8/6/2004
A selection of rather wonderful student projects, with lots of creativity and skill and obvious enjoyment:
- Sykkelturen 2004: Documenting and promoting three lads cycling from the North Cape to Sicily.
- Turan.dot: A presentation of the opera.
- Project Mayhem: A fiction piece (thank goodness) about three blokes planning, well, mayhem. I think they robbed a bank on May 17. Must have been very successful since the papers didn’t report it. I’m particularly happy that a group tried their hands at a real electronic narrative.
- Baltisk biltur: A guide to the Baltic told as fictional postcards sent home with facts along the way.
- Gatekunst.net: Grafitti, tagging and stencils from the streets of Bergen.
- Magasin for etterpåklokskap: A scientific journal for, well, hindsight.
- You think you know…: A charmingly chaotic concoction of girltalk about being girls, boys , sex and flirtation.
I’ll post the complete list to the class blog soon - there’s a lot of good work been done!
Filed under:teaching — Jill @ 8:22 pm
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7/6/2004
‘nother article about blog fiction. Via Lisbeth. No blogging till tasks completed. Link only. Be good. Work hard.
Filed under:General — Jill @ 10:55 pm
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finalise curriculum for autumn’s course on networked culture
send compendium for autumn’s course to Studia for copyingfinish gradingdiscuss grades with external examinerfill out grade formspackedit paragraphs for funding app.mow lawndo dishes- empty rubbish bin and purge fridge of perishables
- and definitely not least:
prepare panel presentation!!!
The list of stuff I’ve already done is far longer than this list. Could be far worse.
Filed under:General — Jill @ 8:16 pm
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6/6/2004
“I’m so glad to have you around,” she says, just as I start to tell her I’m leaving again. “You spend more time away than at home,” she says accusingly, but still brings in my mail, lovingly sorting it into neat piles of ads, circulars and bills. Each time I return she climbs the stairs more slowly, softly, pausing to tell me how adorable my daughter is and how frightened she is to see her climb so high. She can’t eat, weighs just 39 kilos now, she says, the thinness of her voice slipping away. Each morning she asks me “Did I keep you awake last night?” Each morning I smile a no, not at all, I slept like a log. How unfair that her coughs torment her, alone.
Filed under:images — Jill @ 7:19 pm
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I’d been looking forward to time alone. I always do. Time to get that work done, time to take care of all the details, time to go for a run and to lie on the sofa lazy and quite sure nobody will come and want me to look play read admire come do help but then of course she leaves and all that time just feels empty and I’m quite alone. Last night I wrote a farewell speech from my colleagues to myself on the occasion of my retiring party in 30 or 35 years. Looking forwards towards hindsight it is far easier to filter out all the things that I don’t want to do today, that I shouldn’t do today. I’m not quite ready to spell them out in public yet, though. I know enough to see that I’m a long way from understanding enough about academia to know exactly how to manoeuvre my way through all the people and details and demands. I’m leaving details and demands behind in a couple of days (after checking off a lot of items on lists) for a conference, and after that, several weeks with time to look play read admire come do help love a long way from work.
Filed under:General, working in a university — Jill @ 7:00 pm
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5/6/2004
Reading that Google recommends a single webpage has a “reasonable number of links (fewer than 100)", Gina made a bookmarklet that’ll tell you how many links a page you’re reading has. This page, before I post this post, has far too many links.
I like linking.
