All Play and No Workflow Makes Internet Something Something

via @bldgblog, this post on organizing the Internet Reader workflow.

It's an anecdotal account of a designer reviewing how he saves links to read later. Complete with white board wire frame.

You probably do something similar, and so do I, and maybe it is less complicated or more complicated. And we'd probably all love to write a blog post detailing exactly how. Because this is the internet, and we like to share.

And there are a shitload of links.

But here's what I thought of, while I found myself trying to visualize the map he was describing. I thought of, "what the fuck, why am I reading this?"

Here's something I didn't read. It's an article on Time Magazine's website about how there are things out there that figure out what we want. Like Pandora and Facebook. It's funny that there's an article in what used to be my link into American content when I was seven years-old, telling me my content is now being provided by products I've been using for five years.

But not that funny. Because there is a lot of content out there, and this is a SERIOUS PROBLEM.

I don't know how I can play with this duality in this essay in a funny way, so instead of dancing around it, I'll just say it. Yeah, the shit we read on the Internet isn't really world-crucial. But then again, it is. Amid the laughing cats there is the only forum for oil spill news and revolutions and campaigns, and, to use a term from the time of Time Magazine, civics. It's the internet, of course!

So the best guide towards managing this content is a designer's whiteboard and a chorus of sites and services ending in .us and .ly, or a five year-old five years-late Time Magazine?

I work in an industry that is very similar to the Internet. It's called "printing". Printing is a lot of things, but for the purposes of this blog post it is a completely custom manufacturing system. This means, if there is a mistake in manufacturing, you can't have the customer go to the Apple Store and get a completely identical item, because there isn't one. It means you can't go back and fix spelling errors in the content after it is produced. If you fuck up, you are making the whole job again.

This is similar to the Internet not just because most of what the print industry actually prints advertising, but because there is not one Internet experience that is the same. Everyone uses it differently and has a different product. Different content.

You can't run a successful print manufacturing system without a workflow. There are just too many places for mistakes. Between designer, salesperson, estimator, prepress, press, and bindery, there are about five place each for things to get fucked up. Any fuck up costs money, any fuck up past estimator ends up costing material resources. They call it spoilage. Stuff that gets recycled because it's no good to anyone.

So it strikes me as I'm reading this first link, how is there not a workflow for the Internet? It's like we kept a print shop open with nobody working there, and when the customer shows up we show 'em in and say, "help yourself". Try not to get your legs stuck in the rollers.

Of course, there isn't what OSHA likes to call "stored kinetic energy" on the Internet, and the only resource we have to lose is time.

But still, there is no unified approach to Internet content management. No workflow. Just a browser, and a bunch of .us.ly's. The fact that a browser can combine an address bar, a search portal, bookmarks, and maybe even RSS all in one program actually puts it in the front running for workflow.

One of the great parts of the Internet distributed OS-experience is that you can customize. Plug-ins, extensions, javascript. But you have to find these, or hear someone else talk about them, or start picking a bunch of social media chicklets at random, using your email address like a coin in a slot machine. Every workflow ought to have flexibility built in, but still, there is no place to even start.

It's been the prevailing logic that the content provider is responsible for this. There is an awful lot of talk on the Internet about "curation". Like, each website is a museum. How many museums do you go to a year? Every time you need to check a fact, do you run on down to the Smithsonian? Museums are nice experiences, but they are not resources for most people. Some websites do a pretty good job, with a sturdy comment system, and maybe even a little community going on, that leads people to stop into their site directly, to see the dinosaur bones, and the woolly mammoth, and the real Apollo space capsule. I'm thinking of Slashdot, or maybe BoingBoing. But these are still magazines, publishing about things that are going on elsewhere. If the Internet is really supposed to tell us what is going on around the world, and help us connect with other people, it's some sort of crazy open air market, where people are getting pickpocketed, lost amid the meat harvested from unrecognizable creatures, and a sweaty westerner is buying a strange little puzzle box at the cafe in the corner, where it seems they sell a lot of those little puzzle boxes to westerners. Maybe this is the flavela chic stuff that guy is always talking about. What guy? I don't know, something I heard behind a stack of shipping crates.

