02011 was an incredibly busy year, so the number of posts published has been less than expected with only 11. Behind the scenes, the number of posts drafted was probably an all time high. Many new ideas were stubbed, but the time was never found to research, write and illustrate them further. That just means that 02012 won’t be short of any new content.
In 02011, a mailing list was also started. As much as I love RSS, not everyone understands or uses it. Good ol’fashion email still trumps many new technologies. So I am trying to reach out on a quarterly basis to more readers via email. I encourage everyone to sign-up, since there will be a few additional links and notes posted only in the email newsletters.
As always, the purpose of this omnibus is to resurface older posts that have had amendments, new finds and/or thought.
What are 2D Barcodes?
This continues to be the most popular post according to the referrers. I wrote this article in June 02009, yet it is still popular almost 3 years later. In response to the changing wides, I wrote a follow-up article entitled, What 2D Barcodes aren’t, hoping to inform people of the many shortcoming and changes in the technological landscape since it was first published.
While I personally love 2D barcodes, I must admit that their usefulness is limited. What once had incredible potential has been surpassed by other, more simple technologies. While people are still trying to flog 2D barcodes and some panacea for user-engagment, it is snake-oil and certainly on the downward trend. I’ll probably write more on this topic in 02012, but at some point it is beating a dead horse.
The Delete that Wasn’t
This article was from August 02010, but instances of rippled, deletes raised its ugly head again in 02011 and probably will for the foreseeable future.
Recently, there have been several instances of services that have appeared instantly full of content and users. One such example of this was a site called MasterBranch. They were attempting to create profiles of users that they gleaned from other source code websites such as GitHub. This meant that I had an account without knowing or signing-up. For them, it seemed as if they had more users than reality. For me, it was a way to encourage me to sign-up and claim my profile. This trick has been done by plenty of companies from Dating Websites, to Online Stores, and it never ends well.
The problem related to deleting was that you couldn’t outright purge your database. Companies like MasterBranch that relied on scraping of public data couldn’t simply delete my profile because the next time they sent their web scrapers around to look for new users, they would re-find my profile and see that it was not in their database and simply re-add my info. That same info that I asked to be deleted. There are plenty of issues at hand, but in this case deleting user information would cause more problems that it actually solves.
Welcome, the Entire Land
Back in December 02009, I was attending a conference in Lisbon, Portugal when I unveiled the Egyptian translation of “Hello World”. Since then, Glenn Jones who also attended the conference has been on a mission to collect as many translations of “Hello World” as he can in other extinct languages. In his post To the Quarters Four, Hallo, he managed to get a 4,000 year old translation of “Hello World” and as you do, he sent me a t-shirt!
1,000 year game challenge
Back in November, I entered into the 1,000 year game challenge. The challenge was to invent a new game that would be as popular as dice, chess or other games which are over 1,000 years old. You can browse through the submissions, but mine was the only one that would literally take 1,000 years to play. The winner will be announced on January 1st, 02012. There are some great submissions and I will update this post accordingly if my submissions of the millennium saga wins.
02011 Wrap-up
Looking back on 02011, there was plenty of travel involved, 9 conferences attended and several new projects in the works. Many of the articles in the next 12 months will revolve around projects started in 02011. The lead time, development and launch of some of these projects will span years. Some of which I can probably never tell you about. Hopefully, if 02011 is anything to go by, 02012 will be a great year.