.. or how to figure out whether you are hallucinating.

In the past few weeks I have come across more and more commentary about the site MyBlogLog, a service that is responsible for the list of pictures of other recent site visitors on the sidebar of some blogs (example).

But I was confused. I was quite sure that I had signed up for a free MyBlogLog account over a year ago, and this was not at all the service it had offered back then. I started searching and most recent commentary focuses on the above-mentioned social aspect of the service. So how to figure out if I am just utterly confused and mixing this up with another service?

First, I searched my email archives to see whether I had signed up for this service at some point in the past. Indeed, I had created an account back in June, 2005 with the purpose of tracking the relative popularity of various outgoing links on my blog.

Next, I turned to the Web archive to see what the site had looked like back then. As I had remembered, it was something quite different with a focus on enabling a site owner “to track when offsite links are clicked by your visitors”.

Finally, I did a search on del.icio.us to see when people first started bookmarking the site. The first mentions date back to March, 2005 with the descriptions focusing on the link-analysis feature all the way up until August of this year.

Nonetheless, reading the descriptions of the site you would know little of this.* I find it fascinating how short-lived people’s memories are or how little attention is paid to the background behind these much-hyped sites. Perhaps I’m just being influenced by all the historians I’ve been hanging out with recently, but I think context is interesting. And luckily there are tools that can help us figure it out even if current commentary is lacking in that domain.

Regarding the new features, the community aspect of MyBlogLog sounds interesting and not too freaky now that they have implemented the opt-out feature in case you do not want to be shown as having visited any particular Web site.

[*] To be sure, I haven’t read through the hundreds of recent mentions, but this is my impression from reading several.

I had lunch at the Googleplex yesterday and as a result got to add several geeky license plates to my photo collection. I wasn’t even trying hard to look for these, I was just glancing at the plates I passed walking to and from my car.

In unrelated geekiness, if you prefer to unleash your inner geek with the help of a bit more text then I recommend the quotes on this page. A couple of my favorites:

There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses. (Bjarne Stroustrup)

[The BLINK tag in HTML] was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it! (Mark Andreessen)

If none of that made sense then you could go watch some Jay Leno Headlines where it is by design that many of the featured items don’t make sense.

Is this is a new Google Maps feature? I noticed the Google logo with Africa as the “g” on Google Maps today. I wonder if this is a way of letting people know that Google Maps now covers that continent. Neat.

I’m collecting examples of interesting ways in which people use various online services for their benefit. Of course, I can come up with lots of hypotheticals and examples from my own life, but it’s helpful to have concrete cases from the world at large.

Here, for example, is an interesting case of IT being put to use for the potential benefit of folks in a realm having little to do with IT. It’s about the use of Google Earth to back up claims about the value of some land that the government in India wants to acquire from farmers for limited compensation. The piece doesn’t say whether the use of these images ultimately led to a different outcome, but the potential is there.

Another relevant example is how people exploit spelling errors on ebay listings to get good deals. Because most people searching for those items don’t find them, there is much less of a bidding war and the final price is lower than would be otherwise. There are now even Web sites that help you exploit this, for example, eBooBoos does the guessing on your behalf. The results of a search on “turtle” yield items such as a turle neck sweater or a trutle box. (One wonders why ebay hasn’t worked on this issue in-house, but that’s another matter.)

I am looking for other examples concerning the beneficial uses of IT by average folks in particular, although interesting uses by super techies are welcomed as well. I’m not so much interested in (at this time) cases of xyz Web site helping to deal with other realms of IT uses (e.g. a handy tool for following blog posts), but uses that have a relatively direct impact on other realms of life as well. If you can share pointers to articles like the one above regarding the farmers in India that would be great. I also welcome stories from personal experiences. This is all related to some talks and papers I’m working on. Thanks!

I’m having two problems with Firefox these days. I don’t know if they are the result of some extensions I’ve installed. I’d welcome suggestions for fixing these issues.

