jill/txt

Oh no. I was feeling unconvinced about my book chapter (where I was trying to compare World of Warcraft to Web 2.0, oh dear, oh dear) and then a few paragraphs sort of came out that I found a lot more interesting and I realised that really that was what the chapter should be about.

Which is good. Except that I’m already way, way late on this and making the chapter about the better idea instead requires that it be completely rewritten.

Oh no.

I was looking for something else, of course, but stumbled upon an article by Mieke Bal about the common academic rhetorical strategy of trashing an argument or a whole school of thought (sorry, Jstor subscription required):

Trashing is a dismissal based on minimal argumentation, usually spice with heavy irony, allusive accusation, and moralistic discourse. I have engaged in it as well as royally suffered from it, and wiht this double-edged expereince I feel well placed to reflect onit. As I am about to bothh perpetrate and denounce it once again, I suddenly have lost my innocence, and I feel compelled to draw attention to the ways the activity operates.

I’m forcing myself back to what I’m supposed to be doing instead (i.e. finishing a draft of my book chapter about how WoW relates to other participatory media) but do want to store this here as I suspect I will want to read it properly later.

Ooooh! Look at these biscuits!!! I’m definitely having a go at them for Halloween!

Found at Diane’s, originally from eGullet forums. Diane’s pasted the recipe so it looks easier to follow.

“Because you know, if I got up an hour earlier in the morning, I’d totally have that book written by now.” –New Kid on the Hallway.

Ah well. I’m off to buy pumpkins and then I’ll totally write that book. Um, chapter, not book, today it’s a chapter, a draft chapter for our World of Warcraft anthology, the workshop for which is in exactly a week!

I found something new: a YouTube for powerpoints. Look, I can embed the slides from a talk I gave, oh years ago, into this blog post, and you can page through it really quickly without downloading anything. Oh and yes, when the first page of this is clickable, it gains meaning…

So that’s kind of cool, right? If you go to their site (Slideshare.net), you’ll see there are lots and lots of slideshows already there. Search for “Web 2.0″, for instance.

I don’t believe that using slides for a talk is evil - yes, bulleted lists on a screen is not great communication, but there are a lot of other uses for slides. However, how much use is a slideshow without the speaker? Does looking at the slideshow above actually give you anything without my words to accompany it? If it does, what does that do to the notion of a talk as communication - is my talk on this now a simple product? If we all start sharing our slides like this, will we have to write them with a reading audience in mind instead of a present audience who can be directly addressed?

I discovered this on Nancy White’s blog on her Australian October, where she’s posting about the talks she’s been giving.

There’s a wonderful little segment about our World of Warcraft researcher’s guild (a European research network that happens to meet in the world we study) on tonight’s pop science show Schrödingers katt - the segment’s already online at NRK’s site. It stars Torill Mortensen, our guild mistress (she does a brilliant job of it too) with some bits of a guild meeting, too. Here’s Torill’s report, and here’s a link straight to the video. Well, straight to the video in NRK’s interface, which doesn’t quite work in Firefox.

I just wish someone would upload it to YouTube so I didn’t have to fret over the bad Windows Media Player compatibility with my Mac.

Scribbling woman put the Eliot quote I found last week into context - to wit, she’s actually read the whole essay, and knows her stuff. Reading her comments, I find myself wondering (again? like others? un-originally) whether we’re moving back into a culture that doesn’t adhere to the cult of originality and individual genius. These things appeared (largely) with Romanticism, although practical concerns of originality and copyright came earlier, with the printing press and publishing. Before that, did anyone really care? Shakespeare’s plays were hardly original - he just retold those old stories so damn well.

If we’re on our way to no longer valuing or caring about or even believing in originality, then the increases in plagiarism and the unbridled downloading of music and the remixes we see everywhere are symptoms of this cultural shift, or better, they’re what we’re moving towards.

How long, then, can the rules we’ve set in place based on the Romantic cult of the individual genius last? Copyright law is now one of the biggest industries in the world, somebody said (this is hearsay, I know, but an interesting idea) and universities still outlaws students who plagiarise, if they’re caught.

