Two Slashes

Yesterday, I was messing around with Facebook and ended up stumbling into what I thought was a bit of a privacy leak.  I wrote it up, and it’s now available on the Writeups page or at this link.

I’m still doing some small edits to the article, but I wanted to make sure I got this notification post out before midnight so people would take it at least mildly seriously.  (Tomorrow’s April Fool’s Day, remember?)

Read it, pass it along, try it for yourself…ignore it.  It really doesn’t matter.  I just thought there might be a few people who wanted to know.

Feel free to leave feedback about it in the comments, including any suggestions you have on how to improve the content.

I was talking on IRC with a friend a few weeks back when he asked me to remind him of the URL to this blog, as he was having fun looking up the Google PageRanks for various websites.  Considering the length of time since I last checked (as I don’t really care), I checked myself and was surprised to find that I’ve managed to reach a 4 (yes, I double-checked that).  In the past, this blog has typically hovered between 2 and 3, so this was unexpected for both of us.

I have no idea how this happened...

Immediately after this magic number was revealed, the topic quickly turned from PageRanks into how I could be making money from my blogging thanks to said PageRank.

<Number_5> dude you could be making 7500-12000 a month
<Limp_Trizkit> who, me?
<Number_5> yeah you…
<Number_5> with the right SEO and good keywords
<Number_5> you could make a great full time income
<Limp_Trizkit> lol
<Number_5> you laugh i’m not joking

I have plenty of respect for the people who can successfully make a living off of their blogging, but blogging has never been something I’ve been able to see myself doing for money, even if it came from advertisements or endorsements.  I write because I enjoy writing, and while some money would be awesome (*cough* college student *cough*) to keep things running (like the server), I would feel rotten trying to make money off of something I tend to put onto the back burner quite frequently.  (Yes, I’m thinking of the entire lifespan of this blog, with the exception of February.)

I can think of and sympathize with the few instances where ads might be worthwhile or useful, but for the most part, I find them annoying.  I guess you can say that I see peoples’ contributions as payment for all of the things they get out of this vast intercontinental library, in a way.  Collecting $12,000 every month would be alright phenomenal, but I can’t justify “whoring” my personal projects out in any way that would feel “right” or reasonable to me.

Of course, none of this stops people from calling me out for keeping AdBlock running.  Besides using it as a useful toolkit for hiding parts of websites I just don’t want to see, I will admit that I take advantage of the Firefox plugin as it was intended to be used.  (Didn’t I just say that I find ads to be mildly annoying?)  But, is it really that big a deal that I don’t want to see ads for male enhancement just because you used the p-word word once?  I get enough of that every time I check my e-mail, thank you very much.

If you're a student in Britain, chances are you'll be sending messages like these at some point. (Oh, who am I kidding? They'll all read "@somefriend Wanna hang out?" instead.)

Math, literature, gym, and history.  These are all staples of the education system no matter where you are.  America, Spain, Russia – they cover cover all of these topics at some point.

If you’re of school age and happen to be living in Britain, it sounds like you might be adding a more thorough understanding of computing and the Internet to your curriculum.

TechCrunch is reporting that skills and tools useful in an online/social networking context, a la tweeting, blogging, and podcasting, are to be added to the elementary school curriculum to bring kids up to speed with the Internet their older counterparts are already experts at abusing.

I remember my computing classes back in elementary and middle school (at least, I remember some of them).  There really wasn’t any point to the class, as most of the work assigned was either grunt work or designed to benefit the teacher more than the student.  (Yeah, it happens.)  There’s only so many times you can print greeting cards or type up the same lame one-page story up before you’re an “expert” at using the computers, and as most of these classes, at least the ones in elementary school, were held using near-antique systems (I mean this in terms relative to when I was 10, mind you), they weren’t even relevant when I was attending them.

But while my youth may have been wasted away word-processing tales of dinosaurs and making birthday cards for my teachers, it seems as though somebody’s finally figured out what all that computing time could be used for.  However, I’m not entirely sure that Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites are the things to be showing first graders around.  (I’m not entirely sure they’re for older people, either, but that’s a discussion for a different day.)

Let’s think about this for a second.  Companies still add legal disclaimers to their television advertisements telling kids to ask their parents before they go online.  This isn’t just to make sure mommy and daddy sue the company for telling their kid to rack up dial-up charges (heaven forbid they’re still on dial-up), it’s to remove any liability that they might have as far as disturbing and obnoxious people who might appear on the site.  It’s not a possibility that they’ll come into contact with some unsavory character; it’s guaranteed to happen at some point, and with the state of things, almost daily, too.

I also didn’t bother with cell phones until I left for college.  Now, considering little Timmy and Tori over there are probably already text messaging each other hourly, I can see how showing them things like Twitter might seem to be a natural extension of what they’re already doing.  However, factor in that little kids tend to be incapable of discretion, and all it takes is one misplaced “I’m at the park!” for things to get ugly.  (No, I’m not talking about that.  I’m saying that it’ll be extremely easy for mom and pop to pick up on where their offspring has been recently.  Alright, maybe your idea is more valid.  Much more valid.)

