Not long ago I was going to post about the challenge of keeping relevant people posted of one’s travels. That is, the challenge of knowing who among one’s friends may be in the same location at the same time. It’s one thing to remember who lives at a particular destination, it’s another to try to guess who may be travelling there at the same time you are.

Fortunately, just as I was about to post on this, I came across Dopplr, which is a site that addresses this precise issue. Once you sign up, you can let the system know about upcoming trips. You also link up with other people to share your itineraries and the system tells you when you’ll overlap. It’s in closed beta, but if you can think of a friend who has an account, you can ask him/her for an invitation.

Obviously, the value of such a service increases by the number of relevant contacts that join and keep their accounts up-to-date. I wonder if they will be adding the option of distinguishing among contacts. You may want certain people to know about a trip, but not others. And of course, if you prefer that people not know about a certain trip at all, you can exclude it from your list altogether.

I’m excited about this service, but the usual challenge remains: getting enough of my non-geeky friends to join and update their travel info.

In the near future, Crooked Timber will be hosting another book event. I thought it would be helpful to alert folks ahead of time so people can read the book and thereby participate in the discussions more actively and in a more informed manner.

The book is “Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children” by Greg J. Duncan, Aletha C. Huston, and Thomas S. Weisner.

During the 1990s, growing demands to end chronic welfare dependency culminated in the 1996 federal “welfare-to-work” reforms. But regardless of welfare reform, the United States has always been home to a large population of working poor— people who remain poor even when they work and do not receive welfare. In a concentrated effort to address the problems of the working poor, a coalition of community activists and business leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, launched New Hope, an experimental program that boosted employment among the city’s poor while reducing poverty and improving children’s lives. [The authors] provide a compelling look at how New Hope can serve as a model for national anti-poverty policies. [source]

You can either buy the book directly from its publisher, the Russell Sage Foundation, or get it at Amazon. Chapter 1 [pdf] is available online for free.

In addition to Timberite contributions, we’ll have comments by Nancy Folbre and Kimberly Morgan plus a response by Greg Duncan.

• Explaining Women’s Success: Technological Change and the Skill Content of Women’s Work
  (tags: research ToRead)
• reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books
  very interesting initiative to help against spam while also digitizing books one word at a time
  (tags: captcha spam security tools books)

Soon there will be a Web site just for this – if there isn’t one already -, but until then, let’s see what we can collect here.

Yesterday, Google announced a new feature of its Maps service: Street View for select urban areas in the U.S. plus Google’s backyard. We’ve seen this before on services like A9 (which discontinued the feature), and Microsoft’s Live Maps, but this seems more user-friendly.

Boing Boing has a thread with links to some interesting finds. Oh, the temptation to go hunting for more! Spot any embarrassing situations or funny captures? There is potential here for hours of amusement!

I’m off to Trader Joe’s.

• At Some Schools, Facebook Evolves From Time Waster to Academic Study
  (WSJ)
  (tags: research facebook)
• Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream
  Pew report
  (tags: research stats muslim surveys religion)

• Poland to probe if Teletubbies are gay (WaPo)
  (tags: news politics)
• Picnik
  “edit photos the easy way, online in your browser” – full of ajaxy goodness, very sophisticated tool
  (tags: edit photos tools)
• Flags By Colours
  “Each sector of these piecharts is proportional to the area of the colour on the respective flag”
  (tags: interesting colors design international)

• Women In Art
  500 years of female portraits in Western art (moprhing)
  (tags: video art arthistory)
• From the creator of Solitaire…
  (tags: funny)

• Winnder of the 4th Annual Smithsonian magazine Photo Contest
  (tags: photos contest)
• My Own Cafe
  a community for teens sponsored by a library association
  (tags: community teens social libraries)

• Hack My Son’s Computer, Please
  “Can an elderly father give police permission to search a password-protected computer kept in his adult son’s bedroom, without probable cause or a warrant? In April, a three judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said yes.”
  (tags: article technology privacy rights legal)
• World of Warcraft wish becomes a reality
  The Make-A-Wish Foundation and Blizzard Entertainment help a grade schooler become the first outsider to create a new character in World of Warcraft
  (tags: article warcraft chidlren)
• Pew report on Spam
  users report more spam in their inboxes, but fewer people than before seem to be bothered by it
  (tags: report spam users)

• As the Grapevine Withers, Spam Filters Take Root
  (New York Times) fun article about Dan Ryan’s work about notification
  (tags: article, research, sociology, netiquette)
• Gay flamingos are both family men
  (tags: article animals)
• Flickr greasemonkey script – Favorite Finder Link
  see whether the person has any of your photos favorited
  (tags: flickr greasemonkey)
• Flickr greasemonkey script – Scout Explore History Link
  see the history in Explore of the photo being viewed
  (tags: flickr greasemonkey)
• Free To Be Al Gore (WaPo)
  “Whatever flaws he has, Gore suffered through an extreme injustice with great dignity. His revenge is to have been right about a lot of things: right about the power of the Internet, right about global warming and right about Iraq.”
  (tags: article politics)
• 10 Animals That May Go Extinct in the Next 10 Years (Scientific American)
  sad and scary
  (tags: article science animals)
• 100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers
  interesting idea, amazing that someone took the time to follow through
  (tags: video random)
• Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains
  (CNN Money) – getting rich through domain name speculation
  (tags: internet domains article)

John Tierney has a piece in the NYTimes about Dan Ryan‘s work concerning the sociology of notification and information dissemination among friends and acquaintances (based on Dan’s recent article in Sociological Theory).

