Posts from the “Practical Opacity” Category

danah boyd | apophenia » NOTICE: Email sabbatical will start December 15

Posted on December 1st, 2011

danah boyd | apophenia » NOTICE: Email sabbatical will start December 15 Over the years, I have learned that vacation isn’t vacation if you come home to thousands of pending emails. Cuz then you spend most of vacation worrying about the work that’s piling up. So, over seven years ago, I started instituting “email sabbaticals” in my life. While I’m away, my lovely procmail file (aka “filtering software”) will direct all of my email to /dev/null (aka “the permanent trash”). I will not be reachable. Healthy.

Categories: Practical Opacity

Posted on November 30th, 2011

Path is private by default. You are always in control of your moments and who can see them. Path — About Any company that makes privacy the default starts with an immediate cache of trust in my book. I wish more companies would see it this way and therefore not have to work so hard trying to earn it.

Categories: Practical Opacity

Twitter Blog: 200 million Tweets per day

Posted on July 4th, 2011

Twitter Blog: 200 million Tweets per day Halfway through 2011, users on Twitter are now sending 200 million Tweets per day. For context on the speed of Twitter’s growth, in January of 2009, users sent two million Tweets a day, and one year ago they posted 65 million a day. For perspective, every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Reading this much text would take more than 31 years and stacking this many copies of War and Peace would reach the height of about 1,470 feet, nearly the ground-to-roof height of Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world. Crazy.

Categories: Practical Opacity

Internet users now have more and closer friends than those offline

Posted on June 17th, 2011

Internet users now have more and closer friends than those offline In a new study done by the Pew Research Center, collections of data from thousands of participants showed that people who use social networking services are now not only likely to have larger networks than those who don’t, but also have more close friends. The authors of the study don’t cite technology as the cause of our newfound friendliness, but those inclined toward social connections are now more likely to be online and networking than not. I find this more than a bit fascinating.

Categories: Practical Opacity

Bird Brain: Why I’m limiting Twitter – Rick Stawarz

Posted on June 17th, 2011

Bird Brain: Why I’m limiting Twitter – Rick Stawarz If you pay attention to my blog, you know that I’m not exactly BFF with my iPad.  That’s about to change.  It will become my dedicated, time-wasting device.  Twitter, Reeder, and Instapaper are all welcome here.  I hope that by physically restricting these apps to the iPad, I’ll have less temptation when carrying around my iPhone or working on my Mac.  An ideal day for me will conclude by putting the kids to sleep, grabbing a Sam Adams & iPad, and stretching out on the couch. He’s not the first I have heard of limiting time spent on non-prioductive tasks to specific devices. That said, I wanted to highlight the strategy again here because I…

Categories: Practical Opacity

Seth’s Blog: In praise of programming

Posted on June 14th, 2011

Seth’s Blog: In praise of programming We’re all programmers now. We all have to decide what to post next, what to point to next, what to launch next. Is there a skill in dreaming up Must-See Thursday nights, or in establishing a season of Shakespeare or even in deciding what’s on the special list at the restaurant? I think there is.

Categories: Practical Opacity

Social Fax Machines : James Shelley

Posted on June 14th, 2011

Social Fax Machines : James Shelley The fax machine analogy raises a couple interesting points. Firstly: just because technology makes a certain mode of communication feasible, it does automatically guarantee the medium provides any certain, practical degree of usefulness. At some point — while sitting there with a pile of faxes on your lap — you’d invariably ask yourself: “Why am I spending my time reading material that wasn’t even written for anybody in particular?” Another stellar observation piece by James.

Categories: Practical Opacity