I’m ecstatic to announce that my short paper on Friendster was accepted to CHI. For those interested in reading it, check out my papers listings.

Thanks to Nathaniel and Shawn, i just put up two new Ani songs on the lyrics site: Knuckle Down and Recoil. I hear there are four more out there so if you have em, send em my way!

As for these new songs, woah… they’re intense and full of pain. ::sigh:: I wish that i didn’t cringe every time that a new Ani song came out because the raw emotional quality draws me in so intimately. I’ve always found it eerie to hear her songs because i can grok her expression at a level that i’ve never recognized with other artists.

but somewhere between hollywood and its pretty happiness
and an anguish so infinite
it’s anybody’s guess
is a place where people are all teachers
and this just one long class
and that ass will get you nowhere tonight
…
and i know that i was warned – still it was not what i’d hoped
cause i think i’m done comin’ to get closer
to some imagined bliss
i gotta knuckle down just be ok with this
i gotta knuckle down just be ok with this
course that star struck girl is really someone i miss

Two people have recently asked me for a blogging bibliography. There are a handful of articles that i regularly suggest to people, but i have a feeling that people might have far more comprehensive bibliographies out there, or other materials that they think should be shared in a classroom/research setting. Thus, i thought i’d ask you.

What are the key academic papers, blog entries and media writings on blogging, particularly on the social analysis of the phenomena? [Also, any links to blog bibliographies out there.]

My current list is here.

People keep asking me why i don’t build my own YASNS. Usually, it comes in a sarcastic statement like “if you’re so smart, why don’t you do it?” The short answer is that i’m an academic, not an entrepreneur, but it’s more complicated than that.

First, as an academic, i’m interested in what people do, why and how. I’m not interested in capitalizing on them; this doesn’t motivate me. This is also why i’m far more aligned with the geeks than the entrepreneurs. Geeks, by and large, want to build something cool that people use. I get that and this sometimes motivates me too. This goal is about tapping into the motivations of the population, not trying to pervert them. I also want to tap into the human psyche. Unfortunately, right now, i think that my current goals require me to restrain from building and focus on analyzing.

Fast moving and highly complex spaces likes YASNS and social software require iteration. No one project is going to completely “get it.” Lessons will be learned, features stabilized across different applications. I certainly have ideas for the next iteration, but to develop them means to stop paying attention to the larger picture and work on just building that next level. Furthermore, to make a living doing it requires jumping into the entrepreneur space, which is something that i detest.

There’s another problem… In the case of YASNS, i don’t really care to make a working tool. Effectively, i want to experiment on people. I want to create technologies that bring out human traits in order to understand human behavior at a higher level. This is the kind of thing that makes any human subjects board FREAK. Highly not acceptable. And right now, i need to play nice with human subjects.

For those outside of academia, there didn’t used to be a subjects board. But then a bunch of psychologists (ahem, Milgram) started running studies on human behavior that sent many subjects (a.k.a. his grad students) into post traumatic stress. Human subjects boards were developed to protect subjects from those experimenting on them. Lots of 1960s research could never have been done under the current restrictions. You would never have heard of Milgram if there was a subjects board back then. But they’re here now and us academics must play nice with them.

That said… while i’m restricted in experimenting on people, entrepreneurs and entertainers aren’t. Thus, just as i rely on Jamie Kennedy to push human nature to its boundaries and provide me with a text to study, i count on technologists to create perfect fodder for my curiosity. My public critiques are not my academic output; they are intended to be my feedback to the domain whose creations i’m studying. They are channeled feedback from users, suggestions based on learned lessons and ideas for public discussion. In effect, they are publicly presented usability material without any pressure to listen to me whatsoever.

I do not think that i have all of the answers. That said, i do think that i’m asking a different set of questions than the creators of these technologies. And i believe that those questions are valid and valuable. For that reason, i offer some of the results publicly so that they can be part of the greater discourse. My apologies to those who don’t think that’s good enough. Perhaps one day i will go back to development, but not right now. Right now, i’m having fun.

