notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

2012-03-14

post/19302664410

quote 20:10:05
“ I feel sorry for blogging. How could something so great just wither on the vine? There are vast prairies of abandoned blogs now. Without any specific decision, there’s been a mass migration to social networks, like tribesmen picking up and moving to cities overnight. It’s certainly not the worst decision in internet history but maybe it’s fair to say that it wasn’t given much consideration at the time. “Just imagine a band of savages,” Diamond writes, “exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep.” Progress isn’t deliberated upon, it’s magnetic. But once drawn in, you might find yourself living (in a shotgun shack) on a cheaply manufactured high-carb, high-fructose diet of realtime information. You’ve traded still pools of honest expression for rivers of pageviews and machine-generated timelines. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether we all made a little mistake with that. ”
Emmet Connolly: Mistakes we made along the way, drawing a parallel between the shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture and the move from blogging to social networks. (via)

2010-07-19

Flickr Catchup: A Technique

text 10:12:00

I’ve been on holiday for a fortnight, so I haven’t had a chance to check Flickr. How to catch up?

Well, the search box on the “photos from your contacts” page has a handy filter: “from your contacts”. Put in space, press return, and you get… an error. Then go to advanced search, change “date taken” to “posted”, and put in the date you went on holiday, and you’ll end up at a page like this.

(Note the date in the URL; you can change that if you want to skip the navigation outlined above.)

That’s sorted by “interestingness”, so you’d hope the better / more noticed photos would come to the top. If you’re more egalitarian, you could always go for “recent”, and then start at the end of the list and work forward. 

If I was away from a computer more often, I might use the API to turn this into a service, but I’m not, so I won’t. Also, as I’ve noted before, it’s a shame more sites don’t offer filtered search to your contacts. I kept up with Twitter pretty well, but I have no idea what I’ve missed on delicious, for example. Hurrah, then, for Flickr.

2009-08-07

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quote 06:35:00
“ Many [teenagers] didn’t know why the term had become a trending topic, were unaware of the Mashable article or Nielsen study, and thought that Twitter chose the trending topics. (I was in awe of how many teens commented that Twitter was stupid for making such a lie a trending topic.) ”

danah boyd: Teens Don’t Tweet… Or Do They?

Bonus points for actually collating data (even if it’s self-reported). It makes a refreshing change from comment threads full of anecdote (“I’m on Twitter” “I’m not but my mum is” “Why does anyone even care about it, it’s full of banality”; repeat until bored to tears).

what

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