Posted November 27th, 2007, in: New Media| Technology| Web 2.0
(been meaning to finish this up and post it for a while now)
First, here are some reasons not to do this:
- I may later regret how naive I sound about a particular topic.
- I may later regret giving away details about my life or the lives of others.
- I may later regret making a public record of myself in general, for reasons not covered in the first 2 bullet points.
- Blogging is doing something. Therefore, time and effort are required.
- Blogging is dependent on an infrastructure that at any time could completely collapse, therefore the time and effort I afford this may at any point become a waste.
- Writing, in the technical sense, is not something I am particularly talented at or interested in.
- It is very likely that I will never have much of an audience.
Despite all those great reasons not to waste any time blogging, here are some reasons why I’ve been doing this.
- It’s good for my Brain, kind of like stretching a muscle, to do some writing every day if I can.
- It’s good for my outlook on life to see trails of accomplishment behind me, so as long as I believe in what I’m writing about, blogging should help me to remain happy with myself.
- Increasingly, it is evident that the Web is a Read/Write medium. By taking part in it, I am making it better. Also, as my humble readership grows (and it is growing), I may influence how other people think and help them to discover new ideas. This is a beautiful thing.
- It is valuable to me to be valuable to other people.
- Blogging is making me a better spellr.
- Creating content and then watching what searches people used to find my content and what people are clicking on is very interesting. It’s educational. It is broadening my understanding of people and culture.
- “Have a nice day!” is my final reason.
(isn’t that pretty?)
So far, the Positives are positive enough for me. If the scale should tip the other way, I’ll try to say goodbye before I hang up.
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Posted November 27th, 2007, in: New Media| Technology| Web 2.0
Thanks, Mike Hedge.
Over at a new Blog called ‘Collective Thoughts on Social Media,’ Marty writes
in a post called Gilded Crown of the Hypocritical Social Media Czar
“The sheer propensity of mainstream humans to congregate in targetable, virulent, and roaming electronic social packs has resulted in spawning a beautiful new breed of working class public relations heroes: “The Social Media Czars.”
A social media Czar is a true, brilliant, and presumably selfless influencer whose authority was born out of peoples’ revolt, acute intuition, and holistic intent. Nobody questions him or her. Nobody would dare question them. The problem is that some (not all) social media power brokers are mob-bred mercenaries who are at least partially full of shit. “
Talk about a Rant. That’s great.
The Blog Itself seems to be put together mostly by people who have worked in SEO and SMO, which makes the post itself more of a “C’mon, we all do it!!” than a straight-forward “Bloggers are just as corruptible as anyone else.”
I recommend reading the whole thing for yourself. There’s some spot-on observations in there.
It brings up the question (again):
“Just because a system can be gamed, does that mean it should be gamed?”
the inevetible answer to this question is usually something like:
“Only in a way that I agree with. If you’re gaming the system to promote ideas or products I don’t like, you’re an asshole, but if I like what you’re promoting, then cheating is OK with me.”
This obviously spills over into a debate about ethics on the Web, if you believe there is such a thing. I’m not implying that the point of view of the article is an unethical one, I’m just saying that it’s a debate. It’s a complicated topic with many sides to it.
Ethics.
Are non-Web ethics any easier to navigate?
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Posted November 27th, 2007, in: New Media
I found this there:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdKwRdWocco&rel=1]
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Posted November 27th, 2007, in: Intellectual Property| New Media| Technology| Web 2.0
Mark Cuban recently blogged that he thinks ISPs should block P2P. …Period. His idea being that P2P usage is hogging up all the precious bandwidth, and in turn, slowing down the Web.
I don’t want to bother with taking apart all the things that Mr. Cuban said over there, because I think they’re mostly completely ignorant things to say like
“…To help those of you who cant understand how to distribute audio on Google Video, here is a hint: Re encode it with a little video, a couple pictures, whatever. Then it it wont be an audio file, it will be a video file.. Ta da . You get distribution by the best distribution network on the planet, for free.”
