CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-06-20 00:44:36 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Adieu James, rest easy, bro ...
This news has put the sads on my day.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/hbo-and-james-gandolfinis-managers-say-the-actor-famous-for-the-sopranos-has-died-in-italy/2013/06/19/60da0eb0-d93e-11e2-b418-9dfa095e125d_story.html?tid=ts_carousel

2013-06-18 15:14:27 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

This is inevitable...   #ifyouhadglass   

2013-06-16 12:48:47 (18 comments, 1 reshares, 14 +1s)

Can't understand the people who say, "Well, if the government wants to look at my cat videos or listen to me talking about Duck Dynasty...har har har. And if it keeps us safe."

That's such a false premise and a short sighted view. It doesn't keep us safe. If you go outside your glass bubble, there is risk. That's life, folks. Put your big person pants on and deal with it. As for the government reading your emails, social media, and listening in to your calls (which it was just revealed they do, despite their claims they weren't)

ummmmm .... IRS targeting, anyone? Along with visits from the FBI? Those people had nothing to hide and had done nothing wrong, too, and they still got years of harassment, intimidation, and attorney fees to contend with. Har, har, har.

2013-06-15 08:57:25 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

HURRAH: THERE IS HOPE
Faber-Castell says people are still choosing to write by hand!  Yay!!!!

The world is not yet doomed to gadget illiteracy!

2013-06-15 00:44:59 (52 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

IS GOOGLE ACTING CRIMINALLY OUTSIDE THE US?
For a lawyer, Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond comes across almost sympatico in this British interview.  He even navigates the treacherous waters of the time delay with some equanimity.

He seems convincing when he states that Google does not permit US spy agencies direct access to its systems.  Let’s take that as read for the moment.

But Drummond appears to think that exigent circumstances in the US should not give rise to any concerns.

He states emphatically that to comply with ‘legal requests’ for data, only a ‘tiny fraction’ of Google’s hundreds of millions of users are ever affected.  Somehow I’m not at all comforted by that statement.  It could mean tight surveillance of the all the people in a country the size of Australia.

At around the three-and-a-half minute markin the interview, D... more »

2013-06-14 05:19:52 (20 comments, 2 reshares, 17 +1s)

AUTOCRACY CRUSHES HUMANITY, NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the régime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom—that is the idea, more or less. And many people are under the impression that this is going on now in Germany and other dictatorial countries.

Why is this idea false? I pass over the fact that modern dictatorships don’t, in fact, leave the loopholes that the old-fashioned despotisms did; andalso... more »

2013-06-14 04:51:25 (16 comments, 2 reshares, 9 +1s)

ABSENCE OF ETHICS AT GOOGLE
+Eric Schmidt I just saw you on video saying that if there's something I'm doing I don't want anyone to know about, maybe I shouldn't be doing it.

What about if I am an Australian soldier fighting in an American imperial military action, killing civilians?  It seems to me the US government is saying we shouldn't know about that.  Are you OK with people not knowing that side of things?

Such a battlefield would be just an emerging new market for you, wouldn't it?

And what about you persoanlly?  If you jerk off in the shower in the morning, should we all know about that (it's a line from Enemy of the State, which you ought to watch sometime)?

What about if I search for Hayek, and get labelled a perv by your techno-cretins because you serve up cheesecake images of Salma, but your intellectuallych... more »

2013-06-13 06:19:56 (19 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

TAPS
One last full measure of disapproval ...

#ildl  

2013-06-13 03:47:56 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

SYCOPHANCY HAS BEEN ODIOUS FOR QUITE SOME TIME AFTER ALL ...
WHEN I read of the goings-on in the House of Commons the week before last, I could not help being reminded of a little incident that I witnessed twenty years ago and more.

It was at a village cricket match. The captain of one side was the local squire who, besides being exceedingly rich, was a vain, childish man to whom the winning of this match seemed extremely important. Those playing on his side were all or nearly all his own tenants.

