I just realized that Dancing with the Stars is back and on tonight.
I only got to see one or two episodes over the summer, because, ironically, it conflicted with my dance classes. However, this Fall my club has Salsa classes on Tuesdays and I don’t like Salsa that much so I am not going to those classes. Thus: no conflict. (For those who are curious, my favorites are Cha-Cha and Samba, but I’m also taking West Coast Swing this term.)
Next year Eszter’s Blog will be coming to you from Silicon Valley. I will be a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. I am super excited about this opportunity. The Center got a grant from the Annenberg Foundation last year to add Communications to the fields represented among its fellows and I’m going as part of such a cohort.
There’s something amusing related to all this. Or I thought it was amusing until I shared it with a friend who didn’t think it funny at all. You be the judge. While I was lifehacking away a few weeks ago, Chris pointed me to Google Sets for various associations. I decided to see what Google Sets had to say about my academic affiliations. I typed in the names of my BA and PhD granting institutions plus Northwestern (the place of my current employment) and pressed Large Sets. The fourth school on the list was Stanford. When I did this I already knew that I was headed to the Center next year so I found this amusing. But perhaps you need to have a certain geek factor to get anything out of this exercise.:)
In the past I have recommended Dreamhost as a hosting service, but after numerous problems with them in the past months, I would like to point out that I no longer recommend Dreamhost. In fact, I am in search for another hosting service that has much more reliable service and offers better and faster customer support. Two of my important sites – eszter.com and webuse.org – are down this morning for no apparent reason. Moreover, the error message that comes up makes it seem as though the fault was mine yet I have done nothing to the sites in days so it’s not possible that any action on my part would have led to this outage.
Crooked Timber is also hosted at Dreamhost and that site was down for several hours late last week. (I should note that neither of these have to do with the electricity problems in LA that I know affected numerous other sites as well.)
A few days ago, my Web Use News blog (down now) went completely crazy and although the top page worked, all of the underlying links – including the ones to simple entry archives – were inaccessible. Then suddenly an hour later all was okay again.
This is unbelievably unreliable service and is not an option for sites that have a professional purpose. I welcome suggestions for alternatives.
I have absolutely no recollection from the past two years I have spent in Chicagoland as to whether this is regular weather, but I am delighted to have had the opportunity to enjoy another beautiful weekend. It was still warm enough to go down to the beach although I did not venture in the water past walking knee-deep. I did, however, get a chance to “stand on water“, which was neat.:-)
I’m spending Friday and Saturday at a meeting about the Power and Political Science of Blogs organized by Dan Drezner and Henry Farrell. The discussions have been great so far – and I suspect will continue to be very insightful and interesting today – and we also had a fun dinner last night at Emilio’s Tapas.
UPDATE (9/18/05): I posted a related note with some relevant links on CT.
D’oh, I can’t believe I missed it. Browsing Otto Pohl’s blog I realized that Arrival Day was yesterday. The Head Heeb started the tradition of the Arrival Day Blogburst two years ago in preparation for last year’s 350th anniversary of the first Jews’ arrival in the U.S..
Each year’s blogburst has a theme. The theme this year is “American Jews as part – or, more accurately, parts – of a larger whole.”. Since I like to take this kind of an exercise seriously, I’m going to have to postpone a response not having an immediate inspiration. In the meantime, you can check out what others had to contribute.
And here is what I posted on this day last year.
They weren’t. Or they certainly weren’t thinking about anybody else.
At 4:58am this morning I heard a very loud bang. Then I heard another. Then I heard a whole series of them. By the third I decided to get up. I saw small fireworks a few blocks away. Who decides to set off fireworks in the middle of a densely-populated residential area at 5am?!
[I have also posted this on CT.]
This discussion concerns a survey I posted on Crooked Timber (the group blog of which I am a member) and Lifehacker (where I guest-blogged last week).
First, the bullet-point version of this post:
Second, thanks to the 784 readers of CT who took the survey. Read on for more.
There are numerous photo printing services available online these days. Their prices can vary considerably. The cheapest I have found recently is York Photo. It looks like this may be temporary, but for now as per their summer sale, 4×6 prints are just 10c each. I used them a few weeks ago and just put in another order. They processed my orders very quickly. In fact, even this Labor Day Weekend, the order I put in yesterday is already ready for shipment today. (Of course, due to the holiday, it will only be shipping tomorrow.)
