Nancy’s Blog

David Pogue describes Pangea Day:

a one-day, global, cross-cultural film festival — a marathon of movies, amateur and professional, whose common thread was fostering understanding of ‘the Other’… as the organization puts it: “Pangea Day endeavors to bring the world together and promote understanding and tolerance through film.” Over 2,500 movies were submitted from 102 countries; the Pangea committee winnowed them down to 24 short movies, which will all be shown on May 10 in a four-hour marathon.

Shown online (among other ways) beginning at 11 am PDT May 10.

Using technology to generate a simultaneous, world-wide event that’s NOT on the major broadcast networks — but may have wide appeal.

A Berkeley journalism student, James Buck, was arrested in Cairo and notified his friends by posting one word, “arrested,” to Twitter. Here’s the story from — of all places — the Daily Cal. One of the local TV news programs picked it up last night, where I saw it. He also kept calling contacts and posting updates to Twitter, and the university sent lawyers who negotiated his release.

Updating the world about one’s minute-to-minute activities can sometimes be worthwhile.

Suggestions for how to do this?

My recent high school reunion led to calls for a class website.  We want old and new photos and text, the “what have you been doing since graduation” stuff.

People vary a lot about how interested and tech savvy they are. When I put photos on flickr group only a handful joined –see below.

So we want a site with the following requirements.  My question is: does anyone know of a site or service that makes this EASY?  E.g., a wiki would do IF there’s a really easy, accessible one.  Or maybe someone has created just this for alumni groups.  But we’re all savvy enough to be suspicious of any site that looks like it’s harvesting email addresses for spam.

What I’m looking for:

• Some sort of front page on which everyone has a short profile, with links to more info.
• For each person, a place for text AND photos, with easy uploading/adding.
• They can update their own info for themselves, or I can do it for them.
• Easy, easy, easy.  Did I say easy?
• I think registering for Flickr was a barrier. So either no registration, or clearly registration for this site only — I suspect some were suspicious because for Flickr they needed a Yahoo id and worried that Yahoo was going to suck them in and re-use their email etc.
• Free!
• An easy way to link this site with email addresses so people can be notified when info is updated. This is not a group to subscribe to RSS feeds or check frequently, just for fun.

I haven’t used things like Yahoo groups etc so dunno whether something like that would work. Or whether there’s something designed just for this purpose.

From Pew Internet and American Life Project (emphasis added):

A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users

Fully 85% of American adults use the internet or cell phones - and most se both. Many also have broadband connections, digital cameras and ideo game systems. Yet the proportion of adults who exploit the connectivity, the capacity for self expression, and the interactivity of modern information technology is a modest 8%.

Fully half of adults have a more distant or non-existent relationship to modern information technology. Some of this diffidence is driven by eople’s concerns about information overload; some is related to people’s sense that their gadgets have more capacity than users can master; some is connected to people’s sense that things like blogging and creating home-brew videos for YouTube is not for them; and some is rooted in people’s inability to afford or their unwillingness to buy the gear that would bring them into the digital age.

These findings come from the Pew Internet Project’s typology of information and communication technology (ICT) users. The typology categorizes Americans based on the amount of ICTs they possess, how they use them, and their attitudes about the role of ICTs are in their lives. Ten separate groups emerge in the typology.

What kind of information technology user are you? Answer a few questions to see where you fit in the new typology of information and communication technology users developed by the Pew Internet Project. Take our quiz here:
http://www.pewinternet.org/quiz/

Update: I took their quiz and was classified as an omnivore – here’s what they say about omnivores, who make up 8% of the population — i.e., that’s where they get the 8% figure above:

They are young, ethnically diverse, and mostly male (70%). The median age is 28; just more than half of them are under age 30, versus one in five in the general population. Over half are white (64%) and 11% are black (compared to 12% in the general population). English-speaking Hispanics make up 18% of this group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many (42% versus the 13% average) of Omnivores are students.

As a former birder, I love the idea of the this project — but I have to point out that birders call it birding, not birdwatching.

Maybe I’ll leave CONE on my monitor at home when I’m gone, to keep the cats entertained.  Tho I’m afraid I’ll come home to find the monitor toppled over, with scratch marks.

