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Amanda French

Worldchanging | Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - 0 views

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    In response to the person who said in class that people who edit Wikipedia "have a lot of time on their hands" -- see this 2008 piece by Very Smart Guy and NYU professor Clay Shirky, who points out that editing Wikipedia is a more productive use of time than watching TV. Which, somehow, a lot of people also seem to have a lot of time to do. *** "I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?" I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system." So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years.""
mgotcher

Where do people get their news? - 0 views

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    Here's a recent article published in April about where people get their news.
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    That's useful, Milan, thanks. Note, though that it's not super-clear what "get" means in this context -- I'm sure a lot of people, like me, get their news from several of these sources. I get news from radio, the Web (including newspaper websites and Google News), and social media, and I'm not sure which of those sources is primary.
Emily Broadwater

The 25 Most Influential People on the Web - 1 views

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    Here is a good list of different people that are behind big sites on the internet.
Cameron Wall

JOMC 50 Internet History--People - 0 views

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    A list of some of some important people in the history of the Internet, just to give some ideas to anyone still thinking!
Emily Broadwater

Google Has Gone 'Dark': The Search Giant Just Ended Its Free Data And People Are Freaki... - 0 views

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    AP Late this month, Google went "dark" in terms of providing publishers with free information on which words led people searching in Google to click on their sites. The move came as Google seeks to reassure users following the NSA/PRISM domestic surveillance scandal.
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    Wow, I hadn't even heard about that, Emily. Terrific story. That's a bummer, though -- I use Google Analytics on some of my sites, though I probably should make more use of it, and it was always interesting to see what keywords people were using to get to my site. Sometimes the keywords were weird.
Taylor Kreinces

HowStuffWorks: "10 Differences Between Macs and PCs" - 0 views

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    This is a slide show about the differences between Apple computers and computers that are deemed "PCs". It compares everything from design to software. I thought it was interesting to see how people see these computers and what the actual difference between them were.
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    I see that both you and Marion have shared links from HowStuffWorks.com -- that site usually has pretty good information, especially for basic stuff. I find it interesting that they're classified as an "entertainment" site; they pay people a little (not much) to write the articles, and then they sell ads on the content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_stuff_works I know a guy who works there -- Jonathan Strickland. Great guy and great podcaster.
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    Interesting, Taylor, although I wish that article had a date on it. I bet it's a couple of years old: both Macs and PCs change a lot. Still, those differences still apply. Technically, of course, Macs are PCs, since PC stands for "Personal Computer," which a Mac is. But what can you do -- language is slippery.
Amanda French

Help and FAQ - W3C - 0 views

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     The World Wide Web Consortium's definition of the difference between the Web and the Internet is understandably technical. It annoys me that there's a typo in which "TCP/IP" is misspelled "TPC/IP". Way to confuse people. 
Amanda French

Dave Raggett's Introduction to HTML - 0 views

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    A nice, short, clear introduction to HTML, if you're interested in pursuing it further. Last revised 2005 -- even that long ago, most people weren't writing it by hand, but it continues to be useful to know how to do so if necessary.
Amanda French

First Look at Aaron Swartz Documentary 'The Internet's Own Boy' - 0 views

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    A couple of people wanted to do research on Aaron Swartz, who was arrested under the Computer Fraud Act for unauthorized use of MIT's network to download "all of JSTOR," presumably for rerelease onto the open web. Here's an article about a forthcoming documentary on him.
Amanda French

Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008: Clay Shirky | Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus - 0 views

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    Here's a tremendously engaging video of Clay Shirky giving the talk I just linked to about where people find the time to edit Wikipedia -- he thinks they probably stop watching TV. Which do you think is more productive? Another great quote from this piece: "So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought. And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television."
Claire Madison

Why Don't People Want to Read E-books on Tablets? - 0 views

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    Great article of why there is a drastic statistical decline in people reading e-books
Amanda French

Med Students Earn Credit by Editing Wikipedia Articles | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    Personally I don't think I've ever looked up a health topic on Wikipedia; I use WebMD for that. Which isn't crowdsourced, I don't think -- I think they pay people to write the content on WebMD. Still, nice idea to offer college credit!
Ellie Cattle

Scientific research: Looks good on paper | The Economist - 0 views

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    An article about a recent incident in China where a group of people were found to be selling fake scholarly articles to academics and producing fake medical journals for sale.
mgotcher

