This is my final research paper about social norms on the web. It’s a good time. It’s kind of long, but here are the highlights:
You need investment from the user, either through a genuine offline to online identity, or a strong tie to the community focus.
We want the same things online that we do offline. We just want everyone to be nice. Again. And again. And again…
This stuff is based in game theory and evolutionary biology. Check out the ultimatum game. Only when you have the possibility for altruistic punishment and user engagement in site moderation can you develop successful norms.
I wrote a short PHP script which allows you to compile study guides really quickly.
Lets set the scene: You have a long list of vocab terms, and you need to collect basic information on them all quickly…basically you need to find the definition from Wikipedia. With this tool, you just type in your words, and it fetches the information and creates and formats the study guide for you!
Test it out and let me know what you think! — (it’s not perfect, but it definitely works)
So I got the ipad yesterday, and ive been playing around with it a bunch and I think I figure out some of the things that make it an awesome piece of technology. The reason I want to explain it is because I have heard such opposing opinions on the device.
I have heard people say that it’s amazing, and i have heard people wonder why you would ever get something thats just a big Itouch and is worse than a computer.
(i think my typing is an indirect review of the keyboard… It definitely works but it takes somr getting used to)
So for me, the reason the ipad is an amazing new device is because it represents a fundamentally new category of technology. People who criticize it say that it doesn’t really do anything your laptop doesn’t do, in fact it does less. People say the music and other apps exist on the iPhone– and both of these claims are true. But the real point i want to make is that its a different category of device which means that although people are doing the same things on the iPad, they are using it in different ways.
For example, when the laptop came out, it really was not better than the desktop computer. Actually, it was probably worse because it had less computing power, and a smaller screen, no mouse, and a small keyboard. So it would be fair to wonder why anyone would ever get a laptop when a desktop does what you want and does it better. However, a laptop offers mobility, and this alone makes it useful as a whole new category of product. Suddenly it can be used in schools by students, and in hundreds of other cases, and it really makes it a new type of product. It really becomes silly to compare its shortcomings to the desktop because is a different product with different goals,
This is how I see the iPad. It looks like a big iphone and a small laptop (and it is), but these differences make it a new product made for different situations. It is the right size to be a book and a hand held web browser. It is the right size to be a game board or a video screen. It is made to go on airplanes, it. Has your books, music, and video all in an easy format to access. It is made to be used in groups.
While computers feel like they are made for productivity, the. iPad seems to be made for casual usage. It is like an interactive coffee table book or your newspaper as You relax And eat breakfast in at the morning.
That’s my take on the iPad. It’s made to be used differently. The features it lacks actually seem to demonstrate what it was made for. Its not for coding and its not for power usage. It meets basic modern day computing needs ( music, video, email) in a simple and beautiful design. I say if you’re a person who gets angry with computers, this may actually be the “computer” you are looking for.
How cool would it be if you could follow updates on sites that don’t offer RSS feeds?
It would be very cool.
And there’s a Google product for that. Google Reader can now get you updates on site changes that don’t export RSS feeds. My current use case will be to fetch announcements from class pages. I haven’t really used it yet, but it sounds legit.
This was inspired by this article from the New York Times sent to me by my dad, which led me to this post on the Google blog.
This article talks about how Google and everyone else should embrace open standards on the internet. I completely agree with this philosophy (either because I think its a good idea or because I have been brainwashed by open-internet-free-information propaganda), and the article is very interesting (and a little too long).
The main idea is that “open” is better for everyone, including Google, because it promotes company growth but also industry growth. It is about how open is the future, and that Google promotes open and you should too. (See Wikinomics).
You see the success and importance of open standards especially in infrastructure decisions. TCP/IP must be a standard so everyone can use it. Railroads must be a standard size so all trains can use them. Outlets must be standard so everyone can plug in. Gas stations must have gas that can go into all cars (that’s why I think the most important change for the future of green cars is new infrastructure).
We all know examples of when open standards fail. Everyone has file conversion problems (.wmv on a Mac? .docx on an old computer? ) and it’s annoying. Who wants DRM protected iTunes song formats and ebook formats that no other program can read? There is still the tension with companies who think that closed standards and file formats are in their best interest.
I think open is also the future, because it just makes sense. That’s why everyone hates browser compatibility (IE <= 8 ). With computers especially, you just want things to work together, but this is not usually the case, and probably because of lack of use of open standards.
It’s especially interesting in the article how Jonathan Rosenberg notes that Google’s search code and algorithms must be closed source:
While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to “game” our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone.
Yes…but doesn’t that conflict with the opening premise that “open wins”? I think it does, but it’s interesting to think about. Can you espouse the policy “open wins” when your main product is not open? Maybe Google is right about having its search source closed, but if open wins, Google search would lose.
If you are reading this now, you are on the internet, and therefore have probably used Wikipedia. Everyone I know uses it, and uses it a lot. It is one of the few websites on the internet subsisting just on donations, and for how often I use it and how important it is, I really owe it to Wikipedia to pay a small fraction of their server costs.
I donated to Wikipedia, and if you use the site a lot and find it useful, you should donate to Wikipedia too.
It’s pretty cool that all of this information is out there for free.
A REVEALING TALE ABOUT MISDIRECTED ATTENTION IN THE MEDIA
As I sat down to write a new article for the Flipside, I went to do my so-called “research.”
Today, I decided, the perfect topic to write about was this so-called “Balloon Boy.” When balloon boy came up in our meeting and we brainstormed ideas about it, I realized this was just an unbelievable topic to satirize. Mainly–when things that happen in the real world seem fake, you know the opportunity is ripe for irony and satire.
Let me explain a little more.
I went to go read more about what happened with this balloon boy so I could come up with some sort of coherent viewpoint and a set of ideas and a perspective for my writing. I searched Google for balloon boy and started to read some articles, and while doing so, realized how this event is extremely meta.
My one sentence take: The balloon boy incident is really about how a hoax fooled the media, and then fooled the rest of us, and in doing so, succeeded in its publicity stunt.
So why was reading the news on this meta? Well, the news is exactly what caused and blew up the problem in the first place. I was reading these reports which were the source of all the fuss initially.
So where to look for credible information? I think the answer to this very important question is not where to look, but how to look. We look when someone points, that is kind of a given of human behavior. But I think the thing we can control and the thing we should work on is to look carefully. Look slowly and think over the timing, the source, and the motivation of the information.
At the end of this, I am still unsure what to make fun of about balloon boy, but it is a very interesting topic to think about how the media can lead us astray. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no… it’s Balloon boy!
See my research paper on critical reading here
See an article with similar ideas from the wall street journal here
This is not really a long story, but I think it’s sort of interesting. I was going to turn in my physics problem set with my friend, and on my way there, I saw a crew of three or four people with a very large camera doing something. It looked sort of interesting, so I casually asked them what they were filming. They said they were from BBC and shooting a documentary on the web. I said ‘cool’ and then as I was leaving, one of the main guys asked, ‘hey would you like to be interviewed?’ I agreed and about 15 minutes later I was being interviewed for (possible) inclusion in BBC documentary about the web.
So, why was this funny?
1) Because there’s always all this random stuff going on here.
2) Because when they started to interview me and then my friend Eric, they had this whole twist about how corporations may be involved in the CS department, how does it affect you that the CS department has billionaires, or what do you think about the companies… etc.
After thinking about this for a little while afterward, I think the thing that was funniest to me is that I feel the CS department here is very traditionalist, and really looks down on pandering to industry. This is why they have been slow to adopt classes about the web, because it is looked down upon by real computer scientists. This was rather ironic, since many Stanford computer science students go from “pure academia” right out to cs industry. Just something to think about.
I recently watched a very interesting video that Google made about what people think a browser is. The general sense you get from the video is that people generally have no idea. See the video here: (Don’t worry its short enough to watch)
I also read a really interesting post by my friend Feross (read here) where he talks about technology making things so easy that people no longer have the vocabulary to fix their problems. It’s a very interesting idea, especially as the web becomes more and more powerful. I’m not sure if the sample in the video is representative of the country or the general web community, but it is very intriguing that much of the web and much of technology is used without any knowledge of what is going on behind the scenes.