A while ago I wrote a catalogue piece about electronic art in public spaces, and one of the pieces presented was Nathalie Barret’s Ad sonore, an interactive sound installation in the new university building for “bio-basale fag” here in Bergen. Here’s my piece in Norwegian and in English translation, though actually the blog post I wrote about it is much more detailed and interesting. And has photos.

Anyway, the University newsletter just wrote that a lot of the people who work and study in the building find Ad sonore really annoying It actually scares people, because they think there’s someone following them down the stairs when it’s actually just the artwork trying to communicate with them. To try to abate this, the installation is now turned off after office hours, and they’re also going to be offering guided tours to the work, to be led by art historian Steinar Sekkingstad on Oct 26 and 27, Nov 2 and 3 and Dec 2. Probably quite interesting. Though they don’t mention the times.

I was shocked to wake up this morning to news that Vegemite has been banned by the United States! Apparently, they can’t accept the folate in the good stuff, because folate is only permitted in cereals and breads. Actually, that sounds like a load of hogwash, since the folate in Vegemite is natural and the US regulations are only about added folates (or at least, so says Cerebral Soup in their “is it a hoax?” article), but hoax or not, the story is perfectly suited to boost Australian identity.

We’re going to the US for Thanksgiving. Now I assume I’ll be pulled aside and strip-searched for illicit Vegemite once they see my Aussie passport, like the Aussie expats living in Canada who were trying to smuggle a jar of the good stuff across the US border. Heck, even that bizarre Aussie gift shop across from the hotel I stayed at once in San Antonio (yes, in Texas) says they haven’t been able to get Vegemite.

But ya know what? My trusty US source of Vegemite, simplyaustralian.com, says that though they’re out of stock of all but the tiny jars, they should have more in later this week. Hm. Is the vegemite crisis just spin? A viral marketing campaign by Vegemite’s advertising agency? Or maybe a subtle way of getting all us expats to feel all protective of our Australian culture? I mean, half of you probably didn’t even know that I was Australian. Not as if you can hear my accent on the blog, and after all, I live all the way over on the other side of the world… Look at Technorati’s list of the many recent blog posts about vegemite - if it’s viral marketing, it’s working. (First seen on BoingBoing)

Update: SimplyAustralian emailed me back with the following answer to my question about whether Vegemite was banned:

We are expecting our shipment into Seattle on Wednesday or Thursday and will need FDA clearance in order to sell it. At this point we are not expecting any problems. Check back on Friday for an update……….jan

So wait and see…

Update 2: “US denies Vegemite ban”

Tenth Nordic Conference for English Studies
University of Bergen, Norway
Thursday May 24 to Saturday May 26, 2007

I just received this call for papers for a conference here in Bergen that may interest some of you - we were thinking of submitting a panel on electronic literature and so on. Or maybe blogs. Interested? (more…)

Jean titles her post on this My computer is just like me (not): The new Mac ads are even worse than the old ones - so not only are the Windows and Mac users rather white men of two rather clichéed stereotypes, they compare the home videos they edited. And guess what, they’re women. The Mac user’s is pretty and well-dressed and described as “professional”, whereas the Windows user’s is a man dressed as a frumpy woman. This makes me want to switch to, oh I don’t know, Linux, I suppose. If you were in any doubt that men are the default and women the aberration (or, on occasion, the creation or possession of men as in this ad), you might want to note how men’s naked bodies are “human anatomy” while women’s naked bodies are “female anatomy” (via Martin).

Kulturnett Norge gave me a call last week and asked if I could talk at a seminar they had today in Bergen - they wanted something on web communication, they said. Kulturnett.no is a rather cool site and system that connects all cultural organisations in Norway - museums, libraries, literary organisations and so on - imagine the potential!

