jill/txt

Oooh! Look!! Mouse-over a link. Any link! This one, for instance, or this one, or maybe this one. See!??? A picture of the website linked to popped up!!! Isn’t that just super-cool!

All you do to install it on your blog or website is insert a line of code from snap.com in your html. It’s free, or rather no money passes hands. Really it’s a barter: I (and you) get a cool effect, and snap.com gets to know all about how many people visit this site and which links you guys hover over and which links you click. D’you mind?

File this under super-cool new web toys that will either change the world or be quietly forgotten in a few weeks time. (discovered at Craig Bellamy’s blog)

Presidential candidates for the 2008 US elections are popping up left right and centre, and no doubt, they’ll be heavy on the internet. John Edwards actually has a YouTube account, video log and all (presumably his aides update it for him, but still) - and although some of his videos are kind of clumsy, others definitely play with the casual YouTube aesthetics - look, a chance capture of a conversation about multi-millionaires paying minimum wages, followed by music and cheap computer titles just the same as we can do ourselves. I assume someone will write about the rhetoric of political YouTube videos, right? Probably a lot of people. Would make a nice thesis topic.

Me, I hope Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama gets the democratic nomination and then, the presidency. About time there’s a woman or an African American president for the US. Actually, I’d been wanting Hillary, but she voted for the war, and kept posing with the military - and honestly, what’s with this keep-it-in-the-family presidential thing? Nah, Barack Obama’s looking better (we’ll have a woman next time) - he seems to have done a great job in Chicago and Illinois, and he’s young and, um, kind of looks like a movie star, and obviously has a professional production team. Which I know shouldn’t matter, but well, then again, maybe it should (not the good looks but the well-kempt looks and the production quality), it’s certainly part of the rhetoric a statesman or -woman needs to master today, just as the ancient Greeks or Abraham Lincoln needed to master a different style of rhetoric. And he’s playful. I mean, look at this:

Mind you, Barack doesn’t have his own YouTube account yet. Does he need it?

This is great; Kathleen quotes a talk Anne Balsamo gave at the MLA yesterday where she argued that “academics must cease their quest to educate students-as-replicants and instead start thinking about educating students-as-mutants”.

Yeah! Go mutant students!

It’s a damn good point, actually.

Skimming through a paper on cultural differences in editing the Wikipedia, I am baffled at the following:

The higher the MAS [masculinity index] of a country, the more contributions in the categories Add Information and Clarify Information are found. Although we did not predict this outcome, a possible explanation could be that in countries with a relatively higher MAS (e.g., Japan), success and progress are more important than in countries with a lower MAS (Hofstede, 1991).

I hadn’t heard of masculinity indexes before, so obviously had to re-skim the bit of the paper explaining them:

Masculinity, according to Hofstede, “pertains to societies in which social gender roles are clearly distinct (i.e., men are supposed to be assertive, tough, and focused on material success whereas women are supposed to be more modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life). Femininity, in contrast, “pertains to societies in which social gender roles overlap (i.e., both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life)” (Hofstede, 1991, pp. 82-83).

The Masculinity Index (MAS) describes the extent to which a country tends to be masculine. In countries with a high MAS, it is valued to be ambitious, successful, and assertive (Hofstede, 1991). In countries with a low MAS, relationships with other people and the preservation of the environment are important (Hofstede, 1991).

A little odd, but odder still: this index was based on observations made (of IBM employees in 70 countries) between 1967 and 1973. I should jolly well hope gender relations have come along a bit since them.

It’s interesting to see any kind of cross-cultural analysis of wikipedia use - though surely there are more recent measures of cultural differences than the ones this paper uses, from 1967-73.

I’m not at the MLA conference right now (I’m Norwegian enough to find a conference during the romjul or quiet days between x-mas and New Year kind of barbaric) but I’m impressed to see the vast number of interesting-looking panels in the digital humanities and about electronic literature, blogging etc - all neatly compiled by the ACH.

Apparently there are 10,000 people at the MLA, which is the biggest conference in literature and languages that exists, I think. Until I realised it was always during the holidays (barbaric, I tell you!) I had vaguely romantic ideas of it, based on reading David Lodge’s academic romantic comedies (ooh, and see also Murder at the MLA- but I hear what most characterises it really is that all the hiring interviews for every English department in the United States is conducted there, so apparently there’s this constant anxiety and stress overlaying everything.

Instead I’m writing up an application for other conference funding for next year. I rather enjoy the hopeful creativity of it!

Mind you, I wouldn’t mind having a drink in Philadelphia right now. It’s amazing how cold and dull and empty home seems when you get home and nobody’s there and the fridge is empty and suitcases unpacked. Fortunately this time I had a very eager cat welcoming me. He even curled up with me all night to sleep - and he never grants me that privilege that when his master is home. Pity cats don’t fill the fridge for you.

Iskia stepped into one of those PX-238 Winter Wondervolt things the goblins have set up by the Zeppelin, and to my horror, she came out like this! When she walks, her tits wobble, and when she stands still, she waits a little while and then starts wiggling in this really offensive way.

Also, since the patch, there are all these breasty women on the load screen, you know the kind, tiny bikini armour. If we’re going to do this, well, where are the objectified male genitalia?

And why is “tits” a rude word that’s translated to %$#% in WoW? Makes no sense - in language it’s offensive but in images it’s all over the place. I like tits, but on my own terms, thank you.

Donna Leishman, who does really intersting interactive graphic narratives like The Possession of Christian Shaw, sends word of a job opening at her department in media arts and imaging, which
currently spans practices as diverse as: performance art, film, web, audio
art, 3d animation, data visualisation, illustration, interactive media
and digital theory.

Yesterday my two year old mobile phone suddenly decided not to make noises anymore. And no, it wasn’t on silent - it simply no longer rings out loud, no matter how I set the volume or ring tones or profiles and so on. Interesting, then, that the Oslo courts have just decided that mobile phones should last for five years, like fridges and washing machines, and that the mobile phone producers are responsible for fixing them for that long too, so long as the customer wasn’t irresponsible in her use of the device.

Maybe I won’t be buying a new phone after all :)

Looks like PayPerPost has succumbed to the outcry about paid, advertising blog posts where bloggers don’t specify that they’re being paid to write about a product - their new Terms of Service require participating bloggers to disclose the fact that they’re paid to write about a product.

And with that, most of my ethical concerns about PayPerPost are laid to rest.

Oh, I would have loved to be here! But then again, I love being here, at home, Christmas decorations up and just thinking about whether I’ll go out and get the last gifts this evening. I’m actually happy that it’s dark already because the Christmas lights look so pretty.

I’ve been offered to opportunity to apply for qualification funding - funding for research travel and so on that’s likely to help me publish more so that I eventually qualify for full professorship. Which would rock. So I’m trying to figure out what I should do. The standard thing, what they sort of expect, is a year being a visiting scholar somewhere. That’s impossible for me for family reasons, though I think I’m going to wangle a month in Perth with my daughter (and my now-fiancé-then-husband (!) will be able to be there for about half that time) and that I can do maybe a three-week thing somewhere later. I can apply for conference funding too, I think.

So my question to you, my dear blogosphere, is: what should I do? What would be the best places to visit, conferences to go to and so on?

And of course, what the heck is my project? I’ll have finished the book on blogging by September 1, so what am I going to spend the next ten months of my sabbatical on? Another book? More blogging? Participatory culture? Return to the distributed narrative project I wanted to do a book on? Or has time moved on since then - I’m thinking participatory narrative might be a more interesting concept these days. Who cares if it’s distributed, the point now is that you can barely tell a story without the audience getting into it and telling half of it too.

It’s hugely luxurious getting to plan how to spend a whole year’s time and even, quite likely, some money too. At times like these I adore academia.

Interesting new PhD fellowships open at the University of Oslo: two have been advertised for people doing practice-based research on new forms of texts that will be used in knowledge work, learning and so on. My understanding is they’re looking for projects that use creative, experimental development work and theoretical reflection, and that explore what kinds of documents we’ll use in the future, taking (for instance) hypertextuality, mobility, location and multimodality into account. If you have questions, Gunnar Liestøl is the project leader and the man to contact. His email address is in the advertisement (which is in Norwegian). Usually foreign applications are welcome, but Gunnar would be the one to ask about that.

And yes, these are the comparatively very well-paid (same salary as a nurse or policeman) kind of three year PhD fellowships we have in Norway, where you’re officially employed and earning pension rights and part of a welfare state and have rights to paid parental leave (10 months, shared between parents) and two hours off work a day if you’re breastfeeding and so on. Why everyone doesn’t try to move here, I’ll never know. (OK, don’t tell anyone about the rain. I think it rains less in Oslo, anyway.) Oh, also, in the Norwegian system, you need a really good project description when you apply for the position - you don’t get a few years to figure out what you’re doing. So applying does take some time.

Leevi Lehto in Ny poesi:

[P]ublishing in book form can be seen as a concession to the part of my potential readership that has not yet embraced the advantages of reading online. To me, book is a tool for marketing the online writer, not the other way round.

Read the rest of the article for more - and I’m thinking the man is right…

Have you heard of Undercover? It’s laptop protection software for Macs that only goes into action when your laptop’s stolen. See, that’s when you tell the Undercover people your secret code, which they then register in their database of stolen computers, and then next time someone (the thief!) connects your computer to the net it’ll check with its mothership and realise that it was stolen.

Goto Plan A: it’ll notify the mothership of its IP-number, take photos of its user (if it has a built in camera like my MacBook) and send in screenshots every six minutes, that might show things like the thief’s email address or other personal information. The company that sells Undercover gets this information to the police and hopefully your laptop’s recovered just like that.

If not, goto Plan B: a simulated hardware failure. The laptop will no longer work - until it’s taken to a repair shop (I’m not sure how they know it’s a repair shop, maybe they have all the IP addresses of Apple repair stores?) When it realises it’s being fixed, it displays big messages saying I’M STOLEN! or something and (I love this) it plays a VOICE message at top volume saying something to the same effect using the built in text-to-voice software.

Just imagine the scene!

All this for $39 or $49 for a household licence, well, what with my office being (relatively harmlessly) burgled this weekend I was all ready to buy it. Until Scott said hm. How do you know they’re legit? Are you about to just let some random company with a cool concept get a backdoor into your computer?

So now I don’t know what I’ll do. Sigh. But still, isn’t it an amazing idea?

Ugh. When I got to my office this morning a window was slightly open, stuff on the shelf by the window had been knocked down, there were muddy footprints on the floor between the window and the desk and the external monitor I use with my laptop was gone. The iMac was still there, weirdly enough. Nothing else was gone either - really there’s nothing else of monetary value in the room. The books are valuable to me, obviously, but hardly to thieves.

Turning on the iMac I feel worried. How much could they have accessed if they’d taken it? How many websites would my browser remember my username to? I set my computers so you have to type in a password to access many things (email, remembered passwords etc) but the information is in there if you can get past the password.

“We’ll just have to stop keeping personal things on our office computers,” the secretary said. That sounds sensible but is almost impossible when work and life overlap in so many ways. Sure, I don’t have to check my bank account or check personal mail at the office but what about my blog, my work email, the dozens of websites that have my username, my calendar info…

Ugh. Good thing the thieves thought the iMac was too heavy to lug out the window.