Plaxo has some really compelling address book synchronization offerings. Really, for me, Plaxo was sort of a mini dream come true as far as my personal data is concerned.
But I thought about it and I just don’t trust Comcast. They are limiting my access to competing media distribution channels, and they have a reputation for fighting against consumer interests, and perhaps even human interests, if you’re willing to step back and see the implications of the non-neutrality they are in favor of with regard to the Internet.
Comcast, you have an uphill PR battle in front of you. People like me will continue to think of your brand as representing pure evil until you start to prove us wrong. I don’t know how you’re going to do this, but making acquisitions that appear to consumers to be privacy concerns, given your already soiled trust with the public, isn’t the best thing to do right now. I’m all for socially curated media, and I’m glad if Comcast is working in that direction, but frankly, you’re in a position where you could really start to seem like the orwellian “Big Brother” Nightmare everyone is terrified of. Perhaps you should point all your guns at bringing IPTV into reality, or better yet, let’s see the real convergence between TV and Web that we all know is coming one way or another. Do that first. And why don’t you also try getting all the dark spots in the Net lit up! The South, you know? Let’s get those people online and you can sell them programming later. I know there’s not really a bandwidth problem, not when there’s 100 channels of “HD” programming streaming into all your cable customers homes 24/7. C’mon. Quit lying and cheating and stealing and start making some progress toward our common good. Or on the other hand, why don’t you announce the acquisition of an arms manufacturer. That’d help your company’s image.
I’ve deleted Plaxo’s software from my machine, and I closed my Plaxo account. Goodbye Plaxo. Really, an open-source version of the same type of thing would be better anyhow.
Got the rumor tip from Scoble (there’s no real info there so don’t bother)
Plaxo? Are you listening? Keep doing what you’re doing, stay behind the scenes, work on enabling users to publish their own data, at will, in Semantic Standards as they become timely (now?) and stay independent of the little tug-of-war between closed, albeit increasingly API-enabled social apps. You’re better than them! Hang in there and you’ll be worth way more! Don’t turn to the dark side!
Competition for traffic will get everyone using RDF and Microformats soon enough… Semantics are like SEO 2.0… The next bandwagon everyone will want to pay way too much for.
Plaxo, you’re in the perfect spot to make money on this. Think Virtual Private Networks, Semantic Publishing to the Web, and Semantic Productivity Tools at home.
If you mistakingly used the WordPress “feature” “convert categories to tags,” and then realized that you just threw away all of your categories, do not fear.
…Let’s all take a moment to realize the value in posting solutions to our own tech problems online, for the sake of the community, and if you’re a cynical bastard, for our own interests as traffic mongers in the Social Web…
I’m not going to quote the solution here. Go read Ankur Banerjee’s blog and learn what to do with your MySQL Admin tools to fix yourself up.
What if you’re blogging on WordPress.com? I am in the same boat. No access to my database because I’m blogging for free here at wordpress.com.
Here’s my response to Ankur’s post.
I agree that it sucks. No warning and then bam, one of your best navigational features is destroyed (categories listed at the bottoms of posts).
I just accidentally did this too, but I’m currently on a wordpress.com blog…
I really appreciate that you took the time to post this fix.
Unfortunately it wont help me. I’m trying to find a script or something to hack the wordpress.com export file ( WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR), so I can re-import it and have my categories back. Let me know if you know of anything.
Really, I think WP has made a few unwise decisions recently. The first was to insert automatically generated tags (based on users’ cat names) at the bottoms of our posts so when someone clicks on them, rather than seeing the posts by that blogger under that tag or category, the reader is taken to WP’s blog-surfing, technorati-like blog search results. I’m so disappointed, but I can’t move to my own hosting a for a month or two. In the meantime, My blog’s navigation is destroyed. So sad.
I’m determined to get one of my smart friends to help me with a script that will re-write the wordpress export file, turning the tags for each post back into categories, so I can re-import everything and be back where I was, back when I had functioning categories. If you’re waiting for a solution to this problem, message me privately and I will let you know when I get it squared away.
You know about using quotes to get an exact text string including spaces between words.
You probably already knew about -word to 86 any sites containing a certain word from the results.
And there’s site: url
And you may already know about Define: word to get a dictionary entry.
But there are tons of these things. You can use Google as a calculator, you can search for text in specific HTML tags and much, much more.
A good place to find many of these (if not all of them) is at GoogleGuide.com
One interesting example of this is using intitle: or inurl: to get addresses of security cameras that aren’t password-protected. Since the software that comes with these things is left to the default settings and someone wasn’t savvy enough to password-protect the cameras when they were set up, you can actually go to these cameras and control them as if you were in charge of them. You can peer into other places in the world in realtime thru the lenses of un-secure security cameras! And move them about!
Here are some example google queries from the post.
google - inurl:”view/index.shtml” - Axis Network Camera
google - SNC-RZ30 HOME - Sony network cam
google - inurl:indexFrame.shtml Axis - Axis Video Server(cam)
google - intitle:”Live View / - AXIS” - AXIS Video Live Camera
google - intitle:”Live View / - AXIS” | inurl:view/view.sht - AXIS Video Live View
google - intitle:”The AXIS 200 Home Page” - AXIS 200 Network Camera
google - intitle:liveapplet inurl:LvAppl - Canon Network Camera
google - intext:”MOBOTIX M1″ intext:”Open Menu” - Mobotix Network Camera
google - intitle:”WJ-NT104 Main Page” Or inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=” - Panasonic Network Camera
google - intitle:”QuickCamPro WebCam” inurl:webcam - QuickCamPro
google - intitle:”SiteZAP WebCam Control” - SiteZAP WebCam
I bet SEOs are going crazy over this with their dragon-chasing. Someone could spend weeks trying to figure out more about Google’s results systems using these more sophisticated queries.
My question is, why does Google effectively hide these tools from us? I have gotten so frustrated looking for something specific while only knowing a few ways to narrow my google results. These new tools promise to be very helpful. But why are they coming from some other random site? Why isn’t this right there on G’s results pages or something?
In the suggested reading section of the page for the DIY Rel=”Me” project over at dataportability.org’s wiki, There’s a link to this blog post, which is an attempt to explore the usefulness of rel=”me” to the regular old web user. The article is slightly tunnel-visioned at what you can or can’t do with your browser to exploit MicroFormats. Of course, being able to detect locations or personal contact info thru a browser extension is useful and I’m all for it, but beyond a few obvious exceptions like those, The Semantic Web, MicroFormats included, wont be much use to us at the level of the browser. We will still need Web based portals or “Libraries” or “repositories” or “Catalogs” or what have you, to connect to, in order to really take advantage of this stuff. Semantic markup on pages is great. RSS is an example of how a little bit of semantics can go a long way. But what’s of greater significance is the idea of the Web Of Data, where resources are “semantically” interconnected, by leveraging information that’s mapped to the domain of knowledge where it’s useful and the relationships between resources are also specified in a machine-understandable way.
Rel=”me” is the equivalent of saying “The person represented by this URL is the same person as the person represented by this other URL.” Taking that into consideration, imagine how this would effect the experience of searching the “Web of Documents.” I argue that if enough of us implement rel=”me” (or other microformats or RDFa) in our HTML pages, we will empower the Googles and Yahoos to take advantage to knowledge expressed by this markup. So let’s do it!
“…So assuming that you went through the trouble to write up your HTML with rel=me, what next, where is that information actually consumed. I don’t think the 2 most popular browsers (IE 7 and Firefox 2) at this time have native support for XFN, I hear Firefox 3 is suppose to have native microformat support but I haven’t looked for it and if it is there, it isn’t immediately obvious to me. The closest thing I can find is a Firefox plugin called Operator. Operator is a microformat capable reader and for the most part seems to be able to consume most of the above microformat standards except rel=me, kind of odd but kind of understandable…”
“…At this time, I can honestly say that XFN rel=me proliferation is limited and experimental at best. It would take a while for mass adoption to happen and requires a lot of user education, adoption by popular social sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc, and native browser support…”
I commented there and when I take the time to write a long comment out, that isn’t something I’ve already written in so many words here, I like to steal my own comment and put it here for anyone who reads my blog. My response:
I felt like I had to chime in and point out that the point of MicroFormats or RDFa isn’t really to make an overnight change in how we use the Web. It’s to create a backbone of linked data so that as Search Engines and other “Libraries” begin to have stores of these relationships between documents and other resources available to work with, they can begin to improve their services. It will be nice when Search is only partly based on scanning for text-strings or combinations of words.
If you were looking for Andrew in Sebastopol, CA, how would you do it? Perhaps you’d google “Andrew Sebastopol CA…”
But what if you could specify that you are looking for a person?
What if you could specify geocoding info or otherwise specify that Sebastopol is a town in Northern California?
