Wednesday, March 30, 2011
The Extreme Centrist
Check out this semester's academic blog at http://theextremecentrist.wordpress.com.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Fast Media - Slow Recovery
Today there was a 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Pakistan. I heard about it 6 minutes after it happened via Twitter when CNN tweeted about it. Last year around this same time news of the Haitian earthquake spread just as fast through social media. Not only did people receive immediate, on-the scene news through Twitter, Facebook, an text messaging, they were able to donate money to Haiti via the same avenues in the first mass digital media/text message fund-raising effort. And it was a huge success...at least on the fund raising end.
As of last week, the one year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, little of the damaged areas of the country had actually been repaired. Although in some ways digital media has helped globalize fund-raising for philanthropic efforts, it has not yet effected the actual physical work that has to be done. Most of this has to do with political corruption and bottle necks for the money on the Haiti government’s side. No matter how much money and how quickly the world gives to the country’s efforts, if it is mishandled, the people of Haiti and other countries, like possibly Pakistan will not benefit from the ease of the technology. No matter how many advances happen in technology, when it comes to rescue and rebuilding efforts, it still takes physical people to do the work, and a functioning government to make sure they have the resources needed. One year later, a lot of work is left to be done. Here are some ways we can still help.
As of last week, the one year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, little of the damaged areas of the country had actually been repaired. Although in some ways digital media has helped globalize fund-raising for philanthropic efforts, it has not yet effected the actual physical work that has to be done. Most of this has to do with political corruption and bottle necks for the money on the Haiti government’s side. No matter how much money and how quickly the world gives to the country’s efforts, if it is mishandled, the people of Haiti and other countries, like possibly Pakistan will not benefit from the ease of the technology. No matter how many advances happen in technology, when it comes to rescue and rebuilding efforts, it still takes physical people to do the work, and a functioning government to make sure they have the resources needed. One year later, a lot of work is left to be done. Here are some ways we can still help.
Friday, April 16, 2010
New Social Media Sites
As Social Media grows and becomes more and more popular, many new sites have started popping up. Two have recently caught my interest.
Blippy.com is like Facebook for your credit card purchases. It allows you to publish how much you spent on your credit card, where you spent the money, and what you bought. Then, your friends can comment on the purchase. Why? I don't know, but it certainly is following the social media trend: everything is public, and nothing is private any more.
Another up and coming site is Unvarnished. This site allows people to create profiles about people and then anonymously rate them as a person, in the business context. The catch is, you can not edit or delete any comments made about you! It's like that slam book on Mean Girls, but in real life! You can check out the website at www.getunvarnished.com. If you go to Unvarnished.com, this is what you will see:
Some guy's blog just got really huge, or really screwed.
Blippy.com is like Facebook for your credit card purchases. It allows you to publish how much you spent on your credit card, where you spent the money, and what you bought. Then, your friends can comment on the purchase. Why? I don't know, but it certainly is following the social media trend: everything is public, and nothing is private any more.
Another up and coming site is Unvarnished. This site allows people to create profiles about people and then anonymously rate them as a person, in the business context. The catch is, you can not edit or delete any comments made about you! It's like that slam book on Mean Girls, but in real life! You can check out the website at www.getunvarnished.com. If you go to Unvarnished.com, this is what you will see:
Some guy's blog just got really huge, or really screwed.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Kavi
For the last several years, I have had the opportunity to vote on the short film submissions for the USA film festival. Last year, one short film really stood out to me and the other panelists. Kavi was actually still a work in progress, but the spark was already there. It was actually one of the least beautiful-looking films we saw that year. Technological advances have made it much easier to make a beautiful looking movie, but the story and the substance has to be there. The actors have to be good and you have to be interested in it. Kavi had all of those things. A story about a slave child in India, Kavi is filmed on location and is based on the actual life style of the brick-making slaves that still exist in India. The story was compelling and rang true. We passed it on to the next round.
Kavi ended up winning best short film in the 2009 USA film festival, which qualified it to be nominated for an Academy Award. Gregg, Helvey, hte writer/director of the film spoke at the festival and emphasized that his reason for making the film was to create awareness about the slave problem still alive in India today. In fact, 30% of profit for the movie benefit anti-slave non-profits. I hoped that the movie would make it to the next round.
Academy Awards nominations came out a few weeks ago, and we heard all about Avatar 's many nominations, but no one talks about the short films. Curiosity finally got the best of me, and when I checked the Academy Awards site today, this is what I saw:
Needless to say, I am excited, and I really really hope Kavi wins, not just because I had some part in voting its way to an Academy Award, but also because it's a good movie for a good cause. If you get a chance, I encourage you to check it out. You'll be glad you did.
