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?

The natural question is “What’s that conference about?” Luckily, this year I can answer that, since registrants were (mostly) kind enough to tag their interests. And so I present the Internet Research 8.0 official tag cloud! For those of you unfamiliar with these things, the size of the font corresponds to the number of people who tagged their interest that way. Also, in this case, if two terms are close to one another they are more likely to have co-occurred. (This is far more true of the very top of the list than the bottom, where it’s generally isolates.) You can click the image below, or go to an HTML version. Oh, and IR8.0 isn’t a tag–it’s a title.

I–like you, dear reader–made fun of people on tour busses. (And silly tourists like that pictured above, who snuggle with koalas–this one is named Axel.) I remember being in Indonesia as one of those monster tour busses passed us on the road. We were in a little van, and the driver was trying to fix a gasoline leak in the engine, using his lighter so that it was easier to see. We were uncoddled, authentic travelers, albeit with a little extra air conditioning here and there. They were insulated from the living existence of the country.

And so, yes, I had somewhere in the corner of my mind Therouxian ideal of paddling up to the natives and talking about cannibal soup. Clearly, there is that authenticity, but the locals like hamburgers too. And the truth is, as I get older (ahem), comfort is increasingly a big part of my travel puzzle. I’m sure that keeps me from seeing some really cool stuff, but it also keeps me sane enough to keep traveling. And I still get to snuggle with koalas and sea snakes now and again.

Luckily, according to the TSA, laptops are still allowed on board for flights originating in the US, and US-bound flights are generally under the same requirements. As the date approaches, I’ll need to keep checking to see what the security arrangements are. And look at ways of defending the poor laptop in checked luggage.

The first choice, of course, is to bring a more disposable laptop–one that won’t hurt as much if it gets thrashed. Namely, an old Sony Vaio. I think the batteries are fried, but I can probably find non-Sony batteries to replace them. The alternative is to bring the Mac Book Pro, which–besides being bigger–I would be a bit more unhappy if it got thrashed. It’s not really “mine” anyway, since it’s a university machine, but still I think I need to keep it in running order for a while.

Thomas Wailbum has posted some hints on how to keep your computer safe and secure if it has to be checked (via Aaron). I’m thinking a Pelican case might be a good idea. Then, if we crash and are “lost” on a South Pacific island, I’ll be the only one with a working laptop. Or perhaps a cheapo version of the same, since the authentic Pelican version costs almost more than the computer is worth (though they are often for sale on eBay). The Container Store had some basic plastic commercial cases that should fit the bill, if it comes to that. (I suspect they can be found elsewhere for even less.)

$1,212 a year certainly doesn’t seem like a whole lot, and it isn’t. But it is worth noting that China’s GDP per capita is $7,204, which means that these workers are making–at worst–17% of the national average income. Given the average per capita GDP in the US ($41,399), that works out to the equivalent of $6,965 annually, or (assuming a 40 hour work week, which may be a very large assumption), the equivalent of about $3.48 an hour. If I were making $3.48 an hour, I might also be willing to take free factory housing, as well.

Now, I am not saying that it would be a very good thing if these workers were paid better. But the trick is that they are being paid better than they would be otherwise. I believe that the extreme income disparity that exists between countries and within countries is something worth fighting against. But especially here, if we can provide factory jobs for the very poor in China (and these workers do not represent the very poor), and move manufacturing jobs from prison labor to legitimate waged labor, it is worth encouraging that, I think.

Back to the topic: what would make it even better? WiFi on the planes. Jetblue already offers free wireless in their JFK hub, but they now plan to offer it onboard. Smart move.

OK, ratings suck. But I would happily live in any of the cities listed in the top 51, there.

1. Transportation

I love being able to walk out my door and hop on a subway. The idea of having a driver any time you want, via the ubiquitous “yellow sharks” is also great. (Last fall, a father pulled his kid on the sidewalk having spotted a taxi speeding toward the intersection and called out “yellow shark! yellow shark!” and this has kind of stuck for me.) Of course, it’s not all roses, but I do like being able to rely on my feet and public transportation to get me where I’m going.

