Archive for the Category » Things on the Web «

Saturday, May 16th, 2009 | Author: Moody

In my continuing effort to broaden my connections to the various communities and individuals who use the Web, I have added Google Friend Connect (it’s over there in the sidebar). What is it? According to Google, Friend Connect allows you to “Build your community” and “Increase engagement” without having to do any programming.

Robert Scoble turned me on to it. He did have some reasonable reservations about how easy it would be for the average Web user to install on his or her blog, but even with my limited skills I was able to have it up and running in under five minutes without any problems. I imagine that the process will be streamlined over time, but right now it is not a steep learning curve. A motivated newbie could set things up without shedding tears. However, that said, I think it is fair to say that for some people the task of using an FTP application and having to manually add files to a blog directory may seem a bit much. Lots of people are used to having everything set up for them (like, fill out the sign up form and voila!—it’s ready to go), and technical stuff is all handled in the background by somebody else whose job it is to do the techie thing in the background, like quietly and unobtrusively sometime in the wee hours when decent folks are asleep and dreaming of non-electric sheep or horses or whatever.

There are also a number of other “social tools” available that Google has tied in to the Friend Connect API. All of them require just about the same amount of minor work to install. I think that they are worth looking into. What do you think?

In the meantime, I hope that you, dear reader, will consider joining one of my networks. I’d like to think that doing so will lead us both to a better level of interaction.

Saturday, May 09th, 2009 | Author: Moody

As a member of the forty-something crowd, on the cusp of middle-age, I can say that I have seen a great many changes in the world. For example, I remember the decline and eventual death of the 8-Track cassette with the popular advent of Compact Cassettes and Compact Discs. I also remember the arrival of cable TV. Our neighbors were the first people I knew who had ON TV (along with a big, strange box they needed to access it). The first computer in my house was some variety of an Apple II that did not go “online”. The Internet existed, but not for the folks at home, and there was no Web at all.

The media was a different animal, back then. I delivered the newspaper as a kid, on a bicycle with big canvas bags slung over the handlebars. People received their news from me on their lawn or driveway or front porch. They also watched news broadcasts on the networks, and read, like my parents did, various periodicals. Typically, the nightly news on TV and the daily newspapers went together hand in glove, in a complementary linear fashion. Periodicals, such as Time or Newsweek, created, supplemented or helped drive the larger stories. And although there were always “Letters to the Editor”, the system was effectively closed to the consumer. The media was the authority, the arbiter of what made news. You might petition the media for some reason, but it was not responsible to you.

Once widespread adoption of the Web by the populace reached critical mass (circa 1995, with apx. 16 million users then surfing the Web1), the demand for interaction naturally started to become the driving force on the Web. Connectivity on the Internet really means connecting people to other people—their ideas, their shared information. So while the “walled garden” of AOL eventually fell into disrepair because the company couldn’t grok the meaning of the Web to society, newer social networking sites appeared that offered a new and more robust form of open community and communication. Today, with over 1.5 billion users on the Web, more than nine times the number of people who were online in 1995 use Facebook alone. Nor are these people—and I hope you’ll pardon me making such an obvious statement—merely sharing recipes, jokes, and pictures of the family (although they certainly do that). No, like me, millions of people share and discuss the salient news of the world. They leave comments to news agencies as freely as they do to each other, and they expect some form of interaction; they expect, at least, to be heard. They blog and keep up with blogs. They share with various communities online, such as are found at FriendFeed. They tweet throughout the day on Twitter and follow not just friends or celebrities but news aggregators and media analysts.

Today, the near-ubiquity of the Web—enabling users to share massive amounts of information, pretty much anytime and anywhere, with an audience who are, themselves, no longer confined to a single or passive role—means the media cannot continue to operate under their comfortable old M.O. The shift is already well underway. What Steven Walling says of Wikipedia, that “An honest analysis of Wikipedia cannot divorce the content from the software and the community”, is becoming true of the media in general, after a fashion. Or, as Emily Bell, head of digital content at Guardian News and Media, put it in a lecture at the University College Falmouth, “There are two lessons here – one is that the news business is struggling to understand the language of the web, the second is that tools plus users equals content, both are key to the future of journalism” [see also "Emily Bell on The Future of Journalism"].

