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.

I have a very popular site that consists entirely of Ani DiFranco lyrics. I’ve been maintaining this site since 1996. People send me lyrics corrections; i adjust the lyrics, etc. Each page is a simple HTML page. This is sooo the ideal case for a wiki. Only, the idea of converting everything to Wiki format, getting rid of all basic HTML and losing all of my URL addresses does not appeal to me. Right now, an ideal tool would let me list all HTML pages that should be converted into a Wiki and it would retain everything that it knows about the page while simultaneously wiki-ifying it and not losing the pages and thus pagerank.

Ghosts in the Machine is an article about online identities that represent people who have died. In particular, the story follows a Friendster user whose profile represents his state of mind when he passed away.

My oldest public entry on this blog is simply called mutant. Since last fall, almost 300 comments have been posted to that thread by people who want to share their mutant powers and find common friends. Their comments make me smile.

Today, i read an article about a mutant DNA gene that makes a 5-year old baby exceptionally strong. It made me think of the mutants who visit here regularly so i thought i’d share it with them. To the mutants!

I firmly believe that people do not actually want to have technological precision; they want their technology to be able to permit a certain level of deception. Perhaps you’ve been known to say “My spam filter must’ve eaten it” or “I’m going under a bridge so i might lose you” even though you know that these are (white) lies.

In For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi, a few mobile phone users have taken this to a new level. They’ve developed a network of people who aid each other in developing and maintaining deception via mobiles.

(tx Kevin)

Liz’s entry on blog research is spot-on, critiquing the current academic approach to studying blogs and offering some suggestions for how the medium should be researched.

“A community can represent many things and be directed toward a definite goal, but community itself is the focus of a spiritual science that inspires universality. Day-to-day living in a community fosters a very practical concept of existence. Community life represents the frontier between the macro and micro in terms of human organization, making it possible to experience all levels of human existence. The community is, therefore, a vast landscape for a material realization whenever each person enters into contract with the gifts, virtues, and shortcomings of its members. It is also the immense spiritual and psychic laboratory that enables our spirits to develop.”

-Alex Polari de Alverga
in Forest of Vision: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Spirituality and the Santa Daime Tradition

I first heard of Ani through tape recordings of shows back in the day. I had this 1991 Jazzberry’s tape that i literally wore through. After a series of dreadful events (including a few break-ins and a car fire), i lost almost all of my early boots. Of course, so many of them are burnt into my head that i can recall them without the recording. ::laugh::

This week, Ani announced that she will be putting out an official bootleg series for folks like me who have always appreciated the raw energy of concerts. Every six weeks or so, she will release a new raw concert boot. This is absolutely fantastic!

For the readers here who are not familiar with Ani, you should read her lyrics. She has been one of my biggest inspirations, always reminding me that there is value in fighting the system. Her work is very political and she is one of the strongest independent artists out there, refusing to sell out to the music industry in any form. (All of you EFF-loving readers, you’d love Ani’s political efforts against the music industry. For example, Million You Never Made is an ode to that system.)