alt.larryanderson.org

28 Feb 2010

They chose China

Just watched this film on the National Film Board of Canada site. Amazing story of the American POWs who refused repatriation at the end of the Korean War. Highly recommended.

26 Feb 2010

A few words about Google Buzz, posting, and me

If, like me, you've been spending time playing with Google's new social media platform, you've probably seen a few posts about the "right" or "wrong" way to use Buzz, what you should or shouldn't post, how to get unfollowed, etc. It seems that lots of people have their own ideas about what Buzz is and how it should be used; the complication is that not everyone shares those ideas.

This is as it should be. As a new platform, Buzz will be defined by its users. The norms of interaction and the acceptable ways of using the platform will be--are, in fact, now being--defined by the early adopters and the heaviest users. That's why I find the notion of trying to dictate some kind of Buzz etiquette to be misguided--laughable, even. You can't dictate this stuff. It's organic, and it grows from the ways in which people are even now using the platform, pushing its limits, and defining its problems.

Take @-replies (or @-mentions), for example. The whole notion of an @-reply originated in the early days of Twitter, when users themselves began to use the convention of an @ symbol in front of a username as a way to reply, since the platform itself gave them no way of doing so. It became so widespread that it was eventually adopted officially by Twitter. The lack of a truly workable equivalent on Buzz is not necessarily a deficiency. It may well be that a better method will eventually emerge over time as users wrangle with the issue, or when Google engineers bow to pressure and simply provide a button or a dropdown. But simply because it works one way on one system does not mean it has to work the same way on another. My point is this: we're in the early days of an exciting new product. This stuff is going to get worked out. Relax.

On a related topic, I should mention something about how I intend to use Buzz, my philosophy about posting in general, and my feelings about following and unfollowing people. For me, Buzz is the perfect aggregator, pulling in my content from various places on the Web, and doing a fine job of presenting it all in one place where someone can see it all at once. That's my hope, anyway. To that end, I think it's perfectly legitimate to pull in blog posts and my shared Google Reader items along with my native Buzz posts. You may disagree, and that's a legitimate area of disagreement. But I'm not going to change to suit anybody else.

As for posting, if you take a look at my profile or read my About Me page, you'll see that I have a fairly eclectic range of interests. You can expect my posts to run the gamut of those interests. One post might be about Buzz, the next one about some oddball Eastern Bloc car, and the third about health care or the Orthodox Church. You may or may not agree with what I write, and that's fine. I will be honest about who I am, but once again I'm not going to change to suit anybody else. I hope not to offend anyone (unless, of course, they need offending) but it is worth noting that none of us has the right to not be offended. However, we do all have the right to take our respective balls and go home. I follow a wide variety of people with differing backgrounds and interests, because I hate a one-note chorus. I follow with deliberate care, and unfollow very reluctantly. If you feel the same way, I think (and hope) that you'll enjoy reading what I post.

There is one sure way to get me to unfollow or block someone, though, whether here, on Buzz, or on Twitter, and that is for them to be persistently obnoxious--in short, to violate Wheaton's Law. Life is too short to waste time with the obstreperous. Enough said.

And that, dear friends, is my philosophy about Buzz, posting, life, the universe, and everything. Thanks for listening.

24 Feb 2010

Test post

This is just a test to see how things look with a different theme. I'm trying to decide whether or not I want a theme with a dark background; I tend to prefer lighter backgrounds, but thought that for the video-oriented part of my site that a dark background might work well.

Anyway, here it goes. Maybe I'll stick in a YouTube video just for good measure...

Edit: Obviously, you're not looking at a dark theme. I decided it was too busy. Whatever you might say about the standard theme, it's clean and readable (or at least more so than the available options).

20 Feb 2010

Using Google Buzz: The Inbox Problem

One of the criticisms that people seem to have about Google Buzz is its integration with Gmail. While I see this as a plus, there is no denying that having Buzz posts fill up your inbox is annoying. Here's how I dealt with the problem:

1. Set up a filter to keep Buzz posts out of the inbox. Go to Settings>Filters>Create a new filter. Where it says "Has the words," type "label:buzz." Click "next step," and check the box marked "skip the Inbox." Then "Create Filter." Gmail will put up a warning that such a filter is not recommended. Forge ahead anyway.

2. Activate Labs if you haven't already done so, and in the Labs tab activate "Multiple Inboxes." In the settings for Multiple Inboxes, for Pane 0 make the search query "label:buzz" and the panel title "Google Buzz." Set your maximum page size (mine is 5 conversations) and click the button to position it where you want it--mine's above the inbox.

When you're all done, it will look something like this:

Voila! Your Buzz posts are separated out, and still readily available. Problem solved.

