Noodle knows I’ve got a ton of writing that needs to be done, like yesterday. Just so I can keep it straight in my head:

* The #g20 paper. This was an awesome paper that was nearly done two years ago. The data is dated, which is going to make publishing harder, but the ideas and analysis are still really interesting and good, I think. I just need to finish off a small bit of analysis (oh no! that has little to do with writing!) and write the sucker up.

* The aforementioned book. Or at least a couple of the chapters for it, which are now about five years overdue.

* A short piece on Enders Game.

* Updating some research (eek, more non-writing) and writing it up (phew).

* A dozen other little projects.

I also, however, have a bunch of other pressing things: planning for two new courses, maybe coding up a new version of my badge system (although, unless somehow funded, that needs to be a weekend project), and of course the ever-present AoIR duties.

Oh, did I say weekends. Yes, the first caveat to my pledge: I’m trying not to work weekends. My family is my first priority, and while that is easy to say, it’s harder to do. So I will endeavor not to do any work on the weekends. I’ve been trying to do that so far, and it’s not really possible, but it’s a good reach goal. Oh, and I’m taking a chunk of Thanksgiving week off, since my Mom and all her kids and grandkids (including the ones in Barcelona) are coming together at our house for the first time in probably more than two decades. But I’ll do a make-up in December.

Second caveat: I’m counting posting to the blog (since this is where I used to do a lot of my pre-writing). I’d like to count email too, since I did a solid 6 hours of catching up on email today, but I think that’s a no-go.

Really what we are talking about then is four consecutive weeks of completing 6,000 words each week. That may not sound very ambitious, but given how hard it was to push out the last 5,000 words (it took way more than a week–sorry editors!), I think that 1,200 words a day is plenty ambitious. Oh, and by doing it as Monday-Friday weeks, I get to start next Monday. Procrastination FTW.

Now that I’ve managed to negotiate myself down, it doesn’t seem like much of a challenge, but there it is. I will report on my goals here on a weekly basis. I may try to add some other metrics (time on task, people mad at me, etc.) as we go forward. But for now: words, words, words. (Though only 573 of them for this post.)

While there are a range of potential topics, some might include:

• Has mediated culture changed to fit new regimes of attention?
• With an infinite number of channels, is it still possible to get citizens to talk about the same topic?
• How do marketers get attention when technologies, from TiVo to pop-up blockers, allow for filtering?
• Does the ability to work anywhere, thanks to mobile devices, break down the idea of attending to home or family within particular temporal and spatial blocks?
• How does a new disciplining of attention (or a lack of such disciplining?) affect learning inside and outside of schools and universities?
• Are “Lifehacker” and “Four Hour Work Week” just continuations of a long interest in efficiency, or do they mark a move beyond the workplace for such efforts?
• Is there a consensus regarding “multi-tasking” and “continuous partial attention” vs. task focus in terms of effectiveness?
• How do individuals create their own “situational awareness”? To what degree is our attention locationally based?
• How have technologies of social networking affected who we attend to and how we attend to them?

Presentations will be in “pecha kucha” format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecha_kucha), and presenters are expected to abide by that formalism. These should represent positions and perspectives, or thinking-in-progress. Papers are welcome, but not expected. These presentations should be designed to create controversy and conversation.

If you’ve gotten this far, and are interested in presenting on the panel, please post your proposal to Twitter, using the #tldr11 hashtag, no later than February 1, 2009.

Please forward widely.

More of the Same

As with every new system or innovation encountered on “the internets,” a common claim about blogging is “it’s all been done before.” I kept a blog before they were called blogs: a frequently updated website, an email newsletter, a periodically downloadable file on “the Source,” an early ISP. And before that there was Plato. Isn’t blogging just BBS software / forums in new bottles? How is the blogosphere substantially different from Usenet? These questions are both inevitable and valid. Too often we thrill to the idea of the latest incarnation of the “virtual community,” and are quite willfully able to forget the hyperbole surrounding earlier technologies. And it is difficult not to recognize the kind of buzz around blogging as similar to these earlier collaborative technologies.

I think blogging has a simple answer to this: none of these other technologies captured the public imagination in the same way that blogging has, nor the same number of users. Sure, there are more who use email, brows the web, or communicate via IM, but these are not really the same special type of large-scale discussion technologies that blogs embody. I think that when future historians look back at the earliest years of this century, two of the things that will show up in the history books will be the mass adoption of blogs and wikipedia. I don’t think that these are the most important innovations of the last few years, but I do think that they will have some of the most important social impact. So part of the answer to that question is simply one of size. Usenet, even at its peak, did not (I believe) have a million people writing, and ten times that reading. We don’t have to fall back on hyperbole: if the story of blogging ended today and no one ever blogged again — and I although I don’t think we’ve seen the peak of public blogging, I would not be shocked if this were the case — we would still have to acknowledge this as one of the most widespread examples of user-produced media, and something worth understanding.

