Reading Linus Torvalds’ blog I came across this paragraph:
Not that I actually ever really minded wearing glasses, but I could not recognize my own kids when in a swimming pool and they were more than six feet away. And let’s face it. swimming after other peoples kids and tickling them is not socially acceptable. At least in the US.
Laughing…
I came across a brief blog post titled “Social Networking – Do you do it?“. While the context of the question in that post was more along the lines of “Do you use social networking to promote your products and servers, and drive more traffic towards your site?“, it got me thinking. And, as usual, in a somewhat different direction.
If we are to ask “Social Networking – Do you do do it?” to a large Internet crowd, what sort of responses would we get? I guess, the majority will be somewhere in between “No” and “What’s social networking?“. I think that the majority of people on the Web have no idea of what social networking is, where to find it, and if they are using it already or if they should use it at all. And I also think that the majority of Web population do use social networking, either for their personal or business purposes.
Examples from the top of my head include LiveJournal.com – the most popular blogging platform in Russia, Flickr – one of the most popular image sharing services, YouTube – the most popular video sharing service, Odnoklassniki.ru – the most popular (in Russia) social network for people to find and communicate with their class mates, and a few other, similar services. A huge chunk of their userbase have no idea that these services are a part of social networking. “Oh, no, I don’t do no social networking. I use this web site to communicate with some of my friends and share blah blah blah“.
And I’m not sure if we need to push the term “social networking” any further. We are humans. That what humans do – social networks. Give us a communication tool and we’ll start networking with it. Then, instead of asking us if we use the tool for social networks, just ask us how we use it. Yeah.
Back in the 1990’s, when the Web just got popular, it seemed like every more or less large web site had to have a bunch of awards.  Awards were the first web promotion tricks that I’ve learned of. Anyone could establish his own award. All you needed was a little image that looked like a medal or a star.
Awards were demanded by the “big guys” who wanted to show how “special” they were. And they were often taken advantage of by really small guys, who were making the awards, and used them to promote their own “award giving” web sites.
Then there were so many web awards that nobody cared about them anymore. And it was quite for some time.
The new wave started with trust certifications. Lots and lots of people on the web were followed by all sorts of scammers, spammers, crackers, hackers, and what not. Many got worried and afraid. So, the certification boom started. Trust of that, protection of this, guarantee of something, warranty of something else, etc.
Surprisingly, after all these years, so many web sites still use this non-sense. What is even more surprsing is that so many of them are prepared to pay money (and huge money in some cases) to get the award or certification.  Why? That’s really beyond me.
More and more people spend more and more time online. I wish more and more of them read RFC 1855 which covers netiquette guidelines. This document is more than 10 years old, but most of the points that it discusses are as valid today as they were back then. Some are even more important today than they used to be. Another good thing about this RFC is that it has theoretical directions combined with some practical advice.
A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we call these “flames”) even if you are provoked. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get flamed and it’s prudent not to respond to flames.
Reading this document won’t make you wise enough to avoid all the mistakes of online communications, but it can seriously minimize them.
There was an sudden boost in searches for Cyprus yesterday. The reason for that was a bug in Twinkle – a Twitter client for iPhone. For some reason, Twinkle was identifying current location wrong for a whole lot of users. Instead of being somewhere in the States, they were said to be Nicosia, Cyprus. That probably felt very surprising for them, especially considering the fact that not many of them knew what or where Nicosia, Cyprus was. Hence, all the searching.
There is a rumor going around that it was the work of Cyprus government, desperately trying to keep tourism levels up. You, of course, should believe whatever your tin foil hat tells you to believe…