Experiments in Cyberspace

Have you ever spent the last day of the year on-line? Instead of partying, hitting the streets or freezing your privates out in the snow (this obviously rules out the people of the southern hemisphere), have you tried celebrating the New Year in front of your computer in peace and tranquility? Well, before you call the men in white coats let me explain. It happened to me once, about 5 years ago if my memory serves me right. Surprisingly, I was not alone. There were quite a number of souls who were in need of psychiatric help apparently. I will go on and say - at the risk of being called anti-social, cynical, narcissist or a similarly appropriate term for the occasion - I enjoyed it very much. For reasons I will not go into, I had to stay home and rather than watching TV and testing the alcohol barrier, I punched the keys until the early hours of the day while the fan was humming gently in the background, trying to cool the system. This is for those who will spend the evening of Dec

I sometimes come across in blogs an add-on which shows the mood of the owner, the song she listens and the book she reads at that particular moment. Now that Christmas is due and the New Year is imminent (apparently the economic crisis affected my vocabulary), if I had a similar plug-in, mine could as well read: Mood: Gloomy Listening: Sound of Silence Reading: For Whom the Bells Toll Still, in spite of ominous signs, tightened budgets, shrinking profits and accelerating unemployment, this is the time of year to hope, and to reflect . Capitalism, just like it does not distribute wealth equally, does not distribute peace, happiness and joy with a conscience. Well, let me stop before this turns out to be anything but a Christmas post. I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happier New Year.

It is customary to compile a list of events when the New Year is near. As most of you know, Google makes a similar list of popular searches every year on a country by country basis. I have taken the liberty of picking the most interesting queries among them. Here they are: "my" from Australia - This is definitely my number one. When you don't have a mirror, what do you do? Yes, you ask Google. "qq" from China - It probably means something in Chinese; then again, it might not. "you" from Chile - Another intelligent search item. Were they talking to Google bot? It was also the number eight of the Colombians and number nine of the Spanish. I am beginning to suspect you is a nick for a new drug. "danmark" from Denmark - Apparently the Danish like to see how many times their country is indexed by the search engines. "google" from Germany - I have nothing to say. "hong kong" from Hong Kong - The Danish were not alone. &

You surely know Aesop's fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." The tragic ending of the shepherd boy and the flock is used to teach us not to lie. However, this short story has always irritated me: there is something wrong with the moral of it. I do not know your experience, but here, in this lovely corner of the world, shepherds hardly own flocks. They are usually hired hands and the protagonist in the fable is also depicted as one. OK, the boy lied and got eaten, but so did the flock. Now, whose flock was it? By not believing him, whose property perished? Whenever I hear cries of help from industries in trouble after the recent economic downturn, I can not help but remember Aesop's tale. Some scream and shout, some refuse to believe because they have been lied and ripped off so many times. Before rejecting help to those who are presumably in need, it is worth thinking about what happens to the flock.

With no intention of upsetting numerous bloggers - some of which I closely follow and benefit - who advise on how to make money on line, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics that was recently published in Edge can be an eye-opener. In his analysis of the latest crisis of the banking system, Taleb says, When I was a quant-trader in complex derivatives, people mistaking my profession used to ask me for "stock tips" which put me in a state of rage: a charlatan is someone likely (statistically) to give you positive advice, of the "how to" variety. Go to a bookstore, and look at the business shelves: you will find plenty of books telling you how to make your first million, or your first quarter-billion, etc. You will not be likely to find a book on "how I failed in business and in life"—though the second type of advice is vastly more informational, and typically less charlatanic. Indeed, the only popular such

As the number of social networks increase, so does their importance for bloggers in particular and businesses in general to promote their content through them. It is critical to understand the metrics used to use social media effectively . One particular industry that has high stakes in this is the search engines as social media sources provide an effective alternative to traditional web search by directly connecting users with the information needs to users willing to share the information. For example, users can post questions or new items, and rely on other users to comment or rank the content (e.g., sites such as Slashdot or Digg) or rank the popularity of users (like Twitter). While the responses could be excellent, the quality could vary greatly. Hence, user feedback, such as voting, or rating the content, has become a crucial aspect of the effectiveness of the community as demonstrated by the paper, A Few Bad Votes Too Many? Towards Robust Ranking in Social Media [pdf] by Jiang

Less and less things in life surprise me any more. But this new craze of "let's all follow each other on [insert your favorite network here]" has amazed me. Apparently there is still room for surprises and I have gladly taken it as "I am not that old after all." Fine! Let us dissect and analyze this 'following phenomenon'. What makes the number of followers valuable as a metric? For instance, Matt Bacak of Twitter fame claims he has so many followers that he is the third tweeted??? man in the Tweetland. He thinks it is valuable so he markets it: First Facebook, now Twitter. The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, has taken himself to the top of the social media networks yet again, this time beating out 99.9% of the fastest growing site's members. [...] Turn your income-generating ideas into handfuls of cold hard cash. [...] By Matt Bacak, the Powerful Promoter and author of Powerful Promoting Tips newsletter. "If I could show you a proven, b

