Web – the Industry

Better than adblocking

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Just jumping on the adblocking yea/nay blogging train: I don’t block ads. I could but I don’t bother. Most of the time they don’t bother me unless I’m trying to read a long article, at which point I use Readability, which is infinitely better than an adblocker for that situation.

Before Readability
before-readability

After Readability
after-readability

Note: Readability runs fine on Minefield if you use Nightly Tester Tools to force-install. There’s also a bookmarklet version if you don’t want to install an add-on.

Hey look, a way to waste even more time…

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Google Video. Yep. Now, if you really want to, you can watch a poorly compressed low resolution episode of CSI or Star Trek Voyager or (for whatever f*&^ing reason) The Brady Bunch for a mere $1.99 USD.

Um. Or not. Personally, I’ll save my money and instead of spending $51 ($44 USD) on a season’s worth of crappily-encoded episodes of CSI, I’ll spend $54 for a season on DVD. Some of which are even in high def!

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t watch enough TV to justify spending that kind of money on that kind of quality when I can, 95% of the time, order what I want from Amazon and have it on DVD at my house within a week. I also don’t buy music online, so maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon. Maybe someday when music is $0.10/track and TV episodes are decent quality. Or, you know, 5 years from now when physical media has gone the way of the poor, poor Dodo and I have no choice.

Damned kids. Get off my lawn.

Paul Graham on Web 2.0

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Paul Graham, prolific and excellent essayist, has written an essay about Web 2.0.

Does “Web 2.0” mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn’t, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don’t need it.