Public Relations and Blogs

On Wednesday (November 30th) I participated in a panel organized by the Canadian Public Relations Society, Toronto titled “Wake Up and Smell the Blogs!”. I was the token academic on the panel chaired by Michael O’Connor Clarke whose personal blog is Uninstalled.

The focus was mostly on how to use blogs in public relations and how to get attention from journalists. Jack Kapica of the Globe and Mark Evans of the National Post, both have good blogs on the tech industry. Kapika’s is hosted by the Globe, Evans’ is not hosted by the Post. What does that say? John Oxley from Microsoft (see Canadian IT Managers) talked about Microsoft supporting bloggin by employees. There is a lot of anxiety about letting personal blogs loose and not being able to control the message of an organization, and he explained how Microsoft is trying to use blogs to provide a more personal and transparent face. Rick Segale (who used to work for Microsoft and is now a venture capitalist) spoke forcefully about the virtues of blogging and the need for passion.

I realized by the end that I am a very different blogger than the other panel members. I have a freedom to say what I want that most in industry (and yes, the media is an industry) do not. I also don’t have justify what I write in terms of attention – this blog doesn’t need to be read widely to be worth it. Finally, I realized, again, how blogging is not about the technology, it is about voice and engagement. It is a sign that web technologies are maturing when things like RSS and XML are not really the issue, it what you do with them and how they are hidden.
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Historical Visualizations

Matt Jensen of NewsBlip has pointed me to work he and others are doing on historical visualization. See, for example, the technical report on Semantic Timelines that he wrote. Historical Visualizations, by David Staley in the JAHC: Journal of the Association for History and Computing (vol. III, no. 3, Nov. 2000) surveys the ways visualization is used in history from concepts to timelines.
Another similar project is the Temporal Modelling project led by Johanna Drucker. She and Bethany Nowviskie have been working on visual forms of knowledge production. See their Prototype Designs for a temporal vocabulary which I blogged earlier at 3D Timelines.

TagTagger

Judith sent me a link to Tag Tagger which proposes to develop a system for tracking and tagging tags. The proposal is a joke by The Silent Penguin (“Making a dent – somewhere”), but one which points to the infinite regress of information. Tags and links become information at which point they too need to be tagged and linked … see Technorati Tags. (No joke is too funny to be implemented.)

Which reminds to write about Tags, known to the rest of us as “keywords” or “subjects”. In some usability work we are doing on the TAPoR portal we found our users had no idea what “tags” were. Obviously they are not digi-literate enough.

CS Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia

The Guardian has a thoughtful article about CS Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia, titled His dark materials after Philip Pullman’s trilogy. Why Alison Lurie titled the article about Lewis after Pullman’s trilogy is a bit of a mystery; yes, Pullman is quoted on the controversies around Lewis’s sexism, racism and “muscular” Christian propaganda, but is Lurie suggesting Pullman (another Oxford fantasy writer) has special authority? Or it is just a good title for a story on the a series we loved as kids and now find distasteful for their incoherence and racism. See also Pullman attacks Narnia film plans on Pullman’s critique and The Narnia Skirmishes on the controversy around the release of the Disney version.
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flowerGarden

flowerGarden by greg judelman is a “web-baed software application, produced in Flash, for real-time soica network and conversation visualization.” It produces a TextArc like visualization of people in conversation and concepts they discussed. Judelman uses a flower of petals for people in a way that makes the visualization look like a garden of words with flowers blossoming. This is thanks to Bethany Nowviskie.

TagCloud

TagCloud is both a way of showing word or tag frequency and tool for content analysis. TagCloud.com has a tool that I think will give you a tagcloud for placing in your blog. The words are sized by importance and link to lists or related entries. A cool idea of content analysis interface that provides a dynamic folksonomy.

TagCloud.com links to a good article on Folksonomy in the Wikipedia.

Web Crawler: Nutch

Nutch is “open source web-search software. It builds on Lucene Java, adding web-specifics, such as a crawler, a link-graph database, parsers for HTML and other document formats, etc.” There is a Nutch Wiki with links to news, presentations and articles on it.

Nutch is basically a open Google-like engine that indexes an intranet (or the web) and gives you search capability. This sort of tool could be useful if there were ways to adapt it to discipline specific crawling.

Coté: the Dispositif

My colleague Mark Coté is working with an interesting idea borrowed from Foucaut, the “dispositif”. He has a short paper/abstract in the Proceedings of the GENEALOGIES DE LA BIOPOLITIQUE. He defines dispositif as,

The dispositif’s something literally “lost in translation” with English-language interlocutors’ a grid of intelligibility; a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and nondiscursive elements that come together in response to an urgent need, a combinatory machine that allows us to ‘see’ and ‘speak’ and in the process producing not ‘ideology’ but their own ‘truths’. (Coté, Mark, “The Soft Revolution”,
Conference Proceedings : Genealogies of Biopolitics, Oct. 18, 2005)

How is a dispositif a machine? How is it different from a tool? Does it give us a way of understanding the limitations of tools?
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