I used to be a digger of Digg, until I listened to one too many of episodes of Diggnation, the podcasts of its creators. I could only stand so much of Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht squirting beer out of their noses, their flaunting of their ignorance of the world beyond videogames and gee-whiz science, their endless ”good times” and boasts about their girlfriends and their gear.

Don’t get me wrong. Digg took colloborative blogging/commenting to a new level, they broke the mold, yada yada. Kevin and Alex deserved their place on the covers of tech-biz publications. But hearing the way the Digg founders talked and thought just helped to remind me that their fanbase is still largely boys of a certain age, and that I need to to extricate myself from this certain age, that is, unsubscribe to the daily feed of 100 of the COOLEST CSS hacks and Five ALL-TIME Best Positions for Orgasm and the Wickedest Laptop Battery Explosion Yet!!!

I think this page sums up my feelings for Digg the best.

I can get by on my daily feed diet and I am trying to trim the fat, but what I’m hankering for is Web 2.0’s version of Arts & Letters Daily, some buttkicking combo of anarchic social bookmarking and savvy editorial guidance.

Is that asking for too much?

When I recently read praise for Netscape’s rip-off of Digg, I secretly hoped to find a more mature alternative (yes, I never even bothered to check out the redesign, way back whenever). I suppose you could call it mature, and but it also looks to be quite barren. Maybe it has something to do with that moldy green color scheme. It just feels stagnant here. Netscape perhaps has the bucks to headhunt and pay its ”editors,” but it can’t pay users to participate (at least not yet).

At first glance, I’m liking what I see at Buzzfeed. It makes me think of Rojo’s newsletter, without the in-crowd cheekiness, Technorati without the splog growth. Buzzfeed is obviously harnessing the ”power of technology” but it would appear that someone is driving the car.

It looks promising. Crazy eyes and Nip Slips wasn’t really what I was looking for, but hey, if half-intelligent people are buzzing, I’m feeding.

Posted in fourth estate council | 1 Comment

I can’t really remember how it all started. It was probably some random link that I bumped into, on the giant flowing RSS river.

I found myself at the Google Image Labeler, laid out with the usual g-fashion: minimal, practical, charmingly 1999 (do their designers have to sign a contract promising to avoid all current design trends?)

I signed in with a nickname, and was initially confused by the interface. What does ”off limits” mean? Why does my partner keep passing? And what the hell is that little tiny thumbnail? Google actually expects me to label that?

Eventually something other than rational thought took control of my brain.

Early adopteritis?
Hard-wired competitive streak?
Severe obsessive-compulsive disorder?
Chronic time-wasting tendencies?
An urge to masturbate my brain in public?
A longing desire to make the Web a better place to live?

All of the above?

I soon fell into something resembling a trance (and let me point out I’m not a hardcore gamer, simply because I do not want to go there). I began to have an out-of-body experience. My hands typed out the simplest words possible — ”man,” ”people,” ”black,” ”animal,” ‘’square,” ”object” and so on, seemingly before my brain could move on to more descriptive and accurate expressions, such as ”millions and millions of stars forming a rich purple crystalline cosmos,” or ‘’some sad suited saps smiling trying their hardest to smile at trade conference dinner in Best Western,” and pointlessly so on.

It’s pointless, because to truly win the game of labeling, you have to boil everything down to simplest elements. Yes, your knowledge of the world occasionally comes into play, but mostly it’s about nailing it with as few keystrokes as possible.

A lot 0’s and 1’s have already been spilled about this being Google’s underhanded attempt to create a Web sweatshop. Evil Google, recording every keystroke and click, bombarding me with ads, outing innocent Chinese dissidents and Brazilian undesi. Oh Big Brother of our worst nightmares, you tricked me into using your search, giving you access to my spreadsheets, archiving and cataloging all most intimate mails and chats. You had everything you need to profile me, but you had to have more. You have not only put me to work for you, deceiving me with your little game for little points, you are trying to read my thoughts.

Seriously, though, there are no alarms and no surprises. I have freedom of choice. I could have closed that window and moved on, never to label another speaker, machine part, or galaxy.

But no. I had to label on, until I was KING OF THE IMAGE LABELING HILL!

And I did, of course. I was king, I tell you. For at least one brief google-second.

While my opponents in the West were sleeping, I was in the East, making my way steadily up the list. I evolved new digits, that blurred across the keyboard as I encountered nameless partners with whom I could mind-meld and match labels in one fell swoop.

