WTF Archive

A story came out about a week or so ago from the University of Florida where they ran tests that showed that microwaving a sponge for 2-10 minutes can kill the bacteria living in it. So naturally everyone ran out and started "nuking" their sponges. Loads of posts then came out about how great this is. There was a story on Digg, but the Digg search sucks and I can't find it. Even the great Congdon posted it on her tv show.

And then, just yesterday, we start to see reports of FIRE being caused by doing what Amanda shows on her video and what the University of Florida says is a good thing to do.

The team at the university has modified their language to state that the sponge must be soaking wet and it will be very hot when removed.

So remember, just because someone (or some university) on the Internet said something, doesn't mean it is always right or that you should run out and do it. I think we tend to believe things we read online as if they are gospel. I am sure the TV lawyers will be all over this like, well, bacteria on a sponge!

ATT Cingular Wireless has announced a new "bee". I have heard of spelling bees, now there is a TXT Bee… I am calling a WTF! Events will be held in Florida, Atlanta, Chicago, LA, and Texas this spring. Kids can win $10,000 in scholarship and donation money and the goal is to help parents also learn more about texting.

"Texting has become an entirely new forum for young people to communicate with each other," said Cristy Swink, executive director of messaging, Cingular Wireless. "To many parents, this new language of text messaging may often seem irrelevant or appear to be unfathomable. Through our TXT2 Connect campaign and TXT Bee events, we are helping parents interact with their kids through text messaging in a fun environment. For some parents, this may be the first time they've ever tried to text. Once they see how simple it is, we are hopeful it won't be the last."

From their release:

Contrary to what parents might think, kids want to communicate with parents – on their own terms. With text messaging, parents can connect with teens in a more convenient way. Text messaging allows parents to get quick answers to important questions, give their teen independence while still staying connected and enter their child's world by using the child's preferred mode of communications. Texting gives kids more space and allows parents to keep in touch as often as necessary.

Sixty-three percent of parents who use text messaging believe that it improves their communication with their children, according to a recent Cingular survey on text messaging and parents conducted by Mediathink. In addition, 65 percent of parents who text message say they communicate more frequently with their children when they are away from home and 64 percent said that texting made their kids easier to reach.

Maybe for quick things like "come home by 4pm" or "bring home dinner" will work but I wonder how fast we will move into bigger discussions with texting. Can you just imagine using texting for things between parents & kids such as: IM Prego, IM Drunk, i h4t3 y0u, etc. I think parents and kids speak so little today, do they really think texting will help? So now kids and parents will see each other even less and assume texting will take the place of a sit down discussion?

Alright here we are on a Friday nite and I am calling a WTF. In addition, I am requesting Prop 149B1 to be enacted by the WBO (world blogger organization) to remove blogger photos on home page. I need your support to make this a reality.

I read many blogs everyday. And a good bit of them, have the author's picture on the home page and all pages throughout the site. I am frankly sick and tired of seeing this. Two of my favorite bloggers have their photos on the site, and everyday when I read their blogs, I have to continue to look at them. I click a link to read more, I see their photo. I do not believe the photo offers any value, most of the photos I see are old, and some of them even make the person look as if they are showing off their ego. It's not like if the photo wasn't there I would think less of this blogger.

My suggestions are the following:

• Move photo to "about me" type page
• Show photo first time, cookie user, no photo after that

So I ask, for those that have photos, why? And for those who read blogs that have photos, what are your thoughts?

This morning I posted an article regarding my thoughts on why Digg should not be indexed by Google. Several things happened since then that have made start to think about another topic, why does Digg allow comments? And again, I love the Digg service and what it offers to the Internet. I know I spend 60-90 minutes a day on Digg finding interesting stories.

Before you continue reading, please take a deep breath and an open mind.

• I write column
• Column gets started on a Digg path – hits 18 diggs in only a couple of hours and then suddenly disappears. Digg support let me know that it was buried as "being lame"
• William Burn writes an opinion which opposes mine
• Loren at Search Engine Journal grabs snippits from both articles and opens a discussion
• Loren's article gets front page digg flavor within mere hours, and is already over 300+ diggs and 50+ comments

Now let's look at the coment situation:

• 50+ comments on digg
• 30+ comments on Search Engine Journal
• 1 comment on CenterNetworks
• 0 comments on William's blog

So, the 2 people who actually bust their asses and write about this get close to no traffic and none of the discussion. But the issue is actually bigger than that.

My belief is that 4 places for discussion on this topic is too many. And why should people be able to comment on Digg? I don't get it. Digg should be a place to find the latest and hot news. I like that part. Aggregate and vote.

