Changes on the Web can be good, of course, but there are pretty much only two types of changes that I really like. Making a site faster is always good — waiting for a page to load is so dialup! Adding new functionality and features is generally a good thing, too, even if they force some changes in a site’s appearance. Purely cosmetic changes, though, are made far too often, I think. There’s no sense in disrupting a perfectly good user experience.

When I speak about cosmetic changes, I’m not purely talking about graphics, layout, and other design elements. Even something as simple as a changing address can annoy users. For instance, I’ve used Delicious to store my bookmarks for ages. Every single time I go there I direct my browser to the URL http://del.icio.us just like I always have. A while back, however, some genius (or perhaps a whole team of geniuses) decided that “delicious.com” ought to be the main URL and so del.icio.us redirects me to that address now. Honestly, was this really necessary? It makes sense to OWN delicious.com so that traffic intended for the site isn’t misdirected, but the site came to fame with a different URL, a pretty unique URL. I just don’t get why you’d want to make that change. One of the reasons I wanted to try Delicious out in the first place is because it had such a quirky URL; new users probably won’t have that motivation. Another site that’s gotten on my bad side is BBC News; I used to always go to the low graphics version of the site, but it doesn’t seem to exist any longer. It’s not like BBC News has a graphics intensive web site, but I prefer the simple, classic layout of the low graphics version of the site. I know it sounds silly, but my visits to the site have plummeted directly as a result of the change. Suffice it to say that if you change your site on ME, prepare to face the consequences!

What really made me log in today was my worry that someone had left a comment and was wondering why it hadn’t been approved. Luckily, I just had a single spam comment waiting for my disapproval. I wonder how people can ever just drop a blog. Don’t they ever wonder if someone has stopped by and left a comment? Don’t they ever feel like they’ve given up on a cool project way too early? I encounter cool blogs all the time that seem to have been abandoned…there’s something undeniably sad about it. Rest assured, Four Forks won’t become one of those abandoned blogs so long as I’m alive!

My only rationalization for this phenomenon is that a lot of people actually like echo chambers. They feel more comfortable surrounded by people of their persuasion. It seems like it would be dull to me, but what else could keep people writing similar thoughts and comments day in and day out? This trend towards echo chambers is something you see all over the Web even though the sites themselves are often not started with the idea of serving as a home for a particular group of people. It just seems to happen spontaneously and, as I noted with regards to Digg, one group of people can seemingly push out another group fairly quickly. There’s nothing to be done about this — it’s natural — but at the same time I think it is a sign that the new breed of social sites haven’t replaced Usenet and message boards. Social sites are arguably better at creating communities, but they seem to be worse at integrating disparate viewpoints into those communities. I imagine the burnout rate is pretty high as people tire of the echo chamber effect begin to long for real discussion.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve not become a big fan of luge. For Nodar’s sake, I gave it a chance, but it’s not the best of spectator sports in my view. There’s very little to focus on except for the sensational speeds involved — the lugers aren’t actively moving or employing strategies that are easy for the untrained eye to follow. It’s not that there isn’t skill and training involved. Clearly, they are involved, and that’s why some lugers are much better than others…it just doesn’t translate well to a passive audience. Sorry, Nodar! Maybe I’ll get it some day. I don’t plan to luge in this life, but I’d be willing to race you in heaven!

The proliferation of spam is one of the saddest developments in cyberhistory. Most email (90%+) sent is unsolicited commercial junk. Given that email is one of the major ways humans communicate on planet Earth nowadays, that’s pretty crushing. The search engines have done a decent job of filtering the spam (perhaps so much so that it’s hard for the little guy to get noticed on today’s Web), but spammers still hit blog comments, forums, guestbooks, social networks, newsgroups, and anywhere else they can. It’s like there is a constant battle going on between people who just want to be able to communicate and exchange information and people who are willing to disrupt all communications for the sake of a buck or two. Thankfully, I think the smarter people in this fight are on the side of good, but the barbarians are at the gate. Will we always be able to fight them off?

