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Twitter is Suffering
Twitter is suffering and Jaiku is showing off about how great that website is in comparison. They omit to mention two facts.
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It’s (giving the impression of being) proprietary, interesting mainly to Nokia users (at the moment)
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It’s better online (requires a browser to take full advantage)
Twitter is a mobile status tool of sorts
–edit note–
All text in italics is an edit following on from Petteri’s comment.
De-rushing
As I arrived home today, after a slightly more relaxed day I found that two tapes had arrived in the post. It’s the ones from the final fling. I still need to go through them and find usable footage. I’m going to be editing that over the next two or three days, depending on what the work load is for the other documentary.
I’m feeling inspired, thinking of the logistics of the first weeks back at uni. First I need to find a home, and once that’s done work on creating an action plan firstly for the year ahead academicaly but also for the smokescreen project. I need to make sure the project is far clearer in people’s minds and check that I have one or two crews that are ready to do the work professionaly, making sure to get a variety of shots for dynamic video productions.
Tuesday is not the most productive of days
One of the best nights to go out on at the moment is Monday night because that’s the night when most friends are out in the same place. Last night I was at the student yet again and I took 73 pictures of which one I’m afraid I’d prefer never to look at.
Some of those pictures are really amusing and the expressions are great. I’m going to keep those private, simply for my friends to view. They’re on my phone, Facebook, and my iPod. They’re a collection of memories for when university is finished and that what remains are memories.
What made last night interesting as:
1) lollipops, two girls I know had a lollipop fight, a sticky affair
2)Many photographs of friends
3) Many conversations
4) the cold
Of course, the night had started differently. It started when I went to watch some friends act in the show Howard Katz. A friend was in the play from the first to last scene, that’s 110 pages. There were some great moments and the principal actor has great stage presence and projects his voice well.
I enjoyed the play because I allowed myself to be transported into the moment. It’s a shame that it’s the last play I go to, produced by this university.
When Galaxus Sends You the Wrong Things
Many weeks ago I ordered something from Galaxus and it didn’t arrive when it was scheduled to. A few weeks ago I ordered one thing but instead got half a dozen things. I thought “Why do I have so many extras, before realising that the order was wrong. They sent me the order that someone else had made.
For a while I thought “What do I do, do I let them know about the mistake or do I tell them. In the end I let them know about the mistake. By eventually I mean within half an hour, not five weeks. They told me to send them a list of all the items I had received in mistake, and to send it back to them.
When you see that Galaxus has made a mistake they will want the European Product number of each item, as well as for the package to be sent back. The Swiss post makes it quite easy to send an item back to the sender. You go to the Swiss post site, and within a few minutes you can register the return, and the next day a post man will pick it up as he delivers other packets. For fifty centimes more they will print the label for you. It’s cheaper than buying printer ink to print one page, and then have it dry up before the next time you print.
A few days after the incident I checked my orders list and noticed that the mistake I had declared was catalogued in their system under my name. The charge was zero francs but their system had catalogued the value of the items. If, for any reason, I had taken too long to send back the package, or an item had been missing I suspect I would have been charged for it, which would have been fair.
I was tempted to tell them that I was a blogger, and that if they let me keep the items I would write blog posts about each item. In the end I simply sent back the order within a day of realising.
Such an event tests your morality. It would be easy to say nothing, and see whether they ever notice. I didn’t want to take that chance. I like using Galaxus for ordering things online and if there was a mistake then I would want people to announce it, in the hope that I would not have to wait too long for a mistake to be fixed.
On their blog they speak about return rates in the French and German speaking parts of Switzerland but not about their error rates, and how often people are honest enough to report them. After ordering things on Galaxus over several years I have had one occurrence of something not arriving when anticipated, and another of getting the wrong thing. They are quick, and reliable so I will keep using them.
In Switzerland we have the luxury of not having to rely on Amazon. I see this as a luxury because Galaxus collaborates with plenty of online shops but provides a single point of entry. If you order things you can see a list of providers, and the difference in price.
I also appreciate that they use the Swiss Post rather than DHL, Fedex and other carriers. I like that they use the local post, and local couriers like Planzer on occasion.
A gorge and a Railway tunnel
Today I went exploring the French Jura in the hope of capturing some of the Autumnal colours. I drove an hour into the Jura and arrived at this place. They say that it’s a one hour walk but it took me less than that to cover. There is information along the path for children to learn about features of Gorges and how they’re formed.
What I found more interesting was a sign for the Tram Jurasienne railway line. In June there is a race along the path where the railway line once passed. Like Julia Bradbury in her British Railway walks I walked over a viaduct and along some lines until I arrived at a tunnel. I enjoyed that documentary series and as a result I would like to follow the line further.
It will require some research. So far I see that it was the first Jurassic tram. I also know that the race with the same name is 29 km long. What I don’t know is where it starts and where it ends. I also don’t know how much of the path is walkable. That is part of the time.
More information
Some more information
Aerial view of the line
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157628003227616″]
Wikipedia Reaches 2 Million Articles
A recent article has brought to the world’s attention that Wikipedia has over 2 million articles on its website and that’s great. What it means is that thousands of people have taken a little time out of their day to provide what knowledge they had to a global audience through their small contribution.