IMPORTANT UPDATE (9/17/05): I no longer recommend York Photo. It took this shipment ten days to get to me AND they cropped by photos even though that was not identified in the order and this means that they got rid of important parts of my pictures. I do not plan on using them again.
This compares well with very similar services such as Snapfish – the service I usually use -, which charges 12c/print. What used to be Ofoto, but is now Kodak Easy Share Gallery charges 19-25c although if you sign up for a pro account on their service you do get 10c/print for 4×6. There are lots of others that charge 20-25c/print, I see no point in linking to them.
I did check and York Photo’s mailing fees do not seem to be higher – in fact, if anything, they seem lower – than those of Snapfish so it’s not as though they are making up for costs there.
Perhaps I should note that I am not affiliated with any of these services. However, if you think you may sign up for one of them and send in an order, do let me know. If I send you a referral and you do put in an order, I get a few free prints. Why not?:) This intro offer is available on both York Photo and Snapfish.
You will notice a new requirement when you want to post a comment to this blog: you are asked to type in my first name. It is not a trick question, not to you, the reader that is. It is supposed to trick automated spammers though. (Be sure to enter my name exactly as shown next to the field.) Thanks to Jeff Barr for posting the relevant bit of code on his blog.
Comment spam continues to be a problem. You may not always see this as some of the messages are caught to the extent that they are sent to my mailbox for approval. I used to deal with these by creating a filter in my mailbox so that any such email was sent directly to my Trash folder. Unfortunately, as I described earlier, this still left me with a serious problem since my provider decided that I was using too many resources and was going to either shut down my account or start charging me $100 for it. That’s extreme for a relatively small site.
I experimented with a CAPTCHA solution (completely automated public Turing test), but ran into some problems. So I went looking for alternatives and this solution seemed like it might work and I was able to implement it. So we’ll see. From what I can tell, even if you don’t get it right the first time around, the system should keep your comments in the comment field so hopefully by pressing the back button – after you receive the error message – you can retrieve what you wrote.
Let me reiterate, the requirement is exactly as simple as it sounds. (Although given the number of times people misspell my name perhaps it’s not quite as simple as I think. But hopefully by having it right there next to the field you’ll be able to do it.:)
Feel free to leave a comment here to try it out.
I really appreciate Ted’s offer over at CT to motivate/thank people for donating to relief agencies. I encourage everyone to donate what they can. In case the suggested $100 is too much for some, I thought I’d offer an incentive/thank you for smaller donations. If you give $35 to the Katrina fund of a relief agency then I will send you (restricted to US addresses*, I’m afraid) a copy of my parents’ book Symmetry, a Unifying Concept. It’s a nice book filled with hundreds of wonderful pictures. I will also add a unique thank-you card not available in stores.:)
If you would like both a CD from Ted and the book then why not donate at least $135?
Send me a note at katrina05@eszter.com letting me know that you made the donation and when. Be sure to include your mailing address.
Offer ends when I run out of books. I’ll update this post when/if that happens.
*If you live outside the US and make a donation, I can send a book on your behalf to a US address you specify (gift for a friend?).
Numerous people are turning to community site Craig’s List in an effort to find information about family and friends from the New Orleans area and also as a means to reach out to victims with offers of help. People from across the country are offering free housing. If you know of victims who left and are stranded in various parts of the country, the notices on the site may help them out. Of course, as with all such things, one needs to proceed with caution.
It’s sad to see, however, that even these sites are not immune to spam.
I’ve been very busy over at Lifehacker. A friend of mine says it’s like “quirky academic meets Martha Stewart”. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but it’s a reasonable description of what I’ve been up to. Here are some posts I put up in the past couple of days. I will have a roundup of all the free downloads later in the week. If you can’t wait, feel free to check out the site directly.
General tips
GMail/Flickr tips
I am guest-blogging over at Lifehacker this week while regular editor Gina Trapani takes a breather. Lifehacker is part of Nick Denton‘s Gawker Media empire that has managed to make money out of blogging. (We’re not all in it for the $s, but it’s nice to know that some people who don’t necessarily have other main sources of income are able to pull it off.) CT readers are probably most familiar with Gawker’s Wonkette, but there are about a dozen Gawker sites at this point addressing all sorts of topics.
Lifehacker focuses on ways to make your life more productive. Many of the posts feature downloads (e.g. Firefox, Flickr), shortcuts and pointers to helpful Web sites. There is a whole category of advice pieces as well ranging from how to deal with various situations at work to ideas for getting things done more effectively.
