Tom's 23 Things

Second Life

2008-03-06T16:06:00.005+11:00

The Inquirer describes Second Life as 'the premier destination for those lacking a first'.

It strikes me as a virtual world frequented by slightly daggy people who are a bit out of touch with technology but think they might just appear hip to their children, along with other, somewhat strange people who like to meet other somewhat strange people. To an online gaming whiz-kid, I imagine it would be a weird, slow and boring environment that older people seem to like. The technology looks old and out of date, and the world looks like it's built for old people. It doesn't nearly match up to the slick, graphically impressive games available in recent years. It is really slow, and it takes forever to do anything, and in order to do anything even remotely cool like make your character look like a Wizard, bodybuilder or your favourite cartoon character you need to pay money, and even once you pay for it it still looks lame. And you have to pay for lots of things. And there are losers in it that keep ruining it for everyone.

I truly think that attempts to use Second Life as a communication medium, or to reach a younger audience, are both misguided.

As a communication medium, it is unnecessarily complicated and overly restrictive. It requires a new, high powered computer. Most laptops or office desktop computers won't run it satisfactorily. It also requires a fast broadband internet connection, and uses a lot of bandwidth, making it unnecessarily expense, and for users in some areas, all but unusable. There are high costs involved in leasing 'virtual land' within Second Life in which to conduct your meetings. It also presents an unfamiliar user interface to everyone - more unfamiliar than they possibly could have imagined before. Suddenly, in order to conduct a meeting all of the participants will need to configure their avatar and wander around a 3D world, a complicated task not usually required for participating in a meeting.

As a way of reaching a young audience, there are problems. Firstly, if any of the people you are trying to reach are under 18, they won't have access to the same Second Life world as you, and you won't have access to theirs. They have their own separate 'teen' world which attempts to be safe from predators by barring access to adults. Some 'Second Life library' proponents apply a generation-Y stereotype that portrays young people as all being as comfortable in 3D virtual worlds as in any other medium. It's a stereotype that doesn't have basis in fact. 3D environments are used in certain genres of video game, and video games are by no means enjoyed by a majority of young people, nor do these people accomplish other tasks in 3D virtual worlds.

I have a Second Life account and I have stumbled through the overly long, complicated and poorly guided procedure of customising my character and wandering around various places. It didn't really appeal; it was just too frustratingly clunky to be enjoyable.

Podcasting

2008-03-05T13:21:00.005+11:00

I could spend this whole post writing about how annoyed I am about the origins of the word 'podcast'. In its reference to the 'Ipod' it makes my hair stand on end. Contrary to its name, however, 'podcast' hasn't really been claimed as a trademark of Apple Corporation, nor was podcast technology invented or licensed by Apple, podcasts are not affected by DRM, and they are not restricted to playback on Apple hardware or via Apple Itunes or Apple Quicktime. In as much as the 'pod' in podcast is a brand-specific reference by fans of Apple Corporation, it is inaccurate and misleading.

Podcasts contain free audio files that are not restricted in any way. Because they use the popular MP3 file format, they are playable on virtually every device, from your computer to any MP3 player or modern phone. You can download them and save them and play them back whenever you want. In technical terms the podcast stream itself is just a web feed with MP3 attachments (enclosures), so you can subscribe to a podcast in any feed reader that can see attachments. Most can, including Google Reader.

Before podcasting, websites that wanted to produce audio shows often fiddled around with proprietary file formats like Real Media and Windows Media which needed a vendor plug-in and restricted users' ability to download the file and play it back later. Audio and video were streamed and as such they were low quality and unreliable. Anyone wishing to produce audio programs in the Real or Windows Media formats faced largish costs and a fair amount of hassle. Even though MP3 has been around for a while and certainly pre-dates podcasts, it had a bit of a stigma attached to it as the format used for illegal file sharing, and I believe many publishers avoided it as they didn't want their content stolen.

I like to believe that the idea of podcasting came about as a reaction to the restrictions and proprietary file formats of larger publishers. The concept brought the idea that any Joe, with a microphone plugged into the computer, could record anything he want and make it available to young fashionable people who had hard drives or portable devices full of MP3s.

