There is an old saying: Zen Mind - Beginner's Mind.
Likely if you are using steem.it you are either a digital native or tech-savvy. Like anything else that's complex, its easy to get into limiting habits when browsing the internet. In this post I share some of the inane things I do while browsing the web. The real goal is to outline my online habits, or patterns of technological use, in order to find ways to reframe how I use the inter-webs. Its good to have a beginner's mind.
First, I'll show some of my own meta-patterns and maybe suggest how they can be augmented.
Sometimes when I feel deeply bored I go wikipedia and start clicking the random page link. I just hold command (alt or ctrl on other operating systems) and start clicking away opening up many many tabs. Its the digital native's equivalent of chain smoking. Its swapping time for information novelty.
Now that I have that in writing, I can ask myself "How can this process be improved?"
There are a few things that spring to mind. First, I can write a script that will spit out summaries and automate this process. For example see: https://github.com/tetriseffect/wikirandom and usage below
Note: need to install requirements.txt:
pip install -r requirements.txt
and
chmod +x wikirandom.py
$ ./wikirandom.py 3
William Crozier (artillerist)
William Crozier (Carrollton, Ohio, February 19, 1855 – November 11, 1942) was an American artillerist and inventor.
Nokia 6630
The Nokia 6630 is a 3G smartphone announced by Nokia on June 14, 2004 and released in November. It runs on Symbian OS 8.0a (Series 60 2nd Edition FP2). Codenamed Charlie during development, it is an evolution of the 6600 and 6620 smartphones, supporting tri-band GSM (run on lower operating systems).
The Nokia 6630 is the first phone ever that allows truly global roaming; previously GSM phones have had near-global coverage except in Japan where 2G phone standards were different. The 6630 automatically uses the W-CDMA network in Japan. 6650 and 7600 were also able to function in Japan, but they did not support GSM1900, often needed in the United States and Canada (the Nokia 6651 has the GSM 1900). The Nokia 6630 was also the first 3G phone Nokia introduced to the market.
Nokia says the Nokia 6630 is the first dual-mode, tri-band handset designed to work on 3G (WCDMA), EDGE and 2G networks in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
2016 Irish Greyhound Derby
The 2016 Boylesports Irish Greyhound Derby started on 11 August and culminated with the final held on 17 September at Shelbourne Park.
The prize money on offer was €240,000 of which €125,000 went to the winner Rural Hawaii. The competition was sponsored by Boylesports.
Produce Stakes & Champion Stakes winner Clares Rocket headed the ante-post lists at a very short 5-1. Other leading contenders included the defending champion Ballymac Matt, Kirby Memorial Stakes & Dundalk International champion Droopys Roddick and the 2016 English Greyhound Derby winner Jaytee Jet.
The script doesn't apply sumy which is a utility to compress writing into a shorter form. Its actually cool, check it out as it may be a good time saver for longer reads. Ie imagine running this on something like Project Gutenberg and skimming through a bunch of works. Also, I've applied sumy to bigger pieces of writing such as taking a pdf and compressing it about 1/10. I used it on the following PDF and was still able to get a lot useful information: https://www.umass.edu/digitalcenter/research/pdfs/JF_NetworkSociety.pdf Quick way to learn. Thought I'd share.
That's great, but not inherently intelligent. The real question I want to answer is different. Truly, how can I find novel ideas and people online? How can I improve my frame of reference of the digital world?
Well, besides using something like sumy, you could possibly use something like google trends to filter more relevant content. That would be cool.
Another pattern you could apply is to search: "wikipedia hacks" on google:
Some of the more interesting things I found when doing this are:
WikiTube extension - Watch relevant youtube videos to the article you are reading: http://markdunne.github.io/
WikiTrends - Shows trending articles which may be better than trying to automate this yourself http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikitrends/english-uptrends-this-week.html
WikiMindMap - It may be good to connect and create concepts or a mind map as you browse for yourself and others: http://www.wikimindmap.org/ . Ie http://www.wikimindmap.org/viewmap.php?wiki=en.wikipedia.org&topic=hamming+distance&Submit=Search
Pretty cool stuff, but what other techniques can be applied?
As a sneaky lurker in places like reddit I often use the following patterns to get a meta-feel on a multitude of topics.
Firstly, you can find a sub-reddit for almost anything. Just think of it and it should be there. The key is to force yourself to think of it. For example, seeing as I'm obsessed with Wikipedia, I can go to https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/top/?sort=top&t=all
I usually apply the "arrange by top of all time" to get a feel for a sub-reddit quickly. I haven't tried using the reddit enhancement suite: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-enhancement-suite/kbmfpngjjgdllneeigpgjifpgocmfgmb?hl=en-US
Its also good to take this concept and look for lists of things. The list patterns applies to almost anything useful.
Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists (I can spend hours browsing this stuff)
Reddit - https://dailytekk.com/the-top-50-subreddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/trendingsubreddits/
Github - https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome (list of awesome lists)
Slack - http://www.slacklist.info/
You may also try to search for related sub-reddits to some of the more interesting ones: http://marketersguidetoreddit.com/how-to-find-subreddits-related-to-your-niche/
Another interesting technique is to try to hash out who has a lot of karma posting the type of content or posting in the sub-reddits you like an do some reconnaissance. Imagine you sort-by top per sub-reddit, go through some of the highest rank posters and see what sub-reddits they browse. You may be able to come up with a simple algorithm and codifiy it.
You can even just use the reddit search and try varying terms: http://marketersguidetoreddit.com/how-to-find-subreddits-related-to-your-niche/
Those are some of my patterns. I'm not sure if there is a broader term for this other than google hacking or growth hacking: http://www.binarytides.com/google-hacking-tutorial/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_hacking (likely a lot of automated techniques to this).
I haven't even tried out things like IFTTT: https://ifttt.com/
...which btw has an open source analog: https://trigger-happy.eu/
Are there others? You bet. I bet there is a huge set of life hacks devoted to this topic.
I'm hoping to get a list of interesting techniques going. For example, one of the more interesting things to do in social media systems is to follow people or groups.
Here is an example of an interesting set of tools that does this:
https://www.shoutmeloud.com/5-free-tools-to-autofollow-your-followers-on-twitter.html
I can see that it would be worth-while for people to create their own automated bots for various things in the near future. Maybe there will be a simple suite that people can install that will aggregate this stuff and tune it for their liking.
Ironically, this is almost a push-back against search and filter bubbles. Basically, google and Facebook are in the market of giving you what you want, but sometimes they are very wrong. Its important to find ways to breakout and be in charge of the content that gets delivered to you.
If anyone finds this interesting I'll create a part 2 - N.