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.