Really it doesn’t mean that things are over, just that they need to change. And frankly those changes may take some time, because you aren’t a priority. Let me give you an idea of some things to expect.

First, let’s talk about looks. You look like this largely by accident. I developed this theme as a teaching object for one of my courses, showing students how to use their new HTML and CSS skills to theme a blog. I don’t love it and not just because the footer is mismatched (a simple tiling issue I haven’t had time to deal with in the last, oh, five years.) Many of the choices here had a didactic rather than design reason. Those icons? Made them for a quick lesson on image sprites. Frankly, my design cue more naturally would be Daring Fireball. Keep it simple.

Actually, Medium has largely done what I would do. Some of you may recognize those side-notes–I had them in an earlier iteration of the blog, when I was on a Tufte fanboy kick. I also experimented with tweet-comments. It’s still a little too busy for me, but it’s close.

Second, I tend to be a bit more diffuse in where I write things. I used to tweet on this blog, before there was a Twitter. I didn’t really do anything with Facebook. Now, I split things up more by length than by audience. Twitter for the very short or mobile. Facebook for the largely in-between (and a slightly less public audience, though generally the posts are world-viewable), and then here for longer form. And, I guess, journal articles and the like. I think this becomes an aggregator for all that, slurping up my tweets, posts to FB, Pinterest pins, YouTube videos, and everything else, and slapping them together locally.

There may also be a more cloistered space–perhaps a separate blog–that will be for friends and family and sharing pics and the like. I’m a little sick of Flickr, and FB isn’t a great place for hi-res photo archiving or sharing. It may be I go for one of the OS photo archiving systems for that–I haven’t really decided.

Third, I need to do a better job of putting forward my scholarly and professional side, once I discover it. At a minimum, that means collecting self-archived preprints and the like in an easily grokked space.

So, this probably won’t happen this week or this month. But it will happen, someday. Until then, blog, just chill.

A brief paper on the long history of mobile ICTs

Especially over the last decade, the rapid diffusion of mobile telephones and related worn technologies left many struggling to understand how they might relate to social change. Although there can be little argument that we have seen rapid development in the technology of mobile communication and computation, at least some of our surprise must be related to a flawed overall frame for understanding technology and place. After all, these technologies seem on first blush to be very different from the kinds of communication devices we are more familiar with: technologies of the screen. When faced with technologies that are inherently displacing us, the literature tends to frame them from the perspective of dwelling and settlement, drawing on metaphors of cyberspace and virtual settlements. But mobile telephony is not as new as it first appears, and our focus on dwelling as a metaphor for all technology leads to a gap in understanding the social role of these new devices.

Understanding communication technologies and networks through the lens of the built environment is natural. The evolution of modern human society might be traced through a shift from biological to social change. Rather than adapting to our environments, we change our environments to suit our needs. No particularly acute skills are needed to discover human habitation: we build. And the creation of the built environment has been seen as key to creating physical proximity and urbanity at the core of the modern human experience. We have, however, been unable to build ourselves out of significant human ills, and in many cases the magical and spiritual nature of our built environment has been engineered away. The problems of modern society can be found most acutely in its characteristic environment: the metropolis.

But the rapid diffusion of the mobile phone both within the more and less developed world has turned this seemingly unbreakable bond between urbanity and evolution on its ear. Rich Ling, Mimi Ito, and others write about the new uses of these media to tightly control collaborative processes, particularly among the younger generation. The ability to act in coordination without being co-present, though of course always possible, is now more easily available to larger and larger populations. The favoring of these personal, ephemeral network brings the magical and spectral world back to us. These days, we all hear voices.

This article counters claims to novelty by suggesting that there are long-standing historical precedents to many of social functions of modern mobile devices, and that our tendency to think in terms of physical environments has blinded us to these long-term social uses of mobile technologies. Moreover, it is useful to understand a range of worn technologies, from sidearms to spectacles, as inherently information, communication, and control technologies. By providing an outline and taxonomy of worn technologies, it is possible to more easily distinguish dimensions along which change may be occurring, and find historical precedents to seemingly novel arrangements, like Castells’ “insurgent communities of practice.” It’s dangerous to assume that social arrangements made possible through the affordances of new technologies represent a revolution. As Robert Darnton has suggested, we tend to forget earlier technologies (like the “Tree of Cracow”) and social organization isomorphic to these modern shifts.

