Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be posting about my experiments here, as they’re not at all related to the topics I regularly discuss.  However, together with a little help from a friend or two, I’ve tried to poke and pry at people’s online habits with my past few tests.  What did I find?

The Birthday

Ah yes, my birthday was last week.  (Any and all birthday comments will be deleted and/or edited.)  Of course, only a few people even bothered to remember or acknowledge it (alright, so perhaps even the majority of my family didn’t care, but that’s beside the point).  For this experiment, I spent the two months prior scrubbing almost every reference to my age or birthday I could find from the Internet, well ahead of any search engine bots that may want to cache it as my birthday drew nearer.  The test?  To see whether people really rely that much on notifications from web forums or social networking sites to keep track of trivial facts like birthdays.

Granted, a birthday is nothing to be excited about, and in its own right might be considered useless or trivial information, depending on how well you know the person (and it’s more or less useless in an online perspective, but I digress).  And just to make things interesting, even after all of the information I removed (and now need to remember to re-add), I decided that I would cough up a few subtle hints.  (Alright, maybe my definition of ’subtle’ is skewed, but I’m not going to argue that point here.)  Net results:  A single congratulatory tweet (and what probably would have amounted to a second had I qualified a number in one of my tweets), one response via Skype after making it almost painfully obvious (you know who you are), and absolutely no response from any of 269 Facebook users friended with me (which is, admittedly, just a little pathetic).  All in all, a quiet great birthday by my standards (I don’t want the attention, so perhaps my motives were a little flawed…)

Now that I’ve confused you enough, let’s try to take all of that and try and sum it up into something simpler:  Apparently people find Facebook (and other social networking sites) suitable replacements for a calendar.  Admittedly, there might be some benefit in having your friends make sure THEIR birthday is correct rather than have you transcribe it into your agenda a week early, but ultimately anyone who could and/or should have remembered (by my expectations) failed.

The Bait

With my birthday said and done, a friend of mine suggested that we play with some heads on Facebook by intentionally leading people to think that my birthday was a day later than it actually was by coughing up the appropriate status messages and wall posts.  Again, not a single person took the bait and left anything resembling a birthday greeting.

The thing to note about this, though, is that the friend I worked on this with only shares a portion of my friends mutually, and so comparatively there’s a much smaller pool of people to attempt to draw from.

Facebook Link Check

As you might have surmised from the leading line of this post, I decided to try one more test with Facebook simply to see if anyone was paying attention.  The action was simple:  click a link to visit this website.  No URL shrinking, mentions of rewards, or anything - just a link to Two Slashes.  And even though it’s been about an hour and a half since I posted that link, people have clicked it at least a few times, including while they were in the middle of searching through other peoples’ photo albums (actually, there are two referral links already).

Since this experiment is more or less still in progress, I’ll come back to edit this post if anything interesting or unusual comes out of it, but I don’t think there’s going to be anything all that exciting to discuss.

On the other hand, though, this eagerness for people to visit my site without too many hints that I even control it demonstrates once again that people are blind to what could happen should one of their friends get phished and start sending out some spammy URLs.  Not just on Facebook, but anywhere in general.

Conclusions

All of this makes me think of a single line from Men In Black:

Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.

Well, from my experiences, I’d be willing to go so far as to say a single person is just as intelligent as the collective (and that’s stupid).  And that’s especially amusing to me following this short on why the Internet is making people more cognizant.

One of the first projects to get an upgrade is Rolling Paper, the nearly pointless little wallpaper-cycling utility I wrote eons ago to randomly swap wallpapers in a given time period, almost turning your Windows desktop into a picture frame.  (Hint:  If you’re looking to do that without any of the desktop icons in the way, you might want to check out HideIcons while you’re at it.)

While Rolling Paper hasn’t picked up any new features (I know, I need to fix that little one-folder problem…), it has picked up an important bugfix.  A bug that resulted from my stupidity and a bit of zealous copy-pasting with some of the settings code that made it impossible to use the software more than once or twice without manually rewriting the configuration every time you used it.  If you happen to be using it, you might want the update, available now on the Rolling Paper project page.

• “Why shouldn’t…”
• “Is it possible for…”
• “Where in the world…” *
• “Who can…”
• “Is this a…” and “Is this an…”

I suppose, in a sense, this is a reasonable way to gauge the intimate levels with which we as a culture seem to have lifted from the Internet.  Some of the types of search queries that are suggested are of the same caliber as those one might ask privately to someone such as a counselor, and many are quite surprising.  Other queries also suggest what some of the common thoughts and concerns of the public are; given that the U.S. presidential elections have just ended, it’s not surprising to see that a few of my images mention the candidates, voting, or the current economic instability.

