Forward or Delete?

Yeah, there's Snopes, and they do have a pretty good fauxtography category.

Into this arena, though, comes the Forward or Delete column from Gawker, in which they take four or five photos making the rounds this week and either debunk or endorse their veracity.

For example...delete (not true), forward (true), forward, delete...in that order here...

The infinite jukebox

The infinite jukebox seems simple enough, but the results can be fascinating if the right song is chosen.

The site takes any song you upload or that you choose from their already uploaded list, analyzes it to find all the beats in the song, matches those beats with other beats in the song, and plays the song on a near-infinite loop, jumping from identical beat to identical beat in entirely different places within the song.

That means that "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson sometimes plays through jumping from five seconds in to a minute and a half, plays for ten seconds, then jumps back nearly to the beginning to continue the process. Not every jump happens, but every possible jump is marked by a connection within the visual representation of the song. Here, for example is "Billie Jean"...

Each connection across the circle shows a possible jump when one part of the song sounds identical to another part. The highlighted green link is the moment that was playing when I took the screecapture, and the highlighted arc is a jump not taken. Right now, "Billie Jean" has been playing for seven and a half minutes on my computer and has played through 585 beats, two other interesting bits of data on the track.

It's a blast to play around with, but check out the already uploaded tracks. Most any song you would want to try has been thrown on their servers already.

What songs did you find that worked the best?

Rickman...the truth...

The Girl pointed out this outstanding quote/meme from Alan Rickman - Hans Gruber, Severus Snape, Metatron.

It's a great, wonderful, touching quote...but...

...there's just one problem. From what I can tell, that quote's not from Alan Rickman at all.

My bit of research pointed me to this forum discussion on GoodReads...which sent me onward to this post from user Tiffany which seems to be the first appearance of the above quote on the web...

I've grown up reading Harry Potter. Each and every character has taught me how to be a better person. Whenever I'm feeling upset, I always reread a Harry Potter book and no matter how bad things get, I'll always have the Harry Potter Books to get completely absorbed in and just forget about all my worries. Watching the last Harry Potter movie at the midnight premiere, I starting breaking down in sobs at the Warner Brothers logo at the beginning. I couldn't help but thinking that this movie was basically the end of Harry Potter: from that day on, I wouldn't have anything to look forward to. I know that's not true; I'll always have my worn-out books to reread over and over again. I'll always marathon the Harry Potter movies every weekend. I'll still have fanfiction to read, A Very Potter Musical and Sequel to watch, and Wrock to rock out to. Because, as long as there's still one person that believes in the magic of Harry Potter, this legendary book series will never die. 

I plan on sharing this series with my children and grandchildren. When I'm 80 years old and sitting in my rocking chair, I'll be reading Harry Potter. And my family will say to me, "After all this time?" And I will say, "Always."

Remember folks that no matter how good a quote, check your sources.

Adrift

We are adrift in the digital ether.

We don't control our data.

We don't control where our data goes, who can see it, whether it ever gets deleted, when/where/why/how we access our data, even what data we are putting out there.

Remember this at all times.

(Thanks to Tweetage Wasteland for posting the initial article - linked above as 'access our data'.)

A new search

Looks like iGoogle is going away.

I've got a little while; it's not going away until November 2013 (sixteen months from now). I am, however, now on the look out for a new way to access my various RSS feeds. I liked the way that iGoogle organized everything so I felt like each morning I was reading a modernized version of my morning paper, checking out the sports and news and how my friends (real, imaginary, close, distant) were doing.

Here's what my iGoogle pages (and I do have four of them) look like right now to give you an idea of what I'm looking for - something that'll let me see at a glance where there's new stuff (new stories, new posts, new whateveres) on the various websites that I follow. Anybody have any suggestions for me?

Landing page - email, actual news, calendar, my blogs, weather

Webcomics

Blogs of friends (a couple of fairly dead at this point - need to do some housecleaning)

Various entertaining blogs

So, whatcha got for me?

Into the deep end

I've been on Facebook almost a year now. I joined up last summer to create Facebook groups for my two chemistry classes, but I've been resolutely telling my students that I had no friends on Facebook at all - by choice. I had my reasons.

