Anyone using the internet a decade ago–when AOL was still relevant and adding version numbers to The Web wasn’t even a thought–will surely have noticed a change in the landscape of comments. A nonexistant phenomenon at first, websites slowly opened their doors to commentators, and now the internet is overrun by them. Unfortunately, as the number of comments has grown, so has the quality of comments dropped. Matt Haughey sketches some possible causes for comment degradation over at A Whole Lotta Nothing, and (ironically?) a long list of readers provide high-quality responses.

Haughey’s sentiments are summed up in his deriding comments as “just another content management feature available to you on the web.” Though Huaghey hints at the technology being the problem, he actually lays blame on the audience, saying:

I’m starting to think there’s this “new generation” that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you’d never say anything in a comment that you wouldn’t say to a friend’s face.

A good scratch at the surface, but the mystery runs deeper, and it takes a few dozen comments to take the argument to further, more insightful ends. The audience’s attitude is important, but that attitude is shaped by the available technology and the context in which that technology is used.

As Haughey points out, technology has enabled comments to be added to a website with no thought at all. This has resulted in almost every blog to have a comment system, and a majority of comments to be of “poor quality”. A lot of blogs are of “poor quality” as well, so it is not surprising that comments are no different. Lowering the barrier of entry means letting in both the intelligentsia and the idiots.

But the technology deal cuts both ways. It is easier than ever to comment, and it is easier than ever to blog. As Brad says, “the big problem with comments is most people who want to engage thoughtfully with blogs and bloggers already have their own outlets (blogs/twitter/facebook, etc).” Your mileage may vary with this argument, but you could easily find examples in big name bloggers like Jason Kottke and John Gruber. Really any “cabinet of curiosities” blog with an abundance of links and commentary is an example of someone who took their good comments and turned them into an independent blog instead.

Thirdly, technology’s deficits also play a role. With the proliferation of blogs, and the move away from relatively few structured communities (newsgroups, forums), user identity is becoming more and more fractured. Even when entering the same personal information for each comment on ten different websites, there is no system setup to link one comment to another. On ten different websites, I am ten different Spencer Sugarmans. OpenID is a start, but a million more things need to happen to get from where things are (multiple usernames) to where things need to be (decentralized tracking of user activity). (One of those “million more things” being reconciling the need for community with the need for privacy.) Some grand solution would turn the internet into a single, giant conversation.

Lastly, technology aside, why do we even care about comments? Originally, grandiosely, comments acted as “a conversation between the reader and the author of the original post.” comments falling into this category are generally labeled as “good quality”. “Poor quality” comments, on the other hand, are usually short, off the cuff, and add little in the way of meaningful dialogue. Disregarding spam and flames, “poor” comments are pretty much the linguistic equivalent of an upvote (or downvote) on Reddit or Digg. They scream “I visited!”

But this use of the commenting system is hardly unreasonable. Spurred on by sites like Reddit and Digg, comments have become a system for feedback, showing website owners their users in ways Google Analytics can’t. And often dialogue is not disregarded in total, but shifted from a conversation between the reader and the author to a conversation betwen the reader and another reader. “A place to argue amongst themselves, quite independently of the author and his ad impressions,” as Nick says.

Of course, “good quality” comments still exist (look at this recent Hacker News thread), and are even flourishing. But so are the new kind of comments, at an exponential rate. The crap found below the videos on YouTube is an unavoidable result of changing technology, but this is only the public face of commenting. Thousands of blogs incite deep, meaningful conversations; it is just a matter of slogging through the mud to find the gold.

Tired of Google’s stagnant, antiquated approach to search, a group of ex-Googlers and other techies have opened up their own shop: Cuil.com.

Pronounced “cool”, the Cuil search engine has an index spanning 121 billion web pages, and operates by comparing your keyword to the rest of a page’s contents instead of relying on “superficial popularity metrics”. This mechanism calls to mind the semantic web, but Cuil’s About page is too ambiguous to tell for sure how Cuil works.

What is sure is that Cuil’s team sees their engine as the future of search. Anna Patterson, who moved to Google after building the search engine used by Internet Archive, has low hopes for Google. From CNN Money:

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company’s approach to search. “Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now,” she said, “and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now.”

