A Content-Provided World

I live in a content-provided world. TiVo faithfully records all my shows. The comic book store reserves all the titles I read. My newsreader checks the websites I like. LiveJournal collects my friends. I never have to go out and find anything. Information arrives in prescribed doses, pretending that the world is built to deliver media tailored to my tastes.

But the danger of having the whole world at your fingertips is that you never have to find out what’s beyond arm’s reach. There’s probably a lot out there.

Marie Ely

I never knew my paternal grandmother. She died at age 32 when my dad was five. A few years ago he started going through and collecting her poetry. She had always wanted to become a published author, but only got one small work out before the leukemia set in. For my dad, reading her poetry has been a way to get to meet the mother he never had a chance to get to know.

Over the past few months I’ve helped him set up a website so that people can read about her. Though I’m sure internet publishing isn’t what she had in mind when she wrote the poems, it has at least let me get to know her. Much of the work is dark, referring to a failed romance, fear of getting involved with my grandfather, and sadness over knowing she was going to die and leave two small children.

The site is up at www.marieely.com. There’s also a collection of black and white photographs and low-res scans of the Sacred Paintings she wrote about, her only published work.

How far above or below the Mason Dixon Line is your accent?

How far above or below the Mason Dixon Line is your accent?

The Meaning of Jesus’ Suffering: What Mel Missed

My dad sent me an interesting article today that discusses the most important difference between The Passion of the Christ and the Gospel: the Gospel glosses over all the suffering. While Passion will probably do a great job at depicting how terrible a thing to die on a cross would be, the Gospels themselves don’t focus on it. It wasn’t until many years later that Christian rhetoric centered on the suffering instead of the sacrifice.

[To focus on the details of the crucifixion] would be as odd as welcoming home a wounded soldier, and instead of focusing on the victory he won, dwelling on the exact moment the bayonet pierced his stomach, how it felt and what it looked like. A human soldier might well feel annoyed with such attention to his weakness rather than his strength. He would feel that it better preserved his dignity for visitors to avert their eyes from such details, and recount that part of the story as scantly as possible to focus instead on the final achievement.

This is the sense we pick up in the Gospels. Jesus’ suffering is rendered in the briefest terms, as if drawing about it a veil of modesty. What’s important is not that Jesus suffered for us, but that Jesus suffered for us.

Of course, the film’s purpose is to tell the story to modern audiences for whom suffering is an integral part of the tale, but the fact that it wasn’t at the time is interesting. Since the suffering is now such a big part of the Passion, I wonder if one could say that it doesn’t mean the same thing it did 2000 years ago. And if it doesn’t, wouldn’t that bring huge theological consequences if our culture has rewritten the single focal point for our faith? Are we getting it wrong?

Go read: beliefnet: The Meaning of Jesus’ Suffering — Mel Gibson’s Passion Contrasted with Early Christian Thought

The Passion Controversy

It says a lot about a certain segment of Americans that people are worried a movie about Jesus, the figure of forgiveness, might provoke hate towards Jews, a group that had already been persecuted for thousands of years before His crucifixion. Apparently dying on a cross just wasn’t enough.

The Kerry Slate

Tuesday’s Slate article, Kerried Away – The myth and math of Kerry’s electability, discusses the problem of electing a candidate based on his perceived electability. It says:

How did Kerry win? By racking up a 4-to-1 advantage over Dean among voters who chose their candidate because “he can defeat George W. Bush in November.” Among voters who chose their candidate because “he agrees with you on the major issues,” Dean and Kerry were tied.

Let me say that again: Among voters who picked the candidate they wanted based on the issues, not the candidate they thought somebody else wanted, Kerry did not win the New Hampshire primary.

The problem is that voting for a candidate based on whether he can beat President Bush involves dangerously circular reasoning. People perceive John Kerry to be the most likely to beat the president, so they vote for him, making him the nominee not because they agree with him on the issue but because of a bandwagon impression that other people have confidence in him. If each voter selected the candidate who best matched up against his own stance on the issues, we’d end up with a candidate who best represented the beliefs of the voters. Instead, people seem to have forgone the spirit of representative democracy out of a drive to remove the sitting president from office at all costs.

Saletan goes on to point out that what’s going to matter is not who democrats believe can beat Bush but who gets the votes of moderate republicans and independents. The thinking is that since democrats are by large willing to vote “not Bush” no matter what, the most electable candidate is the one who can win over the undecided. While I disagree with this push toward to middle for the sole sake of ousting George W. Bush, I do strongly feel that there are a lot more people out there who disagree with the current administration than popular opinion holds.

The problem is figuring out what the non-vocal majority thinks. Saletan quotes exit polls from the past few weeks’ primaries, but I’m not sure this is a valid way to answer the question. There’s no way to know that independents and republicans showing up to vote in democratic primaries are voting their hearts. I’d actually assume that republicans voting in these elections are doing so to screw up the system. I myself, a democrat, voted for Howard Dean not because I want to see him elected (though I do like a lot of his issues), but because I think it’s important to keep him in the arena to encourage discourse.

2000’s race was a tie. I’m interested to see how far to the left or the right this country has swayed in four years. Has President Bush’s strongly conservative footing alienated everyone who had been on the fence?