• I wasn't going to start accepting friends of current students. Yes, I want to build a positive relationship with my students so that they can trust me and feel comfortable learning from or with me, but I need to maintain a professional relationship with them, leaving some distance between my private life and theirs.
• I have heard horror stories about people saying improper/unprofessional things on Facebook in the thoughts that their comments would be read only by their friends only to find that their words went far beyond their intended targets. This past year at PHS, for example, one of my coworkers made a comment about one of our administrators on Facebook - leaving the administrators name off the comment and merely attributing it to 'a principal'. That comment quickly made its way to our administrative team - via friends of friends, parents, someone. It wasn't well received and left her a target for subsequent investigation that lead to her firing by the end of the school year. I feel that I have been diligent on this blog in offering my opinions and interests in such a way that they couldn't cost me my job, and I don't necessarily want to train myself to be as careful in another medium (Facebook).
• I have always been prone to having a small circle of friends. As I have moved around, I have struggled to keep in contact with them - something that Facebook seems to be perfect for changing. I have, however, been happy to let more casual friends slip away as we have moved apart physically, something that Facebook seems to make tougher.
• I am not at heart an early adopter, at least not in a lot of technologies. If anything I'm somewhere in the early or late majority. I haven't jumped into Twitter - and in fact have some pretty mixed opinions about it as I've seen it used. I waited until a billion other folks we active on Facebook before I accepted my first friend. I never made a MySpace page. I haven't IMed with anyone. I didn't dive into Google+ with the first rush. I don't flap. I kept hearing about people on Facebook and wondering what the big deal was. Sure, it let you leave little messages and post funny pictures for people, but it seemed to be a vast collection of people telling the world their minutia.
• And, perhaps most honestly, Facebook was just another thing. I already have personal email, school email, and this blog, and a private blog that's mostly inappropriate jokes and pictures I share with my closest friends.

And yet this past week I accepted my first Facebook friend...and then I accepted about twenty more.

And I switched over to the Timeline design for my account...and added a bunch of life events (vacations, mostly)...and freaked out a few friends who I had told I wasn't taking friends on Facebook so I thought I'd take a minute to explain why I finally became a moderate adopter of Facebook.

There are probably a lot of little reasons that added together to push me over the edge.

• I'm tired of telling people I'm not on Facebook. Yeah, I should be stronger and I should be able to forge my own path, but at some point I just seem like more of a luddite to people because I don't have Facebook than I seem normal if I just have the account.
• I realized that I didn't have to use Facebook to tell people every time I'm pooping. I know it seems stupid that it took me a few years to realize that, but I couldn't initially figure out what else I could use Facebook to do. I see now that it can be a photo sharing site, a microblogging platform, a way of communicating with friends and former students when I wanted to, 
• I started to see lots of my students acting as though email was beneath them, they looked at emailing the way that I look at writing a print letter. It's old technology, it's something that they simply won't do because it's too much work, it's too slow, it's old.
  
  Imagine the only way I would let my students communicate with me was via print letter, waiting for the letter to get to me and standing before them and yelling that I wouldn't listen to them any other way. As the ranted and raved about how important letter writing skills were for my students' futures, I would just be ignoring them and giving them the tacit message that I didn't want to talk to them, that their concerns didn't matter to me, that somehow I was looking down on them from the a self-carved bully pulpit.
  
  At some point that's what I was starting to feel like: a lone voice standing up on a soapbox yelling about how the rising tide, the blowing wind, the rising sun all were wrong and that my way was the better way.

So I'm on MyBook now.

Ping me...

Don't look here

That video's from a CNN story about Brett McGurk, President Obama's nominee to be the new US ambassador to Iraq. To sum up, it looks like - as of my writing here on Saturday - that the man carried on an at least flirtatious if not possibly/probably consummated relationship with a New York Times reporter outside the bounds of his marriage. He has, however, since divorced and married the woman with whom he had extra-martial relations.

From my position of deep and thorough knowledge of the situation now that I've watched the whole four-minute video, I don't know that I can provide any sort of authoritative analysis of the situation. He might be a spectacular ambassador. He might know more about Iraq and the tenuous government situation there than I know about DC comics. He might sleep his way across the entire Fertile Crescent for all I know. (By the way, I'm really proud about that last sentence there. Google Fertile Crescent if you don't get the gag.)

What I'm here to announce today is the fact that I don't give a crap about the private lives of our public servants.

If a president wants to kick back and sign bills while an intern is under the desk, I don't care.

If a Congressman wants to send photos of his fully-clothed junk via twitter to a dozen media members, I don't care.

If the mayor wants to hire a prostitute and pay her with a rubber check, I...don't...care.

And pretty soon we're all going to have to stop caring because otherwise we won't have any leaders left because either they're all flawed human beings or because no one is going to want to have their lives examined at such a ridiculous level of scrutiny. We're going to have to let some of this stuff go because our secrecy and privacy are just shy of entirely disappeared. We use private companies for all of our modern communication - gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Skype - and they all have policies saying that anything we put out there is theirs forever. And the Patriot Act has given the government the rights to look at all of those as well as our phone conversations.

The concept of private life is dead, and we're going to have to move beyond that notion and stop punishing our elected officials for being human beings with the same flaws that we all have.

Or we're going to have to fight back phenomenally hard if we want to keep our private lives private.

Gimme a little something...

...if you want me to give you my business.

This past week I got a simple postcard advertisement in the mail for Portable Miniature Golf.

The card was addressed to resident, so it appears that I'm not on any miniature-golf-specific mailing list, or at least that this advertisement didn't come from such a mailing list...which kind of surprises me, honestly.

The postcard, however, isn't today's story. Today's story is the website that the postacrd lead me to. Here's a screencap...

The top header has three rotating images - the one shown, a closeup of a kid trying to blow a golf ball into the hole, and a closeup of the green and hole with no context. So those other photos don't give us any more information than does the rest of the page.

I like the general layout of the page, particularly the simple background imagery. The black, green, and yellow makes for an attractive enough presentation, and the use of the light grey in the bottom right draws the eye to the pricing request form, the real meat of the page.

In general, there's not much else on the page, however, and that bugs me a little. I want to see the quality of the hole construction. I want to see if the various holes have any bumpers, any obstacles - like the one we maybe see in the header picture on the right. I want to see people standing next to the course so I can see what a 12' long hole two looks like. I want to see the pencils, scorecards, balls[,] & putters that they say they provide.

I guess they're assuming people don't want to know that stuff, that they assume people will sign up having not seen the holes in any detail. I'm hoping their business model is working, but the lack of detail is driving me nuts. Gimme some sort of photo album of people at the church festivals, corporate events, and the birthday parties. Lemme see that you've put a little work into making the hole frames sturdy. Show me that your carpet is nice, clean, unworn, and evenly, firmly glued down.

Of course I'm crabbing about their website with absolutely no intention of ever being one of their customers unless I hit the lottery.

All we hear is rdio gaga...rdio dada...rdio blah blah...

Anybody familiar with Rdio?

The Cincy Library had a news item up announcing the new availability of Rdio, a streaming music service.

From the few online reviews I checked out, it looks like rdio is a competitor to Spotify and Pandora with an iTunes-like interface. Their service is $5 a month for web-only access or $10 for web+phone-access, but the library is offering free 30-day access to anybody with a valid PLCH library card - which I conveniently have.

I'll report back in a month or so.

Update: Social Media, take a bizillion

It's been a few (maybe three) weeks since the PHS students started a Princeton thread on High School Memes and a week or so since I posted about them. I've been checking in every couple of days and flagging individual posts - particularly those particularly nasty about individual students - when they were offensive. Yesterday when I checked in, however, I noticed that all of the meme posts had been deleted and replaced with just these two...

In the site's terms of use, "We do not undertake to review all content submitted to us, but we reserve the right to do so. We also reserve the right to decline and/or take down any content that we deem to inappropriate, and the right to deny access to any user who uses the site and/or any content in any manner that we deem to be inappropriate, all in our sole and absolute discretion." Some of the memes were admittedly offensive (some toward students, some toward administrators), but they certainly weren't all offensive. I had flagged some of the posts, and those were taken down. Honestly, I assume that the site barely has time to glance at any flagged images so they automatically take them down.

Possibilities of what happened...

• It's possible that some student went through and flagged all of the memes and that they were taken down.
• It's possible some administrator went through and did the same.
• It's possible some administrator contacted the site directly and expressed displeasure, asking the site to take down the entire thread.

Which of those happened really didn't matter because the truth won't ever be known. The meme posts are gone, and how it happened doesn't matter in the least.

Here is a selection of what's been posted since the first round of meme posts were taken down.

What does matter is the reactions that the students have had to the disappearance of the memes. They assume it was one of the latter possibilities: that the administration betrayed them. Our administrators use social media extensively (Twitter, Facebook, wordpress), and they don't always pay attention to the negatives that can come along with using them.

When you encourage students - people, honestly - to have a voice, then you get the good AND the bad from those voices. If you choose to selectively allow them to use their voice, to censor their free speech that you claim to have been encouraging, then you run the real risk of serious backlash.

It's far tougher to teach someone how to use something properly - to educate them about the positive and negative aspects to speaking out - than it is to blankly act like something is entirely positive and then overreact when its negative aspects rear their ugly head.

Social Media, take a bizzilion

So another social-media conundrum showed up on my doorstep this past week.

As one of the managers of the PHS facebook page, I've taken it upon myself to occasionally check to see what people are posting to the page. The page was - and is - set-up to display only posts by the official PHS folks when you land there, but clicking can let you see posts by everyone - including this one...

...which directs you to this thread on which some of our students have taken to creating their own meme images. It's a simple enough site, one that's in the same vein as I Can Haz Cheezebuger on which people can type in their own messages to display over top of standard - and somewhat cliched - meme images (success kid, most interesting man in the world, socially awkward penguin).

