Oliver Siodmak’s Rants & Raves

I just learned that Schmap.com has decided to include one of my photos (The Ansonia in Winter) in their website. It’s always amazing to me how people discover my online photos and include them in their projects. This is the third time this has happened. Really cool!

The Chick Magnet

Originally uploaded by osiodmak

Last week I took the team I am working with in West Chester, PA down to Miller’s Smorgasbord in Lancaster, PA. As we entered the restaurant both @GiantMike and I caught a glimpse of this tee shirt in the window and immediately looked at each other and said, “Hey .. that looks like Mark”. The likeness was just too uncanny for words .. except for those I am outlining here.

I have always been fascinated with the art of Visualizing information. Tag Clouds (or weighted list in visual design) are a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. By using a tag cloud, you can see which tags have a high, medium or low occurrence on a web site. The bigger and bolder the word, the higher weighting it has received.

TagCrowd.com is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud. The site was created by Daniel Steinbock, a doctoral student in Design and Education at Stanford University. The site allows you to enter a URL and it will quickly scan the site and develop a visual representation of the tags used on the site.

Outlined below is the current TagCrowd Visualization of Siodmak.com:

By viewing your website content in this manner you can learn a lot about your content. When I first ran TagCrowd against my blog, I immediately noticed that “Colleague” received a very high rating. This is not because I have a lot of different blog posts about colleagues. It is simply because my recently post entitled, “Pulling an ‘April Fools’ joke on a colleague via instant messaging” contains a chat transcript where the word “colleague” appears over 20 times. As with any content analysis, you can not blindly accept the visual presentation presented.

Through careful analysis this tool can help you better understand the core content of the material you have posted. Additionally, it can also help you better understand how web crawler and other external elements view your site.

Between working all week on site at a client and preparing for Jake’s 5th birthday party, I never had a chance to post the chat transcript of a little trick I pulled on a colleague over instant messaging on April 1st! The team I am working with on my current project and I are sitting in one small room. We had just come back from lunch where we had been discussing the “gullibility” of people we know. When we got back to our computers, I decided to put this theory to the test.

The great thing about IM is that you can continue maintaining a straight face much, much longer than you could if you were attempting to pull this off face to face. If I didn’t have to get back to work I could have probably kept this conversation going for another 20 minutes.

I have changed the names to protect the innocent (and the gullible):

Colleague: Hi there
Me: Hi
Me: Did you know that Sandeep has an illegitimate child with a girl he met in Canada?
Colleague: NO, get out!
Me: Yeah. It slipped out at lunch
Colleague: I just read People at the dr. office and it was about teenage pregnancy 700K
Me: Wow .. That’s high
Colleague: what meeting do you have this afternoon
Colleague: trying to keep track of all interviews we have
Me: At first he didn’t really want to talk about it. It appears she trapped him or something like that
Me: Then she found out he wasn’t a US citizen
Colleague: does he keep in contact with the child?
Colleague: was she Indian?
Me: Canadian French
Me: I think he does. He said its hard because of the distance
Colleague: that’s why you gotta keep protected
Me: Plus, she can’t immigrate to the US because he doesn’t have citizenship
Colleague: are they still dating?
Me: Not sure. I think they only have the kid in common.
Me: The girls name is Avril. Means April in french [Can you tell that I went to an Avril Lavigne concert the week before?]
Colleague: how old is she?
Colleague: I’m sure his parents were not to pleased
Me: 12 YO
Colleague: What?
Me: Not sure if he’s told them
Me: He went to school in Canada before he came to the US
Colleague: isn’t he 25
Colleague: that means he had her at 13
Me: No. He’s older
Colleague: 28
Me: I think that’s why he had to come to the US. His parents disowned him. He’s parents are pretty religious
Me: I think they had an arranged marriage for him. But the girls family called it off.
Colleague: wow
Colleague: you are like the Enquirer
Me: Just goes to show .. you never really know somebody
Colleague: does he give $$ to support
Colleague: so the mother was really young when she had Avril
Me: He went to High School in Canada. They meet at school.
Me: I think they both were very young
Me: I’m sure he helps out
Colleague: I’m getting [my daughter] a chastity belt
Me: Good idea

This exchange has really made me reevaluate how much I can really “trust” a conversation I am having with someone over the internet (via email or IM). Especially when I can’t fully gauge the intent of the message they are sending. My point is this. When I speak with someone face to face, I use body language to judge the validity of what they are telling me. Without that sensory input, I become much more vulnerable and have to “trust” that the information they are communicating to me is the truth. Internet communication relies on a much higher level of trust than I realized before this little experiment.

Of course .. now that people know I like to play pranks over the net .. my trust-worthness has just dropped several points!