jill/txt

Here’s a pretty amusing video that’s been going the rounds - it’s the first episode, uh, webisode, of a series about a World of Warcraft guild…

Television scholar Jason Mittel has an interesting discussion of how scholars discussing complex narratives like Lost tend to leave out any mention of soap operas, although soap operas obviously have a great many formal similarities with Lost. In his post, Jason makes a comment about soap operas that might equally be said of blogs:

I believe, as Robert Allen has argued in his classic work Speaking of Soap Operas, that people who don’t watch soaps with some regularity cannot really understand the form, as the whole point of the genre is the long-time accrual of meanings and experiences, not the individual narrative segments of episodes.

I think - and many others have said this in various ways - that blogs have that same emphasis on long-time accrual of meanings. There’s something about following a blog for a long time that’s really important to one’s understanding of a particular post. Maybe I should read about soap operas to see how Robert Allen describes this for that genre.

Jason Mittel also lists two crucial differences between soaps and complex narratives like Lost:

• Soap operas are broadcast continuously, whereas Lost and its ilk are broadcast in 13-24 episode seasons, after which you have a long break before the next season.
• Radio and television soaps assume an audience that may be distracted by other tasks (children, housework, phone calls) and might miss episodes, so there’s redundancy built in. Lost and others assume their audiences will be deeply concentrating and can access any missed episodes or watch sequences again. Sometimes you need to watch sequences with freeze frame - or see someone else who’s written this up on the web - in order to grasp a plot event.

So I’m thinking that blogs - (and web serials like Lonelygirl15?) - are closer to the audience and attention expectations of soaps than of complex television narratives like Lost. Is that a useful analogy, though? The content of blogs is generally far from that in soaps, and the narrative arc of blogs, when they have one, is completely different.

Zentation.com is an interesting-looking site that allows you to view (and upload) videos of presentations along with the slides - and slides and videos are nicely synchronised. Might be a step up from Slideshare, which I’ve been using a bit, though it obviously requires a bit more work to set up. So far I haven’t found any really compelling presentations on Zentation, but it’s a very new service, so that might change.

Look, a movie projected on a four-story building in New York - set up by HBO, the cable TV channel that produced The Sopranos, Deadwood, Rome, Big Love, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City and so on. The New York Times YouTube critic Virginia Hefferman was there when they projected it and has a perceptive analysis of its function as advertisement rather than entertainment or art.

But what are they selling? I asked and asked. Maybe in the rooms in the film, if you look closely, maybe there are Altoids and Alli diet pills? No, said the HBO marketing woman. That is not how sophisticated marketing works now.

HBO Voyeur is about underscoring what HBO already does, its special “it’s not TV” magic — how many tentacles HBO has, how deep into your life it already penetrates. HBO Voyeur, she said, is about retention.

The online version at HBO Voyeur may be purely intended to steal your soul, but it’s also quite good fun… I guess I’m a sucker for this kind of advertisement, eh?

We already knew that Facebook was growing fast, but it’s interesting to see how its growth is now primarily across new demographics, that is, the non-college student agegroups, according to Inside Facebook:

• Visitors aged 12-17 increased 150% over the last year
• Visitors 18-24 increased 38%
• Visitors 25-34 increased 181% during that time - a huge number
• Visitors 35+ increased 98%

Now Facebook already had 85% of US college students, so the potential for growth in that demographic was clearly a lot less than in other groups. But considering that a huge amont of the last months’ growth has been outside of the US, where neither college students nor anyone else was a member before September 2006, these figures suggest that Facebook’s users are becoming a lot more diverse. At least in terms of age.

In our World of Warcraft Reader (it’s in copyediting now, MIT Press says it should be published Spring 2008) Hilde Corneliussen’s chapter discusses the way gender is used in the game. Among other things, she shows how different races and cities are very clearly gendered in different ways - it’s really an interesting piece. Anyway, in the chapter she mentions how some armour looks rather different on female characters than on men - although it’ll offer the same protection no matter what your character’s gender is. At Linn’s sister Christin’s blog, Strumpet’s Life I found this amusing comic strip that shows the situation beautifully:

This is a fascinating demo of how massive amounts of photo-data can be linked together in a system called Photosynch. (The best bits are about 3-4 minutes in and to the end.) They’ve downloaded all the photos on Flickr of Notredame (I bet mine and Scott’s are in there too!) and are able to hook them together - the software actually analyses the images and matches bits that are the same - the round window over the entrance, obviously, but also more diffuse shapes and colours. It then pieces together a navigable space where if you click on that piece of carving, there, and another photo in the collection provides a closeup of it, you zoom in to see the closeup.

