[Also posted on Crooked Timber.]

Super smart and super nice blogger Jeremy Freese is calling out to the blogosphere in a desperate plea to help him figure out how to get his sofa into his new place. Jeremy just moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and it turns out his beloved sofa won’t make it up the stairs into his new apartment. Even before his furniture arrived earlier this week he had already succeeded in finding wifi and keeping his blog readers updated regarding his move. Not having any furniture for a night didn’t pose any major challenges, but the sofa’s arrival yesterday meant the start of some real stress. It is still standing in the hallway its legs now only held up by the remaining three screws that won’t come off.

Anyone with suggestions on how to solve this puzzle, please leave a note on Jeremy’s blog.

I’m sure everyone has and knows of hellish moving experiences. One of the worst stories I recall concerns a friend gearing up for her last year in graduate school. The university’s housing office told her that they could not accomodate her any longer so she had to move. She packed up all her stuff and transferred everything to the new location. Unfortunately, it turned out that several items among her possessions would not fit through the doorway and hallway of her new apartment. In the end, the univ housing office let her back into her old apartment. But so why exactly was all that packing up necessary?

The winner of the most unfortunate move in my circles is my brother. He was in the midst of moving in between cities and spent a night in a motel. His truck in the parking lot got broken into overnight. The culprits managed to take all the really personal stuff that could never be replaced leaving the few things that were perhaps of any objective value (e.g. a computer). Go figure.

It seems that moving always entails some hellish experience, the question is more about the magnitude of the unfortunate events that will unfold.

This is somewhat random and I don’t know if I’ll end up using it much, but it’s interesting enough to pass along: customized stickies on a Web page. (That link points to one I just set up for my Web-Use Project. You can see the service’s main homepage here.)

Some first impressions regarding features:
1. The user should be able to change the graphic in the upper left-hand corner of the page. That’s the location where one expects to see the title of a page and it’s confusing to have the company’s general logo there. In the least, the user should be able to specify “User’s Protopage” to taylor it to the specific page a bit.
2. It’s a bit annoying to have all the links opening up in new tabs (or new windows). Why not the current one?

As I said, I’m not sure if there will be much use for this, but it’s nifty enough to try out.

Continuing the discussion about browser/program nuisances, I just noticed something else that’s not right. I use GMail for most of my emailing. (For some emails I’m still a Pine user.:-)

I prefer to compose messages in plain text. Previously, when I pressed Reply (or simply clicked in the text area), Plain Text would come up as the default option. Now Rich Formatting appears. Moreover, my cursor is not automatically inserted in the text area, I have to click in it. This didn’t used to happen either. This latter component is especially annoying as it requires a mouse movement whereas I prefer to be able to do things relying solely on the keyboard. (And note that even if I use the keyboard shortcut for Reply “r”, the cursor is still not placed in the text area.)

It all seems to work just fine in IE.

So is there a compatibility problem between Firefox 1.0.6 and GMail?

Is there a way I can force the compose window to default to Plain Text view?

All this is making me wonder whether I should have started out the title of the last post with Firefox as well since that seems to be the culprit here. Otherwise, it would be quite a coincidence that just when I upgrade Firefox things start to get weird.

I cannot log into my WordPress panel for esztersblog.com using Firefox. It works fine for IE. However, I know it’s not a general WordPress/Firefox incompatibility, because Crooked Timber – the group blog of which I am a member – uses WordPress and I can log into that account just fine using Firefox. So what may be going on? Any ideas?

Others have commented on this, but I wanted to add my part. The two most recent posts (before this one) on this blog have already received comment spam. They will have been in existence for one and two days respectively. I have installed a plugin that closes comments on all posts after seven days, but is that too large a margin?

The problem is not only one of annoyance, it’s one of blog viability as well. My provider almost shut down my previous blog – or suggested I switch to one that costs $100/month – solely due to the amount of resources eaten up by comment spammers. Of course, figuring that out took several hours in and of itself, which is a cost to my productivity.

If anyone has suggestions on how else to deal with this, let me know. Again, the problem is not solely that I have to delete and/or moderate. It’s also the resources eaten up by these scoundrels.

