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Chipmark Project

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Chipmark is a fun project in which a group of University of Minnesota students have worked together — with advice from me — to build a distributed bookmarking system.  Check it out at chipmark.com!  It's wonderful if you use many different browsers in your day-to-day Internet life, because you can share the chipmarks among the browsers effortlessly.  The main interface is through a browser plugin, for either Firefox or Internet Explorer.

The other cool feature of Chipmark is that three teams of 12 students each have worked together over the past three years to do all of the implementation themselves.  It has been a great learning experience for all of us — and I expect to see them doing great things out in the world as they graduate.

URLs Matter in Social Bookmarking

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Interesting article that argues that getting noticed in social bookmarking sites is based on your apparent popularity. The difference between being in the top 10 list and not in the top 10 list can be huge; one important factor even for very popular sites is making sure everyone bookmarks your site by the same URL. The article mentions a couple of ways of doing this.

 

Captology Video Shorts

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B.J. Fogg's students at Stanford have created a fun set of short videos about the use of persuasion in popular Web 2.0 sites. The videos are here: http://www.captology.tv.

I have only watched a small set of the videos, but I particularly enjoyed ShaneWalker112's piece on starting up a social network on sites like linkedin.com. Videos about Web sites can be dull, but ShaneWalker112 uses Lionel Richie tunes to nice comedic effect. Overall, I was very impressed by the quality and information content of the videos that I watched.

Max

Larry King has never used the Internet, doesn’t want to

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Larry King admits he's never used the Internet, and doesn't want to. "The wife loves it. I wouldn’t love it. What do you punch little buttons and things?"

I think it's great for people in the computer field to understand there are those who don't use computers and don't want to.

He may be missing out, though. He asks, "The Internet as a political medium viable?" Well I think probably yes.

Dan

 

Can the US government can subpoena a person’s location history from their cell phone company?

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I came across this article by Mark D. Rasch, J.D., a former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit, who now serves as a lawyer specializing in computer crime, computer security, and privacy matters. He explains how it is easy for the US government to subpoena a person's location history from their cell phone company:

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/376

…I had long wished that somebody from the legal community would weigh in on this– thanks Mark!