Creating Community Online

January 04, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I spent all afternoon today at Gospelcom, where I used to work here in Michigan. I went out to lunch with some of the tech guys and then sat around at the office keeping people from working. My time was sort of split between talking about eThreads and talking about downtown. The downtown part's what I want to get into here, though.

One of the things that I've really wanted to do since May, but haven't, is develop my ideas on a very localized community site. This sort of extends back to the blogging paper I didn't write: while the Internet's a global medium, my life is local. Most of what I do online these days centers around LA. I read LA writers, LA news, LA weather, listings for LA shows, etc. I'd love to localize that even more, and create a hub not for LA, but just for downtown. The challenge is to figure out how you make this interface ordered enough to navigate sporadically, but also make available enough continuity to involve people in a running sense of community narrative.

That probably doesn't make sense... Hang with me, though. I want to develop this further.

Right now, though, I need to eat dinner before watching USC win the Orange Bowl.

Learning from the Movies

January 03, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I went to see The Aviator with Kathy and her parents tonight. The moral of the story? All geniuses are crazy. Therefore: It's ok to be a little crazy if you think there's a decent chance you're a genius.

I think that's a good thing to keep in mind.

All I Want is a Cheap Ride

January 03, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Starting next Monday I'll be going from downtown to USC and back three days a week. This semester it was two, and I used the bus most of the time. Since I was adding a day, and on one of those days I would most likely be making multiple trips (I have a six hour break between classes), I thought I'd look into getting a bus pass. Metro offers a reduced fare pass for college students, and even though it would be a few more dollars than I'd be putting into transit otherwise I figured the convenience might be worth it. Looking at the application, though, this assumption might need to be rethought... — Continue Reading...

Please Excuse My Ping

January 03, 2005 by Eric Richardson

One of the things that annoy me most on the web is sites that ping when they haven't in fact updated. I've talked about this before, back in September. In eThreads' blog module I try to be smart about it and only ping when a post happens that is going public for the first time. However it appears sometimes that's not how it happens. I was just updating a spate of old posts that had bad links in them and afterward found the blog had pinged as if I had made a new post. Oops. It's not good to participate in the things you dislike.

I was looking at blo.gs yesterday, and it appears that it might be smarter about this problem (by going out and getting the page and doing an md5 sum). I need to ask jim more about that.

One Year Later: The Cat's Still Crazy

January 02, 2005 by Eric Richardson

At my house there's a cat that my Mom got when us three kids had gone off to school. It's crazy. In fact I was too lazy to take a new picture of it, so I'm reusing one I took last year (when it was a good bit smaller). What did I caption it then? "crazy cat" And it still is. As I type this the cat is hurtling around the room, trying to burrough under my laptop case, and seeing how far it can go hopping from furniture piece to furniture piece without touching the ground -- pretty much all at once. Or at least they're fast enough that I can't tell.