The Quality of Information

Maybe this article would better serve to complain about the quality of everything, but its hard to bitch about everything in just a few words.

So lets narrow it down: The internet sucks.

The internet is quickly becoming a boring pile of feces, if it wasn't one already. What is the internet exactly? It is a means to communicate information. If the internet is a bunch of bullshit, it must mean that most information is bullshit. In this massive sea of garbage, we must be extremely concerned that the shit we are most interested in easily floats to the surface. But that becomes hard when there are so many producers of useless content. I make extremely useless content - therefore I know where the evil lies.

We can blame the computer people for bombarding the world with crap. I will admit my guilt right now, as long as this serves to shame the rest of the guilty.

Search engines like Google provide a means to swim amongst the crap and enables the internet to become something almost useful.

But there are a number of factors that will always throw a wrench into an otherwise utopian internet, such as:

• Mangled English
  If your webpage, email or otherwise, spells "mangled" as "moinglad" then no useful search technology will prove useful to you. If the document you created has messed up English, chances are your search terms are also going to be messed up, and your computer will never find it. Computers can't think for us quite yet.
  
  Google does its best at catching your errors as you search for something, but it doesn't go out to solve every spelling error on the internet. For example, searching for "recieved" returns 1,890,000 results while suggesting that you probably meant "received". Searching correctly for "received" yields 200,000,000 results. But now even though your search string is correct, it by no means the author of the content you are searching for actually spelled anything at all correctly. The content could lie in the first set of results, and you'd be screwed.
  
  This is why people that would spell "going to the movies with you" as "goin 2 da moviez wit u" need to be shot. Fuckups in the language seriously impede the ability for content to be usefully indexed and understood, and therefore seriously screw up any usefulness it may have had to someone. Online forums would be an excellent resource if people could use English in a half decent manner.


• Made up shit
  The road to hell is paved with acronyms. Satan loves made up unpronouncable words 3 characters in length. Words like SEO, CMS, and even IRC. Special places in hell are reserved for retardedly long acronyms, like AFLAX , WYSIWYG and MSNBC.
  
  The crown of made-up internet bullshit has to be search engine optimization (SEO). Some jackass obviously made the acronym to try to append legitimacy to what he/she does for a living. People that do SEO simply bastardize the internet in order to show up higher in a search engine's listing. SEO proves that any idea of negligible value only needs a fancy name and a few books written about it to become the next big thing. Software Engineering, anyone?


• Verbosity
  On the internet, it is easy to find someone's 5000-page essay on what colour thong looks best.
  
  Okay, it is a slight exagerration, but it wouldn't be at all surprising for it to turn out to be true. The internet, along with other medium, is absolutely clogged with extraneous information. Whether it is an email or real letter, some people don't quite understand how to summarize at all. Sum it up!
  
  It's a wonder with all those genius lawyers out in the wild that nobody can seem to write a contract without a mountain of paper. Does anybody read these? Some contracts I've put my big X on weren't even written in English, let alone legalese English. But it didn't make any difference whatsoever.
  
  This is also a huge problem in the software world, where a lot of asses think adding a few thousand lines of code to a product will make it infinitely better.
  
  Now this article is itself an offender, however that doesn't let anyone off the hook. If an alcoholic says you have a drinking problem, that means you should definitely lay off the booze.


• Repetition
  People are extremely repetitive. Everyone likes to reiterate and regurgitate. All you have to do to see this in action is watch a few all-news television networks for about an hour.
  
  While news TV is intentionally repetitive as its means of delivery forces it to be in order to be useful - the internet is repetitive just because it wants to be. Maybe it's a holdover from Hollywood, where original content is severely lacking.
  
  The internet seems to encourage linking lunacy. Sites like Hamncheez, Slashdot and FARK have claimed huge success in simply linking to or directly ripping off another's work. Why do anything when you can just link to it and claim it as your own creation? It is much easier to be a link bitch, especially when most search engine algorithms put you higher in their results for being a shameless link trader.
  
  While I deride the value of a link page, it could be said that they help contribute to organizing the internet's information. Even so, such websites like these exist in such prevalence that many of them could be done away with.
  
