Words’ End

You know what I’d like? I’d like a piece of OS X software that will pull a black veil over, black out, everything on my screen that’s not the window (of whatever software) I’m looking at. No cluttered desktop, no other windows, nothing. Like WriteRoom but letting me use, say, TextEdit.

And while we’re at it, I’d love the use of a Mac that can run Classic and has it installed.* For a full day, if possible. Anyone reasonably local (Boston-Providence) have access to such and a kind heart? :)

*I’d thought it stopped shipping with OS 10.4, but mindlace says it’s 10.3. So pre-10.3, I guess?

Four of the five electrical outlets I’ve tried to use to recharge my laptop don’t work.

As usual at such events, I’m getting a bit overwhelmed by the information flying at me, anyway. So will try to synthesize more later, in much less detail.

Edit: ha! there’s a live video feed in the neighboring room, and a ton of outlets! Thank you, fellow IRCer!

Linking in Web 2.0. Moderator: Saul Hansell, a reporter for The New York Times.

(I confess that it’s not clear to me yet what Web 2.0 is, exactly.)

Hansell: Think of the internet in terms of “cultural physics,” as a cyclotron that separates The Internet into Very Small Particles, each of which is “a piece of communication.” Based on their trustworthiness, they combine (link) into various compounds.

Nicholas Carr, former editor of the Harvard Business Review, book author, and blogger. Interested in the economic structure of “what we call Web 2.0″, in partic. how it influences how we consume media and other creative content. On consumption side, the link and other characteristics of W2 is disambiguate the units of consumption. Unit = not a newspaper or magazine but an article, for ex. On the production side, this means that each unit has to stand on its own economically (commercially) speaking.

Concern: even if you want the market to determine the above, what the hell is this market, that says everything has equal value, and that value is zero?

Martin Nisenholtz, Sr. VP, Digital Operations, The New York Times Company. Talks about writers who drive the most audience: people who write about less economically-connected topics tend to make less money!, regardless of how interesting/relevant their pieces are. Much else that I, sadly, missed.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia talks about the uneven representation of information about certain parts of the world, as compared to other parts. The internet is actually equalizing that a bit: reporters who write about, say, Africa have way more articles than they’re able to get print-published, but they can put them on the net. Wikipedia finds the internet to be amazingly subversive, and blogs are a large part of that (see also, Iran). Ethiopia, Wales says, has gone from being an extremely journalistically open country to a monstrous Big Brother. So people have gone on the net, which has connected three groups: Ethiopians, the Ethiopian diaspora, and the larger [interested] community.

Nisenholtz again: we can throw out all communally-created artifacts and nobody would miss them. The important stuff is created by individuals. Uproar on the IRC channel! Someone asks (online) whether we should throw out the Talmud.

Ethan Zuckerman, Fellow, Berkman Center, Harvard University, disagrees with Nisenholtz more eloquently than I do above.

Discussion ensues, and there’s too much going on on IRC – I’ll try to synthesize some of the most interesting thought from the channel later on.

Panelists roster:

Twenty-eight men.

Five women.

Of the latter, at least one is already not here. (Nancy Tellem of CBS was supposed to be on the first panel, and isn’t up there at the table. Maybe she came in late!)

I’m talking to you, people.

I’m sitting here at the Hyperlinked Society conference in Philadelphia, blogging it alongside mindlace. I’ll probly post something from each of the six panels and conclusion that has something interesting in it. Apologies if writing is incoherent. :) Also, these next few posts are notes; reflections later.

This thing is getting audio- and video-recorded; I’ll post a link if (when?) they post it online.

First session, “Mainstream Linking.” Jay Rosen, moderator, has asked the panelists how links work in their world and what they mean.

Tony Gentile, VP of Healthline, a vertical search engine focused on health information. They participate in search engine marketing – they specifically go out to buy links from Google, Yahoo etc. So which links to buy, how to present them to the user, and what will the user see if they click on the ad link? Generally with linking there’s a feeling of reciprocity, he says, but one of the companies they had a contract with made back-linking a mandate. The link has transcended hypertext: they’ve developed an API that emulates a link structure. Also, they work to circulate people to the main areas of their site. In addition, esp. with health information, they have to be discerning as to whom they link to – and their whitelist (algorithmically and somewhat manually generated) contains about 170,000 companies.

Tom Hespos, President of Underscore Marketing, LLC, “a marketing guy” says the moderator. Hespos works with clients to get them “more linked in” – but he’s also a journalist and a blogger, and that gives him a perspective that other marketing people may not have. Points to the debut of Google as the turning point in link importance. Google brought relevance back to search; gave links an intrinsic value that they’d never had before. This might have done a bit of evil, in giving that value to links, despite Google’s motto (“do no evil”). Linking is a vote of confidence: page A linking to page B puts in a vote for page B. This is true in blogging world; businesses want links so that they can be found, vote-of-confidence has nothing to do with their attitude re: links, and that – Hespos says – should change, and quickly.

