Preoccupations

New from Google Scholar

Google Blog:

John Nash's papers that helped define the area of game theory don't refer to the area as game theory. … Now there's an additional way to find related work in Google Scholar, which should be helpful in such situations. For every Google Scholar search result, we try to automatically determine which articles in our repository are most closely related to it. You can see a list of these articles by clicking the "Related Articles" link that appears next to each result. The list of related articles is ranked primarily by how similar these articles are to the original result, but also takes into account the relevance of each paper. To go back to the game theory example, clicking on the Related Articles link for the first result for game theory enables users to discover several of Nash's seminal articles.

Technorati tags: Google, Google Scholar, search engines, research

Why not to buy a Mac

An email from Apple just appeared in my Outlook inbox:

'No' to all of those.

I'm drawn to Macs (there are many reasons for considering the Intel Mac as an excellent choice), but adverts like this one just put me off.

Dave Winer:

Every time my Mac crashes in the middle of the night I think of the stupid Apple commercial where they claim that Macs don't do that. It happens about once a week, sometimes every other day.

Apple: "Your toaster doesn't crash. Your kitchen sink doesn't crash. Why should your computer?" 

Good question. The answer is that computers crash, even Macs. In my experience, they crash more than Windows machines. Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt, their marketing people don't understand computers. Better to promise to help users when the computer you sold them crashes, than to promise they don't crash.

Technorati tags: PC, Windows, Dave Winer, advertising

Participatory Media

Stewart Butterfield, as reported by AlwaysOn:

… the key to success in participatory media (a term he prefers over consumer generated content) is the people, not the photos or medium. The photos are just the “locus” for people bringing people together. You can’t have one without the other, and when you put it that way, calling it participatory media does make a lot of sense.

There's a tension here: that last sentence ('you can't have one without the other') doesn't sit so easily with the rest of the paragraph, and in fact what Stewart Butterfield says (play the 2½ minute Google Video at AlwaysOn) is suppler, weighted, much more nuanced — and made me recall what Jyri wrote in 2005:

The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. … The social networking services that really work are the ones that are built around objects. And, in my experience, their developers intuitively 'get' the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life. Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. … Approaching sociality as object-centered is to suggest that when it becomes easy to create digital instances of the object, the online services for networking on, through, and around that object will emerge too. Social network theory fails to recognise such real-world dynamics because its notion of sociality is limited to just people.

See also: Russell Beattie and Anne Galloway.

Technorati tags: Stewart Butterfield, Flickr, Jyri Engeström, participatory media, social networks, object centered sociality

Google novelties and the social web

I read earlier today (Google Talkabout) that if you set your GMail settings to 'US English' then GTalk would update to offer file transfer and voicemail — and also offer to show what music you're currently listening to. And it has, and it does:

I've tested the Voicemail facility, by the way, and it works beautifully: very simple to use (both to record/send and to receive/open) and it produces a very clear recording. (The 'Meep' is something we'll surely grow tired of very quickly, but it did remind me of the guy whose answer machine ran, 'Leave a message after the sheep'. So many people never stopped laughing after the 'Baa' that he had to change his greeting in order to get any messages.)

Changing the language settings also altered the top left of my screen in GMail:

Is this also new, or "just" something that's been there for a while for US users?

Picasaweb is beginning to attract some interest (and the purchase of Neven Vision adds spice). firsttube concluded a comparative review of Flickr and Picasaweb:

In the end, flickr and Picasaweb provide different things and a comparison isn't as apropos as you'd think. Picasa integrates with your current tools (Picasa on Win and Linux, iPhoto on Mac) and creates a simple interface to share and organize your photos. Flickr's strength comes from its thriving Web 2.0 community and collaboration and search. If you are seeking a place to store your online photos, either service will likely serve you perfectly well.

