Week Four

I'm pushing hard to try and catch up with the course, so hard on the heels of 'Week Three' comes 'Week Four', which is about RSS and newsreader applications.

I'm keeping it lean and simple this week. First up, I was tasked with setting up a free online newsreader, setting up some feeds, and linking to it from this blog. I chose google-reader in order to be consistent with my google-blogger account, and I cheated a little by choosing the bundle of feeds suggested by google staff for new users. Then I picked a few of the more interesting stories to share - I hope. So here it is.

Newsreaders are an interesting idea but much depends on finding a good stream to subscribe to in the first place. Although I'm a fan of LOLcats, pictures of anthromorphised animals in general make me yawn. Although I like news sites such as the English Guardian and Observer, I like to trawl through them when the mood takes me and click on interesting links; as opposed to having everything dumped into my newsreader. I'm not particularly interested in new gadgets because I can't afford them. And blogs? Well, I do a lot of reading. But it's mostly the classics, in book form, in delightfully musty second-hand condition, on a comfortable sofa, at home. A blog has to be pretty damn interesting to compete with that. Something by Alain De Botton would qualify - but guess what? He doesn't have a blog.

That's the thing, see. In this time when so many seem so eager to throw their opinions and the details of their lives into the 'blogosphere', perhaps one should be asking if it's a good idea to do so. Schopenhauer advised that we should keep our private affairs private. Over time we may come to regret that others know personal things. And, as a general rule, it's more advisable to show our intelligence by saying nothing than by speaking; for silence is modest and doesn't offend, while speech 'has something in it of vanity'. The opportunities for choosing one or the other are equally common, but it seems that many pick the fleeting satisfaction of speech over the permanent advantage of silence.

Week Three (Part 2)

My next task is to use 'Picnik' to play around with an image, then post the altered image to my blog.

Picknik is a nice little web application. This site will be useful to customers using the library computers; no need for photoshop or even its free cousins such as GIMP. Of course Picnik doesn't have the sheer image processing power of a dedicated software application, but one can crop, resize, and alter easily enough. This will be handy for the crowds of backpackers, memory sticks bulging with digital photographs, who flock like Nordic birds to our internet terminals.

Here, I altered Schopenhauer's 'temperature' to a cool blue tone, cropped the image, and added a dashing black moustache.

My final task is to experiment with some image generators - a fun thing to do.

I was intially impressed by 'Obamicon me' which I found on the Generator blog. It enables you to upload an image and change it into the style of the iconic Obama poster used in the last U.S. election. However I became irritated when attempting to save the image - it looked as though I needed to register and that bugs me. A shame, because I had a nice image of Schopenhauer in Obama style with the caption 'Pessimism'.

But then I discovered a magazine cover generator courtesy of the BigHugeLabs site. The result was the following hypothetical magazine.

And here ends week three!

Week Three (Part 1)

A lot to do this week so let's get started!

My first task was to explore 'Flickr' and link to an image - so here's our hero courtesy of Flickr. Unfortunately photographs of old Schopenhauer are far more common than young Schopenhauer (who can be seen in the profile picture of this blog), probably because he found fame only in the winter of his life.

Frustratingly, at first, neither Flickr's 'blogging tool' nor Blogger's 'photo upload tool' would work on my library staff computer. In theory our library is embracing web technology for service delivery; in practice this fine ideal is hindered by the technical aspects of I.T. in a large organisation - firewalls, bandwidth, security, and the like. However I did succeed on a later attempt.

Clearly Flickr is an amazing resource. One could spend happy hours perusing the photographs of strangers. An uneasy thought struck me: what if someone posted a image of me without my permission? I am not photogenic. I loathe the pale and squinty creature who peers out of photographs purporting to be me. A quick search of my name showed nothing.

Both 'Picasa Web Albums' and 'Smugmug' are clones of Flickr but without as much content. On its homepage Smugmug touts quotes from various media such as 'Elegant!' and 'Best looking!'. Yet for all that I couldn't see how it was significantly different from the others. Picasa seemed much the same.

