The Ninjutsu of the Internet-Savvy Skeptic at #SkepTech

Last week I gave a presentation at Skep-Tech in Minneapolis. It was a first-year conference put on by the student groups from three different universities in the area. They chose to focus it on technology and skepticism – which is right up my alley. So of course I was excited to speak.

I chose to focus on how skeptics need to cultivate specialized skills and learn new tools in our battle against irrationality on the world wide web. I decided to use the concept of a ninja as my metaphor. The video has already been posted and you can watch below.

After the jump you can see the slides that I presented and a list of links to tools and websites that I mentioned in the talk.

Slides

Here are the slides I presented, you can follow along with the video or go through them separately.

Links

My projects outside this blog:

• What’s the Harm?
• Today in Skeptic History for iPhone/iPad
• Skepticality podcast
• Virtual Skeptics webcast

Funding examples:

• The NCSE vs. creationism group numbers were directly gathered from Charity Navigator
• The Secular.org number comes from a March 9 email, the opposing figure from the Pew study “Lobbying for the Faithful“
• Unstoppable Secular Students by Liz Lyddell is the source of the Secular Students vs CRU numbers

Spirit and Unarmed:

• Yossi Sherrif quote is from here
• HootSuite is the tool I used to pre-schedule social media. Other tools exist such as SocialOomph

Curation:

• SkepTV curates skeptic and science videos
• RBUTR lets you curate rebuttals and debunks
• Skepticism conferences are listed in my guide at Lanyrd. Skep-Tech itself has a page there too.

Arming yourself:

• Unsourced finds the paper behind the story
• FourMatch can quickly validate if a photo has not been tampered with
• Pundit Tracker records the prediction track record for talking heads on the news
• Reality Drop gamifies the task spreading true climate science and debunking denialism
• Hypothes.is released an alpha version just after my talk
• Also browse the articles about tools here on this blog.

iPhone apps put skeptical experts in your pocket for those debates in the bar:

• Creationist Claims – creationism vs. evolution
• Skeptical Science – climate change denial (also for Android)
• Skeptics Dictionary – general skeptic topics

Other tools:

• See my articles here on Wikipedia and Susan Gerbic’s Guerrilla Skeptics project
• Skeptic Stack Exchange is where I answered the L.Ron question

SEO and Meta-data:

• Google’s SEO Starter Guide is all you need for SEO
• If your theme/template doesn’t do it for you already, help is available on adding Twitter cards to WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr. Be sure to test them here.
• If your theme/template doesn’t do it for you already, there’s help with Facebook Open Graph for WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr
• Google Authorship intructions
• Set the map location for a YouTube in Info & Settings > Advanced Settings. It is called Video Location

Espionage:

• NSLOOKUP is a program on your computer to look up web addresses. Here’s a smarter online version.
• WHOIS also may be on your computer, but also has an online version
• What Is My IP Address and IP2Location will show you where an IP address is in the world
• Google Image Search and TinEye let you upload an image to search for. Alan Rice documented how he outed fake psychics using it.

For more ideas of things you can do, watch my talk from TAM last year.