Cow’s Blog

June 30th, 2008

photo: *L*u*z*a*

There is some fascinating research from Michigan State University about the use of online social networking sites by college students and the effect on their social capital. For non-economists, social capital is one of the three types of capital or “wealth”. The other two types are physical capital (what you own e.g. a computer, machines, money) and human capital (skills, experience). The third type of capital is your social connections - or social capital.

The study found that Facebook allows people to keep in contact with communities more efficiently, hence increasing their social capital. The authors of the study wrote, “Social capital has been linked to a variety of positive social outcomes, such as better public health, lower crime rates, and more efficient financial markets.” In addition, there was a correlation between Facebook usage and psychological well-being.

Of course, Facebook started off as a social networking site for college students only. Hence, it encouraged people to develop their relationships with people within their local college communities and people who they know offline which is more useful social capital than that which would be gained through forums and sites such as Digg.

photo: Kate_A

The study goes on to look at two different types of social capital: bonding (cementing networks of homogenous groups of people) and bridging (social networks of socially heterogeneous groups of people). The argument is that some types of social capital are bad: criminal gangs, racist and extremist groups have high levels of bonding capital. The study found that Facebook tends to generate the good type of social capital: bridging.

Perhaps my criticism of the study is how it can be shown that Facebook causes an increase in social capital. To me, it seems pretty likely also that people with greater social capital will be more likely to sign up to Facebook.

But it’s certainly an interesting study. There certainly hasn’t been much study in the general area but I think it’s an area which needs studying: just as the web allowed us to enhance our human capital by learning more about different kinds of things, the social web will allow us to enhance social capital.

The “social web” may have drastic implications for our society and economy.

• Economics , Facebook , Internet , Science , Web 2.0
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June 24th, 2008

Please accept my apologies for the third successive post about Facebook!

I wanted to show off a proof of concept I’ve developed of using Facebook as an identity system for your blog. The proof of concept doesn’t run on a real blog system - that is simply to keep it simple and because I didn’t want to spend a lot of time with the ins and outs of Wordpress. I can see no reason why it couldn’t be adapted to integrate with Wordpress/Drupal or whatever.

How does it work?

• You’re on the blog page and you wish to make a comment.
• You click on a link which takes you to the Facebook webpage.
• If you haven’t before used your Facebook identity on this application before, you’ll be asked to give permission for it to access your personal information.
• You are returned to the blog page, now logged in with your facebook identity.

Total development time was about 1 hour, took about 50 lines of code. If anybody is interested, I can open source the PHP source code.

As far as I can see, it follows the platform terms of use. The only information which my proof of concept has access to is your name and the URL of your Facebook avatar. This information is not stored except with your expressed consent (e.g. you post a comment).

Pop over to the proof of concept and feel free to login or to post a comment to try it out.

• Facebook , Internet , Web 2.0 , Web Development
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June 14th, 2008

Two fantastic visualisations of emotion today which may serve as inspiration for some of art, writing or perhaps even webpage designs.

We Feel Fine

We Feel Fine scours the internet for human feelings every ten minutes. According to their website, they use sources “including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google”. They then analysewhat is written in the blogs for “I feel” or “I am feeling” and do further analysis/crawling around the website to pick up information on the type of feeling which is being felt as well as the age and geographical location of the author.

The applet on the website then generates a “emotion cloud”. Try it out.

Getty Images Moodstream

Moodstream is a visual brainstorming tool. Choose from 6 presets or select your own from various parameters such as happy/sad, calm/lively, humourous/serious, nostalgic/contemporary, warm/cool. The applet finds music, images and videos and combines them to deliver that image. It’s designed to be a take you in inspired and unexpected directions.

• Cool Stuff , Internet
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June 10th, 2008

photo: _StaR_DusT_

Theres some really interesting research In May’s Scientific American about the possible health benefits of blogging.

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery.

This comes just a month after the New York Times published an article talking about the poor working conditions often enjoyed by bloggers and the stress that bloggers could be put under.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

…

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

photo: flattop341

Two seemingly contradicting articles perhaps? To me, the two articles seem to describe different types of blogging. I believe the first article argues that blogging for yourself and for fun is beneficial. It’s therapeutic and you’re not worrying about the number of posts you need to make in a day or how many readers each post gets.

The second article argues that blogging for profit is very stressful and damaging to your lifestyle. I think it makes sense: as a technology blogger you’re essentially competiting with all the big tech websites such as Cnet and Gizmodo and worrying whether you’ll get your article to Digg before everyone else. And of course everything moves really quickly on the internet.

In the end, I think it all comes down to a work-life balance. If you want to blog for profit, there is a certain point where you must let go and employ somebody else to contribute to your blog: perhaps from a different part of the world or a different time zone. One blogger is never going to be able to match the large technology companies for size or speed. It’s not easy to earn money from blogging: otherwise everyone would be doing it.

photo: arquera

I’d personally hate to be a professional blogger. The whole idea of having to spend a lot of time submitting to Digg and having to spend excessive amounts of time on the internet just doesn’t appeal to me. The very nature of blogging means it tends to happen at home making it very hard to get that correct work-life balance.

Saying that, I’ve recently introduced Google AdSense onto my blog archives. As a cash strapped student, any additional money I earn and which can go towards tuition fees is very welcome and very needed. It’s certainly not a huge amount of money and I’d be lying if I said it took no work to achieve even that. The way I see it: I’ve been blogging for 3 years and my blog income is very unremarkable. I couldn’t even begin to wonder how much work it would take to earn a living from it.

• Blog , Google , Internet
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June 5th, 2008

I remember a few years ago receiving a copy of Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee as a gift. Tim Berners-Lee is of course the inventor of the World Wide Web and is a real hero of mine. This is a fascinating book about the events which lead up to the invention of the web.

Tim Berners-Lee graduated in physics and created a programme called Enquire at CERN. The programme stored relationships between scientists at CERN, their projects and their contact details. In fact, it sounds very much like what wikis do today.

He discusses the launch of the first page on the web, the different protocols and the concept of URLs, the spread in popularity across the globe, early web browsers and the launch of the W3C web standards consortium.

In the last half of the book, he discusses what he saw as the future of the web: the social and eventually the semantic web. Although the book was written in 2000 at the height of the dotcom boom, it is interesting that this vision is only becoming realised today with the rapid explosion in social networking websites over the last year or so. The semantic web still looks like it’ll be a few years away but DBPedia might be one site to watch.

I was amused when I visited Switzerland a few years ago to see CERN advertising itself as the place where the World Wide Web was invented. No, never mind the physics. After reading the book, I found out that the people at CERN weren’t particularly enthusiastic about the web to begin with and I feel CERN may be slightly exaggerating their role in the development of the web.

Even though this book is reaching a decade old, it’s still a fantastic account of how the web came about. If you’re interested in the web as a whole and where it might go in the future, this is still one to read. I’m sure history students will be studying this text in 100 years time.

You can buy the book from Amazon.com (US) or Amazon.co.uk (UK).

• Books , Internet , Reviews , Web 2.0 , Web Development
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June 2nd, 2008

A big headache for web developers is testing websites in different versions of Internet Explorer. In Windows you can only have one copy of Internet Explorer installed.

To get around this limitation, some developers use IECapture which takes a screenshot of your webpage in Internet Explorer. It’s great for a quick test but it’s impractical during development: you can only see part of the page and if doesn’t help you debug anything.

Another option is to use Microsoft’s virtual machine or the Standalone IE program.

A little application called IETester can simplify the process. It features the rendering engines for IE 5.5, IE 6, IE7 and IE8. You can open up a tab for each rendering engine, hence switching between different rendering engines seamlessly. It also allows you to split the view and to see your website in the different rendering engines at once.

An interesting user interface design too… An odd blend of Firefox 2 icons with an Office 2007 ribbon.

• Browsers , Internet , Microsoft , Web Development
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June 1st, 2008

I’ve noticed a big trend over the last few years. Instead of people sending birthday and christmas greeting cards, people have taken to sending e-cards instead.

Even more recently, people have switched to sending birthday “wall posts” on Facebook rather than e-cards. I logged on this morning to send one of my friends a birthday “wall post” to find out I was actually beaten by 9 other people, one of whom had obviously stayed up until midnight to be the first person to say happy birthday! From the looks of it, I think a lot of people seem to do this rather than sending paper cards! I’ll admit to doing it… it seems like a lot of effort to pop down to the local Clintons Cards and then work out which address to send it to and how much it’d cost.

I must say though, it still much prefer to recieve paper cards. There just seems to be something that makes it a lot more special and fun. Or perhaps a bit more heartfelt when they also contain a personal message.

I do still make the effort to write personalised paper cards for my closest friends. But I’d like to put this question out: do you prefer to recieve paper cards over electronic ones? Is it worth continuing to handwrite your cards or is a birthday greeting still a birthday greeting whether it was delivered by a postman or electrons?

