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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
I use Facebook a fair amount, though possibly not as much as I did when I first got involved in it. (I read somewhere today that in general guys tended to take up social media quickly, outnumbering women 2 to 1, but now things have reversed: the women have come on board, but the guys are moving on.)
It may be that I don't use the apps on Facebook to any extent - I got sick of being told that this or that app would need to take lots of my personal
information in order to work properly. Consequently, this may be the reason why I had no idea that Facebook has credits - and these can be purchase through the site. Furthermore, Facebook is now working towards using these credits as a kind of monetary exchange, as far as I understand. A bit like PayPal, perhaps, but on a different level. (PayPal, once it got over its joint pain treatment - you might call it - of its early days, now seems to function very well as a money exchange for the Net.)
I'm not convinced enough that Facebook is 'tight' enough in the money sense to entrust my cash with....not yet anyway.
Here's a quote from an article - by Audrey Watters - on the subject: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Credits would soon role out to the whole network. Credits allows users to purchase virtual currency through Facebook that can be used to purchase virtual goods across multiple applications.
At present the credits program accounts for 'only' $10 million out of Facebook's annual earnings of $700 million. With the changes afoot, that's bound to increase, possibly exponentially. It might be worth keeping an eye on.
Yesterday at work I spent a good deal of time investigating the bibliographic reference program, Zotero. It comes as an add-on to the Firefox browser, and only functions within Firefox (there are no versions available for Internet Explorer, Opera or Google Chrome).
Basically it's intended for keeping track of book title references, and information related to them, along with links, articles and pdfs, etc. All these can be collected together, searched and variously sorted within the programme (which looks very simple on the surface, but is actually pretty powerful.)
By the time I was getting to grips with it, I'd worn my brain out, (and anyway had an appointment at the doctor's for a piece of minor surgery on my eyelid, which was kind of reducing my concentration as the day wore on). I was going back through my copy of Microsoft Access, picking up the links to books and articles online and seeing how easy it was to transfer these into Zotero.
Supposedly Amazon books and the like are all set up for Zotero to automatically pick up the bibliographic information by 'translators' but I couldn't get it to function properly with Amazon. However, as I say, it's early days, I was a bit distracted, and I've got more time up my sleeve to get it sussed before the boss wants to try and use it as an alternative to EndNotes, which is a more well-known bibliographic programme but very expensive. The only cost with Zotero comes when you want to store stuff online through them. Even that cost is pretty minimal - certainly for the amount of information we'd be uploading.
So, you may hear more about Zotero yet. Once my eyelid has ceased to be swollen and black and blue!
Anyone who read my last post about losing stuff when geocities was demolished by Yahoo, may be pleasantly surprised by this extraordinary coincidence: I'd gone to find an example of a link to my old geocities site, one that no longer went anywhere, and lo and behold I suddenly found myself at the reocities version of one of my old geocities pages.
I thought I'd try checking to see if the main page existed, but the computer just whirled and whirled (on the screen that is; this new computer doesn't do such childish noises) and seemed to go nowhere. And then while I was doing something else, up pops my original home page with all the links. I haven't checked them all yet, because the one I was most interested in was the one with the missing stories I'd been writing about in the last post.
I checked on the link....and it went to the stories' index page. I clicked on the story I was most concerned about (one that was broadcast on the radio way back in 1989 - and has been broadcast several times since) and it was there! Great excitement. The other three stories on the page (which announces three stories instead of the four that are actually there...mistakes live on in cyberspace!) are all there too. And so, seemingly is a good deal else.
Guess what I'm busy doing? Downloading them all onto my computer, and then they'll go on the backup drive, and then...
It's very hard to protect data completely, but I'll be doing my best!
Over the Easter weekend I spent a bit of time putting my previous computer back together again to see if I had copies of some stories that got deleted from the Internet when Yahoo, after having 'acquired' Geocities, decided they didn't really need it and dumped it from the system. Thousands and thousands of geocities files vanished overnight. I think we were warned, but I'm not entirely sure.
I hadn't used the geocities site for a while because I was mostly blogging on Blogger, but there was a bunch of stuff there, including five stories that didn't get reloaded on my new computer. (I may have mentioned on here earlier that I spent a lot of time a few months back trying to see if my geocities site had survived the purge by being picked up by one of several sites that attempted to put geocites back together again. At that time there was no sign of it. However there are still dozens of links to my geocities site, which of course go nowhere anymore
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Some time back I wrote a couple of posts on the problems I was having with Dell and the computer I'd ordered from them.
Ultimately everything got resolved - even to the extent of the original missing monitor turning up and sitting in its box in my office for about three weeks until Dell managed to organise themselves to have it picked up again. Heaven alone knows where it is now
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This post has nothing to do with technology, except in the widest sense - that of making a stone sink.
When I heard the phrase, 'stone sink' I thought , 'I've never seen one of those, ' but I have. They're not commonplace, but certainly some hotels I've been in over the years have had. (Usually not the hotels I've actually paid for
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Back in December I wrote about several online companies that would back up your data for you on a continuous basis. Most of them didn't come off too well in reviews, in spite of all their promises.
In an Hewlett Packard ezine the other day I noticed that they were discussing a new home server designed for use with both Windows and Mac computers. It's touted as a central repository for automatically backing up and accessing digital music, videos, photos and documents from multiple computers on a home network
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330 Posts dating from January 2007
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information in order to work properly. Consequently, this may be the reason why I had no idea that Facebook has credits - and these can be purchase through the site. Furthermore, Facebook is now working towards using these credits as a kind of monetary exchange, as far as I understand. A bit like PayPal, perhaps, but on a different level. (PayPal, once it got over its joint pain treatment - you might call it - of its early days, now seems to function very well as a money exchange for the Net.)
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