as I live a few more questions

Google+ is the New Facebook -- Pass It On!

I have been exploring Google's new social network, Google+, for almost a month now, and it is fantastic!  It's still in beta but it already has about 25 million members.  

If you want to experience it yourself, please click on the following link for an invitation (I've never tried this before so I hope this works!)

 

https://plus.google.com/_/notifications/ngemlink?path=%2F%3Fgpinv%3Dq0KF43JpBr0%3AaM-ILF2xqAY

 

I know, I know....

...I haven't posted here in almost a full year now.  Mostly it's because I have been doing my posting elsewhere, to my facebook account, where I have most of my links to my friends and acquaintances and family members.  I'm still in the process of figuring out if I am going to keep this blog, and if so, what I intend to post to it.  Obviously longer-format material than what I can fit into a facebook post.

This week I also started up a Google+ account, and it's been déja-vu for me, the whole startup of a new social network reminds me so much of Orkut, and Tribe, and Friendster befor that, stuff that happened six years ago for me.  By now I'm an old hand at this sort of thing, but I still get a bit of a thrill as I make the cosil network connections.

 

ARGH! Call Extreme Makeover!!

I just found out this morning that my 25th high school reunion is coming up in 10 weeks.  Of course, I would have found out about it a lot sooner if I had bothered to check classmates.com every so often.  *sigh*  Figures, it's one of the few social networking websites I ignore....

I find it ironic that both me and my friend Lynne are on their Missing Grads list :-) guess I'd better get myself un-missing.....I seem to remember they had the same problem tracking me down at the 10th high school reunion. 

Of course, I'm going.  But I need an Extreme Makeover, pronto!  AAARGH!!!

Two words.

In case any of you, the extremely small number of people who read this blog, wonder what black hole has sucked me away this past five weeks--

Well, I can sum it all up in two words:  Second.  Life.

More details on my past five weeks in three-dimensional virtual reality to come.  But, for now, enjoy some of my snapshots from Second Life...

Out On Stage

Now this article in New York Magazine (also available here) really hits the nail on the head, putting into print (or pixels) something I had been thinking about for a long time.

You see, I am one of those people who are profiled here: someone who lets it all* hang out online.  *well, OK, not all, but a lot.

But the one big difference between me and the people profiled is this: I'm a whole generation older than they are.  I'm 43, but online I have more in common with these 23 year olds than I do with my fellow fortysomethings. 

In fact, I've given up on trying to interest my cohort in social networking services like Flickr or Digg.  They could care less; most of them don't see any point in participating.  "Why would you want to share your photos with other people?", they ask.

And I see a few (not many, but a small percentage) of people in my generation (e.g. the Boomers and those born in the decade after the Baby Boom) participating in this grand experiment in self-disclosure.  But we are vastly, VASTLY, outnumbered by the crowd born after 1980, the teens and early-twentysomethings.  They have taken to heart one of the things that their elders still don't (or won't) see:  VERY LITTLE ABOUT YOUR LIFE IS PRIVATE ANYWAYS.

Let me explain.  Most of the facts of your life, if you think about it, are available to anyone who has the resources and connections to find them.  Whole businesses are devoted to the task of building and sharing databases filled with information about you: your credit history, your driving record, your shopping habits (Air Miles, Safeway card, etc.), what courses you flunked out of in college, pretty much everything.  That, uhh, "novelty" you picked up at that adult store?  There's a sales record.  That regular rendezvous you're carrying on, that you think your spouse doesn't know about?  Don't count on it staying a secret for very long.  How do you think private investigators stay in business?   

The big difference between the generations is how they respond to this lack of privacy.  Most fortysomethings are uncomfortable, even horrified, about it.  Many of them don't even want to think about it.  But the post-1980 crowd TREATS THAT LACK OF PRIVACY AS A GIVEN, and thinks: "Well, if I'm going to be public anyways, then I may as well enjoy my time on stage and grab a little spotlight."  In other words, the younger generation doesn't see our modern data-mining, lack-of-privacy culture as a problem, but as an opportunity.  Not something to be feared or escaped from (as if you could!), but something to be embraced, a way for them to say "Hey, this is me.  This is what I like and don't like, these are my friends, here are my photos and what I think about that new CD that just came out, and here's my dating profile on LavaLife, and..."

