Tag: Web, Blogging and Computers

Come Along – Let Google Do The Thinking For You

Remember when there was the whole “calculators in class” argybargy back when wideleg jeans were out before they were in again but after the second time they were out? Well, Lord Goog may be setting up a similar non-mathematical quandary:

One of the more experimental products was called Google Squared, which will go public in the next month or so. It takes information from the web and displays it in a spreadsheet in “split seconds”, something Ms Mayer said would normally take someone half a day to do. During the demonstration, a query for “small dog” was typed into the search box. Seconds later a table popped up showing photographs of various dogs, their origin, weight and height in a clear and simple layout.

Sounds like homework done in a snap to me. Of course, on one level this is good and really just a tabular representation of a results sheet that drags information from Google images, news and general web searches. And it will demonstrate the importance of gathering and sorting different classes of data into useful format. But it will also carry the air of authority so that there will be tension with the idea of improving on Google’s presentation as well as the problem of knowing to what degree the analysis presented is purely based on Google and what is the individuals.

Should we care? Should figuring stuff out and digging for information be valued even if the results are a bit like a nine year old’s take on a pancake breakfast, messy and less than appetizing?

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Can You Make A Map About Nothing?

Ruk is a helpful person. Far more helpful than I ever am. This weekend he posted about how you can create a Google map to collaboratively and graphically and geographically display information about something. Trouble is… I write on a blog and have been writing on this blog for six years and about two weeks but I don’t really think it is about anything. So, I am creating a map to see what would go on a map collaboratively and graphically and geographically to display information about nothing.

It will take time to either fill or be forgotten. I have invited a number of people to try to play with this but also have made collaboration public, too. Click here to get to the map if you care to watch or play amateur cartographer. And read Ruk’s instructions for how to participate. Remember at step 5 to press “edit” to make that blue water droplet icon for creating new information.

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Friday For The First Stinking Hot Weekend

It’s the meteorological chitchat that keeps you coming back. I know it. We spend so much time looking forward to a bright hot day that you would think we would record them in binders like family albums, categorized by how nice the breezes were or how long the evening seemed to last. Tomorrow bodes very well. Perhaps 80F in April on a sunny Saturday. 70F this Friday evening. This very day. It’s the anti-blizzard weekend. The one you wanted on a Tuesday in late January.

  • I sure love it when people who accuse others of having no moral compass then have to admit that the guy was pretty much right. Oh, what a giggle we will have in the next era when we look back on these times.
  • I would have thought the whole “eating a replica of our bodies” might have been a bigger issue than the name.
  • SPACE BLOB!!!
  • I thought this was pretty funny. When to worry about the IT geeks planning to control your lives? When they say “…people are passionate about your product…” or “IZ: You mean enhance civilization, make it even better?” you know someone is quite enraptured by an impending cash-in.
  • In the same vein, when someone says “Can we just retire this stupid line of questioning once and for all?” after referring to “the straw man” you may need to realize they are facing an argument they don’t want to admit is lost due to the weight it places on the possibility of being enraptured by an impending cash-in.
  • Sometimes the things that got cashed-in die and, quite surprisingly, take 675 employees. Can you believe GeoCIties was bought for 2.9 billion ten years ago?
  • Not necessarily my deepest love with a french fry van – I reserve that for Colburne’s of Pembroke, Ontario – but certainly my first. Sitting on the wall at the Halifax central library having a Bud the Spud was a big part of my youth.
  • Why are we not hearing news item after news item about how Ford saw this coming, may well never ask for a penny of public money, is about to crush its competition through sheer prudence and actually makes cars people buy?

And you may ask yourself how do I work this BBQ? You may ask yourself where is my suntan lotion? And you may ask yourself where does that garden path go? Is this my beautiful yard?

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Group Project: Is Twitter The New Gold Fish Eating Contest

I wonder about things. I wonder why I need so many half consumed jars of jam. I wonder why the rise of the internet, the economic bubble and its bursting are all related. I wonder why no one seems to notice that. And I wonder why Twitter is taking off, jumping the shark and about to become (in Mr. James’s words or – better – something like them) the usenet of the 2010’s. Remember usenet? It was so great. People being all Web 2.0 a decade and more before Web 2.0? Now people are being all 25% usenet fifteen years or more later. What is up?