The thread was started by one of our students. He's clearly named himself; his call. Most of the images have been posted anonymously, though one or two were perhaps foolishly signed. All are tied to Princeton High School by the thread title. Some are less than polite. Some are downright vulgar or offensive. Most are moderately funny and specific to PHS.

I'll include a few examples so you know the kind of stuff I'm talking about...

Here's the question now that I've seen these. As an officially designated person in charge of monitoring the PHS Facebook page, do I...

1. ...inform the principal? He's made issue of OnlyAtPrinceton, a hashtag that students (and possibly teachers?) were using to 'discuss' Princeton on Titter. This isn't as popular (only about twenty-five meme posts so far and already fading by the time I'm writing this up on Saturday morning), nor is it nearly as negative.
2. ...delete the post? I've deleted posts that were openly offensive or purely advertising. 
3. ...leave the post and ignore it? After all, people have free speech, and if the school goes about the Facebook page allowing only pro-Princeton comments, that's sort of defeating the purpose of the interactive nature of the FB page.
4. ...chuckle at some of the images, flag some as inappropriate, and post about the whole situation on my blog?  

I've chosen option #4.

Being social: part 2

If you need to take a moment to look back at my previous posting about all the identities that are officially, unofficially, or absolutely not representing Princeton High School (PHS) (or Princeton City School District (PCSD)), go right ahead.

Now, what's to do about it.

First off, it's not my job to look out for Princeton's online identity. I am, in fact, making a point of divesting myself of some of the non-necessary parts of my Princeton life at this point. Teaching at Princeton High School is my job, and there's a lot of things about PHS and the PCSD that aren't my job. I've also been hired to do a special project in managing the PHS website for the 2011-12 school year, but that special project wasn't defined to include anything like 'watch out for PCSD's online identity', it's a whole lot closer to 'just post some stories from time to time and update some of the stuff if anybody notices it.'

But, in case you wanted to know...

Marketing today isn't marketing in the pre-intertubes era. Back then, a company controlled its image and could sue the living snot out of anybody who tried to take control of that image who wasn't a part of the corporation. Coca-Cola produced ads for Coke. They picked their colors (red, white, black), their images (American, fun, young, nostalgic), their spokespeople (Santa Claus, Mean Joe Green, Selena), their iconography (the Coke bottle). If somebody started making unofficial Coke products (drinks, shirts, whatever), Coke simple sicced their lawyers on the offenders. With Coke's deep pockets, they could simply out sue any monolithic copyright offenders into submission and protect their image that way.

In the interweb age, however, it's far tougher to keep control of an image. Anyone offending that image is likely to be far less monolithic, far tougher to squish like a bug. Parodies, video commentaries, tweets, Facebook statuses are all very quick to spread around the web and almost impossible to remove once they're created and shared. This all means that an organization has far less control and has to be willing to open things up to web users. The best organizations turn this into an opportunity rather than a frustration. The worst thing to do in such a situation is to rant and rave pointlessly at any web user who decides to do something creative.

Steps I think PCSD/PHS should take...

• Have a plan - Somebody needs to have some vision for Princeton's online presence. That somebody used to be the PR director (with varying quality as the position's gone through three incarnations/office holders in my eleven years in the district). Now, with less money, PCSD has no PR director but needs to have the work done somewhere.
  
  This could be a single individual (somebody at central office, I would think, because otherwise an individual building would likely be favored if a person at that building were chosen - this is a skoo district, not a district of skoos, after all) or it could be a group of people (somebody from CO, HS/MS/Elem reps, tech savy parent and/or student maybe). In this case I would suggest most of the work be done by employees. Our district makes a huge attempt to include parents and students and non-parent community folks on every committee, and that has its place. It keeps everything open and allows non-employees to provide important input. In this case, however, there is value in having PCSD folks determine how/what PCSD wants to market themselves.
  
  Then, put together a plan. Figure out what the Viking is supposed to look like (a consistent coloration), figure out what our online red and grey are (this has been done for the new school's interior but not for the web), what the important phrases/graphics are going to be, what the policies are going to be about online Princeton, who's going to search the web once or twice a month to see if a new Princeton persona or website has come into being.
• Centralize the official presences - The PCSD website is already in place. There are aspects of it that I like, and others that I don't like quite so much. It's in place, however, and I don't think it's going away even with the district's money troubles. The central office folks - or the committee or person in charge - needs to tell the entire district (principals, staffers, whoever) that anything put online using the Princeton brand belongs to Princeton. If it has a Viking on it or says Princeton or PHS or whatever - and absolutely, positively if it's being run by an employee - it belongs to Princeton. That means the account info and password and link info for any of the official Princeton things needs to be handed over the moment the thing is created. If it's not given to the committee (I'm going to stop saying 'committee or person or central office') within one week of the site/persona being created, it gets shut down as soon as the district finds out about it. There needs to be some incentive for quick compliance.
  
