jill/txt

Dagbladet (the more cultural of Norway’s two major tabloids) has started up a newspaper weblog. Jon writes about it, I haven’t time to look at it now (coat, lock door, get bike, fetch book from library, daughter from after-school care, dinner, bath, story, lullaby, thesis) but must say that a photographer from Dagbladet came and photographed me today and a journalist has been asking questions and there’ll be a piece on weblogs and web diaries soon. The weekend, maybe, the journalist said. I get to play the part of the serious researcher (forgot to put on my fake beard-and-spectacles) and others get to be the self-revealing tell-it-all-on-the-web sell-the-story characters.

In weblogs groups emerge and dissipate based on what’s being discussed, whereas in a mailing list it’s the other way round: the group exists first and discussions exist within the group. Because weblogs emerge, no one has the power to unform them.

Another wedding invitation: two names and a date. A tiny red confetti heart held safe inside laminated plastic that will last forever.

A few weeks ago Liz invited me to join Friendster, which is a social networking site. You enter your profile, say whether you want to make friends, find business partners, date or all of the above, and then you hook up with your friends. I thought it was way cool at first - wow, I’m connected to a deity like Megnut through only two degrees of separation through two different channels! Ooh-ah! Then, after convincing lots of friends to join (thanks, guys) I was wondering what to do next. OK, so now I has a map of some of my friends and some of their friends - now what? Frank added to my scepticism, pointing out that Friendster claims complete ownership of anything you put on their site - hm, bit dodgy that, though they probably won’t do anything bad with it. Then I saw Dave Weinberger was sceptical too:

Mm. That led to a long post from Michael Connor O’Clarke: How to Lose Friendsters and Influence People.

This is true, at least assuming all interesting people you could meet online have blogs. Cos it’s bloggers I meet online.

But then today I found lots of Friendster mail in my inbox. Torill had added a testimony, Anne asked to be my friend (of course I said yes!) and when I clicked the “gallery” I discovered there are suddenly 13 Friendsters with photos in Norway! And piles of Swedes! There’s still noone I don’t already know in Bergen, but that, I suppose, is where the potential of such systems is. I already know how to find people with similar interests to me online. But I might be overlooking someone who’s right next door to me.

Actually, as Adam Greenfield writes, Friendster’s “killer ap” is “The swelling joy that fills my heart every time I look at the pictures of these, my good friends. (Awwwwwww…)”. (I found this via a digression in a post by Liz at the new Corante social software blog) I like seeing that photo of Lisbeth, and Friendster telling me “Lisbeth is your friend.” (I stole that line from Lisbeth herself actually).

She wondered whether she should rewrite the past to explain the present. Does now negate then?

Yes, Jarle, I agree absolutely, Humanistic Informatics should have a portal to our blogs, like they do at Harvard. We’ve talked about it. Soon we might start working on it too!

The New Media Theory students are using the course weblog actively, and even cooler: Wu has started her own blogspot blog, Thinking while walking and some others have set up a joint blog, La Escuelita. The New Media Theory course has a course blog for everyone, and blogging is only compulsory for off-campus students. Even they only have to post three posts and three comments each. My Web design and web aesthetics course, on the other hand, has compulsory individual blogs. It’ll be interesting to see how these different strategies work. I wonder whether the percentage of New Media Theory students who start their own blogs will be the same as the percentage of very successful bloggers in the other class? Perhaps it’s a general rule: 5% of the population have a blogging gene, or something like that.

According to Karlin Lillington, writing for the Irish Times, William Gibson will stop blogging when he starts writing his next novel. It sounds as though he needs privacy in order to write:

or, as he writes himself in his blog:

One thing that was immediately clear to me, from the first blog, is that this is not an activity, for me, that can coexist with the writing of a novel. In some way I only dimly apprehend, it requires too much of the same bandwidth (yet never engages anything like the total *available* bandwidth).

But, definitely, the ecology of novelization and the ecology of blogging couldn’t coexist, for me. It would be like trying to boil water without a lid. Or, more like it, trying to run a steam engine without a lid. (I wonder if that would be the case for a native of the blogosphere — for whom, as Lou Reed once said of heroin addicts, “the needle is a toothbrush”? Maybe not.)

