Scott Hanselman writes:
The strangest thing just happened. I’m sitting here in a hotel in New Zealand and my phone pops up an alert from a push-to-talk voice chat application I recently installed called Voxer. It’s a voicemail from a tween (a child perhaps not quite 13 – in-between) teasing me about my name. “Scott Hanselman – Who would name their kid Scott HanselAndGretal man. *giggle*” Harmless stuff, of course, but weird and random. No idea who this is.
The name wasn’t familiar but there was a little icon next to the voicemail in the Voxer app. Perhaps you’ve seen it before. It was a little red pin.
I clicked, and the young person’s exact location popped up. They were sitting in a public library, likely after school. Because the application is an iPhone app and tied into their identity, the app shows their full name, not an alias. Literally a light 20 seconds (not minutes, mind you) of Googling and I find their Google Plus profile and Twitter. Google Plus promotes even more “information leakage” with it’s “Places Lived” feature. This showed the last three cities the young person lived in. One of them was Portland. Since I live in Portland that seemed too coincidental. I searched for people I know on Facebook with the same last name who lived in Portland. Turns out I’m Facebook-friends with this young person’s dad, although both have long since moved out of town. I messaged him and he was appreciative, relived it was me and not a stranger, and is dealing with his child.
He goes on to talk about some of the implications of the location based services and how the average person probably doesn’t even understand what they are getting themselves into. I’ve quoted about half the article, but it’s worth checking out. Thought provoking for people with children, but important to consider for all of us.
Something I’ve noticed recently is that some days I don’t have time to check Twitter at all. I feel a little out of the loop, because often these are the same days that I don’t really check out any news at all. If I do, it’s really late at night and only briefly. I always wonder if I missed something. I pride myself on being up to date on the world around me.
Enter the web service News.me. It’s really basic, but really useful. You sign up and add your Twitter account. News.me then calculates the five most popular stories linked to by the people you follow on Twitter. Simple, easy and useful. I don’t check the e-mails every day, instead I only look at them a few times a week.
Check out News.me here.
Author Alan Moore, creator of the original V for Vendetta, recently gave the BBC some of his thoughts on the Anonymous movement and it’s co-opting of the Guy Fawkes mask as its symbol. From the article:
As for the ideas tentatively proposed in that dystopian fantasy thirty years ago, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that whatever usefulness they afford modern radicalism is very satisfying.
His thoughts on the movement are definitely interesting, especially as it is something I’ve frequently wondered about. What is it like to see something you popularized take on meaning and then becomes a political force in itself? I’m happy to see Moore say that he is happy with the movement and it’s use of the Guy Fawkes mask. Anonymous’s use of the symbol is certainly more inline with the protagonist of the comic book version. As Moore puts it:
…when the movie industry apparently decided to re-imagine the original narrative as some sort of parable about the post-9/11 rise of American neo-conservatives, in which the words “fascism” or “anarchy” were nowhere mentioned.
What do you think about Anonymous? Mis-guided anarchist, kids with nothing better to do, growing political power or something else all together?
Some academics recently released a study regarding online piracy and box office returns. The results are interesting.
In a paper titled ‘Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales’ researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College examine the link between BitTorrent piracy and box office returns. As hypothesized, they find that international movie piracy losses are directly linked to the delay between US and foreign premieres.
Does this mean that the MPAA is going to suddenly give up their wildly unpopular legislation and instead change their business practices to solve the piracy “problem?” It seems unlikely.
So why don’t evidence and reason seem to matter anymore? In every segment of society there are examples of people doing things despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is a state funded creationism museum and there are parent groups advocating the dangers of wi-fi to their kids health. The list is endless. What is wrong with people?
My theory: there have always been people like this out there and there always will be. They are just made easier to notice in our increasingly interconnected world.
Kanye West is living proof that if you talk enough, you will eventually say something smart. In one of his songs he says the line “would you rather be: underpaid or over rated?” It’s a good question and something I often think about.
This week The Economist had a great chart on executive pay.
(click to enlarge)
I’m sure if you ask the executives on the left side of the column they would say over rated, but argue at the same time that they aren’t over rated themselves. The executives on the right side column would probably say underpaid. With people like Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer on the underpaid column, I’d like to think most of those executives are performing better because they are passionate about their work and not in it for the money.
