Reflection

I may have circumvented the purpose of this project by mostly publishing links to sites that I regularly visit. FP Passport, 3QuarksDaily, and Arts & Letters Daily are great, but I've known about them for a long time. The same goes for many of the other sites that I posted.

So if the assemblage project did not open my eyes to corners of the web unknown to me, what did I gain from it? Certainly, I've created a journal of my favorite sites. And, in doing so, I created an eclectic cloud of tags that describe my reading habits and, perhaps, my priorities. My two most popular tags are blogs and news, indicative of my habit of getting almost all of my news from blogs. Other frequent tags describe my interests: photography, behavior, art, and media. But the most interesting tag, to me, is community.

The sense of community evident on the sites that I visit comes, I think, from two factors: common interest and communication. The users of most websites obviously share some sort of common interest because they are using the same website. But common interest alone does not produce a sense of community. Communication, then, is what brings users together. By sharing, debating, and criticizing--by writing--users form their own communities. Writing brings our online communities together. Reading and writing are not dying out, and human interaction has not disappeared, and communities have not devolved. The Internet has not destroyed these tenets of society, it has simply changed their forms.

Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera is the only international, independent media organization based in the Middle East (its headquarters is in Qatar). I visit its English-language website almost every day for two reasons. First: I love the design. The top story and a handful of other important stories are always displayed alongside quality photographs--photographs that are large, relevant, and beautiful. This design contrasts with the BBC's website, which uses tiny, grainy photographs that make me squint.

Of course, when I'm visiting a news website, my main goal is to get the news, not to look at pictures. But Al Jazeera holds its own in the journalism category, too. While its global reach is nothing like that of the BBC, or even that of NBC News, Al Jazeera absolutely meets global standards for fairness and accuracy. I've been reading the site for over a year, but I have not been able to determine its ideological leanings. Of course, it gives more coverage to events in the Middle East, but it covers international news at least as well as American outlets.

DualScreen Wallpaper

I use two flat screen monitors for my desktop computer, a setup known as "DualScreen." An entire community of gamers, gadget nerds, and productivity wonks have sprung up around the DualScreen concept because it doubles one's screen real estate, increasing productivity (and allowing one to frag zombies more efficiently!)

But using two monitor presents an aesthetic problem: wallpaper. Finding desktop wallpaper that will stretch across two monitor without looking pixelated or warped can be difficult. DualScreen Wallpaper offers a solution: high-res wallpapers with proper aspect ratios (mine is 2560 x 1024, 2.5). The site allows users to browse wallpapers by the most popular, the most recently submitted, or by the resolution. All are free to download and submitted by the site's users.

An African Photoblog

David Rizzi's anafricanphotoblog is a once-daily photoblog with an African theme. All of Rizzi's photos are set somewhere on the African continent. Some photos feature people or animals as subjects, while others focus on landscapes and cityscapes. I follow this site because I love photography and I love Africa (or at least the small corner of it that I once occupied). Rizzi is a talented photographer in his own right; that he has chosen my favorite continent as his subject makes him even better for me.

Photoblogs have a variety of designs, but one design in particular is most popular--the one that Rizzi uses. The day's photo is typically centered, loading right in front of the user, with no need for scrolling. To advance to the previous day's picture, the user simply clicks on the current picture. This design allows the user to quickly (though spending time on each shot is my preferred viewing habit) click through the site's photos.

Deadspin

Deadspin is the most popular sports blog on the Internet. As its tag line states, the site provides "sports news without access, favor, or discretion." The site's editors post legitimate sports news, like today's inevitable Brett-Favre-Ending-Retirement-Again story, but they add their own commentary and humor to their posts. The other attribute that delineates Deadspin and other sports blogs from mainstream sports news websites is its user-driven commenting community. The commenters are just as funny (and just as driven) as Deadspin's award-winning editors, so the comment threads that develop after each Deadspin post are long and hilarious.