I'm working on a redesign of my website(s) right now, because on the output end, your system and workflow does affect your content. Without the right tools, it's hard to make anything. But I still don't know what to do about absorbing the content, and helping my content be absorbed by others. I tweet links, comment on blogs, share-and-share-alike, but often it feels like I'm a guy waving a sign at an intersection, or sending ten thousand pieces of junk mail. I wouldn't rather send my stuff off to an editor, and wait six months for them to tell me they lost it (for fuck's sake, thank goodness internet self-publishing is actually rewarding compared to something!) but it seems like there is a hole here, for something not yet invented. I can actually almost taste it. Tastes like a community as easily browseable as Facebook, that incorporates any login, with public, semi-private, and private feeds, with synchable bookmarks, and read-and-comment-republish RSS/Twitter compiling... Hell, if I had any programming chops, I'd build it myself.

Until somebody builds it, I guess it's just "what's your pleasure, sir?"

Interdome Content-Object Shakeup

Been thinking a lot about Tim's (of Quiet Babylon internet-fame) project, "Unlink Your Feeds".

The problem of multiple, interlinked feeds has long been a burgeoning neurosis of mine.

Let me share my problems with you!!!

I love interconnectivity. I use my Google account with great zest, trying out the new features as they add them. A lot of them are useful, but a lot of them I try to use, simply because having everything linked together makes it easy to experiment. I don't have to invent a new password and username to try X service, I just click the link. If I don't like it, I just stop using it, and never pay it another thought.

Additionally, Google's interconnectedness is a huge plus. There are plenty of portals and application uses between Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and so on, which I don't have to spell out for you. I use my iGoogle page as my widget desktop, and then access my cloud holdings from there. The interconnectedness makes it superior in function even when it lacks particular features, and all of this has made me continue using Blogger rather than going solely to Wordpress, caused me to shun Facebook, and even avoid using Twitter for a long time.

But Twitter... oh, oh Twitter.

It's just too damn easy. All those one-line witticisms I come up with during the day, with no one to share them. The ease of retweeting, rather than saying something original. The ability to take a picture of a strange car and share it with the world, all from my cell phone, while still driving with my knees.

Twitter isn't owned by Google.

So, I have this other feed going. In addition to my RSS feed, and my Reader feed. Now that I know what a wonderful world Twitter is, I get curious as to what the hold-outs who refuse to get Twitter are saying on Facebook. And I think maybe I should start cross-posting to Facebook.

Then they created Buzz, which is the Google-Twitter I always wanted, except that it still sucks, so everyone read on Twitter is still only on Twitter. So I linked my Twitter feed to Buzz, as well as my reader account.

And now I live in this hellish world I have helped create.

Tim is right--we cannot live like this. And while the idea of cutting the feeds free, and using each as each is best suited has a nice, Marxist "to each according to his need" sort of feel, I still have this need for interconnectedness. I just can't blog, feed Reader, Tweet, Buzz, and Facebuke (the verb?) separately and simultaneously. Hell, I'm supposed to be writing books! I still want to maintain my Internet presence, and read what I want to read, so there has to be some over lap.

How, oh, how, can I make all this damn technology work for me?

The secret to using a Google Account, in my opinion, is to be flexible, and also to be patient. Many things work, and over time, Google makes them work better. And, work better together. Also, as I experiment with different tools, I change my use of them as they work, and work differently, together. Only recently did Google Docs get to a point where I was comfortable doing serious writing with it. And, since I spend less time online in "open surf mode" than I used to, I now only bookmark certain feed posts, rather than keep detailed notes about various web sites.

The same is possible with my feeds. I think I've hit upon a way to link them so that people who want to know what the deal is can still find out, without redundancy, and with most of the input automated.

This is the way it is working now:

I am looking at these feeds in terms of objects of communication. Any feed-ready information posted to the web is an object, treated as an individual, accessible, feedable piece. Different classes of objects hold different amounts and kinds of content, which may or may not overlap other objects' capacities for content.

Additionally, certain objects may have a certain shape, which allows them to fit into different data flows or lines of assembly (feeds). For example, I can set up Buzz to attach Twitter-objects to Buzz-objects in my Buzz feed. However, this shape is a shape of intensive flows (in the sense that it allows a certain change-of-state transition of the object, rather than a transitivity, like A = B = C). I'm getting all complicated with my terms, but basically, think of it like how yeast can bake into a loaf of bread, but bread cannot be dissected back into yeast. A Buzz-object cannot be translated into a Twitter-object (at least not yet).

