jill/txt

Not much blogging this week, I’m afraid. Scott and I are far too busy fretting over last minute wedding details (wedding kjøreplan? ceremony program? who picks up the flowers? Ok, so they’ll deliver 70 chairs to the ceremony spot, but who will bring the fancier chairs for us, our best man and maid of honour and our celebrant?) and hanging out with all the guests who’ve arrived from out of town - and from other continents. Having them all here is amazing - practically his whole family is here, and soon most of mine will be too. And thank goodness, although it rained on this afternoon’s barbecue (we had a party tent though, it was fine) the forecast for this weekend is getting better and better. We’re having an outdoor ceremony (followed by an indoor reception, it is Bergen after all) so this is a very good thing. Wish us luck!

Oh, we’re going with the horseshoe table. Still haven’t figured out the seating, but it’ll come, no worries :)

It’s just six days till our wedding, guests start arriving tomorrow and Scott and I are figuring out lots of last-minute details. Like where people will sit at the reception, and how to set up the tables. To me, the traditional Norwegian horseshoe set up is my idea of a wedding, but in the US that’s strange; they use lots of round tables instead. The reception site we’re using obviously prefers the round tables. Maybe they’re easier for the waitstaff? Or maybe it’s just less work for them to set up round tables as that’s what they already have in the room. The guy we were meeting at actually told us that the horseshoe arrangement has gone out of fashion. Hardly anyone uses that anymore, he told us. Well, last week there was a couple who wanted the horseshoe for their wedding dinner, but they were in their sixties, he announced.

Of course I tried going to the Norwegian wedding discussion board to ask whether this could be true. I mean, did horseshoe tables really go out of fashion? Unfortunately, the wedding site with the most activity is dittbryllup.no, a wedding magazine website that has the most appalling forum software in existence. In fact, it’s now so broken that nobody has successfully posted a note since May 14th. I don’t think these people can realise what an asset they have: hundreds of brides and grooms post to this forum every week, it’s the best community in Norway for weddings, and people spend lots of money on weddings. And they put absolutely no effort into making sure the community actually has a platform that works, and allowing the community to connect with the potential vendors that the community actually wants to find. Dittbryllup.no must be a strikingly clueless company.

There aren’t really any other active Norwegian wedding forums. There’s Kvinneguiden, that has some wedding talk. And a few brides set up a new forum at bryllup.diskusjonsforum.no - you can set up forums for free at diskusjonsforum.no. Nobody’s really there yet, though. There are active Swedish and Danish forums, that lots of Norwegians use, but not all traditions are the same and the vendors are all different. The US forums are mostly useless because traditions are very different and vendors mostly irrelevant.

So I’ll try my blog instead: are horseshoe tables really out of date in Norwegian weddings? Are they more work for the people serving than small tables? (The small round tables would each fit 5-6 people.) Are they less social, less fun?

Facebook now has an open API, which means that anyone can build a small application that a Facebook user can add to their Facebook interface and that uses their connections. TechPresident reports that Barack Obama is the first politician to make use of this in their Obama application, so of course I signed up to see how it works. And sure, I support Obama, I think - my coming in-laws (only eight days till the wedding!) are Chicago Democrats, and Obama’s done a good job as Senator for Illinois for years. My coming brother-in-law even had him as a law school professor. So I’ve heard a lot of good things about Obama, though admittedly I’m neither American nor extremely well-versed in US politics. I mean, I haven’t even considered, say, John Edwards’ politics, I’ve just decided I want a woman or an African American as president of the United States. But anyway, that’s good enough reason to try out the first political Facebook application, don’t ya think?