Within that “longue durée” of worn technologies, I suggest we can identify a set of functions for addressing and manipulating social networks, from communicating authority, to record keeping and surveillance, to command and control. While these mobile technologies are inextricably spatial, it is important to recognize that thinking of them from the perspective of geography and place represents only one way of framing the understanding of such technologies, and unfortunately such framing is often done unconsciously and relatively uncritically. What does it mean to move beyond debates of space and place, of cybernomadism and locative technologies? Does the mobile device–from quipu and ehekachichtli, to the saber and flounce, to the iPhone and pacemaker–represent a technology of binding the Bund as much as binding space or time?

Now, the downside. There was a lot of hubbub when Twitter started hiding @replies to people who you were not following. Many felt this impeded the conversation. Some adopt the .@ to hide this, or simply include the @address later in the Tweet. But especially if you follow any “stars” in Buzz, you can quickly get firehosed with replies. Some of these are good, but I don’t have the time to have them pushed to me.

The “and XXX more” is helpful. I don’t know if this is a new feature, or if I can control it. I would love to be able to decide which users replies to hide behind a folder and which are open by default. So, for example, while I don’t want to come immediately face-to-face with 150 replies to a post by Pete Cashmore, I’m happy to see a dozen replies to a Tweet (a “buzz?” a “bz”?) by Dean Shareski.

I suspect that when (if?) they user tested it they forgot about the “stars & friends” issue. It works well for friends, less well for stars.

Overally, I think I like it more than I do FriendFeed. So, for me at least, Buzz-is-the-new-FriendFeed. We’ll see if I abandon it as quickly…

It died in a way that felt very much like 2001 and was unfamiliar for me. It started out by periodically blanking the screen and Vista (yes.) giving me an error regarding the Nvidia drivers. This is a very common error, and I spent a lot of time running all over the web trying to figure out a solution. At first, I was OK in Safe Mode, but then I started getting artifacts even when it was generating text on the startup screen. So, having spent several hours on this, I now figure that was wasted time: it’s a dead graphics card. Eventually, it’s not putting out any signal to the monitor.

The card was an XFX 8600GT. (No making fun–I’m not a gamer and this was overkill for what I use the computer for.) I dig out of the closet a “someday this will be a project” computer and pull its old MSI 7300 card. I put this in the newer machine, and nothing: blank screen. OK… So maybe that’s not the problem.

I stick the 8600 in the old machine, and it comes up with nasty artifacts on the boot screen. OK–so that problem is solved (I guess), the 8600 is toast. I’ve never had a video card fail on me, but I’m sure it happens. But what’s with the MSI card?

I pull it out of the newer computer and throw it back whence it came. Blank screen on startup. Now, I never tried starting it up after I pulled it out of the closet, but I have to assume that it was working when I mothballed it. It was going in the closet to be a headless file and print server (never got done), but I know I must have had it plugged into a monitor before it went into the closet.

So… My first impulse is to go out and buy a new video card ASAP, and put it in the new machine. But now I am wondering if the new machine is somehow killing video cards. That seems to me to be be extraordinarily unlikely, but I am uneasy about betting a new video card on that unlikelihood. I suppose it could be baking the things–it’s a pretty crowded case–but when I put the 7300 in it, I left the case open. I suppose I could have somehow killed it with my static touch: though I took precautions, and I have never killed a board this way before, so that seems like a strange coincidence in timing. In any case, I am befuddled.

Needless to say, this is putting a crimp in an already overstuffed schedule. If you have ideas, let me know. Otherwise, I’m off to some retail shop to pay too much for a video card so that I can have it in hand right now.

More broadly, I’ve found myself in the strange position of visiting old houses and neighborhoods in Google Earth, and on the web. I stroll down Motomachi and note a new Gap–they show up everywhere these days. As do, it seems, the Street View vans. It made sense that they would start with the large cities, but I somehow didn’t expect them to start covering my old neighborhood in Buffalo (ah, so there’s the neighbor’s new playhouse–they told us about that) or my Mom’s place in California that I’ve never visited, but sits out in a spot that is pretty remote. What happens when the Google car covers the globe? Well, they turn around and do it again, of course. That way we can also roll the clock back.

