Archive for November, 2006

Links for 2006-11-13

Monday, November 13th, 2006

Project 365: #18

Monday, November 13th, 2006


At the Stanford basketball arena

Taken: November 11, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

Although watching a Stanford basketball game is not as exciting for me as watching Northwestern play, it was still fun to welcome back the college basketball season. And just to spice things up a bit, this coming Friday NU is playing Stanford here so if all goes well I’ll get to go to a really exciting game.

Overheard

Sunday, November 12th, 2006

Are you a teacher?
Yes.
What subject?
I am a sociologist.
Then you must be good at making friends.

Firefox problems, again

Sunday, November 12th, 2006

I’m having two problems with Firefox these days. I don’t know if they are the result of some extensions I’ve installed. I’d welcome suggestions for fixing these issues.

1. When I try to comment on my own blog (right here, this one) I can’t do it when rendering in Firefox. I get the following error: “Error: This file cannot be used on its own.” Fortunately, IETab comes to the rescue as the commenting works fine when the page is rendered in IE. IE Tab is a great extension that lets you render a page in IE on a Firefox tab. I recommend it! Nonetheless, I don’t see why I can’t leave comments in FF.

2. Out of the blue and in seemingly completely random ways, the “Allow sites to set Cookies” option keeps unchecking itself (under Options > Privacy > Cookies). I keep having to check it again after I get logged out of GMail, WordPress, Flickr, etc. It is extremely annoying. Has anyone experienced this? What could be the problem?

I have recently installed Greasemonkey including some scripts. But I disabled all those and the problems persist. Other than that, I think IE Tab is the only extension I’ve added relatively recently.

Can anyone offer advice on either of the two issues above? It would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

Links for 2006-11-12

Sunday, November 12th, 2006

Project 365: #17

Saturday, November 11th, 2006


Sanford wine

Taken: November 10, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

On Friday we had a social hour at the Center. The wine committee came up with the above selection.

The following is a paid post

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

As you have probably noticed, I’m not big on advertisements on this blog. I have some Amazon links on the right side of the front page included in the books randomly chosen from my Library Thing account, but that’s about it. But what if I could make a few extra bucks without upsetting the overall layout of the site and through an activity that is in line with my interests?

The site ReviewMe launched recently with the goal of paying bloggers for posts on specified products, sites and services. To try out the service, they are offering people the opportunity to make some money by posting an entry about ReviewMe itself. So that is what I am doing here. Above I said “through an activity that is in line with my interests” whereby I meant that I regularly point people to Web sites on this blog and offer commentary so to do so on yet another site or service seems in line with what I do around here anyway. If there is full disclosure about the fact that I am getting paid for a review, does that dilute the post’s value? More generally speaking, does my involvement in such an activity dilute the value of my blog on the whole?

ReviewMe has some guidelines that should help in deciding whether this practice is problematic or not (or the extent to which it might be). The service makes it clear to advertisers that they may not require a positive review. They explain why advertisers should not see that as a problem though:

We do not allow advertisers to require a positive review. The vast majority of reviews are measuredly positive, although many do contain constructive criticism. We view this as a bonus: how else can you quickly and cheaply get feedback on a product or service from influencers?

If you sign up, the system figures out how much you will be paid for each post you accept to write. This sum seems to be determined by influencer status based on Technorati rankings and such metrics.

Then you sit back and wait until advertisers find you and offer you the chance to blog about their product. You are not required to accept these offers so it is still up to the blogger to decide whether a review fits one’s interests and blog content.

ReviewMe requires bloggers to be explicit about the fact that the post is in exchange for payment.

One question is what I noted above: How, if at all, does this influence the value of a blog or a particular post? The other question I have about all this is whether it will succeed. That is, I’m curious to see whether ReviewMe will succeeds in attracting advertisers for purchasing product reviews.

Project 365: #16

Saturday, November 11th, 2006


Lloyd at the Fountain

Taken: November 9, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

Continuing the theme of blasts from the past, I got to see Lloyd on Thursday. The last time I saw him was in San Francisco when the American Sociological Association meetings were there in 1998. Lloyd published one of my parents’ books (Symmetry) and I interned with him for about ten days during college when I was considering a career in publishing. It was a cool experience, Shelter Publications is a neat enterprise.

