Why the Telegraph & Twitter Are Full of Crap

So a hot topic this morning has my blood boiling. Now usually this is just because Mashable posts something ridiculous, most times some Apple loving spew. I'd like to think I keep my temper in check. I usually vent by posting some kind of overtly logical comment, reaping a few "likes" on Disqus and then moving on to something more useful like writing for Teknami. This morning the level of blind ridiculousness hit a new level when several, supposedly, respectable social media personalities were re-tweeting a story from the UK's Telegraph news paper found here that says, only in its title, that more Indians have cell phones than there are toilets.

The first issue is that no where in the article does it quote what the title states. Second there is no link or statement of any kind to back this up. Even the quotation used from the UN individual doesn't include a statement to that effect. The UN individual does state a total sum of money that is needed to meet UN sanitation targets for India but beyond that there is no indication that more phones exist than toilets.

Like wise if we use a little logic and know a little history it's pretty obvious communication has always been more valuable than sanitation. Just pulling a few broad examples. Pheidippides was a greek messenger more interested with delivering the message than stopping to shower up. I have to imagine he also wizzed all over and probably dropped a duce along the way. From the Wikipedia entry:

The legend states that he was sent from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians had been defeated in the Battle of Marathon (in which he had just fought),^[3] which took place in August or September, 490 BC.^[4] It is said that he ran the entire distance without stopping and burst into the assembly, exclaiming "Νενικήκαμεν" (Nenikékamen, 'We have won.') before collapsing and dying.

 Like wise sailors through out history have gone with out proper sanitation to deliver reports of war, plague, famine and all sorts of other things back to their hiring parties. Are we all freaked out because soldiers routinely deal with high tech equipment like ROV vehicles, weapons and all sorts of technical toys even though they go weeks at a time in the field with nothing more than wet wipe showers and no toilets. Not so much. The point is the two things are totally unrelated and yet some how this is considered news. Are we seriously so bored with ourselves that we have to literally make crap up?

To top it off the old fashioned news paper style of writing what you want and ignoring the consumer/customer is still holding strong with no method to comment on the sorry excuse for a story. There by shoving this garbage down our throats. When are we as citizens of the internet going to start worrying about the sanitation of the net? Internet garbage like this seems to be piling up!

P.S. In what I thought would be a cute turn of play I borrowed the post image from the telegraph. What was more amusing was finding that that Telegraph apparently has a sort of potty mouth. The image came from an article about Britons tweeting or surfing on the toilet.

Video Game Blogging From Inside The Game

Those who have been using Steam as their gaming platform of choice will know about a little built in feature called the browser. It isn't your average browser. It's actually integrated in to Steam's in game interface which over lays what ever game you happen to be playing at the time. It isn't very fancy, it doesn't support tabs or even a right click menu. It does however support javascript and most of the functionality of Google's web apps. This includes mail and Google Docs. That last one is what I wanted to focus on in this post.

Steam plus Google Docs makes a wonderful platform for writing about games. More specifically writing reviews that some times require using names and places specific to the game that are easy to find when you are playing but not as easy when you are searching the web. A simple two button combination switches between live game play and your word processor. What could be better for writing about such dynamic content as games?

You also have access to the IM and chat client built in so you can bounce your ideas off your gamer friends. As well as get input and feedback on what you've all ready written. You can use it to get quotes to add some spice to your write up. Community and game groups also give you some data and statistics on how many people are playing a particular game which is also very useful. So many wonderful uses for the system!

Of course it doesn't have be limited to Google docs and I could see this being useful in quite a few ways. Blogging is another similar use of the system. Simply fire up your web based blogging interface and you are set to go. Twitter would be another great use for it. Tweet your clan matches or LAN party games as they happen. You can even use Pandora radio to give your game an alternate sound track. What other crazy things can you come up with to use the steam built in browser for?

Look Later: Seesmic Look Follow-up

I wrote an initial look at the new Seesmic Look sporting a little Metro interface action. You can read that here. This is the follow up to that. I've been running Seesmic Look on all my computers since I wrote that initial post. I love the look, layout and balance between features and functionality. There are just a few small issues that have been nagging me and hopefully as Look iterates these will be addressed.

The first thing is the re-tweet function. In every other client re-tweeting copied the original tweet to a new tweet field and you could edit or add to the re-tweet. This does not exist in Look. It's an exact dupe or nothing. Kind of a curious usability decision on the part of Seesmic and it's a little disappointing to not be able to add several extra exclamation marks to emphasize how awesome something is. The fix here is obvious. Make the field editable.

The second issue I've had is another usability issue and not a technical one. The issue is with readability and scrolling. It's hard to explain the issue here. When scrolling you can only use the function icons(reply, retweet, DM) the tweet that is at the top of the column. While it isn't hard to tell where the top of the column is often its hard to tell that the scroll has taken place to get the tweet you want at the top of the column because the tweet below it may be similar or have the same sort of sentence structure as the one you were after. This is as much an issue with the graphics that frame the tweets as it is with the scrolling. The fix here is less obvious and would probably require some trial and error. Possibly changing the outline word bubble graphic around which ever tweet is at the top of the column might help. Like wise may be just a change in font size for the "selected", or top of the column, tweet would help distinguish it from the rest. I think it would also be helpful if the scrolling was a little smoother.

While it isn't the most feature rich client around it's certainly one of the easiest to look at and fun to actually use. I highly recommend it for the casual twitter user.