Month: May 2008

The Fall of twitter (and the rise of tumblr)?

I have been a fall of twitter for sometime now, but they are having serious problems due to their architecture .
(See here Twitter Technology Blog: Twittering About Architecture). I hope they get it resolved soon, before it is too late.

I have also been a fan of tumblr for some time too. So I thought it was interesting that twitter is updating their
Twitter Status using tumblr. Perhaps more people will start using tumblr as a result. Tumblr is great and worth considering.

The use of web 2.0 in American politics

Katharine Q. Seelye of The New York Times had a good article on how Hillary Clinton — and others — are using blogs, twitter, and other approaches on the campaign trail. For example, Clinton…

“…held her first blogger-only conference call on Friday, phoning in to about 40 bloggers from the campaign trail in Oregon.

And the campaign has stepped up its use of Twitter, a social-networking service that sends short, text-based posts, to make real-time calls to arms.”

Businesses and other organizations could take lessons on how American politicians use social computing for their benefit.

P.S. For all those asking “why use twitter?”, you now have at least one (of many) answers.

Annoyed by ad spam on Facebook? Here’s how to turn it off (2008 edition)

2013 update: note, this may no longer work. I am keeping the post, but you may want to look for a more current blog posting on this topic.

You might not be able to tell from this title, Silicon Valley Users Guide: How to avoid being a Facebook shill like VC David Sze but this article tells you how to modify your facebook settings to turn off annoying ads.

Don’t worry, most people won’t. And even if they did, well don’t worry: coming up with new ways to direct advertisements to you keeps marketing folks in work.

Errol Morris and W.G. Sebald or Art and History


David Byrne has a good review of Errol Morris’s new film, Standard Operating Procedure. (David Byrne Journal: 05.03.2008: Objective Truth)

I initially was disappointed by the film, since I thought it was going to be shattering in what it revealed. I hoped it would be like Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line”. As it was, the story it told through the voices of those involved didn’t appear new or interesting. However, as I thought about it afterwards, and I considered some of the ideas that Morris has been writing about, I began to think that that wasn’t the only point of the documentary. For the documentary is also a study of the question: what does photography signify? It is a question that Morris doesn’t answer so much as explore. It’s the study of this question that makes the film interesting, more so than the (hi)story of American involvement in Abu Ghraib.

It reminded me of the reviews I read about W.G. Sebald’s book, “On the Natural History of Destruction”. Many of the harshest critics of the book appeared to take it to task solely as a work of history. But Sebald is first and foremost an artist, and in this work, as in his fiction, he is exploring ideas and themes almost independent to the (hi)story at hand. To criticize him solely on his historical qualities is to miss much of the point of the writing. Likewise, to watch Morris’s film and criticize him as if he is Seymour Hersh is to also miss much of the point of his filmmaking.

The death of captcha, and what is next

Kevin Kelly , in his blog, The Technium talks about how spammers are using artificial intelligence to defeat captcha, the hard-to-read letters you are sometimes asked to fill in when doing an online transaction.

Harder captchas could be devised, but then people may not be able to solve them, either. You could show three pictures of flowers and have someone type in “Flowers”, but eventually computers will recognize this. Even subtler forms of recognition will eventually be defeated.

We may end up with the V-K machines in Blade Runner after all.