Here’s a follow-up to my earlier post on complimenting weblog comments with lighter ‘gestures’: while at it, I made another mock-up. It’s a panel that offers post-specific interactions: ratings, del.icio.us bookmarking, quick feedback smileys, and the ‘send related link’ function.
When I browse weblogs, I would often like to be able to do one or both of the following two things quickly: 1) send rapid ‘gut reaction’ feedback (for instance a smiley) to the author, mostly to thank people for taking the time to write something I liked; and 2) offer a URL that points to something which I think relates to the topic. These reactions aren’t really comments; they are more like gestures that would let the author know that there are readers out there who appreciate the stuff even if they aren’t posting comments. Another reason why I think it’d be worthwhile to investigate ‘gestures’ is that weblogs and comments are literary formats which require a certain level of competence to author, and this makes it hard for those of us who haven’t developed a routine for this mode of expression (especially non-native English speakers) to participate in the blogosphere.
Here’s an attempt to illustrate what I mean, as a right-click menu photoshopped over the NetNewsWire UI.
This blog is starting to take shape now that I’ve engaged the help of friends to transfer the content from its previous home at aula.cc/jyri here to zengestrom.com. I decided to set up a new home for my stuff when I began moving the Aula site in its entirety from our old custom-built PHP platform to MovableType. That migration is still not finished; so much material has accumulated at aula.cc over the years that sorting it all out takes time.
A few words about this new zengestrom blog: I wanted to have a personal and friendly, down-to-earth sort of blog space. That was how I briefed Mikko Hyppönen, my graphic designer friend. His design makes use of a sketched portrait, which is from the pen of Nene Tsuboi.
I’m quite excited about the result. Yet here I am refurbishing a very infrequently updated blog in good faith while the reality is that my waking hours (and I suspect a good slice of my sleep too) are spent processing a wholly different set of narratives that should materalize not as a blog, but as a PhD thesis. What’s up with that? Even William Gibson suspended his blogging when it was time to do serious writing. In the ‘last postcard from Costa Del Blog‘ he wrote:
I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging, I’m definitely still on vacation.
On the other hand, there are authors who claim they could not write without a blog. In My Blog, My Outboard Brain Cory Doctorow maintains that
Being deprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain-damage. Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish … my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form.
How to locate oneself in relation to these professional scifi dudes? In my case, the nature of academic writing has proven to be quite blog-averse. My research is about the work practices of real people in a corporation, often covering them to a degree of detail that is quite intimate. Although this ethnographic material is in digital format, it is not online; I’ve spent over two years collecting it in in the form of field notes, recordings, transcripts, photos and video clips, and cataloguing it into a searchable ‘outboard brain’ on my PowerBook. The reworking and eventual publishing of this material requires care and also a degree of anonymising. Alongside this I also occasionally give talks about the social aspects of technology, which sometimes make for good blogging. But I haven’t blogged about them much either. I suspect the silence has to do with a personal migration of a sort: I feel like I’m drifting into new space, but I don’t yet quite know what kind of stories live there. Recently I’ve noticed that a couple of my peers are experiencing similar drifiting. Maybe it’s a sign of the times.
UPDATE: Dan has just informed us that he won’t be able to travel to Helsinki on the scheduled April 12th date! We’re currently searching for another speaker. We’re also looking into the possibility to reschedule Dan to a later date this year. Stay tuned…
Our guest speaker at the next Aula klubi on Tuesday, April 12 in Helsinki will be Dan Gillmor, who will talk about ‘The Rise and Importance of Citizen Media.’ From the summary:
The collision of technology and journalism is having profound effects on the three major constituencies of news: journalists, who are having to learn how to turn what they do into a conversation, not a lecture; newsmakers, the people and institutions journalists have covered, who are learning about an entirely new class of journalists but who have new options for getting their own messages out; and the former audience, which can get a better news report and participate in the journalism process as well.
When Dan spoke at Aula’s Exposure event in 2003, he was in the process of putting these arguments together. The outcome was a book titled We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, published last year by O’Reilly. Dan also practices what he preaches: at the turn of the new year he quit his job at the San Jose Mercury News to found Grassroots Media Inc., ‘a project aimed at enabling grassroots journalism and expanding its reach.’ Welcome to Helsinki, Dan. I’m looking forward to this.