The only good public transport in OC is in Disneyland. As Jeremy notes below, you are judged by your ride in SoCal. Yes, this is very superficial, but if you like cars, it’s hard to be too critical of a car culture. It’s fun–if slightly harrowing–to be able to go out for drinks and pull your rental between one of these and one of these. And driving along PCH with the windows down and the radio up is one of my favorite things to do in the world.

2. Scent

Sorry, SoCal wins hands down here. As spring rolls around, the air there (at least along the coast) is scented with the smell of flowers and sea breezes. As the cold melts away, New York smells less appley than what Dinesen might suggest is the ultimate fate of Shiraz.

3. Housing

Ruined by Buffalo’s cheap housing, New York came as a bit of a shock. We had expected the housing in SoCal to be, at least in comparison, more manageable. It’s true that rents have remained stable (I think the rent at the apartment complex I used to live in has grown only by inflation–if that–over the last two decades), the cost of buying a home has doubled in the last nine years. Great for people who bought houses in either NYC or SoCal–not so good for those of us who hope to someday buy one.

And what about those spaces? Obviously, the housing stock in SoCal tends to be much newer, and that which is older is not usually old enough to be of interest. While San Diego is offering “real” lofts (unlike the ones that are created specifically for residential from the get-go) New York offers loft-living that often comes without the creature comforts. Like walls. A friend was offered a rental that, literally, was missing a couple of exterior walls. Very bohemian, no? Nonetheless, even though it’s impossible to afford anything more than a shoebox, if you care more about the livability than the number of square feet, I think Manhattan has to win out here, if only by a hair. Though the idea of walking out the back door onto the beach in California is appealing, there are very few opportunities to actually do that.

4. Stuff to do

New York is the center of the universe. It really is. There’s plenty to do in SoCal, but you better like the stuff that’s there, because it isn’t changing much, while in New York, all you have to do is wait five minutes. I grew up as a mall rat, and many of the malls in OC really are more commodious and entertaining than their east coast brethren. But, hey, they are still malls. How much shopping can you really do?

5. Weather

Um… duh. Even during earthquake season, this is a no-brainer.

6. Attitude

It’s pretty funny: the generally-held opinion in Southern California is that New Yorkers are at best brusque, at worst rude. New Yorkers seem to think Californians are superficial and vapid. And guess what: they’re both right! At least a little.

I have a strange feeling that both of these stereotypes are shaped largely by the culture of table service in both cities. In my experience, servers in OC (perhaps less so up in LA) are either very professional, very friendly, or both. They think of what they do as a service, and they grew up being exposed to this as a service. Is it fake? Well, yes. No doubt, they would rather not be working right now. But unlike in New York, they won’t tell you this.

And I don’t mean just fancy restaurants. Go into a diner in New York, and the person who waits on you will bring you your food, and generally do a pretty good job at it. But don’t expect them to be happy about it, and certainly not obsequious. Go to IHOP in HB, and your waitress will be friendly, and even if it is her job, I think the smile is in some way genuine.

I was startled by people saying hello on the street in California. That’s not to say that people ignore you on the street in Manhattan. Perhaps because we have a big dog, we are used to talking with people on the street. The last time we went to Fairway, on three occasions people gave their unsolicited opinion on my food selections. But especially at night, you pass too many people to bother to acknowledge them. If you are out on foot in California, there is probably something strange going on, so a disarming “Good evening” is in order. On the other hand, if you tell the person next to you at the deli counter that they should get more ham, you will probably be considered rude.

I do think that you are judged by how you look more often in SoCal than in New York, but what is seen as unnecessarily gruff in one place and superficial in the other is really, I suspect, a difference in vocabularies of interaction rather than anything else. Being bi-coastal-lingual can be a real advantage. This may be colored by reading Eastern Standard Tribe on the ride back, but it seems to me that the cultural differences between the coasts are deeper than our language and nationality would make immediately obvious.

