Here’s Lesson 1:

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And here’s Lesson 2:

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Thanks, Peter, and enjoy!

Enter bit.ly. Bit.ly was created by Betaworks, the NY-based software concern that created Summize. Summize was recently acquired by Twitter, if you’re not following the rapidly evolving Web.20 startup space.

Dave Winer used a post announcing the launch of bit.ly on scripting.net to explain why bit.ly fills a number of other needs:

“They asked what it would take for me to use bit.ly, I said: data. I need to know how many clicks each pointer got and where the clicks came from. They gave me that, and thumbnails, permanent caching of the pages I’m pointing to (goodbye linkrot) and a lot of smart stuff going on behind the scenes that we’re not ready to talk about yet. (Though we told Marshall and he explained.) Here’s the info page for this post.

And, most important, an XML/JSON interface, so I can process all that data with my own programs. Here’s the XML readout for the shortened link to this post.”You can use your own keywords to the URL, organizing your links like tags.

Winer also notes that he’s a minority investor in the service, so while you can take his words with a grain of salt, try the service out and weigh its merits for yourself.

 I will say,  however, that bit.ly is easily the best URL shortener I’ve used to date.  It accomplishes its core mission quickly and easily, converting long URLs to short ones on the bit.ly homepage or using a bookmarklet you can drag to your Web browser’s toolbar. (It’s even kinda cute; note the blowfish mascots on the right.)

If you’re a Web developer or simply a data geek, the ability to pull all of the data about a given shortened URL through a XML or JSON interface will be quite helpful for analyzing your traffic and audience behavior.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of bit.ly’s other nifty features:

• display your 15 most recent shortened URLs below the entry field
• tracking of both clicks on shortened URLS and referring pages
• an API for creating shortened URLs from web applications, which is quite useful is you’re a Web developer
• automatic creation of thumbnail images that can be displayed on a webpage next to shortened URL

If my excitement about bit.ly doesn’t move you, Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted a glowing review of bit.ly at ReadWriteWeb that thoroughly explains why bit.ly is worth a try, along with an endorsement of bit.ly’s advanced URL tracking capabilities by Lifehacker.

If you like bit.ly, please recommend it to others. The larger the bit.ly community grows, the more effective and useful this nascent index of the Semantic Web will become. That’s because bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters. All the data gathered is available in public RSS feeds. bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of the database of submitted links.

While Nelson is credited with coining the term “hypertext, Vannevar Bush is responsible for inventing the concept, which he described as “instant cross referencing.”

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As usual, we tread in the path of giants.

Tech fans may find gems like “SIMS 141 – Search, Google, and Life,” with Google’s Sergey Brin, to be of particular interest:
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If that doesn’t meet your bar for online video goodness, you might try BoingBoing TV, a new IPTV feature hosted by cybergoddess Xeni Jardin and BoingBoing’s co-creator, Mark Frauenfelder.
The 3-5 minute segments will also feature cyberpunk author and digital copyright maven Cory Doctorow and gadgets editor Joel Johnson. The debut episodes featurethe usual mix of pop ephemera and geeky art, including a piece on Listography.com, an remix of an industrial movie from the 1960s and a robot covering Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

All Things Weird and Wonderful, here I come.

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So what is Facebook? It’s a simple idea, done well: move the “facebooks” of incoming college undergraduates online, with headshots and interests constituting a basic profile, and then create the tools for nodes on the network to interact and browse each other’s profiles.

It’s also my “latest discovery,” as I joined earlier this spring, egged on by a neighbor. Back when I went to college, we had such a thing, printed on “paper,” bound and distributed to the freshman class (and just as quickly appropriated by upperclassmen frequently interested in more than discovering who else was into rock climbing or Pearl Jam). Facebook was, at its inception, a social network for college students, with access limited to only students in the same institution. Now, Facebook has laid claim to being a “social utility,” bidding to become the platform or framework we use to organize our online lives.

Audacious, perhaps, but not unprecedented. Friendster had the early start in filling that role but never recovered from an inability of its original technical architecture to scale to massive traffic demands or challenges from MySpace and other networks.

To be fair, over the past spring and summer, the social networking phenomenon has continued to explode in popularity and innovation, but Facebook has grown much faster and pulled in the digerati like no other.

