Ryan Jones Blog – dotCULT.com Ryan Jones Blogs About Internet Culture, Marketing, SEO, & Social Media

When we think of the “generation gaps” we usually think of TVs, Cars, Wars and Baby Boomers right?

We may even divide it musically by Siantra, Jazz, oldies, disco, and hip hop.

But what about on the internet? Clearer and clearer internet generations are starting to form.

I remember progressing from Prodigy to AOL then to Cable modems. Many kids today don’t even know what dialup is.

Remember IRC? Some of you may not even remember Napster, but I’m sure you’ve heard of kazaa.

The newest generation is the MySpace generation. Thankfully I missed this one (I missed livejournal too) I’d label the kids from 11 to 17 the “MySpace Generation”. Before myspace it was LiveJournal. Before that, only a few of us had blogs.

It used to be that blogs required technical knowledge, HTML skills, a domain name and webhosting. Live Journal changed that, and MySpace made it a viral popularity contest.

People used to only blog if they had something to say. Now we have hourly reports about “how cool Britney Spears is”, what Shelly from wisconsin had for lunch, or the hottness of the new boy that Suzy from Chicago is dating. How is this helping the web?

Not one person anywhere has ever once said anything productive or intelligent on a myspace account. Seriously, I challenge you to find something insightful from a MySpace domain. I mean, just look at the crap people are posting to their livejournal at this very second. (shows last 30 images uploaded to livejournal by all accounts)

I’m one for free speech and all, but I really don’t care if Jenny thinks she’s bisexual, Brad got dumped or Michelle really hates her mom because she won’t get her that cool new camera phone.

I hope our next internet “generation” at least offers something productive.

Ok, before we get into an intelligent design debate, I’m not talking about any of that. I’m talking about a book by Thomas Friedman.

In his book Friedman mentions that “the world is flat,” not because of biblical beliefs but because of technology.

With the current state of technology and oursourcing, the trend is now towards emigrating rather than immigrating.

Thanks to globalization we now have cheaper labor, cheaper products & services, and offshore poker sites; but is this causing the west to lose its stronghold on the economy?

Currently China is graduating twice the amount of bachelors degrees as the US, and India regularly graduates 1 million more degrees than the US. Not only that, the number of technology & engineering degrees in the US is declining.

over 70% of Japanese 7th graders can pass our high school equivalency exam.

Our students no longer have any motivation; and they will eventually be the downfall of America. That’s right, your kids (and mine someday) are going to crush our economy with their math grades.

As Friedman puts it “In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears…” And that’s a BIG problem.

At what point in this rapid globalization process should companies stop looking out for the global economy as a whole, and start protecting their own interests? How can we fix this?

This article is what makes me vote democrat.

According to this article, many republicans actually believe that God created the world in it’s current form just a few thousand years ago, and that dinosaurs co-existed with Adam and Eve.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

This is a political party that listens to God over their cabinent. They spend valuable money fighting to teach creationsim when it could be put to better use.

Are you arguing that God created the grand canyon and fossil record just to fool us? If so, then God would be an “Evil Deciever” and we all (well those of us who read) know the Descartian implications of that right?

It’s time for a new party. Let’s call it the rational party. Or, lately if we want to actually win the election we should call it the “patriot party” or the “anti terrorist party”. A vote against the anti terrorist party is a vote for the terrorist party right? Who wants that.

Did you ever wonder what it’s like to have a website filled with tens of loving, adoring fans? So have I.

Since I don’t even have that, I’d like to say Merry Christmas to the 3 or 4 of you that actually read this stuff. (when of course the people at actually have the database up and running)

I hope you all have plans for the new year. I’m tenatively scheduled to spend the new year in Chicago. I’ll tell you how that works out.

I’ve got 2 or 3 new websites I’ll be launching, but I’m going to save them for after the new year. They just don’t fit the holiday spirit.

What are your new years resolutions and goals? Mine are pretty simple:

Finally start that diet.

Work Out more.

Launch 5 new websites over the year.

Work hard enough at work to get a raise.

Pretty typical I guess eh?

anyway. Merry Xmas.

