The Power of Social Networks

What a year! 2009 turned out to be the Year of The Social Networks. Your mom joined Facebook. The news media wouldn’t stop talking about Twitter for months. And now everyone is a “Social Media Expert.” Actors and musicians connected with fans, as did sports stars. (I’m sure Tiger enjoyed more than a few ‘random’ TweetUps). People used social media to cover war, the loss of Michael Jackson, and the story of a small Oregon boy risking his life in an airborne balloon craft. The latter turned out to be a hoax, but the impact of these new forces of immediate social communication became very real. You could send out an alert if you were in trouble or you could post up some mind-numbing minutiae if you were feeling bored. You could connect with and ‘follow’ people of interest which you had never had access to before. It was an exciting time and this emerging trend served as a handy distraction from whatever else was going on in the world.

It wasn’t all just welcoming handshakes and joyous LOL’ing, either. A study was released that attempted to show social stratification amongst the social networking set. I believe the conclusion was that lower socioeconomic individuals gravitated towards MySpace, while those slightly up the scale were trending towards Facebook. This led to further musing on the idea of “segregated” online networks and the potential for online inequality. Authors and journalists decried the dissolution of language to a bunch of abbreviations, emoticons, and short burst induced incompleteness. (These same people don’t seem to like text messaging for the same reasons). Computer connected employee productivity has taken a nosedive to such proportions as to almost cause a global financial meltdown. Privacy experts are practically having a conniption over this whole exposing oneself idea. Clearly, all is not rosy in the social networking arena.

So, why then are these newfangled social networks taking root and growing so fast? What is the value add? What do we get out of it? And why are these ephemeral and immediate networks so powerful?

First of all, online social networking is not new. Supernerds have been convening on the Internet since the early 1970′s. There were early bulletin board (BBS) systems, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and (of course) electronic mail (now commonly and coyly referred to as ‘email’). [The first Web-enabled chat I recall was ICQ circa 1998. I found the "group-shout" interaction intriguing, but rather annoying. Clearly, I wasn't ready for short burst communications just yet. But I digress...]

Anyway, these perfect new online social networks are full of pizazz! Full of allure! And full of potential vectors for malware and privacy invasions. But mostly full of pizazz and allure — The pizazz to show off your own unique self and super-fantabulousness to the universe and the allure that you can connect with ‘anyone at any time’ and likely for any reason. Lots of people use it to follow their preferred news sources or to catalog information regarding their industry or career. Yet the killer feature seems to be localization. You can find people near you who do what you do. Or you can follow your local politicians (check to see if they’re on there). You can ask questions like “Where can I find a great Italian restaurant around here?” or “What bands are playing in Raleigh tonight?” One of my favorite services for this type of localized search is Aardvark. You should go there and sign up. (Or let me know if you still need to have an invite.)

My favorite use of social networking technology is to remake connections with friends from the past. It has been quite interesting to see all my high school friends emerging online almost two decades later. Not only that, but many people I didn’t have the opportunity to know better in the past have connected and enhanced our relationship via online social networking. Beyond that, I have often gone to my vast legions of social network peeps and sought job leads, medical advice, shopping consultancy, and all sorts of things.

There is also the notion of communicating for communicating’s sake. I like to crack jokes and mash-up the day’s events into (quasi-)witty status updates. I rarely tell Twitter “What’s happening?” and instead just throw out “What’s on my mind?” I think there is a lot of value in the new social network scene, despite the non-extraneous time they seem to consume. If you can enjoy your time on these networks and not get carried away, then I guess you’ve won the battle.

What say you? Will the Web 2.0 social networks shepherd about the end of language? Will Twitter be responsible for the decimation of our final strands of time/information management? Will pictures of you holding a beer can in high school ruin your entire life? Why do you do (or don’t do) the online social networking thing? And how the hell did anyone solve any problems or research anything before The Google? Shout it below.

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The Eyes of March

Beck Tench got me involved in her whacky Experimonth concept. The idea is to conduct 30-day mini-experiments for each month of the year. This month has been dubbed “The Eyes of March and the goal is to take and post a photo every day.  There is an awesome Flickr pool and Beck has her own fancy aggregate site going.

Please take a look and comment and participate to your heart’s delight. We certainly are enjoying it.

Global Colding

So I have pretty much decided that the scientists who came up with the whole “Global Warming” scam are actually full of shit.  I mean, all that data they came up with seemed pretty reasonable (automotive emissions, green house gases, ozone holes, etc), but there is one simple question that none of these Poindexters can seem to answer honestly — “Why does it stay colder LONGER each Spring?”

If the globe was actually warming then I would be warmer, right? No, in fact, I am colder. Thus, science is wrong. And this is why each February I want to move to the Equator.

BLOG POST!

First!!!!!!!11111

LOL.

Tell Us Something

There has been no progress on this blog since April. Lame. Totally lame. My re-tooling session is taking longer than planned. Some things came up, like moving back across the USA to North Carolina, job hunting, starting a new job and all that. No big whoop.

I am thinking of moving the weblog to matusiak.org, but wonder what this might do to page traffic and search engine ranking. It would probably be disastrous, but I will likely do it anyway. Something’s got to give (according to the Beastie Boys). Let me know what you think about this idea, if you are so inclined.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Well, it looks like 2008 is going to be as rife with change as 2007 was. I certainly hope the end of 2008 equates to relative stability and prosperity, but only time will tell. I can’t even comment on most of these changes because I honestly don’t know what most of them are going to be. All I know is that patience is a virtue and that one must remain calm in the midst of chaos.

More news as it happens. See you at Elmo’s!

