Oh baby, they did. They really did. On Main and Folsom.

[Appropriately, Jen ROFLed.]

I’m not good at being ill. After much internal struggle and because of my confidence in Christopher Allen, i responsibly stayed at home last night; Christopher took my place at the CMU event. This morning, though, i operated via danah logic… that’s the kind of bass-ackwards logic that gets me into trouble. I figured that i needed to go to the doctor, the doctor was in Berkeley, BlogOn was in Berkeley… If i went to BlogOn, i would definitely go to the doctor. If i didn’t go, i probably wouldn’t visit the doctor. I knew that i needed to visit the doctor, so obviously it made complete sense to give my talk at BlogOn, right? Besides, i was no longer contagious so why the hell not?

In many ways, i’m glad i went. I had fun sharing my reflections on the linguistic connotations of my blog panel title – the dark side. I told the audience that i had asked people what came to mind when they heard the term ‘the dark side.’ Everyone kept saying Darth Vader… Star Wars… evil. I was annoyed. I was being asked to talk about people and their practices – is that really the evil side of social media? Conference organizers told me i was being pessimistic. Another conceptualization of the dark side kept coming up – Pink Floyd. When you think about the dark side of the moon, you think about the side upon which the sun has yet to shine. Perhaps my role at BlogOn was to share the perspective that people and their practices have yet to be considered. This was my way of providing optimism. I don’t know if anyone got anything out of the panel, but it was interesting to me.

The sad part was that i didn’t really get to stick around for BlogOn. Immediately after my panel, i went to the doc’s because i was having a really hard time breathing. There, i got to breathe foul tasting stuff for 5 minutes and that opened up my lungs – thank goodness. The doctor was nice (for once), although it was a bit eerie to realize that he was my age and looked like a friend of mine. I love doctors at universities because they draw pictures and explain what’s going on. Of course, i found myself wondering if this doctor blogged his experiences at the urgent care like the guy who writes Gross Anatomy. 2 hours of BlogOn did seep in.

I received 6 emails for not blogging recently. Bleh.

My lesson of the week is that strep throat + bronchitis is a deadly combination and definitely requires a doctor visit. I am sick, in bed and sweating profusely. The only creative thoughts that have emerged from my head involve figuring out how to get food without fainting. This is not a recordable experience.

Instead, let me share with you the events that i would’ve attended if i were healthy so that you may attend without me since they all involve good people:

– CMU West Speaker Series: The New Phenomenon of “Enabled Social Networks:” Social, Commercial, and Political/Civic Implications
– BlogOn 2004 – The Business of Social Media
– Ripple Effect’s Connect For (fundraiser for disadvantaged youth and Village Reach)
– Monkey vs. Robot party at Cellspace

Enjoy and perhaps i will have more interesting things to say shortly.

It only took three years of hearing about Jane McGonigal before we were finally in the same room together at Intel’s Street Talk: An Urban Computing Happening. The conference was most magnificent because it was a gathering of some of my favorite researchers, all talking about what urban life meant, how pervasive technologies were evolving, gaming and other constructions of sociability in a digital world. Fun fun fun.

Yet, meeting Jane was just such a pleasure – it took far too long and too many misses. Everyone out there who was determined that we should meet was right-on. She’s got immense amounts of spunk and she puts together creative public games; she studies performance and bridges the digital/physical divide in a total complementary way to me. Even better: she has a pet word that is awfully similar to my own. Pareidolia is “a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct.” [My favorite word is apophenia: “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena.”]

If you have a weakness, it is your inability to say “no.” While your peers respect you, they find it difficult to resist taking advantage of your positive attitude and eagerness to take on work. You depend on a good manager to keep you from sinking under the weight and burning out.

This is from 20 Questions to a Better Personality. I took it while procrastinating the additional paper that i took on earlier this evening. Hrmpft.

Of course, this was the second time that the concept of 20 questions passed my desk today. The first was a social software site called twenty questions.

I’m still fascinated by the CaPiTaLiZaTiOn that appears online. When i posted about it last, folks gave me some *great* pointers. Since then, i’ve followed up on the Azn style and started talking to people. I talked with folks about different spelling styles that emerged with chatrooms and BBSes. I talked with folks about the motivation for spelling words phonetically.

Some of this has obvious technical roots – like pager culture. There’s also a desire to be writing in an encoded fashion so that outsiders can’t tell what is being said. Folks also write this way because it’s cool or because it lets them personalize text.

When thinking about it, i realized how much this was common even in class notes. Remember the hearts above the i’s or the backwards slanted writing? It was all about personalizing the communication – giving it character.

Digital modes of textual presentation are very prescriptive. You have a choice of the following n fonts. Each letter looks the same. There’s no emotion in the letters. It’s sooo boring. No wonder folks have come up with ways of expressing themselves through the typography as well as the text. Think graffiti.

By doing this, people are pushing against an emphasis on the text. They are challenging that text as text is nothing; it’s all about the surrounding features of the text. There was once an art to typography; people haven’t lost that.