Erik’s Blog

In general, for just about any academic topic you want to know more about, you can find information on the internet to satisfy your curiosity. Luddites complain that “We know less these days because we can forget things and look them back up with such ease!”, but I think that’s a load of bollocks. Having more knowledge at our fingertips means we can learn more, and, even more important, we can recheck our current knowledge more often to keep it accurate.

Several times a day I find myself in a situation in which my understanding of a subject is unclear, so I look it up on the internet to clarify my knowledge. Over the past week, however, I have had the same rare experience twice: that the all-knowing internet was unable to clarify my foggy understanding.
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Recently there was a soccer match that I wanted to watch, but that was not broadcast on my basic cable television. Investigating around the internet for a site that would stream the live game, I stumbled upon a very well designed website called watchlivefootball.tv. If you go there, you will see a nice listing of today’s fixtures with the time the match starts, the players, past results for each team, and the logos for each team as well as the league or tournament the game belongs to. It looks very professional. On each match page, there is a video player. When you click play, you are presented with this:
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Several weeks ago, I was contacted by a representative of Proporta.com, a manufacturer of cases and accessories for mobile phones, asking if I would be willing to review three of their products on my blog. I’m always up for new internet experiences, so I agreed. I scanned their website to find the most expensive products that might benefit me. I found nothing over £30. I ended up choosing an Antimicrobial Silicone Case with SteriTouch for the iPhone 3G, a Ted Baker Leather iPhone 3G Case, and a Handy Travel Bundle. I chose the travel bundle because the week before I had lost my airline audio jack and I also needed a new wallet.
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The other day I received an email asking me to link one word in one of my posts to a website. In exchange, they offered me $50 per year. Now, my ad revenue from Google AdSense is about $7/month or $84/year. If someone (not you, Mr. SEO Marketer!) offered me $50/year to put a large bold ad on every page, I might consider it. But one ad hyperlink on one word on one post? No problem!

To be honest, I was a little doubtful, but I added the link and replied that I would remove it if I didn’t receive $50 in my PayPal account within 24 hours. Sure enough, the next day, there was a big fat Ulysses sitting in my PayPal account. Awesome.
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Recently I’ve been recommending some wordpress plugins to people, and I find myself repeating the same reasons and explanations, so I thought I would write them down here so I can just point people to one place. Ironically, I can totally live without all of the plugins that I took the time to write: Flickr Flash Badge Widget, Revver WordPress Plugin, Widgetize Anything, and YT-Audio: Audio Hosting From YouTube.

I’ve ordered them from least important to most impressive and important, just like top ten lists are supposed to be.
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Two weeks ago, I was contacted by someone claiming to be a contributing editor to a book that is about to be published, asking if I would accept money in exchange for permission to republish a blog post of mine in their book that may or may not sell millions of copies in over thirty languages. Here’s the email I received (hyperlinking mine):
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Today I stumbled upon a website that is rather incredible. The technology to run it is utterly unremarkable. What’s amazing is that the internet is becoming so ubiquitous that such a sight is possible at all. The site is called OMGICU, which is teenager/text message language for “Oh my god, I see you”. The way it works is that, when you spot a celebrity, you submit a sighting report to the site, saying who you saw, where you saw them, and what they were doing. Obviously only a small percentage of the users of the site, mainly those living in Los Angeles and New York City, will be submitting sightings. The key is the service that minority will be providing for the other curious majority. The whole point of the site is that you can follow a celebrity that you are a fan of, and get real-time updates of what they’re up to. Amazing!
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internauta: n. a user of the internet.

Just like an astronaut navigates the stars (still only figuratively, unfortunately), an internauta navigates the complex network of tubes connected computers collectively known as The Internet. The threshold to be considered an internauta is more or less being able to send and read email and watch a video on YouTube. I mainly hear the term on the television news when talking about users of a certain website.
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Back in April, my friend sgazzetti sent me an invite to particpate in a new social networking site I’d never heard of, called Aardvark [vark.com]. I’ve been using it for several months now, and I must say that I’m very impressed and fascinated. Aardvark is a question-answering engine that uses its users to answer the questions of other users. It functions on several principles…
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Dear NASA Webmaster,

Your organization has been using the internet for at least 20 years, way back before there existed a World Wide Web or even a Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Even I remember the days when Gopher was the most user friendly internet service. In the intervening years, however, you may have noticed that a few unwritten standards have cropped up.
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