Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Neighbors

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What does djwudi.com have in common with the blogs of a girl in the Netherlands, a guy in the UK, a guy in Georgia, a girl in Michigan, a girl in South Africa, a guy in California, Phil, Phil (a different one), and a guy in New York; somebody’s list of their .mp3 files and someone else’s list of their DVDs; homepages for a web hosting company and a web design company; more homepages for a shareware program for the Mac, a Mac developer in Georgia, and a web message board software package; and finally, John Gruber‘s post over his disgust with VersionTracker?

I haven’t got a clue. But that’s what you get when you do a “related” Google search to find which sites Google considers to be similar to djwudi.com. Definitely makes me wish I knew the criteria.

michaelhanscom.com

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As a followup to my “Own yourself” post, I’m now the proud owner of www.michaelhanscom.com. It’s not active yet, but once everything propagates through the ‘net, that address should automatically redirect straight to www.djwudi.com. It’s a start, until I figure out if I want to do anything else with it.

I’ve also changed my displayed name on this site from ‘djwudi’ to ‘Michael Hanscom’. After a few Google crawls through the site, I should have fairly firmly entrenched my real identity upon the ‘net at large.

In theory, at least. ;)

Own yourself

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An excellent article from Anil Dash on some of the side effects of Google’s ability to find anything — and anyone.

Every time there’s a resurgence in general-audience (non-techie) interest in Google, as after Newsweek’s recent Google fawning, the issue of privacy in a presence of a pervasive and permanent record rears its ugly head. People who aren’t technologically savvy don’t realize that statements don’t fade away or remain in confidence on the web; The things we say only get louder and more widely known, unless they’re completely trivial.

We’re all celebrities now, in a sense. Everything that we say or do is on the record. And everything that’s on the record is recorded for posterity, and indexed far better than any file photo or PR bio ever was. It used to be that only those who chose career paths that resulted in notoriety or celebrity would face having to censor themselves or be forced to consciously control the image that they project. But this faded as celebrity culture grew and as individuals are increasingly marketed as brands, even products.

Google’s ability to track people down often can be truly amazing, though admittedly, it does pretty much require you to have a somewhat unusual name or e-mail address to use for the search. For instance, Googling for ‘michael hanscom‘ does find me, but not until the sixth link, and even then it’s just my name buried within Phil‘s FOAF file. However, Googling for my online pseudonym of ‘djwudi‘ brings up link after link related to me, either posts here on my site, or comments I’ve left in various other places around the web.

What to do about this ability to be ‘found’ on the ‘net? Well, the best things to do may just be to accept that nothing you put on the web is truly private, and become active in taking control of what information is out there, as much as possible.

I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.

One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I’ll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They’re fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it’s going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.

That’s the future. Own your name. Buy the domain name, get yourself linked to, and put up a page. Make it a blank page, if you want. Fill it with disinformation or gibberish. Plug in other random people’s names into Googlism and paste their realities into your own. Or, just reveal the parts of your life that you feel represent you most effectively on the web. Publish things that advance your career or your love life or that document your travels around the world. But if you care about your privacy, and you care about your identity, take the steps to control it now.

To that end, I think I’ll be picking up www.michaelhanscom.com soon, most likely pointing it here. Comments to other sites, where previously I’d use ‘djwudi’, I’ll probably start using my real name now. As long as I’m me, in a world where incredible amounts of information can be found with just a few clicks of a mouse, I might as well take control of who I am.

Caught by the Zeitgeist

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I’ve been having a blast recently watching the effects of current trends on my little corner of the ‘net here at djwudi.com. Last October I ran across a website claiming to be a protest against the latest installment in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films, ‘The Two Towers’, equating its title to the WTC attacks of Sep. 11th. Seeing this as something ridiculous and fairly laughable, I posted about it.

Over the past week and a half or so, as the release date for LotR:TTT has grown closer and closer, that entry on my site has suddenly been getting a highly unusual amount of interest. While I figure my primary regular readership consists of somewhere around ten people (mostly family and friends, but I know I’ve picked up a few other readers over the past few months), I do get a fair amount of one-time visitors finding my site through search engines, so when a comment popped up on that post on Dec. 9th, I wasn’t all too surprised. But then another comment appeared. And another. And another! What the heck?

I wondered at first if I’d been linked to from another, more high-profile site, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. After going through my referral logs, it seems that this is all just due to people finding that page through searches, primarily from Google. At the time of this writing, Googling for “two towers protest” returns my page as the third primary link, and according to my site statistics for the past week, that has become the third most popular page on my site (197 hits during the week of 12/8-12/14, just behind my index page at 220 hits, and the index page for The Long Letter at 279 hits)!

Fun to watch, certainly. Not sure if I’ve picked up any more regular visitors or not from all this, and while it didn’t really lead to any discussion per se (more a lot of somewhat amusing self-righteous indignation and rambling, for the most part), it is kind of cool to see one page on my site with eighteen seperate comments posted, mostly from people that aren’t regulars (that I know of, at least).

Y’all come back now, ya heah?! ;)

Interesting Apple rumors

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Some unusually interesting (to me, at least, as both an Apple fan and a music fan) rumors surfacing over at /. today.

