Diablog December2003

What is Mediology?

I´m constantly reminded of all I do not know. Among those I found the term “mediology” which seems to something I should have some knowledge about. I have not read Frank Hartmann´s new book - Mediologie - Ansätze einer Medientheorie der Kulturwissenschaften - but it made med discover Régis Debray:
In a short article, ”What is Mediology?“, Debray writes: ”In spite of its suffix, mediology does not claim the status of a science, and even less something “new” (because it is not in itself a discovery). Despite its root, mediology is not a sociology of media systems under another name. Mediology would like to bring to light the function of medium in all its forms, over a long time span (since the birth of writing), and without becoming obsessed by today’s media”. I do like that approach, maybe as a counterpoise to all the talk about “new media”. (Not to discredit Lev Manovich, who has written a brilliant book, but Sergei eisenstein might as well have written a book titled ”The Language of New Media” in the 1920s).

Debray also explain mediology in an article published in Wired back in 1995:
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Moblogging for other people too

Mfop2 allows you to moblog without setting up any special scripts on your own mail server. All you have to do is register some of your blog details and you will be able to post to your blog from your mobile by emailing your blog entry with images attached.
Mfop2 also help you save time typing, by allowing you to store your own list of shortcut strings which will expand into longer strings of your choosing before being posted.

Dangerous almanac carriers

- Hey, he´s got a gun…
- Don´t worry, trust you almanac!

Salon tells that the FBI issues alert against almanac carriers: ”The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning (via Eirik N.).
Maybe the scariest part is that this isn´t a joke.

Wikipedia need contributions

A lot of people ask for your money on the web. This letter for Wikipeia Foundation seems to be among those worth noticing. Wikipedia has technical difficulties due to lack of hardware in order to cope with routine failures.

”The solution to this problem is to purchase now sufficient hardware to give us enough excess capacity so that we can be reliable. I estimate that $20,000 in hardware would get us to a point where we have reserves to handle the failure of any one machine. Additionally, we would be well-poised to continue our track record of astounding growth”.

The encyclopedia of new media

”The encyclopedia of new media“, it almost sounds like a contradiction in terms. With technology changing rapidly I guess large parts of this book will be obsolete long before you´ve got the value of your $125 investment.

Publish del.icio.us Links on Your Site

The previous post about del.icio.us led me to Jeffrey Veen who writes about The Easiest Way to Publish del.icio.us Links on Your Site. This article links to Feedroll.com which actually turned out to be a nice way displaying the recent comments in this blog too. That is until I figure out how to do this the way I want it to be in Wordpress.

Update: Someone helped me out on this one. Actually the Wordpress support forum has become a very useful resource.

del.icio.us

Some years ago I made myself a database, using FileMaker, in order to keep track of all the links I came by while surfing the web. I display some of the links in my “norwegian” blog. Now it seems like del.icio.us can do some of the job in a better way.

One problem remains though, part of the reason I made the database was that links tend to become “rotten” after a while. Therefore I also have made the habbit of copying the content into the databse for later reference. I do not see how del.icio.us can help me with that part, but it seeems to be a nice service anyway.

Web Page Analyzer

This service enables you to test your web site speed: Enter a URL to calculate page size, composition, and page download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and finds the total for each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page display time and website speed.

Dropload

Is your mailbox full of heavy attachments? Dropload might be what you are looking for. It´s a service where you can drop your files off and have them picked up by someone else at a later time. The recipients you specify get an email with instructions on how to download the file. Files are removed from the system after 48 hours.

To anyone “dropping” by; Merry Christmas! Dinner is waiting, have to go…..

Blogs explained

Howard Dean´s blog has a nice explaination of what blogs are, what they might be used for and how to actually use them. It´s writtten for those who hasn´t got a clue in the first place, but that is perhaps what makes it interesting.
I find Dean´s campain impressive in many ways, the fact that the campain-blog recieves about 2300 comments per day can be added to that list. The Dean’s campaign has also commissioned a game where you are supposed to do different things in order to win more supporters (see Jill´s writings about this).

Back to Iraq

Jill writes about Chris Allbritton, a journalist who is using his blog in order to finance his travelling to Iraq as an independent journalist.