The World Wide Web was not always as easy to use as it is today. Back when I started using the world wide web there were less than six million web pages. Now there are several billion and google is helping to index this mess. This mess I’m talking about is the enormous amount of content that people have created and shared on the world wide web without any consideration for ease of retrieval. In 1997 when I wrote about the Romans I was one of ten to twenty people who created content on this topic. As a result, it was not hard to get other people’s attention. As pioneers of online content when Larry Page and others started to create lists of interesting websites it was easy to be added to the collection. As more content was produced so the link collection would have to be stepped up and get help from search algorithms. I remember when Altavista was one of the great websites you wanted to be linked from.
I remember the first time I saw that Google had sent me traffic. It was quite interesting because google was a young startup only just getting to be noticed. I was happy because I was the top result on this search engine as a result of which I would get more traffic.
There was one drawback however and that was that I did not have the time or inclination to carry out the level and quality of research to write new articles therefore I looked for contributors. I tried with forms, with e-mail addresses, and with a forum. All of these had little or no success because I had not generated enough of an active audience. I was getting many insults and questions by e-mail but no one bothered to give me answers.
As a result, what you see there today is what I wrote when I came back from a holiday in the Ardèche region of France.
Over the years I would study a number of subjects and as I learned a little more on each one I would add a page or two and see more traffic and more comments come my way. The lack of contributions meant that my website is the labour almost entirely of one person. Last month I had half a million visits in a twelve-month period. Keep in mind that I am not a social networking website and have no programing knowledge to create something attractive to a mass audience in the same way as Flickr, Facebook or other websites.
Communities have been part of the internet since the BBS days when it was text-based and only universities and government officials had access. Over time so the community would develop and people would team up to work on specific projects. Wikipedia was one of them. Jimmy Wales found a model by which he could get people to contribute “as little or as much” as they wanted. They could as easily add one line of text as add an in-depth explanation of a theorem. As a result, no one was kept out of the loop.
He is often credited with being a pioneer whilst in fact, this notion is as old as the first dictionaries. Whilst I do not remember the name of the first people to compile the first dictionary I do remember that they worked by contributions. Their idea was simple. They would ask people to write down a word and a description of what they thought it meant. Over the years as more and more words were amassed, and as the need for storage went from a room to a barn and beyond so the dictionary would become a good resource for a uniform definition of words. I’m sure there’s a great dissertation to be written on that topic.
Anyway, the point is this; through the combined effort of a community so knowledge could be processed and shared through dictionaries, encyclopedias, and more. In so doing we now have access to the answer to any question we can think up.
I have noticed a trend in online interaction that has been particularly strong within the past six months to a year and this is the centralisation of specific activities. If you’re looking for social communities there is a movement away from interest-based communities to having mega-communities such as Facebook, myspace, Bebo, youtube, and Flickr. Each of these communities helps to bring together vast amounts of people but they also help to move away from the search engine.
What I mean by this is that whereas in 1997 you would go to search engines and type a search query today you know that you’ve got central locations where to concentrate your effort. In 1997 you’d type Roman Civilisation and my website would have been the first result. Today if you type the same query you’ll end up on Wikipedia because at least to thousand dedicated people have put so much time into the web site aggregating and collating information. As a result of this some people would say that the section of my website on the Romans is redundant since you have such a great resource within the depths of Wikipedia. The web killed Encarta and similar efforts to provide encyclopedias in electronic form. As a bonus, any researcher can drop by Wikipedia, find a short introduction in what he is researching before moving away from this website to a more in-depth knowledge that has been written by academics and experts in their field of research.
This brings me to the Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen. He was criticized by people such as Leo Laporte for expressing his thoughts that the web is a congregation of content for idiots. You can tell he didn’t read the book or listen to the audio file and here’s why. The web is full of content that takes only a few seconds to compile and digest but that’s because those who are new to the medium are playing around and testing a variety of possibilities. Now take a look at the trends for university graduates per year and you’ll see that there’s an increase in the number of highly educated people.
As a result of this, there is an increasing number of experts on a progressively diverse number of topics. If you’re specialised in zombie films, as was one friend, for his dissertation then you’ve got a widening base of specialists who can talk between themselves. It’s the same for development studies, for documentary and any other intellectual pursuit.
Whilst academics are busy carrying out research and making sure that every point they make is backed up by at least three or fur other sources the “plebs” for lack of a better word are playing around with the technology and seeing what works and doesn’t. For them, it does not matter whether what they say is right or wrong because they have fewer credentials. Take as an example of what happened to the BBC with the Hutton inquiry. The problem was not whether the information was correct or incorrect but who was saying it. If Sky news makes certain allegations then they will be ignored because they are not as highly regarded as the BBC. The BBC is held in such high regard that should they say anything that is not absolutely backed up by the fact they will be called to account.
It’s the same with the online community. Children and teenagers are developing the infrastructure, which they, as grown-ups will take full advantage of. Wikipedia is a self-moderated international community of researchers who work together to get the most accurate information out to their readers. We should see the same trends within the wider blogosphere and as people gain more experience in audio and video websites such as myspace, youtube, and Facebook.
Jimmy Wales and his community have demonstrated on a small scale, with over two million articles, what we should expect to see from the World Wide Web within the next few years.