Sean's Blog

Chatsum has been one of those “web apps” that I enjoyed using when it came out, as did some of the students in the office. I’ve commented on Chatsum before, but in short, it lets you chat with other users who are visiting the same webpage you are, which is interesting to say the least.

Chatsum is dying though.

I haven’t been using it much, but I do occasionally open the extension to take a look at what is going on, which typically isn’t much, aside from comments on how, as said on Chatsum:

marcmarc (2 days ago): chatsum puts an emphasis on actual “chatting” though it’s not popular enough to actually do that

I wish that wasn’t true, but there hasn’t been much done or said by the developers on the Dev blog] or the personal sites of the main developers George or Lee. One reason nothing has been done with it is that in the most recent Dev blog post, George mentioned that he was going to San Francisco at the end of July for Yahoo!’s 2006 Design Expo. Perhaps Yahoo! managed to get the rights to Chatsum but prevented George or Lee from commenting on it doing so. Perhaps they were approached by Microsoft, a rumor that the users on orkut started/heard before Lee or George knew. Who really knows? Their absence and/or lack of posting just adds more confusion and creates more questions.

George has his e-mail on the website… maybe I send him one.

So, someone at Chevy decided it would be good to let people make their own Tahoe commercials.

Probably not a great idea. No, I’m sure it wasn’t.

This is the one I made. It’s based upon a skit by Patton Oswalt. And yes, this is a typo in the “commercial”, but short of me recreating it, you’ll have to deal with it.

I found this nugget of fun on Dvorak Uncensored, which also links to a site listing other people’s commercials.

This is as good as when you could make Bush/Cheney ’04 signs. See the solganator memorial.

There isn’t one per se, but Scott Karp thinks people should act as if there is one, and I agree.

As I was reading his post, I was wondering if my post about a previous post of his was included in the first group of people he mentioned.

People who thought I was right because I was being iconoclastic, but who didn’t respond to the substance of my argument. I’m always wary when someone agrees with me completely; I can’t possibly be that right. (A related category is people who agreed with the iconoclasm, but then proceeded to argue the conventional wisdom.)

I didn’t agree with him completely, and I did go off on a tangent in my post. I don’t think I argued the conventional wisdom either. Re-reading that post, I’m not sure what I argued. That, in and of itself, is an example of something he says about blogging:

Think before you post. Blogging has made it too easy to publish without thinking (maybe those pesky editors were good for something). Try rereading everything at least once, if not several times, before posting it.

I need to try and do this more, or at least better.

He immediately ends with the following:

I don’t claim to be a sterling example of any of these suggestions, but we all need something to aspire to. As micropublishers, bloggers are liberated from many of the constraints of Old Media; but that doesn’t mean we should be liberated from intellectual standards. Many in Old Media, as well as many media consumers, are wary of blogging because they think it lacks standards, and to a large degree, they’re right. Blogging is dynamic, liberating, and self-empowering, but with that freedom comes responsibility. If consumer-generated media is the wave of the future, then we need to hold it to the highest standard.

I found this recent article from Publishing 2.0 to be worth the read, as it pointed out many things to take into consideration when blogging.

On a side note, I occasionally comment on articles I find. Part of the reason I do this is because I have found it a bit harder to argue my points of view effectively. My website is pretty much the only way I do critical writing. I can read and understand stuff, but sometimes the communication of those concepts in face-to-face communication, I think, is lacking on my part. Hopefully, my critical writing will improve as I read more articles and comment on them, which will hopefully improve my face-to-face communication.

I was doing my typical blog/site hopping, moving from one story or article to another, when I came across Publishing 2.0. The first post I read over was Bloggers Are So Wrong About Media. As you might be able to tell from the title, it’s his opinion about how bloggers are convinced that blogging will bring down the current media giants. I agree with him that it may not be done the way some think.

He mentions in this post as well in one this past Tuesday that bloggers oftentimes do not do a good job explaining the blogging technology. When the majority of the population enjoy holding a daily newspaper or any other type of publication in their hands instead of reading the same articles on a screen, how are you going to get them to use a feed aggregator? Most people wouldn’t know what you meant, and so “bloggers explaining blogging technology” is only part of the issue.

When I was in college, I took a class titled Technology Systems in Socities. One of the instructors (there were two; they alternated every 4 weeks) commented that the purpose of the class was to educate us so that we could go out into the world as technologists; so that we would have an understanding of how technology and systems interacted with human cultures. Everyone who uses Internet and web technology should take the time to explain it to others, especially those who you want to use the technology; you are using the technology, thus you are a technologist… do something with your knowledge.

I guess I got a little off topic there, but it’s still relevant. As much as I like Firefox and Thunderbird, I’m not going to get people to switch to it just by talking about it; I need to show it to them and explain it. I put Firefox on Danielle and John’s laptop and showed him why I used it and certain extensions. I showed my mother it as well, and tried my best to explain its usage. I formatted my brother’s computer, and he wanted Firefox and GAIM on it. Chances are, had I not shown them the programs in the first place, they wouldn’t have used them.

As for blogging, I sort of knew about various things dealing with blogging, such as trackbacks and the like, but I had to dig my way through it to figure out what it all meant and how to work with it. Yes, I choose to host it on my own site instead of going with a specific host like Blogger or Xanga or LiveJournal, but I wanted to be able to easily backup my data and change things around if I wanted. Eventually I found drupal and have been using it for a month or so, and the modules available made blogging easier, but I had to research stuff and try them on my own.

All in all, I can see why he made the post he did, as well as the update to it. I personally don’t think that Web 2.0 will bring about a sort of communism, as he mentions. In a conversation with my father around Christmas, I said that, but then changed it to socialism, which I would now say would be more a derivation of socialism, such as democratic socialism perhaps.

I think Publishing 2.0 is worth reading. I know it’s now been added to my delicious “blogs” tags. This overall post may seem disjointed, but I spent about 5 hours on it, going back and forth between reading, writing, and working.

Well, the slogan of the site used to be “a node of the world wide blogternet”. While the term makes sense, I really shouldn’t be using it. The best option would either be “a node of the Web 2.0″, or even “a node of the read/write web”. The second one is a better descriptor of Web 2.0, at least as far as my understanding takes it.

Part of the reason for the change was I was reading a post on Read/WriteWeb titled Lessig on the Read/Write Web, where they were summarizing an essay on FT.com by Lawrence Lesig. The synopsis was enough that I read the essay itself, which talked about the change in the Web from read-only (consumption by the public only) to read-write (consumption and creation by the public), and what this meant for those trying to perfect the read-write web and prevent the breaking of current policy, such as copyright. From the essay, the following paragraph struck my interest. “AMVs” refer to anime music videos, anime movie clips put to music.

But phenomena such as AMVs signal a new battle in the copyright wars that the architects of the Read-Only internet never contemplated. AMVs are just part of a growing and important “Read-Write” internet – a world in which content is bought, but not simply to be consumed. Blogs, photo journals and sites such as Wikipedia and MySpace signal an extraordinary hunger in our culture for something beyond consumption. According to a recent Pew study, almost 60 per cent of US teenagers have created and shared content on the internet. That number will only grow next year. As it does, these creators will increasingly demand freedom to create, or more precisely, re-create, using as inputs the culture that they buy. In a sense, this re-creativity of the Read-Write internet is nothing new. Since the beginning of human society, individuals have remixed the culture around them, sharing with their friends the product of these remixes. You read a book and recount its plot over dinner. You see a movie and ridicule its naivete to friends at a bar. This is the way culture has always been used. The only difference now is that technology permits these remixes to be shared. And that capacity in turn will inspire an extraordinary range of new creativity.