Technology
Entries related to technology.
Keen and Kafka
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/24/2007 - 22:13Being the web 2.0 aficionado that I am, Andrew Keen’s book, “The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture” has bothered me. To a certain extent, I felt that it was because of his fundamental lack of understanding about the nature of authority and credentials. Yet I have just read the interchange between Mr. Keen and David Weinberger as posted on the web by the Wall Street Journal.
Tom Guarriello sums it up nicely here. Yet as I read the interchange a different thought occurred to me. Keen asks the question, “Is Web 2.0 a dream or a nightmare? Is it a remix of Disney's "Cinderella" or of Kafka's "Metamorphosis"?” He continues this metaphor, holding up Disney as the sought after cultural icon and Kafka as that which should be avoided.
If today’s Internet is killing our culture by causing content creators to be more like Kafka then like the Disney Corporation, then I dedicate this blog post to all the Kevorkianesque bloggers out there.
Or, to do my own Kafkaesque mashup, “Someone must have traduced Andrew K…”
The Cult of the Amateur and the Democratic Debates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/23/2007 - 17:32This evening will be the Youtube/CNN debate. The pundits are all weighing in on how important this debate will be. TechPresident has a summary of views here.
It seems as if there are two determining factors. The first is whether you are a new or old media sort of person. New media people generally think it will be important. Old media people think it won’t be. People who want to see ‘professionals’ handling our political discourse, those who like Keen’s Cult of the Amateur think it won’t be. Those who believe in Jeffersonian democracy think it will be important.
That is, of course, leads to the second factor. Will CNN gatekeep the debate too closely? That is the factor that causes some new media fans to worry that the event won’t be successful. Yet for people that want a more democratic democracy, to poke a little further fun at Mr. Keen, two candidates will open the gates a little wider, no matter how well or poorly CNN does.
Sen. Edwards and Sen. Dodd are both going to be answering questions from supporters and the Community Counts website. After the televised debate is over Sen. Edwards will answer additional questions on his website, while Sen. Dodd will do the same on his.
As an aside, I read Dodd’s email immediately after I read one of those endless spam emails telling me where I could buy medications that would make me “the most confident man in town”. Dodd’s email was entitled “Sometimes sixty seconds isn’t enough”. I almost skipped it, thinking it was more of the same.
So, is democracy something that we should leave to the professionals, or do we believe that all citizens should have a voice in the political process? After seeing the way the mainstream media is covering the election so far, with its focus on fundraising, haircuts, polls and not on issues, it will be pretty hard for the amateurs to do a worse job than we’ve seen so far.
Lots of stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/23/2007 - 12:57Health
I had another appointment with the allergist today. In a nutshell, I’m allergic to shrimp and dust and should avoid them. If I have a strong reaction, antihistamines should be fine. Kim’s Lyme disease has been acting up and she’s back on antibiotics. Miranda sprained her ankle playing ultimate Frisbee at camp. Fortunately, it was the day after the first dance. I spoke with her last night and her arms are sore from the crutches, but she is in good spirits. My mother will have knee surgery in about a week. One of my friends has a bad infection which she had a year ago, and it has returned. Another is going in for a hysterectomy in a week. A third friend lost her mother to cancer this week.
With many of these cases, there have been issues one way or another with insurance and how things get paid for. All of this provides a good setting for me to go see Sicko. The Working Family Party in Connecticut has a great idea. Ask your State Legislators to go see Sicko with you. It would be good to get more of the Legislators to see the movie. At the same time, it would be good for more people simply to learn who their State Legislators are. I remember when Kim ran for State Rep and I heard a statistic that 85% of Americans don’t know who their State Rep is. Do you? Have you ever gone to a movie your State Rep?
Technology and the move
Most people get in touch with me via an email address that comes as part of my Internet service from my cable company. I’ve had this email address for many years. I’m on many mailing lists and in many address books with this email address. I’ve also used it for signing up for many social networks. We expect to move during the month of August, probably to an area served by a different cable company, so my email address of many years is about to go away. So, I’m starting to change as many subscriptions ahead of time as possible, and get as many people using a new email address.
I’ve had email addresses at Google and Yahoo! for years and I check them from time to time. You can use those addresses by simply changing the name of my ISP to yahoo.com or gmail.com in email address. The college I went to provides email addresses for alumni and I check that address from time to time. For that, you can use my first initial, my last name and the year I would have graduated at alumni.wooster.edu
However, I am encouraging most people to contact me at an email address I’ve set up to go with this blog. Simply use the domain name of the blog, and add my firstname, a dot, and my last name as the beginning of the address.
Unfortunately, this morning, my domain was down because of a hosting problem. It has since been resolved, but it gave me a scare.
Technology and social networks
As part of the email address transition, I updated my profile at Plaxo. I was pleased to see that they now include OpenID. I’ll see what I can do with that a little later.
I’ve also added my new email address as a contributor to my ”blogger” blog. At some point, I’ll update that blog to use the new templates.
I’ve also started kicking around new, at least to me, social networks. One is Blogcave. You’ll see my recent readers widget on the right near the bottom. So far, I haven’t seen anything that Blogcave does that MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and BumpZee doesn’t already do. I figure sometime soon we will see a shake out in this space similar to what we saw with click exchanges.
I’ve also added OthersOnline. Again, it is similar to MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, BumpZee as well as BlogCave and Criteo. It works primarily on tagging, so is a little closer to having something unique. I’ll search some of the links they come up with.
Lijit is an interesting site that I’ve stumbled across. It does web searches based on what you’ve found interesting in social networks. Think Rapleaf for searches. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get their widget to work properly. I’ll kick that around more later.
Travels
On top of trying to figure out my next job and moving, I’ve got a bunch of traveling coming up. This Thursday, we’ll be going up to Falcon Ridge for the weekend. It is a folk festival we’ve gone to for years. The following Thursday is whenYearlyKos starts. Like Falcon Ridge, it will go from Thursday through Sunday. I’ll probably attend it in Second Life.
However, starting on that Sunday, is the National Conference of State Legislatures annual conference. It is up in Boston and I’ve applied for press credentials. It goes through Thursday. However, Wednesday I am planning to speak in Connecticut about blogging. Once that is all done, it is back home to deal with packing and moving. I’m hoping we’ll have some friends and relatives around to help with that.
Getting rid of stuff
As we prepare to move, we are going to be getting rid of a lot of stuff through many different venues. Some stuff we will give to charities. Other stuff we will try to sell online, perhaps through sites like eBay and Craigslist, as well as some specialized lists. Some stuff we’ll give away through Freecycle, and in the end we may have an estate sale, and/or just get some junk removal company to come take things. So, if you’re interested things from the house, let us know.
Other Stuff
My latest graph of MyBlogLog surfing is up on Flickr. Stop by if you’re interested.
I’ve also recently added a bunch of sermons that I’ve received via email to the Stamford Independent site that got set up a long time ago, but never really gained traction. There’s some good stuff there if you like reading sermons.
So, that’s it right now at the Hynes household. Lots of stuff.
Technology tidbits
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 07/18/2007 - 09:10dk2 invited me to Pownce. I’ve signed up, looked around, and so far, it looks like yet another Twitter or Jaiku. It uses Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) to run an application on your desktop. Unfortunately, AIR doesn’t run on my old NT based machine. Perhaps I’ll try it on a different machine later. Until then, I’m not sure I’m seeing that it does much. It doesn’t even seem to have RSS so that I can link it nicely to A maze of twisty little passages, all alike . If you use Pownce and can tell me what I’m missing, please do.
A week ago, Kevin Makice pointed me to Remember the Milk. It is a simple, well done task list. It integrates with netvibes, Twitter, Google Calendars, and can be accessed from your cellphone (although not by text messages, other than via Twitter, as far as I can tell). It also has an API and third party services. I don’t use task lists a lot right now, but it does look like a neat tool.