Eric Picard, Manager, Ad Product Planning, Microsoft. (Gasp! Not the Evil Empire!!1! Ohh, I’ll get over it.) Works on team called “MS Digital Advertising Solutions.” Focused on long-range planning and emergent media. He spends time trying to understand the economic model of hyperlinking – connecting people to information and people to businesses that might be relevant to that information. He started out as a multimedia designer and moved to things like VR, and then the web. He takes a broad view to the issues of hyperlinking. Thinks about the ways in which people “move through information.” Thinks about video game advertising, digital TV, areas into which people step for the first time in a commercial setting. Question is, how do we do this commercial setting (advertising) that is beneficial both to the consumer and to the advertiser – or at least doesn’t infuriate the consumer? MS, he says, should be thought of as an “ecosystem company” (?!); defends the “good job” MS is doing, supporting the “ecosystems” they work with (operating systems, for example, the MS search engine…)

Jay Rosen, “a student of multimedia,” reflects on above:

- Raymond Williams (sociologist) says in Culture and Society: “There are no masses; there are only ways of seing people as masses.” He meant that you can’t go into a northern England home and find a Mass Person. People are complicated. They don’t obey formulas. What does exist are ways of addressing people as masses. Today, all the past ways of seeing people as masses are coming apart, they no longer work so well. Now we have to specialize, and learn how to see people as a public, a community, knowledge producers in addition to being consumers. We’re good at connecting people UP – to companies, to central powers. Broadcasting is a good example of that. Today, a lot of the transformation and disruption in the media world is because the internet is good at connecting people laterally, not just vertically. The cost of like-minded people to find/meet each other has gone way, way down. If they’ve found each other, in many ways they don’t need the mass media. This radically changes the balance of power in the media world.

This became even more interesting when Rosen discovered blogs through a student who showed him Instapundit, just one link from which can instantly give an obscure blog ten thousand readers. Whoa. Rosen’s blog is PressThink, and it blew his mind that he could now write about media without having to run his writing through that same media. Holy freedom, Batman.

Q&A session I’ll leave for Ethan to describe in more detail.

E-mail mckin-at-edrex-dotttt-com. Go ahead, do it.

(E-Fest 06 is being held at the McKinney Conference Room, at the Watson Institute for International Studies.)

Now, if you ever see a sticker somewhere with an email address ending in @edrex.com on it, you’ll know what to do.

Hello from E-Fest 2006, being held at Brown right now. It’s lunchtime; the first session of papers has passed, as has the first evening of performances (last night, natch). A few thoughts so far. They aren’t intended to be an exhaustive review of the event, just things that occurred to me so far.

The most immediately striking thing, for me (thanks to reading Dr. B et al., and recent women’s issues debacles in the news*) is that, out of the twenty-two official participants, three are women. Three.

Aside from that, however, the event’s pretty interesting thus far. One of the highlights at last night’s performance was Aya Karpinska‘s reading of open.ended. Aya will be the next electronic creative writing fellow in Brown’s Literary Arts MFA program.

Judd Morrissey did a fantastic reading as well, but I can’t find it online; structurally it was similar to his The Jew’s Daughter, which is also a worthwhile read.

Nick Montfort‘s presentation particularly interested me from a pedagogical perspective. He has been working on software that, when overlayed onto a pre-existing piece of interactive fiction (in yesterday’s case, the classic Adventure), allows the user to read the game’s text transformed into different narrative styles. Victorian, for example, peppers setting descriptions etc. with “Reader,”; explicit, when you say “go west,” informs you that you have decided to go west; you have relocated yourself westward; you are now in $otherlocation; you see objects around you. That sort of thing. It seems that, applied to [IF in] other languages, this could be a useful tool for language learning!

Then there’s today. Today’s first session was titled “Memory and Real Time.” It was pretty whirlwind, but one thing that Braxton Soderman was talking about caught my attention: the place of criticism, theory and critical thinking within the increasingly real-time digital culture. (I could be misquoting; will correct later if needed, but this was for me the essence of his talk.)

Briefly: text encoding as literary analysis/research is critical thinking “on the run” (which, for Braxton, was: you get an idea and “run with it”). On the other end of that, the software that eventually shows you a larger picture is also “running”. This feels more real-time than paper writing.

Networked publication of that research, as well as online collaboration (VHL, instant messaging), are also much more real-time than publications in journals and then responses published at a much later date.

Not particularly deep, but a useful snippet for theorizing Roland^HT!

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*And speaking of South Dakota’s legislative idiocy, check out the fuck-you message sent by the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe to the white boys in the state senate there. How much ass does this woman kick?! Needless to say, please donate… or don’t, but we’re not having an abortion debate in the comments, mmkay?

Auspicious, that I only discovered Wikiversity today: voting that will determine whether the project will go ahead will end at midnight UTC!

The purpose of the Wikiversity project, which will ultimately reside at www.wikiversity.org, is to build an electronic institution of learning that will be used to test the limits of the wiki model both for developing electronic learning resources as well as for teaching and for conducting research and publishing results (within a policy framework developed by the community).

More information is at the link above. The idea needs work and much development and goodwill, but is promising. I’d be excited to participate, that’s for sure.

Please take a moment to create* a (free) new account and vote if you’re even remotely interested in this; they need a two-thirds majority to launch the beta. At the time of this writing it’s 197 Yes to 83 No, which is encouraging but awfully close.

*The interface for creating a new account is a bit misleading. Just fill in the username and password (and email, if you want) fields, and click on “Create new account.”

All I have for a company is a URL. The whois information on the domain name gives me a company name. They’ve registered the domain through Domains By Proxy in Arizona, and their info is mostly private, although the domain server names are different from both the company name and DBP and so may help. I want to find out whether they’re legit, and whether they might have anything to do with (drumroll) SPAMMERS. Is there any publically available information that might help me with this?

I’ve never done any 3D modelling, and would like to play with it. Is there a cheap or free program for OS X that is quickly learned? My time is stretched thin right now, so I’d rather stay away from Photoshop-like complexity. My requirements are easy, really: I’d like to manually create a bunch of nodes (doesn’t matter what they look like as long as I can name them), define connections between them, and then see a 3D representation of the resulting structure. Preferably, a representation that I can turn about and see from different angles.

Later on, I’m gonna want something that will take an XML-encoded text, process it according to the rules I give it, and spew out a 3D representation of that text. But that’s sort of a pipe dream; for now, I’m more interested in a very basic DYI. Does such a beast exist?