With these bold words and the talent behind them, as well as Cuil’s claim to fame of indexing a hypothesized three times as many web pages as Google, it is hard dismiss this Google contender along with all the others. But even a cursory glance at the engine’s functionality shows a less-than-polished product without much bite.

A lot of people have been finding massive differences in the number of search results between Cuil versus Google. An interesting example is found in “banana” and its French translation “banane”. “Banana” returns 47 million results in Cuil versus 97 million in Google, while “banane” closes the lead a little bit by returning 5 million results versus 11 million (though still roughly the same percentage-wise). A clear numbers win for Google, but dig a little deeper and you see Cuil vastly improving within only 24 hours since its launch. PontifexPrimus originally found only 15 million results for “banana”, and none at all for “banane” (unless you, curiously, turned Safe Search off).

Of course, the raw number of search results is much less important than the number of useful results. Unfortunately, Cuil falters here as well. Searching for “Spencer Sugarman” on Google returns maybe every individual website I am involved with, all on the front page. Cuil, on the other hand, returns 10 links to Undress Me Robot, and 1 link to an article about Burt Sugarman. The “banana” search mentioned above is much better, providing many relevant and unique results. But what Cuil fails to do on any search I have tried is surpass the quality of Google’s results. Instead, all they manage so far is to land somewhere along the spectrum of Much Worse to As Good.

This is likely to change. It is difficult to tell whether Cuil is incorporating changes as its engine is stress-tested, or if the learning is built-in, but either way the engine seems to be improving. If Cuil expands its hardware to ward against the downtime problems they were experiencing yesterday, and continues improving its search results, the search engine could soon stand strong against Google. But as CNN points out, Google’s immense power as a brand means winning will take a lot more than just marginally better search results or a slicker design.

Cuil.com - new search engine built by ex-Googlers and boasting an index three times as large as Google. More soon.

Baby’s First Internet - It’s not your job to right a wrong // just mark it FAIL and move along.

Paul Graham posts venture capital firm Y Combinator’s Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund. The list is 30 ideas long, and covers a wide breadth, from ousting Microsoft from their monopolizing grasp on office software (#11) to “[doing] to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica” (#23).

Hit refresh for another image. If you’re not saying ‘Om Nom Nom Nom’ out loud at the same time as looking at these pictures then you’re doing it wrong.

© 2008 The Artists of Om Nom Nom Nom

What the fuck, Internet? Why are you so boring?

With reverence to the great activists of the 1960s, Belgian “politician” Tania Derveaux wants to steal the cherry of any net-neutrality supporter. “In history, man has always waged war for freedom,” she says. “Now it’s time to obtain our freedom with love.”

So….if you are an able-bodied defender of internet freedom looking for love in the least likely of places, click “get laid” to arrange a private intimate meeting.

The terms of service are pretty lenient, with a small emphasis on safety and hardly a stringent policy on corroborating the applicant’s virginity or opinion on net neutrality. (Also, it is pretty optimistic: “due to time limitations each performance can last no longer than 30 minutes.” Derveaux has such hope for her virgin audience.)

Of course, the whole thing is a farce. Some of you should remember her from last year’s promise to hand out 400,000 blowjobs. The same promise that ended with a virtual blowjob by her “Asian assistant” via YouTube. I imagine this charade will end similarly.

Surprisingly, the Don’t Stay A Virgin website is entirely lacking in any information on net neutrality. After going through the trouble of flashing some sex in your face to grab your attention, one would hope that attention would be put to good use. Alas not.

So as it stands, this is a publicity gimmick (which I apologize for perpetuating) with no substance behind it. A few links or articles would go a long way in pulling Derveaux out of the realm of internet skank grasping for page views.

April Fool’s Day on the Web: 2008 - My dead hard drive wasn’t so funny, but some of the pranks up so far are superb. YouTube UK has some pretty great Featured Videos worth checking out. And it’s no time machine, but Google finally let’s us search into the future and send emails yesterday.

The Web Standards Project has released the newest version of their Acid tests, “a line of tests designed to expose flaws in the implementation of mature Web standards in Web browsers.” Basically, there are 100 things a browser needs to do, and it gains a point for each thing it manages to do. It is not the end-all-be-all in how successful a browser is, but it does a striking job of illuminating just how terrible some browsers are.