1. When I try to comment on my own blog (right here, this one) I can’t do it when rendering in Firefox. I get the following error: “Error: This file cannot be used on its own.” Fortunately, IETab comes to the rescue as the commenting works fine when the page is rendered in IE. IE Tab is a great extension that lets you render a page in IE on a Firefox tab. I recommend it! Nonetheless, I don’t see why I can’t leave comments in FF.

2. Out of the blue and in seemingly completely random ways, the “Allow sites to set Cookies” option keeps unchecking itself (under Options > Privacy > Cookies). I keep having to check it again after I get logged out of GMail, WordPress, Flickr, etc. It is extremely annoying. Has anyone experienced this? What could be the problem?

I have recently installed Greasemonkey including some scripts. But I disabled all those and the problems persist. Other than that, I think IE Tab is the only extension I’ve added relatively recently.

Can anyone offer advice on either of the two issues above? It would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

Just a few hours to go before the Yahoo! Time Capsule closes. They’ve been collecting contributions of text, photos, videos, sounds and drawings representing the following themes: past, beauty, faith, sorrow, love, anger, you, hope, now, fun. There is time until tonight midnight West coast US time to contribute. It is not fully clear what will happen with all of this material, but it’s an interesting idea to see what contributions people are motivated to make around those themes (and which themes are of most interest to folks).

I will be posting about Yahoo!’s Time Capsule Camp separately later.

Is this new? Did Flickr finally add a favicon to their site or did it just change it? I don’t recall seeing this before. I’m pretty sure I would’ve noticed it had it been there earlier. One reason is that I’ve been trying to figure out how to apply a Flickr decal to my car. I wasn’t sure if the pink dot should be on the left of the right. I guess the blue goes on the left.

Ooh, this is cool. You can view a tag cloud of the most common words in U.S. presidential speeches, declarations and letters since 1776. Slide the arrows on the bar to move from the representation of one document to another. The bottom of the page has a detailed description of how the tag clouds were generated, it looks like a careful approach. What a neat idea. [thanks]

Earlier this year, Brad DeLong suggested that he should get rich and then give a large grant to me to do a study. I’m all for Brad getting rich and I happily await the day including the check he’ll send my way as a result. However, in the meantime, it’s good to know that there are some other sources of potential funding for work on information technologies.

Yesterday, the MacArthur Foundation announced a new initiative in Digital Media and Learning. They have committed $50 million dollars over five years to this. I was fortunate to be one of the recipients of a research grant. My project will be a look at young people’s uses of the Internet with particular focus on their skills and participation. I will also be conducting a training intervention (on participants randomly assigned to the control versus the experimental group) to see if we can create a program that helps people improve their online abilities (in such domains as efficiency in content navigation and evaluating the credibility of information).

Generally speaking, the goal of this initiative is to gain a better understanding of how young people are using digital media in their everyday lives and how various types of learning are taking place outside of the classroom through the use of such media. MacArthur has also launched a blog to discuss related projects.

The press conference was simulcast in Second Life and some participants captured a few screenshots, including ones from Teen Second Life.

As you can imagine, I’m super excited about all this and so will likely be blogging about related issues in the future (hah, not that I haven’t already).

Over the weekend I found a few fun Flickr tools. I’ve bookmarked these (see del.icio.us links), but they are worth a separate post.

First, Steeev’s Flickr Projects is a goldmine. The resources there are mostly Greasemonkey scripts, which requires that you use Firefox and that you download Greasemonkey. (For the non-techies in the audience, it’s not that painful. The instructions are pretty straight-forward on that site. Just remember, as with all Firefox extensions, you’ll have to restart Firefox after the installation.)

My favorite script from Steeev’s site is FlickrPM. It adds useful links next to each user’s name. You can now quickly find out whether they have any images in the Explore archives, view their images in order of interestingness, jump to their mail or profile page directly, all via a direct link right next to their name.

There are several other goodies on that site, it’s worth a look.

