How to Waste Time on the Internet Using Web 2.0 Tools

http://www.slate.com/id/2203733/

I ran into a funny article on Slate.com with suggestions about how to spend your time on the Internet now that the election is over. You can read the hilarious suggestions for yourself, but I've decided to take the list one step further:

Julie’s Top Picks for Wasting Time using Web 2.0 Tools!

10. Add flare to your Facebook page. A high school friend sent me some flare recently and I'm hooked. For those of you who don’t currently have ‘flare’ you can find funny buttons and put them on your own virtual corkboard, or even create your own for others to browse.

9. Search random people’s photos on Flickr – I use the Search function to find a place I like to visit (i.e. Paris) or funny and cute pictures (i.e. puppies). Once I’m on a cool person’s page, I’ll just look at their photos and try and figure out their life.

8. Visit www.podcastawards.com to view the latest and greatest award-winning podcasts. Download. Enjoy. My new favorite is Fly With Joe (http://www.flywithjoe.com/) which is a pilot telling funny flying stories. I’m a somewhat nervous flyer and Joe puts me right at ease.

7. Read archived Dear Prudence columns. I know that it's a trashy waste of useful brain space, and not exactly a Web 2.0 thing, but a guilty pleasure is a guilty pleasure. Here’s the link for those of you not addicted yet. http://www.slate.com/id/3531/landing/1

6. Become a member of an active online community. I just joined the community at Boots ‘n’ All, a travel site where people talk about their amazing travel plans. I’m pretty much just a lurker, but I am planning a weekend to Iceland in January, so I’ve actually been posting some questions. http://boards.bootsnall.com/eve/ubb.x

5. Listen to free music on Rhapsody. This site allows you to listen to 25 songs per month without signing up, logging in, anything. Even better, this site isn’t blocked by the firewall at my office, so this morning when I couldn't for the life of me remember the lyrics to an old Dispatch song, I was able to find it and listen to it, all while checking email!

4. Rate films on Netflix. I like to rate screen after screen of films, view my friends’ queues and rearrange mine. This can kill an hour easily.

3. Watch TV. When TV just won’t cut it, or my TiVo didn’t pick up a vital show, I’ll turn to the computer and watch my must-sees there. Bonus points for watching real TV while watching TV on the computer...it's a unique skill that I haven't quite mastered.

2. Google Search old flames, friends, co-workers. Enough said.

1. When all else fails, watch funny videos. I like www.kontraband.com for narrowing down the mass of videos to just the crucial, most hilarious picks. I’m also a pretty hardcore Terry Tate fan, and the Slate guy (above) suggested a series of videos called “You Suck at Photoshop” which I will be watching this evening.

I'm always looking for new and exciting ways to kill time on the Internet, so please pass over any suggestions you may have. I will be spending the holiday at my parents' place in the Midwest, so you can bet lots of time-wasting will be had!

Google's Black Hole

Geoff’s recent blog post (and our subsequent discussion) about Google’s new flu tracking capabilities struck a cord with me.

http://geoffreytorrance.blogspot.com/2008/11/google-flu.html

Never mind that I personally find the correlation between CDC data and certain Google searches interesting but not particularly useful. I find lots of things interesting and not particularly useful. But, Google seems to have this market cornered. If you take a journey to Google, you’ll notice all the other Google-related programs you can access: Images, Maps, News, Shopping, Groups, Books, Finance, Blogs, etc. In fact, Google has 42 other products you can access! Since 2001, Google has purchased 50+ companies, many of whom created their now-available programs, and many more of whom have yet to make it to the famed page of products.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

Some of these are well-known and heavily used, like Blogger, Google’s blog-creation tool. One of my personal favorites is Google Earth, which allows you to view satellite images of the house where you grew up or the hotel where you’re staying on an upcoming vacation. Other programs are completely unknown: Knol is a site featuring “authoritative articles about a specific topic.” Sounds like a weak attempt to copy Wikipedia, if you ask me. SketchUp allows you to create, modify and share 3D models. Huh?? Docs looks like Microsoft Word, but isn’t.

Google appears to be playing the buy-up-a-bunch-of-products-and-see-what-sticks game. A fun game, truly. It gives all of us something to talk about. But without promoting their products, most of those that even make it to the website go virtually unnoticed, which means they just linger around indefinitely until something else comes along. I am curious about Google’s motives, when they purchase these small companies only to let their capabilities and existing users languish in the depths of Google-dom. Isn't this a waste of time, energy and mostly, money? Are they hoarding all their purchases in a virtual vault somewhere creating the ultimate mashup of everything? A writer at Slate.com has had similar thoughts. He has dubbed the phenomenon the Google black hole.

http://www.slate.com/id/2197434/

A black hole, indeed.

