The New Cornell Blogs
You’ve probably noticed that Cornell’s now hosting student blogging projects. They’re running (for the technically inclined) an out-of-date version of Wordpress 2.0.3, using some minor customization, and without mod_rewrite turned on. It’s a bit sad that they’re trying to reinvent and rebrand the services that Wordpress.com already offers, but for a CU hosted blogging project, it’s probably a good start.
The Prez is quite critical of the content of the blogs, most of which deals with verbose, mundane details of each of the official bloggers’ lives. Caroline responds and says, “If you want a little dose of what it means to be a regular old student here, I hope that my blog will fit the bill.” While there is at least dialog going on now in the online Cornell blogging community, what Cornell actually did was create a migration program for personal online journals.
Now, instead of publishing the mindless details of their private lives for the consumption of their close friends on livejournal, Cornell University has nominated them public spokesmen to share their private lives with everyone! Reading over their last forty entries, the content seems to be about on the same level of insight and quality as the median of Livejournal, Myspace, and Xanga. Of all the posts I encountered, there was only one I approved of in any way, and only insofar as it at least included pictures to go along with the personal flow-of-life writing: Collegetown is so far away.
The Cornell Daily Sun (currently dying on the web), wrote a piece about this. In it, some editor wrote:
The applicant pool was limited only to students who already promote the Big Red on a regular basis. Only those who serve as campus tour guides, members of the Cornell Tradition or Undergraduate Admissions employees were eligible for the job.
The short of it is that the Cornell University Student Blogging Project is just a watered down PR machine written by a gang of unfocused novice bloggers.
Facebook Hacks, Plugins, Features
If you haven’t been on top of the Facebook scene, you’ll have missed some interesting developments, including a developer’s API and a special advertising deal with Microsoft. You’ll be missing out on a new Facebook feature, Facebook badges, the Firefox Facebook Stalker extension, and greasemonkey scripts to hack their pages themselves!
Facebook Badges & Banners
Login to the Facebook Badges page and you can customize either a horizontal (pictured above) or vertical banner for your website or blog. Facebook will give you either a raw image to post just about anywhere, or for the most fancy, some javascript. You can include any of the following fields in your badge: Name, Networks, Email, Screen names, Birthday, Cell number, Websites, Status updates, Recent pictures, Upcoming events, and Latest notes!
Facebook Stalker Firefox Extension
Download this Firefox extension, ignore the unsigned warnings, and prepare to have your web browser remember all your friends’ profiles and markup the changes the next time they update them. It’s very useful to see what your friends think is new and changing!
Facebook Greasemonkey Scripts
The User Scripts Facebook Library includes the following:
- Facebook Age Checker
- Facebook aim status icon
- Facebook Auto-Colorizer
- Facebook Autologin
- Facebook Autopoke
There are also a number of hacks to change the Facebook theme, and do other irritating things.
Electronic Crime, Harassment Bad
It’s not hard to imagine how an article I’ve written could land me in the territory of having enemies I’ve never met. While I respect those who take different ideological positions than I do, it’s hard to understand readers who react violently, emotionally, or criminally.
Towards the end of last semester I received a number of:
- Opt-in spam emails indicating that I had signed up for them
- Telephone marketing calls indicating that I had asked for more information about their products
In other words, someone was using my public status to create havoc in my well-ordered online life. I don’t like persistent telemarketers or spam. I don’t like receiving email newsletters with a misspelled version of my name.
Fortunately, one of the many spam emails I received included the IP address and the time at which the individual abused my identity. The moral of the story is that electronic intimidation, no matter how anonymous and safe you think it is, can be traced back to you.
It’s also a cowardly and childish way for you express your opinions. The person who did this is a Cornell student, but never left a comment on this blog, and never sent me an email. If you’re attending an Ivy-League institution, you should have the good sense to deal with a difference of opinion through open debate, not illegal harassment.