A confession: I was a fairly popular commenter on Deadspin (and on its sister site, the much more immature Kissing Suzy Kolber) before the demands of school took over my life. I actually had to remove both sites from my RSS reader because even their headlines are distractingly hilarious.

Google Trends

Google Trends provides access the usage trends/statistics of the Google search engine. It has two features that I use regularly. First, you can type a search term into the entry box to see search statistics related to that term. For example, searching for "boston red sox" produces this statistics page. You can view search trends over time and you can see how news events affects the statistics. Another interesting feature that I use regularly is "Today's Hot Trends," which is on the GT front page. This feature displays some of the day's most popular search terms, but it weeds out those terms that are regularly popular, leaving only those terms that have recently become much more active than usual. This feature is helpful because it provides a window into the constantly changing tides of pop culture and world news.

woot!

woot! is an electronics dealer with a unique business strategy. At 1am EST every morning, they post one product to their homepage. Unless the product sells out (which happens frequently), it will be for sale until the next product is posted at 1am. The product is typically an electronic item--popular items include computers, cameras, keyboards, and televisions. woot! sells the item a low price, but they stock a limited number of items and sell them on a first come, first serve basis. Thousands of people simultaneously check woot! at 1am to see what the day's deal will be. If the deal is really good, the item will sell-out almost instantly, and the site will post a "sold-out" sign until the next product is posted the following morning.

ESPN

ESPN.com is famous sports network's Internet presence. The site has undergone changes over the years--the most recent of which drastically changed the the entire purpose of the site. Previously, the site placed a lot of emphasis on text-links to stories and on photographs. A small video player in the sidebar would automatically begin to play (with, of course, annoying audio) when the homepage loaded, but the user needed to scroll down to the middle of the page to view it. The recent overhaul eliminated that famously-annoying feature and changed the emphasis of the homepage, moving from a text- and photo-centric site to a site that features video highlights and video stories alongside text and photos.

This change is indicative of both the increasing market penetration of broadband Internet connections and the fact that sports are best consumed by watching them, not by reading about them or looking at photographs.

Idealist

Idealist is a website on which people organizations can "exchange resources and ideas, locate opportunities and supporters, and take steps toward building a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives." The site helps users find information, news, jobs, volunteer opportunities, and other users who are interested in common ideas and pursuits. Topics are diverse; users can find a local human rights group in Croatia, the political campaign of a Turkish politician, a faith-based soup kitchen in Colorado, etc. The uniting quality of the website is that it is for idealists and their ideas.

Writer's Market

Writer's Market is a website dedicated to helping writers publish their work. It provides contact information for thousands of editors, publishers, and agents. It also provides users with tips on relevant topics, like manuscript formatting and correspondence between writers and publishers. The entire site is free and searchable.

The Science Creative Quarterly

The Science Creative Quarterly is a blog and publisher with a unique mission. Though it sounds like a high-minded industry journal in that it's published quarterly, it is actually a down-to-earth amalgamation of some smart, creative writers. It actually publishes new material every day.

In its own words, the SCQ is:

an experiment of sorts, a web publication that will attempt to be, well… different, creative, charming and yet informative. We’re hoping to provide an online (and future print) platform that will accept all types of scientific writing. This will include those that plough through material in a journalistic or review style, or those that skip daintily, poignantly, humorously, or even angrily into creative writing. I suppose our own little holy grail would be to present an assortment of well written science literature in all of its possible connotations.

During each of my weekly checks of the SCQ, I get to read something funny and/or insightful. Some recent highlights: Being an Insect, Science Education, and Of Evolution and the Bible.

GIMP

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is an open-source image editor modeled on Adobe's Photoshop suite. While GIMP lacks a few of Photoshop's most advanced features, it acts as a Photoshop replacement program (and it's totally free, compared to CS4's $699 price tag). The GIMP website also offers an extensive community of users and programmers who answer user questions, troubleshoot errors, and publish tutorials.

