Internet & Society Course Blog

Here are some entertaining sites that also require some strategizing.

• Planarity - untangle nodes from a Web of confusion
• Peekaboom - for the benefit of science; work on image recognition in collaboration with a randomly picked other person (it’s much more fun than I’m making it sound here)
• Gravity - use your physics know-how to avoid collisions
• Balancing levers

Here are links to some material that we have looked at in class in the past couple of weeks.

Videos

• JibJab on This Land
• George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People
  by: The Legendary K.O.
• Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog on these two

Free software

• HTTrack for downloading entire Web sites
• GIMP - check this previous post for specific links
• Inkscape

Related blogs

• Freedom to Tinker
• Lessig’s blog

Fun site

• 
  Kiss This Guy

In the spirit of Halloween, I thought I’d post a link to this little mystery game starring the ghost “Jinx”, not to be confused with our own Jinx. (If you are seeing this right before doing your assignment for Monday’s class, I recommend clicking on the link AFTER you’ve submitted your blog post.)

This article is relevant to the discussion we had in class today regarding different prices offered to people depending on their profiles.

We’ve discussed feeds before and J. asked today about RSS use. (Granted, his question may have had to do with the browser link in particular, but oh well.) Here is a list of ten ways in which you can use feeds. It’s just a list to get you started, I suspect you’ll come up with others more relevant for your own interests.

Here is the list of extensions we discussed in class, plus some additional ones.

UPDATE: Fixed a bad link (thanks, Andrea!). Feel free to leave links to your favorite extensions in the comments to this post.

In preparation for Wednesday’s class about Firefox and its advantages, you may want to read this summary of why Firefox is worth giving a try. Also, if you haven’t yet, you can download it here. For detailed instructions on how to install it (Windows), check this site.

You can also start looking around on this page for possible themes in case you want to change the layout of your browser. Doodle Plastik is the one I have installed for the profile I use in class.

Social bookmarking lets you keep track of sites of interest while sharing your finds with others. Moreover, a social bookmarking system lets you browse others’ bookmarks as well. One popular such service is del.icio.us. Yahoo! also has its own version at My Web 2.0. Now a new service has launched that is more user-friendly in some ways than these others: BlinkList. Keep track of your bookmarks and those of your friends in one location.

Tags play an important role on such a service. You can add tags to your bookmarks. These bookmarks will show up if anyone browses tags that you associated with a link. Similarly, you can decide to browse what sites people have posted under tags of interest to you.

BlinkList, like del.icio.us, let’s you see who else has bookmarked a site that you have listed. This is particularly interesting since it lets you find others who share interests with you. They may have other sites that you will find beneficial.

BlinkList lets you add some bookmarks privately in case you don’t want to share them with others.

Board notes in class,
originally uploaded by eszter.

In case you wanted to have a permanent copy of today’s board notes, here’s a little pic.

Splogs are spam blogs, blogs that exist solely for fooling search engines about the popularity and relevance of certain sites. Now there is a search engines geared toward searching just splogs: Splogspot. I am not sure when you would want to use it except perhaps when trying to show someone an example of a spam blog. Nonetheless, I thought I’d post a link just as an example of the types of specialized search engines that exist these days.

The majority of you indicated (over 80%) that you have little or no understanding of tagging. This article in the New York Times addresses the issue by describing three sites that use tagging for connecting people with others sharing similar interests: del.icio.us, 43Things and PledgeBank.

Here are some links following up on the conversation in class about whether Gore ever claimed to have invented the Internet, and Bush’s comment last year about “the internets”. (This latter link points to a brief video clip of the actual quote.)

The Facebook is in the news again. (Recall Fly Gal’s post pointing to a TV news segment.) This time the coverage concerns parents of incoming first-year students at Syracuse University. Based on information they gathered about their children’s roommates (e.g. about race and sexual orientation) parents started contacting the university demanding that their kids’ roommates be changed. So much for providing their children a mind-expanding college experience.

UPDATE: You may find this analysis of Facebook use by first-year students on one campus interesting.

You can access archives of Web sites on the Internet Wayback Machine. According to the site, it has 40 billion pages archived. Just enter the Web address of a site that is of interset and press “Take Me Back”. Then choose the date of interest.

You will notice that the Internet Archive also houses other types of material such as moving images (with almost 20,000 items) and live music.

Here is an article about Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive’s creator and some of his most recent initiatives such as Ourmedia.

Here is the Anonymous Lawyer blog I mentioned in class today. It looks like the site attracts thousands of visitors daily.

Here is the article in the NYTimes to which I referred in class about its author and the blog.

Similar to Bloglines (introduced in this post), Kinja helps you keep track of blog updates. I have set up an account that is a collection of class blogs plus this instructor’s blog. By simply going to this page, you can monitor in one location additions to your peers’ blogs.

In class, we have discussed various ways in which spam creates problems for bloggers. Here is an interesting new twist on spammers’ latest moves in countering the measures set up by bloggers to filter out spam.

At times you may want to post a comment on your own blog. The most obvious reason for this would be to leave a response to someone else’s comment to one of your posts.

WordPress leaves you logged on unless you consciously log out of the system. This means that when you go to comment on a post you will not be given the option of filling out the spam guard “blog” line. However, when you then try to submit your comment you will be told that your comment cannot be posted since you forgot to enter the blog word.

To sidestep this problem, be sure to log out before commenting on your own blog. You can usually hit the back button on your browser and retrieve your comment text, highlight it, copy it and then paste it into the comment field once you are logged out.

This is another inconvenience for which spam is responsible.

It is imperative that you active a plugin to protect your blog from comments. If you don’t do this, the costs of maintaining these blogs will go up exponentially.

Here is what you have to do:
1. Log in to your blog
2. Click on the Plugins tab
3. Click on Active (column on the right) for the “Auto-close Comments” plugin (probably listed first on the list of plugins)

You’re done. Seven days after you post a new entry the comments to it will be closed off automatically.

This page gives you more information than you probably ever wanted to know about how search engines rank their results.