I took a week off after the baby, I worked a week from home, and now I’m back to work.  You would think in that time I would have had time to write something.   That I have so much going on that I should be sharing and contributing, giving you information – either the mundane, interesting, or where you think I am on crack.    I do have ideas, just little effort right now.   You could say that my energies are directed at other things, but it’s not really that.   It was only yesterday that I caught up on e-mail from over two weeks ago.   I did manage in the last week to catch back up on my RSS feeds (that was a huge pain and some feeds I just did the blanket mark as read).

So right now I’m taking the rest of the month off.   Yes you may see some twitter comments here or there, you may see me comment somewhere.   This is me digesting information.  Looking into the reflection pond of the interwebs and seeing what echos back.   I do plan on next month gearing back up to speed.    I do hope to do some writing in what is left in this month, but anything I do write will more then likely get put off from being published until next month.   Of course if there is an “OMG WTF” event I may still do an article.   Alone getting this out for now is just enough.   It is enough effort so no one thinks I’ve vanished.  It is enough effort to make it to completion.  It is enough to reach out ot the community that follows and interacts with me.

I’ll see you in two weeks.

]]> http://creeva.com/2009/03/17/taking-a-net-break/feed/ 0 http://creeva.com/2009/02/26/we-are-having-a-baby/ http://creeva.com/2009/02/26/we-are-having-a-baby/#comments Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:55:48 +0000 Creeva http://creeva.com/?p=4273

When I say we are having a baby – I don’t mean in the abstract sense that it’s happening soon.  Literally we are having a baby right now.  This post like most of them I am writing ahead of time, so there will be some details missing.   The one most important is what day is this going to publish?   I’m not sure – the baby is due any day now, I have to be ready to rush out the door.  I am hoping to run by the blog for five seconds to get this alert published.  By the time you are reading this (depending on how quick you do) we should be either on the way to or at the hospital.  When we get home I’ll be putting up a new article with pictures and the whole nine yards.

The signs have started that we are going to be having our child in our arms very soon.  I don’t yet know the weight or length of him.  I don’t know what the time or day of his birth.   He is very close to appearing.  Some part of this since I’m writing this ahead of time reminds me of Linus telling Charlie Brown about the Great Pumpkin, in theory the Great Pumpkin is going to show up, but yet there is no proof.     We are hoping everything goes well, that there is no complications.   Wish us well.

I’ll be giving updates on my twitter feed, so watch that for the latest information.

Image from here

A few weeks ago I wrote about the NYPD want the ability to turn disable cellphone coverage in the case of a terrorist attack. Now it seems that states and local governments are fighting for their own ability to do that.   In my previous story I pointed how fruitless and ineffective it would truly be during a terrorist attack, I think it’s insane.   The question I have now has anyone thought about how this is a terrorist attack against our own people?

The idea of a terrorist is that they use fear as an attack weapon.   If there is an emergency going on and people can not get through to there loved ones that this wouldn’t inspire fear.   Heck it may scare some people if they can’t send a message about the emergency to Twitter or Facebook.  We’ve all seen enough movies that we are ingrained as a people if hte enemy is going to attack they will cut off our communications so we can not coordinate a counter offensive properly.   This is an of it’s self stupid since something will always get through, example Independence Day and the Morse Code maneuver.  Yet this would scare and dare I say terrorize people since not only would you be scared since you can’t call, no one around you can call and is freaking out also.

This is a sad side effect of living in the era of constant communication, we take it for granted.   When it would be ripped away form us, and we wouldn’t know what is going on, what ideas is that going to put in your mind.  People in the middle america may think a cell tower is down, what if they drive an hour – even the most idiotic person isn’t going to think all the towers are down.   Some people may think since I’m saying that the government has an inadvertant take on an idea that could become a terrorist weapon that I’m a nut job.   I however think this is a fairly obvious look at human psychology.

Picture from here

For all those Trekkies out there (or do you really prefer Trekkers?) Brent Spiner just joined Twitter today.  I looked at who he was following, and there we get Wil Wheaton and LeVar Burton.  So now you can get your Trek on with Twitter.   Go forth and follow – and while you are there you can give a little follow to me also.   Please let me know if you find any other Star Trek performers on twitter and I’ll update this post as necesssary.