  I don't know if class-specific websites would be included here. For example, I have a Facebook group for my honors chemistry classes that doesn't necessarily represent Princeton but that I have called PHS Honors Chemistry. If I was required to give the control up to the district, I would rename the group to not include PHS or Princeton in the name, but I recognize that the district has a right to know/approve what I'm doing.
• Reach out to the unofficial presences - Ask every coach to contact their sports boosters, every music teacher to contact the music boosters and communicate to them to district's goals and expectations for any online presence that says Princeton. Ask them to work with the district and be careful about what they do online when using Princeton's name.
• Try to shut down anybody who won't comply - The Facebook profiles that say they're Princeton but aren't Princeton and don't necessarily represent Princeton well should be reported to Facebook. So should any Twitter feeds or anybody else who isn't Princeton but says they are. At the very least, those feeds should be monitored, and the real Princeton personas should be posting there to make sure everybody knows they're not real.
• Be vigilant - Somebody needs to be searching the web on a regular basis to see if Princeton's online presence is changing. Google notifications make this a little easier, but there's no substitution for straight up, diligent web searching. Look for Princeton and PHS and Vikings and Vikes and Evendale and Springdale and Sharonville and PCMS and every other school out there in various combinations.

So, where did I go wrong? What did I forget? 

Being social

So, I'm the PHS webmaster this year. It's my first year back on the job after a hiatus of a year and a half. It's also the first year that PCSD has been without a public relations (PR) director in my eleven years in the district. Perhaps as a result of that latter happening, I've been finding myself more and more interested - and sometimes frustrated in Princeton's various online personas.

Today I'm going to run through the various online presences that exist in and around Princeton City schools. This will be an incomplete list because I'm pretty sure there are other presences out there that I don't know. I'll come back early next week with my thoughts, beliefs, and understandings about our online brand.

There's the district website, redesigned almost two years ago now and managed through SchoolWorld, a website/company that managed school websites around the country. The district website is being managed by our technology director and the secretary of the former PR director. Each of the school websites - all a part of and largely indistinguishable from the district site - is managed by somebody in the building.I'm the high school webmaster, but some of the elementary schools are being managed by the building's principal.

There's the high school's Twitter feed, managed by our principal, occasionally by some of his student interns, and - I think - by our athletic director/principal/fotball coach. The feed is branded as being our principal's, self-described as 'leader; innovator; visionary; change agent." In a weird way this seems to make it less official for me because if the principal leaves, I assume that Twitter feed would leave as well. Two examples of that exact problem is here @PCMSViking where the former principal left the building for our central office or @PrincetonSchool, the Twitter feed of our former PR director. When that happened the Twitter feed died, leaving anyone who relied on it as communication to be lost. Makes me wonder what will happen to Dale Even (@EvendaleLilVike) when their principal leaves or @ImproveSchools when Tim Dugan retires...again.

For a while our principal also had his personal YouTube channel that he was using as the high school's channel, uploading videos and linking them to the official website and Facebook page (that's coming in a paragraph or two). At some point, however, that stopped, and the PrincetonVikings channel - which was created a year and a half ago to post a valedictory speech video. I'm not sure how many people upload videos there, but I know of at least a half dozen high school employees who have the password.

The most viewed Princeton online presence might be the high school's Facebook page. There are six administrators there - a music teacher, me, two principals, our librarian, and our technology director. We have 5217 likes there, and this is the place with the most frequent updates from PHS - especially since almost every Tweet gets reposted here. Somewhere along the way, the choice was made that only official posts show up when people land here. There's also the Princeton Vikings 'person' which simply refers visitors to the main high school Facebook page.

A while back - two years, three years maybe - I created the PHS Vikings PicasaWeb account. For $5 a year, we get 20GB (for now, the amount of space for that price will likely go up) to post photos. There's only one person who has the login info for that account, and that's intentional.

The final online official PHS presence (that I know of, anyway) is a Wordpress blog called Leadership 24/7. There our administrative team and invited teachers post entries about, well, leadership. The blog saw six posts in August; none in September or October; then four more posts in the ten days after I asked our principal if I could go ahead and remove the link to the blog because of inactivity. That was in late November and the first week of December.

Now we get to the less official presences of Princeton on the web, the sites that aren't being run by Princeton employees or at least aren't purporting to represent Princeton in any official capacity.

