The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for.

— Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

In Spanish, it’s even worse, since each W requires four syllables with uve doble. Stephen Fry has suggested we say “wuh wuh wuh”, but that sounds like a dog barking to me.

Given the ubiquity of hypertext “web” documents, for me, it comes down to this:

The fact that you have to put the http:// before all of your web addresses anyway already tells your browser and the server and everybody that you’re looking for a hypertext document, so the “www.” is entirely superfluous!

But old habits die hard, even if they are a waste of resources. Just think of all the bandwidth we are dedicating on a daily basis to sending those four bytes to represent the “www.” across the wires!

Even Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the whole darn thing, said back in 1999 that the WWW prefix was outdated:

Nowadays, however, the web server may be far and away the biggest service foo company has, and it might make sense to give it pride of place. Remember you can only do this with one service. You could use http://foo.com/ which is after all easier to type, even though people expect to have to type the “www”.

This issue seems even more important now that we’re in the age of Social Networking in which web links are passed around in dizzying quantities, giving rise to an entire industry of URL shortener services.

I hope that more and more companies will figure this out and buck the trend. It’s easy enough to forward a URL with “www.” to one without it, so your customers will still find you. In the mean time, you can find me at erikras.com, not www.erikras.com.

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Think, People!

Here are two particular offenders that I’ve seen in the last week posted by more than one of my Facebook friends. If you have posted this, I’m not directly calling you an idiot, just pointing out that, either you and I have very different ideologies, or you did something without thinking, which is something I do all the time. If you still believe your support of the statement to be valid, then by all means explain yourself in a comment.

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered, “Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

He’s saying, in terribly fragmented sentences, that what most surprises him about Humanity is that we plan and worry about the future and strive for wealth. Seriously?

My friend, Lance, who re-posted this in order to mock it, nailed his comment. I’m paraphrasing, since I can’t find the exact comment:

The Dalai Lama is a doofus. That’s what we do! That’s like “our thing”. Saying that’s what most surprises you about humanity, is like saying that what most surprises you about cows is that they go moo.

I get the whole romantic Carpe Diem, “dance like nobody’s watching”, vibe, which is great, but no one actually does that. The very reason our species has become so dominant is that we, unlike all our furry planet-mates, developed the capacity to not live solely in the present.

There are people who have suffered brain damage and specifically lost their ability to form memories and plan for the future, and no one would call that state the pinnacle of human existence. In fact they require constant care and attention (which requires wealth that the Dalai Lama would prefer that we not have saved up for a rainy day). The Dalai Lama himself is so concerned about the future that he’s discarded the millennia-old tenet of his religion about how the Dalai Lama is reincarnated throughout history, and wants to appoint a successor before his death. The irony of his power play is that by discarding the reincarnation doctrine, he’s also discarding his entire claim to authority. That’s the problem with Religion’s trick of setting the standards just out of human reach and claiming that past dead leaders really did attain those standards (e.g sinlessness, enlightenment, etc.). Present day leaders can’t possibly live up to them, and are destined to appear as hypocrites. I could say that what most surprises me about the Dalai Lama is that, as a leader, he’s such an egotistical control freak, but I won’t…because that’s so incredibly human of him.

I always say to people, “No one earns $100 million. You steal $100 million.” People earn $10 an hour. People earn $40,000 a year. “Earn” means work. Okay? It doesn’t mean steal, which with these vast amounts of money, of course you steal them.

Fran Lebowitz

This sounds very clever and empowering at first glance, particularly in the midst of the present Occupy Wall Street movement against bankers. Believe me, I’m very much in favor of Wall Street reform and taxing the billionaires at a much higher rate than the rest of us, but this statement, after a little thought, is absolutely ridiculous. It’s logical conclusion is not a place I want to live.