Most of the Twitter arguments work with the general blogging case, too.  Unless these schools are intending to be putting up their own copies of Laconi.ca and WPMU for the students to mess around with explore while making sure the general public doesn’t get to cause too much trouble as a result of what’s posted, I have some major issues about letting these kids loose on the web.  (TechCrunch also mentioned podcasting, but I’m not entirely sure that such an endeavor is feasible enough to be worrying about it.)

Yeah...this seems more like an elementary schooler to me.

There is a positive effect to the (micro)blogging idea, and that would be that students would be encouraged to write and proofread their work (well, unless they default to “wrtng lke thyr n a phn”).  Microblogging would also be a great way to train students in how to “trim the fat” from their writing because of the small character limit.  However, I don’t see these as pros that outweigh all of the cons.

In short, I find the cause to be noble, but a school with limited supervision is not the time or place to be letting kids explore their social life, even if it’s a Web 2.0 social life.  So let them deal with their reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic, because that’s all they should be working on at their age anyway.

Lady Ada

It’s not well-known, but today is a day that most geek calendars include.  Today is Lady Ada Day, named after Ada Lovelace, recorded in history books as the first person to write a computer program.

There’s a giant roster of people who are supposed to be posting about a female figure in the tech industry today whom they admire as a “Modern Ada.”  Considering the long time it’s been since I managed to put in some posting time on here, I figured I would take this challenge up.

Me?  Well, I never was one for following memes (which I consider this to be), and I can’t think of a woman in the tech world I really admire.  Well, that, and I’m not one to play favorites.

Sure, I could talk about some of my fellow university students and the impressive work they’ve completed, but that would get boring to everyone who has no idea what school I attend.  (And I appreciate my privacy in that matter, thanks. )  And, to be honest, that would probably be creepy for anyone to read, most of all them.

I could always cheat and pull some random tech employee’s name out of a hat, but that wouldn’t work either.  Not only could I not name-drop any reasonably-well-known females in the tech industry, but there will probably be countless other blog posts drooling about how attractive/intelligent/rich/attractive said woman is, which makes picking anybody of note instantly a poor choice.

However, I think I have a solution.  Rather than write one more post about whatever useless tech journalist/CEO/evangelista the rest of the blogosphere is, what about taking a second to thank all of the female bloggers I know for doing their thing?  After all, in a loose definition, they’re pretty in-tune with technology themselves (even if their blogs let on otherwise).  Right?

So, with that said, I’m going to suggest you spend the rest of your Lady Ada day appreciating not just female software developers and company CEOs, but female bloggers too.  And you can start with those I have in my sidebar.  That’s right, tonight looks like a great night for you to check out Keri’s Curious Cloud, daigakudeki, Geekin’ Out, Rachelskirts, Snubs’ personal blog, Splendid Mishap, and maybe even mosey over to Brooke’s or Gretchen’s blogs if there’s time left.

(There are more, of course, but seeing as even I have not talked with everyone in the universe yet, it’ll have to do.  Also, I should probably do some housecleaning, because there are a few stale links in my sidebar.)

I’ll admit:  Skittles rank pretty high on my list of treats.    I’ve been known to cough up a few dollars at a time for those colorful candies without too much thought about what they might be using that money for.  After being directed to their “new website” today via Twitter (thanks to Keri from Curious Cloud), I have since been considering a boycott. Why?

This is what you get greeted with when you first visit the new Skittles website. It's quite the warm welcome, isn't it?

Frankly, you should take a look for yourself so you can get a thorough firsthand experience of the horror, but to save you the torture, I’ll cover it with as much detail as possible.  Essentially, your first visit to the “redesigned” Skittles.com website requires you to fill out a form stating that you’re of an appropriate age (which they don’t explicitly state) and that you agree that you can’t hold Skittles responsible for anything you see.  Wait, what?

Getting past the age request (or, amusingly enough, looking to what’s behind it, as it loads in the background before you confirm that you’ve agreed to Skittles’ usage policy), you notice that you’ve been brought to Twitter’s search portal, where (of course) “Skittles” has been pre-entered for your enjoyment and there’s a floating Flash movie in the corner for you to use for navigation.  Flipping through the various options on the top of the panel, you quickly find out that the only reason Skittles.com seems to exist anymore is as a quick access station for Twitter (Home and Chatter pages), Facebook (Friends page), Wikipedia (Product Information page), Flickr (Media page), and YouTube (Media page).

And although I typically tend to blow by the idea myself without consideration (though I might have a little more of an excuse than a company), I don’t think the site design offers itself well to people with disabilities.  As I recall, Flash doesn’t cooperate well with screen readers, and the fact that the website is more or less a terrible mashup of every major social media platform with extra navigation doesn’t do too much to suggest they’ve taken this into consideration themselves.

No offense to Mars, Inc., but I can just as easily go to Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, or YouTube without any help from you (or that annoying Flash panel).  In my opinion, what they’ve done feels tacky, and I can’t help but make the assumption that someone’s cousin’s friend’s son got paid for this mess.  (“Bueller?”)  For future reference, here’s a hint:  When you’re a multimillion-dollar company, you don’t skimp on your advertising and presence budget.

I wonder how many other people are making the same face that this gentleman and I are sharing.  It’s quite becoming, isn’t it?