What if you could filter your results by the time web-pages were created or filter by domain specifications (like show me wiki articles first or show me all MySpace profiles) or filter by type of site like say, show me blogs only, and finally, and this is where rel=”me” comes in, what if you could specify in your search results that you want to see every other document that is an expression of the same person, once you have selected from your query, a person named Andrew who lives in Sebastopol, CA? This is what it’s all about. It works because links work backward. In other words, you can already say “show me all the pages that link to this thing…” but what about being able to say “show me all the pages linking to this Twitter page that link using rel=”me” or better yet, show me all the pages linked to with rel=”me” from any page that links to this twitter page with rel=”me” …And so on…
The Web is becoming a library. By adding microformats and other semantic markup to our documents, we are making it possible for decent “card-catalogues” to be built, whether they’re being built by google, yahoo! or the guy down the street.
This is what ASCAP, which I am a member of (I’ll report on whether or not that was a good idea in the future), has recently put forth as its sort of manifesto for the digital age. I will be adding strike tags to indicate the parts I would like to see removed, for the sake of freedom of culture, ethics in general, or for other reasons.
“Just as citizens of a nation must be educated about their rights to ensure that they are protected and upheld, so too must those who compose words and music know the rights that support their own acts of creation. Without these rights, which directly emanate from the U.S. Constitution, many who dream of focusing their talents and energies on music creation would be economically unable to do so - an outcome that would diminish artistic expression today and for future generations.
At this time, when so many forces are seeking to diminish copyright protections and devalue artistic expression, this Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers looks to clarify the entitlements that every music creator enjoys.
We have the right to be compensated for the use of our creative works, and share in the revenues that they generate.
We have the right to license our works and control the ways in which they are used.
We have the right to withhold permission for uses of our works on artistic, economic or philosophical grounds.
We have the right to protect our creative works to the fullest extent of the law from all forms of piracy, theft and unauthorized use, which deprive us of our right to earn a living based on our creativity.
We have the right to choose when and where our creative works may be used for free.
We have the right to develop, document and distribute our works through new media channels - while retaining the right to a share in all associated profits.
We have the right to choose the organizations we want to represent us and to join our voices together to protect our rights and negotiate for the value of our music.
We have the right to earn compensation from all types of “performances,” including direct, live renditions as well as indirect recordings, broadcasts, digital streams and more.
We have the right to decline participation in business models that require us to relinquish all or part of our creative rights - or which do not respect our right to be compensated for our work.
We have the right to advocate for strong laws protecting our creative works, and demand that our government vigorously uphold and protect our rights.”
We’re also joined by Brady Brim-Deforest, founder of Human Global Media, talking about the DataPortability Legal Entity Taskforce. He provides a good overview and update on the process underway to formalize the the project under a recognized legal banner.
The featured interview segment is with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web Developer at Talis. He touches on moving from document linking, through microformats, to feature-rich RDF modeling to identify portable data. Contrary to popular belief, he dispels the myth that it’s hard to migrate from a standard SQL data representation into addressable semantic objects.
I AM MRS MARY DAVID FROM FRANCE, A WIDOW TO LATE MR EZURUS DAVID NOW A NEW CHRISTAIN CONVERT, SUFFERING FROM LONG TIME CANCER OF THE BREAST, FROM ALL INDICATION MY CONDITIONS IS REALLY DETERIORATING AND IT IS QUITE OBVIOUS THAT I WON’T LIVE MORE THAN 2 MONTHS, ACCORDING TO MY DOCTOR, THIS IS BECAUSE THE CANCER STAGE HAS GOTTEN TO A VERY BAD STAGE. MY LATE HUSBAND DIED LAST TWO YEARS,AND DURING THE PERIOD OF OUR MARRIAGE WE COULD’NT PRODUCE ANY CHILD.
MY LATE HUSBAND WAS VERY WEALTHY AND AFTER HIS DEATH, I INHERITED ALL HIS BUSINESS AND WEALTH. THE DOCTOR HAS MADE IT CLEAR TO ME THAT I MAY NOT LIVE FOR MORE THAN 2 MONTHS, SO I NOW DECIDED TO DIVIDE THE PART OF THIS WEALTH, TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHURCHES IN AFRICA, AMERICA ASIA,AND EUROPE. I SELECTED YOU AFTER VISITING THE WEBSITE AND I PRAYED OVER IT. I AM WILLING TO DONATE THE SUM OF $2,000. 000. 00U. USD( TWO MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) TO THE LESS PRIVILEGED.
