It is my firm belief that sociologists are the most prolific bloggers amongst the professoriate - at least, all the blogs I read are written by professors, and chances are, if someone forwards me a link that relates to academia that they found on a personal blog, that blog will be written by a sociologist. I am sure that if I ever took the time to investigate this and write it up, I could find a higher education journal to publish it - they love to publish articles about faculty - but then again, I would need a 20 page lit review explaining what a blog is, and then my internal rant about how it is 2008, not 1995 would start rolling, the one where I rant about how we ought to expect a baseline of knowledge about the internet amongst college-educated readers, and there isn’t enough antacid in the world for that to happen again. But I digress. Sociologists blog, and I read their blogs, and I get some great information from them. Today’s gem: tips for article writers, by Ezra Zuckerman at MIT Sloan School of Management, via OrgTheory.
Netvibes: a custom made web 2.0 home page solution. I didn’t even know how badly I needed this until I found it, but there is something so beatifully simple about a modular based customizable personal portal site that just mashes up the best of Web 98 and Web 2.0. Simple, elegant, and best of all, it comes in English and French. And apparently, soon to be available in Esperanto! A few basic themes, the ability to back up your feeds via an OPML file…. it is always nice to come across a web product that solves a problem for you.
I feel so …. organized. And there are so many modules to download.
So, Myspace is so kewl, you know, because you can totally set your profile to private and then only your real friends can read your comments. Or, you know, the rest of the internet.
http://editprofile.myspace.com/user/viewallcomments.cfm?friendid=XXXXXXXX&page=1
Replace the XX’s with a myspace userid. To scroll the pages, change the page= number.
Now, go check out celebrity MySpace pages, and remind yourself how lucky you are that your friends are not sycophants and drug addicts. Or, check out your young nieces and nephews pages to see who has a girlfriend! Secret’s out, d00d.
Nothing posted online is private. Lather, rinse, and repeat. It isn’t private behind a ‘friends only’ cut, it isn’t private if your site is password protected. It isn’t private if you don’t give the URL out to anyone. It isn’t private if you use a pseudonym. It isn’t private even if you remove your content. Everything is archived, all sites have admins, all ISPs have sys. admins, and at the end of the day, nothing posted online is private.
Which is why it is in your best interest to dissuade your friends from leaving references to your drug use in your MySpace comments.
Web 2.0 is so 5 minutes ago. Today, those in the know know it is all about CHMOD 777
Ah, Fred….you had me at “breathless conflation.”
Lovely school on the hill, if I had had your templates when I was formatting my master’s thesis, maybe I wouldn’t have spent the night before it was due trying not to cry. And since you have a template called portable thesis, maybe the Very Very bad formatting error that somehow mashed my Excel spreadsheets of data into my Word document formated thesis would never have happened, if I had only used this.
,p> note to self: some day write the saddest blog post in the world about what happened when I took the GRE, what happened to my thesis the night before it was due in hard copy, and why /. saved me and the GRE testing place did not. Thesis: I love computers, but sometimes, computers do not love me back.
That when we dig holes in our backyards, we end up coming out in the Indian Ocean. Is there ANYTHING that Google doesn’t do? I am pretty sure Google is going to start walking the dog and dusting under the bed for me. It pretty much does everything else in my life.
In September, I am working with a colleague to do some training regarding resonsibly managing one’s digital presence, and it has me thinking about the practical aspects of this.
How do other people manage their business online?
As a former tech worker, I can tell you that the most boring part of my job was being called to help the office staff when they had lost their new computer log ins and passwords. We were all required to change all of our passwords weekly, a security measure against …. nothing, as it turned out. When companies force employees to change their passwords so often, employees get frustrated, and security goes down, because one of two things happen - either they recycle the same two or three passwords, or, most likely, they write down their new passwords on Post-It notes, and stick those notes under their keyboard or their mousepad.
75% of the time, my awesome password recovery skills involved me flipping over the mousepad.
In honour of getting my thesis bound today, ready to be turned in tomorrow - some links to keep us all organized!
And…it is never to early to get organized! Organized Christmas and Holiday Grand Plan!