Notably, every version of Internet Explorer does horrendously; nothing surprising considering IE 8 will be the first version to seriously adhere to web standards. However, most current browsers fail the test, but there are a number of shining beacons being built.

First and foremost is Safari, the default Mac browser. The current stable release doesn’t fair so well (39/100), but the current nightly (developer release) manages an astounding 90/100. It’s not perfect yet, but it is far beyond the 67/100 of Firefox 3 Beta 4 and 61/100 of Opera 9.5.

Safari is likely to stay ahead of the pack for awhile, as Firefox will never pass without major architectural changes and Opera is unlikely to pass until version 10 is released. But again, though Acid3 is the test for web standards compatibility, there is obviously much more to browsing than the simple rendering of the page. Speed and security are two entirely reasonable aspects for a browser maker to focus on over standards.

Take the Acid3 test yourself, and see how your browser inevitably crashes and burns.

I have been avoiding all the brouhaha over the new version of Internet Explorer, but I feel compelled to inform that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is now available. Download at your own risk, though; the comments alone are a cautionary tale of grave proportions. (Really, maybe this should have been IE 8 Alpha 1.)

What brouhaha? Version targeting. The new feature was announced over at A List Apart, and quickly stirred up a lot of ire among bloggers (Digital Web Magazine collects all or most of the reactions) and lemurs. The gist? Version targeting is lame.

My opinion is that (1) it seems too cumbersome to really work, and (2) who cares about Internet Explorer? Microsoft needs to scrap the whole browser department, and just package Opera or Firefox with Windows.

Chez Pazienza: Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career:

As far as CNN (and to be fair, the mainstream TV press in general) believes, it still sits comfortably at the top of the food chain, unthreatened by any possibility of a major paradigm shift being brought to bear by a horde of little people with laptops and opinions. Although the big networks recognize the need to appeal to bloggers, they don’t fear them — and that means that they don’t respect them. Corporate-think dictates that the mainstream television press as a monstrous multi-headed hydra is the ultimate news authority and therefore is in possession of the one and only hotline to the ghosts of Murrow and Sevareid. Sure those bloggers are entertaining, but in the end they’re really just insects who either feed off the carcasses of news items vetted through various networks or, when they do break stories, want nothing more than to see themselves granted an audience by the kingmakers on television.

This, of course, is horseshit.

Two weeks ago, CNN fired Chez Pazienza for his blogging under his real name. The atrociously antiquated employee handbook states “any writing done for a ‘non-CNN outlet’ must be run through the network’s standards and practices department,” and CNN seems to have a history of exercising the rule without discretion. More than evidence of the company’s ridiculous bureaucracy, the story and ones like it illuminate the company’s unfortunate hypocrisy.

CNN’s willingness to fire someone like Jacki tells you everything you need to know about how backward the network’s thinking is when it comes to new media. It pays more lip-service to bloggers and their internet realm than any other mainstream media outlet, but in the end that’s really all it is — lip-service.

Sadly, the criticisms of conventional news media cannot be confined to its dealings with the internet and New Media. The problems are more fundamental, stemming from the overwhelming focus on profit margins that permeates every major corporation. It would be impossible to underestimate the effect this has on network news reporting. When news is seen as a necessary evil — barely profitable but wanted by all the target demographics — strict objectivity is thrown out the window. What stories are reported, and how they are reported, instantly changes.

During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what’s worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, “What can we do to not lead with Iraq?” — the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn’t always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I’d “increased shareholder value.” (For the record, if you’re a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word “shareholders,” let alone be reminded that you’re beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public — to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up — and that’s not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.

Pazienza’s lengthy diatribe is largely depressing, as any bitterly honest look at network news is likely to be. But it ends on an uplifting note. As more and more households gain access to the internet, conventional news media will become increasingly irrelevant. Until the fateful day, though, when we can cast off the entrenched Old Guard, people need to constantly call them on their shit.

Awhile back I was watching a great documentary on the birth of the punk scene, it closed with former Black Flag frontman and current TV host Henry Rollins saying these words: “All it takes is one person to stand up and say ‘fuck this.’”

I truly hope so, because I’m finally doing just that.

And I should’ve done it a long time ago.

Amen.

Wikileaks, “an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis”, has been silenced by a U.S. court order. The organization has worked to provide an anonymous forum for anyone looking to expose unethical behavior in governments or corporations. Bank Julius Baer, which requested the order, seems to have gotten upset after being accused of laundering Kenyan corruption money by documents posted on wikileaks.org.