Me, one of my weaknesses is the stock market. What can I say? I never really got into it. I don’t know all that much about how it works. Until relatively recently, I had the notion that when you bought stocks on the open market you bought it from the company directly. The truth is less cool and more confusing: apparently you always just buy stock owned by other traders because evidently only the high and mighty types of the world get to buy stock direct. Basically, there’s a lot I don’t know about investing, and reading balance sheets is not really my idea of a good time. Nonetheless, I’ve been forcing myself to learn more by browsing what the search engines have to offer. I’ve spent hours over the past couple of weeks reading articles on Investopedia and studying web sites devoted to such arcane topics as the anatomy of a stock quote. Frankly, I’m still not really into this stock stuff. Maybe I never will be.

That reluctance makes me wonder if I should just resign myself to playing it safe with my money. I don’t see myself trusting my savings to a professional when I don’t have a firm grip on the fundamentals myself. Bank accounts aren’t so bad, right? Unfortunately, a quick mental calculation using the rule of 72 suggests I’ll have to wait a long, long time to earn an appreciable return at today’s interest rates. Oh well!

It shouldn’t matter so much to me, but the trouble is I’m pretty dependent on Google. I search with Google, I email with Google, I shop with Google, I play with Google. I try to find alternatives to reduce my dependency from time to time, but the trouble is the alternatives so often prove not to be as good. Google does an awful lot of things right — I hope they can keep it going or at the very least someone else emerges that can truly compete with them. Justifiably or not, I worry that Brin or Page are selling stock because they can perceive the future for the big G is not all rosy. For the Internet’s sake, let’s hope that’s not true!

In truth, Alloymail hadn’t been my main email provider for a while now. I use Gmail for most of email needs nowadays — it has features and a storage capacity that my old ally Alloy couldn’t even dream of. Still, when I got the email that told me Alloymail would be no more as of December 15th, it shocked me. How could it just go away like that? Unfortunately, on the Internet, things go away like that all the time. It wasn’t that long ago that Yahoo decided to wipe its server of all GeoCities homepages. Still, it’s hard for the mind to take.

The strangest part of the Alloymail story is that it lasted an extra month longer than anticipated. It actually went down on January 15th, 2010, a month after its scheduled demise. Part of me was hoping that some mind had been changed and the service would endure. It baffles me that such a venerable domain would be tossed into the dustbin of history. Goodbye, Alloymail — you were a fine email provider in your day. I can’t even count how many hundreds of emails I sent and received through you. Some were intensely personal. Some were all business. Many of them were very important. With you gone, I can’t help but feel a part of my life is gone, too.

The world is responding to the crisis as it should, but as the hours tick by more people are dying. The sheer awfulness of the event is hard to fathom. People say that giving to charity makes you feel better about yourself, but I don’t think I’ll feel any comfort as I send in my donation to the Red Cross. It’s all just too horrible.

The thought of enraging a partisan audience would give even the most sincere of the newly converted pause before announcing their new political stance to the world. Personally, I’d probably let my old blog die, and, if I wanted to still blog about all things political, I’d simply start over from scratch with a new blog without letting my old readers know. There’s no use getting people riled up unnecessarily. However, politics tends to give people an evangelical bent to some extent. I wonder how many political bloggers would dare give up the chance of trying to win a few votes for their new team. On the other extreme, I wonder if there are people whose political views have changed but yet who continue to blog from another point of view because they’re so involved with that blog and don’t want to lose their audience. The talking heads on TV usually don’t seem all that passionate about politics; they’re just doing their job and getting paid for the views they’re espousing. There are probably bloggers like that, too.

If Kos were to return to the Republican fold and announced it on his site, the Daily Kos would certainly be a scene of absolute chaos. Most blogs are nowhere close to that size, but when you’re on top of the blogging world angering your audience has to be frightening. Death threats wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility because politics is something people get so passionate about.