the molife of crappy booze

Update: All photos of Shellie’s son was taken off upon her request.

I had intended, today, to focus solely on coding and site issues, as I have been doing for the last 36 hours (aside from a brief nap). I made the mistake at glancing at the headlines a few minutes ago to see what parts of the world had passed me by, and I caught a story from Kim LaCapria over at the Inquisitr that really caught in my craw, and I couldn’t let pass without comment.

In case you hadn’t seen it, Shellie Ross, the author of the fairly popular Blog4Mom mommyblog, tweeted out yesterday: “Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool.” She has since protected her tweetstream, so while I can’t get a direct screenshot (I’ve borrowed this one from Kim’s post), I remember seeing it retweeted a number of times the other day.

About five hours after the initial tweet, she said on Twitter: “Remembering my million dollar baby http://twitpic.com/tkt9t.”

It’s a tragic story, though not particularly worthy of note in the grand scheme of things, particularly on a blog dealing primarily with “grand picture” of technology news, trends and analysis. There are a million tragedies a day in this world, and many of which are routinely documented on social networking sites.

Tuesday morning, though, is when insult was quite literally added to injury. Unable to let a woman grieve in community with the assemblage of friends that had come to support her in her hours of tragedy, segments of the media and the mommy-blogosphere saw fit to publicly flog the poor woman for allowing an accident like this to happen, and put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Shellie’s “addiction to Twitter.”

From Kim’s Inquisitr post:

Those of us who use the internet daily for work or maintaining important relationships may not find that shocking- and stay at home moms (or dads) are a group in particular who rely on the godsend of internet companionship to alleviate the loneliness that can settle in when parenting small children. So when tragedy visited her family, she reached out to her friends- and was reminded cruelly in her time of need that everyone on the internet isn’t always your friend.

Kim points to one mommy blogger in particular, Madison McGraw, who has taken it upon herself to not only blog a dissenting opinion on the topic (which, while not in good taste, is certainly her right), but reach out to the media and offer her armchair analysis as to why Shellie deserves no time to grieved. From Florida Today:

Madison McGraw, who does not know the Ross family, tweeted about the incident and also posted an item on her blog, at http://www.madisonmcgraw.com, titled “Mom Tweets While Son Drowns.”

“The person that I have compassion for is her son – who might still be alive if (Ross) interacted with her son like she interacted with people on Twitter,” McGraw wrote. “To me, that shows the repercussions for social media gone awry.”

McGraw’s Twitter account lists her hometown as being Bucks County, Pa., which is near Allentown.

Asked by FLORIDA TODAY if she thought it was appropriate to attack a woman she doesn’t know who just lost her son, McGraw responded, “If she didn’t want questions raised at such a painful time, perhaps she shouldn’t have tweeted immediately after her child died. A child is dead because (of) his mother’s infatuation with Twitter.”

This story hits particularly close to home for me as a work-from-home father.  My son is roughly the same age, and he’s at a stage of development where all it takes for him to get into trouble is for him to be out of site for literally two minutes.  Just this morning, I was on a video conference with Michael Sean Wright, and I stepped out on the back patio for a quick smoke, and even with my son in plain sight, he still managed to lock the back door without my noticing (which is why, incidentally, I always keep a spare key to  the front door in my wallet).

Twitter addiction has nothing to do with it – as a mommyblogger (just as in my situation), using Twitter is a very important part of what brings home the bacon, and two year olds are generally rambunctious trouble-seekers.

McGraw is certainly right about one thing: social media has gone awry.  I understand that when you’re a blogger and twitterer with a wide following, you’re open to rebuttal in the same way that many celebrities find their private lives open to scrutiny. The difference is, here, is that in the pursuit of attention and internet-fame, bloggers like McGraw feel it necessary to create a three-news-cycle item, cashing in on the tragedy of one of her peers.

Since McGraw has turned Shellie’s son’s drowning into an international incident, Shellie has taken both her blog and her twitter stream offline (as well as removed postings from TwitPic of her son’s memorial photos). McGraw has, in essence, caused Shellie to withdraw from her community in the same way that a few rotten apples caused Kathy Sierra to withdraw from the blogosphere two years ago.

The impulse to share with people who care about you that a major tragedy has occurred isn’t social media gone awry.  Feeling it’s incumbent upon you to demonize in the news media a mother, and one of your peers, who’s going through her life’s greatest grief is social media gone awry.

Social Media Gone Awry: When Mommybloggers Attack is a post from: The SiliconANGLE

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If you were looking for instant gratification from Palm’s turnaround you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

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With more than two billion links a month passed through its link shortening service, bit.ly can see what is some of the most buzzed about and shared content on the Web. Today, it is exposing the most popular videos people share through bit.ly on Bitly.TV, which is the second project under bit.ly Labs (the super-short j.mp URL shortener was the first).

With bit.ly being the main way people share links on Twitter, Bitly.TV might as well be called Twitter TV. The videos featured are based on bit.ly’s bitrank algorithm. “The algorithm looks at velocity, popularity and persistence,” says general manager Andrew Cohen. “We’re examining the social distribution history of each video to determine what is trending, and to predict what will go viral.”

When you click on a video it opens up in a lightbox player along with a live stream of Tweets about that video and the ability to share it again on Twitter, Facebook, or via email. As you are watching, you get the realtime commentary in a box on the right and a retweet number so you can get a sense of how viral it is and why.

Just last week, the startup released Bit.ly Pro, which allows Web publishers to send out short links with their own branded (short) domain names such as nyti.ms, 4sq.com, mee.bo, or tcrn.ch. Publishers also get an analytics dashboard which shows realtime stats like the total number of clicks, and their distribution by geography and referring sites. The data around URL shorteners is incredibly valuable, and even Facebook and Google are jumping into the game with goo.gl and fb.me. With Bitly.TV, bit.ly seems to be upping the ante by providing a way to see the most popular videos on the web.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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With only a few weeks left until we close out the ‘naughts and move into the teens, it’s almost obligatory to take a look back at the best and not-so-best of the last decade. With that in mind, I polled the O’Reilly editors, authors, Friends, and a number of industry movers and shakers to gather nominations. I then tossed them in the trash and made up my own compiled them together and looked for trends and common threads. So here then, in no particular order, are the best and the worst that the decade had to offer.

The Best

AJAX – It’s hard to remember what life was like before Asynchronous JavaScript and XML came along, so I’ll prod your memory. It was boring. Web 1.0 consisted of a lot of static web pages, where every mouse click was a round trip to the web server. If you wanted rich content, you had to embed a Java applet in the page, and pray that the client browser supported it.

Without the advent of AJAX, we wouldn’t have Web 2.0, GMail, or most of the other cloud-based web applications. Flash is still popular, but especially with HTML 5 on the way, even functionality that formerly required a RIA like Flash or Silverlight can now be accomplished with AJAX.

Twitter – When they first started, blogs were just what they said, web logs. In other words, a journal of interesting web sites that the author had encountered. These days, blogs are more like platforms for rants, opinions, essays, and anything else on the writer’s mind. Then along came Twitter. Sure, people like to find out what J-Lo had for dinner, but the real power of the 140 character dynamo is that it has brought about a resurgence of real web logging. The most useful tweets consist of a Tiny URL and a little bit of context. Combine that with the use of Twitter to send out real time notices about everything from breaking news to the current specials at the corner restaurant, and it’s easy to see why Twitter has become a dominant player.

Ubiquitous WiFi: I want you to imagine you’re on the road in the mid-90s. You get to your hotel room, and plop your laptop on the table. Then you get out your handy RJ-11 cord, and check to see if the hotel phone has a data jack (most didn’t), or if you’ll have to unplug the phone entirely. Then you’d look up the local number for your ISP, and have your laptop dial it, so you could suck down your e-mail at an anemic 56K.

Now, of course, WiFi is everywhere. You may end up having to pay for it, but fast Internet connectivity is available everywhere from your local McDonalds to your hotel room to an airport terminal. Of course, this is not without its downsides, since unsecured WiFi access points have led to all sorts of security headaches, and using an open access point is a risky proposition unless your antivirus software is up to date, but on the whole, ubiquitous WiFi has made the world a much more connected place.

