Keith Hampton, a dear friend and colleague, just put together a site called i-neighbors. Keith is a sociologist interested in neighborhood communities (and their online equivalent) and this site is dedicated to supporting physical neighborhoods in the States and Canada.

Signing up for the site made me contemplate what it means to be in a neighborhood. I live near Folsom and 24th in San Francisco. I firmly identify as living in the Mission. My version of the Mission is quite a bit different than the one inhabited by my friends who live at Guerrero and Liberty, but we both identify as Mission residents. There are gangs in my neighborhood. The cut-off appears to be 21st. Do the two different gangs both identify as living in the same neighborhood? What about my Mexican neighbors – do they identify with the shi-shi folks on Liberty? My neighbors are obsessed with our block and keeping the meth addicts, homeless drunks and gun shots far away.

What constitutes a neighborhood in a city? How does class, race, religion and ethnicity play a part? Do i really live in a neighborhood bounded by zipcode or is my neighborhood also bounded by education level and transience? Of course, i’m guessing that this is exactly the boundary that Keith wants to tear down.

Over at GPN, there’s a discussion about how people chose their handles. I’ve always been intrigued by handles and blog names and often ask about them in my interviews. I’m constantly stunned at how many of them are connected to some pop culture reference point.

Personally, i was always obsessed with the letter z. I lived with a dog named zephyr and often used that as a nick. For the last few years, i’ve used zephoria which is a combination of zephyr and euphoria. I must’ve been in a good place when i concocted that – a euphoric wind. Apophenia comes from my addiction to weird rarely used words. I’ve subscribed to WWFTD for ages. Yet, if i look back on my teenage handles, they were all associated with Jack Kerouac novels (those i’m not telling because they connect me with Usenet – ::gulp::). Even my first car was named Cody. My computers have always been named xanadu… note: my love of Coleridge predated my awareness of Ted Nelson.

How did other folks choose their handles? (And btw: i’m *loving* the responses to this)

Update: Does anyone know any published literature on handle choice? Or about how people remember each other’s handles?

Wow – i’m completely exhausted. I used to be so invincible at conferences, able to leap tall buildings with no sleep. These days, it just ain’t so. But it was amazing to spend a large chunk of time at SIGGRAPH. I have to say that my highlight was going through the art gallery and emerging tech with two small children and witnessing interaction through their eyes. It’s amazing to watch how bored they get when things look too realistic. Of course the picture should move if you rotate the display. Duh. ::laugh::

It saddens me that WiFi has been available at conferences for ?5? years now and still, conferences suck at it. Blogging is difficult to do when you have to sneak away to the media room, but it sucks more because attendees aren’t able to get to your hard work until after. Still, i was stunned that there were 8000+ cookied uids on the wiki. I wish i knew how many people visited the blog, but the counter i was using broke so alas, i have no idea. Stewart tells me that we definitely had an impact on Flickr, which came entirely through the blog, so i’m guessing the blog did pretty well. At the beginning of the weak, no one knew we had a blog and most had no idea what a wiki was. By the end, people were coming up to me asking if i was the blog/wiki girl. People knew it was there and many found it quite helpful and fun. I’m sure that Bruce Sterling’s announcement and /.’s coverage helped tremendously. And it was so great to have other bloggers help out with entries and random strangers send in photos.

Basically, i think that it was a very successful experiment. And i look forward to see if it continues to grow as SIGGRAPH finishes.

I just got an invite to yet another social network service – Multiply. The second paragraph is labeled “Personal message from {friend}” and it says:

I’ve decided to add my network over on Multiply since there’s a ton more I can do with it there. I’ve got my own personal web page where I can share my photos, journal, reviews, classifieds, etc. with you and all my other friends. I now go to Multiply regularly to check the message board and see the new stuff posted in my network. Accept my invitation and check it out for yourself.

OK. I’m not an idiot. There’s *NOTHING* personal about that message – it’s all marketing speak. I’m just sooo thrilled to see the term “personal” get abused. ::grumble::

We’re not even going to begin commenting on the import tools for Friendster and Orkut. Aren’t we done with these replicas yet? Anyhow, i refuse. So don’t invite me.

Entrance to SIGGRAPH

Originally uploaded by siggraph.

SIGGRAPH has officially begun – yay!

It’s great to be back here… it’s kinda weird though since i’ve been to this convention hall soo many times. Passing the Figueroa gave me jitters. So many crazy nights there. Welcome back to SIGGRAPH!

OK. I couldn’t resist. I wasn’t going to blog this but i’ve been telling so many people about it that i figured i had to. The Onion wrote an article about President Bush’s blog that captures the essence of a certain form of blogging. To the tee. So much so that i really couldn’t stop laughing. Like rolling on the floor laughing.

