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“The goal of the conference is to bring together researchers working in a variety of academic disciplines to understand current and possible uses of social software in the academic context.”
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You can get a Google aggregation of all the reviews for any film by typing in movie: and then the name of the film. Likely to damage my all-time web fave site metacritic.com
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Much more attractively designed than the Guardian’s current crop of weblogs – we’ll have to wait and see if the content’s interesting
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Looks stunning – although it’s extraordinarily weird to see animated versions of famous actors on screen…
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An entire galaxy apparently composed of dark matter – couldn’t be more imaginatively evocative if it tried, even if reality will probably prove less interesting…
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I read his book you know. I went out and bought his book and read it and I really quite enjoyed it. Just so’s you know…
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Not sure this one’s going to take off so well – but although it’s kind of semi-joking, I think there’s a lot of value in podcasters looking towards smaller componentised chunks rather than full shows
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Now if these are translucent, then they might really take off – the Apple white look should be great for non-permanent personalisation
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Loved this article. Loved it. If for no other reason than because it’s about those of us who care about the web and what we can do for and with it. Brother in code, I salute thee!
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The Bruce Wayne of webloggia goes batshit on podcasting’s ass. Awesome.
A brief word on a Flickr logo…
Spotted this morning for logged-in members of Flickr (along with a very snazzy top navigation bar that I am muchly liking), this piss-take / lawsuit-baiting logo saturated with irony and litigation-potential. Very funny. Highly enjoyable. Just one question: Can this kind of hi-jinx continue when they (new rumour!!!) get bought by United Dairies?
Links for 2005-02-26
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“But eschewing advertisers is more of a risk. Kottke is avoiding them because, as a one-man operation, there’s no easy way to neatly separate editorial and advertising.” Couldn’t agree more…
Links for 2005-02-25
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Extraordinary fluff piece from BBC News on the death of the Gold iPod mini further cements the iconic stature of the Apple MP3 players
This would probably be something better suited for the linklog, but the sheer incidence of really interesting articles in the Guardian’s combined Life/Online supplement today bears extended comment. Sometimes each section has a bit of an off-week, but not today! At least three articles that are worth extended perusal.
First off there’s a fascinating and even-handed article on how people experience religious feeling and sentiment: Religion may be a survival mechanism. So are we born to believe?. Now obviously by implying that there’s anything to do with survival and evolution going on in the constructuion of human beings, this article is going to alienate some religious people. But beyond the potentially disconcerting concept of applying the concept of scientific research to religious sentiment, there’s little else here to offend people with strong spiritual beliefs. The article can be read in two ways – either as a rationalist debunking and explanation of religion or as an examination of what happens biologically when someone genuinely experiences the presence of God. As a confirmed and long-standing atheist, I choose to read it as an interesting explanation of why people choose to believe such counter-intuitive things – but there’s something here for everyone, and I applaud Ian Semple for writing it so elegantly:
Newberg has been criticised for his investigations into the essence of spiritual experience – the most vehement attacks coming from atheists. “Some people want me to say whether God is there or not, but these experiments can’t answer that. If I scan a nun and she has the experience of being in the presence of God, I can tell you what’s going on in her brain, but I can’t tell you whether or not God is there,” he says. Religious groups point out that there is more to religion than extreme experiences. It is a criticism Newberg acknowledges. “The problem is, the people who have these experiences are so much easier to study,” he says.
Another fascinating article is in real Lakoffian territory – so it’s great to see him name-checked in the article a couple of times. It’s about a fairly isolated people who have completely different metaphors for time – believing the past to lie ahead of them and the future to be behind:
The Aymara word for past is transcribed as nayra , which literally means eye, sight or front. The word for future is q”ipa , which translates as behind or the back. The Jesuits undoubtedly noticed this oddity in the 16th century, when they ventured up into the mountains to spread the word. More recently, linguistic anthropologists have puzzled over what it means. In 1975, Andrew Miracle and Juan de Dios Yapita Moya, both at the University of Florida, observed that q”ip¸ru , the Aymara word for tomorrow, combines q”ipa and uru , the word for day, to produce a literal meaning of “some day behind one’s back”.
And finally and on more familiar weblog-like territory, there’s an article on Posting for Profit – running weblogs for cash – by Bobbie Johnson:
In fact, for all but a select few, this city of gold will always prove elusive. Instead, it seems the real way to make money from weblogs is not from producing the final product, but in delivering services to bloggers eager to live the dream.