Ultimately, I have chosen Picasa because Flickr's interface is just too clunky for quickly accessing specific photos when you have a large number of photos in your photostream. However, I still use flickr, and fairly avidly, because the communities are great and the number of photos is simply astounding. It comes down to the fact that Picasaweb is a personal experience and flickr is a group one, and what I'm looking for for my photos is a simple way to show them to my family.

For me, the me/group distinction is telling. Richard MacManus posted yesterday, Social Software dominates the tech news: 'A lot of people think the social aspect of this era of the Web is its defining characteristic. And judging by all the news above, it's hard to argue against that! It's fantastic too that Apple is getting into the spirit of things, while Microsoft and Yahoo continue to set the pace for the big companies. Social networking and Google are uneasy bedfellows, but hopefully even they will get into the act soon.'

So I was particularly interested in Google Video shifting in a more social direction, as Ben also noted:

Techcrunch has screenshots of the new Google Video interface. Google Video, of course, is Google’s Youtube competitor - which is faring badly in comparison. At first glance, aside from a page reformat, there are two features, either new or made significantly more prominent - comments, and “more from this user” - that Youtube has always had. In short, in order to compete, Google has added people into the mix.

Suddenly the dynamic changes. It’s not just a bucket where you throw video and hope someone will see it; people can now share videos with each other within the interface, and if you like one submission from a user, you can see everything else they’ve contributed. Rather than just the technology, it becomes a more social ecosystem, allowing users to filter content through other people they might be interested or have something in common with.

It will, indeed, be interesting to see how Google develops in the more human era of the social web.

Update: Google Talkabout has an excellent posting about the new features ('The new Google Talk features … have completed testing and are now available to everyone' — everyone? Other language users? US English users only?) written by one of their software engineers, here.

Technorati tags: Google, Google Talk, Google Mail, GTalk, GMail, Google Video, YouTube, Flickr, Picasaweb

Free citywide WiFi in Mountain View

Excerpt from Google Blog:

Today, Google launched a WiFi network in our hometown of Mountain View. Radios hanging on lampposts throughout the city are now broadcasting a "GoogleWiFi" wireless (802.11b/g) signal that brings wireless Internet access to the city's residents, businesses, and visitors. All anyone needs is a laptop or other wireless-enabled device and a web browser to get online. Then Mountain View users can select the "GoogleWiFi" signal, open their web browser and sign in with a free Google Account. To learn more about the network's coverage area and the location of the WiFi radios, we've published a map. …

Another goal of this network is to promote alternative access technologies by using Mountain View as an example for organizations considering investments in the WiFi arena. We think successful mesh wireless deployments will promote competition, create cheaper access alternatives, and (if done correctly) foster open, standards-compliant platforms for content and service providers to showcase their applications without the hassle of the traditional walled-garden approach.

My italics. See also here.

Technorati tags: Google, Mountain View, WiFi, mesh wireless, connectivity, walled gardens

Live Writer

Newborn it may be, but Live Writer already has its first plug-ins: Tim Heuer has written a tagging plug-in that tags for Technorati, del.icio.us, Flickr, IceRocket, Buzznet, 43 Things, LiveJournal — and offers the option to custom-tag.

He's also written a Flickr image plugin.

Nathan Weinberg points to a Currently Listening plugin — here. This enables you 'to add your current track information to your blog post'. Should you want to do this.

I'm blogging this via Live Writer. (Well, I tried, but I kept getting a Network Connection Error: 'Error attempting to connect to weblog at: http://www.typepad.com/t/api. The operation has timed out.' Hmm …)

Update: and it did post from Live Writer … but very slowly. (Possibly a TypePad issue?)

Technorati tags: Windows Live Writer, Technorati, Flickr, tags

Windows Live Writer beta: test posting

Windows Live Writer is out, in beta. Read about it here and download it here.

This is a trial posting from Live Writer. Installing the software for this blog created a test post:

Had to format the image (above) manually in order to centre it.

Nice, clear, user-friendly interface.

Technorati tags info (below) entered manually.