Google Earth already integrates some photos, those marked on Panoramio, but wouldn’t it be nice to integrate video from YouTube, or images from Picasa (or heck, be more open and include Flickr and Revver). As more of our multimedia becomes time stamped and geotagged, I think we can look forward to records that come close to approximating what was happening at a given time or place. Now, of course, if you are out in the middle of nowhere, the nearest tagged photo may be beyond the horizon and five years old. But in Times Square, you can see photos from last week. Is it that hard to believe that, as more and more phones and cameras include instant uploading, that images from an hour ago, or from five minutes ago, are that far off?

This isn’t some huge leap in technology, this is just charting the current trajectory. What happens when you want to know where your friend is standing and can pull up five views of 82nd and Broadway from your mobile?

I’m also wondering about the loss of creative instrumentation. If virtuosi performers on traditional instruments (not that electric guitar is “traditional,” but it is far more traditional than a desktop computer) become more rare, will there still be people who develop instruments like this?

Finally, there are lots of people inventing musical instruments: a kind of makers’ market of such beasts, both using electronics (including circuit bending), and using either constructed or found physical objects (like buildings!). With rare exceptions, these tend to be played only by their inventors, since the sunk cost in learning to play a new instrument requires some common cultural value that can be exchanged. By evolving an existing instrument that is widely known into something that produces a different musical effect, does this encourage greater diffusion? I think the answer is clearly “yes.”

The mastiff we live with likes a particular dog toy, manufactured by Fat Cat, Inc. It’s a large and fairly expensive stuffed kitty toy that flops around nicely when a dog shakes it. You’ve probably seen a version of these if you have been in a pet shop: either in the smallest size, or the larger 14 inch size. You may not have seen the giant size that measures over 22 inches, and is our dog’s favorite. Although they are expensive, in the long run they make sense for us because even though the dog is fairly gentle with them most of the time, he would generally destroy the smaller size in a couple of days, and the larger ones tend to stick around much longer. When we went to order them, we found that pretty much every retailer has them listed as “discontinued.” It’s possible we were the only ones buying these toys, but I doubt it. Had we known they would stop making them, we probably would have stockpiled some. As it is, I guess it’s time to start watching eBay. I’m sure we can find an alternative he’ll be happy with for Christmas, but he does love a new “baby.”

My partner asked for a trackball like the one I use on my computer so that she could use it for work. She’s impossible to shop for, and so I was relieved to have such an easy shopping task. She is talking about the Microsoft Trackball Explorer, the best pointing device I have ever used with a computer. Microsoft really got it right with this thing. Anyone who uses it for more than five minutes covets it. When I bought mine, I think I paid something like $40 for it, so–given how the hardware market works–I hoped I might be able to find a discount on it. Despite wide adoration, Microsoft no longer makes it, and no one has stepped in to clone it. As a result, scratched and abused used versions of the trackball routinely sell for $150 on eBay, and that price is likely to continue to rise. I have bid on some of the lower-priced used versions, but I don’t hold out much hope for actually winning one of these auctions.

Now, these are both probably niche products. The big dog toy is probably a novelty unless you have a dog the size of ours, and there aren’t very many of those in the world. Likewise, although it turns out my trackball is nearly a fetish item for some geeks, the vast majority of computer users will continue to be happy with their mice, and wouldn’t even consider trying a trackball. (Like I once did, they probably associate it with Missile Command and Atari Football.) So these two products are both residents of that long tail–a tail that may have reached online retailing, but doesn’t stand up well to the scaling needed for Chinese electronics manufacturing.

We can probably try to replicate the dog toy. We do have a sewing machine, and I guess we can try to draw faces on with a permanent marker or something. I don’t know when we’ll find the time to make dog toys, but at least it is in the realm of possibilities. The same cannot be said of the trackball. The obvious way to do this would be to track down the factory that made the device in China and get them to do a short run. Even though there are people willing to exorbitantly for the devices, however, I suspect that the market is actually pretty small and deep. Unlike a short run for a T-shirt design or a book, I suspect there must still be a mass market before a complex gadget like the one I am using at this moment can be reproduced efficiently.

In the meantime, if you see a Microsoft Trackball Explorer on the back shelf of a computer retailer somewhere, and it’s priced at retail or below, snap it up–eBay is waiting.

