internet

A search revealed that I’ve written about micro blogging and Twitter specifically before, but today I wished to write something about the subject again. This news caught my attention. It’s Dutch, so let’s translate for my English audience. It says that the Dutch Bloggies foundation has decided to abolish itself after it has held it’s last award ceremony for the best Dutch weblogs tonight. It’s founders think the use of weblogs has been overtaken by social media, specifically mentioning Twitter and Facebook.

I couldn’t disagree more. Yes, social media and Twitter and Facebook have become very popular and hyped. I’m not saying the founders think the opposite, but I think weblogs will not die. Anyone who has read my weblog systematically will probably know me quite well, my weblog posts are quite detailed and transfer a lot of information. What do the short messages on Twitter and Facebook tell us? With them, we can merely get to know the person writing them superficially. The messages are too short to go in any kind of details or depth. Most of the time on Twitter or Facebook (not necessarily so on Facebook because that doesn’t impose a such a low limit on the amount of characters to use for a message) messages are in the following form: I’ve done this, been there, this happened or I think X was good or bad. Well, at least I know what the person is doing or thinking, but why are they doing what they do or hold certain opinions? The ‘why’ question is barely ever answered on those media.

A specific gripe I have with Twitter is that many persons using it simply have nothing interesting to say. Many organisations who use it don’t use it in a valuable way either. For example see the Twitter account of the VVD, the Dutch People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy. Most of the messages are a dialogue between certain users and the person responding for the VVD, which concern quite specific questions not interesting for the general public. It’s extra annoying in this regard that you have to use the ‘in reply to X’ link to see which message is replied to, rather seeing something like a threaded/topical view. The useful messages mention news on the website of the VVD, but for those a web feed is a better solution. Another example is the Twitter account of the White House, to stay within the character limit they use all kind of ridiculous abbrevations like POTUS and SOTU, while the meaning of these is probably not immediately understood by every reader. The account has to spam messages because they can only include one quote of the State of the Union in a single message.

And of course, Facebook and Twitter own these services. No one seems to realize they are better off with using identi.ca in the case of Twitter or the upcoming Diaspora in the case of Facebook. Both are open source and distributed, so they can communicate with other services using the same protocol. Simply put, that means you’re not tied to the companies behind Facebook or Twitter, you own your data. With weblogs that is already the case. If you don’t like the company providing you with a weblog, you can back up your data and migrate. I’m glad to have my own website and be able to do with it what I like to a great extent. Using Facebook and Twitter requires submitting to vendor lock-in.

Yes, I have a Facebook account myself, but that’s more because I want to keep up to date with what other people are doing. I’d be more happy if they all switched to identi.ca or Diaspora when that’s ready, I simply feel forced to use Facebook because that’s what others use. But even then I’m tempted to trash my Facebook account. I like all the people I’ve added as friends over there but I don’t speak most of them frequently. Close friends don’t need a social network to keep each other informed, they can have a good conversation in person instead, something which I value much more.

A while ago I wrote about adding tags to my posts. The tag cloud certainly looked cool, but using tags was tiresome because a lot of them were so specific that they could only be applied to one post. I’m a person with perfectionistic tendencies, so I tried to choose tags very carefully, which required too much of my time. I think categories will suffice. On the other hand, maybe if I’d use more generic tags which can cover the subjects of multiple posts while still being more specific than categories, I could give it a try again.

So far I have only used categories on this weblog, but today I’ve created tags for all posts on this weblog. I’ve also placed such a cool tag cloud widget in the sidebar. The difference between categories and tags might not be evident, I didn’t understand it either until I read this document on the WordPress.com website. In a nutshell, they are supposed to be used to describe posts in a more specific way than categories, and tags are supposed to be many and ad-hoc while categories are fewer and planned. Even though there are no advantages for search engines, I think tags could be useful for organising posts.

However, I’m not sure how far I should take them. Initially, I created tags for every place I visited in Rome for my two posts covering Rome. Some places have a name which is quite long for a tag, and the list of tags became quite long this way. I also thought the tags were too specific, and I got rid of them. How do others handle tags?

Micro-blogging and specifically the service Twitter are quite a hype these days, which is not justified in my opinion. Let’s describe what Twitter allows you to do in one sentence. With Twitter you can write posts of no more than 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and sent to other Twitter users who wish to receive them or only the user’s friends.

So in fact it’s nothing more than ordinary blogging with a restriction that you can’t use more than 140 characters. There isn’t much difference with ordinary blogging, is it? I can start writing posts on my weblog which don’t exceed 140 characters, and everyone who wishes to read my posts can use the RSS feeds or visit my weblog. The only noticeable difference would be that posts on Twitter don’t allow comments, replies to other users’ posts constitute a post on their own. Twitter allows restricting posts to friends, but so does WordPress allow password protecting posts. Maybe the single advantage of Twitter is the feature to send and read posts via SMS messages, but for me personally this advantage is void because I never send SMS messages. I don’t want to spend money on sending SMS messages. I don’t know if SMS is a serious advantage for others?

So it’s nothing special, isn’t it? If you disagree, then at least read about Twitter’s policy regarding privacy, which could concern you. And Twitter is not an open system, it doesn’t work together with other micro-blogging services, Twitter locks their users in. So why not migrate to identi.ca or another open micro-blogging service?

Until know I had only contributed a few small changes to Wikipedia articles, but today I finally created a large addition to Wikipedia. The article which I modified is A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. During the last quarter of the academic year I followed a course about 18th Century British literature, which required reading three novels: Gulliver’s Travels, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, and either Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded or The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. I looked up all four of them on Wikipedia, and noticed that the article on A Sentimental Journey was by far the least developed article. Because it didn’t give me enough information, and because I gained enough knowledge of the subject after I read the book, I decided to improve the article. The subject doesn’t genuinely interest me, however.

My contribution consists mostly of the plot summary. Compare the revision of 17 December 2008 with revision of 30 January 2009 to see my changes. I also added some comments on the article’s discussion page. I think the plot summary I added is adequate, even though it probably leaves something to be desired. What annoys me slightly on Wikipedia is that there are no uniform guidelines for citation. When I searched for the footnotes policy and the citation policy, I read that Wikipedia does not require adherence to a single citation style. The way I see it, this only contributes to chaos. Fortunately Wikipedia does have the citation templated page, which listed the “cite book” template. It’s quite convenient because it allows you to give the citation data without worrying about the format, so I used that in my contribution.

Maybe I should also ask an expert to take a look at the article and judge what can be improved. Hopefully I will be able to contribute to other articles as well in the future, most of the time I’m reluctant to contribute because I don’t think I have quality knowledge. I’m slightly perfectionist after all.

My collection of user accounts for various websites has grown a lot during the years I’ve been active on the Internet. I estimate I have more than 30 user accounts, and I need to keep track of user names and passwords for all of them. Fortunately, technology has been developed to solve this problem, it’s a shared identity service which is called OpenID. If you have an OpenID, you can use your OpenID to authenticate your identity with every website which supports OpenID.

Apparently I already had an OpenID when I read the OpenID website. I already had a WordPress.com account registered, because using the Akismet plugin for WordPress requires an API key which is provided to you when you register an account. Somehow using the OpenID associated with my WordPress.com account didn’t work, when I tried to authenticate with my OpenID WordPress.com told me I had to log in to my account, when I already was logged in. So I decided to register an OpenID at another OpenID provider, myOpenID. This is my OpenID identity page now.

I downloaded the WP-OpenID plugin for WordPress and installed on my English and Dutch weblog. Now I can use it to log in to my administrator account, and visitors can use it to place comments. It works quite nicely, but I think OpenID support should be included out of the box in WordPress so it is more accessible. As you can read on the OpenID website, several important websites provide OpenID’s or support them. Unfortunately most of the websites I visit still don’t use it, I hope this will improve because OpenID makes your life on the Internet a lot easier.