Internet

You may have to be a pretty particular breed* to appreciate the following, but I can’t be the only one in the CT crowd. I found this Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character quiz quite entertaining. I scored 33 and while it is probably a sign of something positive that I didn’t score higher, I was still a bit disappointed. My point range gets the following recommendation: “As your doctor, I recommend moving out of your parents’ basement.” The whole thing is quite amusing, try it. Don’t look at the score chart until you’ve taken the quiz, you don’t want to spoil that part of the fun.

[*] The original post said “bread”, which should explain some of the comments.

The University of Michigan Press is putting together a volume called The Best of Technology Writing 2006. The editorial team is soliciting suggestions for pieces, including blog posts.

[W]e’re asking readers to nominate their favorite tech-oriented articles, essays, and blog posts from the previous year. The competition is open to any and every technology topic–biotech, information technology, gadgetry, tech policy, Silicon Valley, and software engineering are all fair game. But the pieces that have the best chances of inclusion in the anthology will conform to these three simple guidelines:

1. They’ll be engagingly written for a mass audience; if the article requires a doctorate to appreciate, it’s probably not up our alley. Preference will be given to narrative features and profiles, “Big Think” op-eds that make sense, investigative journalism, sharp art and design criticism, intelligent policy analysis, and heartfelt personal essays.

2. They’ll be no longer than 5,000 words.

3. They’ll explore how technological progress is reshaping our world.

The resulting publication will be available both in book form and online.

Hop on over to digitalculture.org for more information and to submit your nominations.

This article in the Times is about the dangers to children, real and imagined, of social networking websites. The usual ping-pong back-and-forth about MySpace, etc. I liked the tag-line, though: “Parents fear Web predators. Some Internet experts, and some kids, call that fear overblown.” Other parental fears that “some kids” strenuously call overblown: the fear that the kid will spend some huge amount of money if given the chance, the fear that the kid will take the car and crash it at the first opportunity, the fear that the kid will have a big old party in your house while you’re away, etc, etc. Compare these reassurances to their near-perfect complement, “stern warnings from the AMA”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/27655 to 19-year-olds about to head off to Rocky Point for the week: “The American Medical Association is warning girls not to go wild during spring break after conducting a survey in which 83 percent of college women and graduates admit spring break involves heavier-than- usual drinking, and 74 percent saying the break results in increased sexual activity.” You don’t say! Both these messages will be put through the well-developed Bayesian filter located in the brains of their intended audience — parents in the first case, spring-breakers in the second — where the probability of the information being worthwhile is weighted by its source and then immediately disregarded.

Sometime in the next couple of days, the one-millionth article will be added to the English-language version of Wikipedia. It’s an impressive achievement for a project that’s only five years old , and it’s already clear that Wikipedia has surpassed its main competitors, Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft’s Encarta in many important respects. Neither Britannica’s 200-year history and expert staff nor the Microsoft juggernaut have proved a match for Wikipedia’s ten thousand or so regular contributors, and thousands of occasional helpers. While many criticisms of Wikipedia have been made (as with most things, the most comprehensive source for such criticisms is Wikipedia, none has really dented either Wikipedia’s credibility or its growth.

Still, as Bismarck is supposed to have said

If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”

The process by which Wikipedia entries are produced is, in many cases, far from edifying: the marvel, as with democracies and markets, is that the outcomes are as good as they are.

I’ve been active on Wikipedia for several months now, and had some interesting experiences.

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Dan Drezner “picks up”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002592.html on today’s NYT article about students emailing their professors in slightly weird ways. I thought the article ran together several different kinds of email oddness, some of which are more of a problem than others. One thing it didn’t mention: even though universities give students email addresses, it’s often the case that students won’t use them. Instead they prefer their free hotmail or yahoo or gmail addresses. No problem as such there, except that sometimes the students pick the kind of addresses for themselves that aren’t exactly professional-quality. Frankly it feels a bit odd to correspond with, e.g., missbitchy23 or WildcatBongs about letters of reference or what have you.

_Addendum_: One other thing: Assistant Professor of English Meg Worley’s rule that students must thank her if they receive a response because “One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back.” Very Foucauldian. Only not really. I think Erving Goffman makes the observation somewhere that the capacity to be gracious is actually an _aspect_ of being powerful, not something that’s _owed_ to the powerful. In any event, I thought it seemed a little snotty. _More_: In the comments thread to “this post”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=149#comments by Tim Burke, Meg says she was misquoted, and the rules she says she talked to the reporter about are in fact quite reasonable. Stupid NYT.

Scott McLemee: “The effect of constant web access is a kind of mental entropy.” Similarly, a recent comment by “Dave Pell”:http://davenetics.com/2006/01/referrers/:

I can’t read books. I can’t even focus on a magazine article without stopping every few paragraphs to email my team at Rollyo about tweaks we should be making to our new Firefox tool (or whatever happens to be to project of the moment). I can’t listen to other people for more than a few seconds. Eye contact is unthinkable (too much else to see). … Did the internet make me like this? Did the always connected, always emailing, always browsing, always IMing and always going all-in while playing online Texas Holdem gradually destroy my ability to focus and think clearly? Or was I just a guy with a short attention span who was therefore drawn to the internet?

Judging from my posts around here – not to mention my daily browsing habits – I’m obsessed with Flickr. I wanted to take a step back and give a bit of basic info about the site to those who are not that familiar with it. It is my way of trying to spread all that Flickr goodness to more people.