Phones Get Smarter: In the late 90s, we started to see the first personal digital assistants emerge, but this has been the decade when the PDA and the cell phone got married and had a baby called the smartphone. Palm got the ball rolling with the Treos about the same time that Windows Mobile started appearing on phones, and RIM’s Blackberry put functional phones in the hands of business, but it was Apple that took the ball and ran for the touchdown with the iPhone. You can argue if the droid is better than the 3GS or the Pre, but the original iPhone was the game-changer that showed what a smartphone really could do, including the business model of the App Store,

The next convergence is likely to be with Netbooks, as more and more of the mini-laptops come with 3G service integrated in them, and VoIP services such as Skype continue to eat into both landline and cellular business.

The Maker Culture: There’s always been a DIY underground, covering everything from Ham radio to photography to model railroading. But the level of cool has taken a noticeable uptick this decade, as cheap digital technology has given DIY a kick in the pants. The Arduino lets anyone embed control capabilities into just about anything you can imagine, amateur PCB board fabrication has gone from a messy kitchen sink operation to a click-and-upload-your-design purchase, and the 3D printer is turning the Star Trek replicator into a reality.

Manufacturers cringe in fear as enterprising geeks dig out their screwdrivers. The conventional wisdom was that as electronics got more complex, the “no user serviceable parts” mentality would spell the end of consumer experimentation. But instead, the fact that everything is turning into a computer meant that you could take a device meant for one thing, and reprogram it to do something else. Don’t like your digital camera’s software? Install your own! Turn your DVR into a Linux server.

Meanwhile, shows like Mythbusters and events like Maker Faire have shown that hacking hardware can grab the public’s interest, especially if there are explosions involved.

Open Source Goes Mainstream: Quick! Name 5 open source pieces of software you might have had on your computer in 1999. Don’t worry I’ll wait…

How about today? Firefox is an easy candidate, as are Open Office, Chrome, Audacity, Eclipse (if you’re a developer), Blender, VLC, and many others. Many netbooks now ship with Linux as the underlying OS. Open Source has gone from a rebel movement to part of the establishment, and when you combine increasing end user adoption with the massive amounts of FLOSS you find on the server side, it can be argued that it is the 800 pound Gorilla now.

As Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” When even Microsoft is releasing Open Source code, you know that you’re somewhere between the fight and win stages.

Bountiful Resources: 56K modems, 20MB hard drives, 640K of RAM, 2 MHz processors. You don’t have to go far back in time for all of these to represent the state of the art. Now, of course, you would have more than that in a good toaster…

Moore's Law continues to drive technology innovation at a breakneck pace, and it seems that related technologies like storage capacity and bandwidth are trying to follow the same curve. Consider that AT&T users gripe about the iPhone's 5GB/month bandwidth cap, a limit that would have taken 10 solid days of transferring to achieve with a dialup connection.

My iPhone has 3,200 times the storage of the first hard drive I ever owned, and the graphics card on my Mac Pro has 16,000 times the memory of my first computer. We can now do amazing things in the palm of our hands, things that would have seemed like science fiction in 1999.

The Worst

SOAP: The software industry has been trying to solve the problem of making different pieces of software talk to each other since the first time there were two programs on a network, and they still haven’t gotten it right. RPC, CORBA, EJB, and now SOAP now litter the graveyard of failed protocol stacks.

SOAP was a particularly egregious failure, because it was sold so heavily as the final solution to the interoperatibility problem. The catch, of course, was that no two vendors implemented the stack quite the same way, with the result that getting a .NET SOAP client to talk to a Java server could be a nightmare. Add in poorly spec’d out components such as web service security, and SOAP became useless in many cases. And the WSDL files that define SOAP endpoints are unreadable and impossible to generate by hand (well, not impossible, but unpleasant in the extreme.)

Is it any wonder that SOAP drove many developers into the waiting arms of more useable data exchange formats such as JSON?

