Back in September, at its f8 conference, Facebook announced a new kind of app, with the ability to use "frictionless sharing"—basically a fancy way of saying that users' activity can be shared without users specifically clicking a "Share" button.

The first reaction to this announcement was lukewarm at best. As users began to notice just how much activity was being shared, they complained about both ends of the process. Some users were upset about how much of their activity was being shared (Spotify, in particular, started out by sharing every single track listened to); others felt overwhelmed by the new activity ticker in the upper right corner of their Facebook home pages (which was flooded by Spotify posts in the beginning).

News organizations jumped on board with their own apps for auto-sharing every article read by a Facebook user. Some, like Washington Post Social Reader, live entirely in Facebook, allowing (and encouraging) users to read articles without even leaving Facebook.com. Others, like Yahoo News, share activity from the organization's site via code that pushes activity to Facebook.

The Yahoo News model of frictionless sharing is actually more disturbing, because there's little to no indication to the user that sharing is taking place. Activity on Facebook can be reasonably expected to be shared, but activity on a third-party site seems outside Facebook's influence.

There are other considerations as well, around the meaning of sharing. As Farhad Manjoo wrote in a now-archived Slate article, "You experience a huge number of things every day, but you choose to tell your friends about only a fraction of them, because most of what you do isn’t worth mentioning." Nicki Porter, blogging for CopyPress.com (which provides content development services), made a very relevant point based on that: "If we only share about 10% of what we see online, we’re sharing the best 10%."

Philosophy and user opinion aside, the last two months have seen massive growth in news app usage. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman wrote this morning that news organizations are reaching millions of users through these new auto-sharing apps. In particular, Open Graph statistics released by Facebook yesterday show:

• Yahoo News: 600% increase in traffic from Facebook; 10 million users connected, who read more articles than the average
• The Independent: 1 million monthly active connected users; articles from the late 1990s taken viral
• The Guardian: 4 million users installed their app, more than half of them under age 24; averaging nearly 1 million extra pageviews per day
• Washington Post: 3.5 million monthly active users of Social Reader app; 83% of readers under age 35

Facebook is helping news organizations with a box at the top of the homepage News Feed that shows a small selection of stories that friends have read recently.

The lesson from all this is that a platform like Facebook, which has over 800 million active users (as self-reported on its statistics page), can be a real boon to news outlets. Traffic equals eyeballs, and more eyeballs can generate more advertising revenue.

What's especially interesting to me is how similar the new sharing (which is officially part of the Open Graph API) seems to Beacon, a "mistake" (said Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook) that launched in late 2007 but was shut down in 2009.

Beacon also shared user activity on third-party sites back to Facebook, at first without permission. The class-action lawsuit Lane v. Facebook, Inc. resulted in Beacon being modified to require user confirmation before any sharing occurred. Open Graph sharing as it is today resembles the original Beacon, sending data to Facebook and publishing activity without any user intervention or even consent.

I, for one, stubbornly refuse to install any of those new auto-sharing Facebook apps. (Fortunately, it's pretty easy to bypass the request for permissions that pops up when I click an article featured at the top of my own News Feed.) I agree with Farhad Manjoo and Nicki Porter: Sharing is about choice. If I want to share something, I'll take the three minutes to post it myself.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

As I've worked to find people I can interview for my feature article, I've found that it can be really difficult to actually connect with even one person who can address the topic in question. Many people will simply ignore interview requests.

I'm sure part of the problem is my choice of subject. Not that many people know about Bitcoin, after all. What's more, privacy and anonymity are cornerstones of Bitcoin's design. That makes them part of the user culture…or maybe that just means Bitcoin attracts privacy fanatics.

In any case, I've successfully found only one source, an assistant professor of economics here on campus. I found him through the head of the economics department, and even that wasn't in time for me to include in my first draft anything he said. (He's only on campus on Fridays, and I didn't get his name until the Saturday before the Thursday my draft was due.) I also couldn't take the time to properly write my first draft. It was probably the roughest piece of writing I've ever submitted to a teacher, whether graded or not. (Well, there were those bits of writing I did in elementary school, but I won't count those because I don't count those years as part of my real education.)

