Twitter: Put some status in status updates

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Friday, February 24, 2017.

Paragraph Symbol

Give me an extra character for every year that I’ve been with Twitter.

Another extra character for every tweet that gets retweeted more than a couple of hops outside my social circle.

Ten more characters if I #AskObama and he answers.

Etc.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Twitter: Put some status in status updates #etc #twitter A modest idea to fix Twitter without needing any blue checks. More relevant now than ever! )

Circles

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Friday, February 24, 2017.

 A Circle

I just got on Google+, and the Circles concept definitely moves the ball forward, but my heart sinks a little at having yet another disconnected social identity. It’s been said before, but it’s worth saying again – social networking needs to be an open, core internet standard like email. You can live on Facebook, Google, Twitter, wherever but your social graph should be independent of any specific service.

I don’t mean this in any (well, OK, a little) granola crunching open source way. Companies should compete to the death on their social graph implementation and added value. But the actual data on who your friends are should belong to you and should be both portable and interoperable. I should be able to friend someone on Google from within Facebook and share core items in both directions. If I get fed up of Facebook I should be able to move my graph and central identity elsewhere.

We’ve got OpenSocial, strangely not mentioned in the same breath as Google+, and Open Graph which is open for things but not people. Also FOAF, XUP, and other possible foundational standards. Of course the barriers here aren’t technical.

Altly wants to be Pepsi to Facebook’s Coke. I’m waiting to see what it tastes like, but it doesn’t sound like they’re itching to change the game.

Diaspora is an interesting project, but running instances (pods) of a social network is the wrong level of abstraction.

Of course ‘owning’ the graph is tremendously valuable and it’s hard to see Facebook giving this up anytime soon. If Google really don’t want to be evil they should use Google+ to liberate us from the tyranny of walled social gardens. Unless it turns out to be another Buzz or Wave in which case it’s down to us.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Circles #etc #google #facebook #twitter #socialgraph #opengraph #opensocial #foaf #xup #altly #diaspora #buzz #wave Did the Google+ Circles concept revolutionize social networking, and what we should have instead. )

International Date Line Longitude, Latitude Coordinates

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Thursday, June 30, 2022.

International Date Line

I’ve been working on an update to Catfood Earth. Several people have asked me to draw the International Date Line on the time zones layer but I’ve struggled to find a decent source for the coordinates of the line segments. I finally ended up manually digitizing the version of the line that appears on Wikipedia. The original is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported so I’m making the coordinates below available under the same license:

Longitude Latitude
180.0000 90.0000
180.0000 75.0000
-169.2500 67.7356
-169.2500 65.0189
170.0500 52.6863
180.0000 47.8353
180.0000 -0.9000
-159.6500 -0.9000
-159.6500 2.9000
-161.8500 2.9000
-161.8500 5.0000
-155.9500 5.0000
-150.6500 -7.8000
-150.6500 -10.0000
-156.0500 -10.0000
-156.0500 -7.8000
-178.0500 -7.80000
-172.7500 -15.0000
-172.7500 -45.0000
180.0000 -51.1815
180.0000 -90.0000

This looks great for Catfood Earth. Please take the coordinates with a pinch of salt if you’re designing a cruise missile guidance system or something.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: International Date Line Longitude, Latitude Coordinates #etc #internationaldataline Longitude and Latitude Coordinates for plotting the International Date Line, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. )

Apparently you can’t build an alternative to Facebook without Facebook integration…

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Wednesday, May 19, 2021.

Altly - We are working on an Alternative to Facebook

Text: We are working on an Alternative to Facebook. Thanks for reserving your username, we will email you when Altly launches. 1,096 people like this. Be the first of your friends.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Apparently you can’t build an alternative to Facebook without Facebook integration… #etc #altly #facebook Altly prepares to launch an alternative to Facebook... and it has a Like button! )

CAPTCHA advertising

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Friday, February 24, 2017.

Norton 360 CAPTCHA ad

It’s kind of clever because not only do you have to read the ad but you also have to type part of it in so their catch phrase is more likely to stick.

It’s mostly throw up in your mouth, because it takes a while to even figure out that this is a CAPTCHA and because you know that you could be digitizing books instead.

Spotted on boxbe, although some light Googling suggests that this has been around for a few years.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: CAPTCHA advertising #etc #captcha If you're going to make be solve a CAPTCHA please don't make it be advertising at the same time. )

Dog First Aid

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Thursday, November 12, 2015.