We are, many of us, de facto journalists now, compulsive fact checkers and news hounds. Armed with multiple means of recording the world around us, we are delivering the news on our virtual bicycles, throwing packets of information and analysis from the information highway right into the laps of our readers (whoever they may be), through their open window on the world. Our future is one of greater and greater connectivity. This is a good thing. It will, in the end, ask us all to be more responsible members of our world-wide community. But it will ask this first of those who are professional journalists now. They will be expected to lead the way, to set the example, to show the old paradigm the door and properly usher their profession into the new way of the world.

. . . . . . . . . .

Update. From a salient Op-Ed piece by Frank Rich, titled “The American Press on Suicide Watch“:

…[T]his self-destructive retreat from innovation is hardly novel in the history of American communications. In the last transformative tech revolution before the Internet — television’s emergence in the late 1940s — the pattern was remarkably similar. The entertainment industry referred to TV as “the monster,” and by 1951, the editor of the industry’s trade paper, Variety, was fearful that the monster would “eventually swallow up practically all of show business.” Movies had killed vaudeville a generation earlier. This new household appliance threatened to strangle radio, movies, the Broadway theater, nightclubs and the circus. And newspapers too: “NBC’s New ‘Today’ Attacked by Papers as Competition” screamed a front-page Variety headline in 1952.

. . . . . . . . . .

Additional resources: “Why comments suck (& ideas on un-sucking them)“; most anything by Jay Rosen50 Awesome Online Lectures for Social Media Masters.

Note: 1. Several things came together in 1995 that, collectively, acted as a booster rocket to the Web. A few examples: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was released and the “Browser Wars” began; the People’s Republic of China made its first connection to the Internet; the last commercial restrictions were lifted when the National Science Foundation ceased its sponsorship of the Internet backbone; Yahoo! and AltaVista were founded; Amazon.com, Inc. launched. [See "History of the Internet".]

Category: Journalism, Meta: Web, Things on the Web  | Tags: , ,  | Comments off
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 | Author: Moody

See Here: Comment Calamity? No. Not anymore.

Why stop at a new theme when you can also make your comments section more lively?

I have now installed the IntenseDebate plugin and am ready to intensely debate things… or, you know, talk. But what you want to know is what in the blue blazes is this IntenseDebate thingum? Well, you could click the link, yeah? You could leave a comment and see for yourself, right? And maybe you would, if only I’d stop frakkin around and give you something to work with. Ahem. I know. OK then. Check it. Here is their official press release:

IntenseDebate provides many new features meant to inspire discussion and easily follow the conversation. In order to better organize the discussion, we’ve implemented comment threading which allows users to directly reply to one another. Users also have an identity that spans across all blogs powered by IntenseDebate. Along with this is a reputation value, based on the quantity and quality of the comments users make, meant to give an overview of a user’s commenting history. Quality is determined by the users through comment voting, which also serves to move the best comments to the top. With all of our comment systems being interconnected, we make it easy to track users and their activities across all blogs using our system by providing email and rss notifications. In short, IntenseDebate has completely transformed the commenting experience. IntenseDebate. Comments Rediscovered.

That’s fairly straightforward. And so was the process of installing the plugin and signing up. The only snag was in the importation of comments. On my first try there were a few comments lost (not really lost, but they failed to show up on the blog even as they were still found backstage—where all the magic happens!). I reset the plugin with the conveniently located button and re-imported my comments. This time they were there. So, a few minutes of WTF? followed by the FTW! moment.

Monday, March 09th, 2009 | Author: Moody

Just wanted to note that I’ve switched to a new theme. Nothing really wrong with the default theme, but I wanted something more pleasing to the eye and exciting. Green Light, available from TemplateLite.com, was just what I was after. I am still looking at some other themes (with an eye out for excellent customization features), but for now and the foreseeable future I am very happy to say I’ve got a look for VWN that pleases me.

Brian, the fellow who designed Green Light and many other excellent themes, deserves a huge round of applause for many reasons: clean code, cross-browser compatibility, professional design standards, etc. I hope that you’ll go check out his work.

Saturday, December 27th, 2008 | Author: Moody

Stories from Curious Outsiders

Stories from Curious Outsiders

hitotoki : A Narrative Map of Tokyo. (See also New York, London, Paris, Shanghai, and Sofia).

This is one of my favorite sites to visit. What you are presented with is an active Google map of the city with placemarks to identify where each story happens. You also get a few pictures that link to the various stories, as well as text links that quote a line of any given story. The layout is pleasing to the eye and straightforward.