• Shades of Grey - This used to be an annually-published literary 'journal' but has turned into a tumblr and YouTube account posting student-read and, I assume, written poetry, prose, photography, and singing. This one is run by a PHS teacher and PHS students but does break the district policy against posting student first and last names with images unless prior, written permission fro a parent is obtained.
• Princeton Vikings - This Facebook 'person' says it's PrincetonHighSchool, but it's not run by any Princeton employee that I know of. Instead, it's largely a front for a person/business that sells DVD transfers of Princeton football games from the glory year 80's and early 90's. I have registered a number of Facebook complaints against them as not being any official Princeton capacity. 
• Princeton BoysBasketball (Boosters) - This Facebook 'person' seems to be run by our basketball boosters, which would mean that it's quasi-official since the boosters is an quasi-official Princeton group. It's probably a Princeton parent or two - maybe with the endorsement of our two basketball head coaches, but it's interesting to wonder how the management of the page passes from year to year.
• PHS Pasta for Pennies - This one's mine - with Calen, anyway - and was created as a non-profit entity for our annual campaign for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (speaking of which, it's not too early to sign up for the March 5K.) Princeton certainly didn't authorize the creation of this page in any way. We just made it and have largely shifted forward to our Facebook group instead for most communication.
• Princeton Viking Orchestra - This one is also a Facebook 'person' and seems to be run by a Princeton employee, a music teacher or two. I don't know how many of the music teachers have control of this, but I'm guessing it's not Bob Monroe, the person officially in charge of the district music program at this point but whose name doesn't appear once on the district's website.
• New Princeton Vikings Middle School and High School - This one is weird to me in that it's not run by anyone at Princeton but is tacitly endorsed by the Princeton administration. It's run by Cole + Russell Architecture. They post occasional renderings and photos of the architects in meetings.
• Princeton Vikings  - This is another 'person' page that isn't Princeton in any official capacity. It appears to be somehow football-related just based on the content that I can see, but it doesn't appear to be run by the football coach/athletic director/principal himself. There hasn't been any content change here since July.
• Princeton Vikes - Another 'person' that is neither a person nor Princeton. 
• Princeton Vikings - This group has one post and very few images.It's fully public, so I know that's all there is there.
• @VikesFootball - This one doesn't appear to be run by the football program. I say this mostly because it isn't the kind of quick updates that a coach would be offering to his parents and players. It's more rah-rah, bragging stuff.
• There are also countless YouTube, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts that include Princeton content but don't title themselves in any way that suggests that they are a Princeton organization or person.

Where have I seen this before?

I love TinEye.

It's a reverse image look-up, such a simple thing, but one that I'm thinking can be exceptionally useful.


Upload your image or enter a web link, and TinEye searches the web to find where else that image is used.

Nothing fancy...nothing drastic...nothing phenomenal...just basically awesome.

Not Princeton High School...what to do?

So, a couple of years ago, Princeton High School set up a Facebook page. It's nothing really special or anything. It's fine. There are occasional and sometimes useful posts from time to time. That's not the story, though.

The story for today is that there's a separate page that's titled Princeton Vikings and uses the web address www.Facebook.com/PrincetonHighSchool. That page is the story for today.

See, that other page isn't managed by Princeton High School. It's managed by some anonymous person who - as far as I know - doesn't have any official connection to the Princeton City School District. I've spent the past couple of months trying to figure out how to correct this problem. See, Facebook doesn't have any way to say "hey, this facebook page says it's run by my employer but isn't actually run by my employer...can you make 'em take it down." They do have a link in the bottom left that says report page which leads to a pop-up asking what's up. The best I can put from their options is This profile is pretending to someone or is fake which leads to the question asking who/what they are pretending to be. I went with represents a business or an organization. I've also reported pretending to be someone I know but the page wouldn't let me enter that they were pretending to be Princeton High School and pretending to be a celebrity but they didn't seem to believe that Princeton High School was a celebrity.

The real problem I have here and now is that I've filed a couple of reports on this page via that report page link, and nothing's happened. I've searched around Facebook's help pages and can't seem to find anything that lets me email them directly to say that there's a fake Facebook page out there other than via the report page link. I've  emailed them with a 'security concern' and described the situation, but nothing seems to be happening.

I've got a question and a request.

First, does anybody have any advice as to how to go about getting the faux Princeton High School facebook page shut down?

And then, my request, in the meantime, would you be willing to go to the fake Princeton High School facebook page and make a report page request for me? I'm hoping that if my one voice won't get anything accomplished, maybe a chorus of voices will.

Pardon our ranting: Yappi

Yappi is both everything that is right and everything that is wrong about the internet.

Today's rant is brought to you by the Yappi discussion about Josh Andrews's new job as the head boys basketball coach at Middletown High School.

I have to admit that I've used Yappi in the past. I've checked out how Princeton's girls basketball team was respected in the state, basketball scores around the state, who was going to be the next Princeton football coach, and info about some other GMC schools.

(Oh, by the way, for those of you who aren't from around here,Yappi is a discussion site about Ohio high school sports.)

