jill/txt

Even infants need passports these days - and you have to get a passport photo by the same rules as for adults: front of the face, eyes open, looking at the camera, no parental hands holding her up, white background, mouth closed… Apparently the best way to do this is to wait until baby is pooing…

Jessica Ann Rettberg was born two days ago, on Saturday April 19, at 11:45 am. She weighs 3655 grams and is 50 cm long, and is absolutely beautiful. Everything went very well, really, well, you know, obviously the whole giving birth thing is extraordinarily hard work (just try relaxing through a hideous contraction so the baby can finish rotating down the birth canal) - but I had great support from Scott and the midwives at our hospital and everything went really well. We’re back at home and apart from her tendency to want to sleep all day and wake all night, we’re doing wonderfully. Here she is, just ten or fifteen minutes after she was born.

Jessica hasn’t started blogging yet, but Jason Nelson made us a beautiful birthday present for her, look at this!

Our World of Warcraft Reader is coming out next month, and MIT Press has updated the webpage for the book with a complete table of contents and PDFs of the introduction, the contributors’ bios and the index.

We’ve had a bit of local media attention about the book, too. The University of Bergen’s internal newspaper has a great interview with Hilde and me about the anthology, and yesterday I talked with Bergens Tidende’s television program MM (Hilde was out of town). You can see the interview on their website - it starts 5:39 minutes into the program.

You might even get a glimpse of The Belly. Which is continuing to grow - only nine days left till the due date. Almost everything’s ready for her now…

In Norwegian, the word høygravid means “high-pregnant”, or extremely pregnant. I only recently discovered that there’s an official definition of the word: when you have 40 days until your due date, you’re høygravid. Or at least that’s what the word is on the Norwegian pregnancy websites.

So today is the day. I’m høygravid - extremely pregnant. Our baby’s due on April 14, which is just 40 days away. My maternity leave starts on March 24, which, what with Norway’s lovely extensive Easter holidays means that I only have twelve work days left, including today. This is clearly a good thing, as it’s getting harder and harder to concentrate on work. Quite apart from the rather frequent need to nap, my mind seems far more into babies than the web these days - unless the web helps me think about the babies, of course. I’ve been ignoring my RSS feeds lately (very weird for me) and instead reading Barnimagen.no, Babycenter.com and doing numerous googles for topics like “acupuncture in preparation for birth” or “sleep and newborns”.

I think instead of guilt-tripping about the lack of blogging I’ve been doing and my utter disinterest in my RSS feeds I’m going to just succumb to all these mothering hormones and assume that in time, I’ll once again find news about web 2.0, social software, blogging, online narratives and so on intensely interesting.

Until then - well, I’m sorry but I don’t think there’ll be a whole lot of blogging going on here… I should of course have blogged Hanne-Lovise Skartveit’s most excellent defense of her PhD last Friday (congratulations!) and our new exchange and network agreements with Raine Koskimaa and Kimmo Lehtonen’s MA in Digital Culture at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland and with Lissa Holloway-Attaway, Maria Engberg and Talan Memmott’s BA in Literature, Media, and Digital Culture at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola in Sweden. I would have blogged that I got the proofs for my Blogging book, too - proofreading that is my last major task before I’m out of here.

I’ll be back from maternity leave in January 2009. And I have no idea how or whether I’ll blog between now and then. We’ll see :)

The 2007 Digital Economy Fact Book is a 200 page PDF of statistics and data about the internet and usage; as the Hill Library Blog writes, “a tightwad researcher’s dream: In-depth, statistic-heavy, well-cited, and freely-available online. One could hardly ask for more.” It’s published by The Progress and Freedom Foundation, which sounds a little scary - they’re “a market-oriented think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy”, according to their mission statement. Reading on, I see they want governments to “resist the temptation to regulate, tax and control”, and one of their goals is to “explain[..] the imperative to protect rich digital content and encourage innovation through the traditional legal notions of copyright and patent”. I imagine they don’t like open source, open access, the creative commons or Lawrence Lessig. Their sponsors include traditional big media industry names from Disney through Clear Channel, Microsoft and AT&T - and Google, for some reason.

So this is hardly objective research, or at least, it’s not research conducted to find out the truth: it’s research conducted to make the argument that we should retain traditional copyright and keep control in the hands of the big corporations rather than the government or the people.

And yet there are certainly lots of graphs, charts, figures and so on, all with sources given, and certainly this tightwad researcher may have a look at them next time she needs some info. But I’ll take them with a grain of salt.

The New York Times writes that girls are far more likely to be creating content for the web than boys:

Indeed, a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).

Girls also eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15 to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17). Video posting was the sole area in which boys outdid girls: boys are almost twice as likely as girls to post video files.

Ars Virtua, an online-only artists’s collective with a gallery space in Second Life, recently advertised an artist in residency for World of Warcraft. They just announced that they’ve selected two artists: Tom Betts and Alison Mealey. There’ll be a “meet-and-greet” where we can all go say hi to the artists within a few weeks, apparently. And yes, there’ll likely be more residencies in WoW for artists in future. Oh, and Ars Virtua also has an artists’ guild on WoW - on a US server. Such a pity servers aren’t truly international.

It’ll be interesting to see what projects Tom Betts and Alison Mealey come up with!

• Yesterday, Harvard University decided that all scholarly publications by employees at the university must be made available online in an open access repository. The University of Bergen, like many other universities, already has an open access repository; but Bergen, we have to opt in by going to the effort of uploading our work. The Harvard proposal uses the opt-out model instead, where all articles must be submitted to the repository and scholars who don’t wish their work to be openly available must apply for a waiver. I would love Bergen to follow suite!
• Anna Serner, the leader of the Swedish Newspaper Publishers’ Association, has started blogging. Or “blogging”, according to Richard Gatarski, who notes the many ways in which this “blog” fails to get what blogging is.
• Apparently 80% of Koreans over the age of six use the internet, and 40% of Korean internet users have their own blog!
• The Australian government has finally apologised for the injustices done to the Aboriginal peoples, in particular the Stolen Generation of the 1930s and onward.
• Espen Andersen wrote about the difficulties highly-educated professionals with years of experience have finding jobs when they move to Norway. Ola Tunander suggests that part of the cause is that friendship and networks are given more priority in Norway than skills, experience and education. So when we complain that our students don’t put enough effort into their studies, spending their time partying instead, they’re actually being entirely rational and will probably end up more successful - in Norway - because of it. Sigh.

A take-off of will.i.am’s heartfelt video of singers overlaying an Obama speech - this is the same but with a McCain speech. I guess they’re kind of simplifying things, but, well, works great as political entertainment. Oh dear. Politics has become entertainment. Maybe it always was. (via Liz)

I’m filling out the marketing form for my book on blogging (copy-editing done; proofs next!), and they want me to provide a list of fifteen people who might adopt the book in teaching - I’m assuming the publisher will send desk copies to these people, or at least to most of these people. If you think you might use the book with your students, leave a comment here and I’ll add you to the list :)

Oh, and any ideas for conferences, professional associations, academic journals, journalists or “bloggers” (the form amusingly uses scare quotes for this) that the marketing department should contact would be great too. I have a number, but I figure more wouldn’t hurt!

I’m in Copenhagen today, at the first meeting of a Nordic network on political communication online headed by Lisbeth Klastrup. The object today is to get some overview of activity in the different Nordic countries, and I’ve been tasked with presenting the Norwegian scene. Which, it turns out, is not that easy, especially since I guess I’ve actually been paying more attention to the US campaigns - oh dear, but, they’re just more entertaining, you know? And they’re using social media far more interestingly, at this point, with great hubs and commentators like TechPresident to keep us up to date about what’s going on. So anyway, I’m going to start by talking about the things that fascinate me about uses of social media in political communication: the user-generated things and the ways voters - and to some extent, campaigners - are inventing new ways of communicating and promoting their opinions. Here are a few examples I’ve enjoyed:

• Vote Different mashup by ParkRidge47 (YouTube, March 2007), a.k.a. Phil de Vellis, who called it a “citizen ad”. (Here’s an interview.)
• I got a Crush on Obama by Obama Girl/Barely Political (YouTube, June 2007)
• Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am and other artists’ overlay/remix of an Obama speech (DipDive.com, YouTube, etc, January 2008).

These are all examples of remix culture, amateur production, user-generated culture, mashups. In the US, a 2005 survey by Pew showed that 59% of all teens uploaded their own content to the internet. 19% of all teens uploaded remixes of various kinds. There are to my knowledge no equivalent surveys of Nordic Also a product of American culture, where political advertising on television - the 30 second spot - is immensely important in campaigns. (There’s a wonderful recent documentary on this by CNN, “Campaign Killers”, that I can’t figure out how to buy or download - here are the teaching notes for it though.)

Other interesting developments in the US campaigns are the use of Facebook - for instance in the US Politics application that I think was set up by Facebook in connection with a television debate in January (at least that’s when I became aware of it.)

In Norway things are certainly not as sophisticated yet, but then, that’s not too surprising. The local elections in September 2007 used YouTube, but in a pretty elementary way - local elections obviously carry less critical mass than national elections because fewer voters are involved in each election. In France last year, it seemed use of the web was more sophisticated than in the US elections in 2004. This year’s US elections are using social technology far more. Presumably the national elections in Norway in September 2009 will be more interesting, seen from an online perspective.

What did happen in the 2007 local elections was that political parties started using YouTube. Arbeiderpartiet and many other parties published short, boring talking-head videos of every candidate. Most of these have about 36 views - and they don’t invite viral spreading. Apart from being extremely boring, they have comments and embedding disabled. I only found one campaigner who actually used YouTube’s features of answering other politicians’ videos in new videos (actually that was disabled so he fudged it), and he was ignored by the politician he answered.

VG, one of the major tabloids, tried to forge their own online platform for politicians, Valg 2007. It’s basically a blogging system for politicians, presented as though all local Norwegian politicians are on it: “Your local politician blogs here!”. It encourages me to see what my local politicians are saying - but there’s only one blogger in Bergen, who’s from a party I’ve never even heard of. That’s a pretty small party, I’d say. Being utterly proprietory, this system doesn’t pull in other local politicians who have been blogging for years (e.g. Heikki Holmås. If I were a politician I’d be pretty suspicious of starting a blog on a tabloid newspaper’s website.

Arbeiderpartiet, which is the largest party in the coalition government, are currently working on updating their program, and their website invites everyone to “take part in the debate”. They’ve got their web 2.0 rhetoric right, but do they follow through?

Unfortunately, the answer is a clear no. The debate pages are slick and video-dense, with some cool Flash effects, and yes, they’re also posted to YouTube - with comments open, hooray! But the “take part” section is rather pathetic. Here are the options for participating:

Right. Send them an SMS (when I’m back in Norway I’ll try and see what/if they answer), send the talking head an email (no way to connect to other voters there), visit her blog - which is on VG Nett’s politician thing, in fact, or their Facebook group - which has had no activity since the election and where the few voter questions are not answered by the party - or go to YouTube, which is, perhaps, the best option. The interface for the videos is nice, though:

That’s about it for now - more later.

Cons:

• My belly’s big enough now that I can’t bend over comfortably, or pull on my stockings, or zip up my boots. The fun second trimester’s definitely over.
• My normal walk to work - thirty minutes, which I usually love - is unusually exhausting.
• My stomach muscles are stretched to the point of uselessness. Getting up from any seated position other than a straight-backed chair, or from a lying position, involves puffing and panting and cunning use of arms.
• Did I mention I’m a lot more tired than usual? Not really sleepy - just tired. Not much energy over for blogging - or even for washing the mark left from that week-old cat puke properly off the floor. (Oh dear. I did vaccuum. And I promise I’ll wash the floor more when the baby starts crawling on it…)

Pros:

• The lovely barrista at Kaos saw my belly and announced that they serve free cake to pregnant and breastfeeding women! Cake is something I can eat LOTS of these days, so I’ll be a frequent customer…
• There’s no way you could see my belly and wonder whether I just gained a lot of weight recently. I’m very definitely pregnant…
• Only nine weeks until we meet our little baby girl!

Ian Bogost notes that there are fewer political games so far in this US presidential campaign than there were in 2004. Largely, he argues, and this seems fair, because “since 2004, online video and social networks have become the big thing, as blogs were four years ago”. I wonder how this may shift as time passes?

• Jean Burgess explains why she’s deleting her Facebook account - and how difficult it is to do.
• Strange video overlay of many, many attempts to complete a Super Mario Bros level. Via Kottke, who also notes several other examples of videos representing multiple times at once.
• A problem with silicone baking trays might be that it’s hard to get the soap all rinsed off them?
• Kevin Anderson gave a talk on blogs and the US elections, and his blog post about it includes lots of useful links and notes.
• Datalagringsdirektivet.no is a website dedicated to the controversial Data Retention Directive, the EU proposal to store all data about our internet and mobile phone usage (connections, who, when, IP numbers, protocols etc, not the actual content of our emails and such) for up to two years with no cause for suspicion. This directive may become Norwegian law by the end of the year. I hope not. Bente Kalsnes has more links to info.

I enjoyed my First Tuesday Bergen experience yesterday. Interesting people at dinner beforehand, and the two other presenters gave very engaging talks from a business point of view - Rune Røsten (long-time Norwegian blog enthusiast who ran the blogs and more at Dagbladet before going to Nettby last year) talking about Nettby, the biggest Norwegian social network site at the moment (Spray Date and Blink no longer rule, though Facebook arguably has more Norwegian users), and Kjetil Manheim talking more generally about community and social sites and how businesses should think about using them - hey, his slides are already on Slideshare, cool.

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As the voice from academia I started by talking about strong and weak links, as Granovetter theorised them in the 70s, and went on to talk about how some social network sites, like LinkedIn, primarily try to help us use and develop our weak ties, whereas others, like dating sites, are more about finding new friends and contacts. Unlike LinkedIn, Facebook has become a social site where all sorts of networks are mixed - I have contacts there ranging from acquaintances from high school, students I had three semesters ago, neighbours, colleagues I met once at a conference, through to colleagues I see or talk with regularly and close friends and family. The collision of networks is one of the problems with sites like these, as “boyd’s law”, formulated by Cory Doctorow expresses: “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” According to Doctorow, that’s one of the reasons social networking sites only tend to last for a couple of years - once there are enough people in your “network” that you don’t want to have contact with you’ll move to another site. I then told boyd and Heer’s story about the teacher whose students found her Burning Man style profile on Friendster (PDF, and noted that services like Spock and Open Social are making these kinds of collision more and more likely, even when we try to keep our networks separate. danah boyd’s post yesterday was great as a round-up: Tim O’Reilly’s argument that this kind of openness is a kind of vaccination against the foolish belief that we can be private online (”We have a moral responsibility to eliminate “security by obscurity” so that people aren’t shocked when they are suddenly exposed.”) vs. danah’s argument that that’s all very well if you’re privileged, as tech geeks in Silicon Valley are, but if you’re not in a position of power - say, if you’re a teenager, or a dissident in a dictatorship, or queer in an oppressed society, or a whistle blower - that vaccination may damage you badly, or even get you killed.