ONE
As the ideal socialnet, I would not add features that frustrate my users and that point out how I am kissing the ass of Viacoms by pretending to care about copyright. In other words, I wouldn’t be like YouTube today and add a new “feature” that allows me to annotate only my own videos. Its stupidity is compounded by the fact that all a user has to do is download a video off YouTube here, and then upload it as my own video on YouTube and annotate away. As a brilliant socialnet I would respect my customers enough to realize that my service is built on interactivity, not creating busywork for them.

TWO
I’d employ the old phony security lingo while I rushed towards more important things like data portability as an excellent way for allowing hackers to create increased traffic to the site at no cost to me. MySpace did a great job of this today by integrating with Yahoo, making it simple to view private MySpace pages. So all my users get free pictures of Paris Hilton touching her nasties in a tanning bed. Genius! (more…)

Google wants the intervals between television channel frequencies—called “White Space” —and I want them to have it. They’re no geniuses for figuring out how useful it could be. Carol Anne Freeling did it first in 1982. But while the Freelings had an appreciation for innovative use of white space, Google and Microsoft’s experiments are pissing off television broadcasters and others who use it because they fear interruption of service to their customers.

Now, I hold no truck with empty people who rely only on television for entertainment. Anyone worth their pop cultural mettle has the The View on in the background while Twittering and reading Techcrunch and listening to Howard Stern. If my neighbour’s iPhone jams up against Whoopi and Joy rolling their eyes at the Bush-lobotomized Survivor chick, I’ve got planned serendipity and dropping loads to cover me. (more…)

KEMBLE, ONTARIO—We all go home. It is a return that can be couched in obligation, satiation, relaxation and a myriad of divergent emotions. But it is also done because of familiarity. We go back because it is a physical and emotional gesture that has worn a groove into our minds so vast it is impossible not to fall into it. It is impossible to erase the groove but with motivation and years of effort it can be flattened out and made more avoidable. It’s like sucking your thumb. Even though I quit twenty years ago to avoid social castigation, when I try it now it feels normal. Like home.

Historically, our home on the Internet has been a homepage. From 1996 until 2005 my homepage was a site called lynx mindex. I used it because it was an aggregation of categorized search boxes giving me instant access to every form of search. From dictionary to versiontracker and travelocity to boingboing. Eventually Google supplanted the entire directory because it outperformed niche searches. But I kept using my old homepage until it went offline—because of the groove in my mind it had worn. (more…)

The Luddites were early nineteenth-century people who feared that mechanization would rob them of their jobs. They were right insofar as those who clung to their anti-mechanization stance were screwed.

In 1848, Barthelemy Thimonnier, inventor of the first true sewing machine, had his working machines burned up by an angry mob of tailors who claimed that women could never do the job the tailors did at home, nor could machines ever produce clothes as they had. According to their narrative, the machines signaled the downfall of civilization as we spiraled downwards into ill-fitting clothes with weakly sewn seems. Tailors here in Canada shared this view, and their protests delayed the introduction of sewing machines into factories by two years. (more…)

Like Dolly Parton, I love tackiness. In interviews Dolly often tells the story of being a little girl and admiring this ‘pretty lady’ in town. The lady had crimson lipstick, glittering clothes and platinum hair. She fashioned herself after this lady and it wasn’t until she was grown that she realized the lady was the town whore.

I relate to Dolly. Only I admired a place, not a person.

Growing up I dreamed of Las Vegas. Not a day went by when I didn’t imagine myself in the most beautiful place on earth: The Vegas Strip. As a child I dressed as though I was headed there (just in case). I wore gold lamé, faux-leather mini-dresses, and I stuck sparkles to my face.

It wasn’t until I was grown that I realized Paris, France, was supposed to be a far more desirable destination than Paris, Las Vegas. All the spitballs and Baby-soft perfume bombs suddenly made sense. (Note: I still haven’t made it to France).