Another interesting Greasemonkey script imports information about the Upcoming event with which the photo may be associated. I no longer remember, but this may also be the script that lets you add a tag with Upcoming event information from your Upcoming event list seemlessly to any Flickr photo.

Finally, for some fun, check out Museumr, which lets you place any of your Flickr images (or probably any image from anywhere online) in a museum setting. Here is an example.

Yahoo! hosted a party the other day celebrating the third birthday of del.icio.us and the registration of its millionth user. I found out about it thanks to a listing on Upcoming. It was a fun reason to return to Yahoo! headquarters just a few days after Yahoo! Hack Day.

There was some overlap in attendance, but I thought the demographics of this crowd was noticeably different from that of the one at Hack Day. There were more women and I no longer contributed to skewing the average age – toward ancient – considerably.

In the background was a screen showing additions to the site real-time. It’s fun to imagine the dozens of users, at any one minute, clicking on their del.icio.us bookmarklet (or whatnot) entering information and contributing to the overall value of the site.

The first person I met reminded me of the shallow shmoozing that went on at Silicon Alley parties in the late 90s. (I’m sure they went on at Silicon Valley parties as well, but since I was living in NYC at the time, I have experience with that bit.) He wasn’t even a del.icio.us user. Worse yet, he spent most of our brief encounter questioning the service. Why bother showing up? I won’t embarrass/dignify him with a link to his company’s Web site.

I did better with the next round of folks I met. I stumbled into a group of people who already knew each other through a Flickr meetup group. We spent a good chunk of time sharing our adminiration for that service and community.

Next, I went over to say hi to Andy Baio whose links page has often inspired posts around here. We’ve exchanged emails about numerous things in the past so it was nice to meet in person finally. I also got to meet some folks from the Flickr team including its co-founder Stewart Butterfield, and Matthew Rothenberg whom I look forward to seeing next week when I go back to Yahoo!, this time for research purposes.

Finally, I ran into our CASBS Librarian Trisha who, conveniently for me, took a picture of the swag, which consisted of a cute T-shirt (the back shows the party information as a del.icio.us entry) and stickers.

Overall, it was a fun event. It’s neat to be in the area and have the ability to just hop on over to these things.

There are 2,122 images in my Flickr stream viewable to all, 2,868 viewable to me (the number’s in between there somewhere for family & friends). It’s so much fun to be able to go back and remember various things from the past year by being able to browse photos of people, events and places. It’s also a delight to communicate with people on the site and learn about others’ interests, passions and environments. If you’re not yet a user, I highly recommend it! Here are some instances of Flickr mentions on this blog.

UPDATE: I really didn’t want to have to do this, but after reading some related threads over on Flickr Help it looked like it may be hard to avoid clearing the cache so I did. Things are now back to normal.

Original post:

I apologize, this is yet another post about a technical problem I am experiencing. And believe me, I am not finding these amusing nor do I think they are a particularly good use of blog space, but there’s always the hope that a reader may have an idea for a solution. So far E-BLOG readers have been very helpful so that keeps me motivated. (Which is not to say that if you’re sick of these posts you should stop helping me out with the hopes that then I’ll stop posting about them.:)

The problem: Flickr looks like a mess when I pull it up in Firefox. Here is a screen shot of the welcome page:

It looks like the css file is not being considered when rendering the page. Curiously, some pages do come up okay. For example, when I click on “all sizes” for an image, I get what I’m supposed to get.

But I get the above mess not only on the welcome page, but on each individual photo page and also on others such as my Favorites or “Recent comments you have made”, etc. And yes, it’s the same when viewing other people’s accounts as well.

This all started yesterday around the same time that Flickr was experiencing upload problems. For a few hours I just figured it had to do with that. I didn’t see why they should be related, but I figured there were just all sorts of general site problems. However, eventually I realized that no one out there was commenting on this and it had been a while so I pulled up Flickr in IE. It rendered just fine.

