The horror
Only on the Internet can you get involved in a heated debate with your personal heroes.
It feels awful!
Gold spam and search engines.
Richard Bartle is annoyed at the everpresent gold spam that follows MMO-related searches and content. He’s putting the blame firmly at Google’s feet, arguing that IP owners should inherently be able to control what gets put next to their IP.
Flawed argument
His YouTube example is via a third-party site (WoW.com). They had plenty of other options including paying for ad-free videos on YouTube or simply allowing visitors to stream / download video directly on their own site. As many have learned, bandwidth for popular game videos is expensive.
When you opt for free solutions using someone else’s services and accept that there will be advertisements, you throw away all of your rights to aggressively protect your IP. There are many paying options for those kinds of services, the point here is they went with option: Free.
Blizzard themselves could also provide these videos rather than pushing the costs off onto third-party sites for easy promotion. Again, that’s their choice as an IP owner.
Richard Bartle clearly expresses that he found the video via WoW.com, not via a search on YouTube (or Google). This isn’t a gatekeeper situation.
Welcome to advertising
The ads are clearly marked “Ads by Google” so I’m at a loss with his rant about associating IPs and property confusion. I’m sure that the CFL would be quite welcome to purchase ad space during the NFL Superbowl. It’s just the nature of advertising to go with the highest bidder.
Shooting the Messenger
I find gold spammers / farmers quite unsavoury and it makes me nauseous how they continue to collect gold via keylogging, identity theft and other nasty methods without any more punishment than temporary bans. However, as long as the sale of the gold is legally legitimate, I don’t see how Google or any other business should be roasted over the coals.
The fact is that a significant number of players buy gold. I may not agree with them and I certainly don’t agree with the methods which the gold is collected, but there’s clearly a market and a large percentage of players don’t find it immoral or distasteful. So when Lum the Mad suggests Google should police it as a community standard, I wish I could agree with him, but how is it reasonable to expect Google to pick sides?
Convince those players to stop buying gold and the whole problem would be solved. Or better yet, stop providing gold farmers with such a readily exploited and valuable resource.
The games industry as a collective whole hasn’t done much about gold spammers other than wave the ban hammer around and make loud noises. There hasn’t been much effort to address them legally. Blizzard’s lawyers have chased the makers of bots and private servers, hardly to the heart of the matter. Of course, who wants to do more than throw a few bans around when a significant portion of your customer base is involved?
Blaming Google is convenient, but they’re the least guilty on the list of involved parties.
Side Effects include a Corporate Internet
Richard Bartle’s perspective seems to be that IP / Trademark owners should get complete control of the space around their promotional material. Why should the IP / Trademark owner have such automatic entitlement?
When you choose to carry your product through promotional channels that are convenient and cost-effective, you also choose the compromises that come along with it.
If you want complete and utter control, pay for it. Either go for premium services or foot your own costs of distribution and promotion and opt away from piggybacking on the success of others.
The most absurd part of this entire argument is the suggestion that Google’s ~70% search marketshare gives them a blanket monopoly in content delivery across the entire Internet.
If Google was defacing every website that passed through search, I’d be on Richard Bartle’s side for sure, but the embedded advertisements he’s complaining about offset an inherent cost that Google takes on providing video bandwidth, caching websites, etc.. These are optional services. I fail to see how any defacto monopoly trumps optional. It’s a hollow argument.
If YouTube holds any effective monopoly in video distribution it’s because it’s cheap / free for content providers and popular amongst people who want to watch videos without constant hitching, reloading, etc. It’s not that YouTube has superior tech, it’s that they’ve footed the bill.
Richard Bartle is wagging his finger at the wrong target.
I like the <big> tag
Why does <big> get the short end of the stick? It’s been deprecated while <small> gets to continue.
I know X/HTML purists would say none of the ‘phrase element’ tags are needed. Sure, all of the same effects can be done in CSS with styles attached to <span> (or you can make a site entirely in <div> tags), but there are some good arguments for simple emphasis markups like <small>, <i>, <strong>, <code>, etc.:
- They’re semantically rich and descriptive. Even <b> and <i>, which often get little respect, have appropriate uses when you just mean to bold or italicize something. They are exclamations in a way, although <strong> and <em> (emphasis) are even moreso.
- They’re useful for people who don’t know HTML, but still want to style their text in a blog comment or forums post. Most people understand small tags like <b> = bold. <big> and <small>, they’re self-explanatory.
- For web designers, it’s easy and efficient to allow the simpler markup tags on input. We can filter out all of the attributes and have one less worry about XSS & injection exploits. Don’t make us resort to BBCode (*ugh*).
- They’re convenient and they don’t harm anyone. They’re warm and fuzzy. I really cannot fathom what <big> did to get itself booted from the HTML club. If it was too large I could understand, or if it annoyingly blinked or scrolled like a marquee, sure. But it’s just a little more emphasis than strong.
Usually I’m on the side of standards, but on this one little (<big>) thing: I’m tempted to skip markup validation in order to provide my users with the convenience of an easily recognizable tag.
Note: Of course I can just present the tag to my users and convert it to <span class=”big”> but shhhh, I’m trying to make a point here. ;)
Two good Twitter apps
I’ve been using both TwitterFon and TwitterFox for a few weeks now and oddly it never occurred to me (until just now) that they were made by the same company. That’s the nature of app repositories I guess, since I snagged TwitterFox directly from Firefox’s built-in addon browser and TwitterFon Pro I purchased from the Apple app store.