Filed under:hypertext, links and power — Jill @ 4:25 pm
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The FBI has subpoenaed several artists and art professors after Steve Kurtz was detained and had his (biological) art supplies confiscated. The FBI is using the US Patriot act’s paragraphs against bioterrorism. The mailing lists are abuzz (rhizome, fibreculture, nettime etc) - many people in the electronic art field know these people personally and are extremely worried. Others (such as myself) only know RTmark, the site publicising this, as a site of many a hoax, where they “shift identities, [hide] their artistic practice as Duchamp did…declaring what they’re doing as non-art” (Rachel Greene: Internet Art, p 95). After dozens of scams, I’m sceptical, ya know, and this fits so glibly into a current narrative mould for explaining the universe (scary big brother government idiotically but terrifyingly attacks innocents) that emails without mainstream media backup or personal connections had me wondering. Others have pointed out that though this is a serious and frightening case, there are artists and activists detained and abused daily in less affluent countries and nothing like the current fuss about it. It’s mainstreamed now, with several journalists having contacted the people involved, and it sounds quite appalling. I signed the support letter, and perhaps you would like to, too?
Filed under:General — Jill @ 10:52 am
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3/6/2004
Here are the links for my talk today in Trondheim, with a very brief summary.
In the days of mass media (newspapers, radio, television) you could get away with sending a message to your audience and stopping there. With the internet you need to think conversation, not mass distribution. We “don’t read online", but the average Norwegian reads online for 30 minutes a day - between 60 and 80 minutes a day if you only count Norwegians who regularly use the internet. Usually we don’t just read, we want to write as well. A lot of our time online is spent seeking out other people who share our interests. Maybe you’re pregnant - you’ll search for other expectant parents because your friends close to home will be sick to death of your single-mindedness. Maybe you miscarried - find blogs written by women in your situation with blogrolls consisting of dozens of other women fighting the battle you’re fighting yourself. Join mailing lists, add your voice to the scores of comments, write your own blog and add your friends to your own blogroll. Blogs are interconnected and search engines read links as peer endorsement. Blogs are written in a human voice (Cluetrain Manifesto). Whether you choose to take part in a conversation on your website, or you choose to create a space that allows a conversation to grow forth (Amazon, dikt.no, Newgrounds, Dagbladet) remember that the age of mass broadcast is past. Sometimes just being able to see that other people are here too (Rhizome) really makes a difference. Derek Powazek’s Design for Community is a book that has a lot of ideas about and case studies of online communities.
Filed under:talks — Jill @ 12:31 pm
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I was showing the community stuff at Amazon.com during my talk today when I noticed something that wasn’t there yesterday: “Jill’s Plog,” my personalised amazon blog. I’m not convinced it’ll do anything that Amazon doesn’t already do, but whatever:
Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we’ll post it to your Plog.
The notion of “blog” is expanding.
Filed under:General — Jill @ 12:26 pm
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2/6/2004
I didn’t understand why a denial of February allegations of an affair with Kerry was on the top ten at Blogdex until I got well into the article. It’s written by Alex Polier, the young journalist who was falsely said to have had an affair with Kerry, and she doesn’t just write her version of the story, she investigates how the rumour was spread. Some important journalists and politicians spread it without knowing whether it was true or not:
“I regret it,” he says now. “I read it in the paper, I heard it gossiped about, but I didn’t do anything like reporting. I joked about it on the Internet in a way I would at dinner. Then I learned the Net is like print, not like dinner.” (David Frum, qtd by Polier)
But further back, the rumour wasn’t even started by any individual. A blogger flippantly claimed that an affair between Kerry and an intern would be leaked next week, and journalists followed up by searching until they found the most likely intern, without bothering to check whether there was any evidence of an actual affair.
It was becoming clearer: No single person had to have engineered this. First came a rumor about Kerry, then a small-time blogger wrote about it, and his posting was read by journalists. They started looking into it, a detail that was picked up by Drudge—who, post-Monica, is taken seriously by other sites like Wonkette, which no political reporter can ignore. I was getting a better education in 21st-century reporting than I had gotten at Columbia J-school. (Polier, page 5)
Polier blames the internet for the speed with which the rumour took root: “I am struck by the pitiful state of political reporting, which is dominated by the unholy alliance of opposition research and its latest tool, the Internet.” Perhaps she’s right. Maybe it spread faster. With less research. Good and bad.
Filed under:net culture — Jill @ 9:33 pm
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