The recent twitter phishing scam had non twitter users scratching their heads on why this service would be targeted for a phishing scam at all.. Most people view little or no monetary value to twitter accounts. For most people this may actually be true. For people like Scoble or companies that promote themselves over twitter, well the brand name damage caused by a hijacked twitter account could be quite costly.

One of my friends on twitter had a reply about this issue (I’m assuming the other person didn’t realize the long tail potential impact (yes I used the term long tail – get over it)). What I saw was this:

@jeremyasmus could be any number of reasons, spread malware, spam, get passwords, us humans tend to use the same password over and over.

This is the crux of the issue isn’t it? The problem isn’t average user with nine friends directly, it’s the large power users and the passwords for other services. Let’s look at each of these.

Let’s say you are Scoble and your account get’s hijacked. Scoble has a level of trust built from himself, he is known to get the inside scoop on information, people click his links. Scoble has over 47,000 followers. If his account was hijacked and ten percent clicked a link that was really a malware installer – that would be 4,700 people infected within a matter of minutes. I think however the number of Scoble followers would be much larger probable in the 50-60% range. For a malware distribution this is a great return for the time frame, with the added benefit that you may get some other high profile names in the attack.

The cost to deploy such an attack is extremely low – under ten dollars, while the net return would be a few thousand, potentially more. Since there is little risk to getting caught if you know what you are doing, you could make some decent money by exploiting this chain of trust that exists and is protected by a mere password.

Let’s look at the side of this coin, the normal user.  Adam Baldwin nailed it right on the head when he stated “us humans tend to use the same password over and over”. I know I do, though different level of things have different passwords – my banking account does not use the same username/password combination as my twitter account – neener/neener. It is however shared with some other web 2.0 services. Some other people may not be so diligent. This once again is a chain of trust issue. You are trusting the companies that you give your passwords to are truly them, so once your password is in the wild it’s exposed and all of your accounts are open to attack.

Let’s look at the information an attacker can get from you if they have your twitter password:

User Name – while by itself it’s exposing a little bit about your account and your password – the problem lies in having both bits of this information. That part should be blatantly obvious. The issue lies in the fact that most of us use the same username or “handle” across many sites on the web. Doing a Google search for “Creeva” yields over 46,000 hits. A lot of these hits are different services that I play with and over 90% of the hits link back directly to me in some fashion. Since most sites use you username as your login name, if I used the same password every single one of these services would be exposed if I fell for the twitter phising scam.

E-Mail Address – Yes though it maybe only a small amount these days, your e-mail address is still worth a few percentages of a penny to the spammer. This would get you on more mailing lists, and ones that would be quite hard to get off of. It is also normally used as a login name for service that do not use your handle. More accounts have now been exposed because of this. If your e-mail account passwords is the same as your twitter account (dumb mistake) everything about your online life, accounts, and transactions can now be exposed and utilized against you. Would you notice a gmail filter that someone setup to clone every incoming e-mail?

The other issue is even you do not have accounts that show up in a Google search they could use a service search engine such as Spokeo to find accounts even you may have forgotten about.

Mobile Phone Number – This probably would be one of the most annoying things, that your phone number has been exposed to the internet underground. Phone spam, call back charges; there are a few things they can do with this number. I do think this is small annoyance compared to loosing your email account.

Being a good security professional my recommendation is to use strong passwords that are unique to each service and are rotated regularly. I am also a realist and know that you won’t. This may be the time to start doing segmentation where different accounts do get different levels of passwords. This is what I do so if my twitter account was compromised only the services that I consider on par with Twitter security-wise was at risk. Lower level accounts would be safe and higher level accounts would be safe. I also think with the range of accounts, I could move faster then the phishers going through and knowing what to change faster then they could try all 46,000 sites. It’s a thought – now what are yours?

I never truly finished my “Month With Mom Series“, I was working on the novel for NANOWRIMO, and then came back and ran out of steam to finish the blog article series.  It’s take me over a month, but I wanted to address a couple comments.  The first came from my youngest sister who still lives with my mother and step-father:

Ok well im just going to say what I feel . About the part 2 and part 3 , I feel she should of never ever took him back . He is not a father and doesnt act like one. He does not bother talking to us all the time except for my yonger brother usually. And is mean to the pets . I dont even like him living in the house . And seems like he doenst even try at all . But I still dont get what she see’s in him. When he was in Columbus it was better without him . But thats all im gonna say .

