Bergermj’s Weblog

Here we are-a nice little tutorial and description of mashups.  As my ranting thirst for the night was quenched by my other post from today, I’ll make this short and civil.  Nice article.  Helpful, brief, and easy to follow.   Gave some examples of mashups (always good) and in the spirit of true web2.0, didn’t get bogged down and lectury.  Nice colors too.  I like colors.  Wow it’s too late.

It doesn’t get much worse than some facebook apps.  Seriously, enough is enough.  O look at me, I’m gonna be a pirate!  And a ninja!  And a feudal lord!  And a student at Hogwarts!  And a person without a life!!!!!  NOT to mention the invasion of privacy and overall lack of decency that they have come to represent!!!!  huff, huff….  I needed to vent a bit.  This article understands me.  Anyways, Fapps (Facebook + Applications–yeah, I made that up.  I’m so clever) are a big problem today–certainly something worth looking into.  In class, it always seems like we’re singing the praises of every gold-wrapped piece of crap video or webapp that we lose the common sense to realize what is stupid and pointless and what isn’t.

Exhibit A: The Spongebob video.  Need I say more?

Fapps have made facebooking chaos; anarchy; free-range, chicken-hunting, panting, slobbering absurdity.  So much crap on everyone’s page makes it hard to use facebook for what it was meant for: communication.  Basically, it comes down to the fact that information overload always sucks.  There could be hope though.  This article claims that there might be a sort of “survival of the fittest” element to the Fapp race.  Maybe most of them will be gone in the near future–leaving the few useful ones behind.  This might even become a trend amongst all webapps and mashups on the net.  It might be interesting to look at how apps and such have died in the past–and if the webapp explosion is dying down yet or not. Don’t get me wrong–not all webapps are bad.  Some need to die though.

Here’s me crossing my fingers.

This article is a pretty mediocre stab at that effluence of the public, citizen journalism. I do like, however, how the author relates the movement to human rights and democracy. The example given, related to S. Korea, rings true as to the spirit behind citizen journalist efforts. The author them procedes to fail when she tries to tackle the “Journalism or not” issue. This little argument about what is journalism or not is about as old, torn, and worthless as the “art or not” question. Such a topic is the stuff of bored philosophers and jaded academics–people with nothing better to do than argue about identifying a media rather that experiencing it. Point of my little rant: the author should have left that little subtopic out of the article.

Finally, the last part encourages readers to join the movement. This is noble I guess. Wish the author would have given the readers sites to use or access more information from. Overall, not sure I’d recommend this article, now that I think about it.

Who better to discuss the technicalities and uses of blogging than a site that hosts a ton of them? This article discusses blogging and how anyone can join in and start their own. The page remains light and easy to read while going into some pretty sophisticated specifics of blogging and managing a personal page. Though this page doesn’t hone in on big intangibles like (Now, let’s use our snobbish, official-sounding voice) “how blogging affects society,” it doesn’t something vital: it encourages a person to blog. How can a person appreciate the importance of blogging if they don’t try it themselves? The dark, scary world of blogging becomes a bit more accessible after reading an article like this.

You know what’s great about articles like this one ? It’s not some stuff specialist trying to impress everyone. The article is concise, explains the topic expertly and efficiently,and–look at this–it even includes pictures! So what if it’s not 16 pages long on adobe reader; seriously, how can you expect someone to seriously read an article on wikis that long? Also, how can you expect for an article that long to be efficient and not confusing? Sure, it sites lots of fancy, snooty sources, but this article does a good deal of citing as well as says just about as much.

Give me brevity or give me death.