Why? There’s no single reason. While the decision to open the formerly closed network to the Internet at large is an obvious place to begin, instead of limiting membership to isolated pools of collegians, other factors are in play. Making APIs available to developers resulted in a tsunami of applications that help to further interconnect nodes within each social network has attracted enormous amounts of energy (and, increasingly) venture capital to the platform.

Choosing to keep a clean, easily navigated interface has mattered as well. While MySpace is still the biggest social network — and by most measurements, the most popular site on the Internet, the contrast between the two services couldn’t be much larger, aesthetically, as Facebook (by comparison) radically limits the visual control a user has over a profile. It doesn’t hurt that all of the young college graduates enter the workforce with profiles, either.

If you need a sense of how bound into the tech community Facebook has become, consider how Silicon Valley reacted to a recent Facebook outage.

There’s plenty of evidence too that spending time on Facebook has also evolved into a significant productivity drain (though some disagree) and security risk. (If you’re wondering which companies lead in embracing Facebook, along with the most risk, just read Elisa’s post). The trouble is that sysadmins with itchy trigger fingers may not be able to quickly shut off the flow of bandwidth by firewalling Facebook. Unlike other more informal networks, many professionals have been using to “friend” their coworkers, clients and collaborators, along with former college roommates and dorm buddies. While LinkedIn has long been the social network of choice for many professionals, Facebook has begun eating into that market. In the online social media world, the gaps between online and offline networks are continuing to close, along with whatever space remained between work and personal lives.

Netizens my age (proud members of the “XY generation” that bridges the gap between Gen X (children of the 80s) and Gen Y (folks who don’t remember life before CDs and email or who said “trust but verify“) and older may find some elements of Facebook surprising, though perhaps not more so than MySpace. Older users are joining, however, and finding a place. While privacy options for profiles exist, unlike MySpace, there’s significant potential for embarrassment and even calamity for college or career prospects for those who aren’t wary about posting photos or blog entries that don’t put them in a good light, to put it mildly. PR professionals and marketers would do well to consider the advice of social media gurus. And, as neighborhood applications crop up, there are also alarming security concerns regarding personal safety and property, given that clever criminals can posit where and when individuals are away.

While much of the value of joining these networks can be found in keeping touch with friends and alumni — and making new ones from within that social network — the amount of information that many people are adding to their profiles has also been identified as a valid phishing risk, with significant potential for social engineering hacks that allow access to corporate networks.

What to do? As is the case with the rest of the Web-based applications that have made their way into enterprise and personal desktops alike (users keep outwitting IT when installing consumer apps, apparently), the key is likely to be adaptive security policies that both recognize the increasingly blurred boundaries between work and personal life while respecting both the bandwidth limitations high usage may inflict upon a network and the need to limit the leak or theft of potentially damaging proprietary or personal data. No one is suggesting that developing, implementing or enforcing such a policy is easy, but the consequences of failing to try may extend well beyond a public relations disaster to the organization or individual who doesn’t consider Facebook to be a risk.

There are also no shortages of critics who view the closed nature of Facebook with some distaste — “yet another profile to populate” is a new form of fatigue in the digital age. Personal data portability may become a online movement. It’s certainly been the inspiration for a business plan or two. The founder of LiveJournal, for instance, has published a mini-manifesto for portable, open social networking, according to Mashable. (It may help that Google appears to be backing him). Other observers have noted that Facebook hasn’t been proven to be a rewarding platform for advertisers yet either, though the model is still evolving, as described in this excellent article from Business.com, the Facebook Economy.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy watching classmates and friends pop up on Facebook; lest you wonder, you can find me there as well. Be warned: I’m sticking with adding friends, coworkers and neighbors, lest I develop social networking fatigue myself.

It’s always a pleasure to get such direct feedback. When I asked what she liked (and didn’t like) about this blog, she mentioned that she appreciated past posts about free online education resources. (Just click on our learning tag to see them all to date.)

A simple search for other similar resources turns up many other hits, of course, notably for OER. OER stands for “Open Education Resources,” an effort to create a free, globally accessible commons for educational materials. In a spirit much like that of Professor Lessig’s Creative Commons, UNESCO‘s 2002 initiative encourages educators to publish learning content and the tools to create that content online, free of intellectual property considerations. You can learn more at the Open Education Conference’s Web site, if you’re interested in the movement.

