jill/txt

Ida Jackson is a Norwegian blogger I’m adding to my RSS feeds after reading some of her posts - she’s risen to blogger fame after writing reviews of the journalists who interviewed her about her new book, Jenter som kommer. Her reviews are great: she includes the best question and the worst question they asked and really shows how different interviews of the same person can turn out. The journalists of course were shocked at being reviewed (though the reviews were fairly positive, really) and so wrote about that. Here’s Jackson’s post summarising the whole affair, the article the journalist wrote afterwards and Pål Hivand noting that the journalist’s “we journalists” vs “the bloggers” distinction really doesn’t work anymore.

Norwegian politics doesn’t work the same way as in the US - a Norwegian politician using the high drama and emotion of Obama’s wonderful speeches looks foolish in a down-to-earth Norwegian. And because of regulations limiting political advertising, Norwegian elections (thank goodness) aren’t based on donations. We don’t have a two-party system, or primaries in the same way, and election cycles last a few months at most, certainly not two years. I wonder, though, whether Norwegian political parties in next year’s national elections could make use of the internet in organising volunteers as well as Barack Obama’s campaign did, as TechPresident discuss in their argument that the internet won Obama the presidency: “Online volunteer organizing essentially built the campaign a structure in places where it didn’t exist, letting paid staff parachute in and immediately take command of a working political army.” Sounds pretty good.

I’m totally into Ravelry these days - the social media site for knitters where you can see how 783 people knit a particular pattern in completely different ways, or who buys yarn at the same local store as you do, or which patterns or finished knitted objects your friends favourite. Honestly, if you’re at all into knitting, or you simply want to see a great example of how social media can work for a (surprisingly large with 200,000 members and they’re not even out of beta) speciality group, go sign up. Oh, and it’s also a nice example of how a social media site can add value to existing social practices in a (loose) community - Ravelry links up and display’s users’ Flickr and blog streams, which both adds value to Ravelry itself and helps strengthen the existing networks that extend outside of Ravelry.

One of this morning’s great finds was this handknitted sweater with a portrait of Obama on the back of it (here’s a link to the project in Ravelry if you’re a member). The woman who knitted it generated a chart for the intarsia knitting by uploading a jpg image to MicroRevolt’s knitPro, which according to the site’s blurb is “a web application that translates digital images into knit, crochet, needlepoint and cross-stitch patterns. Just upload jpeg, gif or png images of whatever you wish — portraits, landscapes, logos… and it will generate the image pattern on a grid sizable for any fiber project”.

If you’re more the linguistic/code type of person, you might prefer knitting a variant of Binary. If you’re in the mood for binary knitting you can encode your message here and knit, say, a scarf, a hat or a pair of socks. See 164 examples at Ravelry.com.
Now all I have to do is figure out what I’m knitting!!
PS: I’m jillaroo on Ravelry - if you’re on Ravelry too, send me a note!