Like I said, most older people don't get it, shake their heads over it, are afraid of it even.  And I find myself in a weird situation of being from an older generation, but living in the mindset of a younger one. 

Last.fm Update

Last.fm (still my favourite Internet radio station) is again working on an upgrade.  One of the new features that I like is something that I had seen earlier on a service called finetune, the ability to stick a personalized radio station into your blog or MySpace page, so users can listen to a stream of your favourite songs without having to go through all the sign-up hassles UPDATE: Whoops, turns out if you don't already have a (free) account on Last.fm, it asks you to sign up when you click on the radio below.    Please give it a try, and send me a comment to tell me what you think.  It's still in beta so there may be a few bugs, oh and this radio app requires the Flash browser plug-in.

As I was kicking the tires on the new Last.fm beta service (the beta test is open to subscribers only, sorry), I came across this terminology that made me chuckle (see right).  Nudge nudge wink wink saynomore saynomore ;-D  (Note that "my neighbourhood" is Last.fm-speak for listeners whose musical tastes are calculated to be the most similar to your own.)

Radio Paradise: Check It Out.

Radio Paradise is an Internet based radio station devoted to offering alternative music. Based in Paradise, California, this little “radio station” is a throwback to those early experimental days of FM of the 1970’s. In those days a DJ was a disk jockey, not just an employee of a large corporation.

“It seems that everyday it gets harder making an honest dollar without giving up a little piece of your soul to the corporate reaper.” So William (Bill) Goldsmith felt when he started Radio Paradise. Yet as time went on it became apparent that he wasn’t the only one who felt this way as more and more people tuned in. Internet radio had come into its own thus allowing new avenues of creative expression that traditional radio couldn’t achieve. (Source: Case Study: Radio Paradise)

Radio Paradise mostly plays different styles of pop and rock music, but occasionally also everything from jazz to classical to electronic music and world music. (Source: WikiPedia article on Radio Paradise)

Now with over 35,000 registered users from around the world (there's an interactive global map for you to see where they are), Radio Paradise seems to be doing quite well.  And for once, I have found an Internet radio station that plays music very similar to my own eclectic tastes: everything from 10,000 Maniacs to Neko Case to Jimi Hendrix to Neil Young to Louis Armstrong, all mixed in together.  No rap, no hip-hop, just good tunes :-)  The only downside is lack of support for Audioscrobbler. 

Best of all, you can listen for free, although they do want regular listeners to donate to help keep the station afloat.  You can also register and take part in music rating, discussion forums, and the like. 

Vox, by Six Apart

For the past week or so, I've been playing around with Vox in beta.  Vox is a social blogging service similar to Yahoo! 360, Tribe.net, etc. and I think that Six Apart has watched and learned from the mistakes and mis-steps made by many of these earlier services. 

One idea that I like is having objects (a video, an image, a song, a book, etc.) as separate from blogposts.  Blogposts can contain one or more objects (e.g. a comparison of three books on global warming).  This reminds me of the Elgg software, which was structured much the same way.

In this screenshot of my Vox blog, my most recent post is a YouTube video clip of the music video for Johnny Cash's haunting cover version of the Nine Inch Nails tune, Hurt.

Vox is due for general release on October 26th, but you can get a jump on the rest of the Internet, and grab that blogname you want... I have four invitations for Vox to give away, to the first four people who ask for them (please leave me a comment or send me an email via my Vox blog). 

On Vox: Accident Magnet

(I'm currently kicking the tires on the beta VOX site.  You can visit me there if you like.)

   
   

I've decided to start calling my car A.M. That's short for "Accident Magnet". I had my trusty, rusty Ford Festiva for 10 years, and no accidents. I've had my Toyota Echo for three years, and this morning I was involved...

   

» Read more on Vox

   

Some Social Networking Sites for Gay Men

Thanks to an online friend: Eight Social Networking Sites for Men Who Love Men.  I kicked the tires on D-List a while back, but I hadn't heard of many of these sites.