The order has caused the removal of the wikileaks.org URL from the DNS hosting records, resulting in “Server not found” messages for anyone attempting to visit the address. Luckily, the website’s IP address remains usable (http://88.80.13.160/), as well as a long list of public cover names. The main server is being bogged down by traffic (no press is bad press!), but some of the various cover URLs resolve to mirrors of the Wikileaks site.

That a Swedish bank and its subsidiary could reach into the United States to bring down this site’s domain name in such short time…it’s astounding. The harassment is bringing Wikileaks much deserved attention, but at too great a price. Hopefully the wikileaks.org URL will be reinstated. The site will do fine without it, but ethics and a true commitment to freedom of speech demand its return.

More on the court injunction is available at the site.

The emerging media snack culture is featured in the latest issue of Wired. Given the popularity of link aggregators (kottke.org, Metafilter, etc.), instant messaging, highlight reels, television show video clips, and any number of other bite-size media bits you can think of, Nancy Miller argues pop culture now comes quick, easy to eat packages like cookies or chips. The logic is a bit dubious, but you have to love any article that describes the 10 Commandments as “Biblical PowerPoint” in its Epic History of Snack Culture. Also worth mentioning: the Snack Online section has some good links.

Of course, the whole “Manifesto for a New Age” seems a bit tongue-in-cheek; a simple lead-in for the other sections. Thankfully, Wired isn’t lost in its own bullshit. Ending the “Snack Attack!” feature is an editorial by Steven Johnson “in praise of the full meal. “Snack culture is an illusion,” he states, and rightly so. I recently finished watching the third season of The Wire (coincidentally, considering how often Johnson references it), and it is a prime example of how our culture is not turning into a snack culture. Where do shows like The Wire, with complex and intelligent characters and storylines that span over weeks and months, fit into snack culture?

I again agree here with Johnson when he says “we have more snacks now only because the menu itself has gotten longer.” As I see it, with the inundation of new ways to proliferate media, the whole media-sphere as has grown. In fact, all of the bite-sized video clips, highlight reels, sound bytes, and weightless television shows are foils to the page-spanning blog posts, 120-minute-long film opuses, and intricate television dramas. I, for one, am even thankful for the rest the snack media gives my brain after reading one of the newest linked articles on 3 Quarks Daily.

The one thing Johnson’s editorial doesn’t address is one of the main roles some snacks have come to play. He mentions “a more nuanced awareness of the right length for different kinds of cultural experiences,” but media like the link aggregators and video clips mentioned earlier go beyond length. Websites like video blog onegoodmove or Activate, a weekly news review, seek to pare down the available mass of information (news shows and world news, respectively) into a few, most interesting parts, but they are not replacements for non-snack media, and do not really intend for their audiences to get to them and just stop. Conversely, onegoodmove has room for discussion and links to external articles, while Activate always litters its news summaries with links to in-depth articles from major news sources.

Link aggregators work the same way. As of September 26, 2005, Google reported having over 8 billion pages indexed (but some trickiness showed Google to actually have at least 13 billion pages indexed), and I think it is safe to assume that over 15 billion pages have been indexed by now. Whether by the power of the masses or intrepid web surfers, link aggregators sift through these billions of pages and find the gold. Furthermore, this gold can be anything from bite-sized to king-sized (oh I am a consumer whore). Intelligent blogs like 3 Quarks Daily and Cosmic Variance epitomize the latter, with posts and links that sometimes take quite awhile to read and wrap your head around.

So, yes, pop culture in bite-sized pieces is being churned at an increasing rate these days, but so are the full meals. There’s enough media out there in any size piece to give you exactly what you’re looking for, so don’t feel guilty about having a quick snack every now and then, but fine dining is cheap these days. Don’t be afraid to get some good, worthwhile media in your diet. And in case you didn’t get it: go watch The Wire. Now.

A chart showing every instance of the phrase “is the new” from various sources. Confused? “____ is the new black” is a snowclone catchphrase from 2005 “used to indicate the sudden popularity or versatility of an idea at the expense of the popularity of a second idea.” My favorite? i is the new e. Har har har.

2008 Update: Barack Obama is your new bicycle!