Category: social computing
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Wikia’s open-source “social search” alpha is up
Wikia‘s an open-source search engine that uses community feedback to improve search results, an approach referred to as ‘social search’, and they released their alpha version today. I briefly discuss the social networking aspects of this and my initial experiences on the Tales from the Net blog and linked out to some initial reviews and…
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CNet’s “social networking year in review”
Other than the title, which doesn’t do it for me, Caroline McCarthy’s Social networking gets its geek on is an excellent short roundup of the activity in 2007 in the social networking space, with great links both in the story and the “2007 highlights” sidebar. One thing that popped out at me: legal and political…
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More (negative) attention to Facebook’s privacy practices
With a two-part series on TPM Cafe’s Table for One, an article in the Mercury News on Christmas Day, and the recent settlement of a suit on text messaging, Facebook continues to become a focus for discussion of privacy issues. To some extent this is a consequence of their size and success: they’re a high-profile…
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“The official channel of the British Monarchy”
Queen Elizabeth’s annual Christmas broadcast, along with about 20 other clips, are up on YouTube as the inital offerings of The Royal Channel. George V started the tradition with a radio broadcast in 1932, and the queen took it to television in her 1957 broadcast, hoping that the new medium would give a more personal…
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Poisoning squirrels in the repository
Slashdot’s linked to a bunch of good stories on computer security recently. Squirrelmail repository poisoned has the catchiest title, and plus it’s about squirrels, so it goes first. What happened was that an intruder got into the site where you download Squirrelmail, and introduced a very subtle change in the code that would allow somebody…
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Did Blockbuster and Facebook violate the VPPA via Beacon?
James Grimmelmann has an excellent post over at the Laboratorium. His summary: Another member of a professorial mailing list I’m on asked whether Facebook may have violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. Nicknamed the “Bork Bill†(a newspaper published his video rental records during his confirmation hearings), the VPPA protects your privacy in…
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Antifreeze for the winter in Seattle
There was a great article in the Seattle PI on Friday about Seattle Anti-Freeze and how their participative, theme-based gender-balanced parties are “finding a cure for the common cold”. Gayle Laakmann, one of Anti-freeze’s founders, interned for me several years ago at Microsoft Research, and since this gave me an opportunity to get in on…
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Bullies and moderation in online discussions
A kerfuffle that recently went on in one of the online communities I hang out in is a nice illustration of some of the complex interaction between moderator privilege in discussion forums, power vectors and bullying. Briefly, a poster engaged in a bunch of techniques such as using loaded and admittedly-pejorative terms in a theoretically-neutral…
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w00t, w00t: just “claimed” my blog on Technorati
and in the two minutes from when I signed up until I checked the blog’s summary page, its rank went from 4,446,976 to 3,053,157 — at this rate, I should be top 10 by dinner time! Authority = 1 for now, but no doubt once everybody starts crosslinking and adding to their Technorati faves, it’ll…
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Power vectors and HTML in comments
I just made my first HTML comment here, at the end of the Lorelei experiment, pointing to its continuation with Leone (the theme not the director). w00t w00t! It’s not at all obvious but by default WordPress blogs are set up to allow HTML in comments. There’s no preview feature or WYSIWIG editor though so…
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How to use categories and tags? (meta)
I’m thinking through how to use categories and tags on this blog … I know I won’t get it completely right the first time so it’s worth starting from the beginning tracking the different experiments I do. Usefully, WordPress allows multiple categories as well as multiple tags, so one way of thinking about this is…
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“A bit sad”, a bit surreal … and a very good thread on Mini
Mini does a great job of simultaneously conveying the disappointment I heard from a lot of people about how my Microsoft career ended, as well as the surreality of my multi-cameo at the company meeting, which we were laughing about at my goodbye parties. An excerpt: A lot of Microsofties interested in changing Microsoft’s internal…