Verdict

Perhaps it is my innate optimism, but I like both places a lot. I like them enough to overlook their flaws.

These days, I usually just say “California,” which for many on this coast is the equivalent of saying “Mars.” In other words, my interrogator simply answers “oh.”

I’ve had a recurring dream–one of those dreams so real that it seems like it must be–of a place with tall white buildings and lots of water in canals. I thought for a moment that I had found it when I visited Singapore, but then I realized it was too hot to be home. I’d still love to find that place, but I am increasingly concerned that it is only in my head. Not that most homes aren’t in people’s heads.

I was perfectly happy being a “citizen of the world” for the longest time, and then last year I got a funny feeling when I visited southern California. As the plane settled onto the runway, I had this strange feeling in my belly. At first, I thought it was just the roller-coaster feeling one sometimes gets on landing, but then it washed over me: I’m home.

So, that should settle it, right? My flag of convenience–“the OC” in recent parlance–has become my home in the heart. So, I guess that’s that.

Only recently, I got that same feeling landing at JFK. Very confusing. I’ve always been a late bloomer; maybe this is my nesting instinct kicking in. Or maybe I have always been without a home, and now I am finding that I am at home in the global city, wherever that may be. Or something.

As to our “reaction,” Tim Bray says it better than I can. I almost copied over his short post wholesale. Basically, the best response to something like this is to figure out why it happens, and try to cut it off at the source.

My suspicion is that one of the best ways of reducing such violence is to work on spreading literacy and learning here in the US. Enlightenment is contagious, and a population at home that mixes tolerance and skepticism is likely to provide a better model than one that sees violence as the most effective means of solving disputes.

As Mr. Bray notes, this is not an excuse for such horrible acts. I think we can agree to despise such violence, and then move on to examine effective ways of reducing its future occurrence.

It gives me no joy to be the bearer of such news, but scientists from around the world have recently informed me that they have done the calculations, and an object of tremendous size is on a collision course with our home. I am convinced that we will witness a near miss, and for those who have dug observational tunnels to the surface of our comet (and please note that if you have done so without a permit, you are in breach of Public Law 1342), you may observe a celestial body at a distance very near to our surface.

There have been some rumors spreading that the object currently rushing toward us is made by some sort of alien race, perhaps residents of one of the giant planets of this solar system. While I am not so small-minded as to absolutely exclude the existence of intelligent life outside of our comet, this idea that beings like ourselves created this thing is clearly claptrap, for several reasons.

First, why would they create a craft so huge? Unless they themselves are gigantic, which seems highly improbable. If there is intelligent life elsewhere in this universe, I suspect they do not look too different than we ourselves look.

But second, and far more important, we can expect that if such a race exists, and is technologically so advanced as to build a city-sized craft capable of cruising through space, they probably also are able to steer the thing, and choose a course that is not so dangerously close. At the very least, they would signal to us from afar, rather than approaching at such a tremendous pace.

I do not wish to give false hope. The models available at this time clearly indicate a collision of devastating proportions. If a breach of our world does occur. Please behave as if you are just boring minerals. If these aliens are bent on attacking us, our best bet is to look boring.

In open cahoots, your fearless leader,

Zoloft

Always a bit nostalgic cruising around your old neighborhoods via Low Earth Orbit. To the left here is a collage of the campuses where I have spent significant time as a student or professor. Pretty easy to guess some of those. If you need help, click on “more” below, and you will get them in a larger version and in chronological order…

1. It’s a museum of style. OK, officially is is a museum of “design and art,” but at its heart, it is all about the history of style, from a very particular perspective. This is a guide to the cosmopolitanism of distinction: an appreciation of other cultures that cements the visitor’s position in his or her own.

I walked by a young couple (it seems that it is also a “date” spot) in their late teens or early twenties, as they peered at a set of samurai armour. “So, this is art, too, then.” “Of course.” “Does it have to be ugly to be art?” Not if you are “cultured,” I think, reading the girl’s exasperation.

