Monthly Archives: October 2010
Vincent
Eat your hearts out, Robert Englund and Johnny Depp. For me, the soundtrack of Halloween would not be complete without the gloriously gloomy and sometimes slightly maniacal voice of Vincent Price. Evermore.
Other Posts about Halloween you might enjoy reading:
Crypts, Tombs and Catacombs
When they say “History is underfoot”, they must have Israel in mind. You can’t dig more than a few feet anywhere in this country without turning up antiquities of some sort. In this case, we’re talking about the recently opened section of the Beit She’arim (House of Gates) catacombs, nicknamed “The Menorah Caves”,which we visited on an atypically cool, cloudy and occasionally rainy Saturday morning.
Each of the catacombs varies in size and number of burial places, the largest being the “Horseman’s Cave” with about 380 burial niches at various levels in 16 corridors. The original “residents” of these catacombs came from as far away as Yemen in order to be buried alongside some of Judaism’s greatest scholars. (Celebrity Catacombs?) Like the tomb of Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, the most impressive catacomb on site, many of the entryways still have their original stone door, which swings on a stone hinge, has a “deadbolt” and is made to look like a wood door reinforced with iron plates and studs.
Originally explored in the 1930′s and 40′s, funding to develop this area of the catacombs for visitors was only received within the last few years and opened to the public late 2009. Visits are presently limited to about 2 dozen people per tour, so if you love squeezing through really small doorways to check out burial caves, make sure to sign up in advance with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and bring your flashlight.
When Good Social Networks Go Bad
“When we use a social network religiously, we feel a sense of ownership. Which is what the social network’s parent company wants us to feel: a sense of loyalty. But with
that sense of ownership, we feel entitlement as well. Entitled to being part of the process of change, to be able to give our input before change happens, to be able in some
way to control the change.
While some smaller companies do gather input from their users to determine modifications of their services, most larger ones, like Facebook, will make changes often, and seemingly at random. We’re left scratching our heads or
panicking because of the potential negative impacts of the new changes on our social media presences.”
via Surviving Sudden Social Network Changes: Business Collaboration News «.
Posted, ironically, using WordPress.com’s “Press This” utility.
WordPress.com is not the only social network where I’ve experienced this kind of change. All the icons above represent services that I started using way back when they still felt like close-knit communities, flickr and last.fm being the most painful transitions thus far.
The kind of heated discussions that we’ve seen in the WordPress.com Support forums and elsewhere during the last few months over implementation of reblogging, the 30-minute “Under Review by Staff” delay and such like are all symptoms of the collision between a rapidly growing service and those of us not directly associated with it who may feel, correctly or not, a certain amount of “entitlement”. As a for-profit business, I have no doubt that WordPress.com will continue to go through major changes and have made a conscious decision to “keep calm and carry on“.
But it won’t keep me from thinking that it’s a failure for everyone concerned when a service no longer listens to its most devoted users.
