Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Internet

  • TED Talk: Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

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    The tumult in Iran is huge news of late. As a Baha’i, news of the persecution of Baha’s in Iran has stepped up because of the Internet. Stories crossed the ocean through email. News agencies almost never picked up these stories. As fast as the Iran government could shut down CNN and NYT and BBC…

  • Facebook Usernames

    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…

  • Awful Chatter

    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…

  • Comment Spam Resumes

    Have spammers figured out how to pick reCAPTCHA‘s lock? All of a sudden I am getting hundreds of comment spam blocked by Akismet. When I added reCAPTCHA, it dropped to a few a month. Now 409 in a week. Guess this is why layers of security are good. UPDATE: Scanned through for false positives. The…

  • TED Talk: Brewster Kahle builds a free digital library

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    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.”

  • Expression Costs

    (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…

  • The LMS is So Web 1.5

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    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…

  • The Twitter Timesink

    Glenn asked: “What is it about Twitter that makes it more of a time sink than Facebook?” I consider a time sink something where I invest a high value of time for boring and poor value. My contacts mostly duplicate in Twitter what they provide in Facebook. The time I spend reading Twitter posts I’ve…

  • Week Two Almost No Twitter

    Since I cut back on Twitter, my sneezypb account’s password was changed to something completely random and unknown to me. Tweetdeck was uninstalled. Most of the few on my subscription list I still need to follow now reside in my RSS reader for now. Productive? Check. We tell real stories instead of how talk about…