Ow the resemblance it hurts
I do this way too often.
Posts tagged blogging
Wake up and smell your lost anonymity
I for one don’t understand all the uproar about the new Google Shared feature. I posted my shared items as a list on my public blog from day one of using Google Reader, and I have enjoyed followed the shared items of others like Scott Beale of Laughing Squid. I was really happy to see the shared feature expand as suddenly new interesting articles popped up from friend’s shared items. And when I first saw mention of the uproar on Daring Fireball, I was confused.
I mean what did these people think the word “Share” meant? Sure your shared items were very slightly obfuscated behind a unique url, but come on folks! It says right there “Your shared items are publicly accessible.” How can one ever assume from that statement that it was private? Without password protection (even then it’s suspect) your actions are there to find like anything else you do online — get used to it.
It amazes me that a lot of people still assume that they are anonymous online. Well as a certain terrible ad campaign might say, “welcome to the social.” It’s web 2.0 baby! We are now in the era of kids getting expelled for posing as gangbanger wannabes on myspace, cyber-bullying on facebook, and copywrite battles on flickr. You may be home in your underwear surfing on your laptop posting as jackalope1, but for all intents and purposes you might as well be in town square wearing a paper bag on your head while shouting at a security camera with a megaphone.
There are ways to be private online, but you gotta work for anonymity these days — always start with the assumption that nothing you do online is private.
Welcome internets, please make yourself at home. Would you like something to drink?
TUAW has posted about the iPhone/Gmail/IMAP email hybrid setup tutorial I created. And now the internet horde has come making my earlier site stats look laughable.
As all you new here may notice, I commit the number one sin of blogging by not focusing on any one topic. My interests are eclectic ranging from web design, neuroscience and psychology, online health care, art, cultural commentary, politics, and the artist freak scene here in San Francisco. If I had all the time in the world, I could probably produce enough content to support a blog about each of these topics.
Instead of spreading myself thin and risking blog abandonment, I write this one single blog and write detailed and researched posts about whatever is motivating me at the moment. Some of my favorite and well received posts include:
- My Rhymes Are So Dop… amine - a laymen’s primer on the dopamine
- Is that a cockscomb in your pocket? - discussion of John Stewart’s role as America’s court jester
- SF Politics in the 21st century - humorous discussion of the online SF Mayoral campaigns of Gavin Newsom and Chicken John
- Also related to my work at UCSF I’ve posted about Pediatric Blogging, Patient Blogging, and the lame attempts at health care information Second Life.
I hope you find the iPhone email tutorial useful. I don’t run ads here or have a donation button By request of one of my visitors, I’ve now added a PayPal Tip Jar to my blog over in the right hand sidebar under my photo. It did take me a bit of effort to figure all this out and write it up. And I’ve been busier then I expected answering everyone’s questions, so if you find this useful toss a couple bucks in so I can buy myself a drink or something!
Thanks!
Colin
p.s. You can also say thanks by sashaying over to my partner’s site, NifNaks, and checking out her adorable handmade wool dreads, wool critters, accessories — my favorite being the Flying Spaghetti Monster pin. Both her and I have poured a lot of time and love into NifNaks and would appreciate the company over there as well.
Basic blogger courtesy
Last week I logged into my blog admin to see links coming in from a site I hadn’t seen before. It seems that some random blog* was using the Zombie Hand Puppet picture from my blog as their Picture of The Day.
I’d be flattered except the blogger:
- was displaying the image without uploading it to their own server (thus usurping my bandwidth)
- didn’t bother to credit my site, myself or the photographer
- didn’t even have a link back to my main site (just a direct link to the jpg)
- was too lazy to send me a note asking permission (come-on! I have a easy to use contact form)
I went to the site itself and left a comment noting that he should have asked permission, but he could keep the image up as long as he added a caption crediting myself, my site, and the photographer.
So instead of doing this he decided to remove the image and my comments without any email or any form of apology. Which frankly is fine by me — I don’t need traffic from his blog. The is blog itself is just a random collection of mostly rather lame stolen web images. Frankly the quality of my zombie picture took his blog up a notch.
* I’m not going to link to his blog as I don’t want to give it any traffic. However, I will link to his photobucket account, where if you want to bother you can see his collection of random stolen images. It should give you an idea of the insipid “content” of his blog.
p.s. if any one else out there in the interweb wants to use my content or images, just ask. I’m usually more then happy to share most of it, but a bit of courtesy is nice.
SF Mayoral Race 2.0: Watch out Newsom’s got a mic in his hand!
This being San Francisco—which is if not the heart at least the aorta of the intertubes—one would expect all its candidates to have web savvy campaigns. I mean come on this is 2007! If the little town of Medicine Park, OK (pop. ~400) can have a blog, shouldn’t we expect our politicians to be a bit more internet-slick?
Recap of Round I
In Round I, I covered the web campaigns of Chicken John and Gavin Newsom. Neither of them got very many style-points for their web presence, but Chicken John was the winner of that bout with his more personal and direct internet campaign.
The judges reconsider
However, it seems that the judges missed something in their review: as it turns out, the Gavin Newsom campaign, Act Locally SF*, has a flickr account, and they have an active YouTube campaign. Mostly it’s just a bunch of long rambling unedited boring meetings, but I love his Pet Peeves on the Streets series!
The Pet Peeves on the Streets video series have Gavin Newsom himself interviewing random people on the street and in barbershops asking what their pet peeve is with San Francisco. The series is a few months old at this point, but they are a good attempt to reach out to people the way that this new social web is meant to. We need to see more campaign ideas like this.
So with this revelation, I gotta give the YouTube Stardom category over to Gavin Newsom, and I’d say the Web 2.0 Social Aptitude category is now a tie.
With this turnover, Gavin Newsom is now in the lead as the top 21st century political candidate of San Francisco!
A scrappy new contender
However, Gavin Newsom shouldn’t get too cocky. He only won that one by a nose and as Scott Beale of Laughing Squid reports, Josh Wolf seems to be coming out with both guns blazing. He’s got a new blog, Josh Wolf for Mayor and a campaign video. The judges have yet to completely review but they did have this to say:
“Please please next time get a tripod and don’t ever sit in front of a nauseatingly bright greenscreen!!!”**
So stay tuned for Round II where it’s the stiff backed experienced politico Gavin Newsom against the slouched over activist Josh Wolf!
* I gotta say though that Act Locally SF is a terrible campaign name. It sounds more like a generic NGO then a campaign. Why not just Gavin Newsom 2007?
** Bonus Points go to anyone out there who takes Josh Wolf’s video and remixes it using the greenscreen background for something Dumb. Note: that’s Dumb with a capital D—ya know the kind of Dumb that’s actually funny and creative.
I’ve been away for a bit…
With vacations in Hawaii and campouts on the playa, I’ve gotten outta the habit of blogging lately. Looking to get back into the groove though.
As a warning, my next post is gonna be about this lovely bit of future I now own called the iphone. For those of you sick of iphone discussion, watch this awesome music view and ignore the next post.
Hot Chip ~ “Over and Over”
“Over and over and over and over like a monkey with a miniature cymbal…”
