Thanks On Thursday: Blog Anniversary

Five years ago today I began writing this blog. My intention was to keep focused on the interesting bits of my life, and not get bogged down with petty details of life that are of no interest to others. I wanted to use it as a platform to explain myself, to show how it is not contradictory to be a Buddhist and a moral person, and to be non-monogamous.

I've loosened up my expectations of myself, using it for these things, but also as a way to remember myself, and to remember what I've done, what I've read, what I've imbibed in entertainment. In that way it has become closer to a journal I suppose, but I still write hoping to keep it interesting to someone else. This technology has even introduced me to a different way to read a book, slowly while blogging with others, so that even the reading voice in my head has changed.

This week I highlight my gratitude for this technology. Email, web, and social networking platforms have allowed me to express myself and to discover some people find my thoughts valuable and wise. This technology has also allowed me and others to make connections to organize in easy streamlined ways. I couldn't take care of a local chapter of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship so easily, nor have taken the lead on 5 years of putting together a local Buddhist Festival without this technology. All this would have moved along much more slowly, and perhaps would have fizzled. I couldn't even have rented the other side of our duplex so easily without this technology.

In the 5 years since I began, I have seen polyamory become more known to the mainstream. I think it was able to coalesce as a movement more quickly than similar ones in the past because of this technology. The wisdom of the masses could filtrate more quickly thanks to the ease of connection. The recognition of similar experiences also rose to the surface more quickly thanks to the ease of communication. Because we are not limited by geography, when we are radically different from the public face we aren't so lonely because we find others like us through this technology.

In this five years I've also learned that this blogging thing isn't just a platform to spew myself out there for others to find. It is an expansion of community, and works well when I as a writer recognize it as a dialog, not a monolog. It works well when I recognize the currency of this sphere is that of gifts. Not only do I give intimate pieces of myself for the view of others, if I give my attention to other bloggers with links and comments, they are more likely to give back to me. That is another thing about this technology that I am grateful for: the rediscovery of the currency of gifts.

2.0 Extra Credit

OK, not really extra credit. It's not like I'm getting graded or anything. Once finished, I will receive a thumb drive, courtesy of the Friends of the Library. (All you grumpy taxpayers out there who think public employees are mooching off your dollar, you should know by law we are not allowed to get perks from doing our jobs, unlike you private sector employees. This is allowed because the Friends is a private entity, and the gift is available as a reward to all employees...no one is given special consideration.)

It was around 12 years ago now that I was introduced to email through work. My first husband got his first computer (paid for by the guy for whom he contracted to write jokes), and spent so much late-night time browsing and chatting, he practically growled at me if I interrupted. We speculated that the lack of blinking ignited a primitive aggression response. It was just over 10 years ago that we got a divorce (unrelated to the growling) and soon after that, bankruptcy for both of us, separately.

Imagine my surprise that when the bankruptcy went through, I started getting oodles of credit card offers. The lowest kind of credit card offers. Believe me, I did not want to get back into a debtors hole immediately, but I remembered that a little piece of plastic was the thin line that kept us from homelessness more than once in the years since college, so I applied for just one.

All those bills erased, wow. I could pay my living expenses with ease. I realized if I decided to get a computer for $1000, I could pay it off in 3 or 4 months. My friends advised against it. I knew I could pay it off quickly, but wasn't sure I could actually save the money that quickly, so I went for it. I did pay it off within 4 months.

In the beginning my internet access was through work, and then through the free Juno. From the time I got that first computer, my home page has been My Yahoo. Listed among the 2.1 applications were other sources of home pages.

I was briefly distracted by the simple blocks of Sputtr and symbaloo, but it was iGoogle that captured my attention. Netvibes seems similar, but I liked the look of iGoogle better, and it got bonus points for not requiring me to sign up for gmail.

My Yahoo has just been getting stale. The "new look" is annoying to me. The cool thing about iGoogle, you can add gadgets. (Widgets with muscles?) You can move them around, and change the settings. So I found the ones for bloglines, del.icio.us, yahoo mail, flickr*, movies, and kept the ones for weather and How to of the Day. You can even create your own gadgets. They want you to. So after 10 or so years, I am changing my home page.