On the social media front, I've had a nibble or two, but no real responses. I got a really good referral on Twitter from someone I interact with pretty often, who told me about a Bitcoin fanatic he knows, but this fanatic 1) has a private Twitter stream and 2) ignored my attempts to get in touch. What I said about privacy before definitely applies to this guy.

Actually, a follow-up message to the economics department chair here at Brandeis fell through the cracks when I asked about another source within the department who might be available for interview sooner—in time for my first draft. (I hope it fell through the cracks; the alternative is being ignored, and I don't like being ignored when I'm trying to do an assignment. No, Brandeis' email system doesn't lose messages. Google Apps has higher reliability than that. I use it for my personal domain, so I have some experience there.) I guess that can't be blamed on the Bitcoin culture.

Having failed to find any more sources in the week since turning in my draft, I plan to launch something of a guerilla campaign on Friday. (The rest of Wednesday and all of Thursday will be dedicated to making sure I finish my Java programming assignment by the deadline, and to studying for my Hebrew midterm on Friday morning.) My current campaign hit list includes the economics and computer science departments of several colleges, a few friends of mine who must either know about or know someone who knows about Bitcoin, and a couple of legal firms with which I have connections. This last item is important, as I need to understand the legal environment surrounding Bitcoins competing with the United States Dollar (and with every other nation's currency).

May my campaign result in a deluge of responses. If it doesn't work, I guess I'll be asking my professor for help on or around Tuesday afternoon.

As an aside, Bitcoin is also hard to research. In looking for material online (for not much has been said about it in physical media), I followed many dead links. The system is somewhat unstable, as shown by what happened when the Mt. Gox exchange was compromised (a part of my research); the information resources about it are even more so.

Thanks to my source-finding campaign plans and my need for better research, I foresee that my weekend will be full of work for my journalism class. Well, the part of it that is not taken up by tech week for The Last Night of Ballyhoo, for which I am the sound designer.

Perhaps I should just say that I will be having a busy week(end).

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

The New York Times' "Bits" blog published an article last Tuesday that really opened my eyes. The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School released data on what information is passed between certain popular websites.

Long story short, logging in (or even trying and failing to log in) to a site can pass information about you to third parties. That information can be as innocuous (but still trackable) as a "unique identifier" generated by the site or as specific as your email address, username, and real name.

Somini Sengupta (author of the Bits blog post) says:

Take for instance these findings, released on Tuesday by computer scientists at Stanford University. If you type a wrong password into the Web site of The Wall Street Journal, it turns out that your e-mail address quietly slips out to seven unrelated Web sites. Sign on to NBC and, likewise, seven other companies can capture your e-mail address. Click on an ad on HomeDepot.com and your first name and user ID are instantly revealed to 13 other companies.

I did some digging of my own through the Microsoft­® Excel® spreadsheet available from the Stanford Law School page (direct link to XLSX file) and found some interesting examples of my own.

For example, MSN.com leaks your birth year and birthdate to FBCDN.net (a domain owned by Facebook and used for content distribution). Facebook's CDN can't possibly need that information for anything but tracking. Take another case: Ask.com sends your username to Google Analytics, reCAPTCHA (owned by Google), ScorecardResearch (part of comScore, Inc.), Gigya (a company that "makes websites social"), Quantserve.com (used by Quantcast, an advertising network), IMRWorldwide.com (controlled by Nielsen), and LinkedIn.

Incredibly, The Huffington Post's website sends your username to BlogCDN.com (another CDN), BuzzFeed ("Tracks the Web's Obsessions in Real Time"), AdSonar (owned by Advertising.com; provides targeted text ads), ScorecardResearch, AOL.com (Huffington Post's owner), FBCDN.net, aolcdn.com (AOL's CDN), ATWOLA.com (stands for AOL Time Warner Online Advertising; tracks surfing habits), Facebook.com and Facebook.net, Google Analytics, IMRWorldwide.com, Quantserve.com, and HuffPost.com (used for delivering static content without cookies, ironically); your birthday to BuzzFeed and IMRWorldwide.com; and your birth year to Advertising.com and ATWOLA.com.

The point is, any information given to a website as part of the registration process or entered later while updating a profile allows third parties to do just that: profile you as a person through your behavior across countless sites. All this tracking is thanks to the triviality of circumventing the "same origin policy" of data stored in browser cookies through collaboration between sites.

