jill/txt

I thought of LambdaMOO and the Wizards’ abdication, of course, the moment I saw the new announcement at the top of my Facebook page this morning:

LambdaMOO was one of the famous communities of the nineties: a text-based virtual world with thousands of inhabitents (users), where anyone could extend the world, where bizarre conversations and art and experimentation was constantly going on, where an intricate form of democracy prevaded, with petitions and votes and endless discussions. You could log onto LambdaMOO at any time of the day or night and always find interesting things going on.

LambdaMOO was started by Pavel Curtis and other programmers. They were the Wizards and could do anything possible to do in code. If your user was a programmers you could do a lot with the code, but you couldn’t, in general, change other peoples’ code, you’d have to create your own objects. Builders could make some new things, but with less finesse than programmers. Facebook doesn’t call the programming team Wizards, but they might as well.

In the beginning, LambdaMOO was governed by the Wizards. But in 1993, the Wizards abdicated:

So, as the last social decision we make for you, and whether or not you independent adults wish it, the wizards are pulling out of the discipline/manners/arbitration business; we’re handing the burden and freedom of that role to the society at large. We will no longer be the right people to run to with complaints about one another’s behavior, etc. The wings of this community are still wet (as anyone can tell from reading *social-issues), but I think they’re strong enough to fly with.

After that, of course, much mess ensued, including the Rape in Cyberspace Julian Dibbell so famously analysed (and his entertaining yet incisive article should be required reading for any student of digital cultures). As Steve Jones concisely describes in his entry on LambdaMOO for the Encyclopedia of New Media, this mess led to intricate social self-governance, with formally agreed-upon systems of petitions, discussions and votes. The total anarchy left by the Wizards’ abdication didn’t work. The most interesting thing about this is that there was a point at which the program created by the Wizards in a sense no longer belonged to them. It was a world and as such, belonged to its inhabitants.

Facebook’s business team isn’t abdicating. I doubt they’ll ever give up the power to, say, arbitrarily delete accounts, or delete photos of nursing mothers. But they are to some extent admitting that their system has become more than just a program. It’s a community, or many communities, and like most communities, very resistant to dictatorship.

So Facebook is trying a kind of semi-democracy, as they describe in yesterday’s blog post. They’ll drop the legalese and try to write things in a way that is intended to communicate with users and not confuse them. They’ve proposed two documents that will be like constitutions for Facebook: the Facebook Principles and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. They’ve given each a group for discussions, and promise to put them to a general vote before the go into effect. They also explicitly reserve the right to make technical changes - such as when they implemented the news feed or more recently changed the interface - without any vote or input from the users. And of course, in many ways it’s the technical affordances and limitations of the system that really affect our day-to-day lives.

So Facebook-the-business certainly hasn’t abdicated like LambdaMOO’s Wizards did. And their democracy is very limited. Will there ever be a system for general users to petition for changes, for instance? Technically, one can certainly imagine using the group structure and saying that if you can get X members to support this petition, it must be put to a general vote or something like that.

The question is whether Facebook still sees itself primarily as a business or as a community, a “world”. When I first read this paragraph from yesterday’s blog post I thought they were starting to see themselves as a world:

Our main goal at Facebook is to help make the world more open and transparent. We believe that if we want to lead the world in this direction, then we must set an example by running our service in this way.

But I suspect they mean the world outside Facebook (what do you think?).

I think Facebook’s users do not see Facebook as a business. To us, it’s a place where we meet and communicate with our friends and familys. It’s a place we inhabit and where we leave traces of ourselves. It’s a world - and that’s why “Terms of service” jar so horribly with our expectations.

It’s going to be really interesting to see how Facebook continues to balance between being a world and being a business.

Store norske leksikon is Norway’s major, mainstream encyclopedia. Last week they opened their attempt at conquering the digital world: an online encyclopedia where all users can contribute articles and suggest changes to articles, but where some articles are “quality assured” by topic experts. Anyone can apply to be a topic expert, but there’s a vetting system - and I think topic experts are paid something, too. This is an interesting model for a well-established, commerical encyclopedia trying to survive in a Wikipedia world - and perhaps it will work very well.