The mere fact that people are willing to accept the advice of complete strangers, without qualification or question and as found by a search engine with little more intelligence than a walnut, and trusting enough to ask these questions of a headless, emotionless entity in the first place suggests both that people are too insecure with themselves and their peers to confide their deepest secrets in other human beings and that they believe that the research they glean for their issue from the Internet is the best help they can get given this insecurity.

With all of this in mind, it’s not hard to connect that this blind trust, if you will, is perhaps one of the reasons such problems as spyware and phishing even exist.  If people were trained not to have this trust, but instead more of a distrust for machine and what comes out of it (and as a result of this training, develop an attraction to the warmth and individual attention that defines humanity), we would be able to eliminate a vast majority of the “evils” afoot.  Such training might even teach people enough about their privacy that they won’t turn their social networking profiles into flagrant and public advertisements of their misdeeds.  (If such training were to include the repeated usage of my favorite quote (”Trust is a weakness.”), I would be impressed.)

As kids, there’s no doubt that one of your mother/stepmother/grandmother/guardian’s favorite things to say was, “Don’t talk to strangers.”  The computer, although at this point a staple of nearly every technologically advanced household, may not be an intelligent and sentient being to talk to, but people forget that their computer has conversations of its own.  And, based on some of those Google suggestions, it’s telling everyone some of the things you might not want publicized at any cost.

* Alright, I added this one mostly as a joke.  Interestingly enough though, the top result is NOT what I was expecting.

I find it interesting that AOL would attempt to play a humor card while they tout their own rusty horn, especially when you consider this is the same AOL that uses Google to power their search engine. Excuse me a second while I point out that this makes everyone at AOL look like a pack of three-year-olds without a babysitter and add myself to the numerous people who agree.

As someone who’s had rather interesting personal experiences with AOL over the past decade or so, I find their behavior here fairly lame.  Given those same experiences, though, I guess I can’t be too surprised.

I do have some words of advice for AOL, though (and I can think of a few others who can take something away from this as well, in a more generalized form, of course):

• When you’re trying to mock a company who may be trailing you in one area, it might be wise to consider whether you’re partners with them or not in another.  Nobody wants to do business when the only words you can say are, “I’m better than you,” especially when you seem to have forgotten that you’re not.
• Just because you’ve managed to beat someone to market with something as silly as an IM to SMS bridge doesn’t make you better.  I can’t exactly call most of Google’s offerings bloated, but I do suggest you go take a look at the whale you call your Internet portal and see how much fat you can trim out.  If it can’t function, I don’t care that it looks all glossy and shiny and can make little noises to notify me that somebody’s picking their nose.
• Perhaps there’s more to the Google branding than meets the eye, especially in professional terms.  Before you make a snide comment about Google only allowing users a Gmail domain, perhaps consider that nobody is going to use an address such as nicktabick@crazyforemail.com to conduct professional business.  (I find that address too stupid for personal use, either.  I also believe I’ve seen that address in my Spam folder before, but I digress…)
• If Halloween is a grand occasion to make fun of one of your partner/competitors, I wonder what Christmas is going to be like at the AOL offices this year.  However, for everyone’s sake, it might be better to ensure that the liquor, sugar, caffeine, and everything else that might get one of the press writers giddy is safely locked up lest someone posts a follow-up entry making fun of Time Warner.

Perhaps someone at AOL had a few too many candy bars before they came in for work (or, from the look of the timestamp on their post, on their lunch break).  Nice try, but next time around, use the sugar rush on something more productive - like decent software.

According to a draft of one of the Army’s latest reports, Twitter, GPS, and voice-changing software are among the newest and hippest tools in a terrorist’s arsenal.  Yes, that’s right, things you probably wouldn’t find your neighborhood technophile without.  (Alright, maybe the voice changer is a stretch…)  Given this, the typical “terrorist profile” must include compulsive tweeters who have a tendency to get lost and then use one of those toy voice-changing bullhorns to ask directions of random strangers.

Considering the ridicule the U.S. Armed Forces is probably facing for a lack of their common sense, I’ve decided to list off a few of my own believed “terrorist tools.”  These are things that probably should have made that list as well for the sake of completeness.

