Welcome to Sad Salvation. Day by day by day by day ... this is my attempt to make sense of the world.

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Sunday, July 05, 2009

Taking the summer off

I feel like I have no good ideas to write about this summer. I have been spending my time working on other projects. I have been working on Jeremy's Aught Music Blog, My Costume Checklist blog, and my Twitter feed. For now that is all I got. I think I am going to take the summer off Sad Salvation. Maybe I will be ready to write come September.

Labels: Aught Music, blog, Costume Checklist, sadsalvation, self, Twitter

- Rich, 6:06 PM

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Types or useful Twitter Messages pt1

Yeah, I know not ever tweet is useful. Hopefully I am good at removing people from my twitter stream who never have anything interesting to say. That is harder than it seems. I wanted to make a post of sum of the times of tweets I fine useful.

The Blog Promotion: These are tweets where the person posting is trying to bring you back to their blog. Some of these are useful and some are not. I do not have them sent to my mobile device

SlingSays "Bristol Palin Talks About Motherhood for the First Time": http://tinyurl.com/dga7q4

The Headline: This give the reader the Headline, but they need to search out the story themselves. Helps alert reader to specific details that they might miss or not know to look for.

interrante: GM cancelling Saturn and Pontiac. Hummer and Saab are on the for sale list

The News Joke: Take part of a headline and make a joke out of it. This helps share

wirehead: figures that GM would have a Saab story.

The Share: Teaches us a little about that person. It is the best when it is a simple expression of a thought or idea. It can be like poetry.

nicole: Loving how clean the air is after the rain.

Labels: posts, tag overload, tweets, Twitter

- Rich, 10:57 PM

Is Blogging Over?

I know that I have been falling down lately when it comes to writing in this blog. I do not have the time and I cannot seem to make the time either. I sit down to write and my mind draws a blank. I am not reading my friends blogs all that often either. I read some blogs, but it is not important to me.

I am keeping my twitter account up to date. I can always find a few minutes to use twitter and read other twitter posts. Twitter is where I go to find out what is happening. During the election I used it all the time to find the latest news. I rarely found news by reading blogs.

I have some blogs I read in Google Reader, but most of them are Professional blogs like Gizmodo, or Engadget. Those are not really tools of the masses. Blogs have good from tools of the masses where anyone can be heard to the domain of professional writers and journalists. I think this is a big shift.

The web is a weird place. There is this constant battle between communities of users and monetizing the web. In 2002 I felt like blogs were giving the internet back to the people after the dot.com boom gave it to companies. Now user content has gone away from blogs and has gone to Twitter and Facebook.

I enjoyed when Blogs where king. I remember when I went to my first blog meeting in 2002 people were asking of blogs where dead or not. That was before most Americans had even heard about blogs. Maybe I am asking the wrong question.

Blogs will not go away, they are just being knocked off the top of the internet food chain. Twitter, Facebook, and other mobile apps will be taking over. That is what people will be looking at first. Blogs will just be coming after that. Who knows where technology will take us after that.

Blogging must be dead. I cannot pay attention long enough to make this post make the point. 140 characters would have been better.

Labels: blog, engadget, factbook, Gizmodo, self, Twitter

- Rich, 6:51 PM

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Twitter: A tool for Good or Evil?

I little while ago my friend Slacy aired his problems with Twitter. I am a big twitter fan and I found almost all of his criticisms to be sour grapes. if not sour grapes it falls under, "This tool does not fit my standards, there for it is bad for the internet." I might be hard on Slacy, but I do not agree with a lot of his points.

Character Limit

Mostly arbitrary and irrelevant 140 character limit. This only applies to SMS users, which I believe there are very few off. All hardcore people either use m.twitter.com, a regular browser, or a custom client for their (i?) phone. Arbitrary per-character limits are so 1990’s.

I think the character limit is a good thing. If you need to use more that 140 characters, use something else. Twitter is about short messaging. The question of twitter is What Are You Doing? and your change is to answer it quickly and easily.

I think the idea that all the Hardcore users are using twitter is a very limiting idea. Only one fifth of the current mobile market are using smart phone. I use SMS for twitter. I think twitter is best if is getting to more people.

Markup

Lack of markup. Again, the 140 character limit makes it impossible to have reasonable (any?) markup and thus, all links are in plaintext, etc. This sucks and is more like the internet from the 1990’s. I’d like to use markup instead of *bold* and /italics/ and _underlines_ please and thank you.

I think this is the case of using the wrong tool for the wrong job. I want everything in plain text. What is the goal of marking up twitter messages?

@foo Syntax

@foo syntax (@ = in reply to) are beginning to appear on other sites, and have little to no meaning in most contexts. I frequently see “@myfriend” style wording in other sites, forums, blog comments, etc. This is unacceptable, as the syntax pretty much blows except for when using twitter.com, where the “@” links actually become active. When I don’t know who the “@” is actually referring to, it’s doubly pointless. Things like “@barakobama way to go dude!” are also pointless.

I saw the @username syntax in forums and blog comments well before twitter launched. I am not sure they started it.

As for people using @username for things other than accounts, that is users for you. They are bound to do things like this. I know that this is something that is easy to do when using SMS. I think there are problems with this syntax, but it made total sense the first time I saw it. I did not need need a manual to explain it to me.

@ Replies

Passive followers see nothing but a noisy one sided conversation. I really don’t actually want to hear my friends saying “@importantguy Your socks rock in my boots!” Especially when I don’t know “importantguy” and I could care less about your socks. Thanks for trying. Following most people on twitter reminds me of the feeling of listening in to someone’s phone conversation on the bus or train. Pointless.

Check the settings. The user can choose If they want to see All @replies, Only @replies when they are following both sides of the conversations or no @replies at all. I think this kind of user choice is good.

