I made a mistake over the weekend. I accidentally clicked on a YouTube of a couple building a tiny house from the ground up. I didn’t watch the whole thing but it was enough for cyberspace to jump on it. This morning my YouTube feed is filled with tiny house videos. They have not completely supplanted my usual card-making, dogs, Harry/Meghan (proverbial train wreck) videos, but there are A LOT of tiny house stuff. Sigh. I know that if I don’t open any more, they will eventually fade away but it’s a little irritating that cyberspace is so completely curating my online experience.
Then yesterday I opened up YouTube on my work laptop to look for a band for a client. The feed was nothing like my home feed and had a preponderant amount of “relaxing music” videos. This didn’t surprise me at first because my main use of YouTube at work has always been background soothing, relaxing music. When I started to think about it, I wondered how YouTube knew this… after all, this laptop is not the laptop I had before I retired. And I haven’t logged onto YouTube using a work address since August. So how did YouTube know, without my even asking, that relaxing music is likely to be what I want? This is just a hypothetical question – I’m sure I wouldn’t understand a real answer about the algorithms used by YT, FB, etc. But it is a little eerie and does make me wonder what my feed would look like if I searched for other random items every few days?
Do you care enough about anything to follow it in cyberspace?
Trail Baboon 
I am inundated with animal rescue stories, and whole grain and sourdough ads.
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that’s because you’re interested
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I get so many politically-oriented emails every day, I hate to think what my inbox would look like if I actually responded to any of them. I really should send them to spam instead of just deleting them.
I don’t generally follow sites. The ones I care about I check in on regularly but on my own terms. I have been following Heather Cox Richardson but that’s about it.
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I no longer care, but, ironically, I wish more people would follow the blog to which I post something daily. It seems that since I dropped Twitter, the traffic to my blog has dropped, too. But, HEY, I don’t care enough about others’ stuff, so the balance of the universe kind of leaves me out of others caring about mine.
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I follow the Cesky Terrier America site, as I am a member. I also somehow got on a Danish Cesky Terrier group list, but that is fun news to look at.
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I know how this goes. I’m a member of the Louise Penny group on Facebook. But in addition to that group, which was started by her, there are quite a few other Three Pines/Gamache/Louise Penny groups, and once you start looking at your first group, I think they all want to get in on the action.
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Morning.
I follow us.
And the bank accounts.
On YouTube, there’s about five different farmers, that I watch regularly. I have learned about tools that I need, I have gained a little, more self-confidence, thinking, well, if they can do it, I can do it, even though they have much bigger machinery, and big indoor shops, And I still know my limits.
As I plan for my summer, cement, work and shop remodeling, I’ve been reading up on shops hope and I don’t forget anything important.
And then, of course, there’s just fun things to watch like Ozzy man reviews, and anything with Ron Swanson from parks and rec.
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Sorry about all the commas; dictating and Siri really seems to like her commas, and I don’t catch them all.
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I always throw in some superfluous punctuation to compensate for tim’s lack of it.
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Snort!
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Perfect
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It’s all about balance.
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i was goons say i hadn’t noticed added commas
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Interesting, tim! I thought you believed punctuation an unnecessary barrier to communication. I can’t punctuate to save my life, but combining what little I comprehend about punctuation in English, and my fairly sturdy knowledge of Danish rules, I’ve developed my own “style” in a vain attempt to help people understand what the heck I’m trying to say.
A huge shout-out to Linda, who chopped her way through a patch of ice in front of my front door that prevented me from leaving the house. Thanks, Linda, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.
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OT – Don’t know if this is of interest to anyone, but here’s a link with information about a free exhibit at the Hennepin County Library through the end of the month:
https://www.hclib.org/about/news/2023/January/testify-exhibit?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=testify
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I don’t do Twitter or Facebook.
I follow Vanguard Investment Services, The Trail, Mediaite, Webb telescope and MPR.
YouTube has lately been giving me film noir which is welcome. Yesterday watched Whirlpool staring Gene Tierney and Jose Ferrer. Some Charles Laughton are up next.
BirdTricks for my Bird People.
David Pakman for my progressive politics.
Dawn Marie from Scotland for movie reaction videos .
The Dodo for animal rescue videos.
Leckere Minute for recipes.
MindYourDecisions for math brain teasers.
Worldle.teuteuf.fr for a daily geography lesson.
Other then those, I never use the cyberspace.
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I regularly get caught by recipes, and the cyber world knows it – tempts me regularly with easy, yummy looking stuff, esp. sweets.
Even though I have no dogs, I sometimes share funny stuff on FB about dogs (and cats…), so I get ads for pet food…
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Another OT. Tim brought some eggs up from Rochester yesterday, and I am currently in possession of a dozen more than I need. Anybody in the Twin Cities need eggs? I can bring them?
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At some point in the past I downloaded academic papers related to pre-Columbian archeological sites in the US. I don’t know why they were offered to me in the first place. Now I get notified whenever an academic paper gets uploaded that references anyone named Bill Nelson. That means I get one of those notifications about once a week asking, “Is this you?”.
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Unfortunately, I think the only answer to that question is “yes, it’s me“ which probably doesn’t clarify anything.
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I try to follow this blog. Really I do. But sometimes WP doesn’t want me to. Sometimes even logging in is a challenge… sigh…
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I follow this guy on youTube….https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGMGmsiiV-0
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: ) : )
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I try to check out the photo on bing.com every day, and sometimes download it for my desktop background.
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Too many sites, mainly author/writing-related sites. Also TB blog, Investing sites ( watch my money like a hawk! 🙂 )
I also subscribe to Politifact and OpenSecrets. Quite eye-opening some weeks.
Chris in Owatonna
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