Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer
You are unknown to me.
Your camera’s memory card was in a taxi; I have it now.
I am going to post one of your pictures each day.
I will also narrate as if I were you.
Maybe you will come here and reclaim this piece of your life.
—introduction to I Found Some of Your Life, the most embarrassingly entertaining blog I’ve seen in a long while
Chalk up a +1 for Speedo: I received a response to an emailed product inquiry in half an hour.
This would not be noteworthy were it not for the many companies that don’t do this well (like ATA, which took longer to respond to an email about my pending flight than it did for me to fly home).
Wired News: “It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now.”
Wired News, long the place of record for online notation, has decided to drop the capital letters from Internet, Web and Net. All well and good; this has been happening elsewhere for years (I recall debating the merits of the capitalization with the editors at The Economist back in 2000).
What it references is the acceptance and commoditization of the terms. This happens frequently with new words that lose quotes or hyphens as their meanings become universal. Consider, for example, the slow conversion from “e-mail” to “email.”
However, Wired News’s justification is all wrong:
The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.
That’s not necessarily true. These words were capitalized because they were once considered namesâthat is, Internet was a proper noun, not just a noun. By dropping the caps, the writer has acknowledged that there is nothing personalized or particular about the word in use.
Example: “xerox” is often used as a noun and a verb as well as a company name. In print, one would write, “My photocopier is a Xerox home-office model,” but drop the capital letter to say, “I need xeroxes of this document.” The same lowercasing is now being applied to the web and the internet.
The problem here, for this author at least, is in the singularity of the terms. There’s only one Internet, one World Wide Web; these are still proper nouns in many ways, despite the increased commonality of their usage. The typical use of the article “the” before these words gives increased value to their status as proper nouns, not just nouns of ordinary use.
Personally, I am okay with the shift away from the capitalization, but I’m not ready to let go of it just yet. I do like Wired News’s assertion that internet and web each define a medium, not unlike radio and television. Still, the Internet and the Web still denote specific locations to me. Think about these analogies:
The Internet:Broadway vs. internet:street
The Internet:Manhattan vs. internet:city
The Web:Central Park vs. web:park
Even if the terms’ commoditization is complete, Wired News’s assertion that they never deserved their capital letters forgets the era when the Web was a fascinating new world, a destination in its own right, rather than a common vehicle for airline ticket sales. Perhaps the Internet’s maturity is just about complete.
Five service appointments and uncounted phone calls later, Time Warner Cable has classified my digital wire servicing as “complete,” and instead has informed me that a “huge outage” hit New York City last Monday-Tuesday, the aftereffects of which I will be noticing for an indeterminate amount of time this week.
All I know is that I’ve had little to no reliable Internet access since mid-July, and as I type this, my wireless hub keeps blinking into “no access available” for no good reason. When I manage to get through to my Internet connection, things are sluggish at best.
I’m thisclose to moving to DSL for a while. Even its unimaginably frequent outages were more tolerable than what I’m going through this summer.
Please contact me if you have or have not had a similar experience. Oh, and call me on a telephone if you want to reach me with any expediency. Doesn’t look like I’ll be online much this week.
I’m attending Ad:tech 2004 Chicago today and tomorrow at the Sheraton. Interesting stuff so far, and nice to be back in Chi-town.
Favorite sighting so far: Rick Bruner, with his hair combed and slicked back, in a suit. Best-dressed blogger here.
As of tonight I no longer have a catch-all email address for incoming messages to netwert.com. I’m receiving between 2,000 and 3,000 spams per day to the overall domain, and the IMAP web-browser-based mail system I use has been choking on the filtering of so much junk.
What this means is that you can’t use cutesy addresses to email me anymore. More importantly, I am no longer responsible for typos: friends of my mom’s who misspell “myrna” are out of luck, as neither Mom nor I will ever see the message.
This is a pretty crappy way to manage email, but until spam’s chokehold lets up, I’m more or less stuck. Maybe I’ll just move my whole life to Gmail.
I should really get it rolled into my site, but until I do, you should visit my link log for a rolling feed of the sites I discover daily.
Six Apart built its burgeoning weblog empire on a free piece of software that promotes goodwill and encourages people to use its paid service, Typepad. So what does the company do, now that it is a full-fledged company? It makes the new release of Movable Type surprisingly cost-prohibitive for most noncommercial users. I hope for Anil, Ben and Mena’s sake that this doesn’t create the backlash I think it will.
Update: In the scheme of things, MT’s cost structure isn’t particularly expensive. It feels expensive, because MT users are used to it being free. But $99 isn’t that much money; I regularly pay $39 to $79 for BBEdit releases, and they’re a similar company in size and stature. I’m a cheapskate with personal software licensing, but when I’m ready to add more publishers to my platform, I’ll be paying.
Update 2, May 17: Read Brad Choate’s piece on the matter, which sums it up nicely.
Blaise Pascal: “If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.”
Jason Calacanis: “So, the big show down in Gotham went down last night. … It was a great discussion and as many of you know Nick and I are, in fact, friends.”
Nick Denton: “Calacanis, who did most of the talking last night … is his own worst enemy, far more lethal than I could ever be.”
Hilarious deconstruction of the weblog cool kids in TMN today.
I picked up nine business cards that night. I was confused as to what I was supposed to do with them. Do I call these numbers when I need something blogged? Hey, we met at Royal Oak, and I was thinking, Yo La Tengo is cool. Can you blog that for me?
Ideapad © 1998–2024 David Wertheimer. All rights reserved.