After two happy years as a Wordpress self-hosted install, I'm moving our 8th grade science class site/home/hub, GriffinScience, to Blogger:

GriffinScience: "Because we'll be using Blogger as a main platform of interaction with the 8th graders next year due to our school Google accounts making that a no-brainer, I've gone ahead and moved GriffinScience from a self-hosted Wordpress install to Blogger."

I don't think the students will mind or notice much, and it does make a good deal of sense to eat my own dog food if I'm going to encourage students to make use of our school's Google Apps accounts and use Blogger (or Google Sites) as their digital portfolio's home (of course I don't mind if they want to venture out into Wordpress or Tumblr or Posterous land as well). For some reason, this makes me sad in a "but I'm a real geek!" way. It's not that Blogger isn't a proper blogging engine or geeky enough site... but I've always encouraged folks to dive into code and make their own templates or sidebars. Those are possible in Blogger, but it's a little too graphical and "easy" in my mind. I need to get over myself, clearly. Nevertheless, here's to another few good years of GriffinScience.

People (especially students) don't do their best work when compensation or reward is based on intermediate performance goals:

Google Wave: Why did Google feel that Google Wave was a good product? - Quora: "In short, Google was experimenting with a drastically new model in an attempt to retain key talent and ended up getting the incentives so perversely aligned that it both directly contributed to a failed product and also compensated that failure more than what a moderate success would have been."

Balanced and insightful views from a source I deeply trust:

A Review of Verizon and Google's Net Neutrality Proposal | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Oddly enough, I'm back on a couple of Google apps like Calendar because Anna wanted to re-establish our calendar sharing there (and my iCal import wasn't working well enough for her). Marriage > Principles, I reckon. Plus the new GMail interface is pretty and my students all use my Google Voice number and it works so well and Google Reader is so much better than anything else and I can edit Google Docs on my iPad... ah, stupid entrapment.

We Can Haz YouTube:

YouTube - SpartanburgDaySchool's Channel

Inspired by Alex Wild's post I study the wrong thing…", I decided to run my own stats on the trending efficacy of my studies/classes. It looks like humanity (or the searches we do) jumped the shark around Fall '08 (although one could argue for the scientific possibilities of a quantum-focused Zombies Studies course): Yep, zombies always win (except against plants, of course). Thank goodness Associated Content or Demand Media style optimization algorithms don't run our educational system. Yet.

I started using the web very early as a middle schooler in the early 90's. I don't remember the first browsers I used when I realized what a "browser" was, but I do remember being in love with Mosaic then Netscape (and always disliking/distrusting Microsoft's browser from the beginning). That love translated into affection for Firefox (I even have two Firefox tshirts). So, as I come to this crux, I have to wonder... Chromium or Firefox? My searching around has found this interesting thread:

Arch Linux Forums / Firefox vs. Chromium - The final verdict: "That's an entirely different thing. Adblock for FF prevents ads from being downloaded, hence makes your web experience faster and less annoying. The 'Adblock' for chromium is just a CSS hack that will hide the ads after they've been downloaded (and sometimes shown for parts of a second which is even more annoying)."

I don't think I could browse the web without Adblock, NoScript and Firebug. They are just exemplary add-ons for any web browsing experience. I didn't realize that Adblock's Chromium extension was limited in such a way, but it makes sense. Plus, would I really like to experience the web via a Google product (even if it is "open") instead of something from the Mozilla group? Reading this fascinating interview of Mozilla's Asa Dotzler doesn't make me lean to Chromium any further, either. So... Firefox or Chromium? It sounds like I've made up my mind towards Firefox (I am a steadfast Thunderbird user, after all), but since I primarily use Apple hardware (Macbook Pro, iPhone, iPad), it's not a black/white issue. However, I do love the thought of using the Firefox/Thunderbird combo for most of what I do.

I love this paragraph from Doc Searls' post today:

Doc Searls Weblog · Context is King: "Phil Windley (disclosure: I’ve done work for Phil) gives a talk in which he provides a brief history of e-commerce. It goes, ‘1995: Invention of the cookie. The End.’ Thanks to the cookie, we have contexts — but only inside each company’s silo. We can’t provide our own contexts except to the degree that each company’s website allows it. And they’re all different. This too is a bug, not a feature. (Just like carrying around a pile of loyalty cards and key tabs is a bug. Hey, I know more about who and what I’m loyal to than any company does — and I’d like my own ways of expressing that.)"

