Archive for the ‘Social Web’ Category

Del.icio.us bookmarking.

Monday, February 18th, 2008

Yea, I know, del.icio.us was so four years ago. Well, I finally decided it wasn’t a fad, and gave it a try. With home & work machines, it was starting to become annoying to re-google for everything. And it’s terribly convenient. Tagging is kindof fun; the nebulous mass’ suggestions for keywords is informative.

Anyway, my bookmarks are here. I’ve also linked it in the Wordpress “Links” section.

Hot or Not

Sunday, January 29th, 2006

Quite awhile ago, I was encouraged by one of my closer friends to put a picture of myself up on hotornot.com, to challenge my underwhelming sense of physical appeal. I hesitated at the time, and let it go back-burner, (like many things.)

But I did it about a week or so ago on a whim. I used a photo that I’ve used on many “social” websites (friendster, orkut, facebook, etc.) I got this photo taken by my friend Ping when we were waiting around for a group Banquet, so I was in casual shirt & tie. Anyway, the voting result seems to be hovering around 6, which they purport to be 56th percentile. Well, I suppose being average isn’t so bad….

You get to see the distribution of the votes over ratings of 1 through 10. Mine’s roughly flat for 1-3,5-7 with 4 being much higher, and 8-10 drop off to zero quickly. First, it’s weird that results in an average of 6. Secondly, it’s sad that I got very little high-votes. If I cared, I’d get another photo taken of me in a more relaxed manner, and see how that does. I think it would get a better ranking. Maybe if I’m still thinking about this a few weeks from now I will.

The other interesting subject is how people & I vote on others. That peak of 4 on my vote distribution for one implies allot of people default to that one. When I vote on people, I decided ‘4′ was for “unattractive”, ‘7′ was for “attractive”, and everything else was for modifications of those ratings. I quickly realized that I was being very critical of others, voting low values about 80% of the time. Or is it common for others to be as critical? It’s an interesting question of psychology & perception.

Now that I’ve gone to this website several times this past week, it’s starting to loose its amusement value. Although I must admit that ranking so many people seems to come unnaturally to me. I don’t normally go about my day critically viewing and assigning a 10 point value to everyone I see. Maybe I should a bit more…