She seems to have some of the same feeling that I do on the issue, at least when it comes to how my mother dealt with my step-father during their separation and the reconciliation.    So this is similar feelings coming form someone that is thirty-two and someone that lives in that household and is thirteen.   This is also her father, it might be my step-father, but it is her father and this is the treatment she feels that she gets.  Don’t forget that I had another sister pipe in on her feelings.  My own father has read my series, but thought it would be best to not leave public comments, I guess in some ways he is a wise man.

This next comment was left by Groovymarlin who runs her own blog, but I knew through playing SWG with.  This comment was left on part 20 of the series (also the final part I finished).

I’ve been reading these all along and I have to say they’re fascinating, though maybe not for the reasons that you think. I’ll just summarize my thoughts so far:

1. Your mom is obviously a very shallow person. It also sounds like she was a little too selfish and self-centered to be a very good mom.

2. On the other hand, you were all fed, clothed, received medical care, etc., etc, growing up yes? My point being – she may not be a very good mom, but there are much WORSE moms.

3. A lot of your complaints about her sound pretty nit-picky to a third party. I’m sure that to you, just about everything she does is annoying and obnoxious and irritating. But to an outsider, a lot of the things she does sound like…things that middle-aged women do. However…

4. Your opinion and view of her has obviously been colored by the truly negative things she HAS done in the past, and therefore every one of her transgressions is magnified to you.

5. Your mom seems to have a bad habit of using people, but remember: people allow themselves to be used. Your grandparents in particular seem to have no problem allowing her to manipulate them. Is it right? No. Are they adults, and capable of deciding for themselves whether to allow this? Yes (at least as far as we know – if at some point due to age or health they become unable to make these decisions on their own, then there would be a real problem).

I think in general you’re handling the mom situation the right way, which is to just let her do her own thing, as long as it’s not hurting you or your own family. I feel pretty bad about some of the things she said about, to, and in front of your sister. That passive-aggressive shit is not cool, not from anyone, and especially not from a mother. But what can you do about that, other than give your sister your emotional support and help her do her own thing as well? Nothing.

People suck, don’t they?

Ever since I read this comment I thought it would be a good blog post on it’s own for a reply instead of loosing it in the noise of comments that no one would ever read, just like my sister’s comment above.  Though she says I’m handling this the right way and can see where I am coming from I wanted to address a couple of the points.

Point number two stated because we were clothed, fed,  and had medical care that she couldn’t have been a terrible mom, there are crack addict mothers that can do the same.   When I was 16 I had a job where I pulled a muscle in my chest.   It kept going for a few days where I didn’t tell anyone that I was having trouble breathing.   Everytime I took a deep breath it physically hurt ot breath.  Not to the point where I couldn’t breath, but to the point where I thought something was wrong with my heart since it was in that vincinity.  Like eveyr male I ignored it as long as possible and finally mentioned to my mother.

My mother thought I was making it up and yelled at me for making her take me to the doctor.   Stating she didn’t have the money for it (my parents were divorced by then).   I think my grandparents ending up paying for it.   It turned out I didn’t have heart problems like i was afraid, but a pulled chest muscle like I said.   I had been hyper-ventilating for days, which means taking breaths faster and more shallow then you normally would.  I hadn;t noticed since it seems we are taught when you are hyperventilating you are gasping for air.   I was proscribed codeine for the pain, every once in awhile to this day the problem will creep back for a week or two and I just deal with it since pain medication is the only thing they can proscribe.   My siblings have had similar doctor experiences where my mother only reluctantly took them after we plead the case to my grandparents since my mom thought it was some sort of attention plea.

I never asked for medical attention from my mother.   Besides getting teeth pulled for braces the last major medical thing tha tI had done was in elementary school when I got chronic ear aches.   So this wasn’t a case of my mother always dragging me ot the doctor and me haivng nothing wrong with me, it was serious to me, I was in tears fearing the worst about my condition and thinking it was my heart.

A similar issue goes with the getting fed thing, my mother has always chosen not work.  Because of this she happily took advantage of the free lunch program for the local schools.  I can’t say that my sibling are still on it, yet for two years of my high school I was.   It seemed to her better to get her kids free lunches then to get a job.    She has worked the welfare system so she could go on buying things from the home shopping network and Longaberger baskets, but send her children into the free lunch program.  that is selfish and naive, and if she had been cutting back on other things maybe I would have more sympathy and understanding.