A standard feature of Web browsers is sending the address of the last page visited (the "referrer") to the page being loaded. In the case of images, scripts, or other resources loaded within a page, the referrer is the page in which they are embedded. If the page displaying advertising has personal information embedded in its URL, that information is passed on to any sites whose assets are embedded in the page. This kind of information leakage can be accidental as well as deliberate. It does not typically function for sites that are encrypted (URLs beginning with https://), as most browsers disable sending referrers for secured connections.

Websites intentionally wanting to share user information might go about doing so another way, and while I had a written explanation of an example process it is sufficient to say that methods for intentionally sharing information and tracking users across domains, even in spite of user privacy choices like clearing cookies, are numerous.

When information is revealed in the URL, it's not necessarily intentional. Back in May, Symantec discovered (The Daily Mail reports) that some applications on Facebook's platform were potentially giving advertisers access to users' accounts due to app URLs including access tokens, the bits of information older Facebook apps used to identify themselves and connect to users' accounts. It was just an oversight.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

The New York Times ran a story Monday about a new lawsuit filed against HathiTrust, a partnership of universities and research libraries that maintains a digital book collection on its website.

Plaintiffs in the suit include three major authors' groups: the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, and the Québec Union of Writers. Eight individual authors are also party to the filing, among them Pat Cummings, Roxana Robinson, and T.J. Stiles.

The objections raised in the suit center around the HathiTrust collection itself. "[S]even million copyright-protected books" (according to Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, as quoted by the NYT) are available without any consent from the authors. The Authors Guild and its fellow plaintiffs say that the collection violates copyright law.

HathiTrust's collection consists of books digitized by Google, Inc. as part of the Google Books project, which has been steadily scanning books from participating university libraries across the United States.

The Google Books project has been the subject of many lawsuits over the years since work on it was begun in 2002. A few examples will help provide context:

• 2005: The Authors Guild sues Google for "plain and brazen violation of copyright law" (archived press release from AG via Archive.org)
• 2009: French court halts Google Books in France: the ruling applies only to books published in France under copyright (Los Angeles Times article)
• 2010: Several professional photographers' organizations bring a class-action suit regarding the reproduction of copyrighted images within the books scanned by Google (Mashable.com article)

The Authors Guild has been involved with this issue before. This time, the fight has been brought to an organization with a bit less might than Google.

But never mind who sued whom, for what, and when. The issue is really quite simple, and most of the lawsuits against Google Books have had little to no merit.

United States copyright law (the laws under which most Google Books lawsuits have been filed) contains a doctrine known as Fair Use. It was originally intended to protect commentary, critique, and parody of copyrighted works. However, the principles of Fair Use (Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute):

1. "the purpose and character of the use" — e.g. for commentary, critique, parody, scholarship, etc.
2. "the nature of the copyrighted work" — published/unpublished, fact/fiction
3. "the amount and substantiality of the portion used" — how much of the work was used, and how significant the used portion is to the work as a whole
4. "the effect of the use upon the potential market" — if the use of that portion will negatively affect demand for or the value of the original work

(Thanks to Stanford University's Copyright & Fair Use information center for helping me refresh my own memory of these concepts.)

The way Google Books works is carefully designed to fit within existing copyright laws. Books in the public domain are fully accessible, with no restrictions. Copyrighted, in-print books allow whatever access the publisher has specified. For in-copyright books that do not have a publisher, Google restricts access to "snippets", which show just a few words surrounding the user's search term.

So: Whenever Google Books shows a significant portion of a book, it has permission from the publisher to do so. Without permission, Google Books displays tiny fractions of the full work in an immensely transformative manner.

Google Books falls well within Fair Use doctrine, at the very least. Displaying card catalog–type information about the book plus at most a sentence or so for each search result (I'll go down the Fair Use list):

1. Is for scholarly reasons
2. Uses published works
3. Displays at most a few percent of the whole book
4. May actually increase demand for the books featured in the results

(Parts of Lawrence Lessig's 2006 video discussion of Google Book Search came in handy for an overview of how Google Books works.)

So why are publishers and authors suing Google and HathiTrust?

As far as I can tell,^{[original research?]} HathiTrust follows the same rules as Google Books. This makes sense, as the content is from the Google Books program.

