jill/txt

This morning started unlike every other morning of the last nine months. Sure, I woke up, showered and fed Jessica, but then I ate an amazing breakfast Scott cooked for us (Dutch apple pancake baked in our new cast iron skillet - so yummy!) and after seeing the twelve-year-old off to school I kissed Scott and little eight-month-old Jessica goodbye and went to work. My first day back at work after nine months of maternity leave.

It actually feels pretty good being back at the office. My desk is so tidy. My phone is rerouted to my old phone number, my computer is hooked up again and I’ve gone through my email (actually I just archived everything from 2008 without reading it) and my paper mail (mostly catalogues). I’ve been figuring out my schedule for the spring. I’m teaching into the web design course, HUIN105, with Eric Rasmussen, who’ll be substituting for Scott this semester. I’m also supervising a few students who are doing independent practical projects in HUIN305. But I’m only teaching for a couple of months, because I’m getting a bonus few months of sabbatical since I missed part of it being on maternity leave. And thanks to brilliant Norway I only have to work 5 1/2 hour days: I get two hours paid leave every day because I’m still nursing. I love Norwegian parental leave.

I’m also giving a couple of talks in the next weeks, both for librarians, who are some of my favourite people when it comes to genuine interest in using social technology and the web to connect with readers. The first talk is at Neptunseminaret on January 21 here in Bergen, which is an annual meeting organised by various regional library associations. This year the topic is “Human meets machine”, and the other speakers look really interesting. I’m looking forward to attending this. My second talk is in Oslo at Kari Skjønsberg-dagene on Feburary 9, and is organised by the Faculty of Journalism, Library and Information Science.

All this is good.

But walking to work I realised that I may never again spend all of every day with my baby. She’ll be with her daddy for the next semester, which is fabulous. But our days of me being there always are over.

I’m already looking forward to going home and holding her close again!

Ooh, only 12 more days on maternity leave, and then Scott takes over. I’m actually going to the MLA conference in San Francisco just before my maternity leave is officially over, too - I was hoping this would sort of jump start me into academia again, remembering all the interesting papers on blogging there last year (not that I heard them, I just remember seeing them on the program) but this year there’s barely anything on blogging, to my great disappointment. Hopefully I’ll still find some inspiration.

Jessica is still fabulous. She’s nearly eight months old and smiley and gorgeous. She must always have something in her hands to examine and is intensely curious about the world. I have to admit I have very mixed feelings about spending six or more hours away from her each day, but I know the time she’ll be spending with her father is precious and I absolutely love that the Norwegian system allows me two (paid!) hours off each day because I’m still breastfeeding. A six hour day won’t be too bad, really. And while I know I’ll miss Jessica horribly, six hours of time devoted to brain work - my goodness, every day, that’s insane luxury! No interruptions! Well, obviously, there will be, but of a very different nature.

So I imagine I’ll be back and blogging in January. Till then: happy holidays!!

Ida Jackson is a Norwegian blogger I’m adding to my RSS feeds after reading some of her posts - she’s risen to blogger fame after writing reviews of the journalists who interviewed her about her new book, Jenter som kommer. Her reviews are great: she includes the best question and the worst question they asked and really shows how different interviews of the same person can turn out. The journalists of course were shocked at being reviewed (though the reviews were fairly positive, really) and so wrote about that. Here’s Jackson’s post summarising the whole affair, the article the journalist wrote afterwards and Pål Hivand noting that the journalist’s “we journalists” vs “the bloggers” distinction really doesn’t work anymore.

Norwegian politics doesn’t work the same way as in the US - a Norwegian politician using the high drama and emotion of Obama’s wonderful speeches looks foolish in a down-to-earth Norwegian. And because of regulations limiting political advertising, Norwegian elections (thank goodness) aren’t based on donations. We don’t have a two-party system, or primaries in the same way, and election cycles last a few months at most, certainly not two years. I wonder, though, whether Norwegian political parties in next year’s national elections could make use of the internet in organising volunteers as well as Barack Obama’s campaign did, as TechPresident discuss in their argument that the internet won Obama the presidency: “Online volunteer organizing essentially built the campaign a structure in places where it didn’t exist, letting paid staff parachute in and immediately take command of a working political army.” Sounds pretty good.