Installing Live Writer might see you choosing to install Windows Live Toolbar — IE only — which adds tabs to IE 6:

TechCrunch:

Windows Live Writer has a lot of bells and whistles - preview in WYSIWYG or HTML mode, support for most blogging platforms (Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress and others), easy insertion of photos and things like Live.com Maps, and tagging. Good stuff, but none of it differentiates it from existing year old products.

What does differentiate Live Writer is that they’ve released an API that allows developers to extend the capabilities of the software to publish additional content types.

Ed Bott's first take here. Nathan Weinberg has a very full first view:

The centerpiece of Live Writer is the Web Layout view. In it, your blog appears relatively similar to its real world styling, and the text is formatted as it would appear on the final website. All this is done by the program downloading and using your blogs own HTML and CSS in the program. Brilliant! It falls apart, as you can see above, if you have a black sidebar, but other than that, this is the most visually pleasing way to edit a blog I have ever seen.

Technorati tags: Windows Live, Windows Live Writer, Microsoft, blogging software

Rhymes with …

Excellent article in today's Guardian by Ruth Padel on poetic form: 'Italian poets invented the sonnet, but their counterparts today do not get protested at as, last month at Ledbury, Jo Shapcott, Sean O'Brien and I did (the Poetry Society's president, vice-president and chair, respectively), on the grounds that the society supports the wrong sort of poetry: poetry that does not rhyme.'

… the real rallying flag for the rhyme police is end rhyme in a rhyming scheme. This battle, though, was fought over 400 years ago by cutting-edge practitioners whose blank verse (begun in English around 1540 following Italy's versi sciolti da rima, "verse freed from rhyme", developed roughly 1530) was blazing out of the language.

In 1602, Thomas Campion attacked "the unaptnesse of Rime in Poesie". Bad poets, he said, "rime a man to death". The "popularitie of Rime creates as many Poets as a hot summer flies". Rhyme should be used "sparingly, lest it offend the eare with tedious affectation".

Samuel Daniel wrote furiously back "proving", he said, "that Rhyme is the fittest harmonie of words that comportes with our Language". Campion, this traitor to rhyme, has called "our measures grosse, vulgare, barbarous". If it be so, Daniel snarled sarcastically, "we have lost much labour to no purpose". Ben Jonson weighed in with a satirical poem, "A Fit of Rime against Rime", accusing rhyme of "Wresting words from their true calling, / Propping verse for fear of falling"; of "Jointing syllables, drowning letters, / Fastening vowels as with fetters".

The nub of Campion's protest was laziness and banality. It is fatally easy to rhyme badly. If you rhyme, it had better be fresh, better be good. Otherwise it doesn't just spoil your poem, it betrays rhyme itself.

Milton was against it. Rhyme acts on poets as "a constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have exprest them". Paradise Lost does not end-rhyme, nor much Tennyson, Wordsworth's Prelude and Excursion, or most of Shakespeare's plays. "As soon as lazy thou" (Jonson says to "rime") "wert known / All good poetry hence was flown."

It was an important quarrel, then, which TS Eliot said produced some of England's greatest poetry.

Additional reason for reading her whole article: what connects John Masefield, Thomas Traherne (probably), Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, John Drinkwater, Eleanor Farjeon, W H Auden and Thomas Mann's daughter, Erika? Ledbury.