So I did some surfing this weekend and it turns out that “museoblogging” is this whole new thing. One inspiring find was Jim Spadaccini’s blog with roundups of museums, blogs and community sites, and in particular his powerpoint for a presentation he gave back in March on Museum and Web 2.0. My other favourite find was the Walker Art Centre’s blogs, which are marvellous. They even blogged about their guidelines for their blogging staff. Here’s a great summary of what a museum blog might have that would make it worthwhile:

…something more personal, something that’s not going be on the official website. Perhaps press/reviews regarding exhibitions from publications, reviews of staff, of programming and/or performance, curatorial insights, anecdotes about installation, execution, general thoughts, images, artist interviews that are included in current exhibitions, etc. Anything that supplements and rounds out the programming and, perhaps, includes the viewer. Blogs can make the possibilities of what an institution can do endless and with ease. (Caryn Coleman)

I piled a lot of screenshots into a powerpoint for this talk, and since I found Jim Spadaccini’s powerpoint so useful, I thought I should share mine as well. So here it is, in Norwegian, and mostly screenshots to be honest, but with URLs as appropriate: Nettformidling 2.0. Or you can click through it right here, thanks to Slideshare.net:

(Mind you, the font’s messed up. I guess maybe it’s Mac-specific. Pity.)

I really, really, really need to be writing Chapter 2 of my book about blogging, because I’m presenting parts of it on Tuesday and Friday this week. Instead, I made a tag cloud of what I’ve written so far.

That sort of counts as writing, right?

OK. That’s enough. Go and actually do it.

A swift video showing a woman’s transformation to divine billboard queen using makeup and Photoshop. I’m definitely showing this video to my daughter. (And yes, it’s for the Dove “real beauty” campaign, which I appreciate although I for some reason have never liked actually using Dove products. (After all my delving into the PayPerPost stuff I’m all super-anxious people will think I’m paid to advertise things or something. Yuck.) (via BoingBoing)

[Update: Of course, of course, this is also a viral campaign - but one that I like and that’s completely honest about its corporate origins.]

It turns out there are plenty of sites like Creamaid, which I wrote about the other day, out there. PayPerPost is one of the biggest, so I signed up to see what it’s like. And um, also because one of the featured “opportunities” was writing about World of Warcraft and you’d get $3 for a post on that, the front page said, and hey, I already write about World of Warcraft all the time. Like Creamaid, the deal is you write about requested topics and are paid from three to ten dollars for your post. Once you’re signed up you get access to all the “opportunities”. Currently there are about a hundred - but to my slight distress I couldn’t find the write-about-WoW “opportunity”. Others varied in their degree of detail. Some are very specific:

The post should describe about culture and how marriage affects culture. It should cover the topics., 1) Is Marriage Really needed? 2) Asians gives more value to marriage, For example in India, I see that Online matrimonial Portals are making a great income. For example, i came across, Bharatmatrimony.com, It seems to be the leader of online Matrimonial services. 3) They try several innovative ideas, like, launching of the First matrimonial toolbar, Also Provides RSS feeds., Even yahoo has shown an interest on them and has invested in them. (https://payperpost.com/blogger/opportunity/detail/765)

A Technorati search suggests this attempt at generating buzz hasn’t been all that successful. Other “opportunities” want you to plug a javascript into your blog post, and give you extra money for each click-through you get. There’s a x-mas gift service, for instance, that specifies that in your post, with the javascript that shows top-selling gifts, you need to include a sentence about how bloggers will be making money this Christmas, and not just on PayPerPost! (https://payperpost.com/blogger/opportunity/detail/738) Some are clearly not really targeting readers but search engines:

Need 36-100 word articles on Whitetail Deer Hunting, naturally written articles incorporating the 3-5 key words linked to the URL as indicated below. Key words: Trophy deer hunting, Guided deer hunts, Archery hunting - link: “http://www.The-Deer-Hunting-Guide.com/strategies” Key words/phrases: Deer hunting guide, Hunting land, Whitetail deer hunting - link: “http://www.The-Deer-Hunting-Guide.com”Keywords: Deer hunting equipment, Hunting blinds, Spotting scopes, Rifle scopes - link: “http://www.The-Deer-Hunting-Guide.com/equipment” Key words: Deer antlers -link is “http://www.The-Deer-Hunting-Guide.com/whitetails”Keywords: Hunter - link: “http://www.TheDeer-HuntingGuide.com/the_harvest” Links related to subject. Min page rank-3. (https://payperpost.com/blogger/opportunity/detail/828)

The only difference between this and comment spam is that they’re paying bloggers three dollars to do it and that humans, presumably, can make more “natural” and thus un-detectable-as-spam blog posts than machines.