The squire’s side were batting, and he himself was out and was sitting in the pavilion. One of the batsmen accidentally hit his own wicket at about the same moment as the ball entered the wicketkeeper’s hands. ‘That’s not out,’ said the squire promptly, and went on talking to the person beside him. The umpire, however, gave a verdict of ‘out’, and the batsman washalf-way back... more »

2013-06-11 00:01:50 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 8 +1s)

YOU'RE ALL A BUNCH OF FASCISTS
One would think that the defeat of socialism world-wide would have put paid to the use of the epithet 'fascist'.  It has certainly disappeared from newspapers and broadcast media.  Yet it seems odd that one can never find anyone feisty enough to roll out the accusation any more, even when it has a passing semblance of truth about it, as is the case for some contemporary political visions on both sides of Bandt's washing line.

Not to worry.  We aren't half as confused as George Orwell's lot in the 1940s:

Conservatives: All Conservatives, appeasers or anti-appeasers, are held to be subjectively pro-Fascist. British rule in India and the Colonies is held to be indistinguishable from Nazism. Organizations of what one might call a patriotic and traditional type are labelled crypto-Fascist or ‘Fascist-minded’.Exampl... more »

2013-06-10 17:06:04 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

This should go down well.

2013-06-10 05:26:47 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

Monkeys on a stick
LOOKING through the photographs in the New Year’s Honours List, I am struck (as usual) by the quite exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed there. It seems to be almost the rule that the kind of person who earns the right to call himself Lord Percy de Falcontowers should look at best like an overfed publican and at worst like a tax-collector with a duodenal ulcer. But our country is not alone in this. Anyone who is a good hand with scissors and paste could compile an excellent book entitled Our Rulers, and consisting simply of published photographs of the great ones of the earth. The idea first occurred to me when I saw in Picture Post some ‘stills’ of Beaverbrook delivering a speech and looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose.
- George Orwell, ‘As I Please’, The Tribune, 7January 1... more »

2013-06-09 14:38:44 (14 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

There is no agreement between the NSA and NBN
Side effects of surveillance are purely coincidental, and probably just evidence of paranoid schizophrenia ...

2013-06-09 10:52:17 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

For your consideration
A few days ago I read and lifted from a proposed set of guidelines in a business-oriented community the following paragraph:

2. High Quality Posts. Try to make your posts of high quality.  In general - high quality posts are “self contained”.  They have original thought, use complete sentences and don’t force our members to “click through” to another article to learn what the post is about. If you post a link to a website or article, tell us what it means to you:  How did it help your business? What do you think its strongest points were? Were there any parts of the article with which you disagree? If you are posting a question, let us know why you want to know. Talk to your fellow entrepreneurs here as equals.

I’m not advocating this as a rule, but I re-posted it to 'public' precisely because the matter of linkbait andlinkchase is b... more »

2013-06-09 03:14:23 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

As I Please
The Tribune, 28 January 1944

Personally I admire several writers (Céline, for instance) who have gone over to the Fascists, and many others whose political outlook I strongly object to. But one has the right to expect ordinary decency of a poet. I never listened to Pound’s broadcasts, but I often read them in the B.B.C. Monitoring Reports, and they were intellectually and morally disgusting. Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person. People who go in for that kind of thing must take the consequences. But I do agree with our correspondent in hoping that the American authorities do not catch Pound and shoot him, as they have threatened to do. It would establish his reputation so thoroughly that it might be a good hundred years before anyone could determine dispassionately whether Pound’s much-debated poems are any good or not.
ht... more »

2013-06-07 19:29:52 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

George Orwell - As I Please (excerpt), The Tribune (17 January 1947)

"This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it. Considering that the people of this country are not having a very comfortable time, you can't perhaps, blame them for being somewhat callous about suffering elsewhere, but the remarkable thing is the extent to which they manage to be unaware of it. Tales of starvation, ruined cities, concentration camps, mass deportations, homeless refugees, persecuted Jews — all this is received with a sort of incurious surprise, as though such things had never been heard of but at the same time were not particularly interesting. The now-familiar photographs of skeleton-like children make very little impression. As timeg... more »

2013-06-07 16:32:53 (7 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

The Behemoth may win, but ...
Here's why I won't be silent about my opinions about the google #waronwords  no matter what ridiculous reasons are thrown at me for leaving or being quiet.

