Googleheimer – Markus rantet und fasst die aktuellen Probleme mit/für Google zusammen.
I have nothing to say, really.
Fuck off.
Public spaces
Does it really need to be explained why all this is bad? The courts have spent centuries determining reasonable limits of free speech in public settings: we don’t need private corporations absorbing the public sphere, providing governments and themselves easy mechanisms to marginalize anyone unwilling or unable to play nice inside the walled gardens.
Rob Beschizza – Why we shouldn’t let Google (or anyone else) claim their private services are public spaces
Bookmarks for November 24th through November 26th
- inessential.com: The Readable Future
- The beatings will continue until morale improves – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- @icedsoul
- Wie ich das Geld auf der Straße fand und was ich damit tat nachdem ich es gefunden hatte – Hackety hack hack
- "Zinsen einer negativen Aufmerksamkeitsökonomie"
- Queryology: Googles ehemaliges Geschäftsmodell | ctrl+verlust
- 500px / Photo "***" by Igor Makarov
Bookmarks for October 31st through November 1st
- Wohnen: Think mini | Lebensart | ZEIT ONLINE
- Country von Jeff Bridges: Es gibt immer ein Pferd, das noch geritten werden muss
- Und plötzlich ist das Internet da
- sv1ILT
- Racism in Tech
- Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? – >*
- → The New-World Economy of a Modern Magazine, or, A Single-dip
- Google Reader Gets The Google Plus Treatment
- Bummer.
Google Reader
We haven’t quite seen yet what exactly is going to happen with the redesign of the Google Reader but that blogpost did not look good at all and people are rightfully unhappy about it. It sure looks like Google Reader has to pay the strategy tax and get rid of features in the hope to lure people to use Google+.
And yes, I am a bit worried. Google Reader is by a far margin my most used site on the web.
Give him a mask.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Oscar Wilde
hackr+
das ist zwar nicht besonders sozial, aber ich hasse das geschnatter von leuten, die ich nicht kenne, das aber in meinen strom gespült wird und das teilweise die idiosynkratischen nettigkeiten zum unangenehmen hin verstärkt.
Google+
So, since yesterday I’m on Google+ and unlike their previous attempts at “social”1 I really like it and judged from the activity by the folks in my circles I’m not the only one.
There’s basically just one thing missing – some kind of multilingualism thing. I’ve talked about it before and it’s pretty obvious at Google+ where I’m basically connected to Geeks worldwide – and the German ones prefer to use German, while basically everybody else uses English. Now I won’t comment on that, except that it makes things a bit complicated and slightly annoying with comments and posts.
And as I said on Dirk’s post about that problem: who, if not Google could build something that either automatically or via a tagging option, could check the language of posts and comments and offer an option to have the text instantly translated to whatever language the user wants? I’d very much like that.
- Someone smarter than me should write something on how this word changed in the last couple of years. [↩]
Soccer Moms
Lately I get invited to soccer practice a lot.
It seems like Google Calendar and/or Android is finding it’s way to soccer moms. And when those add “Dominik” to their new calendar entry “Soccer Training” Google is trying to be smart, adds “@gmail.com” to that name and sends me an invitation.
Nobody is amused. Especially not the soccer moms who I keep asking if they will pay my express flight ticket to the USA.
Potemkin Extension
Google just released their new Chrome Extension which makes it possible to hide results from certain websites in your result pages. Now one might think: “Awesome” and many do, but basically the Extension is nothing too exciting – basically it loads the results, stupid content farm content1 and all and then iterates over them and removes the matched results. Something that a good JavaScript developer might have done with Greasemonkey.
I was hoping – and I guess many people understand it that way – that the filtering moves to the server-side. The way it is now, some result pages might be completely blank, if all results are from blocked domains.
- Department of Redundancy Department [↩]
How to rescue your WordPress-Tag-Feeds when using the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin
It’s quite popular to use the FeedSmith-Plugin when using FeedBurner with WordPress.1 There is just one little problem: as Google themselves say on their webpage:
Please note that “tag” feeds in later WordPress versions are not supported.
Which just goes to show that they’re a bunch of lazy bums. All you need to do to make the feeds for tags work again is to change this line:
111 | if (is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() && $wp->query_vars['category_name'] == '' && ($withcomments != 1) && trim($feedburner_settings['feedburner_url']) != '') { |
into this:
111 | if (is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() && $wp->query_vars['category_name'] == '' && $wp->query_vars['tag'] == '' && ($withcomments != 1) && trim($feedburner_settings['feedburner_url']) != '') { |
in the FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin.php.
Voila.
- Yay, CamelCase! Well, you’re at LostFocus. Duh. [↩]
Sociocultural Ignorance
As it turns out, the way we can all express ourselves on Facebook today is literally constrained by the limits of what Mark Zuckerberg can see.
Anil Dash in The Facebook Reckoning, a blog post both a response to and an elaboration on the quote within this article in the New Yorker The Face of Facebook
So Google is so awesome that the company has to pause so the rest of the world can catch its breath? And we’re all so stupid that Google geniuses have to “hold our hands” as they explain things?
Mike Elgan wonders Why is Google so condescending?
It’s quite a socio-cultural dilemma isn’t it? Privileged kid builds something with major consequences but quite possibly unintentionally overlooks the possibility that harm may be done by people who have things to hide.
Clint Boulton wraps it up: Facebook, Google Arrogance Points to Sociocultural Ignorance and closes with: