Rickrolling is the latest internet meme. Simply put someone will post a link purporting to be something interesting and relevant to the subject at hand but it will in fact be a link to 'Never Gonna Give You Up' by Rick Astley on youtube. If you clicked the link then you have been 'rickrolled'.
I have to admit I have been rickrolled more than once, and it does make me smile.
Rick Astley himself thinks it is all a little amusing too, "“It’s a bit spooky, innit?” said Rick Astley, the singer who made the song famous in 1987 and who is not dead". You can read (and listen) more in the LA Times blog about his thoughts on the subject.
Or for more information on this and other internet memes check out the wikipedia page.
With spring on the horizon and the snow melting (at least in my imagination). I am looking forward to getting back to some outdoor activities (I become a hermit in winter - don't like the cold).
One of my favourite outdoor activities is geocaching. Geocaching is a 'sport' of sorts. It involves taking advanced military hardware and perverting it for use in a trivial game; interested yet?
The game involves finding hidden 'treasure' (or caches) hidden around your local area. There are probably tens within a few miles of your current location. The idea is you load the GPS coordinates into a GPS receiver and then go out and try and find the cache. When you find the cache you sign the log-book and take a trinket (if you take a trinket you must leave a trinket also). In many ways it is similar to the British outdoor activity of letterboxing.
It's not as easy as it sounds to find the cache even with GPS co-ordinates as the caches are often well hidden and your GPS has a limit to its accuracy (about 25 feet if I am remembering correctly). The great thing is you get to find lots of little hidden parks and places you never knew were in your local neighbourhood, and you get to have a great day outside.
All you need to play is:
1) A basic GPS receiver, nothing fancy. In fact you can pick one up off of Amazon.com for under $100. I personally use the cheapest one I could find and it works great for geocaching. Try searching amazon.com for the Garmin etrex series for some great basic GPS receivers.
2) Access to the internet (before you leave). You simply search http://www.geocaching.com/ for caches and enter the co-ordinates into your GPS receiver before you leave. You may also want to familiarize yourself with the locale by checking a map before you set out.
A little advice, when searching in an unfamiliar area make sure to mark your 'home' location (such as your car) before you go wandering off into the great outdoors. Having a GPS is useless unless it points you somewhere... and safety should always come first.
So if you have some spare time this summer you could do worse than a day out geocaching.
I suspect many of you are using these resources in your daily lives already, but if you aren't well... you should really take a look at them. I find these sites to be invaluable for news and information and research on the internet.
Social news is nothing particularly revolutionary, slashdot, for example, have been at it to a certain extent for years. It seems, however, to have really come into the limelight after Digg came on to the scene. These sites don't just contain traditional stories but anything people
find interesting or noteworthy. They are social news networks,
the stories and links are provided and ranked by the visitors without interference from editors.
Digg was founded by Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose (previously of TechTV) in 2004 and has risen to arguably become the most popular site of its kind on the internet. Digg features news, images, videos and podcasts. Each section can be individually accessed or (and by default) they can all be aggregated into a single combined view. On Digg stories are 'dug' or 'buried' and once stories are made 'popular' they appear on the 'front page'. Stories gradually move to higher pages as new stories are made popular.
Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanin in 2005. Reddit is similar to digg and stories are voted up or down by the visitors. Reddit is noteworthy not only for its strong community and informed users but for its part in the campaign to name a whale 'Mr Splashy Pants'; which it did successfully and is now being tracked across the South Pacific ocean. More information on 'Mr Splashy Pants'.
Online encyclopedia's provide a wealth of free knowledge and the Encarta and Britannica Online sites are great. My personal favorite in this genre is Wikipedia and as this blog post is focused on the social internet I really could not miss mentioning it.
This website is a social encyclopedia; all the articles are created, edited and maintained by people like you. It is a great starting point for looking something up and it is hard to believe it has only been around since 2001. It was founded by Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales and Larry Sanger and as of December 2007 featured over 9 million articles in over 250 languages. Just don't try and reference Wikipedia in your dissertation...
Image hosting has been around for a long time, but nothing has quite matched the simplicity, professionalism, sense of community and ease of use you get from flickr.com. This isn't supposed to sound like an advert, I just really love the site.
Flickr is a web 2.0 social photo hosting and sharing website. Founded in 2004 and currently owned by Yahoo!. Membership is free although a paid membership is available that gives extra space / the ability to display more images. You can post the images to pools where they can be discussed and commented on.
Social networking is nothing new, neither is online social networking. The current 'fad' in social networking could be described as Social Networking 2.0 as its popularity is based on a large part the technologies of Web 2.0; plus of course the ubiquity of internet access in the western world.
The question is what makes a successful online community. Plenty of online communities wither and die, or last forever in a zombie state where no one posts anything. Yet others bloom and last for years. Some people have suggested that it takes a few people dedicated to the success of the community, who take care of creating interesting subjects and polls. In some cases this may be true, however in my book a good community should NOT require any poking or prodding. If there is poking a prodding required to keep the community alive then there is something wrong with the community to start with.
Today I revisited an online community I have been part of on and off for the past nine years. Nothing had really changed, there were the same people posting and chatting about the same kinds of topics, even the signatures of the posters had barely changed if at all. What is this community? Well really its a community based on nothing, sure originally it was based on something (a British Computer Magazine), which I will come to later, but now really it is based on nothing. As Seinfeld proved you don't necessarily need a specific topic to be successful.
=== Some overly detailed background information - you can probably skip this ===
The community originated from a British magazine publication 'PC Format', at the time it was the most popular UK magazine for computer 'stuff' (or at least so it claimed). In fact until last month I had been a loyal subscriber to the magazine for over 10 years. The magazine, at some point, decided they needed to reach out to their readers and decided to form an online community. They setup a forum on Delphi Forums (yes the same people who were famous in the early 90s for Delphi Internet). Some time around 2001 the publisher decided it was costing too much to host the forums on someone else's platform, and why bother, after all they ran a website on a web server and forum software is free right? So they ended their contract and moved the forum else ware. Many of the community didn't like the software though and decided to stick with the Delphi Forums platform setting up 'The Not PC Format Forum' or NPCFF for short. A short while later Delphi Forums started sticking ads all over the place and making some features only available for an extra fee. Being an ingenious lot the members decided to write their own forum software to emulate the look, feel and features of Delphi Forums (and improve upon them where they saw fit).
Years later and now named 'Teh Forum' they are still around, the same bunch of people but conversing on a platform they created. The software is open-source and freely downloadable if you're interested (just search for 'Beehive Forum' in google).
=== End of overly detailed history you can probably skip ===
Anyway history lesson over, the point is, yes people have come and gone over the years, yes I only pop in once every year or so, but how has the community survived? Is there an elite group of people poking and prodding the community to keep it alive? Nope. Its a place where people can come after a bad day of work and rant, its a place where people can ask for help, its a place where you can be an arse and people will point at and make fun of you.
No one pulls any punches, if you are being a fool you will be called a fool.
No the success in my opinion is that it is a place full of real people, who don't give a crap if they offend you. They say what they think. There is little moderation - no elites in hats telling you what you can or can't say.
Just think about that for a moment, how many online communities are plagued by censorship or run by elite members too full of themselves to actually care about having a good discussion or a bit of fun. How many communities are people needlessly polite for fear of offending people.
Live life and most of all be real - so-to-speak (and for anyone who knows me you will probably be laughing now right?).
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