Twitter - I just don't get it.

In class last night, we spent a couple minutes watching a You Tube video about how Twitter works – the video was clearly produced by Twitter to show how, as a loyal Twitter-er, you can let the people who care the most about you know what you’re doing minute by minute between phone calls and emails.

I have already experienced a little weirdness in this respect from my new Facebook account. The other day, my sister introduced me to the word “chillax” – I know, corny, but she’s in high school, and high schoolers like to make up strange words and use them incessantly. After our conversation, I updated my Facebook status to: “Julie is chillaxing.” The next day at work, several co-workers came up to me and asked me if I had a good night chillaxing. One co-worker even asked me where I heard that great new word that he now wants to incorporate into his daily vocabulary.

This little run-in left me with two impressions. One, people like reading status updates. Two, be careful what you write up there because not only are people reading them, but they absorb, store in their long-term memory and save for later mundane conversation by the coffee maker. I'll even admit that when I’m having a really slow evening at home, I will check status updates of certain people who are particularly funny or who are blood-related.

Despite this, the idea of Twitter still confounds me. I cannot think of a single person whose Twitter account I would want to follow. I cannot think of anyone who I would want to follow me! Even my mom, who I would think would be the most interested person in my every move, could probably care less that I: am at the grocery store, am home from the grocery store, am walking the dog, am bored, etc.

In fact, when I really think about it, the whole concept of Twitter is narcissistic. Who am I to think that anyone really cares about what I do all day long? A random chick’s blog I follow that has a pretty loyal readership recently posted recently about how she has 1,000 people following her on Twitter. Ew. She is NOT THAT INTERESTING!!!

I would really appreciate some other opinions – this class is full of smart, interesting people, so if someone could please clue me in to Twitter, I would most certainly listen! (More than 140 characters is perfectly fine)

Turning a Blog into a Business

As a precursor to the upcoming class focused on Technorati.com, I decided to do a little research. The site recently posted its annual report called “State of the Blogosphere” (and, strangely, that word, blogosphere, did not trip up my spell check).

Some fun statistics:

• Bloggers post some 900,000 posts per day
• Bloggers with 100,000+ views per month earn an average of $75,000 annually (a somewhat skewed figure, because the top few blogs earn much more than that)

Some of the biggest blogging money makers are Perez Hilton (celebrity gossip raking in $111,000 per month) and Overheard in New York (quotes that the author hears on the streets of NYC while earning $8K per month). Some of technorati.com’s other big money makers are just regular guys and gals blogging about their lives without specific purpose.

Making money on a blog is becoming easier than ever. The Amazon Associates program gives you a referral fee if someone buys a product from a click-through on your blog, and Google can analyze your site, places relevant ads and give you a spif for every click.

When your blog is making money, and you’re beginning to rely on that income to live, your life pressures are different. Namely, blog and blog often. The revenue stream from ads is entirely dependent on traffic to your website. If you decide to slack off and go on vacation for a week, your traffic slows way down and ads start to be pulled.

While the idea of making money writing about something I personally enjoy for a full time job is enticing (my personal fantasy includes rolling out of bed way past 7am, making my way slowly to the nearest coffee shop, drinking latte after latte, happily posting about my thoughts and feelings for a couple hours and promptly taking the rest of the day off) the pressure to remain popular is difficult for me to really wrap my head around. I think I’ll wait to begin my blog career until after payment via the “click” method expires and bloggers are paid by the genius of their words – a world in which I’m bound to be much more successful!

Mounting a Hacker Attack

An interesting article appeared on Time.com last week about the development of those pesky security questions that appear on virtually every website that requires a log-in process.



http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1843984,00.html?xid=rss-business



The article focused on a recent hacking into Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account. Someone claiming to be the hacker posted their tactics online:



1. Go to email account that you wish to hack.

2. Click on "Forgot password"

3. When security questions appear, use Wikipedia, the US Postal Service website and online newspaper archives to find the answers to the questions provided.