Over on Orient Lodge, I was checking various logs and found that Google was crawling over forty different pages with the path ‘browse/Office2003Blue’. The problem is that I don’t use OfficeBlue so they were all not found. I added a Deny line for Google searching the browse subdirectory. As I searched around, I found workfriendly.net. Apparently a lot of people have been using OfficeBlue on workfriendly.net to search different sites. It looks like it does proxying and strips out photographs, which might not be work friendly.
Beyond that, it appears that OfficeBlue is often used for spamming or phishing. There was a brief mention of it on Drupal.org, and I came across an anti-phishing site, http://www.phishtank.com/.
PhishTank is a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the Internet. Also, PhishTank provides an open API for developers and researchers to integrate anti-phishing data into their applications at no charge.
It looks like an interesting tool.
One final technology tidbit for this morning Alexa has finally gotten around to a Firefox Toolbar. As I’ve noted before, Alexa isn’t the most reliable ranking system. Anyone who uses it seems to have abnormally higher ratings for their own websites, which is part of the reason why I’ve been rating higher than some of the Presidential candidates. I’ve added the Alexa Firefox toolbar. So far so good.
Managing online identities
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/16/2007 - 15:52I’ve had some interesting discussions recently about online identities and how we manage them or fail to manage them. An example of this is that a friend of mine was taking a train home from work. He fired up his laptop and logged into Facebook. The young woman next to him said, “I can’t believe your on Facebook”. I suggested that he should have told her, “Yeah, a lot of us check out Facebook and MySpace profiles before we interview anyone.
Even people who think a lot about the searchability of persistent online data can be surprised what can be done with online data. During Gov. Dean’s campaign they explored using Friend of a Friend (FOAF) as a means of connecting supporters. People were surprised to find detailed information showing up about them in unexpected places, through the power of FOAF crawlers exploring the web.
Today, I spoke on the phone with another friend who was interested in promoting the use of open source social networks for political purposes. I walked him through some of the tools that are out there. We started at my Facebook profile. (You probably have to be a friend of mine to see much of anything there.) In it, I’ve added a social networks application that connects up with UpScoop.
UpScoop is a pretty amazing tool where you can upload your mailing list and search to see who on your mailing list is on which networks. It is very slick and amazingly powerful. Looking at my profile on UpScoop, it showed sixteen different networks I was on, including links to my profile on almost all of them.
As I explored this with my friend on the phone, we decided to follow the link to one network that was listed that I didn’t remember joining, RapLeaf. It turns out that RapLeaf is the underlying engine for UpScoop and that their goal is to provide reputation information, based on email addresses tied into various social networks. In particular they focus experiences other people have had with you as a buyer or seller on sites like eBay or CraigsList.
It looks like it will be a very powerful tool and helps drive home the importance of managing your online identity.
All that said, I have a lot of recommendations of things that I would like to see RapLeaf do. First, it would be great if they could add OpenId. There is already OpenID support in Ruby on Rails, so it should be easy to add to their site. RapLeaf is based on email identities and ties it into profiles on social networking sites. OpenID is based on website pages. The two are closely related and ideally should be linked.
Beyond that, it would be great if they could support XHTML Friends Networks (XNF). It would be a pretty simple change to add. All of the links in the social networks section of the page could simply have the rel=”me” tag and the friends at the bottom could have a rel=”friend” tag. This would facilitate tools that explore XFN.
Ideally, it would be great if the could search out blogging systems as well. For blogging systems that will reveal user information based on email address, they should be able to do this simply. However, most systems want to keep email addresses private.
To get around this many systems, including RapLeaf use an SHA1 hash as a method of checking email addresses without ever showing the email address. If systems like Drupal, Scoop, Soapblox and others would allow people to look up people by the SHA1 hash of their email address, these sites could be searched as well. Maybe I’ll add the ability to search for users by the SHA1 hash of their email address on Orient Lodge. It would be great if people added it to some other blogging systems.
There are plenty of other ways in which this could be used in politics. Anyone who is interested in this aspect should contact me offline.