So did she keep clothed, fed, and medical care – only when it suited her, she didn’t have pay, it didn’t effect other people’s appearance of her, or she was forced.   I still wonder what school officials thought about me wearing hundred dollar tennis shoes (since she wanted us to look our best) while getting free lunchs.

Number three stated I was pointing out alot of nit picky things – I mentioned earlier that alot fo these were small things, things that eventually broke me and caused me to cut off all communication with her.    I don’t deny some of hte things were small, but it is also the small things that shape us.   The big things we overcome; my mother didn’t beat me, she was the person that cared about herself first and her children second.

Number four stated that I magnify the issues and focus them on myself.   I was the whipping boy, after me it the third in line, then the fourth (my brother second in line didn’t get the whipping boy treatment), now it’s my sister that’s fifth in line.  I can say what I felt was slights to me and things that I have a right to complain about.   If one day my siblings decide to tell their own stories alot of similarities will line up, since this is what they tell me “off the record”.   Eventually maybe I’ll get some of them to talk about their own experiences more.

I’m also however not going to deny that I’m writing about the things she did that annoyed me or set me off.   These feelings will seem stronger to me then outside forces.    Some of it is truly petty, but I needed material to write and I did leave some bigger things off the record for the moment, writing this piece reminded me of the doctor’s issue I mentioned.    I’m not saying I’m done with this series, but for the moment I’m done writing about it.   I may do some more pieces in the future, but it will be about the larger things she did when I have the time, energy, and motivation to write about them.

If your interested here are the links to the stories so far:

Read Part 1 Here

Read Part 2 Here

Read Part 3 Here

Read Part 4 Here

Read Part 5 Here

Read Part 6 Here

Read Part 7 Here

Read Part 8 Here

Read Part 9 Here

Read Part 10 Here

Read Part 11 here

Read Part 12 Here

Read Part 13 Here

Read Part 14 Here

Read Part 15 Here

Read Part 16 Here

Read Part 17 Here

Read Part 18 Here

Read Part 19 Here

Read Part 20 Here

Picture from here

Just wanted to share this video I got from Sheagunther on Twitter:

I really didn’t have time to write about this last week when it first came to my attention but it seems that Creeva.com has been banned from Technorati for gaming the system.   It states that I republish materials from other sites onto this blog.   This is not untrue, though 90% of my posts actually originate from there.   If I write something I centralize it all on creeva.com.   It’s simple.  It’s efficient.  It allows me centralize and backup my writing.

That being said, they aren’t wrong.   One of the underlying experiments that this blog does is crossposting.  It crossposts to myspace, facebook, tumblr, blogger, and many more.   I don’t make huge piles of cash (haven’t made a dime in my pocket yet).  I don’t blast people with ads, though on some sites including the main there are some that are there.   I’m not doing it to drive up profit in any way.  I’m doing it so different communities can read my stuff.  I won’t harp on it, I’ve written about my crossposting before.

The question is how relevant is Technorati becoming.   I know this question has been asked before, and I used to believe in Technorati.   I didn’t start 500 blogspot accounts to promote the material.  I used 1 public site per service.  For the point of experimentation and proof of concept.  I also have been slowly working on a whole article series on how to crosspost.   With the myriad of services and the fact that data is not yet truly portable, but beginning to become so.   How can these services accurately  track where information is originating from.

Like I said I’m not annoyed, I can live without technorati.  When people are posting links to their site on tumblr, friendfeed, twitter, and others how long before there are more people like me?   Services like Ping.fm and HelloTxt serve in a market segment only to fuel this further.   I’m not someone who has a targetted truly branded blog beyond self branding.   I don’t have a certain topic set I cover and regulary write about.  I’m a schizophrenic writer that is all over the place.   The only thing I hope is consistent is my voice.  Beyond that take away from my writing what you will.

