Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: web site

  • Should CS Be Required?

    Each of the nearly 2,000 freshmen entering Georgia Institute of Technology each year must take a computer science course regardless of their major, says Charles Isbell, associate dean for academic affairs at the school’s College of Computing… Similar to traditional general education requirements such as philosophy or world history, the purpose of each courses is to turn out…

  • Social Ghost Archetypes

    I met Allie for the second time at a birthday party. The birthday girl is a Social Tech Ghost. Allie is a Pseudonym Surfer and former Dunbarian. Another person at the party is an Infrequent Checker. I decided these remain legitimate strategies to keep from getting drawn into spending too much time online. Since I like…

  • Curious Traffic Spike

    I glanced at my Google Analytics stats for this site and noticed a huge traffic spike. Somehow my TED Talk: We Are All Cyborgs post landed Bing’s number two spot and Google’s number three spot for “ted talk we are all cyborgs” a couple days ago. Normal for a Tuesday is something like 650 visits.…

  • DDoS of Social Media

    Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and other sites all admitted to suffering from a DDoS attack. It seem to me the purpose of a Denial-of-Service attack (DoS) against a web site is to flood it with so much traffic the site becomes unusable. The DDoS is where multiple other computers are coordinated into launching the attack. All…

  • Tell Michael Chasen

    From a January 13, 2009 email from Michael Chasen to the customers: Please share any feedback with me directly at a Web site created for just that purpose called Tell Michael Chasen.  I will personally read every message I get, so please let me know what you think. That page in the email is no…

  • Little Changes

    Flipping channels, I ran across Deep Impact during a speech given by the president (played by Morgan Freeman). The black president didn’t amaze me. Hollywood figured out how to portray them a decade before the US figured out how to elect one. What amazed me is that with all the really cool forward looking technology…

  • The LMS is So Web 1.5

    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…

  • Blame It on Oprah

    Ev said, “To those asking: Site slowness today had nothing to do with @Oprah.” Social networks are amusing and fun at times. I’m just a fan of moderation. Too much of anything will ruin it. Ever since Twitter became the new Golden Tool of PR, I knew it would be a matter of time. Friends and…

  • LMS Security

    This morning there was a flurry of effort to locate an article called “Hacking WebCT.” My coworker was able to locate it. We were disappointed.  The main points of the article were: Lazy administrators make compromising user accounts easy. Lazy instructors make getting questions for assessments easy. These apply to any LMS. So, here is some…