Kavi ended up winning best short film in the 2009 USA film festival, which qualified it to be nominated for an Academy Award. Gregg, Helvey, hte writer/director of the film spoke at the festival and emphasized that his reason for making the film was to create awareness about the slave problem still alive in India today. In fact, 30% of profit for the movie benefit anti-slave non-profits. I hoped that the movie would make it to the next round.
Academy Awards nominations came out a few weeks ago, and we heard all about Avatar 's many nominations, but no one talks about the short films. Curiosity finally got the best of me, and when I checked the Academy Awards site today, this is what I saw:
Needless to say, I am excited, and I really really hope Kavi wins, not just because I had some part in voting its way to an Academy Award, but also because it's a good movie for a good cause. If you get a chance, I encourage you to check it out. You'll be glad you did.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Foursquare Widget for Capture the Market
For the last several months I have been playing Foursquare on my iPhone. It's a fun social media app where you can "check in" to places you visit to let your friends know where you are, if they want to come and join you. The app also has a game element in which the person who is at a location the most in a 60 day period becomes its "mayor." You also earn points for checking in and creating new venues. Checking in certain numbers of times and at certain places can also earn you "badges."Foursquare has an open API, which allows people to use it to create other applications. One of the things that has been created is a widget that people can place on their websites or blogs. This is aimed mostly at venues that want to advertise their popularity and their mayor. Here it the widget for my office. And yes, of course I am the Mayor!!
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Sunday, November 29, 2009
The Future of the Internet: Applications
FarmVille and MafiaWars! Just the names of the two Facebook applications that dominated my Live Feed (until I recently removed them) drive me crazy. The open platform that allows them to exist on Facebook also opened the gateway to other types of spam. In a recent NPR interview, former Facebook spammer, Dennis Yu, described several different ways people let spammers into their Facebook lives, simply by participating in applications. Yu explains:
Appvertising and spammers are just a few of the downsides to open platforms found on Facebook and MySpace before that. Identity theft, Phishing, and viruses have also become problems on these once mostly safe sites. Before Facebook opened its platform in 2007, there were only a select few Facebook created Applications for sharing photos, groups and events. Now, it seems like there is an application for everything, including those crazy addictive FarmVille type games. Some people would vote for a more sterile Facebook of the past, but others clearly enjoy the new offerings an open platform can bring, even if the bad comes along with the good.
This is the dilemma faced in Jonathan Zittrain's book, "The Future of the Internet -- and How to Stop It." Zittrain argues that the open platforms or Generative-ness of PCs and the Internet, while beneficial for their initial development and popularity, are now becoming more of a negative than a positive. In 2008, when his book was published, Zittrain noted that 90 percent of email was spam (p.99) and that 80 percent of it came from zombie computers sending it without their owners' knowledge (p.46) and nearly half of those computers were in North America. These are staggering statistics, and they are beginning to make people sit up at take notice. Last week I wrote about the prevalence viruses on Windows-based PCs, but according to Zittrain, the truth is that all personal computers are likely to be infected with some kind of virus, especially if they are hooked up to a constantly open Internet source like broadband or a T1 line.
The solution in the past has been to just throw more bandwidth at the spam problem, so that the email lines don't get so clogged that the relevant email can't get through (p.99). However, at some point that solution will not work any more, and then people will have to face the real problem: there are people exploiting the Generative nature of PCs and the Internet, and they're ruining it for everybody. People like Alan Ralsky, the self-proclaimed "King of Spam" and many even more malicious people have used the easily re-programmable nature of PCs and the Internet to not just make a profit, but to take advantage of and hurt people in the process. Although Ralansky was caught and punished, there are thousands more to take his place, and as more patches are made to the system, even more work around programs will be written.
For some, the solution to these problems is to just close the whole thing off and create tethered technologies. Tethered (or appliance) technologies like iTunes, TiVo, and XBoxes are not generative, meaning that they can not be changed or reprogrammed by the consumer, but must be used in the way the manufacturer intended (p.3). These technologies can be reprogrammed and often are, but only by the remote manufacturer. Tethered technologies still serve many useful functions, but they allow for less innovation and their content and functionality are not fully controlled by the user, even if the user has technically bought the product outright. This can of course lead to undesirable outcomes, like a service getting changed or canceled, and the user losing content or functionality that he or she already paid for.
Zittrain includes iPhones to the tethered technology list, but I disagree with him, since there are thousands of applications (written by third and fourth parties) that can be downloaded and added to iPhones, changing what they can do. Perhaps technologies like the iPhone could be the happy medium between too much freedom and too little. Apple does allow applications created by virtually anyone to be uploaded to their App Store. I say virtually, because although anyone can create and upload applications, they first have to pay to become a developer, and then go through online training to learn how to develop, and finally their applications have to pass standards before they can be added to the App Store. Except for the having to pay for the privilege part, this program seems to me to be a great solution to the programming woes of traditional generative technologies. In the Apple Application setting, programming is allowed and even encouraged, but standards have to be met, before new programs can be released to the general public. And, unlike Facebook, iPhone/iPod Touch users do not have to send applications all of their personal information in order to be able to download them. Apple's program may not be perfect, but I think it's on the right track.
"When a user clicks Accept, that they want to join, most of their profile information is now available. That can be used to create a very intense, addictive game, but it can also be used to [sic] advertising, and when you can use that data inside an ad to inject a user's name, their profile picture, the information of their friends, it creates highly relevant, highly targeted advertising, very smart ads. We can call them appvertising..."These "appvertisements" can now be opted out of by in-the-know users, but many of the less savvy users might be taken in by these targeted ads. The real trouble comes when spammers use the collected information to hack profiles. This has happened to several friends of mine, who suddenly send uncharacteristic comments, messages, or status updates wanting friends to go to certain websites. Luckily, these incidents can be mostly alleviated by changing passwords.
Appvertising and spammers are just a few of the downsides to open platforms found on Facebook and MySpace before that. Identity theft, Phishing, and viruses have also become problems on these once mostly safe sites. Before Facebook opened its platform in 2007, there were only a select few Facebook created Applications for sharing photos, groups and events. Now, it seems like there is an application for everything, including those crazy addictive FarmVille type games. Some people would vote for a more sterile Facebook of the past, but others clearly enjoy the new offerings an open platform can bring, even if the bad comes along with the good.
This is the dilemma faced in Jonathan Zittrain's book, "The Future of the Internet -- and How to Stop It." Zittrain argues that the open platforms or Generative-ness of PCs and the Internet, while beneficial for their initial development and popularity, are now becoming more of a negative than a positive. In 2008, when his book was published, Zittrain noted that 90 percent of email was spam (p.99) and that 80 percent of it came from zombie computers sending it without their owners' knowledge (p.46) and nearly half of those computers were in North America. These are staggering statistics, and they are beginning to make people sit up at take notice. Last week I wrote about the prevalence viruses on Windows-based PCs, but according to Zittrain, the truth is that all personal computers are likely to be infected with some kind of virus, especially if they are hooked up to a constantly open Internet source like broadband or a T1 line.
The solution in the past has been to just throw more bandwidth at the spam problem, so that the email lines don't get so clogged that the relevant email can't get through (p.99). However, at some point that solution will not work any more, and then people will have to face the real problem: there are people exploiting the Generative nature of PCs and the Internet, and they're ruining it for everybody. People like Alan Ralsky, the self-proclaimed "King of Spam" and many even more malicious people have used the easily re-programmable nature of PCs and the Internet to not just make a profit, but to take advantage of and hurt people in the process. Although Ralansky was caught and punished, there are thousands more to take his place, and as more patches are made to the system, even more work around programs will be written.
For some, the solution to these problems is to just close the whole thing off and create tethered technologies. Tethered (or appliance) technologies like iTunes, TiVo, and XBoxes are not generative, meaning that they can not be changed or reprogrammed by the consumer, but must be used in the way the manufacturer intended (p.3). These technologies can be reprogrammed and often are, but only by the remote manufacturer. Tethered technologies still serve many useful functions, but they allow for less innovation and their content and functionality are not fully controlled by the user, even if the user has technically bought the product outright. This can of course lead to undesirable outcomes, like a service getting changed or canceled, and the user losing content or functionality that he or she already paid for.
Zittrain includes iPhones to the tethered technology list, but I disagree with him, since there are thousands of applications (written by third and fourth parties) that can be downloaded and added to iPhones, changing what they can do. Perhaps technologies like the iPhone could be the happy medium between too much freedom and too little. Apple does allow applications created by virtually anyone to be uploaded to their App Store. I say virtually, because although anyone can create and upload applications, they first have to pay to become a developer, and then go through online training to learn how to develop, and finally their applications have to pass standards before they can be added to the App Store. Except for the having to pay for the privilege part, this program seems to me to be a great solution to the programming woes of traditional generative technologies. In the Apple Application setting, programming is allowed and even encouraged, but standards have to be met, before new programs can be released to the general public. And, unlike Facebook, iPhone/iPod Touch users do not have to send applications all of their personal information in order to be able to download them. Apple's program may not be perfect, but I think it's on the right track.
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