My favorite quote:

Bush said he could not understand McLaughlin’s anger, characterizing his blog as a “personal thing written for friends and family or whoever” and therefore “none of the CIA’s business.”

Continue reading →

As much as i’m a geek, i’m also the classic end user. I have no patience for technology that doesn’t just work and after hours on the phone with support, i always break down in frustration and tears. I am not someone who gets motivated to figure it out – i just want to throw it all away.

Mind you – this is why i hated computers for the longest time and why i’m really particular about technology that i buy. If i can take it out of the box and use it right away, we’re going to get along fine. I cried out of joy when i turned on my first 12″ because it asked me if it should join the apophenia network.

I was a terrible programmer in this regard because i hated debugging. With a passion. I would just lose it trying to figure it out. This was only worsened by the fact that i can always create the most peculiar bugs in any system. There were a few people who were always able to calm me down and get me out of that frustration and set me on a goal-driven direction to be productive. I was good at coding – i just hated it and i hated what it did to me.

Today was a reminder of why i stopped coding and debugging technology. A friend generously arranged for me to borrow a fancy phone for moblogging SIGGRAPH. I was ecstatic. I was like a little kid with a new toy, happily showing it off. Unfortunately, it was down hill from there. Taking a picture was easy. But it wasn’t sending. I read the manual (which was good because i couldn’t figure out a lot of things before that). I got on the phone with T-Mobile. I spent over 3 hours and 7 phone calls with T-Mobile. They were patient and kind, trying to change my plan, trying to sort through manuals to figure out how to deal with this new phone that was not yet available in the States, trying to make it work. Another friend was IMing me with suggestions because she too had one of the fancy phones and loved it (in fact, it was she who inspired it). The errors kept coming. I had to change my plan to get email to work. They suggested that i call the maker of the phone. The maker refused to talk to me because that phone is not supposed to be available in the States.

Over 5 hours of futzing went by and i was in tears, having gotten nothing that i was supposed to be doing done and being nowhere closer to moblogging. My friend kept giving me suggestions, bless her heart, but i reached that state of impossibility, defeat, exhaustion. I took a walk and decided that it would be better for my sanity to revert the account back to my Sidekick so that i’d at least have email, SMS and IM, even if no camera.

I feel super guilty because my friend was so kind in getting the phone to me. I feel like a failure for being unable to get a stupid phone working. But more than anything, i’m reminded of the state of mind that motivated me to leave computer science. The added weirdness comes from the fact that i’m about to drive to LA to see the man who spent four years trying to keep me in computer science. And i still feel guilty for having left.

Updated note: T-Mobile was great for what they were able to work with. I am by no means frustrated by them. In fact, i’m far more impressed with them for their patience and kindness. The problem was that the phone manufacturer whose States’ division would not help and whose technology did not easily connect.

Show Me Your Context, Baby: My Love Affair with Blogs is Kate Baggott’s trAce award piece on blogging positioning blogging against literature and discussing its merits as its own medium. The piece is thought-provoking, but the image is outright eerie.

“In lieu of charisma, bloggers possess a magnetism that would repel in any other medium. Bloggers are like the smart and difficult students who interrupted every lesson with sarcastic commentary and passed their exams with audacity and contempt for their schools, their subjects, their teachers and the exams themselves. They do not write for audiences or according to deadline. They comment because they have something to say.”

[FYI: it’s a New Media style piece and assumes some knowledge of theorists like McLuhan and Postman.]

Look who just got Flickr to auto-blog! Be warned. Soon there will be a camera phone and then it will be all over. Trouble is a-brewing because i started playing with new technology. (And yes, this means that i’ll be able to auto-Flickr-photo-blog SIGGRAPH.)

SIGGRAPH (computer graphics) was my original academic community. I first attended the conference as a student volunteer in 1997 and have attended most years since, always with a role ranging from speaker to party press. (Yes, i managed a legitimate pass once to cover the party circuit… it was the web era.)

Last month, i got CCed on a conversation about social software and SIGGRAPH. Not surprisingly, i opened my big mouth and shouted off my opinions. Of course, as with all academic communities, the moment you start giving suggestions, you’re told to just implement it. So i did. And it’s official. SIGGRAPH is using social software and the links are live on their main page.

* SIGGRAPH 2004 BLOG

* SIGGRAPH 2004 WIKI

I will be blogging live from SIGGRAPH (and hopefully moblogging). This is a fantastic moment of blending my current life with my past life. I’m ecstatic.

[Oh, and if you’re planning on attending, add yourself to the list of attendees at the Wiki.]