I’m totally into Ravelry these days - the social media site for knitters where you can see how 783 people knit a particular pattern in completely different ways, or who buys yarn at the same local store as you do, or which patterns or finished knitted objects your friends favourite. Honestly, if you’re at all into knitting, or you simply want to see a great example of how social media can work for a (surprisingly large with 200,000 members and they’re not even out of beta) speciality group, go sign up. Oh, and it’s also a nice example of how a social media site can add value to existing social practices in a (loose) community - Ravelry links up and display’s users’ Flickr and blog streams, which both adds value to Ravelry itself and helps strengthen the existing networks that extend outside of Ravelry.

One of this morning’s great finds was this handknitted sweater with a portrait of Obama on the back of it (here’s a link to the project in Ravelry if you’re a member). The woman who knitted it generated a chart for the intarsia knitting by uploading a jpg image to MicroRevolt’s knitPro, which according to the site’s blurb is “a web application that translates digital images into knit, crochet, needlepoint and cross-stitch patterns. Just upload jpeg, gif or png images of whatever you wish — portraits, landscapes, logos… and it will generate the image pattern on a grid sizable for any fiber project”.

If you’re more the linguistic/code type of person, you might prefer knitting a variant of Binary. If you’re in the mood for binary knitting you can encode your message here and knit, say, a scarf, a hat or a pair of socks. See 164 examples at Ravelry.com.
Now all I have to do is figure out what I’m knitting!!
PS: I’m jillaroo on Ravelry - if you’re on Ravelry too, send me a note!

Noted in my rapid morning reading of RSS feeds: danah boyd writes about Facebook’s complex privacy settings confusing people: “Tech developers… I implore you… put privacy information into the context of the content itself. When I post a photo in my album, let me see a list of EVERYONE who can view that photo. When I look at a photo on someone’s profile, let me see everyone else who can view that photo before I go to write a comment. You don’t get people to understand the scale of visibility by tweetling a few privacy settings every few months and having no idea what “Friends of Friends” actually means. If you have that setting on and you go to post a photo and realize that it will be visible to 5,000 people included 10 ex-lovers, you’re going to think twice. Or you’re going to change your privacy settings.” Indeed, that does seem like the obvious solution.

Technorati’s released a new State of the Blogosphere report, and Anne Helmond provides some thoughts on the results and the way they’ve done it this year.

I don’t seem to be a very good blogger while on maternity leave - but that’s OK, I’ll be back after the New Year when I’m at work again, I’m sure. There are so many things I could have blogged over the last months, but it’s a lot easier to read blogs than to type blog posts while you’re nursing and otherwise looking after a baby, so I’ve thought more blog posts than I’ve written.

Here’s a post that’s easy to do, because the AARP has practically done it for me: look, type your name into the box below and see it emblazoned throughout the video. It’s kind of fun - and a cool strategy for trying to make a video go viral. It’s also interesting that the AARP is an organisation for over-fifty-year-olds and (in my non-American ignorance) not a traditional political organisation. And of course the message is simply to get out and vote.

AARP 08 Video

Enter your name to see who can bring real change to Washington. First Name: Last Name:

The group that hacked into Sarah Palin’s email, Anonymous, seems like something out of a William Gibson novel.

I’m not sure, but I might prefer to keep them in novel-space.

Forskning.no, a Norwegian web journal that publishes science and research news, has jumped on the newspapers-must-assimilate-blogs bandwagon and asked researchers to blog for them. Unfortunately they don’t seem quite sure what a blog is. Links are rare and clumsy, posts are long, the bloggers don’t respond to each other’s posts or to readers’ comments. This is a series of newspaper-style opinion pieces, not a blog. It’s not properly set up to foster the social writing and conversations that good blogs engage in.

It drives me crazy that the premier Norwegian publication for popularised science is trying to set up research blogs and not getting it right.

In one post, a professor of physiotherapy spends most of his blog post talking about his skepticism to blogging: unlike traditional media, he writes, blogs break the tradition that an assertion made in public should permit other people to respond to an assertion. Blogs, he continues, often tend towards the monologue, a sort of mumbling to oneself rather than engaging in debate.

Which blogs could he have read to get such a wrongheaded impression, you may wonder. Well, a newspaper blog, it turns out. The Bergen popstar Doddo’s blog about football, which, if you take a look, looks a lot more like a newspaper column than a blog. The professor criticises this blog quite sensibly, saying it’d be more interesting to him if Doddo wrote about something he’s an expert at instead, such as music.

So the professor does exactly what he’s criticising Doddo for and writes about something he’s not an expert at: blogging. Hopefully his next post will be about his research on physiotherapy instead.