But neither Dolly nor I changed our ways. I still prefer electric-green polyester paint-suits and neon to cotton and sunlight; likewise, Dolly never took off her wigs, nails, or boobs. (more…)

I did some soul searching before I wrote this. I’m worried this post might come off the wrong way; you might think of me differently. I don’t want to ruin my impeccable image or to insult my gentle readers.

So let’s get one thing clear: I don’t like Facebook. Especially if the Scobilized rumours are true that Facebook’s lockout of Google’s Friend Connect is a harbinger of far more nefarious and apocalyptic things. Namely: Microface. Or Facesoft. Whatever it will be called, if Microsoft buys Facebook for fifteen billion dollars, Google and the entire open web movement might finally have a concrete bogeyman. In this one case I was forced to use Facebook because it has become a blockbuster. Like mining a scene in Jaws for filmic metaphor instead of Indiana Jones 4. The former was the first big hit of the past but Indy 4 will be even bigger—it’s only a matter of time.

Now for a bit of romance and intrigue: (more…)

eBay and Craigslist are swapping lawsuits like spit. eBay owns about a quarter of Craigslist. eBay created Kijiji (a Craigslist-clone classifieds system but covering both urban and rural areas) while being in bed with Craigslist.

Sound a little slutty to you?

It did to Craigslist. So they started to sneak around behind eBay’s back in revenge. When eBay found out it went into hysterics. The only known cure for hysteria, as everyone knows, is a lawyer.

eBay sues Craigslist. Which begets more hysteria. Craigslist sues eBay.

eBay’s codename for Kijiji is “Craigslist Killer.” How arrogant of them. Staring down their monied noses at ethical little Craigslist. I’m wearing my TEAM CRAIGSLIST T-shirt right now. Well I would be if I ever wore T-shirts. My favouritism might only be because I found my French snow-shovelling saviour on Craigslist and yesterday I got sniped while trying to buy some Edwardian shoes on eBay. Do you know how hard it is to find size-11 shoes from 1905?

The criticism consistently leveled at sweet, volunteer-driven Craigslist is that it is urban-elitist: It only services major cities. If you are from Elderslie or Nelson and you want to sell your marble chess set asap for money to buy a Bluefly prom dress, you’re screwed. eBay’s genius was not in thinking up a service that fills that gap but in buying itself into bed with competition. Was Craigslist really so naive?

The worst thing would be a hostile takeover of Craigslist. It would be devastating. There is a history and social network there that would truly be missed. Like losing the Five Cent to a Dollar store in Tara when I was 12. The Best of Craigslist is the home of some of my favorite rants of all time. Craigslist needs to build on and develop these most valuable assets to bail itself out of trouble. eBay has the money and power to be a serious threat. What would become of an eBay-owned Craigslist? Would it continue mostly unhampered like a Yahoo-owned Flickr? I think that the volunteer-powered Craigslist is integral to its success and utility so I’m pessimistic.

eBay, while enjoying its’ fair share of stunts, has no such vibrant culture. And Kijiji is a well-timed and -funded transmutation of print classifieds into a rural-friendly, no artsy-crap, Craigslist. Its strength certainly comes from small towns. My cousin from Kemble swears by to put snow-tires on his various cars.

And me?

I go to Kijiji when I want to sell a horrible faux-oak ceiling fan for $20 (true story).

I go to Craigslist when I want a tenant who is sparkling and won’t pee on my carpets (again, true).

I go to eBay to buy my Edwardian chemises. (I am planning my ’09 fashion season.)

Despite the apparent uniqueness of these services, a sea-change is coming in the online classifieds game. Neither my dalliances with fashion nor the hysteria of small and giant corporations can stop it. The itinerant capitalism machine will come out ahead, no matter what.

Here Mashable, take my vagina. I’m obviously not using it right.

According to Mashable, the In Touch of the social networking scene (bold and uppity upstart with a handsome Twitterface), I am not actually a woman.

