I don’t hang out there nearly as much as I used to (and worse, a lot of my “community web site” time has shifted to <gasp> Reddit!) so it was a bit of a shock to see a librarian colleague post on Facebook about the big changes happening at MetaFilter.
MetaFilter (and Reddit and most sites) probably struggle with the need to balance implementation of new designs and new features without turning off the user base (hello Digg!). MetaFilter looks almost exactly like it did when I joined in 2001 and I wonder if that’s part of why it lost a bit of its appeal to me recently?
This is my own opinion which is definitely not shared by the top folks at MetaFilter but I think they also really missed an opportunity when they said there would be no “ChatFilter” questions allowed in the AskMetaFilter section (ChatFilter = generic questions like “What’s your favourite book?” or “Who’s the funniest comedian you know?” or whatever. My take is people really enjoy those types of questions which are very engaging. That’s not just a sample size of one talking – if you look at the top voted posts on Reddit’s front page at any given time, many would be classed as ChatFilter.
My fingers still want to type “MetaFitler” every time I type the site name which is essentially me Godwinning myself. 😉
Jessamyn will be a huge loss to the community and much of what I learned about moderating an online community – most recently the 80+ members of the Social Media team for the Ryan Meili campaign but various other places as well – was modeled on what I saw Jessamyn doing: being humourous, responsive, open, fair, thoughtful among many other techniques she used. (I wish I only had 1/10 of her success!)
They don’t like NewsFilter posts either but because of the types of users it has, it’s still the first place I go to see feedback about breaking news and events – just as it was in 2001 when the 9/11 disaster inspired me to stop lurking and finally join the site…which Jessamyn has laughed about to me on more than one occasion – “Oh, you’re one of *those* people.” – since the site saw a massive influx after 9/11.
Maybe just me but I’ve noticed a real uptick in infographics showing the greatest X for different states, provinces and countries lately. Here’s one I came across that shows the biggest exports for countries around the world
I consider myself pretty computer savvy but occasionally there are weird glitchy things that happen in the world of computers, technology and online services that I either can’t figure out (or if I can find a quick workaround, I realize it’s just as easy to use the workaround as spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to fix the problem.)
I know you’re probably thinking “Why don’t you just Google the answer?” Sure, that works sometimes but you’d be surprised how many times you get all kinds of results that aren’t relevant or from people who have the same problem but their solution doesn’t work for you or the question has been posted but no one has a solution.
Anyhow, here’s a list of some of the things that are on my list of things I need to figure out…
Part of what inspired this post is that my blog has been crashing quite a bit lately. I haven’t spent a lot of time figuring out why but suspect that maybe a plug-in is causing some problem. I’m usually on my site enough (or my mother-in-law lets me know!) so that these outages don’t last very long. If I had a huge readership or advertising dollars rolling in, I’d probably worry more about it. But instead of spending time un-installing and testing every plug-in the site has, I’d rather spend time with my kids! 😉
A recent Thunderbird update means that a few of my filters don’t work anymore. Most of them still do and if I manually run the filters, everything goes where it should so I haven’t spent much time trying to figure it out.
I have no idea why this happened but recently, iPhoto stopped auto-splitting events when I import new photos (yes, the “Auto-split Events” button is checked.) The new pictures are auto-split when I look at them as Events but previously, they’d also show as separate events in the “Last Import” window which is where I’d rename them. I can still do so in the Events or Photos view but since I often import from different devices at the same time (Shea’s iPhone, my iPhone, our iPad, our regular camera, our waterproof camera) it can be a pain scanning through the full list of Events to find ones that aren’t titled.
Speaking of Shea’s phone, she’s got an older model and I made the mistake of updating to the latest version of iOS 7 which has really slowed down her phone a lot. I’ve tried a couple tricks to speed it up again but still regret ever doing that. (She’s due for a new phone anyhow but is trying to hold on until Apple releases the iPhone 6.)
I use IFTTT for a variety of automated functions and for the past few months, I get regular e-mail updates that an IFTTT recipe that auto-saves my Facebook statuses to Google Drive has been shut off. I have no idea what triggers this – definitely nothing I’m doing intentionally. I click through when I get the e-mail, re-activate the recipe and I’m on my way again. But so frustrating when you have absolutely no idea why something like this is happening.
Going back to iPhoto, it just seems *really* slow to load in general. I’ve taken it to the Apple Store in Winnipeg and the Apple Store in Edmonton and they haven’t been able to figure out why. Their best advice is to add more memory or only run iPhoto when other programs aren’t running but both of those solutions are less than ideal.
Those are a few off the top of my head – I’m sure there’s a bunch of others that are so minor, they don’t even register most of the time. It’s mostly when it’s something I work with regularly – e-mail, iPhoto, my smartphone and blog – that gets glitchy that you get frustrated.
Professor Robert Buckingham, a long time professor at the University of Saskatchewan, was recently fired for speaking out about some major ongoing budget cuts and restructuring plans at the U of S.
The University administration claimed that there was a difference between the freedom of expression tenured professors should expect for expressing controversial or politically incorrect views and that which is expected of senior leaders at the institution with regards to transformative change initiatives (although as the “Most Liked” comment on the CBC story I link to below proves, some would argue that speaking out in this way is actually showing true leadership…
so by standing up for the university overall and opposing the budget cuts you get sidetracked by the current administration because you refuse to support their BS, sounds like the leaders the unviversity administration approves of are the ones who will not show leadership and just do what they are told.
part of being a leader is standing up and opposing bad ideas, leaders do not sit by and applaud every idea that comes from the administration
U of S president Ilene Busch-Vishniac told CBC News that Buckingham should never have been fired from his tenured position, calling the dismissal “a blunder.” She said the university is looking into how it happened and those involved will be disciplined.
It’s been an interesting situation to watch develop as it raises lot of interesting questions about the nature of freedom of expression, especially in institutions of learning (or are they?); the obligations of employees speaking about their workplace – both at work and in their personal lives; the potential fallout that can ensue when management mis-handles employee relations, or worse, utilize heavy-handed excessive discipline.
And unlike debate on 99% of the Internet, the respondents are often successful in changing the view of the original poster!
A recent questions was one that, as someone with an interest with language and society, I had wondered myself – is there real value in preserving dying languages that are only spoken by a few hundred (or a few dozen) people?
On the other hand, you might point to the enormous communication benefits gained by having only a handful of core languages (with English being dominant) around the world and that languages, in many ways, mirror the rise and fall of animal species in the natural world – eg. “only the strong survive”.
Anyhow, I didn’t have a strong opinion either way but tended to lean towards dying languages not being worth saving (although *archiving* is something different in my mind) but the conversation in that thread, as usual, gave me much to think about on both sides of the issue.
