Paul O'Flaherty

Why I’m Not PC In This Online World

Definitely Laughable

I received an email earlier today because someone felt that I had been more than a little unfair towards redhead people in my commentary on this post on Daily Shite.

Subject: Gratuitous Abuse

So Paul, why pick on redheads?  That seems gratuitous.  They get enough shit without clever folks like you stooping to that kind of abuse.  Leave it to the morons.
All due respect,

Tom

I feel that the reply I emailed to Tom is worth posting here and speaks for itself:

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your email. I get where you are coming from but with all due respect we do *not* pick on redheads.

Picking on somebody would imply that we single them out. We don’t. We make fun out of every race, color and creed. White or black, blond, brunette, redhead, male, female, skinny, fat, emo, goth, American, Irish, Chinese, Canadian or Darth Vader, we don’t pick on anybody, if there’s a joke or comment to be made, we make it.

You see Tom, I hate political correctness. I believe it will be the downfall of society because eventually there will be nothing left that you could possibly say that wouldn’t offend someone. Those who abide by PC rules are looking to be molly coddled through life and that is, unfortunatley, not the way real life works.

I’ve known and know plenty of redheads. One of my best mates is of the ginger fraternity and has a serious carrot top for a brother. Hell, one of my own brothers is a member. None of these people were offended by the post.

Throughout the 1300+ posts on the site we have made commentary about just about every race, sex, color, creed and hair color. Even the Irish have been given shit by the authors of the site and you wouldn’t think that would happen when I (one of the co-owners) is Irish. Not only that, but I have personally been slagged off in a few posts.

I’m sorry Tom, but if we stop making comments about any one type of person deliberately then it becomes favoritism and then it does become *picking on people* because we are actively discriminating.

If people can’t take a joke, then I’m sorry, but we aren’t going to stop making jokes just because they might offend a handful of people.

I know the world has gotten so arse backwards lately (because of the PC movement) that the will of the outspoken minority dictates what happens to the silent majority but that is not they way things should be and not the way I will live my life or run Daily Shite.

We make no bones about what kind of site we are. We make no apologies for our content. We have our guidelines we work within (no porn, no T&A etc…), but I am not going to censor myself or the other Daily Shite authors just because a handfull of people get offended.

Where does it stop Tom? Do we see a repeat of Denmark and the Mohammad cartoon scandal? Do we limit every bodies right to free speech because a handful of people can’t handle it?

As far as I see it it’s a very black and white thing. Either everybody is fair game to be poked fun at, or nobody is. I’ll bet that red headed folk poke fun at blonds. Will they stop? I doubt it! Should they? Never!

Thanks for the email.

Paul

Thoughts and opinions are welcome as always.

Lights In The Sky Over Cobh

Chinese Lanterns being lit

My sister Jenny, among other people have reported that they’ve heard, on Cork local radio (96.fm Red FM), people discussing strange lights in the sky over Cobh during the night of Saturday the 20th of February.

Apparently there has been a heck of a lot of speculation including people saying that the lights, which apparently were moving in formation, where part of some sort of military maneuvers.

I’ve been finding this all a little more than amusing, as I’m sure my sister and almost every member of family does. Why? Well we known the true explanation for the lights and it’s nothing as sinister as military maneuvers or little green men buzzing Great Island looking for cows to abduct and mutilate, or the unwary to anal probe.

The truth is that the lights “moving in formation” were nothing more than a bunch of randomly set off Chinese lanterns, which were set off around 23:30 (or there about) from the Cobh Ramblers grounds in the midst of celebrations my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary.

So happy anniversary Nan & Grandad, it looks like your celebrations brought a lot more attention than just those of us who were there to share it with you

Has Social Media Legitimized Hotlinking in Web 2.0?

Okay, Maybe Not!

Hotlinking used to be a bad thing. Essentially bandwidth theft, hotlinking is the practice of displaying and image (or video, audio file etc… ) on your site but actually having the file served by someone else’s server. In other words you use their bandwidth to display the file on your site. (This is not the same as content theft, taking someone else work and presenting it as your own. That’s another discussion for another post).

We all know that bandwidth isn’t free.

Last night, as Daily Shite clicked over it’s 1 millionth page view for February, I was looking at our bandwidth usage and wondering where did all of the 423 Gigs we’ve transferred over the past 15 days go?

Obviously on a humor site like ours that aggregates the best content from around the web, hotlinking can be  an issue.

We don’t hotlink. We makes sure that all images and files are hosted on our own server and even go as far as having measures in place to ensure that anything that might accidentally get hotlinked is automatically cached on our server and the link rewritten.

Yet so many people hotlink today and I feel that with the rise of sites like Digg, Facebook, Reddit and even my beloved Google Reader are to blame.  They’ve taken hotlinking and instead of supporting the idea that is unacceptable have played a major hand in making hotlinking acceptable.

There are way and means to prevent hotlinking. It’s easy actually, but the problem comes not with the prevention, but the fact that oft times it is necessary not to prevent it  in order to actually be able to promote your content on the web.

