This blog is fun for me to write as well as for me to look back over (even tho I haven't been adding to it for that long). I get to embed images and video that have tickled my fancy, and therefore get to feel like it is mine, in terms of remembering it and showing it off to others. "Look how cool I am! I saw this and I liked it!" I'm not saying it makes a lot of sense. Maybe it's like being a fan of your local sports team and reflected glory.
from "Blogging Tips: Keep it legal - How to avoid committing libel" by wholeenchiladaHowever, I'm not sure that my blog has any interest to other people. I suppose the things I like say something about my personality, so if you know me, maybe you would be interested in that. Or, if you like the things that I like, then maybe it is a useful collection of links. Other than that, it really doesn't add any content to the internet -- no nodes, just edges, in graph terminology.
That makes me feel like the blog is somewhat hollow -- it's got a lot of pictures and stuff so it looks all fancy, but it reminds me of writing my thesis. I started with a Latex template that auto-created title pages and tables of contents and figures and acknowledgments, and even before I'd written anything, it already looked impressive. Anyways, I thought I'd add some content to the blog by writing a few paragraphs about how the blog has no content :). Yes! Mission accomplished!
[[ Comment: All the above was one paragraph before, but I remembered an interesting and relevant article I read about how people read on the web: Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online. Since I'm already being super metahyperselfaware in this post ...]]
from F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web ContentI've also been thinking about the social web this week. Recently, I read an article about why Facebook is an important first step to the social web (I don't remember where the article was from; I'll look for it later). It said that the ideal social web would be one where, wherever you go on the web, if one of your friends has been there before, he can leave comments and notes that you can read and then discuss the article, etc.
Lots of places on the web let you leave comments, but they are comments that anybody can see, and, more importantly, when you look at the comments section, you see the comments of a bunch of random retards you don't care about. There is some use to seeing the comments of strangers if the webpage is about a rather obscure topic -- you can meet people with similar obsessions (e.g. I read and add to the comments on RP Does the NYT Xword). But, if you're watching a video on YouTube with 1.26 million views, undoubtedly most of the comments are vitriolic spam from angry, angry people with poor spelling and grammar skills, and who wants to read that?
from Spongebob Motivation by FramedThiefGoogle Reader lets you do this to some degree, I think. I signed up for it yesterday -- I'll let you know. You don't really get a lot of freedom, though, in how you can note -- you can't highlight text or make comments while reading, you just can make a note when you share an article you read. Also, I don't think it allows any social back and forth.
I also don't think it has the Facebook News Feed feature, which is the best thing about Facebook, to me, anyways. I haven't been on Facebook for very long, but I feel like I better know and am more involved in the lives of the few "friends" I have that comment regularly, and that is from the News Feed which tells me my "friends'" status updates and silly posts. Someone should invent a catchy word for a Facebook friend, by the way. I will do it. Facefriend. Patent pending.
It's not a deep friendship that I've found through Facebook, but it is definitely an amusing distraction, particularly in my world, where everyone I know (including myself) is career-driven, and only lives in the same place for a couple years at a time. I've been struggling since I moved to Pasadena to make any new actual friendships. This is mostly because I'm shy and have huge social phobias, but partly because I'm at the age where people are starting to have full-fledged families, and perhaps partly cuz I'm at Caltech, which is not renowned for its socially-disposed students.
When I first started with Facebook, I found it uncomfortable, as I was friends with people I hadn't talked with in a while, and my News Feed was telling me all kinds of random stuff about them. It felt like spying, or something. Now, though, it feels a lot more natural, as really there are only a few people I know who write stuff regularly to their Facebook account, and I leave little comments to them about their posts on occasion, and they will on occasion leave comments on my posts. So, I'm cool with Facebook now, even if that Facebook guy Mark Zuckerberg sounds like a total jerkasaurus. Ooh, Kyle and I have an awesome Facebook app idea for that, by the way.
from Dinosaur ComicsI'm waiting for the Facebook app that lets you mark-up and comment the HTML webpages you read and share, lets you know when a webpage you read but didn't share is shared and commented by a facefriend, and lets you browse the pages shared and discussed by your facefriends through a News Feed-like interface. When the number of pages shared gets to be large enough that you don't want to look through them all, it would be cool to use some machine learning tools to order the pages shown to you.
Once we've got virtual reality down and we all have implanted microchips feeding information to all our sensory organs (or maybe we just need an iphone? I don't even have a camera on my phone yet, so I don't know what iphones can accomplish. I hear it is miracles, tho :)), it will be cool to be able to comment and share random things in the physical world as well -- I'm imagining little virtual glowing post-it notes everywhere.
By the way, I think my facefriend Daniel B.'s new Facebook app Helpy is a step toward the social world. It allows you to make requests for help of any kind to your facefriends who also have the app installed (note I am getting annoyed at myself for every use of the new catchy term facefriend :)). For instance, I have a broken fluorescent floor lamp, and I added a (virtual) comment to it asking people if they knew how to fix it (of course they don't, but it would have been cool if they did). I also added a comment to a memory I have from the '80's, and was able to solve a decades old mystery. Decades!
Anyways, I feel a little better about there not being any words on this blog, as now I have added way too many boring sentences for any human to possibly read and pay attention. Here, let me go back and add some bold phrases so that it is more parse-able :).
No comments:
Post a Comment