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.

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.

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

You may want to add images to your posts. Here is how to go about it.

First: what not to do. Do not link to an image on someone else’s Web site directly. Each time someone looks at a Web page in their browser, the image will have been downloaded to their machine. This means that you are using up bandwidth from that person’s account.

Instead of linking (or what’s called “hot linking”) to someone’s image on another site, create a local copy. Of course, you should only proceed with this if you know that the particular license associated with the image allows copying.

The problem with creating a local copy in our case is that you don’t have rights to upload images to your blog directory. So what to do?

Here’s an option: you can post it on an image-hosting site and link to it there. Such hot-linking is okay.

You may consider creating a free account on the photo-sharing site Flickr. Yahoo! owns Flickr so if you have a Yahoo! account then you can just use that.

Once you have a free account on Flickr, you can upload up to 200 images to your account (there are some limits on how much you can upload per month). Flickr then gives you the option of looking at different sizes of your images and choosing one for inclusion on your Web site.

You click on an image to view it. You then click on the All Sizes button above it. The thumbnail or small version would work well for blogs. Here is an example of both:

You don’t have to figure out the code with which to include your images in a blog post, Flickr gives it to you automatically. In fact, the system even lets you blog about an image straight from the site. Just click on the link above the link that says “Blog this” and follow the instructions.

This discussion on how to be productive in college has advice that may be helpful to some of you.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is used to create documents on the Web. PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (it’s a recursive acronym), which is used to create dynamic Web pages. (That is, the Web page is generated when you call it up based on additional information available.)

If you want to play around with changing some things in your theme templates, you will need to know some amount of basic HTML and feel comfortable enough with computer code to look around in the PHP files to see what you may be able to change. HTML files usually have a .html ending (although in some cases they are truncated to .htm), while PHP files end in .php. Although none of the files you’ll encounter here end in .htm(l), knowing basic HTML will help you tweak other types of files. It will also help in writing your posts.

In addition to PHP files, there is also a file ending in .css in your theme folder. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. Information in such a file is used to style Web pages. One important difference among the different themes we are using across our blogs is that they rely on different CSS files to render them. If you want to change the color or size of fonts on your blog, you should look for related information in the .css file.

For example, colors are usually denoted by six or three numbers/letters (often a mix of the two) so if you want to change the color of something on your blog, look for such six- or three-digit codes preceded by a # sign.

There are numerous HTML guides online. Here is one that explains some of the basics clearly. Here are some pointers on how you can achieve certain outcomes in CSS (understanding this will require some basic HTML knowledge though). This tutorial lets you play with CSS code right on the page. Finally, here is a tutorial that brings together basics about HTML and CSS in one document.