Category — internet/web

Took a little poll (very little, but high quality) from a couple photographer/writer friends I’ve known for many years and whose creative judgement I trust, and they both liked (from the list I sent them), the name “strangeoutput” the most. “Something about ’strangeoutput’ amuses me.” Troy Paiva writes, and Larrie Thompson says “… Anyway, yeah, strangeoutput… Another vote in favor!”. I tend to agree. “Tend”? No, it’s more than a tendency, it’s a … something stronger than that anyway. A bone of… no, that’s ‘contention’. A boner? I have a boner for it? Nevermind. Like I said – or am about to say – the brain serves up strange output. In any case, it rings true - with what my girlfriend says about me and what the brain does. And it just sounds cool, and let’s face it, in this coollified medium, that’s what counts, eh?

And besides, “Blog Sin Nombre” is already taken - by a few Spanish-speaking bloggers in South America. There’s also a YouTube video by that name - (actually two) by some Spanish-speaking dude yabbering into the camera.

The subtitle of the newly-renamed blog, er “Tagline” (as if this were a movie - maybe it sorta is, with the way it “plays” on a screen, before the viewer’s eyes…), what immediately came to mind was “Missives from the edge”, which goes along with “strangeoutput”, since my tendency to think philosophically, or be interested in the edges of science, be skeptical about society, always reaching for some creative newness in art, photography, writing, inventions, ways of living, etc. … it all goes together. (If it all starts “going together” too much, it’s time to put me in the loony bin).

Now I just gotta be brave and sign up for the domain name, before somebody nabs it …

And if I do at some point, then I have to migrate all the posts, comments, etc. over to the new site. Then do a little trick so that the search engines don’t wipe me out of their listings because of duplicate content – this involves, from what I’ve read, putting a 301 redirect in the .ht … something or other. On the server. At the “root level”. You techfreaks can read about it here.

Yeah, I like it.
“We’re getting some strange output here,” the master technician said, staring at the monitor intently, tapping determinedly at the keyboard …

Indeed.

These are just the beginnings of some notes and explorations about the topic of Social Networking Software and websites. I welcome comments.

I’ve been playing around with Facebook lately, and have an account there - an “identity” if you will (as myself - Eric Platt) . I’ve gotten some messages from friends and family, and notices via email that someone wants to add me a s a “friend”.

But it’s a strange kind of socializing, if you want to call it that. What is it about? People update their “Status Updates” with what they made for lunch or what kind of tea they drank. My question is, who cares? If they do care, why? I exchange messages with people, yet I could do that via email. I prefer to use it to mention projects I’m working on.

Is it real community? A symptom, or a cure of what ails us?

It’s ironic that I’m writing about social networking software sites via a blog - yet another way of trying to connect with people via computer networks and software. Of course, people have been doing social networking with computers for decades: using email and Usenet. What’s the difference?

I asked a friend of mine, who is not a computer person but very social and has used FaceBook, her impression of the social networking website phenomenon. For one thing, she mentioned that the difference from email and such is that you have visuals.

Speaking of visuals, Flickr, the photo sharing site, is also a kind of social networking site. People share their photos, make comments on each other’s photos, interconnect their accounts from this and other social networking sites, and so forth. It has some of that same cutesy, trendy concept and design. I tried used Flickr a little, again at the urging of an acquaintance, and found the interface frustrating. If I was going to represent myself as a photographer and as a person through time (a photo journal as it were) on their site to other people, I wanted to have a large collection of my photos online, and that was just too onerous a project, given the awkwardness of the uploading, tagging, organizing etc. via their interface, and the fact that I’d have to go through 7 years of photos and find the relevant ones and re-size/process them for Flickr’s site. Who has the time? A friend of mine that does night photography, has a very high output level of photographs, and has published a couple of books on the subject, uses Flickr as a kind of testbed to see what people’s reactions are. It’s a marketing tool, both for feedback, to get his name out there more, and connect with other people that he knows or doesn’t. I can understand how for him it has a function. For me, I’m not quite so sure, yet.