Anyway, being ticked that the Whitehouse apparently really really discovered Twitter last night and finding 30 or so of the last 50 posts I had to wade through were about policy and Obama girls, I deleted that feed. I have been spending much of my Twitter time in the last two weeks deleting feeds. I even had a show trial of a brewer whose pace of twitting was far too manic. I bet that really stung. Being unhappy with Twitter has given rise to a few observations which I trust you will confirm in their entirety:

  • People consider the haiku moment of Twitter to be the restriction to 140 characters. I would prefer 50 characters myself. I had no idea that people could actually go on with only 140 units at their disposal.
  • Twitter is now full of spam. Twitter spam is of two sorts:repeating the posts of others when any one with any sense would plagiarizer a good idea and straight up commercial blabbery. Are people now so accustomed to spam that they don’t notice it is spam?
  • A more annoying constraint is the limit to the number of posts I can view meaning that a twitting blabber mouth can monopolize your view screen. I say view screen as it is a more accurate 1964 way of describing the screen you view. For you stuck in the 90s please refer to the GUI. If you post more than 4 times a day, you are cluttering your readers’ view screens.
  • There is something really really sad about news media discussing Twitter. But it might equally be said that it is very sad when bloggers write about Twitter.
  • Twitter is incredibly anti-social for social software. It is entirely isolating, insulating and, if one were hooked, immersing. Stephen Fry may well be playing out his addiction in public and one wonders what it means to “follow” 55,243 feeds. Surely, the format is simply broken at that point.

So, is Twitter the widget that is so simple yet dysfunctional that no one actually has to admit it does not really work except as a Borg training device?. And why is it so apt for people in the time of recession? What does it speak to in a time of doubt and uncertainty? Is it like Depression-era eating goldfish or dancing non-stop contests without a prize?

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Friday Bullets For The Golden Age Of Orange

It was 1:22 am when the game ended. I only made it to about four overtimes listening on UConn’s radio AM 1080 out of Hartford but Syracuse won. So that was good. I thought I was staying up late to watch Cramer on John Stewart but that was a fold. I kept waiting for Cramer to say “but you don’t exactly treat your subject matter with full seriousness.” Nada. He rolled over and asked to have his tummy rubbed.

  • Dalek For Sale Update: “once. i. built. an. evil. em. pire. made. it. run. made. it. run. against. time…“
  • “Why Doesn’t The PM Understand?” Update: Apparently PM Harper takes the wrong road and blames consumers for the economic collapse…but then refuses to confirm that is what the secret speech was all about. Not the finance industry and certainly not economists. Average people. Nice.
  • I love this photo. It’s like Zep cross the space time continuum and left messages in the Italian sky of 1527.
  • Speaking of Cramer and who is to blame, I think these people are to blame. Blame the eggheads.
  • For all the gloating about new media, note how many papers are in trouble because of debt. And often debt that was incurred by non-news-people taking on newspapers. Blame convergence as much as anything.
  • Nice to see Joe grew up. But is this the biggest loser of a guy taking a “personal day” ever?
  • All of Charlie Brown is now online. Rejoice.

Gotta run. Up way too late.

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“This Column Is By A Finance Crime Convict”

Why doesn’t the National Post point that out as part of the byline on Conrad Black’s musings? I mean at the end of my fellow blogger Stephen Taylor‘s NP posts on the same “Full Comment” feature it states in sort of a footnote:

Stephen Taylor is a scientist, political analyst and a Fellow at the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, an institute founded by Preston Manning. Read more at his blog, stephentaylor.ca.

If that is the right thing to do – and it is – should Conny’s at least state that he is n the hoosegow for corporate finance crimes the sort of which were indicative of and generously larded the years leading to the current worldwide economic collapse? Seems only reasonable to me.

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Friday Bullets For The January Thaw

Things are loosening up. There is no minus sign in front of today’s temperature and that is in Celsius. It’s back to the deep cold tonight but one day of a lighter jacket and slushy rubber boots not mountain climbing gear is good. Things are lightening in the political world as well. Obama (aka Barry) is at his desk. The clench of fear may be relaxing. It may also be just moving to another part of the body, less about anticipating a body blow and more about handing out what those who wield fear deserve. Up here, Iggy seems to be trying to get us off the roller coaster of brinkmanship that we have be saddled with for most of the decade. “We need an election in February like we need a hole in the head,” Good point:

  • I am learning more about the founding of Kingston and those who founded it. Really really interesting stuff. Go here and search for Cataraqui, the French name for the town. We are Yorkers!
  • I like the ability in the US to break down party lines without causing a constitutional tizzy fit.
  • Looking at the people from space.
  • Reason enough to understand why having some idea that Any Rand offers legitimate ideas is nutty. The ideology of paranoia.
  • This is quite an extraordinary web page if you think of where China has been as a culture in my lifetime.
  • Occasional comment maker and fellow Zapster Ian (and Tesse) know the new US Senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, based on them helping her past campaigning. I now have three degrees of separation from Obama…or is it two. Do you count yourself or only the intermediaries?