Content and associated discussion should live in its home. Those 50 comments belong on either my site or William's or at a stretch Loren's. But not on Digg. All that does is continue to add to my topic about whether Digg should be in Google.

If you look at some of TechCrunch's posts, he has 100+ comments on TC and then another 100 on Digg. All of them should be on TC.

People come from Google to Digg, read the snippet in the initial post, read the comments (some of which copy pieces of the author's article) and then post their comments and leave.

I just don't get it. There is no reason for the discussion to take place on Digg.

This one comes from the WTF Dept.

Update: this article made the Digg home page, except not from here. Search Engine Journal posted a snippit of this article plus a snippit of a counter argument from William Burn. You can read the comments on Digg. For some reason, the Digg community found this article "lame" but on SE Journal (with no new content) found it Digg home page worthy :)

Update Jan 3: I just added a new article about whether commenting should take place on Digg or on the actual article. Read it here

I just do not understand why Digg shows up in searches on Google. Don’t get me wrong. I think Digg is a good service and provides many sites with a good bit of traffic. For example, TechCrunch reported that 80% of the traffic to the site comes from Digg. (reported by Arrington in September 2006)

So why does Digg have better search results than the sites themselves in some cases? Because Digg has a higher rank within the Google system. But if you look at Digg, from a true standpoint, what does it really offer? It offers a link to the actual story, a 1-2 line overview of the story and sometimes comments from Digg users.

My belief is that this is not enough to warrant a listing in Google. Since at its most basic sense Digg only offers a link to the actual story, then that story should occupy that position within Google, not the Digg link. I believe content publishers actually lose the chance to see that visitor because the person has to click twice and even understand that they must do that. And I am talking about mainstream non-diggers now, not the group who already understands what Digg is for.

Here are a couple of searches which produced Digg results:

In closing I would say that I like Digg a lot for many reasons and hope to create "Digg-worthy" content everyday. But by removing Digg results from Google, we can get people to what they are really after quicker, the actual content.

Alrighty, here is yet another for the WTF Dept.

This comes from CNN International from Berlin (Guten Tag mein Freunde!). The story is really pretty simple. Tourist (21 yr old) wanted to visit his girlfriend in Sydney Australia. But he ended up in Syndey, Montana in the U.S.

From the story:

A 21-year-old German tourist who wanted to visit his girlfriend in the Australian metropolis Sydney landed 13,000 kilometers (8,077 miles) away near Sidney, Montana, after mistyping his destination on a flight booking Web site.

Gutt's airline ticket routed him via the U.S. city of Portland, Oregon, to Billings, Montana. Only as he was about to board a commuter flight to Sidney — an oil town of about 5,000 people — did he realize his mistake.

The hapless tourist, who had only a thin jacket to keep out the winter cold, spent three days in Billings airport before he was able to buy a new ticket to Australia with 600 euros in cash that his parents and friends sent over from Germany.

"I didn't notice the mistake as my son is usually good with computers," his mother, Sabine, told Reuters.

Didn't he realize when he was watching the map on the flight? This gets a huge WTF!

This post comes from the WTF Dept.

I spent a bit of time creating the post that shows the top searches from the different engines over the years. And today we learn that Google's Top Searches (and I bet the other engines too) are not really Top Searches, but "Whatever the F Google wants to show based on calculations."

Here is what Google said originally:

Google today announced its annual Zeitgeist, featuring lists and charts of the most popular and fastest-rising global search terms that people have typed into Google.com.

And here is what they posted today:

This is why when we come up with the lists of top searches on Google.com for 2006, we do not simply retrieve the most frequently-searched terms for the period — the truth is, they don't change that much from year to year. This list would be predominated by very generic searches, such as "ebay", "dictionary", "yellow pages," "games," "maps" — and of course, a number of X-rated keywords. These are constants, and although unquestionably popular, we don't think they actually define the Zeitgeist.

Instead, we looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 — the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over. To come up with this list, we looked at several thousand of 2006's most popular searches, and ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2005. ("Bebo", for example, had very little traffic in 2005.) We also gave a bit higher score to searches with more traffic. Similarly, our "what is" and "who is" lists are not necessarily the absolute most frequent searches, but rather those that best represent the passing year.

So basically that means that the terms in the list are not so much top searches as some computation (I assume) of movement. But since Bebo had almost no traffic in 2005, it would naturally have a higher movement power than most other terms.

I call a WTF on Google and am disappointed that they manipulated language to suit their needs and make a fancy terms list that would get them some buzz. That my friends, is so Web 1.0.

Liz at GigaOM and Mike at TechCrunch have some additional viewpoints on this matter.