My investment
I use an electronic journal to type up most of my comments longer than around 200 words, and certainly all my essays.  I trawled through those journals going back to October 2011.  I added up all the words I wrote for Google Plus, subtracted October 2011 and June 2013 numbers, and came up with a word count of 489,000.  That’s around 900 a day for 19 months.

That's not counting my handwritten journals, though there is some duplication across the electronic and longhand volumes.  Nevertheless, half a million words is not a casual engagement.

I can hear the peanut gallery already: volume ain’t quality.  True.  Read some of my essaysand tell m... more »

2013-06-07 12:32:16 (14 comments, 0 reshares, 12 +1s)

'ere!  you 'avin' a larrrrf, in'cha?
There is some real irony in the fact that some of the people disseminating this meme are among the most touchy, girly, whiney, sulky thumb-suckers I've come across on Google Plus.

Still, Ricky's orrrlright in my book, innit!

Gotcha!!!

2013-06-07 12:18:06 (8 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

Too much goodness... via +Olivia Chen 

2013-06-07 10:41:50 (20 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

Alas, for German speakers only
Grosse Klasse!

Was der Mann mit Sprache tun kann ist ja beinahe unheimlich.

Georg Schramm - Sprache der Politik

2013-06-07 03:42:35 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

Typo ...
Freudian slip!

#ILDL  

2013-06-05 15:58:17 (64 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

Drop in average interaction with the new Google+ layout

Many people are mentioning in the last days that there is less interaction on their posts with the new layout.
We had the same feeling, but we like also to see some analytics with objective numbers ;)

We have analyzed 9.787 posts from 100 persons for the last 3 months and here is the result.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words check out the image in this post (and engage! ;) )

You can find this chart also on this page where it is more interactive so that you can check the exact numbers for every day:
http://www.circlecount.com/postsanalysis/


ping: +Dede Craig King +Max Huijgen +Lee Smallwood +Michele Messenger +Paul Stickland +Wolf Weber +Yonatan Zunger +Marie Hélène Visconti +Eileen O'Duffy +Erik Andersson +Lise Bjerregaard Nielsen +Eve A +Jaana Nyström +Euro Maestro

2013-06-05 03:08:59 (9 comments, 1 reshares, 9 +1s)

Etiquette?
+Rob Gordon from the community below posted a proposed new set of rules for that group.

It included the following statement I think has universal application once you swap out the terms entrepreneurs and business:

2. High Quality Posts. Try to make your posts of high quality.  In general - high quality posts are “self contained”.  They have original thought, use complete sentences and don’t force our members to “click through” to another article to learn what the post is about. If you post a link to a website or article, tell us what it means to you:  How did it help your business? What do you think its strongest points were? Were there any parts of the article with which you disagree? If you are posting a question, let us know why you want to know. Talk to your fellow entrepreneurs here as equals.

Of course, if you start in bybeing a jerk,... more »

2013-06-03 13:06:38 (13 comments, 0 reshares, 10 +1s)

2013-06-01 09:46:05 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Almost makes we want to vote Green ...

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/former-army-colonel-to-stand-for-greens-in-queensland-20130601-2nics.html

2013-06-01 08:29:23 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

The protest was unusual in that it brought together young and old, the rightwing and leftists, and nationalist Turks and Kurds. They complained of issues beyond the planned shopping centre from government policy on the war in neighbouring Syria to new curbs on alcohol and a recent row about kissing in public.

This is the bottom line:

Ugur Tanyeli, an architecture historian, said:  _"The real problem is not Taksim, and not the park, but the lack of any form of democratic decision-making process and the utter lack of consensus. We now have a PM who does whatever he wants."_

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/31/istanbul-protesters-violent-clashes-police

#direngeziparkı   #geziparkıiçintaksime   #geziparki  

2013-06-01 08:27:27 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

I have to say that I really gave this new interface my best try but I simply don't like it. It reminds me of trying to love my Microsoft Surface, but it's just not good enough.

