jill/txt

Demos Greenhouse has a post today that nicely encapsulates the power of blogs and networking online - and the disadvantages of it, seen from the point of view of a thinktank of political activists and researchers (”people changing politics”)who have only recently decided to focus on the net. The upsides are things I’ve seen happen in many other blogs, and they really are quite startling, especially the first time they happen to you - you know, when the person you’ve blogged about comments on your post defending his or her point of view, or when someone you didn’t know emails you forging some useful connection that wouldn’t have happened by simple person-to-person networking. The risks are less often pointed out:

To put it bluntly, I won’t get a byline for the THES article; Demos won’t be seen by the rest of the world as any more influential even though one of Europe’s leading statesman takes the time to read and comment on our blog.

The online and offline “public spheres” don’t always connect. Acquiring influence in one doesn’t necessarily give you recognition in the other. I think this will even out in time, as we spend more and more time with online media. Though perhaps we’ll have to wait until print newspapers have digital paper and links to make connections back to their sources, like mainstream online papers are doing now.

I can’t find any mainstream media confirming this, and the links go to a 404 at a homeschooling network rather than to a government site, but perhaps someone more skilled in US politics can confirm this or expose it as make believe: apparently the US congress is trying to get two bills through, quietly, that would reinstate the draft so men and women between 18 and 26, even if in college, could be sent to war against their will. Starting June 2005.

If true, surely the mainstream media would be reporting it, though? Google news doesn’t have much on it. A regular google search for US draft June 2005 brings up lots of blogs and alternative media discussing it, but I couldn’t find any official sources referenced.

[Update: Metafilterists dug up links of course. Snopes reckons it’s an urban legend, though who knows? Anyway, Norway has the draft already. Yay.]

Wordpress was far easier to install than Movable Type was, and it has built in spam blacklists and easier-looking comment management, and a nice interface, but I don’t know php so editing the templates I find that I’m spending a lot of time squinting so I only see the familiar codes and not those lines of php with all the disconcerting question marks.

To change the URLs of my permalinks I have to “use mod_rewrite” which is no doubt basic for a programmer and I know I’ll be able to google my way to doing it, whatever it is, in time, but I’ve gotta say Movable Type is closer to HTML and familiar pastures.

I was getting a teeny bit sick of having to delete comments every single time I took a look at my blog, though. I’m not convinced Wordpress’ll have better spam control, but simply changing systems should confuse the evil spammers for a while, anyway. I thought of using Tinderbox again. Now that Haloscan offers both comments and trackbacks I wouldn’t have to give up my networkedness. But I do like having the comments in my own control. It’s so cool that I could just import all the posts, comments and trackbacks from Movable Type, no problem!

I’ll try Wordpress for a while. Maybe I’ll return to Movable Type, or Tinderbox, or another platform in a while. Trying out different systems is good. Like stretching. Keeps you flexible.

This layout is called Rubric, is designed by Hadley Wickham, and won second place in a styling competition for Wordpress. I’ll come up with something of my own in a while, but not just now.

[Update: design is changing…]

Wordpress is far easier to install than Movable Type was. Might take a while before things are in order here, though.

• Cameron Marlow on weblogs and authority

• Charles Lowe and Terra Williams on weblogs in the writing classroom

Steve Kurtz’s bioartsupplies have been confiscated by the FBI.

I went to see Alladeen with Hanne-Lovise this evening. Five actors, many projectors, several technicians: it was theatre and video and animations all on top of each other, extravagant and often quite effective. The website is a separate project and perhaps even more interesting: alladeen.com, a web documentary about the people who do phone sales and customer support for Americans - in Bangalore, and about the disjunction of time and space in today’s society, and about identities. The idea and the theme is fabulous: enactments of the language classes given to the call centers’ new hires (obliterate any trace of your mother tongue, learn about American culture, fake an identity, “Phoebe, my name’s Phoebe”, “I live in New York”, “The snow here is terrible”) and jetsetting Indians in New York, London, on mobile phones switching from British to American to Spanish to Chinese always agreeing to meet or just having met. There were a few wonderful moments where the cross-media thing really worked well - a webcam closeup shot of a call center woman’s face as she explains directions to a spiritually lost man in California, or the way the exact same background is used for New York as for London, different traffic lights sliding up the screen as an actor walks in front of it, talking into her cellphone constantly.