My result after taking the Which Revenge of the Sith Character are you? Quiz:

I’m not sure what to make of this. It’s probably best not to make much of it given that I have no idea how things were figured out. It’s fun especially since I got the Yoda picture. That’s good enough for me.:) (No, I did not change my answers even in cases where I thought I was definitely not going to be aligned with Yoda given my choices.)

This map shows the geographical location of E-Blog visitors, courtesy of gvisits.com. This one is the map for Eszter.com.

UPDATE: I just realized the maps only show the geo location of the last twenty visitors, fyi.

I just had to try this. I’m sitting in the Harrisburg, PA station of Amtrak waiting to depart. I caught some free wireless. How cool. Had to try blogging while sitting on the train. 🙂

UPDATE: Of course, before anyone gets too excited, I should follow up by saying that as soon as we pulled out of the station the connection was gone. But since we had a few minutes at the station it wasn’t completely useless.

I started a program to train to run a 5K. I posted a blog entry about the related pledge (password: running) on Crooked Timber, but since that was the time E-BLOG was misbehaving I hadn’t replicated it here. A dozen people from all over the world pledged to join me and so we’ve started down on the road to a healthier lifestyle. (Perhaps I should only speak for myself on that point. The running program is only a part of a larger agenda for me. I’ve given up on sodas for the most part and continue to look out for additional ways to change things for the better.)

We started last week. The first week was not easy, but it really motivates to know that other people out there are also undertaking the same training at the same time and you owe it to them in addition to yourself to stick it out. Now I’m into the second week and for now I’m happy to say it’s going better. It’s hard for me to imagine that three training sessions would make that big of a difference, but who knows. For now I am really enjoying the program, which helps.

I used to run quite a bit back in elementary school and was good at it. Since then I haven’t done that much. However, several of my close friends run regularly and I also have numerous friends who even run marathons. So I figured there must be something there if all these people I like are so into it. That’s partly what motivated me to try a program. I’ll report back on how it is going.

Socializing with Lego Lady,
originally uploaded by eszter.

I loved playing with legos when I was a kid. I remember constructing an entire town with my brother one time. It was super fun.

Most toy stores in the US that carry legos usually sell complicated preconstructed elements. My interest has always been in starting from scratch with the very simple little bricks.

I finally found a lego store that I thought would have the basic bricks. I walked into the store enthusiastically. The store clerk who greeted me started with a simple question: “What age is the child?”. Ouch. Now how is that a good marketing plan? If I had been any less confident about my legitimate lego interest I would have turned around or had pretended I was shopping for a kid. Instead I just raised my arm and pointed my index finger at me. Then I asked for the basic bricks section.

In this same mall – located on Michigan Ave aka Magnificent Mile section in Chicago – is this lego lady at the West end of the third floor. There’s a guy on the east end of the second floor near the store itself. I wonder if I’ll find any others during my next visit.

The photo-sharing site Flickr has come out with some nifty features recently that make it even more fun to browse pictures on the site than before. Beware, there are hundreds of thousands of photos to see, and more ways to navigate the Web site than before so a simple click can take you away from whatever it is that you were doing for longer than what you might expect. Of course, just like with blogs and many other things, there is a lot of uninteresting mediocre material. But there are also great pictures to view. To help find these, Flickr came out with the interestingness feature. To figure out what gets highlighted in this section, they are using “a ranking algorithm based on user behavior around the photos taking into account some obvious things like how many users add the photo to their favorites and some subtle things like the relationship between the person who uploaded the photo and the people who are commenting (plus a whole bunch of secret sauce)”. There is a calendar feature that lets you browse the interestingness category by day.

