jill/txt

Amusing video: “I look at people who have 100 friends on Friendster the same as I look on people in the real world who have 30 sexual partners.” (via Danah)

The new Detox exhibition currently touring Norway has an interesting list of partipating artists. Lots of electronic and new media stuff. Due to hit Bergen in late November. Curated by Peter Andersson and Ståle Stenslie.

I promised more on the Norwegian Electronic Literature Organisation. After Scott Rettberg’s talk here in January, Thomas Brevik suggested we start up an organisation for electronic literature in Norway, a Norwegian sister organisation to the Electronic Literature Organisation in the US. Obviously I was eager, and Eirik Newth also joined in. We’re a good trio: Eirik is a well-published and well-known non-fiction author as well as an expert on electronic media who has years of experience with electronic dissemination. Thomas is a librarian with a lot of experience and knowledge about electronic media, libraries, knowledge, archiving and publishing, as well as infectious enthusiam and proliferous ideas. I’m an academic and critic who’s into electronic fiction and non-fiction. So we got together and applied for seed funding from Kulturrådet, the http://www.kulturrådet.no/”>Cultural Fund. (No, the site doesn’t work well on a Mac.)
(more…)

Half an hour’s writing a day keeps the doctor away, Finn notes. Let’s blog!

Ooh! We got seed funding from Kulturrådet to start up a Norwegian version of the Electronic Literature Organisation! This is so cool!

So what do you do when your kid starts a group blog with his or her friends for complaining about their parents?

My favourite Stumbles of today:

• Other People’s Stories:
  Every story on OPS is a story a contributor heard from someone else. These stories have been overheard and misheard, told and re-told and sometimes refined over time. They do not shy from hearsay, gossip, myth or guys we knew in high school. OPS is dedicated to the time-honored tradition of stealing other people’s material and we therefore recognize our debt to those from whom we’ve stolen and acknowledge that these stories do not belong to us. (about.html)
• The Word Project: Photos of people holding words are put together to make sentences, or rather, the beginnings of sentences. You can add a word to a sentence by sending in a photo of yourself, holding the word you want to add.

If Bush keeps tripping over his own feet, it should be hard for the Democrats not to win the election.

Good heavens: Automated Essay Grading exists. Admittedly they’re only recommending it as a tool students can use during revision, before submitting the paper, but if you read the full paper (PDF) you’ll see that computers have many advantages over human assessors:

Well, students do want to believe that we’re objective, infallible graders. At least, the students I made do peer assessment last semester said they did. Perhaps students would prefer computer assessors?

You can try out the system if you like. Unfortunately the sample topics don’t include “write a 600-1000 word review of a weblog” which is the next assignment I’ll be grading.

I came across this deep in a post on hacking literature by Maciej Ceglowski over at Idlewords. Maciej suggests that if this technology exists, pretty soon students plagariasing essays by copying them off the internet will be surplanted by students automatically generating essays. Won’t that be fun!?

I’ve been meaning to blog this for weeks: Stumbleupon. Sign up, add a toolbar to your browser (not Safari or Explorer for Macs; use Firefox or Mozilla instead) and click a thumbs up when you like a website. It’ll store the bookmark. Add a comment if you like. It’ll generate a blog for you, consisting of all your comments on websites you find, and it’ll collate the comments in connection with the site you commented on, so you can see other people’s comments too. Cooler: click the Stumble button on your new toolbar and you’ll arrive at a random site that people who liked the sites you liked liked. Dig deeper if you want and manually add people to your social network: friends or just people who’ve liked a lot of the same sites as you like. Join groups according to your interest, and get sites related to the groups. I suspect there’s more too, that I haven’t even discovered yet. I’m only just starting to use this.

But I love being able to click Stumble now and then. A lot of the sites I Stumbleupon are just the sort of sites I like.

This is the first time I’ve seen social networks used as a non-obtrusive foundation for something I want to do anyway. Friendster and Orkut and the rest just do the social network but it’s not for anything, you just collect friends, that’s all. Flickr lets you do something: share and discuss photos, using social networking as a basis. That’s cool, and is great for photoaddicts, but I don’t really have great unfulfilled photosharing needs. I do enjoy finding cool stuff on the web. Stumbleupon nicely does what I already do only better. And more socially. I love that.

My Stumbleupon name is Jill (fancy that) so my profile is at http://jill.stumbleupon.com/.

Oh and this is hilarious: ping pong theatre in the style of Hong Kong fighting movies. Or a fight in The Matrix.

Interestingly presented website of a street artist in Copenhagen -Husk mit navn is his tagline, remember my name. As you’ll see if you poke around the photos on the website he does lots of kinds of adornment, mostly painted on walls. I particularly like the sheets of paper posted like ads with strips for tearing off with a drawing instead of a phone number. (via David Earle’s Stumbleupon)

Grumpygirl seems to have thrown her recent blog-gloom, having several more of those wonderfully slanted observations she does so well. Can’t find her archives though. I also found some morning amusement at Courting Disaster, the diary of an Australian lawyer currently doing an MA on something in Cambridge where he lives with strange flatmates. His list of What Not To Do When Submitting A Draft To Your Supervisor is but one of the funny incidents noted. At She Sells Sanctuary I found tales of fathers and babies, and a link to Blogjam, Tim Dunlop’s wonderfully dense regular piece in the Sydney Morning Herald webdiary linking to things said in political blogs, mostly in Australia.

How on earth could Virgin Atlantic have been surprised that this urinal would be offensive? Pissing into a woman’s mouth? Hello? (via Gianna)