Digital rot

A few years ago I created, together with some other green-party members, a website: bodemlozeputten.nl. It was a small local website aimed to make voters aware of all the money that was thrown after bad in that region. Like reopening an airport that has never been able to run profitably even in times when the state was still subsidising it with its military presence. Or the amount of money spent by the local municipalities on land, which had by then already created huge debts for several municipalities and still hasn't turned out to be a profitable for neither the citizens, the local economy, nor the municipalities themselves. It was a small website, hosted at the free hosting option that Heroku offered. And a few days ago I received an email that I should've spent more attention to an issue with this website that I kind of neglected. And now the website is showing an error message: "Application error". And while [it is not rea…

Kitsch as in Instagram

I don't like Instagram (or Hipstamatic for that matter) — the I turn your photo into something into a more romantically-worn-image-app. Yes, it looks nice. Don't we all love the atmosphere of a Polaroid, but c'mon. Digitally recreated is kitsch! Fake authenticity. And so many are buying it.

No, I don't really mind that Instagram is destroying bits by applying filters and reducing the camera's output from 5MP to a .5MP pic, nor that they are forcing you into (yet another) social network. But when Chris Brogan asked whether “instagram makes you a better photographer?”, i turned a little sick. To me that is like asking whether a vocoder make you a better singer. Or a better analog…

It's digital stupid

Notes by Luke Wroblewski on the Martin Belam (Guardian) talk at EuroIA:

> Up front, the team did not get their API model right. They tried to use ISBNs for books and did not heed advice that ISBNs are “evil”.

Sounds quite familiar :)

> They (ISBN numbers, ed.) are a physical system not a digital system. They don’t identify a unique work but a specific edition. They don’t cover anthologies, they are added to CDs, calendars and even card displays.

Lately I've been wanting to slam my head quite a couple times for a similar reason: not choosing the right identifier. While much of the data I work with lately has multiple codes/numbers that look like unique identifiers usable in the digital environment I am building. None of them, however, fitted my desired digital world view. While I could have adopted the real world view underlying the existing identifiers, that view did not fit the …