.. as in “new links” and “new feature”. I created an account (free) on BlinkList and am publishing the links I add to my accoun there on the sidebar of this blog. The section is just below the search field, which is below the Flickr photos (or “Flickr badge”) on the right.

BlinkList is a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us. BlinkList’s site has a page devoted to explaining its advantages over del.icio.us. It is certainly a much nicer user interface and the fact that you can publish the links on your own blog so easily is a nice feature. BlinkList also offers the option of putting selected other users’ lists on your own watch list. This is a feature I very much missed in del.icio.us.

Let me know if you start an account so I can add you to the list of people whose list I watch.

If you are a Digg user you’ll also note the similarity regarding the “blink it” feature.

Changing leaves,
originally uploaded by eszter.

Fall has arrived and so far it’s looking great. This tree is right outside my office. I really liked the changing colors within one tree.

The accompanying weather makes for great walks by the lake.

Hungarian food,
originally uploaded by eszter.

One of the things I miss the most from Hungary is food. Over the weekend I was cleaning up comment spam from months ago. In the process I discovered some legitimate comments people had left on this blog a while back. One of them pointed me to Bende.com, a store close to Chicago that sells Hungarian food. I contemplated driving out there, but realized it would be easier to order something online. Here is what I got: Hungarian salami, pickles, sauerkraut, herring in tomato sauce, plum halves compote and chestnut puré. I put in the order over the weekend and already had the products on Tuesday. I chose the cheapest/slowest shipping option.

Board notes in class,
originally uploaded by eszter.

We were discussing portals and search engines in today’s Internet and Society class. I had various statistics to show the students, but first I had them guess the figures. I find that this gets them more engaged. Moreover, because I ask them to justify their guesses, I think it gets them to think about the issues more than if I were to inundate them with a bunch of data points without any discussion.

Pictured here is the prize for the winning guesses. No, there is no physical award, just the drawn prize. Today they were a car and a trip to Hawaii. No, this was not preplanned, it just evolved from the interactions.

I haven’t drawn much before in class, but students seemed to enjoy it so I may be adding more cartoons in the future.

A propos cartoons, I already start each lecture with a cartoon on the slides. I try to have them relate to the day’s material. Those cartoons are a “bit” higher quality though being drawn by professionals and all.

Halloween prep,
originally uploaded by eszter.

Before you carve your pumpkin, do a practice run here to see what the outcome will look like.
[thanks]

My Southpark character,
originally uploaded by eszter.

A few weeks ago I had Meetro running and communicated with a few folks. One of them created this Southpark character based on the photo of me on my Meetro profile. If you know me you know that this isn’t exactly what I look like. That said, it’s a pretty good rendering of the picture.

FYI, Meetro is an instant messaging application that adds a geographical component to interactions by letting you know who from the network is in your physical proximity.

Business card,
originally uploaded by eszter.

I’m always on the lookout for ways to organize physical objects digitally. Back when I was guest-blogging at Lifehacker I posted an entry about using Flickr to help keep track of wines by taking pictures of their labels and uploading them to Flickr. While a handy tool, I’m not much of a wine fan so it’s not something I’ve been able to use myself.

But now I have thought of a way to apply this method to something that is quite present in my everydays: business cards.

Despite lots of material available about people on the Web, exchanging hard-copy business cards is still something people seem to do quite a bit. There is some value to it. If you add a few notes to the card then the card can help you remember the person. That is, the person may have a Web site with all the relevant contact info, but if you cannot recall their name then that won’t be of too much help. Business cards can help in remembering people’s names and recalling the context in which you met them.

So I started taking snapshots of business cards I have collected recently. I upload these pictures to my account on Flickr. Since people don’t necessarily want their contact info floating around publicly, I have specified these pictures as completely private.

I then add information about the context of the meeting in the notes field and info about people’s affiliation and fields in the tags.

In an off-topic comment* (ahem;-) to this post, Jeremy requested that I make the blog spam guard flexible enough so that you can type in “Eszter” or “eszter” as the key word. Good idea, but Jeremy didn’t say how to implement this in php. Now it may seem like I know php since I pretend to know something about it whenever I’m implementing new things around here, but in reality, I don’t actually know anything about php. Jeremy must have knowns I like a geek challenge though. The request is now implemented.

Enjoy!

* I should say that the comment was only partly off-topic since there was a thread-related note in it as well.

[Also posted on CT.]

I am so glad that somebody finally wrote this piece regarding press fascination with iEverything. (The author does acknowledge Slate’s history with Microsoft.) The article also links to this great spoof ad, which summarizes much of the point quite well.

There is absolutely no need to educate me about the merits of Mac products. I used to and still do own several. That’s not the point here, which you’ll understand if you read the article for what it is.

This is cute, but I’m not convinced blog readers need even more reminders of how much time they’re spending away from what they were going to do when they sat down at their machines.

Chicagoland time

Castle in Budapest,
originally uploaded by eszter.

I just booked tickets to Budapest this morning for a trip coming up in a few weeks. I hope to take lots of pictures although I will be busy attending meetings. In the meantime, check out this photostream by a Flickrite. This set of pictures captures Budapest extremely well.

E-BLOG is happy to catch up with blog tag goodness. Thanks to the helpful Jerome’s Keywords Plugin and associated instrudctions, tags are now added to posts and you can even view a tag cloud for tags used on this blog (what’s a tag cloud, you ask?). Thanks also go out to Barb for sending me relevant pointers.

If you are or want to be at the cutting edge of all things tag-related, you may want to attend TagCamp.

UPDATE: Oops, I just realized that this isn’t fully functional yet. Although the links work if you click on them in any one post, the links from the cloud are not functional right now. I won’t be able to tend to this for a few days, but I’ll try to fix it soon.

UPDATE 2: I was able to fix this problem. I just had to change the link specified under all_keywords in the tag cloud plugin file. Instead of linking to

/tag/%keylink%

the code needs to say

/tag/?tag=%keylink%

to work.

Sunday pancake,
originally uploaded by eszter.

A friend of mine visited a few weeks ago and brought me delicious pancakes made from *drumroll please* over 40 ingredients! We played a guessing game: what’s in it? It had everything you can imagine and then some. It was also great.

Although I haven’t quite adopted her approach to making pancakes, she has certainly inspired me to make my pancakes a bit more interesting. On Sundays, I purposefully take some extra time to enjoy the morning and this allows for some gourmet pancakes. This morning’s mix included the following ingredients in addition to the basics: chocolate chips (I always include those!), dried fruits (cranberries, pineapple, apricots) and various spices (mint (!), pumpkin spice, ground nutmeg).

I didn’t have any fresh blueberries at home, but those are one of my favorite ingredients. In fact, the pancake pictured above is of one such mix.

I recommend experimenting with various pancake mixtures. They make for a very yummy treat. Oh, and I don’t eat my pancakes with maple syrup, I eat them with whipped cream.:-)

I’ve written here about Upcoming.org before. It’s a great free online service that helps you organize your upcoming events and also lets you coordinate with others and find additional events of interest by geographical location or types of happenings.

Last night, its creator Andy Baio announced that Yahoo! has bought Upcoming. This is yet another great acquisition by Yahoo! this year. Congrats to Andy!

Shana Tova!

Yahoo! has launched a new site: Hot Zone featuring the first news correspondent of its own: Kevin Sites. Sites will transmit news from around the world – mostly from areas underreported by the mainstream press – using various forms of media to Hot Zone readers. The articles often come with accompanying photo essays, audio or video material. Comments are open (for those with a Yahoo! ID, which readers can get for free) on the pieces so readers can contribute to the content.

A study conducted on Brits suggests that the majority of people don’t know what blogging and podcasting mean. It seems that the survey was conducted on both Internet users and non-users. There is little reason to expect non-users to know these terms. And based on findings from previous work conducted as part of the Web Use Project and a recent study by Pew we also know that users don’t tend to have a solid understanding of these terms either.

One challenge is to figure out whether it is simply the terms that users do not understand or whether they really don’t know anything about these practices nor do they encounter/use such forms of media. That is, it is possible that people who read blogs do not realize they are reading blogs per se. Among teenagers, it is definitely important to ask about both blogs and Web journals as the latter term seems to be more widespread (probably due to the popularity of such sites as Live Journal and Xanga).

Although an analyst of the British survey does mention that even among Internet users the terms are only known by two-thirds of users, these figures are not broken down by blogging and podcasting so it’s not possible to compare to the results they have published for the sample overall, which also includes non-users.

Overall, the results confirm the notion of a “second-level digital divide” – a focus of my research for over five years now – that suggests different levels of know-how among users with respect to Internet uses.

Despite thousands of stories on Digg.com about Google, Digg’s spell checker highlights “Google” as a misspelled word. Although other systems may also not recognize Google, it is somewhat ironic to see this on a system that prides itself on being cutting edge and providing up-to-the-minute techie news.

Then again, it doesn’t seem to recognize itself either:

Inspired by this post on Digg, I started running searches on Google to see what would yield a really high number of results. A search on “www” yields results “of about 9,160,000,000”. This is curious given that according to Google’s homepage, the engine is “Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages”. Perhaps they are extrapolating to sites that they are not searching. Or perhaps those “of about” figures are not very accurate. In general, those numbers are hard to verify since Google won’t display more than 1000 results to any query. The figures may be helpful in establishing relative popularity, although it’s unclear whether the system can be trusted to be reliable even to that extent.

Yesterday was de/lurker day in the blogosphere. First of all, what’s a lurker? A lurker is someone online who reads material on an interactive site/mailing list, but rarely contributes to the discussion.

The idea of de/lurker day is to give these quiet visitors a chance to say hello.

Of course, by definition, a lurker is someone who tends to opt out of such contributions so I suspect this initiative won’t get too many people to contribute, but perhaps some will decide to come forward.

I happen to know from the site statistics that there are plenty of people who stop by here, but don’t seem to comment. (Thanks to those of you who do.:) Of course, there is nothing wrong with not contributing and given that I don’t post comments on most blogs I read, I know it has little to do with what you think about a blog. That said, it is interesting to know who reads a blog and how they came upon it.

My best guess is that people who stop by here are friends who didn’t feel like migrating over to Crooked Timber when I started blogging there two years ago. But clearly there are some other people as well. Who are you? Feel free to say hello now or some other time and do so anonymously or not. Oh, and if you have any thoughts on what type of material you prefer to read about on here feel free to mention that as well. I can’t make any promises, but I can take suggestions under advisement.:)