 You know, if you've ever done a Google search for homeopathy or something like that, you get crazy websites right in the top. You get some good skeptical searches near the top, too, but it's hard for a neutral person to distinguish. So there's kind of a battle going on between the misinformation and the information that's out there. We've been doing good things to fight that battle. We've got a lot of great skeptical blogs. We've been using the social networks, Facebook, and things like that to organize people. Meetup is a great place to organize. Social linking sites are great ways to call attention to skeptical content. And Google bombing. We've had a good success with that just in recent months. Google bombing expelled exposed, so it shows up right next to expelled's website in the Google results. There's a few problems with these methods, though, that I see. One of them is that they're very ad hoc. It requires a blogger to notice something's going on and write a blog about it. It requires us to organize each time we want to Google bomb something that's skeptical. The other one is that skeptical websites, to a certain extent, tend to preach to the choir. We've got a lot of folks from this room reading the content, which is good to get everybody educated on what's going on. But how do you reach out to the people that are neutral and don't know that homeopathy is bunk? So we need to extend our reach. We need to find ways to get our message out in ways that it'll get in front of people who don't even know that skepticism exists. And we need to be more systematic about it. We need to find ways to measure what's going on in the web. And one of the ways, one I'm going to be talking about is using what's called Web 2.0. This is kind of the current crop of new websites like Twitter and Friend Feed and things like this that are kind of coming along and changing the way we work on the web. And a few of the main kind of bullet points of Web 2.0. One is community. We're familiar with that. We've got forums and things. A second one is specialization. We're seeing very, very specialized websites in Web 2.0. A third one is programmability. Now, if you're not a programmer, don't be turned off by that term because everything I'm talking about today are things that you can do just by clicking on websites. You don't have to be a programmer to take advantage of these things. And the fourth one is maybe something you haven't heard about, which is called mashups. Because these sites are programmable and expose their data in a way that other people can get to it, you can create new resources by taking data from multiple sources and mashing it up. So what I'm talking about is applying these techniques to skepticism and finding ways to use this to get our message out. My first point is work smarter, not harder. Use these tools. Use them to be more efficient. The second one is specialize. Others have talked about this this weekend. We need more specialized resources and tools on the net. Don't just put up another skeptical blog. Find a niche and fill that niche. The third one, the biggest thing perhaps that I can say is open up your data. Don't assume that people are going to come to your website in order to look at what you're doing, provide it in a way that it can be seen elsewhere. And then mash it up. Figure out ways that you can take data from multiple skeptic websites or skeptic and neutral websites and mash it up in new ways that help people learn what we're trying to teach them. And finally, appeal to neutrals. Don't write snarky stuff that is preaching to the choir. Write stuff that a neutral person who doesn't know one way or the other can appreciate and help sway them. So on the topic of work smarter, not harder, there are a lot of really good tools. But one of the most important ones is RSS. You may have seen this logo on websites. RSS stands for really simple syndication. And fundamentally it's just a special kind of webpage on a site that's marked up in a very specific way that allows other computer programs to know what's new on that website. It's like a what's new page that's written for another computer to read. And this allows you to subscribe to sources. Instead of having to go to skeptic every couple of days and see if there's new stuff, you can use a tool like this. This is what I use to read skeptical sources. It's called blog lines. There's a bunch of other good ones like Google Reader. And it will tell you, here's what's new. Here are six new articles on skeptic. Click here and I'll show you just the new ones. But one of the cooler things you can do is you can filter your feeds. If you do follow a lot of skeptical blogs and different websites, you know it can be kind of a fire hose sort of situation. There's a very cool tool called Yahoo Pipes that's targeted and non-programmers that allows you to do things like filter what's coming out of an RSS feed. And here's an example that I built. The box at the top, sorry about that. The box at the top are just a list of eight or so feeds from various skeptical websites, web forums. And in their RSS feed, they list when new messages have been posted on the forum. And that box in the middle simply says if the title has homeopath in it or the body of the message has homeopath in it, send it out to the bottom. So literally you drag that box out, you put in some URLs, you drag this box out, type a couple of words in and you connect them up by clicking on them and boom, you have a working tool that will now show you whenever anyone is talking about homeopathy in a skeptical forum. And that is a fantastic tool that allows you to specialize on what's going on. Google alerts, you probably know about because if you ever use Google News, it bugs you about it at the bottom of the page, but