Congress: this time it's serious!

The U.S. Congress finally swung into action this week aroused by admissions of marital infidelity and the surrounding scandal. Like most Americans I was glad to see Congress take its oversight responsibilities seriously. We all know that a Congressional investigation into the Petraeus affair is of the utmost importance in these dangerous times.

And rightly so Congress will continue to ignore less important matters that at this point can only be distractions. For example investigating the President and Executive Branch for maintaining that the government can kill Americans without judicial due process. Everyone knows that the American public embraces this policy because the government can be trusted to only kill the right Americans.

Another minor irritation that troublemakers might harp on at this politically critical juncture is the growing use of drones over the United States by the government to spy on its own citizens. Congress is well aware that the only people bringing up this issue are those who obviously have something to hide. Their tired appeals for the respect of "civil rights" can't be seriously considered now, with the current state of the country.

Don't even get me started on people who want Congress to investigate the government programs that capture citizens' email messages and mobile phone conversations. Or war. Or voting rights.

We should all be thankful that the "do nothing" Congress has recently learned its lesson and that it will begin to probe deeply into the critical matter of juvenile female posturing and infidelity by males in powerful positions. Covered interminably by a 24 hour, hype driven, low information news media, I expect this matter will be investigated thoroughly by Congress until it has extracted the maximum political value.

An update to Smashingline: web feeds

I added a new feature to my "internet property" Smashingline. You can now get updates when new race results are posted through a news reader like Google Reader. Web feeds are commonly known as "RSS" and are represented by a icon (technically RSS is a specific type of web feed and Smashingline uses Atom syndication).

Previously new race results were announced through Facebook and Twitter I added RSS because of changes made by Facebook to how items appear on people's "News Feed," you know the thing that used to be called your "Wall." If you used Facebook years ago you know that all your friends' posts used to appear there. When "Facebook Fan Pages" were added you could "become a fan" and all the page's posts also appeared on your Wall. Eventually Facebook changed "Wall" to "News Feed," those "Facebook Fan Pages" became "Facebook Pages," and instead of being a fan of a page you now "Like" them. But most crucially Facebook also decided that users were getting too many posts for them to peruse so they created "EdgeRank" which is an algorithm that attempts to filter incoming posts and only show the "most relevant" ones on a person's News Feed.

Since then Facebook has tinkered with EdgeRank attempting to find the optimal mix of posts you actually care about versus advertising. This tinkering has only accelerated since Facebook's IPO. This past September Facebook announced "promoted posts" where the poster pays to increase the likelihood that their post will appear in a News Feed. The converse is that if you don't pay your posts are less likely to be seen. The most insidious part of all this is that when people "Like" a Facebook Page most of them probably believe that they will get all of the posts from the page. Most of us thought that Like was analogous to "Follow" on Twitter, unfortunately that's not so and Facebook user's are probably not getting information from organizations they are interested in.

Since Smashingline does not make money I will not be paying to promote posts (in fact I have to pay Google every month for resource usage on their App Engine platform). RSS web feeds, a pre-Facebook part of the internet, are the solution to this problem. RSS takes away the power Facebook currently has over what information people see and puts it in the hands of people and the organizations they have a relationship with. It has been suggested that Twitter and Google+ are alternatives but they both have the same problem: ultimately another entity decides what information you get. With RSS there is no gatekeeper between a person and the information they are interested in.

There are a variety of news readers freely available. Google Reader is probably the most well-known. It is very easy to add a news feed to Google Reader and after that you won't miss information from web pages you're interested in. And if you have a web site or blog you should be sure that web feeds are enabled for it, your readers will thank you.