do.”

More Information on Google TV ★

The video makes the concept a lot more clear than the announcement at I/O: looks like TiVo with search and a web browser. The wildcard, though, is that there will be native Android apps for it, too. See the consumer FAQ and developer FAQ for more. The developer FAQ includes a bit more information on input devices:

All input devices for Google TV will have QWERTY keyboards, but users will often navigate using a directional pad. Like remote controls, these limit the navigation model to up, down, left, right, and enter.

Speaking of Good Headlines, Here’s One From Paczkowski ★

Hard to believe Nokia released that turd of a pink “smartphone” on the same day they issued a warning on its upcoming second quarter financial results.

Robert Reich on Obama’s Oval Office Address Regarding the BP Oil Spill ★

Robert Reich:

I’m a fan of Barack Obama. I campaigned for him and I believe in him. I think he has a first-class temperament. I have been deeply moved and startled by his ability to speak about the nation’s most intractable problems. But he failed tonight to rise to the occasion. Is it because he’s not getting good advice, or because he’s psychologically incapable of expressing the moral outrage the nation feels?

Agreed. If this catastrophe isn’t something for Obama to get fired up about — and to get the nation fired up about — what is?

Statement by Apple on iPhone 4 Pre-Orders ★

Apple:

Yesterday Apple and its carrier partners took pre-orders for more than 600,000 of Apple’s new iPhone 4. It was the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions. Many customers were turned away or abandoned the process in frustration. We apologize to everyone who encountered difficulties, and hope that they will try again or visit an Apple or carrier store once the iPhone 4 is in stock.

According to AT&T, that’s 10 times higher than the first-day pre-orders for the iPhone 3GS last year.

This is very good news for Android, because Vic Gundotra told us at I/O that Android is ahead of the iPhone in U.S. sales.

My Favorite Article Title in DF History ★

I had to hack my Movable Type database to make it work.

Ad Hoc MLB Standings Dashboard Widget ★

Tip for baseball fans: the standings page on MLB’s mobile site works great as a Mac OS X Dashboard widget. Go there in Safari, make the window as narrow as it’ll go, and invoke the File → Open in Dashboard command.