5 delicious posts, take two

this week i'll start off my 5 posts from the del.ic.ious posts with the social collider
1: social collider
The social collider is a program that maps out tweets on twitter based on what you search for. This then displays the information of linking groups together. Amazingly the search for RIP Patrick Swayze yielded, from my standpoint, a well rounded trace of information. Most of it was at the top center of the map, while fewer strands fell far off, creating some interesting links over a longer period of time, still related to the topic. The farthest back the longest stream goes is 9/11/09, making you wonder why someone had posted something like this so far ahead of the rest of the crowd.
Social collider has been found to not only find many interesting links between different social icons and news, but when it graphs them out, it creates an amazing array of how these things become connected, and has been known to create mapping layouts that look much like art themselves.

2: disney says you WILL watch ads:
Disney struck a deal with Cox communications to offer hit shows and football games on demand in exchange for the removal of fast forwarding features used to skip ads. The deal only affects Cox Video on Demand services, not DVR's ability to fast forward. In addition, they well cooperatively test technology that will place ads based on Zip codes, to "freshen" the ads with new ones every day. While i do like the idea of rotation on ads, making them less of a hassle to watch (the car guy from brewer... i can't stand listening to him every day). But i feel that this might be something Cox Communications might find to be a bane to their productivity. People who use the skip ads fuction generally do so because they HATE watching ads. So when they lose that ability, the cable all of a sudden will lose it's appeal, allowing other companies who might have that ability to step in and take their business. But i suppose with disney backing them up they'll have a long ways to go before they go bankrupt...

3: gender ads project

This projects measures the depiction of ads through the generations, and points out some interesting facts. Many of the ads based on men make them masculine, strong hearted, bad ass, gun slinging "hotties" who knows what to do in any given situation. On the other hand, Women in ads tend to be very sexual. Trophies for men to fight for, nothing more than to be proclaimed. It's interesting to wonder what would happen if the idea was inverse. Sure, a few ads have gotten away with doing so, but they merely show that they're doing it in jest of the situation. But it's all more interesting to watch as people bicker back and forth about who is sexist, and why today's commercials are so wrong to project these claims.

4.Self Control
This is a nifty little program that will block you from certain things for a time limit. So if you want to block yourself from your mail for 2 hours, you would put in the time and start it. The One flaw, if you can really call it that, is that you cannot undo what you've done once you hit the start button. while this can sometimes be frustrating, i can see how this is a sensable leave out on the software. This can take you off of your computer and push you even further into either getting work done or finding a social environment to stay in.

5: cryptographic tools to keep you hidden on facebook.
On account of the large amount of personal information on social networking sites, a tech review from slashdot has found an article on tools to hide your activity on facebook. this browser plug in will replace sensitive information in a user's profile and news feed with meaningless text that can only be unscrambled by trusted friends or contacts. The data will stay private, at least what the assisstant professor of computer sciences of UWaterloo, Ontario.

"You feel like you are talking to a friend casually in a conversation, but in reality you are publicizing information in a forum where it will stay for a long time," Acquisti says. "Privacy is not the first thing you think of when you use a social network."

It's something to think about next time you decide to skip school or work and then facebook it.

~josh~