As Wendy Boswell details in Technophilia, her typically brilliant column on Lifehacker, such free resources easily available online — if you know where to look. Wendy ends with where I’d begin, however, by suggesting using Google to uncover different kinds of learning content.

As Wendy points out, simply by using the right keywords, you can unearth course syllabi (insert your own subject), lectures, tutorials, notes, podcasts and online books , all through the magic of the Google search field.

When you’re done Googling, the Feds may be able to provide some help: Check out free.ed.gov for an index of different subject areas. The National Education Association also has a page full of free course materials for teachers and students.

Still want more?

FreebiesList.com has a long list of free educational resources.

Finally, in the spirit of the OER, the OpenCourseWare Consortium provides, according to their Web site, “free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.”

Did we miss any of your favorite resources? Let us know in the comments!

What new thing did you learn today?

[Image credit: MasterNewMedia.org]

In fact, it turns out that there were a lot of user-created videos built around the song.

I watched several, thoroughly enjoying the catchy tune with a techie humor twist. Here are my favorites, in no particular order:

• The Codemonkey Dance
• Jocopro’s early homage
• A mashup of Codemonkey and Traders, a Canadian TV show
• Another mashup, this time of Codemonkey and the animated virtual reality of the Sims.
• There was even a WoW version of Codemonkey, perfect for MMPORG geeks like me.

Little did I know that yesterday’s Sunday New York Times Magazine would feature an article, Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog, by Clive Thompson, that would provide both a backstory for Codemonkey! The piece delves into the daily life of the musician (Jonathan Coulton) that wrote the song and explores at length the changing face of music, artistic expression and artists’ control over their work.

There’s a great video exploring how Codemonkey became a viral hit at nytimes.com as well.

Jonathan quit his job as a computer programmer 21 months ago to become a full-time singer and songwriter. Ten years ago, that might seem, on the face of it, either very ambitious, wildly inadvised (as the .com boom ramped up) and touchingly naive. Maybe all of those things. Whatever concerns he (or his wife) may have had, his discipline and passion, along with considerable talent and energy, have turned him into one of new media’s successes. Every week, he writes a new song, which he then publishes and markets online. In the process, he’s built a widespread fanbase and a reasonable income as an independent artist.

Not everyone can pull this off, of course. Just read the Wall Street Journal’s Tech section’s cover story today,”How to be a Star in a YouTube World.” It’s a great piece that drives home both the shift in the media landscape and the challenge in getting your voice heard in the increasingly-frenetic mix of artists on MySpace on YouTube. Thousands vloggers, podcasters and aspiring artists like Jonathan are all using a combination of these platforms to create, syndicate and, increasingly, monetize content. It’s not easy, but for those who have the time and talent, like Ask A Ninja, LonelyGirl15 or Rocketboom, it can work. It’s important to note the amount of writing, production, editing and marketing that is necessary for that success: the Ninjas, for instance, can take up to 18 hours for each 3-minute short.

Can the Web can allow more funny, creative artists like Jonathan to make a living? What do you think? Do you buy the premise of the articles?

And which version of the Codemonkey video is your favorite?

If by chance you haven’t visited the home of Microsoft‘s chairman yet, Amit Agarwal has posted a photo gallery of the Gates mansion, along with a number of links to virtual tours, facts and figures about this rather unique home.

If you haven’t already entered those coordinates, you can zoom into Google Maps or, as Bill would no doubt prefer, MSN Virtual Earth to see more yourself.

The house boasts such 21st century features as adaptive climate control, lighting and music that match the personal preferences of visitors as they move around the house, keyed to a microchip issued to each as they enter. We can’t help but wonder what would happen if a Brazilian and Norwegian entered a room at the same time. There are other features that are less “gee-whiz” but no less extraordinary, including wooden walls made from recycled heavy timber. In fact, Bill Gates funded the first heavy-timber-recycling sawmill in the world for the purpose.

Downsides? Even with energy savings gained from building into the hill, heating that much space and powering all of those screens and electronics is no walk in the park. A cool $1 million dollar annual property tax bill is a bit of a barrier to the light of wallet as well.

Still interested? Perhaps you should found your own software company!

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