HathiTrust's entire archive is intended for academic use. It's unclear why the various plaintiffs in this new lawsuit are suing for the removal of their books from the archive, rather than suing for better access controls. If the concern is that anyone can access the books (which they can), then restricting access to verified researchers would clear up the problem.

It's like big music, film, and television. The music industry figured out that it could simply adapt to the Internet and start offering content over the new medium, giving people an alternative to pirated copies shared through services like Napster, LimeWire, and BitTorrent. Film and television haven't yet figured that out, and I guess the book industry is still working on it too.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

Nobody I know wrote this. The same.

The truth is, I don't know the author of this poem. It was posted to the discussion board of one of my courses today, and I thought it so moving I had to post it here. It'll be a good tide-over for my next "real" post.

Obviously I haven't blogged in a while (more than a week). Since the school year is ending, I have final assignments to attend to, and no time to really sit and think about a meaningful post about last Saturday's show. (I'm journaling facts, though, and I'll post the finished piece in a week or two when things slow down.)

So, without further ado, the poem I came here to post:

Two Types of Friends – Real & Simple

A simple friend has never seen you cry.
A real friend has shoulders soggy from your tears.

A simple friend doesn’t know your parents’ names.
A real friend has their phone numbers in his address book.

A simple friend brings a bottle of wine to your party.
A real friend comes early to help you to cook and clean.

A simple friend hates it when you call after he has gone to bed.
A real friend asks you why you took so long to call.

A simple friend seeks to talk with you about their problems.
A real friend seeks to help you with your problems.

A simple friend wonders about your romantic history.
A real friend could blackmail you with it.

A simple friend, when visiting, acts like a guest.
A real friend opens your refrigerator and helps himself.

A simple friend thinks the friendship is over when you have an argument.
A real friend knows that it’s not a friendship until after you’re had a fight.

A simple friend expects you to always be there for them.
A real friend expects to always be there for you!

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

The setting is a third-grade classroom (no, this is not a reference to Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes). The class is small, only about ten students. One of them is acting up. The teacher, in an effort to get him to behave, threatens to revoke the entire class's recess period if he doesn't settle down.

What's wrong with this? The actions of one student could result in the punishment of the entire class. I can remember that actually happening at least once, being kept inside because one kid was misbehaving.

That is perhaps a good way to teach about dependency -- most people in the world rely on other people in their community -- but it isn't the best way, in my opinion. It would be better for discipline to simply keep the one student in for recess and let them watch their classmates, and more importantly their friends, have fun without them. I believe that would be a better way to teach about consequences.

For me, that was years ago, in the mid- to late-1990s. Fast-forward to 2008. I still see this sort of thing happening. High school, the Internet, whatever. (I can't speak for the office environment yet.) They all use this technique -- "group dynamics" it's called -- to enforce rules. The music teacher at my local high school, where I go to play in the orchestra, says that the entire class will have to stay after school if the two percussionists in the back (for example) don't stop goofing off and start paying attention.

Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress brought up the topic of national censorship yesterday, and I noticed a distinct trend. Her very point was that a few disparate bloggers on WordPress.com are responsible for getting the entire domain blocked in countries such as Brazil, Turkey, and China. There are three million blogs on WordPress.com, and the actions of a few stupid, irresponsible idiots (pardon my French) are getting them all removed from the view of millions of potential readers.

Once again, we see group dynamics at work. It should be the individual blogs getting blocked, and their authors being sued or otherwise punished (fined, jailed, whatever). The 3,000,000+ other blogs should remain untouched. Once again, I find punishing the whole class for the misbehavior of one or two students to be a very bad way of dealing with bad behavior.

To answer Lorelle's question, I am concerned about WordPress.com being banned. I'm concerned when Blogspot.com is banned (that's where I'm hosted right now). National censorship of entire websites happens all the time. The news has carried far too many stories on things like: Iran blocking YouTube, Indonesia blocking YouTube, China blocking WordPress.com and the BBC, Pakistan blocking YouTube, and a bunch of other things that are usually temporary, but all-too-often permanent. (Those aren't necessarily all real examples; I forget who blocked what.) When the changes spill out to other countries, that's worse; Pakistan misconfigured a block and it spilled to the rest of the globe.

But I can only be concerned about things I hear. If I don't know that WordPress.com is about to be (or currently) banned, I can't very well complain about it.

