Category Archives: internet

Youtube’s unequal display rights

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While watching “Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009″ on YouTube, I saw two new buttons to the top right of the video. They allow you to dim the lights on the page and to open the video in a separate window.

YouTubes new features

YouTube's new features

The result is that all the noise is either turned off by the light dimmer or not shown when you open the video in a new window.

Reducing the noise

Reducing the noise

Having the lights dimmed around online videos is nothing new. A lot of services do that. On Reddit I read that this feature has been around for some months. I did check a few other videos, but did not see the features there. I got the impression, that only Google videos had these added possibilities.

Sure, there is a light bulb beneath all videos with which you can turn the entire screen either darker or completely dark. However, the video is darkened as well which the dimming feature does not do. It only blocks out the noise.

I like to dim the background because if the quality of the video is not sufficient to blow it up to fill the screen, I can still focus on the video only and not be distracted by all the other things around it.

What’s plan B?

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A week ago, Steve Wheeler was supposed to present on Edupunk in the Forth Online Round Table of educamp. Unfortunately, his tech equipment and the university servers left him in the lurch. While Steve was trying frantically to get back online, Graham Attwell rescued the situation with PowerPoint Karaoke over Steve’s title slide (you can watch the entire session in Elluminate) and brought along the discussion.

After his failed session, Steve wrote a blog post entitled “Can anybody hear me?” about is intended presentation and his frustration of attempting the humanly possible to get online.

That was the first time that I was in an online session and a presentation could not take place due to the fact that the presenter could not be heard / get back into the system despite previous checks. During CCK08 we had a problem once when slides could not be uploaded to Elluminate, but that was solved quickly by viewing the slides on Slideshare and giving the occassional reference in the chat window to the current slide for late comers.

This debacle led me to think about the question “What is the plan B for online sessions?” When we teach or present at conferences, we usually have a “Plan B”, an alternative, in case the technology we want to use is not available or does not work. I used to have a set of overhead transparencies for presentations and important training material in my luggage. I abandonded that because rooms are now generally well-equipped and sometimes do not have an overhead projector anymore. I still make screenshots of web pages in case the internet does not work and I want to point out something on a live site. Backup copies of the material I need are always stored on a USB stick, sent to my email account and / or uploaded somewhere online. I could even do without the visual support if needed as long as I do not loose my voice.

However, as I have never presented online, I had not thought about what to do when problems occur in the virtual space. Problems like the one we had in CCK08 are manageable when the slides are available online for viewing / downloading. But what can be done when the presenter cannot be heard? A presentation cannot be typed into a chat window. All possible scenarios I came up with always require the internet and another system that allows for synchronous audio discussions. Of course, that requires that the presenter as well as the audience have access to it. That requires a lot from the tech support for online sessions, and I dare say that it is not doable as there are so many factors that are in the dark. Would one have to test two or even three systems in advance to make sure that at least one works?

Less favorable alternatives are the re-scheduling of the session after the tech problem has been solved satisfactorily, a write-up of the presentation as Steve did, or the actual presentation as a post-recording done by the presenter alone at home. Although the latter two are better than not doing the presentation at all, they certainly lack the interactivity with the audience.

So, the question still remains: What’s plan B?

Chatting to strangers randomly

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I have had a tab with Omegle open in my browser for a couple of days now (and thus forgot from where I got the link :-( ) until I got my nerves together to try the service. Leif K-Brooks, its founder describes it as following:

Omegle is a brand-new service for meeting new friends. When you use Omegle, we pick another user at random and let you have a one-on-one chat with each other. Chats are completely anonymous, although there is nothing to stop you from revealing personal details if you would like.

In our age of social media, profile pages, nick names, and avatars, in short: our digital identity, Omegle is a clever chat client that is not bothered with these at all. I write “clever” because the absence of these familiar things as well as the fact that the person with whom you chat is chosen randomly, make it novel and intriguing.

Before I clicked on the big “Start a chat” button, I raided my brain of how I could wittily start a conversation though Leif provides a good pointer: “Say Hi”. What would I write next? How would I react to the stranger. What topic would I choose? Would I chicken out at the last minute and abort the chat? Questions over questions. The only strategy that I could think of was: Just dive in and see what happens.

My first attempt to talk to a stranger among the 2600 something users online about an hour ago was rather ill-fated as my stranger who was chosen randomly got cold feet and left the chat just after my – admittedly rather ordinary – conversation opening.

Aborted conversation

Aborted conversation

@injenuity had more luck and created poetry with her stranger (the link to the Twitter status update does not work anymore).

Reading these conversations, I am reminded of the early days of the internet when people said one could talk to strangers not knowing anything about them and everybody could pretend to be anybody. Still, back then one always had a nickname / handle in IRC chats etc. that one was recognized by. Also today we have our usernames, we fill in more or less extensive online profile pages, and even provide avatars. These things help in conversations. We build up our digital identities and hopefully trust with them so that we are regocnized the next time we log on and converse with others.

Omegle leaves out all these conversation cues and connects total strangers without anything that may help to pinpoint their whereabouts, their (established) identity, and any chance of knowing if re-connected with them is possible there.

I wonder what the average time spent in the chat is, what other strangers talk about. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see a stream of these conversations (and analyze them if the heart desires)?

Toolbars galore

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My beloved Firefox got its personaliy back. Finally Firefox Personas work again for me and the tabs (when there are any) can be distringuished. That was not the case after FF 3 came out. Thank you very much to all the developers working on it tediously. My browser is starting to look like the infamous screenshot of a Microsoft Word document in which all toolbars are open and you have hardly any space for writing. Luckily, my screen is still big enough to manage. ;-)

I will have to do some spring cleaning at one point to get rid of at least two extensions that I just see that I don’t need anymore as I substituted them for another one. And I guess, I could add some more, but that’s the state of affairs at the moment. Of course, I do not use everything all the time, but I am sure that if I did deinstall one extension, I would need it shortly afterwards.

Toolbars galore

Toolbars galore

Here is a list of extensions / add-ons that I have installed. I sort them according to the frequency of my use. Within each group the sorting is alphabetically.

Daily

1Password – installed via the software

Fire.fm – since I have my Last.fm account and this extension, the songs that are played on my station have reached a greater variety; should have added it much earlier

Personas For Firefox – daily because I use a persona, not because I change them constantly

TwitterFox – it may be limited compared to other apps, but as it sits in my browser, it is convenient; my Twitter functionality wish is here

Zotero 1.5 – yeah, the Beta version, I love it and it has been working flawlessly (knock on wood); the synchronization is nice; now I just need to put all my file attachments into the Zotero database and not just link the files from my harddrive so that they are put on the WebDAV server

Very frequently

bit.ly Preview

Cooliris

Evernote Web Clipper – on the borderline to “Daily”; but I also use the desktop version a lot

Download Statusbar

Greasemonkey – I don’t have very many scripts installed as I still seem to have problems with it from time to time, but they make life in the browser easier

Often

Google Gears – whenever I have to go offline for a longer stretch and for testing purposes

Read it Later – I try to limit myself to put too many items there ;-)

Seldom

(unless I have a project in which I need it constantly)

ColorZilla

Delicious Bookmarks – it used to be in the “Daily” category, but since I switched to Diigo, I do not use it much to get used to Diigo

feedly – I always see it’s results; the latest update has improved it for me to understand it better, but I have not incorporated it into my routine

Firebug

GCal Popup – oops, I almost forgot that it is there; I am so used to opening iCal instead of this little handy tool

MeasureIt

Unshorten – bit.ly seems to do the trick most of the time; while searching for the link I found out that this extension is no longer supported; it still works, but probably not in the next version of Firefox

Web Developer

Rarely (or never)

CarCastWebRecorder – I need to invest some time in it to get around it

Drag & Drop.io – just installed it today -> no way I can tell how often I will use it yet

headup – recently installed to see whether it can be useful to me

LaterLoop – one of those that may have to go as I found Read it Later which also integrates with Google Reader

Sage-Too – oh, I did not know that I still had it; never got a start out of testing and I just love my Google Reader

ScrapBook – will most likely also go since I use Evernote and Zotero (Google Notebook is already gone as it was discontinued)

StumbleUpon – I know, I am late to come to this extension, just installed it to finalize give it a try

Zotz – installed it for testing purposes and wrote about it briefly

Facebook likeness

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Coincidentally I just had three status updates of friends’ displayed on my Facebook page and could not not make a screenshot because they are so much alike. It almost makes me wonder if Facebook grouped them or if it was just pure coincidence.

Sleepy night

Sleepy night

A few weeks ago I already had an eery Facebook experience when I used an application to send virtual flowers. After having finished, I was presented with a message to send more flowers to friends who needed cheering up. Apparently, the status updates are carefully read by machines, disected, put through a sentence analyzer, and put out at the right moment. Not so much unlike what Google is always blamed for.

Big brother reads along

Big brother reads along