After decades of ethnographic and quantitative research into the medical skills of Canis lupis familiaris I can finally publish a detailed guide to canine medical lore:

  1. Lick it.
  2. If, for any reason, step 1 fails to work eat grass until you throw up.

Universities wishing to bestow an honorary DVM should contact me at @ithcwy.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Dog First Aid #etc #dogs A detailed guide to dog first aid (from the perspective of dogs, not vets). )

Extreme Environmentalism

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Wednesday, June 28, 2017.

Planet Earth destroyed by cosmic strings

Speaking of Gaia, I read Michael Lind’s Why we should embrace the end of human spaceflight on Salon yesterday with horror. He marshals a bunch of straw man arguments against humans in space, the worst of which is dismissing the threat of a planetary catastrophe:

“A sufficiently large asteroid or comet impact like the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs could do the job. But if a massive bolide threatened the Earth, we would send unmanned spacecraft, not Robert Duvall or Bruce Willis, to steer it away or destroy it.”

That’s a little complacent. Even if we ever get perfect asteroid defenses cracked you’ve still got to worry about cosmic strings, strangelets, radiation storms, Von Neumann probes, DNA hackers, the Yellowstone super volcano and anything shown on a Saturday afternoon on SyFi. All of our eggs are very much in one planetary basket.

Take the Gaia hypothesis to its ultimate conclusion: if the planet is a super-organism then humanity is the reproductive system. We’re the best bet to spread life beyond Earth and ensure its continued survival. The asteroid scenario may trigger panspermia but that would be for a lucky few bacteria, not Homo sapiens sapiens.

Colonizing space is difficult, expensive and for most people unappealing. But stop thinking about the planet you’re leaving to your children and start thinking about the universe you’re leaving to whatever our DNA based planetary ecosystem may evolve into.

A real environmentalist would focus on making this planet uninhabitable so we escape before it’s too late.

;)

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Extreme Environmentalism #etc #gaia #environmentalism #dna #vonneumann #syfi #yellowstone #radiation #panspermia #space A real environmentalist would focus on making this planet uninhabitable so we escape before it’s too late. )

Radio 4: Can I buy you a new hard drive?

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Thursday, November 12, 2015.

I love that Radio 4 is available outside the UK on iPlayer. It’s an essential link to home. But why, oh why, oh why is each program episode only available for a few days? It’s so frustrating to find an interesting looking series and then discover that it’s halfway through and you can’t listen to the first episodes.

BBC, I’d be happy to send you a new hard drive if that would help. It really can’t require that much space to keep the content around for more than a week.

While you’re at it: per-program RSS feeds and more podcasts please.

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(Published to the Fediverse as: Radio 4: Can I buy you a new hard drive? #etc #bbc #radio4 #rss #podcast #iplayer Why does Radio 4 only make programs available for such a short time? )

Is PAD dead?

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, November 6, 2022.

I’ve been a member of the Association of Software Professionals (née Shareware Professionals) for nearly ten years and I publish PAD files for most Catfood products. The idea is that PAD provides a standardized XML format for syndicating product information out to download sites. I used the ASPs PAD directory back in 2009 to analyze product information available in this format.

It used to be that download sites were a significant source of traffic and downloads, especially cnet’s Download.com. This just isn’t the case for me any more. I need to really massage Google Analytics to find any referral traffic from download sites. While I have PAD files available I no longer make any effort to promote them. Given a spare minute or two it’s far more effective to write a blog post.

Historically Download.com did a great job surfacing new products. They’ve shifted to emphasizing paid placements and the most popular so unless you’re a category killer (in a pre-defined category) it’s much harder to get traction. Lower tier download sites used to offer some SEO benefit but I really don’t see this any more as the sites have got wise to preserving their limited link juice.

Other than inbound marketing efforts my best source of traffic is creating Google Gadget versions of my products where appropriate. These provide independent value and link to the downloadable version for people who want more (a fusion of freemium and shareware).

Having got to the point of giving up on PAD I’m excited to see Ryan Smyth’s rallying cry in the introduction to a series on this topic on cynic.me:

“I’m going to once and for all shut up the many nay-sayers that are constantly poo-pooing on PAD, Robosoft, and download sites.”

Maybe I’m just doing it wrong. I hope so and I’ll be happy to learn something if this is the case.

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Siriusly?

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, October 23, 2022.