Another new feature is their clustering of tags. First, let me take a step back for those who are not familiar with the service at all. When users upload photos to the system they can tag them with descriptors such as name of location, type of event, etc. Photos across the entire site can be viewed by tags. Say you are interested in viewing photos of Chicago. There are over 70,000 photos tagged with “chicago” so you are likely shown many that are not of interest. Tags in and of themselves are only so useful since someone may tag all their private party photos with the name of the city in which the party took place, but that won’t be of much interest to someone looking for pictures of the urban landscape. This is where the new clustering feature comes in handy. For popular tags, the system now offers you related tags so you can be sure that you’ll be viewing pictures of the Chicago skyline, buildings or Millennium Park if that is what’s of interest. (Note that when looking for something specific, it’s worth checking alternate spellings/specifications. For example, you’ll get more pictures of Millennium Park under the misspelled tag milleniumpark than under the correct spelling millenniumpark.)

Some basics about Flickr: anyone can create a free account, which comes with the ability to feature 200 photos organized in up to three sets with a 20MB upload limit per month. For $24.95/year you get much more (unlimited storage, 2GB upload limit, no ads, etc.). You can add contacts and specify them as acquaintances or friends. When you upload photos, you can specify them as public or restricted to your contacts. You can join communities based on interest and affiliation. You can mark photos as your favorite and find them easily later. You can add notes to photos. You can leave comments on people’s photo pages. It’s a neat service, I recommend giving it a try.

When you upload photos, you can either reserve all rights or specify a Creative Commons license for them. Although many people – especially those who seem to be pros – reserve all rights, many do not. Thanks to the Creative Commons licenses, the site offers great illustrations for those in need of adding some photos to other sites, presentations or whatnot without worrying about copyright infringement.

I really enjoy browsing the site aimlessly, but I also appreciate viewing pictures from people to whom I have some connection. So if you happen to have a flickr account, how about posting a link in the comments? My album is here.

Finally, I got around to upgrading the software running this blog, WordPress. It’s a much better version in many ways and it’s allowed me to fix some things and preempt certain problems.

I’m happy to say that comments are functioning again. They have not been working for weeks if not months.. and the amount of spam I was getting nearly made my provider shut down my account! In an attempt to deal with those headaches I have installed a plugin that automatically shuts off comments after seven days.

Unfortunately, the default WordPress template has some annoying aspects. For example, the default layout comes with a lot of wasted space on top of the page. Unfortunately, I have not been able to figure out how to get rid of it. Moreover, the link to homepage feature on the header does not seem to be working either. If anyone has any ideas on these, please let me know. I would also like to set up the blog so the sidebar appears on all individual post/archive pages, but that’s not straight forward either.

So while the new WordPress offers much more functionality at some level, unfortunately it’s gotten much more complex and in some ways much more difficult to navigate. Bummer.

Do you know what RSS means? If you do then you are more savvy than the majority of American Internet users.

The latest memo from the Pew Internet and American Life Project examines an important topic: people’s awareness of Internet terms. In a survey administered to Internet users across the U.S. the researchers found that only 9% of users have a good idea of what the term “RSS feeds” means while 26% claimed never to have heard of it. “Podcasting” is the other term with least recognition as 23% had never heard of it and only 13% claim to know what it is. Of concern from a privacy/security perspective is that only 29% have a good idea of what “phishing” means, 52% for “Adware”, 68% for “Internet cookies” and 78% for “Spyware”.

Not surprisingly, familiarity with the terms is related to age, but even among the youngest, most connected group (18-29 year olds) only 12% claim to understand “RSS feeds” and “podcasting” (as compared to 5% of those 65 and above).

All of this is close to my interests as an important aspect of my work is looking at people’s Internet skills. My paper examining proxy measures of actual skill is coming out this Fall. In it I show that the types of knowledge items on which the Pew researchers just collected data are better predictors of people’s actual skill than traditional proxies such as amount of Internet experience or even self-perceived skill (a very common proxy in the literature).

Why does all this matter? First, I think it is helpful to remember what people may or may not know when one is enthusiastically trying to recommend things to them (as I tend to do) or why some people’s machines get overrun with malware (and why some may find it easier to just buy a new computer instead of trying to get the current infected one fixed). Second, as the Web matures (in both good ways – more sophisticated services – and bad ways – more unwanted disruptions) the divide among users will likely increase. This is what I have referred to as the “second-level digital divide“, differences among those already connected (as opposed to the plain old-fashioned “digital divide” that points out the differences between users and non-users).

