‘Here today, gone tomorrow’ nature of the internet

The demise of Google Plus is another example of the “here today, gone tomorrow” nature of the World Wide Web.
Google announced last week that it is terminating its little-used social network. People who liked Google Plus as an alternative to Facebook and Pinterest are out of luck and their content will be deleted.
Over the years, quite a few online services that I’ve used have gone belly up. You can never be sure which web services will survive the test of time.
The same goes for media online. A few news organizations do a good job archiving their content and making it discoverable online. Many others have let libraries of digital content disappear, creating dead weblinks everywhere.
The Internet Archive announced earlier this month that 9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the group’s Wayback Machine.
The non-profit organization is working to build and preserve an internet library. It will offer permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.
I applaud the Internet Archive and Wikipedia for the great work they are doing.
Often online articles disappear out of neglect, because an organization changes its content management system and doesn’t bother to transfer over older articles.
More recently social media services have started censoring the information members post to their networks.
Facebook announced last week that it has deleted 559 pages and 251 accounts that it claims were breaking its rules against spam and “inauthentic” behavior. The purge impacted some pages that had legitimate political speech. Those include the Free Thought Project and Police the Police, Reason reported.
This is a disturbing development since so much of the free speech debate today has shifted to online platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Photo: Wikipedia mosaic (Internet Archive)

Victor Danilov wrote the book on halls of fame

In my research on halls of fame, I learned through Google Books about the 1997 book “Hall of Fame Museums: A Reference Guide” by Victor J. Danilov.
His book appears to be the last comprehensive reference guide to halls of fame produced.
Before his tome, the last major work on the subject was published 20 years earlier. That earlier guide was “The Big Book of Halls of Fame in the United States and Canada” (1977) by Paul Soderberg and Helen Washington.
Danilov was the director and/or president of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago for 15 years, and the founder and director of the Museum Management Program at the University of Colorado from 1988 to 2003. He was the author of more than two dozen books, mostly on the museum field.
Next year will be the 20-year anniversary of Danilov’s book, so it might be time for a new reference guide. But given the state of book publishing, such a work might be an online-only reference. The closest I’ve seen to that is the listing of halls of fame on Wikipedia. But it is incomplete.
Danilov’s book listed some 274 hall of fame museums and exhibits located at 242 sites in 11 countries. Some sites housed more than one hall of fame. He also included walks of fame and stadium rings of fame.
Looking at just hall of fame museums in North America, I counted 213 sites in the Danilov book. (I excluded three that I didn’t consider to be true halls of fame.) Of those, 60 are now closed, or 28% of the total from 1997.
But a lot of new ones have popped up in the last 19 years.
My current list of halls of fame in North America has over 300 museums and exhibits you can physically visit.

12 interesting Tumblr blogs

Tumblr has become the go-to website for viral Internet content. That honor used to belong to Reddit, but the tide has turned.
A study by Priceonomics found that the No. 1 source for BuzzFeed content is Tumblr, followed by Instagram, according to the Washington Post.
What’s interesting is that Tumblr remains popular despite its heavy-handed treatment of users practicing fair use of copyrighted images.
Tumblr deleted my three blogs a year and a half ago after it received complaints from a photographer about my use of a couple of his images on just one of those three blogs. Tumblr didn’t respond to my appeal of the DMCA takedown notice and unilaterally deleted my work.
I criticized Tumblr at the time for not having at least a three-strike rule.
Fast forward to now and it appears Tumblr has finally instituted such a rule, according to a story on Techdirt. This rule may have saved my three Tumblr blogs from oblivion.
But I digress.
There are many interesting niche-themed blogs on Tumblr. What follows is a dozen of them.

Selfies at Serious Places

Selfies at Serious Places collects photos of people taking self portraits in places where they shouldn’t such as at funerals, cemeteries and former concentration camps. (See article by Business Insider.)

Lady Parts

The website Lady Parts compiles sexist casting call notices for actresses. (See article by the Huffington Post.)

Endorsement Bombing

Endorsement Bombing is a website that shows funny examples of “unexpected endorsements for surprising expertise” on LinkedIn, the professional social network.