• Just as Twitter allows one to follow to-the-minute updates of what their friends are saying and doing, why couldn’t RSS FEEDS function in a similar manner?  After all, they’re more or less the same thing (without the social aspect).  Subscribed to a feed put forth by their superior, your terrorist can act on whatever orders he’s been sent in seconds.
• For things that aren’t text or would be better consumed client-side, BITTORRENT would be a plausible option.  WIth the BitTorrent protocol now featuring encryption, the ability to run through Tor (and other anonymous proxies), the infinite file size limit, and the lower distribution costs resulting from its use, it’s already a great method for distributing intelligence.  Combine that with the RSS feeds I mentioned above, and BitTorrent becomes the ultimate way to keep your undercover operatives fully informed.
• To prevent any information from being leaked to the world at large, a private virtual network would be a great way to make sure information stays “in the family.”  Therefore, tools like HAMACHI are terrorist tools as well.  In addition to allowing remote support or remote LAN matches in your favorite video game, Hamachi provides a great end-to-end encrypted virtual network perfect for those building blueprints.
• There’s nothing like immersive training to make sure the trainee knows what things are going to be like in the field.  The NINTENDO WII provides a reasonable platform for combat training, given that it’s a cheap motion-sensitive platform with plenty of combat-oriented accessories available from your local GameStop.  Who said the Wii was just for kids?

Considering I use Twitter, RSS feeds, BitTorrent, Hamachi, I’ve messed with GPS systems, and I’ve played the Nintendo Wii, I should probably be looking behind my back everywhere I go at this point, as should at least three-quarters of the company I keep, lest we be mistaken for some terrorist cell and wake up in a detention center for questioning.

@bomb Countdown 5 minutes.

Normally I wouldn’t care, but TechSpansion is a notable exception for their iSquint, VisualHub, and AudialHub applications for OS X, which are considered by many to be the best and easiest way to convert video and audio on the Mac platform and the inspiration for my previously-halted h.26easy project.

I wish Tyler the best, and hope that his future pursuits are fruitful.  And as for iSquint, VisualHub, and AudialHub, they will be missed.

I myself have taken advantage of this situation, adding the latest builds of Firefox, Thunderbird, Witty, and other products (some well-known, some off the beaten path) to my arsenal.  And I haven’t done this out of hopes that there won’t be problems, or simply because the new versions are “expected to fix outstanding bugs” (that’s a fringe benefit, people), but more so because the latest builds are increasingly and surprisingly mature and well-tested.  (And besides that, who could resist getting all of those new features ahead of the curve? )

At one point, the words “alpha”, “beta”, “testing”, and “development” (stop me anytime) scared people away from software and service simply because the connotation those words carried was one of buggy, incomplete, untested software.  While to some people, the meaning of these words has not changed (and I can think of “a few good reasons”™), these words are being turned into extraneous, meaningless descriptors of the applications everyone uses and loves, tacked into the name much in the same way Web 2.0 “dictates” misspelled words and dropped vowels.  (Flickr anyone?)

As Justin Cox so eagerly pointed out at the end of August, G-Mail has been in beta since it was announced, and Google doesn’t seem ready to remove the label just yet, either.  My point here is that even though the concept and implementation of G-Mail is littered with reminders of its perpetual development, it is still one of the most popular web-mail platforms available today in direct contradiction to the connotations of the “beta” label.

Google is not the only company riding the “always-in-development” bandwagon, either, but they’re definitely one of the most notable, given that they’ve taken beta software to an extreme.  According to this article, almost half of the projects they have their finger in are in some non-finalized state.

While many popular applications apply the “always-updating, always-improving” philosophy, it would be great to one day leave the computer running every night, and come back to find that my operating system has updated itself and made the experience better than it was the day before, with new features and bug fixes provided in a sort of seamless transition.  Unfortunately, I don’t think this is going to happen anytime soon because it doesn’t work too well with either of Microsoft or Apple’s business models, and I don’t see them changing their behavior anytime this decade.

Ah well, I can dream*, can’t I?

*Dreaming is in beta, with an anticipated final release date of <undetermined>.

First, of course, I need to explain the idea.  I’ve looked (albeit not as thoroughly as I probably should), and I don’t think I’ve found any IPTV show or podcast that centers around computer users and their questions.  Sure, shows like my own TechCentric, Hak.5, and even The Screen Savers took the occasional call-ins and e-mails, but ultimately they were airing pre-produced content that they had thought up on their own time.