First came this post…

danamania writes “Apple’s latest promotion is a gimmick with Madonna, Tony Hawk or Beck’s signature, or a No Doubt logo, on an iPod. It seems Apple’s really pushing the iPod as a too-cool fashion accessory as much as a too-cooler MP3 player… is Maddie’s signature worth an extra USD49 over the standard iPod?” Instead of $50 for the engraved signature, you can spend $20 to print “Madonna’s Signature” in beautiful Helvetica.

Then, in the followup comments, someone claiming to be from Apple posted the following in two separate comments:

Comment one…

I’m posting this anonymously to protect my job. Not that they’ll fire me or anything, but why risk it?

For several years, we (Apple) have been working on ways of customizing computers and electronics. It all started back in the Power Mac Cube days, when we were looking into new injection molding processes. That worked okay, but we got a lot of flak from customers who thought the mold lines in the plastic looked like cracks.

Now we’re looking at custom laser engraving, trying to figure out ways to get the cost down to less than a dollar per square inch. The idea is that you will be able to order your laptop with anything at all engraved on the surface: your name, a logo, a picture of your kids, whatever.

This little promo is just some of the runoff from that work.

Oh, and incidentally, Apple isn’t doing this for the money. I don’t want to say anything else too specific, but there’s more going on between Apple and these artists than just this. Expect to see more interesting things in the coming months.

…and comment two…

Actually, it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than that. And I’m astounded that nobody’s guessed it yet.

See, the deal is that Apple’s management — Steve more than anybody else, really — sees the record companies kinda dropping the ball. People are happy with MP3-quality music, and they want to be able to buy it over the Internet. Current systems for doing that just suck. Since Apple controls .Mac, the OS, iTunes, the iPod, and QuickTime 6/AAC, they’re the only ones who are in a position to make a real end-to-end, easy-to-use digital music distribution system happen.

In the future, you’ll (assuming we can cut a deal with Apple Records on that nasty trademark matter) be able to plug you iPod into your Mac, browse a library of songs via iTunes, and download them directly to your iPod over broadband or AirPort. Micro-payment (well, semi-micro; on the order of a dollar per song) will be handled through the .Mac “one click” system, which Apple licensed from Amazon and already uses in iPhoto for buying photographic prints on line. The only DRM will be the stuff we’ve already go built into the iPod that makes it inconvenient, though of course not impossible, to copy music off of it once it’s been put on.

When we go live with this — which we’re hoping to do by the end of next year at the latest — we’re going to need some big names. That’s why we’ve been talking to Madonna, No Doubt, Beck, Dave Matthews Band, Moby, and some others.

Basically Apple is trying to do an end-run around the record companies and the RIAA. It’s not done yet, and it may not work, but the foundation is there and all that’s really left is to sort out the legal details.

If anybody finds out I’ve posted this, I’m out of a job, and I’ll probably end up with my ass in court. Hope this “anonymous coward” thing works as advertised.

The laptop engraving sounds very interesting, though I’m not sure how much I’d take advantage of it — though if I had the money to blow on a TiBook, I’d love to add a few extra dollars to get my tattoo design emblazoned on the lid.

The full-solution music idea sounds quite interesting, though. Seems to me that if anyone’s in a position to get this up and running, it’s most likely going to be Apple. A dollar a song sounds a bit steep at first look — it doesn’t drop the price significantly, if at all, over buying a CD from a store — but then, I just really started playing with .mp3 files this past year, and even then I’m pretty much sticking with my own stuff. Someone more into tracking down and finding music online may have a better idea of how appealing this idea might be.

More on FOAF

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A couple days ago I was babbling about having finally created my FOAF file.

Today, Phil pointed out something I’d actually looked for the other day, but hadn’t managed to find: a web-based FOAF explorer that loads and parses FOAF files. If my babble of the other day was only somewhat comprehensible, seeing what can be done with these FOAF thingy-ma-bobs might make it a bit more clear.

Friend of a Friend

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My FoaF file is now available!

If you don’t know what this means, no worries. Go on with your life. :)

If you don’t know what this means, and are up for some geekspeak, or if you do know what this means and are up for some geekspeak, read on….

Read more

Recommended reading?

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This could be interesting — Mark Pilgrim has set up a Recommended Reading script that analyses your web page, and then suggests other sites that you might find worth reading. I ran it on The Long Letter, and came up with a an interesting list of sites to check. About half I already read, but I may need to add the other half to my newsreader.

T minus 2 hours and counting

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Happy Halloween!

November is almost upon us. As I’ve mentioned a couple times previously, this means that rather than the usual babble about whatever random things cross my brain, either ‘net- or life-inspired, my blog may very well be somewhat neglected.

Instead, I’ll be turning off my PC, closing down my web browsers and newsreaders, leaving my instant messaging programs off, and focusing on diving into the wierd and wonderful world of becoming…

(Drum roll, please.)

…a Novelist.

I’ll be posting my progress as I go, so feel free to stop by and keep track of how I’m doing. Hopefully, it will at least be interesting. ;)

Kung-Tunes upgrade

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Just upgraded to Kung-Tunes 1.9.0. There’s now a bit less information displayed for the currently playing track, but it displays a history of the last few tracks I’ve listened to. Cool stuff!