vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Social Webs for dot Edu

academia.edu is a social app for academics. Slick front end but am concerned that it seems primarily orientated around reflecting existing institutions and their structures. The site is built around institutions, and the problem with this is that I’m not sure I want to know who is at institution x, but rather who is interested in y, then where are they? The other problem is simply that institutional architectures change all the time, my ‘department’ and its ‘location’ have changed at least four times. The location change might not matter, not so sure about the renaming that goes on though.

This is an interesting exercise, early adopters already in there, so be interesting to see what it might be able to develop into.

Spook Country

Have just finished reading Gibson’s “Spook Country“. Enjoyed it immensely. Gibson’s trajectory is interesting as his early and seminal novels are all in a future not yet arrived, much more plainly sci-fi, but his two most recent books are deeply immersed in the technologically and culturally present. “Pattern Recognition” largely described a proto videoblogging art project while this more recent one combines locative art with post Iraq politics as information exchange and encryption. The cover mentions Chandler, that touchstone of noir writing, but for my money Elmore Leonard is the man here. The mix of characters, their patois of not just voice but practice and a narrative of divergent parts that we just now will converge. Look at his ten rules of writing and then tell me, in “Spook Country” what does Hollis Henry look like? Tito?

Automate Me

The automatic upgrader for WordPress plugin is nice. Install and it then does as the name says. As I teach things like blogging to undergraduates I remain stuck (bemused and muddled) by the ways in which the rapid pace of development and change is either invisible, or perhaps just part of the ether, for these students. Of course it could also be more simply that as I approach 50 things seem to happen much more quickly than when you’re 20! But to think that from when I first started blogging to today the systems would have the sophistication, infrastructure and so on that they do, well, it is up there with the early history of the printing press. A collective, shared, and distributed contribution to the tools and then the writing of the content itself, as well as a shift from something that is so foregrounded as an explicit technology (now install this via FTP, replace this file but not that one) to just ‘click here’ to upgrade and let’s get on with making stuff.

Knots

Today in an honours workshop we had a discussion about the nature and quality of a knotty problem. In honours the aim is to find a knotty problem and then through the course of your research see how the knotty problem leads to a change in what you know. This change is not how you now know more, but that you now know differently from before. The knot that is the problem doesn’t deflect you (you don’t detour around it to avoid it) but changes you as a result of its intransigence. This is a knowing differently, a knowing more, which is quite distinct from now knowing more facts about something.

Identifying this change and discussing it in your conclusion shows what you have learnt, and is the major learning outcome from honours.

Growing

Got this post about Tom Fishburne via Jeremy. I love this:

We’ve all heard the expression, “you can’t cut your way to growth”, but most organizations are equipped with cutting tools, not with growing tools.

Places and Names

When I went to the annual edMedia conference in 2004 in Lugano I caught a train from Zurich to Lugano. One of those Swiss trains that runs like, well, clockwork (it had to be said). I caught a slow train, stopping at quite a few stations, not one of the bigger faster intercity, inter-country expresses. Leisurely travel along valleys with cloud tagged mountains. One town was called Zug. In English “Zug” is just a wonderful word, bordering on the absurd. There should be more places called Zug. We need more places called Zug.

Phone Etiquette

Hard to be a hip metrosexual middle aged male. Take mobile phones. Every now and then I’ve noticed someone driving talking into their mobile phone as they hold it out in front of them. I guess this counts as somehow hands free since it’s on loudspeak? Today a sharp suited gentleman was walking up the street talking into his phone the same way. I don’t know why he didn’t feel the need to hold it in the conventional manner, speaker to ear, microphone somewhere around your cheek. Perhaps he just didn’t want to appear to be talking to himself, after all sometimes it is difficult to tell. Is this the new phone style?

Straight To Web

Via ars technica, Michael Moore will release his next doco straight to web, for free. It is called “Slacker Uprising“. Seems it is primarily a political act rather than an experiment as it is about Moore’s tour in to politicise youth for the 2004 presidential elections.

GPS Cinema

GPSfilm is an open source system for GPS aware cinema. As their blurb rather nicely says “not a moving picture a picture moving”. Worth reading the about screen since point two:

The movies are also interchangeable and easily matched to any place. By creating this new type of film viewing experience in an open, collaborative way, the artist hopes that both developers and filmmakers will begin to explore the idea even further.

seems to be recognising the importance of granularity for distributed film narratives.

Media Symposium

Thursday, Hotel Sorrento with all the teaching staff from Media participating in a two day symposium. Been going well, the idea is to actually share what we are all working in (since amongst teaching, admin and so on we lose sense of what we all do as research) and on, critique it and also hopefully provide material towards a larger publication. It really does work to get off campus, out of the city, and to just have time for the one activity. Lunch is important.