this is a tool that I use a lot for what's the harm. Basically it's a way to set up a whole bunch of Google searches that will happen all the time and you get emails from Google that are search results so when new content occurs, a new story about Uri Geller or something like that, you get told about it as soon as Google finds out. Now something you probably haven't heard about is something called Google Custom Search. This is a programmable way to build a search engine that searches only the sources that you are interested in. And I've built one and I'm going to have a link at the end where you can get to it that searches only skeptical websites. It has like 600 URLs in it. Some of them are as little as one tiny little page that debunks a very particular thing about the moonhooks. Some of them are sites like randy.org that have thousands of pages of content. And again, this is a very simple thing. You can set your own up that narrow in on whatever your specialization is just by simply going to Google and clicking around and adding some URLs and it's free. In the future, we hope to add another engine. Actually it's already underway, but it's really not quite ready for prime time that searches just believer websites, just the sites that have all the misinformation on it. And once we have that built, we can actually use in Google Custom Search, build a search that searches the entire web but subtracts out all the blue websites. And you can imagine that would be a fantastic tool to have in a classroom. So we're going to continue the discussion that we're having here right now or continue these thoughts at a site that I set up this week called sceptools.com and it's a blog and there's going to be blog entries on different aspects of what I'm talking about here. So on the topic of specializing, I'll talk a little bit about what'stheharm.net. That's a site I set up in January and it's a very simple idea, thank you. It's a very simple idea of just collecting victim reports, people who've gotten burned by misinformation, woo, whatever you want to call it. And it's intended as a rhetorical tool. It's intended as a way of engaging people who are hitting you with anecdotes about, hey, my cancer was cured by standing on one foot for a week or some crazy idea. You can find counter examples in here. Yes, there are anecdotes, but sometimes you got to use what you got to use. It's also a research tool. If you want to write a blog entry about how bad homeopathy is, I can give you lots of cases to talk about. And here's, if you haven't seen the site, here's the main page, it's all categorized by crazy stuff that people believe. And here's an example page that is about herbal remedies. Now, as you can see, I have a RSS feed that you can subscribe so you can see exactly when I add things. And then I have some mapping stuff and we're gonna talk about what that gives you. That, those two things, the RSS feed and the maps are all about opening up your data. RSS feeds are not just for blogs. RSS feeds are a way to allow any sort of data that's on the web to be accessed. Here's my RSS feed viewed in a particular browser. It gives the user, I didn't have to build any of this. This is just the way the browser shows the RSS feed. It lets you filter on topics. It lets you sort by date. So it's a great way to give some functionality without having to build anything. And my contention is that if you have a website out there, you should have an RSS feed. And if you don't look into getting a plug in or whatever it requires for the software you're using, thanks. Another idea is iCal. iCal is like RSS for calendars. This is an example from Skepchick. You may have noticed there's a calendar on the right side of Skepchick. What you may not have noticed is that calendar is actually generated using Google Calendar which publishes the data as iCal. Which means that in your personal calendar you can pull that data into your personal calendar and sync it to your phone and do all sorts of various interesting things with it. That's functionality that Skepchick didn't have to build. They just put their data in Google Calendar and they get it for free. Very quickly there's a thing called micro formats that you can look into which is a way of marking up the stuff on your site. And one that I'd like to call attention to very quickly is hReview. Which is essentially a way of indicating approval or disapproval when you're linking to another site. And Yahoo is beginning to support this now. A big thing that I'd like to emphasize is geocoding. I just added this to what's the harm in the last few weeks. We have what's called georss which is essentially associating a spot on the earth with each entry in an RSS feed. And the idea behind that is again it gives you a way of working with the information that is helpful to you. This is Google Maps and basically all you do is you take my RSS feed link and copy it and punch it into the box at the top and lo and behold you get a map of what my new cases are. So like for instance in this example if you just wanted to see the cases that I've been posting that are in Europe, there you go. I didn't have to build that. I just had to make sure that the data was there in my RSS feed and you can play with it and do interesting things with it. KML is kind of like RSS for Maps. It's another way of pushing data out that's geographic in nature. Here's another way to look at my data and what's the harm? This is Google Earth and same thing. This is homeopathy in Europe. And when you click on the links in the bloons, the site itself actually comes up at the bottom which is pretty cool. So mash it up. Mashups are combining data. So how do you do that? Well here's an example. There's a site out there that's promoting Bill Maher's new movie Religialist