Lloyd is an amazing person, by the way. He collects life experiences like few others I know. He travels the world very often focusing on the lesser known paths. He maintains a blog about some of his adventures.

He was down at Stanford for the panel discussion in honor of Fred Turner‘s recent book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, which I also attended. It was an interesting trip down memory lane. I thought some of the comments by the panelists were too tech deterministic, but overall it was definitely a conversation worth hearing.

Links for 2006-11-11

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

Project 365: #15

Saturday, November 11th, 2006


Pizza My Heart

Taken: November 8, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

On Monday during the Yahoo! Time Capsule Camp event my group ended up in this pizza place to hear Tony Tuesday give us some clues. On Wednesday, I found myself back in the area in search of food close to midnight. Not that many places are open at that time in Palo Alto, but it turns out Pizza My Heart is. Their Hawaiian pizza slice was quite tasty.

Llinks for 2006-11-10

Friday, November 10th, 2006

Project 365: #14

Thursday, November 9th, 2006


McClatchy Hall

Taken: November 7, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

McClatchy Hall on Stanford’s campus houses both the Sociology and the Communication Department. I don’t go to campus too much spending most of my time up on the hill at the Center, but it is a beautiful area so I do walk around on occasion.

Project 365: #13

Thursday, November 9th, 2006


Yahoo! Time Capsule Camp

Taken: November 6, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

This one was a hard choice as there were so many fun photos from the day. But in the end, this summarizes the events best. I will be blogging separately about the experience at a later date, but I’m so behind in posting my Project 365 photos that I couldn’t wait for coverage any longer.

Links for 2006-11-09

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

Yahoo! Time Capsule

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

Just a few hours to go before the Yahoo! Time Capsule closes. They’ve been collecting contributions of text, photos, videos, sounds and drawings representing the following themes: past, beauty, faith, sorrow, love, anger, you, hope, now, fun. There is time until tonight midnight West coast US time to contribute. It is not fully clear what will happen with all of this material, but it’s an interesting idea to see what contributions people are motivated to make around those themes (and which themes are of most interest to folks).

I will be posting about Yahoo!’s Time Capsule Camp separately later.

Project 365: #12

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006


Interesting tree

Taken: November 5, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

It only hit me late on Sunday that I hadn’t taken any pictures all day. I figured a scene from the neighorhood would do. The plants around here are amazing. I like the way the color of this tree makes it stand out from among its surroundings. I’ll be sure to capture it in daylight sometime as well.

Links for 2006-11-08

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

Project 365: #11

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006


Opening presents

Taken: November 4, 2006 (What is Project 365?)

On Saturday, I went to a big birthday party in celebration of Andrei turning thirty. I had over 100 photos from which to choose one for the day. As you can tell from the entire set [slide show format], many were probably better than this one. However, this one captured several fun aspects of the evening. Since it was not staged, it’s not as elegant as it could have been, but it references a bunch of things so I picked it for Project 365.

On the left is Chris sporting an “I love White Russians” T-shirt with a picture of Andrei on it. This seemed to be the party theme and the T-shirts Chris created were very fitting and amusing. In the middle is Andrei with his myriad of gifts. On the right is Mirek who kindly gave me a ride to the party and then proceeded to quote and refer to Deepak Chopra all night.

It was a very fun evening with lots of nice people, plenty of good food (including a fountain chocolate fondue), all sorts of drinks (including the opportunity to add your own open source mix🙂 and exotic plants (so is this a palm or a pine?).

Links for 2006-11-06

Monday, November 6th, 2006

Project 365: #10

Monday, November 6th, 2006


Fortune cookies

Taken: November 3, 2006 (What is Project 365)

I spent all day Friday in a meeting at Stanford with fellow MacArthur grantees talking mainly about methods of data collection.

In the evening, we went out to dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. Brigid and I were talking shop just before we cracked open our fortune cookies. Hers was the one on top above and while not exactly a fortune, it’s certainly fitting. Mine was the one on the bottom, which was amusing, because I had just responded to a question Brigid asked me a moment earlier about work. I guess my answer must have been the right one.:-)