The verdict is in (day 227)

When Skype came along it seemed like a good idea and it was.  Even older and regular folk use it, they love the video chat.  It keeps families in touch.  Great.  Can't argue with that.   When Twitter came along I never had the thought it was a good idea.  And I routinely hear regular folk say 'why would I want to do that?' in reference to Twitter.  Like it or not, Twitter has a ambiguous value proposition.  Even when you're on it you wonder what it might be.  Like Google Wave, it suffers from being a solution without a well distributed problem.   I think my experiment with Twitter is done, and my conclusion is that there is simply not enough content to keep me interested.  There is too much to wade through and the effort to sort it all out is not worth it in the end.  I'd rather keep up with my RSS feeds and get more in depth content.  The last piece of evidence to let go of Twitter was deliberately being without it for a week.  I felt better without it.  I logged on again briefly to see the difference and I immediately felt triage stress.  I do enough information triage during a regular day.  I don't need more of it.  I need less.  I need the Amazon recommendation engine for the chatter of my friends.  Either that or I need to seriously constrain the friend definition.

I'm a big fan of Google Reader.  There are probably lots of equivalent services out there but the basic idea is that I read my feeds and if I like something I share it with my friends.  They do the same.  It's a nice way to see what everyone else has triaged.  It's distributed triage.  Typically the volume is fairly low so it doesn't add a lot of work to see what they've shared.  I can also keep my own lists of things I thought were interesting.  There are two differences between Google Reader and Twitter that keep me with the Reader.  It's lower volume, and deeper content.  There is something so contrived about the restricted number of characters to a Twitter post.  You can be as clever as you want, it still comes out like half a thought if the underlying context is at all rich.    So for now I'm with RSS and I'm shunning Twitter.  We'll see if peer pressure changes this in the future.  I'm certainly in good company it seems.

Still beyond a tool vs tool diatribe, what is it that I really want out of information tools?

• I don't want to be presented with irrelevant information or idle chatter.
• I want the information to be linked with interests that I've already flagged either implicitly or explicitly.  
• I want to know what my friends are thinking but not necessarily in real-time.
• In fact, I rarely want information as a push mechanism.  I prefer to pull my info.
• I want ambient displays for the creative works that my friends are involved with.
• I want to know about events that are connected to my close friends, or my community.
• I don't want to be invited to events outside of my geographical area.
• I don't want to be invited to be a fan of anything.
• I want easy direct channels for personal requests.
• I want in depth reporting of current events.
• I want time-stamped dynamic geo-tagged information on demand.

 A song for this post.

One for the birds (day 178)

I mentioned the birds yesterday.  They are so loud and diverse sometimes that I feel like I'm surrounded, like I'm in a steam bath of birdsong.  I can't hear anything else.  What I didn't mention is that someone on twitter told me that a biologist friend of theirs says that half the bird calls are warnings.  I was shocked by this.  Could it be that what sounds like joyful songs to me are actually cries of fear?  Could I be so oblivious?  But I shook it off.  It's highly unlikely that this is the case because that would mean that a large flock of birds is not moving from their tree despite being in a perpetual state of panic.  If it's so frightful to be there surely they'd find another spot.  I have seen them panic when an eagle flies by.  The songs stop and only a few call and then they leave or go in pursuit.  Needless to say this reasoning was too long for 140 characters, so I let the tweet go unreplied.

I recorded some of the birds on Friday.  Here is an excerpt.  Hopefully I don't get a comment from a biologist telling me these birds are utterly unhappy and predicting a stock market crash.

A song for this post.

The almighty untethers us (day 130)

Something unusual happened today.  I learned of a current news event from Twitter before I learned it from anywhere else.  This is in part because I haven't been scanning my usual news sources and I've been at home but it's also because so many people twittered about it, in various forms.  I eventually had to pay attention.  My feeds, they are changing.

The ReadWriteWeb blog recently posted that RSS feeds were dead.  A brave and controversial thing to write.  Turns out I wasn't the only one that thought so.  There were many many comments from people that still rely on RSS feeds.  I was glad because when I first read the post I totally felt behind the times.  "But I still love my RSS feeds!", I wimpered.  It felt a little bit like coming back from sixth great summer break and finding out that my favourite game was now uncool.  The memo hadn't reached me in time for me to avoid making a fool of myself.   Thankfully RSS feeds are not dead and RWW had to capitulate.

The news that had people all atwitter is almost as exciting as my feeds changing - Google has announced the latest Android phone and it's not tied to a carrier.  It's the last part that's amazing.  That's right, you buy the phone and you can use it on any network!!!  This should not be such a gift because it should have been the norm all along, but there it is - a gift from mother Google.  I have no idea if any of this will be valid in Canada but it's only a matter of time.   This means that my previous rant may be moot in a year or two when carriers will be forced to compete for my phone's attention.  Take that Bell/Telus/Rogers.

A song for this post.

Tribal misbehaviour (day 89)

Today on my twitter feed there was a news article about being tweckled.  A nice word that belies the extent of damage it can bring.  It's basically bullying on a mass scale in a conference backchannel.  If someone is daring to bore you at a conference you can blow off steam by insulting the speaker with your closest backchannel friends, loudly, in the public twittersphere.  The backchannel group referred to in the article, retrospectively feels justified based on the grounds that the speaker was obviously disrespecting them so they had the right to disrespect them right back.   In the moment, I doubt the thinking even went that far if anywhere at all. Another oft-stated argument was that this is the new world and you better come prepared to face the backchannel.   It rewards richly and punishes harshly.  It's the new world.  Hardly.  It's the gauntlet, revisited.  I've seen this behaviour in snowboarding terrain parks too.  It's not so new.  It's, in fact, as old as the hills.

As evidence of their good nature, they pointed out that they had collectively bought a new laptop for someone in their group who had lost theirs. Seems to be the same tribal behaviour flipped over.  I wonder which felt better.  It's a real question.

There is so much to say about why their tribal misbehaviour and lesser forms of it is harmful.  Part of me refuses to even spend the time thinking about it.  My high horses are so ready to ride but the real argument is based on a humble principle of generosity.

'the world owes me nothing, we owe each other the world'.  -- Ani Di Franco

A song for this post.

How tweetly they fall (day 78)

I've been on Twitter for a few days now so I feel qualified to give my first impressions as someone who resisted the very idea of Twitter for so long.   I got an account and got into a strange loop when adding contacts such that all the contacts that it gathered from my gmail were included in my follow list.  No big deal I figured, I'll just prune later.  Well it turns out that most of them got an email from Twitter saying I was following them.   I surmised that this was the case when I started getting emails saying they were following me back.  This was somewhat disconcerting.  I wanted more control right off the bat.   Then I downloaded TweetDeck for the iPhone and logged on.  I immediately got overwhelmed by the number of letters on the screen and proceeded to ignore Twitter for a few days.  Then I installed TweetDeck on my macbook and things seemed more manageable and I noticed someone had written me a message, which helped.   I started tweeting a bit and doing some searches.  Kinda fun but with a certain amount of discomfort coming from a general lack of understanding of the Twitter language -- the format that things need to be in to properly direct, credit, and link tweets.  Compound that with the use of SMS type of abbreviated words and it becomes a lot to absorb all at once.  Half the time I think I'm doing it wrong and that I'm pissing off lots of old timers.   I screwed up a couple times but there is a delete tweet button so I could redo.

Twitter has a different feel than Facebook, must more about conversation and little observations, less about media collection or persona building.  It's more about linking people together around topics, than around pre-existing cliques.  I am following people that I don't know based on recommendations and searches.  So far I feel that Twitter is more about expanding your network than keeping your existing network up to date.  There is less commitment there than 'friending' someone so it's not such a big decision to link to someone.   Of course one of the biggest differences there is that you can follow without the other person's permission (though there are safeguards).

Sometimes it feels a bit like a cross between messaging or  texting.

I'm still learning the etiquette around twittering.   It feels like it's worth a learn and that's somewhat surprising to me.  But Facebook has taken a back seat.  It already was getting squeezed out but now even more so.  I don't like people that crosspost from Twitter to Facebook.  Seems like an intrusion.  I don't want to be that person.   We'll see if even that barrier falls.

A song for this post.

I'm not in love (day 63)

I used to fall in love with technology easily and deeply.  New gadgets, new tools, new languages, they all  triggered enough interest and hope that I would just fall in, willingly believing that they would change everything.  There are books that end in that phrase.  How x changes everything.   I still fall in love.  Now though I don't feel the love back in the way I used to and I lose interest a bit faster.  Sometimes I resist falling in love.  I don't love Twitter and Twitter doesn't love me.  It's a shallow conviction.  I will eventually get a Twitter account, if only to steep in a new crowd language for a time.  I appreciate that the online culture has fallen in love with social media.  I picture it in my head and I see the fascination in our eyes, the infatuation.  It's sweet and naive and joyful all at the same time.   What I don't love is everything becoming a nail to be hammered by social media.  This too shall pass.  I'm looking for the next stage.  If we've been solipsistic, perhaps we need to have a call and response situation.  I heard the term 'sentient city' today.   The holy grail of being heard is when the city responds automatically.  The grand telematics experiment.  It might evolve into a kind of SimVanCity where popular beliefs and desires are mocked up and tried out before being moved into the physical world.  It might be a mixture of virtual and real.  The idea of a more direct response to our social participation is attractive.  I'm not in love yet, but I could be.

A song for this post.

@irk (day 54)

I'm @annoyed at all @the @$*%*( @tagging that's going @on.   Seriously I can't read people's posts without being cognitively interrupted all the time.  Is it me?  Am I just programmed to pause at an @?  Is my inner voice too loud?  What, if, I put, commas, everywhere, would, that be the, same?  Yup, seems to be.   But the @ has the additional annoyance of being visually prominent.    I have to learn to relax with the @.  Love it, view it as decoration to be skipped or acknowledged after the fact.   Part of a well written text is the fact that it disappears.  I love the lilt of a good turn of phrase.   I love the flow of a nicely timed sentence.  So far the @ destroys that for me.  This annoyance was partially triggered by the cross-posting from twitter to facebook.  In the twitter world the @ has a function that is definitely not the same in Facebook.  I think of a post on FB as being addressed to everyone, but what sometimes happens with cross-posted tweets is that certain people are named or it's obviously a response to something and it feels like it ended up on my FB feed by accident.   Like receiving an invite to a party that's not addressed to you.   It's visual and cognitive noise.

ta@

A song for this rant.

There's more here (day 47)

Geotagging is hot.  I like the idea of say Twitter being geotagged a lot except it brings up a bit of anxiety about being too public.  This is different than the stage fright I felt when I opened my first blog nine years ago.  At that time I was afraid of the judgment, not so much people knowing too much.  That fear came later when it became obvious that the internet does not easily forget.   Geotagged twitter or any immediately broadcast note service is like painting graffiti out in the open.  It better be good and/or sanctioned.    It brings up so many issues of what one may do with a simple lat long.  If that lat long happens to index government land,  are there restrictions on what you can say?  What about a mall or a store?   Owners of that spot will want to control what gets posted.

Geotagging is an extension of the 'i like it, i don't like it' principle to place which in some ways makes it much more personal.   Still I can see so many good things that could happen.  Favourite places can be highlighted with instructions about where to look, history sliders could highlight the changes in that place, stories of that place, replays of the last year's tweets to/on that place, songs tagged to that place.   It really could be little treasures to be found on an ordinary stop somewhere.  Ordinary magic really.   People could leave compliments about each other's houses or garden (I know I'm heading fast into Utopia).   The landscape could respond with subtle clues that geotagged content would complement the experience if we let it.  

The upshot is that we leave traces of ourselves as a matter of daily life and it's being extended into the digital and then back into the physical.   Geo-tagged visualizations will be interesting: as always aesthetically pleasing aggregators will be great gifts.   I think sound will also play an important role in how we become aware that a certain place is rich with content.   Still the issue of forgetting remains.  In real life traces fade and biodegrade.  Not so in the geotagged world.  Maybe forgetting is just something we selectively apply to data as a matter of habit and ethic.

A song for this post.

Did I just help you? (day 27)

I have a dilemma.  Do I bring my computer to the Okanagan this weekend so I can write on the blog and not miss a day even though I can't upload (no internet connection), or do I just declare a blog vacation due to a broadband accident?  My obsessive side says bring the computer, there may actually be some cool stuff that happens in the OK.   My adventurous side says no don't bring the computer, do something completely different.  Maybe I'll bring the computer for the option and then see what I feel like when I get there.

Today I went to a great talk at Emily Carr about collaboration.   Jer Thorpe and Simon Levin talked about their projects,  including 'Just Landed', 'Big Picture', 'Glocal', and 'CodeLab'.  An interesting question came up at the end of Jer's talk about the definition of collaboration and whether it is truly a collaborative action to create an art piece or a visualization from data that was contributed freely but with no specific intent toward the author of the visualization or otherwise.   For example. 'Just Landed' takes data from the twitter feed and scans for words that would indicate someone has just arrived in a new location.  The application then looks up where that twitter author comes from and deduces the start and end point of travel in order to visualize it as a dynamic path.   The vast majority of twitter authors whose data was used have no idea the visualization exists.  Is this ok?  For this visualization, I would say yes it's fine and it's wonderful that it was made possible and most people would be pleased to have contributed without having to do anything extra.   The data in 'Just Landed' was anonymized so issues of privacy didn't occur.   But there is a line to be drawn I believe.   That line might just be begged by visualizations because their specific purpose is to make visible derivative data --- trends and patterns.   So while we contribute all kinds of tidbits about ourselves we may not want anyone analyzing that data for things about us that we would rather remain private.  This exact case came up recently when MIT students announced that they could deduce someone's sexual orientation by their list of friends on Facebook.  Well maybe, but should you?  And should you announce that?  In any case, the question remains.  Should there be a pingback when your twitter data gets analyzed for patterns?  Sounds like a logistical nightmare.

The one thing to celebrate is perhaps the overall collaborative intent of sharing such volumes of information.   We obviously didn't have the worst in mind when we slipped into the experiment that is social networking.  That's human nature, and I like that part of it.

Until Tomorrow or Monday,

A song for this post.