Sine Ira et Studio… sed cum Blogum

Blogs should have been introduced to mankind at least 2500 years before today. Think about it. The New Testament could have gathered thousands of followers in the Greek diaspora during the Hellenistic period. Plato could have written his famous dialogues in a blog read by the entire Academy. He could have included a dialogue-creator widget, too, with which his students from the Athenian aristocracy could have recreated the memorable conversations with Socrates. Oh, and think about what magic a cool chat room could have done in those early days to help spread the seeds of scientific methodology in the disputes of the apologists.

For the Hungarian Anonymous, a blog would have offered a far better tool than scratching on animal’s skins (aka parchment). Descartes would have been the man to write some infamous mottos for the About me sections: blogeo, ergo sum. Casanova could have been the first to add the 18+ tag to his 6-volume-long memoirs (or, in some countries, such as the Pope-governed Italy of the 18^th century, the 21+ tag…)

The posthumous celebrity of 20^th century Hungarian emigrant literature, Sándor Márai, would have also preferred a blog. In fact, he would have been the most avid blogger of all times. Check the thick volumes of his diary from 1940 to 1989 and you will know what I am talking about.

All in all, blogging could have served as a buzzing forum in every century of humankind’s history. Today it is one of the most widespread and popular means of communication and news broadcasting. Most importantly, blogs are free. Amateur blogs are written by single authors and the comment boxes are nearly always open to the public.

Afterthought (War & Peace vs. Brenda’s Wedding Blog)

When I was 14, I used to read War and Peace. I am ashamed to admit that I actually loved it. [Insert “poignant confession” tag here.] I actually loved the stuff that happened on most of its pages (1600 out of the ca. 2100). I even liked the 60 pages-long epilogue of Leo’s vague discourse on the principles of history at the end of the book.

Today I only read blogs. And seriously, I do not feel that there is a devolution here. It is obvious that you cannot actually compare Tolstoy’s work to a wedding-blog, but hey, who said people are interested in anything but themselves. They are not. The huge cyber-catalogue of blogs on the web today is the ultimate place to browse for the content you are interested in. And currently, what satisfies my immediate needs is to read the personal tales of people all around the world; especially the ones in which they explain how they prepare for their weddings.

*Btw, the title refers to the famous latin phrase of Tacitus, a Roman historian. It is taken from his book, Annales (= “yearbook”, Roman [military] history year by year, as seen by the man himself). “Sine ira et studio” translates as “without anger and fondness,” that is, objectively. It is also mostly quoted by historians as their quasi-motto in seeking objectivity while doing their research.

German Mothership?

The destabilizing Greek crisis reached its turning point on Friday when leaders of the German, Italian and Spanish government gathered in a Brussels-summit to discuss the bailout plan for the struggling mediterranean country. From the 110 billion euro aid it is Germany who offers the largest piece of the cake with 22.4 billion euros (as voted in the lower house of the German parliament). So, has the poor region of the EU become the hungry calf feeding on the trusty German Motherland?

Well, not just Greece or the East-European newbies have become indebted in the recent years: Italy, Spain, and Portugal also signed the bailout plan in Brussels to somehow initiate their recovery. The EU has become a safety zone and a seemingly endless treacle of financial aid for many economically unstable governments in Europe. Still, German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave in to signing the bailout only because even she could be persuaded: that letting the economic status quo collapse would only result in an even greater financial crisis, one that could even suck in Germany.

Spain's national economy grew 0.1% (!) this year, and Greece (currently suffocating in heavy protests throughout the country and Athens) approved its package of budget-cutting measures only because the country at least had to meet the terms for the huge bailout aid. The attitude of the aforementioned mediterranean countries, as well as the EU-newcomers: Bulgaria and Romania, could still be best described as "you pushed, I joined, where's the cash?".

Nobody seems to sense the wind of change. Perhaps only the Athenians, whose immediate debt is now prevented by the aid, and who may now wipe those tears, caused by pepper spray, off their face.

Naki Naki Naki! (cry, baby, cry...)

It has already become a contest... Young (wannabe) sumo wrestlers hit babies to make them cry. Oh, and it is a national celebration, too. It is entitled Nakizumo (literally: "crying sumo"). Of course, parental permission is obligatory, but parents do not seem to make too much hassle when lending their newborn to two 200+ kg wrestlers on the podium: the popularity of the festival is immense.

The ritual's origin reaches back to the beginning of the history of sumo wrestling. It is said that by traumatizing the babies and, consequently, making them cry, the evil spirits will eventually escape from the young body and the baby will grow up strong and healthy. Today, however, the ritual developed into a contest in which two weighty wrestles hit the baby simultaneously. Whoever cries louder (do they have a dB-measuring device?), becomes the... if not actually happy, but at least the "healthy" winner.

Bit Too Flashy

It has been awhile since the first few thousand iPads were sent around the world to reach their lucky (?) customers. Apple already celebrated the 1 millionth sold iPad. However, with the new Apple gadget, customers became less tolerant in the continuously rewinding Flass-support issue. iPad, similarly to the iPhone or the iTouch (all of which feature the touch-screen mechanism), does not support Flash. The result is: 60% of YouTube videos and millions of multimedia player plug-ins cannot be accessed via these devices.

Steve Jobs recently responded to the issue in a lengthy public letter posted on Apple's homepage. To sum up the letter in a nutshell, Apple CEO tells the story of Adobe (creator of Flash) and Apple working together in the golden era of developing PC's and then parting ways since Adobe became the sole developer of Flash. According to Jobs, Adobe does not contribute in developing the currently widespread HTML5 technology, the common internet platform over which most of the large webpages (like Google or, recently, YouTube) are based on. Since today an ever growing percentage of internet access is via 3G mobiles, it would be necessary to either upgrade Flash for mobile phone interfaces or touch-screen mechanisms.

Well, it's great that IT history is on the verge of a great breakthrough in web development, but it is taking a bit too much time. Customer still can't access plug-ins or Flash-driven content via Apple gadgets, and their tensioning impatience is easy to understand.

I Can't See Your Face

Full article HERE.

"On Thursday, PC World detailed that Facebook was "secretly adding" third-party applications to user profiles, something that the company once again attributed to a bug and said that it had been fixed. Investor-pundit Paul Kedrosky and fanboy idol Peter Rojas, former editor of Engadget and co-founder of GDGT, both announced on Thursday that they were deactivating their Facebook profiles.

Basically, Facebook is the Pacific Ring of the Web. In its six-year history the company has radically changed its product by implementing one small, step-by-step move after another.

Recently published excerpts from David Kirkpatrick's forthcoming book "The Facebook Effect" recall small Facebook features and quirks that were quietly snuffed from the site, like the random placement of the "Wedding Crashers" quote "I don't even know what a quail looks like" under its search query field. Cue a few thousand early Facebook users saying, "Oh, yeah, I remember that!"

How do you bust up a giant landmass into seven pieces without anybody noticing? Slowly. How do you turn an uptight, closed-off Web business built by a few college students into a sprawling creature that seems capable of sharing anything with anyone anywhere? Very, very slowly. But when something big happens, people start to notice the small stuff that they wish they'd seen earlier.

Concerned Facebook members are now acting like the social network has grown into something beyond their control, that even lawmakers might not be able to do much good, that the company is acting more like an unpredictable force of nature than a business run by, well, humans. Which is funny, because these days Facebook is playing up its human side, its fallibility.

After Wednesday's privacy glitch caused Facebook to temporarily disable its chat feature while all the bugs were fixed, The New York Times quoted the company's vice president of public policy, Elliot Schrage, as saying, "Are we perfect? Of course not." We should be getting used to the fact that an "iterative" product model, the sort of practice that's become commonplace now that pushing out new features no longer requires waiting for the next release of a shrink-wrapped software package, will mean imperfections.

It will mean screw-ups. It will mean bugs that are quickly patched and poorly thought-out features that are pulled in due time, but they were there in the first place, and user data may have been affected in the process. These are Facebook's tectonic plates, and we are just riding around on them.

This is disconcerting, and perhaps unethical. It's provoked concern among lawmakers, anger among activist groups, and fear among Facebook members. But, for better or for worse, this is how Facebook has been working for the past six years, and the Web at large may finally be coming to that sort of understanding.

The ground is moving at Facebook, and it always has been. The social network can credit a big portion of its success to this ability and willingness to keep changing while some of its industry brethren -- MySpace, Digg -- kept products relatively static and are now suffering the consequences.

This doesn't mean that Facebook's unstoppable by any means, though. Maybe the coalition of U.S. senators petitioning the Federal Trade Commission to rein in social networks' handling of user data a bit will be effective, and Facebook will be forced to stabilize the iteration of its service a bit; this, in turn, could mean that its lightning-speed innovation could be curbed as red tape and roadblocks go up, making it more likely that another service could race in and start chewing at its market share.

Or members could, of course, just leave -- and Facebook's business model is only as good as the 400 million people who inhabit it. But people choose to live in areas prone to deadly natural disasters, too. Living your life (or a portion of it) on the Web and entrusting personal data to social-media services like Facebook means that you're agreeing to colonize a product that's subject to change and unexpected error.

This is true for many services besides Facebook, too. Twitter's shown hints of major expansion plans. Location-based networking start-ups have an appetite for marketing partnership dollars and a whole lot of private data in their coffers. Then there's Blippy, the new, edgy purchase-sharing start-up that accidentally exposed several users' credit card numbers last month.

