Archive - Feb 2010
February 14th
The #N900 Bobsled in an Open Source Mobile Virtual World Experience
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 02/14/2010 - 10:38Between watching events in the Olympics, I played a few games on my Nokia N900 and it occurred to me that the game waiting to be made is the #N900 Bobsled run. Let me present a few videos to give you an idea about what I have in mind.
First, there is this video of the bobsled run from a first person point of view:
Then, there is this sample game that comes on the Nokia N900:
Could Bounce evolve to use a Bobsled track? Even better, could it evolve to use various Bobsled tracks from different virtual worlds? This idea comes from reading about the announced release of Naali, an open source virtual world viewer that might port nicely to the N900. Of course the Naali viewer would need enhancements to take advantage of the accelerometer. Discussions about this are already taking place.
To push it even further, what about slalom racing in virtual worlds where the competitors use accelerometer enabled mobile devices? I want to go the sports bar where people bring their N900’s and race each other this way. Each racer sees their own view of the track on their N900s and the participants watch the race on a big screen over the bar.
What I like about OpenSim, the virtual world platform often used with Naali, Naali itself and the N900 environment is that they are all open source and combined they could provide an great platform for an incredible open source mobile virtual world experience.
February 13th
Using Google Analytics API and PHP to Ghostbust EntreCard
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 02/13/2010 - 13:36The EntreCard community has been all abuzz about ‘cheaters’ or ‘ghost droppers’ on EntreCard. These are people who somehow record with EntreCard that they’ve visited your site when they actually haven’t. I wrote a little bit about this in my entry Cheating at EntreCard and Finding Real Top Droppers. In that blog post, I suggested using Google Analytics to see who Google recognizes as visiting your site from your EntreCard drop box.
Since then, I’ve been using these analytics to visit those people that come to my website via the EntreCard Dropbox and visit the most pages. With that, I’ve seen more EntreCard based traffic over the past couple days than I have in nearly a year. Some of that may be simply because of the buzz about EntreCard ghosts and my current rise in popularity on EntreCard. However, it does seem like a useful strategy.
People have asked if my process could be automated, and I’m starting to work on automating it. Details are provided below. In addition, people have suggested it might be good to come up with a Quality Dropper list. Using what I’ve written so far, I can come up with the quality droppers, in terms of the number of page views, that I see. However, I could make this more useful if I had similar data from other sites. If you’re interested in submitting your own data, there are a couple different approaches.
One method, for a simple one time analysis, you could go to the Google Analytics page for your site. Click on Traffic Sources, Referring Sites, and EntreCard in the list. Set Show Rows to 500 to get the most data, and then click on Export TSV. Send the Tab Separated Values file to me and I’ll add it to my analysis. For ongoing analysis, if you give me read access to the Google Analytics for your page I can include your site in the automated analytics I’m building.
Send your TSV file to aldon.hynes at orient-lodge.com, or give the same address read access to your Google Analytics User Manager and drop me a note about it.
For those who want to build their own automated analytics, here is how I’ve been approaching it:
February 12th
#cttu – Aldon Hynes, Internet Novelist
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/12/2010 - 09:46It’s five o’clock on a Thursday and the usual crowd is driving to the CT Tweet Crawl. It is a diverse group of people that gather every so often who are united by little more than their common use of Twitter. I’ve been going to Tweet Crawls, Tweetups, and other social media gatherings for years. It used to be much more geeks talking about some wild idea for a new website. The content producers started showing up, the bloggers, podcasters, and videobloggers. Finally, the marketing people caught on with their nice suits and a chance to exchange business cards.
I’m listening to All Things Considered on the radio as I drive up. They are talking about William Faulkner and I think about novel writing. Every year I give National Novel Writing Month a try, and one year I completed the novel, but never got around to editing it.
I’m thinking to myself, “What do I have to say to this upcoming gathering? What do they have to say to me?” I anticipate the first question I will hear from many people, “So, what do you do?” I eat, I drink, I sleep, sometimes I write or manage to find interesting technology projects that pay the bills, but that isn’t concise enough for this crowd and people won’t want to swap cards with me. I could say that I’m quick with a joke, or to light up a smoke but people would then assume that there’s some place that I’d rather be.
Years ago, I spoke with my daughter’s kindergarten class about what I do. It occurred to me that the best way to describe what I do is to say that I “help people tell their stories online.” With this in mind, the words of William Faulkner rattling around in my head and a little Billy Joel somehow slipping in, I decided on my new job description. “I’m an Internet Novelist”.
Yeah, it’s a little different from Bill’s friend the Real Estate Novelist. I’ve had time for a wife, although she may sometimes get frustrated at the amount of time that I am online. So, at the TweetCrawl, I use the phrase. I get polite nods as people seem to get it, exchange business cards and move on. Only one person seems to object. He points out that novels are supposed to be long form fiction. A lot of social media is very short form, and by novel standards, even a long blog post is short form. In addition, social media people are supposed to be writing about what is really going on, not some fiction.
While I’m a big advocate of truth and authenticity online, it seems as if a good social media presence is concerned with the narrative, with taking all the bits and pieces of life and weaving it into an interesting story. Hopefully, the story isn’t fiction, but becomes true in the telling of the story.
