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| Friday, February 17, 2006 |
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A rising snide links all boots 
| | The headline doesn't mean anything. I just want to get down bunch of links I don't have time to write about (hey, it's Friday night) and also don't want to lose track of... |
| | Okay, that's it for today, and maybe the weekend. Lots to do in the Real World. See ya sooner or later. |
Tools to avoid being a tool
| | Alpha bloggers as we know them are an artifact of blog-reading tools. There are high and low status participants in other social-software-based fora, too, and yes, the power law is inevitable, but blogdom magnifies status differences because it's far easier to manage your subscriptions by author than by topic, and, at least in the tools I've seen, not yet practical to work with threads productively. On a Usenet-like system, every new participant is likely to be seen and noticed by at least some of the regulars. That's still not the case on blogs. |
| | Don, unlike myself, is an actual hacker. So he can say things like this: |
| | What people really read in social software is threads. Blogs have threads. RSS already has everything you need to build a threaded interface on. Just read the One True Threading Algorithm and substitute links for References: headers. |
| | Anyway, I suggested that Doc take a couple of newsreader manuals (tin, trn, PAN, Forte Agent) and hand them out at the next Technorati advisory board meeting. The time-suck problem is best left to something like Webolodeon. |
The pie moving from the sky to your living room
| | The next era — the one in which the bulk of producers will emerge from a mass market formerly filled only with consumers — will begin when video customers begin to realize they can produce higher-definition video than what they can get over their cable and satellite connections. That will happen quickest for customers who buy 1920 x 1080 screens to take full advantage of their new 1920 x 1080 camcorders. While spending under $2000 for both. |
| | Comments are open and invited. |
More credits
| | My blogware doesn't like it when I put too many links in a paragraph, so here are the rest of the links from the (still-short) longtale list of bloggers pointing to The Dumpster (see the post below): mangophreek, zaabaker, nyc.flavorpill, philthe25th and Marius Watz (with a helpful comment from Dumpster creator Golan Levin: The project is still under development and had to go up before all the features were in place. The basic idea is that the currently selected breakup (the yellow one) acts as a search into the complete set of 20000 breakups. All of the other breakups then re-color themselves according to their similarity with the selected one. Similarity is judged according to a weighted combination of a lot of different properties. Many of these properties have been tagged by the software of my collaborator Kamal Nigam, whose expertise is in natural language processing. His classifier attempted to tag breakups with inferences about the emotional state of the author, whether cheating seemed to be involved, etc.) |
Gland fill
| | The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has "dumped" another. The project's graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain. |
| | The Dumpster application window shows a large 'crowd' of circles at the same time. While in a typical painting individual differences would be lost at this scale, here you can click on any circle and read the corresponding blog fragment. And this is just a beginning. Consider the way in which Levin structures the navigation. In typical hypermedia you move horizontally between pages or scenes connected by links. In typical information visualisation you 'move upward', so to speak - from the level of individual data to larger patterns that become visible when the numerous data points are turned into a single image or a shape. But in Levin's group portrait, you are encouraged to navigate both horizontally, vertically, and diagonally between the particular and the general. You can, for example, simply click on different circles, jumping from one breakup case to another and randomly explore the overall data space. Or you can explore the circles that are similar in color - which means that the corresponding postings are similar in some ways. Or you can explore the circles that have an opposite color and thus belong to a different grouping. In short, the seemingly incompatible points of view of Tolstoy and Durkheim - the subjective experience and the social facts - are brought together via the particular information architecture and navigation design of The Dumpster. |
| | I dig the polar distance in articulation between the tech/art community on one hand, and the sources of data on the other: |
| | ... fir, Alez! Shes kewl! Iam goin out w/cody but Trevor likes me again! we went out once but he dumped me! Well Lauren & Jake broke ^! He dumped her 4 no reason at all! wellg2g t.t.i.l8r... |
| | ... bout me and its not true o yeah and jeb is telling everyone that he broke up with me cuz i saw him talkin to a girl one day and i got pissed and went and cheated on him with some guy and he found out and broke up... |
| | ... tody! lol! me and nanee wer doin stupid stuff in language arts! lol! and i will be at my mommies tonight sooo! im single again cuz me and heather broke up today! so holla ladies! lol! * cough... |
| | I had to click on quite a few little circles before I found one apparently by a guy. |
| | Anyway, so here I'm thinking this is the kind of thing that's probably big with the Art Crowd, and the datawonky end of the nonblogging Tech Crowd, so probably new stuff to most of ya'll (maybe even ahead of BoingBoing, since this is their kind of thing, no?). But there in the credits we find Clay Shirky, Peter Hirshberg and Blogpulse, among many other familiars. |
| | Other due credits: I found the dumpster through Wealth Bondage. I see here that it's been in MetaFilter, Kottke, Logopolis, Brainwidth, hominid211, Jim Coudal, Rage on Omnipotent, Regine Debatty, cw wang, Christiane Paul, information aesthetics, Seb Chan, Matthew Hurst, David Balluff, love-dna, networked_performance, Crackunit, loreto martin, Joseph Cartman, newmediafix... |
Bound to serve
| | I hope that some small fraction of the visitors seeking wealth or bondage, and finding neither here, have settled for wisdom instead. Of course they haven't but I do sincerely hope they have left angry and confused. Straight is the gate and narrow is the way. |
Cheney's blog on Fox
| | What would be the best way for Dick Cheney, who is not a blogger, to post something about the shooting incident that has become a defining fact in his life? |
| | An interview with Fox News might be about the best he could do. It would also do what we talk about all the time here in the 'sphere: route around the mainstream media. |
| | Here's Jay Rosen: Cheney took the opportunity to show the White House press corps that it is not the natural conduit to the nation-at-large; and it has no special place in the information chain. Cheney does not grant legitimacy to the large news organizations with brand names who think of themselves as proxies for the public and its right to know. Nor does he think the press should know where he is, what he¹s doing, or who he¹s doing it with. |
| | Just something to think about. |
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