Xeeban’s Musings

Recently a friend of mine mentioned that she was concerned about the popularity of social networking and how that related to privacy.  Many people are now accustomed to putting all sorts of personal information online and sharing it so that anyone can see it without a second thought as to how that data can be used or abused.  True, the potential for abuse is there, but there is also something very compelling about entering frequent status updates on Facebook or “tweets” on Twitter.  I always wondered why it was so addictive, and why people stopped worrying about privacy issues and posted with abandon.  On the other hand, I never really understood Twitter and why people would post all sorts of little updates on very mundane topics like what they were eating for breakfast.  I figured I was just too old to understand.

This New York Times article that I found today from September 2008 seems to answer that question.  A quote from that article mentions “ambient awareness: and how it works with something like Twitter:

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

So bit by bit, we get to live side by side with people that may be separated by thousands of miles.  It brings people closer together by allowing the sharing of their lives.  And I think this is a good thing.  I’ve given Twitter a deeper look and started using it on a regular basis.  I found a core set of friends to follow and who in turn followed me.  After a while, it became strangely addictive.  Comforting, even.

Back in the ancient days of pre-internet online communities, there were people that would come together on bulletin board systems that you would have to dial up and connect to with a slow modem.  Once you fought your way past the busy signals and actually got on, you could read and post messages.  It was very primitive compared today’s tools and technology, but surprisingly the sense of community was very strong.  People spent a lot of time cultivating their online personas and many friendships were born in the midst of text messages being posted and read at 300 baud.

When the Internet started to come of age, dial-up bulletin board systems became obsolete: replaced by online forums, chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs, search engines and a myriad of web 1.0 goodness. But something was always missing for me.  A sense of belonging never seemed to blossom in this new, fast colorful place we called the world wide web.  It was at the same time both amazing and feature-rich, and yet diminished for lack of strong community.  It was shiny and neon, like night time in Shinjuku, but too much anonymity allowed people to hide behind the safety of their web browser, and the tone and character of my online experience changed dramatically from comfort food to junk food.

Now the pendulum is swinging back the other way.  Through services like Facebook or Twitter, people are able to reconnect with friends and through “ambient awareness” that feeling of community is being reborn… But in a totally new and wonderful way.  I am totally intrigued by this and wait with baited breath for how this will all evolve.

So is all this worth the sacrifice of personal privacy?  Time will tell.  But so far, it is looking like the pluses far outweigh the minuses.

Today a nifty device arrived, the Oregon Scientific ATC3K.  It is a small battery powered video camera that stores video on SD cards.  It takes full color digital video at 640 x 480 VGA at 30 frames a second.  It is also waterproof up to about 3 meters, so it is good for all sorts of outdoor activities.

My friends and I have been taking some low quality video with my Sony Cyber Shot during our weekly rides, but the quality of the video is very poor even for uploading to YouTube.  This new camera at VGA resolution should be much nicer.  Not as nice as a real video camera, but not bad.  Plus it’s small enough to mount to a bike helmet and is relatively cheap so destroying it in a crash would not be too much of a loss.  The camera will hold up to a 4GB SD card and uses about 2 gigabytes per hour, so this should enable me to capture 2 hours of continuous footage before having to swap out the SD card.

It comes with several attachment accessories so you can mount the camera to a bicycle or to a helmet.  I’ll probably be helmet mounting the camera to get a little more stability.

So I jumped on the bandwagon and got an iPhone… I must say, it is a sexy and sweet device.  My poor iPod Touch is now neglected and will soon be given away to find a new home.  This device is the killer combination of phone, MP3 player, video player and PDA.  Not to mention the connectivity so you have the web and email all in the palm of your hand.  Amazing.

The new applications that are available are very nice too.  Some are real gems, like Shazam that allows you to identify any song that you might hear playing.  Midomi is a similar app that even identifies songs that you hum or sing.  Totally amazing!

I was interviewed recently by my good friend, Craig Oda. He has always been passionate about online community and community building. He gave me an opportunity to give some of my opinions and to recall some of the early days when I was just getting started with online communities.

You can read the entire interview here.

Pictures like this are so sweet. It hints at how totally fricken huge this universe is:

Click on it for the full version.

More amazing Hubble shots can be seen here: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/the_universe_collection/

http://icanhascheezburger.com/

… okay, I love this meme.

A friend told me today that the Fonts on a Mac were blurry compared to Windows. I had no idea why this would be the case until I found this nifty article:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html

Ever stay awake at night trying to visualize the 4th dimension? Yeah, me too. It’s a bitch. Here is a site that not only helps… it helps you to visualize the 10th dimension! Halp, brane hurts!

http://www.tenthdimension.com/

The BBC is running
a very interesting article about a device created by Kimiko Ryokai, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab.

The brush can scan any external image or surface and use that to “paint” that texture onto a digital painting.

Ms Ryokai wanted to know what would happen if you could literally suck the ink from the environment.

The concept of the space elevator is one step closer to reality. The LiftPort Group, a company planning on building a space elevator, received FAA clearance (a waiver) to use airspace to start testing models of the elevator using a robotic device to climb a free hanging ribbon attached to a balloon initially as much as a mile high.

http://www.techzonez.com/comments.php?shownews=14880