PLEASE I WANT YOU TO NOTE THAT THE FUND IS LYING IN A SECURITY COMPANY IN ABIDJAN COTE D’IVORIE. ONCE I HEAR FROM YOU, I WILL FORWARD TO YOU ALL THE INFORMATIONS YOU WILL USE TO GET THIS FUND RELEASED FROM THE SECURITY COMPANY AND TO BE TRANSFERRED TO YOUR ACCOUNT. I HONESTLY PRAY THAT THIS
MONEY WHEN TRANSFERRED TO YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE SURE FOR THE SAID PURPOSE, BECAUSE I HAVE COME TO FIND OUT THAT WEALTH ACQUISITION WITHOUT CHRIST IS VANITY MY DEAR PLS I WILL LIKE YOU TO CONTACT ME AT (mary. david40@yahoo. com)
MAY THE GRACE OF OUR LORD JESUS THE LOVE OF GOD AND THE FELLOWSHIP OF GOD BE WITH YOU AND YOUR FAMILY. PLS FOR THE SAFETY OF THIS FUND LET IT BE BETWEEN YOU AND MY DOCTOR.
(Lately I’m realizing that good companies and orgs have watchlists so a post like this one serves as an open letter to the company, unless of course, they’re not listening, which of course is their problem, a big problem.)
What this web app does is allow you to make links that, through the free Apture service for your site, link to numerous resources, all previewable via the same sort of javascript popup you get from Snap or the ZitGist “zLinks” plugin.
You must see this in action. This is inspiring. It shows how much more dynamic web pages can and will be in the near future. I’m a bit sick of the over-use of javascript, ajax, whatever you want to call it. It tends to be resource-heavy on your machine. This is an exception.
I wonder if these guys are going to implement any Semantic technologies into the data they store… I wonder if they’re going to make deals with bookmarking services like del.icio.us… All my words could automatically be links to mini-libraries of items I’ve bookmarked! It’d look a little ugly given the current style conventions but hey. Let’s change those.
It’s interesting to me to ponder how this non-semantic-web service, because it’s also a library/bookmarking tool, could become hugely useful to the Semantic Web as they snatch up web user’s resources/web-bibliographies.
Depending on how a server is set up, your WordPress installation might not allow you to upload files larger than say, 20 MB, or at least that’s how it was for me.
Upload form may give you an error saying “This file is too big. Your php.ini upload_max_filesize is 20M.” (or some other number)…
This is actually not really a problem with WordPress as much as it is a problem with your server’s php installation settings. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to fix. If you see a file in your root directory called php.ini you can probably take care of this problem by following these intructions
However, if you are using 1and1 web hosting, like one of my recent clients, you wont see a php.ini file hangin around in your root directory. 1and1 doesn’t give you access to this file. Don’t cry. You can change the php.ini file, that you don’t have access to, by uploading a new one containing only the parameters you want to change, to every directory where you want the php rules to be changed, this means the root “/” the website’s folder if there is one “/website/” the sub-folder for wordpress if there is one “/blog/” and the directory called “/wp-admin/“
The file only needs to have these lines in it
upload_max_filesize = 100M
post_max_size = 30M
“M” stands for Megabyte, if that’s not completely obvious. And you can put any value you want here. I went with 100MB for uploads.
I’m leaning toward being cautious here. Probably you can just put one of these files into /wp-admin/ but I’m not sure. Also, you may be able to delete them once you put them in place and refresh the wordpress dashboard. I’m not sure about that either.
I eventually found this info after much googling here on 1and1’s page about this. Also included is how to do this using .htaccess which is what you need to do if have a Managed Server running PHP as an Apache Module.
Someone should let this kid try out drag racing, not punish him for his ingenuity. It’s our job to empower children, not restrict them. I’m proud of this little G for being so self-empowered. With guidance, and people around him who are wise, he’ll go far in life.
The final 5 episodes, 9-13 have begun rolling out. This is being timed with the retail release of the film at Borders via Genius and IFC. The MySpace Home Page is a major traffic-driver! MySpace has been a really big help with promoting the film since the beginning of the podcast series. If you want to see the spot in action go to myspace.com, and hit refresh til it comes up in the rotation.
I think this is like the 4th time MySpace has featured Four Eyed Monsters in one way or another. I put the value of this spot at between $50,000 and $100,000, based on what I’ve heard.
Last night, I noticed that at the bottom of my posts, the links that normally link to the categories of my blog that i posted the post to, had changed into links to tag-searches in the wordpress community blog search pages. So rather than providing additional navigation throughout my site, the links are taking the reader away from my blog.
I wouldn’t mind this if it was parallel, that is if it said “posted in Category, Category2, Category3.” and then went on “Tagged with Category, Category2, Category3″
But no.
To me, the category links that go with each post are one of the most intuitive navigation features that blogs commonly have. They act like “See more by this author in this category” links. In fact, I think that category links in the sidebar of a blog are less user-friendly than the ones that accompany each post because of the scroll-free way in which you interact with them. You use category navigation largely to evaluate a site or to scan to find a specific kind of content. Who wants to be scrolling back UP and scanning side-columns to find the category navigation? Not me. Scan, click, scan, clack. That’s what we do. And we scan downward, not back up.
