It’s hard out there for a netbook. You think it’s easy, being ultraportable and Internet-ready 24/7? You think it’s easy, cramming the entirety of the Internet into 614400 pixels? Well, it’s not. Not one bit.

Take the ASUS EEE 1000H, for example. A rock solid 5 hours of battery life, a decent keyboard, and 10.1 inches of matte LCD made for peerin’ into the world wide web. Sounds decent, right?

Wrong. But it’s not all the computer’s fault. The 1000H is like the little netbook that could. It’s a 3 pound featherweight anticipating that first-round KO from a better faster stronger competitor like the HP Mini 311. But it’s still going to tighten its gloves, bite down on that mouth guard, and put up its dukes. And with the right web browser in its corner, it might even hold its own.

But that’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it? On a weak processor like the Atom, on a screen that doesn’t even hit 720p, how do you balance performance and usability for the perfect web experience? It’s all about finding the right web browser. Trouble is, none of them get it quite right. It’s tough out there for a netbook — let’s take a look at how Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera help and hinder our exploration of the 10.1″ web.

Firefox has been my go-to browser for years, ever since I jumped ship from the drowning Netscape Navigator. Ah, Netscape 7; what good times we had together in our youth. You may have been a bit slow. To be honest, I don’t even remember if you were a good browser or not. But you led me to Mozilla, and the glory of themes, extensions, tabbed browsing, and, above all, Adblock. I never looked back…

…until I installed Windows 7 on my netbook, and decided it might be time for a change.  I was still perfectly happy with Firefox on my desktop, but for quick web sessions on-the-go I wanted to find something a bit snappier and more space-efficient.  At first, Chrome seemed like the answer, but now I’m not so sure.

Performance

These days, Mozilla is up to Firefox 3.6, but it’s no longer the only dominant competitor for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Chrome is the new hotness on the block, but Firefox is still chugging along, slowly gaining market share. But that’s not the only way it’s chugging; in speed tests comparing Chrome and Firefox, Mozilla is lagging behind.

Comparing startup speeds on the 1000H reveals a major discrepancy. Firefox turtles along at a startup speed of 7.2 seconds, while Chrome boots to its opening screen in 2.6. But all is not dark in the world of Firefox. After extensive use of both browsers, Firefox seems to provide a far more consistent user experience, with reliably speedy page loads.

Chrome, for all its startup horsepower and touted blazing fast rendering speed, delivers wildly inconsistent performance over all the wireless connections I’ve tried. At times it simply fails to load web pages, and no amount of refreshing will convince it that the server is, in fact, just fine. It frequently times out or fails to load a page’s CSS, resulting in an ugly unformatted mess.

Opera comes in somewhere between Firefox and Chrome, starting up in under 4 seconds. Overall, it performs fine, although nothing strongly differentiates it from the competition. Even if Opera boasts some of the fastest Java load times on the block, some websites that work in Firefox and Chrome still won’t work in Opera.

Visual

Firefox was sounding pretty good before, right? If performance was everything, I’d most likely stick with Firefox in a second and not give Chrome a backwards glance. But Google nailed the design of Chrome, making it sleek and capitalizing screen space. Firefox looks downright bulky in comparison, even with small icons enabled and the menu bar hidden away. Granted, doing away with the bookmarks toolbar and relying on the Awesomebar is an option. But I like my bookmarks, okay?

With only 600 pixels of vertical resolution at the 1000H’s disposal, every pixel is sacred. With Firefox, that means ditching something useful. Chrome, on the other hand, diverged from the norm, integrating the title and tab bar and relegating the menu bar to a couple dropdown buttons. It saves a ton of space and brings tabbed browsing to the fore.

But Chrome is not without its own aesthetic issues. Google’s browser never plays nice with the taskbar’s auto-hide, frequently extending over the top of the taskbar and making it impossible to access. It’s an annoying bug, and a bizarre oversight for the development team.

Opera takes after Chrome, and easily bests Firefox in the looks department. It’s sleek, shiny and thin, but everything goes awry when you add the tab bar. Opera’s “Personal Bar” sits between its tab bar and the top of the screen, which mysteriously causes the title bar to separate from the tab bar. What was once a clean, integrated layout becomes bizarrely, unnecessarily bloated.

Conclusion

So nobody’s perfect. Firefox delivers acceptable performance, but takes up more screen real estate than is ideal for a netbook. Chrome alternates between speedy loading and frustrating time outs. In the end, the visual experience isn’t worth the performance headache. And Opera…well, it doesn’t offer much to make it worth switching to.

The future looks a little brighter, at least. The mockup for Firefox 4, scheduled for release near the end 2010, leans closer to Chrome’s design sense. With the bookmarks toolbar nowhere in sight, though, the browser could end up faster and prettier, but just as space-inefficient. Maybe it’s…time to try out Internet Explorer 9.