But really what people are suggesting when they say this is that the principles that we have already discovered in earlier examples of computer mediated communication are just being repeated in another form in blogs. One answer to that is “yes, but to a greater degree.” That is, there are more people doing it, as argued above. Or, the impediments to presenting to the web have been reduced further, so that creating and maintaining a web page is even easier than it has been in the past, and has been reduced to some critical level at which there are compounding returns. But this “more” change is not something that should be dismissed out of hand. On the other hand, there are some elements of the blogosphere that I think are, if not unique, especially important. Some of these are reflected in the neologisms and specialized services that have arisen to support blogging.

New words for new ways

One of the ways to identify what makes weblogs special is by noting some of the specialized jargon that has grown up around blogging. Unfortunately the proliferation of these terms have made entry into blogging more daunting in some ways. But they also indicate new ideas or techniques that need to be named because they don’t fit well into previous paradigms. Among these:

Trackbacks, pingbacks, reciprolinks, blogrolls.

RSS, aggregators.

del.icio.us, technorati, blogdex, furl.

The blogging factors

What, then, are the salient differences, the principle components of blogging, that we should be concerned with?

Ridiculously easy publishing.

Forging public voices.

Conviviality, conversation, deliberation?

Planned serendipity. While improving the ability to search is an important need on the web, improving our ability to stumble usefully is also important.

The return of a workable push media: now with more mods.

Convergence of exchanged data, personal server. Todo: Onfolio

Ubiquitous media.

Future

No one is good at predicting the future of communication technology; there are just too many variables. That said, a prediction of the future state of technology is really just another way of saying that you have a good feel for what is important in today’s technology. Neal Stephenson claimed that books like Snow Crash were intentionally placed in the now. The degree to which they seem to be prophetic is directly related to how well they discern the contours of the present. So the future of blogging is “more of the same” where “the same” refers to those elements of blogging that are important or unusual. If the list above is correct, we can expect innovations to continue to develop along the lines they already have.

The barriers to entry, and complexity of the process of blogging will be reduced. I suspect we will see WYSIWYG blogging software within the next year, at the outside. When you want to add or edit a message, you click on it and start typing. The RSS of anything that might ever change is already providing a way of quickly making semantic connections that allow for other kinds of rapid updates, and I suspect that this will continue. We are all blogging with kludges for blog software at the moment, and many of the ways that this needs to improve are already clear.

There will continue to be a place for small and large public voices, but I suspect we will see some serious changes in the way some organizations do business, such that they can make use of the transparency that blogging provides. This will have a real effect on how we think about privacy and how we think about who we are. The transparent and networked nature of our public identities is, I believe, reversing some of the the century-long opinions about the nature of personal identity/psyche and the networked (or urban) society. It was assumed that we would increasingly become divided into multiple selves in service to a number of non-overlapping groups. Unlike in the traditional village, the people we work and play with often do not know each other, and they each know a different form of “you.” This leads to something that appears to be akin to multiple personalities, and the purposive construction of new identities for different kinds of interactions. But the transparency that blogging seems to encourage may mean a reversal, or at the very least a complication, of this process. The identity that appears in my blog is one that looks the same to my wife, my students, my doctor, my boss, my mother, and my colleagues around the world. Maintaining any multiple identities I might have becomes far more difficult with my social circles become enmeshed together.

We can at least hope that those newly public voices will also lead to new kinds of discussion, deliberation, and conviviality. I must admit that I am particularly suspicious of this. I suspect that very little gets done in blogs, and that there is not a good framework for distributed conversations. This may change, but at present, the kinds of conversations that occur on blogs feel somehow asymmetric. I have talked about this before, on this blog and in conversations: many bloggers are the inverse of lurkers: they are “mumblers.” Lurkers read without revealing themselves to the authors. Mumblers write without knowing if there is an audience. Mumbling is good for public discourse, I think, but it may not be as good for discussion and deliberation.

While they may not host collaborations, they might enable them. The discussions that do occur on blogs tend to be a little like the pheromone trails that ants leave. Those trails may not, in themselves, represent any form of useful structure. However, they form the support infrastructure that allows for large-scale collaboration. By providing some form of transparent “contrail” on the web of your work, your interests, your ideas, your social networks, you allow for the intersection of such paths. As a bunch of ants wandering around exploring the intellectual space of our world, the likelihood that our trajectories will ever lead to a useful collision is relatively small. But this increases many-fold when we leave behind bread crumbs for others to stubble upon.

