Thursday, June 12, 2008 Ng: Entertaining and informative By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
THE good news and the bad news about technology is that there are always great websites that make us waste time every week!
An entertaining site is the FAIL blog, which you can glean from http://failblog.org.
It shows various kinds of failed endeavors, and it is entertaining and hilarious.
When I chanced upon it, it was a straightforward simple blog, but now people can now tag, dig and do all kinds of things with it. Based on the comments there, it is a very popular blog and it also has lots of ads now.
There are many copycats of this, and one of them, which is also as entertaining, is http://mediaeater.tumblr.com/, which
dubs itself as the original fail blog.
Anyhow, this symbolizes what they say is Web 2.0, which means that when you post something, people would want to vote, comment, e-mail, bookmark or put and copy it to their own blogs or social network.
One of the other web 2.0 sites that is quite addictive is www.twitter.com. It is a microblogging service that was founded by Evan Williams, who also started Blogger.com before it was bought by Google.
Twitter is called a microblog because you can only send a message that is 140 letters or less (a little bit less than texting). It is something like yahoogroups and texting rolled into one.
What you do is that you register through the website, and then you can update your account either through texting, instant messaging, through the websites or one of its numerous third party client tools.
You can go around looking at other people’s sites, and if you like it, you can choose to “follow” them.
Following means that if they update the site, you will be able to read about their updates on your website, or you can even choose to have the updates sent to you through instant message or as a text message to your cellphone.
This is almost akin to some of the new features in social networks—whether in Facebook, LinkedIn or Friendster.
All of the updates on your account will be known to those who will check your account.
So currently, I am following the updates of about 200 people, including some famous ones, like Robert Scoble, John Dvorak, Guy Kawasaki (famous author), Kevin Rose (founder of Digg), Jason Calacanis (former head of Netscape’s web and Weblogs Inc), Leo Laporte, Dave Winer (one of the pioneers and developers of Blogs), Jimbo Wales (creator of WikiPedia), Joi Ito and many others.
Barrack Obama also has an account, but no one is sure if he is personally updating it or not.
One of the great uses of Twitter for me was when my kids were in China for summer. They were able to update in real time me, my wife and our relatives of what was happening with them.
Twitter is a nice way to get in touch fast. It is occasionally a good way to get rumors and news.
I learned about the Sichuan earthquake from Twitter.
Last Monday night, I also got a twit that said ABS-CBN reporter Ces Drilon was abducted.
Last Tuesday or before anything came out in the news and even before some people blogged about it, I was already able to read from Twitter what was the latest in Apple’s iPhone offering.
This morning, as I was answering my mail, somebody immediately gave information as to who won the latest Lakers-Celtics game.
So if you are following the right people, it can be a fast way to be in touch.
