Category: Social Media

I had, in my flurry of modifications when moving from WordPress to Wordform, left out a modification to the code that enabled pings to work, and as a consequence, had not been pinging Pingomatic the last few months. Realizing this, I fixed the problem and started pinging this week.

Unfortunately, the relative quiet I’ve had for the last few months and being almost virtually free of unwanted entries in my comments was shattered less than 24 hours later, and I now have to consider using whitelisting in addition to closing comments over ten days old. Whitelisting means that the only comments that post immediately are those from people who have commented previously; others are held in moderation.

I’ve also removed the ping to Pingomatic, and am looking at pinging individual services, but NOT weblogs.com or blo.gs or any other service that provides a nice, tasty list of fresh meat. These services seem to me to be more dinner calls to the unwanted then ‘ways’ of discovering new weblogs. But since I made the mistake of saying the same thing about blogrolls, I’ll qualify this statement by saying that in my personal opinion these seem to be more dinner calls to the unwanted then vehicles of discovery.

If you’ve not left an email address in the past, you’ll have to now. You don’t have to leave a real email address but you have to put something in that looks real, and becomes your way of being identified in the system. The email address doesn’t publish, and I don’t particularly care about it (making an assumption that it’s most likely fake, anyway); but it’s required.

If you do end up momentarily moderated, at least you’ll be able to see how I provide feedback that your comment is currently being moderated. For every cloud burst there’s fresh mold to feed the tiny ants. Or something.

As for Pingomatic, there is an API associated with this service, though I can’t seem to find it. I’m hoping there’s a way to configure the ping request to only ping certain services, so that I don’t have to send a bunch of ping requests out, individually.

I am not one to join social networks. I get LinkedIn reminders constantly, but have no interest in joining. Neither was I overly impressed with Orkut and half a dozen other ‘instacommunities’.

However, flickr has been different for me, and has gone beyond being just a great place to store my photos (with built in web services that are turning out to be too much fun)–it is now become the only social network I’ve been involved with where I actually take advantage of the community aspects of the tool/service.

One main reason why is that Flickr does some things right from a social network perspective. First, there is no ’standard’ on what is good photography at Flickr, like there is with something like Photoblogs, so anyone can feel comfortable uploading their photos–regardless of perceived quality. This resists the hierarchical organizations that tend to quickly grow out of other social networks–leading to a rather ironic flaw in that the tool that’s designed to enable equality of participation is the one most likely to destroy equality of participation.

Second, a ‘contact’ in Flickr doesn’t have the connotations that comes with so many other networks — to be friends with, or establish a trust to, the other person. Creating a contact in flickr could be nothing more than wanting to ‘bookmark’ the person because you like their photos. Based on this, when folks add me as contact, I usually reciprocate, primarily because if a person likes my photos, I want to know why, and I can learn this by looking at their photos. Much of the time, too, I do so because the other person has fun or interesting or beautiful pictures, and I never tire of looking at fun, interesting, or beautiful photography.

When I do add a contact, I never annotate with ‘friend’ or ‘family’ — I prefer to leave the contacts as undifferentiated. To me, this leaves things ‘even’ and keeps open the door of possibilities. Because of all of this, I have contacts ranging from friends I’ve made through weblogging, to technologists (and usually friends) I’ve known for years, to a young 18 year old from the Arab Emirates who has nice photos, but whose friends make such wonderful use of the “Notes” feature with each picture.

Other social networks require that you classify your contact, and most of the time, blare it out for all to see — my god, it’s like grade school playgrounds all over again.

As for activities, lately I’ve been invited to join a couple of new groups; both are interesting and I feel like participating, which is unusual for me. One in particular, is titled Muted Color with a kickoff thread of “Is Subtlety a thing of the past?” This has potential to be an interesting discussion group, as right from the start, we’re talking about ‘muted’ as in color saturation and hue, as compared to ‘muted’ in relation to contrast.

(Among the links listed in the messages was one to a site full of optical illusions and if you haven’t seen it, you may want to spend a little time checking out the different illusions and how they are made. )

Of course, the social networking aspects of Flickr wouldn’t mean a damn to me if the technology didn’t work. From a technical perspective, the service separates out the moving parts from the static photo servers so when Flickr, the service, is overloaded by demand, the photos in pages like mine still show quickly. This is essential because if Flickr can’t serve up the photos quickly, people like me will hesitate about embeddding them in their pages. This functionality is still the main impetus behind my subscription.

The new Creative Commons feature was handy and I used it to find two images that have formed the background of a new web site page I was hired to create (and which I’ll link to when finished). I, also, adore the web services, which helped me create Tinfoil Project, and which I can see other uses in the not too distant future.