Announcing: CONE Sutro Forest: Opening 23 April 2007

The Latest Massively Multiplayer Online Game? Birdwatching.

CONE Sutro Forest allows players to earn points by taking live photos and classifying wild birds. CONE Sutro Forest (CONE-SF) combines a remotely controllable robotic pan-tilt-zoom video camera with live streaming video, image database, and point system.

Conceived by Ken Goldberg, artist and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley, and Dez Song, professor of computer science at Texas A&M, and funded by the National Science Foundation, CONE-SF automatically computes the optimal camera viewpoint that satisfies dozens or hundreds of simultaneous players, including both experts and amateurs. Managing large communities is the specialty of craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who will host the camera from his San Francisco residence overlooking the Sutro Forest. All photos on this page were taken by him.

CONE-SF is free and open to the public. To play, visit: http://cone.berkeley.edu.

[However, my efforts to register are not working -- it registers me, then refused to recognize my pwd; resetting pwd doesn't work, either.]

The Pew Internet and American Life Project announces the release of:

Teens, Privacy and Online Social Networks: How teens manage their online identities and personal information in the age of MySpace

The majority of teens actively manage their online profiles to keep the information they believe is most sensitive away from the unwanted gaze  of strangers, parents and other adults. While many teens post their first name and photos on their profiles, they rarely post information on public profiles they believe would help strangers actually locate them
such as their full name, home phone number or cell phone number.

At the same time, nearly two-thirds of teens with profiles (63%) believe that a motivated person could eventually identify them from the information they publicly provide on their profiles.

A new report, based on a survey and a series of focus groups conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project examine how teens, particularly those with profiles online, make decisions about disclosing  or shielding personal information.

Some 55% of online teens have profiles and most of them restrict access to their profile in some way. Of those with profiles, 66% say their profile is not visible to all internet users. Of those whose profile can be accessed by anyone online, nearly half (46%) say they give at least some false information. Teens post fake information to protect themselves and also to be playful or silly.

Here is a link to the complete report:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/211/report_display.asp

Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped—Now

By Allan E. Alter

PCs should help people learn, not merely perform tasks, the prize-winning computer scientist says.

Most of the ideas in that sphere, good ideas that would apply to business, were written down 40 years ago by Engelbart. But in the last few years I’ve been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they’ve ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have. I don’t think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It’s unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn’t anything to learn from the past, so most people haven’t gone back and referenced what Engelbart thought.

The things that are wrong with the Web today are due to this lack of curiosity in the computing profession. And it’s very characteristic of a pop culture. Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn’t really live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past. I’m saying there’s a lot of useful knowledge and wisdom out there for anybody who is curious, and who takes the time to do something other than just executing on some current plan. Cicero said, “Who knows only his own generation remains always a child.” People who live in the present often wind up exploiting the present to an extent that it starts removing the possibility of having a future.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a report that 34% of internet users have logged onto the internet using a wireless connection either around the house, at their workplace, or some place else. The report profiles these wireless users and describes their intensive use of the internet, especially in exchanging emails and getting news online.The full report is available for downloading at:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/203/report_display.asp

From Patti Bao, who is working on a project studying Flickr with me :

I just stumbled across this site: www.isthisyou.co.uk - where the site owners have been collecting photos from booths and streets and are looking to reunite them with their owners.  Think there’s a Flickr equivalent?  So far I’ve only managed to find this ( http://www-us.flickr.com/groups/foundphotos/) and that (http://www-us.flickr.com/groups/33289933@N00/), but neither of them are quite like Is This You?…

Anybody?

In an article about this, Lehnert is quoted as saying that they were surprised that so few teens reported using social networking sites.

55% of online teens use social networks and 55% have created online profiles; older girls predominate

To read the full report, please visit:
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/198/report_display.asp

More than half (55%) of all of online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Among the key findings:

* 55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.
* 66% of teens who have created a profile say that their profile is not visible to all internet users.
* 48% of teens visit social networking websites daily or more often; 26% visit once a day, 22% visit several times a day.
* Older girls ages 15-17 are more likely to have used social networking sites and created online profiles; 70% of older girls have used an online social network compared with 54% of older boys, and 70% of older girls have created an online profile, while only 57% of older boys have done so.