inquam.ca

Looks to me like the BlackBerry is looking to shed its only-for-work and not-for-fun image and is finally useable for fun too! :P

Over the past week RIM’s official Twitter app has been releases on the BB store for free (http://www.blackberry.com/twitter) aswell as the new Tumblr app (http://tumblr.com/xha8j60va). Now you can get off those shoddy third party Twitter apps that don’t know geotagging from hashtagging and get productive with your fun!

I mean you can’t do media like an iPhone, so might aswell do what you do well and start typing words in a blog/microblog on that huge mini-keyboard of yours!

Did you know that you can find Kosher Coca-Cola? It’s identifiable by its distinctive yellow cap. It was the result of work done by Rabbi Tobias Geffen who was asked to help make Coke kosher back in the 1930s.

To produce Coca-Cola the chemical glycerol is used to help the flavour remain evenly spread throughout the soda. Glycerol is made with rendered animal fat and there’s no way to tell what kind of animal the fat was taken from, thus it is impossible to “kosherify” Coke with glycerol. Special cotton-seed oil was used to create an approved glycerol.

Also unique to these yellow-capped Cokes is the use of sucrose instead of corn syrup as corn is banned during this Passover holiday. 

I’ve recently upgraded this site’s RSS to FeedBurner for all of the added bonus that comes with using it (both for me and for you). So check it out by clicking the RSS button on the left and subscribe to blog using your favourite reader.

:)

Social media and networks tends to be on the bleeding edge of bleeding edge of new ideas, trends, words/jargon, etc. So many of our newest expressions and jokes often find their beginnings on the internet in social arenas. The reason it works is because a lot of people hear/see it and begin passing it around their own circles. This is one of the great things about the information age! What grinds my gears is when people start don’t understand what they’re actually saying/writing and start spreading horrid examples on how a word should be used.

First some background information to get everyone on some common ground. Metadata (information about information) is great! It helps add more context, meaning and organizable data to data. Geotagging a tweet, naming people in a photo, and the grandfather of them all: time/date stamp on computer files.

All of these are great uses of metainformation because it allows for doing and organizing things well beyond their original uses. Finding people near you, finding all photos of you, sorting files by date. What makes these these metadata powerful is their transparency: they all work without impeding the use or accessibility of the original information.

I don’t want to go into a huge example, but imagine if every time you opened a photo on your computer it printed everyone’s name on their face, or you had to know what the last day you opened a file so that you could find it. Yes, it would suck. Well I have belief that #hashtags on twitter are broken (in most part).

Hashtags are the pound/number/hash symbol used as metadata. My problem with them is that they impede the reading of tweets well beyond their usefulness in the general twitterverse. The main reasons why are because there are no concrete rules governing them and most people don’t understand them. 

So let me write some unwritten rules about them so help you make the world a better place.

1. Don’t overuse them. If every word in a tweet #is #a #hashtag, you dilute it’s usefulness, and worst of all you chop up your sentence. Hashtags exist to organize tweets, not make a mess of things. 
2. Make their use and existence clear and meaningful. Do tell the people you will be using it with what it’s for. Don’t use ambiguous tags like #Toyota or #Canada. Even something more specific like #Olympics is still so overarching that you can’t possibly be grouping or finding useful information. #WWDC2010 works, as does #JoshBDay.
3. Use CamelCase. This is kind of obvious but basically tags must be one work, so if you’re putting two words together, capitalizeTheBeginningOf each word to help legibility.
4. Put them at the end of your tweet so it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the tweet.

I guess what I’m getting to is: know how to use them, or stay away. It’s better to not use them at all then to use them incorrectly. Here is a link for more information regarding hashtags that you should read before posting another tweet with a #Hashtag.