The stories are often, I have found, amazingly well written and I always wind up feeling like I know the place a little more, in a significant way, than I did before. Mind you, I have never been to the majority of these places, yet I have gleaned from these personal recollections and anecdotes what I believe to be a genuine sense of them. This is a wonderful thing.

The site enhances our sense of the greater world “out there”, and it shows us that people are not so different from one place to another, even as it illustrates the differences that do exist.

Highly recommended.

Thursday, November 20th, 2008 | Author: Moody

Get Firefox!

Get Firefox!

Updated: 01/03/2009.

Firefox has been my browser of choice almost since it was introduced to the general public. One of its biggest features is the ease of installing useful add-ons that enhance or otherwise improve upon the basic functionality of the browser. Some of these add-ons, I would argue, should actually be considered necessary nowadays. Others are simply, but undeniably, useful.

Although I expect that most people visiting my site will already have installed (or dismissed for whatever reason) the add-ons listed here, it is my hope that at least a few people will find something useful that they didn’t know about. I also hope that I’ll be lucky enough to have someone visit who knows of some new, indispensible add-on that I didn’t know about! Please do feel free to make a suggestion.

(Read the list of fifteen sixteen fabulous, if not Fortean*, Firefox add-ons below the fold.)

more…

Saturday, July 19th, 2008 | Author: Moody

How I wish I could claim to be surprised by the number of ignorant and stupid comments I see on “teh intarnets”–but I can’t. The ridiculously virulent form of foolishness that can reduce otherwise decent people to a manic and bellicose condition of trollishness is so widespread around here that I am more surprised when I run across an actually thoughtful, calm, intelligent (and intelligible) comment. It makes me frakkin’ sad and a wee bit pissed.

Lately, I have almost despaired over the miasma gathered about the issues of climate change and evolution. If it isn’t flat out ignorance of the facts of either subject (or both), it’s a pathetically malnourished capacity for understanding that conjures something very like it. Or it’s a pissy form of apathy. In any case, when it is not some form of apathy, there seems to be a rather fundamental dislike of genuine science on the one side, and an Ann Coulter-like support for the usual dissentient pundits on the other. Not suprisingly, those who automatically scoff at evolution or climate change typically accuse people like me of being the real fanatics, resorting to all manner of hyperbolic descriptions to describe us as, essentially, sickeningly insane and steeped in our own stratagems. They then go on, typically, to portray us as terrorists or amoral freaks whose agenda includes destroying the world that decent, moral, god-fearing, country-loving folks made or whatever. Or they simply say that we are obviously stupid. Not that both sides don’t have their low points; there’s plenty of pots and kettles, stones and glass houses, motes and planks, etc.; all the usual wanker stuff. But seriously, there are a number of strong distinctions between sides here, readily and accurately characterized by the presence of qualities such as insightfulness, integrity, honesty and forthrightness on the side of those who support the sciences, and an absence of one or more of these on the other. Take a look at the freepers and people like Michael Crichton if you’re not sure what I’m going on about. From one end of the spectrum to the other, their voices add up to a deafening, mind numbing wall of sound. It gets so that it’s very difficult for the lay person to get any idea at all of what’s simply true and what’s merely truthy.

This is a tactic of theirs, just so you know. If they can get you to stop before you start poking about, reading up, learning the facts, then they win. This is why their arguments usually devolve into ad hominem attacks or pulp fiction conspiracy theories. If they can get you to believe that what people like me are saying is equivalent to what people like them are saying–if they can so level the playing field–then they’ve all but won. They have the goal in sight once you stop looking for the truth beyond the post or comment. They have only a few steps to go in their endeavor if they can get you to think that in the end it’s all just arguments, smoke and mirrors, trivial or pointless. If you buy their shtick, you’ll walk away thinking that it’s all just a matter of opinion or, in some cases, that it’s a matter of shady politics or villainous social engineering that you should distrust out of hand.

It would appear that their shtick is potent. The sad thing is, I see a lot of people parroting the disinformation back like it’s a weaponized retort aimed at killing the bothersome dissidents who would overthrow a righteous America or patriotic “God” or some such thing.