2. It’s a museum of the real. The focus is heavily on the decorative arts, the kinds of things uneducated eyes like my own recognize as an art of the everyday. There is a gallary dedicated to fashion; of the 1700s and of the 70s. There are musical instruments, locks, and pillow boxes.

3. It’s a museum of consumption. The museum browser finds himself perpetually on the edge of stumbling into Home Depot. An entire exhibit of mosaic tiles that are stunningly beautiful somehow would look just perfect in the new sunroom. An eighth-mile long gallery of cast and wrought iron, strangely torn from the garden and placed on pale white gallery walls, lacks only price tags. A similar feeling spills into each gallery. I walk by an older couple, woman on the arm of the man, as the quickly pass judgment on early Chinese teapots, some of them marked as fakes that have been passed off as original and then given to the museum. “Oh, that’s simply horrible,” says the woman. “How could anyone have thought it was real?” “Oh, it’s not that bad,” says the gentleman through a thick mustache, with the obvious intent of irritating.

4. It’s a museum that places experience first. Not only is it dedicated to the decorative arts, but it uses the decorative arts to decorate. There are foldable stools to be picked up at the head of some galleries, in case you decide you need an impromptu sit. Generally, seating throughout the museum is designed to match the exhibit as closely as possible. There is expansive space between exhibits, and the maze-like intersection of galleries invites strolling. The interactive video displays, now ubiquitous in museums, are actually as informative and interesting as the exhibits themselves.

5. It’s free. There is a suggested £3 donation, but it is not as insistent as such donations seem to be at other museums. For the patron like me, who visits only once every few years, this doesn’t really matter, but as I went through the museum, I noticed that some people came to eat their lunch, or when they had only an hour free.

6. It’s a museum that is more than a building. Of course, all museums try to integrate with the community, but the V&A offers seminars and lectures, integrates with schools, and provides an image database via the internet.

Some of these comments might seem to be sniping in part, but they shouldn’t be taken that way. Visiting the V&A remains an exciting experience for me. It’s hard to focus on one exhibit for too long, as the rest of the museum seems to want to pull you along to see more, and you are never quite sure what corners of the building have remained hidden away this time. There are a lot of museums and other tourist attractions that really are worth seeing in London, but next time you are in town, you should definitely add the V&A to your list.

The funny thing is that unlike many research conferences, you just don’t see that many laptops here. So, my guess is that the requirement that you go to a lab to use the computers was not an onerous one for many. For those of us who live our lives online, however, it was very difficult. Being disconnected from the “outside world” might seem like a good thing in some ways, allowing you to concentrate on the material at hand. But our need for access illustrated one of the points made by Sara Kiesler in her keynote. While the net and real world have always been interpenetrated, they are to such a great extent today that it is not possible to consider “the internet” as an object of study. (I’m not sure many people really have done that, but that’s beside the point.) It was really hard to coordinate even local events and keep up conversations without having networking available.

An immediate result of the wireless has been a lack of blogging even from the regular bloggers who were there, and there were many of us. This represented a lost opportunity for collaboration in at least one venue.

During one of the sessions on the last day of the conference, Nancy Baym, president of AIR, suggested that someone was going to set up a web page with postings related to the conference. This followed her request at one of the keynotes that people write up their notes and post them to the AIR-L list. I noted that Lilia had already set up a Topic Exchange channel to collect bloggers’ thoughts. At the end of the conference, I ran into Nancy again at Falmer Station. She noted that most of the posts so far were just complaining about the lack of access. “Don’t worry,” I said, “when people get back to somewhere with access they’ll post.” As I watched her cross over to the other platform, I thought: what a stupid thing to say.

When people get back to wherever they are going, chances are good that their minds will have switched gears and they will have more current things to post about. I am sitting on notes not only about AIR (which I will post since they are required reading for a class I’m teaching), but on notes from a conference on Informatics a week earlier. Blogging, as a practice, tends for many people to be off the cuff, and the values of timeliness that apply to journalists everywhere apply even moreso to bloggers; we operate on a 30 minute news cycle. I think it’s fair to assume that under those conditions, most people won’t post-post the conference.