I know some folks like the tagging capability, but I haven’t, yet, incorporated this into my online life. Not yet.

Perhaps that’s the key to Flickr–it provides services that form the basis of use, and the social networking is a secondary factor based on something all of us who join share in common: a love of, or at least an interest in, photography.

I don’t want to become a Flickr addict, a person who is always blathering on about how good it all is; but I’ve been critical of social software in the past, so it’s nice to be able to take off my ‘naysayer’ hat and to use a service and honestly say, “Now, that’s the way this all should work.”

I believe that Flickr originated in Vancouver, BC. Maybe social networks are things that only Canadians get–like universal health care, and tolerance for gays.

All you podcast people, and podcast loving people, and cute, white iPod holders should think about having your next blog-pod-ercon here in Missouri. The St, Louis Post-Dispatch did an article on podcasting, and quotes a professor of media studies at the University of Missouri:

While still somewhat novel, podcasts, like Weblogs, portend the future of public and private communications, said Tom McPhail, media analyst and professor of media studies at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. He said both forums ride the leading edge of a wave that will sweep away mainstream media and remake how all of us communicate.

Moves such as those by Infinity and Sirius will be repeated more frequently throughout mainstream media as it struggles to remain relevant, McPhail predicted.

Podcasts “are a real difference for so many people who no longer attend to traditional media,” he said. “A teenager will never sit down to write a letter or carry a transistor radio; that’s foreign to him. But he will write an e-mail, and he will carry an iPod.”

Like I said before, it’s the iron here in Missouri; it attracts the faithful from all over.

Tom Coates of Plastic Bag has decided that Trackback is dead. Now, where have I heard that before…

He also goes on that comments could possibly be dead, too. However, in this I disagree with him — not everyone that has something interesting to say about a weblog post has a weblog, or even wants to write a weblog entry in order to respond. And frankly, a few simple precautions, including turning off comments on posts over so many days old, and putting in simple throttles can not only control this as a problem, it can virtually eliminate it.

Still, I agree with him on trackbacks: trackback is dead, long live trackback. It was a good idea at the time, it was fun while it lasted, but it’s time to move on.

Now let’s talk about referers, and the true problem from which there is no solution. Because of a Fark linked image to a site I hosted, and the constant hammering of referers, I exceeded 30GB of bandwidth this month. Yes, I redirect or kill those I spot. But when the spammer goes from wvhc.net to whvd.net to whve.net, you can’t keep up. Referer spam protection based on keyword helps, but does not eliminate.

Hotlink protection prevents the increasing problems with Fark — that and using a third party service such as flickr to manage our photos. But there’s nothing that can be done with referers — we can’t stop the web server from accepting page requests, or filter each through a open proxy test or some other extreme protection. And while search engines rank on links making weblogs low lying fruit, we will always be faced with “search engine optimizers” who link, comment, trackback, and ping us — and on and on.

As for Tagbacks, this unfortunately has problems of it’s own. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a Tagback is using an unused Technorati tag as a way to group links on a topic. So I could use a tagback for this page called trackbackisdead and people could use this in their posts and they’ll all show up on the same Technorati Tag page.

The concept has interest — let a third party manage spam, while we still benefit from the technology. However, a couple of issues.

First, Technorati pulls the tagback entry from the file name of the URI, not the contained element. You then have to change the filename to fit the tagback name.

In addition, if you want to use your weblog post as the tagback item, you can’t list the link in the weblog post as a tagback item, as well as having a permalink because Technorati thinks you’re then trying to spam it, and will disregard the tagback.

Finally, as more people use Technorati tags, more links go to the Technorati pages related to these topics and these pages become a new form of spam to search engines. Technorati has restricted search engine access of the links, but not the pages themselves.

Though getting the Technorati Tag page as a result of a search is appropriate for something like ‘folksonomy’ — most people who know folksonomy also know that Technorati is– for terms such as Missouri or Military, the associated Technorati tag page is not necessarily value added from a search engine perspective. Unlike a related topic in Wikipedia, there is no ‘content’ associated with a Technorati Tag, it’s purely links.

It’s not an issue now except with very finite topics such as Folksonomy, but if the concept takes off, it could be a problem. A problem that is only compounded as the use increases, and the centralized service becomes burdened by the loads placed on it.

Now the concept of using a tag in our writing and having decentralized services pick it up, similar to aggregators and RSS2.0/RSS1.0/Atom has some potential for interest. Focus the tags on pages that provide a tag/topic introduction, such as an originating weblog post or Wikipedia topic, and you have the start of something that could be even more interesting. Relatively spam proof, too, if the links are aggregated rather than re-published.

Might be worth time to explore, if we’re not all dead tired of the topic by now.

We can write about the new Serenity movie instead. So where is Book?