You can try some of this out online at the Photosynch website, too. But it only works on Windows. For now. I’m OK dreaming about it for a while longer, anyway - oh, how do you think it would handle going through the hundreds of photos from our wedding on Flickr and trying to automatically stitch them together? Could it do time as well as place, or is this a technology best suited to studying monuments that are stable over time, like the Notre Dame? How could this system handle photos of a child growing into a woman, I wonder? Would it?
(via Martin)

There are a number of politicians on YouTube. Arbeiderpartiet (Labour) probably has the most thorough approach, with a dedicated channel for their people that they started back in April, though it’s still mostly just plain talking heads in small boxes saying hi, I’m NN, vote for me. Nina Bachke, who’s running for Mayor in Oslo in this September’s local elections, has a video that’s a little better than most, though certainly still embracing the amateur aesthetics. She situates herself as one of today’s parents by talking about when she grew up (with still photos of prominent people cut in), talks about how much has changed since then, and what sort of things are important for our children (cut to shots of her talking with kids in some parade). Finally the prime minister recommends her. OK, that’s not astounding, but it’d probably do the trick.

But.

Embedding is disabled by the user’s request. Comments are switched off. Ratings are switched off.

Do these people not want people to watch their videos? What on earth was the thinking behind stopping people from reposting the video - here in my blog, for instance, or in the Facebook groups dedicated to Nina Bachke. She apparently has no profile on Facebook herself yet, though she has a blog, of sorts, set up by Arbeiderpartiet.

But the un-embeddable, comment-disabled YouTube video is the top hit on the Google for the woman that the Labour party wants to be the Mayor of Oslo. Oh dear.

Today Bergens Tidende published a kronikk I wrote, Sex, politikk og YouTube, about political YouTube videos in the US campaigns - and especially about the recent ones that are styled as love letters to the candidates: Crush on Obama and Hott4Hill. I should add that I was inspired by Tama Leaver’s post that referenced the videos, and also by a post he linked to at PopPolitics.com called
The Power and Playfulness of Parody: Obama, Hip Hop and Misunderstanding. Go on, have a look at the videos if you haven’t already, they’re amusing:

Note in particular that the video begins with Barack Obama talking about the “conversation” he wants to have with voters - and how ObamaGirl simply takes that literally:

Obama: I want to thank all of you for your time, your suggestions, your encouragement, and your prayers. And I look forward to continuing our conversation in the weeks and months to come.

Obama Girl: Hey B, it’s me. If you’re there, pick up. I was just watching you on C-SPAN. [Sigh] Anyway, call me back.

I just love the porn-style sigh she gives immediately after saying “C-SPAN”, don’t you? (C-SPAN, btw, is the channel that broadcasts continuous coverage of what’s happening in the House of Representatives and Congress and so on - like NRK Stortinget in Norway. Hardly sighable in most cases.)

My main point in the kronikk is that beneath the cheap plays on sex there’s a serious critique in these videos of politicians’ attempt to play the “conversation” card. The relationship between ObamaGirl and Obama is visually emphasised as extremely distanced and one-sided. Hott4Hill plays so heavily on clichéd fantasies (the maid’s uniform..) that it’s quite clear it’s never going to be real. And yet they both participate in a different conversation, that between voters about candidates. Actually I’m not sure I got that last line into the kronikk but I think it’s important.

Since writing the piece, I saw this story at The Guardian yesterday that interestingly discusses the use of the term citizen media for these kind of works: “the notion of a ‘citizen ad’ is an intriguing one, suggesting as it does both a citizen’s arrest - the idea of doing something without pay for the public good.”

Jakob Nielsen, the controversial text-centric usability expert, argues that experts shouldn’t blog in his latest UseIt column. As I read it, his argument is as follows:

Even if you’re the world’s top expert, your worst posting will be below average, which will negatively impact on your brand equity.

And…

The beauty of the blogosphere is that it’s a self-organizing system. Whenever something good appears, other blogs link to it and it gets promoted in the system and gains higher visibility. Thus, the 24 postings that are better than our expert’s very best attempt will gain higher prominence, even though they’re written by people with lower overall expertise.

So if you’re that top expert, you’ll still have trouble convincing the rest of the world that you’re the top expert because not all your posts will be equally excellent - and some will be worse than people who have less expertise than you.

Clearly Nielsen is speaking here to a traditional, old-school expert, and is advising him or her to maintain his or her position as the expert through continuing to use the traditional means for asserting authority. Which might in fact be good advice to such a person. Inversely, I assume, anyone who isn’t already known as the top expert on something should definitely go ahead and blog!

Nielsen doesn’t think experts should stay away from the web, just that they should stick to longer, more detailed and comprehensive articles rather than quick blog posts. These, he writes, will be more highly valued. Of course, he’s right that such articles are important and valuable - but if you don’t engage in other discussions they might never be found.