Some Interesting Alternatives to - 0 views

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    What application springs to mind when you think of creating visual aids to accompany your business presentation? For most people, it's Microsoft's PowerPoint. But that's certainly not the only game in town. Plenty of other tools and services are cooler, faster, easier to use, and-in almost all cases-less expensive.
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    What application springs to mind when you think of creating visual aids to accompany your business presentation? For most people, it's Microsoft's PowerPoint. But that's certainly not the only game in town. Plenty of other tools and services are cooler, faster, easier to use, and-in almost all cases-less expensive.
Rebecca Lee

Open Access Week: The Future of Libraries and Wikipedia - 0 views

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    I attended one of the events during Open Access Week about the future of libraries and Wikipedia. Jake Orlowitz, recipient of a Wikimedia Foundation Individual Engagement Grant, spoke about "The Wikipedia Library." The Wikipedia Library was a new project he founded in 2012 for the goal of connecting Wikipedia editors with the reliable information sources they need. In the first part of his presentation, he discussed much of what wikipedia is and how it is run. He basically summed up much of what most people don't know about wikipedia and a lot of assumptions that people make about how unreliable information on wikipedia is. Then he went on to discuss more about the wikipedia library and how it would benefit wikipedia editors with vital current reliable sources that they need to do their work. I thought the presentation given by the presenter was very informative and interesting. I learned more about wikipedia and how its more useful than I thought. The most interesting point he raised during his presentation were the benefits of the Wikipedia Library. The thought of connecting university libraries with the wikipedia library will present students and many others information that is reliable and easy to access. Many scholarly articles and information from databases we usually have to pay for will be available for universities to provide students at a much lower cost.
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    Thanks, Rebecca. I'll add 5 points to your Exam 2 grade.
Amanda French

1994/1995 Flatland BBS Menu Screen | Flickr - Photo Sharing! - 0 views

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    Okay, here's a picture that roughly approximates how people used to interact with the Internet before there was a Web. All through text, all through a CLI (command-line interface). I started grad school in 1992 and this is pretty much what we had. This too is what that 1988 Washington Post article is thinking of when it talks about Internet.
Laura Vazquez

Instagram turns on 'Photos of You' section for everyone, here's how to control the pict... - 0 views

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    Madalyn's presentation informed all of us on how Instagram started and about its founder, Kevin Systrom. This article explains to new feature of Instagram. Now your followers can view photos that other people have uploaded and you can be tagged in photos as well.
Rebecca Lee

How the Internet Has Changed the R.S.V.P. - 0 views

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    An interesting article from the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times about how the internet has changed the concept and attitudes of R.S.V.P viewed by people. With the modern R.S.V.P, the ability for a host or event producer to painlessly publicize his or her event to many people has replaced the meaning of a social contract.
Gordon Hall

Directory vs. Folder - 1 views

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    This link gives information on the difference between a directory and a folder. The reason I found this link so useful was because it outlines the difference between the two for Mac and PC users.
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    Congratulations, Gordon, on being the very first to post! :) I will say I'm not very impressed with the link, though -- it's a bit fuzzy on whether there is or is not a difference between a directory and a folder, except in a technical sense on Windows Vista. (I'd argue that in general there isn't, though I grant you there are special cases.) And you can't tell who wrote that piece, and it comes from the support database of a particular software company rather than from a site that's dedicated to explanations / teaching / learning / education. At least Wikipedia is deliberately trying to educate people, and it's better on this issue, I'd say, and provides a clearer argument that a directory is something structural in an OS whereas a folder is a visual "metaphor" for a collection of files, which may or may not be an actual directory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_(computing)#Folder_metaphor
Nathan Reinecke

20 Extensions Every Chrome User Must Try - 0 views

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    Mostly useful for people who use Chrome, but most of these undoubtedly have analogues or versions in Firefox. A lot of good extensions for news, productivity and research, plus some stuff that's just plain cool.
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    While this website is helpful, many of the apps do not seem to be useful to everyday browsing, excluding a few in the Education section of the article. Granted, I still went and downloaded a lot of those apps because, as Nathan said above me, they're pretty cool.
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    Browser extensions are definitely neat -- all the browsers have them now, pretty much. Firefox was the first browser to be extensible like this, so there tend to be a lot of extensions available for it. Zotero, which we're going to learn about next week, started out as a Firefox extension. I thought about defining "extension" in core concepts, but it's maybe a little more advanced than that. Extensions (also called "add-ons" and "plugins") are basically little apps that "plug in" to a big app.
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