jill/txt

I’m going to France, and I think I might do some moblogging here. Probably just photos will get posted, since the text part of the phone to Flickr to blog is hiccupping, and then if I’m online (as in if I can be bothered to pay a euro a minute and sit under the stairs on an ISDN connection) I might write in some text. Seeya!

Imagine spinning a story to reinvent your life. It seems that’s what Chicago girl Norma Khouri did. When sick of her marriage and her mother, she wrote a book detailing her life escaping from patriarchal Jordan, and not only made a pretty penny, she was also granted asylum in Australia. She’s even still sticking to her story. She just invented that American identity in order to escape Jordan. The title of her book is wonderful: Forbidden Love: A Harrowing True Story of Love and Revenge in Jordan - sounds good, eh?

Ugh! I want to moblog from Provence (I’m going tomorrow! Yay!) and none of the options are quite working.

• Email to Flickr which posts to this (Wordpress-powered) blog: This kind of works, but no title gets sent, well, no words at all, really. I like words.
• Email to Flickr which posts to a newly created Blogger blog: This works better. The layout’s better, the title tag works, but still no OTHER words. I like words.
• MMS to weblogg.no: This seemed promising, since it’s set up by a Norwegian company and is specific to Norwegian ways of using technology - MMSes are great, really easy, free on weekends… But after just having set up a new blog on Blogger.com I was really frustrated. The interface is jumbled in Firefox, and really needs some work in terms of user-friendliness. There are lots of very small letters and a lot of buttons and NO HELP FUNCTION! Once you’re in there and you try to post something it tells you you can’t until you’ve set up categories, which really seems rather complex for a fresh blogger. The explanation of how to SMS or MMS posts is not in the interface you see after creating a new post, but at the bottom of the front page, and it’s ambiguous, too. When I MMSed a photo and the code word “blogg” and some text to the number given, I got an error message that I hadn’t set up a default category. But as far as I can see, I have. So I think I’m giving up on weblogg.no for now, though I’m kind of loathe to - I know how much easier it is to criticise than to create, and I really appreciate that there’s a Norwegian option now, but I’m totally spoilt by lovely interfaces. Using this made me squirm with delight to return to the elegant simplicity of the interface to Blogger.
• Email to buzznet.com: This works, and I set up my own “moblog” pretty easily, and both words and image came through, but it’s so ugly and overloaded with stuff.
• Wordpress also supports posting through email, but you need your own mail server, and I don’t have one.

Any suggestions? I’d really like to be able to post images to a blog while I’m in Provence… There is a computer, there, but it’s under the stairs, it costs a euro for ten minutes, there’s usually a queue, and really, I don’t want to sit there when I could sit outside and chat. If I can’t work anything else out, I expect I’ll post through Flickr from my phone (best way to get the photos out) and come add some words now and then from the computer.

This cheap motivational trick for writers sounds just like the sort of thing that’d work for me. Would work well for PhD writers too. Which reminds me, it’s about time I put my PhD thesis online. But, see, something’s weird with the Word file, so when I PDF it it becomes three separate PDFs, which the printer could handle, but which I keep meaning to splice or otherwise fix before putting it online. Only I never get around to it cos I don’t have Acrobat Distiller. Tut tut.

Got the student evaluations for last year’s class. I just skimmed them (too much else to do right now, I’ll look at it later) but I noticed a lovely question about how much work the students put into this course. Now the course is 15 credits, and full time students should take 30 credits each semester. So given a standard work week of 37,5 hours, students should expect to spend about 18 hours a week on my course. A few did.

10 Hvor mange timer i uken bruker du på emnet totalt, det vil si selvstudier, forelesning og annen undervisning? (How many hours a week do you spend on this course in total, including independent work as well as attending lectures and other classes?)

Actually this probably isn’t bad, and I just love those two students who spent more than 26 hours a week on the class.

