MIT labs and Aaron Zinman created a digital installation that creates your online genome, a visual representation of how the web sees you. Part art installation, part critique, Personas | Metropath(ologies) exploits the fact that there are likely several people in the world, living or dead, who share your name. A simple search of websites, however, cannot distinguish between you and your name.

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity.

Try your own at http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html

Triangle Transit is trying out a new program to offer passengers wireless internet access while riding a select few of the regional bus system’s routes.

Triangle Transit, in partnership with Verizon Wireless and RCS Wireless Technology, will be offering FREE Wi-Fi access on select vehicles (beginning Monday, Nov. 30th) for the next 60 days. The free Wi-Fi access will be available on select trips of the 105 route, as well as the 500/550 and 600/650 Express routes.  Please visit http://triangletransit.org/wi-fi to view a list of the select trips.

None of the routes listed by Triangle Transit are my usual routes, so I won’t be able to test out the wi-fi. Once the trial is live It’s live now, so if anyone can share their thoughts on it, please leave a comment.

A visualization of the decline of western European empires. Things get interesting around the 1960s.

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

what were you thinking wearing white?
didn’t you know that you might look like a deer’s throat?
nevermind that you walk upright and study chemistry.

That afternoon, Jason D. Cloutier, 31, a son of country folk with deep roots in the area, set off into the same woods. He donned blaze orange to comply with Virginia hunting laws and packed his .35-caliber, high-powered rifle, equipped with a scope to get a better bead on his target. Deer hunting season had started three days earlier, and because he’d been laid off from his pipefitting job, he had the afternoon free.

Shortly after 4 p.m., a single pull of the trigger propelled a bullet into Goode’s chest from a distance of 100 yards. She was killed instantly. After slicing through her, the bullet continued into the hand of her friend, Regis Boudinot, 20, a Langley High graduate from McLean.

Read the rest at the Washington Post — Fatal shooting of student distresses Va. community known for love of outdoors

Virginia and Franklin County investigators work the scene where two college students were shot Tuesday.
(Eric Brady/ap)

Last August (meaning 2008),  my PowerBook’s screen started to flicker. It usually did this when the laptop was booting up or when waking up from sleep mode. I associated the flicker with the sudden change in temperature: asleep, the all aluminum body is quite cool to the touch, and it heats up rather quickly once it is on.

So last summer, I installed G4FanControl, a program that manually overrides the temperature settings at which the laptop’s three cooling fans come on. I have been able to set that temperature lower, keeping my laptop cooler for more than a year. And it has been doing fine. Until today.

Any further suggestions?

This is it. The billboard industry has submitted their proposal requesting to change Durham’s current billboard ordinance. Most significantly, the proposal would allow up to 25% of existing billboard space to be converted to those annoying, distracting digital billboards.

Fairway Outdoor Advertising (now Fairway Media Magic, per a recent merger) has some gall to propose this change now. It’s obvious that they waited until after the election to bring this up, so as to avoid making billboards an election issue. But more importantly, the Durham Convention and Visitors’ Bureau recently released data from a poll conducted over the summer that demonstrates clearly how Durham residents feel about the prospect of digital billboards: 72% of those polled rejected it.

Read more about their proposal at Bull City Rising and the Herald Sun.

Visit the following website to refresh your memory as to why the billboard ban exists, to see examples of digital billboards in other communities, and to learn the concerns about their energy footprint, safety record, and the aesthetic impact digital billboards could have on Durham.

http://supportdurhambillboardban.com/

Please email links to this posting or to  http://supportdurhambillboardban.com/ to your neighborhood listserv, post it to Facebook, etc. Spread the word; stop the billboards.

The new Contact page on the site has been updated with the following suggestion…

Clients and friends of nicomedia,

As many of you know, I started the website and digital media design company nicomedia to specialize in cultivating an internet presence for small businesses, non-profit organizations, and individuals. I work with a range of clients, from scholars and artists to doctors and lobbyists. In keeping with both my philosophy of making information as accessible as possible and with the transformative power of the Internet, this newsletter series is designed to empower you to manage your online presence as effectively as you can.

You have a new or newly refreshed website. How do you get people to look at it?

In this inaugural issue, I suggest four ways that you can attract new viewers to your website. More traffic to your site often leads to new donors for your non-profit, new customers for your store, or new clients for your business.

Search Engines

Chances are, most of the visitors to your website come from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Making sure that search engines know about your website and can read your website, then, is critically important to the success of your website. Designing a site so that search engines can easily access the keywords they need to connect the right people with the right website is a process called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). All websites that I design (or redesign) employ the best practices SEO design. Once the site is up and running, the primary tool we have for further leveraging useful information from the site is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ is code, which you can embed in a website, that helps us track how the website is being used. Who links to your site? When someone lands on your site from Google, what keywords were they searching? How many people look at your site per day, per month, per year? All of these questions and more can be answered through Google Analytics. If I designed or redesigned your website, then Google Analytics is already installed. I use this to track how your site is being used and how to better optimize it. If you would like to receive a free, automatically-generated monthly report on your website’s traffic, just send me an email.

Social Networking

Social Networking can do more than keep you up-to-date with your friends. Premised on the idea that personal connections and advice matter as much as (if not more than) the vetted authority of a high Google ranking, social networking sites are the fastest growing segments of the Internet today. A recent WIRED magazine article noted that “over the past year, Facebook has… become one of the most popular online destinations. More than 200 million people—about one-fifth of all Internet users—have Facebook accounts.” LinkedIn, the most popular professional networking site claims “more than 45 million users representing 150 industries around the world.”

Because of their popularity, don’t underestimate their power to drive new traffic to your website. It is both simple and free to create accounts with Facebook and LinkedIn. As each website walks you through the process of creating your profile, be sure to add the url of your website in the appropriate place. It will be obvious.

Both Facebook and LinkedIn walk you through the process of creating your profile, but if you run into problems or have questions along the way, give me a call. I am happy to guide you through.

Once you create your profiles, be sure to add me as a Friend (Facebook) or add me to your Network (LinkedIn).

Business Directories

Ever wonder how businesses show up in Google Maps? You can make sure that your business shows up by adding yourself to Google’s Local Business Center. Visit http://www.google.com/local/add and
follow the instructions on the site to make sure that the address and contact information for your business is correct. Now you’ll show up when someone’s searching within Google Maps using a keyword related to your business.

Email Signature

Perhaps the simplest thing you can do (and you can do it right now) is make sure that your email signature has all of the contact information a future client, customer, or donor would need to contact you. If you add the url of your website to the bottom of your email signature, most email programs will automatically recognize the url as a hyperlink. And there you go, it’s that much easier for recipients of your emails to check out your website.

Apparently Obama was riding along a Martha’s Vineyard trail with no helmet, and the bare-headed ride was caught by a photographer. Not a very good example to set…

No-helmet Obama

Let’s hope no one hits a pothole.

While Sasha Obama (yellow shirt) and another girl have enough sense to wear helmets, it appears President Barack Obama (second from left), his secret service agent and Dr. Eric Whitaker (far right)need a few bike safety lessons while on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

Whitaker, we should point out, is technically wearing a helmet, but they don’t work very well when they’re not fastened. (See the photo below).

“What kind of fool doesn’t wear a helmet while biking?” wondered Tribune photo editor Maggie Walker, who was so aghast after spotting the images that she emailed the White House. She’s waiting to hear back. (AP photos by Alex Brandon)

Via the Chicago Tribune.