Interweb

You are currently browsing the archive for the Interweb category.

Workbook

March 7, 2010 in Facebook by Ezra S F | No comments

Hanging out with some friends earlier, got me thinking about this. I forget the circumstances of the discussion to start this post germinating in my head.

One of the tools people have for seeking a new job is their social networks and increasingly the online ones. LinkedIn seems to be the popular social network for this. (BTW, I’m glad to give recommendations for anyone I’ve worked with and seeking a job there.)

I can’t say that I would know what everyone in my Facebook “friends” list does. A possible solution is for Facebook to provide a filter displaying current employer and position similar to its phone book filter for the friends page. Users can only see phone numbers both entered and selected to be available, so similar permission-based exposing work information ought to apply.

Until then, it appears one can click on position and employer to search who else lists them. One can also edit the cp= variable in the URL. Change “System” in the example below to “Photographer”.

Example URL: http://www.facebook.com/search/?cp=System&o=2048

The o= appears to be the kind of page, so that should remain 2048 for “People”.

If your search term uses spaces, then use a plus sign (“+”) or ascii code (“%20″) to represent the space.

Example: System+Support+Specialist

I’m sure there are better ideas out there.

Dunbar on Facebook

January 25, 2010 in Facebook, Psychology by Ezra S F | No comments

You’ve read my previous posts on Dunbar’s Number, right?

Go on…. I’ll wait.

Remember the one on Scoble and Facebook? Good. For a while, I fastidiously ensured my number of friends stayed below 150 because I took the idea of Dunbar’s number as a life strategy. Then I let it slip to 200 which I pared back down to 150. My laziness let it hit 500.

It appears Robin Dunbar is now studying Facebook users to see ‘if the “Facebook effect” has stretched the size of social groupings.’ He says despite the large number of friends people only interact with about 150 of them. Maybe like most of psychology, the subjects are college students who supposedly are almost all on Facebook. In the real world, most of the people with which I have regular interaction, exactly those Dunbar’s number covers, are not my Facebook friends.

My Facebook friends instead are my information buffet. Social networks are how we keep in touch with what is happening in the world. My information technology friends provide me what is happening in my career field. My photography friends provide me with useful tips for a big hobby. Also, the bigger our social network, the more opportunities for help from or being consequential strangers. Social networks are a strategy not a replication of the brain.

The term “friends” used by Facebook, I think, is a brilliant marketing ploy. People would much rather show up as my friend than my contact.
:)

Facebook Link RSS

January 21, 2010 in Facebook by Ezra S F | 2 comments

The people I know on Facebook post fascinating things. [1] The people I count as my “Facebook friends” have something interesting to say. I enjoy reading the partisan politics, science, recipes, web comics, and even the celebrity gossip my contacts post. The status updates are one way. Links are another way.

Since Facebook copied the Twitter Retweet feature, I was looking for something worthy of letting all the others I know see. Somehow I was surprised to find my News Feed was missing about half the Links my contacts posted? My first reaction was to put My Friends’ Links in Thunderbird’s RSS Reader (where I put my feeds I don’t want strangers subscribing in Google Reader). Then it dawned on me.

At the bottom of the News Feed is an Edit Options link. A while back there were Facebook chain-statuses about editing the settings here because it controls which of my friends I see. On the first page, one can put how many of my friends I can see vs which I don’t. Also, there is an option for explicitly naming which I will see.

It seems I set specific names which at one time was everyone. However, as I added new people, I never went back and added the new people. All these new people were the ones posting the missing links. Doh! So, I’ve set Facebook to show me the top 9999 people. (The highest it will go.) I’m hoping this will fix it.

[1] Please don’t be offended I consider some of you acquaintances, colleagues, or other social context other than friend. I’ve overly specified in my head what constitutes a friend while recognizing the definition is much more liberal for others.

Google Conspiracy?

January 18, 2010 in Corporations, Gov't / Law / Politics, Interweb by Ezra S F | No comments

Found this gem called The Great Google Coverup about Google changing their minds about continuing to filter searches following a Chinese supported cyber-attack. Whether the attack origin was by Chinese government employees, corporate thieves, or kids living in their parent’s basement, accounts were compromised. Personal data fell into the hands of people who didn’t own it.

This led to this gem:

For the first time, many of us Google converts feel like the cloud, where Google wants us to organize our personal and professional digital lives, is less secure than that encrypted hard drive under the desk.

Sounds like Douglas Rushkoff didn’t understand the Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, or even GeorgiaVIEW for which I work didn’t invent impenetrable computer systems for developing the cloud systems. There are best practices which may or may not be followed. There are code improvements to counter known security holes which may or may not be applied. Personally, I think the public is doing well just to be informed there was a security breach.

Security isn’t about absolutely preventing someone from getting the data. It is about placing stumbling blocks in the way to make attempting to get the data so difficult the perpetrator moves on to an easier target. An extremely determined person or group could unwind the layers of the best security.

Gmail does encourage encryption of POP3 and SMTP. I wonder though how much communication between email servers operates through encrypted SMTP? In general, I figured email to be sent via plain text. Which is why if something is sensitive or super important, email might not be the best medium through which to transmit it.

Protected Post Password

January 10, 2010 in Wordpress by Big Eazy | No comments

I imported all my LiveJournal posts here. Other than posting pictures to there from Flickr, I don’t really use LJ anymore. I rarely even read my friends’ blogs there. Too bad. I still have the teeshirt.