It was a Sunday afternoon when I finally reached reached the pinnacle. But funnily enough, the thrill of victory simply wasn’t enough. NO. I wanted my opponents to awake and see my trails in the distance. I wanted them to weep at the gap I had created between them and me.

I thwacked away each PSP cover, each obscure document, each MAN (person, people, suit, tie), WOMAN (girl, chick, mother, smile) and CHILD (kid, infant, baby, toddler, infant). I was an invincible taxonomist (there, I said it).

Then it happened, in a flash. I had been on top, at 20,5700 points, and suddenly with no warning, a new labeler on the block streaked by with nearly double the points. Where did he/she come from? How did he/she/it get so far, so fast? Oh, cruel fate.

Naturally I immediately went to Google for answers. ”Google Image Labeler Hack/Crack” was my query, but no dice there. The closest I came to evidence were discussions about the Creator, Louis von Ahn, and a brilliant presentation in which he lays the foundations for Human Computation, at … wait for it … Google.

I was impressed, awed, bemused, but not satisfied. And to be honest, I couldn’t kick my labeling habit so easily.

Which is what saved me in the end. As I returned to labeling, I noticed a curious trend. Whereas my previous labeling partners (the sharper ones) averaged about 3 guesses per 5 seconds, I began to encounter partners who were bagging 10, 15, 20 labels in 5 seconds. Not humanly possible, right? That clinched it. As a mere mortal, I didn’t stand a chance against these cyborgs.

You would think that Google would have come up ways to thwart the bots here (or were they thousands of monkeys banging in unison on their keyboards?). Then again, maybe this is what Google wanted all along: bots coupled with humans, working as fast as possible to catalog the world. In the end, it’s all good for Google.

In the end, Mr. von Ahn, you have created a monster, and the beast is within me (us, people, mankind, sentients …)

Posted in bowl of noodling | 

Snapped this in Harajuku a few months ago. Definitely designed to draw jaws. Would love to know what it will house.

Posted in in my sights | 

I’ve come a long way since my days as a young punk who razzed my vegetarian housemate about her hippy eating habits. Her macrobiotic phase made her especially vunerable to my jokes. She’d grill tofu in the oven (which I’m pretty sure was an original recipe) and douse it in tahini. It was foul and stank up the kitchen for hours. And the tofu, which could only be bought at the only health-food shop in town, was just as foul.

I can say that now because I know what good tofu tastes like now, and my former housemate, wherever she may be, would be astounded by how much I love it, in all its many shapes and forms. Put a bubbling cauldron of yu-dofu in front of me, and I’m one happy boy. I get all tingly inside when I find places that specialize in the stuff. I’m such a freak that I’m considering joining the Tofu Detective Army (though I might not be cute enough).
What really floats my boat these days, though, is the brilliant Otokomae Tofu marketing campaign, which could only happen in Japan. I first got wind of it on a silly morning TV show for housewives. They made a big mystery about ”who’s Johnny?” before revealing this insanely popular line of tofu, in a funky surfboard shaped package and the even funkier name of 風に吹かれて豆腐屋ジョニー (I really have no idea how to translate this, but what about The Tofu Shop Johnny Blown by the Wind).

Long story short: Their whole line is hilariously named and the Web site of Otokomae Tofu-ten (”The Symbol of Japan”) is easily the savviest product PR I’ve seen in Japan. They’ve got characters to represent the different tofu, theme songs, an ongoing saga of the Tofu posse. What I want to know is how the guy behind this brand persuaded a tofu-maker to get this wacky.
Branding genius aside, I have to say that Johnny’s tofu is pretty average, though I haven’t tasted the full range and it is a lot tastier if you drizzle it with their ‘’special sauce.”
Call me a sucker, but what I really want is the Otokomae Tofuten parka. Doesn’t get much cooler than that.

Posted in good eats | 

I would have thought this little tidbit in The Japan Times about the Japanese Olympic Committee banning athletes from blogging during the Torino Games would have spurred more commentary (I could only find one related post.)

While the bans reveals JOC’s narrow-mindedness (looks like these American athletes won’t be muzzled) and its notoriously tight-fisted control of Japanese athletes’ behavior, it also says a lot about Japan’s still antiquated attitude toward the importance of blogs. Or does it? By calling a web diary a ”journalistic activity,” the JOC is — in the process of shooting its foot — legitimizing the act of blogging.

Nice job, guys.

Posted in fourth estate council |