There are so many reasons why that statement makes me want to break something. Oh well
Let me focus on this instead:
Cuban’s point of view reflects some common misconceptions.
Misconception 1: P2P and File-Sharing are a bad things.
Peer-to-Peer, or P2P, describes a number of technologies for using IP to network computers. Of these, some of the most frequently talked about in the mainstream news are the Gnutella Network (Kazaa, Limewire Etc) and BitTorrent.
There are others though. Many, many others. For instance, if you use AIM and while chatting, you decide to send a picture to your buddy, you are using P2P. I’m pretty sure (correct me if I’m wrong) Vonage, Skype and other VOIP services are also examples of P2P.
And in fact, BitTorrent is being used for a number of lawful purposes including legal distribution of software and video and audio content.
“File-Sharing” and “P2P” are very broad terms. Using one of these broad terms when you are referring only to the specific instance of a technology that you do not approve of is misleading and/or ignorant. It’s a bit like referring to pornography websites as “The World Wide Web.”
Misconception 2: There is a shortage of bandwidth.
There is not a shortage of bandwidth. If you consider that practically every one of us has a wire coming into our homes that is carrying 100 channels of full-rez video that are always on, 24 hours a day… Yes, all 100 of them are on all the time even when you’re not watching them… Then you might start to wonder:
“Why do they say we have a bandwidth problem?”
or
“Why are Cable TV and the Internet Separate when with Cable’s speed and the internet’s freedom, [...yada yada...]?”
and eventually you might find yourself thinking about:
“What would happen to the Television Advertising Market if all the TV shows were just watched via the Web? Would that be bad for cable companies or good? Where would all that money go? ”
Or even
“Is it possible that there’s an actual reason that our Internet Connections aren’t fast enough to replace Cable TV yet?”
“Is this like a conspiracy theory or something?”
Now would be a good time to learn a thing or two about theThe Net Neutrality Debate. Pay close attention to what the Cable Companies seem to be after. Can you see what they want to do? Can you see why?
As you observe the bizarre feeding ritual of the greedy cable company, keep in mind, some of us are hogging all your bandwidth with our P2P technologies, so your research might get slowed down a little bit .
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Posted November 26th, 2007, in: Technology| Web Browsers
Firefox makes me feel like I’m working on a PC. Clunky, cartoon-y, Flimsy, un-intuitive crap.
EDIT: If you’re on a PC, I guess you don’t have a choice. You’re probably happy that anything is working at all. Congratulations.
I use it to post here because the WordPress wysiwyg ‘advanced editor’ isn’t available to Safari, and I like being able to drag-resize images. Beyond that, I totally avoid using firefox.
And from what I’ve been hearing, the next version of Firefox is going to be even more screwy. Puke.
I can see why everyone wants to have a bunch of extensions. Some of them are helpful sometimes.
But I can’t help but feel like adding extensions to a browser is the wrong approach. Each one is like a little jerry-rig added in place of a real fix for interactivity between online services and my OS.
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Posted November 20th, 2007, in: Technology| Web 2.0
I recently posted that I thought Tumblr was awesome…
There are things about it that suck though.
No support for back-dated posts.
No refresh feature, in case I realize I should change something once I see it live (which is always the case). In other words, NO EDITING!
Only updates every [random amount of time... could be every half-hour, could be every day (it sucks, whatever it is, and it's completely unreliable)] ??
So, I can’t take Tumblr into account in my workflow when posting something, cause it probably wont show up… And even if it did, I wouldn’t be able to edit it!!
Sucks.
Maybe it will get better.
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Posted November 19th, 2007, in: New Media| Technology| Web 2.0
…and I feel like at any moment I may get struck by lightening or the ground might open up and swallow me. Why do I feel all religion-y about the wikipedia?