Further down the 2.1 page, I was introduced to some organizing tools. A few years back, our ability to organize over long distances was transformed by FreeConference. I have participated in teleconference meetings involving people from all over the US, along with a few from around the world. I also use MeetingWizard to find the best time for a meeting that will work for the most involved. These were not listed, but are still good to know about.

I got especially excited about Yugma as a replacement or augmentation for FreeConference. One person can present their desktop to many, anywhere in the world. A team can take turns sharing their desktops, showing each other what they are doing. Those not in front of a computer can still make a phone call. The free service allows for 10 people at a time, but it is possible to upgrade for just one month at a time, in case one wished to schedule a session with more people. Participants can use chat while one is presenting. How cool is that? You can talk while the one person has the floor, and it's OK.

By this time it was the other side of midnight, but I was too excited about one more thing: TeamworkPM. No, not am/pm, but Teamwork Project Manager. As the 5th Annual Buddhist Festival in the Park looms ever closer (first Saturday in June), for which I am the lead organizing volunteer, I hope this will help more people stay involved in the planning and decision process. We can use this to monitor deadlines, keep track of who is working on what, and share and update documents. I was also thinking I could use Google Docs for faster updating as well as blog publishing, but that is a subject for another web 2.0 post.

*The photos are from my flickr gadget, which displays random images from my flickr account. Clicking on the photo takes you to that flickr page. You don't need a password, you could enter any flickr user name. Heck, you could have a whole iGoogle home page of flickr gadgets. Consider them filler.

Google Meet Portland. Portland, Google.

How cool is this? Google maps now includes bus stop information. Click here for the Central Library in Portland. Zoom in, choose either street map or hybrid view, and see the little white and blue icons for bus, train, or streetcar.

I've known for a while that Google was incorporating mass transit into its offerings. Portland was the first according to this article. Now Google Transit includes 17 cities. I haven't used it though, as I either use the phone to find out when the next bus is coming, or I use Trimet.org to plan my trip.

With it incorporated into the maps feature now, I know I'll use this more often. The best thing about Google is the one-stop usability of it. Plug anything into the google toolbar, and you can get the weather, local phone listings, maps, as well as websites. Now with this map I can click on the little icon...go ahead and do it...and find out when the next bus is due. I can do that from the Trimet site, but not via the map like that. What Google is still missing though is an interface with Transit Tracker, the real time estimate of the next bus arrival.

I suppose it will be awhile before Portland gets Google's street level maps. Combine that with the bus stops, and you could know exactly where your unfamiliar bus trip is going to take you.

Changing Times in a Google Economy

A couple of days ago I went to a class offered through work...well not so much a class but a motivational talk looking at our future. Every once in a while some article looks at the fate of libraries in these googling times, and some intrepid researcher compares the answers got from googling to those got from a librarian. Librarians usually come out looking pretty good, but an impression still remains with Joe Q Public that the future will hold no books nor will there be a place for libraries. As one who works at possibly the busiest branch library of its size in the country, I and my co-workers have to snicker. We know libraries continue to get more popular with the increasing access people have to the web and the internet. We also know that librarians use google...they won't be replaced by google.

So I went to this class wondering, what could be so great about this presentation that this guy was brought here all the way from the other side of the continent? Plus the photo he chose for his biographical page makes him look somewhat like Carrot Top. (I'm a little nervous saying this because he revealed himself to be the blogging geek he is, and he'll know I'm writing about him.)

In a nutshell, his message to libraries is that we need to make our presence known on the web. To do that, we need to break down the walls separating our card catalogs from the web, and we need to use google marketing tricks to get pages from our websites to come out on top. To do that, we also need to understand how the web works for people, recognize it as a social space over and above an information space.

Thus we must think of how the google economy works. People don't go where there are barriers, example Encyclopedia Britannica versus Wikipedia. If we have to pay to get in, or if contents are hidden behind a login wall, we won't go there. People do go to top-ranked searches, so we also need to understand how to increase our rank, and that is directly connected to the social economy of the web. Rank is determined by how many times a page gets linked to, and that happens because people are talking about you. (When I got home, my equally geeky husband pointed out that it's not that simple. If you get linked to from a big site, that does a lot for your rank. It's all in who knows you.)