The most annoying thing about it is the visual overload and lack of clarity. Runner up is the namecard popups which won't go away.

Finally... the scrollbars. I count six seven types of scrollbars on the same screen:

1. Message
2. Hangout Message
3. Hangout List
4. Notifications
5. Circles Selection
6. Primary Scrollbar
7. (Update): Home menu

Oh... and then there's the 300+Mb of RAM chewed up by Chrome: http://imgur.com/cnQQZni

#UX   #interface   #usability  

2013-05-31 08:00:17 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 9 +1s)

Der Greis
Everything hurts.  Moving your fingers sends spasms of pain across the top of your palm.  The pain fans out into hot, spidery licks of torture along your arm.  When they connect to your arthritic shoulders the sea of agony is almost fully lit.  Until you attempt to get out of your favourite chair, when the spasm of muscle-twitching, mind-bending pain really starts, stabbing you with barbed tips of spears tearing into your nerve endings like no exquisite pain you ever thought to visit on anyone else.

This is just the first ten seconds of waking up.

The next five minutes, while you relieve yourself, are so excruciating that you wonder why your nerve endings are still doing the job of extremities that have long since needed no reminder of their frailty.

This is the final conception of hell we are left with.  Not other people, who are fucking badenou... more »

2013-05-29 14:41:16 (17 comments, 7 reshares, 9 +1s)

Wombat Field Days/Mutan-T/Dackelpinkel Productions present: 
You what, cock?  It's balls. innit! the movie Death by Powerpoint

2013-05-29 09:56:40 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

This one!  I want this one translated, Icepick, and none of your chickenshit evasion for coarse language either ...

+Dieter Mueller +Oleg Kiorsak 

2013-05-29 04:52:09 (16 comments, 1 reshares, 9 +1s)

Loreen seems like a classy lady.. I don't get what that other girls problem is.

2013-05-28 14:18:14 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Yes, I can relate to this one, too!

2013-05-28 13:24:35 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

Forever Alone...

2013-05-28 21:32:50 (62 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

1972: 8 OUT OF 19 OF GERMANY'S MOST WANTED WERE WOMEN
Makes Anglo-American feminism seem so 'first world'

2013-05-28 07:48:41 (38 comments, 8 reshares, 16 +1s)

#WARONWORDS FOR IDIOTS
The following summary is offered as a means for minimising the repetitive diversion of having to recapitulate the core problems in Google Plus, and in repeated design changes, that have kept a discussion alive and loosely connected by the
#waronwords hashtag for more than a year now:

✪ No font and size controls.

✪ No block indenting.

✪ No inline pictures in posts and comments.

✪ No inline text-linking to URLs.

✪ No linking to comments within threads.

✪ No simple, user friendly font styling controls (italics, bold, fixed width, and not with underscores and asterisks).

✪ No bulleting/numbering.

✪ No effective searches for text, particularly comments under an original post.

Add to these the #googlepluschanges ' more recent emphasis on larger imagesand video place... more »

2013-05-27 13:15:36 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

And tonight a very special #waronwords  killer stare of death disapproval ...

#ildl   #newgoogleplus   #uxdesign  

2013-05-29 12:41:26 (18 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

YOU WHAT, COCK?  THAT'S BALLS INNIT?
The statement in the headline might mean the speaker disapproves, is having a laugh, hates your guts, or is your best friend.

Sometimes the choice between these is largely up to you and how you react.  Now put that in the context of a serious debate about politics, religion, or sport – all topics proverbially recommended to be avoided by genteel folk for the passion likely to be raised in such discussions, and the somewhat spirited exchanges that might occur.

Maybe that venerated old list of taboo topics now ought to include discussing Google Plus design changes as well, particularly as they relate to #waronwords ,   #newgoogleplus ,  and #uxdesign .

