Tag Archives: WebSites

Facebook Face Tags

I do this thing where when someone tags my face in a photo on facebook I remove the tag as soon as I am reasonably able to.  Which is weird if you consider that I tag everyone I can in my picasa albums.  Except picasa is a tad geekier since it does that facial recognition thing.  I find that makes it worthwhile to play along.  So it goes.

The downside to this behavior is that sometimes people take offense to having their work undone.  (Hey, it’s my face, I’ll have it tagged as I see fit.)  But just maybe someday, or one day, I’ll go back and re-tag those photos.  We’ll see.  In the meantime, keep up with my picasa albums.

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iVolunteer, How About You

I probably don’t volunteer as much or as often as I should, but I do get a kick out of it when I do, and it usually lands me in a situation where I meet some new strange people, which makes it all worthwhile in the end, so I want to volunteer more often.

To the point, though, I’ve added the iVolunteer plugin , which you will see in the left sidebar (provided you’re not one of the RSS readers.)  At the time of this posting, the plugin  "displays TEST DATA only." Hopefully it will be up and running soon with local events.  Although, I’m not sure how it decides what’s local for whom?  There weren’t any options to enter information, so it could offer events based on your location, my location, or the host company location.  Seems like it would need to be based on your location to be of any use.  We’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meanwhile, check out the iVolunteer website , and maybe add @iVolunteer , if you’re into that sort of thing.

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Twitter On United States Congress

It’s a lot like wearing a tie in that I don’t know why so many people do it, but I know why I do it, and my reason(s) for doing it don’t seem like they would be good enough for others to be doing it.  See what I’m sayin’?

Tweet Congress is the latest in web twitter tech, and I’m not totally sure what to think about it, but I have started following @tweetcongress , so we’ll see what useful information comes of it.

If you’re curious, TweetCongress.org tracks folks from the Hill that use Twitter.  So give it a look and search for your congressmen.  Let’s get them all to sign up and start sharing with us.  We can chat about all sorts of important things.  Oh yeah!

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Social Networking Sites Need Two More Features

The first feature I’d like to see added to sites isn’t one that I’d probably use, but there are still a couple places I’d like to see it implemented, and that’s the option to opt out of the social aspect of the site.  Which probably makes very little sense in most cases, but could be useful on a site like Wesabe which is useful for tracking my spending habits, but not something I necessarily want to share with other folks on the site, or anywhere on the web for that matter.  I would like for my Wesabe account to be invisible to all other users, or I at least want the option to opt out.

The second feature, and far more important, is that control to block the accounts of minors .  I don’t want to see them nor do I want them to be able to see my account.  There’s no reason I can think of for minors to interact with my social pages.  (The one exception being a relative.)  This seems like it should already be the default setting, when a person sets his age to under 18 that account should automatically be invisible to any adult figure who is not specifically listed as a family member.  (Lying about age is the parents’ burden.)  Which isn’t to say that every adult is a pedophile, but only to say that social websites should be doing more to protect minors, and this seems like a reasonably easy fix to implement.

Let us all play prevent from the get go.  Change our default settings so we’re not forced to opt out completely from using your service.    Thank you.

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Wesabe Or Mint, Which To Use

I’ve been using both Wesabe and Mint for a little over a year now and still I’m not ready to give a full review.  Each service manages my money and spending habits a little differently, but mostly the same.  The one very big difference is the Social experience available at Mint, but it’s not a feature I use.  If we were to measure my use in minutes, we’d find that I probably log more hours using Wesabe than I do using Mint , but at the end of the day it’s still the Excel sheets I created some ten years ago that I rely upon to keep track of my money and spending habits.  It’s not nearly as automated as the online servcies, but I have way more control over how the data is manipulated and that’s truly what I’m looking for.

RIAA Won’t Leave Slashdot

I first started following Slashdot back in 1997, right around the time pop music was popping up on file servers across the US in college dorm rooms for thousands of audiophiles to download illegally.  Sure.  And ever since then the RIAA has appeared in many a topic and been the subject of many debates over on Slashdot for any and every step they’ve taken to combat/thwart such activities online.  Even in 2009, the RIAA continues to crawl the web looking for folks to fight, and they continue to show up in Slashdot conversations, which would almost be fine, except nothing has changed.  When it comes to talking about the RIAA, we’ve been having the same conversations for twelve years.  Why?

Of course we have to talk about it on Slashdot because the RIAA continues to make decisions that a lot of folks want to complain about, at least those of us who know the actions are taking place.  Which many of us probably wouldn’t know if we weren’t reading Slashdot, and I can guess with certainty that it’s why I stopped reading daily for a couple years.  (It’s in my feed reader now.)

