At the laundromat this morning, waiting for the cover for my sofa to dry.
“Well, do you know? Do you know? I’m responsible for shutting that place down! That bar was drugging people and I figured it out! I went in there, and I know my tolerance, because I drank a bottle of Skyy vodka before, so I know my tolerance. And after just two shots I passed out. You know what that means, right? I was drugged! Drugged!”
Uh, yeah, that’s the logical conclusion.
I can’t take credit for finding it—that goes to Matt—but this video is a hilarious take on Facebook in real life.
Seeing this reminded me of something I’ve thought for quite a while: sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc all devalue the label of “friend”.
Some context: Facebook and Linked In are the only social networks I use with any regularity. I’ve had accounts on others (Orkut, anyone?) but those I haven’t deleted have long since gone fallow. I use Facebook and Linked In for two distinct purposes: connecting with friends and connecting with work contacts, respectively. For some time I’ve been taking a rather hard line in both respects. For example, working at Creative Commons gives me an opportunity to work with our international affiliates. One of them really wanted to be my friend on Facebook. The problem is, we’re not friends. I think he’s a perfectly decent guy, but I’ve never met him, never hung out, never done the things friends do. So I declined him, again and again, finally sending him a message saying “look, I get it, but we’re not friends”. His unexpected reply was not combative or offended but rather, “Oops, I was using the contact finder feature, I totally get what you’re saying” (note that I think this supports the idea that social networks enable socially acceptable spam).
So if you don’t want your mom (or co-workers, or boss, etc) to see pictures of you covered in “puke and piss”, do two things: learn about the privacy settings in Facebook and only add friends who are your, well, friends. Alternately don’t put yourself in situations where you can be photographed covered in puke and/or piss, but really, let’s focus on achievable goals.
As promised, slides for my OpenWeb talk, Deploying the Semantic Web with ccREL and RDFa, are available. And while we’re talking about the Semantic Web, note that the slide page is using another low barrier Semantic Web tool, Semantic MediaWiki.
I’m in Canada (O! Canada!) for the OpenWeb Vancouver 2008 conference today and tomorrow. I’ll be speaking tomorrow morning on Creative Commons licenses and the Semantic Web—specifically about how things like ccREL and RDFa allow us to build a real life, scalable, extensible Semantic Web deployment without really thinking about it (“It’s SemWeb! And I helped!”)
OpenWeb Vancouver is a community run conference, much like PyCon. And much like PyCon it looks like it has a really great value proposition (unfortunately much like PyCon it also seems to have crappy wifi... sigh).
I’ll post slides soon (read: when I actually write them).
If you don’t read the Creative Commons blog, you missed the announcement that the deadline for applying to be a CC intern this summer has been extended until March 21 (a week from Friday). On the tech side we’re looking for computer science/software engineering students who want to help us build tools to support the CC license ecology. Questions? I’m happy to answer them.