Firefox 0.8

The Mozilla people released version 0.8 of Phoenix Firebird Firefox today. I know I’ve ranted about web browsers before, but to quickly summarize why you should be using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer: pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, Built-in Search, no major security flaws that let people steal your bank passwords, and standards compliance. True, two of those are features of the Google Toolbar, but they work better when integrated right into the program as opposed to as add-ons. As for why you should care about web standards compliance, it’s really a favor to web designers. When designing a page, you do a lot of work to make it pretty, and then once you’re done you usually spend another two or three days accounting for bugs in Internet Explorer and often dumbing down the page and making it less cool because Internet Explorer’s bugs cause too many problems. If everyone used a better browser, it would save me lots of aggrevation regarding The IE Factor, let you see better-looking pages, and save people money when their tech people have to spend days and days fixing bugs that shouldn’t occur. Windows users: go download Firefox — it has the daveXtreme seal of approval!

Attribution Etiquette

Simon Willison beat me to a point my mind had filed away when I read the same Wired article this morning: attribution is good etiquette. Nothing complicated there, just if you write about an idea or post a link to something, also include a link to where you found the idea. It helps propagate ideas by letting people trace conversations, gives credit to the person who gave you the idea, and helps the magic interconnectivity that’s supposed to make the web, well, a web.

Simon has a cool show referrer bookmarklet. To use, just drag it to your bookmark bar/menu. Click it and it’ll pop up a window giving you a link to the site that brought you to where you are now.

Pepsi and Free Music vs. Dental Health

Coca-Cola has always been, to my tastes, far superior to Pepsi-Cola. True, Pepsi has a hipper, music-oriented image, so I understand why Apple partnered up with it to give away free songs, but it’s just too damn sweet. When I went to the dentist two weeks ago, my hygenist said that my teeth looked great. And while I don’t like Pepsi nearly as much as Coke, if I’m going to spend my dollar on a bottle of sugar water I may as well have a one-in-three chance of winnig a free download. Turns out I’d rather have free music than a Coke and my smile.

Word from Katherine’s friend in dental school: don’t brush your teeth immediately after drinking soda. Rinse with some water first, or the brush will grate the sugar against your teeth because the sugar softens your enamel and the brush could damage it.

Smart Bookmarks

So here’s what happened: I had this post all thought out in my head about how whenever you bookmark a page your web browser should automatically check to see if that page has an RSS or Atom feed so that you’d only have to visit bookmarked pages if you knew they’d been updated. Then I found that OmniWeb 5 is already going to do that, and it comes out tomorrow. So while The Omni Group’s genius was a few months ahead of mine, I’m still going to write about why it’s a good idea.

Most people don’t use newsreaders. Even if one-click subscription worked well and using newsreaders brainlessly easy, it still wouldn’t make a lot of sense for most people to use a separate program for update notification. Obviously there are plenty of hardcore users who read hundreds of news feeds a day and want to be able to quickly scan through their sources, but most everyone else keeps it under seventy-five. Most people just want to be notified that a page they like has been updated. Most people would also prefer to read the page in its original context instead of as a stripped down version in a newsreader. Many pages often contain ancillary content that isn’t syndicated but readers might enjoy. Additionally, many sites are supported by advertising that doesn’t get syndicated into XML, so if readers visited the actual sites, they’d be doing their part in supporting the content provider. Jeffrey Zeldman argues very eloquently against reading pages in really simple syndicated formats:

[…] text alone does not equal content […] We can readily see the benefits of an RSS feed for BBC News, and it also makes sense on sites where page layout is primarily a delivery system for writing, as cigarettes are a delivery system for nicotine.

But most smokers would rather puff than inject nicotine, and most of us used to be as hungry to see a site as to read its words. RSS feeds may subtly discourage that impulse to seek, see, bookmark, and return.

That’s just a small quote; everyone should really go read the entire post. When you come back I think you’ll agree that in context content and form shouldn’t be separable. Power uses may still want to view everything in their newsreaders, but most people would rather get right to the page.

Comment notification

Assuming that OmniWeb’s smart bookmarks work like a charm, it’ll be easy to visit my favorite sites whenever they publish new articles. It’ll also be easy to participate in discussions on weblogs. But as I’ve said before, weblogs don’t do a very good job of keeping discussions going. Weblogs need comment notification. I had suggested that pages should automatically send out emails to let people know whenever new comments are left on a weblog post they’re interested in. xwhite pointed out that this would probably get out of hand. He says:

I’m still not 100% convinced that emails are what i want from subscribing. Ideally for me threads I have subscribed to would appear as something more like an alert/notification. A My Threads section maybe?

I see some problems with the emails too. […] If I went to lunch after commenting on say… 8 posts… I might have 40 emails that are now out of context and i’d have to open and close them each of them.

Also, you only need to know that a new comment has been left on a post, and wouldn’t really want one email per comment. So what you actually want is just to know that the page has been updated since you last visited it, which RSS aggregation would do perfectly (as Courtney suggests).

I usually don’t care about keeping up with comments on most of the posts I read, so I don’t want my aggregator to notify me whenever a comment is left on any post on a page. What I’d like to see is a smart bookmark folder just for comment feeds. Whenever I go to a site and find a thread that I want to watch, I could add it to this folder and my browser would keep a handy list of all the discussions I’m following. This way I’d stay up-to-date on the discussion, and the conversation could move much more quickly as people wouldn’t be simply forgetting to participate. People could stay involved in many threads at once while having notification handled by one centralized solution.