Haaretz and EI

In light of my last post, about the fair presentation of news, I want to show how the user can balance his/her own news consumption habits without using a balancing service. In order to get both sides of the problems regarding Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, I follow both Haaretz and the Electronic Intifada. Haaretz offers an Israeli perspective, while EI offers a Palestinian perspective.

Unpartisan

Unpartisan is a unique political news aggregater that uses RSS to combines news, commentary, and discussion from all over the Internet. But instead of just bringing all of the feeds together, Unpartisan uses a complex algorithm to balance the presentation of its news in an effort to create a fair, unpartisan look at the day's stories. As the front page indicates, Unpartisan is currently tracking 51 news services and 1,088 political blogs. It has been running since May 2005.

CSPAN - Obama Administration

CSPAN's page for the Obama Administration is a clearinghouse for communications from the White House to the public. Users can access the daily press briefings and the President's weekly address. The President's schedule is also listed. In addition to regularly-scheduled speeches and videos, users can also view coverage of the White House's response to breaking news, like the recent swine flu outbreak.

Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days

Starting Today is a simple blog edited by poets Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker. On January 19, 2009, they contacted poets all over the USA, asking them to "write poems that respond, however loosely, to the presidency, the nation, the government or the current political climate." On each of President Obama's first 100 days in office, Greenberg and Zucker posted one of the poems. The result is an eclectic mix of work (and writers) that is at once a catalog of the events of the first three months and a meditation on the nuanced thoughts and feelings that have emerged from a traumatic and historic time in American life.

AcademicEarth

AcademicEarth is similar to the previously mentioned YouTube EDU in that it organizes videos of college lectures.  But the similarities stop there.  AE hosts only six institutions (Berkely, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale).  It places an emphasis on lecturers and lecture topics, instead of institution.  It's easy to find lectures on a topic of choice or lectures by your favorite lecturer.  Furthermore, AE provides entire courses, not simply stand-alone lectures.  My favorite course, so far, is The American Novel Since 1945 by Yale's Amy Hungerford.  The course page even lets me access the class syllabus and final exam.  

YouTube EDU

YouTube EDU is a section of YouTube that organizes YouTube's university-sponsored channels.  Each of the channels is basically a pool of lecture videos from each particular university.  Most of the universities provide less than 100 videos, but some provide close to 1000.  My main complaint is that I can't find a way to sort the EDU videos by topic.

Vimeo

Vimeo is a video site similar to Youtube. But Vimeo is different from Youtube in two key ways. First, Vimeo allows for higher-quality videos. It supports consumer-HD video (720p), and, compared to Youtube, videos with higher average bitrates and resolutions. Second, Vimeo only hosts user-created videos. No commercial videos (like movie trailers, sports highlights, or music videos) are allowed unless the submitter was involved in the video's creation. Vimeo also prohibits gaming videos and pornography.

These two differences have created a Vimeo community that is markedly different from Youtube's community. Judging from the comments and the videos, the Vimeo community seems to be more of an artistic crowd, producing interesting, unique, and beautiful videos; helpful criticism and nice comments; and a culture of unity and achievement.

Some of my recent favorites include: One Year in 40 Seconds, Green, and Her Morning Elegance.

Aid Workers Network

Aid Workers Network is a portal through which one can communicate with aid workers in a variety of ways.  There's an active forum and blog index--both allow the international aid community to exchange ideas, information, even job openings.  The site also features an extensive library of articles dubbed "Advice Pages" that include user-generated tips on topics including the distribution standards of non-food items during crisis and international telecommunications.  The site is run by a non-profit of the same name that's based in the United Kingdom.