My next task is to explore some Flickr mashups.

The simple and effective 'Flickr Color Pickr' caught my eye: a nice application that satisfies both the merely curious and the design minded; the latter perhaps looking for a public domain image suitable for some project.

'Captioner', from http://www.bighugelabs.com/, lets the user add comicbook-style speech and thought bubbles to photographs. Here's one I made in which Schopenhauer speaks this week's piece of wisdom. Schopenhauer considered deep sleep to be like death; a sort of foretaste of non-existence, because when we sleep we lose all knowledge of our own consciousness. He wrote that every morning was like a little birth, every evening an old age, every sleep a little death; and thus sleep itself may be thought of as...

Well that's the first half of week 3; there's still more to do in the second half, next post!

Week Two.

The theme for this week's task is 'social networking sites'. Bebo, Myspace, LinkedIn and Facebook are targeted for apprasial.

Myspace is familiar to me. A few years ago I used it actively despite initial misgivings that it was a juvenile and pointless use of time. It turned out to be more fun and interesting than I realised. Although Myspace as a whole is clunky, poorly layed-out, prone to spam, and slow to load, it has two charms: if your coding skills are good enough you can customise the appearance of your profile extensively; and it's a bit 'alternative'. By that I mean it's not as straightforward, preppie, and boring as Facebook. You can send silly little sparkly animations to your Myspace friends. Link to songs and videos on your profile. It's useful for bands, artists and generally-creative types to advertise their wares.

If Myspace is a quirky teenager then Facebook is a Dockers-wearing balding middle-aged dad. It's a staid version of Myspace with much less emphasis on self-expression: we're all locked into that boring, boxy profile template. But it's become a monster of the Internet, a money-spinning hulk embraced even by those people not previously interested in networking sites.

Why? A vaguely articulated promise of networking (with associated, although hard to quantify, benefits); and a simple, conformist model of profile presentation. Late adaptors find Facebook's predictable template and business networking associations appealing; the younger demographic like it because it's achieved critical mass in terms of the numbers of users - everyone's on it.

I now neglect my Myspace profile; in fact it exists solely these days to direct people to my Facebook. I'm not sure why I've migrated. In fact I'm not sure why I use social networking at all. Often I think about deleting my Facebook, although recently it proved its worth when I was hunting for a flatmate. A Facebook status update from me enquiring if anyone needed a flat netted me several leads within hours. So it has an upside.

But there's a downside, too, which is this: the more people who add one as a 'friend' on Facebook, the less one is actually able to use it as anything resembling a genuine experession of personality, thoughts, or feelings. Several work people have added me to their friends list. This means anything I post now has to be carefully considered. It's the same with family members who add me, or friends-of-friends whom I don't know very well. In fact, when I ask myself why I actually use Facebook, I can only find two reasons: the craven reason is that everyone else uses it, and the practical reason is that it's useful for staying in touch with friends overseas.

Bebo has always struck me as 'Myspace for Kids'. It doesn't seem to have a definite rationale of it's own, choosing instead to compete directly with Myspace, but with and emphasis on a more school-age demographic. Personally I feel a little creepy looking at Bebo profiles - it makes me feel old.

LinkedIn is an attempt to wrest the business conotations off Facebook and it may just succeed. It's a good business idea because it's using a Facebook like model but with a much better defined goal: to network with others in a given industry. I'll be interested to see how it progresses in terms of the number of members. Having said that, the idea of it bores me to tears. I doubt very much whether I'd use it.

Let's wrap this up with some more wisdom from Schopenhauer.

We let our golden days slip by unnoticed. A day without pain races by and we pay little attention to it. Sometimes on such days we sigh, feel bored, wonder when life will start; perhaps we even feel opressed by our predictable routine.

But we should be aware of, and inwardly celebrate, each fleeting day that passes without pain or sorrow; because at some point in the future, when we are ill or otherwise suffering (and this is inevitable), we will long for these quiet, boring, pain free days, and give anything for them to return.