jessie newburn dot com

Freecycle with Social Media underneath

Help me, Beloved Geeks. Someone, somewhere, please take the wild success of Craigs List and Freecycle.org and add a social media component. Let me have a user profile. Let me select tags for items I'm interested in hearing about. (Really, I'm tired of scrolling through Freecycle offers for baby formula coupons, knowing that a pair of ladies ostrich-leather cowboy boots, size 8.5 M might be buried in there somewhere.)

Let me connect with friends and neighbors. Let me offer my items first to my weak social ties, to people in my zip code, to colleagues in a social network. Please, Beloved Geeks, GenXers, leaders who know how to ensure the survival of the tribe in an economy soon to explode into a mess so unimaginable in today's affluence. Help me connect with neighbors. Help me Live Locally. Help me "afford less." Help me, Beloved Geeks, help me.

And here's what I'll do. I'll make it work. I'll bring the feminine mo-jo, the juice, the connectivity. I'll bring the meaning and value and purposefulness to what you do. I'll make your Kingdom of Geekness shine and spread far and wide to lands known and unknown. I cannot build the Kingdom. I cannot protect it as a fortress. But I can make your efforts meaningful. I can make you happy that your strength, will and capacity transformed society.

Oh, and make money while you do it. I wouldn't have it any other way. Add the hyper-local ads. Paid. User-created. TAGGED!!! $1 a pop. 10 cents a pop. Your call. Conquer the universe a dime at a time.

Help me, Beloved Geeks, I cannot do this alone. I need you.

Irrelevant.

There is a God above.

Folks, Facebook just introduced, at least to the Wall Post function inside of FB groups, an option to "Mark as Irrelevant." I love it. I've long been a fan* of not just user-generated content, but user-edited content. And "mark as irrelevant" is an easy and fabulous way of introducing this concept to user-generated content.

YouTube introduced a few months back the "thumbs up, thumbs down" option for users to note about others' comments on vids. That was a start, for sure, but it has a major flaw, methinks: Just as people seem almost mystically drawn to gawk at a car accident for possible horrors, I think seeing a comment with, for example, four thumbs down may actually pull people toward a comment. It's just that kind of perverse, "Oh, what's this that is so terrible" pull and attraction ...

I've also been a fan of allowing the Millenials, a tidal wave early adopters of social technology, to develop systems for monitoring themselves and their individual and collective behavior, particularly as their generation is moving out of childhood and into young adulthood. Many of their parents have wanted to put MySpace and Facebook off-limits to their kids, but I do believe, they must learn these life skills vis-a-vis social networking, profile management and comments.

Personally, I think the Millennial generation has just -- and warning, as I'm going to cuss here -- sh*t all over the internet. Collectively, they've posted online heretofore unimaginable amounts of junk under the belief system of "I'm special and, therefore, anything I deem cute-funny-crazy is important ." Well, Facebook just delivered to them -- and everyone else -- a very simple "Mark as Irrelevant" function. I hope they use it well. I plan on it.

The next step, to track who posts what, whose posts/comments routinely get marked as "irrelevant" and then to start a user-created rating system for marking posters who put up a lot of (warning, cuss word coming) sh*t.

Relevant, imo, blog posts :o)

• The Need for Citizen Patrols
• 5 Black Holes

All I want for Christmas ...

I know I'm a bit early with the Christmas wish list, but, heck, retailers have been hawking the season since right after Halloween, so consider me fashionably late.

OK, so on my "Geek Wish List," this is what I want: a contact management system that 1) is online, 2) has tags so that my contacts can be in multiple lists, 3) imports/exports easily, 4) synchs and 5) allows me to send individual and group list emails with ease. Plaxo is hovering nearby, but is too far away from my wish list to be a serious option.

Can anyone help me out here? Does such a wonder program exist?

Google-ize my address book, please

Google is out to conquer the world in their do-no-evil, offer-everything mode, and, yes, they are doing quite a bit of good with all their free services. But dangit, they seem to have missed one function that I could really use: collecting addresses in a user-friendly, online contact management program.