It's a great site to get quick information from around the state. If I need to know what the best girls basketball teams are in Northern Ohio, I'm going to Yappi.

If I need to know who won the regional final in Columbus, I'm going to Yappi.

Because it's populated by people who are obsessively interested in their little sport niche (softball, Dayton boys basketball, seventh-grade girls Middletown volleyball), the smallest bit of minutia is typically on the site within minutes. The OHSAA won't have the results up that quickly because those people are putting it up as a job. The Yappi boarders are putting things up as obsessions.

And this is all for good and for ill.

These are people who aren't ever going to be able to provide the distance needed for unbiased reporting, for rational thought in most cases, for reasoned consideration of both sides of the issues.

They're going to scream for their coaching candidates, defend their favorite baseball player to the absolute death, and they're going to take anything said against their opinion as a personal attack, a slight, a reason to start a flame war and dig up their old feelings about the hatred for that stupid rival school that cheated their ninth-grade volleyball team in the county championships in 1982 because, by god, those feelings have just never died.

And it's all done anonymously.

No reason to actual cite a source, VikesRulz!!, because nobody's going to know who you really are or call you on anything in the real world. No reason to prove your 'inside information' about the new jv softball coach at your favorite school, Middies4Life87, because if you really do have that inside information, you're not supposed to be sharing it - either because you're probably an employee yourself or because some employee leaked it to you.

But of course you wouldn't be on these discussion boards if you weren't desperate to tell the whole world just how knowledgeable you are, how inside you really are, how much you love your school. So you brag about knowing inside info, you incessantly bring up the '92 football championship game whether it's relevant or not, and you flame everybody who's a little less pure of a RealMasonComet95, don't you.

Yeah, I check Yappi from time to time, but I certainly don't want to ever become a regular there.

ESPN will miss Rob Neyer

Rob Neyer has apparently written more words for the ESPN website than anyone else ever has.  He's been on the site writing quasi-daily columns for fifteen years now, but it looks like he'll be sailing into the ether of the interwebs as today he announced that he'll be departing ESPN - or at least his Sweet Spot Network.

He said goodbye in his usual, casual form...

A Quick Programming Note ...

Fifteen years ago, I moved to Seattle to work for a company called Starwave. The company did a lot of things, but I was hired -- and this might surprise you -- mostly to edit fantasy-related content for a website called ESPNet.SportsZone.com; a few years later, we became the ESPN.com that everyone knows and loves so well.

Frankly, it's a minor miracle that I've been here ever since. I was the new guy, didn't know how I was supposed to behave, and somewhat routinely ran afoul of my bosses and their bosses. I owe a great deal to their good graces, and I'm sorry I can't thank everyone who's allowed me to do what I love for so long. I will toss extra hosannas to Geoff Reiss, David Schoenfield, and David Kull, for reasons they know only too well. Collectively, they're No. 2 on the all-time list.

You're No. 1.

Whether you've been reading my ramblings since 1996 or just since last week, you have my profound, impossible-to-express-in-words gratitude. There is not a working writer on Earth who's more grateful than I for his readers. Without you, I would have nothing.

Today, I hand off this space to whoever's next. I don't know yet who is next, but I'm highly confident that this blog and the SweetSpot Network will soon be in excellent hands.

Meanwhile, I'll be around. The kids tell me it's all about search these days. You won't have to search real hard to find me, if you want.

Happy trails, until we meet again.

I'm looking forward to finding out what that next thing is 'cause Rob's been a fun presence on ESPN.com for a long while now. (Current web rumors suggest tomorrow we'll find out where Rob will pop up next.  Assumedly, there will be a mention of that new home over on his website.)

Might I offer up my references?

When I want to look something up, here are the sources I use...and the last thing I can think for which I used each one...

