Frogs and Ravens

The Great Facebook Rights Grab of 2009

Like increasing numbers of people in this day and age, I have an account on Facebook.  I also have accounts at LibraryThing, Zenfolio, Redbubble, Etsy, Artfire, Twitter, MySpace, Ravelry and probably a few I've forgotten.  I also have at least 6 email accounts, a web page, and three online stores.  Then there's the two blogs I have here on Typepad.  If I had a video camera, I'd probably be adding to YouTube or Vimeo.

In short, I'm a wired woman, very much enmeshed in what the cognescenti like to call "Web 2.0."

As a result of this, and of my years blogging, I've become very much interested in the ways that various online service providers communicate with their clients and the sorts of problems that ensue when they fail to navigate this new environment successfully.  (Etsy offers an often astonishing example of what happen when communication breaks down.  See Unofficial Etsy News and EtsyBitch for discussions of this and links.)

I've also become increasingly protective of my content; the days when I believed wholeheartedly in the idea that all knowledge should be free has been replaced by the conviction that while knowledge should be spread widely and generously, the people who make the effort to produce it deserve recompense for their efforts.  That is, the trade-off of my generosity in this regard is me making enough to eat and pay rent and insurance.  I'm willing to share low-res images with the world at large, here and on my other blog and on flickr, but it's an act of temporary generosity on my part, not an abandonment of my interest in the content.  If I decide to pull those images, both TypePad and Flickr (and its parent company, Yahoo), agree, as per their Terms of Service, that any license I may have granted them in order to use their sites ends.  The licenses they require are also reasonable, related primarily to me giving them permission to show that content to people who visit my sites. 

It used to be that this was the case for Facebook as well.  Their TOS was a bit more demanding - they wanted a much more extensive license to use our stuff - but, like most such network providers out there, they included a clause that basically said, if you take your stuff off the site, or cancel your account, our right to use it ends. 

They have changed that.

It's NOT the Technology, Stupid

Consider the following statements, and see if you can guess what might go in the blanks:

_____a_____ is encouraging people to be rude and selfish.

_____b_____ makes it possible for anonymous people to get away with being mean toward people they've never met.

Before _____c______ people only met each other through family networks and this sort of invasion of privacy didn't happen.

People who _____d______ have no sense of personal dignity and privacy.  They let just anyone into their lives.

Or consider these:

People who _____e______ should not be surprised when total strangers bother them.  What did they expect?

It is inevitable that if you ____f_____, bad things like are going to happen to you.  I know; they happened to me.

It's part of the nature of _____g_____ that things like anonymous attacks, rudeness, harassment, and invasion of privacy happen.  People who ______h_______ shouldn't complain; they knew this when they _____i______.

All people who ______j______ shouldn't be surprised when bad things happen; those sort of things are the point of ______k______, aren't they?

Ready for some answers?

Chore Wars

Combine a Dungeons and Dragons format with an online chore tracker, and what do you get? Chore Wars!

Check it out - it's cool!

(For me, the best part is being able to set up monsters that might attack you during your chore adventure, such as the Tissue Lint Pixie, the Possessed Shopping Cart, or the Hairball of Doom.)

Testing the Neo

This is my first post written on my new Neo.  Whee!

And the process is very simple and cool - I just hook the Neo up to the computer, open my blog window, and press "send" - and the text is put in the window, ready for publishing!

New Toy

I just purchased an AlphaSmart Neo.  Basically, it's a portable keyboard with file storage - for me, it's not a replacement for the laptop, but rather for paper notebooks while traveling.  I'd been reading a lot of reviews about it, most of them waving their arms with joy, and I have to say, I agree.  It is very cool, and I look forward to writing a lot on it - including blog posts.

Organic Html

Here's a new toy to play with: www.organichtml.com.

What it is, is a flash generator that turns a website's structure into a graphic -- in this particular case, a plant with roots and shoots and flowers and stuff. You enter the site, wait a bit for the flash to load (it will show a blank window at first, but be patient; a greenhouse and a place to enter a URL will appear), type the URL of a site, see the generator open, and watch it generate a plant.

The one for Frogs and Ravens was rather squatty and dull, but a lot of others are quite fun. Commercial sites are often really good (both www.yogajournal.com and www.amazon.com produce quite splendid foliage). Comparing the three main political party websites is entertaining (www.gp.org, www.democrats.org, www.gop.org) as is looking at various individual's sites (note, individually designed sites are often more exciting than standard format blogs -- http://pharyngula.org produces an amazingly intimidating creation! and www.dooce.com is quite pretty).

Have fun!

Apple Battery Recall

Those of you who are using Powerbooks or iBooks purchased in the last year might want to go look at this recall notice.

Online Communities

There's an interesting post and subsequent discussion over at Making Light.  It begins with Theresa's guidelines for managing an on-line community, and spirals out into conversations about Usenet, pseudonymity, trolls, and similar. 

Thanks to Jill for the link.

Targetted

This is what appears on Technorati when I look up the cosmos for this site.  Thanks a lot, guys.

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New Toy

D's, not mine. His old laptop started acting cranky, and he's been thinking of upgrading for a while now, so yesterday he went out and bought a lovely new iBook. *ENVY* I haven't even seen it yet, and already I covet it. (Perhaps I should not ask to play with it -- the torment would be too much.) And here's another weird side effect of the leaving of the academia: I no longer have any justification to upgrade. I use my home computer to store pictures and email. That's it. Hard to justify paying $$$ for a new laptop, just because it is new and cool. I'd be better off buying more RAM instead. Well, maybe if I get a nifty curating job sometime I can rationalize buying a new one. Or a telecommuting job. Or something. Meanwhile...

D! Hide the cool new toy! Don't let me see it! Keep its smooth white loveliness away from me!