Lorelle's post was the source of inspiration for this one, and I thank her for it. I certainly hope that the world will soon stop making the group responsible for the individual's actions, and instead begin making the individual responsible for h(is|er) own behavior.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

Oh noes, I'z opening the school email can of worms again! I got the idea for this post from the frequent outages I experienced from my school's mail server in the past month or so. There hasn't been one in the last few days, which is good, but doesn't guarantee against more downing.

So anyway, coming back to the computer after a meal break to find the email page's tab headed with "Problem Loading Page..." started to become routine. "School email server's down again? Oh well, check again in the morning." In a truly reliable system, that would be, "School email server's down?! That never happens!!!"

Actually, the latter quote is basically what I think when Gmail goes down. I haven't had an outage since early last year, and before that they were quite infrequent and quickly resolved. Lately, my school's system has been going down frequently (though not so much any more) and for long periods. Think several hours. It usually failed at night, when there were no techs around to fix it.

As far as I know, there's only one server powering the entire thing, front-end and back-end. If it croaks, nobody can do anything. (I actually never tried sending mail while the interface was down for fear it wouldn't get there.) Gmail has thousands of servers, and techs around 24/7 to fix problems. Believe it or not, I'm not really complaining, not this time. I understand that my school's tech team is only a few people, and that they can't be expected to keep a constant vigil over the servers.

I do have a suspicion, though. I started setting Firefox to auto-reload the page every two minutes using Tab Mix Plus just before the onslaught. I eventually wrote myself a Greasemonkey script (any of my classmates could find this useful, and I'm thinking about adding more features) to do the same thing, only automatically so it didn't have to be reset every time I closed and restarted the browser. It had the same two-minute interval, and the server crashes continued.

Eventually I just updated the script to reload every three minutes instead, and the outages seem to have abated. My guess is that I inadvertently either caused a mini-DoS attack on the server or tripped a rate-limiter that was temporarily blocking my IP address. I am more suspicious of the latter possibility, since it is unlikely that one request every 120 seconds would overwhelm a Web server.

If I'm right about the rate-limiter, let me just point out that Google doesn't limit Gmail requests. I have a ping going once a minute from Gmail Manager, a browser extension that checks my mail and pops up notifications. If it was the unlikely DoS alternative, I think it's just time to get a new server, or move some accounts off to another machine (if it's a shared server).

My point is that one server just doesn't cut it these days. Hardware failures and software crashes are quite common. If one server can't handle the load, add a backup. That's what I would do.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

All right, down to business. Specifically, what happened last night was that I tried to perform an action on the page before it had finished loading. The tests in Blackboard (at least recent versions of the software) have a bar near the top that contains status information on each of the questions, but it is collapsed by default. Clicking the header makes it open up and actually display useful information. Simple JavaScript, but the action of expanding that box had catastrophic results.

Oh, it expanded just fine; there's no question that it functioned correctly. But that function wasn't isolated. Immediately upon my click, the entire page (well, frame; Blackboard still uses that anachronistic design feature) ceased loading. Now, that was a problem, because the buttons to manage the test are at the very end. Uh-oh.

I had before me 25 out of 29 questions, with no way to save my answers and continue, nor to submit the test incomplete. My curiosity definitely caused a problem. But it didn't have to be like that.

Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of scrutinizing the source code of the page for this post. That would necessitate sacrificing another test attempt (and would require me to send another email to my teacher requesting a reset). I can still theorize as to why the problem happened, and brainstorm possible solutions.

First, the cause. While I can't access the page source, as I said, I suspect there was something in the way the expansion link was constructed that caused a navigation event in Internet Explorer (Blackboard doesn't always play nice with Firefox, in my experience, so I use IE6).

Many JavaScript effects are created using an onclick attribute and href="#". I know that when I click a hyperlink on a page in Firefox, anything still loading on the current page is dropped and the new site begins to load. Internet Explorer probably does the same thing. By clicking the link to expand the box, I may have caused IE to try and find an unnamed fragment on the page; and since even navigating to a fragment counts as a navigation, I probably stopped the page loading myself.