So what in the world is going on here? I cleared my Flickr cookies to see if that could help, but no change. I checked and I’m running the latest version of Firefox so no upgrading to do there.
I disabled all extensions in case something there might be a problem, but nothing changed.

I’m really hoping to avoid having to clear cache altogether as I have all sorts of things set that I don’t want to have to retype again on other sites. It is possible to just clear cache for one site? And yes, I’ve done lots of forced reloads.

Any thoughts on how I can get Flickr to show up correctly again in Firefox? I really don’t want to have to run IE parallel to Firefox.. but viewing the site this way is very annoying. Thanks!

The New York Times has an article about GMail’s increasing ability to identify spam correctly (including a lower case of false positives when it comes to legitimate commercial email requested by the user).

What caught my eye was the illustration accompanying this article (on the left in this image below).

GMail calls spam “Spam” not “Bulk”. So why does the illustration show a Bulk folder? On the right, I have copied what all this looks like in GMail. How hard would it have been to get that right?

UPDATE: As a commenter notes on my Flickr stream, it looks like they lifted the image from Yahoo! Mail. Hah!

Taking advantage of my Silicon Valley location this year, I decided to go check out Yahoo! Hack Day (it’s actually a two-day event so I’ll be back for more today).

Hundreds of people showed up for the opportunity to spend a day adding functionality to various Yahoo! products such as Flickr, Upcoming.org and now even Yahoo! Mail. The demos of these creations will be this afternoon (Saturday) where we’ll get to hear 90-second descriptions of the hacks. It sounds fun and exciting especially to someone like me who’s such a fan of some of Yahoo!’s products.

The event organization so far has been impressive with clear directions, plenty of parking, fast registration and some fun swag. Yesterday was filled with various presentations culminating in a pizza dinner and then a live concert. I finally met Lifehacker Gina Trapani in person and hung out for a while. This was fun since despite having written for Lifehacker in the past, we’ve never met in person.

The surprise of the evening was the Beck concert (see a recent interview in Wired as to why he was an especially appropriate selection for this event). The performance included puppet versions of all the artists projected onto the screen behind the stage. It was great. You can find photos of the concert on Flickr (mine, others’) and there’s also a Yahoo! video not of the concert, but of the Beck puppet’s visit to Sunnyvale. Google gets most of the attention for being a fun place to work, but Yahoo!’s campus seems quite fun as well, something I already noted when giving a talk there two years ago.

I try to avoid rants here, but the following has become increasingly common so I’m going to comment.

I consider it a basic form of netiquette to ask people about a mailing list subscription before proceeding to add their name to a list. I realize that most people get too much email as is so if you have to go through asking them first and then requesting an opt-in action then the chances are small that they will subscribe. That said, most people get too much email as is so it’s fair to assume that if they can’t take the time and effort to opt-in then they won’t appreciate the messages anyway. Or perhaps it’s not fair to assume. In the end it’s an empirical question, I guess. I don’t know of any research on it, I’m afraid.

In the least, it would seem courteous to send people an introductory note letting them know that you have added them to a list.

Of course, worse yet is when people add you to a distribution list where you have no way of opting out whatsoever. Thanks to email filtering options, it is possible to route messages directly to trash without ever seeing them.

I noticed a fairly bizarre comment on one of my images on Flickr. (Screenshot here in case the person decides to delete the comment.) The picture is of a motel in Nevada. The comment by user “s_jagdish99” reads:
ok great………!
come on get good pictures like beaches.

That same user left a comment on another one of my photos (screenshot) so I took a look. I then realized that user “rushi.1985” had left the following comment three weeks ago:

whats this r they tennis courte?
ok great………!
come on get good pictures like beaches.

User “rushi.1985” has nothing in the account. User “s_jagdish99” also has no photos, but does list my account as the one and only contact.

There are no links on either account, so I don’t quite see how this is about spam for the purposes of gaining traffic. Is this supposed to be a troll? Curious.