2010-05-08 Edit: I've embedded a Google Wave for further discussion of this topic. If you need a Google Wave account, please visit http://wave-invite.larryanderson.org.

17 Feb 2010

Getting Buzzed

Google Buzz has been out for several days now, and with a decent amount of usage under my belt it seems like an appropriate time for the obligatory Buzz post. I'm hugely excited and impressed by Buzz, because as a major user of Google services I see a lot of potential for making my online experience a better one. The integration with my Google account, the ability to post messages longer than 140 characters, and its ability to pull in my content from other sources are all major improvements over what has gone before. In some ways, it's the Facebook I might have designed for myself; fairly clean UI, media-friendly, but without the annoying games and applications. I like it.

The integration with Gmail was a genius move, even if it has caused Google some grief in the short term from those worried about privacy issues. I've seen things posted online saying that Buzz will be made available as a standalone product, and if so I hope it continues to be well-integrated into Gmail for those of us who like that feature. Actually, I'd like to see it more tightly integrated into other Google products, not less so; I can imagine having it tied into Google Voice, for example, so that I could send SMS from my phone to Buzz, and conversely be notified by text message when one of my contacts left me an @-reply or commented on one of my posts. And think about the possibilities of being able to leave a voice message on Buzz using Google Voice, perhaps with transcriptions posted as Google improves Google Voice's transcription accuracy. It's already being integrated with Maps and Reader; I see tremendous possibilities for accessing the capabilities of Google's translation tools, and even Google Docs. I really do think this could potentially be game-changing.

It still needs quite a bit of work, of course. Several features that one would think should have been obvious to the Google team developing the product are inexplicably absent, such as the ability to collapse comments and show commenter's profile photos. I'd like to be able to link directly to a comment in a post, not just to the post itself, and when someone on my contact list leaves a comment on someone else's post, I'd like that to be available to me even if I'm not following the original poster. I'd like to be able to filter people's streams selectively (for example, show me John Doe's Twitter but not his Flickr), and also have a way to simply flag something I want to look at later. The Gmail "star" function would work well for this, and I'm not sure why it wasn't included.

They also need to work out a better system for @-replies. Having to find someone's Google account name and manually type in the presumably associated email address (as in @John.Doe@gmail.com) in order for the link to be created is a pain. Not converting it on the fly to a readable format is equally a pain, as you have no way of knowing whether or not it's been converted to a clickable link until after you've posted--and if someone hasn't enabled a user-friendly URL for his/her Google profile, it wont work at all. It would be nice to be able to click on someone's name and have a dropdown with the option of "reply to this user" or "direct-message this user." Again, it's hard to understand why this hasn't been implemented, as it would not seem to present any insuperable technical difficulties.

Speaking of Google account names, Google's taken a lot of flak over the issue of privacy. I'm not at all certain that much of it is really warranted. There are instances, to be sure, where exposing your list of followers/followees might bring grief to people in specific situations, but if you're going to participate in any kind of social media, whether it be Buzz, Twitter, Facebook, or something else, you have to realize that you are making a choice to be public with certain things. By all means, refrain from putting your bank account information on your blog, but unless you're willing to forge ahead boldly and live your life more publicly than your grandparents did, you really can't participate in much of the Web. Google did make a huge blunder in not making things clearer to the early adopters and in exposing people's email addresses (tsk, tsk!), but to their credit they are moving quickly to fix the things that people have complained about, and I think they're doing a good job with that. And, quite frankly, I think it's silly to worry about whether or not people can see who you follow. That information has been public on just about every other microblogging platform I've tried, and I've never seen it as a problem. I certainly don't see it as one here.

There is one tiny little problem that I have with Buzz, and it's a good one to have. You see, I have a blog that I host on my own domain, and I have spent a small amount of time setting it up so that it is the one place anyone need go to see what I am doing, whether it be blog posts, Twitter posts, or photos. It is, as its subtitle says, "the canonical Internet lifestream of Larry Anderson." But now, with Buzz, that isn't necessarily going to be the case. Buzz not only pulls in my blog posts, Flickr photos and Twitter feed, it also pulls in comments from my Typepad account, my Disqus account, and anything else you'd care to name that has an RSS feed attached to it. It is frankly going to do a better job of aggregrating my content than I have been doing myself, and in a nice, AJAX-y user interface to boot. Thanks to Feedburner, another part of the Google empire, you can even subscribe to my Buzz feed as a daily email digest. The upshot is that I'm going to have to start directing people to view my Google profile/Buzz page if they really want to see everything in one place. Good thing I've already set it up so that buzz.larryanderson.org redirects there.