The big deal with these apps are not just that they’re featureful, but they’re very apt for the platform:
TwitterFox sits like a tray-app in Firefox and turns Twitter into a sort of IM app, which fits with how I use Twitter from my desktop.
TwitterFon makes use of all the native iPhone / iPod Touch app abilities you would expect it to. In fact, I find it far more natural and intuitive than Twitter’s website controls, especially with the separated tab for @ mentions. I really dislike ads, so I quickly paid for the Pro version, which came with some other useful perks such as the one below:
One feature out of both that I’m getting good usage from is the support for multiple Twitter accounts. I started up an extra feed for posting the minutiae of Gameslate dev updates without flooding my personal NecroRogIcon feed. For TwitterFon that works especially well, because I can set a different display theme per user (otherwise I’d probably make embarrassing crossposts).
Upgrade the Interwebs
While working on my site redesign for Gameslate, I’ve realized an interesting tidbit: All of the new, recently released browser versions are significantly faster, especially with JavaScript.
I’d kinda already noticed this when I installed Firefox 3.5, which was a huge improvement over 3.0, but what I hadn’t known was that the same has been true with IE 8 (much faster than IE 7) and development versions of Chrome. Safari will probably soon follow, but it’s pretty fast already. I don’t know about Opera, but generally there are widesweeping speed and stability improvements across the board.
It’s not some magical boost to your Internet connection, it’s just that these browsers are faster at working out how pages should be displayed. Given the rise in JavaScript usage with web applications / AJAX / etc., the performance improvement really helps.
Of course, I’m biased. I’d like to see people upgrade regardless. At least get rid of the truly crappy old browsers (IE5, IE6, IE7 all seriously suck to support). But even if you’re not interested in the coolness factors of CSS3, HTML 5 (dev), etc., I think upgrading is worthwhile.
Digging into jQuery
I’m a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to web design. I prefer clean uncluttered usage of HTML & CSS, supported by server interaction (usually PHP). I’ve occasionally dipped into Flash, JavaScript / ActionScript, XML and even back quite a few years some VRML. For the most part though, I’ve treated the programmable extras as something between toys and necessary evil, JavaScript especially.
It’s not that I’m old fashioned or clinging to the basic building blocks circa ‘93. There’s just so much bogged down crap and clutter out there using / abusing the toys.
Case in point, Bell Mobility uses AJAX heavily throughout their customer support website: It’s dog-slow, tedious in cases where it should be simple and often hangs (in the middle of their long process of choosing a plan, I wonder how many customers that’s cost them?). Not to get too distracted by the awfulness of it, that’s just one example of bloated web suckage among many.
jQuery is turning all of my opinions about JavaScript around.
I’ve only just started with jQuery (I’m reading “jQuery in Action“) but already it’s been a treat for creating quick and painless JavaScript. It’s hella efficient and easy to use. I know I’m a bit late to this game, jQuery made its first splash about 2 years ago, but count me as a convert.
That isn’t to say you can’t create bloat with jQuery, that Bell page I mentioned uses it heavily, too heavily. The ease of making animations is probably too tempting for many to just cover their sites in perpetual motion. The same goes for AJAX, which should be more efficient and slick, but it’s too often used inappropriately. Some people just can’t resist clanging every bell and tooting every whistle.
That said, when the tools become a joy to use, it sparks creativity. And I’ve been feeling creative lately. I’ve let my old Gameslate site slide for years, to my own embarrassment and the disappointment of its users. It’s a hobby for me, so I need to feel motivated. HTML 5 and CSS3 paired with jQuery have got me excited and productive again.
I’d been wondering what to do with the old Gameslate stuff. It was too walled-garden-ish for me. I felt foolish slamming the social network sites while I had this little web-game community project languishing in the basement. Then, after looking at jQuery, that lightbulb lit up. I decided to stop treating Gameslate like a page, portal or community website and start treating it as an application to get into the games (at this point, just one: Gates Motel). That thought was enough to get me excited to start reworking the site, which will relaunch on August 1st.
I’ll post more particulars later regarding Gameslate, but for now I just wanted to express my joy at learning and working with jQuery.
I’ll use Google’s Chrome OS, sorta
From a PC gamer’s perspective, using Microsoft’s desktop is a necessary evil. Unless Google can magically port DirectX over seamlessly (I don’t think they even want to), I can already tell you I won’t be switching my main machine to Google’s Chrome OS. That’s not the only PC I use on a daily basis though.
Counting each PC I interact with daily, we’ve got 5:
- My PC = Windows 7 (RC1).
- Michelle’s PC = Windows 7 (RC1).
- Roommate’s PC = Ubuntu Linux.
- PVR / Media PC = Mythbuntu Linux (connected to a TV).
- Server = CentOS Linux (rack-mounted many miles away).
On this list, #3 will probably get switched to the Chrome OS. Our roommate only uses it for web browsing. Ubuntu has been decent, but her install is getting dated and isn’t upgrading cleanly, so a reinstall is in order. If Google’s Chrome OS is as clean and easy to use as their browser, it’ll be an easy choice.
The other PCs on the list are pretty much locked in with what’s installed. It’s a “don’t fix what ain’t broken” situation.
