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Published on 4 Comments on Reddit Reprieve

My kids and I tag team various sites and apps, championing and promoting and remaining steadfast to our favorites while spurning others that don't make our personal cut. I am the Google Queen. Drive, Docs, News, Photos, Music, YouTube of course - just about any product Google offers, I'm in. My daughter is pretty Internet savvy. She is all about Pinterest right now. She has a Facebook page, has had her own website, blog, Tumblr, Photo Bucket, used to do MySpace, is a wiz on chatting and a fellow Gmail user. My son was the longest holdout for any kind of tech stuff. He texts regularly but won't do Twitter. He barely checks email unless money or grandparents are involved. He has a FB page but doesn't do much with it, at least not the public one that Mom can see. So I was a little surprised when he mentioned a couple of current news topics and said he heard about them on Reddit.

I had heard of Reddit and had checked it out a few years ago when I was also looking at Digg and some other news conglomeration sites that I have since forgotten. I took another look recently but was turned off by the whole popularity angle. Apparently links are submitted and everybody on Reddit votes on the ones they like. Sort of like a virtual high school homecoming contest. The more votes a post gets, the higher up it appears on the scroll list. A bunch of people not in my peer group (middle aged empty nester) voting on stuff I didn't care about (video games, flavored vodka, out-of-focus pet photos) didn't seem like the best way to evaluate newsworthiness.

Game changer: Obama was a guest on a Reddit feature called Ask Me Anything. I know this because I saw the Forbes interview blurb on the Google News feed. That sentence alone should tell you how I like my Internet news! Anyway - I thought if Reddit was good enough for The President of The United States, I better give it another look.

Overall my reaction is still m'eh. I don't like the color (or lack thereof) or the layout. The posts at the top of some lists were 'sponsored', meaning someone paid big bucks to have their post at the top of the list. Should this be allowed? I understand the Reddit folks want to monetize their site, but doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of a site based on the popularity of the posts? I guess if it's okay for Google . . .  The non-sponsored posts were mostly uninteresting to me, way too Notice Me! or juvenile. And very little organization, if any. Perfect for those of us with ADD but not great for organized, productive news-seeking.

However. I did see one post that piqued my interest and kept my visit to Reddit from being a waste of click time:

The Hulk is now the main character of your favorite movie. How would that change it?

One random post in a sea of thousands had me scrolling and smiling. One random post has inspired dozens of fun ideas for future blog entries. So thank you to my son, the nice folks at Reddit, and the former President of the United States for leading the way to yet another site that will kill hours of my time. Beats cleaning toilets. 

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Published on Leave a comment on Enough Already With The Made Up Words
Nobody does it better

I may have mentioned that I have partaken of the Google Kool-Aid. (BTW part of getting older is the annoyingly ever-present sense of deja vu one feels when bringing up practically any topic. You find yourself prefacing virtually every sentence with 'I may have mentioned' or 'Was it you I was telling' to soften the awkwardness of being told, 'yes, you already told me that'. It's a dementia preemptive strike. The logic goes like this: I can't have dementia if I'm aware that it may seem that I have dementia and forgot I already told you this twenty minutes ago. Flawed Logic Alert: so somehow it is better that you freely admit you can't remember if you already told someone something?)

But I digress.

I am pretty sure I mentioned this Google thing to you earlier, and one of the many reasons I am fond of it/them is the name. 'Google' is, I think, one of the first Internet-related made up words and IMO without doubt the best. It has a carefree air, is easy to spell and remember, and has been joyfully embraced by all. As it caught on, Mad Men everywhere breathed a huge sigh of relief that they could abandon the frustrating search for unique preexisting words and instead turn their ever so creative minds to, well, creating. Never again would we have to put up with half-assed, uninspiring names. Yes, Kia Sportage, I am talking to you.

So how is that working out for you, tech industry? I'll tell you how: not so good. With the explosion of millions of internet-related doohickeys, the fun and cool made-up names evaporated like camel piss on the Sahara. Instead of the Googles and Diggs and Reddits, we are now stuck with a bunch of non-words that not only have no meaning, they do not carry their marketing weight. We couldn't remember them, much less spell them in order to retype their home URL, if our life depended on it.

What brings this to mind is a recent convo I had with my daughter. She was recommending a new fitness app to me. Really liked it, cool GPS features to help you figure out how far your ran or biked that day, etc. What's not to like? I'll tell you what: the name. It's www.strava.com. What exactly is a strava? Is it someone's initials? Some sort of exotic African wildlife? The first, middle and last portions of the names/breeds/colors of the founders' purse pooches? The menu item served when the venture capital deal was clinched? Their favorite bike part/jelly bean flavor/middle school crush? You haters out there are probably thinking, well yeah but what is a 'Google'? I'll tell you what it is: it has grown beyond all doubt and question into its own thing, completely impervious to your haters' hateful hating. Aww, just kidding - spoiler alert - Google haters are right up there with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and a balanced national budget as one of the greatest myths of the modern age.