The social-bookmarking tool del.icio.us turned three today. It’s a great tool. It’s thanks to del.icio.us that E-BLOG has content even when I’m too busy to write up posts. I use del.icio.us to post a list of bookmarked sites automatically to this blog. Yahoo! bought del.icio.us last year and the service has just gotten more interesting (e.g. network features such as posting bookmark recommendations to other users on the system).

Leave a link to your del.icio.us account if you have one. I’m always curious to see what stes like-minded folks deem worthy of a bookmark.

I am hiring for a full-time staff position in my research group. Details are below. If you know of someone in the Chicagoland area who may be interested (or someone somewhere else who’d be up for moving to the area), please let them know about this opportunity. Or if you can think of relevant mailing lists, please let me know. (I’ve posted it on air-l and CITASA. I’ve put an ad on Craig’s List Chicago and on Salon Jobs. And I’ve sent a note to a bunch of people I know both in Chicagoland and elsewhere. I welcome suggestions for additional ways of publicizing it though. For now I’m holding off on posting it on Monster.com.) Thanks!

The Web Use Project, a social science research group at Northwestern University, is looking for a full-time Project Coordinator. The Project Coordinator will work closely with Professor Eszter Hargittai, her graduate students and undergraduate students in coordinating, overseeing and administering research studies on young people’s Internet uses. See http://www.webuse.northwestern.edu for more information about the research group and http://www.eszter.northwestern.edu for more information about Prof. Eszter Hargittai’s work.

*Responsibilities: Coordinate the day-to-day activities for research projects; Recruit, hire, and oversee the management of undergraduate research assistants; Schedule the use of lab space for lab members and research activities; Manage Institutional Review Board (IRB) submissions; Coordinate with off-site project consultants; Organize scheduling of data collection; Oversee and administer data collection; Interview study participants; Conduct training sessions; Manage research databases and locked data cabinets; Manage the security and use of equipment; Ensure conformity to research group policies and perform other related duties as assigned.

*Qualifications: Bachelor’s degree in Communication, Sociology, Social Policy, Human Development, Education, Psychology, or a related field; 1-3 years of work experience; Strong organizational skills; Strong written and verbal communication skills; Excellent interpersonal skills; Strong problem solving and analytical skills; Ability to work in a professional manner as both a self-starter and a team member; Intermediate-Advanced skills in Microsoft Office (particularly Word and Excel); and Intermediate-Advanced skills in using Web interfaces.

*Desired Qualifications: Master’s degree in Communication, Sociology, Social Policy, Human Development, Education, Psychology, or a related field; 3+ years of social science research experience; Project management; Advanced skills in Microsoft Office (particularly Word and Excel); Experience with quantitative data; Experience with public speaking; Skills in use of Stata.

*Salary: between $35,000-$38,000 (based on experience) plus benefits

This position is scheduled to end after one year; based on availability of funds and satisfactory performance it may be renewed for a second year.

Please send cover letter, resume and reference contact information to Eszter Hargittai at jobs06-at-webuse.org. You must also submit your application through the Northwestern eRecruit system:
https://nuhr.northwestern.edu/hr89prod_er/erecruit_login.html
This is position #10572.

Keywords: research, project coordinator, Communication, Sociology, Education, lab manager

Northwestern University is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer. Members of historically underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply.

E-Blog readers have been extremely helpful in the past when it comes to technical difficulties around here so I thought I’d try to get some advice in a related realm once again.

For months I’ve had trouble installing some Firefox extensions. As soon as the xpi file downloads, I’m told that “[xyz extension] could not be installed, because it is incompatible with Firefox 1.5.0.6”. This is then usually followed by the following additional note: “[xyz extension] will only work with Firefox versions from 1.5 to 1.5.0.*”.

What I don’t get here is that 1.5.0.6 IS a 1.5.0.* version so why don’t these extensions work? Any ideas?  I would really like to try some of these extensions, but I can’t right now. Thanks!