Another interesting observation my friend made, that I also noticed, was that people do it to show how popular they are. Why show how many friends you have (a feature of Facebook)? Is it the Same Old Game? In other words, stupid social status popularity contests like in high school? On the plus side, she thought it would be a way to see what friend has what friend, or could be a way to connect with a friend of a friend. You could possibly find people with similar interests, or who you’ve emailed with in the past. Kind of scary though that all these people from the past show up in the “Friend Finder”.

I also took a look at Twitter, where people post what they are doing moment to moment almost, but it seemed pointless to me. I think it’s really more for high schoolers (if not younger) laying on their beds with the iBooks and cells phones their parents gave them. The graphic design would seem to reflect that.

Twitter: What are you doing?

Business people are noticing though - if there’s a trend, there’s a market, right? The other night I noticed an ad on the sidebar of Facebook. It was for a new social networking site “for adults”. It’s called teebeedee, and is marketed towards those over 40. I found an article about it entitled “TeeBeeDee - Social Networking For Baby Boomers” at Business Pundit. The founder, a successful businesswoman already “realized that her generation is very different than previous generations, and that they needed a way to connect, talk, and learn about the things that were important to them.” Now, it doesn’t seem to me it’s strictly for “baby boomers” - I’m 48, and don’t consider myself a boomer - but I get the point: us “old people” just can’t relate to Twitter, Facebook etc. We don’t “get it”. I will probably sign up, just to explore it, and report back to you…

Speaking of ads, let’s be honest here - these are businesses we are talking about, and some of them make serious money.

My friend also suggested that these types of sites prey on people’s loneliness and boredom.

Does it replace real life socializing and being out in nature? There is another site, called Second Life, that’s even stranger and scarier. A programmer friend told me about it. She thought it was so great and wanted me to get involved in it. She is someone that seems to spend all her time at her computer, seemed reluctant to meet people in real life, being an introverted type (who’d had some painful experiences in the past) especially if it was strangers. You can build things, sell things, all in a 3-D virtual world … but why?

Second Life Online Virtual World

The other comment my observant friend made about social networking software was “Why are so many people so lost?” Of course, the theme of “alienation” has been in the culture for a very long time. I remember an acquaintance years ago (she was 17 at the time, but very bright), in relation to Instant Messaging, said that she thought technology actually separated people more than it brought them together. So it is ironic that we are trying to bridge the gap with software. Is it working?

These activities, or ways of being, are what I would call, from my psycho-spiritual studies “Mind-oriented”. It’s why computer dating doesn’t work very often. An image you have in your mind of someone is not the real person. It is a projection. When mental life and reality collide, there is disharmony, pain, even violence.

But these new forms of electronic social networking can have their benefit. You can see what people are doing - if they post something of substance - or experiencing. Perhaps the question to ask is, how much to you expect to get from it - photos of someone’s vacation, or a sense of real connection?

I also am concerned about privacy issues, but will save that for another day…

As I re-do my blog, and very carefully re-create categories (they seemed haphazard and over-numerous in my old blog) I notice that categories multiply faster than actual blog entries (articles). How could this be? The answer is that each article can go in more than one category. In fact, I can often think of many categories that certain articles could potentially go into, but am not sure if there is a reason to actually create or use those categories.

For example, my article “The Future is in The CODE” clearly can be categorized under “science-biology”, and “computer science”, but also mentions a science-fiction author. Should I then also clasify it under “Science & Speculative Fiction”? That would probably be more appropriately a “tag”.

Another conceptual issue has to do with the hierarchy of categories. This is also related to the to a cultural issue: how we separate the “sciences” from the “humanities” and arts, even though, to my mind, they at minimum overlap, and many times are not truly separated in reality. There is much science and technology that goes into art. Depending on the person, this can be informal, learned-in-the-field technique, or well-researched and analyzed scientific approach to the materials and processes that one uses in their art-making. Likewise, there is much art in science.

This very article itself is an example of the issues involved: since it touches on both the humanities and the sciences, should I create a new blog category - “philosophy” - to cover that, as well as putting it under Writing/Literature/Publishing and “blogging”?

I’ll have to ponder this and perhaps do a little research…

Now, as far as Tags go, my impression is that tags are more particularized, whereas categories are more general and hierarchical. Think of a tag cloud: you can see how many posts have to do with a particular topic, and if you see some juicy fruit, you pick it - it’s a way of connecting that primate visual ability with that abstract linguistic human left-brain thing …

This is my newly re-done, resuscitated blog, which I haven’t used for over a year.