• Internet
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May 25th, 2008

photo: Randy Son Of Robert

The Economist has a really good leader this week about Computers and the environment. It is estimated that data centres consumed 0.6% of the world’s electricity in 2000 increasing to 1% by 2005. Data centres are responsible for more CO2 emissions than Argentina or the Netherlands and it is estimated that the carbon footprint of cloud computing will be greater than that of aviation in 10 years.

The corollary of more computing in the sky is more and bigger data centres on earth. These are warehouses packed with humming electronic gear, and in particular thousands of servers, the powerful computers that crunch and dish up data. The biggest facilities are the size of half a dozen football pitches and house as many as 80,000 servers (see article). They are huge energy hogs: in America alone, according to the country’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), data centres already account for 1.5% of electricity consumption.

photo: nattu

There was an interesting analysis at the end of 2006 about the energy consumption of Second Life avatars. Second Life ran 4,000 servers at full power 24/7 and there was an average of 10,000 to 15,000 avatars in Second Life at one time. The annualised power consumption was estimated to be 1,752 kWh. This compares to a worldwide average of 2,436 kWh per year. This means the energy consumption of a second life avatar is roughly the same as a real person. Of course, in developed countries most people consume nearly 8,000 kWh so our digital equivalents are much less power hungry, but it’s still a significant figure. Food for thought perhaps.

• Environment , Internet
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May 9th, 2008

photo: Thomas Hawk

I don’t think I’m alone in having difficulties inventing strong and secure but unique and memorable passwords for every website. The problem has really exploded recently as I’ve started to do more online shopping making it even more important to keep all my accounts secure.

I found out about the following technique to choose strong and memorable passwords today and I think it’s really good.

A good technique for choosing a password is to:
Choose a phrase between 8 and 16 words long that will be easy to remember. You can include names and numbers too.

Take the first letter of each word in order, including any numbers, capital letters or punctuation. This then becomes your new password.

For example:

Choosing the phrase: ‘My pet dog’s first name is Rex!’ would result in the password: MpdfniR!

or the phrase: ‘My sister Peg is 24 years old’ would give the password: MsPi24yo

Choosing a password in this way produces a password which should be easy to remember, but cannot easily be guessed. With practice, you should be able to choose phrases which provide the required number of different character types.

You can choose words and associations which are relevant to the site you may be visiting. Say Amazon.com - you might associate that with the environment and therefore one of Gandhi’s sayings: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.” By taking the first part of his quote and applying the quoted method, you might have a password like “Epe2semn,“.

I think by more or less any measure, this password is pretty secure. It contains a mixture of uppercase and lowercase characters, numerical characters as well as punctuation.

Some scientific research on this method is detailed in a Cambridge University paper “The memorability and security of passwords - some empirical results” (2000).

• Internet , Science
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April 13th, 2008

The Economist has a really good special report regarding wireless technology and how it’s changing the way we live. There are some really interesting stories in this report: about being nomads, labour movement and commuting, how we’re likely to get closer to family and friends but more distant from strangers, new architecture, location-based mobile services, grass roots democracy and advocacy and effects on our culture: from language to dumping someone via your Facebook relationship status.

Interesting points:

• Humans used to live in cultures where they would have one place where they work and play. Blacksmiths, farmers, etc. all worked from home. With industrialisation came the separation of the home and the workplace. The new “nomad” culture could see a shift back to places where we both work and play.
• Buildings are likely to be built as more open spaces, not with a defined purpose but a defined character or etiquette. For example, you’ll be able to log on to your work from anywhere: but you have a choice of whether you want to work from a quiet library or a cosy coffee bar.
• When you’re in a meeting with somebody, what’s the etiquette of what to do when they answer the phone? You can’t look like you’re eavesdropping in on the conversation, so most likely you’ll feign focus on something like your own mobile phone.
• Researchers in America have developed a system with a network of mobile phones equipped with radiation detectors. In the event of somebody carrying a “dirty bomb”, the detectors on the phones will detect the radiation. When data from many mobile phones is collected, authorities can tell from the intensity of the radiation on different phones where the radioactive source is. Intel has mentioned detectors for carbon monoxide, pollen, temperature and more.
• There is a trend that young people are micro-managing their own lives using their phone to avoid having to make a fixed commitment to a certain person at a certain time.
• With SMS messaging, predictive texting and so on, language has been evolving in a multitude different ways. This is IMO a good thing… if language doesn’t adapt and new words don’t come, you can’t express new ideas. But not everyone is such a big fan.

• Internet , Mobile , Web 2.0
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