social media today is a snake oil factory

Seriously,

Social media today is like a ready-made mass production factory  for snake oil.

It’s a pile of crap, however you look at it. There’s people promoting all kinds of stuff. Dig deeper, y’all. You’ve got the internet, there are sources you can check, unheard of, right?

I’ll take the wikipedia any day given this shit-rain we’re getting.

social connectivity – mit style – via good ole email

forget the analytics that google and facebook give you around your social connections..

just based on who i talk to via email.. this is what I get.. this is so much more powerful than google+ or facebook or twitter.

and it’s all based on old internet media – email

it’s available for your use at https://immersion.media.mit.edu/

Banning sites from your browsing experience

I use the internet for searching for things. That’s an understatement. I also use it for a variety of other things like hosting my web presence, or sending/receiving email for even voip. Well, I should probably say, I use the web for searching for things.

Searches (google) get you to a point where you can (hopefully) narrow down your choices to the information you’re trying to get to. Some sites are heavily spammed using ads (google again), some sites give you pointers or more keywords that you can search on. It’s worked for me for a while.

What gets me is the cyber-squatters who try to lure people into trying them to buy into a domain that’s meaninful to you. But even more than that, it’s the sites that actually pretend to be one thing and give you something else.

What I think is a good idea for an opensource project is to have a way to ban sites from your browsing experience, such that, whenever you click on a link, it prompts you about the site being “knowledge agnostic” or “irrelevant to your search” or something. The key concept here is “your browsing experience”, personalized to you. Obviously there’s huge potential for abuse and spamming, but I would hope it prevails over the drive for unscrupulous commercial gain. That’s a judgement call, but hey, wikipedia prevails ( so does google by the way).

Obviously it would require some kind of a plugin in your browser (or bookmarklets etc) and a set of servers that the plug-in would reference for a site. There are similarities to the adult-rating or pro-family checking sites but this would be more general. It would cater to your preferences, somewhat like del.icio.us , based on tags you prefer, tags you don’t prefer and on top of that an editorized heirarchy of tags.

hmm..
another bou.dal.icio.us

If you think about it, it’s the anti-thesis of del.icio.us where you bookmark sites you want. This one would let you bookmark sites that you would not want, with just a click, and you could put tags so others can benefit besides you.