UN Dispatch

In trying to appease my interest in international relations, I try to follow news out of the United Nations as much as possible.  But instead of reading vague wire stories and boring reports, I keep up with the UN by following UN Dispatch, a blog funded by the UN Foundation.  UND writers offer their thoughts on UN-related news/actions and, in doing so, provide me with a place to get both UN news and UN commentary.  The blog features a powerful search engine, archives dating back to 2005, regular features, and a long list of tags to use to sort the archive's stories.  Some recent highlights:  the antics of Evo Morales, Ban's visit to Washington, and more arguing over the ICC.

DMBTabs

DMBTabs is a place to find guitar tabs (and sometimes videos!) for virtually every single song by Dave Matthews or the Dave Matthews Band (including covers and rare live songs). The drop-down box on the home page allows you to select a specific tab by song title, while the album images allow you to select a song by album (using a mouseover drop-down menu). The site also features an active message board and a gear list. The site's content is created and revised by the site's users, who seem to be obsessively knowledgeable and very protective of their submissions. I'm not very good at playing the guitar, but the site has helped me learn to play a few songs. Overall, it's easy to use and usually pretty helpful.

Arts & Letters Daily

Arts & Letters Daily is a news and commentary aggregator owned by The Chronicle of Higher Education.  ALD's editors trawl the Internet for links related to the ALD theme, which is pretty broad.  The masthead describes the site's breadth: "philosophy, aesthetics, literature, language, ideas, criticism, culture, history, music, art, trends, breakthroughs, disputes, gossip."  It's pretty wide, and it's right up my alley (and very similar that of 3QuarksDaily).  I love this stuff, and I spend an inappropriate amount of time reading a lot of it. 

Which is why I'm up this late cramming out Assemblage posts.

Bespin

Mozilla's Bespin is an interface through which web developers can work together on the same project from different machines in different locations. It supports HTML, Java, and CSS, and it stores the code for each group's project in the cloud, allowing any of the group's registered users to access and edit the code using any web browser, on any computer, from any location. At least, that's the goal; the Bespin project is still in development (likely a collaborative development, at that).

MLB Trade Rumors

MLB Trade Rumors is a blog whose editor collects all of the day's Major League Baseball news and rumors related to player transactions.  This includes trades, but also includes free-agent signings, new contracts, and Player's Association (the players' union) activity.  Every post is backed-up by a link to the source of the story--usually a sports news conglomerate like ESPN or a young but vigorous sports blog like The Big Lead.  

MLB Trade Rumors rarely breaks news, but it is perfect for some end-of-the-day catching-up, especially during hectic times like the days leading up to the trade deadline and the days after the beginning of free agency.  The headlines of each post are so clear and descriptive that I can browse the news quickly, reading only the posts that interest me.  

Lightstalkers

Lightstalkers is an online community for photojournalists around the world.  The main section of the site is the discussion board, on which registered photogs discuss seemingly any PJ-related topic under the sun.  The board is a clearinghouse for job opportunities, gear talk, industry news, new photography, and much more (I remember some older posts: a freelance photog inquiring about the best place to purchase body armor in Baghdad, another freelancer asking how to get tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment through airport security, and an art show organizer advertising a call for work).  The site also features a prominent alert system (for breaking news and opportunities), a twitter-esque photographer-tracker called On the Move (for which all users can broadcast their current location), and an upcoming events board.  The greatest asset of the site, though, is the users.  They are energetic, knowledgeable, and--even in the ultra-competitive world of photojournalism--more than happy to help.

Down for everyone?

This simple website has one purpose: to tell you if a website is really down, or if the problem is just you and your network/computer/incompetence.  I use the site frequently, having too many moments of incompetence to even list.  

Fortunately, the clean interface is easy to use--I simply type in the troublesome URL and press "or just me?"  If the URL is really broken, the site gets excited, showing the message: "It's not just you! [URL] looks down from here!"  But if the URL is truly broken, the site reads "It's just you."

Yea, I get that a lot.