Eirik Newth is their expert on “net culture”, and I’m sure he’ll do a great job. He suggests that perhaps Store norske leksikon should embrace the eternal “beta” of so many web 2.0 sites. He even touched up their logo to help them:

After having a look at the site, I whole-heartedly agree. The “best article of the week” is by prime minister Jens Stoltenberg and is about the importance of vaccination in developing countries. The article has nothing in common with traditional encyclopedia articles and seems an odd choice for setting initial expectations to the content. Admittedly, Stoltenberg is prime minister and they show that they’re taken seriously by important people - and the article is a “user article”, not a quality assured article. But still an odd choice.

Even more embarrassingly, the encyclopedia doesn’t even have basic entries in place. Or rather, it does, but they’re not correctly organised. When I search for “Bergen”, the first entry is “Bergen”, so of course I click that, assuming I’ll find information about Norway’s second largest city. No - instead I find a “quality assured” entry about a frigate named Bergen. Looking more closely, I realise I could have clicked on the second entry in the list of “Bergen” articles - “Bergen – offentlige institusjoner, kultur” (Bergen - public institutions, culture) which turns out to be the article about the city itself. The problem here is the way the articles have been categorised. Eventually I found the real article about Bergen - it’s pretty good, but doesn’t show up at all when you simply type in “Bergen” in the search field.

Add to these obvious glitches the ads that keep blinking, blinking, blinking (no ads is a sudden extra reason to love the Wikipedia) and Store norske leksikon really doesn’t excude an aura of well-established authority, despite their tag-line: “Norges ledende oppslagsverk gjennom 100 år” (Norway’s leading encyclopedia for 100 years“).

Obviously when you’re setting up a brand new website that involves hundreds, maybe thousands of contributors, it’s going to take a while for everyone to work out the details. Glitches like these are to be expected. Contributors need to learn how to categorise and tag their contributions so they show up in the right place, and content has to be created, too. This takes time. I know - the University of Bergen just got a new website, after years of development, and despite all the excellent work put in by the development team the success of the website depends upon local content creators actually creating the content - and that takes time. Come to think of it, we should probably have a beta logo on our new website too. Or just a sentence displayed at the top of the first page people arrive at: “We’ve just switched to a new website and some information may temporarily be hard to find. We’re working on it and adding more every day!” That might alleviate some of the frustration people have when they can’t find what they’re looking for on a brand new site.

For Store norske leksikon I think it’s even more crucial though. They’re bravely trying to find a model that will enable them to survive in a networked, participatory culture. While I love the Wikipedia, I would hate a world where the Wikipedia was the only encyclopedia. For Store norske leksikon to survive, they need to keep their reputation as being authoritative. And right now, they’re not.

I’m quite sure that Store norske will improve their website exponentially in the weeks and months to come. But for now, I agree with Eirik Newth: they really should flag the newness and un-finishedness of the website. A “beta” stamp on the logo would be a good way to do that.

The Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry (Nærings- og handelsdepartementet) is considering using social media and they’ve started a blog to discuss how and if they should do so. I’m not quite sure what sort of things I want the Ministry of Trade and Industry to share to be honest. I suspect a focused blog - say, on how to start up a business (if supporting that is even one of the missions of the ministry, see, I’m kind of clueless) - would be more useful than a general blog. I must say, I’m surprised at how much I enjoy the TSA blog, though, or the Danish Patent- og Varemærkestyrelsen blog - both of which are run by bureaucratic department-style organisations. They want feedback, so go over and comment if you have any thoughts.

Norsk språkråd (The Norwegian Language Council) is also just starting up a blog - http://klarspråk.no is going to be the URL but they’re not quite there yet, I think.

Are there other “official” Norwegian blogs I should know about?

Update: Mihoe has Filed under:General — Jill @ 12:07 [ Responses (1)]

I’m on the research committee of our huge department, which means that right now I’m going through a thick pile of applications for PhD fellowships. Ten three-year fellowships were advertised for the whole of the Faculty of Humanities, so our department (one of five) will get 2-3 at best. I have 28 applications in my pile.

After the re-organisation, our department consists of Humanistic Informatics, Linguistics, Comparative Literature, Art History, Classics, Computational Linguistics, Theatre Studies and Nordic, which is huge in itself and includes old Norse, grammar and sociolinguistics, Norwegian as a second language and of course Nordic literature, oh, and didactics too.

The pile of applications is interesting - more than half the applications are in literature - comparative or Nordic. The level of competition in this field is remarkable - so many people want to be literature professors!

