Interweb

You are currently browsing the archive for the Interweb category.

Facebook Usernames

June 13, 2009 in Interweb by Ez | No comments

If you cannot find me, then you are not looking. If you search on Facebook for Ezra Freelove, then I am the only result at the moment. Maybe all you knew was Ezra and the city where I lived? Facebook search is not so great you could find me through my first name plus something else you knew about me (other than email or city). Probably this is for the best. We don’t want to make it too easy to stalk people, right?

Allowing users to make a username is a promotion. The blogosphere making a fuss over all this is a Chicken Little-esque. Sure Myspace, Twitter, and a number of other sites have addresses with usernames in them. No one is forcing people opposed to having one to make one. Only in the past month could one choose a username for one’s Google profile. Prior to that it was a hefty large number of numbers.

I think the reason some people prefer usernames comes down to elaborative encoding. To retain something in memory, we associate that something with existing items in memory. Short-term memory has only about 7 slots and digits are each a single item. Assuming a single incrementation per account created and over 200 million users, using a numbers means there ought to be 9 digits worth of numbers to memorize. Words occupy a single slot in short term memory, by far simplifying remembering. Which would you rather try to remember 46202460 or ezrasf?

An argument against usernames comes down to using the memory of the Facebook database or other computer memory. Computer memory is better than human memory for stuff like this.

All of these work and go to the same place:

  1. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=46202460
  2. http://www.facebook.com/ezrasf
  3. http://www.ezrasf.com/fb

Pick your poison. Enjoy.


Related posts

Awful Chatter

June 9, 2009 in Interweb by Ez | No comments

Seems to me when involved in an IM chat with someone who sends 10 one line messages back to back, the purpose is to give me time to read already sent messages while typing the next. Apparently I wait for indications the other person has stopped typing before I even start to read what they have written. Why read a message when I know the other party is about to send something else? I can read both in a couple seconds. Waiting for the next is also a waste, especially when another is going to come on the heels of the second one.

Is my approach okay Netiquette? Am I a bad person for ignoring my friends and coworkers?

Apparently, these people posting several messages back to back violate the “Give time to respond.” rule of IM etiquette. Who tells people, “Hey, give me time to respond!” anyway? Maybe with more tact….


Related posts

  • No related posts.

TED: Brewster Kahle builds a free digital library

May 26, 2009 in Books / Novels / Writing, Interweb by Ez | No comments

I’ve heard the Library of Congress analogy previously. The question I had then was, “What about the diagrams and pictures which make the books useful. Books are not just letters, numbers, and symbols.”


Related posts

Expression Costs

May 16, 2009 in Interweb by Ez | No comments

(This started out as a blog comment for Sania’s post Facebook Killed Your Blog. I’m posting it here first.)

We share blogs with the whole world. So our blogs get lost in the noise, bolstering the need for a whole industry optimizing getting found in search engines. Its a concerted effort just get noticed. That’s because blog readers have to seek out blogs to follow, subscribe to the feed, and follow. Finding the best blogs to read is sometimes difficult and more from word of mouth than anything search engines provide.

Blogs also tend to have a lot of information to digest. Social networks have just a line or two with maybe a link to more information. Blog readers typically are designed around the idea of collecting all the posts and letting the user pick which to read. Social networks typically are designed around the idea of just showing recent posts and letting the users choose how far back in time to read.

As technologies lower the costs to express ideas (aka get easier), blogs will get left behind as they have become upside down in value. The costs of writings, reading, subscribing, and commenting on blogs are more expensive compared to micro-blogging or status updates.

Why blog when hanging out on social networks are so much easier? Blogs can only survive as long as they have information worthy.

Why blog when readers are no longer reading? Posting blog entries on social networks does help keep traffic levels somewhat by getting exposure.

As bloggers providing valuable expression leave blogging, the value of blogs decrease. People will still blog. It just won’t be the popular thing to do.


Related posts

The LMS is So Web 1.5

May 13, 2009 in Blackboard Vista, Interweb by Ez | No comments

The claims Blackboard’s Learn 9 provides a Web 2.0 experience has bothered me for a while now. First, it was the drag-n-drop. While cool, that isn’t Web 2.0 in my opinion. A little more on track is the claim:

The all-new Web 2.0 experience in Release 9 makes it easy to meaningfully combine information from different sources. The Challenges Are Real, But So Are the Solutions

Integrating with a social network like Facebook is a start, but again, in my opinion, it still isn’t Web 2.0.

So, what is Web 2.0? I did some digging. I think the Tim O’Reilly approach meets my expectation best. He quotes Eric Schmidt’s ”Don’t fight the Internet.” as well as provide his own more in depth.

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called “harnessing collective intelligence.”) Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again

Users expect a site on the Internet to meet their needs or they eventually move on to a site which does. There are so many web sites out there providing equivalent features to those commonly found in an LMS. There is the danger of irrelevance. This is why every LMS company or group strives to continually add new features (aka innovating). The bar continually gets raised, so LMS software continually needs to meet this higher standard.

Tim additionally provides some other rules which you can see at the above link.