Bob is working hard at his sweat-inducing factory job earning a $40k salary. One day, Bob realizes that the weather hasn’t been very good this year, and, having grown up on an apple orchard, knows what that means. So he goes down to his local farmers market and, at the opportunity cost of foregoing some of the pleasures his $40k-earning colleagues enjoy, buys up as many barrels of apples as he can afford. Sure enough, when harvest season comes along, there aren’t many apples on the store shelves, and the price shoots up. Bob then backs his pick-up into the farmer’s market and starts selling his apples that he bought at the original price at this new elevated price. According to Fran Lebowitz, any profit he has made merely by foresight and thought has been stolen! She doesn’t specify from whom, but I assume she means that Bob should apologize and give that money back to society.

John works with Bob at the factory and also earns $40k sweating away his 40-hour week. One particular part of the manufacturing process at his plant has always struck John as particularly laborious, and he’s certain there’s another way. While his coworkers are out at the pub most nights, John stays in his garage at home tinkering with his workshop. After years of refining his design, he patents it and starts up a company to market it. What he’s designed is a piece that can be fit onto one of the machines at his factory to make the process much more efficient so they can produce twice as many units per day. His device, which costs only $50 to manufacture, will save his ex-employer, and thousands of similar factories around the country, at least $5,000 per day. How much should he charge them for the device? Fran Lebowitz would suggest that charging any more than what it costs him to pay his $40k/year employees to manufacture the device would be stealing. WTF, Franny?

The worst thing about this Lebowitz quotation is that it leads logically to exactly to the “no incentive for innovation or hard work” communist hell hole that the Conservatives think all Liberals are trying to take us to with “class warfare”. Passing this stuff around only hurts the Liberal cause.

I totally stole this idea from Dustin Timbrook, the artist that did this masterpiece.

To conclude, I’d like to state that I enjoy these little quotes as much as the next social network addict, and some of them are really good, thought-provoking and important to spread. And the social networks have done an excellent job in facilitating the spread, haven’t they? Zuckerberg’s term is “frictionless sharing”. I just wish that people would put some more thought into whether or not they really want to support a statement before hitting “Share”.

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To allow their content to be crawlable by search engines, they display it all, but then put up a translucent element on top of the entire page to block navigation and easy human consumption. If they really wanted to get serious about the paywall, they could do so pretty easily, but I guess they assume this tactic will stop most people.

AdBlock rules to disable The Onion’s paywall

www.theonion.com##DIV[id="gregbox-wrap"]
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International Only

At the moment, this paywall is only in effect for international visitors. A statement from The Onion:

We have found that most of our readers share articles with each other, and flow in and out of our site, and we do not want to limit that behavior.

There is also a set of avid readers, and we have chosen an article limit which allows that fan base to support us directly. On other platforms like the Kindle and Nook, we have had great support from our fans and other interested readers, which has given us confidence for this move.

We are testing a meter internationally as readers in those markets are already used to paying directly for some (other) content, particularly in the UK where we have many readers.

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WTF is a cookie?

A cookie is a tidbit of information that a website gives your computer so that your computer can identify itself the next time it talks to the website. You see, the way web browsing works is that your computer (the client) requests a certain page from a certain computer (the server), and the server returns the page to the client. That’s it. The connection is closed and there is no agreement that any more communication will take place. Each page request is discrete.

This worked fine when the World Wide Web first began back in the 90s, when it was just pages of information linking to other pages of information, much like Wikipedia is now (but much uglier). But then people wanted to start making web pages do more than display a simple page of text. To make a web application, the web server must know who the client is from request to request. The only way to do this is for the web server to give the client a special “key”, a unique number or series of characters, on the first request, so that the client can give the key back with the next request to identify itself.

Cookies are a bit like those membership cards that grocery stores give you. Your card has a unique number on it, so whenever you come back to the store, they can swipe the card and know that you are the same you that bought milk at the other franchise across town last week. That’s all cookies do.