4. Read your victim's email, and if they happen to be a public figure, post screen shots on Wikileaks.



A couple colliding forces made this hack possible - Yahoo's security questions were biographical, which made their answers easy to retrieve, and Sarah Palin is a public figure and has lots of public data, including a wikipedia page from which to garner general information. Despite this easily avoidable instance, many websites are looking to make their security questions more sophisticated, asking "What is your favorite historical figure?" or "What country do you want to visit?" While these questions are much more difficult to hack (unless you post such information on your public blog or Facebook page), the answers are also difficult to remember. I don't personally have a favorite historical figure and if I picked one for the sake of a security question, you bet that I would forget it immediately, unless I taped a Post-It to my computer screen, thereby entirely defeating the purpose.


Given our recent class discussions about security and privacy, this topic hits home for me because I struggle with the best way to use security questions on many websites. Before the industry as a whole is able to improve internet security on a larger scale, some suggestions for security questions are to add a number at the end of a word (i.e. maidenname1) or spell words backwards (i.e. tops for your dog Spot). It's not Sarah Palin's fault that she picked easy to remember facts about her life; nor is it Yahoo's fault for offering those questions. This just demonstrates a potentially larger problem and will require much more time and effort to fix.

If you build it, they will NOT come!

My first attempt to create Web 2.0 converts failed miserably.

A Little Background: I volunteer at a small nonprofit that does great things for the community but isn’t exactly known for its innovative IT endeavors. There is a core set of volunteers who have permanent assignments and who must find a substitute if they cannot be there on a particular day. On one hand, there is a lot of demand to be a substitute so the list of subs is quite extensive. On the other hand, once you know a sub or a couple of subs pretty well, it’s easy just to call them and the rest of the large list never gets tapped to fill in.

My Brilliant Plan: I created a communal editable online calendar with a generic log-in and password. I then wrote very detailed instructions to all the permanent volunteers about how to post on the calendar when they needed a substitute, and instructed all the substitutes to check the calendar for available volunteering time, and sign up there to get the volunteering hours they wanted.

How and Why it Failed: While the site did generate some early interest, many volunteers still thought a phone call was necessary just to make sure that the substitute who had signed up to fill in meant to and was still available. In this case, we really needed almost 100% participation for the concept to work, and many volunteers still relied on their old sub stand-bys, rather than embracing the new format. Also, as one of the youngest volunteers, I am probably more adept to adopting new online technologies quickly and without hesitation.

To be perfectly honest, even though this happened about a year ago, it still bothers me that my fantastic solution has not succeeded as I dreamed. My inner monologue goes something like, ‘Don’t you all see the time you’re wasting on your stupid phones trying to find a sub? You log into your email every day – one little website that is one little click away (and very user-friendly I might add!) would solve all of your problems…right now!’

I plan on reintroducing the idea this year at the annual strategy meeting – I am absolutely convinced that this application will eventually catch on and my efforts will singlehandedly revolutionize the organization. Or, if it doesn’t, at least I’ll bring a few fellow volunteers into the 2.0 world – whatever it takes!

Reading with Reader...

I’ve never claimed to be an early adopter of new IT technology. I’ve always remained far ahead of my parents in adoption of applications, which has, to this point, been good enough.

In our first meeting of MI703, Jerry pulled up his Google Reader account to show us headlines that he receives each day. I had heard the elusive term ‘Google Reader,’ but had never used it myself. Instead, I have a list of “Favorite” websites that I check religiously every day. Immediately after class, I logged into my iGoogle account and set-up headline feeds of my favorite sites. It took about 5 minutes and I can now say with confidence that I’ve found my new obsession.

Of course, I still cannot claim to be an early adopter of Google Reader, as beta versions of this application have been available since October 2005. It has even been available via iGoogle since May 2006.

Even during my brief foray into G.R. (yes, I have graduated into abbreviation mode already), I do have a few brief complaints:

1. Some of my subscription views allow for the entire article to show when I click on it to open. Others require me to actually click to the website and read the post there. My general feeling is that if I need to actually visit the website, the G.R. doesn’t save me too much time.

2. I tried subscribing to some larger feeds (Marketplace on NPR for example) and was immediately overwhelmed with the number of headlines that posted in a very short time. I definitely already have an obsessive complex about managing my email inbox so those excessive posts in my “inbox” were enough to cancel my subscriptions – for now at least.

3. Finally, (and these are not my own complaints but others I’ve been reading about online) the application doesn’t provide warnings for subscribing to duplicate feeds, allow for password-protected feeds, sometimes experiences a delay in feed posting to G.R.

Despite my minor complaints, I’m really excited about my newfound tool and look forward to using it for all of my favorite internet reading.