Muzzle of Bees

Muzzle of Bees is a music blog that does more than promote the indy music scene.  The writing is smart and free of typical music-elitist arrogance, the regular segments are interesting and creative, and the extensive blogroll on the left has helped me to find even more great bands than the blog itself.  

The writer focuses mostly on the music scene in the Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison area, and the music tends to be of the folk variety, though he is always careful to write and demonstrate that he'll write about (and listen to) any kind of music, as long as it's good.  I'm lucky--he and I seem to have very similar tastes.  MoB is like my personal DJ...it knows exactly what I like, even in introducing me to something I've never heard before.  Some recent highlights: one of my favorite new guys, Bon Iver, releases a new EP (and a fantastic single, Blood Bank), an interview with an old favorite, Jason Anderson, and the best albums of 2008 (check out #15, Girl Talk, for something different/awesome).

Getty Images

The Getty Images daylife photoblog is the image house's public image wire (I imagine the private wire is much better, but also quite costly).  I click it a few times a day, for two reasons.  First, the nonstop flow of fresh images from around the world is helpful in trying to understand the news of the day because the pictures and their small captions allow for quick and intuitive consumption of the news.  Second, I love photography.  International photojournalist is my dream job; York Daily Record photog, not so much.

FP Passport

In endeavoring to further expand upon the number of different topics that can totally consume my thinking for days on end, I subscribed to FP Passport about six months ago.  The blog is published by the editors of Foreign Policy Magazine, a bi-monthly publication that proclaims itself to be "the premier, award-winning magazine of global politics, economics, and ideas."  FPM's stated mission is "to explain how the world works—in particular, how the process of globalization is reshaping nations, institutions, cultures, and, more fundamentally, our daily lives."

The FP Passport, then, is a part of the FP website, which itself is more than just an online archive of print articles.  While the full website features unprinted long-form articles and academic papers, the FP Passport blog acts as a clearinghouse for all things foreign policy, an eclectic mix the editors describe as "our arguments hashed out at the coffee machine, insights on the news, story tips buried on our desks, things we hear from our friends abroad, and interesting links that circulated through our inboxes."  Some recent highlights:  breaking news, insider information, gossip, and, one of my favorite segments, What We're Reading, which, of course, leads me to spending even more time reading about foreign policy.  Also of note: my contribution to FP.  Note the attribution in the nut graph (back story here).  And yes, I actually do monitor the Getty image wire, because I am a huge nerd.

3quarksdaily

3quarksdaily is a blog, similar to Boing Boing and Fark, in which an editor (or a group of editors) trawls the Internet for interesting links, articles, etc. 3QD is different, though, in that its content is rather high-minded and interdisciplinary. As its masthead proclaims, the blog features articles related to science, arts, literature, politics, gossip, and philosophy. In my experience, the articles that the editors feature are usually complex and detailed--this is certainly not a place for mainstream media consumers. Some recent highlights (which were hard to select because I love most of what 3QD publishes): We Cannot Live By Skepticism Alone, Philosophy's Great Experiment, Is Time An Illusion?, and Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie. Goooood stuff.

3QD is my favorite blog, but I do have one complaint. Often, the titles the editors choose for their posts are not clear and/or descriptive, so I am forced to read much of the entry just to see what the related article is about. I already have enough trouble with RSS addiction; Now that 3QD's ambiguous headlines have joined my flow of articles, I've had to cut out some other--less amazing--subscriptions.

spite.com

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Daily Routines

Daily Routines is a blog that publishes descriptions of the daily routines of "writers, artists, and other interesting people."  The blog is user-driven--readers who stumble across a book excerpt or newspaper/magazine/online article detailing the routine of an interesting person submit the link to the blog's editors, who publish the routine--usually as an excerpt--and a link to the full article.  Updates are sporadic, but usually interesting.  Past routines include that of the novelist Haruki Murakami, the mathematician Paul Erdos, the poet Emily Dickinson, the writer Thomas Friedman, and President Barack Obama.  DR is absolutely one of my favorite blogs on the Internet.