If hotlinking is prevented then the images won’t show in Google Reader. Facebook, Reddit and Digg won’t be able to show thumbnails for the posts. This is a negative thing for most publishers regardless of whether or not they are aggregators (like we do on Daily Shite) or content creators like I do on this blog.

No thumbnails means less incentive for users to click through and people can be such very visual creatures.

I suppose measures could be taken to ensure I had a separate directory of thumbnails outside of the “protected directories” of my site that could be used by other sites but that is quite frankly a huge pain in the backside to organize and something that 99% of people will neither do, think about or have the ability to do if they did.

To be honest I don’t begrudge Facebook or Reddit using my images when someone promotes one of our posts, in fact I encourage it. It’s promotion for us.

But what I do have an issue with is that sites like Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit allow linking to an image directly outside of the structure of the site hosting it and that is a problem for me.

When 20,000 or 50,000 people stumble an image on your site and all they see is the image itself, none of your content or the advertising that pays for the bandwidth that is used to serve that image 50,000 or even 100,000 times then there is an issue.

For some sites 50,000 or 100,000 views of a reasonably sized image could eat their entire bandwidth cap and result in them having to shell out money because the major media sharing sites are too lazy to implement a simple bit of code that could ensure that the page an image is on must be linked to rather than stealing some poor sods bandwidth.

Sharing on sites like Digg, Facebook and Stumbleupon is a partnership. They may promote our content for us when it is submitted, but we also provide them with content for their community to view and to discuss. Without our content these sites are nothing and we get considerably less traffic without them.

It’s a partnership, or at least it’s supposed to be. When it comes to images and hotlinking, the partnership is sorely one sided.

Lazyfeed Is Not Serving Sushi. It’s All Spam!

Lazyfeed boasts that is is like a conyevor belt of sushi.

Have you tried Conveyor belt sushi? At a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, sushi plates are automatically delivered to you literally on a conveyor belt, so you don’t have to move around.

Lazyfeed is Conveyor belt sushi for your interest. Lazyfeed is all about letting you watch live updates on every topic you care about. Just add the topics you are interested in and start watching. Real-time updates on those topics will continuously flow in automatically.
Don’t surf. Let the web come to you.

I love sushi and I love the internet, but while others may love Lazyfeed, I find that the vast majority of the result served up by the service are nothing more than spam and splogs. There is no curation, no moderation and no apparent form of spam filtering of any sort. Some of these results are more than obviously spam, they are down right blatant.

In the 10 minutes I was on the service tonight (I’ve been using Lazyfeed for a long time, well before the new conveyor belt design), almost all of the results I clicked through too were splogs.

It would appear that the real “lazy” in lazy feed is the filtering and because of that I won’t be going back.

What we need is a curated system that points to good quality articles at their source (and a little birdy told me that one may be on the way).

It's not sushi on the conveyor but predigested spam!

Google Buzz Reduces The Noise? My Irish Arse It Does!

I listened yesterday and started to believe the crap I heard about how Google Buzz was going to make my social circle more relevant, reduce the noise, filter out the crap and generally make right the wrongs of the universe.

Why then Google, have I woken up this morning with 1000+ new items in my Google Reader, which were shared by people I am following on Google Buzz?

Google Buzz = Less Noise?

This is a perfect example of what Sara was talking about in her post yesterday when discussing Googles need to have a singled shared address book or set of contacts across all their services. Google doesn’t get that sometimes you don’t want to follow the same people everywhere.

For example, I had (prior to Buzz) my Google Reader set up just the way I like it, but now, on top of the items form the 300+ blogs and news sources I check a day, I’ve got all the shares from many of the same people I am already subscribed to? What gives? I did not subscribe to their shares in Google Reader!

That’s like saying that because I subscribe to your blog, I have to get all your tweets as well!

Sorry Google, but this is a major fail – You’ve just increased the noise to signal ratio that I receive exponentially!

Has Google Gone A Step Too Far By Forcing Buzz On Users?

I know Google desperately want people to use Google Buzz, but as Steven Hodson pointed out, growth of the network will always be limited by the fact that you have to have a Gmail account in order to use the service.

Google Buzz is a clever trap, but a trap all the same. It is the hunk of cheese to get more people using Gmail which in turn locks users into Google even more.

Google, in it’s attempts to ensure adoption have taken the kind of  step that hasn’t been seen since the Microsoft of the 90’s and actually forced all Gmail account holders into being users regardless of whether they want to or not.

As Mark Davidson said on Facebook earlier tonight:

I’m not sure why but I’m bothered by Buzz. I don’t like it, I don’t want it. But I have it. Sure I don’t have to us it. I think maybe it’s because for the first time, Google has forced a web tool on me. I’ve been using Gmail since 2004. If I love Gmail, and I do, I’m forced to have Buzz. I’m about 10 minutes away from …re-installing MS Office so I can use Gmail as a relay for Outlook again. You know what I like? Choice. That’s what got me using Google web tools in the first place. Today is the first day, I’ve ever viewed Google in the same light as I viewed Microsoft in the mid-nineties.