This is pretty much the opposite view to Steven Johnson’s statement that he’s been twice as productive in his other writing since he started blogging. But as I understand what Gibson says, for him the incompatibility of book-writing and blogging isn’t that blogging takes time but that it’s too public. Or too open, perhaps. He sounds rather like the individualist romantic genius who needs isolation to create great art, while the blogging ethos demands openness and social sharing of the process. I wonder if these opposed strategies are clichés, beliefs or just a sign of different personality types? I think I’m a native of the blogsphere - though I’m not sure about the toothbrush thing.

Lisbeth’s post about being a grown up academic makes me even more eager to complete that PhD.

I slip my grandmother’s ring onto the middle finger of my right hand. It’s looser than I remember it. My cheeks have lost their fullness, too. I look in the mirror and think that this is what I look like as a woman.

“He gave it to her for their ruby wedding anniversary”, Auntie Joan told me after the funeral, sharing out the jewelry between my sister and me. The flamboyant opal pendant went to my sister, because concerts are more flamboyant than research. I was given the rings. The engagement ring: a lowset, elegant band of diamonds. He was a bank clerk and she, who was she when they met? The silver ring that he made her himself, along with rings and bracelets for their daughters and grandchildren. I remember running into her open arms and the smell of her campher chest. I remember sitting on his lap and playing in his garden. The ruby ring, for forty years of love. It encircles my finger. I keep it on when I shower, when I sleep, because I don’t want to stop believing in the love it promises is possible. I don’t wear the zirconium. It catches in clothes and tears stockings and is not for everyday. The wedding ring is likewise untouched in my jewelry box. It seems not to be mine, though it was given to me.

Ruby, diamond, ruby, diamond, ruby: held close to each other by slightly uneven golden claws. It is imperfect, one diamond smaller than the other. The golden band tapers to almost nothing at the back of my finger. A jeweller told me that the diamonds are cut in an old-fashioned manner. Once, I imagine, it belonged to another beloved woman. Perhaps she died without granddaughters to leave her jewellery to, and so my grandfather bought it for the woman he loved. Generations of love: he loved her, they loved me. The ring is a bond to remind me of this.

One day, perhaps not till after my death, but one day, I’ll give the ring away. With love.

Thomas Brevik is Bergen’s most interesting librarian, and one of the people who convinced me that a librarian who’s enthusiastic about technology is a person you definitely want to know. He’s been blogging for ages, but has now got his own domain, miromurr.no, and has converted his blog, Bibliotekarens bibliotek, to MoveableType. Yup, it was he bought me that pizza! To celebrate Thomas’s conversion to MoveableType, I’m sending him a trackback :)

Eirik Newth’s latest column over at Kulturnett uses jill/txt as an example to explain the social aspects of blogging - comments, trackbacks and so on. He writes:

In this morning’s New Media Theory lecture I amazed myself by happily talking for 45 minutes about the (at least) three prehistories of new media (that of the artists, the literary one and the cinematic one) and the difference between emphasising the work and the network. And I explained how using a course blog not only is a useful learning tool but helps us understand the network: it’s serial, social and about process.

I gave my first paid lecture two years ago or so, and Eirik Newth was the first presenter of the day. I watched in awe, nervously clutching my anxiously powerpoint-filled laptop, as he talked about e-books for two hours without notes or projectors. I’m so surprised that now I find yabbing on about something I’m interested in so much easier than setting up useful problems for the students to actually work on themselves. I had expected it to be the other way around.

Denmark’s ex-Prime Minister has really gotten into weblogging! I was going to just quote some of his latest post, which is of course written in Danish, but I think for the benefit of mankind I’ll translate it into English instead:

For some reason the thought of a staid old politician experiencing such familiar exhileration with a new medium strikes me as amazingly - cute. Loveable. I’m not sure that’s how politicians actually want to be seen, but there you go.

Here’s an annotated bibliography on internet addiction with half real entries and half fakes. It was prepared by Trudi Jacobsen and Laura Cohen to teach students how to evaluate the reliability of online sources and comes with a description of how they work with it in class. Could come in handy.