This post, relating the battle between traditional political pundits and Nate Silver to the conflict between proponents of traditional evaluations of student performance in school versus the new wave of statistical student evaluation ignores what I thi…
For those of you that don’t pay attention on Facebook, Michelle and I drove 12 hours to Indiana on Thursday, and then back again on Sunday.
The mountains of West Virginia on I-68 cost me 7 mpg in the Corolla.
In dash USB ports are a wonderful th…
The news that Google is killing off Adsense for Feeds is disconcerting. What is Google Reader from Google’s POV? It is a vehicle for displaying the ads that they were placing in RSS feeds. If they are no longer doing that, why would they continue to su…
This interesting blog post seems to indicate that Facebook is gearing up to take on LinkedIn.
I guess it makes perfect sense from Facebook’s point of view. Your network is the best place to find a new job. Facebook has the best digital representation o…
Is anybody else getting burnt out on feeling like you need to keep up with everything passing you by on Facebook, Twitter, etc? While reading what I wrote here previously about social media, I came upon this quote from July 27, 2007.
I’m not sure it’s a good thing, but I can see Facebook becoming the central hub for just about everything, replacing individual blogs as the home base for many web 2.0 types
I totally nailed that one, didn’t I?
I recently moved more than a few people on Facebook to the “important only” post setting. Facebook doesn’t seem to recognize political herp derp as important and that has cleaned up my wall quite a bit. The initial rush of thinking how cool it was to reconnect with people I hadn’t communicated with in 20+ years has mellowed to a realization that maybe there was a reason we didn’t keep in touch after high school or college. Hell, I’ve been on the first page of Google for my name since about 1998. Anybody that wanted to reconnect with me could have found me. Pretty much nobody did prior to Facebook. However, I’m also closer with a few people today than I was during high school. That is the great paradox of FB. For all my negative feelings about the service, it does just enough good in my life to keep me around. I think if I stick to using it purely for socializing and stay away from politics I’ll be good. Easier said than done though.
Twitter has become mostly useless. It’s an advertising and self-promotion platform for social media consultants to promote their latest top 5 list to the other 400 social media consultants that follow them, who in turn will promote their own top 5 lists. It is still an amazing resource for getting breaking news right from the source. I have friends locally that I met originally on Twitter. That hasn’t happened in about 3 years though. The interactivity and connections that used to happen on Twitter don’t really happen anymore. It’s a broadcast medium now. It even has commercials in the form of sponsored tweets that get inserted into your stream, whether you want them or not.
I really want to like Google Plus. When I do get involved in a conversation there it is usually interesting. It’s like Usenet before AOL unleashed their losers users on it in 1996 or 1997. However, engagement there is pretty hard to come by. Most posts get ignored. Nobody is reading, regardless of what Google’s press releases claim.
And then there is this blog. The original social network. It’s not going anywhere. Writing stuff here is cathartic for me. Readers are a bonus, but not really required. I may be down 90% since the readership peak in 2006, but I’m still about 1000% above what I ever imagined this could be when O’DonnellWeb 1.0 launched in 1995. So to both of you, thanks for reading 🙂
Back in the old days, there was actually effort involved in selecting an album or tape to listen to. We couldn’t carry our entire music collection around on a device the size of a Tic-Tac box, but thinner. We couldn’t create a playlist to automatically…
Without Open Source software, Amazon.com would not exist. Their infrastructure would kill a Windows server infrastructure. They never could have afforded the licenses they needed to scale their infrastructure in the Windows world back in the early days…
This times 1000. I’ve owned my own space on the web since 1995. The irony is that 90% of you will see this via Facebook. Facebook is fine as a distribution tool, but don’t let it be the only place people can find you. Everything you ever write on Facebook and all the photos you upload are going to vanish someday. It is just a matter of when. And when Facebook finally falls apart, they will likely sell the data they have collected on you. Who is going to end up with all that data, and what will they do with it?
I’ve been sort of writing anything substantial here, but I’m going to redouble my efforts starting today. I will use Facebook and G+ for one liner type status updates, but anything of substance that I write will go here, and be shared to the social networks.
21 years, wow.
Half-way to 42 years.
What was the question?
It’s been a while since I updated this subject. The effort pretty much failed. Zoho Mail was ok, but at the end of the day do I trust a programming team in India more than I trust Google? Also, Zoho spam filtering was inconsistent. So I’m back on Gmail…
