All posts by markdangerchen

Mark Chen is an independent researcher of gaming culture and spare-time game designer. He is the author of Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of an Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft. Currently, he is looking into experimental and artistic games to promote exploration of moral dilemmas and human nature, researching DIY subcultures of Board Game Geek users, and generally investigating esoteric gaming practices. Mark also holds appointments at Pepperdine University, University of Washington, and University of Ontario Institute of Technology, teaching a variety of online and offline courses on game studies, game design, and games for learning. He earned a PhD in Learning Sciences/Educational Technology from the University of Washington and a BA in Studio Art from Reed College.
web 2.0

Twitter Tools vs. Lifestream

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Okay, so it’s been a few days since I installed Twitter Tools and Lifestream.

The topmost sidebar widget on the right of the blog is from Twitter Tools. I like it, and it provides more info than Twitter’s official Flash-based widget.

The weekly digest (that was posted on Saturday) is also from Twitter Tools. I also like it and how it is formatted. I could not figure out how to set it to a different time than 1 AM, though. Whenever I set the time to a different one and hit Okay, the form would reset.

What I like about Lifestream is that it is somewhat like FriendFeed and captures updates from multiple feeds including Twitter and Google Reader. What I don’t like about Lifestream is that it didn’t seem to successfully capture my Pandora thumbs up and thumbs down picks. I also don’t like how the daily digest includes the previous day’s daily digest in its… er… digest. That seems rather redundant and cyclical, causing a little pingback comment to be generated each time, too.

So, verdict?

I’m not sure yet. I like the sidebar of Twitter Tools and I like Lifestream’s Google Reader capture. Maybe what I should do is keep both, but start disabling the things I don’t like about each.

Is anyone finding the daily digest excessive? What if I had a weekly Google Reader digests and just the Twitter feed on my sidebar?

And, while I’m asking, giving people better indication about me is just one side of what I want. I also want a better way of keeping track of people. Right now I’m following certain people on Twitter and Friendfeed, but neither are being pushed to me, so I’m not getting a good sense of when things are happening. Likewise with my Facebook friends… by the time I comment on a status update, it could be quite irrelevant, not to mention that most updates get lost in the ether before I can even see them to comment. Anyone have a good solution to this? Does having an unlimited data plan solve it or would I then be overwhelmed?

web 2.0

Daily Digest for 2009-02-03

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blog (feed #1) 11:59pm Daily Digest for 2009-02-02
googlereader (feed #2) 4:00pm Shared a link on Google Reader.

Action Figure Fights On Despite Loss Of Dragon Sword
googlereader (feed #2) 4:59pm Shared a link on Google Reader.

Rob Cockerham writes article critical of Cash4Gold, gets offered cash to kill story
web 2.0

Daily Digest for 2009-02-02

1 Comment
googlereader (feed #2) 4:11am Shared a link on Google Reader.

Life at Wal-Mart
blog (feed #1) 4:59am Daily Digest for 2009-02-01
googlereader (feed #2) 5:12am Shared a link on Google Reader.

Virtual gold broker "sells" for $10 million
blog (feed #1) 1:07pm Gaming in China brief from Futures of Learning
googlereader (feed #2) 3:34pm Shared a link on Google Reader.

Disney duck family tree
googlereader (feed #2) 4:20pm Shared a link on Google Reader.

Super Bowl broadcast interrupted with porn
googlereader (feed #2) 5:00pm Shared a link on Google Reader.

YourFonts Turns Your Handwriting Into a Personlized Font [DIY]
Games Research

Gaming in China brief from Futures of Learning

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New Media Practices in China, Part 3: Gaming

Nice summary report.

web 2.0

Daily Digest for 2009-02-01

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blog (feed #1) 4:59am Daily Digest for 2009-01-31
twitter (feed #4) 3:20pm Posted a tweet on Twitter.

mcdanger: reading this morning.. so much reading… super bowl party this afternoon!
twitter (feed #4) 3:20pm Posted a tweet on Twitter.

mcdanger: the superbowl has a twitter feed!
googlereader (feed #2) 6:26pm Shared a link on Google Reader.

