No justice like Web justice
Posted: Tuesday, March 25, 2008 11:33 AM by Will Femia
"There’s really no justice quite like internet justice." The short version of
this one is that a thief stole a gamer's Xbox, laptop and TV. The gamer was using a new Xbox when someone sent him a message offering to sell his stolen Xbox back to him. The gamer put the messager's Xbox account and the story on Digg and from there every bit of information about the person who sent the message, short of his DNA sequence, was researched and published on a
wiki. His every point of social Web contact was harassed and ridiculed. They even
called his mom.
The laptop was eventually returned. Looks like the Xbox also
eventually made its way home too. I see a note there asking that the wiki be taken down so that may soon be a dead link. The victim is now trying to get
un-famous. The story is made a little confusing because the stolen Xbox was sold and it was the purchaser who contacted the victim. The "internet justice" was not particularly discriminating about that detail. The whole thing is covered well
here and
here.
Picmatic seems like a great service but I'm not sure how they manage to do it. You upload an unlimited number of photos (under 3Mb each) and they host them, offer you links to embed the ones under 300kb and give you a permanent eternal link to them so you can share the gallery. And there are no ads. My only question is, what's in it for them?
Project Prostitute - Draw what you think a prostitute looks like. These aren't fancy artists or anything. They're mostly pretty feeble drawings. I'm not sure I find as much insight in them as others do. Maybe if we could see some information about the artists it would mean a little more to me.
Quotably is a new service that's potentially useful if you want to make more of Twitter but don't have a sense of the environment there. You'll recall
TweetScan lets you search for a term to see what people are Tweeting about it. Quotably lets you search for a person to see all the conversations they're in. Let's take
Robert Scoble as an example since I know he's an avid Twitter user. Looking at all of Scoble's conversations gives me that sinking "I'm missing out on the party" feeling.
ADDING: Hey, waddaya know, on his blog Scoble explores "
The secret to Twitter." (His secret is to follow a lot of people. "The more people I follow, the smarter I get, the more connected I get, the better the experiences I have in life." I still struggle to get past the idea that following someone on Twitter is like eavesdropping on their IM conversations but I'm working on building a better "follow" list.
Speaking of following online conversations, "Well,
the buzz of the weekend seems to be around a New York Times op-ed by musician Billy Bragg upset about the sale of Bebo to AOL earlier this month. ... Because musicians chose to put their music on Bebo and that helped attract users, don't they deserve some of the $850 million that Bebo got from AOL." My opinion is closer to this blogger's than to Bragg's. It reminds me of the Flickr question we've talked about before. I accept a certain amount of rip-off as part of using the tool because the value Flickr's community and functionality provides is worth it. Same with Bebo or other social networks. The point of Web tools is that you want to make use of every advantage you can. If you can promote your music through a social network, way to go; more power to you.
The idea of tagging everything you own with RFID is a little creepy and probably not worth it just to pull off the cool trick of
making your robot purse happy. Then again, for people of a certain age prone to forgetting things, the utility would definitely outweigh the creepiness. Someone's probably already thought of this, but it'd be neat if food packaging was tagged so that items not in the refrigerator would show up on a screen on the fridge or pantry door, essentially writing your grocery shopping list. Tagging the food would make check-out easier too. No scanning, just roll your cart near the sensor.
Note to self: Check out
Talk2MyShirt the wearable electronics blog.
Mark Glaser's new Mediashift column is about
the mayhem that is the mobile Web. I don't understand how it came to be that Web sites have to jump through hoops to get their content to work on a phone. Why isn't it incumbent on the phone makers to use a browser that can render for the phone's display? I guess now that the iPhone is essentially that we may see some of the responsibility shift. Glaser doesn't really mention a mobile browser war but that seems like the best way to a good solution.
Saturday was
World Pillow Fight Day. There's some debate over whether the event is too messy or otherwise ecologically inconvenient but I'm mostly impressed that it was a genuinely world wide event. (There is no better
photographic exercise than events like this.)
I wasn't familiar with
Muckety before yesterday. They produce relationship charts to illustrate news stories. You need Java for them to render. They're pretty useful (or at least fun) in their initial state but if you click the bubbles to expand the relationships it quickly turns into a huge mess. A neat idea regardless.
Watch every episode of
South Park online free. At least some of them are uncensored too which means F bombs are clearly heard. They're also hosting embeddable clips. Even if you don't care about South Park there's a potentially valuable answer that could come from this site. Will pirating of shows and YouTubing of clips diminish now that there's a legitimate, free, high quality source?
Scientists
attached a camera to an elephant and sent him to roam around in the wild. I'm having a real hard time believing the elephant got such good shots.
Speaking of taking pictures,
The Ten Tastiest Food Photography Tips - I almost never take pictures of food because they always look terrible. The color is always off or it's too shiny.
My best effort and still pretty weak:
