Links for 2006-10-09
October 9th, 2006-
Greasemonkey script for showing upcoming.org event details on Flickr photo
-
a goldmine of Flickr Greasemonkey scripts
-
(don’t ask…:)
Links for 2006-10-08
October 8th, 2006-
presents Top 10 from nine video sites (e.g. YouTube, although not Google Video and not Yahoo! Video)
Links for 2006-10-07
October 7th, 2006-
many colleges seem to be doing just fine without requiring SAT scores from applicants (may not work at larger universities due to scaling issues)
-
one of the best hacks to come out of Yahoo! Hack Day
-
documentary about five young women’s career paths in science fields
Del.icio.us birthday bash
October 6th, 2006
Yahoo! hosted a party the other day celebrating the third birthday of del.icio.us and the registration of its millionth user. I found out about it thanks to a listing on Upcoming. It was a fun reason to return to Yahoo! headquarters just a few days after Yahoo! Hack Day.
There was some overlap in attendance, but I thought the demographics of this crowd was noticeably different from that of the one at Hack Day. There were more women and I no longer contributed to skewing the average age – toward ancient – considerably.
In the background was a screen showing additions to the site real-time. It’s fun to imagine the dozens of users, at any one minute, clicking on their del.icio.us bookmarklet (or whatnot) entering information and contributing to the overall value of the site.
The first person I met reminded me of the shallow shmoozing that went on at Silicon Alley parties in the late 90s. (I’m sure they went on at Silicon Valley parties as well, but since I was living in NYC at the time, I have experience with that bit.) He wasn’t even a del.icio.us user. Worse yet, he spent most of our brief encounter questioning the service. Why bother showing up? I won’t embarrass/dignify him with a link to his company’s Web site.
I did better with the next round of folks I met. I stumbled into a group of people who already knew each other through a Flickr meetup group. We spent a good chunk of time sharing our adminiration for that service and community.
Next, I went over to say hi to Andy Baio whose links page has often inspired posts around here. We’ve exchanged emails about numerous things in the past so it was nice to meet in person finally. I also got to meet some folks from the Flickr team including its co-founder Stewart Butterfield, and Matthew Rothenberg whom I look forward to seeing next week when I go back to Yahoo!, this time for research purposes.
Finally, I ran into our CASBS Librarian Trisha who, conveniently for me, took a picture of the swag, which consisted of a cute T-shirt (the back shows the party information as a del.icio.us entry) and stickers.
Overall, it was a fun event. It’s neat to be in the area and have the ability to just hop on over to these things.
Links for 2006-10-06
October 6th, 2006-
BBC article on recent UK Nielsen/NetRatings study (no info on sample size or response rate)
-
deciphering a Web site
-
careful, addictive
-
user submitted phishing messages
-
requires subscription; includes reference to my work: “Students have not given up on e-mail altogether. In fact, a survey of more than 1,300 students at the University of Illinois at Chicago earlier this year found that 86 percent of them still use campus e-mail regularly. Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor of communication studies and
sociology at Northwestern University who conducted the survey, says
students often ignore messages coming from their colleges,
considering them a form of spam…” -
interesting pumpkin-carving ideas
-
how to make mini Halloween bags
Links for 2006-10-05
October 5th, 2006-
wiki for listing academic blogs
-
it may be a bit tedious to actually implement it, but I figured it was worth taking note of for future reference
Links for 2006-10-04
October 4th, 2006Celebrating 90,000 Flickr views!
October 3rd, 2006
There are 2,122 images in my Flickr stream viewable to all, 2,868 viewable to me (the number’s in between there somewhere for family & friends). It’s so much fun to be able to go back and remember various things from the past year by being able to browse photos of people, events and places. It’s also a delight to communicate with people on the site and learn about others’ interests, passions and environments. If you’re not yet a user, I highly recommend it! Here are some instances of Flickr mentions on this blog.
Another technical glitch: Flickr & Firefox
October 3rd, 2006UPDATE: I really didn’t want to have to do this, but after reading some related threads over on Flickr Help it looked like it may be hard to avoid clearing the cache so I did. Things are now back to normal.
Original post:
I apologize, this is yet another post about a technical problem I am experiencing. And believe me, I am not finding these amusing nor do I think they are a particularly good use of blog space, but there’s always the hope that a reader may have an idea for a solution. So far E-BLOG readers have been very helpful so that keeps me motivated. (Which is not to say that if you’re sick of these posts you should stop helping me out with the hopes that then I’ll stop posting about them.:)
The problem: Flickr looks like a mess when I pull it up in Firefox. Here is a screen shot of the welcome page:
It looks like the css file is not being considered when rendering the page. Curiously, some pages do come up okay. For example, when I click on “all sizes” for an image, I get what I’m supposed to get.
But I get the above mess not only on the welcome page, but on each individual photo page and also on others such as my Favorites or “Recent comments you have made”, etc. And yes, it’s the same when viewing other people’s accounts as well.
This all started yesterday around the same time that Flickr was experiencing upload problems. For a few hours I just figured it had to do with that. I didn’t see why they should be related, but I figured there were just all sorts of general site problems. However, eventually I realized that no one out there was commenting on this and it had been a while so I pulled up Flickr in IE. It rendered just fine.
So what in the world is going on here? I cleared my Flickr cookies to see if that could help, but no change. I checked and I’m running the latest version of Firefox so no upgrading to do there.
I disabled all extensions in case something there might be a problem, but nothing changed.
I’m really hoping to avoid having to clear cache altogether as I have all sorts of things set that I don’t want to have to retype again on other sites. It is possible to just clear cache for one site? And yes, I’ve done lots of forced reloads.
Any thoughts on how I can get Flickr to show up correctly again in Firefox? I really don’t want to have to run IE parallel to Firefox.. but viewing the site this way is very annoying. Thanks!