I’m not really interested in collecting music because I can’t be bothered to make time for it, and I have SiriusXM subscriptions.  I have plenty of legal music.  (I did buy two CDs last year, which I wrote about here .)

How can we get the RIAA to spend its time plotting to help consumers rather than hunting them?  I don’t have the answer, but I sure wish someone would figure it out so we can stop having to hear all the negative chatter on Slashdot.  It’s only a matter of time, right?  I don’t know about you, but I can’t take it anymore, and I’m disappointed that the music industry hasn’t found a whole bunch of ways to keep making money in the digital world.  In the meantime, I’ll just keep skipping those articles.

Web 2.0 Ridiculousness And A Dopey Spat

I’m sure, on some level, that’s in deemed inappropriate for me to be seen laughing at the situation.  I don’t know whether to throw my hands up or hang my head.  Sure, they’re the same thing, but one requires more energy, and I’m in too much pain to do either.  So let’s to a quick low down on what’s been going down.

Calacanis sends out one of his emails saying it’s over for start ups everywhere.  Leaves me jumping for joy.  Ever since that Yammer debacle from TC50(2), the start up world has been a disappointment.  Not having money to throw at every new idea that pops into someone’s head, is probably an okay thing.  Which leads (by correlation, not causation) the VCs to start crying “the sky is falling, don’t throw money at every lamebrain idea.”  Can it be, our wishes are granted.  No more online banking sites for people under the age of double-digits.

So there’s no start up VC money for the new guys, but a bunch of the old guys (late twenties, tops) still have a bunch of money and they decide to take a lavish vacation to Cyprus where they stay at Wall Street power broker Bob Lessin’s get away home to do a very low quality lip dub set poolside to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” which is later released online (surprise) and stirs up a flurry of emotion from the have-nots.  Sorry new start-up kids, you’ll have to wait for the next bubble and, maybe, create a _useful_ service.

Rounding out the senselessness from people who have nothing to complain about is TechCrunch’s very own Michael Arrington throwing a tantrum over rival blogger Dare Obasanjo’s post calling Arrington a horrible name.  Not sure what the name was, but it must have been really bad because Arrington was pissing all over the Twitter stream late Sunday night, shouting at Scoble and Barnes.

I’m left to think this is all a joke of a farce, or something similar, that doesn’t mean much to anyone who isn’t living the Web 2.0 Internet.  But be not afraid, regular people, there is some good to come from all of this, and that’s the Mr. Feldman’s video spoofs to make us laugh.  Head on over to his site and check out some of the humor that’s being passed around via his videos.  Or completley ignore all of this.  The Silicon bubble is of very little consequence to most of us.

“Impression Of A Normal Guy”

Jake and Amir from JakeandAmir dot com nailed it in their most recent video "Impersonation" where, after first bickering about whether or not it would be better to have an infinity amount of chicken nuggets or an infinity amount of money, Amir goes on to give what he calls an "impression of a normal guy".  I don’t want to ruin it for you, so you should probably give it a view before reading on.  You’ll want to form your own opinion about it before I prattle on.

Fair enough.

I don’t know what it is about normal that I find so uninteresting, or what it is that makes it so easy to poke fun around.  (Unless we’re talking about the normal vector, which is a line perpendicular to a plane.  That’s not easy to poke fun around nor is it uninteresting.  However, it is completely off topic, so save your advanced math questions for another time.)  And in finding it so uninteresting, it thereby becomes very interesting.  Strange how that works, right?

It’s true, though, as Amir displays it — normal people give boring monologues and aren’t terribly great for dialogues either.  Reminds me of a conversation I was having with a woman just the other day, where I was going on and on about this and that only to realize I was talking nonsensical circles about life in a far away future, so when I finally paused long enough for her to respond all she could ask was, "what are you doing in the woman’s restroom?"  Seems I was too busy talking to notice I’d lost track of the person I was following.

Not the point.  Watch the video.  Throw these guys in your feed reader.  Enjoy the show!

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Feedly Says What?

I don’t understand the service Feedly is providing.  As best I can figure, it’s taken my feedreader links and rearranged them into some kind of magazine-like layout on a web page, but I’m not sure why I need that.  The other thing it did was mess with the categories in my Google Reader which, admittedly, I approved, but still — it bothers me.  I don’t like it, and now I either have to leave it as it is or take the time to go back and put things back the way there were.  (I should have planned ahead and backed up my settings.)

Feedly is a slower, less efficient way for me to get my daily feeds.  Not a good thing when I’m trying to consume as much as possible over breakfast before I have to make way to the office an hour away.  If I wanted slow, inefficent delivey of my news and whatnots, I’d pick up a newspaper.

I’ll give Feedly a few more days, but if I can’t find some value in it then I’ll be forced to remove its addon from my Firefox.  We’ll see.