Improvements are:

- A new, better theme (neoclassical). Also created new photo headers for it from my photos.

- Upgraded WordPress (to 2.6 from around 2.2). (see more about this below)

- Got rid of articles I didn’t really like.

- Re-did the Categories from scratch

Regarding the WordPress 2.6 upgrade:
I upgraded because I wanted to make sure I was able to use new features and be compatible with themes, and it sounded like there was something called “widgets” that were part of the new deal. Unfortunately My categories were wiped out in the upgrade process (from I believe 2.2). I tried going into the MySQL tables, as suggested by this post by a programmer at another blog. However, there were more database rows than a Google cached page of my old blog categories showed, and it seemed tricky to sort out. so, I simply deleted all the old categories and started fresh. This turned out to be better anyway, because I was able to come up with better, clearer set of categories

Always aim for the simpler, more beautiful solution.

8/7/0
Update: I created a couple of blogs at Wordpress.com a couple of days ago thinking that would be a way to get more traffic to the site, since it was part of a large pooled domain of subdomains, and I’d noticed that many times my Google searches on various topics took me to www.blogname.wordpress.com sites. Well today I did some actual research in to the topic (using Google and the search terms “blog seo wordpress.com vs. self-hosting”) and discovered that there are good reasons for thinking self-hosting is actually the better solution. For example, this struck me:

“8. Better SEO (Wordpress) - You can use plugins to SEO your blog. You can use plugins like All-in-One SEO to SEO each post, link checker to check for dead links i.e. links that are not working.”
(http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2008/08/self-hosting-your-blog/)

A number of commentators (bloggers) also mention a number of other compelling issues, such as control (e.g., plugins, coding), and the ability to advertise.

So… I deleted all the posts at quantumfrog and thequantumfrog blogs, as well as everything else except the “About” link (which links back to this site).

It was a learning experience (trying out wordpress.com), and not a big deal to create and delete them. I got to learn about export and import
in setting them up. There were only 8 posts, so it was not a big job to delete them and the three (static) pages.

I also renamed this blog to “Blog Sin Nombre”.

Had a little fun with the title of one of the defunct blogs, calling it “This Blog Does Not Exist” with the subtitle “except in your imagination”.

Why have a joined the Brave New World of Blogging? I avoided it for many years because I was concerned it would be too time-consuming. For starters, I already write in a journal every morning as part of my daily routine, and often write in it during the day (and night). So, I thought also writing in a blog would just add to the already long (non-money-making) list of things I do everyday, and I would be repeating content - writing double as it were - and I already felt a little guilty about all the time I get “distracted” by my curiosity, passions, interests and creative activities.

However, the reality is … more complex than that. (Reality often is). What happens is, I get interested in some topic, and spend time researching, thinking, surfing the web, saving notes and links, AND THEN, email friends about what I’ve discovered, uncovered, or created (such as photos or writings). This process of emailing different friends is repetitive: I don’t just cc: (”carbon copy”) the email, because different friends are different, with different interests, and I don’t want them to feel they were just part of a mass emailing anyway. That emailing process is repetitive of the journal writing anyway, and repetitive with the various emails I send to different audiences.

Not only that, but later I often want to find the reference to a link I sent to some friend, and have to sort or sift or search through old emails or journals to find it. Blogging software uses a database to save everything, and has search capabilities. Links are part of blog posts. As are photos. So it seems a natural solution.

I can also reach a much wider audience - both those people I already know, and anyone that finds their way here, or who I give the link to.

So … I investigated various Content Management Systems (CMS) besides WordPress (one of the two blogging packages my ISP offers to install for free), with names like Drupal, Joomla, and XOOPS. Sounds like the name of juicebars or candy, eh? I decided to stop messing around and try WordPress. I’ve tended to get bogged down in research in the past when I was looking into blogging and wanting to use a software package on my server instead of one of the services out there such as Blogger.

In the process of research I did get sidetracked this time – though in a good way – learning about such things as “cruft”, “Permalink” and the “MetaWeblog” API. I also saw terms that I’ve learned recently like “pingback” and “trackback” when I was researching “splogging”.
Why was I researching splogging? Well, that’s a long story.