Intellectual Property Wars: How much wasted energy has been spent this decade by one group of people trying to keep another group from doing something with their intellectual property, or property they claim was theirs? DMCA takedowns, Sony’s Rootkit debacle, the RIAA suing grandmothers, SCO, patent trolls, 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0, Kindles erasing books, deep packet inspection, Three Strikes laws, the list goes on and on and on…

At the end of the day, the movie industry just had their best year ever, Lady Gaga seems to be doing just fine and Miley Cyrus isn’t going hungry, and even the big players in the industry are getting fed up sufficiently with the Trolls to want patent reform. The iTunes store is selling a boatload of music, in spite of abandoning DRM, so clearly people will continue to pay for music, even if they can copy it from a friend.

Unfortunately, neither the RIAA nor the MPAA is going gently into that good night. If anything, the pressure to create onerous legislation has increased in the past year. Whether this is a last gasp or a retrenchment will only be answered in time.

The Cult of Scrum: If Agile is the teachings of Jesus, Scrum is every abuse ever perpetrated in his name. In many ways, Scrum as practiced in most companies today is the antithesis of Agile, a heavy, dogmatic methodology that blindly follows a checklist of “best practices” that some consultant convinced the management to follow.

Endless retrospectives and sprint planning sessions don’t mean squat if the stakeholders never attend them, and too many allegedly Agile projects end up looking a lot like Waterfall projects in the end. If companies won’t really buy into the idea that you can’t control all three variables at once, calling your process Agile won’t do anything but drive your engineers nuts.

The Workplace Becomes Ubiquitous: What’s the first thing you do when you get home at night? Check your work email? Or maybe you got a call before you even got home. The dark side of all that bandwidth and mobile technology we enjoy today is that you can never truly escape being available, at least until the last bar drops off your phone (or you shut the darn thing off!)

The line between the workplace and the rest of your life is rapidly disappearing. When you add in overseas outsourcing, you may find yourself responding to an email at 11 at night from your team in Bangalore. Work and leisure is blurring together into a gray mélange of existence. “Do you live to work, or work to live,” is becoming a meaningless question, because there’s no difference.

So what do you think? Anything we missed? Hate our choices? With us 100 percent? Let us know in the comments section below.

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This year has been the biggest yet for online video, and for the first time we’re sharing our official Most Watched lists and some of the fastest-rising search terms on YouTube. Some moments were big (President Obama’s inauguration), some small (a Minnesota wedding party erupts into dance), some expected (“New Moon”), some surprising (Susan Boyle) — but all of them inspired, entertained and connected millions of people around the world via YouTube.

For these lists, we looked at view counts of YouTube’s most popular videos (in some instances we aggregated views across multiple versions of the same video):

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):
1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global)*:
1. Pitbull – I Know You Want Me (82+ million views)
2. Miley Cyrus – The Climb (64+ million views)
3. Miley Cyrus – Party In The U.S.A (54+ million views)
4. The Lonely Island – I’m On A Boat (48+ million views)
5. Keri Hilson – Knock You Down (35+ million views)

Then, to determine the fastest rising search terms for each month, we examined the billions of queries that people searched for on YouTube (through December 15):

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (Global):
January: inauguration
February: christian bale
March: the climb
April: susan boyle
May: pacquiao vs hatton
June: michael jackson thriller
July: michael jackson
August: usain bolt
September: kanye west
October: paranormal activity
November: bad romance
December: tiger woods

Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (U.S.):
January: obama inauguration
February: on a boat
March: watchmen
April: susan boyle
May: pacquiao
June: michael jackson thriller
July: wedding
August: send it on
September: kanye west
October: paranormal activity
November: adam lambert
December: tiger woods

There are a lot of interesting nuggets in here. The fastest rising U.S. search term in July was [wedding], clearly related to JK Wedding Entrance Dance, the third Most Watched YouTube video of the year. And while [michael jackson] was Google’s fastest rising search term in 2009, [michael jackson thriller] was the faster rising search on YouTube. Movie trailers (“New Moon,” “Watchmen,” “Paranormal Activity”) and inspirational moments (Susan Boyle, Usain Bolt) were popular, as were sensational celebrity scandals (Christian Bale, Kanye West, and most recently, Tiger Woods).

We hope to expand these lists in the future, so if there are any “Most Watched” categories you’d like to see in 2010, let us know by leaving a comment on the YouTube Blog.

*Note: Some music videos may be unavailable in your country due to copyright restrictions.

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