He is frustrated that while in France google.com automatically defaults to google.fr (the French Google) despite any easy-to-access attempts to get to the US English version. Cookies are a fascinating topic both in terms of advertising and (especially now with the evolving "social" web) social sites. I wrote about a similar problem I saw in the way online advertisers were using cookies back in 2004 (wow, time flies):

Digital Moses Confidential: How Fresh is Your Cookie?: "It would seem that cookies would be the ideal and have enough inherit flexibility and durability to reign as the online direct response’s choice for tracking well into the future. The cookie quickly gained its pre-eminence in the online world because of its simplicity, its relative obscurity and its long-term reach. However, recent market forces are converging to form the perfect storm that threatens to make the simple cookie… well, crumble."

I was wrong about the gathering storm then, but I think I was right about the implications for sticking with the way cookies have evolved as the keycards (in some cases debit cards) of our online/social experience. It's a model that's bound to break eventually (hopefully) because as Doc points out later in his post, relying on cookies to inform corporate 3rd parties about our contexts (location, social, status, etc) is not optimal because we ourselves are made dependent variables. Instead, we should control our data and our context and be independent. That's what I'm trying to do with this whole harrelson.fm experiment and I hope it works. I'm having fun with it so far and it's been a blast to really have a reason to think hard about where my data flows and goes as it makes its way through all these tubes.

I was concerned that when I moved from samharrelson.com to sam.harrelson.fm, it would take a little while for this new site to be indexed. In reality, this install of Wordpress and its current database (and set of posts) is much cleaner now than the former samharrelson.com one. I did a ton of work on deduping, etc. So, it wouldn't have broken my heart if this site didn't get sucked into the Google vortex overnight. So, I made the post referenced above at 9:36 PM EST and by 10:32 PM EST, it was indexed. I guess it doesn't hurt that I made sure (this time) to do all the correct redirection and 301's on the domain side and I'm using Google's Feedburner (with its associated Pingshot PubSubHubub delivery) for my RSS feeds (had to do that for a number of reasons). Just thought it was curious how fast Google moves these days. [Update] And now it's down to about five minutes from post-to-index as I just got a Google alert for this post at 9:23 after posting at 9:17. Quick!

I've had the "samharrelson.com" domain since 2006 and I've used it as the primary site of my personal blog since that time. I've also had my personal email there (along with a set of paid Google Apps which I've just recently moved away from). However, I started considering whether or not I could move my family to some sort of .harrelson domain that would stay in our family's possession, complete with backend storage for photos, files and memories. That would eliminate my/our reliance on corporations promising not to be evil or companies willing to brashly make decisions for me. Also, I'm looking to do something along similar lines with student blogs/digital portfolios in my 8th Grade Science class over at Griffin Science. Basically, I'd like to equip each student with a subdomain that would have either a Wordpress install or point to a blogging/site service of the student's choosing. So, each kid would have sam.griffinscience.com for perpetuity (if they'd like) but they'd certainly be able to have a copy of their work for the year. So, I came up with the harrelson.fm (on a Media Temple server) idea as sort of a test bed for GriffinScience as well as a way to scratch the indy itch I've had about my family's data. On Twitter, Margaret made the excellent suggestion that .fm could be short for ".family" which I think is just fantastic. If you check out harrelson.fm, you'll see links to Anna, our daughters (and my parents in the coming days). They've each got a large web disk that's triple backed up online and offline, an email account like sam@harrelson.fm and they can either have a blog/site install or go with a cname pointer (which is what Anna did). We also have a family calendar up (nifty Webcalendar install) as well as a family photo gallery and a shared file for docs, budgets, etc. I also get to admin my parents' email and sites/blogs (hope they do blog). I'm excited to see how this works and eventually how it works for GriffinScience. I'm a firm believer in having a central (and independent... corporate free) hub of presence on the web. Hopefully this will be my answer. Now if I can only get in on Dave Winer's Scripting2 experiment so I can take things to a whole different level of blogging and presence! 04e149af6db14524b6ce47d8b22e9b84

When GMail launched on April 1, 2004 I did everything I could to get a precious invite to the service. A few days later, my wish came true and I signed up with skyhawkscience@gmail.com. I then decided to switch over to sharrelson@gmail.com in 2005. That's been my primary "personal email" for the last five years until I started moving everything "back home." Here's the first email to that account (check out that sig quote): Now I'm forwarding everything from there into the sam@samharrelson email (which I plan to use until my atoms move on). It's been a slow process of downloading everything from GMail (via POP) into a secured spot but I'm enjoying creating my "Memory Theater" system full of DIY text files. Here's to the next five yeas of emails (on my own system).