Social Software and E-Learning

Eva Kaplan-Leiserson writes about how social software is used for learning. The article offers several interesting links to different theories on why social software is booming. (via Many-2-many)

You also might want to look into Peer-To-Peer: The Next Hot Trend in E-Learning?

RSS WinterFest 2004

“Looking At The Future of Syndication”
RSS WinterFest is a free Webcast about RSS and the future of Internet content syndication. The goal is to elevate the discussion about RSS and Internet content syndciation. The Webcast will use RSS and the open editing environment of a wiki so that concurrent discussions can take place during the Webcast.
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How people are using camera phones

Picturephoning.com has a number of examples of novel ways of using cameraphones. ”As these phones, widely popular, go mainstream, with image quality and picture snapping features improving with the launch of each new model, it is clear we have yet to scratch the surface on how private individuals and businesses will find ways to use them”.

Who killed Miss Norway?

I´ve always liked stories of hoaxes. This one which Tracy Spaight wrote about in Salon is intriguing : Five years ago, the news that a beauty pageant participant had died in a car crash stunned her virtual world friends. But was it really an accident?

Open Source Hardware

Open-source software has gone from being a hobby for geeks to become an industry-threatening operation over the last decade. Wired writes that ”Open-source advocates hope they can achieve the same results in the hardware industry by encouraging device manufacturers to incorporate the blueprints for various OpenCores technologies into their own designs, thus saving them time and money on research and development. This, in turn, is expected to lower the cost of hardware and even boost the development of more open-source software.”

Trust and Community on the Internet

Quite a few of the papers from this conference looks interesting. Have to look more into it later…
The conference presentations range from general theoretical models about conditions for the emergence of trust and communities to empirical studies of examples for cooperation, trust, and community on the Internet.

Impressive

Nazif Topçuoğlu has made some amazing photographs (found the site via Toril M.)with a lot of art-historical references. Images like some of these make me understand that I still have a long way to go.

Advanced java-scripting

This example, sorting and rebuilding a table using java-script is extremly fancy. It´s author is writing: ”We’ve got these tables that we’re using to display data at work, and like most tabular structures, they allow you to sort columns and so on. Basically, people seem to assume to do anything with these tables on the web, you have to go back to the server, sort out the data, and then re-display it. But in this day and age, we have a wonderful thing called JavaScript. It’s actually a lot more powerful than most people seem to realise”.

Ten Tips For A Better Weblog

Rebecca Blood has written ten tips for a better weblog. Here is a short version :

1. Choose an updating tool that is easy to use.
2. Determine your purpose
3. Know your intended audience.
4. Speak in a real voice about real things.
5. Write about what you love.
6. Update frequently.
7. Establish your credibility. To the best of your ability, be truthful.
8. Link to your sources.
9. Link to other weblogs.
10. Be patient.

Bonus tip: Have fun!

You might also want to have a look at Blood´s writngs about weblog ethics.

Xhtml Friends Network

XFN (Xhtml Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. It provides the basis for a world-wide distributed network of personal connections. It´s simple and decentralized just like the Web itself. By placing the responsibility for adding XFN information to authors, the work of building up XFN data and keeping it current is distributed.

XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their <a href> tags, e.g.:

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

Proprietary data-owning services like Friendster could be to be superceded by XFN crawling and searching sites—a sort of “Friendorati”. The advantage of a Friendorati-style network is that it allows every individual to fully express themselves through personal weblogs and web sites, instead of to the limited degree permitted by a proprietary service’s user interface.

Blog on Blogs, a Weblog Review

Blog on Blogs is collaboration produced by the students of the Fall 2003 Introduction to New Media Studies course at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. The purpose of the project is to provide concise reviews of examples of several different “genres” of weblogs.

The reviews are written considering these factors:
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Report from Online Educa Berlin

Peter Isackson reports from Online Educa Berlin:
”… an interesting conference, offering a rich and diversified panorama of what people are actually doing with eLearning.
/../ While the background issues of organization and methods for universities and enterprises still attract the bulk of the presenters’ attention, several new themes have recently come to the fore and are likely to have more impact in the years to come. The ones that struck me this year were: flexibility, quality, culture and rich media.
/../ In contrast to previous conferences, the 2003 conference revealed two other tendencies I consider to be significant: the engagement of traditional publishers and, for almost everyone, a certain clear-headed honesty and frankness that hasn’t always been the dominant feature in this business”.