You could choose to err on the side of paranoia, assume that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is greedily dreaming of how awesome it will be when he sells everyone's data to marketers and uses the profits to buy himself a private island, and delete your Facebook account.

Or you could just be aware, be cautious, and figure that maybe your credit card data is something you want to keep off of Facebook for now.

Because while Facebook is the company it is today -- subject to constant and frequent volatility, eager to tread into new marketing and networking territory --this is how it's going to be."

The only reaction there is to make is that Facebook is really about the users who sign up for free and upload their personal information. Even today bugs and crashes will occur, and there is no 100% protection against occasional hack assaults. Users must be aware of their privacy settings and should not take it as a surprise if their personal content gets sprinkled all over the web. This idea should be taken into consideration when concerning these leaks, too.

By the way, it was Facebook that patched its system in order to prevent users monitoring the visitors of their own profile. The patch was created in order to stabilize the privacy shield for each Facebook-profile, but it also represented the strictness of Facebook's official policy of the issue. Altogether, Facebook is not exactly infamous of its leaking content...

What I like most about this article is the little Facebook-icon just below the text, where one can share the link to the article and a short preview of it on their Facebook-walls. Sharing web-content á lá web 2.0 style has become so popular on social networking sites, such as Facebook, that many news portals immediately adopted the idea.

Kids and Cats Go Viral

It is not as recent as it may seem. Cat playing with the piano-roll on iPad: 1,300,000 views in 2 weeks. 3-year-old kid spreading her breakfast over the kitchen table: over 100,000 views in less than a few days. Another young girl (tagged as a 3-year-old, but come on… she is much older than that, is it such a must to exaggerate?) cries that Justin Bieber doesn't love her – then laughs out loud, because her lament was simply a joke. But even this latter video earned over 1.5 million views altogether. This tendency has been present since years.

Even CNN covered the issue in its spotlight column. Although parents tend to be careful about their anonymity, these videos going viral will surely make some embarrassing moments for their children later on in their lives. Even further than that, parents will have to face the consequences of such publicity in the form of hostile comments that blame them for showing off with their children. But that’s not even the point.

The point is the enormous attention these videos get in such a short time. And among the thousands of comments (most of them which are published at the exact same second below the video, such is the buzz on the forums), there are quite a few complaining about how the recent decades of immense technological development resulted only in people constatnly turning on their Blackberries to watch one of the new “featured” YouTube videos. Yes, people want short, immediate entertainment. Do these videos offer short and immediate entertainment? Yes, they do. Nothing wrong with that. Still, if these videos appear the “Most Favorited” and “Most Commented” anyway, why feature them separately, as YouTube does? For most people who signed up to a YT-account, the previews of these videos will cover their entire start-page.

YouTube has become such a vast collection of videos; and featuring a clever search engine or the option of creating specific tags for videos is not enough to provide a guide in exploring this endless material. Especially if YouTube organizes its videos in such a way that, as a consequence, “the video of the day” draws another half a million (otherwise totally indifferent) viewers to witness how a cat scratches the screen of its owner’s brand new iPad...

Freelance

The age of magnificent news firms and the realm of heavy, solemn presses is seemingly over. The symptom that is most frequently referred to when considering the decay of journalism is the unselected avalanche of free news that is available to everyone. Newspaper companies cannot anymore monopolize the sources of news or determine what the audience should be interested in. During the history of journalism (up until now), the daily newspaper served its purpose: deliver a certain amount of selected news and reports from around the world to everyone willing to pay for it. Today, the channels of streaming news are free and open due to blogs, free online broadcasts, homepages of freelance journalists and so on.

Still, news articles covering certain topics are much easier to compile in newspapers. Similarly, some other types of news will appear to be more efficient in published by bloggers. According to my experience, there is still a wide gap between blogs and the articles of professional journalists. The most outstanding difference would be the stamp of personality in the articles of web logs and the common third-person style formality of professional journalists. A piece of news the reader can relate to personally will convey its message more effectively than a formal article in any traditional newspaper. Blogs gain audience by featuring a personal style and delivering certain types of news within a narrowed topic: such is the case of travel blogs, par example.

Considering the relationship between blogs/freelance news forums and traditional news firms, blogs will not necessarily replace the traditional news format in its entirety. Instead, blogs simply satisfy the needs of an audience that seek a more “natural” means of acquiring news. A blog revokes the scene of somebody kindly and enthusiastically telling somebody about what happened lately. Such form of telling news may even resemble gossiping, but a blogger also has to maintain her creditability. But who said gossiping was an anomaly of communication? Gossips are stories, no matter how private; they are the stories we talk about and the stories we can’t live without.