In addition to being related to age, Internet know-how also tends to be related to education. The Pew report does not break this down for us, but I have found this in previous work (both in my dissertation and in a paper with my graduate student Amanda Hinnant) exploring similar data. (I can point to a conference abstract, but the paper is currently under review so I am not posting a full version.) The point here is that those in already privileged positions (e.g. higher levels of education) tend to be more savvy about the Web and may well benefit from its uses more than those in less privileged positions. This means that instead of leveling the playing field, Internet use may contribute to social inequality.

The Pew memo comes out just as I am putting some finishing touches on a similar survey (although much longer than what they probably had here). Due to budget constraints I will not be administering it on a nationally representative random sample, but still believe the findings should be of interest. There is much more research to be done about what it is that people do and do not understand with respect to their Internet uses.

[Link noticed on digg.]

I am having some major problems with the blog, thus no updates in a while. I hope to have things resolved in the next few days. My apologies.

I am happy to let people know that the Outstanding Publication: Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s section on Communication and Information Technologies has been awarded to Paul Starr for his book on The Creation of the Media. Paul was one of my advisors in graduate school. He wrote this book throughout the time I spent at Princeton. I learned a lot from following the progress in the project. Here is the note from Lori Kendall who chaired the CITASA awards committee:

Starr is Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs, at Princeton University. Prof. Starr has received numerous awards for his previous works, including the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his book “The Social Transformation of American Medicine.” “The Creation of the Media” recounts the historical development of the political framework for the communications industries in the United States. Given its phenomenal breadth and depth, its wealth of historical detail, and the excellent attention to both social and technological issues in the development of media, “The Creation of Media” provides an important historical context for scholars of today’s media. Published in New York by Basic Books, 2004. The other members of the committee are Karen Cerulo, Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, and Mary Virnoche, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Humboldt State University.

A propos the spread of social bookmarking and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision earlier this week that file-sharing programs can be held responsible for copyright infringement, this article in today’s NYTimes does a nice job of summarizing some of the ways in which various new online services are leading to more and more bottom-up creativity and content whose sharing does not necessarily constitute copyright infringement.

But bottom-up creativity may depend on more traditional avenues at times and the article doesn’t address this other side of the issue at all. For an example, take note that some photo labs (e.g. Walmart, like they really needed to come up with more reasons to alienate people) have decided not to print people’s photos if they look too professional. The burden seems to be on the amateur photographer to prove that the picture was really taken in her own back yard. ARGH.

If you thought Google Maps and the corresponding satellite images were cool then you’ll be hard-pressed to find a word to describe the experience of using Google Earth. Before you get too excited, do check to see if your computer meets the current requirements.

I don’t think you have to be a geography geek like me (I did take four years of high school geography after all) to appreciate this service. It’s amazing. You can zoom in more than on GMaps, you can tilt the image, you can get driving directions superimposed on the satellite images, you can get road names added, dining options included and much more.

In line with this article in today’s NYTimes, neither the directions nor some of the locations of things are always correct, but they’re close. Go play.

[thanks]

The other day I found myself in the curious position of having to prove that I had been on a flight in order to be allowed to return home. The only explanation I could come up with for the airline having no record of my presence on the flight there is that the gate agent had failed to scan in my boarding pass. As far as I can tell I had done everything “by the book”. In this day and age of being tracked in so many situations and so many ways, I found it an interesting twist that I could think of no way of proving (no way that the ticketing agent seemed to find satisfactory) that I had, indeed, been on the plane and should be allowed to return home on my originally scheduled flight. Details follow.

Read the rest of this entry »

I found it curious that in March of this year The New York Times mentioned the Web site BugMeNot.com in an article to which I included a link in the May 16, 2005 issue of E-LIST. Curiously, a new NYTimes article published this weekend repeats this recommendation.

For those not in the know, BugMeNot helps you find a username and password for sites that require registration. This means that you can proceed to viewing articles on, say, sites like nytimes.com without having to create an account for yourself on such sites.

Firefox users may be interested in this helpful extension that allows use of BugMeNot through the click of a button.