When an LMS reachs the point where the resources of the Internet helps people learn, then it will be a Web 2.0. As long as an expert or leader imparts knowledge on students, the LMS is still something different than Web 2.0. Sorry…. The irony? This is exactly what Michael Wesch and PLE advocates preach.


Related posts

Athensdating.org

April 11, 2009 in Interweb by Ez | 1 comment

Writing a Blog Post About This Scam I noticed a little black and white sign: “Single athensdating.org” a while ago. A couple weeks ago it came up in conversation. Today I saw it again. So I visited the site.

First impression: A local site should have images to represent something about the locality. Generic stock photography doesn’t cut it for me. The signup for wanted my home and cell phone numbers.

That sounded phishy to me.

Domaintools.com is a great site for looking up who runs a site. If the owner has selected privacy options with their registrar, then that would be a snag. Fortunately for us, the owner of athensdating.org isn’t hiding. 

Owner: NuStar Solutions

The note “Email address is associated with about 4,690 domains” caught my eye. So I looked up NuStar and found this article about these popping up everywhere. (At least DomainTools gave me the info in one shot without having to do the same extensive research.) Lots of stuff online about these signs, who is placing them, and whether or not this is a scam.

I’m just going to assume it is a scam.

Picture info: Writing a Blog Post About This Scam on Flickr from sneezypb


Related posts

Flickr Search

March 13, 2009 in Interweb by Ez | No comments

Flickr has millions of photos. (Maybe billions.) Many of these photos are tagged. One can look at all the photos with a tag. Every tag has a built in RSS feed. However, to view a combination of tags, one needs to search for the two tags.

Something I would like to see is an RSS feed for Flickr searches. Having to choose between duplication making see the same picture more than once or missing photos because users are… inconsistent.

This is easier than me moving some place else.
:)


Related posts

Information Should Be Free

February 15, 2009 in Interweb, University by Ez | 1 comment

Mark Guzdial makes the point teachers add value to the learning process. Normally, I would agree. However, I got hung up on a misquote from a Walter Isaacson article How to Save Your Newspaper in TIME offering micropayments as the solution to newspapers finding a working model to survive since advertisements are not the right one.

Mark said it was ”information must be free.” TIME said, “[T]he Web got caught up in the ethos that information wants to be free.” Mark correctly attributed it to Steven Levy who said, “All information should be free,” but in the context of: “Access to computers — and anything which might
teach you something about the way the world works — should be
unlimited and total.” 

Higher education provides such access. However, we hide the access behind beaucracy and tuition. Is it worth it?

Another thought on all this came from a Dorothy E. Denning quoting Richard Stallman:

I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses. … When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.

This reminds me of the concept of Creative Commons and open source. Restrictions to information like copyright ensure the creator makes money. At the same time copyright provides some opportunities for reusing it. (CC and open source just do it better than the Copyright Office.


Related posts

Cross-Seeding the Clouds

February 7, 2009 in Interweb by Ez | 4 comments

There is a good post on backing up a PLE or really anything created in the cloud. The danger of working in the cloud is the site disappearing like Ma.gnolia recently. When the data is important, such as for teaching a class, this is huge.

So the advice to have additional copies elsewhere is good. Is it the only way? I like the concept of cross-posting better than backup and restore to alternative sites. Instead of regular exports and imports, as the data is generated in multiple places at the same time. Think of it as an near instantaneous export and import to minimize the loss.

Perhaps more opportunities for cross-posting would make the Interweb a safer place for our data.


Related posts

Separate Populations?

December 9, 2008 in Interweb by Ezra F | No comments

What are my neighbors doing? Curiosity about that question resulted in some conflicting data. Ordered by when I added the RSS feed for them.

  1. search.twitter.com for ”Athens GA”  - results are full of people talking about Athens, GA not in Athens, GA. Useful for people coming into town for an event.
  2. TweetLocal search for “Athens, GA” (or 30605 get same results) within 20 miles – Over the last 24 hours the RSS feed has given me 12 posts. First 5 users in search before 9pm: JeremyAce4 in Athens, GA, justdandelions in athens, ga, bozaf in Néa Smírni, Europe/Athens, aaronbarton in Athens, GA, elbee103 in Athens, GA (last @ 7pm). The hit on Europe/Athens is pretty disappointing.
  3. search.twitter.com for ”near:AHN within:20mi” (or 30605 or AthensGA get same results) – Over the same 24 hour period, its RSS feed has given me 53 posts. First 5 users in search before 9pm: ThePicMan, julieteaston, ryan_lafountain, RyanHague, alester (last @ 7pm)
No overlap. How is that possible when they supposedly are coming from the same population (time, space, and active)? Both services look for their data on Twitter. Both are looking at the self-identified location for Twitter users. Both have the same range. So, why do they have such different results?
Looking specifically for the Tweetlocal users in search.twitter.com reveals them in the results. Searching on a user though doesn’t reveal the location. On the profile is the right location, so they should have been in both results.
Both fail in my opinion.

Related posts

  • No related posts.

« Older entries