Ed's Tech Tips

Recently I have had to clean up "comment spam" in the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly blogazine. At first glance it looks harmless enough, but the comments do not add anything to the conversation. Here are some examples:

• This is a great article!
• This is a heartwarming article.
• Thanks, what an inspiring story.
• I really like the different viewpoints.
• These are interesting travel opportunities.
• And so on.

Then there is a web site link to a business offering a product or service for sale, such as running your car on water, travel agencies, or safety videos. This type of spam originally appeared in Internet guestbooks, where spammers repeatedly fill a guestbook with links to their own site and no relevant comment, to increase search engine rankings. If an actual comment is given it is often just "cool page", "nice website", or keywords of the spammed link. This ruined the idea of having a guestbook on many web sites. It was not worth the trouble to maintain.

Given all of the negative connotations of spam, I do not know why a legitimate business would use it to market themselves, which is why many don't, but there are still those that are lured by the low cost and big promises of spam marketing. However, it can easily backfire since many of these web sites and email addresses will be black listed by anti-spam site. 

I have a variety of measures in place to prevent spam, but Comment spam is difficult to prevent if human beings are the ones submitting it with benign messages.

If you want to learn more about how to avoid comment or blog spam check out the excellent article on Wikipedia which features numerous links.

I'm writing this blog post from within the new Flock 2 Beta web browser. I've written about before, because it included some cool features especially options pertaining to social networking. At the time I did not adopt it, because I was not that much into the social networking scene. However, I'm starting to use Facebook, Flickr, Delicious and Twitter more often via different applications or extensions with Firefox.

Flock has recently released the beta of version 2 of their social networking browser which is built on top of Firefox 3 and takes advantages of many benefits and improvements of Firefox while further integrating the applications I am finding myself using more and more.

The RSS reader is pretty nice and has links to blog, bookmark, email or Digg an article. From within Flock I can easily upload photos to Flickr, as well as follow Twitter in the sidebar, post an article to my blog or keep tabs on updates in Facebook without having to be on my Facebook page. Flock seamlessly brings all of these different services and much more within easy reach.

Read more at: Flock 2's Beta Edition: Good, And Only Getting Better - Open Source Blog - InformationWeek

Tags: web2.0, browser, flock, social networking

Wu-Tang Clan's RZA has partnered up with ChessPark.com to create WuChess.com, a different kind of chess site. From their About page:

Designed for chess enthusiasts addicted to hip-hop music, WuChess.com is the place where your favorite music, movies and celebs will be all while you get your game on. WuChess members will get exclusive offers such as MP3s you can't get anywhere else, playing a surprise celebrity guest, access to one of a kind video clips and many more surprises. This is hardcore chess with half the stuffiness.

WuChess understands that it is important that today's youth develop life strategy skills, so to help their efforts a portion of WuChess revenue will be donated to the Hip Hop Chess Federation's scholarship fund.

Unfortunately, the site is not free. It costs $48 a year, but given that chess unfortunately does not attract a large numbers of fans it is to be expected. However, it looks like an interesting community. I wish it was around when I started a chess club at my daughters' high school. You can read more about the site and RZA in a recent New York Times article. 

It has been said that "information is power" and now sites like OpenCongress are utilizing Web 2.0 Internet technologies to shift power to the masses and bring about a revolution in participatory politics by making it very easy to learn and follow what is happening in the halls of Congress. That may sound like a lot of hyperbole, but I do not think it is. The Internet is changing our democracy and hopefully for the better.

I've written about Barack Obama's web site and how effectively it has been used to create an online community that has motivated him to not accept public financing for his presidential campaign, because he has been able to reach out to millions of small donors via the Web.

From the OpenCongress About page:

OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.

For most people, finding out what's really happening in Congress is a daunting and time-consuming task. The legislative process is frequently arcane and closed-off from the public, resulting in frustration with Congress and apathy about politics.

Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists know what's really going on in Congress, but this important information rarely makes its way into the light. The official website of the library of Congress, Thomas, publishes the full text of bills, but we can do much more to inform ourselves and make our government accessible. Now, with OpenCongress, everyone can be an insider.

OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

OpenCongress brings together, for the first time in one place, all the best data on what's really happening in Congress:

• Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
• News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
• Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
• Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
• Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress.

There is even a Facebook Application to help you track bills through the House and Senate.

I am a fan of Mr. Potato Head and Indiana Jones, so for Fathers' Day I received the Taters of the Lost Ark version of Mr. Potato Head. "Complete with bullwhip and gold-colored idol in hand, this silly character can sport his jacket and fedora. Press and release the fedora to hear three different short segments from the “Indiana Jones” theme song – or hold it down to hear it play straight through."

Last week I received a new device, the AMOD AGL3080, that I think will really enhance our travel photo galleries. It is a GPS Photo Tracker that assist you with geotagging your pictures so that you can show exactly "where" you took a picture by recording the GPS coordinates or longitude and latitude of the location of where the picture was taken.

The device is relatively inexpensive considering what it does. It costs about $70 from Amazon. Not only is it one of the cheapest trackers, it is one of the few that is Mac compatible. It is the size of mobile pager, if you remember what those are. It takes three AAA batteries, has three LED lights on it and two buttons, a power button and a flag button.