Also, it’s interesting to see how the applications are at all levels of excellence - and how quite a few are not. Trying to go through them quickly before our first meeting about them I’m frustrated at how few of the cover letters do something as simple as stating what the applicant wants to write their PhD about. When you’re trying to figure out whether this application should be looked at by an art historian or a linguist or a classicist you want, oh, how about simply including the title of your project? After all, you’ve attached a five page project description. I suppose perhaps having done that, many applicants figure we already know - and we do, it’s just that it’s a lot easier to put all the information together when the applicant does it for us in the cover letter.

We still have at least two meetings ahead of us: we have to gather in assessments of the applications from subject experts, fill out forms describing each of them to be sent to the applicants themselves and to the higher level committee that finally selects who will be hired, and finally we have to prepare a prioritised list of up to seven candidates from our pile of 28.

It’s also rather humbling being at this side of the academic system suddenly. It doesn’t feel that long since I was one of the hopeful applicants. Had I realised the huge piles of paper I’d be competing with I might not have dared! But I’m glad that I did.

I’m going to Oslo again tomorrow, and bringing the breastpump like last time - but this time I’m armed with a printed email from a security inspector and senior advisor at Norway’s Civil Aviation Authority stating that bringing breastmilk and a cooling element to keep it cool through airport security as hand luggage is permitted. He’s also promised to add this to the F.A.Q., which is due to be updated “soon”. He was extremely helpful on the phone, and was apologetic that some inspectors on the ground sometimes misinterpret the rules. I’m posting the email just in case other people need it too.

Her er en epost som bekrefter at det er i orden å ha med både morsmelk på flaske og kjøleelementer for å holde melken kjølig under reisen i håndbaggasjen gjennom sikkerhetskontrollen på norske flyplasser. Det står ikke eksplisitt i eposten men på telefonen gjorde Berntzen det klart at dette også gjelder når man reiser uten barnet, som når mor har vært på dagsreise til Oslo, f.eks., og hatt med brystpumpe for å pumpe melk til barnet som er hjemme hos far. Her er bloggposten om hvordan jeg ikke fikk ha med dette sist jeg reiste.

From: Jaran.Berntzen@caa.no
Subject: SV: Morsmelk og kjølelement i sikkerhetskontrollen
Date: 20 February 2009 12:45:17 PM
To: jill.walker@uib.no

Hei,

Viser til telefonsamtale.

Slik vi tolker regelverket er barnemat, herunder da selvsagt også morsmelk, unntatt. Dette innebærer at barnematen også må kunne oppbevares under reisens varighet, og dermed er også tilhørende kjøleelement unntatt.

Håper dette er tilstrekkelig. Skulle det oppstå problemer i sikkerhetskontrollen er det bare å ringe.

Ærbødigst

Jaran Berntzen
Securityinspektør & seniorrådgiver
Hovedansvarlig lufthavninspeksjoner
Luftfartstilsynet
0047 9826 1834

“Det er ingen menneskerett å få jobbe med luftfart! Det er et privilegium!”

Update All prepared for a fight as I was, I was almost disappointed: I slid through security with no comments at all, despite my liquid-filled cooling element. Ah well, perhaps good old Jaran Berntzen had sent out a memo to everyone reminding them that breastmilk and coolers are cool. Or perhaps I just had really bad luck last time.

Pew Internet published an interesting survey last year looking at how parents and teenagers think about the writing they do in their spare time - online, on phones, and by hand - and the writing they do at school. The most interesting find is that young people don’t think of most online communication as “writing”:

Fully 85% of all teens engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication, which includes text messaging, sending email or instant messages, or posting comments on social networking sites. Although participation in these activities is
widespread, a majority (60%) of teens who send these communications do not consider them to be “writing.”

The reasons they give for this not being writing range from its not being long enough to its being a conversation, not writing - and certainly they have a point. Online writing is often different from traditional writing.

I wonder whether that’s because they genuinely find that online writing is different from traditional writing - or because they’re used to their school system not acknowledging their online culture as valid?

This is kind of cool - a bunch of people in charge of big web sites in Norway have put up warnings on their website to people using Internet Explorer 6.0 (which is from 2001 and horrible to code for) that they have out of date browsers and that they should upgrade. Here’s a long string of screenshots of these warnings. There are a LOT of sites with the warning, and the sites target pretty much all Norwegians - not just webheads.

