Aaacckk! I just deleted my entire review with the careless click of a key. I figure it’s fate’s way of telling me to take the day off in honor of my birthday. In the meantime, you can check out the photos I took last night at the Hot Nights, Cool Tunes concert in Brenham, Tx. (It’s where they make Blue Bell ice cream. Yay, ice cream!)
So I’m back to photo-editing, but I’ll be back tomorrow with more Web 2.0 goodness.
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Ah, MySpace. What would a day be like without them screwing up something else? Mashable reported earlier that MySpace users were getting error messages that their accounts had been deleted. According to the article, Tom was kind enough to send out a message saying it wasn’t so, they were just moving some databases around. Really – can this site be any more unprofessional?
On a related note, maybe there is hope for the future of social networkers everywhere. The response I received to the first MySpace alternatives post has been pretty encouraging – clearly people are interested in other options.
Just in time for this post, there’s a new MySpace alternative on the scene called Cyworld US that introduces a different concept to the social networking space. Users get “minihomes” and an avatar called a “minime.” You can trick out your minihome using acorns,the Cyworld currency system that you have to spend real cash dollars to accumulate. If you’re reading this, and you’re 6-10 years of age, or know someone who is, then I suggest you check this out. I hope you have better luck figuring out the user interface than I did.
Now here’s one that I’m really liking. It’s called Bebo, it’s integrated with Skype, and is reputedly the UK’s leading social network, even ahead of MySpace. The interface is uncluttered, and there are a ton of skins to choose from, but it doesn’t appear to be nearly as customizable as MySpace. Of course, you have the standard videos, quizzes, polls, blogs, etc., that MySpace offers, but it appears that you get more photos. (How hard can that be when MySpace only offers, what, 12?) They’ve also recently launched Bebo Bands, a competitor to MySpace Music. Unlike MySpace Music, though, bands can upload unlimited tracks. The force is strong in this one, Luke.
Finally, here’s one that I think could take off in a big way, if marketed properly. (If the hiring powers that be are reading this, give me a call!) It’s called SportsMates and it’s the MySpace alternative for sports lovers. Mashable! knocks them for the interface design, calling it ugly, but I’ve seen worse. What I think SportsMates needs to concentrate on is signing up users. (Make the signup process a little shorter, guys. Six pages is kinda ridiculous.) Get the users in there and this has the potential to take off.
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I can’t believe I forgot to post about two significant improvements I made to my browsing experience last night. I guess it can be forgiven, though, since I went to bed early (11:00 pm vs 2:00 am) with an excruciating sinus headache.While surfing Digg last night, I found an article titled “New Gmail Feature: Picasa integration.” Even though this turned out to be false, it did turn me on to how to bring about Picasa integration, color schemes, HTML editing, and customized layouts for Gmail using a Firefox extension called Gmail Skins. Sweet! This is what Gmail should have been all along.
I also installed the Wizz RSS News Reader extension because I simply have too many feeds that I want to keep up with. It was time to put them all in one location. Because Wizz is browser-based, like many other services I use, it’s more convenient for me to use. (I used my favorite blog for the screenshot to the right. Emma Sometimes is one of the wittiest writers I’ve found on the blogosphere, a heckofa designer, plus she has a cutie-patootie hubby.Think Erma Bombeck for the new millennium. )
Have I mentioned how much I love Pandora? No? Well, I should have. Pandora is a free online music service that suggests music based on your likes and dislikes. Pandora plays a song, and you tag it as thumbs-up or thumbs-down. It takes it from there and with a little training (very little training in my case) you have a custom radio station. I’ve discovered tons of “new” artists this way. Smartly, Pandora has a feature to save the artist and/or the song to a favorites list. Right now I’m listening to Talk Amongst Yourselves by Grand National, whom I discovered on Pandora. Couple Pandora with a music listening/purchasing service like Rhapsody, and you can check out the rest of an artist’s catalog, and buy it if you like it enough. (Tomorrow is payday and I’ll be purchasing Grand National’s Kicking the National Habit.) Good stuff!
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Sigh. That’s the sound of contentment. I’ve been tricking out my laptop’s desktop, and my browser (Firefox 1.5, natch) and I think it’s all very near to what I want.