If You’re Not Paying For It, You Are The Product

This business trick was probably originally conceived by the newspaper industry, but it was perfected by the radio and television industry. It really is a win-win-win situation for all three parties: the content producers, the advertisers, and the audience. The best internet example of using free products to get an audience to sell to advertisers has to be Google. They wrote the best search engine, the best online email platform, and the best online RSS reader…and they gave it all away for free. Why were they successful? Because people found their products useful and their ads non-intrusive. That’s what’s so great about this system: it uses the free market of internet users to reward excellence and punish mediocrity.

Why track users?

I work at a company that makes e-commerce websites, and we use cookies to track users for a variety of reasons. The primary reason is to remember where visitors that buy products came from, in other words, how they heard about us, or what they clicked on to get to us. Most visitors find us by doing an internet search on a certain type of product they are interested in buying. Why do we want to know this? Well, it helps us better target our advertising, i.e. not waste money on advertising that does not work. If we spend money on ads with the words “jet powered tricycles” and no one makes a purchase after searching for that phrase, then we can stop marketing that phrase. If, however, we sell lots of products to people searching for “speedy trikes”, then we know to focus on those words.

It’s not “tracking” in the sense of a private detective who knows where you were and who you were with last night. It’s just anonymous “79 people saw ad X, 32 of them clicked on it, and 2 placed an order” kind of data. The corporations don’t care who you are; they just want you to give them your money.

Where can you be tracked?

Assuming you haven’t installed some sort of browser plugin by an advertising agency, a website can only track you when your computer is making requests to that company’s servers. So why are everyone’s panties in a bunch about Facebook? In making such an excellent sharing platform, Facebook has also created an incentive for me, as a content provider, to make it as easy for visitors to share my content as possible, such as placing a Facebook “like” button right on my website. And what does the “like” button do? It makes your computer contact Facebook’s servers every time you view a page on my website, thereby enabling them to – dum! dum! DUM!! – know you are visiting my website!

So what can you do about it? Well, there are several browser features and plugins that allow control over “third party cookies” (cookies not coming from or being read by the website you are actually on). There are many, but one that I’ve recently discovered and like is Ghostery. It gives fine control over which tracking services you will allow to track you and which not. Why would you want to allow some services? Mainly so that the social sharing buttons – which are useful sometimes – will actually work.

The other option is to use a “private browsing” feature of your web browser to open up an anonymous browser window. Safari, Firefox and Chrome will all do this. Of course then you’ll be logged out of all internet services and you won’t have any of the benefits that cookies have been providing you. Go try out private browsing mode and notice how the internet works differently, and you’ll understand what cookies help do.

Targeted Ads

As I mentioned earlier, Facebook is an expert in targeting ads. But here’s an offline example to compare online ad targeting to.

Today in the mail, we received a coupon for some wet wipes designed for kids learning to use the toilet and wipe themselves. As far as targeted marketing goes, that was a hit right on the bullseye! The advertising agency probably got our address because my wife signed up for a store membership card when we bought a changing table almost three years ago. Has my privacy been breached? Hardly.

All Facebook or Google might learn from you visiting this page is that perhaps you like Spain, and they can infer to offer you some all inclusive deals for a Spanish vacation or something. Not such a bad thing.

Conclusion

Yes, companies like Google and Facebook can track you in the same way that a credit card or a store membership card can track you. If you’re an undercover spy or terrorist or something, then you probably already know not to use any of these internet services with your real name anyway. If you’re planning on murdering your spouse with cyanide, then you might want to consider taking some steps to protect your anonymity before Googling how to get your hands on the stuff. But for the rest of us, the tracking that cookies provide is actually a good thing, in that it tailors ads to stuff you might actually be interested in. I don’t need to see ads for rifle scopes or parakeet cages because I’m never going to buy one. Why not choose see stuff you are interested in?

I’m aware that the “privacy doesn’t matter if you have nothing to hide” argument is totally vacuous, but I don’t think a hardline stance against all cookies and social networking is a reasonable extreme, either.

