Tuesday, July 1, 2008

I don't know whether to be amused or annoyed..

NYT story about a botched grift / vigilante?

Basically, a guy comes into town, calls himself a federal agent, invades homes busting meth users, and then turns out to be a nobody, completely without authority.

And he fooled the entire town's justice system.


I can't figure out my reaction. On the one hand, this can HAPPEN? Who the hell's paying attention? On the other.. This totally happened and idiots fell for it..

I duno.

9 comments:

Mike Lewis said...

These guys are unimpressed

Roscoe said...

your link is borked, old man.

Mike Lewis said...

They are still unimpressed

Roscoe said...

.... I don't know whether to shame you with a Gossip Girl retort, or a Reaper one.

_J_ said...

Title. Google phrase. Etc.

Roscoe said...

man.. the link states FLAT OUT it's a New York Times story.

can you not go to the times?

_J_ said...

It's just a pet peeve. Posts are indexed primarily by title, so the title needs to reflect the content of the post.

We have labels, but labels are general organizational indicators of content. So any McCain post has "mccain" as a label. Then within all the "mccain" labeled posts the next means of organization is the title. The title describes the content of the post. So when one rifles through past posts they don't have to read the content but rather can see the title and from memory recall what the post contained.

"I don't know whether to be amused or annoyed.." says nothing about the New York Times, vigilantism, meth, anything. Certainly one can express that sentiment of not knowing how to react, but that occurs within the post.

The issue is the role titles serve. "Tao Te Ching" is "The Scripture/Classic/Canon of the Way/Path and the Power/Virtue"; the title describes what the work is. Within the work having that title one can expound upon those notions related to the title, but that expounding does not occur within the title itself.

Also it's about getting our hit count up. Since Google goes by title before content it's sensible to craft titles so that they appear for the related google search string.

Moreover it's not at all difficult to construct sensible titles for posts. So I don't know what the big deal is.

_J_ said...

I like the questions the article raises. But mostly I'm trying to figure out why people give so much of a shit about methamphetamine.

zomg drugs!

Roscoe said...

I reject your formal titling structure. It's a personal pet peeve, and it's not even one you can hold yourself to.

A title describes a work, but a blog post need not be a work. As a matter of fact, often times, they're not. They are nothing more than one of us sharing a link or information with the rest of us.
Your titling scheme is only of value to you, and your mad quest for Google Rankings.

On the article itself, I really wonder how big the town's meth problem was in comparison to the town's belief in a meth problem...

The comment about the guy having been effective and all makes me wonder.. becuase.. I just don't see that he'd be that useful.