Podcasts can be created with free software, and can be served from any website with normal web server software. The lack of any significant cost involved in producing them is both a blessing and a curse. One the one hand, it means that it is relatively easy for any poor student with a bit of technical know-how to start broadcasting their opinion to their blog readers, or whoever should happen by their website. On the other hand, this has led to a large amount of content made with low production value, a poor understanding of audio or broadcasting, or a very narrow appeal. Indexing all this content so people can find it is especially challenging.

Nobody seems to have made a search engine for podcasts that satisfies me. There's no way of previewing the content on-screen to get a feel of their quality and relevance; you have to listen to them. Even with online videos (think YouTube) you can get a feel for whether it is a professional video or a home video of someone's dog doing somersaults from the thumbnail, which isn't available in a podcast directory.

Incidentally, it's possible to include video in a feed instead of audio, and some publishers are now producing what they call video podcasts. MP4 (which, ironically, started life as an Apple invention) is fast becoming a de facto standard for free, portable video with the h.264 format, though AVI files using the older MPEG-4 ASP format (sometimes called Divx) are also relatively common. Neither format has achieved the ubitquity that MP3 has with audio, but the latest mobile phones and portable audio/video devices can play MP4, and free video players such as VLC can play both.

Personally, I was very happy when the ABC and BBC websites started offering podcasts as an alternative to their streaming media, which relied on Real Media or Windows Media. I have downloaded and played back many podcasts from ABC radio shows, where I wouldn't have been bothered if the audio was only available in streaming formats.

YouTube

2008-03-04T17:48:00.003+11:00

Ah, YouTube. I could get stuck on it all day. There's always more to see.

It's owned by Google, contributing to the overall Google-bias of these 23 things. I must admit that I've been more fanatical about Google during the writing of these blog entries than my skeptical self would normally be.

While Google owns the company, it doesn't boast about YouTube as a Google product. There is no Google logo on top of the site, and no mention of YouTube in this list of Google products. It does, however, let you sign in to YouTube with your Google account, though that functionality is hidden, as if to discourage it. This is in contrast to Yahoo's aquisition of Flickr, where the fact that it is a Yahoo company is now readily apparent.

It probably has a lot to do with whatever plans Google has for Google Video's future, which is a long-time sort-of competitor to YouTube. I can't imagine that Google Video will now swallow up YouTube, though. The brand and interface are too well-established and well-tuned.

Amongst all this, I did manage to find some YouTube videos about libraries. I particularly enjoyed the quite famous Library Pacman video that Swinburne produced. I also enjoyed finding a Swinburne promo on YouTube, despite the mis-spelling of both 'university' and 'promo' within the video.

Putting a pet on a wiki

2008-03-04T17:07:00.002+11:00

This is the most difficult of the 23 Things tasks to explain. Resizing and saving images for the web is a complicated task, and it requires using software that many people, including me, had never used before. I chose to provide instructions for Macromedia Fireworks because everybody here has a license for it already, whereas we don't have any site license for Photoshop.

When creating images for the web you have to understand the inter-relationship of capture resolution, which is either the megapixels on your camera or the setting on your scanner, the resolution of the final image, and the relationship this has with how large the image is on screen when viewed in a web browser. Web browsers ignore resolution information (such as 300dpi) and instead size things according to the number of pixels, a concept which can also be difficult to understand.

It all makes for a pretty difficult task, and even if my step-by-step instructions did help I doubt that they gave any insight into why it was done like this or how it could be adapted to other situations where you need to create graphics for the web. While I told people to resample their image, I didn't explain what this was and I didn't cover how to crop the image, so it's the right shape, sharpen the image, but not too much, or do any sort of colour corrections or manipulations, which are often necessary with images direct from cameras.

The second part of this task wasn't too much easier. I am well aware that the wiki is new to most people, and along with this it also has a strange markup language and a not-too-intuitive method for uploading photos. If I had to think of a more difficult thing to do on a wiki I'd struggle - perhaps creating and formatting a table would be it.

The wiki's strange mark-up language was intended to be simple, though this simplicity only exists in comparison to HTML, and only in the minds of the technically literate. In comparison to modern, dare I say 'Web 2.0' tools which use WYSIWYG interfaces such as Blogger, Wordpress and GMail, formatting text in the wiki is horrendous. Inserting images is worse.

