Rubénerd!

Having used Clipmarks for a few months now I feel I can finally do a proper review of it. For those who don't know, Clipmarks uses a Firefox plugin to let you easily "clip" parts of a web page, then comment on them. Once you've submitted a clipping to your profile page you can then submit it to your own blog or to a slew of other sites. Other people can vote on your comments or leave some of their own, and if they're interested in your stream they can subscribe.

In a nutshell, the community is great and clipping parts of pages is very easy to do. For me Clipmarks has filled a nice niche between just bookmarking entire pages on Delicious, and commenting on stories in Google Reader.

Where I've had issues with Clipmarks is it's blog export feature. My idea was to use Clipmarks to generate the HTML for quotes I could easily import into my blog here and comment on instead of using <blockquote>. Unfortunately the code it generates and subsequently exports has several issues:

• It isn't W3C XHTML 1.x compliant which breaks validation on pages here
• It uses tables and other inefficient presentation markup which results in a large mess of spaghetti code that's an order of magnitude bigger than a simple <blockquote>
• Because it's derived verbatim from what you've clipped, if the site you've clipped uses invalid markup this results in errors being cross pollinated as it were
• The default colour scheme looks acceptable in sites with light backgrounds with dark text, but not on the default colour scheme here

I think the problem isn't with Clipmarks, but how I tried to use it. While I was using it for text, Clipmarks can support any payload in it's container including images, Flash videos and the like. In this light, some of my criticisms above are moot.

For now I've worked around the problem by using Clipmarks to save text from pages, then simply import what I clipped here using <blockquote> tags. The result isn't reduced work which was what I wanted in the first place, but it still means others can comment on my clips over on their site.

I seem to be having trouble with Google Reader this afternoon, it won't let me comment on stories (perhaps it's frustrated I haven't cooked a grilled cheese sandwich in a few days). So instead I'm posting the story summaries here and commenting on them with Clipmarky goodness!

RichardDawkins.net: Bloomington Rejects 'You Can Be Good Without God'; Lawsuit Underway

Bloomington was first on the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign’s list of places it hoped to run bus ads. However, the city has rejected our campaign’s slogan, ‘You Can Be Good Without God.’ This is deeply disappointing to our campaign’s members; we all love Bloomington and were very much hoping to run ads in our hometown along with many other cities.

Go to original Clipmark >

I have a hard time believing that faith in Gods is a nesissary precondition to being good. In fact, I'd wager more than a few grilled sandwiches that people who don't believe are often more moral because they're not just doing things for a divine reward or because they're afraid of the divine Hell punishment if they don't, they're moral because they they know it's the right thing to do.

Conversely, I have a hard time believing my religious friends who are moral, honest and caring people would regress into immoral, nasty people if religion disappeared, or that they're only friendly people because they're religious. It's an insult to their character.

What I find interesting is that Christianity uses the threat of everlasting Hell to scare people into believing, but Judaism doesn't: at least not in the same sense. When I was really studying religion a few years ago I was told that the closest the Jewish faith has to a Hell is "Gehenna" which is more akin to purgatory or a waiting area where wicked people are sent for a definite period of time, measured in months. Judaism also has what I would consider an enlightened, almost Buddhist philosophy that hell is also a mental state where the feelings of shame you have is the punishment itself. I don't believe in the Jewish faith as much as I don't believe in any other for the reasons I've stated many times here, but it's an interesting observation.

Now I really am going to Hell aren't I? ^_^

This article from the BBC makes a valid point, many export driven economies in Asia shouldn't expect to develop further by relying on this model indefinitely, at some point domestic demand needs to pick up.

What bothers me about this article and with so many economists and analysts in general though is the assumption that GDP growth automatically equals less poverty. It doesn't. Economic growth measured by GDP per capita is not the be all, end all solution to lowering income inequality and raising average standards of living, and it never has been.

Every country (and in many cases different regions of the same country) has different circumstances and the same economic policies for one won't solve the issues of another. But only attempting to address GDP growth on paper (many provinces of China are infamous for inflating their growth figures) for any of them won't address the specific issue of poverty.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk

Asian governments must cut reliance on export-driven growth and spend more to cut poverty, Asian Development Bank (ADB) finance officials have said.

Countries must restructure to focus on domestic demand as they grapple with economic chaos, the banks' annual meeting in Indonesia was told.

The downturn is set to keep tens of millions of people trapped in poverty.

"Already there are signs that domestic consumption is remaining strong in Asia and may well lead the way out of this downturn."

The ADB is predicting growth of 3.4% in Asia for 2009 compared with more than 9% in 2007.

AdelaideNow is reporting that Twitter has a far lower retention rate of other sites such as Facebook or presumably GeoCities back in the late 1990s. So?

It really bugs me when people attempt to adopt old media principals such as ratings and retention rates and apply them to websites to draw the same conclusions. I’ve long since thought ratings for television shows were suspect, but online they make even less sense, if that’s possible.