  Ultimately the concern here lies in improving the internet's signal-to-noise ratio, or rather content-to-links ratio. This site itself is guilty of adding an amass of links to an already abundant pool, but some righteousness of this page over most can be claimed in that not every word displayed is a link.
  
  (Actually, when you think of how many movies, books, tv shows, etc are simply remakes or adaptations of earlier works, you will inevitably conclude that we may have reached a limit in imagination. Maybe all the good ideas have already been dreamt up already. Yay!)


• Brevity
  It would seem weird to bitch about how much people are writing and how little people are writing at the same time, but oh well. The problem is that people don't write to any length about topics that are actually challenging or vague.
  
  The internet could serve as the world's largest instruction manual - a howto guide about absolutely everything. But it rarely lives up to the hype, as nobody (including many companies) likes to document anything. Shit documentation is not a problem exclusive to the internet, as printed materials also lack usefulness on a regular basis.
  
  Experienced programmers must have seen at least one example of documentation of a non-trivial function being simply a list of its arguments. Rage time.


• Disgusting Uses of Programs and File Formats
  People should be trained before they are granted the priviledge of using the non-words PowerPoint, PDF and XML. These Three Evil Angels of Satan destroy beauty at every corner of the web. They do this not because they are themselves evil, but that they inspire stupidity at such an amazing scale.
  
  PowerPoint brings out the worst in would-be brilliant content creators, who exchange meaningful sentences with message deprived clipart and a perverse fetish for animations. Traditional uses of PowerPoint should be reserved for situations when you actually do have to present simple information to large groups of people. All other situations, and your audience would probably thank you for not assuming they were absolutely mindless.
  
  As for PDF, here is a newsflash: HTML and text (*.TXT) files have more widespread support than PDF ever will have. I wish I had a dollar for every homegrown computer professional put a simple single-page text document in a PDF and thought he was doing the world a favour. The truth is that every important literary work to date could have been written as this article was - in a simple text editor such as Notepad. Adobe Acrobat doesnt need to encompass every single sentence ever written for the sake of incredibly predictable printing.
  
  XML is yet another three letter acronym set to confuse the masses into investing in the latest buzzword. Sure, XML is nifty, but it's nothing new. It's a markup language. Big deal. It's like saying "Hey, we have a new language called Esperanto! We can write everything in Esperanto!". XML employs programmers as much as writing every piece of literature in Esperanto would employ translators. RSS and the like (PodCasts, etc) aren't exceptionally fascinating or technically advanced ideas. In an age where Internet TV and Voice-over-IP should be a reality in everyone's household already, people are trying to tell you a new way to read the news and list information is exciting. Fuck that.

The interesting thing about these perceived problems with the internet is that they have largely exclude the effects of spam and other perverse marketing practices. All the above are not realized by malicious hackers but by the average internet user that isn't doing anything criminally wrong, but by clumsy and naive do-gooders. Factoring in hacking, cracking, phishing, spamming and the like and its easy to paint a doomsday scene for the future of the internet.

Which group may save us from an otherwise stale and impotent HTTP? Wikipedia. If you find more organized and complete information on another website, I'm Santa Claus. Bored people should take a few minutes of their day and input whatever information their idle minds may contain into this project. Aside from volunteering in a soup kitchen or for UNICEF-like cause, you have nothing better to do.

Which group won't? DMOZ. Not that an open human-edited directory of websites is not a valiant effort (I am an editor myself), its just that it will continually be eclipsed by products from real deal search engines. DMOZ is a broken project because the two things it relies on - links and editors - are very fickle things. Editors will always be lazy and political, especially when granted absolute rule over their assigned category. Links will always be broken, unkept and slow. Not quite a recipe for disaster, but not a recipe for something exceptionally delicious either.

So yes. Information is crap. The internet is boring. We can't really blame this one on Bush.

It's all your fault.

You'd be thrown in jail if Marc Emery hadn't already called shotgun on your cell.

Maybe there is vacancy in Mexican prisons...