RSS is the smallest common denominator in terms of objects, more or less. Any feed, be it Twitter or Facebook or a blog, almost always has an RSS feed generated with it. There are various tools to mash RSS feeds together, Yahoo Pipes being the most well-known. However, I am doing this because I don't want to create a new feed, I want to merge and ally the feeds of services I already use. Many of these services also have APIs, and perhaps I could work out some sort of program for managing my posts among the feeds. However, I'm not so skillful in the programming department. Also, if I use the recognized features of these different feed services already in existence, I'll probably be in better shape down the line to adjust to new features, and also I have the services' dependability to fall back on.

Content-wise, Twitter is the smallest common denominator. You can't find anything smaller than 140 characters. I also use Twitter most frequently, because of its small content size.

Additionally, many objects translate into Twitter-objects. Via Feedburner, I can make my blog posts echo as Tweets. Using Tweetdeck, my mobile Twitter client, I can post to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously.

Granted, it is annoying to see someone's high score in a video game echoed as a Twitter post. However, I've been posting less and less on the blog, and when I do, it is a often something that started as a Tweet, but then grew too long. In this way, the Twitter-object derived from my blog's RSS feed is just a link to a memo, a "please see my memo re: X". The duplication is, in a sense, to force people to choose. Either they want my full feed, and tune in to the Twitter feed for the details, or if they wish they were spared my constant witticisms, they can just go to the blog RSS.

It is not yet possible to auto-transmute my Reader shared RSS to Twitter, but that's okay, because I can always post a single Reader item to Twitter via a sidebar tool. This is probably for the best, because I can share anything interesting to those who like my reading tastes, but reserve only the "mainstream" articles for my main, common denominator feed.

Buzz can, and in my case is posting all of these things together in one, lump feed. It is a taste of the chaos. But, because Buzz has set out to aggregate all of these things, it is less of a network in itself, with its own flavor, and more of simply an aggregator. The cool part is, it shows up in my Google profile, so if anyone happened upon me via Google, they could get a good taste of what I'm into on the Internet.

Blogger, with all the new Gadgets you can add into it, is looking more and more like MySpace every day. But this flexibility is good for me. I now have two columns here. One to store these text essays, and the other to provide an easy way to examine the difference between my feeds. The Twitter feed, on the top, is the general feed. Next is the blog only, then my Brute Press stuff only, then other-source RSS only. All of it retains its original, unique feed-object character and content, while one feed, the Twitter feed, acts as the main door way, strictly under my control.

Control, after all, is what this is all about. It's a personal micro-manager's Internet dream. The solution I just described for myself will undoubtably not work for anyone else. This probably won't even be my own solution in six months, as I discover new tools, and start using the tools I have differently.

This is the key philosophical lesson of Internet content, content-objects, and object feeds. (You knew there was going to be a philosophical lesson, didn't you?) If you told people in the blog boom that they would be abandoning their blogs for a service where you tapped in 140 characters with your thumbs from your cell phone, they would have thought you were crazy. Same thing if you tried to sell Gutenberg a Kindle, or some other such foolish spatial-temporal technology metaphor-mashup. I'm sure whatever's next will also be just as weird as the present, and the past. Time is aggregation, after all.

The tools we have to communicate change the way we communicate. Big surprise, no? I'm sure we'll eventually figure out our feeds, so we don't have to read cross-posts anymore. Otherwise we'll drown in echoes, or suffocate in Internet Balkanization catatonia. People will sort out how to mean what they want to mean to the people they want to mean it to. Right now, to me, I'm directing my meaning to the people who follow me on Twitter. If you don't like that feed, please consider the other options to the left. If you don't like that, there is plenty of other Internet out there.

This way, both my communications and the people to whom I communicate can grow towards each other and into each other, like roots into the earth.

Totally such thing as a free feed...

I re-did my links, partially to update, and mostly because Blogger finally implemented the last complaint from my Google Universe post: they added a function to insert your Reader subscriptions into your blog roll. So now there's a crazy updating feed center thing with everyone I thought would benefit from the link or from who's link you'd benefit. (what?)

You have to hand it to Google--every complaint I had was fixed in about six months. Are they listening to me? Or just constantly innovating?

