Thing 47 - Stay Cool, things on a stick

Obviously I had my share of ire over all of this. I still hate web 2.0 and the way everyone uses it. But I did get used to a few more websites that I needed to learn about, and I think I do have a better understanding of the modern internet and how people use it. I forget that it's not just nerds on the internet anymore, so a lot of the rules have changed.

I do think it's at least good that there's an increased focus on shared content on some websites. Or at least, there's more media coverage of the increased focus on shared content. That way, for every hundred or so useless websites, or ones with a good idea but terrible execution, there will be a brilliant one that changes the way we look at information and technology.

I hope I can help people somehow with all that I've learned here. I doubt the ability to directly influence the patrons that come in by telling them about these websites, because we don't really have that kind of connection with them when they're on the computer - I feel it would be invasive to ask what they were doing online and recommend things to them. However, any increase in our understanding of online systems will have their applications in the future. After all, computers are just going to become more and more important as time goes by. That's not up for debate. The more I know, the better.

Thing 46 - WebJunction Minnesota

This is kind of a nice website, but once again we come up against the problem of decentralizing the process. I don't like the idea of discussion pages only coming out of specific groups, because then you decrease the amount of traffic that will look at each dicsussion. There should be levels of discussion pages - ie, not only for individual groups but for affiliations (like Minnesota) and for the WebJunction website as a whole. Then there would be more people checking out the topics, and since they clearly already have the technology for the message boards, it shouldn't be a problem to implement them in more universal ways.

I am speaking this way because I just took one of the free courses on marketing, and it turns out I'm really good at it! I got low percentages on the term definition part because I don't know all the industry jargon (obviously), but in the simulation parts I made good marketing decisions and sol the products well. Anyway, I'm in the zone of identifying implementation needs and strategies. So they should increase the discussion boards and make the whole thing more user friendly.

Thing 45 - Cloud Computing

Seriously?

In Web 1.0 we called this "e-mailing something to yourself so you could print it off somewhere else later". Now, of course, we have the wonderful advent of Web 2.0, and websites that do things you could already do, but much more smugly.

I guess I like the idea of being able to backup your ENTIRE hard drive remotely, but it seems unnecessary for a couple reasons.

1. A LOT of of the space on your hard drive is taken up by your operating system. So paying a bunch of money to back up Windows Vista, which you'd get a new copy of when you bought a new computer anyway, is stupid.
2. What's going to happen to your computer that you suddenly can't get to any of the applications or documents to save them on a hard drive or external hard drive? I guess it could blow up. Spending a bunch of money monthly to protect against this seems like it'd give the people from thing 44 a conniption, though.

So yeah I'm not gonna be signing up for any off these companies. I don't need them and they're stupid. I will continue to e-mail things to myself, which is very easy and very free.

Thing 44 - The Economy

I appreciated the video posted right away at the beginning, it was a pretty good metaphor for the situation we're in. It was a little oversimplified, in that they would explain that a mortgage was like a "promise to pay more money in the future", but then refer to mortgages as promises for the rest of the video. They did the same with business Securities. So conflating all this as "promises" in an attempt to simplify it actually obscured the meaning.

Other than that, I liked it.

Some of the money saving tips were odd. I mean, some of them were overly simple, like the video, like "Save your money and you will have more money!!!" which I think I inferred. But some of them were really weird. I guess I never thought of "raise your own chickens" as a good money saving tips, especially because you presumably have to buy a chicken coop and a bunch of chickens. Seems like it'd be cheaper to just go buy chicken meat from the supermarket. I mean, even if a chicken is cheaper to buy than just the meat, you still have to wait, what, a year before it's big enough to be slaughtered? I don't argue with it being a nice hobby, but I don't think it's a good money saver.

I like that the white house has a few money education websites up. I think it's a good little public outreach effort. I don't know how many people know about them, but I leafed through the pages and it looks like there's a pretty succinct description of most of the important stuff relating to credit, loans, insurance, etc. This is a good resource and I'll recommend it to patrons if necessary.

Overall I guess people are going to have to pinch pennies to get through if prices start to soar or they get laid off, but mostly the crisis seems to be in imaginary money that doesn't exist. So investments and stocks are plummeting but for people whose net worth is in actual dollars (like me!) stuff isn't so bad yet. Gas prices are even down from what they were before things started getting terrible. Obviously we need to solve the recession though, and the good news is that no one has any idea how to do that!

Thing 43: Online TV and Video

I don't have TV at home, so I could see this being pretty cool. I've watched a few shows on youtube and stuff like that, but I don't watch that many new shows so I'm unsure of how Hulu will be. It does have The Office and 30 Rock, which I like. And there are some episodes of the Simpsons, which is fun but it's not nearly as good as it used to be. But I got an account and put a bunch of stuff on queue, so I'll see how this goes. With summer coming I got a lotta time to waste (As if I didn't have enough stuff from the library already).

I guess a lot of the things I said about internet radio can apply to internet TV too, but comparing the two isn't exactly the same. For one thing, it's relatively cheap to buy instruments and recording equipment and form a band you intend to promote yourself. However, the cost of an ongoing television program is astonomically beyond the normal person's reach, so any ongoing show produced and released independently will simply not have the kind of resources a sponsored network show has. This isn't to say that independent shows can't fill a kind of niche and reach a certain audience, but it's definitely a consideration.