Do a search on Google for a thing. It doesn’t matter what thing it is. Tomato, Pencil, slang, satellite information etc…

I bet you find a Wikipedial url.

Forget online directories, Wiki seems to be the new authority figure on everything. If you’re not sure what a wiki is, it’s a site that anybody can edit. That’s right, anybody.

So why didn’t it instantly turn into porn pills and poker? Wikis have strong communities, the people take too much of an interest in their articles and quickly delete the spam.

Is this why Google seems to be giving it such heavy weight despite recent innaccurate data controversy?

BTW, dotwiki.com is currently for sale. The current bit is $200. I’m not completely sure if I want to let it go or not, but if you’re interested drop me a line.

Have you heard about this new class action lawsuit against Wikipedia for having false information? They’re trying to get it shut down for containing “untrue and libelous informatin” Does this sound absurdly crazy to anybody else?

It says right on the page it’s a free encyclopedia that anybody can edit. What did you expect?

Just in case, let’s break that down.

Free – No money.

Encyclopedia – A comprehensive reference work containing articles on a wide range of subjects or on numerous aspects of a particular field. (notice it doesn’t say anything about factual or true?)

Anyone – You, me, grandma, Cletus, Mrs Johnson’s 3rd grade class, any idiot with a computer.

Edit – Write, change, or add content.

Honestly, if you use wikipedia as a reference for anything remotely important, you need your internet privledges revoked permanently. It’s for entertainment like the onion, fark, or this website right here.

If they shut down every website that ever posted “untrue or libelous information” there would only be 5 websites left. 2 poker sites, 2 porn sites, and 1 site about the history of the internet; telling us how it used to be a free place where anybody could post their opinion on anything.

seriously, never use global internet solutions.

So it would seem that one of my sites NoSlang.com recently got hit by the so called Canonical URL bug.

Some of you may remember a while ago when MSN was posting a PageRank of 2? This wasn’t a mean Google joke, it was a case of people linking to both http://www.msn.com AND http://msn.com (without the www).

Since it’s possible (although a bad idea) to actually have 2 different sites on those urls, Googlebot got confused and thought it was 2 different sites with the same content. Thus, the pagerank of the www suffered, and the non-www was seen as a new site (so no pagerank).

This happened to Noslang.com in that it’s main page had a 0 pagerank (unless you went to /index.php of the non-www then it had a 3), but all the sub pages had a pagerank of 5.

A woman in Arizona is trying to avoid a ticket for driving in the carpool lane by claiming that her unborn fetus counts as a person, thus she’s entitled to the carpool lane.

Ignoring all the neo right wing conservative christian arguments, this is ridiculous.

The law was intended for licensed drivers. I believe that if your 6 year old is in the car with you, that shouldn’t count either. It’s not like your kid can drive their own car. It’s carpool for a reason.

If the court does agree that the fetus is a person however, they should promptly issue it a ticket for not wearing it’s own seatbelt.

Germany just passed a new law that says all telecommunication companies must store all information to be searched at a later date by the government to help prevent terrorism.

This includes all Internet, Cell Phone, Land Line, SMS, text messages, etc. Anything that has a signal that travels through a medium that’s not yours is now recorded.

Slashdot says it’s 1984 in Europe, which begs the question: Aprilia Is Freedom Worth Dying For?

A long time ago, our forefathers thought it was, but I can’t say the same is true of today’s society. We’re willing, if not eager to give up any of our freedoms to prevent a possible terrorist incident.

You’re cowards, all of you.

Since when are our individual lives more important than the ideals our founding fathers fought for? If Jefferson knew we were giving up so many rights in exchange for a false sense of security against “terrorism” he’d have a stroke.

With freedom comes consequences. A long time ago people viewed these concequences as neccessary for the good of the whole. It’s because of them we can work the jobs we choose, live where we want, worship the Gods we choose, and think what we want to think. People died horrible deaths, but because of them society continued to prosper.

These ideals are slowly being challenged however, and in a self righteous bid to “protect the children” we’re actually condeming them to an Orwellian future.

Stand up for your rights people. The terrorists don’t need to attack our freedoms anymore, we’re doing a pretty good job of destroying them ourselves.