I'd much rather use a wiki that uses WYSIWYG editing, with a formatting toolbar instead of markup codes, for editing. I know that it's possible - I've worked on a similar thing myself. I've also used the wiki software Confluence, which comes close, though it imposes a heirarchical structure on the site that's just not wiki. There is one being developed called Ogham, and it seems to have an online demo, but it's either taking me to the wrong place or I just can't work out how to use it. Presumably one could also add a modification on to Mediawiki - what we use - to add this functionality, though I can't see that going very smoothly.

Library 2.0

2008-03-03T16:36:00.010+11:00

23 Things has changed from a leisurely stroll through the wonders of the web into a mad sprint to the finish line, as I rush these last few blog posts to be eligible for a laptop prize draw - which after this whole thing I hope I am eligible for: I heard that I may have been volunteered to organise it.

A little under four years ago some clever person saw that there were still new things being done in web applications and they came up with the sarcastic term 'Web 2.0' to describe new ideas relating to web applications. Of course, there is no such physical thing as 'Web 2.0', except a concept or way of thinking. It isn't a new standard or new file format, or in many cases even new ideas. It's just a kinda geeky sounding name which has become quite trendy among those who like being trendy and selling sizzle to their clients, and in as much as it encourages people to develop better and more usable web applications I am happy to go along with it. 2pointno seems to sum up the story of Web 2.0 quite well - that it is a new name for a concept that isn't well defined and isn't all that original anyway.

Library 2.0 seems a bit like the same kind of concept applied to the library industry instead of the web industry, but to me it is quite different in its approach. Having been exposed to the shallow hype of Web 2.0 from my time in the web industry, the library industry's approach to Library 2.0 appears both more earnest and yet also more self-conscious. In contrast to Web 2.0, Library 2.0 seems to have its heart in the right place, genuinely aiming to engage more with users and make better use of technology in order to improve the library experience. At the same time, in its striving to consider users' needs more in delivering services to them, it seems to be fighting a perceived image problem or general deficiency of libraries. It seems to feel that the existence of Google, for example, shows how libraries have slipped behind or are struggling to be 'relevant' to their users. This kind of stopping and thinking about the bigger problems is rarely done in the web industry, which tends to move too fast to stop and think about what it may be doing wrong or who it is alienating, as there will always be more clients to pitch and buzzwords to invent.

In both, the '2.0' part is a bit lame to be as trendy as it's made out to be, and they both come surrounded with tag clouds full of associated buzzwords that mean nothing as a whole, rather than offering a clear definition of the concept and its scope. Indeed, both seem to have no end to their scope, associating themselves with every interesting new concept that comes along, whether technical or philosophical. They also both seem to generate 'gurus' - various industry figures who are idolised for their prophetic sounding blog posts boasting new levels of enlightenment about all that is right about the industry.

See

librarianinblack.net, "Library 2.0 Discussion: Michael Squared"
blyberg.net, "11 reasons why Library 2.0 exists and matters"
wikipedia.org, "Library 2.0"

Delicious

2008-03-03T16:24:00.003+11:00

I've just read (via Wikipedia) that del.icio.us is soon to launch a redesign. I think it needs it. They're also going to take those dots out of the site name and just call it 'delicious', which will make it a bit more palatable to me.

I've used del.icio.us for work - at two different workplaces, actually. It does work. You can share bookmarks, label them with tags and other people searching on those tags can stumble upon your bookmarks. You also might get a little thrill to find out that 'great minds think alike' - that 300 or so other people have bookmarked the same thing as you. Or, perhaps, that you are the first of many to bookmark something truly interesting.