photo by Amador Loureiro via Unsplash

Mind you, I am not talking about domains that co-opt an existing word that has little or no relation to the domain content other than someone just liked the word (Yahoo), or those that have cleverly combined words and letters in a new way (Pinterest) or dropped silent or otherwise extraneous letters a la text message (Flickr). No, I am ranting about words that, until somebody paid the fee to GoDaddy, had ABSOLUTELY NO MEANING. AT ALL. Do you think a bunch of Stanford engineering grads sat around brainstorming these, or some former Papa John's employees just followed a two-year-old around and tried to reproduce every sound they made? I'll let the evidence do the talking. In order from bad to worst:

mozilla - I have been fooling about with computers for so long, I actually remember Mozilla from the bad ol' days of cassette tapes and floppy disks. This one gets a pass for sentimental reasons.

squidoo - actually kinda cute, puts me in mind of an adorable sea creature and its not-so-adorable bodily functions.

squurl - this one is included as it perfectly represents my bias against those who cannot be troubled to learn how to spell.

jamendo and jango - these are both music sites. One is semi-catchy. One fails. Which is which? I'll let you decide.

qz - science nerds running amok playing Esoteric Hipster, dangerously close to mystifying their intended audience. Yeah, I had to look it up.

imgur - yeah I get it but they are taking the phonetic thing a little too far, dontcha think? See squurl. And yes by using dontcha I am being ironic.

dord - this one is not a domain name yet, but if you want to use it, it has a cool pedigree.

meebo - the name wasn't bad enough to keep Google from buying it.

Oh yeah this baby will really drive the traffic to your site

erowid - this is a semi-real word but a) no regular person knows wtf it means and b) my brain keeps wanting to translate it to 'earwig' - eewwww!!

tweewoo - another music site. Folks shoulda put down the bong before they registered this one. I refuse to patronize any site that makes me sound like Elmer Fudd while pronouncing it.

fffff.at - these people have clearly just given up on finding a unique domain name. Isn't this the sound you make to approximate air being let out of a balloon?

Apparently there are websites out there that contribute to this debacle. Their clever algorithms will generate scores of unique yet meaningless domain names. Not to be outdone by a few lines of code, I'd like to take a crack at it. How about these? I even have some ideas for target markets.

foozl - perfect as a dating site for dyslexic court jesters

zaxunz - European police siren repair

klaq - speech pathology site for domesticated water fowl

baahrf - I totally see this working for one of those sites that tells college students where the good parties are

Good news: my hypothesis was correct. No pricey algorithms necessary to generate the perfectly unique domain name.  Just grab your Scrabble tiles (the real ones, not the app version), find a human 24 months or younger, and spell out the sounds they make (regardless of orifice). Piece of cake.

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Published on Leave a comment on More Research Required
Borg me up, baby!

Hello, my name is Lissa, and I am a knowledge-a-holic.

I have been thinking lately that I have an issue with spending way too much time online. I plan to troubleshoot this problem by applying what is left of my brainpower.

What exactly is the big draw? Initially, I blamed my love of technology in most of its forms. I love my smart phone. So handy for so many little tasks! I love my microwave, without which my family would starve. I love GPS. I loved maps before, but the time savings (and no need for folding skills) with GPS is ridiculous! I love my satellite dish. Think about how that works - up in space, whirling round and round our planet, invisibly delivering massive amounts of viewing choices to millions of people 24/7. Speaking of which, I love my TV's remote control. It's not that I object to walking over to the TV to change the channel. But with hundreds of channels all programmed to show commercials at exactly the same time, standing there with your finger on the TV's channel button until you find something worth watching is just not an option.

I love all of these things and more, but it's the Internet that is killing me. I love all of my smart devices, but if it were not for the Internet, I would definitely not have a dead booty and a permanent kink behind my right shoulder blade from sitting in front of a screen all the dang day.

Think about it: without the Internet, how much time would you spend on your laptop/phone/tablet? It's the Internet, with all of this more or less infinite knowledge within literal reach, that keeps me chained to the desk. I am a knowledge junkie. I cannot get enough. So I sit here and ruin my health ('sitting is the new smoking') when I should be out taking the air and otherwise interacting with Mother Nature or other human beings.

Do you know the scene from The Fifth Element where Mila Jovovich's character, Leeloo, is catching up on 5000 years of human history by absorbing knowledge as images on the computer screen zip by? My idea of heaven! But I fear another fictional scenario may be more likely. It's only a matter of time until I turn up like that dude in a Stephen King short story, who spent so much time on his computer that gradually its wires burrowed into his body, and they became permanently entwined.

There's no way I am ready to give up my addiction. I haven't hit bottom yet. If only you could see what I see every day. Recent bounty included these tidbits:


I love info like Smaug loves his gold

Random? Sure. And each factoid has oodles of factoid-lets oh so ripe for the plucking. Dig a little deeper and you will find more info, and more, and more, an endless supply, more than any human brain could ever process. And it's just about as close to 'free' as you can get. I can wallow in this stuff all day long without spending a penny. I know the economists among you are out there waving your arms and shouting 'opportunity cost!', but I choose to ignore you since this is, after all, my blog.

The flow of information is not going to stop, and I'm not going to stop wallowing. So my only alternative is to turn this vice into something productive, channel it, control it. That way, I can rationalize all that time I spend BIC (Butt In Chair), or even (dare I hope?) allow myself even more BIC time. Hey, maybe this blog thing could be part of the solution. Definitely needs more research!

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, I hope you'll take a minute to subscribe to my blog (the subscribe box is near the top of the right sidebar).