I'm not saying that's what had to happen -- that there is no way to prevent it from happening. I'm merely theorizing. If the function or statement called by onclick returns false, the browser shouldn't navigate. That's what Firefox does, at any rate. So perhaps there was a missing or incorrect return statement in the function call. It's also possible to use another tag, like a <span>, to create the link and style it with CSS. The onclick is valid on every element I can think of, and the superfluous href wouldn't be a problem.

Aside from changing the way that box is coded, there is another easy solution to the problem: The "Save" and "Submit" buttons could be duplicated at the top of the assessment page. This is certainly not the first time I've had this problem; it's just the first time it's happened to me on the initial load of a test. (I can usually go back to a previous page and try again to load the refreshed version of the test.)

I believe this might be considered a race condition, in that the behavior of the assessment page is dependent upon when user interaction begins. Race conditions are nasty things, of course, and they've become the bane of any programmer's existence. I'm new to the concept, though, since I've been fortunate enough to avoid them in my own work. I usually hear about them in the context of JavaScript, come to think of it.

The take-away message from this post is not that Blackboard itself has a big problem. I've gone quite a while without this being an issue (nearly four years, actually). The real issue is that this could happen in a more critical situation, like a Web-based management console for, say, a nuclear reactor or weapons system. (More realistically, flight-control or remote monitoring, but the others sound more dire. An error such as this could cause enough of a lag that an operator would be unable to correct a problem in time and the system could cause a disaster.

In short, the moral of this story is that user interaction shouldn't interfere with critical internal functions in an application, whether Web-based or otherwise. The next time something like this happens, the consequences could be more than a simple locked test.

If you're interested in a story created around a similar event, be sure to check out the fictionalized version of events on The Queiba Wars. CodingExperiments.com has a more general summary of this kind of problem as well, should you be interested in that.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

Previous load time was around five seconds. That was tolerable, especially considering what the program was loading. It also logged me in automatically to a local account. Now, however, it takes around ten minutes to load, most of it spent on "Loading Melody Data". And it requires a username and password. Admittedly, the two together are only nine characters, but it's still an inconvenience. Also, commands that took milliseconds in the locally-stored version take five or ten seconds to execute and return results. The load time and latency are the problems that really get me.

So, what does this teach us? It teaches us that carefully considered storage architectures are important for the usability of any program. Loading all the melody data across the Internet is a really bad idea, especially since only a fraction of the data will be used in any one session. Loading everything over a local network is only marginally better, because it still wastes a lot of time and bandwidth for no good reason.

A better way to do it would be to load the server's data once and then cache it locally, requesting only a last-modified timestamp at each sign-on. That would drastically reduce load time and bandwidth use. I'm sure my school is paying for the bandwidth their server uses; they could definitely prevent drastic cost increases.

I'm not sure how to address the latency problem, because one of the foremost principles of application security is to never trust the user. All possible processing should be done server-side to prevent tampering by the client. Yet, this is most of what's responsible for the delays. If anyone has any ideas, this is your opportunity to leave a shout out in the comments.

I sincerely hope that someone who can do something about this egregious usability problem reads this. It's really an inconvenience to have to wait five, ten, or even fifteen minutes before being able to use the program, and to have five- or ten-second delays after issuing commands. Someone please do something about this architecture!

PS: If you're interested in a fictionalized, in-universe interpretation of this problem, I wrote a companion post on another blog I write for, The Queiba Wars. I also wrote a generalized "Best Practices"-type post on this subject for CodingExperiments.com.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

There, all done? Good, now I can comment away!

This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy, too. I don't know if anyone notices, but I try to keep my English as perfect as I can here on my blog, in my email, on Wikipedia... The list of places where I write goes on -- and in each and every location, I try to use scholarly-sounding English that won't have me embarrassing my school, my parents, or (most importantly) myself.

Chris says he gets emails like that all the time. I can relate; I see loads upon loads of messages like that on Wikipedia, in online school discussion boards, and forums across the Internet. Fortunately, most of the people I correspond with via email and IM have a firm grasp of the English language, and only make mistakes when they're intentional (say they're ignoring the rules for the sake of typing speed). Only a very few people I know personally mutilate English.

So, I beg the world, please watch how you write. It drives geeks like me, Chris, my friend i80and, and all kinds of other people absolutely crazy to try and interpret sentences like, "r u srsly gnna get widnows vitsa? u cnat possiby b srs abt tht!"

That's my rant for the day, then.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761