Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I’ve just added two little cute features to the main page of my website. They don’t do much more than improve the usability and aesthetic of the front page by a tiny margin. The first is quite practical–it alerts you and sets the 404 status code if you loaded my site through a domain or subdomain:

The second is a Flickr badge across the top of my page, with a custom-made Flickr logo to take you to my Flick page:

But this is Web 2.0, and I use the Thickbox script in other places on my site, so why not here too?

It’s fun tinkering around with your main page. I need to add a cookie-rotator to the image on the front page, rather than make it time based. Then people can see different versions of me everytime they come back, rather than the current “new elliott at 1 AM” business.

I’m feeling like gadget blog Gizmodo (nofollow) has lost all its credibility in the blogging world. I am sure you’ve all hear about their scandal at CES 2008, which has hurt all bloggers’ credibility and left at least one of their staff banned from CES for life. Ironically, Gizmodo even had the stones to blog about it, calling their childish prank “the meanest thing Gizmodo did at CES (nofollow):”

CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn’t help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn’t stop.

Their title implies Gizmodo did other, but less mean, things at CES. I don’t get why they decided to sabotage a trade show? Their actions show they were there as irresponsible bloggers, and not the members of the press their badges said they were. This isn’t the only thing that’s made me give up on them, though. Here’s a running list:

1) Posting porn to Kotaku

If you check out this apology note from Kotaku, a well respected gaming blog, you’ll find that a Gizmodo editor decided “to post a very inappropriate photo on the top of Kotaku using someone else’s name.” The photo, an obscene shock / porn image known as “Tubgirl” was visible on the site for at least 20 minutes before a Kotaku editor noticed and removed it.

2) Immature staff

I can’t help but reproduce this photo from a pit stop competition (nofollow) Gizmodo did where they thought it would make a cool and professional photo of them all giving the finger. Such displays have their place, but stick them in your Facebook photos where your other drunk exploits go, please?

3) Misleading stories, headlines

When there isn’t news, according to Apple Gazette, Brian Lam–editor of Gizmodo–will just make some up, dropping a delicious teaser story a year ago about the iPhone. Unfortunately, he wasn’t writing about the Apple iPhone, he was writing about the Cisco one. Nevertheless, making it seem like it was about Apple got Gizmodo lots of hits.

4) Gizmodo’s foray into porn

We’ve heard that the “internet is for porn,” but Gizmodo keeps posting inappropriate gadget-unrelated material to their homepage, the latest of which is a tour of the AVN expo (nofollow) also occurring near CES. Sexuality and technology is an interesting topic–one that magazines like Wired cover better and more professionally–but Gizmodo is incapable of handling adult matters with delicacy, and just ruts around with them in the mud.

If you use wordpress and would like to boycott Gizmodo, you can run a simple database query to add nofollow to all of their links:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, '<a href="http://gizmodo', '<a rel="nofollow" href="http://gizmodo') WHERE post_content LIKE '%gizmodo%' AND post_content NOT LIKE '%nofollow%'
;
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, '<a href="http://www.gizmodo', '<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.gizmodo') WHERE post_content LIKE '%gizmodo%' AND post_content NOT LIKE '%nofollow%'
;

This checks to see if any of the old links have a rel attribute in them. This SQL will only touch posts with Gizmodo in them, so rest safe, but at the same time don’t trust me either!

Update: Somehow Gizmodo now thinks that their childish prank is hard hitting journalism (nofollow). How is turning off TVs at a conference about TVs journalism? Would it be excellent journalism if you also firebombed the place?

According to an article in Network World magazine, young IT workers aged 18-31, the so-called Millennials, are difficult to manage and retain. Essentially, Young IT workers disillusioned, hard to hold, survey says makes the claim that Millennials want more than they’re entitled to as entry level employees:

“The issue managers are facing is with retention, not hiring. That means the work environment is not living up to the employee’s expectation,” he says. For instance, many younger workers expect to get an office immediately or be paid at a rate higher than entry level.

“Millennials are coming in with high expectations and are disillusioned about the reality of a work place. They feel they should be rewarded and start at the top, when we all know you have to work your way up. They have been raised to be rewarded often and when you get into the workforce those rules change a bit,” Harrington says

The article strikes a chord with me, as I left my job at a Fortune 25 in the financial services industry on Friday to work for a competitor. My reasons for moving were significantly different than the ones this survey hints at. Where Millennials seem to be expecting perks, promotions, and compensation, I’m more interested in learning something new, challenging myself, and developing my skill set.