Interestingly, there’s a surge of IE6 users every Monday morning, showing that the issue is actually old browsers in the work place, not at home. Embarrassingly, Statoil has a lot of those Monday morning IE6 users.

A kind of cool aspect of the campaign is that it started on Twitter, where Erlend Schei, the guy in charge of Finn.no’s website suggested it and rapidly others followed on. I’ve been using Twitter more over the last few weeks and while I’m still not convinced about its being all that much better than, say, del.icio.us, Facebook and/or blogs, you do get some good links on it. I’m jilltxt on Twitter. Of course!

Well, the talk went well yesterday, and pumping worked out fine - the conference organiser lent me her office, which was great. Airport security was not so great. My breastpump has an insulated compartment and a cooler pack that you freeze and then put in the insulated compartment so you can store the milk in there and it will stay cool. On my way to Oslo I took it through as hand luggage - without milk since I hadn’t pumped yet, and the security people (young women) said it was fine and waved me through. On my way home, the airport train was delayed and I didn’t have much time for my flight. I assumed since Bergen had said the cooler pack was OK, I’d be fine taking the pump, milk and cooler packs through security again. But no - this time the security guy (an old man - coincidence?) stopped me and said the milk was OK but not the cooler packs. I asked where I could find complete guidelines as I hadn’t been able to find anything about breastmilk when travelling without a baby or about cooler packs online. They were obviously not into people asking questions and said I’d have to ask the airline (?) or the general information desk for the airport. And if I was worried that the milk would go bad I could dump it.

I’ve never been angry in a security line before, but I sure was this time. I grabbed my stuff, marched out, and checked in my backpack with the milk and cooler packs in it - I took my laptop out and carried it. The breastpump would need a strap or something to be checked as the cover doesn’t fasten completely - and I’m concerned about whether it’s even sturdy enough to go through as checked luggage, it’s an expensive piece of machinery after all. I then raced to the gate, which was closing, and was the last person on board the plane.

Luckily my backpack got there despite being checked in so late - and the milk was fine.

The thing is, the Norwegian government wants me to breastfeed until my baby’s at least a year old. The Norwegian government ALSO wants me to get back to work and let the baby’s father have some parental leave. Starting in 2009, parental leave is 44 weeks (at 100% pay, or 56 weeks at 80% pay). Three weeks before the birth and 12 weeks after the birth are reserved for the mother. Ten weeks (usually taken at the end) are reserved for the father. And the remaining 19 (or 31 at 80% pay) weeks can be shared however the mother and father choose. This means that mothers on the 100% pay schedule will start to work again when their babies are just over 7 months old. That’s assuming the father takes the shortest possible leave. So you have to assume - or at least hope - that mothers will be breastfeeding and pumping at for at least five months, until their babies are a year old.

Pumping in the workplace is protected. More or less. But what about pumping while travelling for work? What about jobs where you must - or should - travel?

I can opt to travel less while I have small children. Many mothers and fathers do. But if I opt not to travel as much because pumping while travelling is too hard - partly due to security regulations - is that a gender discrimination issue? Or am I exaggerating, here?

Half of me wants to kick up a big fuss. At a minimum write a letter to the airport security people, to the Gender Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud, to Ammehjelpen (the Norwegian equivalent of the La Leche League) and to every parenting magazine in Norway. Increasing the firepower: call some journalists as well.

The other half of me just thinks ah well. Deal with it - travel less and when you do have to travel, dump the milk (pump MORE when you’re not travelling so you have enough to do this). Or use frozen peas as a cooler. Or check it all in. Unless you’re travelling for 12 hours. Current security rules are stupid and disadvantage many people, not just you.

But most people aren’t disadvantaged BECAUSE they’re breastfeeding, working mothers. Women that current government policies specifically want both in the workforce and breastfeeding.

What do you think I should do?

Update: I rang Flypassasjer.no which is owned by Luftfartstilsynet, the Civil Aviation Authority, which is in charge of airport security in Norway. Turns out bottled breastmilk with liquid-filled cooler pack is permitted! And that the problem is simply that some people “misinterpret the rules”. The friendly inspection boss I spoke with sent me an email confirming this and promised to add it to the F.A.Q. on the website “soon”.

