Knowledge Is Power

Digital Genres, Day 2

Day 2 starts off with Biella Coleman, Every Rope Gat Two Ends: The Meeting Grounds of IRC, where she compares caribbean street talk and IRC as an example of connections between peoples. As I did yesterday, I will leave the commentary and live note taking to AKMA and David.

Anne Galloway was next, with Writing the Digital City: from the virtual to everyday life, augmented reality, an assemblage or layering of different spaces.


Molly Wright Steenson, Imaginary Architects: From the Crystal Chain to the Blog, contrasting imaginary architects in the Weimar period (1919-1933) with the type of dialogue on blogs, personal sites, and listservs today.


After the papers were presented, the entire group tossed around with the concepts of modernity, virtuality and utopian discourse.

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Afternoon Session
I now have Andrew live blogging next to me.
Robert Moore begins the afternoon session with: Meat me in the meetworld: brand, name, and identity online and off, He makes the connect with brands and indentity by saying - names are the way we make ourselves available.



Phil Cubeta, via the Happy Tutor, gives us: Bound, Beaten, and Branded: Nineteen Aphorisms and One Parable. You can read it here.

Next up is Laura Trippi, with Compose Yourself: Branding, Blogging, and the Fog of War.



Micah Jackson, show us several Electronic self-objects in the online personality.

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Late Afternoon Session
We start with Greg Costikyan, The Game Industry Crisis: When an Exponential Curve Meets a Linear One in which he gives us an overview of the commercial aspect of games, the exponential curve being the growth in development cost meeting a linear one--growth in unit sales. He gives us many possible solutions. Most of the involve some major innovations, both in marketing and developing.


Edward Castronova, Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier. "Ted" does an economic analysis of the "residents" of a world in Everquest. This stuff is interesting, he has worked out Economic Indices for Virtual Worlds.


Next is Jesper Juul Transmedial Gaming: Exploring the affinity between computer and games.

Digital Genres

This my first attempt at live blogging, so bear with me.

I'm at the University of Chicago, at the Digital Genres Conference sitting at a table with an awful lot of equipment on it. AKMA, David, Trevor and Molly are among those publishing their online notes, and are doing a much better job. I'll stick to pictures. That's Alex Golub starting everything off, and AKMA gives us a 'digital benediction'. Trevor tells us that blogs give us a virtual body. Lay-c talks about the formation of the Chicago Blogger community as an example how the enitre concept of "community" is changing. Naomi Chana's talk is: Battles of Blood and Ink: Apophasis, Identity, and Naming Conventions across Digital and Theological Genres "in shorthand theological identity". The title is not about flame wars, but about a poem, written by Abulafia. The morning session concluded with a lively discussion on the body and identity in the digital world. Again I'll leave the notes to David. Alex sums up everything we need to know about the body in the digital world - "When you live in a digital world, you need a really good chair." It's a shame I can't stay for the afternoon session, however, I know I'll be following it by way of the above mentioned webloggers. I do plan to attend tomorrow's session.

Web Building

The Web Style Guide needs a bit of an update, but this is still essential reading for site designers and project managers, this manual is full of real world advice on handling real-world site-building issues like scope creep, orphan sites, maintainable code, Diagrams for the computer screen and much more.

Weblogging

This blogging thing is hard sometimes. And I don't ever tackle the really hard stuff. Just the mental wrangling of trying to get your head around an idea, and getting it to fit in a nice succinct paragraph that somebody has time to read, is a tough to do on a regular basis. The other aspect of my weblogging, exploring what's out here on the Web is not only time consuming, but sometimes mentally consuming. Sometimes the things you want to read conflict with the things you need to read, and a kind of attention deficit takes over.

But this stuff is nothing compared to the tasks of those who take on the real world in their blogs. Pouring their hearts out on in HTML, battling with life's greatest dilemmas, mourning the loss of loved ones and friends, dealing with the complexities of human emotion and interaction that many of us could never write about, whether from shear lack of ability, or from any number of issues that would raise life's drama level. Anytime you record the events of your life, no matter how clinical or objective you try to be, the mental process of consolidating reality with your perspective and your emotions is really a self examination.

I've always had the greatest admiration for those who have the courage to make their own self examination public. It not only shows a confidence in one's craft as a writer, but one's confidence as a person.

I'm saddened to see one of the best of these writers shut down. While I'm sure to see the man behind SourBob again, both in person, and on pages, it is a loss to the Web that Sour Bob himself won't be out there, setting fools straight with rants and curses, inciting fans and enemies alike, and examining life as it comes. At least. it seems, the man behind the curtain has learned something very important about self-examination itself.