For whatever reason, at Etech, i switched from using Fire to using iChat. I also got conned into using a “real” picture of myself as my image (instead of a butterfly). So, every time i send a message, i see a chipper danah with fuzzy hat representing my text. This completely weirds me out.

What weirds me out more is to see my friends speak back to me. Two of my friends look like their in thinker pose. One has a childhood picture. One is whistfully staring out into nowhere and one is jumping out of a plane. They’re all smiling and looking far too chipper and proper for their own good.

As noted by my previous post, i spent the bulk of yesterday in a dreadful state. Of course, that didn’t prevent me from IMing. So here i am, moaning in bed, greasy, face as white as snow, slumped over IMing with an image that makes me look as chipper as ever. Even *i* can’t take myself seriously. On more than one occasion, a friend would ask how i was feeling and i would respond with something like “::moan:: dreadful…” and i knew that they were seeing the happy fuzzy danah saying this. Cue conflict at its most visceral state!

I regularly carry on a conversation with a friend whose pic makes him look like he’s in thinker mode. No matter how emotional he’s trying to be, i see that post and read him as calm and contemplative even though i know damn well that this is not his state. Ever.

The pictures in iChat weird me out.

So, when i express this to others, they often tell me to hook up a cam and make it an automatically evolving picture and i’m equally terrified. I am a multi-tasker; most of the time that i’m IMing, i’m doing something else as well. For simplicity, imagine that i’m carrying on two conversations. In one, i’m being professional and proper; in the other, i’m gossiping about my girl friend’s date from the previous nite. Why on earth would i want my gossip face revealed to my professional colleague? What fascinates me about IM is that i can be in two contexts simultaneously. My brain is quite capable of doing this, but physical constraints rarely allow it to happen in everyday life. IM is *fantastic* this way. If my picture were updating regularly, it would collapse those two contexts. And besides, the state of my room and/or dress is not for public consumption, particularly at the odd hours in which i’m likely to IM.

Actual faces are so powerful for identifying people. I can look at my IM buddylist and immediately recognize the folks that i know. But i get really screwy emotion detection from it too. When i’m in a grumpy mood and need support, i’d rather talk to the teddy bears, kitty cats and alien creatures than the chipper versions of my friends. I don’t read emotion into the abstract or non-human images nearly as much as the human ones…

iChat is reminding me of why i believe in abstract representations for conversations when cue conflict might be a problem. In any case, i’m going back to the butterfly….

So, if you’ve ever had to deal with university’s health services, you know why i’m avoiding the doctors. It’s worse than the emergency clinic. But, since i’m always surprised about what my blog readers know, i thought maybe i’d ping out to you.

I’m sick as a dog. I’ve been vomiting and and off since the middle of the night and i’m trying to keep Saltine’s down as we speak. I’ve been drinking Ginger Ale. While i’ve managed to avoid vomiting for a few hours, i still feel nauseous as hell, particularly whenever i move. When i sleep, i get hot flashes and can’t really sleep comfortably. When i’m awake, it’s just perpetual dreadfulness.

I don’t seem to have a fever. I feel weak, but i can’t keep food down so i’m not surprised. All of my sniffles, sore throat and the like of last week are gone. I don’t have any obvious flu symptoms. Even the body ache is low other than the feeling of weakness.

My guess is food poison, but yesterday, i hate veggie sushi and an omlette. Is it possible that i’m feeling late ramifications of Mexican food?

Is there anything that i should be doing other than Saltine’s/toast/Ginger Ale/Coke syrup (and late nite dramamine) and waiting it out?

If you want to see a beautiful exponential curve, graph the commonality of last names. Some names (::cough:: Smith) are EXCEPTIONALLY common. Jonathan Moore realized this and he used it to extract more data from Friendster. “From this we see that after trying only twenty-eight last names we have a ten percent chanse of having guessed the user’s last name.”

Moore continues on to tell us other ways of extracting purportedly private data from Friendster. Ah, hackers, how i love thee.