mahiwaga

I find myself commenting a lot on how stupid Digg is. Not the concept itself, which is basically Slashdot evolved and on steroids. The problem is that the average posters are morons.

It is a well established fact that the louder you are, in general, the lower your intelligence is. It so happens that smart people tend to be introverts. They put their thoughts in writing, and if need be, they will write substantial essays/blogposts on subjects near and dear to them. But their thoughts are always secondary to whatever their passion is, whether that is coding, poetry, health-care, TV, science, sailing, art, Star Trek, the Simpsons, Apple fanboyism, etc., etc. Introverts are unlikely to leave inane comments floating around the Internet (except when they’re drunk.)

In contrast, since most people are extroverts, there are, by sheer statistics, more stupid people in this particular group. You know the type. The folks who are always jibber-jabbering away about nothing in particular. You know, obsession over American Idol, or defending the profligate behavior of Paris Hilton. Sometimes you can’t help but wonder if they’re hopelessly narcissistic and just like the way their voice sounds. Yap, yap, yap. Sound and fury signifying nothing.

These are the folks who leave their stupid spoor droppings on Digg, with undescriptive titles and pointless descriptions that say “title says it all.” They’re the ones who leave the ignorant, ill-informed, rude, and contentious comments, the ones that are patronizing, the ones that ineptly describe some well-known cyberspace phenomenon, apparently unaware that there are lots of people who have been on the Internet way before 2006. I mean, you can feel the neurons in your brain apoptosing if you read too many of these comments. And these are the ones that aren’t dug down into oblivion!

So why do I subject myself to it?

I blame RSS.

No, seriously, RSS has been a godsend. Instead of having to keep a bloated bookmark file of my favorite blogs, I can just load them up into my RSS viewer. Instead of clicking on every bookmark one-by-one, seeing if someone has updated, I can just watch the ever-flowing stream of posts scrolling down my screen, like an intelligible version of the display on “The Matrix”

What this convenience gives me is that I have a lot more time to read random blogs. I’m following something like 450 sites or so, and it still takes far less time to skim through the headlines and teasers than it would be to click and check maybe 20-30 blog sites.

So I’m pretty easy when it comes to adding someone to my RSS feed roll. It’s easier for me to branch out, read blog posts from people who have clearly different sensibilities and opinions from me. I have even added 1 or 2 intelligent conservative sites (just this close from being a complete oxymoron), partly because they articulate their opinions smartly, and partly because it always pays to see what the other side is thinking. And this is the rationale for keeping Digg in the list, no matter what sorts of nonsense happens to come by.

But, seriously, headlines matter. If the headline is unhelpful or, worse, badly-written, as in, me-no-speak-English-good (or any other language for that matter), there’s no way I’m going to read the teaser, much less the article. (Although I must say, one of my other pet peeves are sites that only give you teasers. I rarely add sites like these to my RSS feed list, unless they’re simply impossibly brilliant.) Digg is by far the worst offender in this regard. I can scroll through an entire page of Digg postings and not find anything of interest.

The signal-to-noise ratio is discouraging.

And yet Digg offers a window into the brains of 13-24 year old gaming nerds, a perspective that I otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to, so I always hesitate whenever I see a really stupid post that makes me want to just expunge this idiocy from my consciousness.

Anyway, the above expository rant was provoked by this particular post on Digg: NoFollow Just Isn’t Cool. Allegedly written by an SEO schiester, it details why this comment spam deterrent is “unfair,” citing a bizarre interpretation of the nature of free speech, and an even more bizarre interpretation of when reciprocity is expected.

Now, I admit, I don’t know why I respond to this kind of drek, but, well, I guess I’m just not one of the smart ones I was talking about, tending to lean more towards the morons of the world. Whatever. May God have mercy on my soul.

But I’ll actually take this post seriously. For those who aren’t in the know, the nofollow attribute is an attempt by Google to prevent the gaming of their PageRank system, which factors in how many links a particular site has pointing to it, in order to calculate how popular a site is, and which ultimately determines how close to the top the site appears when a particular search query is entered.

Thanks to brilliant solutions like Akismet, which is setup by default in Wordpress, the scourge of comment spam is nowhere near as bad as e-mail spam, but machine intelligence will never outdo human intelligence, and enough comment spam comes by that even the typical blogger who posts for the benefit of two or three people gets bothered by advertisements for Cialis or Russian mail-order brides. It’s all probability, I guess. Bother enough people for enough time, and a few are bound to actually want to buy things from you.