called disbeliefnet.com. I think it might be a spoof of another site. But they have a page called Heretic Press. And it's all these interesting news stories about crazy religious stuff that's happened. And I was looking at this, somebody pointed out to me and I was looking at it and I was like, oh, how do they generate this? Well the old fashioned way would be to manually find these articles, blog about them. A lot of tedious effort involved in this. If you actually dig under that RSS feed, lo and behold, there's Yahoo Pipes again. And this looks very complex but it's really fundamentally the same as that other pipe. They just had to do some tricky filtering in the middle. But these are a whole bunch of feeds from websites that have articles about crazy religious nonsense going on and they just feed it through. And here's some keywords looking for cult and Scientology and things like that. And the result spits out the bottom. So that page on disbelief.net is a mashup of like six or seven other websites and it's generated all automatically. Appealing to the neutral is a big thing. I think other people have talked about this this weekend. I think we need to appeal to people that are neither believers nor skeptics and get our message out. Doing this on believer sites, as we all know is problematically. You get banned, you get censored. Skeptical websites, you have the problem of trying to draw people in. So let's try to get stuff on the neutral or disinterested websites. Well, this Web 2.0 stuff is a way to do that because the data that you publish in this way can flow out to those other websites kind of all by itself. Here's an example with RSS. I don't have a very high page rank so I don't rank very high on what's the harm for certain Google searches but if you search on blog lines if you're looking for good blog content, if you search on blog lines for Chinese herbal remedies, there's one of my cases right in the top page of the results so maybe that'll get the attention of somebody who's interested in Chinese herbal remedies. And Geocoding, this is the most fantastic example and this is something that I think we need to do a lot more of. This is a Google Earth search. Suppose you had wanted to go to Scientology and have your whatever test did, your personality test and you were in Boston so you type Church of Scientology, Boston Mass into Google Earth and here you get the map and there's their building and it's on Beacon Street and there's a number of icons right there and some of those icons are propaganda from Scientology. But if you notice, there's a YouTube icon right in the middle of the intersection. If you click that YouTube icon, look what you get. So this is a way, this is not a skeptic website. I actually did not put that there but this is not a skeptic website, this is not a believer website, this is just a neutral tool out there, Google Earth, somebody just figuring out how do I drive to the Scientology building and lo and behold, you can get in their face and maybe teach them something, maybe keep them from going there. So I'm giving this sort of, for lack of a better name, geo-protesting and I think this is gonna be a big thing. I think we need to get out there and we need to geocode our content. Be the expert on homeopaths in your town, write a review of a homeopath and put your review on the front lawn of their building. I've actually encoded a lot of the cases on what's the harm, you can't see them yet because I just put the geocoding in a couple of weeks ago and it takes some time for this stuff to filter but I've put some kids killed by faith healing churches right in the parking lot of the church and Scientology death I put right on the Scientology building. So this is easy to do, especially if you use a site like Flickr or YouTube, when you post the content, look at those little advanced options and there's a way to do it, you can use Google Earth to poke around and find the actual coordinates that you need to use. And that's it for me. Here's my content, we'll take a question or two. Any questions for Tim? I'm gonna go to the back. Wait a minute, were you sitting up here earlier? Okay, hi, I just have a quick comment. I'd love to see a workshop based on this, I hope you can come back next year. Yeah, that's friendly, thank you. I plan to come back and come to sceptools.com and we will, well, it was up there but it's easy enough, sceptools.com and we'll have a dialogue about this and talk about some of these techniques and people try them out, we'll see what works, see what doesn't work and we'll kind of figure out ways to do this. There's a whole bunch of other stuff I didn't have time to talk about and we'll talk about it on that site. Hi, have you given any thought to how long this geo-protesting could actually last? I mean, it's great short term for us, I think it's a great idea but we're gonna do it, they're gonna do it, every conceivable organization is gonna do it and potentially ruin Google Earth for the long term and then they'll filter it out. How long do you think this will go? Yeah, I foresee that there will be a problem with that. People will just, like that Beacon Street office of Scientology will just end up having a million icons on top of it but on the other hand, that the other icon on top of the building is clearly Scientology propaganda that was placed there by Scientology through the submission process. So Google Earth does have some filtering features so you can see it or not see it but yeah, I do think over time, it may lessen as a useful tool but why not use it while it's available? Thank you for the informative talk, it's very useful. If we don't have the tools, we can't win it. So thank you, Tim, thanks very much. I appreciate it, James and Andy, personally. Thank you so much.