Month: January 2007

Categories
Digital Culture

What does a BoingBoing look like?

Just a few days ago, a post showed up on BoingBoing. For those of you who haven’t had this happen, it can be great (lots of people reading my stuff!) and terrible (the /. effect, aka: melty servers). I just looked back over my raw hits to see how much of a difference BoingBoing made. Here it is, in all its naked glory:

boingboing'd

So I went from around 3000 hits a day to about 65,000 hits in a day. If your server isn’t ready for that, it can come as quite a shock. Luckily for me, Blake Carver and LISHost are amazing, and kept my blog up for the entire process.

Categories
Digital Culture

WordPress 2.1

Well, I upgraded to the latest WordPress release, and it brought with it broken. I had used the php function get_links for a TON of customizations on my blog…my sidebar, my random byline in the header, a couple of pages…and what did they do? They killed it. The call is now wp_list_bookmarks, and the options are less straightforward and I’m still not sure I can do what I want with them.

Just as a warning to anyone else who might be upgrading, if you’ve done a lot of customization with the links, beware the upgrade. And if anyone has any thoughts on getting the new system to behave like the old, let me know.

Categories
Digital Culture

Prior art

As many people in the comments of my State of the Union Tag Cloud post pointed out, there’s a FAR better example of this over at chir.ag, with his slider-based interface of all of the presidential addresses since 1789.

I don’t think I’d seen this before, but it’s entirely possible. So props to chir.ag for coming up with the idea way before I did…and with a better interface. sigh

Categories
Digital Culture

Tag Cloud for 2007 State of the Union

Lately I’m really digging Tag Clouds as information sources of their own, and not just a reflection of a source. For instance, check out the tag cloud for the President’s State of the Union from last night, and see what’s important at a glance…note the difference in frequency of “war” and “security” or “terrorists”.

Welcome to the BoingBoing crowd…thanks for stopping by!

created at TagCrowd.com

Categories
Library Issues

Seattle, ALA MidWinter 2007

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I’m in the pacific Northwest, at the ALA Midwinter meeting! Had a good conference so far, but yesterday the jet lag got to me. It’s only two hours, but it’s the two hours that made me wake up at 5am, and wouldn’t let me go back to sleep.

Took some great shots of the city yesterday, and of Pike St. Market (you know, the famous one where they throw the fish around). Here’s a few of my favorites:

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Categories
Digital Culture

Collaborative Genealogy

Web 2.0 has now brought us a collaborative genealogy site in Geni.com. It popped up in my del.icio.us search today, and I thought I’d take a look.

Geni example

That’s the interface screen, which begins with you signing up for the site. Doing so begins your tree, and allows you to branch off by clicking the yellow arrows for different relationships (up for parent, down for child, sideways for spouse or sibling). The bit of brilliance is that the field for names includes email, and the recipient can automatically sign up and become part of your tree. It’s a combination of viral and collaborative, and a brilliant way to do genealogy.

There’s also a “background” profile where you can give more info, contact information, etc, so that anyone in your tree can contact you. You can also add photos to your profile, so the entire thing can become a sort of name prompt for those family reunions.

Problems? Well, some families are a lot more complicated than this. My biggest complaint, and I can’t honestly believe they did this, is that the sideways arrow doesn’t prompt for “spouse”, it reads the sex of the selected person and prompts for “husband” or “wife”. Sexism ahoy! They should really change the prompt to Spouse, and allow a radio button for the sex of the spouse. As well, for complex child relationships, it kind of falls apart…step-children aren’t part of the tree either.

The technology and concept is amazing, and if they tweak a few interface issues, I think this is a huge Web 2.0 winner in the making. It’s a social network limited to your family, and a collaborative content creation system all in one. They need to add abilities to export the data, or import from existing genealogy services and much more detailed noted fields (not up front in the tree, just behind the scenes) this might become a huge draw. The best thing they could do is publish an API, and allow for other tools to leverage the information…imagine being able to crawl the tree with an API and generate other bits of info from it.

All in all, a great Beta product, but needs work before hitting the bigtime.

Categories
Digital Culture

The Jesus Phone

My favorite iPhone reaction:

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Categories
Digital Culture

OMFG

Well, I’m an admitted fanboy, but holy christ on a pogostick, Apple has pulled one out this time.

The iPhone is far, far more than anyone expected.

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I, like everyone else, will have to wait until June, but I want!

Categories
Digital Culture

Second Life goes GPL

Linden Labs, the proprietors of the MMORPG Second Life have done what many thought impossible: they’ve released the code for Second Life via GPL.

This is beyond huge. I have difficulty explaining exactly what sort of watershed moment on the ‘net this is, frankly. Second Life was the first online environment where there were clear property rights….what you create, in game, is yours, and is treated more or less like physical property. This allowed the residents of Second Life to create a vibrant economy that paralleled the real world, instead of being solely virtual like so many other MMORPG’s (WoW, etc).

This release now allows anyone to set up a Second Life server, giving avatars options as to where to set up camp. It sets up a situation of unlimited emigration/immigration in-world, and the ability to hop from “state” to “state”. I can see a natural evolution now of different Second Life states that appeal to different user groups (instead of the current “areas” in the single state) which will allow for much more customization and play from the residents.

I wish I had more time to play around in SL. I’ve got an avatar that lives there, but just don’t have the time to devote that I’d like to fully explore the SL world. It’s an amazing place, though, and this move could very well make it the defacto next stage towards the metaverse.

Categories
Digital Culture

New bloginess

After being informed that my current theme is causing no end of errors for reasons unknown, I’m going to be playing with my themes for a day or so. Just to let everyone know, so you don’t think you’ve ended up in the wrong place if it looks a bit funky.

Also, I’m up for suggestions if anyone has a favorite they’d like to see used.