Well it seems I’ve been lax the last couple weeks in my weekly summaries.  Let’s catch up:

Articles:

I Think Fragmented Communities in Social Networks Are a Good Thing

Interesting – Guess They Don’t have Time to Meet

Web Application Developers Can Learn A Bit From WordPress

Holy Legos Batman (Not About Lego Batman)

Some Great Macro Photography Images

Sad Day For Free Speech For Students

Had to Remove Some Sites From My Lifestreaming Page

Web Companies Today Are On Top Of Customer Service – Traditionals Take Note

Get an E-Mail or Twitter Alert When a Company Changes is Privacy or Security Policy

Pop-up Study Proves Users Will Click Anything

It Had to Happen Eventually – DHS Testing Pre-Crime Detection

Palin Hacker Is Not Indicted …So Far……

VHS Alumni Band 2008 Memories

Did I Blog Without Permission or Do You Not Understand Creative Commons

Daily Online Activity:

Online Activity for 2008-09-19

Online Activity for 2008-09-20

Online Activity for 2008-09-21

Online Activity for 2008-09-22

Online Activity for 2008-09-23

Online Activity for 2008-09-24

Online Activity for 2008-09-25

Online Activity for 2008-09-26

Online Activity for 2008-09-27

Online Activity for 2008-09-29

Online Activity for 2008-09-30

Online Activity for 2008-10-01

]]> http://creeva.com/2008/10/03/creevacom-weeks-in-review-91908-10308/feed/ 0 http://creeva.com/2008/09/23/get-an-e-mail-or-twitter-alert-when-a-company-changes-is-privacy-or-security-policy/ http://creeva.com/2008/09/23/get-an-e-mail-or-twitter-alert-when-a-company-changes-is-privacy-or-security-policy/#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:04:12 +0000 Creeva http://creeva.com/?p=3437

Picture from here

A couple weeks ago I was talking with a friend about an idea for a new web service.   The web service would have you enter in all the services and sites you use and have an account with online, and then send you a twitter alert when the policy changed and it would show you which text changed.  My problem is while I could come up with the design, function, and architecture I couldn’t figure out any way to monetize such a service.  I let it languish and said I would eventually write a blog article on how to roll you own.   This is that article.

The key feature to making this work (obviously) is a service that can monitor website for changes and give you some sort of data trigger outbound that is usable for repurposing.  I know I could use services that would do an RSS feed, but I wanted something more immediate and trustworthy then RSS for this scenario.  I hunted around and I found the service Change Detection that will send send you an email when a web page has changed.

E-Mail Alerts

With e-mail you have a bit more control.   It’s all easy.  If all you want is an e-mail alert put in the policy page into the page address field.   Then place your e-mail address in the “send alert to:” field.   Easy as cake and your done.

Twitter Alerts

What about getting twitter alerts?  The first thing I’ll point out, I’m not a programmer.  I’m sure there are much better ways to do this in much simpler methods.  I have two requirements for myself.   Keep it free, and it keep it in the cloud.   Make the internet do the work for you, it’s always on and online – your computer doesn’t have to be.  So instead of using an Uber-Twitterbot I’m going to utilize a few free service:

1. Change Detection -Configure the privacy page you want to monitor the same way in section for getting email alerts.  Instead of relying on the emails for notification, change detection allows you to create an RSS feed for each page you are monitoring.

3. Twitter – Setup a new twitter account that you can friend.  If you worried about privacy (people knowing which sites you are watching), set the updates to be protected so only “friends” can see them.   Have the alert twitter account friend you, log out and friend the account back with your main twitter account.

4. Twitterfeed -Take the feed from change detection, pipe it through twitterfeed so it will put update notifications to your “alert account”.   Now whenever anything has changed you can watch updates from that account and you’ll have almost real time monitoring of any web page.

Un immense porte avions fait à l’aide de Legos!

From a twitter contact I received a link to this humongous lego project.   I think this guy is on his way to kicking Zack The Lego Maniac’s ass.  If you following the link beneath the picture you can see more pictures of this insane project.   I think I have lego envy now.   I may have to build something in lego tonight.

Picture from here

I was listening to the last weeks episode of Net@Night and they were complaining that the Twitter community has become fragmented.  This is true in the online world, as well as the offline world.  We are all not friends.  Sometimes I think what you read, listen to, watch, or have to say is utterly idiotic and reprehensible.   I’m sorry.   I do.   I also know that some of you think the same things about me, especially those that are completely fed up with me.