Content Syndication Program

The Nokia Content Syndication Program (NCSP) offers direct links to Nokia documents with RDF, RSS, and JavaScript. Nokia means business, beeing aware that Forum Nokia will never be the only resource developers use. Instead, Nokia wants to help other developer communities by providing simple, free access to Nokia content.
The XML Resources page might be worth visiting even if you´re not going to syndicate Nokias content.

Open Source video streaming

The VideoLAN project targets multimedia streaming of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels and live videos on a high-bandwidth IPv4 or IPv6 network in unicast or multicast under many OSes.
VideoLAN also features a cross-plaform multimedia player, VLC, which can be used to read the stream from the network or display video read locally on the computer under all GNU/Linux flavours, all BSD flavours, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, QNX, Familiar Linux…

Why Dean might be dead meat

Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s political guide, tells in an interview that the Internet is bigger than we have imagined in politics as in everything else: ”It’s the new age in which everybody is a publisher of a newspaper and they can circulate it to anyone who’s interested in reading it. And that period of freedom–that free exchange of ideas, unmediated by who has a station license or can afford paper and ink–really I think is just the essence of the Internet era.”
But Morris doesn´t belive the future is bright for democrats like Howard Dean: ”Let’s remember that the Internet is more male than female, more right-wing than left-wing, more upscale than downscale.” He’s saying that the Dean campaign is Netscape and the Republicans are Microsoft.

Size is no longer important

In 1937 Ronald Coase, winner of the Nobel prize in economy in 1991, realized that cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations. In the past this meant that complex tasks undertaken on vast scales required a huge organization. This was as true for the american political parties as it was for General Motors.

In Washington Post Everett Ehrlich writes that in ”the Internet has changed all that in one crucial respect that wouldn’t surprise Coase one bit. To an economist, the “trick” of the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually zero. So according to Coase’s theory, smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations. And that’s why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big onest of the Internet revolution on companies has been exactly what Ronald Coase predicted: Cheap information has made size less of an advantage in organizations. Accordning to Ehrlich this will influence on politics: ”… the challenge is unavoidable, and the future is coming on fast. Here are some predictions. First, if Dean loses the nomination, he will preserve his organizational advantage and reemerge as a third-party force four years from now. He has done with technology what Ross Perot could not do with money alone. Second, the evangelical right will become a separate political party in the near future, and will hold its own conventions and primaries. Like the Conservative Party in New York state, it will usually endorse Republican candidates. But evangelicals will use their inherent party-ness to make the Republican candidate stand in front of them and give a separate acceptance speech. And finally, in the next six or eight presidential elections, a third-party candidate will win the presidency”.

This led me to some papers with intriguing titles: ”Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm” and Network or Notwork? (actually loooking at Knowledge Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry) which is discussing tha “Paradox of Trading Ideas”.

PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

New York Times writes ”In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship’s foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft’s well-known ‘’slideware'’ program”.
The last part is citing Edvard Tufte: ”Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation – where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it”.
I´m going to use this for all its worth.

Update 04.01.04: An interview with Sherry Turkle from last september seems to be relevant to this post.

Fishing for Music

Wired: ”Media Lab Europe, research partner to MIT Media Lab, is testing tunA, a software application that employs Wi-Fi to locate nearby users, peek at their music playlist and wirelessly jack into their audio stream. Pronounced like the fish and signifying music “tunes” and “ad hoc” file sharing, tunA is being designed for wireless PDAs, cell phones and even its own hardware device.”
An what is the music-industry going to say?

Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment

The second Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment conference (TIDSE) will be held June 24-26 in Darmstadt. GrandTextAuto recommends the gathering, which is a mixture of technical papers / system building and design-oriented approaches.
Just a few days later BlogTalk is scheduled in Vienna!

