Rafe – Page 59

Author: Rafe (page 59 of 989)

What the Church of Scientology denies

For those of you too lazy to read all ten billion words of Lawrence Wright’s New Yorker article on Paul Haggis and Scientology, here’s a list of the things the Church of Scientology denies:

He staffed the ships with volunteers, many of them teen-agers, who called themselves the Sea Organization. Hubbard and his followers cruised the Mediterranean searching for loot he had stored in previous lifetimes. (The church denies this.)

Scientology defectors are full of tales of forcible family separations, which the church almost uniformly denies.

Hawkins told me that if a Sea Org member sought outside help he would be punished, either by being declared a Suppressive Person or by being sent off to do manual labor, as Hawkins was made to do after Miscavige beat him. The church denies that Hawkins was mistreated …

… he presumed that the church had obtained its information from the declarations that members sometimes provide after auditing. Such confessions are supposed to be confidential. Scientology denies that it obtained the information this way, and Davis produced an affidavit, signed by Scobee, in which she admits to having liaisons.

The church denies that it pressures members to terminate pregnancies.

The church denies this characterization and “vigorously objects to the suggestion that Church funds inure to the private benefit of Mr. Miscavige.”

He worked for fourteen months on the renovation of the Freewinds, the only ship left in Scientology’s fleet; he also says that he installed bars over the doors of the Hole, at the Gold Base, shortly after Rathbun escaped. (The church denies this.)

Cruise brought in two motorcycles to be painted, a Triumph and a Honda Rune; the Honda had been given to him by Spielberg after the filming of “War of the Worlds.” “The Honda already had a custom paint job by the set designer,” Brousseau recalls. Each motorcycle had to be taken apart completely, and all the parts nickel-plated, before it was painted. (The church denies Brousseau’s account.)

Why do all those galley slaves seem so happy?

February 17, 2011 / Rafe / 0 Comments

There’s a lot of talk these days about the users of social sites being “serfs” and “galley slaves.” Scott Rosenberg has a good rundown of these sentiments at his blog. What I find interesting is that these writers don’t seem to offer the basic value proposition of sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Posterous, or to an even greater degree, user blogs on sites like the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos.

Social sites enable you to exchange control for audience and convenience. Many people don’t understand this tradeoff fully, but they do understand that signing up for Tumblr or posting their links to Facebook is achievable for them in a way that building their own robust Web presence is not. And plenty of people have moved to positions of more control over the years as their writing gains popularity. Plenty of popular blogs started out under the blogspot.com domain and wound up on their own domains.

I’ve set up blogs in pretty much every way you can, including manually editing an HTML file and uploading it to the server when I created new posts, and for my most recent blog, a link blog for people who are interested in college sports at my alma mater, I set up a Tumblr blog on a custom domain. Why? Mainly because the Tumblr bookmarklet makes it so easy to post things to it. I can just read the news I’d read anyway and quickly turn the interesting news into blog posts.

In the end, most people are writing on the Web for fun, and they’re using the software that lets them keep it fun rather than turning it into work. They understand the strengths and weaknesses of social networking sites far better than the professional writers who see them as serfs.

How black hat SEOs justify their existence

February 14, 2011 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Here’s how an anonymous black hat SEO consultant justifies the existence of his industry:

I think we need to make a distinction between two different kinds of searches — informational and commercial. If you search ‘cancer,’ that’s an informational search and on those, Google is amazing. But in commercial searches, Google’s results are really polluted. My own personal experience says that the guy with the biggest S.E.O. budget always ranks the highest.

That’s from a long New York Times piece on search engine optimization.

Nokia falls in with Microsoft

February 11, 2011 / Rafe / 3 Comments

Matt Drance bottom lines the Microsoft-Nokia “strategic partnership” with the following headline: “Microsoft Buys Nokia for $0B.”

I have absolutely no qualms about calling this new regime at Nokia a puppet government. This is far and away the most brilliant move of Ballmer’s tenure.