Another of the research bloggers writes about waiting in line at the US embassy in Oslo and being sent off because her bag was too big. It’s quite a well-written little blog post, in the personal diary style, but what on earth does it have to do with research? Surely at least the first posts in a research blog should establish it as discussing research in some sense or another?

There are a number of things Forskning.no could have done to improve things:

1. Run a small seminar for the invited bloggers or at least sent out some guidelines explaining what blogging is. (Perhaps this was done: if so I’d love to see the guidelines.)
2. Tell bloggers to use links!
3. Foster a conversation. Ask guest bloggers to at least sometimes respond to each other’s posts rather than write with no context. If staff members are blogging too, they should be particularly active in this, especially in the beginning when you’re just starting to build a community.
4. Set up a technical system that makes linking easy, and where trackbacks work. Such a system should alert your bloggers to posts on other blogs that reference their post so that it’s easy for your blogger to respond either in the other blog or in a new post on your blog.
5. Insist that if readers respond to a blog post, the blogger should ANSWER, especially if their post, like that of the professor of physiotherapy, is about how blogs tend to be monologues and you hate mumbling monologues.
6. Pay bloggers. The professor of physiotherapy notes that this, like so many other outreach activities, is unpaid yet not really counted as “work” by the university. Seriously, if you expect researchers to put all this work into contributing content, they should be paid the same as a freelancer would be.
7. Correct typos and fix links and images shortly after a post is published (I’m assuming bloggers publish directly; as all posts are timestamped at 5 or 6 am this may not (but should) be the case.) Show the same professionality in proofreading the blog posts as with other articles on the site. If you want the blog to add value to the site you have to take it seriously and treat it with the same professionality as the rest of the site.
8. To start such a venture off well, make sure all or most of the first guest bloggers are experienced bloggers. This will create a foundation for future posts. Researchers who have never blogged or read blogs have no idea how to do it and need role models and examples.

Torill Mortensen is one of the bloggers Forskning.no promises will contribute. Torill and I are old cronies - we’ve both blogged for years, and we co-authored the first academic paper on blogging (yes! ever!), Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool. (In Researching ICTs in Context, ed. Andrew Morrison, InterMedia Report, 3/2002, Oslo 2002.) Since then, Torill’s written much more on blogs and of course on her main research field, games. I’m quite sure Torill’s posts will be lively and interesting, and not least, they’ll be blog posts and exist in the live web of blogs and social media. Perhaps that will pump some life into Forskning.no’s blog. Or not - it looks perfectly primed to stay a series of disconnected opinion pieces that doesn’t engage with blogging or social media in anything but name.

Other established research bloggers Forskning.no should invite to contribute are Espen Andersen, Marika Lüders and Eirik Newth. I’m sure there are others: who would you suggest?

And do you know of any examples of this kind of traditional media-driven research blogging being done well? And do you have any more advice for journals trying to set up viable “blogs” inside or beside their nearly-print-style web publication?

build a ROBOT cupcakes!

Originally uploaded by hello naomi

I might have to make some of these cute robot cupcakes I found on Flickr, via Thimble. Their creator, Naomi, bills herself as “a post graduate uni student who programs robots to play soccer by day and a ‘cupcake ninja’ by night” and has the most fabulous collection of insanely decorated cupcakes I’ve ever seen. Fellow geeks may also appreciate the Space Invader cupcakes.

So for the robot cupcakes - do you think you simply use marzipan to which you’ve added food colouring? Of course, to really make these perfect you’d want to use those edible googly eyes that Evil Mad Scientist figured out how to make.

In all the talk about the death of newspapers, people frequently argue that local news will still be of value, and more than that, the hyperlocal stories that couldn’t be covered when space (on paper) was limited. Bergens Tidende, our local paper, has a shining example today of how a local newspaper can gather and report local news simultaneously by coordinating reader participation in a very easy-to-contribute mashup focusing on an issue of huge importance to Bergeners right now, though it’s of absolutely no wider interest.

You see, we’re currently building a light rail system through Bergen, and the road works and constantly changing detours are of course causing major traffic problems. Bergens Tidende is doing the conventional reporting and interviews, but also set up a map where people can double click to show where they’re experiencing problems and where they can quickly enter information about what the problem is. They’ve even thought of anti-spam measures: you enter your mobile phone number and instantly receive an SMS with a code that you then type into the website to confirm that you’re an actual person and that you’re a different person to all the other people who’ve entered their comments. Your identity is not posted to the website. It all works beautifully smoothly and took no more than a couple of minutes in total. And now I can go and look to see whether other people are annoyed at the same temporary intersection as I swear at all alone in the car whenever I drive through it. [Update: Hm, the website I saw right after entering my comment gave a nicer interface for reading other comments than the one I can find now - could be smoother.]

Actually this is the sort of thing the city council should provide for us to tell them where potholes are too big or pedestrian crossings need to be renovated. Though perhaps having a disinterested party doing it (the fourth estate) is actually a very good thing.

Did you ever think of playing oboe when you were a child? Probably not; in fact, it’s pretty much impossible for a child to play a standard oboe, with its complicated mechanics and steep lung requirements. My sister is an oboist in Kristiansand symfoniorkester, and on a crusade to recruit new oboists - because orchestras of the world struggle to find them. Marion’s found tiger oboes, oboes specially designed so children as young as six can play them, and she’s just starting up the first ever kids’ oboe class at the Kristiansand kulturskole. Being a performer and story-teller at heart, Marion has decided the black and yellow striped kids’ oboes are clearly relatives of tigers - and so she’s written a story about how the oboe got its stripes, and has even struck a deal with the zoo where the young oboists get to play music for the tigers and visit the zoo regularly.

So far there are no hits on google for tiger oboe, but if Marion has her way that will definitely change. Here she is in on NRK Sørlandet at the launch - at the zoo, playing for a tiger, of course!

Every book I’ve read about baby sleep - apart from Gina Ford who already has the perfect schedule worked out for you - recommends keeping track of when your baby sleeps for a few days or a week so you can see the patterns and figure out a schedule that meets your baby’s needs and natural inclinations. But tracking sleep on paper is a total pain, even with printable charts. Thank goodness, we live in the age of the web, and there’s a web 2.0 style webbased service that can help: Trixietracker.com.

I’ve been tracking Jessica’s sleep, food and nappies for twenty-four hours, and the little graph is starting to fill up most satisfyingly. When I’ve tracked a full week, it will start showing me averages - how many hours a day does she sleep? When is she most likely to be awake? How does she compare to the other children whose parents are tracking them?

I’m certainly a sucker for feeding in a few numbers and seeing them transformed into pretty graphs - or, in this case, clicking a button on my computer or iPod touch when I put Jessica down for a nap and when she wakes up - but the real value of such a service is in the aggregation of all the data. Nicole at Taking Care of Baby writes that with a whole year of data on her baby, she can find answers to whole new questions:

[B]ecause it is so quick and easy to enter information into the computer, the data points accumulate, and fascinating patterns emerge. Then it becomes possible to answer these kinds of questions: does an earlier bedtime make for a longer night’s sleep? What time has he been going down for his nap lately? If he nurses longer during the day, is he less likely to wake up at night? Should we move from having two naps to a single nap? Are we less tired now than we were a year ago?

In another post, she writes about how she realised from looking at her baby’s sleep charts that he never sleeps more than twelve hours in a 24 hour period, which Trixietracker also shows her is below the average for children his age. So if he naps for a long time, there’s no point in having bedtime at the regular hour. The creator of Trixietracker, Ben MacNeill, has even created different kinds of visualisation to help show different kinds of pattern - such as the sleep scatterplot.

The author of Parentonomics (a book by an economist who apparently tried applying economic theory to his parenting - how do incentives work, for instance?) called this kind of analysis data-driven parenting.

I think it’s unlikely I’ll keep tracking Jessica for a whole year or even a whole month. And to be honest, parents have always noticed this kind of pattern without a year’s worth of exact bookkeeping of their child’s habits. But I’m definitely going to do it until I get my first seven day averages. And perhaps I’ll make a habit of tracking Jessica for a few days every month or two. Looking back, I really can’t remember how my twelve-year-old slept when she was four months. In retrospect, I wish I’d saved some record of that to look back at. SoJessica may well end up with printouts of her Trixietracker data in her baby journal.

Virginia Heffernan wrote about (video-based) web serials for the New York Times recently; she follows up on her blog with a list of recommended serials to try. She’s not been impressed by web serials after lonelygirl15, but continues to be eager to follow the form: “I just suspect that Web video is better — so far — for painterly productions than for narrative ones. So far.”

If I could watch these on my iPod Touch (while nursing) I’d probably watch ‘em all. Unfortunately the iPod doesn’t have speakers, so I’d need those finnickly little headphone things which are a total pain, especially while nursing. I suppose it’s bizarre that I never listen to music on my iPod any more - but you don’t want to wear headphones when you’re with a baby. At least, I don’t. So for me, the iPod is now purely a reading machine.