A new friend

I have just accepted a friends request from a 29 year old Indonesian taxi driver. All I know about him is that if he won a million dollars he would travel to California. If I win a million dollars I hereby promise to visit him in Indonesia.

Playing with wordpress’s P2 theme

I’m still playing with P2 – Automattic’s new(ish) twitter-like interface. It’s buggy. Messages are defined from the beginning as “status updates”, “blog posts”, “Quotes” or “Links”, some of which correspond to wordpress categories. Status updates do not receive a title, or rather, a title is not shown on the page. If you go into the dashboard editing interface, a title appears in the title box. This is an extract of the first words of the status update. Any editing done in the dashboard brings back a title, just like a blog post. Even if you remove the title from the title box, wordpress then recreates a title from the text extract, and this appears on the public version of the site. It may be better to always create status messages as “blog posts”, but choosing to write a blog causes P2 to automatically mis-categorize the post as a blog post, rather than a status update.

So the P2 theme is actually more like a hack than something that Automattic has thoughtfully worked into the interface. Actually, I think it would make more sense for blogging software to work the categories of links, status updates and posts directly into their interface, in a similar way that Facebook does this; except that it should be possible to incorporate all of them on the same page. I could imagine a 3-column page theme that would do this in a satisfactory way.

Installed “Writer’s Tools” in OpenOffice

One thing I miss from MS Office 2007 is the ability to make documents in the Recent Documents menu “sticky”, i.e. make sure they don’t get crowded off the list. OpenOffice doesn’t have a comparable feature. I added “History Master” – an extension that groups “recent documents of same type” – but that didn’t seem to help me. Today I added the Writer’s Tools extension, which has a way to bookmark favorite documents. It’s still too many clicks, but maybe it will help. There a few more potentially useful features in Writer’s Tools – although this might be bloat. There’s another Bookmarks extension in OpenOffice, but when trying to install it on Linux, it gave me a warning I didn’t really understand, in broken English. So I opted for Writer’s Tools, and this seems to work well enough

Chinese lullabies for your baby

Why can speakers of some languages pronounce some foreign phonemes and not others? The usual explanation is that they don’t grow up hearing and using certain sounds. I do not always hear the difference between Arabic gutterals and have difficulty hitting on the correct h for Muhammad. Most Arabs are unable to say p, and are unable to hear the difference between p and b.

But why are Jewish Israelis able to say w, which does not exist in Hebrew, while it gives Germans such a hard time? And how come some Israelis drop their h’s, when the letter does exist in Hebrew? It’s true that the latter is more of a tendency than a disability. The same tendency is also present in northern Britain. French speakers have a still harder time with the h.

Obviously the ability to pronounce certain sounds must be connected with exposure of babies and small children to hearing and using them.  I wonder whether passive exposure to the range of sounds present in other languages would augment their later ability to pronounce them?

Still playing with Twitterfeed

So, my Twitterfeed strategy – once I have it working as I want – is to move the majority of my network activity to my blog on WordPress, and just every few hours to allow a post to go through to the other social networks, in order to keep up a modest presence there, without spamming everyone.

I don’t want to be “owned” by Facebook, Google and Twitter, and for all of my content to be exclusively on those networks. And I want to catch as much as possible of my web activity in one place. At the same time, I want to keep things fairly simple, and not have to worry about complicated relays between networks. I also want to find a single service that allows me read from these networks without visiting them..

The blogging canvas

There’s something about blogging – I’m not quite happy with the canvas, with the medium. I write mostly for myself, but am drawn to the public quality of blogging, in a similar way perhaps that writers and artists are drawn to do their work in corner cafes. But, with all of that, the problem is that you write a post. Then you put it up. And there it is. On a pedestal that you’re not really sure about, or whether it fits. To go back and make changes seems somehow dishonest. Yet that’s what I feel like doing. And the medium doesn’t seem to suit that. Anyone who is going to read a posting will probably see only the first iteration anyway. And the blogging software is clunky. You go into a text editor, then look at it as it shows up on the page. I would like the process to be totally different. Words would appear in the blog as I’m writing them. Then I would go back and change them – half a minute or a year later. I’d look at the screen, change a word here or there, or scrap a whole paragraph. Of course, it’s not necessary or worthwhile to do that with most compositions; and many of them are no longer important a little while after they have been written. But not everything about a blog should be linear and fixed to a calendar.

How social networks ought to work

Note: this posting is still a work in progress

I’m tired of the multiple services through which we connect to people, and tired too of closed garden monopolies like facebook. It would be better if there were a single way to post our profiles and messages somewhere on the web, and for these to show up in whatever network we chose to view them: comments too would show up with the original post. There wouldn’t be a need to join new services unless we wanted to do so, and we wouldn’t need to fake interest and take membership in a certain network in order to find our friends. The appearance of our profile and postings on a given network would be up to our friends. Networks would be windows on the entire people web.

Friendfeed partly embodies this concept in its “imaginary friend” feature, though I have never really worked with this. The problem on friendfeed is that it is possible to add imaginary friends just one at a time. There is a posting on the subject of importing imaginary friends here. For Twitter Friends, some ingenious person has created an automatic script that imports all Twitter friends who are not already on Friendfeed: http://huddledmasses.org/convert-twitter-users-into-friendfeed-imaginary-friends/. I can’t use that, since it works only on Windows and Internet Explorer.

Besides FriendFeed, it is possible to use other aggregators – though usually only for the main services. There is AOL Lifestream (formerly socialthing), Brizzly, Threadsy (which also does email), the Flock browser – and many others. It will be interesting to see if Google Buzz begins to add more services besides the few that it already offers.

The aggregation solution actually solves only one side of the problem.  In order to pull in friends, you still need to join networks.  In a way, it would be better if we were back in the era before social networks and everyone added their content to blogs (as I am doing now). 

There’s another related issue that there is a certain meaning to the communities in which our friends “live”.  In writing, they have in mind their network of people that cohabit their social network.  Kurt Starnes talks about this in a recent blog post “Going native in the age of aggregation“.

We are often not interested in every aspect of our friends’ activity on the web. We are interested to the extent that their interests overlap our own. We may follow a friend on Facebook due to a similar interest in social issues, but be dismayed to find that the majority of their comments are about family life. In conventional blogging, it is possible to solve this problem by assigning categories or tags to our postings. Then it should be possible to subscribe to an RSS feed on a certain topic. In Social networks, it is possible to join groups, subscribe to rooms, or create separate Twitter accounts, but most people are not very methodical about compartmentalizing their web activities. Perhaps in the future the Semantic web will find solutions to this.

Right now, if I want to follow a friend’s activities on the web, there is no easy way to do so without visiting each of the networks in which s/he is engaged. Often people replicate the same content across multiple networks, though inconsistently. If I were able to centralize all of their postings in one place, such as by using Friendfeed, I would probably end up with multiple identical postings. The best is if they are using a well managed lifestreaming service, which brings together the many separate threads of their web activity. Then it would be possible to obtain an RSS feed of that page. But RSS feeds do not permit much interaction with the original content.