Former Golden Girl and definitely not-the-typical Saturday Night Live host, Betty White actually *was* the host of last night's show, mainly because of an Internet campaign that started on Facebook. Here's an article that details some other examples of Internet campaigns affecting pop culture.
I haven't done any freelance writing (the kind that pays anyhow!) for quite awhile but through an old high school friend who works in magazine publishing, recently ended up with an assignment to write a profile of a world champion female kick boxer who happens to work in my hometown.
I did the interview at the gym she attends in downtown Regina (who knew we had an MMA gym here? Not me!) and took one photo. The woman I profiled is shown sparring with one of the other students in the middle of this picture.
If I can get permission, I'll post or link to the article when it's published.
Lately, Facebook
has been giving an even stronger impression than ever before (if that's
even possible) that their early appeal as the one social web site which
gave you total control over your information and your privacy is on its
way to the dustbin of history as they try to establish an even more
dominant position online by sharing and connecting more and more user
information which was previously private.
Facebook's
new social features secretly adds apps to your profile (PC World – this story
has been amended to say that this was due to a “bug” but I think
previously, Facebook has used this same reason to backtrack when it was
obvious they were testing the waters on something that would be
controversial.)
If Google was
smart, they would re-jigger Orkut, give it a much
better name and promote the hell out of it (top search result for every
search you do?) to try and take market share from Facebook at this
critical point in the social networking wars.
If there was an easy way
to jump and Orkut somewhat mirrored Facebook's features, I think I'd
seriously consider making the jump. But barring that, I'm really
thinking about giving my account a good pruning at the minimum.
I'm not ashamed of too
much I have on there but at the same time, I might not want every
single person doing a web search for “Jason Hammond” to know I'm a fan
of say, Stampede Wrestling as well as a supporter of gay marriage. Who
knows what people
might infer?
I have no doubt
that Google is no less dangerous than Facebook as a single entity of
power online. But they are much less blatantly in your face about it!
The names of your own generation sound too ordinary, your parents' too
boring, your grandparents' too old. But by the time you make it back to
your great-grandparents' names, things start to perk up. You've never
known a young Vivian or Julius, so those names sound fresh to you.
How many times have you been reading a book, come across a great quote and then, unless you're really analdiligent and somehow transcribed it, ended up forgetting all about it? I've always thought that the tipping point for e-books would be something that easily allowed you to track these quotes as you came across them. (Do me a favour and go read that old blog entry because man, it's prescient when you hear what I'm about to say next!)
And now, Amazon has released just such a feature for Kindle owners which track both the most highlighted books and individual passages from those books – with both all-time and recently highlighted lists for both books and passages.
Arguments rage on the Metafilter thread where I found this story about how much of an invasion of privacy this is and if its worse than the tracking Amazon does with any surfing you do on their site or what any other major Internet site does.
But overall, I think it's pretty cool. It might even become a new way to do a Coles notes-type speed reading of books that say, some blogger recommends but that you haven't got time to read for yourself. They don't have all the features I suggested in my earlier blog post (tagging, favouriting) but if that happens, look out!
Now, the biggest hurdle is that the Kindle isn't library friendly. I know I could never afford to actually buy copies – digital or dead tree – of every book I read. But some suggest that the Kindle could create a business model that could even replace public libraries! (Search for “public library” to find comment from Josh.)
Everybody's probably familiar with the sad story of Tori Stafford, the young girl from Woodstock, Ontario who was abducted and killed last year.
Recently, some new detail has apparently come to light but the judge has imposed a publication ban meaning no Canadian media can cover this aspect of the trial.
…the practical reality is that in the Internet age, trying to stop the
dissemination of information revealed in open court is impractical.
Indeed, placing limits on traditional, responsible media may be
counterproductive, as the only information available to the public will
be incomplete and rife with speculation and rumour.
As the Globe & Mail says, all a publication ban does is give free reign for anyone with an Internet connection to add their speculation to the mix (hi! ) or, with a couple carefully chosen keywords, even profit from the lurid interest. Some Canadian media outlets are doing the best they can to work within the ban, hypothetically musing their way through their reports.
A publication ban is doubly useless in the Internet age when a blogger OR a news outlet just across the US border in Buffalo or Cleveland could publish the details without any sanction as was frequently the case during the Karla Homolka trial.
Publication bans are even more useless in less sensationalistic circumstances. In the past, media have been prevented from revealing national election results from the east until polls have closed in the west. But again, anybody with an Internet connection and a modicum of technical knowledge could find out what was going on before going to cast their vote…as if enough people would ever be paying enough attention or change their vote significantly if they *did* see results for it to make a difference.
Finally, just as with the attention drawn by banned books pushing the questionable item to the top of the bestseller lists, a publication ban only serves to shine a light on information that would've likely made little more than a ripple otherwise.
The facts get distorted. This is going to snowball to epic proportions
and disgustingness. Really, I don’t understand how they’ll manage to
enforce hush-hushness. I’ve been going on Facebook all day to see if
anybody has posted anything about it. That’s so easy to do now, just put
up an anonymous page and say what you like. How are they going to stop
that? It’s impossible to keep secrets in this day and age.”
I rediscovered this this box in the garage recently and Pace was *very* excited to get so many “new” toys all at once!
For Pace, it's new but for me, this box contains so many childhood memories. I used to spend hours, not just re-enacting Star Wars & GI Joe scenes but using the figures to simulate hockey games, wrestling matches and football games. I used to act out movies, TV shows and rock bands with these figures – some based on real shows or bands I'd seen but many times creating originals out of my head.
If you didn't hear, Blippy, a site that encouraged users to share details about their credit card purchases in another escalation of the TMI world of social networking, had a wee glitch where a few actual credit card numbers were indexed by Google, not just the details of what was purchased and for how much. (Who didn't see that coming?)
Yet another site taking the concept of over-sharing to new levels is failin.gs which asks (or rather helps you ask) “What is wrong with me?” then lets your friends and others in your social circle give constructive criticism on ways you could improve yourself.
I'm usually pretty quick to join whatever new Web 2.0 fads come along and I actually thought about giving fallin.gs a try just to see what kind of feedback I got. Then I thought – actually there are probably some things better left for a private performance review at work and/or the detailed performance reviews I sometimes get at home!
[Edit: The NYT has a story about formspring.me, another site that's similar to failin.gs and which is apparently quite the rage among teeangers right now, precisely because it allows anonymous criticism and attacks.]
) or, with 
