Monthly Archives: April 2009

“Omegle is a brand-new service for meeting new friends. When you use Omegle, we pick another user at random and let you have a one-on-one chat with each other. Chats are completely anonymous, although there is nothing to stop you from revealing personal details if you would like.”

http://omegle.com/

This is an interesting play off the anonymous nature of the internet. I got this link from College Humor’s hot links. I don’t think you can view comments on content without an account, but I often find their comments to be hilarious and often better than most of the site’s content itself. A couple examples from this link:

“This was really awkward. talking to strangers face to face is a lot easier than this.”

I dunno, every time I said I was an under 18 female, not a cop, people kept disconnecting. I just won a rap battle by copying and pasting 8 mile lyrics, and I found my dad.”

“This is a pedophiles dream.”

“I told him I’m 12 and asked him if he has candy. He said he has chocolate and wanted to know my full name and address. Chris Hansen should pay a visit to that web site.”

E: “ Someone just shouted CHF?! at me then went offline. What does CHF mean? :/
J: “Congestive Heart Failure. You f@#$ing killed him.”
E: “I SHOULD HAVE REPLIED SOONER D:”
S: “Ellie, this is serious. You’re going to have to find a lawyer.”
E: “I kept trying to find one but none were online D:”
D: “Try omegle.”

There’s a number of other very funny and often very explicit comments on the site.

http://doihaveswineflu.org/

This is a great mockery of how people and the media tend to overreact to things like this. I love it.

From the Sunday New York Times about the struggles of Web 2.0 companies in foreign countries. (Here it is) Apparently, a lot of sites are struggling to turn a profit–or even break even–in many markets. The ad rates for countries in Africa, the Middle East and much of Asia are much lower, reflecting the economic realities of the countries themselves. But because of technological limitations, servers and bandwidth are much more expensive. Unfortunately, the grand vision of a free web for all may be in jeopardy thanks to the fact that the web is still based in the real world.

The consequences of this for a local audience are fairly minimal–the business structure of companies like YouTube and Facebook has proven to be extremely successful in America. But abroad things are more questionable, and while major sites will probably still be safe, certain companies don’t have the resources to maintain a fully international audience (the article mentioned Veoh, which is a video-sharing site). In fact, YouTube may lose over $400 million in the international market this year, and if that does happen there may indeed be severe repercussions.

We’ll have to wait and see what this will amount to. But dreams of a global, utopian internet, may be in jeopardy. We may be entering into a new kind of European priviledge, one that revolves around superior access to the web. And if these trends continue, many countries on the technological forefront may start running into some unforeseen obstacles–unless bandwidth rates decrease, the United States may have a monopoly on the creation and proliferation of user-generated sites, meaning innovation could be stifled throughout a large portion of the world.

Maybe the article paints a bleaker picture than is warranted. It’s hard to imagine Facebook making their site unavailable in markets as large as India. But even if the fears presented here are unfounded, it’s important to take this opportunity to really evaluate the realities of the situation. Internet for all may not be such an easily realized ambition after all. Disparities of wealth between nations cannot be avoided, even in the virtual realm. This should be a wake up call to let people know that the internet cannot exist independently. The Real World must be taken into account.

I couldn’t find any articles that exactly explained what I was looking for, but I found one that gives a pretty good summary, and there is a really big dispute about the carbon cost of a google search right now.

Essay: http://thayer.dartmouth.edu/~cushman/courses/engs171/eCommerceEmerging.pdf

Google article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jan/12/carbon-emissions-google

One of the many follow-up articles: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jan/12/google-carbonfootprints

I don’t really think that anyone is saying we should stop doing google searches, I think it is just making people aware that when they use their computer, for whatever reason, or plug it into the wall, a lot of energy is being used that most people disregard.

I am interested in the environmental effects of the digitalization of information. Surely some resources are being saved by less copies of books or newspapers in print, among other things, but is the Kindle really a better alternative to the book if now it takes energy to read anything and nothing is permanent?

The main question is the effects of the change from an initial input as in the production of the book, to a continual energy input with no initial input, and if we throw all of our “eggs in this basket” or put all of our money and resources into the digital age, will this actually be sustainable?

As technology uses more and more energy, if we one day run out of the many sources of energy we are using right now, will we be back to ground zero, with few means of entertainment or business not directly tied to the use of the internet and technology?

Here are some more articles on #amazonfail, one of which is a blog post by Mark Probst and the other, an article by Bill Thompson, which discusses the effects that the incident had on Amazon’s reputation.

I found the second article particularly interesting. While I assumed that #amazonfail could only be detrimental to Amazon’s reputation, this article shed light on the fact that Amazon was, in essence, making their website more family-friendly. Yes, they broke the “bond of trust” that existed between them and their consumer base, but they “aren’t violating the First Amendment or even, I suspect, breaking the terms of their agreement with publishers by doing it.” Additionally, Thompson contends that “the error was in the algorithm” which is, to him, not really a source of comfort. There is something unnerving about placing our trust in a company, and allowing online recommendation systems to dictate many of our decisions. He writes: “The consequences of living by the algorithm do not just affect Amazon, they affect all of us as we increasingly rely on recommendation systems to suggest books to buy, friends to add on social networks, emails to take notice of and places to visit. We have put our faith in Google PageRank and ‘Amazon recommends’, and found them wanting, yet we do not have an alternative.” Kind of a scary thought.

I just found this site called Academic Earth where you can watch lectures online.   We’ve talked a bit about learning onine via programs like Second Life, and that a lot of universities are podcasting several of their lectures so I thought this would be an intersting link to share.   I wonder if lectures will ever be produced and then aggregated on a website with the sole purpose of being an online lecture.   For the most part, I think lectures that we see online now are already being delivered to some part of the real world and thus doesn’t really require any extra work to publish them online.