jill/txt

Technology becomes popular in certain countries or cultures because of either a) mass events or advertising, or b) social networks. At least, that’s what Ross Mayfield surmises, based on presentations at the blog conference in Paris, looking at blogging in France (hot, due to massive advertising) and in Germany (not much of it) and the success of Orkut in Estonia (one of the founder’s best buddies is Estonian). Being rather a francophile, I like the French blogging point:

The vibrant growth of the French blogosphere is something to behold. French is the second largest language and half of students in France blog. This is due, in no small part, to Skyradio telling their listeners to Skyblog what they think at most commercial breaks — a multi-million dollar advertising investment from an MSM to make blogging cool. Effective, considering they have 1.5 million bloggers according to Pierre Bellanger’s presentation.

Skyblog seems an interesting project. Basically it’s a radio station that’s adopted the internet not simply as a means of distribution or publicity, but as a community that (I think) feeds back into the radio:

L’Internet n’est pas pour nous un moyen de diffusion, c’est une part organique de la radio. (..) Nous ne sommes plus une radio qui a des auditeurs, mais des auditeurs qui ont une radio. The internet isn’t a mode of distribution, it’s an organic part of the radio. (..) We are no longer a radio that has listeners, but listeners who have a radio. (from a transcript of an interview with Pierre Bellanger, who runs Skyblog)

The integration of mass broadcast and community contribution is interesting. Kind of like Slashdot for radiolisteners, I imagine. Though I must admit I’ve not really explored Skyblog yet, so maybe I’m all wrong?

Ooh. The media department in Oslo lets you subscribe to calendars their events that’ll add themselves to your calendar (iCal, Mozilla Calendar etc.) It’s often annoyed me that the Learning Managemeng System our university uses doesn’t provide that - but of course, our department could easily do that. Dunno why it didn’t occur to me before: it’s simple: if I add our events to my own calendar in iCal and set it to export those items. That’s going to have to go on the todo list…

And yes, I subscribed to the Oslo calendar, even though I’m not in Oslo. I can just untick it so it doesn’t show in my own calendar, after all.

You know what? I am so sick of getting excited about some special offer from some site I’m a paying customer which I’m not eligible for. Amazon did it with the Prime membership thing, plastering my front page with it for weeks and weeks although they’re oh-so-personalised that YES they know damn well I don’t live in the US and that YES it’s free shipping within the US only. Now .mac offers me a free subscription to roaming wireless coverage — and not until I’ve clicked through three screens do I see the fine print “US residents only”.

What’s with that? They must realise they have an international customer base — they have my credit card billing address, for goodness sake. Everything else is customised. Why offend me by giving me ads for great deals I can’t sign up for?

These are my notes for a talk to high school teachers about ways students might approach research on teenagers’ activities online.

Nettet er mangslungent, og for å forstå hva som foregår, hva som er nytt eller gammelt, og hvordan kulturen vår og nettet påvirker hverandre trenger vi mange forskjellige forskningsmetoder og innfallsvinkler. Jeg skal prøve å vise noen av dem. (more…)

I have yet to submit an article to m/c, but I remain fascinated by their approach to themed issues. Right now they have open calls for papers for upcoming issues that will be about print, copy, scan and affect. Yes, one word per issue. It’s a cool concept, and they’ve stuck to it for years.

Today is one of those days that’s full of meetings. Two with students anxious about their projects, one information meeting about the reorganisation of the arts and humanities faculty, and a meeting with the dean and the faculty director about The Future Of The Department.

One of the most annoying things about the university “democracy” is the lack of clarity in the circulation of information and the vagueness of where decisions actually get made. Although now I’ve been doing this Head of Department thing for a couple of months I’m realising that a lot of the reason things appear to be messy and disorganised is that I don’t know the routines. It’s true that there’s no job description for a person in my position, and you’d think that that’s something a huge organisation like the university, with its 2000 or so employees and many many heads of departments would have thought of making, but no, I asked and there isn’t. On the other hand, it’s only now after two months that I can see the huge amount of work the secretary, the student counsellor and the head of our office do. We share this administrative staff with literature and linguistics, and previously I really didn’t understand what they did, apart from pay bills and book teaching rooms. Now we cooperate wonderfully, and thanks to them, largely, this head of department thing doesn’t seem as scary or time-consuming or unsurmountable as it appeared at the start.