(Photo by GodzillaRockit/Ionan Lumis - CC)

Links I discovered:

• There’s an Article about this very issue in yesterday’s New York Times!
• Here’s a discussion with contributions from, oh, 100 or so Wall Street Journal readers about how they dealt with pumping and business travel
• The Mama Bee links to the New York Times article and has five suggestions for how to make travel easier for pumping mums

Jeg skal snakke i dag om blogging og om sosiale nettverk, og siden vi har ganske god tid tenkte jeg jeg skulle bruke en del tid på å vise dere hvordan det fungerer. Vi begynner med å lage en blogg på blogger.com. Vi må se litt på hvordan andres blogger ser ut - bloggrevyen.no viser nye poster fra norske blogger (som er registrert hos dem), og sonitus.org lenker daglig til gode norske poster. Det er mange andre blogger enn de som er registrert her - f.eks. ser man ikke hvor mange som blogger om hager i Norge om man bare henger der. Forskjellige bloggtyper har forskjellige særtrekk også. Filterbloggen til Kottke eller den populære Boing Boing er ganske tekstsentrerte, med mange poster daglig og lenker i en hver post. Hobbyblogger som Smileull eller Posie gets Cozy har ofte ingen lenker men nesten alltid bilde - hver post handler vanligvis om et hobbyprosjekt som skal vises fram. Disse bloggene har langt sjeldnere poster enn filterbloggene vanligvis har - en for dagen er nok standard for de meste populære hobbyblogger. Mammabloggene (Dooce, Soulemama) har gjerne men ikke alltid bilder, men ofte en morsom eller oppgitt historie om lived som mor - og linker er også sjeldnere her, skjønt både mammablogger, hageblogger og hobbyblogger har mange lenker til andre blogger i sidemargen (”blogroll”). Problogger er en av de mest leste bloggene - han blogger om hvordan tjene penger på blogging. Mange bedrifter har blogger - Patent- og Varemærkebestyrelsen; Universitetet i Bergens rekrutteringsblogg Studblogg, designbyrået Visa attityd!, TSA (sikkerhetskontroll på flyplasser i USA). Søker man på “library blog” er øverste treffet en som skriver under pseudonymet “Annoyed Librarian” - slik er det i akademia også, med mange akademikere som skriver under psevdonym (Dr Crazy, See Jane Compute, Confessions of a Community College Dean). Men det er også mange blogger som diskuterer bibliotek åpent og med fullt navn. Thomas Brevik er et godt norsk eksempel. Det er sikkert også bibliotek som har blogger for biblioteket og ikke som individer også - forslag?

Går vi litt mer strategisk tilverks: Technorati.com er en søkemotor for blogger fra hele verden - her kan man følge med på sine egne favoritter eller se de mest populære bloggene og de videoene, bloggpostene og nyhetssakene som har fått mest blest fra blogger den siste tiden. Technorati sine folk lager også jevnlig rapporter om the State of the Blogosphere utfra dataene de samler - her kan vi lære en del om hvem og hvor mange som blogger.

Men hvordan knyttes blogger sammen? Lenker mellom dem og portaler som Technorati er en del av svaret, men det blir kraftigere når vi integrerer flere typer sosiale medier. Del.icio.us, f.eks., et sted man lagrer bokmerker - men poenget her er taggingen og nettverket. (Vi kan forresten lime del.icio.us bokmerkene inn i bloggen vi laget i sted).

Twitter et en form for mikroblogging som har blitt populær de siste par årene. Noen bruker dette som statusmeldingene på Facebook, men mange bruker det for å dele interessante nettsteder og småidéer. Man får også ofte svært gode svar fra nettverket sitt her - se alle svarene jeg fikk da jeg spurte om gode biblioteksblogger i går:

Twingly er en annen sak som forbinder blogger. Se på en artikkel i Dagbladet - nederst er det lenker til blogger som har lenket til artikkelen. En annen ny vri Dagbladet gjør er å la folk lage profiler som knytter sammen kommentarene deres i Dagbladet med bloggen deres og Twitter-feeden deres - smart å skape kontekst for debatt på den måten. Her er min profil hos Dagbladet. Dette å samle forskjellige sider av onlinevirksomheten din er noe det ser ut til å bli mer og mer bruk for. Jeg viste tidligere hvordan man f.eks. kan lime in del.icio.us-lenkene sine i bloggen sin. Det fins også egne sites for å organisere egne sites: Secondbrain og Friendfeed, ja, og mange flere.