As for me, I was asked by somebody doing a story on weblogging if I was ever going to stop doing this. I told her that I didn't really see any reason at the moment why I would stop. I haven't been very prolific for the last year, and the format and style I used when I first started posting has changed in a way that the whole process doesn't intrude on half the time it did, even though I run two blogs now. This weblog will continue on its present course, with its original theme - Knowledge on and about the Web. Knowledge of the kind that Sour Bob has learned is the most valuable. Knowing that sort of knowledge is being put out here, drives me on.

Science links

The American Museum of Natural History's blue whale gets a face-lift. "Corrective surgery has brought the blue whale ( Balaenoptera musculus ) into line with modern scientific knowledge."

Archealogyinfo.com has an enormous amount of info on human evolution.

Albert Einstein's archives are online.

Put a Doctor in Your Pack Looking inside first aid kits Some good advice on what to carry. "Since the old days of traditional 4x4 gauze pads, wound dressings have gotten more sophisticated and feature non-adherent designs and hydrogel dressings such as Spenco 2nd skin. Cleansing a wound is now best performed via high-pressure irrigation utilizing an irrigation syringe. Gone too are the butterfly bandages, replaced by more effective wound closure strips. To eliminate sticking problems, be sure that your kit has tincture of benzoin in it which, when spread on the skin on either side of a wound, serves to help tape and bandages adhere better--useful when the skin is sweaty and dirty."

Weblogging

William Gibson is giving up blogging for creative reasons.

Deep Thinking about Weblogs

And a bunch of NY Times articles on Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It, about the dullest blog and A NY State of Blog, about gawker.

David Weinberger in Evanston

If you are in the area, come up to Evanston tonight to see David Weinberger, hosted by AKMA at Seabury at 7:30.

Another Change

In order to stay competitive, now that I'm self-employed, I got an iBook. It's slick, fast and very necessary at this point. My aged Graphite iBook had a dead battery and a half-blind, arthritic CD drive. The Airport card wasn't much good when you had to keep the thing plugged in all the time anyway.

Also, now I can play with all the things that we're out of reach in OS 9, like Safari and iPhoto. This is the first time I've used OS X, but it is the first time I've crossed over for my own machines. I've gotten used to OS X very quickly and am adapting to using everything new. Surprising, since I've been using the same email client (Claris Emailer) since 1996.

Loads of links

Photography as Fine Arf "This exhibition presents a selection of historical photographs that also explore the complex relationships of people and dogs." Just one of the things to see at The American Museum of Photography.

Many more really cool, freaky things to look at iconomy. via stavros

A couple of introduction articles into syndication:
RSS - Sharing Online Content Metadata
Syndication: Sharing Content Across Websites

A reading assignment for work:
Views and Forms: Principles of Task Flow for Web Applications

KIPlog manages to rank in the top 2000 blogs, while its valuation is $1,244.79.

And finally random knowledge found on the Web:
FAQ about LLAMAS and ALPACAS
Mathematicians of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Gaper's Block

I officially declare Gaper's Block the coolest website in Chicago. "Gapers' Block is a Chicago-centric news and events site, but it's not just another online newspaper or webzine." It's a collaboration by some very cool and interesting people and it's looking like it will be the preeminent source for all things cool and interesting in Chicago.

The World as a Blog

In the category of "very cool, but what is it really good for?": The World as a Blog, real time & updating display of weblog postings, around the world. Combine RSS and geocoding and this is what you get. I'm sure there's some amazing possibilties using this technolgy, but just watching as blogs around the world update in realtime is cool enough.

Unemployment and beer

Mark, one of only two people I know with weblogs, that I knew in real life before I knew how to turn on a computer, wishes me luck on the self-employment thing. Trust me Mark, things are going to have to get much worse before I resort to returning to the sales world, either on the street or on the phone. Just to let you know, things aren't that bad yet. I even enjoyed an Oerbier at the Maproom last week, instead of having to resort to a High Life across the street.

Local funny stuff

Some funny shit by Chicago bloggers (warning these aren't for the kids, nor should you read them at work where you will upset your cubicle-hood with laughter).

Sourbob calls his cat a pussy.

Lawrence Lessig and Clifford Geertz Get Drunk And Armwrestle

Regime Change

After working 7 years for a small corporate communication firm, I suddenly find myself as an independent contractor. I haven't determined yet if this is a good thing or not. I do know I'm busier than I have been for awhile, having picked up the work from my usual clients, as well as a few new ones I would not have pursued had I not got this kick in the ass. Ironically, I haven't had the time to file for unemployment. So things might get slower around here for awhile (if that's possible) or maybe they'll be lots of links about self-employment and how to get several meals from a can of beans.