It’s this kind of move that could result in a temporary boost for Gmail and Googles other services, but as I’ve already seen tonight people are complaining about things like unremoveable messages in their inbox, and of course the pre-existing faults caused by Googles need to have a universal address book and not allow you to delete contacts from one Google service without deleting them on all.

This forced use could ultimately be detrimental to Gmail as users who don’t want an intrusive social network clogging up their inbox choose to go to less crowded and more traditional email systems. Yes, you can stop Buzz features from appearing in your inbox after the fact but once you are in, you’re in.

As I’ve said before, the right tool for the right job, and morphing Gmail into a full featured social network may stop it being a tool of productivity and turn it into another Facebook/Twitter timewaster.

Google Hasn’t Built A Twitter Killer: Goolge Buzz

FYI: I started writing this before the Google announcement today and am writing it as I watch it live and as a product GBuzz looks great.

Google doesn’t want to build, nor is it trying to build a “twitter killer”. What Google wants is your information in order to better target advertising.

Every time you send an email, update your status, chat on Goggle Talk, share an item on Google Reader, post a video to YouTube or a picture to Picasa, Google gets a little bit more information about you that it can use to better tune the advertising you see in the hope that you will click on one of those ads.

Information like your status updates disappear as soon as they are used but by offering timelines where you can see the status updates of your friends Google  can keep you on in their service a little longer and in front of their advertising a little longer.

By associating Facebook and Twitter id’s with your Gmail contacts Google learns a little more about both you and your contacts. They have already announced that you will be able to import RSS streams from other services, connect with twitter, and there was a hint of facebook connect. It was driven home that the platform will be made as open as possible and noted that if you tweet and it gets imported into GBuzz then it could end up on somebody elses recommended list.

GBuzz is shaping up to be a wonderful looking social experience, but it boils down to being a content gathering service. It will allow you to pump information into Google from all your other services, consume information there and ultimately spend more time in from of Google advertisements while providing it with the information necessary to fine tune those advertisements to you and your friends.

At the end of the day it all boils do to gathering more information about you in order to target advertising. They don’t need to build a Twitter killer. Twitter and Facebook already do a great job creating the information that Google wants.

What they have built however, is a marvelous looking social experience for those people who already use Gmail and Googles mobile services and given them the means to pour information about themselves and others into Googles servers.

What A Week

I love weeks like this, where everything unexpectedly starts to come together.

Sara and I have been plugging away at out pet project, humor site Daily Shite, for months now. We’ve been watching it grow slowly and celebrating as we’ve hit various milestones. We’ve watched with pride and more than a fair few glasses of wine (to celebrate the occasion) as 100 views a day went past, then a 1000, then 5000, 10000 and 20000. We whooped and cheered like we’d one the lottery when we broke our first 50000 day, and last night we sat back in sheer amazement as we soared beyond our first 100000 (one hundred thousand) day.

This post isn’t to pimp out Daily Shite although you really should visit and join the Facebook page while you’re at it. It’s to say thank you.

Thank you to everyone who has visited, stumbled and dugg posts, retweeted us and pimped us to their friends. To our authors for their contributions and to our readers and friends who have been emailing and sending contributions via IM.

Most of all I want to thank Sara. She’s done a ton of work behind the scenes, not just putting up posts and pimping Daily Shite left, right and center and deserves more credit than I for us hitting this milestone.

Now, bring on our next challenge – the 200000 day

Twitter Can’t Remember Lists?

I’ve been running into the phenomenon of people who are not on Twitter lists showing up in the results when the lists are clicked.

Have a look at the screenshot below and you will see what I mean. None of the people above @John_C are on the “Daily Shite Authors List” yet there they are on the list page, clear as day.

I’ve also been seeing something similar happen when I view my @ replies, where there are results that quite plainly are not replies to me in any way, shape or form.

FYI Inquistr: Auto Refresh Is Intrusive, Makes You Look Shady

Trust me the numbers are fine!

It’s a rare occasion that I break away from reading an excellent post to write a post of my own. Usually I wait until I am finished, have digested it and then put fingers to keyboard.

My friend, Steven Hodson, wrote what has so far, been an excellent post called “The return of the LP and the future of book publishing” for the Inquisitr, but I haven’t had the opportunity to read it all because I was rudely interrupted by The Inqusitrs need to auto refresh their pages.

I don’t run into this problem too often and normally Inquisitr posts aren’t lengthy enough for me to ever encounter it but I have to ask why sites make their pages auto refresh?

For those of you who don’t know you can make any web page automatically reload after a set period of time by putting a small piece of code in the header like this:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="900" />

Inserting code like this is good for only two things:

1. Updating a page that pulls some sort of dynamic content and would otherwise require the user to hit refresh.
2. Artificially inflating your page view numbers.

FYI: Unless it’s for point number 1 all it does is piss people off.