A somewhat eerie thing happened yesterday – I bought a ticket for American Gangster on Fandango, and a message popped up saying “Fandango is telling Facebook that you bought a ticket to American Gangster.”

The odd thing was that I hadn’t enabled this feature or added an app. Fandango and Facebook had taken the initiative and chosen to talk to each other without my permission. It was also a bit odd to think that my online activities were being tracked to the piont where my Facebook friends could see what movies I’d purchased tickets to.

I investigated on Facebook, and found that you can change the privacy settings of this feature to have Facebook notify you before posting your purchase to your news feed. I chose to OK it, just to see what the posting would look like.

Strange to think that my various online profiles are sharing information about my behind my back.

I think I’ve developed a certain addiction to information – I work on a computer all day, but when I get home I turn the computer on and keep clicking.

After a while it’s not even research or stuff I have to do – there becomes something comforting in typing, clicking of the keyboard, pointing with the mouse, and seeing various colored pixels wash over the screen.  Flickr and YouTube for visuals, MySpace and Facebook for brief snippets of friends’ lives and photos.  It’s like drinking a coffee with a lot of sugar; I know it’s not substantial or necessarily good for me, but it gives me a little rush during the day.

For a while there, I had gotten into the habit of reading a book in the evenings, so that my rush of information wouldn’t keep me up at night.  Even now I’m typing this a bit late at night; I’ll get back to my book after finishing up with a few blog posts and YouTube searches.

Here’s a neat video of a computer-generated Alfred Molina, as he’s rendered in the new PS3 engine:

I can see it’s Alfred Molina, and I can see it’s not a human, but I’m not as creeped out by his face. I do think the eye twitches and blinks help sell the reality of the face.

It looks like the Uncanny Valley (the idea that at a certain point, a fully lifelike robot gets incredibly creepy) is getting shallower.

Awesome – the classic children’s television show The Electric Company is now on iTunes!

What’s next – Today’s Special? Tranzor Z? Starblazers?

This opens up whole new possibilities for iTunes – selling classic TV for nostalgic Gen X’ers and beyond. Relive the Saturday Mornings of your childhood, at only $2 a download.

In the post below, I wondered if it was possible to customize feeds from my central blog to different feeds. 

The reason is that I have logins for Facebook and ELGG.  Two different web sites: Facebook is a social networking site for college students and alumni, and ELGG is an “online social network for those interested in education, learning technology and new approaches to teaching and learning.”  Both allow you to import content from your own blog.

I was concerned that my ELGG colleagues might not want to read about my connection to The Departed, and my Facebook buddies might not be interested in IMS Content Interoperability.

Turns out there is a way to customize my blog for both sites, using 3 RSS tricks!

Trick 1: WordPress category URLs

When you create a WordPress blog, you set up “categories” that you can use to tag each post.  For example, this post is tagged with “WordPress tricks,” “ELGG,” and “Facebook.”  If you go to www.jobriga.com/journal/ (the address of my main blog) and click on “WordPress tricks” on the right, it’ll bring up all the blog entries tagged with “WordPress tricks.” 

You can also note that the URL changes to string below:

 www.jobriga.com/journal/?cat=4 

This means that “WordPress tricks” has an ID of 4, and so the URL is saying the following:

Pull up all the entries on www.jobriga.com/journal/ where category = 4

Trick 2: WordPress RSS feeds

WordPress also allows you to easily set up a RSS feed for your blog.  RSS feeds convert your blog into a format that can be read by other news aggregators.  You can see the RSS feed for this blog by adding ?feed=rss2 to the URL:

 www.jobriga.com/journal/?feed=rss2

Trick 2.5: Combining Category URLs and RSS feeds

If you combine these two tricks into a single URL string, you can create a RSS feed for a specific category:

 www.jobriga.com/journal/?cat=4&feed=rss2

which says:

Pull up all the entries on www.jobriga.com/journal/ where category = 4 & feed = RSS 2 (really simple syndication 2).

So, it’s possible to create a RSS feed of a specific category (e.g. all the categories related to “WordPress tricks”).

Trick 3: Importing the RSS feeds into other sites

Facebook and ELGG both allow you to automatically pull RSS feeds from other sources into your account.  Facebook calls them “Notes,” and ELGG calls it a “blog.”

I created two new categories in WordPress: one called “ELGG” and one called “Facebook.” I then got the URLs for each of these categories

All entries tagged with “ELGG” – http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=28&feed=rss2

All entries tagged with “Facebook” – http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=29&feed=rss2

I then logged into ELGG and subscribed to http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=28&feed=rss2, and logged into Facebook to subscribe to http://jobriga.com/journal/?cat=29&feed=rss2.  Now, every entry I tag with “ELGG” shows up in my ELGG blog, and every entry I tag with “Facebook” shows up in my Facebook Notes. 

This makes it easy for me to determine where my content goes – now I can publish the content once, and send it to multiple places.  I can also target my blog to the appropriate “channel” of content. 

Publishing in the 21st century.  Nice!