There are some new features over on the right (well, I hadn’t mentioned them yet anyway). Google Latitude shows my current position at most times, and there’s a Google Calendar gadget to tell you what I’m doing. Please let me know if they’re not working.
This post attempts to summarize some things about social media for the uninitiated. I will talk about social media in general, and focus on the different ways people use Twitter.
Of course, other people have already done most of the footwork. Please check out this post by Fred Cavazza, paying particular attention to the image of his taxonomy. Also note this essay by Paul Graham, which highlights the role of social media in the lives of those who use it.
I haven’t posted anything in a while. Part of this is, “If you don’t have anything awesome to say, don’t say anything at all”. But also I’ve been very busy. You can follow my day-to-day on Twitter, but here are some general things you might be interested in:
I’m working on a review of Moral Machines for the journal Minds and Machines. Wallach and Allen have a book-related blog. My deadline is like, today or something.
I had the chance to talk to Scaz about my research. It was awesome. I can’t post a transcript here due to my university’s ridiculous views on privacy and human research ethics, but I’ll probably talk about it soon.
I will be giving a guest lecture for the SCSU Philosophy Dept this coming Tuesday (March 10) at 3:15 PM. The topic is going to be robots, more specifically the inevitability of a robot uprising. Hope to see you there.
The folks who do Overcoming Bias have a new site called Less Wrong, which is reddit-てき. You should go there if only to check out the site design. It’s pretty neat. I post as thomblake.
EDIT: fixed date for SCSU talk
congypsy.com until recently had a single validation error (XHTML 1.0 strict), and I can’t stand for that sort of thing on a site I work on. The source was the “Latest updates on Twitter” section; I was using Twitter’s pregenerated code bits with just a little modification, and their script expects the <ul> it uses to have a particular ID. The problem came in when I had two of them on a page; obviously, you can’t have two objects with the same ID on one page! But to my surprise, everything worked as expected in Firefox, so I left it alone for a while. (Fail)
So then I realized I could just download the script from the Twitter site, modify it slightly, and free myself from the horror of invalid XHTML. UnFail.
I don’t tend to like short posts here, but I must announce A List Apart’s annual survey for web professional type folks:
This post is a test of some structural stuff.
I just spent a weekend in Cape Cod, and had some time to think while I was relatively unplugged. Since coming back, I’ve seen a lot of comments out there claiming that people are making too big a deal out of NetFlix removing profiles. I disagree - NetFlix has repeatedly shown themselves to be a bad company, and boycott may be the only rational response. At the very least, after observing the complete lack of professional ethics in those at NetFlix, I regret having given them my personal and financial information. And so I decided that here I should outline a little more thoroughly what’s wrong with what NetFlix has done.
UPDATE: NetFlix is now not getting rid of profiles. But they’re still evil.
So I was poking around the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine today, and found out it does a terrible job of indexing blogs. Split posts (”read more”) are frequently dropped, as are comments. I think it just doesn’t do well with very dynamic content.
I’m afraid of what this might mean for the future. I’ve always assumed that we’ll have at least a crappy, slow, hard-to-access record of all of this information. It looks like it’s still possible for much of it to be lost to the sands of time.
I say we should have better internet archives. There should be a lot of wealthy people now who have an interest in making sure this stuff stays around forever. It could at least make for an interesting Google Labs project.