letters

This postbag contains small pieces of irony or humor which may choke small children or law professors

Perhaps we should call them The New Literalists. Or is Nitpickers a better word? Or how about Pixel Pedants?

The Road to Hell looks like it’s going to be Tagged With Good Intentions, if you pardon the twisted idiom. There are indeed some painfully earnest people who want to avoid any misunderstanding in our online communications through the sheer power of angle brackets.

No, we’re not talking about the Creative Commons crew – but about the quite wonderful taxonomy proposed by former newspaper columnist Dan Gillmor that’s designed to promote honest n’healthy discourse: Honor Tags.

(See Are you trying to be funny? If so check [ ] this box).

Here at El Reg, we view it as an extension of our sadly-abandoned Humor Tags initiative, that we first thought of about four years ago.

Now here’s what you think of the idea of tagging yourself stupid.

Read more

The consequences of the dotcom bubble – being remembered this week five years on from the start of the crash – aren’t just financial. The largest loss of wealth in human history created a wasteland of dead pages and broken links. Now many of the same Dotcom People are back, persuading us to trust them with our most valuable digital memories. And judging from the rhetoric alone, nothing has been learnt.

Preserving stuff on the internet isn’t a given, as we discussed with David Rosenthal, here. Because of carelessness, corporate burn-out, or government pressure, material gets lost. Sometimes material disappears as if by magic. But there is no magic – just the usual suspects. Rosenthal, an alumnus of Sun and Nvidia, has spent five years devising a decentralized peer to peer system LOCKSS for librarians and archivists. It’s a system that ensures documents are preserved through redundancy. But it may be five years, he told us, before the protocols are scalable enough for such a system to be used by you and me.

Read more