Technorati tags: poetic form, rhyme, blank verse, tradition, innovation

Ubiquitous computing and designerly agency

This came to me via Timo's del.icio.us links, and to him via Matt. The original is here and should be read in full. It's by Rob van Kranenburg. These passages struck me:

… ubiquitous computing will enable something fundamentally new, and the main question is : to what extent does it have designerly agency? In places where computational processes have disappeared into the background, into everyday objects - both the real and the subject become contested in concrete daily situations and activities. The environment becomes the interface.  What is the role and place of design in these information spaces that are mediated with computational processes that generate not data (linked to other data) – the kind of communicative process that we are familiar with - but information (linked to other information)? The main challenge in design education lies in confronting this move from interaction as a key term to resonance.  That refers most aptly to the way we relate to things, people, ideas in a connected environment. Interaction presupposes an ideal setting, agency and response. But mediation (the core business of interaction) is no longer a relationship. It has become the default position. …

This then is the fundamental change and challenge that we are facing in ubicomp; the deliberate attempt of a technology to disappear as technology. …

The main question from a design educational point of view concerns the kind of skills and kind of literacies that a designer needs to function. And these turn out to be those that are most foreign to an educational practice today, as this new situation needs designers that can assess emergent literacies, unforeseen uses, unintended use, and resonance – not interaction – as the key producer of causalities.  For such a designer the default position is one of uncertainty, of being able to cope with a continuous delaying of the act of closure, of an ‘end’. …

The working notion of research, however in current academies is deeply infested with a sterile theory-practice dichotomy that functioned in a mechanistic worldview, but is hardly productive in a ubicomp world. We face the challenge of rethinking research as a performative practice based on creating applications for societal benefit. There are very few ubicomp applications at the moment that do not focus on control or surveillance issues. That there is a great need for applications that empower users in dealing with uncertain situations …

The educational design challenge in implementing digital connectivity in an analogue environment lies in creating a working concept of corporal literacy that will inform a design for all the senses. There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods, says Mark Weiser, than in any computer system, “yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.”

… we must not aim to define, alter or transform practices, processes, places or people. The aim should be to define a vision. A vision that should be able to inspire and empower designers in their concrete experience of agency in this seemingly undesignerly new world, towards a humanistic and optimistic positive attitude in the role, function and leadership of the designer in his and her capability to make sense, to work within an uncertain framework of unforeseen consequences, unintended uses, and procedural breakdown.

Three basic ideas underlie this vision: a concept of life and living as slow becoming, as in Eugène Minkowsky’s idea that the essence of life is not “ a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.” … a concept of slow money, to focus on the design process and sustainability of design products, and a working concept of our notion of control, as slow resonance.

I've quoted Claus Dahl's comment before:

Maybe it would be less taxing on the human biology if we didn't have so many tools we had to know how to use but just better surroundings. This involves turning information into a living thing embodied in the spime around us and simply stop thinking of all this data as something we have to know. We can just live in it. I think this idea fits very nicely into the ideas about which of our senses actually afford which abilities. Culturally produced information is just too constrained to live in our focal view all the time, whereas we're effortlessly consuming naturally produced information in much greater quantities through the use of the rest of our senses.

I read Sterling's Shaping Things a couple of months back: many resonances here.

And a challenge for schools: 'assess emergent literacies, unforeseen uses, unintended use, and resonance … the default position is one of uncertainty, of being able to cope with a continuous delaying of the act of closure, of an ‘end’'.

Technorati tags: ubiquitous computing, ubicomp, education

Skype 2.6

Skype Preview 2.6 is out, but be warned:

You can see that it’s called a “preview”, which means it’s not even a beta yet. You won’t find it on any skype.com pages — it’s limited to the Developer Zone and the forum at this time. We only want those people who are comfortable with (possibly unstable) preview versions to download and use it — and report anything you find back to us.

The main change in this version, and the main reason for calling it a preview, is that we made some pretty significant changes in the audio handling part of Skype, which may make it unstable. So at this time the main goal of this preview is to test all the audio stuff. There are some other new or changed things that are also visible, but we’re focusing on the audio part for the time being. share.skype.com

More on the Preview here. I think it breaks new ground in offering a Skypecast tab:

And, a Skype extension for Firefox that 'turns phone numbers on websites into buttons which you can click to call from Skype':

I may not have spotted these, or versions of these, in earlier iterations of Skype, but I suspect they're new to 2.6.

Technorati tag: Skype