After almost five years of relentless blather on pop media, pop culture, politics, and technology, I’m retiring the site to prepare an all new, punchier, tablet-friendly site on a new domain. If you’ve been a regular visitor and want to be notified when the new site goes live, drop me a line. And if you’re interested, there’s a long-winded explanation of why Dissociated Press is calling it a day here. Feel free to express you thoughts or condolences in the comments.

On my behalf, before I begin this long-winded explanation of why the site sucks, I’d like to point out that at least I didn’t  take the low road to high site traffic by creating a site entirely based on My Little Pony Porn or pictures of dead babies on sticks. So there’s that. In any case, if you’re a regular visitor who has ever had a gripe about Dissociated Press, now is your chance to speak up. After almost five years and over 1500 articles with only a brief break in 2011, we’re going on another (longer) hiatus, and will return in a vastly improved form.

Why the break? Well, when I launched the site back in 2008, it slipped nicely into what was at the time a roomy niche. A few sites like BoingBoing had been around for a while, but clones like Neatorama or yours truly were fairly new. In fact, one early challenge for me was to zero in on content that wasn’t appearing on Neatorama. As immense as the web is, the selection of super-current pop culture and tech topics that are actually worth featuring on a given day can be pretty slim. So traffic was plentiful for quite a while, and every day we featured punchy, digestible content built around linking to interesting things. I laughed occasionally when talking to business friends who didn’t get it, but ironically the site’s traffic grew by sending people somewhere else. The key of course being to send them someplace interesting, and to do it every day. But around 2010 a big shift on the web began. With the explosion of “user generated content”, suddenly everyone and their grandma had some kind of blog or social media platform to broadcast their thoughts, and since very few people can actually write in the first place, the idea of writing EVERY DAY was obviously a preposterous notion for the vast majority of these new content creators. So what do you do when you want a well-trafficked site but can’t write your way out of a paper bag? STEAL. The first form of this was content farming, which Google amazingly took the time to deal with. More recently, one of the buzzwords is “curation”. Although there is certainly a legitimate form of curation that could benefit the web, by and large the term is ignorantly (or sometimes knowingly) used by newbie internet marketers as a replacement for the term “content scraping”. Want to rank in Google? Find all the top results in Google, and repost them in various ways, pretending you’re performing a valuable service by “curating”, like you’re the director of the goddamn Huntington Library or something, when in fact you’re just “creating” crap content by repurposing content that in many cases already was crap.

Anyway, I suggested in the headline that I’d explain why this website sucks. Well, while some have complained that I write like a girl, or questioned my fundamental ability to reason, yet others have been so oblivious to the irony of certain articles that they felt compelled to fact check my assertions about NASCAR tracks at the Oklahoma bombing site, or think they’re sending emails to Glenn Beck when they post a comment .

But probably none of those things are the core problems.

The main problems with the site in my view are three-fold. First, the web is simply too “noisy” now. The niche this site used to operate so well in is well-populated with better sites, and once you’ve seen the interesting links of the week, you’ve seen the interesting links of the week. Probably ten times in fact, on Facebook and Pinterest. Second is content length. More than ever, there is a big divide between people who prefer extremely punchy, nearly tweet-like short form content (i.e. variants of microblogging), and people who prefer long-form content more like the Atlantic Monthly or Wired. Dissociated Press lands somewhere between the two extremes too often. And then there’s the “brand”, such as it is. As I pointed out prior to our last break, “Dissociated Press” is kind of clever, but a little too obscure. Interestingly, people clever enough to get the joke constantly call it “Disassociated Press” instead of “Dissociated Press”. And merely “web-two-point-oh-ing” the name leaves you with “dissctdprss” which just doesn’t have the same impact as a name like “tumblr”. Which begs the question, what DID they do with all the vowels left over after Web 2.0, anyway?

But the biggest reasons behind why I’m retiring the site to languish as a relic of the Google AdSense driven, pre-tablet, pre-HTML 5 web are based on those very concepts. Aside from the content issues mentioned above, the site is horrifically tablet-unfriendly, and retrofitting the entire site with a more mobile-friendly format would require hours and hours of hands-on recoding. Trust me, we did some testing. And the majority of the site’s revenue was originally generated by text ads, which – although they were very effective years ago when they cleverly resembled a site’s content – are really just perceived by most smart users as conventional ads now.

So we’re looking at this as a great time to make a fresh start, and we recently alluded to where we’re headed; a tablet friendly, punchy, image-rich digital magazine.

Stay tuned.

If you’re a regular visitor, feel free to drop us a line if you’d like to be informed when the new site goes live.