Kevin is playing with using his new helmet-cam to record his everyday experience. I did this a few years ago, trying to record an entire day, using a webcam and my laptop. Mine was, by necessity, shoulder-mounted, rather than head-mounted, which has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The idea runs back to Mann’s sousveillance or Brin’s reciprocal transparency, though I have to say that the term only gets at a slice of what I think this starts to get at. Really, it remains surveillance, and but with you as the “surveillor” and gateway to other people looking in. That is, the camera is naturally a panoptic device, a one-way mirror, and as such you have to wonder who is or will be observing you. When I did this, I wore a label next to the camera saying “You are being recorded,” and this resulted in a lot of discussions like the one Kevin has in this clip.

The emergence, however, of YouTube and similar services changes the nature of the video camera. In the past, there was always the possibility that something captured on a camcorder could be shown to others, and–if interesting enough–sold to the evening news. Now, however, at least in certain circles, there is the assumption that some form of the video is likely to find its way out onto the web. This makes the camera a different kind of device, and our cultural assumptions and public policy will change as this shift becomes complete.

On the one hand, someone taking pictures of a birthday party at a restaurant has become a common thing to see. But when those photos are likely to be published publicly, and facial recognition (either computer-driven or human-driven, as on FaceBook) becomes the norm, that camera takes on a new intrusiveness. One could even see restaurants outlawing cameras; which, of course, also means outlawing camera phones. Already, this is an issue for those going to courts where camera phones are not allowed. Imagine what happens when camera phones are not allowed in a quarter of the restaurants you visit.

I’m glad Kevin has done this. I’ve been planning on retrying my shoulder-mounted cam (in much lower resolution than Kevin’s new camera!) and do a “day in the life” or “week in the life.” While these kinds of experiments have been going on for a long time now within relatively limited groups (mostly wearables researchers), it will be interesting to see the degree to which amateur panveillance becomes more common in the coming months and years.

“I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

– Vladimir Nabokov, “A Guide to Berlin,” 1925

Now, it seems to me that they are shooting themselves in the foot by basically ignoring the “long tail” of YouTube’s uploads. And even if it were not so limited, I’m not sure it will take off (I won’t be buying the service, esp if I can’t watch my favorite vlogs). But it is at least a step in the right direction.

The most visible public policies affected by the religious right in the US seem to hinge heavily on issues of science and technology: abortion, sex education, evolution, stem cell research, access to the web by children, and gaming, just to name a few. Other moral issues (Darfur? AIDS crisis?), though certainly present, seem not to take the fore. Perhaps the only issue that doesn’t fit into that list is gay marriage, which seems to have little to do with technology, and yet is once again at the cutting tip of the Republican’s electoral sword of Damocles–toe-to-toe with “surrendering to the terrorists.”

This is interesting in part because there is a long history in the US in particular of understanding technology as being a part of God’s plan. We are responsible for cultivating Eden, in part through the tools of human industry. I suspect that swings back-and-forth over time. There are certainly religious groups who take to technology and engage it, but I think the anti-Enlightenment views go hand-in-hand with anti-technological views, both of which are ascendent in the American public sphere of late.

CBS News ran a short piece this evening (WMV [3Mb], MP4[4Mb]). Mark Frank, of course, is featured prominently, and grad student Carolyn Hurley shows up in an early scene. I’m surprised they didn’t get into all the cool tech gadgets they are working with. In the interests of security, I won’t mention what they are. Yeah, I know, security through obscurity not the best way to go, but some of the stuff they are working on is secret. Leave it as: they have ways of knowing more about your body than most doctors do. Pretty neat, and a little spooky.

The take-away from the material they covered here on micro-expressions? We clearly need to be doing more to police the distribution of Botox.

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.

#1 – Power Corner is already gone

The cover that protects the extender on the power cube is gone. It was destined from day 1 to be gone, but it was gone by day 2. If a small plastic part comes off on its own, it needs a leash. I’ll let you know as soon as I lose the VGA dongle as well. I’ve seen at least one left behind at every conference I’ve gone to. It would be worth the extra couple of cubic centimeters (brain by Montessori!) of case space to include a VGA-out as well. To be honest, I’d rather have this in the case than the DVD burner. It’s already the heaviest laptop I’ve ever carried, it wouldn’t add to much to throw in a VGA plug. By the time most projectors I use have a DVI plug–or a cable on site for the plug–I will have moved on to my next laptop. But I got a little off track there–had I known that it would disappear so quickly, I would have super-glued a little plastic leash to that plastic corner.

#2 – PNG should be portable

This is going to be the first of many hassles with switching between Mac and Windows. I dropped a Powerpoint presentation from the Mac to a PC without having “exported” it properly, I guess. As a result, I stood in front of a crowd of people with empty slides because the PNG files wouldn’t render properly on the PC, and it claimed it needed a Quicktime update. Yes, yes, I know: this could just as easily be a Windows annoyance, but the whole idea is that these are supposed to be Portable Network Graphics. And had I done the presentation on a Windows laptop in the first place, it would have worked. Why should Quicktime have ever come into play? Anyway, the suck.

#3 – Keynote click to the end

In the second of two presentations, I was smart enough to swap out the presentation machine, and used Keynote, hoping to distract my audience with pretty transitions. Unfortunately, I got over-eager in clicking forward on the remote, and ended up at the end of the presentation. Double clicks during a slide render should not take you to the end of the presentation. I’m sure there is a way (I hope there is) to fix this in the preferences, but it is *bad* to be half-way through your show and have the presentation decide to skip to the end for you.

To defend against the Mac goon squad… I love the Mac: it’s quick, works well, good battery life. I haven’t yet installed XP (using either method), but I’m not sure I will. I wonder just how often I will want to switch over while on the road. At home, I’ve got XP on my main machine already. I am very happy with the machine, but these are just three of what I assume will be more minor annoyances.

It’s an exciting proposition, I think, because it suggests the idea of typing at the speed of thought. Of course, it turns out that we have a really nicely designed thoroughfare to the brain in our hands, and it shouldn’t be surprising that bypassing the hands to go through the skull makes things more, rather than less, complicated. I don’t expect that we will be bypassing physical manipulation any time soon, but I can dream of a day when my clumsy hands don’t get in the way of a quick blog entry.

The film is slated for a NYC/LA opening at the end of this month.

It looks like the new version of Word (out probably sometime before the Apocalypse) will do that for you. And before you make the natural assumptions (crummy code, only integrated with MS products) go check out the post.

I had a chat with someone recently about what keeps me from going all-Linux for the desktop. I actually like Word for writing in. I can imagine a better word processor, but Open Office isn’t it. There are a lot of things I would like to see–ease of use, strong integration with a bibliographic system, use as an IDE, etc.–and while this happens in pieces, I’ve yet to find something I like. It would be interesting, if a bit surprising, if MS evolved in that direction.

This is one bell/whistle I could actually use. Too bad they can’t open up the structure–a la Firefox–so that we could do our own free plug-ins to extend Word and make it more useful. Yes, I know it is possible to extend office products–I ended up writing some pretty interesting extensions for Excel in two of my jobs in the “real world”–but for whatever reason, it doesn’t have the same feel.

It also makes me glad that I’m not relying on Google Calendar, at this point, and that my word processor is in my own machine. I think that there are a lot of advantages to web-centric software, but net-centricity–that is, designing software to exploit the availablility of the network–doesn’t have to rely on a small number of servers. Given that there are millions of people now using GMail, it seems that it would be worthwhile to exploit their access. That is, if you think of the GMail user-base, I figure you probably have several hundred thousand machines up at any one time, and if each of these was willing to cede a certain number of CPU cycles and a few hundred megs of hard-drive space, you would have something that would be a lot harder to bring down. Sure, it would still be worthwhile to have a server farm at google, and yes, there are a lot of issues that would need to be worked out, but maybe then I could be checking email right now.

On the upside, I guess I do need to do laundry.

Using, for example, PGP is not enough. You need to use PGP to encrypt a message for that special someone, and then send the email to everyone you know and a few thousand you don’t. This pool that you send to can be randomly assigned (beyond your real contacts) and shift slightly with the addition of a few dozen new random email addresses every day, so as to disguise real new contacts.

There are plenty of downsides. Total email traffic would go through the roof. Spam is bad enough now with–really–a fairly small number of spammers. I can see this choking mail servers pretty quickly. If you got everyone’s email, that would be a bad thing, so you would want to set up overlapping communities of recipients. And of course, you would need the recipients to opt-in to receiving encrypted spam.

I have to assume that at least some of the spam I receive every day is just this: steganographic broadcast of private messages. But it seems to me that we could all use a little privacy in our electronic communications these days.

Extending a mail reader to work with this would be simple enough. Try to decrypt every email coming in: if it comes up garbage, trash it. Heck, as long as you are extending the reader, you could make it capable of forwarding encoded messages, adding an additional layer of obscuring noise.