On Mother’s Day Mashable churned out another one of their highly-re-bloggable social networking list of links. The focus of this new list is a bizarre niche group rarely mentioned on Mashable—women!

I felt special. All past slights undone. Mashable was finally compensating for their status quo sexism by exploring “some of the most popular social networking sites for women.” If felt like maybe the Mashable Twitterhead (aka Pete Cashmore) cared about me after all.

But I was wrong. I got all amped up for nothing.
And I was not alone:

I (Rubybeck) agree with AskFrasco. I was excited to see a post focusing on women, but sorely disappointed with the content. This post should be more aptly titled “Top 10 Social Networking Sites for Moms.”

Indeed. It seems that to Mashable a woman is defined by her incubating and birthing abilities. I, socialnet czarina, had only heard of one of the sites they listed. One! And the sites listed would be better placed on an April Fool’s Day post than on one for Mother’s Day. Cafemom was bad enough, but ParentsConnect? WTF.

And then it dawned on me. According to Mashable logic I must not really be a woman. I should just hand my vagina, my uterus—heck my whole endocrine system—over to Mashable because I am not using it right. Even if I did pop out a kid, I would never–ever–use these sites. My main life interests would not shift from historicization and social-net culture to parenting and motherhood. So obviously, even if I bore children, my lack of monomaniacal focus on child-rearing would make me a horrible mother.

In the end, Mashable would be doing the entire world a favour taking these simultaneously useless and dangerous organ-weapons off my hands. Or, um, out of my body.

The single problem here is that the Mashable Men assume that, once birthing, female interests shift to some generic, home-based mother category from whomever they might have been before. Even if this new breed of thin-framed, notebook-totting patriarch uses 43 Folders for excellent file system organization, a devalued housewife is still a devalued housewife.

So thanks Mashable Men for using Mother’s Day to remind me of how insignificant I am to the denizens of social networking because my destiny is to sacrifice my identity for the production of others greater than me. The men can then be free of my menacing feminist critiques to handily carve up the cultural landscape in the mirror image of themselves. I’ll never forget how special you’ve made me feel.

Want to scan and analyze the chatter of millions of conversations? Have an idea for a story, a song, a research paper, or are you a voyeur like me?

Go to Tweetscan.

Pick a word. Enter the word. Presto. You can even subscribe to the search and have it in your RSS feed.

Following the word walrus I have learned that they play an important role in the semiotics of the phallus (the beast not the magazine of course). And that those damn baby boomer idols The Beatles are quoted daily. We at The Walrus have a lot of work to do to remove that pantagruelian taint.

I also follow my own name and reply to everyone who uses it with a short explanation about how I am the real Chantelle. With each explanation I attempt to create the perfect and elusive self-obsessed, 140 character, haiku:

Bloody hammer finds
the lies that chantelle told you
selfish memes us two

The composition of my soul has been cleaved in two: one half social-net savant; the other A-list celebrity god-talker seeking divine counsel through a pop-cult telekinesis.The composition of my soul has been cleaved in two: One half social-net savant; the other A-list celebrity god-talker seeking divine counsel through a pop-cult telekinesis.

But everything that rises must converge.

A Hollywood A-lister has just joined Twitter: Diablo Cody (Academy Award winning screenwriter of Juno with the captivating stripper byline). This time the celebrity is real, not just a pretender scraping the Net and depositing an RSS feed into a Twitter account. And she’s great at it. Sharing just enough of her insider life to keep you panting for more:

I thought I was going to stay in last night, but I wound up on the patio of the Chateau at 2:00 a.m

And then Sharon Stone follows suit. Here comes Hollywood!

Look out, micro-celebrities Scobolizer and Leo Laporte. It’s like what happens to Ben Mulroney and Don McKellar (sorry gentle American reader, I know these names mean nothing to you) when the Hollywood cast of the Toronto International Film Festival sojourns in Toronto: Canadian niche celebrities get a train ticket to nobodysville.