TL;DR Wikipedia

For people who think Wikipedia entries are too long there’s TL;DR Wikipedia. The humor blog is described as “Wikipedia: Condensed for your pleasure.” By the way, TL;DR stands for “too long; didn’t read.”

Sleeping MIT Students

There have been several websites devoted to photos of students sleeping in libraries and public areas of schools. One was the now defunct Asians Sleeping in the Library, which was archived at least in part by the Chive.
Another is Sleeping MIT Students, which shows students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sacked out around campus. (See article by the Huffington Post.)

Napping All Over Rutgers

Napping All Over Rutgers covers sleepy students at New Jersey state university.

Ephs Sleeping In Public

Ephs Sleeping in Public highlights passed out students at Williams College.

White Boys in Salmon Shorts

White Boys in Salmon Shorts was started to draw attention to the preppy trend of white males wearing salmon-colored shorts.

Humanitarians of Tinder

Huffington Post collects screenshots from the dating site Tinder where the subjects use photos of themselves working with impoverished people in other countries. (See article by the Huffington Post.)

Signs from the Near Future

Signs from the Near Future imagines what road signs and other signage will be like in the future with advancements in technology. (See article by the Huffington Post.)

WTF Comcast

WTF Comcast features funny show descriptions from the Comcast on-screen program guide.

Pendleton Ward’s Cartoon Tumblr

As a fan of “Adventure Time,” I also like its creator’s Tumblr blog.

The happiest, horniest, wealthiest states

There are infinite ways to look at the U.S. by laying demographic, survey and other data over a map of the country.
What follows are some interesting examples from around the Web.

The Happiest Regions In America

Researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research put together a map showing the relative happiness of people in metropolitan and rural areas of the U.S.
Among cities, the small city of Charlottesville, Virginia, tops the rankings, and Washington, D.C., and Atlanta both rank as happier than average, according to Priceonomics.
Declining cities like Detroit, Michigan, and urban areas in the Midwest are particularly unhappy. Large swaths of Indiana and Kentucky ranked at the bottom of the happiness rankings.

States with the horniest women

For his book “Dataclysm,” OKCupid founder Christian Rudder uses data gleaned from what people say and do on dating sites to uncover which states have the horniest women and other interesting facts, according to Men’s Health.

States with the longest and shortest average sex times

Fast Company ran a map showing average sex times in states across the U.S.
The infographic was based on data from Spreadsheets, a sort of sex-focused Fitbit.

Map showing whether states prefer boobs or butts

A study of Americans looking for “straight,” “woman-with-man” pornography on websites Pornhub and Youporn revealed which states prefer butts over boobs, Huffington Post reported.

Descriptive words for each state

Business Insider published a U.S. map showing the top autocomplete word for each state when people search Google for “Why is (state) so …?”
Some results:
Why is Illinois so … corrupt?
Why is Virginia so … strict?

Word used most disproportionately in each state’s Wikipedia article

Slate studied Wikipedia articles to find the word most representative of each state. (For Pennsylvania it’s chocolate, for Colorado it’s cannabis, etc.)
Author Ben Blatt discussed how the data can be sorted to come up with different results based on various parameters.

Top State Income Tax Rates

The Tax Foundation has run a series of informative maps.
Check out the organization’s map showing state income tax rates in 2014, which range from zero in seven states to 13.3% in California.

Largest company by revenue in each state

Huffington Post reprinted a map showing the largest company by revenue in each state.
The map was put together by telecom company Broadview Networks.

Wealthiest Americans by state

Real estate blog Movoto published a map showing the richest person in each state.

What each state buys most on eBay

The data analysts at eBay put together a map of the 50 states showing what types of products are purchased in each state most often.
(See article by the Huffington Post.)

Most popular U.S. attractions by state

An Imgur user posted a map showing the most popular U.S. attractions by state.
It was composed using information from a list website called Reflections of Pop Culture & Life’s Challenges.

Each State’s Supernatural Claim To Fame

The Movoto Real Estate Blog published a detailed map showing each state’s supernatural claim to fame, including cryptids, UFOs and aliens, or paranormal activity.
In my current state of Virginia, the top supernatural incident involves the “the Bunny Man” in Fairfax, Va.

