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I was looking at domain names using Instant Domain Search, and I tried some domains consisting of words (or noises) that are commonly repeated over and over. Or rather, if you hear a repeated word or noise, chances are good that the word or noise is one of these words. My findings are presented below. Each item in the list is a word followed by the smallest number of repetitions of that word that is still available as a domain name (.com). I call this number the word’s Available Domain Echo Number (AEDN). For instance, “me” has an AEDN of 8, meaning that the shortest available domain name consisting of repeated “me”s is “memememememememe.com”. Interestingly, the URLs consisting of 9 and 10 “me”s are taken. Here is the list:
- Me: 8
- Now: 4
- Shit: 5
- Fuck: 7
- Ha: 15
- No: 9
- Yes: 6
- More: 6
- Oh: 5
- Badger: 6
- Spam: 5
- Echo: 4
As a control group, here are some words that are not commonly repeated, and their associated AEDNs:
- With: 4
- Spoon: 3
- Grim: 2
- Cheek: 3
This proves conclusively that the items in the first list have longer AEDNs than the items in the second list, as of this writing.
BarCamp Toronto Tech Week is happening right now. Yeah, I’m not the earliest out of the gate with the news, but I’m here, and you should too. There’s still time to think of a session.
Last year’s BarCamp San Francisco was a bit of a transformative experience for me. I had a great time, schmoozed with great people, and became more confident about some ideas I had tossed around in my head for a long time. One of them has since borne fruit, and I’ll be talking about in an hour or two. My work on Quaintance has slowed to the occasional coding binge on plane trips, and I find that getting discussing my projects in a group spurs me to work on it more frequently.
It never occurred to me that I’d help to organize a BarCamp a year after my first one, but I did, and I’m astonished at the number of people who showed up and how smoothly it seems to be going. We (Will Pate, Bryce Johnson, Ryan Coleman, Mark Kuznicki and myself) threw this together in like three weeks, but in BarCamp terms, that’s plenty of time to do what needs to get done, apparently.
Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcampttw, torcamp, web2.0
Some folks were talking during a break in one of my courses about banks and the newfangled authentication systems they’re using, such as two-factor authentication. This turned into a discussion of phishing, and it occurred to me that RSS feeds would solve that problem very nicely.
Right now, banks (and PayPal and eBay, etc) email notifications when they want to tell their customers something. The problem is, you have no way of knowing whether the email is actually coming from your bank. If banks set up a personalized RSS feed for their customers, customers who subscribe to their personal feed have the comfort of knowing that they’re getting the info right from the source. Security wouldn’t be a huge issue. Grabbing an RSS feed is just like grabbing a web page: you can password-protect them and encrypt the connection. Because RSS is built on top of mature web protocols, most of the security problems have already been solved.
Most people don’t use RSS, and that’s okay. You wouldn’t need to replace the email notifications. Just make the RSS system available for people who want to use it. By introducing customers to RSS and demonstrating how they can use it to protect themselves, banks would spur adoption of RSS, which would provide incentive for people to come up with more creative uses, etc.
Fortunately, I’m not the first person to notice this. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like any of the big players are moving in this direction, even though it’s a rather simple idea to implement.
Tags: Phishing, security, technology, the_failure_of.html, web
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All the nerd events I’ve been attending lately have highlighted a problem I’ve long had: sometimes, I’d like a way to keep track of all the folks I meet. I want something like <a href=”http://www.openngo.org”>CiviCRM</a>, but less complicated, and geared towards single users, not huge organizations. A personal contact manager.
The Mac Address Book is a wonderful thing, but I find it inadequate in a few ways. I’ve said that I’m not a big tagger — I see why it’s useful but it’s not something that helps me out very often. However, it’d be great to be able to attach a freeform list of tags to contacts, so that you can keep track of where you met them, what they do and so forth. I’ve looked all over for an address book with tags, and there isn’t any. CiviCRM purports to allow contact-tagging, but you have to define the tags beforehand, which runs counter to the philosophy of tagging. Plaxo doesn’t let me tag — it went into my Gmail account and slurped the address of anyone I’ve had email contact with, so now I’ve got a list of 1000 names and no context for any of them. That’s what tags are nice for in this case: to make it quick and easy to add additional useful context to a person.
Also, I got turned on to microformats at BarCamp, and it’s nice to see that a lot of the folks I met there have hCards so that I don’t have to type business cards in manually. Or, I wouldn’t have to type them in manually if there were any tools out there that use them (Technorati has an hCard-to-vCard converter, but extra work make me cry). I’d like to press the “New Contact” button, type in the person’s name, click “Find hCard” and have Technorati provide me with a list of possible hCards for that person that I can import directly.