But if you want the truth, here it is. Two issues (that are really kind of just one issue) here addressed in one rambling paragraph. OK? Listen…

First off, I don’t hate America or “God” (I am simply opposed to nationalism and theocracy as I am delusion and fanaticism). I am not a member of some occult cabal, and there is no camarilla speaking in Al Gore’s, Barack Obama’s or Henry Waxman’s ear. Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Sam Harris and the like do not want to eat your children or destroy morality. Secondly, that being said, a) please understand now that the world is in fact already beginning to feel the effects of global warming, a phenomenon that a great deal of evidence points to as having a man-made driver as its primary source, and know, too, that b) the theory of evolution is a robust, well-tested and open-ended attempt to explain the mechanisms of evolution–which is a real phenomenon in the world and not something that Darwin, Wallace, Huxley and many, many more esteemed scientists invented in order to supplant “God”. As for atheism (or secular humanism): it is not a religion, it is a philosophical viewpoint. Similarly, there is no “Church of Global Warming”. Finally, the scientific method is beautiful and trustworthy, and the dividends of scientific exploration are fruitful and exceedingly valuable to you, me, and everyone.

Sunday, January 28th, 2007 | Author: Moody

I love it when something that is really useful is also easy to install, and Snap (Snap Preview Anywhere) is both. It comes as a WordPress plugin (which I installed in a couple minutes, thanks to Ajay D’Souza’s good work), a TypePad widget, and can also be installed on Blogger.com or googlepages.com accounts. It’s also fairly configurable in other ways.

Snap Preview Anywhere

What is Snap Preview Anywhere? Snap Preview Anywhere enables anyone visiting your site to get a glimpse of what other sites you’re linking to, without having to leave your site. By rolling over any link, the user gets a visual preview of the site without having to go there, thus eliminating wasted “trips” to linked sites.

And as you can see for yourself, I’ve enabled my blog with Snap. I hope you will find it to be a useful addition here, and on your own blog.

Category: Personal, Things on the Web  | Comments off
Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 | Author: Moody

In order to protect email addresses from being harvested, I have added the Caesarmail plugin, which dynamically converts all email addresses using “random-offset Caesar ciphers”. This prevents spambots from collecting usable email addresses from pages/comments. Spammers aren’t likely to take the time to decipher encrypted email addresses.

Q: What’s a Caesar cipher?

A: A basic character-shift method for encoding/obfuscating text. [More]

Here is an example of the ROT13 method: Urer vf na rknzcyr bs gur EBG13 zrgubq.

ROT13 is a Caesar cipher where the characters of the alphabet are rotated 13 places (e –> r, a –> n). ROT13 is often used because the same step that encodes the selected text also decodes the text. The nice thing about the Caesarmail plugin is that the offset is “randomly generated with each page view”.

Though simple and ultimately easy to decode, the Caesar cipher method can be useful at frustrating the casual viewer. Try this if you’d like [decoded text after the cut]:

. CDYWR MNBANENA MWJ , WXRCJDCLWDY BDXDPRKVJ , HCRERCRBWNBWR NBJL , BUJANVDW XW , NWRW OX NDUJE CXA J QCRF ANQYRL AJBNJL J . ANQYRLNM XC CUDLROORM NAXV NUCCRU J PWRQCNVXB BR NANQ .

more…

Friday, September 22nd, 2006 | Author: Moody

First thing: Thanks to you who commented to my test [now deleted]. I wanted to make sure I had not inadvertently gotten blocked the handful of people who might conceivably comment here. If you were blocked from posting a comment and you don’t know my email address, please email me here (provided email address good for one week, courtesy of Spambox).

Now for the recommendations….

But first, a little story.

Once upon a time (it was not actually a dark and stormy night, but it could have been), I moved from my “apartment” at LiveJournal to this, my “home” here at BlueHost, where I had them set up a WordPress blog for me. Once I was up and running — in virtually no time at all, actually — I posted a few things. All was well and good in my personal corner (niche?) of the blogosphere. But I began to worry anyway… because that’s what I do, m’kay.

Specifically, I began to worry about “comment spam“, also called “link spam”. Although I had not received any, I knew it was only a matter of time. So, I installed Akismet.

You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

WordPress made installing the Akismet filter easy as (memorizing the first four digits of) Ï€. And, in the course of time, it began to catch spam. At first there were just a few. Then, there were a few more, and a few more. And then, there were a lot more. At last count, Akismet has caught 1050 spam comments to this blog. Top hits: ringtones, viagra (and other assorted pharmaceuticals), gambling. Not that I wanted to know; but Akismet saves all the spam in a database for a period of days before automatically deleting them. I did not have a single false positive, and I trusted the filter. It started bothering me, though, that the spam comments were getting so close to me, infiltrating my precious allotted hard drive space, wasting my even more precious bandwidth. I didn’t want to see the spam anymore, jailed by Akismet or not. I wanted it stopped before it reached me at all.