I have been thinking about experimenting with WordPress though... Google Sites is alright, but how can it compete with open source, complete with plugins AND skinned interfaces? But don't worry, Welcome to the Interdome will be staying here for the immediate future. Any WordPress will be unrelated.

Oh, and if you were linked, and now are not, and your web site is functioning (or you have a new one) you should let me know, because it was an oversight: you didn't get kicked off the island. Unless you are XKCD, or a similar large site, and definitely don't need my link for people to know where you at. Not that you would then contact me if you were... but... what was I saying...?




ps. Hit 10,000 visits today, thanks in part to BURNLAB, no doubt. I can't figure out why SiteCounter and Google Analytics differ so much. Maybe SC is counting double hits for page views or something. Oh well, I'll take my 10Gs. Thanks y'all.

Hey There Fair Share-Friends!

Hey, FeedBurner tells me a few of you subscribe with Google Reader.

Do you use your Shared page in Reader? Let's be Share-Friends!

If you don't use Reader, my share page is in the white box on the left margin. I guess my Share page has its own RSS feed too maybe. If you use another reader with some sort of share page thing, let's be Share-Friends too!

I like the Share page. Sometimes an article doesn't need a full blog response, sometimes just a one-liner or a hyperlink will do.

email me your contact info:

adam.rothstein (at) gmail (dot) com

Wither Twitter

I learned about Twitter after it was already popular, and as such, I was skeptical. The idea of constant updates with limited characters seemed a little MySpace to me, or even worse, a bit AIM away-message. I remembered the rainbow font colors, obscenely mundane emoticons, and the horrible, horrible quotes. It still gives me shivers.

But it seems, everyone is doing, and not just every twelve year-old and his/her friends, but even blogs that I enjoy and respect have Twitter streams now. The possibilities seem interesting: a combination of blog, SMS, and RSS feeds, all three of which I enjoy. But will they taste great together?

When I found out that a javascript exists to let me Tweet (still, very uncomfortable with that verb) things directly from Google Reader, I decided to take the plunge. I really like sharing things quickly via my Reader share page, but Reader doesn't seem to have a wide enough following to make it work well. The only people I have ever seen advertise their shared lists are Reader techs. But lots of people seem to like Twitter.

However, this begs an even more important question: do I have enough friends to share my life with to make any of these things work? The only person I really hang out with, email, or SMS is Megan, and she's not a Twitterer. I don't think I know anybody who uses it. So who is going to read my tweets? I've come to terms with the fact that this blog may well be just a journal, and a spot for Google Image Search to land on. But something much more intimate in terms of "buddy lists" unfortunately has the effect of being a depressing mirror to my social life.

Regardless, I figure it will be a learning experience. So now, if you like, there is a link to the left that lets you see the Interdome (i.e. my own) Twitter feed. If you are into that sort of thing, check it out. I promise that it won't consist of sad little musings like this post: most likely it will be cool art, music, and news links that I find that are sharable but do not require a full blog discussion. Call it the Interdome mini-feed, at 140 characters a post.

Refined Newsprint, Latin, and Wicked Hot Dark Elves

My subscribed RSS feeds generally fall into two categories; there are the constant, quick-posed comments from various mega-feeds summing up to over 100 posts a day, which I consume with a quick, channel-surf-like intensity of interest (the intensity being one of minimal depth, but excessive stimulation area). There is the inverse as well: the long, thought-provoking essays that are posted by their publishers perhaps once or twice a week. (The exception is BookForum, which drives my obsessive nature mad by posting interesting material in an incessant deluge with which I could never hope to match.)

The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) is one of the second sort, and probably a prototype for the category. It is precisely the sort of publication for people with a wide, varied intellectual interest but not a real storehouse of knowledge from most of these areas. It launches in-depth studies of topic under scrutiny, but begins at a step back, so that the interested web-scholar who has just wandered into the room has time to find a seat. It also matches reviews and approaches of very current work with topics that all classic, if not overtly classical. The TLS manages to pique one's interest without sounding too pretentious--to me, at any rate. I like the occasional foreign-language phrase inserted into my reading so that I can continue to lament all the languages I cannot read but should. And in a world where txting basd splling psuedo-conventions are making their way into writing as much as by mistake as through a sense of hipness, I don't think it's a bad thing to have at least a few bastions of "high" standards left, as archaic as they may or may not be.