We call places like Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc.  social networks.  They are and they are not.  If you consider High School an experiment in social networking I guess they are social networks.   I prefer to think of them as “Social Platforms”.   These are sites and applications that allow you to be social, but you don’t have to be.   I enjoy going to a movie with someone else and don’t really enjoy going by myself.   That doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there that don’t enjoy going by themselves.   Some people join social networks for the games, some for the functions, and yes most for the social aspect and the ability to connect with people.

I’ve written before that I use different social platforms in different ways.  Some communities, like twitter, I take an active role and participate in, others I hang back and show up when I receive a comment on some piece of work I’ve commented on.   I just don’t have time to be a good community member and interact exclusively (or a lot) on the literally hundreds of social network sites I belong to.  Giving the lack of time in being able to deal with all of them, I write once and post everywhere.  I deal with comments and such.

I won’t add you to my friends list if I haven’t dealt with you in some sort of capacity.  I add you if I’ve met you through online gaming, real life meetings, or I’ve had some sort of conversation with you.   I won’t add you if you thought I look interesting and just want to chat (don’t worry I’m not requesting friendship form you if you look interesting either).   Heck I don’t even like some of the networks I’m a member of.  What does this mean though?

Does it mean I’m not networking socially?   I am and I’m not.   I’m hanging out with friends or exchanging ideas with people I know.   If your coming along for the ride, more power to you.  I’m not going to these just to meet you, some unknown person to me.   Until I know you I don’t want to network with you.

What does this mean in general?  I’ve pigeon holed myself into these social platforms.  I’ve become cliquish in a way that also existed in high school.   Just because I haven’t welcomed you with open arms doesn’t mean I refuse to get to know you, it just takes time.   This is what happens to the splintered groups amongst all of these social platforms.  They have their own secret hand shakes and communities that exist on the platform.   This is actually quite a good thing, this is how you fulfill the niche market.   One size doesn’t fit all.  I do believe your data and the data explicitly shared with you should be able to be moved to another platform, data should be open and you should be able to make your own decisions over the data and meta data you create.     Splintered communities online just show us the social model that we have in the real world can replicate and exist online.

Because online communities begin to form and evolve organically the same way they do in meat space, we know that they are real true communities.   They aren’t Utopian society love-ins.  Just because your friends with Bob and Jane and I’m friends with them doesn’t mean we have anything in common to talk about.  Personally I have issues with Bob and Jane on some things, what if those are the things that you have in commonality with them?  I would then hate you.   I don’t want to hate, but I don’t want to get to know you either.     That’s not a bad thing.  Like real life we need to get to know each other first.   You don’t give everyone on the street you meet your phone number – why would you add them to your friends list.

It’s not necessarily about hiding information from them.  There are a lot of people like myself who literally broadcast their information broadly and openly across the internet.   You really aren’t gaining too much beyond more access to direct communication to me by being on my friends list.   I think these leads us to rethink the idea of friend lists.

Now go friend me on every possible social network you find that has a Creeva.

Image from here

You know how your browser tries to guess where you go by what your typing in?  These are the sites that come up as my suggestions (from browsing history) when I go through each letter of the alphabet:

A -Google Analytics

B – The Other Guild

C – Creeva’s World 2.0

D – Digg

E – Gmail

F – Feedburner

G – General Discussion -Vermilion News

H – Slashdot

I – The Other Guild

J – Journey To Get Paid

K – Kwippy

L – My Lifestream

M – VCMA

N – Network Solutions

O – Oh My Yod

P – Ping.fm

Q – Disqus

R – Google Analytics

S – Slashdot

T – Twitter

U – Yahoo Login

V – General Discussion -Vermilion News

W – Statcounter

X – Yahoo Login

Y – Yahoo Login

Z – Dad Hacker

Interesting?  Not really.   I found this post amusing however.

Picture from here

I have a profound fascination with cloud computing, internet computing, bamboozled processing (whatever you want to call it).  The problem when you start using these terms in the IT world it becomes “Software as a Service” (SaS) in some attempt to legitimatize the business model.   There is a distinct difference, however.   That difference is money.

“Cloud Computing” is still one of the ephemeral terms that no one is quite sure what it means.   It’s akin to the “Network Computer” model pushed out by Oracle in the mid 90′s – it’s all as hard to explain, ridiculed, ahead of it’s time, and understandable as the Network Computer was.  The idea of cloud computing means why you process your data locally through some window (Browser, Local PC) into the cloud (Internet), your data is stored in the cloud and accessible from anywhere.  Terms like Webmail have become keeping your email in the clouds – I like the concept but we are bringing back the 90′s terms about “thinking outside the box” with this type of labeling.   Social networks such as Myspace and Facebook are also considered to be cloud platforms, I assume this means because you can annoy your friends anywhere with applications invites – even if you’ve never met them in meat space.