Dichtung-Digital on Scandinavian Research

Markku Eskelinen has edited the latest issue of Dichtung-Digital (Special issue on Scandinavian Research) with contributions by, among others, Anders Fagerjord who discuss ”Four Axes of Rhetorical Convergence” (By the way, Fagerjord defended his thesis yesterday) and Lisbeth Klastrup who writes about ”Paradigms of Interaction. Conceptions and Misconceptions of the Field Today”.
I´m currently writing on something I hope will become a paper about “videoblogs” (right now it´s more like a specification for a prototype) and I´m looking forward to the next issue where Bo Kampmann Walther are going to write about “Cinematography and Ludology”. I´ll have to read Fagerjords thesis too.

Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview

Steve Jobs is interviewed by Rolling Stone. His, and Apple´s, approach to online music makes sende to me: ”Our position from the beginning has been that eighty percent of the people stealing music online don’t really want to be thieves. But that is such a compelling way to get music. It’s instant gratification. You don’t have to go to the record store; the music’s already digitized, so you don’t have to rip the CD. It’s so compelling that people are willing to become thieves to do it. But to tell them that they should stop being thieves – without a legal alternative that offers those same benefits – rings hollow.
Jobs also seems to be happy because ”almost every song and CD is made on a Mac – it’s recorded on a Mac, it’s mixed on a Mac, the artwork’s done on a Mac. Almost every artist I’ve met has an iPod, and most of the music execs now have iPods.

Weblogs in the Library and Information Science Environment

Anne Clyde has written a paper which provides an overview of weblogs in the library and information science environment as a whole. It focuses on weblogs as sources of information and weblogs as tools that libraries can use for contact with their clients and for promoting their collections and services.
Clyde’s Teaching Page on Weblogs is worth visiting.

Digital Storytelling and Weblogs

Mark Bernstein has published some notes from a lecture at the 2003 Digital Storytelling Festival in Sedona, Arizona. The notes contain sources mentioned in his talk.
The Festival had its own weblog.

Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network

Jills talk at Brown Univ. was titled “Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network” and was about using blogs with students.

Quite a few interesting links here, amomg those Anders Fagerjords writings about hypertext blogging.

The role of weblogs in Lott’s downfall

Gnovis has an article (PDF) which give a close examination of the journalistic timeline following Sen. Trent Lott’s comments about then-Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign, combined with studies regarding journalists’ use of the Internet, strongly suggests that online coverage and criticism of the senator pushed the story’s momentum until it broke out into the open.

What do people want out of a game?

Male and female EQ players seemed to be motivated by different goals. Male players seems to be more driven by achievement, while female players are more into the social aspects of the game. But it was equally clear that not all male players are driven by achievement, and not all female players are driven by the social aspect (via Terra Nova - lots of comments).

This project explores Richard Bartle’s 4 types as possible underlying motivations:

• Achievers are driven by in-game goals, usually some form of points gathering - whether experience points, levels, or money
• Explorers are driven to find out as much as they can about the virtual construct - including mapping its geography and understanding the game mechanics
• Socializers use the virtual construct to converse and role-play with their fellow gamers
• Killers use the virtual construct to cause distress on other players, and gain satisfaction from inflicting anxiety and pain on others

The case of Wikipedia

This paper employs team and club good theory as well as transaction cost economics to analyse the Wikipedia online community. An interpretative framework explains the outstanding success of Wikipedia thanks to a novel solution which reduces the transaction cost of erasing graffiti and therefore prevents attackers from posting unwanted contributions.

Personally I would like to look more into this taxonomy virtual communities:

Amazon storm the antiquarian book market

Amazon.com has acquired the rights to the British Library’s unique back catalogue, dragging the buying and selling of rare and out-of-print books into the dotcom age. The deal gives Amazon the right to use the British Library’s bibliographic catalogue, which contains 2.55 million books.
Robin Terrell, the managing director of Amazon.co.uk said: ”This is a massive deal. We have so far focused on books that are in print but now we can make available to users of the website millions of books going back hundreds of years”. The new service will be available through Amazon’s “Marketplace” on its website. Each title will have its own page on which sellers can post details of the copies that they have available and their prices.

Where´s Juliet?

Romeo gives you remote control of your mac via Bluetooth and a compatible mobile device, controlling programs such as iTunes and DVD Player etc. These convincing arguments makes me wish a new cellphone for Chistmas. And it´s more; Romeo makes it possible to use your mobile as a mouse, as a volume control, or as a method of telling your mac when you’re there. I just have to get this before I start lecturing in january.