Of course, Nielsen’s post has already annoyed bloggers. Robert Scoble has a rather venomous post about it, and takes it entirely personally. No wonder, really - just as Henry Jenkins’s first column on blogging called bloggers “cockroaches” (this was the editor’s term, not Jenkins’s, but still not a good look), Nielsen chooses to call bloggers “monkeys”. Thanks, mate.

In contrast, in-depth content that takes much longer to create is beyond the abilities of the lesser experts. A thousand monkeys writing for 1,000 hours doesn’t add up to Shakespeare. They’ll actually create a thousand low-to-medium-quality postings that aren’t integrated and that don’t give readers a comprehensive understanding of the topic — even if those readers suffer through all 1,000 blogs.

Jakob Nielsen does in fact have lots of useful advice in his columns on usability, and I’ve used his work in teaching often. He has very clear advice which has lots of good points - as well as leaving plenty of scope for discussion, which works great in the classroom. The most common student comment is that his website is so ugly, which in a way is true, but in another way, simply fits his message: focus on textual content, make it succinct and easy to find, skip fancy graphics and visual design. I believe visual design is a lot more important than Nielsen would, but I also think textual organisation is crucial. See, for instance, Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines, How Users Read on the Web, and other Alertbox columns. Note also that these URLs have been stable for a decade, a usability achievement in itself!

I’m really glad that there are lots of us monkeys willing to blog, though, aren’t you?

Ian Bogost and Mia Consalvo have new books out that look at games from interesting angles. Ian’s book, which is literally just published, is called Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, and looks at “the way videogames mount arguments and influence players”. Ian runs the blog Watercooler Games along with Gonzalo Frasca, and makes, researches and writes about these games. Most of Gonzalo and Ian’s work has been on political videogames, little web-based games that make an argument, you know, but advertising and maybe education are other areas this is relevant to. I blogged a bit about political video games during the 2004 US presidential campaigns, and have a chapter in my dissertation about the Bin Laden games that appeared after September 11 - and a blog post with links to many of these games.

Mia Consalvo’s book, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, is about cheating as a strategy in playing video games. She “investigates how players choose to play games and what happens when they can’t always play the way they’d like”, “provides a cultural history of cheating in video games”, and more. I’m the kind of player who loves to cheat - though I have yet to buy gold in World of Warcraft, I despise having to grind for hours and would love a shortcut through that boredom, and playing Zork and Infocom games in the eighties, my sister and I always begged Mum and Dad to buy us the hint books. We adored the invisible ink and the layers of clues - it was such fun! I even want hints for simple riddles, and I love that The Sims have official cheat codes to get infinite money. So I have great sympathy for a whole book dedicated to players who like me, like to cheat.

One of the beauties of subscribing to Australian cooking magazines while living in Norway is that you get those extra months of anticipation and longing, waiting for the ingredients to be in season. This recipe for Summer Nectarine Cakes was in the Jan/Feb 2006 issue of Donna Hay, but I only just baked them yesterday. They turned out yummy. My daughter absolutely loves them, though I would have liked a little more zing - perhaps I went too easy on the lemon rind, or perhaps the nectarine simply wasn’t quite utterly delicious enough.

I personally prefer the Nectarine Tart that I baked last week - it was easy and looked cool and has way more yummy nectarines! But my daughter says she likes these better. Here’s the recipe:

3 eggwhites
1 cup almond meal (ground almonds)
1/2 cup icing (confectioner’s) sugar, sifted
1/4 cup plain (all-purpose) flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
50 g (1 3/4 oz) butter, melted
1 tablespoon finely grated lemon rind
1 nectarine, halved and sliced
icing (confectioner’s) sugar, extra for dusting (I skipped this)

Preheat the oven to 180˚C (355˚F). Place the eggwhites, almond meal, sugar, flour, baking powder, butter and lemon rind in a bowl and mix well to combine. Spoon 1 tablespoon of the mixture into 12 lightly greased 1/4 cup (2 fl oz) capacity party tins and top with a slice of nectarine. Bake for 15 minutes or until puffed and golden. Dust over extra icing sugar to serve. Makes 12.

The Electronic Literature Organization’s symposium ELO2007 this May was a great event, with lots of enthusiastic e-literature writers, critics and readers, and a lot of promise for the future. While we were there, Dene Grigar spoke eagerly of her plans for the next ELO conference, which she’s co-chairing with John Barber in Vancouver, Washington next year. I’ve been to a conference chaired by Dene once before (Computers and Writing in 1999) and it was fabulous - she’s a dynamo of a woman and I know she and John will do a great job with the ELO Conference too. The dates are now finalised, and the CFP is out (papers by November 30th) - I’m reposting this from Scott’s blog, and Scott writes that there’ll be more information in August at eliterature.org.

Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference

Thursday, May 29-Sunday, June 1, 2008
Vancouver, Washington
Sponsored by Washington State University Vancouver & the Electronic Literature Organization
Dene Grigar & John Barber, Co-Chairs

Producing a work of electronic literature entails not only practice in the literary arts but sometimes also the visual, sonic, and the performative arts; knowledge of computing devices and software programs; and experience in collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and hybridity. In short, electronic literature requires its artists to see beyond traditional approaches and sensibilities into what best can be described as visionary landscapes where, as Mark Amerika puts it, artists “celebrate an interdisciplinary practice from a literary and writerly perspective that allows for other kinds of practice-based art-research and knowledge sharing.”

To forward the thinking about new approaches and sensibilities in the media arts, The Electronic Literature Organization and Washington State University Vancouver’s Digital Technology and Culture program are inviting submissions to the Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference to be held from May 29 to June 1, 2008 in Vancouver, Washington.

“Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference” is interested in papers that explore forms of digital media that utilize images, sound, movement, and user interaction as well as––or in lieu of––words and that explore how we read, curate, and critique such works. Topics may include:

• New, non-screen, environments for presenting multimedia writing and/or electronic literature
• Research labs and new media projects
• Strategies for reading electronic literary works
• Curating digital art
• Innovative approaches to critiquing electronic literature
• Emerging technologies for the production of multimedia writing and/or electronic literature
• Building audience for new media literary works and writing
• Digital, literary performances
• Publishing for print or electronic media connecting literature and the arts through common archiving and metatag strategies
• Artistic methods of composition used in intermedia storytelling (improvisation, collaboration, sample and remix, postproduction art, codework, hactivism, etc.)

In conjunction with the three-day conference, there will be a juried Media Arts Show. Along with prizes for the most notable work, selected artists will be awarded bursaries to attend the conference featured at the show. Submission guidelines will be posted beginning August 15, 2007 on the conference website.

The keynote speaker is internationally renowned new media artist and writer, Mark Amerika, named a “Time Magazine 100 Innovator.” His artwork has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the ICA in London, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum and has been the topic of four retrospectives. Amerika is also the author of many books, including his recently published collection of artist writings entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press), founder of the Alt-X Network, and publisher of the electronic book review. He currently holds the position of Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Deadline for Submissions for Presentations: November, 30, 2007
Notification of Acceptance: December 30, 2007

Vancouver, Washington, located in the Pacific Northwest just across the Columbia River from Portland, OR, is about a six hour drive south of Vancouver, Canada and three hours south of Seattle, Washington. The conference day events will take place at Washington State University Vancouver, a Tier One research Institution built in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains with views of Mt. Hood and Mt. Saint Helens. The official conference hotel is the Hilton Vancouver located in downtown Vancouver, Washington with easy access to restaurants, bars, and evening conference events. Special rates have been negotiated for conference attendees. A conference shuttle will take attendees to and from the campus daily. The recommended airport is PDX at Portland, which is about a seven minute drive to downtown Vancouver, WA.

The cost of the conference is $150; graduate students and non-affiliated artists pay only $100. Conference registration covers access to all events, the reception, some meals, and shuttle transportation.

For more information, contact Dene Grigar at Grigar@vancouver.wsu.edu.

[This is a list of Norwegian members of parliament who have blogs.]

Jeg vil prøve å samle en liste over norske politikerblogger her - da mener jeg ikke blogger som skriver en del om politikk (som f.eks. Vampus eller Dagens onde kvinner), men blogger skrevet av offisielle politikere. Jeg håper dere vil gi meg tips om flere i kommentarene! (more…)

Kristine Lowe links to this Wired story about a case where US border security searched the computer of a US citizen coming from from abroad, and found illegal material on his laptop. The court found that searching the laptop was illegal and refused to hear the case. What’s particularly interesting is the reason the judge gave for treating information on laptops differently from other personal items:

“Electronic storage devices function as an extension of our own memory,” Judge Dean Pregerson wrote. “They are capable of storing our thoughts, ranging from the most whimsical to the most profound. Therefore, government intrusions into the mind — specifically those that would cause fear or apprehension in a reasonable person — are no less deserving of Fourth Amendment scrutiny than intrusions that are physical in nature.”

The government, of course, disagrees, and with a rather Orwellian reason:

“If allowed to stand, the district court’s decision will seriously undermine the nation’s vital interest in protecting its borders by removing the significant deterrent effect of suspicionless searches,” reads the filing.

I wonder whether this kind of issue has been tested in other countries’ jurisdiction?
(Photo by CayUSA)