If you're a Gmail user, you've probably noticed that when someone sends you an email including a date and location, a little Googley thing pops up and says, "Hey, want me to save this to your G-O-O-G-L-E calendar?" (Or something close to that happens.)

Oh, how I would love it every time I got an email with an address posted in it, a little Googley function would ask me if I wanted to add this info to my address book. That would be so lovely. An important note: I'd really like that before they offer this functionality, that Google get its sucks-out-the-wazoo contact management function at least into the realm of *acceptable.* (It's currently so awkward that I would never deign to put my contact info in their system.)

I think this service would be a delightful, useful and well-received additional function in the endlessly expanding Google Universe.

I really do want some sort of automated tracking of new addresses. I posted earlier about the subject here.

A Hacker Shows Me the Light

I'm a bit sad. I've come to love loving Geeks. I liken "geek" to "hero." But when I sent an email (actually a Facebook message) to the supposed-Geek who inspired by recent "Geeks Rule the Underworld" post, I was shocked to discover he didn't consider himself a geek. And he explained why. With his permission, I quote,

The relevant quality of me is that I'm a hacker. I'm also trained as mathematician. Most geeks aren't hackers (but most would like to be). Most hackers are geeks, but I don't fit the mold.

A geek is someone who spends a lot of time with computers. He usually knows how to fix your Windows. He often programs a bit, and so with the current shortage of programmers, it's his most obvious occupation. He's usually not very popular, or has a perception of himself not being popular, particularly in high school.

I never knew.

I think it's the Hackers, all along, who may have caught my attention.

The Human Web

I want an application that allows me to track my peeps: contact management-type stuff. I want to be able to apply tags to each contact. And then, what I really want, is a way to visually display the map of my connections. So that I can see clusters of contacts. And overlaps of tags. I think this would be really cool. It would allow me to *see* a bigger picture of my peeps, and make different and better decisions about how to connect with my folk.

Does it exist yet?

Will some uber-geek make this (and make some money at it, to boot)?

37 Signals has Highrise, which has some components of this: namely, the tagging. But I'm looking for the visual spread ... the display.

Tag, and it's done

I would like to use a contact management program that allowed me to enter data into a field just by highlight text in one program, maybe right-clicking my mouse and selecting the field to which I'd like this data transferred.

So, for example, if I was on someone's website on their *contact* page, I could highlight their name, click *name* and the data would magically put itself in the right field.

Perhaps this already exists? Anyone know if it does?

The Need for Citizen Patrols

The Trend:

Try to imagine this scenario:

I'm sitting a computer. I want to research something on the internet. I pull up Google. I type in a simple, but well-crafted search parameter and I get ... um, useless information that I might as well just call "crap."

Hey, the site looked good on the surface, great meta description. But it's one of those content aggregator sites that provide close to no value, snag content from other sites, and just try to earn lots and lots of pennies from me clicking on their ads disguised as links.

Of late, I've noticed such search engine results more and more.
 

What do I do? Well, what are my choices? Nothing right now. Essentially, I can back out, get back to my search and hope I find some information of value as I click away.

Now, why can't I as a "content consumer," upon finding such a site, click a button that sends a flagging report to, for example, Google.

Now, of course, my flagging of a site wouldn't mandate its removal, but Google with it's 5,000 or so employees could certainly set a few brains on a project of assessing such sites and could test consumer-flagged sites against their fancy algorithms, check the site and then de-rank it. (I just made up that word.) See, Google can't close down anyone's site. Nor should they. Nor should they be able. But they certainly can say "Down to the bottomless pit of the internet search results you go. Suffer in the heat of the hell you helped create."

Or, something like that. Maybe not so melodramatic.

Americans. Fellow citizens, has anyone noticed the exponential creation of electronic data of late? If we stand by and do nothing, our beloved internet is going to become more cumbersome by the day.

The Opportunity:

I'm advocating for a Citizen's Patrol of the Internet.

Again. I'm not talking about censorship. I'm not talking about a porn-free internet. Think of it more like a "Don't Litter" campaign or "Sweep Our Streets." Isn't it our duty as members of the electronically oriented public to monitor, vet and point a finger at data polluters?

I think so. Obviously. Or I wouldn't be blogging about this subject.