I saw Dan give a talk on this recently and it’s a really fun and interesting topic. His work makes you think about things like why/when it is and is not appropriate to use cc vs bcc on emails, the proper order in which we should notify various people in our networks about certain types of updates, what medium is suitable for what types of material, etc.

The NYTimes piece specifically mentions the idea of setting up email filters for some friends. I must admit that I have filters set up for all sorts of people. I tend to do it by type of person (as in type of network) more so than by specific individual, although the latter idea isn’t foreign to me either.

As someone who studies savvy with IT, I consider the thoughtful use of email filters an important part of skill in how we interact with IT. Email filters are increasingly important for being able to manage the amount of material that comes our way via that particular medium.

[Thanks to Steve Mintz for alerting me to this piece.]

UPDATE: I forgot to post a link to Dan’s blog about the Sociology of Information. Check it out for more goodies.

• The World’s Fastest-Growing Religions
  (Foreign Policy)
  (tags: article religion top10)
• Tea ‘healthier’ drink than water
  (BBC) yay, good to know, I drink a ton of tea (although article doesn’t address whether decaf matters)
  (tags: article health tea)

My fifth blogiversary was almost two weeks ago and I nearly missed it. I think when I came on sabbatical my blogging went on one as well even though I’ve tried to stay on the scene to some extent.

Looking back, I can tell I was an early adopter, because in my first post, I felt the need to explain what a blog is.

People often wonder when (if ever) is a good time to start blogging. I’ve decided that graduate school was the perfect time. While the following is nearly impossible to appreciate when you’re still in grad school, I know it now: you honestly will never have as much free time as you do when you’re in graduate school. Granted, I was in a cushy position of not having to teach so that experience won’t generalize completely. Nonetheless, the number of obligations that follow once you’re in a faculty position makes it a more daunting undertaking later. (I guess perhaps blogging during a post-doc may also work well assuming that the post-doc experience happens before one gets a faculty position.)

I sometimes look back with longing on the topics I covered during the first year. They seem more interesting than what I get around to writing up these days. It’s not that I don’t think about an equal number of random and intriguing issues, I just don’t find the time to construct blog posts about them. I also wonder if size of audience influences what I blog about and how often. Perhaps one is more hesitant with some topics when blog posts go out to a large number of people instantly, the latter thanks to RSS, also not something one considered back in the “old days”.

One of the most amusing outcomes of a post during the first year of my blogging had to do with the movie Chicago. I wrote a few brief comments about it including a critique of a very annoying movie mistake. For some reason (different search algorithms at work at the time favoring blog posts perhaps a bit too much), my entry came up very high in the results on Google in response to a search on movie chicago. And when I say very high, I mean that it was the first hit on Google having to do with the movie! I got tons of visitors many of whom disagreed with my dislike of the movie and weren’t too shy to tell me. I ended up disabling the comments on the blog it got so ridiculous.

By September, 2003 I joined Crooked Timber. Thanks to the folks there who invited me and allowed me to reach a larger number of readers. It’s been a blast. Thanks VERY much to you, dear reader for making this a worthwhile activity. I don’t know if I would’ve kept it up for five years without, what has mostly been, valuable feedback. I’ve met some great people through this activity and have learned a ton, so I thank you!

• Judge halts terror trial to ask: what’s a website?
  (tags: skill frbk)
• OUPblog: The Martians of Science: An Excerpt
  (tags: books)
• Mom makes daughter who bullied hold a poster in front of schools
  (tags: article bullying children schools education)

For your weekend reading pleasure: the special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication I edited on The Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines is out. The Introduction gives you the motivation for this collection and a summary of the pieces. From the Abstract:

Search engines are some of the most popular destinations on the Web—understandably so, given the vast amounts of information available to users and the need for help in sifting through online content. While the results of significant technical achievements, search engines are also embedded in social processes and institutions that influence how they function and how they are used. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication explores these non-technical aspects of search engines and their uses.

Enjoy!

• Children of Men in Nebraska?
  poster calling on people to “report and deport all illegal aliens”
  (tags: immigrants politics images)

I use Yahoo! Music for most of my music-listening at work. I like the service and at $60 for two years (they had a special when I signed up, the regular now is $72/year) it’s a great deal. [UPDATE: Corrected cost, I had remembered incorrectly.]

The system allows you to customize various stations by giving it feedback about what songs and artists you like. It’s a helpful feature, for the most part. But I think services like this might want to tweak the system so certain songs are kept off playlists at certain times of the year. I am not suggesting that they should be banned, of course, but perhaps not streamed unless sought out actively by the user.

I may like Boney M, but I really have absolutely no interest in listening to a Christmas song from them in the middle of May.

This reminds me of the dance club I used to go to in Budapest when I was in high school. One of the most popular Jive songs at the club was Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree . It was very bizarre to listen to it over and over again in June.

• Cigarette consumption per head (Economist)
  interesting that Hungary is not on the top list
  (tags: health article)
• Meta-analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology: A Proposal for Reporting
  guidelines for what to include in publications (published in JAMA)
  (tags: research article publishing)

• Digital History
  tons of history resources
  (tags: history education resources images teaching)
• Military puts MySpace, YouTube off limits
  (tags: article military access myspace youtube)
• How a Photo Can Ruin Your Life
  Your family photos could get you arrested. Just ask one New Jersey grandmother.
  (tags: article photos rights legal crime censorship)
• Some great Salsa
  (and I don’t even like Salsa)
  (tags: dance video)

• I Have a (Digital) Dream
  Wired article from 2001 quoting then FCC chair Michael Powell re a Mercedes divide
  (tags: digital-divide fcc article wired)
• Boomshine!
  interesting little game
  (tags: games flash)