First, I jazzed up the desktop using deskFlickr v1.5, an application that dynamically changes your desktop wallpaper using Flickr photos. I have mine set up to use my photos since only happy moments are posted on my Flickr account, but one can specify another user, and further delimit the photostream by keywords. (For example: man blonde blue eyes.) Right now it’s displaying a photo of my uber-hot bassist husband shoving a mike in some chick’s face. Hmmm….maybe I should limit it to non-band shots.
Then, I installed some neato-cool (yes, that’s really a word) extensions in my browser. I am writing this blog on the Performancing extension, which installs a full-fledged blog editor within Firefox. In addition to just being easier to use than the Blogger.com interface, it allows me to compose while offline, use my del.icio.us bookmarks, and search Technorati. I also installed a lorem-ipsum generator extension to insert dummy text when needed, and placed a RawSugar icon on my All-in-One Sidebar, which I couldn’t live without. The best part is that they all play nicely together. Contented sigh. Whatever did we do before Firefox?
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Probably one of my favorite sites, Judy’s Book is a social site where users can post reviews of local businesses, products, and more. For those of us that have depended heavily on the Amazon.com ratings to buy products, this site is required reading. More importantly, each reviewer has a “trust score” so you can guage the credibility of the review. Bloggers will welcome the feature that allows them to post their reviews to their blogs with the check of a box.
Another neat advice site that just launched today is Otavo. Mashable.com bills Otavo as “Yahoo Answers crossed with bookmarking and search.” The bookmarking is an especially nice feature as it allows one to keep track of favorite “quests” and stay apprised of new answers.
Finally, for your bedtime laugh, there’s a hilarious thread at YayHooray where designers are posting Web 2.0 versions of well-known logos. My favorite was the “President of the United States – beta” logo by Jack Shedd. Priceless!
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MySpace continues to have problems, and even JudysBook, my favorite review site, is down. The husband theorizes that MySpace took the entire Internet down with it. Of the two, I miss Judy’s Book far more, but my husband and teenage daughter are going through MySpace withdrawal. It’s not pretty. I invited them both to read yesterday’s blog and visit the competitors, but they resisted. They’d rather rend their clothing, tear their hair, gnash their teeth and ululate like rabid jackals. What is it about MySpace?
I continue to learn all kinds of interesting things on the FlyerTalk thread devoted to following the Lebanese/Israeli conflict , such as cultural traditions in the Middle East, world geography, a smattering of Hebrew, and best of all, a Hurricane/Disaster cookbook. I’ve lived in Gulf Coast states all of my life, and I’ve never seen something like this. I think it’s pretty ironic that I found it on a thread discussing events in the Middle East. (By the way, at the time of this writing, BEY and Dov are fine.)
On the Web 2.0 front, of interest to bloggers everywhere, Technorati has relaunched their site with a new design, and I understand, increased functionality, although I haven’t been able to check that out. I do like that as soon as I log in, posts from my favorite blogs are shown on the front page.
Also, a new video site has launched. Word in the blogosphere is that Gotuit’s video feeds are blazingly fast, so I had to go see for myself. They are fast – amazingly so – and the picture quality is impressive. Pickings are slim at the moment, but they are in beta. Of course, they have the requisite music videos, but what I was most interested in were the news selections. I hope that as they mature, there will be an increased product offering. I don’t see it as being a TV killer, now or later, but this technology definitely has the potential to make television manufacturers very unhappy.
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Disclaimer: The following is my opinion, and my opinion only. You listening, Tom?
So why do people stay? I just don’t get it, especially when there are so many better alternatives. My current favorite is Tagworld, which actually works, has a better interface design, and frankly, a better feature set. Heck, even Orkut, Google’s answer to MySpace, is better, although it seems to have been abandoned. It’s not like we don’t have choices. There’s The Black Stripe, a social networking site that is based on who you know in real life, not who you meet online. There’s Yahoo! 360, OnMyCity, and Friendster. There’s communities for music lovers, aspiring film critics, and even for cats and dogs. What all of these apps have in common, aside from the social networking aspect, is that they all perform more reliably than MySpace. (And Dogster has cuter friends.) But getting MySpacers to leave is like pulling teeth, and without your friends at the other social sites, well, there’s not much point, is there?
