Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 03/04/2009 - 07:45
EntreCard Top Dropper Map
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/03/2009 - 09:10Every day bloggers visit other blogs and drop their ‘EntreCard’ on the blog. At the end of every month, many of those same bloggers put up blog posts about the people that have dropped the most cards on them. I’ve written similar posts in the past.
However, I thought it would be interesting to create a map showing the relationship of different card dropping bloggers. I’ve selected the list of ‘top droppers’ from various blogs and created a graph of them using GraphViz. I’ve shrunk down the size so the picture fits nicely in this blog post, which makes it hard to read the blog names.
However, if you mouse-over the blog, you will see the name, at least for most of the blogs, and if you click, it will take you to the blog. Near the middle is Orient Lodge. From the spoke connecting, you can get a sense of the other blogs that are most connected.
Where’s the Beef, Mr. Simmons?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 03/02/2009 - 14:41In an Op-Ed in the New London Day, Former Congressman Rob Simmons asks, Is This A Stimulus For The Government Or For The Economy?. It might have been an interesting rhetorical question if it didn’t present false dichotomies. Mr. Simmons seems to be working from the false assumption that Government spending cannot be good for the economy. I hope he is never back in Congress because I suspect many of his former constituents benefited greatly from the Government spending on submarines.
He goes on to ask,
How did Congress conclude that spending hundreds of billions of our tax dollars on thousands of pet projects will stimulate our consumer economy?
Perhaps, it is because of looking at projects like Government spending on submarines and how the money paid to workers at Electric Boat was spent by them, as consumers, in the local economy. He continues his line of questions by asking,
If consumer spending is the goal, why not give every American taxpayer a debit card worth $10,000 with six months to spend it on consumer items.
Hopefully, however, consumer spending isn’t the sole goal. Hopefully, we have politicians that are willing to put country first and commit to projects that will make our country stronger and more secure. This strength is likely to come not only from submarines built in Groton, but also from having better roads to make transportation more efficient, from better schools to make our future workers and leaders more competitive, and from more efficient use of renewable energy to decrease our dependence on oil from instable regions.
Yes, such spending will also have the benefit of putting people to work and giving them the means to increase their own consumer spending, further strengthening our economy, but that is not, and should not be the sole goal.
He then goes on to complain about the amount spent not being enough to “even pay to replace the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge”. It sort of reminds me of a joke from an old Woody Allen film. Two elderly people are at a resort in the Catskills and one complains that the food is horrible. The other chimes in, agreeing, and complains that the portions are too small as well.
So, what is it Mr. Simmons? Do you have any real ideas about how to make our country stronger, or are you going to just complain that the servings are horrible, and too small as well. Or, to borrow another line from years ago, “Where’s the beef?”
Building A Social Network Contact Management System
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 03/02/2009 - 11:16As my number of followers on Twitter approach 2000, Friends on Facebook approach 1,000 and the number of social networking sites I’m on approach 100, I need to find a better way to manage my networks and my contacts within these networks. I can’t find a good tool, so perhaps I need to build it myself.
Let me start off by describing what I am looking for. I would like a nice, easy to use tool that would list all of my contacts along with what networks they are in. As an example, many of my followers on Twitter are also friends on Facebook. My contacts on DandyID, overlap on an average of thirty social networks each.
DandyID comes the closest to the first part of what I would like my Social Network Contact Management system to do. However, it is still in its early stages and the only people I know there are the experimenters. I would like something that includes everyone from all my networks. In addition, while it does provide an API, it doesn’t provide easy tools to act upon the information. As an example, I’d love to be able to pick any social network and find out which of my overall contacts are on that specific social network that have not yet connected with. MyBlogLog also provides a very nice cross reference list of different social networks my contacts are in, which I can retrieve in a FOAF file, and several other sites provide similar information.
Yet this only gets to the first half of what I would like my social network contact management system to do. The next part is to keep track of my contacts. Part of this would include the sort of social network aggregation that a site like FriendFeed does.
I would like to be able to see all of the content that my contacts have recently put up. Ideally, it would combine duplicates. For example, I use sites like ping.fm, HelloTxt, and Posterous to send the same message to multiple sites. Also, some sites have the ability to feed or pull posts between their network and other networks. When you put all of this together it can get pretty complicated, as seen in the Social Media Map that I created last summer.
Yet more importantly, I want to know when I’ve actually contacted someone in my online social media meta network. When did I last sent them a tweet, retweet something they wrote, write on their Facebook wall, send them a message or give them a call? Whom haven’t I contacted recently that I really should contact? Do I have other notes about them that are important? Who are their friends and relatives online? When are their birthdays? How do they fit into whatever my goals are in using social networks?
To push it even more, I would like to add information such as whether I’ve visited or commented on their blog recently, or whether they’ve shown up on my blog, as noted by tools like dropping EntreCards, or showing up in recent readers lists like those provided by MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog.
Some of this is the standard sort of things that a good customer relationship management system does. I briefly looked at CiviCRM
What do you think? Are you looking for a tool something like this? Are there other things that I should consider? Are there tools out there that come close to this? Feedback is greatly appreciated. I’ve already come up with some initial design ideas which I will share later, perhaps incorporating some of the feedback I get.
Lions, and Rabbits, and Bears
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 03/01/2009 - 10:57I start another month with the childhood invocation to bring about luck or fortune, and like I did last month, add other animals into the mix. Last month, it was the groundhog, the prognosticator of the season who told us we would have six more weeks of winter.
The first few weeks, here in Connecticut were fairly mild, but it seems like the groundhog has gotten to getter with the lion. March, you will recall, is said to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. Well, we have a winter storm watch, bringing us the winter weather the groundhog predicted coming in like the lion.
Yet these winter advisories didn’t stop the Scum Beach Polar Bear Club from taking a dip yesterday. As we were driving home from a cold windy picnic at a park in Guilford, we saw a large group of people gathered on a beach. It was the Scum Beach Polar Bear Club gathering for their yearly party. I’ve put a few pictures up on Flickr and hope to have more up soon, as well as some reflections on the party.
Polar bears are not the only bears that have been seen around recently. The bears have also been dominating the markets on Wall Street. Will the Obama administration come in with a bear and go out with a bull? We shall have to see.
For some reason, it makes me think back to the late seventies when President Ford launched his Whip Inflation Now campaign. People would take the WIN buttons and flip them upside down to get NIM, No Immediate Miracles. President Obama is warning us against expecting immediate miracles, but I sure hope to that we can flip the no immediate miracles into a win.
So, another month starts. It isn’t the cruelest month, that is coming, but we have a foreshadow of what is to come, memory and desire.