I think people are coming to understand this process of encountering trails. You see this a bit in investigations of knowledge management in the real world. More and more, people are abandoning the idea that you can download expertise into a system. If you could do that (and you can’t), you wouldn’t really need the people in an organization. Instead, you need to build tools that enhance the process of leaving a trail, so that when people don’t know what they are looking for, they know who does.

By lighting up an IR LED and tracking the reflection in people’s eyes, the eyeBlog, a research project at Queen’s University Human Media Lab, can clip just the parts of your day that involve a shared glance (how romantic!). Neat stuff.

(Thanks to Kevin for the heads up.)

It’s an interesting balance right now. If they cripple their dashboard by not accepting RSS from competing email providers, etc., they will not maintain any kind of market share. Interoperability is king — but interoperable services are hard to make distinctive. That said, they’ve managed to make Gmail distinctive by providing useful tools, if they can do the same with a working dashboard/aggregator, they will be cooking.

How do they do with me? Well, the first hit is pretty good, naming me as an Assistant Professor at the University of Buffalo’s School of Informatics (you are correct, sir!). Additional titles it assigns me are: Assistant Professor of Communication, Communications and Technology Issues Teacher, Professor of Informatics, Social Scientist, and Communications Professor — all of which are fairly correct. It seems to have pulled these largely from newspaper stories.

But I far more prefer the other possible Alex Halavais. For example, did you know that Alex Halavais is a Reverse Cowgirl at Gawker? An interesting experiment — and I suspect we are going to see a lot more such public experiments in auto-summarization in the near future — but I’m not sure how useful this is.

Now if only the calculator function and the weather function could be combined: “weather buffalo +50”.

I don’t know how many of the current MI students read my blog (I suspect very few), but if you do, this should trigger some ideas if you haven’t yet settled on a capstone. A lot of creative possibilities to combine GPS and Google Maps. I know a few of you are doing things with GPS and wireless (through Paul’s class or in other courses), and this would be a natural kind of extension. Also might allow for some interesting combinations when glued together: think Google Maps + Facebook or other services. Neat stuff.

I had been interested in doing something like this after watching a demonstration of some of the Xanadu tools for “deep linking.” Ted Nelson was busy attacking how Google-centric the web had become, and yet, I thought, the tool he was demonstrating at the time, which hyperlinked chunks of text that had been borrowed from earlier works, could be implemented precisely as it is here by Lenssen. In fact, any other way, which would put the responsibility of finding the links on the user, was silly.

Now, if only you could link it to everything on your own computer. But then, that’s what Google Desktop is/will be for, isn’t it?

But 43 Things is the thing that pulls me over. Since I was a little kid, I’ve made goal lists, and the ability to see and -steal- borrow from others’ life goals is really interesting. As is the equivalent of life goals recommendations (“those who want to become president also are interested in trying new foods”).

I think the bottom-up taxonomy is one that benefits naturally from the use of computers. There’s a big push toward tree-based concept maps lately, but the killer medium for that form of information organization remains butcher paper. The gradual organization from the bottom seems well fitted to tagging. I’ll be interested to see the ways in which people refine this basic process to allow for better social understanding of concepts and relationships.

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline.
The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned.
What happened to the news?
And what is EPIC?

This is a lead in to a very cool history of the future of journalism. It took me a while to get to this because, figured it would be a promo for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, but it’s not.

Instead, it suggests that over the next decade, Google and Microsoft continue to acquire and interconnect various aggregation systems (Tivo, blogger, Google News, etc.), until they become the dominant sources of information in the world. It’s compelling and interesting, and will make for a great introduction if I teach Media in the Information Age next spring. It’s also a great way of showing how much impact audio/visuals can have over text.

That said, I think it gets some things wrong. First, will this really take 10 years. That seems like an awfully long time. Consider the changes since 1994. There will have to be some significant speed bumps for things to go that long.

Second, I don’t buy that the world is a worse place without the New York Times. They don’t give any compelling reason to believe that news constructed entirely from amateur reports will be significantly “shallower and narrower.” Indeed, I suspect that if it were, people would choose to read the Times — as they do today. I would be very surprised if more people didn’t read the New York Times today than did three years ago. They may not be paying for it, but that’s just another issue.

Perhaps what I find least likely is the one merger that does not appear in this ten year history, the Times company with Google or Microsoft. Indeed, if the Times were smart, they would already be using Google to generate advertising revenue for their newspaper. I imagine that it would make them a whole lot more money than drawing from their own ads department.

