Digital presence up date 080112

I have now been working on my digital presence project for over a year. In some areas I have made good progress; in other areas it has been slow going and I still have a lot to learn regarding how I am going to meet my expectations regarding the project. My aim is still the same, to develop a pervasive and enduring presence on the World Wide Web. This update comments on how I think I am going in these two areas.

Pervasive presence

There is no doubt that I now have quite a pervasive presence on the “Net”. If I Google my name I get hundreds of hits from a wide range of sites. I can do searches on my name and key words and still get quite a number of hits. Various items I have posted are now linked into other sites as they troll internet looking for material. I have learned that a key factor in developing a pervasive presence is to ensure that type of posts, and the range of places where these posts are placed, are as diverse as possible. With regard to this I keep finding and developing material on new sites as often as possible.

Enduring presence

Developing confidence that I am developing an enduring presence is much more problematic. If I stopped using the web today I know that my presence would gradually fade. How much this would happen and how fast are unknowns. The Net is still evolving and developing. How this will ultimately impact on links, web sites and the eventual structure  of the Web is also unknown. To ensure that my presence is as enduring as possible I am still:

• Posting a range of diverse material onto the web.
• Posting primarily to web sites that appear to have a level of longevity and robustness associated with them.
• Where possible,duplicating material – particularly photos.
• Testing past posts to check that they are enduring.
• Linking to my own material as much as possible

On the positive side a number of the sites I use have existed for several years now and there seems no obvious reason why they shouldn’t continue to exist into at least the foreseeable future. Many of these sites are becoming increasingly reliant on good linking of the data people are producing; this means the incentive to retain existing links, at least while these sites exist, is quite high.

digital blogging themes

 

A look through my 2011 blogs might give a reader the impression that I blog about anything that I think is interesting in the digital domain. Certainly if something pops up, out of left field, I may comment about it – if it seems interesting, but usually I know the areas that interest me and have been fairly consistent in keeping to these themes. In general these themes are:

Weaving people into the World Wide Web

• The Web was originally developed to handle documents. It then moved on to also handle data. The next progression, as I see it, is incorporating people into this framework. Social networking has been a large part of this, but is not the whole picture by any means. Currently while there are protocols for managing documents and data, there are not “people” protocols. I am interested in any posts that are moving in this direction.

Developing a digital presence on the Web

• Following on from the possibility of “people protocols” is the idea that people will have a pervasive and enduring presence on the Web. That is, a person will become a “data set” that is searchable, can be manipulated and can (maybe) define its own presence.

Digital legacy

• The material people put onto the web, not withstanding how it is woven into the web, becomes their digital legacy. Questions of how it is placed on the Web, how it is retained and what are the long term implications are, increasingly, coming to the attention of writers and web site developers.

The progress of social networking

• Amongst other things, social networking sites are contributing to what a digital legacy might look like; or at the very least are a major data feed into a legacy framework. It is also interesting to see how people are using social networks in their day to day lives and to get an idea regarding which networks they are using. I think it is important that no one social network system dominates, so I watch with interest the range of social network sites people use – and how people integrate their use of these sites.

The analysis and use of the large data sets that are being collected as people engage in Web based activities

• One of the most interesting and fastest growing domains on the Web; how to store, analyse and use the incredible amount of data that is being generated by the activity of people on the Web. Data arrive on the web passively (just through using it, eg., mouse clicks, link access, time – date and so on) and actively by people posting material on various sites, using email, developing profiles uploading photos – videos and so on). These data may be located in many different places and in many different forms. Bringing them together in response to a query, or other type of request, is a significant challenge for programmers.

Mathematical developments underlying web based activity

• As the availability of data increases, and analysis becomes important, the role of mathematics in the scheme of things becomes more vital. In my view it will be the application of math, to many of the problems related to these themes, that will be the key factor in finding ways to move forward.

Public versus private activity on the Web

• A big, and mostly misunderstood, issue on internet behaviour. It does reflect a possible movement in the world in general to revise ideas of what is meant by being public and being private – and what are the implications for the average person in their day to day life.

Software development and evolution

• Along with my longstanding interest in software development I am also aware of an idea that could be termed software evolution. Prior to the Web, and the proliferation of hardware forms, there only needed to be a few computer languages. Almost all programming that people wanted to do could be managed (often on a mainframe) using these key languages. It also meant that programmers were a very portable commodity and didn’t need to seek employment based on the languages they could code in. Today it is very different. There are dozens of computer programming languages that people can choose to use, and they continue to be developed to meet the needs of the evolving internet and hardware forms. An outcome of this is that programmers are becoming more specialist and “ordinary” programmers, like myself, are finding it harder and harder to keep up with the options available. Because I feel strongly that the average person should be able to program a computer (at least at a basic level) this is a problem – one that I hope the future evolution of programming languages will begin to address.

why are my web sites so messy?