You Say Snuggie, I Say WTF Blanket [Parodies]
web 2.0

Daily Digest for 2009-01-31

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blog (feed #1) 4:59am Daily Digest for 2009-01-30
blog (feed #1) 4:59am Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-01-30
web 2.0

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-01-30

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  • sooo ready for a new phone… but waiting, waiting… G2, Pre, G1, iPhone? #
  • just found Lifestream. It aggregates from many sources including Twitter *and* Google Reader, the two things I use the most! #
  • hmm… looks like if I set the time to update too close to current time, it resets it to 1 am… I just set it to 10am, so 1.5 hours til … #
  • maybe it isn’t set to Pacific time… #
  • bah! #
  • If all worked, the blog should now get weekly digest of my tweets every Friday at 8:30 am… 12 min countdown to see if it worked! #
  • trying out Twitter Tools. This tweet was made from my WordPress admin page… #
  • messing around with twitter updates to my blog. #
  • meeting Robin for lunch on the Ave. #
  • reading Steven Fry’s latest blog post on Twitter. 🙂 #
  • needs sleep. #
  • tried to check out Metaplace but it doesn’t fit on my netbook’s screen resolution. 🙁 #
  • reading Lipsitz, the Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Depressing stuff. #
  • reading before class. #
  • in the Cafe on the Ave, waiting for ride home… (trying to twit when I remember but its so sporadic as to be meaningless…) #
  • at Finn MacCool’s for a bit… come join me! #
  • Happy new year! #
  • reading a ton of papers today… transfer, marx and engels, activity theory… #

Powered by Twitter Tools.

web 2.0

Testing out two new tools

3 Comments

Twitter Tools and Lifestream

Twitter Tools will hopefully post a weekly digest of my tweets.

Lifestream does tweets and any RSS feed, but it looks like it can only do daily digests, not weekly. I am interested in it, though, because I use Google Reader quite a bit and Lifestream can grab my shared items (the same stuff on my right sidebar). I want to move away from using the sidebar for the display of these shared items because I have a hunch that most of my site visitors actually just read my feed.

Anyway, both plugins are activated right now. I’ll give it a couple of days and decide which to ditch…

Life, web 2.0

blog posts

4 Comments

So, should I be converting batches of my twitter updates and google reader shared items into daily or weekly blog posts on this site, or would that be too spammy?

Are you all (all 2 of you) interested in that at all, or should I restrict my posts to original thoughts and writings and items of particular significance? (And we all know that means I only post about once a week…)

Life, web 2.0

Inauguration event featuring all sorts of new media

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On Tuesday, I watched the inauguration at a local cafe (The Aster Coffee Lounge) with some friends. Robin commented afterwards that it was amazing how many different forms of media were present.

We had a live stream of the event from the web being projected onto an inflatable screen. This was their workaround for a USB antenna thing that wasn’t working. The stream kept stuttering, though, with periodic stops for buffering. So we turned off the audio and were listening to the NPR live coverage while watching the video stream. But the video lagged about 5 seconds behind the audio, so that was kind of odd, especially when Roberts and Obama had their repair moment during the swearing in.

There was at least one live blogger at the event, at least one twitterer, and people texting and calling each other on their cell phones.

King 5 news, a local TV station, was there, as was print media in the form of Ballard News Tribune. Since I ordered one of the Aster’s special Inauguration Waffles, King 5 shot me taking a bite, and Ballard News took a photo, too. Here’s a photo Erik took:

After the inauguration ceremony, King 5 interviewed me really quickly. (Maybe because I was the only Asian guy in the place… They also interviewed the only Black guy in the place…) I said something like it was prophetic to have happened the day after MLK, Jr. Day and that I hoped that the nation took seriously Obama’s call for collective responsibility and action.

And, of course, there were the multiple sub-groups of people interacting with each other through verbal talk.