We’re organizing the year’s first Aula klubi evening in Helsinki with Henry Jenkins from MIT as the guest speaker. He’s going to speak about the future of gaming. I get to slack this time, since Marko is taking care of most of the practicalities. For more information, have a look at the announcement. If you’re in town, hope to see you at Korjaamo 6 pm tomorrow!
Ulla and I were going to Khao Lak this Sunday to stay in a beach bungalow for two weeks. When I woke up to the news a few hours after the tsunami had hit and checked the travel agency web site, a news flash reported that Phuket had been damaged, but that Khao Lak had not suffered as badly.
As it turned out this information was false. Today the representative of the Finnish foreign minitry was quoted in Helsingin Sanomat, the main newspaper, saying that “Khao Lak in effect no longer exists.” Khao Lak now has the highest body count of all the Thai beaches.
In the midst of the chaos, the Finnish Raya Divers guys were going around finding survivors, helping them get medical treatment, and texting their names to Alex (a fellow Aula member) and a group of friends who run a diving weblog at sukellus.fi. While the ministry’s phone numbers were jammed by the volume of incoming calls from worried relatives, the sukellus.fi blog had information that was accessible and up to date. The hobby blog suddenly turned into a kind of Schindler’s list of survivors, and the number of daily visitors rocketed to hundreds of thousands.
To me it is a startling example of the power that ‘we media‘ can obtain in a crisis situation. It’d be interesting to hear what crisis management experts (for instance, folks working on The Information Technology and Crisis Management project) think about the sukellus.fi incident.
Update: On March 30th, 2005 Alex and the rest of the Sukellus.fi guys received the ‘State Prize’ (10,000 Euros) from the Finnish Government for ‘Fast and up-to-date sharing of information about the boxing day catastrophy in South-East Asia.’ In less than a week’s time, the pages served over 900,000 visitors.
With the overwhelming amount of media coverage that’s being imposed on just about everybody in and outside the U.S. right now, recommending a TV documentary on the main candidates of the upcoming presidential election might seem a bit out of place. But Frontline producer Martin Smith, and Nicholas Lemann, who is the political correspondent of the New Yorker, have collected some highly relevant footage of the two men from the 60s to the present day. The result is called The Choice 2004. The full two-hour program is online here.
Christian took us to see the Light Vests at the Cyberdog store in London today. They’re really neat. The basic design is a black shirt with a postcard-sized passive-matrix display velcroed on the front. They show various looping animations in all flavors of psychedelia. The high-end model titled “Light Red Alert Vest” in the online store (unfortunately made with Flash so I can’t link to it directly) allows you to type in a custom message to a scrolling LED display (think Joi’s hecklebot). The designer calls himself Lightmaster. He offered to make a custom one for me, complete with PC software to personalize it. With an 802.11 radio it could, for instance, display images going by on the wireless network Etherpeg-style.
TheFeature.com has an article by Howard Rheingold on mobilities research at Lancaster. I’m quoted near the beginning on my research on the RFID phone, which is one of the ventures that I’ve been studying at Nokia over the past two years. The discussion started when we met on May Day at Howard’s with Aleksi, Ulla, and Justin and the five of us hiked up Mt. Tamalpais for views of the ocean. Justin blogged the hike.
Last week Nokia displayed a fuel cell-powered Bluetooth headset, which is now undergoing user trials (see the last slide in Yrjö Neuvo’s presentation). Sure, the increase in battery life is a major incremental improvement. However, in his blog Christian Lindholm suggests the replacement of the solid battery with a fluid tank may trigger radical innovation in the design of mobile electronics by enabling form factors that have previously been possible only in sci-fi movies. “Liquid is esentially free from form and will thus enable us to make radically different electronics. It will stimulate an era of organically shaped electronics,” he predicts. I agree. What’s exciting about fuel cells is not their capacity as a power source, it’s their potency to catalyze a new design paradigm.