I just don’t get it.
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I meant to have this posted yesterday – I actually started work on it on Friday night. However, when the subject is as important as the suffering of other human beings, words seem to fail me. I am sure I have not done the subject justice, so please feel free to chip in with your thoughts.
Okay, so yesterday was not the most uplifting blog I’ve ever written. It may not even be the most informed. Hopefully, though, it was thought-provoking and chock full of resources.
Today, I’m writing about the possibilities of information being shared to affect positive changes. This is largely due to an inspiring MSNBC article I read about two men caught in the current conflict between Israel and Lebanon. Since July 12th, Dovster, an Israeli living on the Lebanese border, and BEYflyer, a Lebanese living in Beirut, have been posting nearly real-time updates of the conflict on a travel forum to which they both belong.
What makes this thread so different from all the other coverage of the war was a) the absolute lack of enmity and b) their obvious concern and affection for each other. Oh, to be sure, they have differences of opinion on foreign policy, but they’ve approached these differences with a refreshing absence of rhetoric and a genuine concern for all involved. Even more inspiring is the public’s response to such a positive approach. As word has spread through media outlets and the blogosphere, FlyerTalk.com has been inundated with new members. At the time of this writing there have been 173, 157 views and 1,146 posts on this thread, and almost to a one they’ve been supportive and focused on good wishes for both men and their respective countries.
Clearly the world is interested in what goes on with its neighbors, and the convergence of Web 2.0 with global internet access, mobile phones, and digital cameras has succeeded in not only bringing news into our living rooms, but made it personal as well. Now in addition to the blanket plea for worldwide peace in my nighttime prayers, I’m actually praying for specific individuals that I’d know on sight.
More importantly, as I read the blogs and posts made by people experiencing these tragedies, I experience a deeper understanding of the situation as I become better educated about their customs, their beliefs, and their history. In my view, this ability to network socially – beyond borders – is one of the best things the Web 2.0 platform has going for it.
It’s not just the bloggers that are making a difference in the way the world perceives people of other cultures. World photographers and videographers have been just as busy capturing the images of war and posting them to such folksonomy-based sites as Flickr and YouTube. For the first time in history, these digital captures are showing the true face of war, without edits or censorship, to everyday citizens of the world. (Note: The following link contains VERY graphic, VERY disturbing photos. They are photos of the carnage in Lebanon, and no matter your political views, represent the result of war. I have included the link, after much soul searching, because this is, after all, a post about social accountability. If we don’t know the consequences, then how can we make informed decisions?)
It is my hope that we as world citizens, will take advantage of this flood of global information to educate ourselves, and share that education with others. The Web 2.0 platform gives us an ability to organize people and initiatives on a global scale, and to let world leaders know that we’re watching and hold them – and ourselves – accountable.
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Warning: I’m in deep thought mode
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m job hunting. The emergence of Web 2.0, and in particular the social networking component, has considerably changed the job search process, making it easier to research employers, track resumes, and even search jobs by distance from your neighborhood. This is generally a good thing.
However, I spoke with a potential employer earlier this week, and during the course of our conversation, he mentioned that he had Googled me prior to contacting me. (Of course, I had Googled me, too, before I even sent out the first resume.) This fellow was a little more tech-savvy than most, though, and had the good sense to Google my email address sans the domain name, i.e. username vs. username@gmail.com. That strategy pretty much brings up my entire surfing history since I generally use the same username at all sites. (I’m not nearly smart enough to remember different user names for all of the sites – that would literally be hundreds.)
I have to admit here to a bit of unease about just anyone being able to turn up that much information about me. I have nothing to hide – in fact, I’d bet that my online reputation is better than most since I’ve always taken care to manage it carefully. However, if someone had the time and energy, say a marketing entity, I’d bet they could put together a pretty comprehensive profile on me based on my memberships. For example, just by visiting this blog, one can find my location, my sex, my website, whether I’m a parent, that I like photography, that I take vacations, that I like to read – and even the genres, that I’m buying drapes, that I iron (not professionally, but I do know how to handle a can of spray starch with the best of them), that I own a dog, and even my height. And that’s just from three posts!
Start following the links – especially to my website, which is a treasure trove of information, and one could probably form a pretty good picture of my buying habits, etc. Now multiply that by thousands and you have a pretty valuable mailing list.
It May Be That We’re Our Own Worst Enemy
There are plenty of privacy initiatives to go around, but these are largely instituted by individual websites to define how they use personal information; there’s nothing they can do to prevent the casual – or devious – surfer from utilizing any information one has chosen to make public.
Every day we read about supposedly secure data being compromised by thieves and hackers, but I imagine that the real danger is from the information that a lot of us put out there for everyone to see. (Even worse is the information that friends and family post about us that we’re not even aware of.)
Are We Safe?
Of particular concern to me is how easy it would be for a predator to identify and locate potential victims from information obtained from the Internet. Back when the Internet first became popular, I remember reading a caution against posting any pictures on your site that could identify where you live, but with the explosion of photo sharing sites, it’s now become incredibly easy to identify neighborhoods, and in some case, the actual home address. With enough time, I’ll warrant that a predator could go victim shopping, then assemble a dossier from published information.
Almost as frightening to me is identity theft. Currently it’s humans that are aggregating (stealing) the data, but imagine how much more efficient thieves would be if they had computers to do it. That reality might not be far off. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Internet, imagines an internet that can “become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.” In the wrong hands that could be disastrous.
So what’s the answer? I don’t know, but I suspect that it will be a combination of personal responsibility and legislation. I’m not an Internet security expert, but it would seem that the best tools we can employ in managing our information, and our online safety, are refreshingly low-tech: common sense and education. (Years ago I read a book by Gavin De Becker called The Gift of Fear
Today I’ve covered Gloom and Doom 2.0; tomorrow I’ll post the upside of sharing information, and a very real way that Web 2.0 is being used for a better tomorrow.
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Posted by daniesq
The kids think I don’t see it. They think I don’t see the concern that lines their faces when they awake to find me up, dressed, and feeding the dogs. They think I don’t notice the glitter of fear in their eyes as I set up the ironing board, or hear the hushed whispers between them as I spritz the first pair of pants with spray starch.
“What is she doing?,” my daughter hisses under her breath to her younger brother. “Um, I think she’s ironing,” he mouths back at her. “I didn’t even know she knew how,” his sister says in an intense whisper,” although there was that one time in 2001. And when did we get a new ironing board? I thought she threw it out?” Barely controlled hysteria creeps into her voice as she exclaims, “My God! The kitchen’s been cleaned “
At 16 and 13, respectively, my daughter and son are old enough to intuit that the job search is not going well for their mother. In a fit of desperation, I’ve turned my unfulfilled creative energies towards learning, and mastering, the domestic arena. Having a mother on a cleaning kick is never a good thing, especially when you’re her captive audience for the entire summer, and the kids rightly suspect that nothing good can come out of this for them.
Clothes have been washed, folded, and put away. Our leather furniture has been cleaned and buffed. The carpets have been vacuumed, the dogs washed, and measurements taken for drapes. (We’ve been in the house for nearly a year. It was time.)
Presently, I’m trying my hand at ironing. So far, so good. I’ve managed to line up the creases in my husband’s pants, haven’t scorched anything, and have even successfully used a press cloth for the first time. (Okay, so I didn’t even know what one was until I went shopping for my new ironing board last week. They were hanging on a hook next to the boards in little packages that helpfully explained what they were and how to use them. I must remember to contact my first-grade teacher and thank her for teaching me to read.) The shirts were a little more difficult, but other than the fact that I think I put too much starch in my husband’s shirt collar, I think I did okay. (And really – how important is it that he be able to put his chin down or his head back?)
My next “action item” (I can’t let myself become totally detached from the corporate world.) is to delegate chores to my children. Rooms must be cleaned, dogs must be walked, clothes folded, and yardwork done. I find them huddled in front of the computer, looking dejected and speaking in hushed tones to each other. As I approach, my son catches the scent of my new cologne (Eau de Endust – lemony and fresh!) and blanches. He hurriedly closes out the browser window, but not fast enough to prevent me from realizing what they’ve been studying. It’s the Monster.com mailing list signup form.
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