Yet while these zig-zags and 30-minute zones destroy the pristine geometry of railroad time, they serve a very practical purpose. It is genuinely annoying to schedule meetings, calls, and other arrangements across time zones. The need to constantly specify which time zone you're talking about is a drag. Commuting across time zones would be more annoying still, which is why the suburbs of Chicago that are located in Indian...
The case against time zones: They're impractical & outdated - Vox
9 years
...y cause more trouble than they are worth. Now that several generations of humanity are accustomed to abstracting time away from the happenstance of where the sun is located, it's time to do away with this barbarous relic of the past. Everyone on the planet should operate according to a single time — Greenwich Mean Time would be suggested by tradition — and then local schedules could differ from place to place according to person...
The case against time zones: They're impractical & outdated - Vox
9 years
They were a good idea at the time, but in the modern world they cause more trouble than they are worth. Now that several generations of humanity are accustomed to abstracting time away from the happenstance of where the sun is located, it's time to do away with this barbarous relic of the past. Everyo...
The case against time zones: They're impractical & outdated - Vox
9 years
...th this model BuzzFeed has returned to the journalistic ideal that many – including myself – thought was lost with the demise of newspapers’ old geographic monopolies: true journalistic independence. Just as journalists of old didn’t need to worry about making money, just writing stories that they thought important, BuzzFeed’s writers simply need to write stories that people find important enough to share; the learning that results is how they make money. The incentives are perfectly aligned.
Why BuzzFeed is the Most Important News Organization in the World | stratechery by Ben Thompson
9 years
Perhaps the single most powerful implication of an organization operating with Internet assumptions is that iteration – and its associated learning – is doable in a way that just wan’t possible with print. BuzzFeed as an organization has been figuring out what works online for over eight years now, and while “The Dress” may have been unusual in its scale, its existence was no accident.
Why BuzzFeed is the Most Important News Organization in the World | stratechery by Ben Thompson
9 years
Wikipedia might rely on the donations of its users for funding, but by aligning so closely with Google, it fits right into the search engine’s plan for the wide-scale commodification of the internet’s information. Wikipedia entries show up first on Google searches because they’re a pre-processor for “the vast masses of dreck clogging the Web,” in Mirowski and Plewhe’s phrasing. Like Wikipedia entries, Rap Geniu...
Footnote Records – The New Inquiry
9 years
...p. Many “explanations” aren’t anything more than unnecessary rephrasings of otherwise very straightforward (or purposefully nonsensical) lyrics. Animated gifs, snarky commentary, and most troublingly, ill-informed armchair generalizations of the type typically found in YouTube comment sections proliferate on RapGenius.
Footnote Records – The New Inquiry
9 years
But Rap Genius’ symbotic relationship with Google means it prizes quantity over quality: The more entries there are, the more likely a Googling internet user will stumble on it. Though there are criteria for contribution and annotations are vetted through a hierarchy of contributors (like Wikipedia), Rap Genius annotations are frequently trivial and unimportant. As the satir...
Footnote Records – The New Inquiry
9 years
This “Google bombing” is where Rap Genius separates itself from its lyric translating predecessors and contemporaries. As with other online platforms that fall under the Web 2.0 banner, Rap Genius epitomizes a neoliberal model in which pleasurable activities are themselves translated into “content,” which is then sold to advertisers seeking to attract eyeballs to their products.
Footnote Records – The New Inquiry
9 years
... engines. Any way you search…you’ll be likely to draw one of the fifty or so individual pages they have up, each titled after every individual bar, which will then redirect you to the main lyric page…It’s a clever smoke screen for an old fashioned Google bombing.”
Footnote Records – The New Inquiry
9 years
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