When I signed up, this is what Facebook said:

So immediately it leverages the main currency of Facebook: your friends. I had no idea I had a friend in an early state - turns out Michael Faris, whom I know from his blog Farism, is in an early state. [Note for non-Americans: early states are the first states to vote in the primaries, where everyone registered as a Democrat gets to vote about whether Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards or someone else gets to be the Democrat’s presidential candidate. And the same for the Republicans. The early states pretty much decide the whole primaries as other tend to follow their lead.] Poor Michael, I bet he’ll be getting lots of nagging comments from people who want him to vote Obama…

There’s a prewritten message for me that’s all ready to go if I click the “Message Michael about Obama” button:

Hey,

Since you’re from Iowa, you’re probably hearing a lot about the presidential race these days. But I just wanted to tell you how much I support Barack Obama. You should take a second to check out the Iowa campaign’s website: http://iowa.barackobama.com

I also just added the Obama application to my Facebook profile. If you want, you can add it to your profile too by clicking here: http://facebook.barackobama.com

Talk to you soon,

Jill

What else does the application do? Well, my friends will all see that I added “Obama”. I see Obama added to my “Applications” menu, and if I click that link, I get a page telling me about my one friend in an early state and showing recent news and videos from the campaign.And reading about it, it looks as though it might automatically post news about Obama to my profile, which all my friends would then see in their feeds from all their friends.

I’m going to leave the application in for a few days to see what it does before maybe removing it. It’s an interesting concept - and it’ll be interesting to see whether this works because it’s first and therefore cool. I’m thinking that Facebook could easily become sort of littered by way too many such applications.

• RSS in Plain English
  Wonderful short video presentation explaining what RSS is and how to use it - interesting not only for the content but for its effective use of printouts of screenshots, fingers, drawing and speech for a presentation.
  (tags: tutorial video presentation RSS newbie students)
• Financial Times: Google wants more personal data
  “Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.”
  (tags: google privacy)

Arts Metaverse is an interesting-looking example of a 3d learning environment that’d be an alternative to Second Life (which has many problems for education, not least of which it’s proprietary). Arts Metaverse is developed by the University of British Columbia’s Arts Instructional Support & Information Technology unit, and is based on Croquet, “a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices.” (Via Tim Wang’s Learning Blog.

Some mailing list I seem to be on is on one of those surreal email circles where everyone tells everyone else they’re automatically out of the office, each automated response triggering a new automated response from someone else’s computer. My favourites are these:

Due to exceptionally high volumes of Spam Mail, we have been forced to

Please note: Until your email address is validated, your email is NOT viewed by any human and will not be read.

(..)

Thanks for emailing Linux Game Publishing

Linux Game Publishing Postmaster Antispam Facility

Greetings,

This message has been automatically generated in response to the
creation of a trouble ticket regarding: “Linux Game Publishing Antispam - Your message is being held”, a summary of which appears below.

There is no need to reply to this message right now. Your ticket has been
assigned an ID of [rt.dreamhack.se #26387].

Please include the string: [rt.dreamhack.se #26387] in the subject line of all future correspondence about this issue. To do so, you may reply to this message.

Thank you,
info@rt.dreamhack.se

Isn’t technology glorious?

Tama Leaver discovered that you can now use Google Trends to find information on what people in a particular country and even particular city are searching for. He noticed that while the world as a whole is more likely to search for “wiki” than for “blog”, Australians started using the search term “wiki” more than “blog” last autumn. Obviously I had to try the same for Norway, and lo and behold, Norway’s like Australia, not like the world. While wikis are more popular (well, in google searches) than blogs throughout Norway, the two major cities, Bergen and Oslo, show less of a difference - go have a look for yourself.

At the Personal Democracy Forum last weekend there was a lot of talk about how politicians might blog authentically. I mentioned the way that Carl Bildt, Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, blogs: very personally. As I spoke I realised how very different his style is to most US politicians, and I thought it would be useful to translate one of his posts to show you how it’s different. This is a translation of his latest post, published at 3:03 am this morning (though whether that’s US time or Swedish time I don’t know.)

Day one in Washington

Late to bed after an (as usual) very productive day of conversations in Washington.

The after effects of Fredrik’s visit here last week are as tangible as they are good. It has been noticed that our government has given the trans-Atlantic relations new importance.

And throughout my conversations here today I have felt a strengthened sense of the importance of relationships with Europe.

The thought that the USA can do everything by itself is not at all as prominent as a few years ago. And there are strong hopes for what the combination of new political leadership in various European countries might produce.

I’ve been going back and forwards between the State Department, the Finance Department, the Senate and the White House - with my customary lunch at Barnes and Noble’s big bookstore in Georgetown - and finished with dinner at Ambassador Gunnar Lund’s in the fine Swedish residence up on Nebraska Avenue.