More importantly, I think that most of the people who attended who were bloggers were looking for sessions that were blogging and social network-related. As a result, the view will be skewed toward those topics. And bloggers only record what they think is interesting which is often other bloggers.

In the end if AIR wants web publicity in Chicago next year, they will need to think about ways to make the conference more blog-friendly. It’s not really that hard: just make sure that there is a surfeit of Wifi and power. I get the feeling, though, that many of the old school researchers consider bloggers and blogging as somehow beneath their dignity. Maybe that is a misperception on my part, but I don’t think it is a difficult thing to read from them.

I think we need another conference. No, not another blogging conference — there is already BlogTalk and Kaye mentioned something was in the works for the Big Easy — but one that looks generally at the social edge experiments and the communication technologies that support them. Only presenters will attend, and there will be no parallel sessions. It will be somewhere sunny, with good food (I’m thinking Mexico here, or maybe somewhere Caribbean), with good Wifi and power, margaritas, and plenty of time to talk. All those in favor?

[With apologies to the fabulous Professor Walker for theft of her likeness.]

Local radio has been considered important for a long time. It allows for people to hear and learn about their local area, hear local artists, and generally helps to connect people within a community. Already, people have said that there is a death of distance when it comes to radio, because there are a limited number of formats across the US. You can turn on the radio in San Diego, and it will generally sound the same as if you were listening in Boston. There is value in local broadcasting, and some of the value has even been codified in law. We don’t want to lose it.

Some have suggested that the ideal is a number large-scale radio stations (or syndicated networks), along with small stations. Unfortunately, the financial pressures of finding advertisers makes it hard to stay in business as a small broadcaster. The nature of college broadcasting, usually subscriber-supported, has managed to keep most of them in business even as much of the industry has consolidated.

It makes sense that college broadcasters would want to go online. Not only can they attract an audience without worrying about getting expensive, more powerful transmitters, it is also a very good way of raising money for the station. Unlike the traditional telethon, users need only click and give, and as a result, they end up with more funds than they would otherwise.

Webcasting allows you to keep much closer track of how big an audience is, and where they are listening from, minute to minute. For directors, the temptation to tune your programming to react to that newly visible audience is very strong.

So what happens when college radio goes from local to global by broadcasting on the Web? Will the new audience shape the content of the news in new ways? Will you have to serve a broad audience who is not interested in local musicians or college sports teams? Park decided to interview directors of college radio stations to see whether this was already happening. He did hour-long interviews with ten directors, and numerous other shorter interviews.

His worries, it turns out, were unfounded for now. Even though webcasting has been around for several years, most listeners remain within the standard broadcast area–they just prefer to listen on the computer. The formats on the radio haven’t changed much during this period, at least from the perspective of those doing the programming.

They did raise two interesting issues though. Many of the out-of-area folks are actually alumni, who leave town but still want to listen to the old station. This could be good, since it raises cohesiveness, but it could also lead to more conservative, unchanging programming. Old listeners may not want to see the station change, while in the broadcast model, the audience “cycles” every four years or so.

The other noted item was that the webcast attracted a lot of listeners overnight, when it was daytime in Japan and elsewhere. One possible future for webcast college radio is that it would broadcast for a more local audience during the day, and a more global audience at night.

This raises the question more generally, I think, of how the change in the delivery system, including the reach and capabilities of the new medium, might affect the content more generally. How will big radio react? What is the future for this new form of broadcasting?

