I sometimes forget that most of social media is governed by an attention span algorithm instead of a reverse chronological algorithm. There are at least a couple times, however, when I’m reminded of that fact:

1. I Google a new topic or interact with a new creator on a platform and suddenly my feed is all about that topic or creator. As an example, my current Youtube main page is D&D and Cities: Skylines II. Just one week ago it was retro gaming single board computers, programming, and Cities: Skylines II. The stark difference in the recommendations on a page that I load at least once daily can sometimes be jarring.
2. Semi-related to the first point, my phone’s alerts for Youtube and Twitter tend to narrow to the last 1-2 creators I interacted with. Right now I’m only seeing YT alerts from the official D&D YT account and City Planner Plays. On Twitter I’m only seeing alerts from my local county and this person who posts about 1990s-2000s Contemporary Christian Music. And this has the weird effect of making it seem that no one else that I follow is creating new content. Then I go to my follower page on either app and realize that, no, there is a TON of new content by all the people I follow. I recognize that if the phone were to alert me for every person I follow, I might never be able to use my phone for all the alerts, but I do wish it were slightly more balanced. Maybe more of a power law or something. At one point I was only getting Twitter alerts for an author I follow and I’m sure it seemed odd that I was always commenting, but that also made the algorithm see more engagement so it kept giving me more of her Tweets.

Steganography is the process of hiding a message within another message. The difference between steganography and encryption is that encryption seems to make a message indistinguishable from noise. Encryption will turn “my cat is black” into “df cok eropz” while steganography could involve you sending a picture of a car and the receiver would run that image through some software to get the message “my cat is black”. Why use steganography over encryption? Because it’s less interesting to those who want to know what you’re saying. Imagine we’re in the world of Game of Thrones during Seaons 2 of the HBO show and Rob Stark needs to send a message about troop movements. He has to assume that the man carrying his message might be captured or bribed to give up the messages. If it looks encrypted, then King Joffrey will put his best minds on trying to figure out the encryption. If the message looks like a condolences to a lord for his son’s death, then they might let the message pass.

I came to a disturbing realization the other day - I’ve come to feel that whatever isn’t online isn’t real.  This came about thanks to the Wii’s insanely stupid online policy.  Everything about playing online with the Wii is an exercise in frustrating the user.  Rather than always be connected to the net when the console is on (like modern computers, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3), the Wii attempts to connect to the game servers at the time you wish to play the game.  This leads to the very frustrated experience of wanting to play online, loading up into the game you want to play and then realizing that the system is having problems connecting to the Internet.  So you have to back out to the Wii menu and trouble-shoot the problem.  This wouldn’t be so vexing if it didn’t take the Wii ages to load games, including the “don’t throw your effing Wiimote around” warning every time!  Even in games where it doesn’t make sense!  (Like Rock Band)

Mugshot is the website that continues to surprise me the more I use it.  At first it was just a website with an unusual purple theme.  Then it was the very frustrating site with the purple theme.  Now it just may be one of the most interesting and underrated sites of the year.

In case you haven’t clicked on the link yet, Mugshot is a social web aggregator.  You sign up to Mugshot and then let it know about all of the social networks you’re a part of such as Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, delicious, Picasa, digg and Reddit.  Additionally, you add in some feeds from Amazon.com, last.fm, and Netflix.  Finally, if you enter your blog address it tracks new posts.  It then uses this to track all of these in one convenient place.  The thinking is that you and your friends all sign up for Mugshot and then you have one-stop-shopping to find out everything that’s up with your friends.