Most of my LJ posts are protected. For this site, I’d rather have them set to private. So the section of Wordpress (Tools > Import > LiveJournal) saying this seemed relevant:

If you have any entries on LiveJournal which are marked as private, they will be password-protected when they are imported so that only people who know the password can see them.

If you don’t enter a password, ALL ENTRIES from your LiveJournal will be imported as public posts in WordPress.

Password protected seemed better than not, so I set a 30 character long password, and the form accepted all 30. When the password didn’t work, I logged in as the administrator user and looked at Publish > Visibility >

In my opinion, web forms in general should prevent the user from entering more characters than the application or database will take. Passwords are very exact, so forms for creating them definitely should not allow extraneous characters.

Making Simple Tags Work in Wordpress 2.9

December 26, 2009 in Wordpress by Big Eazy | No comments

Followed Andy Fore’s instructions on adding WP 2.9 to the whitelist.

The only problem I have so far discovered is Tag the Net doesn’t appear to work. The error:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class services_json in /home/path/wplog/wp-includes/class-json.php on line 115

Looks like Wordpress distributed a new class-json.php. Back in Simple Tags 1.6.5, this specific error was supposedly fixed. My guess is something about Wordpress 2.9 re-broke it.

Disclaimer

December 8, 2009 in Wordpress, Work by Big Eazy | 1 comment

At the request of my boss, I added this disclaimer. Positive things I say here about Blackboard are okay. Negative things require distancing my employer from me so the defamation lawsuit comes to me not them.
:)

This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer.

Integrating With Facebook

October 25, 2009 in Interweb by Ezra S F | No comments

At least a couple years ago, I set up the Facebook Notes app to import this blog’s posts as notes. By setting this up, a number of friends have taking to commenting on my posts. I get far more comments on Facebook than I do here.

However, this was a horrible way to get traffic to this blog.

  1. All of the text and images go into Fb Notes. Nevermind the terms of service. People looking at my blog posts think I wrote it in Facebook. Unless they are observant enough to see “View Original Post” links in tiny text, they have no idea about the blog which was originally the point. When I cross post stuff to multiple blogs I make it obvious the other places it exists.
  2. Embedded videos get stripped from Fb Notes. Lately, I have been posting embedded TED Talks videos here. So I have to think about how to change my posts to accommodate Facebook.

So, I discovered some friends who are also photographers on Facebook use an app called NetworkedBlogs. (They are Flip!Photography, Invisible Green Photography, and Stylized Portraiture.) Once configured, this app will post to my and friends’ (on my behalf) Facebook Walls a link to my wall. The format of the posts look similar to when a link is posted, such as a thumbnail.

The setup is also fairly easy. Enter the location, description, category, and email for your blog. Prove it is yours whether by having others verify it belongs to you or placing code on the site. Finally, go to “Feed Settings” link and click “Auto-publish to personal profile”.

I am hopeful this solves my problem. If so, then I have another blog to setup. (Someone asked to buy that domain. I guess I asked too much for it?)

Site Changes

September 26, 2009 in Wordpress by Big Eazy | No comments

Blog

Upgraded to the Tarski 2.5 theme. Previously I was using the Tarski 2.4.

One of the reasons I like Tarski is the opportunity for a custom header image.  Something I can use of my own. However, like the moo.com cards, finding a photo whose crop to this narrow 720×180 window isn’t so easy. At the moment I am using the train photo. Through the weekend I might try new photos.

wplog_header
Original Tarski Custom Header

IMG_3859 tarski header
Consideration one from my train photo.

IMG_3149 tarski header
Consideration two from my Queen Anne’s lace photo.

IMG_6201 tarski theme
Consideration three from my mushroom photo.

phlox tarski theme
Consideration three from my phlox photo.

Leave a comment if you see something you like.

Splash

I’m thinking of putting the above photo into the splash page as well.

The tacky Facebook profile widget got tackier. So now I have a Flickr widget for a slide show of my Most Interesting 60 photos. So, ya’ll visit the set of the strobist shoot to increase the Interestingness of your favorites into the top 10.

TED Talks:Web as random

September 24, 2009 in Interweb by Ezra S F | No comments

In the first video, The Web as random acts of kindness, the characterization of the founding of the Internet here is a group of high school teenagers working in their garage to altruistically to benefit the world because that is what high functioning nerds do and the world behaves kindly on the Internet because of it. The individuals he means worked as graduate assistants at UCLA on ARPANet. (I was disappointed Jonathan Zittrain failed to say the names of the founders of the Internet. Pretty sure he means Vinton Cerf, Jon Postel, and Steve Crocker.) Sure they were not working for a company. They were working for a university on a grant from the Department of Defense.

They had an amazing freedom which was they didn’t have to make any money on it. The Internet had no business plan, no CEO, no firm responsible singly for building it. Instead it is folks getting together to do something for fun rather than because they were told to or expecting to make money off of it.

The examples certainly seem compelling. However, I fail to see the connection between the architecture of TCP/IP and human small acts of kindness. Instead some examples make the Internet and Wikipedia sound a single step from oblivion. Maybe I am not a pessimist?

The second video, Is the Internet what Orwell feared?, discusses the failure of social media to break down dictatorships. Connectivity * Devices != Democracy. Instead of censoring the bloggers and commenters, give the bloggers the opportunity to see the cleaned up issue. The issue gets dropped because there is no longer a story. The moral is transparency can look nice but not actually result in actual change. Wait… The same thing happens in democracies. Hmmmmm.

Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness

Evgeny Morozov: Is the Internet what Orwell feared?

« Older entries