Tuesday, January 13

of trolls and technorati

Someone pointed me to technorati (great stuff for blogs). About 99 times out of a hundred, I don't bookmark other people's blogs, but I may make an exception for odecker (allow several seconds for it to appear .. it's too long)

I suspect the vast majority of people who use the Internet have never heard of Usenet. It's probably just as well; Usenet has degraded to a place where spammers go to harvest addresses, and the troll-to-noise ratio is too high. The only lucid place to hold discussions is in a members-only, mandatory-validation group, such as groups.yahoo.com

I spotted Dallas Restaurant Reviews Guide (which is basically the dfw.eats Usenet group, but in a web browser and with advertising). I wonder if that is the future of what was once a place where real hackers (vs. crackers) went to learn. Somewhat related is a local website which monitors the official restaurant inspections and posts the worst ones: Dallas Health Inspection Horrors @ the PopCulture Shack: "(updated every 15 days) lists Dallas businesses that failed (or nearly failed) health food inspections."

.. and then there was the email, forwarded by one of my co-workers, which included wrong information about flying the Texas flag (bottom line: it is incorrect to fly the Texas flag at the same height as the US flag). Yet (by choosing a unique phrase in the document) I found dozens of copies of wrong information posted across the Internet. It's amazing how most people blindly accept stuff as the truth. As usual when I smell a rat, I went directly to snopes.com and found the truth: Texas flag

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