Chris Ritke is thinking and writing...

...about this and that and some other things...

Sunday, February 26, 2006

This is why the internet is great

This is going viral:

After CBS4's Mike Kirsch aired a piece where several South Florida police officers were caught on camera intimidating would-be complainants against their police departments, one officer has taken action against the station in court.

These goons can't just do whatever they want anymore. You can't hide anymore. Everything is out there. Watch out! You're on the Internet!

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

No, don't f*ck YouTube

They may be pulling all those eyes in with stolen crap - but they're pulling eyes in, and that's got to be a good thing for grass roots media. People are learning that there is an alternative to MSM. They're learning through YouTube and other sites like Ourmedia and 49Media that there is something going on outside of TV and Radio. There may be a lot of crap in there (much much less crap in Ourmedia, no comment on 49Media for obvious reasons) - but I'll bet there's also some good stuff. And one person's crap is most probably some body else's good stuff!

I think that's good!

Back from the Dojo (Digital, that is!)

Had a great time at the Digital Dojo in Ojai. Alicia and Marcus were wonderful hosts as always!

Dave Toole, JD Lasica (Darknet, Ourmedia etc etc), Lucas Gonze (Webjay), Joshua Paul and a whole lot of other amazing folks were there (or with us through a video hookup, like Jay Dedman and Mike Meiser). The darknet/lightnet thingy is really a great way of seeing things - I learned (among other things, of course!) that there is one lightnet but many darknets... Lucas was very adament about that.

Now I'm starting to think more about the interaction of media and user profiles - I think it boils down to two types: the creators (very low percentage of people) and those who don't create but want to associate themselves with creators, much like kids having posters of their favorite bands/actors or whatever on the walls - now they're putting that up in their profiles. And they are going to associate themselves, whether through dark, gray or lightnets; whatever it takes!



Saturday, February 18, 2006

Off to Ojai

I'm heading down to Ojai tomorrow - to the Digital Dojo to be precise. We'll be discussing 'Darknet and Lightnet Applications' - Wow, it says breakfast on Monday at 8am. Really? Well, they do have a few of those really cool French Press coffee makers, so I'll probably be able to handle it.

I look forward to meeting some awesome people - some for the first time. Yeah!

More info to come.

Those damn captchas

I'm starting to feel some sort of connection to captchas. You know, the little thingys you have to type in so your comment will post. Don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.

I'm SMAHUKO. No, wait - I'm ZKISH. No, now I'm QJVFZDY. No, it's 198273.

Aaaarrrgghhhh! They're eating away at my brain. OKWERZ. BLSNT. KSYE89.

!*@&(*@&#(*$@&#*$&!@#!?!?#!?@#!?#@?!@#?!@#?!@!!!


Ugh. 3 Posts in 15 minutes. Steven - what have you done to me?

You wanna know why YouTube is so successful?

Because people are just regurgitating MSM crap on there. They wait until they get a cease & desist and then take it down. But by then they've gotten a million hits on it. Then BoingBoing writes about CBS getting on their case about somebody posting some TV show snippet and they get a million more hits.

They're getting hits because of stolen crap.

Being mean and agressive

Damn. What can I be mean and agressive about?

Steven at Vaspers the Grate today writes about sissies and cry babies screwing up blogging - being nice, agreeing.

Ok - how about this: Steven just turned me on to A Jack of All Blogs. Mr. Cowboy writes about having been turned into America's Favorite Scapegoat. What? Who but a handfull of Cowboy followers knows what he's talking about? I clicked on about 100 links trying to figure out what the heck all that is about. Do I know what is going on? No! Am I American? Yes. Is he my scapegoat? Hell no. Am I going to spend hour upon hour trying to figure out what is going on there? No. He's in this little world of his thinking he's important. Well, maybe to his followers. There's so much other really cool stuff going on out there. Damn.

Ooohlala - Cowboy reports there's 'More nasty drama to report in a few hours'. So what?

(Disclaimer: I'll keep my subscription to see what Steven has to say there. And darn it - I'm going to disagree with something he writes. You just wait!)

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Did you delete your cookies today?

I just added this to my email signature - this whole cookie business is getting scary.

On the other hand - how would logging in to sites work without it (well except for those weird workarounds)... so it's not about deleting all cookies - just the ones that you absolutely don't need. I'm being extra careful to delete all search engine cookies!

It also doesn't make sense to disallow accepting cookies - you'd be losing all sorts of cool functionality. Just delete them once a day... that's what I'm doing... unless I forget.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

AJAX @ 49Media

Just got AJAX working in 49Media - we're using it to dynamically show a link's points when a user votes by clicking a smiley icon.

It's not rocket science - but it's totally COOL!

Hm - what else could we do with that?