I was led to the story of Scott E. Fahlman, who constructed the beasts in an attempt to dull the sarcastic and witty remarks of the computer geeks at Carnegie Mellon. After a long session in which the merits and demerits of a humor system were debated, the board came to the conclusion that such a system was indeed necessary:

18-Sep-82 20:40    Guy Steele at CMU-10A        ! Joke markers again

I hope everyone realized that my previous remark about non-use of joke markerswas a joke, and was flagged as such by the

absence of a marker. This message is not a joke, as indicated

by the exclamation point.

Eventually, Falhman made his fateful suggestion:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman :-)From: Scott E  Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:    :-)       

Read it sideways. 

Actually,

it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes,

given current trends.  

For this, use   

:-(

=

Intrigued, I shot him an email (filled with questions of course), to which he has so graciously responded.

The question we all want to know. What is your favorite emoticon?

I like the two I invented: :-) and :-( Of course, I’m a bit biased. I also like the winy: ;-)

At what point did you know that the smiley phenomenon was big?

It was a very gradual process. The idea spread very quickly through the Carnegie Mellon CS community, and withing a few weeks to the few other research universities and companies that were on the Arpanet in 1982. But there it has to stop — for a while. If by “big” you mean “widely used by the general public”, that didn’t happen until the 1990s, when the Internet finally made it into people’s homes.

As a lover of old computers, I recently profiled one on Micahville.com. Naturally, I am interested in the technology involved, both originally, and in the retrieving of the files. Care to describe it?

In those days, CMU CSD had a couple of big timesharing systems (Decsystem-10s) and maybe 10 or so time-shared Vax/Unix systems that were used by various projects. These were networked and regularly backed up. Some of us had high-priced personal machines in our offices — sometime around then I got a Symbolics Lisp Machine. But when reading mail or newsgroups, we almost all used ASCII terminals. The ADM-3a was one popular model, and probably was the thing I typed the smiley post on.

I wasn’t deeply involved in the 2002 effort to find the original post on our old backup tapes. The key was that Mike Jones (CMU alum at Microsoft Research) pushed for this. As a grad student Mike had been in charge of backups on some of the Vax systems, and he had a good idea what to look for and where to find it. Once the proper tapes were found, our facilities people had to find an old tape drive that could read them, and then had to find the proper drivers and come up with a way of emulating the old systems that could run those drivers. It was a very impressive effort.

Do you think that perhaps the e-mail smiley face has done more to degrade our written communication than to improve it?

It’s not meant to improve serious kinds of communication or serious literature. For quick and dirty notes, I think it serves a useful purpose. But it certainly can be abused.

What are you currently working on now?

I’m working on symbolic knowledge representation, embodied in a system called Scone. We’re trying to get out an open-source system that will be a useful tool in many applications that require some level of common sense or background knowledge. Read all about it at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/scone/

None of this seems final though, but it does look great :-)

	from	Koffi Anan <unitedsection-nation1@hotmail.com>
reply-to		secretary.anan1@sify.com,
to
date		Nov 24, 2007 4:22 AM
subject		US$ 500,000,00 BENEFICIARY.REF/PAYMENTS CODE:06654
mailed-by		hotmail.com

Attention:My good friend,

How are you today? Hope all is well with you and family?,You may not understand why this mail came to you.

No, I don’t. Why would Koffi Anan contact me, worry about my family, and call me good friend?

We have been having a meeting for the passed 7 months which ended 2 days ago with the then secretary to the UNITED NATIONS.This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONS have agreed to compensate them with the sum of US$ 500,000.

I LOVE CAPITAL LETTERS…

This includes every foriegn contractors that may have not received their contract sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government probelms etc.We found your name in our list and that is why we are contacting you, this have been agreed upon and have been signed.

Good Job, Koffi. I love your spelling.

You are advised to contact Alhaji Ahmad Jassim Mohammed of ZENITH BANK NIGERIA PLC, as he is our representative in Nigeria, contact him immediately for your Cheque/ International Bank Draft of USD$500,000. This funds are in a Bank Draft for security purpose ok? so he will send it to you and you can clear it in any bank of your choice.

Shady. Already Nigerians are known for shady business regarding trying to steal money from Americans. Like me.

Therefore, you should send him your full Name and telephone number/your correct mailing address where you want him to send the Draft to you.Conatct Alhaji Ahmad Jassim Mohammed immediately for your Cheque:

Person to Contact:Alhaji Abduallah Musa.
Email:dr.abdullahalmusa@yahoo.co.uk

Loving the email address..

Phone:234-8077441402.

How do I even call this phone number? It is not properly formed..

Thanks and God bless you and your family.Hoping to hear from you as soon as you cash your Bank Draft.Making the world a better place.

Regards,
Mr.David Thomas.
Former Secretary (UNITED NATIONS).

Wait. I thought Koffi Anan was writing me this email. What?

Here is the post

In addition, there will now be more changes to Micahville!

• Every three days, at maximum, I will make a worthwhile post. Not a silly little reposting, but something original. If you want to get great content, you will know where to come.

• I am interested in the creativity and ideas of others. If you would like to write a post or you have any input/ideas/advice, send me an email at micah@micahville.com or tell me through the contact form.

Seeing as how that is it, I will now return to the task at hand. Stay tuned.

Micahville 

They offer the following products in customized colors:

Smart Phones

• iPhone
• SideKick 3

Mp3 Players

• iPod nano
• iPod classic
• iPod touch
• Zune

Laptops

• Mathews® Edition
• MacBook
• MacBook Pro
• ThinkPad T61

Gaming Consoles

• Playstation 3
• Xbox 360
• Nintendo Wii

Desktops

• Intel Mac mini
• iMac

In addition to colors, the also offer Corporate branding

You are in luck, as I have foreseen this problem, and decided to compile a selection of alternative, relatively unscathed video sites.