Personally, I think spammers should be classified as unlawful combatants and interned at Gitmo, but that’s just me, and you spammers out there should be thankful that I’m essentially unelectable to public office. Because you scum would be on the top my agenda, and certainly on the top my mafia hit list.

But I digress.

But what the technique really entails is posting spam comments all over the place, loading up as many unique URLs with links to your shady prescription drug selling site, so that the Googlebot awards you hella points and gives you a massive PageRank. And when someone types in “Viagra” into Google, your site will be on the front page for all the sad impotent bastards in the world to see.

So what Google did was suggest the nofollow attribute. Googlebot ignores any links that have this attribute tag, and thereby awards no points, and thereby fails to inflate said PageRank. Some sad fucks still keep trying despite the fact that Wordpress adds this tag by default, but it’s decreased the utility of the so-called Googlebomb.

Now, I have no problem with this. For one thing, it’s your site. While I’m a strong proponent of freedom of speech, technically, a blog is not a public commons, not the way that a courthouse or a town square is. It’s a private (virtual) location that the owner graciously opens up to people who he/she expects will abide by common courtesy. It’s like any place of business. The owner can always reserve the right to deny service or even access. So if you’re acting like an asshole, there’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution that gives you a right to continue doing so.

Now given this framework, I find it extremely offensive that someone should assume that because they posted to my blog, I owe them a link. Fuck you. I didn’t ask you to comment. Hell, as far as I’m concerned, I’m giving you the privilege to add your own thoughts to my site. There are no rights involved here. I’ll delete your shit if it’s ignorant, offensive, or otherwise worthless, and that’s too bad for you. The hell I’m going to give you any Googlejuice.

The organic way to gain page rank is to impress a blogger so much that they add you to their blogroll. Or at least maybe put a link in their blog post pointing to you. These links are supposed to be followed by Googlebot. And this provides more realistic data about how much other people actually find your site interesting.

And if you think about it, the reciprocal mechanism for sharing thoughts was not supposed to be primarily through comments. Comments are really more suited to responses that don’t warrant an actual blog post. And obviously, for people who don’t have blogs, this is the only way to go. (Come on, who doesn’t have a blog these days?) But people who have blogs? The mechanism that was supposed be used was the trackback. So when you saw a blog post that you wanted to respond to at length, instead of posting a little comment, you would write an entry in your blog and add a link pointing to the blogpost you are referring to.

But sadly, spammers fucked that up long ago, and trackbacks pretty much went by the wayside. Thank you for that, goddamn spammers. Way to go.

Bottom line: no one owes you anything on the blogosphere. If you’re doing something expecting some kind of reward, or return, you’re just deluding yourself.

My sister informs me of the fates of a couple of child actresses from the Shelly Long movie ”Troop Beverly Hills“ [IMDb][Wikipedia]

Jenny Lewis is the lead singer of the indie band Rilo Kiley.

Aquilina Soriano is on the Board of Directors of the Pilipino Workers’ Center, whom my sister met during her stint at SIPA.

Others:

• Ami Foster, who was on “Punky Brewster”
• Carla Gugino, most recently on “Entourage” on HBO
• Kellie Martin, who played a med student on “ER”
• Shelley Morrison, previously on “Will and Grace”, and who parodies the classic line from the Humphrey Bogart movie “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”: “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!” (My 7th grade teacher liked that line that goes “It’s 110° in the shade, and there ain’t no shade!” but I’m really wandering far afield now)
• John Kricfalusi of “Ren and Stimpy” and Spumco fame, who did the opening animation for the movie. Mr. Kricfalusi even has a blog.

Or megalopoleis for the pendantic.

I remember reading Neuromancer and being entranced by Gibson’s vision of the Sprawl, or more verbosely, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis which can be acronymized as BAMA. This is really not that far off, since BosWash (which includes Boston, NYC, and Washington D.C.) has been considered a megalopolis for some time now.

So I thought of what the equivalent would be on the West Coast and came up with SeaSanD, which is basically the I-5 corridor, therefore including Seattle, Portland, the S.F. Bay Area, L.A., and San Diego. But ignoring international boundaries, you could really go from Tijuana to Vancouver, B.C. (Isn’t it random that both ends of the I-5 leave the U.S. and enter a province abbreviated as B.C.? Baja California in Mexico. British Columbia in Canada.)