It's never really grabbed me though. Despite various bookmarklets making it a bit quicker to submit a bookmark to del.icio.us, I am a huge Firefox fan and I love the ability to use Firefox for my bookmarks. It's hierarchical (which del.icio.us isn't) and it is native to my web browser, which reduces waiting and hassles to me. I can drag and drop bookmarks between sub-menus and I can bookmark something by dragging it to a bookmark menu right from a tab. The next version of Firefox even lets you tag your bookmarks if you choose and search those tags from the location bar. del.icio.us represents extra steps to bookmarking something and a slightly ugly interface in which to do it, and I don't find that the ability to see who else has bookmarked similar things to me really calls out to me enough to bypass my browser's safe, comfortable bookmarks.

iGoogle Home Page

2008-02-29T12:16:00.001+11:00

I don't like having Google as a home page and I don't it when other people have Google as their home page, and this is equally true of iGoogle.

I guess my reason may be kind of petty, but to me it's a huge niggle. I don't like the way it takes a little while to load, and then once it's loaded, it grabs keyboard focus. If you are typing something, for example, into your browser's address bar or search bar, the Google page hijacks what you're doing and you end up typing the tail half of whichever word you're on into the Google home page, and then you have to go back to the address bar or search bar, figure out how much of what you typed actually made it into there, and resume from where you left off.

My browser already has a search bar, I don't need a big Google search box loaded when I open a new tab.

Last time I tried iGoogle, I found that the interface for adding a new feed was far too restricted. I couldn't figure out a way to just paste in the address of a particular feed I wanted to add - instead, it wanted me to browse through their categories and select one of their pre-defined feeds. I see that this has now changed. Not only can you add any feed you like just by pasting the address into a box, but you can now have Google Reader show up, so I don't even need to duplicate between them.

I belong to the subset of people who like their homepage to load instantly, rather than requiring any contact with the world wide web at all. At work, my homepage is just a blank screen - that doesn't take any time at all to load. At home, I have a homepage I created myself which contains a whole bunch of links I often use. It also loads instantly, because it is a local file on my computer. And it doesn't steal text focus from whatever other text box I may want to start typing in.

Google Book Search

2008-02-29T11:42:00.005+11:00

Google has a habit of producing web applications that are proofs-of-concept. They stick the word 'Beta' into the logo, and produce a very impressive application that does something few people thought could be done in such a way, even though the concept has not yet been proven and, usually, they haven't come up with a way to make money from it. I think it's fairly impressive - while to Google these are only side-projects, they are still serious projects which have had serious resources put into them.

You can read what I wrote on this page about Google Book Search. It was originally called Google Print Library Project, and it was a joint project by Google and some large academic and public libraries to scan 15 million books within a decade (I think that figure comes from Wikipedia, which came from a press release).

A number of things are impressive about it. The sheer number of books which are stored is the least of it: Google is no stranger to storing and indexing staggeringly large amount of information.

The interface is quite original. Not satisfied with relying on the Adobe Reader Plug-in, Google instead have created their own, web-based, reader interface which doesn't need PDF at all! It's a very nice change from other e-books which load up as PDFs, or worse, in which every separate page loads as a separate PDF! Google averts such nightmares with its own web-based reader, which in a lot of ways is actually faster and easier to use. Faster, because they are using AJAX techniques (as much as I hate that term) to place content on the page without reloading the entire page, so I can continuously scroll through and Google will load each page just as I am about to reach it (unless I run into some copyright-justified limit of course). Easier to use because, well, the problems of reading PDFs on the web should be well known. Reading PDFs on the web is just a nasty experience overall, and one I prefer to avoid.

Apart from the few times I have wanted to find some technical information and a Google search has landed me half way into a book on Google Book Search, I haven't really used it much. As technically impressive as it is, I don't yet prefer to read for enjoyment while I am browsing the web unless it is pretty short and low-brow (feeds for example), and if I need to look up something technical I usually find it in a more web-palatable form than in a book. But I have to admit it has come in useful to me at least once.

Google Docs

2008-02-29T11:14:00.003+11:00

Having worked on web applications for a while I find the concept of an entire office suite running as a web application really amazing. It wasn't too long ago that this would have been entirely a pipe dream.

Google has been pushing the envelope quite a while - I remember when GMail was launched and we all marvelled at their courage, launching a web application for the masses, but one which broke backwards compatibility with any web browser more than a couple of years old. It made heavy use of a technique which has come to be known as AJAX, whereby scripts on the web page itself can send or receive information to or from the server and update parts of the page, negating the need for an entire new page request to be made and a new page loaded. This allows for more responsive, richer web applications which still store their data on a remote server and still require no applications to be installed on the user's machine, apart from the browser alone.