But I’m always a little late to the party. It’s taken me a while to pick up on, and actually listen to, some of the post-1UP layoffs podcasts, namely the mammoth final episode of 1UP Yours and Robert Ashley’s A Life Well Wasted.  And as I listened to these podcasts, I kept feeling, again and again, that something truly special had been lost.  The tone of each podcast couldn’t vary much more radically: 1UP Yours is comprised of a rowdy group who joke, tease, laugh, drink, and find a way to squeeze interesting conversation into the mix.  A Life Well Wasted is absolutely surreal, blending short conversations with haunting music into something more powerful than the sum of its parts.  Where the two meet, where they reveal they have far more in common than their structures imply, is at their emotional core.  Every conversation held, every laugh shared, every memory revealed shows that something genuinely extraordinary has been lost.

Has any publication ever fostered the sort of love EGM did?  Over the course of its 20 year lifespan, how many people grew up reading this magazine cover to cover, absorbing every word, regardless of the game it pertained to?  And how many of them thought, “This is what I want.  This is what I want to do with my life.”  And how many of them actually did it?  It is, perhaps, the highest praise a publication could ever receive — its own fans were the very ones who grew up to give it new life and propel it forward for a new generation of readers.  And that new generation felt the exact same thing.  I should know; I’m one of them.  I can see the very stories recounted in A Life Well Wasted echoed in my own life — the worst games ever made list, featured in issue #150, attained a mythical status among my group of friends, and the mere mention of Custer’s Revenge even today would likely call forth a smirk.  I could probably still name most of the games on that list, and actually having played E.T. made it that much cooler.  It also led me to experience the horror that is Nigh Trap in all its hilarious, campy glory.

The crew of 1UP Yours discussed the fact that many fans felt as if they got to know each podcaster over the course of the show, but that really knowing them wouldn’t be possible given the nature of something like a podcast.  True, it’s not a reflection of real life.  It’s impossible to really know someone through such a detached medium.  But by so thoroughly communicating their own friendship on the show, they managed to pull in listeners, building a sense of powerful community and friendship, inviting us into their conversation, even if we couldn’t be there.  The entire institution was easy to take for granted, but now that it’s gone, I feel like there’s a gap — on the internet, on the newsstand, and in the daily lives of those who felt a special connection with people they’d never met but hoped to one day work beside.

We’re worse off for the loss.

Why is Dr. Horrible so goddamn awesome?  Okay, so that’s rhetorical.  It’s awesome because of Neil Patrick Harris (and Joss Whedon is a genius Nathan Fillion yada yada).  And everyone and his brother has seen it already, but what can I say.  I’m just in that mood.

Fun Wesley life anectdote: a couple months ago my friends and I went to Dragon-Con and had the opportunity to get autographs from a host of celebrities from the geek realm.  One of my roommates went for Alan Tudyk, and I went for Nathan Fillion, who were side-by-side.  Most of the fanatics there went for both, but we decided to split the cost (see how I tried to pretend I’m less of a nerd than those other people?  Freaks!).

Backing it up a couple hours, we came to the realization that there was one, and only one thing that Nathan Fillion could autograph that would fulfill our raging appetites for humor and good times.  One of the best lines in Dr. Horrible occurs thusly: “These (waves fists) are not the hammer…”

“…the hammer is my penis.”

That was what we had to get autographed, preserved for posterity, so that many decades from now we would be able to remind ourselves that penis jokes are funny.  It was perfect.

So we stood in line for 30 or 40 minutes.  They were really crankin’ out the signatures by getting people’s names in advance while they waited in line, and the stars would sign a generic saying like “Stay Shiny” on the picture.  But I didn’t want to stay shiny.  When I finally reached the head of the line, we shook hands or something and he handed me the picture and I asked something to the effect of “Do you do custom signatures?”  And Nathan Fillion, hero of the Whedonverse, said “Sure, man, what do you want?”

I mumbled some sort of prologue to my request and then jumped in.  The hammer is my penis.  It didn’t go so well.  Instead of a legendary autograph, I got “That’s a little creepy, man” and a brushing off.

Positive image?  Shattered.  Awesome autograph?  Denied.  Funny story?  Okay, so I got something out of it.  Too bad he didn’t have a sense of humor.

As the World Wide Web has grown and expanded, it has become an increasingly important source of news for people across the globe. In fact, according to a poll conducted by Zogby International, published in early 2008, “nearly half of respondents (48%) said their primary source of news and information is the Internet, an increase from 40% who said the same a year ago.” Many of the internet’s news outlets are expansions of well-known, trusted television sources — CNN, NBC, and the BBC, just to name a few. However, the web has spawned thousands of other news sources that acquire their information in a more indirect fashion.

