Cryptic Clarity

Facebook: Noun.

A popular social networking website that boasts some 500 million active users worldwide.

FB: Verb.

1. Refers to a Facebook tactic to get reluctant users to sign up. In its younger days, when competition with MySpace was still tough, Facebook promised these potential users who are concerned about their privacy that they would have absolute control of their data and only they can decide what they want or do not want to share. After it has secured enough users to dominate the social networking scene, Facebook does an about-face and starts forcing them to share personal data and selling these personal information to third parties, in the meantime making all sorts of wild claims, such as people don’t want privacy, or privacy is outdated, yadda yadda yadda. Because Facebook is now established as the default social networking website, it will only continue to attract even more users.

2. Figuratively, FB can be used to refer any such practice, in which corporations, politicians, or any persons make specific claims they have no intention of sustaining or promises they have no intention of keeping. The primary goal is to secure as many as head-counts as possible.

Examples:

1. Many FBd users on Facebook are boycotting it on June 6th to protest Facebook’s new privacy policy.

2. Learn to BS before you FB.

3. I don’t use Gmail, but at least Google was up front about its use of contextual advertising instead of FBing its users first and then changing its TOS later.

If you get an error message, go to NME where the video was premiered.
Almost The-Wicker-Man-esque…why do they stuff Wayne Coyne into that ball of virgina?

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Daniel Lyons, aka the Fake Steve Jobs, ex-anonymous blogger behind The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, has some choice words for newspapers:

Faced with their own demise, fearful of losing even more advertising, newspapers have made the huge mistake of becoming ever more timid, more cautious, more in bed with the companies they cover.

It’s the exact opposite of what they should be doing. The truth is, if newspapers want to survive they should go back to doing what they started out doing — muckraking, stirring the shit, calling bullshit.

The case in point? The New York Times.

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This short film (discovered through Racialicious) about racial conflict (perceived or real, intentional or physical) won’t be easy to watch, especially when minimal context is given in its 13-minute run-time. Many films that introduce familiarly emblematic characters with hardly any background stories operate merely on a symbolic level. What you see and what you take with you after the viewing will largely depend on your own background and perception of racism. I’m rather ambivalent about the film, perhaps due to my failure to grasp what Wesley Du, writer and director of the film, is getting at. Even if it does not shed new insighst on issues as complex as as this, If I Was Like You at least opens up a thread for discussion about racial tensions beyond the black and white.



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German branch of the Wikimedia Foundation is hosting a panel discussion on November 5th in Berlin to discuss Wikipedia’s deletion policy based on the notability guideline. The German Wikipedia has been under fire for the last few weeks for deleting an article on the organization MOGiS, a citizen’s initiative founded in April 2009 for “victims against Internet censorship” (Missbrauchsopfer gegen Internetsperren).

The entry was deemed “irrelevant” and removed by the administrators citing reasons from lacking of public interest, insufficient media coverage, to absence of reliable source. The decision triggered heavy criticisms from the Blogosphere, as well as the age-old inclusionism vs. deletionism debate.
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