In its current state I see Google Docs as a proof of concept, rather than a serious attempt to take Microsoft's territory. Previously, not many would have imagined that an entire office suite could be run as a web application, and yet still be easy enough to use, flexible, quick enough to respond, and interoperable with documents from other office suites. Still, by proving it to be possible it at least hints that web applications may start to threaten traditional desktop applications.

One problem with web applications, at least historically, is the latency of the web. It takes time for anything you submit on a web page to be transmitted to the server, and for the server to respond with a new page containing what you wanted. Loading a new page is the traditional way to navigate around a web application. However, applications like GMail and Google Docs overcome this by loading virtually the entire application in a single web page containing scripts, so that most navigation within the application does not require information to be submitted back to the server or waiting for a response, because it is running locally.

A great benefit of web applications is that they require no installation of software on the local machine - a person with a web browser can visit the web application and begin using it immediately. This is in contrast to, for example, a desktop office suite which requires a somewhat complicated installation process, if it is not pre-installed on the computer.

There are sometimes compatibility issues with older or less-popular browsers, though most web applications support a range of recently released browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Konqueror/Safari, Opera and their derivatives) supporting various platforms. One drawback is that many modern web applications are incompatible with the simple browsers found on phones or PDAs. Google produce 'mobile' versions of some of these applications, such as Gmail and Google Reader, which can be used on these devices. But they don't support the features of the full application, and are not nearly as quick or responsive, requiring page reloads to navigate around them.

I don't use Google Docs regularly, though I use Gmail and Google Reader from time to time, both which are applications that have only recently become attractive alternatives to desktop applications - in this case, email clients and feed readers.

Google Maps

2008-01-08T17:40:00.000+11:00

A family asked me for directions the other day, and I had no idea where the street they wanted was. But I pulled out my phone, which has Google Maps on it, and I did a search for the street they asked for, and wouldn't you know it they were only a few blocks away. I was able to give them directions to get there.

I have a Melways directory in the car. I don't use it so often now that I have Google Maps. And now that I have Google Maps on my mobile phone, I am even less likely to use it.

You can get Google Maps for your phone here. However, be warned that you have to have a data subscription on your phone account and it will use some of that data.

Myspace and Facebook

2008-01-04T12:46:00.000+11:00

I have a Facebook account, though I don't think I am the type of person to have one. I'm a fairly private person. Unlike Myspace, however, I like that Facebook's privacy controls at least show that they care about privacy and acknowledge that there are a bunch of issues with people revealing this degree of private information about themselves.

Facebook lets you see what someone is up to without that person ever having to know. If you use Facebook, this is something you have to come to terms with. It's the same as with blogging, Twittering, or publishing anything on the web, except that it contains your real identity and your real name, and lots of personal information. You never know when someone you know is browsing around on your page to see what you are up to, and I don't know about the other punks but for someone like me that can be scary. It also treats all friends as equals, so you can't pick and choose which of your acquaintances will get to see which pictures, videos and notes.

Facebook is still a bit of an experiment for me. I use it because I kind of have to - there are people I know who only contact me through there. But it still makes me feel uneasy, which sucks.

Feed readers

2008-01-04T11:58:00.000+11:00

People who use feed readers tend to use them extensively and wonder what they did without them. It helps people stay informed of all types of news from the newspaper headlines right down to small blogs, their friends' blogs, podcasts, what influential people are doing, product reviews, movies, music, TV programmes, and more.

People describe feed readers as replacing email lists, online forums or bulletin boards, and physical newspapers. All have some element of truth but none is completely accurate.

Here is my own explanation of feeds. I have tried to make it as simple as possible.

Without feeds, keeping up with what is new on, say, 50 separate websites is unmanageable. At best you could have 50 bookmarks in your browser and try to remember to visit them all regularly. You certainly couldn't visit all 50 each day.

