social media

Headline rating app to encourage useful headline writing.

In future I would like an application or social network that allows me to rate headlines according to whether they are sensationalist, informative, emotional informative or other. The aim of this network or app would be to discourage article writers from re-using the same phrases over and over. It would encourage writers rather than marketers to provide headlines that article readers want to follow. I often see articles that I would find interesting but because of the way the headline is written I avoid it.

Social media, loneliness and isolation.

“The pathology of social media is all about loneliness” Social media professionals take the weekend off. Twitter users use hashtags so that their content can be found without being followed. Everything is turned towards discoverability rather than commitment and conversation. Social media practitioners know that people aren’t listening attentively so they repeat and repeat in the hope of a click or two. Hashtags are just a way of pretending that a conversation has had an audience.

Access to contemporary technology helped promote my habits as an early adopter.

Parents in the silly con valley are idiots. They are in a trillion dollar industry and make billions a year because people want to use the technology they are developing. Think about how different my childhood would have been if we had learned camera work and video editing in art classes rather than painting, pottery and other less interesting art forms. Imagine if as a child I had not watched Cousteau Documentaries.

A little bit of twitter history from 21/07/2007

Hello Twitter-ers! As you may already know, Obvious is the parent company of Twitter and it’s never a dull day around here. Today our little building is abuzz with activity surrounding an announcement that Odeo (another Obvious product) is ready for a new home. We’re entertaining offers from potential buyers because Odeo deserves the same love and attention we’ve been heaping on Twitter these days. Have you been by lately? http://twitter.

A proposal for a crowdsourced portal acceptance system for Ingress agents.

People love to submit portals and portals add excitement to Ingress. The more portals there are the busier you are. Cities are fantastic places for ingress players for this reason. Geneva, Barcelona, Neuchatel and other cities already have hundreds if not thousands of portals but go to the swiss countryside, the spanish sea side or away from big cities and portals are few and far between. As a result of this rural players don’t have much to do unless they get in a car and create megafields.

Staring at phones in the rain once again...

Once again I was out in the rain walking around a city. Once again I was looking downwards and then up. I was also looking around and navigating through a city I have been to before but only for a meal and on my way to another place. I went there for a blogobar event many months ago. More recently I went through the city on my way to a Via Ferrata near La Chaux De Fond.

Tourism and Ingress

If you’re a geek and you like mobile phones with a data plan then ingress is for you. Over the last two days I walked 18 kilometres playing ingress and winning back the City of Nyon for the Resistance. It didn’t last long. The same evening the enlightened players destroyed my hard work. I will just have to go back and liberate the city later. I have more important tasks this weekend.

Lebara Spain

David Seifert - 5th of April 2016 This article made my coming four weeks in spain. Thanks! It works and helped me a lot! If I could flattr this post, I would have. Swaayams - 24th of June 2016 Perfect. Thank you very much, just you missed something - that the other apns needs to be deleted. Then it works!

Lebara Spain

If you visit Spain and get a lebara Spain sim you need to set up two access point names. One is for internet access and the other is for MMS. I only point this out because dozens of sites tell you what the configuration requirements are but non indicate that you are setting up two access points. APN 1: Name: lebara internet APN: gprsmov.lebaramobile.es username: wap apn type: default, supl APN 2: name: lebara MMS APN: mms.

Threaded conversations and community

From the 1970s to 2007 we had threaded conversations through bulletin boards, forums, groups and other centralising discussion points. For a brief window of about two years conversations became so captivating that people wanted to meet in person as strong friendships were established. By 2009-2010 the threaded and personal conversations between web users was hijacked by “social media” marketers and so the speed of conversation and quality of interactions collapsed. In it’s place hashtags would replace user engagement with quick metrics.