Anyway, I'll ditch the vocality of a lone warrior standing alone between the barbarian horde and the library with naught but a single trusty pole-arm. Well, maybe not alone. Maybe she would help:


What was I talking about? Oh yes, after severely downgrading the High Culture quotient of this post with suggestive anime, I was going to share my recent, favorite articles I read online at the Times Literary Supplement (that is like the New York Post for English people).

In a recent post I mentioned that in a few weeks Claude Levi-Strauss will celebrate his 100th birthday. Here is an article about the publication of his Works (with a few notable exceptions) that also serves as a good introduction and summary of his life and works. Better than the faulty obituary is the celebration!


Here is a review of Rowan Williams' recent book on Dostoyevsky. Rowan Williams, apart from having amazing eyebrows, is the Archbishop of Canterbury, and quite knowledgeable on many topics. In this volume he discusses the theology of Dostoyevsky's fiction, which is no timid category. The review sums up some of the discussion and discusses Williams' own interaction with Dostoyevsky.


The piece that first got me reading the TLS online was this article about a new work on Lucretius. I know very little about Lucretius, or about Epicurus, but that first bit containing the line, "It is sweet on the great sea [. . .] to watch from the shore other people drowning,” dragged me in faster than an artist's interpretation of a nubile dark elf with a mean looking polearm.




So enjoy those, if you wish. I've had thoughts about more detailed blog posts (oh joy! they cry with unrestrained ebullience!) but I've been holding off while working on a bigger internet project. (The cheers ring up from the gathered masses afresh, thrice renewed.) More about that later in the week, perhaps.

Interdome Notes, Vol. 1

Although most of my posts are long-winded, pseudo-philosophical, personal exhibitionism exercises, I'm going to try and and insert more short segments and brief thoughts, with possibly even no theoretical relevance whatsoever. (We'll see how I do with that.)

Though I've provided ample exegesis on my fondness and support for Google's many projects (even while I feel a bit like Heidegger's 'Rectory Address' every time I declare my metaphysical love for a corporation with a market cap. of $140 Billion; that's right, not like Heidegger but the address itself) I think Google Reader is my favorite. This is actually an affinity for the concept of RSS scripts more than Google; RSS is a little cousin of html and xml script that let's you create your own synchronized newspaper with an appropriate client.

In Reader there is a delightful "share" function, which creates your own RSS feed, similar to a mini-blog, with RSS entries that one finds compelling, with one's appropriate commentary. So, since I have no Reader buddies, I will be sharing these little internet tidbits via my blog; hopefully this will increase my post frequency and also spread the RSS love a bit, since I know that I have at least a few regular readers here.


So, here is
Interdome Notes Vol. 1(general link to my shared material enclosed)

Boing Boing brings us this little tidbit, about McSweeney's apparent plagerism of heavy metal website Encyclopaedia Metallum. The website, and the book, are nothing more than a list of all known metal bands (also the title of the McSweeney's publication). If you didn't already have a reason to dislike McSweeney's, here is another (heh heh). I'm all for open-use and circulation of materials on the internet, but republishing for profit, when it's not in the public domain? That's a no-no. Especially if it is still currently in "print", which the website most certainly is. What's next? Are they going to print Wikipedia too?


Anyway, more of these little items as I find them. I would also mention the current stock market turmoil, which I am watching with interest--but there is no need to enclose a link to that, because you can find that as soon as opening the internet.


Cheers,
Adam

Welcome to the Hegeldrome?

It's been about 3 weeks since I got my iPhone, and as I forecasted in my last post, my life is already completely changed! I have designed a custom ear-piercing so that I can implant a Bluetooth headphone DIRECTLY INTO MY EAR! No, just kidding! Megan talked me out of that one. But really:

We have entered a brand new age of digital literacy!

Or, at least I have. I have discovered that since I last spent a lot of time online, there are many great sites that provide an RSS feed, eliminating all the flashy business and most of the ads, so that I can have direct access to the text. With the help of Google Reader, a RSS managing web app, and the Google App, I can now see the updates to interesting sites in small, bite size pieces, from which it is easy to "hyperlink" to the full article!

Interesting!

This is, nothing less than a Darwinian leap forward for web content. All the dodos (YouTube, hopefully... what a horrible GUI! Not even its own iPhone App can save it!) will be hunted down and killed by Portuguese sailors. Metaphorically, of course. Those who adapt their content to the proper form will move forward, and I think that this can only be a good thing. Why? Because those who properly form their content sites are those with the better content.