And yet, even assuming that I simply don’t yet know how to see how everything works, it does seem that the university “democracy” we supposedly have is rather illusory. We elect our president, and our deans, but only about 10% of staff and students vote. No wonder: the candidates’ programs are all more or less alike, if they even bother to say what issues they actually care about. More worrying is the, oh, see, I don’t even have the words to describe it, because it’s fuzzy, not obvious, but it just seems that a lot happens in the corridors, between people who know each other, rather than in the formal meetings. That’s social networking for you. It’s a great way of keeping power in the group, in an unobtrusive way. But ya know, I reckon I can learn to play the network.

Hopefully in a few more months I’ll be able to see that this isn’t really the case. It’s just that I didn’t actually quite understand the system yet. (After all, I’ve only been an employee here since 1999, and I began studying here in 1990, with just 2-3 years elsewhere.)

Yesterday I installed a plugin so my most recent bookmarks at del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site, show up in the left menu of my blog. That’s right, scroll a bit and you’ll spot them. (Well, unless you’re reading this in the distant future and I’ve taken them away)

That’s cool. I like being able to share those little finds that aren’t quite big enough for a whole post but that I want to show people.

Today I realised that CiteULike does RSS too, and the plugin’ll take any RSS. And since I really have been collecting research papers I want to read or have recently read at CiteULike, my feed changes often. Took me about two minutes to copy and paste the del.icio.us code and stick my CiteULike feed in there instead. So now you can also see research papers that have recently taken my fancy.

I can’t decide though whether it would be better to show you research papers I’ve just read, or research papers I really, really want to read, instead of research papers that have simply caught my eye, as it’s set to display now. What do you think?

Random Place is an Australian soap opera that’ll be delivered to mobile phones at 8 am and 3.30 pm on weekdays, and will cost between AUS $1 and $2.50 a week (that’s nothing, it’s US$1.15-1.95, or NOK 7,50-12,00, and it’s per week not per message), depending on your phone subscription. It’s billed as something to entertain you while you’re on the bus or tram on your way to work or on your way home - clever, eh? I assume it’s video. Anyway, I’m subscribing to the web version, which is free, and perhaps conveniently excludes me from competitions and the like. (via Anya)

It’d be cool to experience it as it’s meant to be experienced, though, on a crowded bus or tram in rush hour. (Via

On Wednesday I’m talking to high school teachers who’ll be engaging their students in research in a University-initiated project called Ungdom forsker på ungdom, young people researching young people. The meeting with teachers on Wednesday is meant to get the teachers thinking about kinds of projects their students might do, and I’m keen to be involved. I love the idea of teenagers, who are obviously highly knowledgeable about their own use of the internet, reflecting around it and considering ways of analysing it.

I’m going to present blogs and web diaries and sites like deiligst.no and blink, and point out some ways in which researchers have studied those sites, hopefully presenting it all in a way that both gives enough of an idea of what these sites are like and gives ideas about what kinds of research questions one might consider.

It’s a pretty cool assignment, really. I’m going to have to make a literature list or link list, or the 30 minutes will be far too stressful. I’ll publish the links here, too.

A two-minute time-waster: Flash game presents you with a set of images, and asks you to guess what word was typed into Google to find these particular pictures. I was surprised that I guessed it within 20 seconds every time. Except one. Weird!

Ooh, Steven Johnson turns the traditional “we must read books” argument upside down in his forthcoming book, All Bad Things Are Good For You. Here’s an excerpt from his blog:

Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia—a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today’s generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.”

Steven Johnson studied at Brown when Brown was the only university teaching hypertext and electronic literature, and his first book was Interface Culture, shows his knowledge of hypertext theory and literature. His more recent books are a little more mainstream (well, sort of) and I rather like this approach: simply take it for granted that your readers will agree that the current generation was raised on interactive narrative and that this will make them discontented with linear narratives that require their submission. It’s the exact opposite argument to that put forth in the NEA’s recent report on the supposed death of reading, or at least of print novel-reading.