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A few months ago, I placed an ad on Facebook, mainly as an experiment to satisfy my curiosity about how their advertising system works. It was a few days before the British royal wedding, and I had done up a silly little photoshopped image of the bride and groom with their faces swapped, so I decided to see how much traffic I could drive to that page. I told Facebook I was willing to spend up to $10 on the ad over three days (I ended up pulling the plug, curiosity quenched, after spending only $8). Then I got to select who the ad was presented to…and that’s when things got creepy.

Because of all the causes and opinion crap that people “like” on Facebook, I was able to choose to only show my ad to people who liked any of the following pages/causes/ideas:

• Royal Wedding
• William and Kate
• Celebrity Face Swapping
• Kate Middleton
• Prince William
• Princess Kate
• DOWN WITH THE ROYAL FAMILY!!
• WE HATE KATE – Britons Against Kate Middleton

I don’t remember them exactly, but that’s about what they were like. I chose both pro and anti-royal people since both might have liked the image. In the end, the page got 78 likes, an order of magnitude more than I’ve ever received for anything else, aside from this entire blog.

What was really fascinating to me was how many options and combinations were available to Facebook advertisers. If you wanted to target an ad at the subset of society of “seventh-day adventists that love Mitt Romney, Sesame Street, Astrology, Keanu Reeves, and Scuba Diving”, Facebook can actually produce those people for you to advertise to. That’s immense marketing power.

But is it a breach of privacy? Not really. Facebook only knows what you tell them, and they only want that information to facilitate your consumerism.

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Yesterday I bought, downloaded, and read Sam Harris’ new e-book, Lying. (No, really, I did!) It was a quick read. Amazon lists its “print length” at 26 pages. While not as thought-provoking or groundbreaking as Harris’ full length books, it did make me consider how honesty and dishonesty affect my life. It was definitely worth my two dollars.

That’s right; it only costs $1.99, and it’s only available in e-book format.

This is the first “book” of its kind that I’ve seen on Amazon. It straddles the gap between essay/article/blog entry and full length book. I like the idea that someone can write thirty pages and then charge a small fee for people to download it. Obviously this won’t work for all genres or authors. If what you want is for your ideas to reach the largest number of people, then you’d better be giving your words away for free. But if you’ve spent a few weeks polishing your too-short-for-a-book thoughts on a topic, and are already a respected author or person that people will want to hear from, then it seems like a great way to make a little money for your troubles.

Apple has already shown the value of pricing music and software down at the $1 level; consumers are much less picky about deciding what to buy when the prices are so low. It will be interesting to see if other authors begin publishing shorter works, perhaps single short stories, as electronic books.

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Americano en Colindres

Erik Rasmussen cuelga en la red su particular punto de vista sobre la realidad española

Erik Rasmussen es la otra cara de la moneda. Si a veces a los españoles nos cuesta imaginarnos cómo es un país desconocido, no digamos cómo será para los foráneos imaginar el nuestro.

Erik Rasmussen es un estadounidense que lleva seis años viviendo en España, en Colindres (Cantabria), pero escribe en inglés. Nada más llegar, y ante la temible pérdida de contacto con su familia, abrió un blog: American in Spain (erikras.com), cuya principal fuente de lectores son ellos, los Rasmussen que ha dejado atrás.

El blog de Erik no es de los más transitados de la red, ni de los que más seguidores tienen en Twitter, pero sí es abundante en contenido. Es, de alguna forma, una correspondencia transatlántica íntima, pero a la vista de todos, y subraya, además, todas esas pequeñas perlas de nuestra tierra que no hacen más que escapársenos a simple vista.