A web page I have recently written for dyd.co.nz to explain why my web sites tend to be a bit messy:


Good question! I look at other web sites, even those similar to mine, and think - they are so tidy and ordered. In fact it is a standard these days to make a web site (or a blog site which is often similar) as appealing as possible with regard to structure, ease of navigation around the site, understanding what the site is all about. The expectation that web sites will be "tidy" is now so entrenched in "web lore" that most people coming across a messy site will probably say to themselves "what is this?" and go away again rather than make any effort to explore the site.

In some ways this is a pity, because the World Wide Web is not tidy - in fact it is a big big mess. It is made tidy by the layers of software that we usually use to access it; but if we access the web in its "raw" form then it is quite a different matter. And yet, by trusting our access to these software overlays we are potentially missing out on a large part of the richness of the internet.

 There clearly needs to be a balance here. We don't want to explore the web only in ways dictated by software, that has often been written not only to make access look tidy but to direct us to particular places on the web. Yet we also don't want to have to work out how to search the web from "scratch" each time we want to find something (and of course most people would have no idea how to access the web without using the software overlays, browsers etc.).

One form of software overlay will help users produce "nice looking" web sites. This software will certainly help produce a site that meets current web site "standards", but it usually comes with an efficiency cost; that is it will take more time and effort to produce the site, using this software, than just putting material on the site directly. I would rather put my time (which is limited) into putting content onto the web, rather than making it all look pretty.

The human mind is not a pretty place. The human mind is more like the "raw" world wide web. This is why we can have such interesting conversations with people, make amazing connections between ideas and thoughts in our minds and build concepts that have fuzzy boundaries.

So, my choice is to put effort into putting content onto the web - not making it look nice and possibly easier to retrieve - and to have a web site that is more like a human mind than a structured history book. I believe that this will make it a more useful site in the long run, particularly as software designed to extract data from the internet, in all sorts of forms, gets more sophisticated.



Denys yeo

upi:dyd-dgyeo

111211

Digital Presence update 07/12/11

 

An update on how I am progressing with my digital presence project. Comments here based on the two key elements I am working on, developing a pervasive and enduring presence. For a general summary of my digital presence project go to: digital presence summary

Pervasive presence

My main measure of developing a pervasive presence has been search returns on my name, and my upi over time. With Google these hit rates have increased dramatically over the time I have been working on my digital presence.

It is important to keep working on a range of web type activities. Commenting, blogging, video, indexing on Twitter etc. It is relatively easy to keep working on areas that are efficient and put off some of the posting activities that take a little more time an effort. I have attempted to deal with this by developing a schedule of posting activity that I can cycle through each day, and working to make posting activity more efficient.

It is important to keep an eye on web activity that is more likely to be picked up by a search engine. Video from You Tube still tend to dominate search results.

I am making sure that I put my name and upi into as many posts as possible.

Linking to other sites and other site activity is important. Even if links are not used immediately they are available for use in the future, adding to the diversity of material on the web.

I am still trying to put as much material on the web as possible without worrying too much about how it might eventually be used. Frequently these days there are articles about how computers are getting better at extracting data from the web; I think this part of the equation will develop over time, but will only be effective if there is a substantial amount of material for it to extract.



 Enduring presence

I am tending to comment primarily on sites that I believe will be operational over the longer term future. These include, The New York Times, The Guardian and Scientific American. It is important to get a balance between commenting on sites that may be more enduring, and maintaining the goal of being pervasive.

I am beginning to use sites such as 1000memories to store some data, not because I necessarily think they are more robust than some other sites, where a reasonable amount of data can be stored, but because the have a commitment to long term archiving of material. In the end there are no guarantees but a commitment of this sort has to be considered when looking at developing an enduring presence.

I am indexing as much material as possible on Twitter. Twitter I believe will still be around for a while, and is a useful way of storing web activity from both a pervasive and enduring perspective. I think Twitter does have a Tweet limit of about 2000 so this may be a metric to watch out for.

I have begun to put more material on Blogger. Again, this may violate the rule regarding pervasiveness, but I suspect Blogger may be around for quite a long time, given that it is owned by Google. I think Blog sites may be at risk so choosing sites that are more likely to last is important.

I have begun to place more material onto Facebook, again because this service is now well established at the number 1 social media site and will almost certainly last well into the future. I also quite like its new time line feature.

Setting up multiple versions of material, and interlinking material posted onto the web is important. For example, if I write a blog it is available on my hard drive program as well as on a blog site. I think it is still unwise to rely on material surviving on the web only, multiple hard drive copies are also necessary to ensure that data endures.

I still feel that if material is placed on the web to ensure it is pervasive, this in itself will increase the chance that it will endure. That is diversity and repetition is important. Nevertheless, there is some tension between putting material on some sites, just to be pervasive, when I am aware that the site may not survive and therefore in this case diversity may not lead to an enduring presence.

new blog page

I have just set up this new blog space to place material related to my digital presence project. Currently some of this material is in my dgyeo blog; however dgyeo will now become mainly related to blogs to do with things that I find interesting, unless of course that interesting thing is to do with digital presence in which case the material will probably be found here!

upi:dyd-dgyeo