2008-10-18»
trackbacks, backtrackยปTwo “productive” wastes of time that writing a blog causes you to commit: re-reading your old entries, which is mostly like re-playing funny youtube videos of people’s skateboarding accidents, and following trackbacks, which is mostly like running into the toilet after giving a talk, and then clamping your ear to the cubicle door to listen for people’s opinions. I don’t get many trackbacks, because I am now delightfully obscure and doing Alexa dead-cat bounces, which means the people who link to me are mostly old friends. It is internally flattering though it may perhaps be annoying to everyone else, like the pica-celebrity equivalent of “Christmas Book Picks” that are just people mutually puffing up their friend’s new novels. I will only, then, mention Lee who was always the secret driving force behind NTK, and asked the question that I’d want to ask Neal Stephenson, had I thought of it or ever met him:
This is arguably the first presidential election of the HDTV age. So is it more important a candidate looks good on high-def… or on YouTube?
It’s an allusion to Interface, Stephenson’s great political techno-thriller, where someone notes the difference between looking good on HD and looking good on ordinary TV, and the effect that had on politicians. Feeding a little into that, it’s definitely true that I’ve heard people say that McCain sounds better on radio, and much worse in HDTV — the makeup over his scars is really obvious, in fact evoking a weird awkwardness when he talked about “having the scars to prove it” in his last debate. The other question is: do your micro-expressions look good in Photoshop? My other thought, flicking through my own backlog, is an idea I’ve had for a few years — a site called Backtracks, where we dig up the posts that bloggers were saying five and ten years ago, and hold them to the acid-soaked cottong bud of enquiry. Easy money! Man, if only I could come up with an idea whose demographic wasn’t “people most likely to be running an ad-blocker.”