I know this sounds like a strange, digital age argument for classical forms, but think of it the other way around; rather than rely upon the time-honored forms of literature, we are now going to be pushing forward to more innovative forms, and, more importantly, not just innovation, but innovation that is found to be useful and more conducive to its content.

Take YouTube, for instance, that I just bashed. It has been heralded as a synonym for Google, not only in ownership, but in the epoch-defining titles that pundits love to trumpet, hoping that they will be known as the soul who coined the term. But no one will ever be the YouTube generation. Here's why.

The site is: a very convenient means for sharing videos, that was made even more convenient when they made it possible to embed video in your web page. Your blog/social site/web page doesn't support video, or you don't know how to make it do so? Bam. Now it/you do.

The site isn't: a video Wikipedia. Enough said. The search tags are awful, as is 90% of the content. If you're looking for bullshit, you found it. If you're looking for the "Glittering C-Beams" speech from Blade Runner, then okay, maybe you found that too. But say, you want to find specific Congressional Testimony, then perhaps not. Why? Because nobody uploaded that video. The bottom line is, if you don't want to weed through the crap, you shouldn't even bother.

Now, I'm not saying that there is a web site out there that will give me something good about any subject, all the time. The internet is all about the search and link. Even a great search engine like Google only gets you about 30% of the way to a nebulous concept, the rest is up to you.

That's why I really like the RSS business. Now I can program 10, 100, or 1,000 different content providers into my little heirarchy, and then search those trusted sources for what I need, or what I might need, but of which I'm not yet aware. For example, in my "Theory" folder, I get the most recent updates from The New York Review of Books, The Anomalist (a review of parascience sites), Erik Davis' Techgnosis, and the journal N+1. In the "Comics" section, I read Dinosaur Comics and The Comics Curmudgeon, and in my "Associates" category I have updates from my friends and colleagues blogs (see the sidebar for their links). Now I have my own little newspaper, made of the sections and contributors I choose, all updated 24-7 and prepped for my mobile device, or computer viewing. Amazing!

And you can make your own, and share articles like how Dad clips out columns for you. Cool!

One of the articles I just happened across was from the New York Times Book Review, called Online, R U really reading? See how they made the "R U" just like you were writing online? Isn't that clever? The article asks the question that Luddite babyboomers would love the answer to: "Is this crazy internet fad going to make my children into porn-addicted, illiterate nerds?"

The answer, clearly, is no. The fact that people like the author of the piece forget, is that there are many more people than Luddite babyboomers in the world. What I mean by this, is that not only are there people in the world that don't have a healthy respect for To Kill a Mockingbird, and other falsely-attributed "classics" (ME, for one) there are also people who although they have the ability, do not read at all, or only read tripe. This was occurring long before the internet, and will occur for long after. 90%+ literacy is a relatively new thing, and the fact is that most people, even in our culture, have no desire to pick up any book at all. So a teenager wants nothing more than to write fan-fiction and read online celebrity gossip... fine. S/he probably wasn't a Jr. Proust anyhow. Not that they shouldn't be prodded towards have a bigger view of the world and culture than is on YouTube, but I think we should look elsewhere than your modem for the problem.

The "classical" element of culture has always been the minority, and probably always will. And I think most who consider themselves part of that culture would like it that way. I remember being able to flash my Philosophy Department credentials in order to get in a standing-room-only lecture by Zizek in New York; imagine if I had to go up to Yankee Stadium (by then, renamed the Hegeldrome) and buy $150 scalped tickets just to watch that lecture on the Jumbotron!

But, what about the internet? Is there any goodness in it for us high and mighty, classical-culturally inclined? Of course! Did you not just hear how I made my own custom newspaper with a few cut-and-paste's in five minutes FOR FREE? The nation's newspapers are going out of business? Fuck 'em! As long as there is online advertising to be sold, there will be more than enough knowledgable opinions online to sort through. And after all, newspapers aren't going to disappear; they are only going to lose some weight, long over due. For those who read them, you will never beat a printed sheet. You can quote me on that. But if the NYT stopped printing it's society pages, I know I wouldn't mind.

The internet is not a dreamland, however. There are censorship issues a plenty, and I'm not (only) talking about the government. But that is a theme for a further post.