It was clear to me that Casey Bisson's message comes from a culture of blogging. At one point he asked, "Who here has a blog?" He seemed quite sure that a beginning blogger who "hadn't done much" would certainly do more, get hooked in. I dunno, real life keeps getting in the way of my time here. But, I could see a glimpse of the blog-addled vision. This social space is as much a part of our future as churches (or church gossips) used to be. He remarked that if he's working on something, he puts it on his blog. Then he knows where to find it. A good tip for this blogger wannabe.

I certainly came away with realizing there were many ways I could make my projects more noticeable. I've been busy working on Portland's Buddhist Festival in the Park. I need to encourage the Buddhist groups involved to link to it. While I had the vague notion that part of blogging culture is to make comments on each others' blogs, tit for tat linkage...I shy away from the Machiavellian nature of that kind of sociability, and I just don't have time to read a lot of blogs or make a whole lot of comments. But what I can do is make sure when something is important enough, that I get those connections made.

What we have here is a new landscape. First there was the physical landscape. Then there was an internal landscape. We developed a sense of being, and carried knowledge from past to future. Then there came a landscape of knowledge that was preserved, oral history and written history. Now we have this landscape, and people are rapidly exploring the different ways we can navigate it. If we want to find the best shores for our cities, we have to be quick to stake our claims.

The two hours ended far too quickly. I didn't get to ask him what he thought of the current threat to net neutrality.

Fun With Google News Alerts

I've set up a few google news alerts to let me know every time certain subjects pop up. For instance, I want to know every time "Buddhist Peace Fellowship" surfaces in the news. I also am quite curious to hear about polyamory in the news. It gets interesting as Google includes many sites as "news" sources that I normally wouldn't stumble across: Some of them blogs, some of them conservative Christian "news" sources like WorldNetDaily. Their motto is "A Free Press For a Free People". The headline across the top today, really an ad for a book: "'Miracles' driving massive growth of Christianity."

Those folks at WorldNetDaily are really concerned about polyamory, of course, and any other wild deviance that defies their God. In December this columnist thought he'd be funny about a conference held by the American Academy of Religion. Tried to say he was bored thinking about all that deviant sexuality (when he was the one that cooked up all those titles to amuse and horrify the prudish readers).

And then there's the National Review Online, where contributing editor Stanley Kurtz continued to attempt the polyamory scare tactic over gay marriage rights. The old, next thing you know, more than two people can marry....can't have that...

I started doing this when the news alert was still the beta version. Back then, limiting quotes didn't work, so for "Buddhist Peace Fellowship" I sometimes got obscure Christian missionary treatises with strategies to convert Buddhists.

Now that limiting quotes do work, I've also plugged in "open relationship". There's an amazing number of articles that come up about parents keeping an "open relationship" with their kids, or businesses keeping an "open relationship" with their customers through blogs. But thanks to that little search, I got the scoop on Will Smith's coming out. (Didn't Hollywood invent open relationships?) But then, there was the contradicting story, where he appears to deny he came out as poly. OK, I know, old news now and probably a ploy to draw attention to his movie Hitch.

It's usually nice to see polyamory come up in Q&A columns. They're usually pretty straightforward and accepting. At Proudparenting.com, "Dear Ari" gives worthy advice on "building unconventional families."

Google includes a news source I won't find on my library's list of news sites: college and university student papers. Like the advice columns, these are usually accepting as well as exploratory.

Usually I get some paper's religion calendar for "Buddhist Peace Fellowship". Today I got a fairly local religion calendar for the polyamory alert. I finally find near the bottom that the Unitarians will have a sermon titled "From Abstinence to Polyamory". Those wacky Unitarians, if you don't fit in anywhere, you just might fit in there. They are at least poly-friendly. Funny thing about the Corvallis religion calendar, what I found most useful were the Buddhist calendar listings...more contacts for my address book, and another strategy for finding new Buddhist contacts.