To use it, you simply power it on, wait for the satellite icon to blink, clip it to your belt and then start taking pictures. Make sure that the clock on your camera is set correctly. You then come back to your computer and download your photos. In addition to iPhoto I like to use a free photo management application called JetPhoto. I use JetPhoto for all of the Alumnae Association photo galleries and use it to upload pictures to Fickr as well. There are versions of JetPhoto for Windows and Macs and it supports geotagging manually or with a device such as the AMOD AGL3080. After your pictures are imported into JetPhoto, you then connect the AMOD to your USB port and import the GPS file, which is a text file that contains line after line of time stamps and coordinates. No drivers are required and if you are using JetPhoto, you do not need to install any additional software.

JetPhoto synchronizes the location data with the time stamps on the pictures. You can view the photos on a map and easily tweak the locations which are for the most part accurate within a few feet or yards. You can press the flag button to flag a location where you shot a picture, but you do not have to and just let the software match the photos with the locations.

Jetphoto can export your geotagged photos to a Google map photo gallery or to KMZ or KML files which can then be imported into Google Earth. I took a walk around campus on Thursday and shot photos of various dorms, academic buildings and some buildings just off campus in South Hadley. Within minutes I had the images in a Google map photo gallery. The satellite photos are out of date. Since the images were taken, the new dorm has been constructed, the soccer fields and track have been rebuilt and the tennis courts by the lower pond no longer exist.

The purpose of buying the device is to use it during some of the Alumnae Association travel programs. In the past I have tried to get staff to manually map where photos were taken, but they could usually only generalize where they had been, whereas the AMOD will be able to pinpoint thier location down to the street corner they were standing on. By being able to map the photos, it will make them more interesting. I would anticipate that once camera manufacturers reach the practical limit of th enumber of megapixels they can squeeze into a photo sensor, they will start including GPS into their cameras, along with WiFi and Bluetooth. There are a couple examples, one from Ricoh and another from Navman, which is a combination GPS navigator and camera.

Here’s a Japanese TV show segment about an amazing bicycle parking tower in Tokyo with a robotic elevator that can automatically store and retrieve 9400 bikes. Itis safe, secure and fast. A bike was retrieved within 22 seconds. When do you think we will see something like this in the United States?

A bicycling idea that is more likely to catch on in America is a citywide bicycle program in Paris France, involving 10,600 bikes in a bid to cut gridlock and give citizens a greener way to get around town. The program, named Vélib — a blend of vélo (bike) and liberté — allows users to swipe their credit card and take and return a bike from one of 750 stations in the city. Already cities, such as, Boston, New York, Montreal and San Francisco are looking to replicate the concept. Learn more aout it in the video below:

Let me be up front, I am a Democrat and Obama supporter, as well as being a techno geek nerd. So, naturally I take notice of how my political party and candidates are making use of technology and the World Wide Web.

The Democrats are taking full advantage of the web. They have recently launched McCainpedia, a Wikipedia like site that details his political positions of the Republican candidate from a Democratic perspective. They are using Mediawiki, the same software used by Wikipedia.

The Democratic National Convention has an attractive web site built with an open source content management system called SilverStripe from New Zealand which I think might be a very promising CMS for the Alumnae Association web site. SilverStripe has a tightly integrated administrative back-end and a ton of built-in features, such as, a built-in image editor, support for development and production versions, a forms builder, web traffic reporting, searching, blogging, commenting, widgets, membership management, work-flow control, menu editor, shopping car, image gallery and much more. The drawbacks of the software are that it is relatively young and does not yet have the add-ons or community that Drupal, Joomla or Plone has, but they are off to a running start and are showing great potential.

It's great to see the Democratic party utilize open source software and when the Dems win back the White Office and additional seats in Congress, maybe the open source movement will be further championed in the federal government. One can dream, right?

I also reviewed the web sites of Obama, Clinton and McCain. I think Obama has an excellent site and is taking full advantage of what the web has to offer, more so than his opponents. He is on every major social network (Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, and Twitter) and then some that I was not aware of, such as Eons, BlackPlanet, Glee, MyBatanga, AsianAve,  and FaithBase which target certain social demographic or ethnic groups. I am not going to link to all of them. You can go to he Obama web site and scroll down to the lower right hand corner for the links.

There is even a my.barackobama.com social network component within the web site  where you can post your own blog, join groups, look up local events and find friends. You can even subscribe to notifications on your cell phone, as well as, download wallpapers and ring-tones.

Why do I share this with you? I think we can draw some inspiration from Obama's web site, not just politically, but technically for the Alumnae Association web site. I think they do a lot of things right which relate to the type of things we would like to do on our web site. The company behind the Obama web site is Blue State Digital. They use ExpressionEngine which is not open source, but is available in free and paid versions ($99.95 and up). 

I've been doing the Twitter thing, but my activity is sporadic. Sometimes I go days without posting anything. However, it is intesresting to read what others have to say. Still, I have managed to pick up a few "followers" - that is Twiiter-speak for people that subscribe to my Twitter postings.  One of my recent followers had a link to the following web site in her Twitter profile: Beedogs.com.

The site is about dogs in bee costumes or more precisely,  it "is the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes." This goes to show you that you can have a web site that is just about anything. This is just one particular humourous niche that I would not have thought of.