Thoughts on "Social Media"

With the quick rise in Linkin's stock price after its IPO, with something like a 140 percent increase in a few hours, the term social media was suddenly a very hot topic on every news show. The term was used a lot during the recent uprisings in the Middle East as well, with twitter and facebook being garnered with far too much credit in those situations. Or were they? I'm not sure, for though twitter and facebook may not have been directly responsible for many people taking to the streets they must have played a major organizational role. It would probably be most accurate to say that they made something easier that would have happened in the first place - namely the organization of mass demonstrations.

One thought the keeps coming to mind, however, with all these correllations between social media and democratization, is that these things rely on something that I am sure must be ultimately very fragile - a mobile or wireless network and at its most basic level an electric grid, or source of power.

It would seem to me that ensuring these two things are available without government infrastructure, or even better infrastructure that can be made available for use without government control - would be of primary importance to any person concerned with personal freedom.

I don't feel like I have the know how to make something like that work, but what would it take? I know that it is possible to make networks out of several devices - ie I think you could have several routers close enough to each other that could connect to each other and therefore create a network. How much power would be necessary to run each router? Enough to be powered by a portable solar cell? How wide could such a network extend?

I imagine a scenario where a network of routers and attendant solar panels are placed in hidden and secret locations spread out over a large area and a map is provided to the group. When some dictatorial authority takes down the communities wireless communication, this network is activated by people setting up and switching on assigned stations.

Research questions:
How would such a network work? What would be its capabilities? Would it have to be centralized with a primary server or decentralized (this relates to an article I am barely remembering about creating decentralized closed mobile networks with only routers)

Using Dropbox for Study and Wiki Maintance

One of my primary uses for the dropbox service is as a centralized folder for keeping my notes, as a backup and in rough draft form before posting them to my nursing notes wiki. The final wiki format is excellent for organization and study and makes my notes easily accessible from anywhere - with a browser and internet connection. This latter requirement is solved by dropbox as well in that it synchronizes your folder locally across any device you install it on in case you find yourself in a situation where you have not network access (*gasp*).

Given my propensity for using different operating systems this is especially valuable to me since I can keep my notes synced through linux, windows or android using any generic text editors. On linux I prefer geany, on window - notpad ++, and I'm still working on an android version.

Editing the file while in the connected dropbox folder, which syncs every time I save my work, is an excellent way of ensuring my work is backed up to an external server as well.

My only problem with dropbox in the past has been space limitations when uploading applications for cross device use, but with text documents this is never an issue. I have explored alternatives, as well, which I use for larger files - see (link to later blog post) for those ideas.

Testing Scribefire

Yikes!  Over a month since any entries!  Ok, time to put this blog into the scribefire extension and try and make some use of it to spur a bit of flow.

Not that I have been totally without words.  I have been wiki mad the last couple of months, really exploring the possibilities of mediawiki on my server and starting to use it as a journal - journal in the cloud that only I have access to ( I hope!)  No passwords there just a lot of fairly uninteresting drivel about whatever is going on inside my head at the moment.  If someone was so interested they hacked in that would be fine!!  Unfortunately i highly doubt this would ever be the case.

This blog entry, then is just to see how the scribefire extension will work as far as posting to my blog.