No gods, no kings, no billionaires
Personally I’m a Plutophile, but I found the new “Planetary Status” T-shirt on Threadless funny anyway.
But sad, too. Can’t make up my mind if I want one or not…if only they had a competing design that graphically thumbed its nose at the IAU, I’d definitely get me one of those.
Walked through Costco this afternoon, and the Christmas decorations are already in the aisles. It’s still August. Hot damn.
Okay, so here’s the new rule: The only people who are allowed to buy me anything this Christmas are Alex and Fiona. That’s it.
It’s not that I don’t want anything–there are plenty of things I’d like to have. I just don’t want anything for Christmas. Not anything from my wishlist, not “just somethig small”, and not a charitable donation in my name. Just nothing. Please.
In their write-ups of @Media 2006, Eric Meyer and Peter-Paul Koch have both spoken out to discourage the use of the “atmedia” tag for photos on Flickr which have no (apparent) relevance to the event itself. Personally, I’m with Russ Weakley in the opposite camp.
The whole point of tags on Flickr (and elsewhere) is that they are not rigid categories decided by the site owners. Everyone uses them differently, and most people pay no heed whatsoever to the global namespace. For example, when I tag pictures of my family, I use “family”, and the first names of whoever appears in the photo, e.g. “family martin fiona”. This is because I’m thinking about the relevance of these tags in the context of my personal space on Flickr. I’m tagging these photos for my benefit, and for my friends and family–not to provide the entire Flickr user base with a convenient way of reaching these photos via a global search.
Tags are descriptive rather than prescriptive metadata. With tags, you can throw as much or as little description as you like at an item. This allows for enormous flexibility, which encourages people to actually attach metadata in the first place. This is a good thing. However, the metadata is also likely to be incomplete, imprecise, and highly subjective. But this subjectivity is actually a strength when it comes to “social” tagging schemes.
The reason tags are gaining ground on traditional fixed classification schemes is that people like being able to create their own labels, with their own personal relevance. People like not having to ponder whether they should file a photo of Westminster Abbey under “Places:UK:London” or “Architecture:Churches:Gothic”. Would Flickr contain even a tenth of the metadata if it provided a set of categories instead, and asked people to classify their photos accordingly? I don’t think so. Aside from the cognitive overhead involved in making those decisions, there’s the usability aspect to consider, too: repeatedly navigating a categories is going to be more difficult than just throwing a bunch of tags into a textbox.
So although it may be frustrating for one person to search for the tag “atmedia” and be confronted with photos of Big Ben instead of Big Veen, someone else is sitting in front of their computer perfectly delighted with Flickr for allowing him to group all the pictures from his trip with a single convenient, and–for him–highly specific and descriptive tag.
It’s fine to suggest a canonical tag for use in classifying photos or other data (blog posts, links, etc.). But trying to specify exactly what that tag should and shouldn’t be used for, goes against the grain of the system. It’s a futile effort at best.
In fact, Flickr already has a mechanism for grouping photos with a narrow set of common criteria: groups. It takes a few more steps to submit a photo to a group than it does to tag it, but that’s the price you have pay for increased relevance in this case. There was a group for @Media 2005, but there doesn’t seem to be one for this year’s event yet. If anyone is interested, I’ll create one.
(As a final note, I have to say that I’m absolutely gagging for the new Tags feature in Movable Type 3.3. It’s about time…)
I know it’s lame to post about why I haven’t posted anything lately, but, well, Matt reminded me that it’s been over two months since I last wrote anything here. Yow.
Anyway, the simple reason for the absence is that I’ve been busy doing other stuff. The more complex reason is that I’m utterly, utterly sick and tired of my current blog design. I had been planning a redesign last October, but I got sidetracked before I could finish it. And since then, every time I’ve posted a new entry here, I’ve looked at it and gone “bleagh–that looks awful“. This has proved to be a powerful anti-motivator for me to write anything. And because I’ve been busy, I haven’t had time to finish the redesign.