The proposition in any post that carries all three hashtags is pretty simple: successive iterations of the Google Plus design have reduced the usability of text asa for... more »

2013-05-27 11:23:04 (12 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

This is for you, +Dieter Mueller 

Cranky common wombat

2013-05-26 20:35:39 (31 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

UXG+: Information Scarcity 
Or "How Google+ fails to be even a pale imitation of Twitter"
Or "Emptiness does not equal simplicity in design"

A lot of people make fun of the 140 character limit to Twitter and wonder what quality of communication can exist under such constraints. Why bother? But Twitter has a purpose and it does what it does very well. It's is like the 21st century version of the telegraph. Short bursts of breaking news. It's responsive and agile and, on the downside, often this agility emphasizes an emotional response, an unthinking mob mentality as rumors spread through the hive mind in pulse.

The strength in Twitter's visual design is in its information density: that important balance between communicating a lot of information in a small space without it seeming cluttered or overwhelming. In Twitter the message is... more »

2013-05-26 16:03:52 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

HEY, GOOGLE ...
Your cloud/replication infrastructure sucks out here in the boonies.

I know many technowunderkindchen couldn't tell Australia from Austria, but waiting for hours or days for some thread posts to become visible is a social/community killer.

Telling me to pass feedback on through an app that insists on taking a screenshot of pages that don't have any bearing on any problems I'm trying to describe seems kinda naff.  Who thought of that one?  Do you hire people from the Department of Obstructionism and Obfuscation for those ideas?

Serving pages to Australia from Singapore is an epic fail.   Think of it as serving American content to Americans via Chechnia.  A hamster wearing a capsicum helmet could do this faster and more reliably.

I'm no fan of the anti-intellectual trend away from words and towards bright shinyobje... more »

2013-05-26 14:38:47 (4 comments, 2 reshares, 11 +1s)

What can I say?  Its TRUE ... we are!

[Posted to restricted circles originally by person who will remain anonymous, but wasn't a man.]

2013-05-26 06:22:34 (20 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

THE ICEMAN COMETH ...
Coming home from my bicycle excursion this afternoon, I cleared my mailbox of the consumer porn crammed into it in the last couple of hours and came across the latest Aldi catalogue, headlining a stylish range of ... ski gear.

Double take.  I'm a bit rusty on my geology, but I'm pretty sure the last time it snowed at this latitude was, oh, half a million years ago.  We're not really expecting that to change for several thousand years.

I suppose the ueber-prudent might stock up now to take advantage of the 'amazing special prices', particularly for the car tyre snow chains, which are sure to be a big hit in Australia (they might actually come in handy for desert four wheel driving, I guess).

The 'efficiency' of centralised trans-national corporate planning is astonishingly similar to its progenitor in the 1950sS... more »

2013-05-25 15:15:59 (7 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

The special THURMAN Look of disapproval contempt and haughty disdain
#ILDL  

2013-05-24 14:18:47 (32 comments, 2 reshares, 10 +1s)

THE CULT OF EXPERTISE: SURRENDERING FREEDOM
[Easier to read at http://peterstrempel.com/2013/05/24/the-cult-of-expertise-surrendering-freedom/, where there will always only ever be one scrollbar.]
 
Every day we abstain from considering and making decisions that are rightly ours to consider and make.  We defer that engagement with our world to people considered more 'expert' in the apparently germane disciplines, but to the exclusion of all others.  And so we build the world around us as it is, with all the grandeur and the despair in it, as a deferred potential and responsibility.  Nevertheless, we build it in our own images, because we ourselves become a perpetually stalled potential when we choose this as a reflexive response to all contemplation and decisions about matters more complex than immediate self-gratification.

What is it that we really do when weabd... more »

2013-05-23 15:28:16 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

The Burqa of disapproving looks blindness
#ILDL

2013-05-23 15:25:31 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

The ILDL Sabrina Look of Disapproval Cones of Approval
#ILDL

2013-05-22 01:30:53 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Nick Xenophon to register party
To avoid the built-in discrimination in election rules.

Contact Nick now if you want to run as an independent under his banner.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-22/xenophon-trying-to-register-own-political-party/4705528

2013-05-21 13:00:41 (15 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

The special MUELLER Look of disapproval
#ILDL

2013-05-21 06:00:41 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

UXG+: Read More  

2013-05-21 13:28:13 (47 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

You KNOW your infraction!!!
#ILDL