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.