Tagliamonte: Instant messaging linguistics study

Instant messaging is not a spoiler of syntax in youth, U of T study suggests (Victoria Ahearn, Canadian Press, August 1, 2006) is a news story that is circulating about a study that Sali Tagliamonte and a student conducted about instant messaging. The good news is that we needn’t worry about IM.

Here’s a word to the wise (AWTTW): Instant messaging (IM), which is often riddled with acronyms like LOL (laugh out loud) and TTYL (talk to you later), is not the spoiler of syntax that some think it is but rather “an expansive new linguistic renaissance,” suggests a new study from the University of Toronto.

Here is the conclusion of an abstract submitted to the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference in October of 2005:

These findings challenge the deleterious perceptions of IM and suggest that they have been over-blown in the media. Instead, IM is vibrant new medium of communication with its own unique style
(see also Herring 2003, 2004). We will elaborate an argument that IM is an illuminating reflection of
the dynamic ongoing, normal processes of linguistic change that are currently underway in the English
language. Moreover, we will suggest that it may well provide a ‘bellwether of future [socio linguistic]
trends’ (Schiano et al. 2002).

See OMG, its so PC! Instant Messaging and Teen Language.

Bemer and the History of Computing

The History of Computing Project is another collection of timelines and biographies sponsored by computer museums in Holland, Poland and elsewhere. There are some gaps, like the empty biography of Bill Atkinson and a history of Apple that is “withdrawn for revision”. It is, however, cleanly designed, and covers a lot.

Some of the information is useful like the biography of Bob Bemer who contributed the ESCape key and worked on ASCII, among other things, at IBM. (See CNN – 1963: The debut of ASCII – July 6, 1999 or the archive of Bob Bemer‘s personal site – he has passed away
.) Thanks to Matt for this.

RefViz: Bibliographic Visualization

RefViz Screen Image RefViz is a visualization tool from Thomson Researchsoft (who also publish EndNote and ProCite). RefViz lets you visualize “galaxies” of bibliographic references showing clusters of references by keywords. It also has a matrix view where you can see how keywords correlate.

Save time and learn more about what is happening in the literature with RefViz. With this powerful text analysis and visualization software program, you get an intuitive framework for exploring reference collections based on content. (From the Product Info page.)

RAMAC and Interactivity: Pictorial History of Media Technology

IBM 305 RAMACPictorial History of Media Technology is a slide show history of computing and media, especially video technology. It is on a site dedicated to “Capacitance Electronic Discs or CED’s, a consumer video format on grooved vinyl discs that was marketed by RCA in the 1980’s.” The slide show has pictures of the IBM 305 RAMAC Computer with what was the first disk drive in production. What’s so important about the RAMAC?

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in a blog entry on An Excerpt from Mechanisms, Professor RAMAC and in an article for Text Technology, Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive, argues that,

Magnetic disk media, more specifically the hard disk drive, was to become that technology and, as much as bitmapped-GUIs and the mouse, usher in a new era of interactive, real-time computing.

Krischenbaum is right that interactivity wouldn’t be possible without random access memory and he takes this in an interesting direction around inscription. I look forward to his book.

Pictorial History of Media Technology

Pictorial History of Media Technology is a slide show history of computing and media, especially video technology. It is on a site dedicated to “Capacitance Electronic Discs or CED’s, a consumer video format on grooved vinyl discs that was marketed by RCA in the 1980’s.” The slide show has pictures of the IBM 305 RAMAC Computer with what was the first disk drive in production.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in a blog entry on Matthew G. Kirschenbaum: An Excerpt from MechanismsProfessor RAMAC and in an article for Text Technology, Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive, argues that,

Magnetic disk media, more specifically the hard disk drive, was to become that technology and, as much as bitmapped-GUIs and the mouse, usher in a new era of interactive, real-time computing.

Krischenbaum is right that interactivity wouldn’t be possible without random access memory and he takes this in an interesting direction around inscription. I look forward to his book.

Keven Steele: Photo.menu

Steele Photo of TorontoKevin Steele’s Photo Menu page has a large collection of small photo essays by Steele. He has a nice clean touch – small numbers of images arranged on a white background using repetitions of different elements.

Steele is a designer who cofounded Mackerel an innovative early Toronto multimedia company that Cory Doctorow says,

“Together, they built the first iteration of a project that would go on to virtually create the market for multimedia in Canada. They laughed. They smoked. They blew a bunch of doobs.”

Previously I blogged his new site for Smackerel where he and David Goff have some great essays on early multimedia – see Mackarel Smackarel.

XFN – XHTML Friends Network

XFN – XHTML Friends Network is a way to tag relationships. Here is an example:

<a href="http://jeff.example.org" rel="friend met">...

The attribute “rel” uses a set of simple keywords to describe the relationship between the author of the page linking from to the person represented by the page (blog or home page) linking to. Interestingly, XFN was designed to only allow positive or neutral relationships.

What can you do with XFN? Well … in principle it will allow the graphing of relationships between people representative sites. rubhub.com is an XFN lookup engine to which you can add your page and then, once it has crawled your site you can see the relationships linking out or in.

I discovered this playing with Word Press which has incorporated it into its links/blogroll feature.

The Flâneur and the Arcade: Hypertext on Walter Benjamin’s, The Arcades Project

Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk: Reading in the Ruins by Giles Peaker is a hypertext project that brings together passages from Benjamin’s The Arcades project on themes like the the flâneur and the prostitute. Benjamin’s project is about fragmentary spectacle in the city, it is itself a collection of fragments, and the hypertext by Peaker re-represents thus. In some sense, this pre-modern moment of the flâneur and the arcade, is the urban precursor to the liesurely browser in the arcade of the web – watching, and through his (her) blog, posing for others.

The arcades were replaced after the convulsions of 1848 in the Second Empire by the great halls of industry of modernity according to David Harvey in Paris: Capital of Modernity (Routledge, 2003). The arcades were scaled up to the modern exhibition spaces from Les Halles to the Crystal Palace. The Paris arcades, thanks to critical interest Benjamin, have become a way to think through the spectacle of the hypertextual (and therefore fragmentary) web. Thanks to Marcel O’Gorman for pointing this intersection out to me.

Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine

Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine is another service that lets you create custom search engines that only search a “Searchroll” set of domains/sites. You can have multiple Searchrolls and you can create small Rollyo search panels for your site.

They are onto something, especially if they allowed hierarchies of shared (public) Searchrolls. The down side of the service is the limit on sites you can include (25) and the advertising that shows up in the results.

Here is one I created form my personal website www.geoffreyrockwell.com:


Sophos: US has the highest Spam output

US Spam Decline Stalled in Q1 according to a Sophos press release. This press summarizes where spam is coming from – 23.2 % originates in the US. What is interesting is the growth in European zombie networks that are advertised. The press release links to a picture of a Russian ad advertising services. Most spam is now coming from zombies or bots. In effect we are sending ourselves spam.

The United States accounts for the highest spam output as a country, but together China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan account for almost half of the worldwide spam output, making Asia the top offending continent. In addition when ranked by continent, Europe has now surpassed North America and has risen to the second position on the chart with a marked rise from Q1 2006 due to increased zombie activity.

If it can be shown that the poor security design of Windows is responsible for so many machines being hijacked by malware, does that mean Microsoft bears some responsibility for all the spam?