Sean-Ward.com

What is Chatsum? Chatsum is an extension for Firefox that allows you to chat with other Chatsum users that are looking at the same website as you.

I literally [?external:http://www.stumbleupon.com stumbled upon] the website for [?external:http://www.chatsum.com Chatsum] a couple months ago. The site only contained information about the firefox extension, and I thought it’d be cool, and signed up for updates and promptly forgot about it. This past Monday I got an e-mail stating they were ready for testers. I had to read about the Firefox extension again, but immediately installed it once I did.

The Chatsum extension opens a sidebar on the left of the Firefox window. Once you register/login, there are two tabs, Site and Page. The Site tab allows you to chat with anyone viewing the same site you are at, regardless of page, such as [?external:http://www.chatsum.com http://www.chatsum.com], whereas the Page tab allows you to chat on a particular page, such as [?external:http://www.chatsum.com/members/SeanEtCetera http://www.chatsum.com/members/SeanEtCetera]. Next to that, there is (currently) a “bug” icon, which takes you to the page listing known bugs, as well as how to report them. The final item present is an unlocked lock icon. When it is unlocked, any site/page you go to in the window will cause the chat to change, but when it is locked, the chat for the site/page you were on will follow you no matter where you surf to.

Just below all that is the scrolling chat window. I’m not sure as to the specifics, but it shows (about) the last 50 messages left on a page. If the page is active, these comments may only be from the last couple hours or days. However, if the page hadn’t had many comments left, it could go back many months.

At the bottom of the sidebar is tab that expands up when clicked, titled Places to Chatsum. When open, it lists the names of all users currently on the page. Below that are items that can be expanded that show the most active pages where Chatsum users are, well, active, the most recent comments made by any user on any site, the sites with the most comments, and then some preferences for Chatsum.

I have enjoyed using it thus far. Most sites haven’t had too many people actively chatting, with the exception of the Chatsum website. However, with a user base of 1086 active users (at this time), that’s too be expected, considering the number of timezones the users may be in and all that. The two main developers are [?external:http://www.chatsum.com/members/George George] and [?external:http://www.chatsum.com/members/Lee Lee], both of London, England. It’s been nice being able to chat with them at the chatsum site, and ask questions about how it works, and ideas for the future, some of which I will try and list here.

Q: How will Chatsum possibly resolve funding issues, for things like server load and hard drive space?
A: This was answered by Lee in a chat sometime on Monday or Tuesday. His comment was that they’d like to keep the financial side small, so that they do not have to make too many compromises to chatsum itself. Foreseen ways to take care of expenses include:

1. Sale of aggregated data, but nothing personally identifying, just stats and trends.
2. Introducing a paid subscriber account with some more features, load priority, no ads, etc., but in a way to keep the free service compelling in it’s own right, and not compromise it to provide a feature to subscribers.

Q: Does Checksum track all my browsing when I have the extension installed?
A: Also answered by Lee in chat this past Tuesday. He said that Chatsum only tracks visited sites the the Chatsum sidebar is open.

Q: Does Chatsum affect any network usage?
A: Since Chatsum operates over port 80/www, it calls the sidebar similar to any other page your browse to.

I think one of the most interesting uses of this extension/service is the ability to use Chatsum on urls that are not websites/pages. For example, you could go to http://127.0.0.1, http://192.168.1.1, or even about:config, and if someone else happens to be “looking” at that location, you could talk. (I think I should add “provided you are connected to the Internet”.) The benefit of the latter 2, the address for a Linksys router configuration page and the configuration page for Firefox, would be to leave different setup options for securing/fixing a router or Firefox issue. The coolest part is being able to chat in the aether of the web, where pages have yet to be created and bits and bytes fly about in the chaotic eddys that flow there by going somewhere like http://where.the.bits.and.bytes.fly/.

As the tag line for Chatsum says “On the web, no one can hear you scream… until now!“.

So I figured I would add a small amount of content to my placeholder [?external:http://www.myspace.com/seanetcetera MySpace page], mainly so some people could find me if they so desired. I then started looking for people I graduated high school with. Not surprisingly, there were very few I could find. It took a while, but I was eventually able to recall each person’s page that I saw.