If you have any lifehacking tips, please send them along to me this week by writing to tips@lifehacker.com.
Anecdotally, I still often hear people say (like I did last night) that it wouldn’t take that much for a new company to enter the search engine market. But we are not in the late 1990s and it would take tremendous resources to enter this market.
The major players at this point are AOL, Ask Jeeves, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!. (Note that in contrast to much anecdotal evidence in the press and among other commentators, Google does not have nearly the market share that many people suggest. Here’s one occasion when I already commented on this point.)
Among the above search engines, AOL, Google, MSN, and Yahoo! represent much more than just search engines. They are vast empires of Internet-related products that continue to innovate and introduce new services.
This does not mean that there is no room for innovation. In fact, we seem to be undergoing a second boom these days (somewhat reminiscent of the late 90s, but in a much more realistic manner). Numerous interesting and innovative services have sprung up in the last few years. However, you will notice that many of these are eventually acquired by one of the companies above. Examples: Google’s acquisition of Blogger and Yahoo!’s acquisition of Flickr.
And to be sure, we have even seen new entrants in niche markets of search, for example, the searching of recently added content. Here, Technorati and Feedster come to mind. While offering valuable services – an almost immediate inclusion of blog content in search results – these engines focus on a very small segment of Web content.
It would take tremendous amount of resources in this day and age to even come close to the computation and labor resources that drive the above-mentioned companies and allow them to index Web content at a more general level. It is unlikely that we will see independent new entrants in the near future. If we do, they will likely be acquired by one of the companies above.
Uploading pictures to my Flickr account is a nice little walk down memory lane. Occassionally I’ll be adding photos of paintings I did, for the most part, many years ago. Here is a self-portrait, the only one I’ve ever done. In case you’re wondering why the look is so intense, try painting a self-portrait sometime.;-)
I took a few studio art classes in college. I started with a course called Design I. I had a great time and then pursued some other courses as well. My most productive year was in Geneva where I took a year-long course at the Geneve School of Fine Arts. Although regular students of the University of Geneva could not enroll in those courses, Smith College – on whose junior year abroad program I was taking part – usually managed to make special arrangements for us. It was a wonderful experience. My teacher, Aldo Guarnera, pushed me to paint on huge surfaces I would never have considered approaching on my own. It was quite a challenge. Here are some of the results.
After considerable time away from home I’m finally catching up on all sorts of nifty things. GMail recently introduced a great new feature allowing users to specify the outgoing and reply-to addresses of all messages. The feature is under Settings > Accounts. See it here. (If you can’t see this in your account then just be patient. When I first checked yesterday I didn’t have the option yet, but today I do. Since GMail is still in Beta, not all features are introduced to all users at the same time.)
The feature is done well. You can only specify email addresses to which you have access so you can’t just start impersonating others.
This should help in the fight against spam. It is now possible to send a note to a mailing list using a different address from what you may use otherwise. This is helpful so your address is not exposed to numerous people and even worse: bots. Very helpful, neat.
For those who did not feel like reading my last long post, I thought I would put up a separate entry noting the arrival of Google’s chat and online phone service: Google Talk. I just tried the phone feature with my Mom and it works great. The instant messaging feature works well, too.
Google Talk is linked to one’s GMail account, which may make it much too obvious for spam. Luckily, it looks like GTalk will only allow incoming messages from people whom you have designated as contacts. This should cut down on unwanted messages.
[Also posted on Crooked Timber.]
I am back from a five-stop two-week trip and am finally catching up on various things Web. I missed the discussion John started at Crooked Timber a few days ago about Google. Instead of adding to that thread, I’ll add a whole post. To think of Google as just a company focusing on search is outdated, in my opinion. Google is becoming much more than that. Since the beginning they have been an expert at using network analysis to their advantage. With the various services they are rolling out, they can use that ability not only to in the realm of search, but in the realm of building profiles of their users.
The title of this post does not refer to a new Google program. Rather, it’s what I suspect the company is aiming at overall. That is, they are introducing (whether through internal development or buyouts) new services constantly, many of which suggest that they have their eyes on doing much more than providing search. Today, they launched Google Talk so now they are in the instant messaging market. For Google Talk, you need a Google Account, which is the same as your GMail account if you already have one. If you don’t, you may consider getting one since now they offer over 2.5 gigabytes of storage. Of course, you may never need that amount of space for email (although I learned a long time ago never to say never when it comes to storage space) in which case you may just want to use it as a backup for files.
