Hal - Deliberately Basic

A big thank you to Mike Elgan for linking back to this site from The Raw Feed. Mike has a fine blog with a lot of good info about the latest technology.

You don’t have to be a tech geek to appreciate his style. He has been in this business for quite a long time and his content is interesting most everyone.

I highly suggest you subscribe to his newsletter. You can have your site linked back with his “Flog the Blog!” promotion. See it all here:  The Raw Feed This is a fine way to promote your blog.

Welcome to the new look of HALDB. If you are new to blogs, minimalism is the fashion. In keeping with the focus of this site, it fits well. Most people I know have been “on the web” for a number of years now, and they don’t visit web sites to see how pretty they are - they go to a site for information.

Of course a nice-looking, clean and well-organized site should be the goal of all site builders. As you wonder around in cyberspace, you will see some that are far too minimal, not enough info to find what you want. One of the worst things is no way to contact anyone.

Then there are sites (especially blogs) so filled with ads and links by the gross, you simply ignore everything and still go for the info you originally sought. We become immune to ads, and don’t care to sift through the multitudinous links, sometimes running down in columns on each side of the page.

Getting to the point is the point, or should be, of any site. Don’t make me hunt, else I’ll leave. Conversely, suppose your site is about photography. Show me pictures. Most of us who work or have worked building web sites know the basics.

Leave the moving, flashing, crawling, annoying pops and cracks to someone else. Animation is a 90s thing, and not usually good on a site. Everything has its place. A little something that moves on occasion may not be so bad, IF is enhances the site.

Since this site is about op-ed writing, you will not see many images. If I see one that makes sense, and adds value, common sense dictates that I use it.

That common sense thing keeps popping up, as it has all my life. If I could only master common sense, life would be so, well, basic and easier.

HB

Roll up your sleeves, speak in mindless platitudes, and connect with the people. Tell the truth and get your ass whupped. What happened to truth and honor in this country? Take Senator Obama for example. Obama commented on the bitterness of working-class people in a speech at an expensive San Francisco fund-raiser. “They cling to guns,” said Obama, “or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.” Christ, nearly any working stiff is bitter, and has been for years.

I don’t usually write about politics, but this is enough to make me want to vote. And for Obama at that. Someone finally speaks a truth, and gets nailed to the cross for it. Clinton and others have called for an apology from Obama. For what?

The claim is he is elitist, that he has talked down to the working class. This is double-speak for denying that we have a class system in this country. Class in the US has always been here, and is ever widening. The liberal, cliché spewing, well-heeled, Ivy-league educated politico has never been “in touch.” At least we know where the stick-up-the-ass, war-mongering conservative stands. He will send our sons and daughters to war and make a fortune from the bodies of the working class.

If you are not pissed off, you should be. As long as the lobbyist paid heros in Washington can maintain the flag-waving, and tension among the ethnic and working classes, nothing much will change for the better. The first words of truth have emerged, and maybe there is some hope for those who do the work. But I am cynical, and I believe that what CNN, FOX and MSNBC tells the people to believe is what they will believe.

I read in The New York Times today (April 14, 2008) that a San Diego man has written more than 200,000 books, with the aid of computers. Most of these are highly selective esoteric works that only sell a few copies. Philip M. Parker has declared himself the most published author in history.

Mr. Parker has programmers who develop algorithms to amalgamate information, and then write it to a Word document. His automated method does the research, and compiles the work using 60 to 70 computers.  Assuming the words are in order, the information is dispensed accurately, we come to the the big question. Will computer generated writing replace human writing?

As a point of departure, consider what is written on blogs. The blogs that receive the most attention are almost always “how to” articles. And the current attention grabbers are 23 ways to do (insert a noun or phrase). Those who write these articles research the information, and bam, 15 ways/tips/predictions or methods to accomplish any given task. These tips, ways and methods are not usually generated out of the author’s head; they are researched and put together (amalgamated) from various sources. In fact, I don’t see a lot of creativity here, except to think of what to put together.

News stories are not much more than facts put together in a reader friendly way. Hell, we don’t read anyway; we skim for facts. For years we have used boilerplate text, and template plots for novels. Mr. Parker is in the process of producing romance novels generated by computer algorithms. From “how to” to sitcoms to rudimentary novels is not a great leap. How do you know what you are reading on any web site is generated by a human? In fact, you don’t.

Years ago I bought a little book called “The Thirty-six Dramatic Situations” by Georges Polti. The first paragraph on the back cover sums up the gist of the book.
“It has long been known to the writing profession that there are no new plots…that all the conceivable situations have been used, and that all modern plots are but variations and adaptations of certain original situations.” This was written in 1921 - my copy is a 1977 publication.

This does not mean that creativity in writing does not exist. Of course it does. You can paint a rose an infinite number of ways, even though a rose by any other name is still a rose. Therein lies creativity. But we need to separate “15 ways to paint a rose” written on a blog somewhere from your way of seeing a rose, which may be different than any way the rose has been portrayed before.

I see computer generated text as prevalent as grass in the future. You plug in statistics, facts and parameters and a program will research and write a perfectly good article. a perfectly good article… a perfectly good article…