the Sam Jackson College Experience

Hey everyone, as is readily apparent, I haven’t made very many updates this summer. I’ve been having a pretty good time in San Francisco with Google, and will try to share some photos of non-confidential fun.

In the meanwhile, in the interests of testing out my employer’s neat products, here is a Google Voice call widget which will let you give me a call and leave me messages, in case somehow you read my blog and are too intimidated to leave so much as a comment (please!) but are less fearful of actually calling me. Anyway, go have a ball. Please don’t make your number private, because it will discourage me from calling you back if you leave an unintelligible voicemail. : )

About a month ago, I wrote about patterns I found comparing Yale and Harvard in Google searches through Google Trends. Well, just today, Facebook released a simply fascinating tool called “Lexicon” which is the same thing, but for wall posts. Computers (not humans!) track the content of every wallpost for words and phrases, and you can search for trends and comparisons over time using this new tool. Very cool, right?

Lexicon shows the number of users that posted each term per day on a profile, event or group Wall. It does not count repeated terms by the same user on the same day. This is to account for the seasonality of Wall posting in general; for example, there are fewer overall posts in the month of December.

My complaint about my previous Google Trends related efforts had been the fact that Google Trends was not targeted enough to college age students to give more precise sampling to *really* show the trends when it came to buzz about individual schools over the course of the admissions cycle. Facebook’s demographics pretty much fix this problem, and the following chart is very exciting.

The greatest influence here can be seen from Harvard and Princeton dropping their early programs. Yale has a huge attention buzz boost in December, but by spring admissions time it is at parity with Princeton (Gasp!) and Harvard has a significant edge in attention. As with Google Trends data, the same incredibly eerie trend occurs where everyone talking about school A talks exactly proportionately with those talking about school B with the same upticks and downticks, with high levels of accuracy.

In general, the same observations as before apply… just nice to see them borne out in slightly cleaner data somewhere else. Read about the patterns I found in the Google Trends data by clicking here, or see below.

Compare with Google Trends data (Red is Harvard, blue is Yale).

Why not discover something new–why not hear some unfamiliar music this weekend?

The South by Southwest music festival in Austin always releases lots of MP3s of artists each year, but this year did not put them together in a torrent all in one place. Luckily, Greg Hewgill did. Click here for the link to his torrent.

I love using Last.FM and Pandora to find new music, and this is another great one-off source. If you just want to browse by artist / location / song on the SXSW site, you can do that too. But this is a really awesome collection, with some really great music to be discovered from all over the country and all around the world. You should do yourself a favor and check it out. The torrent is well-seeded and you can start listening to some of the mp3s while you download!

Have a nice weekend, everyone! I will be slaving over midterms, but at least I’ll have a nice soundtrack…

I was recently having a little debate with Diana over at the Digital Natives blog about how best to manage online identities as a teenager, inspired by Lifehacker’s recent post about managing digital reputations. My main point of agreement was about ‘becoming the source’ for information about yourself, and how important it is to maintain a high-profile place for positive information control. I do that very well with this website–google ’sam jackson’ and you’ll see I’m the fourth result–but right before I saw Diana’s post, I had decided I wanted to cover some other bases.

It’s midterms time here at Yale, and while some people like to go out and shop or buy things to de-stress some, I opted for another route: buying a few domain names. I went to gratuitous lengths to try to acquire a few I’ve been negotiating over for ages, with continued failure. But I did go ahead and buy www.SamuelAJackson.com and www.SamuelABJackson.com. I remain bitter that I don’t have the funds to acquire samjackson.com, or samueljackson.com, etc.

I wish I had been a little older–or a lot wiser–when I was younger, because I would be a lot richer now for my domain purchases if that had been the case. But, in case anyone is ever searching for my full name, I now have some good insurance. These wouldn’t really rank, of course, and I will just have them redirect back here for now. Still–pays to try to cover as many angles as possible, and it’s really pretty cheap. Certainly a much lower down payment now than there will be later, if you have to try to buy a domain off someone or do damage control from high-ranking bad PR.

For a good place to start investigating how to control your public identity online, check out both that lifehacker post and danah boyd’s musings on the subject last fall.

Today, December 21st, is Samuel L Jackson’s birthday! I actually got to chat with him on his website today and wish him a happy birthday, stop by over the weekend to try to do the same! I only got in touch with him briefly, but I’ve always been a huge fan of The Man, not just because of our shared name. It was always frustrating to hear people tell me I should either have / change my middle name to be “L-something” so I could be like him, but I always appreciated the positive correlations that were made between the two of us.

I also always wondered if, now that a search for “Sam Jackson” has me as the 4th Google result,  if he ever happened upon my site? Or maybe his manager got angry that I was taking away search listings? I’m not sure–in any case, I always wanted a chance to chat with him and hopefully will be able to catch him properly sometime over this weekend. He has always seemed to be a really cool guy and if this is any indication, he’s really nice to his fans, too–spending a bunch of time on and off on his birthday to talk to them!

Sidenote: being heavily inundated with Samuel Adams commercials as a child, growing up in the greater Boston area, I always always always wanted to start a brewery and make Samuel Jackson’s with Samuel L as my spokesperson, long before Dave Chappelle did his sketch about the subject.

Anyway… I am done with finals and will be heading home tomorrow. Happy birthday to Samuel L Jackson, happy vacation to me!