the tweney review

Opera Software announced today that they’re releasing a special version of their web browser. This version is in response to problems using Opera on MSN – apparently, the site was constructed deliberately to not work with Opera.

The Bork edition behaves differently on one Web site: MSN. When you visit that site, the browser translates it into the language of the Muppet Show’s Swedish Chef.

“Hergee berger snooger bork,” said Mary Lambert, product line manager desktop, Opera Software, in a press release. “This is a joke. However, we are trying to make an important point.”

I finally figured out how to override those nasty, tiny, fixed-point size fonts in Internet Explorer. (I bitched about them before.) Although it seems trivial, I’m posting this tip because these tiny fonts are, for some inexplicable reason, very popular right now. This despite the fact that they’re very hard to read. Internet Explorer has a useful Text Size feature that lets you adjust font sizes, but it becomes mysteriously impotent if the Web designer has specified an absolute point size, like 6 or 8.

That is, unless you do this: select Tools, Internet Options, and click on Accessibility. Then put a check mark in the box labeled: Ignore font sizes specified on Web pages. Click OK until you’re back to the screen, and voila — adjustable, readable fonts, no matter what the page designer says about it. So it screws up the layout on some sites? Too bad. Next time use a design that accommodates different screen sizes, bub.

While you’re in those Accessibility settings, you can also tell IE to ignore background colors. I found this useful in reading the RIAA web site, which puts all its text in blue on a black background. Very hip, but totally unreadable.

Clay Shirky observes that the popularity of weblogs follows a power law: A few popular blogs get the most links and the most traffic; most blogs get very little of either. Jason Kottke makes the same argument, with better graphics. Dave Winer, typically, misreads Shirky’s essay (probably because it was too long and used too many big words).

The import of Kottke’s and Shirky’s argument is this: The more weblogs there are, the more unequal the distribution of readers will be. Within the next couple of years, the most popular weblogs will be so popular that they will be, in effect, mainstream media outlets. Meanwhile, the rest of the blog world will form a vast, teeming ecosystem with lots of conversations, but very little individual impact. Shirky wrote, elsewhere: “Mainstream media is not the way it is because it’s run by dolts. Its the way it is because as audiences scale up, center-to-edge connections continue to rise, but edge-to-center and edge-to-edge connections don’t (and can’t).” Kottke concludes:

The thing you can’t get away from is that when there are 2,000 weblogs, getting into the top 10% most-linked is hard, but when there are 2,000,000 weblogs, getting into the top 10% most-linked is very, very hard. And when everyone on earth has a weblog, getting into the top 10% most linked will be very, very, very, very hard.