There we had succeeded in gathering quite a significant selection of the city’s interesting thinkers and [opinion-holders?] for a lively dinner discussion about common strategies for the next five years.

It was certainly lively. Often the discussion turned to Iraq. But almost just as often to the question about Russia’s future. And always to the balance between the so-called soft and the so-called hard power in both USA and Europe and the need for a better balance between the both and across the Atlantic.

Tomorrow a full day awaits me, mostly in the State Department, starting with my discussions with foreign minister [he uses the Swedish term] Rice.

Previously, years would pass between discussions between our countries at this level.

Now it’s only been about half a year since the last time.

The “Fredrik” he mentions is presumably Fredrik Reinfeldt, Prime Minister of Sweden - what a typically Scandinavian way of keeping everything casual and down-to-earth. We Scandinavians like our politicians and royalty to be like regular people, and to follow the law of Jante, not thinking they’re better than anyone else. (This is both a cool thing and a sucky thing about Scandinavia.) A quick google found me this wonderful photo of Fredrik Reinfeldt - look at what a man of the people he is! Just a man in the crowd, actually behind (anonymous) firemen or policemen and regular people, but as the others in the crowd look away or hide their faces, the Prime Minister smiles confidently straight at us from beneath a Swedish flag, a flag he doesn’t even wield himself, no no, it’s simply his, given to him by the people, held by an unseen stranger. This is his official presentation at the Swedish government’s website. Heh. That photo speaks the same language as Carl Bildt’s blog, I think.

You’ll notice there are no links - Carl Bildt never links, making his blog look more like a diary than a political blog. Carl Bildt has open comments on his posts, and must moderate to some extent because there’s no spam and I haven’t seen any really offensive comments though some disagree with him, but he doesn’t seem to get involved in the comments discussion himself.

As someone at the conference pointed out, Carl Bildt’s blog might look very different if he were actively campaigning right now. As a more long-term strategy, though, I think this sort of post is likely to build up a trust, likeability and sense of authenticity that would certainly help in future campaigns.

What do you think? And do any other politicians blog in this personal-political way?

Either I was gone or I simply didn’t notice the front page of one of Norway’s biggest tabloids the other day: thankfully Kristine Lowe captured this ridiculous story, simply showing the connections between celebrities who have Facebook profiles:

(Photos by Kristine Lowe; this was probably from May 12?)

Has Facebook been the front page story in any other country? I think that Facebook was so well established as a student-network in other countries that journalists, lawyers and “celebrities” would be as unlikely to use it as to go to a student party or visit the student residences. But because Norway wasn’t in Facebook at all until after they opened it up to non-students and to all countries in September 2006, it’s simply not specifically a student network for us Norwegians. Sure, for those of us connected with universities it’s very obviously tailored for students, but if you sign up in the Norway network, or in no network, you might never realise that. Well. You might wonder why your privacy settings determine whether or not faculty or undergrads can see you, but whatever.

It’s interesting how social networks can develop very differently in different contexts. Was it Orkut that took off in Brazil? Now apparently quarter of a million Norwegians are on Facebook. That’s 5.5% of all Norwegians! That’s an astoundingly rapid adoption.

The media buzz here in Norway, then, is that “celebrities” are using Facebook. There was even a story about a fake Ane Dahl Torp profile that fooled her “real” friends into accepting her invitation to be Facebook friends - until they noticed that she was adding friends on Facebook at the same time as she was on live TV. That’s when they told the real Ane Dahl Torp.

I’ve been meaning to write up Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s very interesting discussion of Ségolène Royale’s online campaign from the PDF Unconference on Saturday, but I’ve not had time yet. Luckily Colin Delaney has done it for me at e.politics, even citing my comment that it sounded as though Ségo was trying to run as a “wikipedia president”, allowing her politics to be edited by the people in real time.