Links for 2006-10-03
October 3rd, 2006-
Earth from a distance
-
“Program impacts on school environments were considerably smaller than impacts on neighborhoods, suggesting that achievement-related benefits from improved neighborhood environments are alone small.”
-
converts ISBN number into full bibliographic citation information; the ability to then export to a reference program like EndNote would be great
-
what in the world was this faculty member thinking?!
Sloppy NYTimes illustration
October 2nd, 2006The New York Times has an article about GMail’s increasing ability to identify spam correctly (including a lower case of false positives when it comes to legitimate commercial email requested by the user).
What caught my eye was the illustration accompanying this article (on the left in this image below).
GMail calls spam “Spam” not “Bulk”. So why does the illustration show a Bulk folder? On the right, I have copied what all this looks like in GMail. How hard would it have been to get that right?
UPDATE: As a commenter notes on my Flickr stream, it looks like they lifted the image from Yahoo! Mail. Hah!
Links for 2006-10-02
October 2nd, 2006-
interesting idea
-
this can probably be applied to other areas as well
-
neat idea, but not a super user-friendly site.. somehow drops off in helping you find the exact location at the last step
-
maps of US K-12 schools (private & public) searchable by zip code, county or district
-
(NYTimes article)
-
“citizens’ compendium of everything,”
-
article about recent ads depicting divorced fathers (although it’s not clear from the Nexium ad whether the father’s actually divorced)
-
inside Yahoo!
Links for 2006-10-01
October 1st, 2006-
finding people like yourself in a location
-
Blogging in motion – winning hack at Yahoo! Hack Day; definitely cool solution, Nokia camera wit zonetag embedded in a purse; the camera posts an image to a blog automatically every so often
-
Flickr & Odeo
Yahoo! Hack Day
September 30th, 2006Taking advantage of my Silicon Valley location this year, I decided to go check out Yahoo! Hack Day (it’s actually a two-day event so I’ll be back for more today).
Hundreds of people showed up for the opportunity to spend a day adding functionality to various Yahoo! products such as Flickr, Upcoming.org and now even Yahoo! Mail. The demos of these creations will be this afternoon (Saturday) where we’ll get to hear 90-second descriptions of the hacks. It sounds fun and exciting especially to someone like me who’s such a fan of some of Yahoo!’s products.
The event organization so far has been impressive with clear directions, plenty of parking, fast registration and some fun swag. Yesterday was filled with various presentations culminating in a pizza dinner and then a live concert. I finally met Lifehacker Gina Trapani in person and hung out for a while. This was fun since despite having written for Lifehacker in the past, we’ve never met in person.
The surprise of the evening was the Beck concert (see a recent interview in Wired as to why he was an especially appropriate selection for this event). The performance included puppet versions of all the artists projected onto the screen behind the stage. It was great. You can find photos of the concert on Flickr (mine, others’) and there’s also a Yahoo! video not of the concert, but of the Beck puppet’s visit to Sunnyvale. Google gets most of the attention for being a fun place to work, but Yahoo!’s campus seems quite fun as well, something I already noted when giving a talk there two years ago.
Links for 2006-09-29
September 29th, 2006-
domain hosting solution (in case Dreamhost becomes problematic)
Mailing list subscription netiquette
September 28th, 2006I try to avoid rants here, but the following has become increasingly common so I’m going to comment.
I consider it a basic form of netiquette to ask people about a mailing list subscription before proceeding to add their name to a list. I realize that most people get too much email as is so if you have to go through asking them first and then requesting an opt-in action then the chances are small that they will subscribe. That said, most people get too much email as is so it’s fair to assume that if they can’t take the time and effort to opt-in then they won’t appreciate the messages anyway. Or perhaps it’s not fair to assume. In the end it’s an empirical question, I guess. I don’t know of any research on it, I’m afraid.
In the least, it would seem courteous to send people an introductory note letting them know that you have added them to a list.
Of course, worse yet is when people add you to a distribution list where you have no way of opting out whatsoever. Thanks to email filtering options, it is possible to route messages directly to trash without ever seeing them.
Problems with IE
September 28th, 2006UPDATE: I’ve figured this out (see the end of the post for details).
As Biliana noted in the comments, there seems to be a problem with displaying E-BLOG in Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out the source of this problem. It seems to have come out of nowhere from one day to the next. I don’t recall adding any code that would have suddenly led to this problem. I welcome suggestions for fixing it. In the meantime, I recommend using Firefox. I am not suggesting anyone would bother downloading a separate application just to view this blog, I am suggesting that it’s worth using Firefox regardless of this blog. (See download instructions here.)
FYI, it is possible to view each post individually in IE. The evidence seems to suggest that the problem is with some code in the sidebar. I just can’t figure out what exactly.
UPDATE: I took out the sidebar to see what would happen and nothing changed, so clearly that’s not the issue. Jim uses a similar layout on his blog (in fact, he got the code – although possibly an earlier incarnation – from here) and his site renders just fine in IE.
UPDATE 2: It turns out my edited version of the sociable plugin was causing the problem. I have disabled it and all should be fine now.
Links for 2006-09-28
September 28th, 2006-
“An online intermediary for Entrepreneurs, Researchers, and Journalists, who follow the Web.”
Introducing Casbie
September 27th, 2006
A deer visits me almost every day here at the Center. There seem to be plenty of leaves falling from the tree to keep it well fed. On occasion I’ll look out my window and there it is. I have decided to name the deer and have given it the name Casbie as a mix of the Center’s abbreviation (CASBS) and perhaps you can guess what else. I’ve started a separate set for it on Flickr. (Sorry about all the “its”, but I can’t tell for sure if it’s male or female. At times like this Hungarian is so much more convenient without gendered pronouns.)