The next question on the form asks whether they think the amount of work required is appropriate for the number of credits. TEN chose not to answer! Almost all the others said “about right”.

Next year I’m going to work them so much harder.

MovableType’s educational licence price of US$39 for a single teacher and a single class of students - with unlimited users weblogs for current students in the class - is entirely affordable. That’s exactly the use I intend. Good for them.

Now that looks useful: Gameblogs displays the latest posts from a variety of blogs that write about games. Does that kind of site exist for other topics? (via GTxA)

Another study shows that filesharing makes no difference to record sales. Joi Ito also points to the original paper (PDF).

OK, so I’ve got a working website set up for ELINOR at elinor.nu (elinor.com, .net, .org are all taken up by linkfarms or “investors” wanting $8000 for the domain), and there’s some extremely basic content too. More will come after the summer.

I was thinking more about Fahrenheit 911 this morning, having heard it’s not going to be shown here until September, and having been reading about it lately. When I saw the movie I cried and raged at all the bits I was meant to, but one sequence really took me by surprise. What on earth was Michael Moore thinking to represent the nations of the “coalition of the willing” in such an overtly racist, ridiculing manner? Vikings for Iceland, joints for the Netherlands and monkeys for Marocco? Cartoon-like voice-overs and open mockery of man nations just to make the point that most of the world opposed the war on Iraq? The English-speaking members of the coalition weren’t mentioned, interestingly enough, nor were the Spaniards.

I know ridicule, racism, sexism and other kinds of oppression are far more easily perceived when you’re on the receiving end, but it seems hard to believe that Moore could condoned such a sequence without seeing what a stupid white man perspective it is on the world.

I once met a guy, at a party I think, who told me he believed that if a discussion continues for long enough, and has enough participants, every possible point of view will be expressed. He used this conviction as the basis of a private game: he liked to sit silently and listen to discussions. He’d plan what he would say, and then he’d wait until someone else said it for him. He claimed that when there were more than three people in the room, in addition to him, one of the others would invariably make his point for him, allowing him to remain silent.

Ideas floating around waiting for a host. Sometimes finding several.

Metafilter is one of the most active collaborative blogging sites around, but oddly enough, though the number of subscribers has grown a lot, the number of comments has remained stable. About 100,000 comments are posted to the site every half year.

In response to the graph showing this, a MeFier wrote, “I know that I’ve basically given up commenting on Mefi because generally what I want to say has already been said by someone else.” That guy I met at a party would have nodded in agreement. Maybe he’d have been a little sad to think of the game wasted - it would have been so much more fun to plan your comment and then see somebody else post “your” words.

This year I submitted an abstract to AoIR for the first time, and my proposal was accepted, I’ll be presenting in Sussex in September. My topic is distributed narrative, or viral narrative, or contagious narrative; I’m not quite sure what to call it yet but I think this is going to be my main research topic for a while. I’ve also made sure that I’m teaching networked culture and contagious media this autumn, so hopefully that will help me keep on track. I’ve found it hard to work up to Real Research after finishing my PhD, but this week I’m determined to do some work on this, so I’m going to focus my energies by blogging it. I’d like to submit this to Fibreculture’s journal issue on contagion (deadline August 31) but with a holiday in France, teaching beginning in mid-August and ten days at ISEA that may be optimistic. OK. To work!
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I’m going to France next weekend, for a fortnight’s immersion in that most beautiful language. I searched my blog for last summer’s French posts, and found a post on on keeping secrets in public, oh, and a story told to me by my sister, it happened to her friend, more or less, and there are images of lavender which is probably withering as we speak. I don’t think I’ll need to fake French, though my grammar is shocking, but you know, it will improve.

I might try to moblog in French. Letting myself write English only as a special treat. Perhaps. There’ll be photos, anyway, now my cameraphone is becoming more pliant.

Scott posted an excellent trip report from Incubation to Grandtextauto - far more informative than my most fragmented bits and pieces and a good read, as well.