Population: One

I love my iPod. I’d long ago noticed that its alphabetic sort puts bands with “The” in their appropriate place; i.e., “The Beatles” sort into the Bs. Good. But I didn’t realize until yesterday that it does the same thing with “Los.” Yep, Los Straightjackets are in the Ss.

So… this is a very cool hack. I admire it. But I have to ask what the social utility of it is. Should we assume that the links with multiple incoming links are more important? Less important?

We tend to assign importance to numbers, regardless of whether any was intended. I’m sure I sound like an idiot idealist, but the tendency to equate popularity to quality disturbs me a little. Google is the most obvious flagbearer for this concept, by the nature of their algorithm; they do a pretty good job of toning down the effect, but you still find this blog way too high in the results when you search on “Population.” It seems to me that Ben Hammersley’s hack encourages people to think of sites with more incoming links as more important, simply because it makes the information so accessible.

Yes, it feels kind of odd to be saying that we shouldn’t be making information more accessible. Hm. Perhaps it’s a UI issue. Complex interfaces that jam too much info in front of your face are bad. You have to think about what the user actually needs. In this case I’m not sure there’s any need for the user to know how many incoming links Technorati has counted; it isn’t ever going to be useful information in the determination of whether or not to click, so why put it there?

Dave rants :

The other Web content management systems don’t even have Edit This Page buttons yet. I’m amazed that people think Movable Type is so advanced. They have a long way to go before they catch up to Manila. And Blogger is totally not in the game and neither product, architecturally is suited to easy connections to editing content. Too many steps, too much memorization.

Oddly, every post on this front page provides me with a one-click method of editing itself. Click, edit, save, done. And I seem to be using Movable Type. I had to add the tweak, but it wasn’t exactly difficult (it’s just a template change) and the Movable Type architecture didn’t get in the way.

The Eater of Meaning is a Web page filter that is somehow so mesmerizing I find it worth linking to. (Via the Redhead.) Through its eyes, I discover that this blog is “Populates: Onerous. It’s wheelers I talmudization to mystics. Gaming, polarity, andrea lingo I donner’t wanderings to formulator abolishment.”

And how happy am I to know that my blogroll contains such worthies as “Boiling Boiler” and “Officer Winslow Opinion”? Not to mention “Theraputic Volunteer Consternation.”

“Meandering, forever thorny of your whorls’ve wong wharton an airport fully of nakedness peony wound loots likeness, now younger canvassing finicky outwitted. Reawakens nakedness peony, notably nakedly port stanchion spreadsheet outlive on topsy of each otherwise or anyhow. Lifted’s surgeons.”