Por ejemplo: Erik opina que los españoles no sabemos utilizar las rotondas, y lo explica en una extensísima entrada, fotos incluidas, en las que detalla para sus congéneres la «peculiar» manera de circular por estos lugares. O la querencia que tenemos por esos gatos dorados de saludo sempiterno que venden los chinos. O la relación de su hija -está casado con una española- con su próxima hermana. O el poco espacio que una aerolínea deja entre asiento y asiento. Todo desarrolladísimo: incluso detalla para lectores poco enterados la polémica que salpicó al jugador del F.C. Barcelona Sergio Busquets en mayo de este año, cuando una cámara le captó lanzándole la palabra «mono» o «morro» al madridista Marcelo.
Erik Rasmussen es una especie de corresponsal extranjero, de veraneo permanente (un fan de las tapas), transatlántico y con un particular gracejo. Desde Colindres, con color.

Now in English:

American in Colindres

Erik Rasmussen publishes, on his personal web page, his own point of view on Spanish reality

Erik Rasmussen is the other side of the coin. If sometimes it’s hard for us Spaniards to imagine how it would be in an unknown country, how it must be for foreigners to imagine our country.

Erik Rasmussen is an American who has been living in Spain for six years, in Colindres (Cantabria), but he writes in English. As soon as he arrived, to counter the frightful loss of contact with his family, he opened a blog: American in Spain (erikras.com), whose primary readers are the Rasmussens he left behind.

Erik’s blog is not one of the most visited on the internet, nor the one with the most Twitter followers, but it has abundant content. It is, in some form, an intimate transatlantic correspondence, but available for everyone to see, and it furthermore underlines all those little pearls of our land that easily escape our notice.

For example: Erik thinks that we Spaniards don’t know how to use roundabouts, and he explains it in a very extensive entry, with photos, in which he details, for his counterparts, the “peculiar” way people circulate in these places. Or our haunting of those golden eternally waving cats that are sold in the Chinese shops. Or the relationship between his daughter – he’s married to a Spaniard – with her next sister. Or the lack of space an airline leaves between seats. Everything is extremely well developed: including the detail for uninformed readers about the scandal that dirtied F.C. Barcelona player Sergio Busquets in May of this year, when a camera caught him shooting the word “mono” or “morro” at the Madrid player Marcelo.

Erik Rasmussen is a species of expat correspondent, on permanent summer vacation (a fan of tapas), transatlantic and with his own wit. From Colindres, with color.

To Alejandro Carantoña, let me know if you ever want an interview or a foreigner perspective on something. You can contact me by commenting on this blog.

UPDATE: This article was in El Diario Vasco (The Basque Daily) too!

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Twitter

Twitter is a bit like microblogging; you spit out your stream of interesting observations, and people can either choose to listen to you or not. This form of sharing is most useful for celebrities or corporations or brands, who can market new products or offers on best last minute holidays or whatever. But it can also be a fun to meet new likeminded people. I like the laissez-faire, Darwinian nature of it, where, if you tweet things that are interesting enough to a lot of people, eventually you will get a lot of people listening to you.

This is the equivalent of “Public” sharing on Google+. I suspect that most of my posts on Google+ will be marked as public since I will be duplicating most of the content on Twitter, and I have a general aversion to restricted sharing.

For Google+ to completely obsolete Twitter – which I don’t think will happen soon – it would need some form of tagging, because sometimes Twitter hashtags can be quite fun and useful.

Facebook

When I first started using Google+, I was confused why I wasn’t having to accept anyone’s “friend request”. I just got notified that people were “adding me to their circles”, and without my permission! The problem was that I was still thinking with a Facebook mindset. Facebook demands a bidirectional relationship. If I don’t explicitly agree that you can listen to my posts, then you can’t.

The closest equivalent to this on Google+ is to share content to “Your circles” (e.g. everyone that you have agreed to be friends with, though not necessarily that have agreed to be friends with you!). This is a good default setting for anyone moving from Facebook to Google+. Of course you can further restrict your sharing to any arbitrary subset of your Google+ connections.