Not surprisingly, for people graduating from Wickliffe High School in 1998, MySpace had more (18) than Facebook (1, myself). A reason for this is that Facebook didn’t reach popularity until I was at the end of my undergraduate college career, and as I had waited two years to enter Bowling Green State University, most of the people I graduated high school with who would have had the needed college e-mail address were already on their way in the real world, or atleast no longer in college. Those who didn’t attend college, or a college that gave an e-mail address, wouldn’t ahve been able to get into Facebook either. And so I stand alone on Facebook, the single point of light representing Wickliffe ‘98 alumni. MySpace, on the other hand, is open to anyone, which mean more people can use it to connect.

Both social networking sites have their pros and cons, but the ugliest part about MySpace is the ability of the account owner to customize their pages. While this can some times give you a nice result, it is seldom the case. Consider the following:

The problem with letting anyone edit the style of a page is that you end up with a bunch of people make pages that they think are cute or cool or pretty or whatever, but they are nearly impossible to figure out where stuff is at or even read. I’ve been using the web for years now, and I’ve seen my share of the horrid Geocities, Xanga, and LiveJournal pages. I’ve gotten to the point where if there is too much flashing and what not, I consider the page to full of unimportant information. I spoke with some of the student workers about MySpace designs, and we’re convinced that the people who allowed it thought a lot of good site designs would be created. They probably forgot that the general public, and not those with an understanding of coding and, well, good sense, would be making the pages.

As one of them said, [?external:http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=3498962 “Take that Freedom.”].

It was also agreed upon that [?external:http://www.blinkyou.com Blink You Dot Com] needs to go away, die, and never, ever, come back again.

Oh, what a wonderful site [?external:http://www.damninteresting.com/ Damn Interesting] as proven to be.

I think it was Tuesday night when I came across [?external:http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=479 a page about a modern-day ghost town] thanks to StumbleUpon. The town is called Centralia and is located in Pennsylvania, and is suffering from an underground fire that was started in 1962. It was caused by burning trash in an abandoned mine pit, and the fire ignited and exposed vein of anthracite coal. You should definitely check the site out, as it is interesting, in that sort of “look at how people can screw up the environment” kind of way. I’m thinking that might be an interesting, possibly “damn interesting”, place to take a road trip to.

As I was reading through the comments, someone said you could go in there and claim it as your own town (an possibly country, but as it falls within PA and the US, that’s unlikely) in a non-hostile manner. Someone commented on that, saying it was like Sealand.

[?external:http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=188 Sealand] is a tale of an abandoned World War 2 sea fort of the cost of Britain, which initially fell outside of it’s national waters. These forts were used as anti-aircraft stations during that war. As Alan, the author of Damn Interesting says in his opening paragraph,

But after being abandoned by the Royal Navy in 1956, this artificial island on the high seas has been the site of a pirate radio landing pad, a takeover, a controversial declaration of independence, a coup, and it’s own miniature war.

Yes, Sealand is it’s own little micro-nation, a case that was kind of proven when the UK took Prince Roy (it’s a principality) to court for firing a warning shot to not come closer at a passing ship. The sea fort falls in international waters, and thus it is not subject to UK laws. I personally like how, if you go to the [?external:http://www.sealandgov.org/index.html Sealand website], you can purchase authentic Sealand papers making you a Lord, Lady, Baron, or Baroness. “Sean Ward, Lord of Sealand” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

There was an article I’d like to finish reading on that site about [?external:http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=522 eyewitnesses to Hiroshima and Nagasaki], and I just fond another about the issues and ways to [?external:http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=160 designate an area as having stored nuclear waste] in such a way that beings in the future (ideally man) will be able to understand what is there; a daunting task for sure. I’m sure I’ll find more, and Damn Interesting has just been added to my list of sites to check out regularly.

2006-05-18 Update: I have looked at more articles on that site, and they are worth the read. Some are longer than others, but I did find [?external:http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=520 Baseball and the Physicists] useful, especially because:

Physicists aren’t the only ones who have been attracted to baseball. Harvard evolutionary biologist and author Stephen Jay Gould said that baseball studies might shed important light on poorly understood aspects of the natural world. Gould argued that the disappearance of the .400 hitter in baseball stems from decreasing variation in talent, not diminishing player quality– a distinction he also applies to evolution, where apparent trends of improvement or decline often prove unfounded.

So there is a use for baseball after all. This must be why it is America’s favorite past time, right?

I know, I doubt that too.