All the analysts are on the same page on this one — this is a huge coup for Microsoft. It’ll be interesting to see whether this deal turns out to be important in the long run. Can Nokia handsets running Windows Phone 7 carve out substantial market share somewhere between iPhone and Android? RIM seems to be having trouble, and is better positioned than Microsoft/Nokia.

Also relevant is Horace Dediu’s short history of Microsoft’s previous mobile partners.

The satellite television revolution

February 11, 2011 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Hosni Mubarak has resigned.

The best explanation of the long term trends that led up to this is Rany Jazayerli’s piece on the impact of satellite television on the Arab world. Here’s a snippet:

For the last 15 years, then, the Arab world has had the access that was denied them for so long. They’ve seen the truth about how oppressive and hypocritical their own governments are, and they’ve seen the truth about how messy and imperfect and yet ultimately how ennobling and empowering Western democracies are. (In the words of Winston Churchill, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried.”) And having already opened the barn door to letting the masses own satellite dishes, the governments of the region were mostly helpless to do anything about it. Baywatch, it turns out, was a Trojan horse.

Hash-Bang URLs and overuse of AJAX

February 9, 2011 / Rafe / 12 Comments

Scott Gilbertson looks into the use of JavaScript in Gawker’s redesign:

The problem with Gawker’s redesign is that it uses JavaScript to load everything. That means that, not only is there no chance for the site to degrade gracefully in browsers that don’t have JavaScript enabled, the smallest JavaScript typo can crash the entire website.

I really don’t get this new trend (as Gilbertson notes, Gawker is following Twitter’s lead) toward sites that require JavaScript to load all the content on the pages. If a developer suggested such a scheme to me, I would be more inclined to fire them than to take their suggestion.

People were, at one time, hesitant to use AJAX to load all the content on their pages, because it made it difficult for search engines to index the content on those pages. Google offered a solution to that by way of hash bang URLs. And now, because Google allows it, it seems like developers are rushing headlong to adopt what sure looks to me like an anti-pattern.

I love AJAX and I think there’s a place for content that is loaded through AJAX but that should still be indexed by search engines. But generally speaking, if content should be indexed, then it should live at a static URL and be loaded through normal HTML rather than being loaded onto the page via AJAX.

Gilbertson’s source for his post is this lengthy explanation of why things went wrong for Gawker by Mike Davies.

What I wasn’t able to find is an argument in favor of building Web sites in this fashion — that is to say, loading everything via AJAX. Anyone have a pointer or want to make the case?

The currency of the Internet

February 8, 2011 / Rafe / 0 Comments

The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position!

Christian Rudder describes the OkCupid user base at OkTrends.

Why AOL bought the Huffington Post

February 8, 2011 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Yesterday I linked to Scott Rosenberg’s pessimistic take on the AOL purchase of the Huffington Post. Felix Salmon is, on the other hand, optimistic about the deal. His argument is that the venture capitalists funding the Huffington Post and the CEO that they chose did a lot more to stifle the creativity of Arianna Huffington and the writers at the Huffington Post than AOL will.

Today, he follows in by comparing an originally reported blog post from the New York Times to a Huffington Post item linking to that post and argues that the chaos of the Huffington Post will beat out the New York Times over time. Of course, to me, the Huffington Post page is Hell on the Web, but to each their own.

If Arianna Huffington is a major strategic asset in the realm of Web publishing, his take on the deal is probably correct. I do not see Arianna Huffington as a major strategic asset.

Scott Rosenberg on the AOL-Huffington Post deal

February 7, 2011 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Scott Rosenberg’s simple explanation of the AOL-Huffington Post deal:

The other, more likely possibility is that this whole thing is about the money, the investors needed to cash out, HuffPo’s numbers weren’t looking good enough for an IPO, and Huffington is basically improvising. She’ll spend a couple years at AOL and then move on. This means that, in 2011, Huffington Post will be playing the same role in relation to AOL that AOL played in relation to Time Warner back in 2000: selling itself at the top of a market bubble, pocketing the profit from a sale that couldn’t be earned from customers, and leaving a bigger, older company with all the headaches.

Nailed it.

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