Sidecar sites

The proliferation of “sidecar” twitter sites is staggering. These sites offer “extra features” like links (bit.ly) pictures (twitpic.com) or external twitter search or news sites (twitter.alltop.com), etc.

I think this is a good business development. Let twitter focus on its core business. Let this other websites do things they thing add value. This will hopefully cause a business ecosystem that will cause people to make good business decisions for their core business.


Content

No one has anything interesting to say anyway.

If this is the case, why do you care at all? Stop using it. If no one is saying anything interesting, don't use it. That solves everything.

Labels: limit, slacy, SMS, Twitter

- Rich, 4:44 PM

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Sending thingd down

After the concert on Sunday, people are worried that everyone using cell phone services like picture messages and Twitter will send the cell phone networks down. I heard on the radio that there was a big spike of SMS messages on election day. I wonder if we can send the whole nation's cell network down. Someone get Reina Hardest on that right now

Labels: cell phone, president, Reina Hardest, Twitter, Washington DC

- Rich, 12:03 AM

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Oh My Science

I spent a little time looking at Oh My Science this week. It is a site that collects on the tweets where people say Oh My Science instead of Oh My God.

This is a really strange site to me. It says a lot about language and America to me. I understand people who want to get God out of their life. In the US God is everywhere, even on our money. Most people say Oh My God without thinking about what it means. We do not think about what we are saying, we just stay it.

I spent a good amount of time looking at these site. There is something very odd about some of the messages.

oh my god science! those boxes were powered by people! un-freaking-believable.

Time for Ellie's first trip on a plane. May god science help us.

Thank God science for an accident. I was almost making good time going home.

I see some of these messages and people are treating science as superstition. These seems very odd. Most atheist I know are rational and do not believe in Superstition. This seems like an interesting turn of language.

Labels: God, Oh My Science, science, Twitter

- Rich, 2:11 PM

Friday, August 15, 2008

Twitter like people are listening

I saw this blog post about Twitter Etiquette linked on Laughing Squid. I think this is pretty good. My three keys to twitter are simple.

1. Remember that people use twitter on different platforms. Some people use it on their phone, some people use it via the web, and some use it IM. Not everyone will be able to follow your links. If every post you make has a URL, you are cutting yourself off from some the the readers.

2. Slow down! If you are sending more that 5 twitter 10 minutes, 10 twitters in an hour, or 20 twitters in a day, you need to find other ways to communicate. Twitter is great for occasional messages. I do not need blow by blow accounts of most things. Remember that.

3. Mix it up! If you are always twittering about the same thing or in the same style it is going to get boring. If you are always talking about tweeting about your blog entries it will be a snooze. I do not only want to know about how campcamp was. If every entry is about some party I am not invited to, it is not so cool.

Just remember, people are really paying attention to your twitter. Just act like they are

Labels: list, microblog, Twitter

- Rich, 6:22 PM

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Messages of All Lengths

I have been thinking about Twitter, Plurk, email, and blogs lately. I have been using Twitter and Plurk a lot lately. I know that they are mostly chatter, but it is easy to fit chatter in with everything else I have to do.

I remember use to love e-mail. Back in 1996 I used to get up first thing in the morning and read my e-mails. If felt exciting, like waiting for letters in the mail. I was sharing e-mail with people all over the world, at least the English speaking world. When I logged onto my computer I could not wait to see what was there for me. It was new and exciting.

Now a days I mostly ignore my personal e-mail. I check it all the time to see is anything good is there, but I rarely write anyone. I rarely get any good e-mail from anyone. If I get an email the correspondence will go on for two or three days before it dies off. There is a lot of reasons this is true. I do not have the attention span for e-mail anymore. It might be because I am so attached to e-mail every day at work I do not want to be attached to it at home.

Twitter and Plurk are interesting because of the short aspects of both these services. Twitter is amazing at how much can be shared in just 140 characters. It has the ability to make me feel very close to some people because it is so casual. Plurk is amazing because at how quick the communication it. It is really communication in the now.

I know that I need to be willing to put times into communication. I would love to e-mail my friends again, but it is more effort than I have to give right now. I hate to think that these forms of communication are making me lazy.

Labels: blog, email, Plurk, Twitter

- Rich, 4:59 PM

Friday, April 11, 2008

The web around me

Gapingvoid did a webcomic about why he deleted his twitter account. This is interesting to me. Lately I have been less active on my blog. I know this has to do with being engaged. I spend a lot of time with Kate. Even when I am sitting at my computer, I cannot just whip up a good blog entry. It takes time and a lot of effort. What I want to say is just not on the top of my head. It takes a little drilling for me to get to.

I have a twitter account. It is an interesting communication tool and it is worth using for me. It just not the same as a blog. I spend much of my time just deleting messages. Most of the time I am using it on my phone. While it is entertaining, it really makes the rest of text messaging less useful to me.

Twitter at its best feels like a really good short blog, cutting through all the crap. The problem is that is rarely feels that way. Most of the time it is just people talking too much. It seems like less worth my time than reading blogs.

I am not sure if I stopped twittering I would write or read more blogs. Twitter is like a lot of web 2.0 things, I like it, but I will it was more useful.

Labels: blog, flickrpost, gapingvoid, Twitter, web, Web 2.0

- Rich, 8:07 PM

Saturday, November 24, 2007

back of the hand

back of the hand
Originally uploaded by earthdog.

Some days I feel this blog is nothing more than me looking at the back of my hand. I must admit that is what Twitter feels to me. Most of the Twitter messages I get are people saying, "Look How Cool I Am." I like some of them, but if you are twittering more than once hour every day you might want to rethink your twitter policy.

Labels: blog, flickrpost, sadsalvation, self, Twitter

- Rich, 3:20 PM

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