Tuesday, 5 August 2008
Why I succumbed to Twitter....
I avoided it for a long time – who needs another obsession? – but after the NLab Social Networks Conference, I decided I had to have a part of this, and yes it’s become a regular practice. I follow and am followed by various other people interested in social networks and online communities and I’m already seeing some interesting insights, being pointed to useful resources elsewhere on the Web and being caught up in new discussions both on Twitter and elsewhere (e.g., on blogs and mailing lists.
After comments by Andy Roberts and others on emint, here are some suggested rules for effective use of Twitter:I can see a lot of positive uses for Twitter over and above the simple “What are you doing now application”.
- Only follow people you find interesting.
- Use the Twitter search to find people (not the “invite people” – I find that’s a red herring and not the way to find people!)
- Ask questions or throw out any problems you’re grappling with. Use it like a “garden fence” for the eliterati.
- Use additional services like following a news or sports feed - you can then get that feed to your mobile via Twitter.
- Beware of getting a large feed sent to your mobile – the thing will keep you awake!
- Distributed problem solving
- Finding out a bit more about your contacts and facilitating closer relationships
- Keeping attendees at a conference informed before and after
- A quick way to keep members of a community or network in touch
- Alerts to web content (using short URLs)
- Learning prompts and alerts for learners on a course.
Labels: blogging, internet policy, moblogging, twitter, Web 2.0, web applications
posted by Helen Whitehead 10:44 AM
Sunday, 3 August 2008
Why you should always secure your wifi connection
It's amazing how often I am in places where I can find an unsecured wifi network - especially in the business sectors of cities where you'd think companies would know better. Here's the most cogent reason yet for making sure your personal or business wifi is properly secured:
Mumbai police raided the home of Kenneth Haywood, an American ex-pat, when his wifi was used to send an email taking responsibility for a terrorist outrage. The email address was created just ten minutes before it was sent, probably for exactly that purpose. Mr Haywood had no idea, one assumes, who was using his connection.
Of course some providers want to share and provide free wifi to as many people as possible as a service to the community. Worthy - they shouldn't have to suffer and are not responsible for who uses their wifi.Labels: internet policy, online identity, privacy, safety, security, wifi
posted by Helen Whitehead 12:20 PM
Thursday, 24 January 2008
80 Million Tiny Images
Here's a beautiful web project: 80 Million Tiny Images, a visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning, by Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus and William T. Freeman at MIT.
It's not just pretty, either: the project aims to use this massive dataset to train a computer to recognize objects within an image and to understand the scenes depicted in photographs. What's fascinating to me is the way the composite image comes out so familiar - colours of the earth, I suppose. This is despite the fact that each of the tiles in the "poster" represents a composite image of one of the 53,463 nouns (retrieved from WordNet) representing an average of about 140 images (a total of about 7,527,697).
Is it art, is it linguistics, or is it science? The answer of course, in the traditions of the best projects, is all of the above.Labels: digital art, image processing, internet policy, linguistics, web projects
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:04 AM
Monday, 29 October 2007
Links for week commencing 29th October - Copyright
Principles for user-generated content services
http://www.ugcprinciples.com
To protect copyright in services providing user-uploaded and user-generated audio and video content. It's good to see copyright being taken account of. But a shame that it's about commercial content and not that of the users themselves...
One thing that sometimes surprised me when I was working in HE was how little knowledge there was of copyright as it applies when people create their courses within institutional VLEs. Universities who employ permanent copyright specialists, usually within the library, are ahead of the game, and such specialists have a big job to do.
The JISC-SURF programme on 'Partnering on Copyright' covers mostly open access issues (we're back to institutional repositories!) rather than those of using copyrighted material within courses. But there is lots of useful information here. "This web site, created as part of the JISC-SURF 'Partnering On Copyright' programme, aims to contribute to a better understanding and awareness of copyright issues regarding OA through the provision of information resources for academic authors, HEI managers and librarians/institutional repository (IR) managers."
Here is an informative site from Leeds University on copyright
Links to information on copyright and IPR
Creative Commons UK
OK, everyone should have heard of this by now, but it's the appropriate copyright for the digital era. Excellent idea, and I must get around to putting it on all my sites! It allows you to share content with some rights reserved. I hadn't considered before the advantages of using a UK CC licence. Take a look.Labels: academia, copyright, HE, institutional repositories, internet policy, IPE, IPR, repository, research repository
posted by Helen Whitehead 8:53 AM
Monday, 14 May 2007
How Second Life could be a haven for terrorists...
From the Sunday Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/13/nternet13.xml
I'm pretty sure Linden Labs can find out where people are logging in from. But would they cooperate with US police let alone British police? So the watchdogs think it's dangerous.Labels: internet policy, second life, terrorism
posted by Helen Whitehead 9:08 AM