Current definition essentially is if you are doing anything online except reading a static web page (library interaction in the clouds?) – is considered cloud computing.   Some people are referring to any of this same type of activity as SaS whe nit is in the IT realm.  It’s not, please change your wordings, understand what you are talking about, respect both the IT world and the non-IT world.  You are confusing people with concepts that are also completley non-explainable already.

SaS is much similar to cloud computing, much like a cheetah (SaS) is similar to a bobcat (cloud computing).  Both of the latter animals are members of the feline family and have similar body makeup, but we can also recognize that they are not the same and have vastly different feature sets.   A bobcat is also more common.  First I’ll say it, most SaS is boring.  It’s the kind of stuff you do at work.  Whether it’s Peachtree’s online application,  it’s the remote backup service and outsourced server monitoring your company purchases.   These are software packages your company can buy and manage but they’ve moved them off site and out of their direct control over the hardware.  It’s on the network and that’s all that matters.

SaS products come with service level agreements that guarantee up time and will compensate you for excessive (which is sometimes 15 minutes) of downtime.   I have yet to see a check from Twitter or Myspace, and I’m sure some users can show actual cause and effect of damage to their online businesses if their is an outage.   SaS is normally pretty niche, costs money, and replicates things you already do.

I pay for Flickr?  Does that mean it’s an SaS?  No it doesn’t, the Flickr “application” is free, what I am paying for is storage space and a small number of features – not the application.  The same goes with Google Apps and Smugmug.  If it’s a consumer grade product it’s still a cloud computing application.  When we move into things like Microsoft offering remote hosted MS Exchange packages, we are entering into SaS.

The other day I received this e-mail in my inbox:

Hi Creeva,

I would love a review of my site if you feel it would be worthwhile…

Twiggit is an automated service that lets your friends on twitter know what articles you digg. every so often we check for the last article that you voted for on digg, and update your twitter status to reflect this.  Options include the ability to only tweet the articles you submit rather than digg, pause the service at anytime, change the frequency of when to check digg, completly remove your twiggit account.

There is nothing like this in the market, we aim to bring digg and twitter closer together!

http://twiggit.org/

Any questions please let me know :-)

Jason

It took me a few days to add this onto my plate, but I did get around to signing up for the website.    At one time I attempted to crosspost all of my online activities over to twitter – this got way to spammy.  When I set it up this account I configured itto send everything I submit on Digg to crosspost over to Twitter.  Since I sometimes will go on a digg spree and digg 50 stories in a day I didn’t want all of them to show up as tweets.   Props to them for thinking about this.

To test this out I submitted a recent story I wrote onto Digg attempting to find out a title about a movie I was tracking down.   The product works as designed.  All in all there is no frills, it’s single purpose – but single purpose that works quite well.  There are other methods of doing this such as importing feeds into twitter – but while Twiggit is essentially doing this at the back end – it makes it easier for people that would be intimidated by the level of understanding that this takes.  Twiggit is something I would send over so my parents could set up (if any of them used Digg or Twitter), versus something psuedo complex that I would have ot configure for them.

On the downsides, there website shows the following image:

If you look at the bottom of the image it says it received it 2 minutes ago from Twiggit.  This acknowledgment seems to be missing from my tweet which states submitted 1 hour ago from web.  I’m assuming this is a bug.

All in all Twiggit is not something groundbreaking, but it’s deserves it’s niche.  In the era we are moving into of micro-niches it fits in quite nicely.   With all the sites that integrate with Twitter, Twitter needs to start setting up a developer API similar to Google or Flickr so we don’t actually have to give these sites our Twitter usernames and passwords.  That however is a rant for another day.

UPDATE:

Originally the title mentioned Twiggit.com – which is the parent website of twiggit.org – the application is at twiggit.org.  Unfortunately I can’t catch everywhere I crossposted this story to, but I’m editing here on the source site.