Take Evan Williams, one of the founders of Blogger.com, the pioneering personal publishing firm whose easy-to-use software helped put weblogs on the map. Six years ago, he was starting up a small software firm with a handful of friends. In 2003, the company was bought by search giant Google in an undisclosed big-money deal. Last year, he decided to leave the Mountain View firm, safe in the knowledge he had trousered enough to give him ample time to decide on his next step.
Obviously there’s stuff in the article that I’m not totally sure I agree with – I’m hoping that the main motivation for people to start a weblog is not a financial one, although I could be wrong about that. To be fair – one of the main reasons I like it (other than it’s mention of Jason’s attempts to go pro) is that he incorporated the phrase “he had trousered enough [money]”, which is frankly glorious. But even if that had been excised, there’s enough here of interest and intrigue about the emerging financial aspects of webloggia to open a few people’s eyes. Awesome stuff. Bring on next week’s issue…
Links for 2005-02-24
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Been everywhere meme that I liked despite myself…
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… and nothing much happens. Intriguing and irritating, but he doesn’t snap and he doesn’t kill anyone. Slightly disappointing…
Kottke goes pro…
Not a lot to say about this, even though I’m fascinated by the whole enterprise – Jason Kottke has quit his job and is taking the weblogging gig to a new professional level. He’s not going to take advertising, instead proposing a kind of micro-patronage system with donations from the willing public who read his stuff. I’ve donated my $30 – have you?
One bit of his post really really resonates with me. It goes a bit like this:
And yet, I almost quit last spring. The site was getting out of hand and wasn’t fun anymore. It was taking me away from my professional responsibilities, my social life, and my relationship with my girlfriend. There was no room in my life for it anymore. As you can imagine, thinking of quitting what had been the best thing in my life bummed me right the hell out.
After thinking about it for a few weeks, I had a bit of an epiphany. The real problem was the tension between my web design career and my self-publishing efforts; that friction was unbalancing everything else. One of them had to go, and so I decided to switch careers and pursue the editing/writing of this site as a full-time job.
Now I don’t think I could ever go that far – much as I love my site, I don’t think I’d find enough satisfaction in maintaining it to quit working for. But I know that I’ve found the last year or so really annoying, that I feel like I’ve let this site slip a lot in quality and content and that I could say the same thing for my other major project: Barbelith. How to get that balance right… Difficult questions…
Links for 2005-02-22
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The agony is intolerable… This is what it’s like to live inside my brain…
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“Hunter S Thompson, the American counterculture writer, has been found dead at his home in Colorado.”
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The official website for the gay-friendly marriage policies of The Simpson’s hometown. Awesome episode. Awesome…
Links for 2005-02-21
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Mark my words – the aspiration of humankind is to make the real world like Second Life
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Phil Gyford puts some perspective on the beautiful things in the world…
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“AlienBBC is a plugin for slimserver, the software platform used by the Slim Devices line of networked music players. It is designed to allow the user to listen to (mainly) BBC Radio streams.”
Links for 2005-02-20
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I’ve been getting cross with Fetch recently. I think maybe it’s time to switch…
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I’m quite charmed by what I’ve seen of Read Regular – there’s something about it which is slightly Comic Sans-y, but with much more restraint and class
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“When you’re doing it for yourself, it’s like a chore, its drudgery. When you’re doing it as part of a community, in a collaborative way, it can still be a little bit of work, but the payoff is so much larger.”(categories: stewartbutterfield flickr socialsoftware folktags folksonomy tags tag ethnoclassification)
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Talk about having a niche audience…
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Obviously they’re doing it because of the sometimes enormous time-lag between a show being broadcast in the States and in the UK. There’s one way to fix that straightaway…
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Which is a good thing, if only because it meant I could ask him what good webcam software there is for OSX…(categories: jasonkottke webcam)
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Not only webcam software, but also motion sensor, permanent archiving and a nice interface
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It’s all to do with methane emissions from subterranean caves. Very hopeful about this one. Life on another planet – however trivial and basic – would blow the world open…
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Half the planetary systems so far discovered could harbour life, and we might be able to see if they do within fifteen years…
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Some stuff here that’s so clearly been heavily influenced by Flash-based web design, and some other stuff that you couldn’t do in any other medium. Stunning.
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Enormous and detailed site about Iron Man – new patron saint of O’Reilly Emerging Tech 2005
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Typical vile quote: “All this should put the fear of God into the metropolitan elites. For years there have been widening gaps between the governing class and the governed and between the publicly funded broadcasters and the broadcasted to.”