So an interesting framing for something a lot of people have been thinking about (I’ve held it under the label of Todo, both suggesting that it encapsulates all mediated communication and that it is something we should be working on), and puts it in a simple, easily understood form, but it also suggests that there is a simple conflict here that should be addressed. The change in how we think about news is not at all simple. At present, news media and microcontent (blogging, etc.), form a symbiotic relationship. If you want to suggest one is killing the other, you need to fill in some of the blanks.

Emergence: Complexity & Organization (E:CO) is an international and interdisciplinary conversation about human organizations as complex systems and the implications of complexity science for those organizations. With a unique format blending the integrity of academic inquiry and the impact of business practice, E:CO integrates multiple perspectives in management theory, research, practice and education. E:CO is a quarterly journal published in print and online by The Complexity Society, the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence, and the Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity in accordance with academic publishing standards and processes.

Full online access to the latest special double issue of E:CO (issue 6, numbers 1 & 2) is available free here.

(via Patti)

You will seldom make a purely business trip, because linking consoles will be so much more efficient. When you do visit another person with the object of intellectual communication, you and he will sit at a two-place console and interact as much through it as face to face. If our extrapolation from Doug Engelbartâ€s meeting proves correct, you will spend much more time in computer-facilitated teleconferences and much less en route to meetings. A very important part of each manâ€s interaction with his on-line community will be mediated by his OLIVER. The acronym OLIVER honors Oliver Selfridge, originator of the concept. An OLIVER is, or will be when there is one, an “on-line interactive vicarious expediter and responder,” a complex of computer programs and data that resides within the network and acts on behalf of its principal, taking care of many minor matters that do not require his personal attention and buffering him from the demanding world. “You are describing a secretary,” you will say. But no! Secretaries will have OLIVERS.

At your command, your OLIVER will take notes (or refrain from taking notes) on what you do, what you read, what you buy and where you buy it.It will know who your friends are, your mere acquaintances. It will know your value structure, who is prestigious in your eyes, for whom you will do what with what priority, and who can have access to which of your personal files. It will know your organizationâ€s rules pertaining to proprietary information and the governmentâ€s rules relating to security classification.

Some parts of your OLIVER program will be common with parts of other peopleâ€s OLIVERS; other parts will be custom-made for you, or by you, or will have developed idiosyncrasies through “learning” based on its experience in your service.

Engineers recorded a message from a test pilot’s daughter, with the sound coming as a whisper from behind the left ear: “Daddy, put the gear down or you will crash.” When Tom tells the story, it gives you shudders to think of it, and that was exactly the intent.

I was suddenly reminded of this while reading a story on automated “mentors” for soldiers:

Akin to the promptings that newscasters get from their producers via earplugs during a broadcast, mentoring (as the technique is called) has already proved valuable to military teams in achieving mission goals. But instead of a human mentor, the Sandia group is looking to devise a software mentor that could offer advice like “take a deep breath and relax your upper body” or “pay attention to what Private Smith is about to say, his excitement level indicates it could be important.”

The researchers recently used a neural network to learn the signatures of abstract desirable traits like “leadership,” as well as warning signs such as “nervous,” “afraid” or “daydreaming,” by analyzing the pulse, respiration, perspiration, facial expressions, head movements and other biometric data streams coming from sensors attached to group members. Goals could be achieved in a stressful virtual environment only if the group cooperated effectively. By perfecting their approach in virtual reality, the scientists hope to someday enable automatic advice and counsel from a virtual mentor.

This is one of those technologies that is disturbing: and for me, disturbing is interesting. It’s disturbing in the same ways that subdermal technologies are, and for some of the same reasons. It is technology that is extraordinarily intimate. It “knows” things that only other people can know, and that sometimes neither they _nor_ you yourself knows. It’s creepy for a machine to know when you are _subconsciously_ affecting your body in some way, and it is creepy-squared when that is then reported to you by a simulated social entity.

But it is at the same time, for me, endlessly exciting. People throw around McLuhanian ideas of extending our nervous system, but these guys plan “to add a 128-channel electroencephalogram to correlate brain events with social interactions,” along with an electromyograph, electrocardiogram, and a bunch of other stuff. Where do I sign on?

If this is enough to pique your interest, definitely check out the video (“mpg”:http://www.sandia.gov/ACG/videos/Mentor%20Movie.mpg). It looks like what they are doing is recording biometrics of a bunch of a team in a “kind of virtual reality scenario” (looks like “counterstrike”:http://www.counter-strike.net/ to me), and then predicting each persons’ state.