Blaming bloggers for their personal style manipulating or even distorting news is somewhat one-sided, especially considering the subtle ways a traditional article is able to do the same with a short, 1-column-long, boring little article by “carefully trimming” even the tiniest bits off in order to fit the blank space on the paper. A blogger at least allows free and direct channels for feedback. Moreover, considering reader’s response, for many readers, an uncensored and constantly refreshed comment page is more reassuring than a carefully selected compilation of letters to the editor that appears in a meticulously separated section of a newspaper.

Sziget Festival for Hungarians?

As the summer period approaches, the hype around popular summer festivals also erupts. Sure enough, a week-long gathering for music and party enthusiasts yields a number fun stuff ranging from listening to the favorite bands live to getting involved in developing relationships with even international friends. However, attempting to take part in such an event becomes less fun if it takes over a month of summer-work for teenagers or college students to earn the outrageous entry fee. The reason why nobody will ever care about the odd situation in Hungary, namely, that Eastern Europe’s largest festival in the middle of Budapest is invaded mostly by Western European foreigners who will eventually and necessarily raise the price threshold, is because economically there is no need to alter a policy which relies purely on financial considerations. On the other hand, the intention to create a new festival in Eastern Europe with its certain vibe and authenticity has faded away during the years of Sziget’s evolution.

Throughout Europe, attending musical festivals has been a popular and successful trend since the eighties, or, taking the UK as an exception, since even earlier. Even though it was the legendary Woodstock festival in the US that created such a chain reaction, the large capitals relatively close to one another on the map shifted the hotbed of musical festivals from the States to Europe. Many of the music festivals are built around a certain genre in music, resulting in a great variety of themes and styles. Drink or clothing brands promoting such events even form their entire marketing profile and strategy in order to accommodate the specific style of a certain subculture, or the taste of people who will presumably attend the festival; and Sziget has always been following the reliable patterns to attract promoters and visitors. True, the popularity of Sziget today is mainly based on this careful, step-by-step policy in gradually raising the bar in order to reach the Western European level. However, as Sziget finally managed to converge with the standards, its repertoire of both Hungarian and other European (but compared to the overwhelming Anglo-Saxon pop music trends, not canonized and, therefore, less popular) music was reduced to such a small proportion that these shows today generally appear on the smallest stages, which are carefully tucked in the far corners of the Óbudai Island.

Sziget has gained its global recognition only in the last decade, but even in such a short timeframe, it managed to outgrow the hosting Óbudai Island, where it takes place annually. Due to the sheer lack of space and the ever-growing number of visitors, Sziget must also gradually raise the entry fee to control the vast crowds forcing their way onto the island. And since the popularity of the festival manifests itself year after year in the increasing amount of attention it gets, why not monetize the inevitable opportunity?

For foreigners arriving from the West, Sziget is a cheap and atmospheric little place to spend much fewer money on drink and show-tickets than it would otherwise cost in German or English musical festivals, while still listening to the same music they hear at home. While it is obvious that globally recognized bands and artists will necessarily attract visitors with fat wallets, as a consequence: the vast majority of unduly underrated underground bands from this part of Europe slip off the stage. If Sziget had intended to create a balance between importing popular music into its repertoire and providing some reasonable amount of platform for either Hungarian or (so far) less popular artists, this intention turned out to be shamefully unsuccessful.

Cluny Revisited

Since an almost 30 year-old pedophile scandal resurfaced a few weeks ago, the siege of Vatican does not cease. The news of a priest from Munich sexually harassing a young boy back in the 80’s made the current pope’s reputation tremble. As the details of the scandal emerged from obscurity, it turned out that from Switzerland to France and from Brazil to entire Africa, every country could come up with at least one child molester to feed the scandal of the Church’s collapsing reputation.

According to the psychiatrist of the molester priest of Munich, Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI.), although the archdiocese in Munich during the incident, did not eventually know about the reinstallation of the abuser into service. Today, Joseph Ratzinger is dictating letter after letter to the Polish, Irish and Swiss churches in order to come over the rising tension. Apparently, he has to stand firmly on his heels if he ever wants to provide a proper response to the major news outlets’ scream for scandal: “Irish disgust over Roman Catholic Church”, “Pope’s tarnished reputation”, and so on, just to name a few of the popular headlines.

Vatican experts claim that the current scandal is mainly due to the “dam-effect”: in case of such delicate issues (like: concerning morality), one spark is enough to evoke the flames.

The outcome of this current issue is especially relevant from the aspect of the long-awaited reform of priests’ regulations, especially the question of celibate. Back in the 11^th century, the reform of Cluny aimed at reorganizing the law of the Church to prevent priest from forming families and thus (via heirs) shoveling all the wealth out of the system. Today morality issues are the weakest link in a religion’s agenda, and while Ratzinger (sadly) needs to patch up his torn reputation, an even more interesting finale of the current issue is going to be the dilemma of abolishing celibate. Will this also abolish pedophilia? Is that the real remedy?