I know a lot of people that come into our library use hulu and other TV services, so now that I know a little more about it I can help them out if they ask. Which is cool! The movies on the site seem a little more lacking, but I bet those are harder to license.

Thing 42 - Music 2.0

Ignoring the 2.0 label, this one rules!

FIRST of all I friggin' love Pandora and last.fm. As you can see (as if anyone is reading this) I have embedded a last.fm widget over here on this side -------------->

Which means now this blog knows what I have been listening to on my iTunes.
And soon I'm gonna be adding that pandora/last.fm mashup to my home computer (which I just got working) which rules because, come on.

ALSO ALSO grooveshark is the neatest thing I've seen recently. It lets you play whatever song you want! No catch! Also they have some obscure stuff and I was impressed with the amount of songs on there you can listen to. I don't know why, but I appreciate that it exists.

Also thanks to whoever added that comment on the pbwiki page about places to get free music. That Amazon link had a few cool ones I'm gonna get when I'm home again. I sent the link to myself via facebook.

I am basically certain that internet radio is going to overtake traditional broadcast radio, at least in terms of most people. The thing is that music is not even CLOSE to universal anymore, there's no such thing as a song that everyone's listening to. So broadcast radio stations have to play music that they KNOW is going to be listened to by a LOTTTT of people. This means:

1. Classic Rock, because that music came out when people DID all listen to the same thing, and old people don't know how to use the internet
2. Mainstream Pop & Country that's advertised so heavily that people who don't care about music that much listen to it and are ok with it. (which isn't to say that none of it has value, but advertising is pretty heavily involved).

Everything else you kind of have to assemble yourself. And the internet is a very very good way to do this, especially because of music networking sites like this that can recommend similar stuff to what you like.
The problem of decentralizing the music business, of course, is how the music artists themselves are going to be paid. Ignoring the impossibility of stopping torrents, if everyone listens to pandora and online radio and such (sites that only pay for the rights to use the songs, I think), where does the artist earn money? Record sales and concerts are traditionally the source, but with music becoming more diverse and specialized, they can't hope to be superstars nearly as easily anymore. Right now we're in an in-between state that capitalizes on the established order of the past, and the new opportunities of the future. But this won't last forever.

Anyway, I like music sites. So, yeah.

Thing 41 - Mashup your Life

Now THIS I am in favor of! I spend a lot of time on facebook and a lot of time on Twitter, so putting them together seems like a pretty boss idea.

Naturally, however, I have some stuff to complain about.

The problem here is that Lifestream.fm (or friendfeed if I had chosen to use that) require you to subscribe to other people THROUGH their website. I understand the need to get people to sign up for your website, and requiring someone o use the service in order for people to be able to follow them does that, but it sucks in that it's not ever going to be the same as facebook. It's never going to have the same amount of press or the same amount of people on there, so unfortunately you're only going to get a few people. Same with twitter, everyone I follow would have to add LivingSocial and then I'd have to resubscribe to them.

What I WANT is an application that gives me all the twitter updates AND all my facebook stuff. And I have last.fm on LivingSocial as well, so if that could be part of the deal too, it'd be great. Of course, facebook applications give a pretty close approximation of what i just described, but because facebook just opens their code up to third party stuff, the interface isn't all that great and it's certainly not consolidated into what you'd consider one website. It basically just opens the other website up in a new window, which gets them an A for effort but no so much for effect.

I guess as Mashups become more common and implemented I might see what I want. An RSS feed type LivingSocial facebook mashup. That would be righteous. Then I could have a last.fm/pandora/youtube mashup thing on THAT website and I'd rarely have to leave!

Except somethingawful.com and my blogs, and google. But surely a COUPLE extra websites would be ok.

Thing 40 - Mashup the Web

My hour's up so I gotta go, I'll finish this later but here's my mashup

http://www.polyvore.com/how_to_go_digging_for/set?id=8509226

edit: Ok, back to finish this one up.

I had fun messing around with some of these, even though a bunch of them didn't work. I don't have last.fm here at work, but I have it at home and these additions to that sound pretty friggin sweet, especially the one that syncs up with pandora and scrobbles your songs. I have a pandora station set up to play JUST a certain kind of music, so having that scrobble would be double-sweet. I'm gonna look it up at home.

That silly one with clam digging was kind of a cool idea, but it was mostly womens' clothing sets. I might have played around a bit with men's clothing and whatever, but I don't know what I woulda done with it. ha ha

Basically though, it was a good way to see how different websites can work together. I don't know anything about coding and mixing websites or anything, but I like the idea.

Thing 39 - "Digital Scrapbooking"

I went a little nuts on this one, too. I didn't really have that many pictures on my facebook or a good theme. Plus I am trying to get these done in a timely manner so I can actually finish before May 20. The flood is to blame for this.

Thing 38 - Screencasting

I couldn't download onto this computer, so even though skitch looked really cool and I'm sure the people who developed Jing are really nice, I had to go with screentoaster. I made a real boring tutorial about how to open non plug-and-play drivers in Windows. In case you really wanted to do that.

Free online screencasting tool