Så fins det mer spesialiserte sosiale nettverk. Dere vet gjerne om Flickr for bilder og YouTube for videoer - men hva med Ravelry for strikking og hekling og Shopstyle for moter og shopping? Shopstyle er langt artigere å bruke enn Kelkoo og andre “comparison shopping sites” som forsåvidt tilbyr en lignende tjeneste, bare kjedeligere…

Så hva ligger bak all disse sosiale mediene? Vel, la meg vise dere en til - Slideshare - og vise dere en presentasjon jeg har lagret der.

Spørsmålet til dere er selvfølgelig hva kan bibliotekene gjøre med alt dette? Og jeg vet at det er mange bibliotekarer som allerede jobber med dette - og andre enn bibliotekarer (se f.eks. Library Thing)

Oh god. I’m giving a talk in Oslo on Monday at Kari Skjønsberg-dagene, which I’m looking forward to - and I’ve got flights taking me straight there and back so I’ll not even be away from nine-month-old Jessica for much longer than on a normal workday. But I just realised that pumping at a conference might not be easy.

I realised a while ago that I’d have to drag the breastpump along on the plane. But it only just occurred to me that I’ll also need a PLACE to pump. I won’t have my office with its nice lockable door. I do have a battery pack for the breastpump. But I hate the idea of sitting on the seat of a toilet in a cramped cubicle and pumping for ten minutes. Ugh. Skipping pumping won’t work - I’d be in agony, there’s no way I can go from 5 am till 4 pm with full breasts. This side of motherhood is (like many others) extremely bodily. Hopefully I can get hold of the organisers - maybe they’ll have a room I can use.

And then I’m assuming they’ll let me bring the breastmilk home on the plane.

I’ve been involved with the Digital Arts and Culture conferences right from the start, when my MA (and later PhD) adviser Espen Aarseth chaired the first DAC here in Bergen. He hired me as the practical organiser, and it was amazing: there I was, an eager young would-be-scholar, right in the middle of all the most interesting researchers in the field. I was thrilled, high on the energy of it for ages. And I managed to finish my MA that same semester. The website I made way back then - ooh, eleven years ago, how strange! - is still online. I remember it looked pretty cool to me back then, I was quite proud of it. Lol. The full program with long abstracts for each paper is still there too. Oh, it was a great conference.

Since then there have been many iterations of the conference. The last one was in Perth in 2007 - it runs on a bi-annual basis now. The 2009 Digital Arts and Culture conference is to be held at UC Irvine and is chaired by Simon Penny. Bits of information have been seeping out over the last few months, but yesterday the official call for papers and participation was sent out, and the website is now online. There are a number of themes this year:

• Embodiment and performativity
• Mobile/locative/situated/wearable practices
• Software/ platform studies
• Environment/ sustainability/ climate change
• Interdisciplinary pedagogy
• Cognition and creativity
• Sex and sexuality

They’re also looking for readings, presentations, demos and so on of artistic, literary or otherwise interesting projects. 600 word abstracts are due on May 1, and if the abstract is accepted, you need to submit a full paper by October 1.

I’m not quite sure whether I’ll be attending this year. I’d certainly like to, but I have to say, having a small baby makes me want to spend much less time travelling. So we’ll see.

Inspired by NRKbeta’s analysis of this I went ahead and applied for a beta user account for Dagbladet’s new debate profiles. Dagbladet is one of Norway’s biggest newspapers and has a very active user community - perhaps communities would be a better word. Most (or all?) of their articles are open for comments, but often the comment threads fill up fast with trolls, or just with people wanting to vent the same venom (women suck and I’m outraged that my ex-wife makes me pay child support) again and again. As a way of combatting this, Dagbladet is experimenting with giving registered “real name” users priority in debate, so registered users show up first in comment threads, and with a nice icon and link to their profile. Of course I signed up.

The way Dagbladet provides context for debaters is pretty cool. Yes, they want full names, and encourage you to upload a photo. More interestingly, they connect your Dagbladet account to other parts of your online identity. So when someone clicks on my name in the comment thread of a newspaper article, they’ll see my profile page at Dagbladet, which includes not only my comments on that site but also my Twitter posts and posts to my blog. That’s a pretty good way of grounding me, of giving me a context. And it also means that I’m less likely to want to act like an idiot and attack people in debates on Dagbladet - because it’ll all be visibly part of my “self” online. It’d be as silly as acting like an idiot in real life. Sure, some people still do that, but it has social repurcussions.

Here’s where you sign up for a beta account. I got my email after a couple of days.