jill/txt

No posting lately. Hardly even checked my pet blog. Way too many things to do…but soon I’m on holidays, and then there are a couple of weeks of writing and then more holiday. It’s conceivable I’ll blog in there somewhere - or maybe not.

Have fun!

Is it normal to check one’s own blog several times a day just in case it’s updated - even though one knows one hasn’t done a thing?

I could pretend it was to see if there were any comments. But I already checked that through the Wordpress dashboard.

Maybe I need a ghostblogger.

While looking for a reading list for a student who might be doing some work on social software I came across this interesting-looking site, H2O Playlists:

An H20 playlist is a shared list of readings and other content about a topic of intellectual interest. It is a simple yet powerful way to group and exchange useful links to information - online and offline.
For the list I found on social software, for instance, you can continue on to lists that influenced that list, to lists that were based on that list and to lists that contain some of the same items as that list.

Potentially an interesting counterpart to CiteULike.org, where you bookmark and tag individual academic articles and books rather than whole lists. Looks as though it would be easy to create and manipulate lists.

Ragnhild reminded me that the Norwegian Medieforskningskonferanse (media researcher conference) is in Bergen this year, and that the deadline for sending in abstracts is next week - June 15. The conference sounds rather useful in that it’s set up as a bunch of workshops where you discuss work in progress. You submit 2-300 words now, then if accepted, you send in a 12-20 page draft of an academic paper, you read other people’s papers and you discuss them. Could be rather useful. I’d like to know more of the media and communications people in Norway who do digital media, too.

Hm, but what would I write about? And should I submit it to the group on digital media, on crossmedia or on fiction?

Liz Lawley told me I had to meet Rich Ling, who’s a researcher at Telenor here in Norway - and indeed I very briefly met him last year when Howard Rheingold was here for Digital og sosial. So of course I’m at his talk today at InterMedia, where he’ll be co-supervising a PhD thesis. Rich wrote a book a couple of years ago about mobile phones’ impact on society.

His entire presentation, The role of mediated ritual in mobile communication, is online - so you can read the slides yourself - there are a lot of useful statistics and touchpoints. Here are some notes. (more…)

I love reading between the lines of blogs - though sometimes I’m completely wrong about things! So it was fun to see an interpreted and confirmed version of what went on behind the scenes of Jason Kottke’s and Meg Hourihan’s blogs in the last few years:

Neither Megnut.com nor Kottke.org is a particularly confessional site, but regular visitors were invited to read between the lines.
First, there was cohabitation in San Francisco, then, in December, 2002, mutual relocation to New York. The summer of 2003 sounded like fun—trips to Copenhagen and Paris—but disenchantment followed: when Meg took off for Nantucket in the summer of 2004, the move was conspicuously undertaken in the first-person singular. In December, 2004, she wrote a post entitled “A Sad Breakup”; and while its subject was Barbie, whose boyfriend, Ken, had sometime earlier been sidelined by Mattel for a new beau, Blaine, attentive readers wondered whether a more significant allusion was being made. Confirmation of a sort was provided in January, 2005, when Meg revealed that she had moved to New Hampshire—and, in an even more stunning turn of events, was making do with a dial-up Internet connection. Meanwhile, Jason was blogging moodily about hiring a man with a van to move his stuff across town.

By May, 2005, however, Meg and Jason had both made reference to vacationing in Ireland. Then, in November, Meg informed her readers that she and Jason were engaged. Resolution of the most satisfying order was provided on March 28th this year, when Meg posted a photograph that showed her wearing a long white gown and clutching a large bouquet, mid-smooch with a be-suited Jason, under the heading “Married.” (via Kottke.org

If you don’t know Meg and Jason’s blogs, you might be interested in checking them out - Meg was co-founder of Blogger.com, and Jason writes an excellent link-ful blog and even lived off blogging for a year after accepting micropayments.

Me, I’ve gone a bit quieter with my own between the lines. Realising that a lot of students and colleagues and bosses and journalists sometimes read my blog has got me drawing sharper lines between public and private. I’ll let you know when I get married, though :)