After visiting hundreds of sites, all with their shiny favicons displaying in your browser's address bar, you decided to use your own favicon in your Blogger/Blogspot blog. You designed and polished it and now what? Here are the steps you should follow: 1. Upload your newly created favicon to a free picture host and take note of the URL. 2. Visit your site and check your HTML source code by pressing CTRL+U (Firefox users). 3. Copy all the code after the opening head [head] tag up to the opening title [title] tag: [some script]...[/script] [meta content=...] ... 4. Back up your template. 5. Go to your dashboard and choose "layout", and then "edit html" 6. Delete this line from your template: [b: include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/] ... 7. Paste the previously copied code in step 3 in lieu of the line you deleted in step 6. 8. Change the favicon URL to the one you got in step 1 like this: [link rel='icon' hre

Every now then we feel the urge to change our templates in our blogs. This can be out of necessity (we might need a bigger area to upload images), because we get bored with the previous template or upon discovering a new one which complements the topics we write about or our style. Regardless of the platform you use, be it Blogger, Wordpress, Evolution etc, switching to a new template is trivial. But, unlike for instance Wordpress where the images come in its own folder with the template, Blogger images are usually stored in free picture hosts. Pictures hosted at such places can cause you trouble in future: Uploader's account can be deleted for any reason. Such hosts often impose bandwidth restrictions and you can suddenly see warning messages in your blog, or no images at all. Template writer can accidentally delete those images. A good way and a neat trick is writing a post like this, uploading all those CSS images to your Picasa album and change the image addresses in your

Analyzing the crisis of journalism and whether blogging or independent on-line journalism can take the place of media reporting as we know it or not, are not easy issues to tackle. The difficulty stems from the fact that, public's right to access to information, ensuring public's safety, personal and privacy rights, safeguarding the bloggers and anonymity, upholding copyright and patent laws  are all intertwined in a beautiful mixture of a soup we call Internet. Since the topics are huge and will provide enough material to write for many years, I am going to start at a random point. Unlike many though, I do have a proposition to solve most of the problems of today, but to present it gracefully requires time; so it will have to wait. Today, I would like to give three seemingly unrelated news and want you to focus on not who is right or wrong but on the mechanics of them, i.e. how things operate or unfold. First, we have the report of Committee to Protect Journalists,

I have partially covered some of the social networks you can use . Now, let us focus on making the most of them. I will recommend a slightly different strategy for you to follow. After you have made your own experiment and decided on which networks you will concentrate your efforts, here are some tips for you: Do not rush submitting your own posts Do not try to game the system in vain. Instead, give your readers the opportunity to bookmark and/or submit them. This will be a new experiment with which you will measure what percentage of your subscribers take the time to bookmark and share your posts. Think how you can improve the submission rates Most probably, the initial results will be discouraging, that's good! Now, reread your posts and note how you could have written them better, especially the titles. Check if your bookmark links function properly and if they are clearly visible. Do you encourage your readers to share? Use comments to your advantage When answering a rea

Linda Hilfling, with her project Gate Peepin' and the Misspelling Generator, will be among the speakers of Speaking out Loud symposium of Netherlands Media Art Institute , to be held on December 18, 2008. Linda works with the premises of participation and public spaces within media structures, with a focus on means of control (codes, organization and law) and their cultural impact. Her artistic practice takes the form of interventions reflecting upon or revealing hidden gaps in these structures. Initially designed and coded in python and bash by her and also available as a Firefox extension thanks to Erik Borra, the Misspelling Generator intervenes directly within the Google search engine, allowing users to take advantage of the informational gray-zone of misspellings. And it does exactly what it claims: Each query typed into the normal Google search-box will generate misspellings inserted above the normal Google results – similar to Google’s 'Did you mean', but now

Devil's Advocate reporting: Time and again I read news about a cryptically named organization introducing a new device, technique or mechanism having an equally cryptic name that will limit or restrict unwanted use of a product throughout the Internet, and soon after, time and again, I am informed that same mechanism is rendered useless by a crack. For most, it looks like a game of hide and seek, played by thieves and the police, good and bad or you name it. Is it really so? We often forget that this game is played in cyberspace, between parties with views wide apart. Back in 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, The telephone: speech without walls. The phonograph: music hall without walls. The photograph: museum without walls. The electric light: space without walls. The movie, radio and TV: classroom without walls. Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his Paleolithic ancesto

No, I am not obsessed with speed if you have mistakenly got the impression after seeing this post and how to design an efficient blog . I live in an unfortunate area with an Internet connection averaging around 8 Kb per second, which is 1/13 of those who live 10 kilometers to the east and west of me. The tel-co will supposedly make some infrastructure improvements only after January, 2009. Well, at least that is what they claim. I can handle a slow connection but it is really annoying to wait for my own blog to load for 40 seconds. So I decided to make it leaner for my own sake. Before writing this post, I pulled down various statistics of the site (home page only) to help me improve a bit: Total HTML: 19,899 bytes, compressed; Total images: 53,785 bytes; JavaScript: 230,649 bytes; CSS: 8,417 bytes; Total CSS imports: 4. Looking at the above figures, it is apparent that there are only two areas I can make some improvements: JavaScript and CSS imports. I focused on cutting bac