Holy shit.
I’ve been up the whole night doing research on my essay for MCI 212 and I’ve only just broken the 1000-word mark. Damn. It’s gonna be a rough journey ahead.
Good thing is, I’ve found this awesome Firefox extension that helped me out immensely in organising my reference materials.
zotero.org
If you’re a college or uni student, and you find referencing an unnecessary pain in the ass to do, check it out now. It not only organises your reference materials properly, it also saves a copy of whatever website you referenced and even allows you to highlight stuff you think is relevant or important and also post ’sticky notes’ of sorts.
And best of all - citation and bibliography generator. And there’s a Microsoft Word plugin for it. How Fu-Yoh! is that?
Since I’m a member of Nuffnang (as you can see from the ad on the sidebar), I naturally felt compelled to join Innit when it came out. After all, what could be more fun than looking at other blogs from Malaysia while promoting your own blog, eh?
After signing up, the first thing I thought was - ‘man, this looks a hell lot like digg…’
And yeah, it did work like Digg, sort of. Only with much less features. But it comes with the blogspam.
What Innit really needs is a bury feature. (among other things like seeing what stuff you ‘nanged’ up in the past) Oftentimes, I see crap like some person’s wordpress upgrade posts (which nobody cares and shouldn’t be submitted to Innit), or some blatant shocker titles just to attract visitors - and worst of all, posts promising riches and crap like that (and ends up being one of those blogs with a 7-mile long sidebar filled with ads).
Man.
Even so, since Innit’s just starting out, I guess I shouldn’t be too harsh on it. After all - they’re probably still optimising and upgrading and adding features and stuff. (here’s for hoping they see this and take my opinion into consideration)
Muahaha.
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edited at 01:15am 17 December 2007:
Okay, I forgot the fact that not everyone uses Digg. ‘Bury’ (as mentioned in the comments), is basically the direct opposite of a ‘nang’ - ie. removing 1 point from the number of nangs. For a live example, check out Digg.
Yep - and whoa, Timothy Tiah replied to the post. Cool.
Epic fail.
Probably according to StupidFilter, my comment above should more or less qualify as a ’stupid’ post or one from a troll. Call me a troll or a skeptic if you want - but I personally think this just isn’t going to work out. While I salute their effort in attempting to weed out the plain idiots from the internet, I highly doubt that a mere algorithm can effectively sort out the idiots from the witty.
One needs to consider context and the current flow of the conversation to actually identify if a comment is ’stupid’ or not. A one word comment which sounds stupid can be full of win in the right circumstances, while a logical take on things (usually in an attempt to sound smarter than one really is) can be the proud recipient of the infamous facepalm in the wrong setting. Can a mere algorithm accurately determine and measure these variables?
Given the fluidity and the randomness of web discussions - I think not.
Well, until a machine can successfully comprehend human nature and react according to circumstance - and might I add ‘learn’ and ‘mature’ from previous experiences, I doubt such an attempt will be very successful.
Of course, by that time - we should be worrying about more pressing issues like SkyNet.