Recently, WordPress seems to have decided that they want users to start using the Tag feature. They’ve even moved the Category form way down below the fold of the WYSIWYG, below the Tag form.
I have never used Tags because I think they are pointless for the author to add. Tags are for folksonomies like delicious, not for bloggers to use to increase their own meta-clutter. We have meta keywords in html for that. And a good blogger will use categories in reasonable ways which will result in user-friendly navigation as well as SEO.
I thought maybe if I used the “Convert Categories to Tags” feature, once I had some tags in the database, maybe the “filed in” links would default back to the way they are supposed to… Maybe this was a bug I’m experiencing because I have never added a tag to my blog.
Alas, all my categories are now deleted. I have around 200 posts on this blog.
I’m realizing now that we’re being manipulated into driving traffic to WordPress.com Tag-Searches. Sickening. I don’t mind linking back to the community blog-pile, but shit, don’t take away my readers’ ease of use to do it! Jeez.
Categories are not the same as tags, not in the WordPress.com infrastructure anyway.
This is so unfair. It feels like WP.com is selling me out to eyeball-count-based ideas of monetizing. This is not the culture of WordPress that I have based my trust and support on.
My blog is feeling suicidal right now. It’s not OK to exploit your users in order for WP’s pseudo-search-engine to get more traffic.
Maybe you guys don’t work on the weekend. Please just fix this right now, real quick.
God Damn, I’m so angry. Please reverse this update. It’s not cool.
I love the WP Community stuff, but shit. This is horrible. I don’t want people navigating my blog to be navigating everyone who uses wordpress’ blog at the same time.
I WILL ABANDON WORDPRESS.COM OVER THIS.
THIS IS NOT OK.
there’s no point in having a domain (or sub-domain) if readers are just going to end up in the larger community mix. May as well just serve permalinks for posts and not even have a serial publishing platform that is author-specific aka blogging platform.
This is a photo I took as a resource material. I was really more focused on aged plastic lawn chairs, with their patina of plastic degradation mixed with dust, dirt, mold etc… The aging of these things adds a layer of human-skin-like-ness… Real people have blemishes and unevenness in their skin. These plastic Lawn Chairs have all the qualities of manufactured ideals of organic beauty, and all the symptoms of how manufacturing makes something less organic. They have plucked eyebrows. They have face-lifts. And they are sexy but slightly repulsive and all too familiar.
Another of the many Lawnchair Paintings I did over the course of a couple years. This one was destroyed in the fire, and I was glad to see it go in a way at the time. At a distance, now I see that there are some cool things about it. Oh well. It’s gone. Such is life.
Four Eyed Monsters, the feature film, will have its national cable TV debut tonight at 9pm Eastern time on IFC. The film has received tons of awards and critical acclaim since it first hit the film festival circuit. It was even nominated for two Independent Spirit awards, Best Cinematography and Best Feature made for under a half million dollars (or something like that).
The film has made a big splash in the realms of Social Media Marketing and Digital Distribution. So this is news on a few different levels. It was the first feature film to screen in Second Life; the first full-length film shown on YouTube; probably the first MiniDV film to get a “best cinematography” nomination from a major film award organization (pretty sure about that one); one of the first films to be advertised via additional content via podcasting (probably the first film to video podcast at all); and all this from a film initially thought to be un-marketable by Hollywood distributors. This film has clawed it’s way up the back of our mainstream culture using totally innovative methods and now, after proving itself online, having been watched around a million times on YouTube, Four Eyed Monsters has been acquired by IFC. Smart pick, IFC!
Tune in! (isn’t that what they used to say back in the TV days?)
I have tons of socks that are similar, but not the same. I can’t bring myself to mix and match so each time I do laundry, I have to carefully examine the stitching, subtle differences in color, and amount of wear, making sure to not pair two that are of a different brand or age.
This is difficult to do because I have approximately four different brands, from at least 6 different purchases. At the laundromat, I find myself contemplating the differences of these socks very carefully, while feeling like to most people, these are trivial differences. I get self-conscious when other people are around because I feel like I must look crazy. To some people all these socks would be dubbed “The Same,” but to me, they are very, very different and for some reason I really care about this. This is important to me. It’s my life.
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Data Portability (DataPortability), Evil Robots, Humanity & Culture, Life 2.0, Social Software, Social Software and The Social Graph, politics, technology | 
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Posted by Andrew A. Peterson