I want to preface this article by adding that some of these sites do have ads (seeing how this revenue model is now the cure-all solution to cash flow problems). Don’t worry; they aren’t obtrusive ones, and hence your mind can filter them out. If it can’t, I suggest AdBlock Plus for Firefox.

Vimeo

Pros: Outstanding user interface. Although deemed by some to be YouTube clone, it relies solely on user created content. This means more interesting video blogs, less Heroes repeats. User community focuses on quality over quantity. Along this line: videos often get lots of useful feedback, and users can link their comments to certain points in a video. Privacy options make sure that that stalker from down the hall can’t watch your shorts. And the best part is that once you sign up, all the ads get up and leave.

Cons: Although Vimeo has a tons of original content, it does not feature any non-original content. The users are hip, and won’t tear your video apart. Be prepared for lots of constructive criticism. Other than that, it is the premiere source for some creative or off the wall content. If you make tons of videos, you are limited to only uploading 250 megs of them. All the cool kids come here.

Best Feature: Customization of the embeddable video player makes sure that you can tweak the already attractive interface to your desires.

Revver

Pros: Video player is very minimalistic. Revver provides the choice to add adverts or not. Each view of your video earns money, split between Revver and you. Number and length of submissions is virtually unlimited, as file size size can not exceed a whopping 100mb per video. All videos have default Creative Commons copyright licenses. In depth stats let you track how many peeps have viewed your videos.

Cons: Some people do decide to add pre-roll advertisements. That is, advertisements prior to the showing of a video. These ads are short, and there is a limited amount of users who choose this option. Don’t come here for fanciness.

Best Feature: Opt-in monetization allows advertisers to control their videos and still make money passively. In twelve months, Revver has paid out $1 Million to its users (solely from clicks on the unobtrusive ads following the video). Time to make money off of those cute baby videos from your childhood.

Dailymotion

Pros: Lax copyright control means a smörgåsbord of TV and Video, all online. Multi-lingual support translates into wider audience. Obscure and unforeseen videos pop up every day. Share your videos with RSS feeds and subscribe to your favorite publishers.

Cons: The interface reminds me of 1995, yet the staff have been working on some improvements. In addition, a copyright violation detector is in the works. Of course, this is only at the urging of the record industry. Some channels do have pre-video adverts which are exitable and only shown once (until you clear your cookies). Once again, number of advertisements is inconsequential.

Best Feature: It has an iPhone video browser to replace your iPhone’s silly YouTube capabilities. Beat that.

Blip.tv

Pros: Classy site yields a wealth a wealth of well thought out videos that actually have plots. It is the home of such well knowns as Rocketboom, and my personal favorite internet sitcom Break A Leg. Crossposting features let you maximize publicity. Community features ease the building of a fanbase. Statistics let you see how popular you are.

Cons: Niche video content might bore some. Advertising is opt in, so the money grubbing publishers can choose to add some if they care to. Many don’t because they know it will drive viewers away. More traditional media includes sitcoms, and less spontaneous offerings.

Best Feature: A recent partnership with Pando means that your high quality videos can be distributed over its HD P2P network.

OurMedia

Pros: The only site that has text, video, audio, and images. Content is downloadable, and their hosting is handled by a partnership with Blip.tv and Internet Archive for storage. Based on the popular Drupal content manager, all of its code is released to the public. You can download it here.

Cons: Doesn’t look pretty. Honestly, the design makes me cringe. Everything will be saved for ever by the Internet Archive. don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your grandchildren to see. User moderation might lead to edit wars.

Best Feature: User involvement is streamlined. Think Wikipedia but on a multimedia site. Complete with all of its idiosyncrasies and advantages.

Wrap Up

All of these services are superb, yet none is perfect. Which one or ones you choose to switch to depends on personal preferences. Tell me what you want, use, or want to use.

Currently I am using Dailymotion the most because of an awesome little video aggregation site entitled TV Links. Someone has deigned to gather all of the smörgåsbord mentioned early onto one proverbial table. Dig in by clicking here.

So, which one do you use, and why?

Some Features

On its most basic level, Mugshot could be described as way to keep all of your web activities filed. Once you configure your Mugshot profile, the app retrieves the feeds of information attached to the aforementioned services. Currently the list of trackable feeds include, but are not limited to: Digg, Reddit, Flickr, Facebook, Amazon, Google Reader, del.icio.us, Twitter, and Netflix. Lead by some of the guys from a popular Linux build named Red Hat, it is an open source, and community driven project.

Even when you don’t have a web browser open, you can continue perusing your friends with the desktop client, which has faint resemblances to the Pownce and Digg desktop clients. If you want to show off your web savvyness, they have a Mugshot badge maker that you can place in your sidebar.

My Thoughts

At first look, Mugshot appears to be a unsubstantial tool. However, upon using it even more, I have discovered the joys of staying connected. Unifying multiple sites onto one page makes my web browsing more efficient.

Some features that I would love to see added are possible filtering for services because some services can engulf the entries of others. The unconventional integration of Amazon is an interesting function as well.

A well-designed, and effective feed tracker is a necessary tool in the arsenal of any social bookmarker. On the other hand, users need to establish a balance between the services that they use and want to stay connected to, and the services that they need to stay connected. This is an unfortunately necessity, however Mugshot fills this empty niche. At least for me.

• Do you know of any similar services?
  
• Would you try Mugshot based on this article? If you do decide to, leave me your experience in the comments.