If those websites provide a feed, however, you can subscribe to them in your feed reader instead. Then, instead of visiting all 50 websites each day, you simply open your feed reader in the morning. All new items from all 50 websites will be there in one place. You have not wasted your time visiting a bunch of websites only to find there is nothing new on them, and you have instant access to whatever is new on those that have updated.

Feeds are well used, but the problem is that all this use is only by a small minority of people who 'get it'. It's an incredibly difficult concept to understand, and there are a number of things which are to blame for this.

Firstly, there are so many different names and so many different (and competing) file formats for feeds. There are two quite separate formats both which are abbreviated to RSS, one standing for 'Really Simple Syndication' and another for 'RDF Site Summary', formerly known as 'Rich Site Summary'. Notice that neither is a particularly user-friendly name, and one even has another abbreviation, 'RDF', inside it, which offers no hope to the uninitiated. There is another format called 'Atom', which is separate again to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and RSS (RDF Site Summary/Rich Site Summary). To make it difficult, some people refer to them all as 'XML', though technically XML can contain any file format, it has nothing to do specifically with feeds.

Secondly, people providing feeds to the unsuspecting public persist in giving them these inconsistent technical names, some sites describing them as 'RSS', others as 'Atom' and some as 'XML'. They usually provide no explanation of what they are, assuming I guess that the only people that will be using them will know the technical ins and outs already. Assuming that the only people who want to use them will already know about them is like giving up. It's admitting that feeds are unusable by the general public. But they needn't be like this.

Whereever possible, I refer to them as feeds. This is the most generic term I can think of that seems to get kind of close to describing what they do, and seems to used by others as well. I don't call them 'RSS', because that is jargon and specific to a certain technology; feeds need not even be in the RSS format. I don't call them XML, because that is not descriptive and it betrays a misunderstanding of what XML is. It also helps to add to people's confusion about XML in general.

I think one of the best things to happen with feeds sofar is when in 2005/2006, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera all agreed on a single icon to identify a feed. The icon chosen was one originally devised by the Mozilla team, who created Mozilla Firefox. The same icon, except blue instead of orange, has been adopted by the Safari browser for Mac OS.

Browsers now recognise feeds linked to a web page and offer a better way of subscribing to them; usually by clicking the orange button in the address bar or status bar of the browser. You still need a separate feed reader to get the most out of feeds, and web-based feed readers like Google Reader are getting pretty good. But at least the browsers are beginning to integrate at least a little bit of functionality for reading feeds.

Not all websites have adopted the standardised method for linking to a feed, and many continue instead to provide their own various 'XML', 'RSS' or 'Atom' buttons to identify feeds. This means that you can't simply click the browser's feed icon to subscribe to some feeds. In addition to this, a huge number of people still use Internet Explorer 6, which does not recognise linked feeds at all, making the subscription process more difficult.

I use my feed reader almost daily, and have subscribed to over a hundred feeds. In fact, I have subscribed to all of the feeds from people's 23 Things blogs as a way of keeping up to date with them, thus demonstrating how useful they can be. I have a handful of feed categories, including one category named 'Uninteresting', where I keep subscriptions from websites that don't really interest me, but I might look at if I have time to kill.

LibraryThing

2008-01-04T11:16:00.001+11:00

I was at the Innovative Ideas forum in Canberra and I saw Abby Blachly speak about LibraryThing.

I think the idea of social cataloguing is a good one and LibraryThing is obviously popular and well used, but I was skeptical about the ways it was trying to market itself to libraries. It offers an API which libraries can use to integrate a tag-based browsing feature or recommendations into a Library catalogue's web interface using small 'widgets'. However, it seems so walled-in and inflexible; a marketing exercise for LibraryThing intended to gain itself a reputation in the library community as being 'library-worthy', rather than a no-strings-attached offering to improve the experience of library web users throughout the world, which it appears to market itself as.

LibraryThing has a business model closely modelled on Flickr. It makes its money from users paying for yearly subscriptions, while offering users a reduced-functionality account, with a limit of 200 items among other things, for free. Like Flickr, it offers sharing, not of photos but of book collections: which books you have in your virtual 'library'. It collects information about books such as the tags various users have given the book, ratings and comments. It compiles some useful information. For example, LibraryThing is able to figure out recommendations for a certain book based on which other books the people who have given that book a high rating also liked.