I’m not as creative or well-funded as either of those latter two enterprises, but at the same time that also gives me the benefit of being able to say whatever I want to say without having to worry about losing sponsors or any of that other business-bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo any corporation or sponsored organization would be subjected to.

If you’ve skipped the previous two paragraphs, here’s the idea in short:  I’d like to start (”experiment with starting” might be a better term) a viewer-oriented vidcast answering a viewer question (or two) per episode.

This is where you come in.  Obviously, I can’t experiment with this without having questions, and in order to have questions I need to let everyone in on what I’m doing (or attempting to do).

Before I go any further, I’m going to try and lay down the following ground rules:

1. I’m not discussing religion. If you don’t get what that means, I’ll boil it down to mean that I’m not comparing X to Y and telling anyone that Y is better than X for reasons theta, beta, and alpha.  In popular usage, this would usually be referring to things like which browser/operating system/Linux distro is the best to use, but considering these are more opinion than technical, I’m not going to even put my toes in the water.
2. Be appropriate. I’m not interested in what porn sites you visited to cause whatever problem you’re having, and I’m sure nobody watching (my prediction is that this doesn’t even reach 3 people) is yearning to hear about what fetishes you have.  Keep it discrete or take it to someone with a privacy policy.
3. I am not your employer’s IT department. If you’re going to ask me questions about your work PC, you probably should be asking the friendly face on the fourth floor, not a kid with a video camera and no free time at school.  Not only will my tips possibly not work for you due to any settings your department has set you up with, but they may not be happy to hear of you tinkering with their carefully-controlled setup.  Which brings me to my next point…
4. Don’t expect episodes (if I decide to continue this experiment) to magically appear every few hours or days. As a college student, I’m already swamped in work, and add to that the content development for TechCentric, my fledgling attempt at a social life, and all the little other odds and ends I have in my daily routine, and you’ll notice that the free time left after all of the above (in which I would need to film, edit, and upload episodes) is actually negative.
5. I am not responsible if my tips result in more harm than good. I’m going to say what works for me (and should, theoretically, work for you).  However, I cannot be responsible for human error or the inevitable stupidity.  (And actually, if you toss me an e-mail full of blame, I might use it to publicly humiliate you.  Alright, maybe I wouldn’t…but you don’t know if I would make an exception… )
6. I have no budget. If your question is about something that requires me to pay $3,000 for product T, you’ll disturb fragile college budget U and cause me to fail to make my insurance payments V.  If the cost is somewhere in the ballpark of $10, I might go out and acquire whatever it is you’re asking about, but that will most likely be only if I get a decent viewer base and people decide that donations would be cool.
7. I reserve the right to filter questions. This one’s more to cover my behind than anything else, but I would rather pick questions that I can answer knowledgeably, that I have the resources to answer (i.e. Mac OS questions might be a little more difficult for me seeing as I don’t have a Mac on  hand) and that I feel might benefit a multitude of people.  If your question’s so detailed that the answer’s only going to apply to you, I’m going to skip it.  If I don’t pick you, I’m sorry.

For now, I have to figure out a distribution medium (either post videos to YouTube/Vimeo/insert-video-sharing-service-here, or go the full and involved way and put up a site with RSS feeds).  The first video or two will probably be posted here, however.  If you’d like to express your opinion or suggest something I’m overlooking on the matter, e-mail me.  I’ll also need a name (sorry, but I won’t be using Two Slashes for it no matter how many votes I get) and some cool graphics (i.e. logo for whatever name I end up with, lower thirds, and the like - I’m looking for at least some professionalism here).

For anyone worried about what’s happening with TechCentric, this is officially unrelated to and detached from TechCentric and I’m not looking to detract at all from the TC base we have going.  In fact, I hold TechCentric at a higher priority than this simply because it’s been the TechCentric crew’s ongoing pet project for the past several years in all of its forms.

Of course, I think that leaves me with one last loose end.  For now, go ahead and e-mail questions to the G-Mail account listed on the Contact page, but there’s a special requirement:  subject lines must start with “[question]” (exactly as written, but without the quotes).  This is more so I can set up a filter to set them aside in their own special pile, but it also means that the person asking the question isn’t as brain-dead as some of the people I’ve talked to in my life.  (Yes, I’d prefer if you had a head.)

I think that just about sums it up.  Let’s break the bottle and see where this goes.

And a special thanks to Calais for suggesting that the ideal tag for this post was “insurance payment.”  I kept it simply out of humor.