Predictable Like The Weather

Pretty much as soon as I made that last post about the winter snow, the rain came to wash it all away (to prove me wrong, I presume). Since then we have seen many signals of Spring, including sunshine, plant growth and people wearing t-shirts in 40 degree weather. It is almost like Miami around here!

There have been four or five other snowfalls, but they were so light that they only hang around for a day or so. It does make for some extra muddy dog walks, but I guess this is how this area gets its moisture for the season. During the rest of the year this is supposed to be one of the driest regions in the USA. Oh well, “Summer will be beautiful!”

Work has been keeping me busy and I’ve since launched a large-scale scanning project at home to digitally archive all my important memories from the past twenty years or so. My camera was away for repair for almost two months and I think that is the longest stretch I’ve lived without a camera for my entire life. It was rough to miss out on capturing some neat sights. As the days grow longer and warmer, I hope to get out to explore and photograph some of the beautiful places around Moscow.

Apparently, the UNC Tarheels are doing really well in some basketball tourney that is going on. I don’t even know what a tourney is, but since everyone knows I’m from North Carolina I can’t walk fifty feet without someone mentioning it to me. I’m always like “Oh yeah! Awesome! Tarheels ROCK!!” and this seems to be a satisfactory answer. On the flip side, this is way better than everyone talking to me about tobacco farming.

Cabin Fever Anyone?

Here I am relaxing by the fireplace and watching the lovely snow fall.

When I was interviewing last September, they told me about the “mild” winters in North Idaho. When I arrived in November, it was only a matter of days before the snow began falling. Since December, there has not been a time when giant mounds of snow were covering every inch of ground. Two weeks ago, the university closed on both a Thursday and Friday because the amount of winter snow was so insane. Yes, the entire university closed for two full days. No, the university hadn’t closed for snow-related reasons since 1969.

Needless to say, it is cold as a mofo and those of us not made of cast iron are stuck indoors at all times. You know things are rough when I begin referring to days as “warm” when they are reaching the low 40s. There is constant mention that “The summers here are beautiful!” and I thought the Spring might bring some relief, as well. Now folks are telling me that it is cold right up ’til July 4th. Then they say “Although it is unusual to have snow fall on July 4th, it has happened.” WTF? I will be in an asylum by then. Pray for The Tuze!

Chocolate Cherry Bagel

Why am I posting pictures of frightening looking turds on my weblog? Ha-HA! I am not!! That, my friends, is the world’s greatest culinary creation — the Chocolate Cherry Bagel !!!

In Moscow, we have this truly fantastic bread and pastry shop which goes by the moniker of Wheatberries Bake Shop. You will find me in this place at least five days a week. I would be there seven days a week, but they choose to make me suffer by being closed on Sunday and Monday. This means I usually have to stock up on Friday and Saturday.

One day around the holiday season, I see this funky, turdy looking thing in the back of their display case and I had to inquire. Once they told me it had both chocolate AND cherry in it, I was sold. I purchased the little turd and brought it to my office. Little did I know that this bagel would change my life.

The story goes that for the holidays they make chocolate cherry bread and there happened to be some batter left so the owner thought “What the hay?” and made some bagels. The chocolate cherry bread is only supposed to be a once-a-year thing anyway. Yet I have caused such a stir in their tiny little shop that they had no choice other than appeasing the “big crazy white man” and deciding to offer this manna from heaven at quasi-random intervals. This means that on the days I see them in the case, I have to buy all of them immediately to keep anyone else’s greedy hands off them. Mmmmmmmm….. Mine all mine, Choco Cherry Bagel. Arrggglllll….

I feel sorry for you if you can’t have a choco cherry bagel at least twice a week. I mean, what are you living for?

GIAC Rising

The certificate granting branch of the SANS Institute, GIAC, just reached two important milestones. The first one was attaining ISO certification, which I’m not sure about, but I think it means that if an airline pilot has a heart attack and they need someone to fill in, then they will let me safely land the plane. The second big deal was that there are now over 20,000 of us. Twenty-thousand elite hacker, plane flying super geniuses who are all out there protecting your data from that evil CATS character.

“What’s a GIAC?” you may be asking. I wasn’t sure so I had to go look it up myself. Just kidding! If I learned one thing from my GSEC class (and I did) it was what GIAC stands for.

GIAC (pronounced Gee-ACK) = Global Information Assurance Certification
GSEC (pronounced Gee-SEC) = GIAC Security Essentials Certification

I guess they would call that second one a recursive acronym. If you have any idea what ‘recursive’ means. Anyway, this is all good news for SANS (Steven Northcutt) and GIAC (Jeff Frisk). It is good news for me, too, because in 100 years, employers in the technology realm will know what GIAC stands for.

You see, there is this other “certification” (if you can call it that) named CISSP. I have no idea what that stands for either, but it has one more letter in it. This obviously means something really really good to hiring managers because everyone I’ve ever known who got a really awesome job has “CISSP” after their name. I’m sure a simple Google search could unearth this mystery, but honestly who has that kind of time?

Anyway, there are a lot of CISSPs out there. Droves. Like a bazillion or so. And they hog all the headlines when it comes to those slick technology magazines that you all want to be seen reading in the coffee shop. So GIAC wants to dethrone CISSP. Or at least give it a huge black eye. But the playing field is, like, way unfair and stuff. So think back to that incredible theatric release of 2006, 300. It is like that! Dramatic, huh? Except we (the GIACs) are like the Spartans. So now envision me (and a bunch of other pot-bellied dudes) waving GSEC certificates over our heads whilst screaming “THIS IS SPARTAAAA!!!!!” and charging a bazillion nerds wielding CISSP certs.

Whoa. That would rock. And much blood would be shed. But it is all for a good cause. We just want to protect your computers, like, man. And thus was the tale of GIAC Rising.