Norway has had an impressive contract between publishers and bookshops, ensuring that bookshops must stock at least one copy of every book published in the last year (or is it two years?) and fixing the price of books, so that a book will cost the same in a tiny Northern village as in Oslo, and so that best-sellers to some degree sponsor less sellable books. In addition there’s a standard contract between authors and publishers, guaranteeing minimum payments to authors. Norway has a few other ways of stimulating Norwegian literature too, notably libraries, which are of course financed by the state, buy a thousand copies of every book (or is it novels and poetry only?) published in Norwegian, except for a handful a year that are nullet, or deemed unworthy of being called literature. Although it sucks that none of this funding of literature accepts online writing as potentially literature (if it’s online it’s an “unpublished manuscript” and not eligible) it’s certainly paid off: Norway has a vital and largely high quality literary production that is really impressive given that only 4.5 million people or so can actually read and write this language.

Now the modernisation department (is that such a retro name for a new government department!) is suggesting free pricing of books and dropping the standard contracts. Authors in Bergen are putting up an impressive fight, a Forfatteraksjon against the new deal. They point out that Germany and France have recently adopted the equivalent of the Norwegian system, because free pricing doesn’t work.

The most amusing part of Forfatteraksjonen should be the collective loan of every book in Bergen library written by an author who’s name begins with V. Valgerd Svarstad Haugland, the minister for culture, has chosen to remain silent on this issue, you see, until the modernisation department has finished streamlining and market orienting everything. Emptying the library’s shelves of all the books beginning with the letter V speaks then to Valgerd’s silence.

If you want to go, it’s at 6 pm tomorrow, Monday, and you’ll get to borrow a white coat if you’ll borrow a bunch of books written by people starting with V. They promise it’s a legal demonstration. Wimpish as I am I worry about library fines, but heck, they’re authors, they’ll return the books in good condition.
Oh, and there’ll be lots of readings and such the rest of the week. Should be good.

I’m going to have to redesign. If you click on the monthly archives, you only get the last ten days or whatever from that month. I can’t find my own old posts! Yikes!

I think it’s that I’m using a slightly adapted Wordpress 1.2 template, and really I should be completely rejuicing it for Wordpress 1.5. Maybe I’ll be in that kind of a mood tomorrow.

This is just sad. Reboot is a conference to be held in Copenhagen in June, and so far there are 23 male presenters and one woman presenter. The organiser claims innocence:

i hadn’t even thought of it this year. Take that as reboot not having any preference on the subject. reboot’s speakers are selected out of strict quality criteria - and nothing else.

Isn’t that cute? He really thinks that the reason he thinks he’s only invited men (well, OK, there’s a woman too: that brings us to about 4% women speakers) is quality.

You know I was just at a seminar on social networks. Strikes me the point about the importance of weak ties must be relevant here. Most people remain ensconced in their own little clusters of people who are more or less like them and who basically have almost all the same information as each other. That’s why bridges to other social clusters are vital: if you find people who connect to people who are different from yourself and your buddies, you’re going to get a whole lot of new information and new ideas. That’s important.

I also recently read Blink! It’s a very easy read, and I have the feeling I’ve read a lot of it before somewhere - online maybe? But it also brings together some important points. The book is an examination of how we make snap judgements based on pattern recognition that we can’t really verbalise. That can be extremely powerful, but it also means we act on biases that we’re not even aware of. This is probably the most interesting — and frightening — section of the book, really. (I wanted to link to an online research site mentioned in the book where you can test your own biases, but can’t find it?)

There is no such thing as selection from strict quality criteria and nothing else.

Seems to me it’d be in mens’ interest to get a few more women involved in their conferences. A few connections to other clusters couldn’t hurt, surely?

I won’t be going to Reboot. Sure, the topic interests me, and yes, it’s in Copenhagen, and I can get cheap flights and I have friends there. No, I’m not going because I find it too exhausting to be in a constant minority. And heck, I’m a white woman who passes as native: if I’m exhausted, what on earth must it feel like for those who are even more marginalised in meetings like this? (via Caterina at Misbehaving)

I made one of those pictures of myself where you chose from lots of options. I’m in Southpark. Except once I’d put in the freckles and umbrella I couldn’t get rid of them. Yes, I get freckles in summer and use an umbrella all winter, but right now it’s springtime and I have neither!