For example, according to my server logs I have a retention rate of 33.3% which is in a similar league to Twitter. Therefore, I must be as successful as Twitter is, by golly gee whiz wow! When do I get my large swaths of venture capital?

Such ratings also don’t take into account how sites are used. For example Facebook may have a higher retention rate simply because people log in to check messages then leave again; the nature of Twitter is that you’re generally posting messages or not logging in at all. And who’s to say the 70% of people sticking with Facebook are better than the 40% or so of people who stick with Twitter? That’s the problem with quantitative and qualitative analysis, just doing one doesn’t tell you anything.

Even in spite of my own vested interests in the service as an avid user and fan when all other social networks have failed me in the past, I can confidently say Twitter is doing just fine.

clipped from www.news.com.au

MORE than 60 per cent of Twitter users have stopped using the micro-blogging service a month after joining, according to Nielsen Online research.

"Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty," said David Martin, Nielsen Online's vice president for primary research.

Martin said that when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter their retention rates were twice as high and they now have retention rates of nearly 70 per cent.

ANZ and Westpac bank buildings on an appropriately drizzly day in central Adelaide, by Dodge 76 on Flickr

ABC News is reporting Aussie banks are taking advantage of vulnerable consumers. And you know what my first reaction was? I questioned whether they were also going to tell me the sky is blue, you need oxygen to live and grilled cheese sandwiches are generally made with bread. It's sad our financial systems around the world have become such... I'm trying to think of a word that's less harsh than "cesspools" but has more bite than "meanie companies".

I know my writing this here won't make a lick of difference, but it's time to throw out Thatcherism, Reaganism and it's derivatives that define all regulation as burdens to capitalism and dampners on growth, and regulate the crap out of these guys! The regulations have to make sense; mindless red tape doesn't get us anywhere; but conversely no regulations are not the answer. We need some serious checks, balances (terrible financial puns) and oversight on these guys. And it needs to be done globally.

If we've learned anything from this financial crisis, it's that banks and other large financial institutions cannot be socially or financially responsible by regulating themselves. It didn't work in the 1920s, and it ain't working now.

As for the article about Australian banks? I remember discussing a similar case with a conservative guy on Twitter when the subprime mortgage crisis was first rumbling in the United States. He claimed liberals (American not Australian sense) were to blame for it because they had the gall to want affordable housing for people, which in turn led to unrealistic loans being given out to people who couldn't afford it. It's interesting how predatory lending, extortion and and blatant exploitation of the most vulnerable people in our society can be twisted to be entirely their fault. I would think even from a conservative standpoint this argument wouldn't make sense.

And to think banks around the world are receiving tax dollars to stay viable, only to pull stunts like this on decent people, some of whom perhaps need education in fiscal prudence and management but who nevertheless don't deserve this treatment. It generates some resentment in me, but mostly it just makes me... sad.

clipped from www.abc.net.au

Banks are being accused of exploiting their most vulnerable customers by offering them credit they cannot afford.

Many face bankruptcy with no prospect of paying down debts totalling tens of thousands of dollars and banks are being accused of taking advantage of them during the boom via direct marketing campaigns.

Chris Gration from credit reporting group Veda Advantage says those in the greatest financial trouble are the ones most likely to take up an offer.

NAB says it is winding back its direct mail campaigns and Westpac is doing the same.

But the CBA and ANZ continue to direct market at the same levels they did 12 months ago.

Very well put.

clipped from www.scripting.com

I made enough money in the late 80s to realize what wealth buys -- distance. Then it took a few years to learn that distance is not what I wanted, in fact I don't think it's human to crave distance. People are built to want to be among others, at least I was.

I bought a house with a 750 foot driveway in the middle of the woods. My neighbors built houses the size of high schools. You couldn't walk anywhere.

Now I live among humanity, much more modestly and I'm happier.

Om Malik mocking John C. Dvorak on Cranky Geeks 162!

As usual, Om Malik from GigaOm.com hits the issue right on the head. He's one of the few tech bloggers and commentators today I have all the time in the world for.

As I've been saying for a while now, the problem with Facebook's latest design is that they think I really care what all my former classmates are doing 24 hours a day in the same vein as Twitter, which just isn't the case. I use Twitter and follow people I'm really interested in.

If you only read one paragraph below, make it the last one. Worded brilliantly, unlike the paragraphs in this post I wrote myself. Grilled cheese sandwiches contain tastyness.

clipped from gigaom.com

Facebook, by its very nature, is mostly about our past, sometimes about our present, but very rarely about our future. Being symmetric, it’s important that we have some sort of a prior relationship with a person in order to friend them on Facebook.

Zuckerberg & Co. have let themselves turn green with envy over the latest Silicon Valley phenomenon, Twitter — and in the process, have set out to mutate Facebook's own DNA.

Facebook’s recent redesign brought Twitter-style updates into its service [...]

By allowing a torrent of status updates into our Facebook pages, the company has destroyed what made it special: its ability to construct a constantly updated newspaper about us. With Twitter-like updates, the site has lost its intimacy, flooding us with a lot of white noise.