Archive - Apr 2008
April 24th
Social Network Fatigue
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/24/2008 - 12:33Yesterday, I was in meetings and mostly offline for much of the day, so my unread emails have sky rocketed again. On top of that, I was told about two new social networking tools yesterday I want to explore.
The first is SpokeO. I kicked it around for a while, but so far, I’ve been pretty unimpressed with it.
The second is onaswarm. This site is overwhelmingly cool. I played with it for a while last night. It is supposed to support OpenID, but I tried to log in with OpenID today, and it said they weren’t accepting any new users. I guess they got swamped last night. Perhaps I can find how to associate my OpenID with my existing account.
It did go out and import 18 social networks that I’m part of. Today, it is asking for validation of a couple of them. The validation is returning blank pages, but seems to have worked. Well, it is a beta, after all.
When I go out to explore my contacts, well, that is where it starts go get overwhelming. It pulls in friends list from various sites, as well as picks up microformat tags. With that, it picks up over sixty sites that are identified as ‘me’. It grabbed another hundred general sites. It grabbed about a hundred from Livejournal and about 350 from Twitter. Other sites will a small number of friends added about another hundred althogether. These sites included Blogger, buzznet, Jaiku, last.fm, Myspace, Pounce, StumbleUpon, Tribe, Typepad, Upcoming and Vox .
Some of these sites over lap, although onaswarm doesn’t seem to recognize these overlaps yet. In my case, there was also some interesting stratification of the social networks. One group of friends were people that I knew from LambdaMOO. Many of them ended up on Livejournal and Tribe. Then, there were my friends from the 2004 presidential cycle. Some of them also show up in places like Livejournal and Tribe. Others of them have remained more active or connected than some of my old MOO friends.
It was curious that onaswarm brought in only two of my friends from StumbleUpon. I checked and saw that I had closer to a dozen. I also saw that a lot of people added me as friends on StumbleUpon that I haven’t added as friends yet. So, I spent a little time updating that. Now, if only I can figure out how to get onaswarm to recheck my updated friends on StumbleUpon.
One thing that I liked was the way onaswarm sorted my friends, by network, and then by name. I know that people have been looking for nice ways to get a sorted list of people they are following on Twitter. Onaswarm seems to do that.
The friend adding was slow, tedious, and didn’t really seem to bring much benefit. The sorting of entries in the feed didn’t seem to work all that well, and I’ve already got enough different sites that do this. What is interesting is that onaswarm, as well as many of the other friend feed type sites make their feeds available via RSS, so you can subscribe to them on other systems.
As I wrote in A maze of twisty little passages, all alike and Tracking the Twisty Mazes, there are all kinds of interesting and potentially horribly confusing things you can do in trying to link all of this together. Onaswarm just takes it to one more level.
So, I’ll poke around onaswarm a bit more when I don’t have hundreds of unread emails waiting for me, as well as a fun conference coming up.
Over on Twitter, a few people have been asking who is going to #PodcampNYC. If only I could get Onaswarm to check out who is going to be at Podcamp and come of with a list of people to say hello to.
Aleady, I know quite a few friends and fellow twitterers that will be there: Faye Anderson, Joyce Bettencourt (@rhiannonsl), Christine Cavalier (@PurpleCar), Tom Guarriello (@tomguarriello), Chris Hambly (@audio), Noel Hidalgo (@noneck), Dean Landsman (@deanland), Joshua Levy ( @levjoy), Drew Olanoff, Heath Row (@h3athrow), Liza Sabater (@blogdiva).
So, hopefully, I will rally and find the energy for all this social networking, not to mention, catching up
April 23rd
Amann Retiring?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/23/2008 - 12:35I'm in a meeting in New York, but I just got a call from Kim saying that Speaker of the Connecticut Assembly, Jim Amann is not running for re-election. I didn't get a chance to get details.
Update: It is also being reported at
cthouserules, CTNewsJunkie, MyLeftNutmeg, as well as My diary on MyLeftNutmeg
Changemaker of the Week at Change.org
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/23/2008 - 05:59Yesterday, I was found out that change.org has named me their ‘Changemaker of the Week’. I was pretty excited about that.
Change.org is a social activism portal aimed at connecting people with similar interests so that they can work together for more effective actions. When I stumble across a cause that I’m interested in, Change.org is one of the first places I go to look for more information about the cause and who else is interested. In addition, when someone contacts me about an issue I try to help them connect with others on change.org
I guess it is this approach that has helped me become the Changemaker of the Week, because I don’t do anything out of the ordinary in my activism. Yet perhaps, that is an important part of the message. Meaningful activism can be very simple changes; letting other people know about good causes and good organizations trying help these causes, and then making small changes that combined with the actions of others can have a big effect.
One example is Project Laundry List.
Project Laundry List uses words, images, and advocacy to educate people about how simple lifestyle modifications, including air-drying one's clothes, reduce our dependence on environmentally and culturally costly energy sources.
Other actions have been as simple as letting people know about interesting organizations, like Council for a Livable World or Great Strides Therapeutic Riding.
Whatever change you would like to see in the world, Change.org is a great place to start.
April 22nd
Mark Kingdon to become new Linden Lab CEO
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/22/2008 - 19:58At the Metanomics session Monday the 21st, Mitch Wagner of Information Week and Gartner Fellow Steve Prentice expressed concerns about the future of Second Life. As a business collaboration tool, it is loosing ground to competitors like QWAQ.
Yet the back channel seemed more concerned with whether or not Mitch at Steve were analyzing Linden Lab properly. Is Second Life an application that needs to be constrained? Is it a platform that can serve many applications? Is it a community based upon a platform? Much of this will be questions that need to be answered by the new CEO.
Today, the new CEO was announced. His name is Mark Kingdon. He has been CEO at Organic, a leading online marketing firm, since 2001. During his time there Organic doubled in size.
Everyone is pouring over comments Mark has made, blog posts, interviews, etc., to get a sense about what he will bring to Second Life. Yet the view of what Linden Lab was looking for can be found in an interview Philip Rosedale did with Reuters in March where he said they were “someone who has experience with and a passion for growing this type of company — a software platform company.”
Presently, residents of Second Life expressed cautious optimism, waiting to see what sort of changes Kingdon will bring. Some of this reflects the different views about what Second Life is all about that different residents have.
A good summary of Mark’s background, and some of his articles can be found at ClickZ
The blog post from Linden Lab about Mark can be found here.
Doc Wiley
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 04/22/2008 - 10:54I originally set up Orient Lodge to be ‘A literary outpost on the Internet’; a place where I would post not only commentary and news, but also fiction and poetry. Over the years, I haven’t written as much fiction or poetry as I would like. Yet last night, a story came to me, which I’ve written down this morning. All the standard disclaimers apply. This is a first draft. It is loosely based on real experiences I’ve had, but it is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real people is coincidental.