I guess the thing that irks me is the way in which it markets itself to libraries, but is not flexible enough to provide something that will be really useful for library customers. It speaks about offering the usefulness of tag-based search to library catalogues, but the tags that appear link back to LibraryThing's website. In order to add a tag to a book, the end user needs to do so at LibraryThing's website, and have a LibraryThing account. Integration into library catalogues the world over will give LibraryThing a lot of new customers, and yet deliver a feature of dubious worth to the library catalogues themselves. If libraries want tag based browsing, they would be better off finding a system that will integrate into their own catalogue, rather than LibraryThing's, allowing their own users to define the tags and allowing the browsing to be better integrated into the user experience of the catalogue, rather than as a small widget that pops up a small separate LibraryThing-provided window.

As a social networking site I think it's pretty good, though I don't intend to use it. I already use other social sites which I am happy with, and I am not keen on paying money for an account if I were to get serious about cataloguing my books. I have more than 200 books, and am not really gripped by the idea of cataloguing them for the world to peruse.

Commenting on blogs

2008-01-04T11:08:00.001+11:00

During the 23 Things I have added comments to a few people's blog posts, but it was sort of in my capacity as the guy who reads everyone's posts. I like to think that I've offered a little bit of encouragement. Of all the tasks in the 23 Things one of those I am most proud of is number 4, the one that requires people to comment on each others' blogs.

I have spoken before about why I think that's been a good idea.

When you are blogging, your cannot see your audience. You don't know if you are doing it all in vain, because most people will view your blog and not add a comment. You don't know how people are reacting to what you are writing. If you receive no comments, you may presume that nobody is interested, when in reality this could be far from the truth.

When running a blog, getting comments can be very difficult and this can be discouraging.

Getting comments on your blog makes blogging rewarding, by showing that at least someone is reading what you're writing. For someone that is new to blogging, I think this is a good head start. It shows what blogging can be like if people are commenting on your blog and helping to contribute and share.

How to become a famous blogger

2007-12-07T15:19:00.001+11:00

Progress

2007-10-18T15:29:00.000+10:00

We now how a rough indicator of how much progress people have made in 23 Things. There is a chart here; those of you playing along at home will need a staff wiki log-in to see it.

Today I wanted to acknowledge that there is a huge variation in how easy people have found the tasks and the effort that they have had to put in. For some, setting up a blog has taken hours of work, and that's before making a single post. For others - well, some people had already done most of the things in the program anyway. Setting up a blog on Blogger could take as little as a couple of minutes if you already knew what you were doing.

I think the program is aimed at that former group - those who haven't used a blog before, or feeds, or other online tools. I don't want anybody doing 23 Things to feel 'left behind' because they haven't figured out how to do something in an hour, when it took their colleague five minutes. Hopefully, people can get help from each other, rather than wondering where to get started. If anyone has other suggestions for encouraging those have more difficulty, please do comment.

I have read everyone's blog and commented on a few, and some of them are very interesting. It's also good to see we have some Doctor Who fans!

A word of encouragement

2007-10-18T15:13:00.001+10:00

Before 23 Things started I hadn't used an image generator at all, but it has been one of the most popular tasks in the program, probably because it's something very visual that we could demonstrate when we were showing people 23 Things.

For this image I used the excellent and very classy ICanHasCheezBurger Factory. I used a photo I found on Flickr by Lazy Lightning, who kindly licensed their photo to allow adapted works.

Using flickr

2007-09-28T12:08:00.000+10:00

I am already quite familiar with flickr; I do some photography as a hobby and I have an account there with a large number of my photos already. I pay flickr's yearly fee so people can see more than 200 of my photos.

Of all the 'social' web applications, flickr was the first one I ever joined, so I wasn't used to its 'contacts', 'groups' etc. I was a big skeptic when it came to social web applications. Since using other social applications, I find that I wish flickr had more privacy control. I'd love it if I could prevent certain parts of my profile or certain photos from being viewed externally (such as by Google's indexer), or set viewing rights for my photos on a per-contact basis (so I can show a picture to a certain person).

