Liz: March 2004 Archives

Why yes, it was inevitable and perfect that someone should invent Political Friendster, a tasty mix of the aforementioned site, They Rule, and Wikipedia.

It reminds me, actually, of the Pepys diary project -- another absolutely spot-on intersection of medium, content, and group participation.

[FYI, they have also posted, in what seems like near entirety, a ridiculous and telling IM transcript of a conversation between Jonathan Abrams and a friend of the founder.]

Mobile Community Design

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Mobile Community Design...is an academic blog I just found focusing on:

Design of mobile communication devices that facilitate mobile communities, Computer Support Cooperative Work (CSCW), sociotechnical systems, usability, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), ethnography, User Centered Design for mobiles, groupware, social networks, mobile reputation systems.

Recent posts covered Using technology to create positive norms and Effects of size on physically distributed groups.

It's run by a Ph.D. student at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He's looking for collaborators, so why not send some postings his way?

Cellspotting

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spacenamespace made an implicit challenge to developers:

phone with WAP browser would count as a 'location-aware device'; standard services allow you to locate nearby pubs; in urban areas, the few hundred metres accuracy available per cell ID suffices for this, in a blunt-instrument way. but the device-location mapping isn't open or free; available for re-sale, for bootstrapping commercial services.

...and Cellspotting.com answers it:

“CellSpotting.com" is a global location based service for mobile (GSM and soon UMTS) users.

Use CellSpotting to find information for the place you are at!, and even better you can help and give information to others about places you know! CellSpotting is a Collaborate Location Based service built by its users. [...]

- Find the name and location information about a place you are at.
- Track your Cellspotting friends, You can find the whereabout of your friends.
- Find the distance and direction to spotted cells!

The applications Cellspotting proposes are pretty mundane: tourist information, local interest groups, maybe a “jazz clubs near me” and other types of categorized services. And there's no discussion of ownership of content and/or the social ramifications of using collaboratively generated, potentially inaccurate, kind-of-spotty location data to lookup your friends and loved ones. But it's interesting how accepting uncertain, incomplete, and potentially flawed data from a whole lot of people might enable "good enough" location-finding in the public domain. The problem is recruiting enough sources -- and how open Cellspotting is to letting outside developers use their database.

Coverage of the US is unsuprisingly poor, but the scope of the project -- spanning carriers and continents -- is impressive, especially given that the client only runs on Nokia Series 60 phones.

via Veen

City as canvas

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There are always more links...

Sidewalk trompe l'oeil

Street artists (check out the free stickers)

Sky Skypoems David Antin, 1987-88

paper fun...and annoyance

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I spent hours cutting and gluing paper structures together when I was a little kid (I also liked watching water boil and paint dry) so I'm happy to see some nice ones reappear: robots! (via boingboing) and a weird collection of structures via someone at deli.cio.us. I like the Sydney Opera House much better than the WTC...oh wait. It looks like boingboing got this one too. I really hate it when that happens. I'm not going to not blog it, but the thrill of discovery is gone.

Audioscrobbler

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From a random person on deli.cio.us comes a new way to waste hours and hours — and it’s musical: Audioscrobbler. Audioscrobbler is a music player plugin that coordinates with a central website to transmit and track your listening preferences, then connect you with other music you might also like. No music is exchanged — it’s just about metadata. Users can club together into groups and aggregate all their playlists. There’s also a forum function so that scrobblers can comment on any song, artist, and other scrobbler they like. Audioscrobbler very consciously draws on the Amazon principles — but what they don’t say is that they’ve also learned the lessons of various YASNS.

They're also using the metaphor of the neighborhood, which I like -- I'm assuming it's borrowed from blogstreet. Your neighborhood is your favourite artists, friends, and people with similar music taste to you. It only really gets interesting with the Neighborhood Gossip option: Show me similar gossip that may be interesting to this user' (Though I haven’t gotten this feature to work yet.)

The social causes and effects of automatically publishing playlists on a website for strangers to view is especially interesting because it’s inherently tied to real-world decisions, albeit on a micro level. Every single track listed in my profile is there because at some point I pressed "play." Unlike, say, Friendster, where there’s no way to know whether I’ve actually read all the books I claim as favorites, there’s no faking it with Audioscrobbler. Thus, the requirements for joining groups actually have some numerical weight:

Membership requirements: 200 songs scrobbled, at least 8 of your top 20 scrobbled artists must have been part of the 80's rock/metal scene.

More than 5 grunge or nu-metal bands anywhere in your top list will disqualify you from this group by default for having poor taste. :-P This group is for true fans of 80's rock only.*

I’m slowly getting addicted to watching my profile update itself. Tonight I decided that I need to do some image-maintenance so that I look a little less 1994-indie-centric than I really am. Obviously, we can all think of ten ways to game this system before breakfast. But that’s the point: even by trying to game it, you’ve already bought into its comprehensibility and its values.

Audioscrobbler works so well because it never prompts me to enter track names or artists. Instead, it draws its (relatively harmless)** data dynamically from everyday activities. Combine it with I Love Music, the best music-based community (and I use that word very advisedly) ever, and I would be hooked forever.