So, there you have it. I’ve told my story of being an Internet Novelist, and hopefully telling this story makes it a little bit true. It certainly made the discussions at the CT Tweetup more interesting. On the way home, I listened to Fresh Air as Terry Gross interviewed Loudon Wainwright. He talked some about his father being a journalist for Life magazine and how he had bought into the notion that you need to write a book to be a serious writer. Maybe I’ll end up buying into the same notion, but until then I’ll keep up my various forms of internet writing and hope to weave them into interesting stories.
February 11th
Cheating at EntreCard and Finding Real Top Droppers
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 12:44Yesterday, Martin at Corneymans Money-Blog wrote a blog post about EntreCard members getting scammed. Specifically, he noted that even after he removed the EntreCard widget from his website, several people continued to drop cards on that website.
For those not acquainted with EntreCard, it is a system where you have a widget on your site with an advertisement for another participating member. EntreCard members that visit your site can ‘drop a card’ on your site by clicking on the widget. Every time they do this, they get a credit, and then use the credits to put up advertisements up on other people’s sites.
Martin wondered how people could drop cards on a site that doesn’t have a widget. He accused people who have done that of ‘cheating’. I suggested that while this shouldn’t be happening, it is a bit of a leap to call such people cheaters. It could be a bug with EntreCard or something else we don’t fully understand.
Martin went on to provide an example of how people could cheat on EntreCard by posting just the part of the widget necessary to drop a card. It appears as if EntreCard has fixed this part of the problem since that now shows up as ‘Invalid’. However, it does not address the bigger part of the problem. In theory, anyone could post anyone else’s widget on their own site. They could even set up a page with the widget of the top hundred sites they wish to drop on. It may well be that EntreCard has come up with some code to address this, but I didn’t want to do extensive testing and end up setting off triggers at EntreCard.
Whether or not people have been dropping cards on people without widgets as a form of cheating, because of some bug, or simply using some dropping tool they don’t fully understand, it does seem that the number of drops, and the drops in the inbox are not as accurate as we would like. So, what can be done about this?
Using Google Analytics, I checked out the traffic coming to my site from EntreCard. Specifically, I went to Traffic Sources, Referring Sites, and clicked on EntreCard. I found that the top two pages where from the Category Browser, and from my details page. The remaining 370 pages were from people’s inboxes.
For obvious security reasons, you cannot go to other people’s inboxes. However, if you use their userid, you can get to their details at http://entrecard.com/user_details/nnnn where nnnn is their userid. As an example, my user detail page is http://entrecard.com/user_details/11692. With that, and a little poking around I could find out who came to my site and visited the most pages from their drop in box. It is worth noting that this is not necessarily related to how often they drop on me. In some cases people would come from their inbox to my site a couple times a day. Some would visit multiple pages on each visit. To me, this is much more interesting. These are the people who are engaged with my website.
With that, let me highlight a few of them. At the top of the list was Doctor Faustroll Writes the Wrongs.. Coming in second was First Door on the Left, which is a blog I love to visit as well. Third was One World Realty. In fourth was Moms Lifestyle. Rounding out the top five was The Last Bear.
This was a surprising and interesting list to me and I expect I’ll spend more time visiting sites that rank high on the page visits instead of how many cards they drop on me.
Am I concerned about possible cheating at EntreCard? Yeah, a little bit. I would much rather have visitors that come and read what I’m writing, than those who drop cards on me, perhaps without even visiting my site. However every card dropped on me does boost my popularity on EntreCard, so even those visits are not completely meaningless.
If there is cheating going on, I hope the folks at EntreCard fix it so it stops. More importantly, I hope people read my blog and that I continue to find other interesting blogs to read.
What do you think?
February 10th
CT Underhound Railroad, Half a Year Later
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 14:19Last August, Fiona and I gave a ride to a young pit bull rescued from the Hartford Pound. It took the efforts of several people to save the young dog.
First, Sherry, an animal control officer in Hartford reached out to people that might be able to help. A woman in Maine had a place where the dog could be fostered, if there was some way to get her up to Maine. Fiona and I couldn’t drive up on the day that the dog needed to be picked up from the pound, so another person pulled the dog from the Hartford Pound and took her over to the Sadie Mae Foundation where she stayed for a couple days. Finally, Fiona and I picked her up and drove her up to Maine. Another woman picked her up from us and brought her to her foster home. Eventually, she found her forever home.
After the trip, I set up a mailing list for the CTUnderhound Railroad. Over the past half year, we’ve set up a website, a group and fan page on Facebook and have touched the lives of many dogs. As we look at our next half year, we’ve been thinking back over the past half year, and how we can be most effective.
Besides finding homes for dogs in need, we also need to work to make sure that there are fewer dogs that end up in the shelters, and we’ve worked hard to encourage spay and neuter programs. We also want to encourage town animal shelters to adopt best practices to make sure that these dogs find safe homes as quickly as possible.
The group has worked together to create a spreadsheet of town shelters as well as to reach out to various animal control officers. Currently, we are listing the Petfinder pages of forty-four town shelters on the CT Underhound Railroad Shelters Page.
This morning, I did a quick census of dogs on these pages. I counted 125 different dogs of twenty eight different breeds in these shelters looking for homes. Almost half of them are pit bulls. Pit bulls can be wonderful pets when they are properly taken care of, and I hope that people looking for a new pet seriously consider adopting a pit bull. However, I realize that for some people that is not an option and there are many other wonderful dogs in the shelter of Connecticut. If you are looking, please spend time looking through this list and seeing if there is dog that meets your needs.
The first half year of the CT Underhound Railroad has been more successful than I ever imagined it would be when we first started, and hopefully the second half of our first year will be even more so.
