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august 1st, 2009? Really? I am not a blogger.

The Internet is basically a simple idea: let computers talk to each other. I think one of the most interesting things about this is how it has enabled people to do things that were basically impossible before we connected computers together. There are several  examples that i think are really interesting, but here is one that you have probably seen before, but you might not know about:the reCAPTCHA.

You have seen this before…it’s the challenge that web sites give you to type in some words to make sure your not a computer trying to spam or open fake accounts. But a particular implementation of it (the one called reCAPTCHA) looks like this:

This variation is uniqe from a lot of others. Each of the words you have to type in are pictures of scans from old texts (like old editions of The New York Times for example). Basically the pages have been scanned and a computer program is trying to figure out what all the words are so it can be stored, searched, etc. The problem is tha sometimes the computer can’t read the words. People however are a lot better at figuring out what hard to read words are then computers. Enter the reCAPTCHA.  Of the two words in the reCAPTCHA the computer only knows one, that is the one it is using to make sure you are really a person. It does not know the second word, but when you type it in it stores you answer in a database, after time lots of people have answered that word and the program can know with certainty what the word is (you can test this, go to a site with a reCAPTCHA and try and guess which word the computer does not know, (its usually the one that is hard to read), and type it in wrong. Type the other one in right and it will still let you by. Of course, you are adding bad data to the database…so be sure and feel guilty). There is more info about this here.

I think this is interesting for several reasons. First, before the Internet the only way to do something like this was to pay people or find volunteers to do it manually. Which would work, but would be expensive and time consuming. But by using the network you can get a lot of people involved and make it more efficient. The second thing that is interesting is that it makes a task serve double duty without adding any burden. If a site needs to challenge a user to see if they are human having them type jumbled text is a good way to do it…so people are always going to be typing jumbled text. connecting that text to a useful task does not add to the time it takes to complete the test (or adds very little), but makes it so a previously sort of useful act becomes more useful. Of course none of this is new (see SETI@home) …i think the really interesting thing about it is that people don’t even realize it is going on, they are just typing words into the browser.

There are lots of example of this. Fold.it i think is really interesting (more info here) And of course SETI@home, which was one of the first big implementaions of this idea, and is currently one of the largest.

I recently watched a nice little debate on some message boards, a classic school yard shouting match complete with name calling. It ended with one of them basically saying “well, at least i got your attention, thanks for the input.” Who cares if you got their attention. You can get their attention by hitting them in the face., but that does not lead to a good conversation, or new ideas, or compromise, or dialogue or anything worthwhile.

…so all the people who don’t read this blog will have something to read

My father just joined twitter. So, i was thinking, how could twitter be useful to my dad? The fist thing of course would be to get the right tools (tweet deck or similar), rather then trying to use twitter.com. Second is finding people in his field (programming and networking) who have useful and interesting things to say and following them.

Then, i was thinking what could he do past that? How could twitter become helpful to his department (IT) within his school? A few quick thoughts:

• set up @jbu_helpdesk for students to report problems, and to learn about issues (outages, maintenance, etc)
• set up @jbu_ideas for students to give ideas about how IT stuff could be improved or made more efffective.
• set up some always running searches to watch for jbu related comments. If somebody says “i hate it when the printers at jbu dont work” they can respond and figure out the problem.
• how about setting up @jbu_print and writing a program so that students could direct message an amount and a code and have that amount added to their printing account

just a few quick ideas

First, I think at its core it basically means the a big celebrity with a big effort (and some bribes along the way) can get a bunch of people to listen to him. New tool, some song. Im not sure why anyone thinks this is symbolic of power to the little man. Aston is just as much a part of a big media machine as anybody else. I think overall all it shows that personality and perception are really important in getting attention. From reading comments it seems like a lot of people felt like they could stick it to the man by following Ashton…they were making a statement about something. Overall, its hard for me not to buy into this great line from a forum: “Forget the whale. It’s shark jumping time.”

Dear Exxon,

Perhaps you are right. Perhaps global warming is just a big scare and we have plenty of oil to last for years and years to come. In some ways i hope your right.

Please take your $31 billion and technical expertise and start figuring out some alternatives to oil, you can even take 60 years to do it. It will work out great. If your right you will be poised to phase out of oil just as when you predict that we will be running out, and you will have the next great thing. If your wrong, at least you have a head start, you will be better off then you would be if you did nothing, and it wont take you long to to bring your work to market. Either way you end up in a good spot, and you just might save the world.

I know twitter is important to nlr now. Why? Today  somebody contacted us through twitter. Not email, not phone, not fax..twitter.

Im going to show off my twitter newness:

I have a little twitter question: Who should @new_life_ranch follow? Its easy  for me to figure out who i should follow on my personal twitter account (i just decide…). But @new_life_ranch is different. Its not me, its an organization.

Right now i have 3 schools of though:

follow everyone who follows @nlr. I like this because it lets people know we want to connect with them, the conversational aspect of twitter, if you want to engage with people following them is part of that.  I dont like it because the reality is i will never actually keep up with the (potential) stream, so why fake it? Ill end up following lots of spammers.

Follow some people. I thought about only following other organizations that we have some sort of relationship with (churches, dayspring, other camps).

Follow nobody.  what i like: it keeps things simple. If people want to contact us through twitter they can @reply and DM, so its not like we would be cutting ourselves off completely. There is no chance i will insult somebody (i have been coming for 10 years, how come you followed that spam guy but not me?) what i dont like: its cold, and not very relational…and camp is inherently relational. Some people may be turned off by us not following them.

I did an informal organization survey and people are all over the board on this. Some organizations follow some, all and none. And there is some conversation about this:

http://www.twitip.com/why-following-too-many-people-will-cost-you/

http://www.twitip.com/how-to-follow-alot-of-people-on-twitter-and-still-be-engaging-using-tweetdeck/

Most of the conversation is focus on individuals (or individuals who are brands, like Chris Brogan)

Right now im leaning toward following everybody, but being willing to unfollow if they are clearly just looking for traffic. Then just checking in with the stream every now and then to see if there is something to engage in. And of course be very engaged when people to talk directly to our about nlr

I would love to hear thoughts on this. Where am i wrong? where am i right? If you follow an organization what are your exceptions for how they will interact with you? Do you feel they are disengaged if they dont follow you back?

Dear Bank of America. You will notice i have a $0.21 credit on my card. I would like to collect my 34%  continuously compounding interest please. Just put it back in my account. You can keep my $0.21 as long as you want.