There was an article on mashable today questioning if ping.fm and hellotxt were helping the web world or hurting it.  I understand the authors point that if you are using these services that you are not taking an interest and active use in the social community that you are using these services to post to.   I can say from hits for ping.fm beta code requests on my blog, that lots of people are interested in getting access to ping.fm.   Now that it’s out of private beta I’m sure I’ll lose my number one spot in google for the term “ping.fm beta code”.  

If people want this what does this say?  It really means that we have diverse friendships.  We have communities that we want to share information with.   We don’t have time to manually copy or paste, nor do we have the time to try convince everyone we know to use a single service.   Since we can’t bring our friends to the service (much to the dismay of the social network providers), we take our information to them. 

We want to share our information, we don’t want to hoard.  I for example do all my writing on my main blog, twitter, and handful of other services.   Yet I have friends on almost every little social network out there.   Why should I be forced to chose between friends and the information I share with them.   Yes I’m sure some actual readers that are not into crossposting get annoyed over the repeated information on multiple services.   What about my friends though?   Where does the line of a healthy blogging business end and friendship cross?  My friends are the ones that inspire, the will always have the information directed towards them.    I am more then willing to take my information to them.   At what cost, a minor annoyance to literally a handful?

No one is forced to read my messages.   No one is forced to follow me.   No one is forced to my site.  If the author doesn’t follow ping.fm links, so be it.   I’m not losing what I truly care about.   Maybe when the a single network has all the features I want and 99.9% market dominance – then I’ll stop cross posting.   Until that time I’m proud to be a crossposter.

Picture from here

Some people may notice that on my lifestream page it has a new look and feel, it also has a whole lot more stuff in it.   I’ve transitioned to a new lifestreaming plugin, previously I was using the “Simple Life” plugin.   The new plugin is is called “Lifestream“.  It allows me to put in more RSS feeds then I was previously able to with “Simple Life”, it also performs a daily digest post (which has allowed me to stop using the twitter plugin I used to use to pull in my digest of tweets).   There is one bug with the digest posting in the fact that it does a double post.

For creeva.com this is easy to fix.  I just go in each morning and remove the duplicate post.   However the people feeling the sting are the ones that I crosspost to.   There is absolutely no way I’m going to go everywhere my data replicates and track down and clean out the duplicate posts.  I have been in contact with the plugin author and he is aware of the issue.   He did some massive updating last night, let’s hope this got corrected.  I was also kind enough to hide these daily posts from the front page of the blog.   I didn’t want to make it seem that all I did was do daily updates of myself.  I’m not that vane to broadcast on the front page of my blog.   There is a link at the bottom of my lifestream to direct you to my lifestream archive.

The other thing to notice is the multitude of items.   It makes me look like an internet posting maniac.  Ok I am an Internet posting maniac, but not as much as my lifestream shows.  I thought it apt to try to get information on where my stuff is being posted and pull in the RSS feeds from here.  This will allow readers to see everywhere I crosspost to how frequently they are updated.

We’ll see if this is the magic bullet for my life vaulting.

This week has been a crazy one. Here is what has been published.

Articles:

Bill Nye The Science Guy is Coming Back – I always enjoyed Bill Nye The Science Guy.

The Second Day of Kindergarten – Heart break and scheming

Week One of My New GTD Strategy is Over – The success rate is a debate

County Fair, after County Fair, after County Fair – Many trips scheduled

Will Social Networks Lead to Political Revenge? – Wondering what happens when the next generation gets into power

Utter Frustration and Writers Block – General rant on not writing

How I Changed The Channel At Grandpa’s House – A child finds a flaw in the system.  As one comment pointed out I hacked my grandfather.

Competitive Training is Not an Excuse for Sending Kids to Public Schools – A rant against someone who thinks everyone should go to public schools to be truly competitive

My Obsession With Capes – A short fun little post

The Time I Thought I Was Related to Spider-Man – Sadly I truly am not

New Look For The Blog – Announcing the new theme

VCMA Concert Tonight

- I need to write the follow up

I Admit it, I Liked Archie Comics Growing Up – I’m weird.  I know.

Twitter Updates:

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-15

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-16

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-18

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-19

Twitter Updates for 2008-08-20

Daily Activity Summaries:

Daily Digest for 2008-08-21 – starting yesterday I’m gonig to be posting a daily post of all my online activity – my lifestream day by day in a post.   I hope you enjoy.