The implications are enormous. (more…)

Am I a just a myopic textard? A horsegeek of the updated apocalypse?

From Lifehacker comments:

Everyone join in and repeat after me…

Social Networking Will Destroy the World.

Yes, you heard me correctly. Social Networking is the glue that binds retarded anti-socialites together; without it, they would need to ACTUALLY interact with real humans or just accept being shut-in couch potatoes (what we used to refer to these people as before they could all join together virtually in one giant blob of mental mush.

Twitter is for those people with too much time on their hands and too few REAL friends to spend it with.

Come on everyone, detach your fingers from the sticky keyboard (or keypad, you textards) and go outside and just breathe… just breathe fresh air and then go knock on your neighbors door (you know the strange people that live next door) and say hello.

My keypad isn’t sticky! It’s protected by a kbcover. I get plenty of fresh air at wifi cafes with patios. And, when I last spoke to my octogenarian neighbour all she said was “WHAT? SAY AGAIN!” and “WHY DON’T YOU HAVE THE BABIES YET?” so I retreated.

But, after smashing my grocery cart head-on into scuppie couple searching through the organic coffee at Dominion for the Decaf Cliff Hanger Espresso because I was mid-tweet (and then naturally twittering the entire event during the aftermath) I have to wonder:

Am I a just a myopic textard? Am I a horsegeek of the updated apocalypse (physical atrophy, social apathy, emotional starvation and digital immortality)? I don’t have a horse—but I do have a thin, small and pale-coloured dog!

Are you sick to death of hearing about Twitter and not knowing what it is? Of feeling behind the times?

Here is a step-by-step Twitter video instruction guide presented by a pioneer lady. In just a few minutes you can be part of the modern era!

Twitter for Beginners: So Simple A Pioneer Can Do It from twitter howto on Vimeo.

Are you ready for even more? You’d better be:

• Concise and comprehensive guide to Twitter, including desktop applications and practical uses.
• Animation video overview of Twitter from Commoncraft.
• Video from the history of Twitter.
• 137 links of the most recent Twitter developments and news.
• My username on Twitter is the past form and yet femininized version of Tweet: Twot.

Articles about tech blogging and death have been bubbling through the tech lifestream over the past few weeks.

Triggered by the passing of two prominent bloggers that may or may not be blog-stress related, the feeing that the news never stops has driven many tech bloggers (like Michael Arrington of Techcrunch) to sleeplessness and the complete abandon of their physical and mental well-being.

But they love it.

I do too. But from there my perspective diverges. (more…)

Ebay helped me sell my beloved Remington Steele car to a man who lived many hours away in a town named Swastika. The swastika originally comes from ancient India but of course that’s not the first thing that came to my mind. I immediately Twittered and Twitpic’d the event and my feelings about it.

After reading “The Spy Who Blogged Me”, I’d think Hal Niedzviecki might call me a surveillance slut as I go blindly putting my private life out into the world. (more…)

Pierre Maraval, as part of June 2008’s Luminato/L’Oréal arts festival, took my portrait this morning. He calls his latest project Toronto’s Mille Femmes and describes it as a cultural landscape of women who “enrich” Toronto.

And, luckily for Mr. Maraval, in our culture we all are expected to wear make-up, so L’Oréal flips the bill in this murky synergism of capitalism and ‘capital A’ Art.

Each woman is asked to provide a word that will accompany their portrait. Each portrait and word will appear in both a gallery show and companion book. I looked at what words other women had chosen: libre, honest, étincelante, fabulous, cosmopolitan, flexible and even jedi. The other women with me deliberated thoughtfully before committing their word to paper.

I, on the other hand, didn’t miss a beat. I handed my paper to Maraval’s assistant.

“What is this?” she asked in her thick Quebécois accent, “I do not know of this word? What could it mean?”

Everything, I answered. Just everything.

My word? Can’t you guess? All praise Twitter. Testify!

“Tweet.”

Newton wanted to reshape his retina, I want to Tweet. (more…)