Internet & Society Course Blog

Brain flexing

Eszter Hargittai — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:01:39 +0000

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

Links from lectures

Eszter Hargittai — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 09:42:38 +0000

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

Fun site

Kiss This Guy

Halloween fun

Eszter Hargittai — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 17:01:42 +0000

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.)

Different prices for different profiles

Eszter Hargittai — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 21:34:09 +0000

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

Uses for feeds

Eszter Hargittai — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 23:01:31 +0000

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.

Firefox extensions

Eszter Hargittai — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 16:21:22 +0000

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.

Firefox prep

Eszter Hargittai — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 03:36:56 +0000

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.

More on social bookmarking

Eszter Hargittai — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 00:33:45 +0000

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

Eszter Hargittai — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 23:57:36 +0000

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

Eszter Hargittai — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 19:39:12 +0000

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.