The Big Picture

The Boston Globe's Alan Taylor runs a great photo blog called The Big Picture, which is published on Boston.com, the newspaper's Internet gateway.  The blog features a new photo essay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  Taylor picks the theme of each essay, usually choosing something relevant to recent news and events.  He scours the photowires for the best shots, and then publishes them in high resolution.  Unlike daily photo blogs which publish one photo per page, TBP publishes each essay (which usually includes between 25 and 40 photographs) as one long, vertically-scrollable web page.  In my opinion, TBP has been the web's best photo blog for a long time, so I am happy that it has recently gained an enormous following and that it was recently nominated for a Weblog Award.

NPR Song of the Day

This blog combines two of my favorite things: music and NPR.  The editors of NPR's Song of the Day do a great job keeping the music new and interesting while also maintaining a commitment to talented muscians and top-notch audio quality.  Two complaints, though: the site's pop-up media player is cumbersome, and it's much too hard to steal download the mp3 files.

It Might Be Dangerous... You Go First

Major League Baseball General Managers are among the most secretive, secluded people in all of professional sports.  While the MLB trade rumor mill is constantly active, the men (and yes, they are all men) who actually make personnel decisions rarely offer any insight into their thoughts or plans.

San Diego Padres GM Kevin Towers is the exception.  He has allowed his assistant, Paul DePodesta (of Moneyball fame), to blog about the team's personnel decisions.  On It Might Be Dangerous...You Go First, DePodesta details the braintrust's thinking behind trades, contract extensions, free agents, draft strategy, etc.  DePodesta's blog is unique in that it's the first time that the management of a professional sports team has communicated with the team's fans without going through the media.  This direct, 1-on-1 communication could prove revolutionary (by, perhaps, fostering interest in the team and widening the team's fanbase) or, as the blog's title suggests, dangerous (by providing information that could help their opponents).

flickr's Geotagging Milestone

Photo-sharing website flickr recently reached a milestone. Over the weekend, the amount of the site's photos that has been geotagged passed the 100,000,000 mark. This is an opportunity to discuss geotagging.

Geotagging is a feature that flickr developed almost three years ago. Like flickr's text tags, geotags aid other users in finding photos of a specific kind; geotags allow users to find photos taken at a particular place. Unlike conventional tags, however, geotags are not text-based. Instead, users can use a map app similar to Google Maps to pinpoint exactly where one of their uploaded photos was taken. The popularity of geotagging (as the post indicates, almost 3.5% of flickr's three billion photos have been geotagged) actually affected the digital camera industry. Nikon recently released a camera attachment that automatically inserts geotag data into a photograph's metadata (like EXIF and IPTC).

Overseas Development Institute

The London-based Overseas Development Institute is among the world's leading international development think tanks. It's mission, to "inspire and inform policy and practice which lead to the reduction of poverty, the alleviation of suffering, and the achievement of sustainable livelihoods in developing countries," is accomplished through a three-part approach: conducting research, making practical policy recommendations, and spreading news and ideas. The methods of the third part have evolved over the years, from monthly publications in newspapers and industry journals to what is now a daily link to the general public through a weblog. While there is much to discuss regarding the ODI homepage, I'd like to focus on the ODI blog.

The blog is unique in that it does not require a subscription to an expensive industry journal (the Journal of International Development, for example); everyone with internet access can read that which the men and women at ODI have to say. As such, the writers have been forced to tailor their pieces to a new audience--an audience that may not be formally educated in relevant areas and an audience that may have an interest in the topics different from the professional interest that most journal-subscribers and industry workers possess. The blog also allows for other changes, like the inclusion of a blogroll (which introduces readers to blogs from groups like the Center for Global Development, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Alertnet from Reuters), access to RSS feeds and podcasts, and the ability to book a spot at upcoming events. The blog does, however, feature some dead links--an unfortunate bit that would never happen in ODI's journal articles of old.