Gobry, who blogs at TechRepublican, and previously wrote that piece on the French elections at TechPresident, worked on Sarkozy’s campaign, so obviously wasn’t a Ségolène Royale fan, but he’s certainly very savvy about online politics, and he did a great job of pointing out how very thoroughly networked and user-centred her online campaign was. It was a really good session, and he made some really interesting points. I’m planning to grab screenshots of her and Sarkozy’s campaign websites before they go offline and maybe make a Slideshare presentation out of them for future use, because this stuff would make very good examples for teaching or talks.

• Swedes open first Second Life embassy | NEWS.com.au
  They won’t offer visas or passports but will explain how to get such documents in RL - I’ll be very surprised if they really have staff there at all, most places in SL are empty buildings.
  (tags: SL SecondLife Sweden embassy)

I woke at the crack of dawn again, of course, purposefully staying jetlagged as I’m going back to Norway this afternoon, and after reading in bed for a while had a most delicious breakfast at the Soda Club, a candy-themed café right next to the Cosmopolitan Hotel where I’ve been staying. The breakfast was excellent (with salad! yay! and awesome hash browns) and reasonably priced ($10.55 + tips for a full breakfast with orange juice and coffee) and the hotel’s pretty good too, really, although I was sort of put off by the bed-under-the-ceiling thing when I arrived. It’s certainly situated very conveniently - I had a five minute walk to the conference, there are plenty of reasonably priced restaurants around, a place selling toothpaste and dozens of other things, a Starbucks, a breakfast place and a subway station right outside the door. And as reviewers on Tripadvisor said, the hotel room’s cleaned very well, and sure, the bed’s comfy too. Though next time I won’t get a mini-loft, I’d rather have a regular room. And there’s free wireless, that even has the email ports open so you don’t have to use webmail.

Now I’m off to do some last-minute shopping before flying home - Barnes and Noble on fifth street should be open by now. See ya!

Yesterday was mostly people talking to us from the stage, something that Robert Scoble and Dave Winer complained about. I guess they weren’t at the Idea Market, a room with fifteen tables with people sitting round them talking about different topics. Or at the last session, when they finally hooked the chat up to the projector and made our conversation as visible as that of the internet campaign managers on the stage. “They didn’t put the chat on screen earlier because those people were too important,” someone said today. “You can’t have chat behind the back of Google’s CEO.” Perhaps it’s true that backchannel chat on a project works better for a panel that’s already a discussion than for a monologue.

Today is the Unconference, with no speakers, all conversation. At an Unconference, everyone writes ideas for sessions on sheets of paper, people sort of collectively paste these up in a grid on the wall, and people simply go to whichever session they’re interested in and talk about the topic. Click on the photo of the schedule to see it big enough that you can read the words (it’s huge though, I’ll compress it later).

Most people here today are working on political campaigns, or they’re working on websites meant to help activists coordinate activism or debate politics or they’re building tools they want to sell to political campaigns. I’m almost the only academic here, I think. And I think after the next session, which is interestingly entitled “How Segolene Royale won the netroots and lost the election”, I might leave it to the non-academics.

Last night one of my best conversations was after I left the conference, beat. I walked out the door at the same time as Dan Newman of MAPlight.org, a website that gives people access to information about representatives in congress, showing how much money they were given by which organisations and lobby groups and how they voted on different bills: “Money and politics: illuminating the connection”. Using the internet to make information available and to make it easier to see connections seems like a wonderful way to use it, and a very interesting way of making an argument that is about transparency and showing the data rather than persuasion. It also fits what Lee Rainie from Pew called the forensic way we’re reading these ways.

The Segolene Royale session is starting. I’d better go.

• PIRATE PARENTING: Capn Billy The Butcher MacDougalls Guide to Pirate Parenting: Why you should raise your kids as pirates and 101 tips on how to do it by Tim Bete
  “If you’re like most parents, you long to raise your children as pirates but just don’t know how. In Guide to Pirate Parenting, Cap’n Billy “The Butcher” MacDougall provides everything you need to know to turn your little powder monkeys into hap
  (tags: pirates parenting kids)
• Eventful
  Site that lets you track events in your town (like other sites) but also lets you upload your iTunes library list of artists and alerts you when any of them are in your town, and it has a demand system where you can say what events you WANT and bands actu
  (tags: events community social viral)

The revolution will not be YouTubed. Content is not king; contact is king.