Finally, there's an interesting identity angle to all this. I recently posted about my frustrations with I-names, and my experiences with them. I think it's becoming fairly clear that our online identities are, and will be, defined by our accounts with major providers, for better or for worse. The proliferation on web sites of "log in with Facebook" or "log in with Twitter" options is a sign of this. As I have said, going forward I am going to have to rely more and more on my Google identity, simply because so much of my life is tied up with Google products. It's ironic, because I have historically been averse to tying myself too closely and exclusively to the Microsoft or Apple universes, but Google is providing so many services that do pretty much exactly what I need that I'm becoming very Google-centric. At any rate, this highlights a problem for the I-names contingent, because people understand Facebook profiles and Twitter handles and are comfortable using them as logins--essentially making them their web identity. That is what my Google account is becoming to me. The problem is that I-names, or any similar technology that introduces new language and jargon, is going to find it a very tough battle for acceptance. At bottom, they're not really offering anything unique (sorry, but it's true). You pay your annual registration fee, and you get a handle you can use. Stop paying your registration fee, and your handle goes away. It isn't much different than what I do with larryanderson.org and my domain registrar. True, with I-names you get to keep your corresponding I-number forever, but what's the point? It's not like the I-number is usable for anything on its own.

The bottom line is that most people are going to be perfectly happy using their Google, Facebook, and Twitter accounts as their primary online identity. Things like OpenID may gain acceptance among the geeks and tech nerds, but the general audience isn't going to care. Hell, I'm one of the geeks and I'm starting to not care. With Buzz, Google has produced a product that just might keep me firmly ensconced in the Google orbit permanently. I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords. :)

14 Feb 2010

Testing 1-2-3

This is just a test to see how Buzz handles it when I email a photo from my phone to a linked site. This will be deleted shortly.

14 Feb 2010

Welcome!

This part of the site is intended as a home for those pics I want to post on Google Buzz, Twitter, and other microblogging sites, rather than use something like TwitPic. Anything you find here that originated with me will also be found on my Picasa and Flickr pages. Links to those sites can be found on my Google Profile at http://profile.larryanderson.org.

13 Feb 2010

When hell freezes over, revisited

Forgive me, but this is just too good not to post.

I got a message last night through my contact page. Here it is (minus any identifying information):

Hello Larry:

My name is (redacted) and I'm the owner of (redacted) and we are trying to expand i-Names the way they were originally envisioned. By providing you a way to make telephone calls, send postal mail and even e-mail using just an i-Name.

In monitoring the XRI community throughout the web, I came across a post which you stated you would not be renewing your i-Name. Which was a response to a previous post of yours in which you declared i-Names dead!

I would encourage you not to give up on i-Names just yet. As a member of XRI-TC along with Drummond Reed, I can state that we are working hard on the next version of the XRI and XRD standards. To that end I would be happy to pay your renewal fee and invite you to use (redacted)'s maximum plan free of charge for one year for =larryanderson.

Just send me an email and I will set your account up. We are very responsive and are looking to improve our offerings to provide the best possible service.

Best Regards,

=(redacted)

Well, that's very interesting, and God bless them for trying, but I won't be taking this person up on the offer. I simply have no faith that the technology they're trying to resuscitate will ever amount to anything, and quite apart from the money it's an unwelcome distraction in my life. Been there, done that, ain't going back. You can thank Victor Grey and Fen Labalme for that.

The delicious part is this: normally, a functioning I-name will redirect to a contact page when you go to http://xri.net/=username. In this case, the I-name with which the message was signed redirects to a parked-domain page.

And I'm supposed to be filled with confidence that this group is going to bring I-names back from the dead?

Thanks, but no.

8 Feb 2010

When hell freezes over

Like the title says, I'll be renewing this I-name when hell freezes over. I've gone into the reasons why elsewhere, but here's how I concluded my remarks:

...In the matter of identity, trust is everything. The entire point of a technology built on the concept of identity is that it can be trusted. When the oldest and largest purveyor of that technology effectively ceases to operate in any normal fashion, that trust has been irrevocably shattered...

I, for one, have decided to stop trying. I own several domain names, I have a blog, I have a tumblelog, I have accounts on Twitter and Facebook and the like. It's hard for me to see what significant benefit I'm going to derive from continuing to pursue this matter, particularly when my domains are all less expensive and much more useful. I don't mind supporting new technologies that might be beneficial down the road, but there's a limit, and that limit has now been reached.

I-names are dead.

Read the whole thing.

1 Feb 2010

The mark of a desperate landlord

I'm guessing the building owner isn't seeing many signs of an economic recovery...