*This group only has one member, natch.
** Or is it harmless to know for sure that Anil Dash wen through a big Prince phase? In the interests of fairness, I will admit that my own musical tastes are fairly indefensible.

Dressed for dependence

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So I've been kind of overwhelmingly busy lately, but I took a break last week to go see the exceedingly clever Erik Sandelin and Magnus Torstensson talk about their Digital Peacock project at ITP. In their words, they critically use "issues of naivete and trust" to explore surveillance and increased dependence on technology.

Some key phrases:

"de-search and re-velopment"

"de-cycling"

"sartorial submission"

"dressed for dependence"

I especially liked their Power Pilgrims project, in which the creators wander around dressed only in robes held together with electromagnets, begging power from anyone with a wall outlet.

Using the umbilical power cord the pilgrim recharges the battery from a normal wall socket. Without power the electro-magnets cease to function and the robe fall to the ground in pieces, leaving the pilgrim naked, ashamed and repentant.

I'm also a big fan of the social experiments their students have done:

One student wrote all their personal numeric data (credit card numbers, etc) on a sweatshirt, then tried to get through a normal day by reading the numbers of the sweater -- or having strangers do it for her.

Two other studentsmade a custom apron with mobile-phone-sized pockets.She then stood in the lobby of a bank with a no-phones policy and offered to babysit entering customers' phones by putting them in her apron until they concluded their business. She also offered to answer the phones for them, and take a message if required. Amazingly, quite a few people took her up on the offer.

They aim to operate with "fresh eyes and dirty hands." Yes.

Did you ever wish you could hide your location when talking on the phone? Ever wanted to give the impression you were somewhere else?

SounderCover gives you the ability to add a background sound to any incoming or outgoing call, giving the impression that you really are in the environment where the background sound is normally heard.

My favorite background noises are "dentist," and "circusparade." For only 14.95 Euros, a bargain. No, a steal.

Duplicious

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a dupliance, unlike an appliance, is a device that serves two purposes. but these two purposes can't just be any purposes of which you can think. rather, for a device to be a dupliance it must be designed to encompass an information-related activity as well as it should support a particular physical activity. Daniel Fallman

Does singing in the rain count?

Broomsticks and mobiles

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familiar.jpg

In wizardry, a familiar is an attendant spirits that serve its master, usually a wizard, sorcerer, or other magical being. Familiars were mentioned in Shakespeare's Macbeth, as the witches called their familiars...The most common species identified as familiars are cats (particularly black cats), owls, and sometimes frogs or toads. from Wikipedia

In the days when I thought I would live and die in my cubicle (RIP Elizabeth Goodman, 1976 - 1999: She never letterspaced her lowercase), I used to while away the late afternoons before the coffee kicked in by imagining my own pseudo-Disney musicals. The heroine was a hapless - but determined - paper pusher victimized by her cruel boss (based closely on the wicked stepmother from Snow White). Struggling mightily to get through massive dance numbers yet still produce final mechs on time, the heroine (in no way based on me) had only one ally to depend upon: her mouse.


A childhood spent at the movies had taught me the necessity of a sidekick. All great Disney heroines worth their salt had a cute, wisecracking anthropormorphized friend -- whether it be a meerkat, or a mouse, or even a dancing teacup. So why not a computer peripheral?


I suppose if I were to do it all over again, I'd give the heroine a cellphone that talked back.

A few days ago, by the way, was the the 312nd anniversary of the Salem witch trials. I spent the first part of my childhood in Massachusetts, and the Puritans have always felt very close. Four centuries ago, 25 people were condemned to death after young girls began to speak to beings that others could not see. It occurred to me last night that the Disney animal friend is, weirdly, a distant echo of the witch's familiar. Turned inside out and upside down, Cinderella's mice are the witch's cat. The former leads to the fairy godmother and a royal marriage, and the latter leads (in the eyes of the Puritans) straight to hell in Lucifer's Caddy. And remembering my old Disney parodies, I began to think about the cell phone as not just a cultural echo of the Disney sidekick, but also as a kind of familiar.

Bear with me here.

My phone makes noises only I can hear. It brings me messages from faraway places and shows me things I could never see on my own. It helps me do things I could never do on my own -- like find a dress for a dance or talk to invisible spirits in the air. I take my phone everywhere, and keep it close to my body at all times. Nevertheless, it depends upon me and I must feed it constantly.


China Mieville has this great story, which I cannot locate online, about a man and his familiar. I haven't read the story for about a year, but it concerns what happens when a man creates an external extension of himself, then tries to rid himself of it. The ending is not very pleasant.

There's something very soothing about having my cell phone around, so soothing that I can almost forget how anxious I feel when it's not there. I've become so used to the way it extends my presence in the world, used to walking down the street with cell signal, my invisible umbilical cord, extending far out to the other cell phones my cell phone calls friends.

A witch was supposed to feed her familiar spirit with her own blood, which the animal sucked from her body at a special nipple that became known as a witch's mark. http://www.supernaturalworld.com/familiar.html

The first part of my childhood I spent in Massachusetts, as I said. But I spent the other half in Los Angeles. I recognize a Magic Kingdom when I see it.