As Judy Muller describes them in her article “Plagiarism goes by a different name on the web,” these websites are secondary news sources. They exist as an aggregate of news from a variety of sources, thereby profiting (or at least maintaining themselves and achieving steady traffic flow) by feeding off the work of others.

Because the internet is still “young” in terms of its development, establishing real-world rules concerning legality and copyright issues is difficult — and enforcing those rules is even tougher. In “Plagiarism goes by a different name on the web,” originally published in the magazine Nieman Reports in Winter 2006, Judy Muller examines the issue of plagiarism on the web and the way in which it affects individual journalists and the field of journalism as a whole.

Muller’s article begins with a long story about a group of journalism graduate students, after a brief introduction explaining the article’s thesis — the dangers of sites “repurposing” content, a form of internet plagiarism. Muller’s story immediately sets the tone for the entire article by introducing a human concept to the story. Like many journalists, she injects a human element into her writing to help convey her message. This sets the story apart from a more traditional essay approach. Rather than stating a main idea and then backing it up with facts, figures, and citations, Muller influences our opinion with a personal story about how the problem she is addressing influenced a group of real people. This method will make her message especially influential when read by anyone who could potentially be affected by internet plagiarism or was in the past.

Muller writes that “the problem with repurposing is that it is open to interpretation by various outlaws roaming the World Wild West.” She cites two different websites as examples of secondary news sources. The first, Yahoo! News, she praises, because it “always credits the original reporters and often links back to the original source material.” It is with the second, Buzzle.com, that the problem, and focus of Muller’s article, lies.

Muller’s graduate students spent a summer developing a story about the lives of teenagers in towns bordering the Mexican-American border. Their work resulted in a story being published in L.A. Weekly and a broadcast piece making it onto Good Morning America. When the students were tipped off by a Border Patrol agent they’d interviewed that information from their story had been published on Buzzle.com with no attributions, they were understandably upset. Buzzle had pulled quotes from the L.A. Weekly article and used an image that had no correlation to the story itself. The article was also attributed to Buzzle’s “reporting staff.”

Buzzle was quick to fix their mistake when confronted, and claimed that “although we stand by our author and assert that no plagiarism took place, the fact that there was even a question indicates that we failed in properly demonstrating our sources.” This statement is the one Muller bases her argument on. Buzzle’s stance brings into question what plagiarism really is on the net. Muller argues that the rise of terms like “repurposing” and the existence of sites that exist as “Secondary content sources,” as Buzzle claims to be, have changed our definition of what plagiarism really is, as well as how we deal with it.

Because of the style Muller chose to use to convey her message, the entirety of her claim is based on the incident with Buzzle.com. At the beginning of the article she states that Yahoo! News is a reliable secondary content source that acknowledges the sources it gathers information from. Because the students only have an issue with Buzzle, we are given no real sense of the scope of the problem of plagiarism on the web. Are there lots of secondary news sites that fail to cite where they get their information? Or, worse, do they misappropriate text or images in such a way as to skew the original author’s work?

Muller’s article leaves us with more questions than answers. As a piece of scholarly writing, it is very effective in making us think about the problem of plagiarism. It establishes the problem exists with factual evidence in the form of a real situation encountered by her students. She also (jokingly) proposes a solution — an “E-Posse” to run the plagiarizers off the net. This suggested solution does little more than reinforce Muller’s opinion that plagiarism on the net is a problem.

Judy Muller successfully makes us consider the issue. Whether or not we take the next step — doing our own research and finding sites that back up or challenge her assertion — is left up to the individual reader. By providing more examples and citing more sources, Muller could have made “Plagiarism goes by a different name on the web?” a challenging piece instead of a thoughtful one. Still, the article fits into the general schema of journalistic writing present in Harvard’s Nieman Reports. The magazine is written by prestigious journalists and professors and typically deals with social issues and the ways in which they affect and are affected by the journalism industry. “Plagiarism goes by a different name on the web” is a good springboard for further study on how the journalism industry has been changed by secondary content sources on the web.

In my personal web experience, I rarely come across a secondary content source that has irresponsibly handled its source material. A great many sites I’ve visited or contributed to in the past rely on other websites to collect information firsthand. The secondary news sites then take that information, rewrite it, and provide a link to the original source of the news or information. Because I haven’t seen the practice Muller warns about as a rampant problem, it’s hard for me to take the article at face value, but it absolutely makes me curious to find out just how often this truly occurs.

Works Cited

Muller, Judy. “Plagiarism Goes by a Different Name on the Web.” Nieman Reports 60.4 (Winter2006 2006): 84-85. Communication & Mass Media Complete. EBSCO. University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, GA. 18 Aug. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.com/>.

“Zogby Poll: 67% View Traditional Journalism as “Out of Touch” Zogby International. 5 October 2008. < http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1454>