Conclusion

Any time someone comes along with a new way of doing things, it’s a bit jarring. The more I understand Google+’s circle system, the more I like it, with the exception of being excluded from posts I would be interested in that the poster thinks I wouldn’t. I think that Google’s circles are simple enough for anyone to understand, but complex and customizable enough to allow for a very fine level of control for its users. Google+ is still in its infancy and is lacking many, many features that will be needed to permanently pull users away from its competitors, but I see a lot of potential and nothing spurs innovation like some good healthy competition.

In the interest of brevity, I have simplified the privacy settings on Twitter and Facebook for this post to the way that I personally have my accounts set up.

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One thing Google+ is using circles for is to allow you to optionally restrict who can see your status updates to only certain circles. While on the surface, this seems like a good idea, after giving it a little thought, I’m convinced that it is an inherently bad idea.

Other Interests

One of my favorite things about Facebook is that it gives me insights into other corners of people’s lives that they normally might not share with me. I love seeing photos from a marathon that someone has run or hearing about their time participating in a civil war reenactment. With Google+, those are exactly the kinds of posts that they might restrict to their subset of friends that they think are interested in those activities. The unrestricted “fire hose” format of sharing is one of the advantages of online social networking over how offline relationships work, where people only talk to you about things you have in common. Sometimes you end up finding a common interest with someone that you would never have found if you weren’t sharing your entire self with everyone.

Opposing Views

I have this one Facebook friend that loves to read books about and post quotations supporting the myth that the United States’ Founding Fathers were all Christians and wanted the US to be an inherently Christian nation. This is one of my pet peeves because the profound intelligent foresight of the Founding Fathers to divorce government from religion is one of the things I most respect about them. So I butt rhetorical horns with this friend whenever I can. Most of his quotations can be found to be frauds simply by searching on Snopes, but others are genuine and need counterexamples. My point with this anecdote is that, using Google+, this friend would most likely only post his “Jefferson was a Baptist” nonsense to his likeminded churchgoers and never get any other viewpoints, resulting in a filter bubble, a polarizing ideology-strengthening echo chamber that’s not good for anyone.

Filter When Reading, Not Sharing

I love the idea of being able to filter my feed by circles. Back when I was using the Nambu Twitter client, one of the things I loved about it was the ability to categorize my followees into groups. I’d never miss a tweet from someone in my “Friends” group, but would often just “mark all as read” for the entire “Celebs” group. It was great. I had progressive cascading layers of contacts that, depending on how much time I had for social media consumption, I’d read in order from “most important to me” all the way down to Ashton Kutcher.

The way I think social media works best is to share everything to everybody and then let each consumer filter their incoming feeds by what is important to them. Google+, should it win its battle with Facebook, may ruin what is most beautiful about online social networking.

Why Google Won’t Change This

After thinking about this issue a bit more, it occurred to me why Google has done this…and it’s not to make a better user experience. You see, Facebook collects information about you based on which links you click on in your feed. If it notices that you tend to click on political stories hosted by entities owned by News Corp, it’s a pretty good bet that you’re politically conservative, and thus, they can show you ads targeted at political conservatives.

This is where Google’s genius insight comes in. On Facebook, in order for them to gather subtle ad-targeting information about you, you must actually use Facebook. On Google+, on the other hand… Say you sign up for Google+ just to check it out, but aren’t that big into online social networking and you never go back. You’d think they couldn’t collect information about your interests, right? Wrong. With this new circle-restricted sharing, they can! Let’s say that three of your Google+ friends share links about pottery and restrict them to circles that you are in. Voila! Google can deduce that you are interested in pottery and can, if you are logged into Google, show you pottery related ads on any website using Google Adsense across the internet. Your friends, not just you, are giving Google information about you by using circle-restricted sharing.

The advertising genius behind this subtle social networking “feature” is astonishing. After all, advertising is where Google’s revenue comes from. Let’s just hope that Facebook doesn’t borrow this idea and ruin their free spigot of social sharing.

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