Ian On The Red Dot

I was trying to fit a message into the 140 characters limit when I realized that while some academics and intellectual snobs have bemoaned the quality of English used on services like Twitter and the bastardization of the language, I realized that Twitter can actually help us improve our English.

Remember all those summaries you had to do in Secondary School? Well, Twittering with proper English words forces you to learn how to say what you need to, or want to, as succinctly as possible. You might be compelled to improve your vocabulary by learning synonyms and antonyms.

Of course we can just continue to use lol, wtf, rofl, omg or just make up new ones. However, I think the use of such services, while condescendingly referred to as symptomatic of our snacking culture, might help us if we allow it to.

Any teacher planning to create a course syllabus around the use of Twitter as a tool to teach English? Imagine a game being played with Twitter where players actually improve their English at the end of the day.

Hmmm…

Is it possible to have a site powered by a CMS without the need for the site to store any of their own content on their own servers? If so, what would the solution look like?

First, the non-idea. Let’s not build the whole infrastructure from scratch just to implement whatever ideas we do have for taking the Youth Olympic Games online.

Example of an Idea: Hey, you know what, let’s allow people to share their homemade videos of the YOG.

Example of what we should not do: Build our own backend to store the videos.

Example of what we could do: Host the videos on YouTube. Create a website that allows people to upload their videos of the YOG. Use the new YouTube API to save the videos on YouTube servers. The YOG website just aggregates videos stored on YouTube.

Why: Save Money. Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants. Don’t Do Something From Scratch Just For The Sake Of Doing It.

Now, for my idea.

We setup Flickr-booths around the island with iconic buildings and scenery as the background. People take photos at the booths and the pictures are instantly uploaded to Flickr tagged appropriately. A YOG site aggregates these photos.

How to do this. Simple actually. Get Apple to sponsor tons of their iMacs. Protect their computers with a telephonebooth-like shelter. Use their PhotoBooth software as well as plugins like FlickrBooth to take the photos and immediately upload it to Flickr.

Do a similar thing for videos. Again, get Apple to sponsor tons of iMacs and put them at spots around the sportsmen/sportswomen village. Use the iSight camera to create videos which are immediately uploaded to YouTube. I’m sure a simple plugin can be written for this if it has not already been done so. A YOG site aggregates these videos.

Let’s look at the cost here. Hmmm… There are the computers and the booths and the website to aggregate links to the videos and photos. I think cost of computers and booths can be covered by sponsorship and official partners.

Last part of the idea which might be the one with significant costs - all participants of the YOG are issued some EZLink-like card which contains all the important details about them. When they take a photo or make a video, they tap the card against some device attached to the computer which then appends all these details as tags for the video or photo. Even better, use RFID so no tapping is needed.

The metadata is needed so that the YOG website can better aggregate the videos and photos.

This is my idea. What do you guys think about it?

Recently, someone posed as a representative of Nuffnang and posted a bunch of comments on a blog. The(new)mediaslut wrote a blog post giving advice on how to deal with the issue of an imposter. That post highlighted steps that can be taken after the fact of impersonation.

So the question I asked myself was how to prevent anyone from posing as a representative of a company in this new online media landscape with blogs and comments.

Specifically, how does a representative of a company establish his or her identity?

There are two ways which I am aware of.

1. Leave your name, email and site’s URL.

Presumably, the email you leave will be a secret which is used to identify yourself to the blog’s administrators. However, emails are easily harvested and it is actually a trivial thing to find out the email used by the representative of a company.

2. Install a blog commenting system to handle the identity of commentators.

Four examples of such systems:

a. http://www.sezwho.com/
b. http://disqus.com/
c. http://www.cocomment.com/
d. http://www.intensedebate.com/

There are a few problems with such systems:

1. The system has to be integrated with a blog.

2. Unless the services all use OpenID, people who like to comment regularly would need to have an account for each system.

3. Even if all the systems implemented OpenID, data regarding the comments made by a user would be stored in separate data silos with no aggregation of data across services.

So, I would like to propose a possible solution.

There will be a company, let’s call it COTRD, which establishes itself as an identity verification service for companies. COTRD is responsible for authenticating a user’s identity - the user is verified to represent the company or a company can setup accounts to be used by their representatives. The commentator, representing a site or company, who would like to establish his identity on a blog, first logs into COTRD to post the comment. Once the comment has been posted on COTRD, the user then posts the same comment on the other site with a link back to the comment on COTRD.

The idea behind this solution is to make use of the third field in the form when leaving a comment - the ‘Website’ field. Most people would just enter a URL for a domain (i.e. ian.onthereddot.com). What if, instead of just leaving the domain name of the website, the URL left is a permanent address to a comment hosted on COTRD?

Since, only the authenticated representative of the company could have left the comment on COTRD, if the comment on COTRD matches the comment on the blog, then that comment must have been made by the representative.

An analogy would be this. Only two people have the key to a house. Let’s call them Boy A and Girl B. Girl B receives a note from a stranger who claims the note is from Boy A. The note contains the words - ‘I Love You’. Now, Girl B goes back to the house, and sees the words ‘I Love You’ on the wall. Since only Boy A could have left those words because he was the only other person with a key to the house, then the note, or at least the words on the note, must have been from Boy A.

Of course, an astute observer might ask why can’t a company just post the comment on their own blog as a post. They could. But blog posts and comments are two different beasts and a company might not want to muddle up the content of their blog with every comment they had to post on other blogs.

A company could of course set up a separate blog where only comments are posted on it, so COTRD would have to provide other services to companies using its service.

Below is a comment highlighting the use of a service like COTRD.