I am now just coming off a short lunch break at the meeting on web archiving in the board room of the British Library. I am not much one for the whole “liveblogging” thing, as I’ve noted before. I like to give things a chance to stick. Unfortunately, since I had to walk off an airplane to this meeting (I could really use a shower!), so I’m afraid I might forget some of this. There is a great group of researchers here, and some interesting ideas being passed around. I would have thought my blog-centric views on archiving would have failed to find an audience among the library-centric folks here. There is, in fact a difference in the way librarians and more blogcentric people think about archiving, but there is more interest in sharing ideas than I might have expected. The major difficulties, if any, seem to revolve around vocabularies (e.g., what constitutes “metadata”). Many of the ideas I presented in my talk had already come out in some form. The biggest thing people seemed interested in was furl.

Lots of people presented their ideas, I probably should go into more detail here, but I’m not going to. Steve Schneider talked a bit about his experience with coordinating thematic archives, and systems that facilitate this process. Paul Koerbin talked about the Pandora project. Lots of good comments from folks. Pierre Levy once again presented on his ideas towards a universal semantic category system.

After lunch, we are discussing some of the “use cases” on which he national archive will work. Quickly, we get into some pretty wild requests. This is an interesting approach: demonstrating the cases and getting feedback rather than talking about specifications. Frankly, though, the front end is less important to me than revealing the internals.

The main hangup seems to be how to select what should be archived. It’s a little like “what three records would you take with you if you were going to be stranded on an island?” What on the Web really matters enough that the national libraries should be going out and saving it. Steve Schneider, later at the conference, noted that the question was really between prospective needs of scholars, and retrospective needs. The retrospective needs are really important, but extremely hard to predict. My opinion is that the best thing to do is be very receptive to what scholars want archived now and hope that this also counts toward the future.

A comment by Torill Mortensen got us talking about archiving not just the web, but the total experience of the web. At a very basic level, this means holding on to the software that is being used, either by storing machines or emulating them. But she was particular interested in the question of how to document the kind of information and social ecology that exists around the web. Many of us today have been using broadband exclusively for so long we can’t even imagine dial up speeds (or the old 110/300 switchable bps modems). We need to be able to understand what the web was, not just what it contained.

Why not a Wikipedia of rafts, a mob riverboat? Designate somewhere on the Mississippi, maybe Minneapolis. Fix a date and a place, and take all comers. They can bring any salvaged material that is enough to float themselves and another person (and that they don’t mind never seeing again), and necessary provisions. Then make your way down the old Miss, picking up people along the way. End it with a huge party when we hit the Gulf of Mexico.

Has this already been done? It would only require a skeleton crew, some scrap lumber, and a cheap motor to get rolling, I’d think, and could accommodate as many people as were willing to give it a whirl. Maybe next June? The USS Snowcrash?

It started snowing last night and didn’t stop. I should be in a taxi right now headed for my hotel in New York, but instead, I am sitting waiting for the plane to arrive. I should be thrilled to have wireless, happy that Jet Blue has an amazingly pleasant staff, and pleased that Buffalo-Niagara International is relatively comfortable, compared to some airports. But all I can think is how much I’d rather be at home right now. Or on the beach–that would be OK too.

There are a score of professors at UB who make the commute from NYC. It doesn’t sound that bad in the abstract. The flight in only a bit more than an hour, when everything goes just right. But how bad would this be if you faced it throughout the winter?

Update(12/16): It’s not that Jet Blue does anything all that earth shattering–serving drinks at the gate, individual TV screens at the seats, professional staff who are polite because they seem like they want to be and smile like they actually like their jobs, a woman pilot (it seems funny that this is here, but I can’t remember the last time I heard a female voice from the cockpit), a few extra inches of knee room, a sense that design is a part of good service, frequent flights to useful places, and a reasonable and clear pricing scheme. The first question is how they have managed to stay in business, but the real question is how anyone else does.

And it’s a long way to Buffalo.
It’s a long way to Belfast City too.
And i’m hoping the choice won’t blow the hoist
‘cos this town, they bit off more than they can chew.
– Van Morrison

Off to Toronto for IR4.0, to present an outline on blog research (pdf). I’ve stolen an idea from Steve Jones, and made sure that my slides (Powerpoint) have little to do with my actual narrative. Possible light blogging ahead.