Oh yeah! Because it’s awesome. The wikipedia is basically the best site on the Web. And beyond reliably being a tremendously useful source of information on an ever-expanding number of topics, the Wikipedia is also a profound symbol of human tolerance and cooperation.
The Wikipedia, is like a community garden. How we treat it determines its fate and whether or not it continues to be valuable to us.
EDIT:I don’t think my link to myself was too spam-y. Besides, I’m not selling anything here anyhow. Too late. My link was immediately deleted by some sort of guardian of that page. Damn. That was quick!
EDIT 2: Feeling less bashful now, I decided to add a link to myself on the entry for Four Eyed Monsters. Surely that wont get deleted.
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Posted November 18th, 2007, in: New Media| Reviews & Thoughts About Products| Web 2.0
I was asked to make an account on Kompoz. Apparently, this is supposed to help us collaborate on a scoring project.
EDIT: I know it looks like you should be able to click on the upload part of this box… Nope.
I created an account and found the existing project I was supposed to contribute to. But I couldn’t figure out how to contribute! Where’s the upload form?
Meanwhile, I’m being bombarded with pictures of “attractive” people posing with musical instruments.
Puke.
Hate to say it, but this is so not musical. At least not to me. It looks more like a music discovery tool.
OK, fine. I can deal. We musicians need to market ourselves too. But where do I upload this re-edited sample, quantized to 107 BPM? Oh look! She’s kinda pretty.
And a Cover-Flow style album-browsing thing! That’s nice. But… where do I upload this file?
So…
Anyways, I spent more time looking for how to contribute to this ‘project,’ than I did actually manually editing a sample (of a phone being dialed) to make it a consistent tempo, so it can be more easily Re-Cycled etc! I could have easily FTPed it somewhere by now.
I like the idea of an online, social app for music collaboration. This isn’t the idea I like though.
And LastFM seems like a smarter place for an upcoming musician to spend her time building a brand.
Arrgh!!!
It’s like… I came here to work, not to be advertised to! And I can’t seem to get any work done here, so what the fuck is the point?
Maybe I’m missing something. I’ll check back on this service later maybe. Maybe I was just having a bad day for finding upload forms. That’s possible.
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Posted November 16th, 2007, in: Technology
Moving today. Buzzy buzzy buzzy. Just a quickie:
The place I’m moving into doesn’t get reliable coverage from the cellular carrier I just went into a new 1-year contract with.
Shouldn’t there be consumer protections in place for this? I mean there is with a cable TV contract: If you move where they don’t operate, you aren’t charged a cancellation penalty or whatever.
What about my damn Cell phone?
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Posted November 15th, 2007, in: Scam Email Mashups
Attention:
How are you today? Hope all is well with you and family?,You may not understand why this mail came to you.We have been having a meeting for the passed 7 months which ended 2 days ago with the then secretary to the UNITED NATIONS.
This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONS have agreed to compensate them with the sum of US$ 100,000. This includes every foriegn contractors that may have not received their contract sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government probelms etc.We found your name in our list and that is why we are contacting you, this have been agreed upon and have been signed.
You are advised to contact DR. USMEN JAFFARR of CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA PLC , as he is our representative in NIGERIA contact him immediately for your Cheque/ International Bank Draft of USD$ 100,000. This funds are in a Bank Draft for security purpose ok? so he will send it to you and you can clear it in any bank of your choice.Therefore, you should send him your full Name and telephone number/your correct mailing address where you want him to send the Draft to you.Conatct DR USMEN JEFFARR immediately for your Cheque:
Conatct Dr Usmen Jaffarr immediately for your Cheque:Person to Contact DR USMEN JEFFARR
Email: usmanjeffer010@ubbi.com
Phone: 234 80 84256666
Thanks and God bless you and your family.Hoping to hear from you as soon as you cash your Bank Draft.Making the world a better place
Regards,
Mr. Kofi Annan
Former Secretary (UNITED NATIONS)
MORE SCAM EMAIL MASHUPS.
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