So that’s what I’ve been working on a little bit, as a Summer of Rails project. The first step is to basically clone the functionality of the Mac address book. Lots of in-place editing, easy customizable fields, auto-complete goodness. Along with that comes tagging, because it’s trivial to make objects taggable in rails.
Then the hCard/vCard import/export hijinks.
Then the drag ‘n drop excitement.
Name? As of today, I’m thinking “Amigosphere”.
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I’m at BarCamp San Francisco, and one of the (half-joking) rules is I have to blog about it. If more events I attended included compulsory blogging, I might write more often.
(I also attended a Mashpit on Tuesday, where I participated in the inchoate birth of PhoTiger.)
I feel a little like I’m in a cleaner version of the sixties. Shorter hair, flannel pajamas instead of tye-dye, and the Microsoft office in the Embarcadero aint exactly the Panhandle, but the ethos is the same. BarCamp is basically a weekend-long be-in for geeks. There’s a pervasive feeling of technical promiscuity — free code, bluetoothing files, open networks. Document everything and put it online, so that other BarCamps can build on the stuff discussed. And it’s all got a fight-the-man cadence to it. There is beer and pizza. There is shwag from companies I can’t pronounce. There are acronyms UTW. It sounds like it’s raining gently outside but it’s really the soft static of constant typing on laptop keyboards. I’m having a blast. I think half the people who keep the internet fun are here.
Notes:
- My three self-describing tags: events, politics, ShowComber. This list isn’t as encapsulatory as I’d like, but it did the job.
- I led a discussion on political discourse during the first time slot. The Internet has been great for self-expression, and for finding like-minded people, but it hasn’t been so good for fostering the less pleasant part of free speech — the part where you actually have to listen once in awhile and keep yourself open to persuasion, so that ideas have a chance to circulate. I had an idea for solving that problem in a small way, so I was interested in getting feedback, and discussing other ways to solve the problem (as well as collecting insights about the nature of the problem itself). When I type them up, notes will be here. The tag for this discussion is “socialprotocols”.
- Everyone likes my PowerBook (and everyone takes better pictures than I do). Also, this picture is great.
- “Led” a “session” on an idea I had for a document revision system. No one showed up, but there were two guys already in the room who happened to know a helluva lot about the field of document revision, and they gave me some priceless feedback. One of them was Adam Kalsey. The idea, apparently, is not without merit. I didn’t take notes but maybe I’ll write something up later. A quick straw poll: if you are in a situation where you have to edit a document with a bunch of people, how do you do it?
- Was going to lead a third session on ShowComber (and the larger problem of how to get automatic event notifications for stuff you like (two days later, this gives me an idea for implementation.)) but someone else posted a session about event aggregation, musicians and microformats, which is basically how I’d have described my session, so I joined that one instead. The guy running the session was Nate Aune, who runs bostonjazz.net and had some insights from a discussion at BarCamp Boston. If there were one CMS that venues and bands used to construct their websites — the way that most political groups have adopted CivicSpace as their system of choice — we could build hCalendar into that system and aggregation could happen automatically. Alas, as of now, the burden is on managers and fans to enter information manually into their mailing list, myspace and databases like upcoming.org. Tricky.
- One of the pieces of shwag available is a ruler from Microsoft. Unlike every other ruler in America, it only has inches on it. No centimeters. Even their tchotchkes aren’t standards-compliant.
- Sat in briefly on a session about technology for non-profits. Did some evangelism for Drupal, CivicSpace and CiviCRM.
- There’s a healthy tech/web2.0/barcamp community in Toronto! Yay! If they’re anything like Malgosia and Jon Green, I’ll be in good company.
- I suppose after I post this I should install some sort of tagging plugin so that I can tag this with all the right tags. I’m not a big tag guy, but what the hey.
- Now it’s Sunday and I’ll be attending a brainstorming session for a cooking site, because Chris Bauman has a great idea. Also wanna find out about Citizen Agency. And I suppose I’ll help clean up.
Technorati Tags: barcamp, showcomber, mashpit, puppy, technology, web
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Sunil egged me to start a linguistics/politics/framing blog, not knowing that I’d been cobbling this thing together for the past, what, month and a half? Okay. Open for business.
It was a lot of fun to do this the hard way, actually. To have crafted a blog, rather than signing up for one. Not that I wrote the software myself, but the configuration and design are all me, for better or worse. It’s not quite done yet, but I’ve got more important things to worry about this month.