The highest paying “opportunity” I saw was for PayPerPost itself (https://payperpost.com/blogger/opportunity/detail/702). They’ll pay you $10 to post a link to a piece on them in TechCrunch. Not to the most recent critical piece, but to a slightly older piece about how they’ve just raised 3 million in venture capital. OK, so I just linked to that article they’re paying people $10 to link to. I thought about claiming the $10 - since (ahem) my research on blog trends would be furthered by seeing whether I actually received the $10 in my Paypal account. So I went to check out how to register a blog so I’d get the booty. Unfortunately, they actually review blogs before they’ll start accepting your for-pay posts. And I dunno - if I were PayPerPost I’m not sure I’d want pesky researchers writing skeptical things about my service. And ugh, now it feels “dirty” to link to that site even without being paid for it. (I put a “nofollow” thing in the link though so at least search engines won’t index it.) The critical TechCrunch story about PayPerPost compares their service to payola A real problem with these services is that they’re advertising concealed as content. Mainstream media long ago set clear boundaries between ads and content. Although clearly those boundaries are blurred quite often when journalists are given freebies and such, the principle remains. Services like Creamaid and PayPerPost require that the post be written in the blogger’s own voice, though. At least Creamaid makes it clear to the reader that this is part of a campaign - as far as I can tell, it’s invisible to the reader that a PayPerPost-sponsored post is in fact sponsored. Some of the “opportunities” specify that they require this invisibility, as in this one from a wedding website - and this is a high-paying one, they pay $8 for each post:

Minimum of PR3 w/ Google. Title needs to include keyword “wedding” or “weddings”. If title, or any part of your site says your reviews are “pay to post” it will not be accepted. Use extra hot links using keywords that lend itself to the topic. Ex: weddings, brides, groom, maid of honor, wedding dress, wedding gown, reception, honeymoon, wedding planning, wedding planner, etc. These links are over and beyond the required link. Must include a recommendation for brides to register at the forums the url link: http://www.weddingstrategies.com/forums/ Will not accept business opportunity blogs. (https://payperpost.com/blogger/opportunity/detail/835)

Technorati shows only four blogs linking to this URL, but they’re all recent links, and while some link to PayPerPost (PPP) in other posts, none of them explicitly admit that their recommendation of the wedding site is paid for. The ones I looked at clearly had a lot of posts that were influenced by PayPerPost earnings. Lynn Terry writes ClickNews!, which is billed as an Internet Marketing blog, and she seems to have one of the most nuanced positive opinions of PayPerPost. She tried out blogging with PayPerPost for a month, wrote a list of the posts she’d written for pay (so disclosure after the fact - not before) and asked readers what they thought about it. A lot of the reactions she received were positive. Here’s another of her posts that gives a good round-up of a lot of discussion on PayPerPost. Lynn Terry isn’t worried about bad uses of PayPerPost, and I agree that she has a point - bloggers who sell their credibility will not have many readers:

While I understand that some bloggers might take the PPP opportunity a little far, and put anything and everything on their blog, those are not the types of bloggers that pull enough weight in the blogosphere to worry about anyway. Those of us who are passionate about our blogs, and love our readers, will pick and choose the opportunities that come through PPP and work it in with integrity.

This ignores the more automated aspects of the web though, such as the increased PageRank that links even from little-read blogs will lead to. Most of the “opportunities” I read about looked a lot like blog spam to me. Ultimately, I don’t want to think that blogs I read are biased because they’re being paid to write about something. If you’re being paid for a post, I’d like to know about it, and that way I’ll read it differently than if I think it’s your own, independent voice. That’s why I’d prefer to keep a line between ads and “editorial content” in blogs.