PA Arts Experience

The PA Arts Experience is "a non-profit arts organization promoting the scenic river valleys of southeastern Pennsylvania as a destination for arts-minded tourists and patrons."  The group promotes the PAE Artist Trail, a geographic corridor that unites the works and events of the artists of southeastern PA.  The PAE website features a landing page (a banner image featuring minor text and a beautiful photograph), a navigation bar along the top of the entire website, and links to external sites, like lancasterartshotel.com.  I found the aesthetics to be pleasing and the site organization to be logical and intuitive.

Dealzmodo

Gizmodo is a blog focused on consumer electronics. Almost daily, the blog's writers use one post to publish the day's best deals. The post usually features a picture at the top depicting some of the best deals to be found in the post. Following the banner is a dense list of product names, marked-down prices, original prices, and links to the vendor offering the deal. Because the Gizmodo writers scour most (if not all) of the other popular websites that feature daily gadget deals, this daily post, dubbed "Gadget Deals of the Day," acts as an aggregator for all of the best deals on the web.

I've got a fever, and the only prescription...is more aXXo

It has never been easier to remotely share digital data. We have come a long way from the days of FTP-run central servers, transfers coordinated through messenger software, and peer to peer file sharing applications like Napster and WinMX. The BitTorrent protocol (BTP) is the new standard, as it has masterfully outperformed all other protocols. Instead of facilitating a transfer of data between two users, the BTP works to allow all users possessing the same file to share parts of the file with those who wish to obtain it. One can download many small parts of a file from many different users at the same time.

While this latest protocol has exhibited lofty new standards of efficiency and security, it is not without flaws. Because the files are not regulated (seeing as how the very existence of most torrents constitutes a violation of intellectual property laws) one can never be sure of a file's true content until it has been completely downloaded, thereby exposing one to a plethora of malicious attacks. It is this climate, a climate (both humorously and seriously) comparable to that of the illegal drug trade, that has produced the need for a reliable source of digital files, just as a drug addict would hope to find a reliable source of "safe" drugs (in both cases, you want to be sure that the product is what the vendor says it is).

As the article describes, aXXo's files are the gold-standard of the torrent world. His emergence is an interesting product of the new online behaviors dictated by advances in file-sharing tech. Just as aXXo's emergence was a result of a demand for his services (an uploader who consistently provides reliable, quality files), his emergence set off other behaviors.

Let's examine Mininova's dedicated aXXo page. It lists only those torrents uploaded by the user registered on the Mininova website as "aXXo". Therefore, the uploader of these files, needing aXXo's password to access his account, is mostly likely the real guy (or guys. or girls, for that matter). It is safe to assume, then, that all of these files are safe and of good quality, because they were almost positively uploaded by the real aXXo, not some imitator harboring bad intentions.

Next, examine the Mininova search results for the query "axxo". There are two important points to consider regarding evolved online behaviors.

1. Those files ending with the familiar "-aXXo" may not be genuine aXXo files, because anyone can affix that text to the end of a file name. This is an obvious hole in Mininova's search infrastructure, but they have remedied the problem by creating the dedicated aXXo page mentioned above.
2. Now notice the other files from the search results. Many end with the notation "KLAXXON". This is an instance of a user taking advantage of the public furor for aXXo files. As you can see, "KLAXXON" actually contains the string "AXXO". This is not a coincidence. In wanting to increase the popularity of his torrents, the user behind the "KLAXXON" handle decided to create a handle that would be returned by the ever-popular "axxo" search query. (Also of note...this point indicates that the Mininova search engine is not case-sensitive. This, of course, is by design, and should not be considered a weakness. A case-sensitive search engine, in this environment, would be too specific.)

So that's about as nerdy (and as long) as my posts will get. But I thought this was a pretty interesting example of evolved behavior at the confluence of technology, law, and the concept of supply-and-demand.