Best quote? Dave Warner (who, perhaps not coincidentally, also spent some time at the HITLab)

This is like an exosomatic evolution, where the biology of humanness is actually creating other structures to support human-like activities. The computers are a step in evolution in the sense that biology is putting information together outside of itself that ultimately becomes part of the system in which biology is connected to. It’s a cybernetic loop. So this is the first phase in, probably, what will be a long series evolutional steps to… make the world a better place.

Great to know there are people seriously pushing the boundaries here. Exciting (though, of course, in some ways concerning) stuff.

The article is less about text-blogging than it is about photoblogging. Of course, a million (or a hundred million) photoblogs with shots throughout the day is interesting, but more interesting is when all of these are classified, integrated, and accessible. It allows for a new kind of surveillance (and not necessarily in the nasty “big brother” sort of way) of everyday life.

How lightweight (both literally and in the user-interface sense) must a device be to make it a useful real-life annotation system. It must provide both a nearly transparent way of recording a life, but equally important, it must figure out how to skip over the boring stuff.

That last bit is kind of interesting. I mentally already skip over the boring stuff in my memory –as well as some of the not-so-boring stuff, unfortunately. Forgetting is an amazing valuable cognitive function. Creating PLADs (woo-hoo, new acronym) that augment our memory is a huge project, but it only forestalls an even bigger one: devices that augment forgetting.

The two first PHP projects I’m doing to teach myself are related to entering info into a MySQL database. The first is for the department, a form for undergraduates to request that they be overloaded for particular classes. This represents a serious amount of work for our undergraduate advisor, and I agreed to take it on since it seemed like a relatively easy project.

The second is related to journaling my everyday activities. There is a huge literature on time-use, ranging from the differences among world cultures to the business measurement and time-and-motion studies since Taylor. There are regular panels at the meetings of the American Sociological Association devoted to time use.

What I’m interested in is ongoing time-use measurement, tracking, and indexing, and linking this to data and work. The trick is, for this to be usable it needs to be as unobtrusive as possible. For work on the computer, eventually I am thinking of something along the lines of a combination keylogger and classification system. I want to start small, though, and maybe allow for it to happen outside of the computer. For now, that means plaintext lists of what I am doing during the day.

But I want a web-based widget that allows me to indicate what I am working on at a particular time. I am leaning toward the web because although that requires that I be at a computer, it does allow me to be at any computer. The idea of using technology for doing these kinds of studies isn’t new. Previous studies have used bar codes for this, for example (see “Scanning Technology Can Improve Time-Use Studies”-pdf). I’m thinking something with buttons for common activities and a button for less common activities. Eventually, this would move to the client side and be, in some way, “context aware.” Eventually, this would be integrated with other parts of the file system and PIM.

I wish people came with a pie chart on their chest that showed in slices how they spent their day–a slice for health, for work, for family…

There are a number of inter-related factors driving changes in the ways in which researchers create, access and communicate information. Among the more significant of these are increasing demands for the commercialisation of research outcomes and for measurable research performance, and the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs). It is only by understanding both the evolving needs of researchers and the emerging mechanisms for meeting them that we can effectively resource their activities at the individual, institutional and national levels.

This project examines evolving research practices, focusing on how practices are changing and what the implications of those changes are for scholarly communication and the future development of the research information infrastructure. It was supported by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training’s Research Evaluation Programme, and is intended to provide an input into the Government’s thinking on the future development of Australia’s research infrastructure.

(via FOS)

But spellchecking aside, it is easy to underestimate the power of this tool. Many profs already recommend Amazon as a way of finding material, literature, and sources. I do not, but I will be sure to mention this as an interesting alternative to a google search.

“I don’t want to get all `JFK’ about it, but we’re all being photographed all the time,” said Merlin Mann, 36, of San Francisco, who bought a Sanyo 8100 phonecam, one of Sprint’s newest, this month. “The question is, What are you going to do with it?”

* take pictures and have them automatically posted into online albums
* jabber a thought into my mobile phone and have it recorded and archived into an mp3, posted on my weblog
* record what sites I visit, and keep them tabulated in a calendar
* nab the titles of the songs that I%u2019m currently listening to embed events into a syndicated feed
* track my location over time with the gps in my phone and pda

I want those things to. I did a short presentation of my research agenda; it looks only marginally like the outdated version on this page.

I am interested in the intersection of personal information management and collaboration. Though the technologies of the memex have by-and-large come to pass, the ultimate vision has not. I want for the scientist or academic (or anyone, really–this just makes for a convenient target) to be able to record his or her life, and–this is important–to be able to make sense of it.

I could call this strand of research “sense making within personal data environments,” but for now, I am just calling it Todo. As in “everything” (I have a feeling that people increasingly use their email or the schedules as universal organization schemes) and as in “to do.”