As a result of having photos on flickr I occasionally get comments from other people who are into photography. This is encouraging. I have also had 3 photos which were published in magazines - one in print, the other two online. The publishers found my photos by searching flickr based on the tags I had used and, in one case, the Creative Commons license I had given the photo.

If you want your photos to be found, I would recommend adding relevant tags to them. That way, someone who is doing a search for a particular Melbourne landmark is likely to find your photo of that landmark. I'd also recommend submitting them to relevant groups, so Melbourne photos can go to the Melbourne group, and so on.

Picture Australia (from the National Library) has created 2 flickr groups which encourage people to upload photos of people, places and events, and their town. The idea is that selected photos from these groups will become a part of Picture Australia's image collection. I haven't contributed anything yet, though there's no reason I shouldn't - I have plenty of photos of 'my town'. If you feel like contributing photos to Picture Australia would give you a warm fuzzy feeling then do have a look at the information on their site. I think I might get involved.

Managing passwords

2007-09-25T17:20:00.000+10:00

I have so many different accounts with online services that I cannot possibly use a different, easy to remember yet hard to guess, password on every one. Or at least that's my excuse.

For security it's a good idea to choose a password that contains both letters and numbers, is at least 8 characters long, and doesn't contain a dictionary word. This rules out passwords such as 'ringwood' or 'happy123', or anything with your user name in it, because machines could guess them quite quickly. It's also good practice to use a separate password for each organisation where you have an account, and to make sure that you remember them without needing to write them down. Here's some more about password security. While I have a decent understanding of online security, in various ways I fail each of those requirements.

One could argue that the importance of a given password is relative to the sensitivity of the information it protects, and hence the damage it could do if someone else were to gain access. For my online banking, for example, I use a string of otherwise meaningless numbers that are very hard to guess, and I've never written them down anywhere. If I did that everywhere that I have an online account, however, I wouldn't be able to remember them all.

Some people use a software package such as KeePass to remember their passwords for them. This stores and encrypts all of your different passwords, and reveals them to you only after entering a master password of your choosing. I'm skeptical about this, because it allows a single point of failure; if someone manages to get that one single password they can now access anything you own. At the same time, if I forget that master password or my hard drive crashes, I have a frustrating time ahead of me.

Another concern is social engineering attacks including phishing, which have the potential to render all technological security measures useless, as they work by simply deceiving the password holder into revealing the password to someone who appears genuine. A rule of thumb here: if it looks like your bank, it may not be your bank.

From my perspective, though you should always be careful about security online, you should exercise the greatest caution with any organisation that has access to sensitive information such as your credit card numbers, where you live, your real name, or anything that could be used to defraud you or pose as you.

If there is a better way to remember many passwords yet at the same time ensure they are unique and hard to break, I'd be interested in finding out more about it.

Blogging privately

2007-09-21T16:41:00.000+10:00

A lot more people than I expected have been blogging anonymously. It shows that people are concerned about revealing their identity online, which is probably a good thing. I've never had a blog before where I've used my real name - though people have been able to find me anyway (more on that later).

Someone pointed out to me this afternoon that while blogging is second nature to some of us, the concept of having an online identity is foreign to some, and the idea that people out in the wider web would be able to find our account without us knowing is a little worrying.

It's true - having a blog enables anyone who really wants to, to find us. If you're taking the step to allow other people to read your blog, people can be reading it at any time and you won't know. It's not so strange to me; as a web site publisher the fact that my audience is largely unseen and unknown is usually at the back of my mind.

I'm quite concerned about privacy and being able to be found on search engines such as Google. So I often use alternative names where people will be less likely to find me. Sometimes I've had to have information revealed about me because of my job - the company website, projects I've worked on and things I've attended.

Unfortunately many of the ways in which I appear in search engines I have no control over, because it's been other people putting information about me online. People have added photos of me to their own sites and tagged me with my real name. I think it's pretty rude, but it seems to be common practice among many people and lots of people aren't as concerned about my privacy as I am. Some believe that I should be less concerned about it too, because it's supposedly inevitable that privacy as I know it will always erode.

I do understand however that anything I place online is likely to be archived by search engines and other public access sites for people to search far into the future. Something worth getting concerned about?