inquam.ca

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:)

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.

Google has finally pushed an update to their Wave product that allows users to be notified via email for updates to waves that they follow. This was previously only possible with a separate extension which had certain reliability issues.

Looks like Wave isn’t a lost cause after all!

Look, I’m not saying it’s because the frigtards who run Twitter probably won’t be able to handle the load tomorrow and the whole system is going to crash. But let’s just say I wouldn’t bet against that scenario, either. I mean look at these guys. Birdman and Baldy, we call them. As Larry says, these guys couldn’t find their own assholes using two hands and a flashlight. You really want to rely on them for something important? I wouldn’t rely on them to wash my car.

-Fake Steve Jobs on his live blogging of Apple’s impending tablet release.

Google is finally sick of bending over to China’s demands to censor the Internet and search results. In this bold announcement on their blog today, Google announced that they will be ceasing their much-beloved censorship program at Google.cn.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results.

…

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

— David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google.

This is great to hear (although not the part about the attacks on the human rights activists). Please read the above post and, if you believe this is a good move on Google’s part, support them in their move to help free China’s people from their “great wall of censorship”.