A busy day ahead. Planning for the weekend. Getting into that relaxed state. Picking out my casual clothes from the pile. A really big day.

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Blogging’s Best Upside After Near Six Years Is…

…meeting clever people. I have never bought into the idea that the internet creates community or makes you more clever yourself. But it is undeniable that it gives you a direct connection to clever people whose lives are on other paths than your own. This morning, I got a link to Evan Rail’s new personal blog via Twitter and his summary of his 2008. I know Evan thought the beer blog and played a wee role in getting him into the digital game. Similarly, we have comment makers Ben and Stephen, one of whom I have actually met in person, who both made it to the Inauguration. That’s Stephen to the right in a photo he posted to Facebook with some guy forcing himself into the frame.

And then there is Damian, our comment poster who has found himself on a media tour with the Canadian forces in Afghanistan. I have told you to send him some money. So now send him some more. Because he’s explaining what others can’t explain – how Canada is dealing with the land mines that have been so devastating. As a graduate of RMC – aka “charm school” I am told – he is likely better placed than any journalist to tell that tale. That is him circled in red standing in Kandahar. And make sure you hit the jar to help fund his travels, too. That is that link down at the bottom of the post.

Why do I mention this? Not to appear to achieved some level of vicariously cleverness. It is to remind myself of the good. Among other things, yesterday’s internet traffic includined some of the most shocking displays of mean spiritedness and stupidity I have ever seen. We sometimes can be overwhelmed by the how loathsome people can be through their access to the internet. The outpouring of negativity and just plain dumb that I saw in relation to Obama’s inauguration was as embarrassing a display as I have ever seen. The tedious chicken littles were in fine form. One took the time to say over and over to me that the end of all our freedoms started yesterday. Cluck. These are the dopes, the chaff. But note the neither Ben or Stephen would be a supporter of the new President yet they were there to wish him well not only because there is not much point in the alternative path but just because of that splendid thing that is democracy. Damian is doing what he is doing because of the importance of the work he is witnessing. Evan is doing what he is doing to explain the wonderful and somewhat exotic part of the world he lives in. They are all clever people taking the high road and making a go of it and using the richness of this media to share the view from their chosen path. Stephen recently described the experience of sharing through blogging in this way:

I’ve enjoyed blogging as it provides an outlet for my views and lets me connect with Canadians who either share or don’t share my perspective. I’ve met a lot of interesting people online and offline as a result of this blog and I’ve found that most have been sincere and genuine in their respective views on how to make Canada a better place for Canadians, no matter their prescription for that outcome. I look forward to continuing our conversation.

Exactly. This is not about those echo chambers that people call “community” and it isn’t about wallowing in scorn. It’s about seeing people make something of their lives in ways that you can’t imaging and thinking that if they can do that, well maybe I could do this. It is about ordinary people – people you may never meet face to face – being extremely interesting. That is the best thing about doing this…well, that and beer samples being couriered to your door. That is sweet, too.





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Twitter Hacked – Who Cares?

I am using Twitter more and more. I am enjoying the ability to quip, to note, to park an idea. It is a veritable hotbed of fifth-rate wags like me. But there is trouble afoot as the BBC reports:

Micro-blogging site Twitter has admitted that some of its most high profile bloggers have been targeted by hackers. It announced that 33 accounts had been hacked, including those belonging to president elect Barack Obama and singer Britney Spears. It follows a phishing scam on the site which encouraged users to click on a fake Twitter homepage.

Tragic. Imagine the world thinking that a quip by Britney Spears (or rather a junior assistant in her PR firm) was actually not a quip by Britney Spears!!! Hackers are so bad. They might figure out a way to make the background behind the home page of Britney Spears look like the background behind the home page of someone else. Fantastically disasterous. Temple walls coming shattering down clacklily about one’s ears.

The success of Twitter is in its fundamental unimportance. How else can you explain it’s ascendency over Facebook, that millstone of webby obligation relatively speaking? Twitter is what it promises. Nuttin. Hack away.

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