social-software

I subscribe to several mailing lists. A beelion years ago we used to call these things “listservs”—basically it’s an email address that is an alias for a whole group of people, and when you send mail to it, everyone on the list gets a copy. WebSanDiego was my mailing list for a long while.

Anyway, on mailing lists, occasionally there are people who are annoying, or do what’s called trolling, or are otherwise jerks. Not sure what an internet troll is? Think of YouTube comments. Those are internet trolls.

Now, most civilized lists don’t let in people who are merely idiotic jerks. But there are some people who are frustrating. Again, in the old days, I used to simply send any email from such people to the trash. Nowadays, since I use Gmail for email predominantly, I have a different solution.

I tag them.

People who I find begin to act like bozos, I add a little filter to my email such that when email comes from them, it gets a little tag that says “bozo” on it. It’s a reminder of the previous history with that person, and the red color I give the tag in Gmail’s interface functions like a stop sign. It’s personally satisfying. It also discourages me from replying. Because I don’t want more email with bozo tags in it. My bozo tags make me smile, and not frown, when bozos are bozos.

I have no doubt some might consider me a bozo on email lists. I have been that, at times.

Live and let bozo, I say.

I didn’t go to the Web 2.0 Expo last week, but I did read Sassy’s concise wrap up.

Some video from the conference is out there, here’s social software thinker Clay Shirky:

Here’s Clay’s writeup.

A unique visualization of my twitter posts from tweetclouds.com – basically parsing by unique word, discarding “stop words” as described here. See it below.

I like how replies to leahpeah appear: large and important and central.  My first “tweet” – a post to twitter of 140 characters or less – was on October 12, 2006. I don’t think I knew what to do with it but I didn’t give up on it. I post to twitter pretty regularly now.

The link to the visualization is here, and I have archived it here.

I quite like this approach to bring attention to conferences with poor gender diversity, by Dori Smith of Backup Brain:

Given that I’ve been ranting about this issue for several years now (boy, time flies when you’re having fun, don’t it?) and nothing has changed, I figured I’d try something new this time: creating a group on Upcoming.org called Needs Women Speakers. Feel free to join, and once you’ve joined, you can add “Needs Women Speakers” as a tag to any conference you see where you think it’s applicable.

I’m working with Facebook Apps this week and in looking at it I note that bebo.com apps are roughly compatible with them. So I signed up for Bebo. Anyone else in there? Here’s me: http://www.bebo.com/JoeC664

I’ve been reading and listening to lots about animation, and one of the more fun things has been Spline Cast, a podcast about 3-D animation.

My favorite podcast right now is Dave Ramsey’s 1 hour version of his show. Don’t bother with the 3-hour version, it’s not really free.

My previous favorite podcast is Harry Shearer’s amazingly witty, terribly dry podcast “Le Show.” Supremely funny stuff to me.

The coming Scriptaculous 1.8 library looks like it has some new and powerful stuff in it.

Douglas Crockford’s latest comments about worrying about the security of JavaScript where many sites are pulling JavaScript from several tom-dick-and-harry websites (for ads, maps, calendars, photos, etc.) are interesting: Making JavaScript Safe. His concept is AdSafe. If you want to see him talk about the need for the tool prior to the announcement of AdSafe, check out this Google Talk on Gears and the Mashup Problem (Incidentally, this is the kind of thing I watch while I do the dishes):