An Autumn walk at the foot of the Jura.
An Autumn walk at the foot of the Jura. It was earlier today as I was doing the later shift.
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157627857326021″]I am tired of the Facebook monopoly. While Google gets fined for helping people shop websites like Facebook do the opposite. Instead of increasing the diversity of content on the web and the sharing of ideas it has helped create silos of like minded people. Likeminded people is a polite way of saying brainwashed in the case where opinions are based on opinions rather than facts.
Shorts on Facebook are usually very short. You skim through dozens, even hundreds of posts but none of them have much value. Compare this to blogging. When you blog you need to develop ideas that you can expand to at least three hundred words. With those three hundred words you can include images, video, tables and more. You can tell a complete story. On Facebook you post some text and people might read it.
People use twitter both privately and publicly. People I follow have their accounts set to private so I am careful not to answer to certain comments to preserve their private sphere. Other people see no value in having a public chat. They don’t remember the chatrooms on the late 1990s in the same way that I don’t remember party lines. Whatsapp and Messenger are used instead. Both of them allow private group chats from the comfort of a computer or with the mobility of a mobile phone. Ingress, Pokemon Go and others are happy to experiment with other platforms but mid to late adopters are stuck in the Facebook universe. They have a monopoly.
Instagram is a great image sharing app but it’s owned by Facebook.
Almost every event you go to these days has a Facebook events page. Many events only have a Facebook page. Unless you are a Facebook user you miss out on a lot of events.
The World Wide Web offers such a breadth of opportunities for creativity that it’s a shame that people are spending time on Facebook rather than on more malleable social networks. I’m thinking of Wordpress as one example. We will see whether people go back to blog friendly social networks.
PAF is not just the way you discribe something hitting something else. It is also used to define a portable application file. These are self contained executables that you can use for mobile versions of your favourite browser.
One of my personal favourites at the moment is Chrome, it’s fast, light, and behaves the way I want it to. Better still it incorporates flash into the code. This means that I can view flash content without it being installed on the computer I’m using.
Yesterday D-Day Film Archives were shared on Facebook. These film archives were of landing crafts landing troops on the beaches, of battleships firing rocket salvos at the coast, of gliders being pulled by planes, of paratroopers getting and more.
Over the years films have been preserved by transferring the footage from one film stock to another and then transferred from film to tapes. The problem with film and tape is that they are stored in a physical location that only archivists have access to. This means that if we’re curious about seeing the footage, like the footage included in this post we would have to go to the film archive and ask for permission to see this footage. Within a few hours, days or weeks we might get an answer. We would have transport costs, access costs and more.
The advantage of digital video archives accessible online is that everything is accessible within a few seconds with the right keywords. This means that a child hearing about the Second World War for the first time can do a quick search and see this footage. History, rather than being words on a page, is brought to life. It stops being an abstract subject for the mind. In this footage, we see our grandparents and our nephews and nieces see their great-grandparents.
An effort, by the international community, should be made to preserve, digitise and then make available as much of this film material as possible. The technology exists today so that, at the very least, we can have digital backups of all of this material and in the best case scenario for this material to be available for future generations to watch and study.
I have already spent 15 months as a video archivist and media asset manager and I would like to continue this line of work. I find it to be a fascinating and interesting way to learn about history. It inspires to find books that contextualise the material that I am seeing on screen. This material makes us more informed citizens of the society in which we live.
A lot of people love the re-tweet because they believe that it is a fast and effective way to tell both their followers on twitter as well as the person being retweeted that they are listening or that they thought this was a interesting point. This is true in a number of situations but this was not always the case. There was a time on twitter when people who liked what you linked to would comment on the topic and converstions would grow. It would take time, and involvment, and it would create noise, but it did provide one thing. Indications of friendship.
You see friendship on twitter is a feature that you see less and less on twitter as the emphasis is on following, rather than conversing with people. Many of those I used t follow now follow thousands of people as a result of which they lose track of what they sad to who. Answering every tweet takes a lot of time, and time is a commodity people are rarely willing to give to others. I wasn’t willing to watch five minute videos on seesmic because I felt there were more effective ways of conversing. People feel the same way about conversation on twitter. They’ve given up on it and this is a shame.
Twitter is all about the short form. The more short messages you send the more people will know about your likes and dislikes. If you retweet the short form loses some of that value. You are more succinct about why one point is more interesting than another by discussing the topic with the person. Every message contributes to the grand picture.
If you want to show that you like a tweet, or like a link, don’t retweet it. Go to friendfeed and mark it as liked, share it. Write a little comment at the bottom. This provides so much more information to those that decided that what you have to say is of interest. No single network can do everything, so experiment and see which is best for which purpose. Your experience will be enriched by such a process.