Preserving online information for posterity

I’ve written a lot about the fleeting nature of online content, including newspaper articles, YouTube videos and other media. But some organizations are trying to preserve online information.
First and foremost, there is the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit digital library dedicated to preserving the Internet’s past for the use of future historians. It runs the popular Wayback Machine for seeing what websites used to look like. (Tech-media-tainment has been saved twice in its history, once in June 2011 and again in May 2014.)
Personally I wish I had been more diligent about saving email from old accounts from the early days of the commercial Internet. All that digital correspondence with friends from the 1990s is gone forever.
The Internet Archive is one of just a handful of institutions, including parts of the British Library and the Library of Congress, trying to ensure that what is online now is saved for the future, the Financial Times wrote. (See “How to preserve the web’s past for the future,” Financial Times; April 11, 2014.)
In May, the Internet Archive announced that its Wayback Machine had archived 400 billion indexed webpages, from late 1996 to the present, The Next Web reported.
The Internet Archive has collected about 15 petabytes of information to date, Mother Jones reported. (A petabyte is about 1 million gigabytes of data.)
Wikipedia also is becoming a resource to preserve Internet history.
The National Archives and Records Administration is uploading its digital holdings to the Wikipedia Commons to gain a wider reach for the documents, TechCrunch reported.
In April, the Digital Public Library of America celebrated its one-year anniversary. The DPLA is a platform that connects the online archives of many libraries around the nation into a single network. All the archives are searchable through the digital library’s website, Ars Technica reported.

Photo: Internet Archive servers in August 2011. (Pernilla Rydmark on Flicker)

Web vandals put ‘Futurama’ character Bender in Robot Hall of Fame

Fans of the sci-fi cartoon comedy “Futurama” vandalized the Wikipedia page for the Robot Hall of Fame recently to add the show’s antihero robot Bender to the list of inductees.
While Bender would make a fine addition to the fictional robots portion of the Robot Hall of Fame, he was never chosen for the honor. The error also was added to Bender’s Wikipedia page. I have since gone in and edited out those errors and added more citations for the actual winners.
If Bender is ever going to have a chance to make it into the Robot Hall of Fame, the organization behind the hall is going to need to find the financing necessary to resume operations. It suspended operations in 2010 for lack of funds.
Bender is one of many real and fictional robots who have been nominated by the public for inclusion in the hall.
The original error about Bender was added to the Robot Hall of Fame Wikipedia page on Dec. 5, 2011. It was added to the Bender Wikipedia page on Feb. 8, 2012.
It’s not the first time pranksters have had fun with Bender online. In 2010, a team of hackers from the University of Michigan got Bender elected as president of the Washington, D.C., school board by tapping into the city’s flawed electronic voting system, PCWorld reported.

Photo: Bender the robot from “Futurama” (20th Century Fox).

New wiki website devoted to mancations

Last week I suggested that somebody should create a wiki devoted to mancations. Today I decided that that person was me.
A wiki is a website that allows many people to collaborate on writing and editing content. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is the best known wiki.
I set up the Mancation Wiki at Wikia, an advertising-supported wiki service. I put up the basic framework tonight and plan to add content to it in the days and weeks ahead. I’m hoping that other people discover it and share their knowledge about fun mancations as well.
Mancations are man vacations. They can range from short weekend trips out of town to longer road trips or traveling to exotic destinations. They can revolve around the great outdoors, sports, thrill seeking or geeky pursuits.