While Phelps was standing on a podium getting the reward for his efforts, a different kind of Olympic-style test of strength has been brewing here in the United States, a contest with plenty of records lining up to be broken of its own accord.  (And I really need to quit doing *#$&ty post introductions like this one.)

I don’t typically pay attention to politics; I don’t really care who’s President, Senator, Governor, or any one of the tens of other elected positions as long as there isn’t a significant impact to my life.  To me, one candidate is as good as another, especially if things work transparently and their actions (and misactions) don’t change the way I go about my daily business, and I have a reasonable expectation that whoever ends up elected is at least as well-qualified as I am for the office they’ve been elected into.

Take Bush for example; everyone (alright, myself included) has bashed him time and time again for the state of affairs in the Middle East.  I have no idea whether I would pretend nothing was happening or send in the troops, launch a few missiles, and have the entire Armed Forces deployed before lunch, and it’s my inability to make a knowledgeable and fair decision that makes him a better candidate for that office than I am.  If it weren’t for the fact that the media constantly bombards you with claims of his failure as a leader of this country (or the war stuff), he might never have even been seen.

This election year has things playing out a little differently than normal, however.  We have an African-American running for President (having nearly squeezed a nomination over the wife of a previous - and notorious - office-holder), and a female vice-presidential candidate, neither of which (to my knowledge) has ever won their respective seats in government.  (I don’t see any ladies on this list, do you?)

What this sounds like to me is not a vote merely for the sake of “exercising our right as Americans” but a popularity contest in the sense of which candidate you’d rather see being awarded a Guiness World Record and which “invisible barrier” will be broken for future elections, if they all haven’t already been shattered by the current candidates.

I would have taken the time here to analyze the scenarios of what would happen should a woman become President (either by vote or incapacitation), but the concepts of a “Presidentess” or the “First Gentleman” are too humorous for me to discuss seriously.

Don’t take me wrong when I mention that, once again, I don’t have enough information to say that either Obama or McCain is superior to the other, but someone has to have noticed that this is bigger than just a four-year vacation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it’s a chance for the prospective record-breakers to get more material for those bestselling autobiographies that are due to be released any day now (and will no doubt become required reading for at least one high school class due to their lessons in perseverance, dedication, or some other related but meaningless literary tripe).

Unless something motivates me to get off my sorry backside and register to vote (and then actually convince me to go to the polls on Election Day), I’m not going to have any more involvement in this election than retaining my right to the occasional rant.  That aside, it’s up to (the registered voters of) America to choose which recordmaker President/Vice-President they want to take office.

And by the way, someone can remove the parentheses from my keyboard now.  I won’t be needing them for a while.

Not to demean the award or anything, but I’m of two minds about the concept (neither probably what the people who came up with the award are looking for, sadly), and I might as well get everyone else’s opinion.

As you might have guessed, I can see similarities between this award making its rounds and the chain letters my mother ever-so-happily forwards (directly into my Spam folder, mind you ) or the tripe you might find on MySpace, sans the “death penalty” for not forwarding it to anyone.  (I hope Justin doesn’t have to stab me with a spork under a blue moon in the middle of November for not passing this on.)

I also think it’s a little ridiculous to single out just a few people when there are probably a ton who deserve recognition.  (Of course, the exact number is up to the post authors, but all the same it seems like people are going for two or three at a time.  Interestingly, though, the original site requests that you suggest five blogs.)  Favorites games never work out well, though, so why should people be asked to put them into the spotlight?

I add blogs (and other sites) to my blogroll if I think they’re worth your attention, not because I need a “finalists” list for games like this.  Also, I realize that my blogroll is a little on the longer side, but rest assured that just about everything on that list finds its way into my browsing a few times a day.  (And people say they have problems…)

People shouldn’t need to write up posts suggesting where their readers should check up next; that’s the role of the blogroll (or whatever they happen to call their links section, if they have one), and I think that’s a start as far as recognition is concerned.  (Response posts would be another form of recognition, but that’s a different animal for a different day.)

So, given that little rant, instead of me rolling the dice and having to choose from that expansive published list in my sidebar, how about you try visiting a few of the glorious links in my blogroll of your own accord.  They’re all winners in my book, and they may very well be in yours as well.

(On the other hand, though, there are some great opportunities for a “Six Degrees” game here.  I’m just not motivated enough to follow through with it, though.)

I don’t mean to sound rabid with this post, so I apologize if you’re offended or otherwise put off by what I’ve said, but I’m standing by it.