Facebook continually pesters me to entrer the "city" where I live, but rejects Kempt Head, Ross Ferry, Boularderie, and Cape Breton all of which are more-or-less accurate. It will allow me to enter Halifax, Sydney, or Baddeck, none of which is accurate. Contrast this with Google, which embraces locations with admirable granularity. Google effortlessly adopts islands, villages, hamlets—even micro-locations like Frankie's Pond and Parker's Beach—as long as it sees real people using them. This may seem a small thing, but it strikes me as a profound difference in the cultures of the two organizations. One constantly cajoles you into ill-fitting pigeonholes. The...

08 July, 2013

I'm new to blogging and still feeling my way around the courtesies and protocols of the genre. When I post an item I found somewhere else, I usually credit and link to the source where I encountered it — a figurative tip of the hat. Sometimes I dig deeper and link to the original source material, and sometimes to both ("hat tip [originator] via [mysource]"). These links are courteous to my comrades in the ether, and provide a richer experience for the reader. Traditional news organizations sometimes complain that the whole blog world is an endless exercise in ripping off their...

03 June, 2010