Web 2.0
Twitter in 1935??
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 | Web 2.0 | No Comments
I seem to have developed some sort of gleeful antipathy to Twitter. A sort of ‘love to hate’ relationship. Well here’s the latest spoils of StumbleUpon. It brought up this little blog post on a 1935 version of a messaging system. It’s a sort of vending machine-looking piece of communication apparatus to be put up on street corners or popular meeting places. The ‘meeter’ can scribble a message on a band of paper, pop in a coin, and the message will then be prominently displayed in the machine’s window for the ‘meetee’ to find. I.e. “Sorry matey, you were 10 minutes late and I have more important things to do than stand around in the rain waitning for you.” Matey then turns up, to find that he’s missed you by exactly 2 and a half minutes.
Yes, granted, it makes even less sense than Twitter, since you can be pretty sure that the right person is definitely not going to see your message (at least until the point where these messaging machines become so well integrated into the meeting-culture that you would actually expect people to look at them). But still, a wry smile of satisfaction from me over yet another piece of Twitter mockery.
What a lovely view!
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 | Web 2.0, leisure, tools | 2 Comments
Yes, it’s official, I’m addicted to StatCounter. Even more than I’m addicted to Facebook.
StatCounter is a tool that lets you folow the traffic on your blog and tells you where in the world people have viewed it. Now, I’m aware of the power of information visualization and all that, but it is a completely different feeling when you are visualizing your own data, your own little creation of no particular importance to the world in general, but important enough for these people to have a look and a read. Thus, my very favourite function on StatCounter: the map. And here’s the current map that makes me so happy - there’s something magical about knowing that someone in Iran or in Peru has looked at what you’ve written.
Asking boring questions gets you boring answers
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | No Comments
I really liked this vlog post about social networking and in particular Twitter. I do not agree that social networking is pointless (although he’s got the right end of the stick with disliking the verb form ’social networking’). Granted, for a social octopus who is capable of keeping in touch with everyone, and naturally changing colour to fit into any setting or group of people - yes, such a wonder of nature is not necessarily helped by Facebook-like sites. For the rest of us, who tend to mostly stay our particular shade of gray, it can be an invaluable tool to remind us of all those people who we’d actually rather like to speak to again, but for some reason have moved away from, stopped calling or sending greeting cards to - just lost. For those particular reasons I’m a keen user of Facebook.
I’m not a keen user of Twitter on the other hand. I have never used the site simply because their sales pitch failed to convince me that this is a form of communication that I’m missing. I did sign up to Twitter - it seems all the rage these days, and as someone purporting to have something to do with technologies for education, I feel I have to give things a chance. But there my engagement with Twitter ended - I simply didn’t see the point. I think Lore Sjöberg is absolutely right in his post - they ask the wrong question. Ask me to tell you something interesting and I might. Ask me what I’m doing right now… well, I’m blogging. Excited? Probably not. You’d probably rather read my actual blog post than read about the fact that it is being created. Is this a sort of meta-reporting that we really don’t need?