In this modern age of the Interwebs/Internets/The Great Series of Tubes, truth is a consensus, rather than an absolute. I don't entirely blame this era of the Post-Modern "well if it works for you" mentality, but is allowing the largely uninformed world the ability to decide the truth of something for everyone else the best thing? I'm not talking about spiritual truth and the issue of whether or not you're going to burn in a lake of fire for all eternity, but the simple expression of measurable, documentable, day to day, facts.

Historically speaking, personal testimony in the form of journals and diaries is one of the key sources when researching an event. However, through blogs, every single current event has hundreds of people recording the incident. The problem is they probably weren't all present and that they tend to draw their content from one another. The problem is with the documentation of fact.

Wikipedia is a glorious resource, but it is still only a consensus. While it may be better than only allowing the "victor" to write the history, it will never give an unbiased account of well, anything. The problem is that people like truth that agrees with their opinion of what truth should be.

Social media and social bookmarking perpetuate this problem. Things that people agree with are promoted and things people disagree with are routinely buried as "inaccurate" or "this is lame" (at least on Digg). I've written recently about how newspapers as a whole don't place much value on social bookmarking, but are they correct to do so on an epistemological (study of truth/knowledge) level as well?

Blogs really are the crux of this issue; without them would we need sites like Digg to decide "truth"? A blog can turn anyone with an Internet connection and some hosting space into an instant self proclaimed pundit:


It is ironic that I'm attempting to wax eloquently on a topic I have no credentials to speak about. I won't pretend that these are indisputable facts, but merely my observations. That being said, this really is the "glory" of the Internet. I can expound through this site and spread my thoughts to the world (true or not) and have them arbitrarily accepted or denied. I suppose that rhetoric is just as potent on the Internet as it is on the campaign trail.

Is the "power" of social media is a relative concept? Those that are involved in it, that read Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and the ilk would certainly say it is a breakthrough in the distribution of information. However, only 22% of the Top 50 Newspapers (by circulation), have any form of social bookmarking integration aside from a simple "email this article" link.

I spent an hour or so mindlessly clicking and compiled a table of the Top 50 Newspapers in America and their level of social bookmarking integration:
Option 1: Google Spreadsheet
Option 2: PDF

In summary, every single online edition of newspaper had a link to email the article to people (except the WSJ which wanted me to pay to read it), but very few had "Digg it" buttons or similar links. The most logical explanation is that newspapers don't try to drive additional traffic from social media simply because the traffic isn't worth very much.

I don't mean that in the sense that traffic from Digg et al doesn't do anything other than leech bandwidth; such traffic simply isn't profitable. When compared to the dead tree form, online advertising is not all that profitable for newspapers despite their online distribution being nearly limitless.

Daily Newspaper Advertising Revenue 1984 – 2005
Source: State of the Media


Online Ad Revenue, 1997-2005
Source: State of the Media


The most striking aspect of these graphs is that the Online Ad Revenue graph depicts the total amount of advertising online, not merely for newspapers. This says two things about the Internet:
1) Social media doesn't really matter to the real world (yet).
2) Companies like to make money and maximize their cost to profit ratio.

When it can be easily seen that the newspaper industry makes 379% more than the total revenue from online advertising in a year ($47.4 billion vs. $12.5 billion), it's not hard to understand why they don't put more effort into driving traffic to their websites with social media.

That being said, there is some value in social media and user generated content. For the moment, big corporate media doesn't seem to care about such things, the blog-o-sphere is growing rapidly and may one day truly matter in the journalistic scheme of things.

It is rather depressing that as I sit here writing this article I am writing about my own insignificance. However, I have encountered something during my exploration of this topic that I should remember: blogging only really matters to bloggers and people that spend a significant portion of their lives on the internet.

So, I have presented my evidence of the current insignificant of the blogging and social media, especially from the perspective of corporate media, and now it's your turn to answer the question: does it really matter?

I spent a few minutes this afternoon and tossed together an app to make my life a bit easier. I find that I'm copying text from places and sticking it in .txt files on my desktop all too frequently.

I wrote ClipNote to simplify this task.
1) Copy the text
2) Run ClipNote (hopefully with Launchy)
3) Specify a filename and hit enter.

Download (Windows only)

Every nerdy abode should be adorned with video game "art" of one form or another. If your area is currently lacking, you should consider creating a masterpiece out of Legos, or some other creativity inducing material.

For instance create a Lego Mario:



Here's a template to create your own: Download/View

Let me know how your nerdy pursuits turn out!

I know that Vista tips and tricks are all the rage these days, but there are still a lot of things in XP left to explore (at least for me). So when Josh showed me that you can configure the behavior of Windows Update in the Group Policy Editor, I knew I just had to tell the world. Personally, I just have them set on manual, but it’s nice to know that some of the annoyances can be removed.

Run: gpedit.msc
Navigate: Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update
Remove: the annoyances of your choice:



Personally, I hate it when it:

• Adjusts the default shut down option
• Tries to auto-restart
• Reminds me when I tell it not to auto-restart

Perhaps I'll have to investigate this "Vista" sometime and start posting tips about that too. Anytime someone wants to give me a copy, I'll try it out and stick up a fair review (ahem ... Mircosoft).