And now for the best movie web site I’ve seen in a long time, Be Kind Rewind. The premise is that the web is erased (by Jack Black, presumably) and various other web sites have to be sweded, which has something to do with coming from Sweden (and “sweet”?). There is a two page PDF that explains it all and examples like a swede Google. It looks like paper reverse engineering of a web design.
Thanks to Calen for this.
The Charms of Wikipedia is a charming review essay about editing the Wikipedia by Nicholson Baker in the New York Review of Books (Volume 55, Number 4 · March 20, 2008). In the review essay he talks John Broughton’s Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, which is just that – a manual for editing the Wikipedia. Baker talks about trying to rescue articles proposed for deletion and concludes with,
My advice to anyone who is curious about becoming a contributor—and who is better than I am at keeping his or her contributional compulsions under control—is to get Broughton’s Missing Manual and start adding, creating, rescuing. I think I’m done for the time being. But I have a secret hope. Someone recently proposed a Wikimorgue—a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren’t libelous or otherwise illegal. Like other middens, it would have much to tell us over time. We could call it the Deletopedia.
This reminds me of another story about the Wikipedia and its founder, Larry Wales. It turns out that Wales has been dating the bizarre Canadian conservative Rachel Marsden (infamous in Canada for a harassment case with her SFU swim coach.) Wales apparently broke up with her on the Wikipedia and she is retaliating by selling his T-shirt on E-Bay. See the Globe and Mail story, Ms. Marsden’s cyberspace breakup: tit-for-tat-for-T-shirt by Siri Agrell, March 4, 2008. There is a longer article with links to the relevant materials from Fox, titled, Wikipedia Founder’s Fling With Columnist Ends in Nasty Public Breakup. There is some question as to whether he was using his position to sanitize her Wikipedia entry.
I went to a talk by David Theo Goldberg who also heads up the UCHRI (University of California Humanities Research Institute). His talk wasn’t about networked politics, but he repeatedly mentioned flash mobs as a new political phenomenon and then he went on to praise the long blog entry Barack Obama and The Long Tail of Politics by Isaac Garcia of Central Desktop, the company whose wiki-like collaboration software was used by Obama to organize California. The blog entry is one of the best explanations of the Obama phenomenon I’ve come across.
An interesting story on a study from MIT. Using datamining techniques, researchers looked at corporate email use and draw some interesting conclusions on productivity — measuring information-worker productivity being an area considered particularly difficult, apparently. The specific conclusions presented in the overview aren’t breathtaking, indeed, they rather confirm the sorts of things about people I like to assume, and their broader conclusions sound slightly breathless, but plausibly move beyond mere speculation.
What is most interesting is the appearance of email as a starring player at a time when most people talking about digital communication seem to have given up on it; of further interest would be application of some ideas behind the research to non-email communication.
First found at bettercourse.org (via infovore) where more interesting comments may be found.
The New York Times has a story by Norimitsu Onishi,
Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular – New York Times, about how novels written in snippets on cell phones and posted to special blogs and then published in print were five of the top ten best-selling novels.
The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by cellphone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004.
I wonder if the serialization over time builds anticipation and sales? Does writing them on a cell phone change the prose?
Right after Christmas I was involved in two events at the MLA. I organized and presided over a session on Open Digital Communities which was nicely written up by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Tech and the Humanities: A Report from the Front Lines – Chronicle.com.
I also participated in a newish format for the MLA – what is now being called a digital roundtable on Textual Visualization organized by Maureen Jameson where I showed visualization tools available through TAPoRware and the TAPoR portal.
Martin Mueller and James Chartrand both pointed me to an article in the Economist on volunteer computing, Spreading the load. The article nicely covers a number of projects that enlist volunteers over the web, like those I noted in Tagging Games. They don’t really distinguish the projects like BOINC that enlist volunteer processing from the ones like BOSSA (and the Mechanical Turk) that enlist volunteer human contributions, and perhaps there isn’t such a difference. It is always a human volunteering some combination of their time and computing to a larger project.
What Martin has suggested is that we think about how humanities computing projects might be enabled by distributed skill support. Could we enlist volunteer taggers for electronic texts with the right set up? Would we need to make it a game like ESP to check tagging choices against each other? The only example I can think of in the humanities is the Suda On Line (SOL), a project where volunteers are translating the Suda, “Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda, a 10th century CE compilation of material on ancient literature, history, and biography.” (From the SOL About page.) Can that infrastructure be generalized to a translating and enrichment engine for language, literature, history and philosophy?
Stories like this one from CNET, Is this the end of Netscape?, are saying that AOL won’t support Netscape past February. See BBC News and Tom Drapeau’s blog entry announcing this.
Netscape Navigator was created by Marc Andreessen (after he co-authored Mosaic at the NCSA) and released in 1994. When Netscape went public in 1995 marks the beginning of the dot-com bubble. AOL bought Netscape in 1998 for billions of dollars. What were they thinking?
Matt pointed me to a Stanford class on Facebook web site: Home The Stanford Facebook Class: Persuasive Apps & Metrics. Here is a quote from the home page explaining the interest of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab in Facebook,
In 2007 the most effective persuasive technology has been Facebook. People in our lab have researched persuasive technology since 1993, and we’ve found the fastest path to insight is studying what’s working best in the real world. Today’s Facebook experience has so many elements of persuasion, so we’ve decided to dive in deep. Our goal is to understand the psychology of Facebook. This page gives an initial overview of our project.
As a course it is impressive (see especially the speakers they lined up), but I found the press more interesting as they analyzed the phenomenon. Tim Oren in his blog entry, Facebook Apps: Playing the Viral Lottery writes the following,
 You’re better off thinking of a Facebook app as a virtual form of social stroke, a sort of networked take on what we called New Games once upon a time. “Here, have a hug, pass it on.” Indeed, among the most successful of the Stanford apps were hugs, kisses, send Love, and a pillow fight. There were more complex games and multi-user projects, but those were the teams that found they needed to simplify and/or restart with a new application to attract an audience. The summary learnings of the class were simple and to the point: Start simple, go viral, then deepen the engagement – before attempting to monetize. Watch your metrics and learn fast – teams were iterating versions on 12 to 48 hour schedules.
This doesn’t bode well for analytical widgets that are complex, but it is great to see there is still room for the small student team to do something that gets traction.
My friend Laurence pointed me to Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for her Nobel Prize for Literature in which she compares the hunger for books in Africa to the excess we have.
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution.
I want to give all sorts of glib answers to Lessing. I could say that those who spend hours on the web are reading too. I want to say that the nostalgia for books reminds me of the nostalgia for an oral life before books one finds in Plato’s Phaedrus. But these quibbles miss the point. There is a hunger for books in many places and a waste of books in our places. Or, the point is a question to us all,
“Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.”
The web is not that space. It is a chattering noisy public space with endless distractions, not unlike our libraries stuffed with the excess we cannot grasp. The space of writing may be near the webrary, but not too close. Those who are far from webraries – those who hunger for just part of a book with a glass of water shame us.
That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is – we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?
I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us.