commissioned Fakesters?
Andy reports that all of the Anchorman characters appear on Friendster as Fakesters while a banner ad for the movie runs in the advert section. Has Friendster stopped its ban on Fakesters so long as they’re commissioned?
Update: Friendster really is supporting this. And they don’t see the irony in it. “What Friendster is doing with these movie-character profiles is actually a brand-new paradigm in media promotion.” Oh dear god.
the 20 questions day
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.
flickr colors
Flickr color tags like orange or green or blue are sooo beautiful. Sophie Calle would be proud!
[For those who aren’t familiar with Calle’s work, she is fantastic. Read Double Game. But in reference to this, Calle ate only one color of food each day and took photos of that food. What a beautiful exhibit.]
more thoughts on CaPiTaLiZaTiOn
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.
from HTML to Wiki?
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
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.
are MUDs and MOOs dead?
I thought MUDs and MOOs were dead… or at least only used by the same folks who have been using them since the 80s or the new folks that have to play with them for some academic enterprise. The only folks that i know who use MUDs and MOOs are academics – the folks who have been studying them. Sometimes, i wonder if they are studying each other engage in what MUDs and MOOs are supposed to be about.
Anyhow, does anyone have a good status report on MUDs and MOOs?
into the blogosphere
Into the Blogosphere is a collection of articles about blogs from multidisciplinary approaches. I haven’t read them yet, but i’m super psyched that they are being published.
blogging is trapped in a metaphor
I’ve been trying to sit with some of my frustrations about sociable technologies lately. I’ve been trying to work through them in order to understand why Liz’s frustration with blogging research resonates and why i start twitching every time people put together panels that pit blogs against “big” journalism. I wanted to let go of my boiling anger over the fact that YASNS do not look like “real” social networks.
I realized that all of these concerns come from a common root. Sociable technologies are all built on metaphors. They are often an attempt to model a set of practices already known in everyday life. Yet, as models, the technologies are not the same as the metaphors on which they are based. The result is an entirely new form that encourages entirely new practices.
Metaphors are not new in the technological world. Email’s metaphor was built into its naming. Yet, today, when we talk about email, we can draw on the metaphor of mail, but we all know that email is something entirely different. It is a fundamentally new communication system, not simply an electronic form of its predecessor.
My frustration with academics, press and conference organizers exists because the primary way to handle these new technologies is to address them in metaphoric terms. This perspective comes from a distanced vantage point.
What is special (and magnificently more frustrating) about blogs is that they stem from many metaphors, including newspapers/magazines, journals/diaries, and log notebooks. No wonder people are up in arms screaming that it’s not like a newspaper, it’s like a diary! or vice versa. They’re both right and wrong. If you’re stuck in a metaphoric understanding of blogging, the conflicting metaphors are problematic and discount your approach to the system.
Now that most people are on email, it is rare to have to explain that form. But when people were starting up, it was confusing. My grandparents thought that i couldn’t write because my emails were strewn with spelling errors, lacked capitalization and were often fragments. Nowadays, they get it because they get that email is different than letters.
With blogging and YASNS, people haven’t “gotten it” yet. Even many of the people creating these technologies still think that they’re building out the metaphors. Of course, if they stay trapped in the metaphor, they’re doomed to failure. It is crucial to understand that YASNS and blogs are different than their metaphoric precursors.
This is precisely why it’s bloody hard to study/discuss these technologies without being a practitioner. Distance is valuable as a researcher, but it’s also limiting. You need to engage with the culture at a deep level in order to study it. Because digital technology cultures are so peculiar, you need to be involved at an intimate level. Being a lurker is just not the same. It is the practice of engaging with these technologies that makes you able to move beyond the metaphor.