Personally I’d rather be underpaid than over rated. I want people to find my involved me essential. Besides, if you’re important to an operation of any sort and people realize it, you have tremendous leverage for solving the pay problem. It doesn’t quite work the same way if you’re over rated.
Obviously this makes a lot of generalizations, but what do you think? Would you rather be underpaid or over rated?
I now regularly use three different computers over the course of my day. At home I’ve got my MacBook Pro. At home and at the office I have a MacBook Air, but in the office I also sometimes need to use an iMac.
Anyone have a suggestion on how to easily sync bookmarks, online logins, dropbox files and evernote across three machines like this? Ideally a method where I can also log out of all these services, because in the case of the iMac, different people use it from time to time.
I hate having to log in and out of everything so often. There has to be an easy fix to this, any ideas?
I assumed people just created bots and then pointed them towards a specific account. It turns out that there is a service that you allow to use your account to randomly follow people. It then checks to make sure the people you randomly follow continue to follow you back, otherwise it unfollows them. It does this whole thing automatically. Twitter only allows you to follow about 2,000 people before you it the cap. The cap isn’t removed until you have over 2,000 followers yourself. This is why you see so many accounts that are following that many people, but have so few followers themselves.
It’s a good way to game the system, and over time it works. People think they will have more credibility if they have more followers, but that isn’t actually the case. How likely is someone to actually read your tweet if they are following several thousand people? Not very. This is why services like Klout, which measures online influence, are increasingly relying on the ratio of followed to followers. Something to keep in mind when someone is claiming to be a thought leader because of the large following they have.
Maya Arulpragasam, or as the rest of the world knows here, M.I.A., short for Missing in Action. Previously she was probably best known for her hit Paper Planes and last week she released an incredible video for her new single, Bad Girls.
If you’re aren’t aware, during yesterday’s Super Bowl performance came out to do a short rap during Madonna’s performance of her new single. At the end of her lines, M.I.A. added the line, “Yeah, I don’t give a shit” and then gave a hundred million people the finger. Here is a clip of the incident (it will probably be taken down soon).
Opinions are all over the place about whether or not it was intentional. A “source” claims she was caught in the moment, but I don’t buy it one bit. The same person who puts out a politically charged music video which YouTube permanently bans, doesn’t accidentally do something like this at the Super Bowl. She knew exactly what she was doing and that’s what makes it so great. In the same Super Bowl that featured former bad boys Motley Crue selling a Kia, M.I.A.’s gesture says something about authenticity and what it actually means to be rebellious these days.
At the same time it should (although it won’t) start a conversation on how ridiculous this outrage actually is, I could say more, but I’ll leave you with the image below.
Update: a quick Google search reveals that this line is actually in the original lyrics, wow that makes the outrage even less relevant.
Every year Nick Denton (the guy who built Gawker and turned it into a $300m media empire) puts out a memo about the state of journalism and publishing on the web. It’s always interesting to see what someone at the forefront of an industry is seeing and this year’s memo is no different.
Absent from the memo is much talk about longform web journalism. Over the past few years this category has developed into more of a cohesive writing form. Instead of pithy blog entries of only two or three articles, longform has embraced articles that routinely take thirty to forty minutes or more to read. Here are some examples of some good ones I’ve read in the past week or two.
Longform is great for a couple of reasons. It’s interesting and intellectually much more stimulating than a lot of other web content. I love having a cache of long interesting pieces to choose from if I don’t feel like reading my book on my commute every morning. Most importantly, it is legitimizing the idea of “reading stuff on the internet.”
While Denton’s memo points out a lot of other interesting trends, I think longform is definitely one you should look into if you’re not already aware of it. Two great resources to finding articles are Longform.org and Give Me Something to Read.
For those of you who know me well, it’s no secret that I love timelapse videos. There is something about them that is mesmerizing. They have been everywhere for the past few years. People are constantly making them. Now I think supercuts are replacing them. Supercuts are videos where one person doing one thing across a bunch of different clips are combined into one.
Here is an example of what I’m talking about. I didn’t realize it individually, but put together it’s obvious. And now whenever I see Brad Pitt eating something in a movie I think, wow, now I’ve been made aware that this is apparently something he does all the time. Fascinating.
I am still going to make my own timelapse video at some point, but now I need to add editing a supercut to the list.