San Diego as the southern nucleus of a West Coast megalopolis is kind of misleading. As of 2005, the city of San Diego had an estimated population of 1.25 million. The entirety of San Diego County had an estimated population of 2.9 million. In comparison, the population of Tijuana in 2005 was estimated to be 1.47 million. San Diego’s land area is 372 square miles while Tijuana’s land area is 246 square miles San Diego’s population density is 3,360 people/square mile while Tijuana’s population density is 5,975 people/square mile, nearly twice as dense as San Diego. One could argue that Tijuana is really the core city, and San Diego its most populous suburb. Or at the very least, it would have co-center status, the way that the San Francisco Bay Area is centered around both San Francisco and San Jose—while San Jose is the larger city, San Francisco has the cultural cachet.

The megalopolis that exists now on the West Coast has been called Bajalta California, which includes L.A. San Diego, Tijuana, and Mexicali. This is, however, an urban studies term. The more colloquial term is probably just Southern California, or alternately, SoCal (which I think is most popular among my generation), or, as the local news networks put it, the Southland (although I think this is generally restricted to the Los Angeles-Orange County-Riverside consolidated metropolitan area and typically does not include San Diego or Imperial Counties)

This conurbation could actually be defined by the convergence of now obsolete routes, namely US-101, US-99, and US-80. All these routes have been decommissioned (While US-101 still exists north of L.A., it used to go all the way to the border.) US-101 and US-99 meet in downtown L.A. US-101 and US-80 meet in downtown San Diego. US-99 and US-80 meet in El Centro, which is just north of Mexicali.

Having grown up in L.A., you tend to get the myopia and narcissism characteristic of anyone from a major metropolitan area. New Yorkers are notorious for this kind of provincialism. In any case, for the longest time I’ve thought of San Diego as the southernmost suburb of L.A., and Las Vegas as the northeasternmost suburb of L.A. My conception of Southern California has been thus: San Diego to the south, Ventura and Santa Barbara to the west, Palmdale/Lancaster to the north, Las Vegas to the northeast, San Bernardino and Riverside to the east. In contrast to other metropolitan areas, where the downtown areas are incredibly dense and then the density tapers off quickly as you reach the periphery, something which I noticed of New York and Chicago, Southern California is almost of constant uniform density from core to periphery. Except for Camp Pendleton, you can drive from San Ysidro at the Mexican border all the way to Santa Clarita to the northwest or Palmdale/Lancaster to the north without once leaving the city. To the northeast, you only really enter the desert once you leave Barstow. To the east, you have to go as far as Palm Springs. To the west, it’s not until US-101 bends from east-west to north-south.

L.A. is often wrongly impugned as the origin of sprawl, but interestingly some observers actually consider it the most densely populated metropolitan region in the U.S. The population density of the urban core of the Southland is about 7,000 people per square mile as of 2000 (still more than twice as dense as the fourth largest city in the country, which is Houston, a far better example of sprawl gone wild), but there are neighborhoods where the density is as high as 36,000 people per square mile (in particular, Westlake, the next district west from Downtown.) This is half as dense as Manhattan (which has 67,000 people per square mile)

But it’s mostly the impression I get when I fly into LAX. I recall flying into O’Hare or JFK, where all you see is farmland, and then all of the sudden, the huge dense urban district pops into view. (The view of NYC from the sky still amazes me. It’s just miles and miles of huge buildings.) When you fly into L.A. from the east, the urban area starts when you’re still at least 30 minutes out, and this doesn’t even take into account delays and circling around. The urban carpet just goes on and on and on. Most cities, you can see the borders from the air, where suburbs give way to farmland, but L.A. spreads from horizon to horizon.

There is also the putative megalopolis called SanSan that basically includes all the urban areas of California, from San Diego to San Francisco. It’s hard to make the argument that there is a continuous urban chain from S.D. to S.F., particularly if you follow the I-5 corridor. But the (former) US-99 corridor is actually growing quite rapidly. You could make a case for a continuous chain of cities from L.A. to S.F. via Santa Clarita at the I-5/US-6 (now California 14) split, north through Palmdale/Lancaster all the way to Mojave, then east to Bakersfield, north on US-99 (now California 99) to Fresno, the largest city in the country not served by an interstate highway, through Stockton and Sacramento, and finally west to the Bay Area. While I wouldn’t say the urban presence is continuous, I can see how it might eventually become so after a few years. The US-99 corridor is growing fast.

You finally leave civilization entirely just north of Sacramento on the I-5, and there’s a huge gap between Sacramento and Portland, as well as between Portland and Seattle. It’ll take decades or so before those gaps ever fill in, but it might be quicker than I think.