Enter Bad Behavior:

[A] set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots. It goes far beyond User-Agent and Referer, however. Bad Behavior is available for several PHP-based software packages, and also can be integrated in seconds into any PHP script.

There are a lot of plugins for WordPress, a number of them dedicated to stopping spam. Out of the many I looked at, Bad Behavior struck me as being particularly effective. So, I installed it. Quickly and easily, too, using Fetch. Once I fired up the plugin, I didn’t have too long to wait. Within an hour Bad Behavior had caught ~20 “spambots” (see the Web Robots FAQ for more info) trying to accomplish their nefarious ends. Since yesterday, it has caught 77 spambots. And nothing has gotten through even to Akismet. Needless to say, I am quite pleased with Bad Behavior and hope someday to donate some currency to its creator, Michael Hampton (who also happens to run a recommended site, Homeland Stupidity).

Wednesday, August 09th, 2006 | Author: Moody

[image]My StumbleUpon page. I spend a lot of time there lately, as StumbleUpon one-ups del.icio.us in a number of ways (not that the folks behind the latter site aren’t beginning to catch on). It offers the user a chance to “journal” as well as tag and review links stumbled upon. It offers many views of a user’s list of sites (”Tag Cloud”, “Pages I Like”, “Discoveries”, and more). It allows you to add (and drop, of course) friends, leave comments or reviews, and so on. You can even write a little bio for yourself and have a user pic. There’s also the nifty toolbar extension for users of Firefox/Mozilla (both of which you should have). With the toolbar extension, you can cruise about the Web seeing sites you may not have ever run across otherwise, and of course you can tailor your stumbling to suit you.

Anyway, I hope to stumble into you there.

Category: Personal, Things on the Web  | Comments off
Sunday, April 30th, 2006 | Author: Moody

Saving the Internet

Yes, it’s that time again: it’s time to save the Internet from nefarious schemers (most of them Republicans) and their rotten plots (most of them serving giant businesses) to take over the last, great, free (as in freedom, not beer) medium. But before you complete the eye-roll you just started, you might want to consider exactly what’s up this time around, because this time the threat looks pretty serious. We’re not talking about email postage stamps, all right?

According to the folks over at MoveOn.org,

Congress is now pushing a law that would end the free and open Internet as we know it. Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet’s First Amendment. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. So Amazon doesn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more properly on your computer.

In an email I received from MoveOn, they informed me that my representative, Hilda Solis, stood up for Network Neutrality “every step of the way”, and they encouraged me to blog about it. So I am. Kudos to her and all the others who stood up and voted for me and you and our rights. Apologies to those of you whose scoundrelly reps attempted unceremoniously to bend you over and spank you….

Anyway, I recognize an important issue when I see one, and this one has the potential to impact all users of the ‘Net. Like much of US policy, it starts here but its effects won’t stay here, because people nearly the whole world over access servers right here in the United States. So this could become everybody’s problem in future, given the size and power of the corporations interested in controlling the ‘Net for profit.

If you’d like to see how your representative voted on the Markey Amendment (which “[contains] enforceable Net Neutrality provisions”) and the COPE act (”the Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006, or the COPE Act for short — which marks a dismal overhaul to federal laws concerning media, internet, and telephones in the United States” [source]), the Save the Internet.com Coalition has provided a page that tallies the vote counts for both. The results of the first round were not pretty, and split along partisan lines as you might expect, with Dems for protecting the Internet and Repubs for selling our souls, one ‘Net connection at a time. But the fight is not over.

Please — I urge you to get involved. Understand what the threats could be, learn if your representative is on the committee, sign the MoveOn Petition. More resources for you to peruse are:

  • Statement: SavetheInternet.com Coalition (MoveOn, Gun Owners of America, etc.) after yesterday’s vote.
  • Article: “Panel Vote Shows Rift Over ‘Net Neutrality’” Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2006.
  • COPE: All about the nasty little Communications Opportunity Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006.

Don’t let corporations gain control of the Internet. Don’t let your government ignore you and sell you out. Don’t just sit there: blog, concerned ‘netizen, blog!

Thank you.

Category: Politics, Things on the Web  | Comments off