A Greene Man’s Blog

While Apple has announced a new Apple TV and movie rentals on iTunes, now more than ever it’s high time they made sure that all their video content is closed captioned. With the writers’ strike affecting television programming and more people switching to downloadable content, let’s not take a huge step backward by delivering a huge mess of inaccessible content over the Internet! The ADA does not require Internet deliverables to be closed-captioned because the ADA was drafted before the Internet, but the spirit of the law is to ensure that people have access to media, and since most movies and television shows have already been captioned for legacy media, it shouldn’t be difficult to deliver those captions along with new media. Apple has put the technology in place for the viewing of closed captions in iTunes, QuickTime, and iPods. The next step is actually selling and renting closed-captioned videos!

Hyperlinks Weave the Web

Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene.

There would be no World Wide Web without hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are what allow us to add photos to web pages, link from one page to another, etc. These days, much of this hyperlinking is done for us automatically on sites such as Flickr. But Flickr also allows you to create hyperlinks yourself in many areas of the site, including photo descriptions, comments, and group threads. I create links between photos and members all the time, and it’s easy for me to do so because I’ve memorized the HTML. Once you learn the HTML for a hyperlink, you can be a hyperlinker yourself!

An HTML tag begins with a less-than sign, created by holding down the shift key while you tap the comma key. Then you type “a” for “anchor” and “href” for “hypertext reference”. Then you type the equals sign (=) followed by a quotation mark. This quotation mark is the beginning of a “container” for the URL, or “uniform resource locator.” The URL is the “web address” for the object to which you are linking. As a mnemonic device, I think of this opening tag as the English phrase, “Anchor hypertext reference is…”

Recently, I posted a photo I took of a fellow Flickrite at a FlickrMeet. I wanted to link to her photostream so that other people could appreciate her photos. This is a way of showing respect and giving credit, similar to the citations used by academic writers. So, what did I do? Well, first, I wrote the text, “katdavis kindly posed for a portrait.” Then, I decided to make “katdavis” (her username) into a hyperlink. In order to do so, I found her photostream and copied and pasted the URL from my browser’s address bar above the first page of her photostream (the URL being www.flickr.com/photos/katdavis/ ). Then, I returned to my photostream— specifically, the photo page containing the portrait of her (the URL being flickr.com/photos/danielgreene/2100926688/ ). I clicked in the description text so that I could edit it, and I placed my cursor just in front of her username. There, I inserted the magic of the Web: I typed <a href= and I pasted the URL I had copied from the first page of her photostream. The “aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash” is absolutely essential to the HTML expression. Immediately following that URL, I typed a closing quotation mark (a.k.a. “close quote” — same as an open quote in this case, since HTML uses only the “inch mark” type quote, not “curly quotes” or “typographer’s quotes”). I then completed my opening HTML tag by typing a greater-than sign. The greater-than sign signifies the end of an HTML tag.

But the tag would not be complete without the link text being bracketed by the closing HTML tag. So, after I typed the opening HTML tag and typed the link text “katdavis” I enclosed the link text with the closing HTML “anchor” tag which is a less-than sign, slash, a, and a greater-than sign. As you can see, enclosing HTML tags are bracket by less-than and greater-than signs. The slash mark represents a closing HTML tag which marks the end of an HTML expression. You can think of the end of the anchor tag in English as “end of anchor.”

The resulting hyperlink looked like so when I finished editing it:

What the visitor to my pages sees is a hyperlink they can follow to jump to katdavis’s photostream, like so: katdavis

Hyperlinking creates virtual connections that can lead to or supplement the actual connections we have with each other in the real world. Hyperlinks are the sine qua non of the World Wide Web, and are even more important in the social, democratic "Web 2.0." Learning the HTML for creating hyperlinks is one of the steps to joining the ranks of the digerati and harnessing the power of the Web for yourself.

Have fun, and weave on!

I received a phone call the other day from someone claiming to be from Canadian Diamond Traders. He said that he had sent me an e-mail demanding that I remove some objectionable content about CDT from my website. I had not received that e-mail. I gave the man another e-mail address to send his letter to, and I haven’t received it to that e-mail address either.

It’s possible that my junk mail (spam) filter blocked it, but that’s beside the point. Why would Canadian Diamond Traders want to silence a blogger? All I said in an entry I posted over a year ago was, “Is Canadian Diamond Traders a scam? I suspect so. Consider what the FBI says about pyramid schemes…” and I went on to cite an FBI article warning of common fraud schemes. I am sure that nothing I wrote or cited could be considered libelous. The only thing I can think of that they might object to is that I allowed a man named David Thornton to post a long comment after my blog post, and in it he says some very damning things about CDT. Even in what he said, however, there are links to reputable sources warning consumers of fraud schemes whose claims and procedures resemble those of CDT; in fact, a couple of them name CDT outright. (See Diamond Pyramid Scheme Warning article on the Western Australia government’s Department of Consumer and Employment Protection website and the Mail Scams article on the Parliament of New South Wales (Australia) website. Also see this warning against Pyramid Schemes from the Maryland Attorney General’s website.)

In the interest of presenting opposing views, I also allowed a woman named Mary to respond to David and tell him he was wrong. She didn’t make any persuasive arguments, though. The Google searches I’ve conducted have revealed nothing but a lot of people saying CDT is a great way to make money and a lot of people saying CDT is a scam. Almost all those in favor of CDT are CDT resellers themselves, and almost all those against are irate consumers. That, in itself, says something. But with all due respect, it has been nearly impossible to find any facts from reputable sources. A search of the NPR website brought up only one article, and it had nothing to do with exploring whether or not CDT is a scam.

It is my right as a blogger to present information for the public good. There were other vociferous people who wanted to argue the issue back and forth by posting more comments after my original blog post, but my blog is not a place for that. The arguments are already out there on the Internet. I stand by my statement that I have said nothing libelous. If Canadian Diamond Traders wishes me to remove anything from my blog, let them send me a letter, and we’ll take it from there. Until then, I believe I have every right to question their business practices and encourage people to research more and decide for themselves. I would love to see some reputable news agencies pick up the story, but until then, this humble blogger will have to do.