TTFN

Ian

More recently, my personal frustration with computer interfaces has only accelerated with the purchase of a tablet. As much as I love the thing, it creates two problems. The first problem? If you use a tablet for a while, you’ll probably find yourself quickly and easily adopting gestures like swiping, pinching, and tapping. Pretty cool, very functional stuff. But soon, you’ll run into apps or websites that don’t respond to any of these gestures, or worse yet, the layout of a website (like the site you’re on right now!) will make it hard to even tap links because of type sizes and image layouts. So the first problem is the transition period to a new form of interaction. But the second problem is even more irksome in my opinion, and it is that in spite of the tech industry’s new focus on the second screen as a growth market, the last thing we need is another screen. While perusing How ‘Minority Report’ Trapped Us In A World Of Bad Interfaces on TheAwl.com the other day, I ran across a link to piece called A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, by Bret Victor. It’s probably one of the best summaries I’ve seen in a while of the problems we still face with interface design, the most obvious of which is what Victor calls “Pictures Under Glass”. No matter how cool the animation of an action is on your iPad, it’s still just a picture. And you’re still just dragging your finger around on a piece of glass, a dull experience – given our complexity as organisms that can grasp, see, and feel – that Victor calls a “Novocaine drip to the wrist”.

Why, when we have things like fingertip-tracking gesture technology or 3-D interaction, or even using brain waves as a control input almost at our er, fingertips, would we zero in on the dull and often less-than-useful action of “fingerpainting” on glass? Again, Bret Victor sums it up nicely, compiling in a single image all the amazing real-world examples of how this gesture is used in every day life:

Below are examples of just a few of the alternatives mentioned above, but take the time to check out that rant on interaction design. It examines the issue in an entertaining and insightful way. Maybe some day soon, you’ll be able to get your hand off my banana, but for now, you’re going to have to keep poking and pinching it.

Here’s an example of an early version of Leap Motion’s gestural interface

Here’s Tan Le, Developer of the Emotiv brain wave controller headset giving a detailed demo at TED:

And here’s a clip about MIT’s “SpaceTop” project.

Hopefully once they get the interface designed, they’ll make millions and be able to hire a voiceover professional…

Who knew brainwave headsets could be so stylish?

Die Hard, with Shitpeas and Cunk

The Wonders Of Life – is Brian Cox on Acid ?

Philomena Cunk and Barry Shitpeas on the Harlem Shake

The Entire Show – Season One, Episode Four

The Weekly Wipe brazenly tackles One Direction, Charlie Sheen, Chris Dorner, the Pope, and Reality TV, among other things.

An unfortunate collision of world
events and visual theme can really
put a ding in your sales.

The other day I happened upon a tune I had forgotten existed, a song by Afro Celt Sound System called When You’re Falling, with Peter Gabriel on vocals (video below). It’s an uplifting tune with a persistent and catchy mandolin riff and Gabrielesque vocals and percussion, generally perceived around the world as a positive song about love and resilience. I actually own the CD it’s on, so I couldn’t for the life of me think of why it was that I had so completely forgotten about it. But as I did some quick poking around, I discovered one likely factor. The CD the song was on was released on June 19, 2001, so it would have been getting a little rotation just before September 11. Within just a couple of days of the attacks, Clear Channel circulated an internal memo with a recommendation of 165 songs that it might be inadvisable to play in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy. If you do a little research, you’ll find that even Snopes is willing to reinforce Clear Channel’s attempts to distance themselves from the absurd list, but if you examine the language of Clear Channel’s backtracking in the press, they don’t deny issuing the list, they just try to frame it as some casual “recommendation”. But as anyone who has worked in a corporate environment knows, defying a “recommendation” can put your position in just as much peril as blatantly violating a clearly stated company policy. So Clear Channel’s denials are patently absurd. But not nearly as absurd as the list of songs. While you can almost understand items like Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” – not so much because of the lyrics but because the song is kind of crap in the first place – the list in its entirety is utterly preposterous. Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World? Elton John’s Bennie and the Jets? Nena’s 99 Red Balloons? Mitch Ryder’s Devil with a Blue Dress On? And then there are oddities like Alien Ant Farm’s cover of “Smooth Criminal” being on the list, but not Michael Jackson’s original version. See the entire list here, and tell us if you can find the logic behind it all. Below are a few of our choices for “Weirdest Choices for a Post-Terrorist Attack Blacklist” list.

Louis Armstrong – What a Wonderful World

When you’re trying to instill widespread panic and fear in the populace, the last thing you want them thinking about is the fact that by and large, the world is pretty wonderful.

The Bangles – Walk Like an Egyptian

Just look at those clothes. Clearly, they are terrorists, and that’s obviously some secret attack command in the pharaoh dance.

Martha and The Vandellas – Dancing In the Street

What could be more terrifying after a national trauma than to send an invitation, across the nation, a chance for folks to meet? A song like this of course. Before you know it, they’d form a big strong line, and get in time and start laughin’ and singin’.

Nena – 99 Red Balloons

“Ninety-nine red balloons, floating in the summer sky. Panic lads, it’s a red alert!” Okay, the song is sort of about a war tragedy, but puh-lease. They could’ve at least let the German language version play, right?

Afro Celt Sound System – When You’re Falling (ft. Peter Gabriel)

This is the tune that made me aware of the list in the first place. The discomfort around the key imagery is understandable, but the tune otherwise is cuter than a roomful of puppies…

Book Retrieval Porn