Beware of erroneous information on the web

With newspaper and magazine articles, most readers trust the companies behind them to put out truthful reports. After all, these publications employ professional writers and editors, and often fact-checkers.
With the World Wide Web, it’s a different story entirely. Citizen journalists, amateur bloggers, people and groups with political and social agendas, and even pranksters are out there writing articles along with professional journalism organizations. With all those new voices, a lot of misinformation is getting spread.
Wikipedia is an amazing resource, but educators and news organizations have learned the hard way that its model of an encyclopedia anyone can edit is flawed. Errors, sometimes malicious, are introduced and don’t get caught fast enough to stop them from being disseminated.
Check out PC World’s article on “The 15 Biggest Wikipedia Blunders,” published in August 2009. Also, read “PSA: Don’t believe everything you read on the Web” from Yahoo News, posted June 30.
At its best, Wikipedia is a great first stop for people researching a topic. Hopefully they can find links to other resources through Wikipedia that verify the information it presents.
Modern urban legends and erroneous political propaganda are often spread virally through forwarded e-mails. A visit to Snopes.com, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com and TruthOrFiction.com often can determine the veracity of such a report. But many people forward an inflammatory or shocking e-mail without doing such a check.
A public relations person a year or so back e-mailed me a pitch that referenced a speech that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates supposedly had given called “Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School.” A quick check of Snopes.com revealed that Gates had never given the speech attributed to him. The erroneous report has been circulating on the Internet for years.
The surging popularity of Twitter and Facebook have brought countless examples of fake stories and rumors passed off as news. Both allow people to post quick updates and discuss current events in real-time online.
Britain’s Daily Mail was fooled by a fake Steve Jobs Twitter account last month. It wrote a story based on a tweet by “ceoSteveJobs” that Apple was going to recall the iPhone 4. Jobs doesn’t have a Twitter account.
Erroneous tweets also led to news reports in March that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was retiring. (See the Los Angeles Times account of the incident.)
Twitter is a favorite medium for people to spread celebrity death rumors. Kanye West is one example of a celebrity reported to be dead on Twitter when he is still alive and rapping.

This is the latest in a series of articles called “The Failed Promise of Digital Content.”

Joining the ranks of Wikipedia editors

The other day I decided to make some changes to entries in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
I’ve always wondered who writes and edits Wikipedia, which has nearly 3.3 million articles in English alone. It’s a special type of website called a wiki that is designed to make collaboration easy. Mostly volunteer writers and editors contribute to the website.
Making changes to Wikipedia articles is pretty easy, but there’s a lot of special coding to be aware of. It's also time-consuming work, so I doubt I'll be a major contributor.
I made fixes and updates to four articles: Halls of fame and walks of fame, Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, Toy Industry Hall of Fame, and Plaxo.
In the article on Halls of fame and walks of fame, I deleted two redundant entries and added the Burlesque Hall of Fame, Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame and the Toy Industry Association Hall of Fame.
For the article on the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, I added the 2009 inductees. I also added the 2009 and 2010 inductees into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame.
And finally I updated the entry on Plaxo, the online address book company. I changed the article to reflect its new owner – cable company Comcast – and new CEO. Plus, I added some references, including a company press release and company blog post.
I like Wikipedia and think it’s a great public service. I’d caution anyone using it as their only reference though. It can get out of date and is always subject to possible false information. But its use of references to back up claims goes a long way toward alleviating concerns.

Art: Wikipedia logo

Today’s brilliant idea: hall-of-fame hall of fame

The opening of the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday got me thinking.
There are so many halls of fame now that there needs to be a hall of fame for halls of fame.
I amaze myself sometimes.
Wikipedia lists about 170 halls of fame, mostly for sports. There are 11 halls of fame for motorsports, 10 for baseball and softball, eight for horse racing and six for professional wrestling.

There are 22 halls of fame for music, including such categories as rock and roll, country, blues, jazz, classical, gospel, rockabilly and polka.
We have halls of fame for astronauts, cowboys, miners, the insurance industry, sports mascots, and porn stars.
Not all halls of fame have physical locations. Some are only online.
But here are my picks for interesting halls of fame to visit:

1. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Cleveland, Ohio
2. Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Springfield, Mass.
3. Robot Hall of Fame, Carnegie Science Center, Pittsburgh, Pa.
4. National Toy Hall of Fame, Strong National Museum of Play, Rochester, N.Y.
5. NASCAR Hall of Fame, Charlotte, N.C.
6. United States Astronaut Hall of Fame, Titusville, Fla.
7. National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
8. National Inventors Hall of Fame and Museum, Alexandria, Va.
9. National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, N.Y.
10. Pro Football Hall of Fame, Canton, Ohio
11. International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame, Arlington, Texas
12. Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Seattle, Wa.