Deliciousness: yet more bacon, Snow Leopard, Hitchhiker's, WhereCamp Europe, under your feet and shell scripts for your baby.

This week's trawl through what appeared on the interwebs and made it into my Delicious bookmarks.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Rush Hour Cozy-ness

The Bakerloo Line is part suspended today due to engineering work which is due to last over the Bank Holiday weekend, so naturally everyone either piled onto the Waterloo & City Line or onto the Northern Line at Waterloo this morning.

And on the Northern Line, somewhere between Waterloo and Embankment and underneath the Thames it all got a bit cozy as we suffered the inevitable and inexplicable "Tube stops for no apparent reason".

tag: tube, underground, commute, london

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Online There's More Than One of You

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article on this blog that highlighted the issues around managing our digital identity.

"Managing our digital identity through those sources we know about is a challenge for a significant percentage of the online population"

Then this morning, (ex Yahoo!) Cathy Ma posted a link to her recent blog post about the Personas project being run by Aaron Zinman at MIT. Personas tries to "show you how the internet sees you". So I duly surfed over to https://personas.media.mit.edu/ and plugged in my full name and some time later a rather slick Flash animation gave me this supposed "characterization of the person".

Deliciousness: more bacon, UK geek location, your PIN number, birds tweeting, Ohio as a piano, OMG and WTF and UNIX turns 40.

A semi regular, almost weekly, trawl through the latest stuff on the interwebs bookmarked on Delicious.

Harvesting Your Digital Dandruff, Crumbs and Footprints for Fun and Profit

"I'm just a face in the crowd, Nothing to worry about, Not even tryin' to stand out, And I have nothing to say, It's all been taken away, I just behave and obey"

Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails, Getting Smaller

Ten years ago our online identity, if we had one at all, was a simple affair to manage, comprising of an email address and perhaps an avatar name or two. Fast forward to the close of the first decade of the 21st century and it's an altogether more complex affair. You've probably got several email addresses, possibly some domain names and then there's the plethora of social networking sites that you frequent, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace and so on. All of which define the online version of "you" in much the same way as your passport, driving licence and bank account defines the offline "you".

The key difference is that the online version of "you" is much more subtle, complex and diffuse. We leave scraps of our path through the internet behind us. At the Being Digital conference in London earlier this year, I tried to explain this with the clumsy phrase "digital dandruff"; in the soon to be published book, "My Digital Footprint", Tony Fish far more elegiacally describes it as our digital footprint, which is "the digital 'cookie crumbs' that we all leave when we use the some form of digital service, application, appliance, object or device, or in some cases as we pass through or by".

Managing our digital identity through those sources we know about is a challenge for a significant percentage of the online population. But despite being a challenge, it's one which is achieveable if you're willing to put enough time and effort into it. But most of us don't have the time or are unwilling to put in the effort, so our digital cookie crumbs and the varying online versions of "us" stay online, ready for someone with the time and effort to search for, find and put together with profit in mind.

Some people take an active role in managing their digital footprint and try to exploit it. Some people also try to exploit other people's digital footprint. Let's look at a concrete example of this.

Deliciousness: broken customer service, Twitter on a PostIt, speaking to dogs, the end of the world and Tube maps.

This week's selection of what I bookmarked on Delicious.

Deliciousness: data, licensing, WordPress autosaves, cheese in space and lots of Nutella

More intriguing, interesting and just plain bonkers stuff from the information hose pipe we call the internet:

  • Starting off with a serious note, Ed Parsons, my opposite number at Google, wrote a great blog post on the knots that data licensing can tie you up in and why you end up paying more for a leased digital version than you do for the physical paper version.
  • WordPress started bugging me about an auto-saved version of a blog post I didn't want to keep but couldn't get rid of. Turns out there's no way to do this from the WordPress dashboard but some MySQL hackery did the trick.
  • "I am, and am VERY badly affected by being in close proximity to WiFi and other microwave transmission sources. Not that I’d expect you or anyone else who isn’t adversely affected to believe me". The rest of the story on the Daily Telegraph blog is priceless.
  • Ofcom confirmed what anyone with the UK ADSL line already knows, that the average UK broadband speed is just over half of what's being advertised and paid for.
  • A US highway exit sign got every word misspelled, apart from the word "exit".
  • Forget putting men on Mars or getting the Space Shuttle working; we put cheese into space, tracked it, lost it and found it again. Makes you proud to be British.
  • Someone likes Nutella. A lot.
  • And finally, if your iPhone gets a text message containing a single square character. Turn it off. Turn it off now.

Deliciousness: USB dogs, children on espresso, recursion and Twitter spammers

This week's selection of what caught my eye on the interwebs: