ANYWAYS, I said all that to say this: here is a neat little video explaining Twitter in Plain English. I think it’s part of a series of videos that explain web phenomenons to regular people (which, clearly us internet people are NOT).

It’s a bit on the long side, but her essay entitled “Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?” is very good if this stuff fascinates you like it does me. Granted, the essay is a year old and people are a little less panicked over MySpace now, and some would argue that Facebook is more popular now, but the essay is no less relevant.

Here’s an article about race and Second Life. I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I find this kind of stuff extremely fascinating.

The idea of allowing teenagers to have access to these tools kind of blows my mind, too. High school is already a huge social pressure cooker. When these things become a “requirement” to be considered as a part of society, it could considerably alter the way teens perceive relationships and what it means to have a meaningful relationship with other people if they feel they have to depend on these tools. In fact, I’m pretty sure my generation didn’t come out of it completely unscathed, and we didn’t have half of what is availabe now. I can’t imagine how different things would be among me and my peers in high school if we had access to this stuff on a near constant basis.

While this stuff has been on the back of my mind for sometime, the catalyst for this post was this article on how some youth are rethinking how online communication plays a part in their lives. Most of the people in the article are college students or people in their 20s, though, and for the most part are mature enough to realize such things. I wonder what high school students would have to say about such things.

Article Here

Hat tip to Jeffry Zeldman’s site, who tactfully and succinctly put in words what I’m sure a lot of people are thinking:

What happens next is anyone’s guess, but I suspect it will involve lawyers.

I’ve noticed a new trend among my friends on the web: they’re closing their blogs/online journals or merely no longer posting to them. Just like every big internet fad before it, I think it’s finally starting to stabilize to a reasonable level. It mirrors fairly closely the trend of everyone creating a personal website in the late 90’s. Everyone wanted to create one for the heck of it, and there were plenty of free services to meet the demand, but the initial charm eventually wore away when people realized maintaining one took effort. Most of them end up being deleted for lack of activity, and then the free shared webhost services started to die out. I think we’re starting to see the very same thing with weblogs.

And the world keeps on spinning.

Google takes it a step further: they advertise the availability to use third party clients and will even tell you how to set it up. Very cool. However, to try the service, it requires a GMail account. I avoided getting a GMail account for a long time, but I wanted to try out the IM service, so I finally cracked and joined the herd. Therefore, you can find me on Google Talk at chucksplatt at gmail dot com.

Oh, when I signed up for my GMail account, the initial suggested username was hnguyenenator@gmail.com. Funny. When I tried hung.nguyen@gmail.com, they said it was taken (no surprise) but they offered some alternatives which were amusing. My favorite? nguyennecessary@gmail.com

Benjamin Smith III was arrested and charged with unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony in the state of Florida.

The stupid thing about this is that the arrest was made for a crime not committed. There is no such thing as unauthorized access to a completely open wireless network. Nothing has to be broken into or circumvented – all you have to do is stand in the proximity of the wireless signal! A co-worker thinks the case will be thrown out.

[11:57] CoWorker1: ha, word.
[11:58] CoWorker2: word?
[11:58] Me: Word to your mother.
[11:58] CoWorker1: fo’ shizzle.
[11:58] Me: Straight up, G-money.
[11:58] CoWorker2: What kind of vernacular are you employing here, [CoWorker1]?
[11:59] Me: Oh no, I just had a terrible idea.
[11:59] Me: Ghetto talk + 1337speak
[12:00] Me: f0′ 5h1zzl3
[12:00] CoWorker1: just trying to keep it fresh, yo
[12:00] CoWorker2: I find this discourse to be quite presophmoric
[12:01] Me: I will r0xizzl3 your b0xizzl3s!

Jaynes, of Raleigh, N.C., told the judge that regardless of how the appeal turns out, “I can guarantee the court I will not be involved in the e-mail marketing business again.”

Edit 04/09/2005: follow-up article

It’s exciting! Really. It’s like summer camp for interactive media geeks. Except instead of cabins you stay in hotel rooms, and it’s much more expensive. Fortunately, since I actually live in Austin, I can just come home and I only pay for parking.

A lot of the bigwigs in web development are sure to be there, and there are usually even a few personalities that would be recognizable to the pop culture conciousness at large.

Admittedly, attending it last year was partially what motivated me to finally overcome my initial reservations to do things like start a blog and open an account on Friendster. I discovered a lot of neat things there. I got to see the Red vs. Blue film and talked with the creators. I got to see the faces and talk to some of the people behind some web phenomenons, big and small. I discovered Magnatune at the IF trade show. I also discovered a few interesting websites that I visit semi-regularly.

That’s even how I first heard about Wordpress. I heard the guy who wrote it, “Photo” Matt Mullenweg, mention it during one of the panels. He wasn’t even on the panel, he was in the audience. It wasn’t very high profile then, but now it’s pretty much the most popular blogging software out there (as opposed to a public blogging service.) Even with the kind of rep that tends to go along with these things, I realized that they can be useful and fun elements of the online experience if you use them with tact. So it made me overcome what small fears I had about looking like a conformist and it made me a little prouder to be a geek. Truth be told, though, a lot of people attending that conference could easily out-geek me.

And boy do I envy them.

This is all happening, of course, in the wake of the security concerns that have recently been exposed in both Microsoft Windows and IE. Security is the new driving point at Microsoft. The new IE 7 will supposedly also come with anti-spyware and malware preventive features. No doubt, the rise of the popularity of the Firefox browser – which is being touted as the secure alternative on Windows – is also making Microsoft realize it can’t sit back any longer. So, in a way, the existence of Firefox has done it’s job – it’s forcing Microsoft to do something about their outdated browser. The only problem is, all the talk is about security. There is very little being said for improved web standards in IE.

Let me get something straight with everyone: I have never been against IE simply because it was a Microsoft product or because it was insecure. I’ve disliked it because it has stifled web innovation in the past several years with its refusal to change and locking its 95% share into a stagnant technology, and has made it difficult for web designers to create clean, accessible sites that work largely across platforms and browsers. There is little doubt in my mind that they may have intended that. However, partly because of Firefox and IE’s own follies, Microsoft hands have been forced. The result is that there is now a shred of hope and a window of opportunity.

Now that we know there will be an update to IE, us web designers need to work hard to influence Microsoft into making improved CSS support, PNG support, and correct their rendering engine bugs as part of their update. This will still be, as it always has been, an uphill battle. Microsoft will mostly be concerned with doing what it takes to give their users warm and fuzzies. They claim that will be listening for feedback during the beta cycles. We should take advantage.

I was rather amused about the title of one which is being published by O’Reilly Books called Don’t Click On The Blue E!

It has become almost the main online music store for internet-saavy progressive rock fans, and they know it.

Now, they aren’t a niche-market shop. They do well in selling music to mainstream and other genre artists as well. It is probably the most reputable online music seller there is, outside of maybe Amazon. They have good customer support, reasonable prices, and they usually ship pretty quickly. They often feature on their front page regular big name artists like Leann Rimes, U2, Nelly, etc. However, they also tend to feature artists that are practically unknown to the music buying public except for those who follow the niche progressive rock scene. Like right now, they are advertising on the top of the front page the new Spock’s Beard album coming out in February. When the new Neal Morse album came out, it was also advertised on the front page, and was in the Top 5 seller list for a couple of weeks. The recent Dream Theater live album was there for even longer, I believe.

It just tickles me pink when I see it, because I get amused thinking about other people who visit the site and see these unknown artists being promoted and constantly doing well on the sales charts.

As you can tell, I also finally made this blasted thing look like the rest of my site. It wasn’t hard, it just took me a while to get around to it.

However, when I was about 14, I created my first website that I continued to refine and maintain up until about the year 2000. Even by then, I was barely updating it. I have since abandoned working on the site, though for posperity I have kept it up. In its heydey, it used to actually be a source of a lot of e-mail for me. The one page that got the most traffic was my 80s music pages. Since is was extremely unhip to like 80s music in the mid 90s, especially for a young teen, it was my expression of individuality. Being part of the 80s music fanbase on the internet was my only refuge from my friends’ utter disdain for it (since then, and not surprisingly, most of my friends have even come to accept some 80s music as quite good). The main attraction to my site was, simply, a big list of 80s songs. It wasn’t organized in any particular fashion, but it struck a nerve with a lot of people because – all on one page – was a list of all their old favortie songs, and the very mention of them brought back memories. I even became sort of an 80s music answer man for a while. People would e-mail me with lyrics as best as they could remember from a song and, 9 times out of 10, I could tell them exactly the name and artist of the song.

