a thaumaturgical compendium

I admit it: I thought DOPA was too dopey to be very worried about. After all, Net Neutrality seemed to me to be more important in the long run, and more embattled. I never imagined that DOPA would make it very far, and so I wasn’t worried about it. As Will Richardson notes the anti-social networking bill has passed in the House of Representatives. The vote was 410-15. My response is aligned with the American Library Association’s: what are these guys smoking?< ?a>

So, time to call your senator. Really. Schools already are too much like prisons. At least, social networking provides a bit of escape, and a chance for students to be proactive. At most, it encourages self-driven learning, collaboration, and creativity. Let’s not let our congresscritters add more blinders to students eyes.

In particular, I’m going to be calling Hillary Clinton’s office to make clear that if she expects to get any of the under-40 (yeah, yeah, I had another birthday—and I won’t be part of this group too much longer—but 40 is the new 30) vote in future elections, going after social networking is the wrong way to do it. And I promise, when it comes to 2008, I will remember her vote on this issue, and I will be very noisy about it.

The New Yorker has a very nice article on Wikipedia, which sums up the site better than I’ve seen it done, and (as noted by David Robinson) Wikipedia agrees with that assessment. It will be a nice item to add to introductory social computing readings—something the Atlantic Monthly (esp. Charles Mann) has been a good source for in the past, but, despite Gladwell’s social science-oriented pieces, has been less available in the New Yorker.

I spoke with Schiff for about forty-five minutes last month. And yes, I am shallow enough to have hoped to see my name in the pages of the New Yorker, but I guess I’m just going to have to write something myself for that to happen :). I think she summarized some of the research Derek and I are doing when she noted (as Wales has) that “Wikipedia remains a lumpy work in progress.” I generally speak to a few journalists each month, and though I would never teach an interviewing class, some of them are really bad at interviewing. And unlike what you might expect, some of the worst interviewers are at the top papers. They can be bad in two ways: technique and knowledge.

On the technique side, I just don’t get it. I am certainly willing to wait a second while you catch up on typing something out, but if you are making me wait for a minute between each question, I’m going to tune out. Use a tape recorder! And if you have questions, have them be answerable. I’ve been told that I am a good interviewee, in part because I have no problem listening to myself talk, but there is nothing worse than answering a question like “Sooo, what do you think about X?”—at least if that’s the only question there.

Some reporters come in with an agenda. I’ve actually been asked something along the lines of “Would you say ‘Bats enjoy attacking humans,’” and then saw a lead that said “Expert says “bats enjoy attacking humans.’” That, obviously, is taking it too far. But it’s not as much fun if a reporter calls with no angle at all, then there isn’t really anywhere to go with the conversation. I don’t mind helping them fish out an angle—I enjoy it—but it needs to be a two-way street.

And then there are folks who are reporting on something—for me it’s usually social/mobile computing or (sometimes) pornography—and are totally clueless. They’ve clearly been assigned this topic and haven’t bothered to do some basic Googling. That’s fine—that’s what there are experts for after all. But just like when students come and ask you questions that were already covered in lecture and the book, it can be a little bit frustrating at times.

All this to say that Ms. Schiff was one of the most enlightened interviewers I’ve talked with, she knew what she wanted to ask, and clearly had a good feel for the complex issues surrounding Wikipedia. It may be that I just caught her late in her research—and obviously she isn’t under the time demands that most of the newspaper journalists I talk to are—but after talking with her, it does not surprise me in the least that she did such a good job in capturing the dynamics of the issues surrounding Wikipedia.

When people meet all 200 pounds of The Finn on the streets, their first comment is almost always “I hope you have a big apartment!” We do, by Manhattan standards at least, but the truth is, Finn would be just as happy in a place half this size. As proof, here he is snoozing in our narrow entry, rather than hanging out in any of the far more spacious rooms available to him.

Normally, it’s not a good sign if you think people are reading your mind, but sometimes it can be convenient. I’ve been using a spreadsheet to track my time for a while now, but it’s not reliable because I forget to enter time once in a while, and a bad record is more frustrating than no record at all. I did a quick search of existing time trackers—at least those that were free or cheap—and decided I could do a web-based one fairly easily. I sketched out what it would look like and the basic functionality, and decided someday I would put it together. Well, as always, wait long enough and someone will do it for you. Enter the Slim Timer.

I’ve been playing with this for a couple of days now, and it works like a charm. Simple, usable, and very functional. I’ve learned my lesson, and rather than writing a scraper, requested that the creator include RSS feeds. Not necessary for most people, I suspect, but I have been gradually trying to collect life indicators via RSS.

I’m a bit behind the curve on this one. I’ve done the standard 15 minute presentation, but it took me a lot longer to put together than I had expected. The topic: the learning blogosphere. I’ve glanced as some of the other offerings for VR@RL, and this is a bit on the lightweight side, but I hope there is something there of interest.

You can also download a copy of the presentation in WMV (18 Mb) or MOV (35 Mb) formats.

Update: By popular request, the video (split into two halves) is now up on YouTube:

Some of you may have missed my short interview on the radio this morning about blogging basics. Why? Well:

• It was on a DC area AM talk station.
• It was early in the morning on a Saturday, when most of the party animals that read this blog are just going to sleep, some returning home after the hunt in order to avoid the disasterous health effects of sunrise.
• It was on a station that has a book club reading Ann Coulter right now. Seriously! Check out the web site. Is it just me or is that the equivalent of liberals having a book club to read Mad Magazine?

But Rick Fowler asked some interesting questions. Like always, I sound goofy to myself, but that’s the way it goes. Here’s the seven minute recording: MP3 (1.6 MB).

So, someone forwarded along the following from C.W. Nevius, a journo-blogger from the SF Chronicle

Alexander Halavais, may only be an assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, but he knows how to deliver the money quote. Asked about bloggers by the Washington Post, Halavais came up with a beaut.

“The average blogger is a 14-year-old girl writing about her cat,’’ Halavais said.

Leaving aside the “only” (is that because of the assistant prof thing?), there is only one problem with this. I’m not entirely sure whether I am the source, or if I was paraphrasing something from Perseus. I talked to a reporter, Kim Hart, with the Washington Post yesterday, and in her story, she has me saying it:

“The average blogger is a 14-year-old girl writing about her cat,” said Alexander Halavais, an assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

Trick is, I thought I was quoting a something from Perseus, and told her I’d email her the cite. The closest I could come up with is this from Perseus’s press release (the site seems to be down, so it’s from the Google cache):

Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will be written very informally (often in “unicase”: long stretches of lowercase with ALL CAPS used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant messaging conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations). Underneath the iceberg, blogging is a social phenomenon: persistent messaging for young adults.

And some googling fails to come up with anything about cats and 14-year-olds. So I guess I really did say it. I distinctly remember saying it at the MEA conference talk back in—what—2005? So it must have been that I just remembered myself saying it. Deja vu all over again.