• imdb.com - For movies and television shows - primarily to see which ones various actors were in as well as trivia about each one.  I use this pretty much every time I review a movie and a lot more frequently than that.  The last things I looked up here were trivia for Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Part 1.
• wikipedia.org - For pretty much everything.  I'll admit that I use Wikipedia all the time and have even contributed to the site at various times - most significantly in writing the initial Princeton High School entry.  The last things I looked up here (other than just now for the PHS entry) was Bill Nye the Science Guy because on imdb.com's new design, I couldn't tell if 1997 was the start or end of Bill Nye the Science Guy...and Doctor Who because I saw a commercial for the Masterpiece: Contemporary production of John Lennon and couldn't tell who was playing Lennon.  Once I recognized the nose, I went to wikipedia to show The Girl who the actor was.
• allmusic.com - For any album, artist, or song. This is another one that I check out pretty much any time that I'm writing a review post - for music, anyway.  Their listing of albums - including alternate versions (Japanese releases, re-releases, collectible editions, anything) - is impressive and makes for a great reference.  The last thing I looked up here was listing of any albums from the Muppets.  Sadly there aren't many on cd.
• baseball-reference.com -  There is, quite simply, no better place to look up anything about baseball players, teams, seasons, or records.  They provide every possible statistic - from the most obscure to the most mainstream.  In the past year, their biggest improvement has been the addition of their blog which is nothing short of outstanding, and they're committed to improving the site constantly.  Awesome.  The last thing I looked up here was Adrian Beltre's statistical record in looking at whether he has a chance to get into the Hall of Fame some day.  Quick answer: probably not.
• sports-reference.com - What started as just baseball-reference.com expanded to pro-football-reference.com and has since expanded to include college football; basketball and pro football, basketball, and hockey; and olympics sports.  Their non-baseball sites are still catching up to the awesomeness that is baseball-reference.com, but they're pretty awesome.  Look, for example, at the records of the Indiana Hoosiers.  Each season is entirely clickable and holds all sorts of details.  Love it.
• IndianaHSBasketball.homestead.com - I do enjoy a good high school basketball game from time to time, and I keep up on the happenings back in my home state via this site.  Thankfully, the alma mater has gotten off the schnide with a victory over the dread Highlanders on Friday night.

I'm still desirous of a site that's a great reference for books - kind of like an imdb for tomes.  Any suggestions there or other reference sites I should be using regularly?

Thank you, intertubes

Every February for the past seven or eight years, The Girl and I truck down to Gatlinburg, TN with Calen and her The Boy for a relaxing three-day weekend.  Some years there are other couples with us; some years there aren't.

For the past couple of years, we've stayed at this nice little cabin called Beyond Expectations.  Kinda cool - complete with a nine-hole miniature golf course in the basement.  If it'd had a ping-pong table, it would've pretty much been heaven.

This year, however, that chalet was booked so Calen's The Boy went searching the intertubes for a few other options.  Admittedly, hitting a website for cabin/chalet rentals in the Gatlinburg-Pigeon Forge-Sevierville area is a little like hitting water when you fall out of a boat, so he presented us with a couple dozen workable options, took feedback, narrowed the choices, and held a little poll in honor of Election Day (he is a social studies guy, after all).

The winner - and this year's clear choice for vacation destination: Puttin' on the Ritz.

Awesome looking little place with a basement game room (including darts), nice kitchen area, big windows, all the required trimmings for a fun-filled three days of kicking it G'burg style.

Apparently, however, Calen's The Boy (there has to be a better appellation for him) went searching those wacky intertubes to see if anyone out there had anything to say about Puttin' on the Ritz before he made the final booking.

A couple of people did...

From TravelGuideAdvice.com...

I have spent 23 years in the army and have transported tanks in Iraq; hauled fuel down mountains and would not suggest the average driver take this trip. Because of the ruts and wet gravel it caused the tires to spin on the lead vehicle and that vehicle had to be unloaded and those individuals had to walk the last two to three miles to the cabin. 

There are three separate areas where the gravel roads have deep ruts. The first is a short steep hill with a blind curve in it, and probably the most dangerous. The second is long and not as steep but just as dangerous. The third area is after you past the paved portion of the road and you can see the cabin. You have to go down a gravel road and then back up one to reach the cabin. On all three roads there is nothing to protect you from going off the right side of the road and taking a very steep tumble down the side of a mountain.

From TripAdvisor.com...

I will never ever visit those cabins again unless I have proof the roads have either been paved or had gravel put on them. The roads are simply not safe! My husband's SUV back wheel was of the edge of the cliff and the men in my party literally had to lift the suv up and set it back on the road. There was wet mud and ice that prevented you from getting traction to travel up it. If they had simply put gravel down we would not have had any problems. With several attempts we finally made all 6 SUVS, my guests in the cars simply had to go back down and park. Several of my guest including my husband almost lost theirs lives, it is simply not worth it. There are too many cabins in Tenessee with paved safe roads.

First off, thanks to the folks who stayed at Puttin' on the Ritz and took the time to review their stay.

Second, thanks to Calen's The Boy for being smart enough to do a little intertubes searching before booking the place.

Third, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and Al Gore for soldering together the intertubes.

Happy Read Comics in Public Day!

• Houses with amazing views - appropriately titled
• 50 Greatest Movie Trailers - at some point listing seems a little pointless
• Paint the Street - an art project in downtown Cincy on September 26
• Scollaton's YouTube channel - the first four seasons of all uploaded...it's a godsend and clearly illegal to enjoy it for now
• Reports from a Resident Alien - an autistic student at Wright State reports from her world...heard about it on, of course, NPR

Short list for today...good times, though...I'm off to BrewHaHa tonight.  Feel free to stop by our booth and support the campaign.