I also had a Peanuts fanpage on the site that featured character analysis of the Peanuts characters. I wrote it when I was 15 and I have never edited it since. Somehow that also attracted a lot of attention. When Charles Schulz announced his retirement from doing Peanuts, Internet Tonigh on TechTV did a piece of Peanuts fan sites, and one of the sites mentioned was mine! My website had appeared on TechTV, which was a really big deal for a high school computer geek. I generated quite a bit on traffic on that as well.

Another relatively popular part of the site was my HTML tutorial page. It was meant to explain HTML in layman’s terms, and in a straight and forward manner. I used to originally help some friends who wanted some lessons, so I created the page one night and miantained it from time to time. It turned out to be extremely helpful to a lot of people who stumbled on the page, and I got many e-mails from complete strangers about it. What was really great, though, was finding out that my fellow schoolmates was using my HTML tutorial page as their guide for doing a webpage project. The fun part was, the teacher was trying to teach them HTML as well, but they found my tutorial more helpful, instead!

To some degree I miss those days, because the Internet was a much different beast back then. There was no worry about spam, pop-ups, etc and it was a more trusting and intimate place to be. Complete strangers with similar interests found no problems e-mailing each other or posting up their contact information in public places, and so there was often more feedback for doing these things. Even the Splatt page used to get all kinds of great feedback from people around the world, but the culture of the internet is no longer the same. At this point it’s all been said and done. Having a website for our group of friends was a really, really neat thing back then. Now, it’s a pretty common idea.

Anyways, I’ll tell you what prompted all of this. My old site has been moved to the splatt.org server – specifically, it’s hn.splatt.org. I put it there and have since more or less forgotten about it. I was looking at the stats for the Splatt site today, and ventured into the part of the stat program I barely look at: the subdomain stats. There was hn.splatt.org, and I clicked it just to see what kind of traffic it was getting.

My old site, the one I built when I was 14 and have not touched in four years, still gets more traffic than the Splatt site. Consistently. It gets about 700-900 unique visitors a month.

Is it the sweet sweet sound of the tide turning?

It may be so…

CNN.com
Yahoo! News
Business Week
eWeek
Wired News
Slate (A MSN site, nonetheless!)

And to be fair:
Microsoft responds to IE Vulnerabilities

And the patch is out, I just downloaded it myself today. Still, though, lots of people suspect that this will not be the last time we will see this and recommend using another browser anyways. Why is it more secure? The biggest problem with IE security is that it is tied right into the operating system – you can’t in a sense, separate the two. That means the browser has access to parts of the OS that might be sensitive, and if the browser is compromised, so can your operating system be compromised. Combine that with ActiveX technology that allows the installation of programs without your knowledge, and you can see why security experts are worried.

It seems that Firefox is getting recommended as the alternative, but the Mozilla Suite and Opera are perfectly fine alternatives as well.

Paris is considering using GNU/Linux and other open-source software as part of their initiative to upgrade their systems. Microsoft responds by cutting its prices by 60%.

Middle of the year album sales are up 7 precent from last year, indicating a change in direction from the continuing slump of album sales from the last three years. Digital downloads are also up, and will soon count for Gold and Platinum validation. I have to wonder if this is a direct side effect of the RIAA cracking down on file-sharing, a side effect of file-sharing itself, or if maybe the output of the music industry has just been better this year than it has in a long time. It’s hard to say.

Microsoft is also ready to roll out its revampned MSN Search in its ongoing battle to take the piece of pie that Google has claimed. They also recently bumped the capacity of their Hotmail service to compete with GMail, and Yahoo! Mail has done the same. Yahoo has also been trying to catch up on the search game as well since the take-over of Google. You have to hand it to them, Google has excelled in improving markets that no-one thought needed improving and has now got the big boys scrambling to try to hold on to their share of the market by playing catch up. Competition is indeed good.

Added @ 1:53 PM:

A recently discovered serious flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has led experts to suggest using a browser other than IE until a patch is released. Hey, how about doing one better? How about using a browser other than IE indefinitely?