But despite the richness of the theme and the cool technical effects and the enjoyable unfamiliarity of watching a documentary play, Alladeen seemed to be missing something. There were vignettes, there were suggestions of stories, there were videotaped statements from call center workers, but it needed something more. Perhaps that something more is suggested in the website: Aladdin’s story, the rags to riches story of mixed ethnicity and wishes to be granted. Apart from the lamps projected on walls at various intervals, and the wishes flicking across the ticker at the end of the performance, there wasn’t much Aladdin in there. I wanted more story.

The website, alladeen.com, is designed as a standalone project, and is definitely worth a look. Some of the videos of call center people describing their experiences are hilarious - and enlightening.

Tomorrow a mixed reality game/performance will be mixing on-the-street players in West Bromwich in the UK and online players like yourself, with the aim to find objects in a virtual yet real city. It’s called Uncle Roy All Around You and is produced by the London-based artists’ group Blast Theory. You can play on Macs and PCs and even with a dialup connection, you just need Shockwave and you need to click the PLAY button between noon and 6 pm British time tomorrow or Friday or Saturday - or

Berlin: 13:00 - 19:00
Tokyo: 20:00 - 01:00
Sydney: 21:00 - 02:00
New York: 07:00 - 12:00

Actually those times don’t all make sense, I think the last three should get an extra hour on the end - but they’re off the site, so maybe something mysteriously stops non-European players playing an hour before the rest of us.

Will you give it a go?

Tomorrow and Friday there’s a conference here where Friedrich Kittler and Jay Bolter and many other worthy speakers will be talking about new media. Should be good. I bet you could turn up even if you’ve not registered - it’s free.

Confused by different standards I bought jeans in the States two sizes below what I thought my size was and returned home to find the jeans are big enough I could be five months pregnant and perfectly comfortable in them. What a waste of money.

I wonder how all these different size conventions around the world actually originated. 38 or M in Northern Europe, 75B in Scandinavia, 95B in France, 10 in Australia, something less than 8 in the US, XXL in Asia. Did everyone just start their own systems completely independently? Then why do the sizes always skip two - from 10 to 12, from 38 to 40?

Maybe I’ll try and boil the jeans. Aren’t jeans supposed to shrink, anyway?

Ew. In September Critical Art Ensemble are coming from New York to Stavanger’s iolab to lead a workshop in wetware. Wetware, yes, that means making art from organic materials. I’m a wimp, but there’s something about the word wetware that makes me imagine my hands deep inside a freshly killed deer, pulling out its still almost beating heart. Actually, I think they’re more the white labcoats kind of artists than the hunter in Snow White. One of them, Steve Kurtz, very uncomfortably had FBI agents remove the e.coli. bacteria from his house after his wife died and the police thought the biomaterials looked suspicious. (The e.coli. bit is from memory since the newspaper linked from there has removed the story.) I’m no wetware art expert, so couldn’t tell you whether genetic art like Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent green bunny rabbit (neither art nor new, say some) fall within the wetware paradigm. My aesthetic reactions are primal: it’s frightening, horrible, like that hot bloody heart pulled from the deer’s docile body and my analytical abilities are bypassed completely. Some might say that’s a sign of the artists’ success.

I just sent back the Telio IP phone adaptor I was so enthusiastic about when I first heard about it.
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I’ve been meaning to blog this - looks like it’ll be interesting to many people doing research on academic uses of weblogs and of the web. The link below goes directly to the PDF; there’s also a summary page for the dissertation.

Björneborn, Lennart. Small-world link structures across an academic web space : a library and information science approach. PhD dissertation. Copenhagen: Department of Information Studies, Royal School of Library and Information Science, 2004. xxxvi, 399 p.
ISBN 87-7415-276-9. Available: http://www.db.dk/lb/phd/phd-thesis.pdf

We not only had fun following the players around and laughing at their antics, they reminded us, in the most amusing manner, of how rich with history Bergen is. It’s easy to forget all the stories here - like the stories of the Hanseatic League, whose Northernmost post was in Bergen. The Hansa merchants’ houses still line the harbour, and stepping into the labyrinthine passages between them is still bewitching. Of course, 500 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to walk through those passages. Women weren’t permitted in the area at all. Nor could women own property, sign contracts or trade - except for their bodies. I like living now. It was great seeing my seven-year-old daughter soak up the history, too, especially with such enjoyment.

Bergen Byspill will be playing Hansaspill for another month.