Better Googling

I thought I'd search for a synonym by typing "synonym" and the word I was searching for in Google (it worked) but I also found a site stating if you used ~ along with your search term, Google will search for synonyms of that term as well. That got me excited, because I realized there could be a whole plethora of ways in which I could put Google to better use, so I did a search for "google tips". I found great stuff from Tech TV's Call For Help, Sree Sreenivason from WABC in New York, PC Magazine, and Google itself.

I put together my own list, thinking of my wish to search faster and more accurately, whether working reference on-call, or doing my own thing.

I played around with it, and found these operators won't necessarily make searching easier. Perhaps with use I'll find the appropriate ways to use these new functions. For instance, I looked for mention of the Multnomah County Library. In some cases the number of hits increased when I tried to limit it in various ways from including MCL's own web pages. I figure since MCL's own pages have the highest rankings when ordinary searches are done, when I did these unusual searches leaving those out, the Google rankings started losing their meaning. The hits returned were no longer the familiar front pages of web sites, but many single pages of web sites.

I also found some of the advanced operators don't work, or I couldn't get them to work, even though they're found on the Google help pages. Language: didn't work for Spanish...it returned pages in English.


Note
Those terms with a colon are advanced operators, add them to your search terms. Most of these require no space between the operator colon and the search term. Example: "intitle:multnomah library" will return results with "multnomah" specifically in the web page title and "library" anywhere in the page.


Basic Reference directly from the Toolbar

Maps--Type the street address and the zip code, Google recognizes this as a map search
Phone book--Type name, city (optional), and state
Reverse Directory--Type the phone number in the search engine
bphonebook: specifies business listings for phonebook search
rphonebook: specifies residential listings for phonebook search
define: Provides a definition of the words you enter after it, gathered from various online sources. The definition will be for the entire phrase entered. You can also simply type the word, then click "definition" found on the right side of the results page. This yields the dictionary.com entry.

Refining Searches (we all know "", +, and -)

~ Looks for the term, and any synonyms of the term
.. Two periods between two numbers searches that number range. Specify the unit of measure, dollar sign, etc. ($150..200; 100..200 lbs; 1993..1997)
allintitle: Looks for all search terms only in the web page title.
intitle: Looks for web pages containing that word in the title.
intext: The opposite of intitle:, searches only the body text, ignoring titles, links, etc. (I found the terms could still be in the title. "-intitle:" will give results without the term in the title. Not sure that’s useful anyway.)
stocks: Treats search terms as stock ticker symbols, links directly to stock quote page. You can also just search the stock symbols, then click on the "Show stock quotes" link on the results page.
site: Limits the results to those websites in the given domain. Could be com, edu, etc. or the whole domain name. Useful to use in place of the search engine on a given site. Also useful with the minus sign to get results from anywhere but a given site.
allinurl: Looks for all search terms only in the url.
inurl: Looks for documents containing that word in the url.
related: Lists pages that are similar to the specified web page.
link: Finds pages linking to a particular web page. (Cannot be combined with other searches.)


Here's some samples of various searches I tried:

Approximate number of hits:

61,500.....multnomah library (mcl's homework center top hit)
527.........."multnomah library" (top hits: homework center, kids page, the county site)
19,600....."multnomah county library" (mcl site top hit)
3,680.......intitle:multnomah library (homework center top hit)
1,640.......allintitle: multnomah library (homework center top hit)
15,600....."multnomah county library" -site:www.multcolib.org (top hits: county site, friends of library, county, ipac page)
56,900.....-inurl:multcolib multnomah library
none........-inurl:multcolib allintitle:multnomah library
1,920.......-inurl:multcolib intitle:multnomah library
54,000.....-inurl:multcolib intext:multnomah library
51,300.....-inurl:multcolib intext:multnomah library -intitle:multnomah
499..........-inurl:multcolib "multnomah library" (top hits: dailywireless on mcl’s access trial, Library Journal)
15,500.....-inurl:multcolib "multnomah county library"
14,700.....-inurl:multcolib "multnomah county library" -inurl:multnomah (a lot of very specific pages)
1,450.......link:www.multcolib.org
29............related:www.multcolib.org (top hit:www.multcolib.org; results include the Official Site of the Portland Trail Blazers...hmmmm)