Flickr may seem like no more than a photo-sharing Web site, but it’s actually much more than that. It is a large community of people sharing images, yes, but also learning about a myriad of topics, exploring nearby and distant lands, and communicating with people from all over the world. In some ways it resembles corners of blogworld. One important difference is that a good chunk of the communicating is done through images rather than text.

Flickr can help you get to know people in all sorts of ways through their photos (and I don’t just mean by looking at what they had for dinner, although frankly, if the cook or restaurant is a good one, that can be interesting as well), get to know cities (e.g. the Guess Where Chicago and Guess Where NYC groups are both fun and informative), learn about healthy foods, read thought-provoking (or not) quotes, and much more.

In case you don’t need these basics, perhaps you’ll find some helpful tips in my guide to finding great photos on Flickr published yesterday on Lifehacker. Consider that the second installment to this post.

Here are some of the basic features of the site. Some of the links below will only work if you are logged in to the system. If you have a Yahoo! account then you are all set. If not, sign up for a free account now, you won’t regret it.*

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The journal First Monday started publishing IT-related articles on the Web in May, 1996. The entire archives of the journal have remained freely accessible to the public over the years. First Monday will be celebrating its 10th anniversary this coming May in Chicago with a conference appropriately focusing on issues concering open collaboration on the Internet. In line with the journal’s history and the meeting’s topic, the program and related materials will be available online for all to see. Submissions are due February 6, 2006.

Just to say, that the new “Google video search”:http://video.google.com/ (and the associated Google Video Player) is fantastic. I particularly enjoyed the search results for “Liverpool” (gets you Sky highlights of the comeback against Milan) , “Steven Gerrard” (his 10 best goals) , and “England” (which got me the Channel 4 report of Ashes victory and Owen’s hat-trick against Germany). I had a bit less success in other categories, but I did find a clip of Buddy Miller playing a festival somewhere. (Obviously, Irish people, Welshmen, Australians, Chelsea fans and people taking an interest in so-called “American sports” would derive more pleasure from other clips.)

“Pootergeek has a post”:http://www.pootergeek.com/?p=1908 on using “Google’s blogsearch”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch as an alternative to Technorati. For full instructions follow the link to his site, but meanwhile “here’s the search set up for Crooked Timber”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&filter=0&q=%22crooked+timber%22+-site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fcrookedtimber.org%2F&btnG=Search+Blogs

… and Brussels imposes.

Or not. Ireland – or rather the Irish Dept. of Justice – is threatening to legally contest the traffic data retention directive passed (with disgraceful ease) by the European Parliament (EP) this week. The directive will force internet service providers and telcos to store at their own cost all the traffic data of their users in case it is ever required by government agencies. Using the well-worn ‘national competence’ argument, the Irish government is arguing that the EP had no right to decide about data retention in the first place. The argument runs like this; Ireland should retain its veto in sensitive justice matters, and should not be told what to do by the European Commission and EP. This is a very disingenuous argument on the face of it, and rather perplexing when you dig deeper.
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Go read about Warner Brothers’ attempt to shut down a non-commercial mashup of Greenday’s “American Idiot” album. Then go listen to it while you still can. All I can say is that there are a lot of very talented people with a lot of time on their hands – amazing stuff.

IDG News Service has an article with results from a study conducted by S.G. Cowen and Co. about search-engine use by socio-economic status and Internet experience of users. The findings suggest that Google users are more likely to be from higher income households and be veteran users than those turning to other services for search. Finally some data on this! I have had this hypothesis for several years, but had no data to test it. I am usually frustrated when people make generalizations about Web users based on data about Google users (worse yet, Google users referred to their Web sites through particular searches) and this is precisely why. I did not think Google users (not to mention ones performing particular searches on certain topics) are necessarily representative of the average Internet user. (The report says very little about the methodology of the study so it is hard to know the level of rigor concerning sampling and thus the generalizability of the findings.)

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I’ve been moving house, so my apologies for the lack of content (as we used to say in those late-90s, Venture Capital days when CT was set to become a major portal/ bookseller/ search-engine/ content-provider … Ah, “content” — fungible like money, homogenous like lard, extrudable like sausage. A marvelous substance.) The other day our own “John and Belle”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/ suffered a “nasty double-meltdown”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/11/idied_update_pu.html of their “computers”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/11/idied.html. This prompted me to do something I should have done ages ago, which is set up an off-site backup system. Like John and Belle I’d previously relied on synchronizing my laptop and desktop machines (using “Unison”:http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/). Properly backing-up your data can be a pain, but then so can losing everything. Thankfully, though, the Interwebs nowadays provide some useful and easy-to-use services in addition to all that content (consistency somewhere between Hellman’s Mayonnaise and Cool-Whip; can be used as spackle if needed). So I’ve also signed up for a basic account with “Strongspace”:http://www.strongspace.com/, part of Dean Allen et al’s “Textdrive”:http://textdrive.com/ outfit. With the assistance of a helpful tutorial from “MagpieBrain”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/index (Part “One”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2005/10/29/strongspace_backup, Part “Two”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2005/10/31/strongspace_and_ssh, Part “Three”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/2005/10/31/automated_backups), I now have secure, automated, passwordless, incremental, daily remote backups of the important stuff on my Mac. Strongspace starts at eight bucks a month for just over 4GB of space (and unlimited bandwidth). I recommend it. (And they’re not even paying me to endorse them.)