Stalemate, because it’s stale, mate.
Charlie Stross has just written about an attempt to steal his bank security details not via email, but over the phone:
Some bastard just tried to steal my bank account. I have no idea how they decided to target me, but from the sound on the line they’re running a call centre, and from the accent, they may not be based in the UK at all. If I had taken it on trust that my caller was from my bank and answered their questions, I would be in a world of hurt right now. I’m pretty sure they don’t have my bank details (I don’t leave statements lying around) but there’s one due real soon now that hasn’t arrived yet … and you can never be sure what’s happened to the mail that you haven’t received. Barclays aren’t a major high street presence in Scotland (they’ve got three branches in the whole country) and my phone number has the Edinburgh dialing code, so to be targeted that way implies that they knew beforehand that I am a Barclays customer and were just looking to fill in the gaps they need. Which is worrying. It implies they know more about me than they’d get by just sticking a pin in the phone book.
Something similar happened to us last year, but I’m not sure if it was an actual con, or just clueless behaviour on the part of Ikea. We had just bought our new kitchen, and paid for a large chunk of it with a new Ikea store credit card (to get the 15% discount). The following week, someone called us one evening claiming to be from a company representing Ikea, and wanting to gather some extra information to complete our “customer profile”. Sure. The conversation went something like this:
Them: So, to start with, could I take your Mother’s maiden name?
Me: No.
Them: Uh…we need that information to verify your identity.
Me: But you’re calling me. Surely you know who I am. Or are you just calling people at random?
Them: I understand, but we’re dealing with your personal information here, and the data protection laws won’t allow me to proceed unless I can confirm who I’m speaking to.
Me: Okay…so how do I know who I’m speaking to? You could be anyone.
Them I’ve already explained that we’re a company working on behalf of Ikea to help them complete their store card customer information records.
Me: And…?
Them: (Getting frustrated) Look, if you don’t believe me, I can put you through to my supervisor, and you can take it up with him.
Me: So what on earth is that going to prove? He could just be some bloke you’ve pulled in off the street. If I have no idea who you are, how am I supposed to know who he is?
Them: How about I give you our phone number then, so you can call us back.
Me: And that phone number could just be pulled out of a hat, too. I’d prefer to just call Ikea’s head office and ask them to put me through to you.
Them: But we’re not part of Ikea–we’re an external company acting on their behalf.
Me: We’re not going to get any further here are we? You have no way of proving who you are, and until you do I’m not going to give you any personal details. In fact, I’m going to hang up now.
There was something fishy about the call right from the start, and I tend to be pretty belligerent about companies calling us in the evening anyway. It might have been for real. We had just got an Ikea store card, and it’s plausible that Ikea (or an agent of theirs) would to do a follow-up call to pad out their customer database. But:
The best advice for a situation like this is what Charlie says at the end of his article: never disclose secret information — like your banking details or passwords — through a communications channel which you did not initiate for yourself.
The bad guys really are out there, and it pays to be on your guard when it comes to your money and identity at all times.
In case you haven’t come across this already, a new and highly nasty Windows security flaw has been uncovered in the last few days, and it is being actively exploited to infect Windows machines with rootkits and who knows what else. The flaw can be exploited by merely looking at a particular kind of image (a .wmf file) in Internet Explorer any browser or your mail client. It can even be activated without being viewed, if it happens to get indexed by something like Google Desktop.
I’ve been tracking news about it over on the F-Secure blog. Fortunately, there is a temporary patch available. If you’re running any form of Windows from 2000 upwards, you need to follow these instructions and install the patch right now. The patch doesn’t cover earlier versions of Windows, but the flaw is present in them, too. In fact, it has been there since Windows 3.0.
I don’t normally go into a flap about security issues, but this one has particular resonances with the short story “BLIT” by David Langford, which describes a fractal image that is “incompatible with human neural input”, and can kill you just by looking at it.
Sometimes I look forward to the day when I can access the cybersphere via a hardwired neural connection…and sometimes I just plain worry.