One of the great features about GMail is that it checks for new email regularly (several times a minute) so as long as you stay logged on, you can get regular email updates. Of course, as long as you stay logged on, Google can track all of your online activities connected to its services, which include searches run on its search engine. Not only do they have information about all of your emails, they also know what searches you run and what results you choose.
Being able to scan your email (as they do for the purposes of displaying Google Ads) doesn’t only give them information about what topics you discuss, they also know with whom. They can develop very nice maps of people’s networks. Now that they have launched Google Talk they will also know which of your email contacts are strong enough that you also tend to contact them through chat (assuming you are using Google Talk for IMing). They will have more data on which to draw for a network map of your connections. And since the use of Google Talk requires a Google Account from both users, they can construct network maps of those people as well. So your network map is not just at one degree.
Of course, Google is not the only player in town. This is a good thing since at some point all of this tracking can get potentially disconcerting from a privacy point of view. Yahoo!, MSN and AOL remain major players. Yahoo! has been rolling out new products constantly as well and they have been buying up all sorts of popular services (e.g. Flickr, which has already been merged with people’s Yahoo accounts). Many many people continue to use the various services of these other companies. In fact, during my trip in the past few weeks, I saw and heard numerous people use and refer to all sorts of non-Google products (e.g. the continued prevalence of Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Mapquest, AIM, etc.). Of course, my observations are based on anecdotal evidence, but that helps at times just so you don’t think everyone else’s actions mirror your own.
Much of Google’s financial success is attributed to its ad program. However, this has started to encounter problems recently due to click fraud. You will also notice that Web site owners’ desperate attempts at getting people to click on Google ads is leading to some very opaque placement of ads. That is, it is not at all clear that you are clicking on an ad. One example is this site where the user may think that the links below the four pictures on the top of the page have something to do with the images, but that’s a wrong assumption. This may lead to more initial clicks, but long term users may get weary and although they may continue to click through to a list of results, they won’t take the extra step to click on anything on the list of results.
In the meantime, Yahoo’s ad program is gaining prominence. Not only have several big sites switched to it (e.g. CNN, The Washington Post), but they are now also targeting smaller content providers. Who is to say AOL Time Warner won’t come out with its own such service as well? And Microsoft has already announced that it will be moving into this space soon.
Given all these recent developments, it makes sense for Google to focus on more than just search. Or even if search remains its main source of revenue, it makes sense for it to develop super detailed profiles of its users. It helps advertisers to have as much information about the audience as possible and the profiles generated through the use of Google’s web of services will offer immense details about many of its users.
It would be very naive to think that new players can enter this market easily at this point. However, there are some old ones that remain viable alternatives. Of course, from the user’s perspective this is a very healthy thing. Whether MSN or Google, we wouldn’t want one company holding a monopoly on all of our online doings.
As for my part, I continue to use a variety of services from various companies partly so my profile at any one of them doesn’t become too detailed.
This is a test post to see how/whether RMail works with my blog. If it does then I should receive an email about this entry being posted.
Perhaps I’ll say a few additional words about what’s going on here given that not many people seem to know what RSS means. According to Wikipedia: “RSS provides short descriptions of web content together with links to the full versions of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, RSS allows a website’s frequent readers to track updates on the site using a news aggregator.â€
People can track updates to selected Web sites by getting feeds from them. This allows tracking content without actually having to visit each Web site of interest separately. Rather, RSS readers (e.g. Bloglines) aggregate the feeds and present them in one location. However, not many people seem to use such services. I have set up a few (I have an account on Bloglines and I have also set up some feeds using the Live Bookmarks feature of Firefox, which can add feeds to the Bookmarks menu of the browser), but I don’t tend to use them much. Instead, I’ve always thought receiving email notification of new posts would be ideal. RMail is supposed to do just that. I’ll see if it works. (I’m also curious to know how it handles updates to a post that’s already been published. If it sends out a separate email each time an entry is updated then I’ll want to be careful about tweaking a post after putting it up on the blog.)
UPDATE: It works! I did get notification of the post, although not immediately. I have since been able to test it on the post that follows this one as well. That notification arrived about half an hour after the entry had been posted to the blog. That sounds good to me. I don’t have to hear immediately. So I have now added some more feeds to RMail and will see how it works. I wish there was an easier URL though. I always think to look for rmail.com, but then realize the URL starts with k. Is rmail.kbcafe.com a possibility Randy?
