jill/txt

[don’t localise me]

Morning horror: I type google.com into the URL field of my browser and get a Norwegian version! Google has started to forceably redirect anyone who goes to google.com while in Norway to their new Norwegian site: google.no.

They did this in Australia two years ago, and I hated it. How dare they assume that they know what I want! I’m perfectly capable of typing in google.no if I really want the Norwegian version. How about trusting that if I type google.com I actually WANT the .com version?

Thank goodness, after a few minutes, I find a “Google in English” link, click it, and they reset my cookies so that from here on I get google.com when I type google.com - with a persistent link to “Google in Norwegian". I suppose that’s OK. Maybe even helpful. I found no such out from the Australian Google two years ago. But you know, I’m a nomad, I don’t want localisation. I want to be able to travel and know that the web will look the same from whereever I am.

[found life]

I found some of your life: someone found a memory card from a camera in a taxi, and is posting a photo a day, narrating as though he’s the photographer. Ethically really iffy (would you like it if it was your photos?) but such a cool idea!

[embarrassing searches]

I’m not going to get away from it, realistically, am I? Amazon gives you a discount if you use their A9 search engine - which disconcertingly remembers not just my name, but also a couple of slightly embarrassing searches I did in 2003. Google probably already stores every search I do, anyway, given Blogger recognises me by name when I go there and Google owns Blogger. (Btw, A9 isn’t a new search engine. It uses the Google algorithm, but displays stuff differently.)

I must remember to use the SwitchProxy extension to Firefox and go via an anonymous proxy next time I want to do an embarrassing search.

[download radio]

IT Conversations looks like a nice alternative to radio: download interviews with people talking about blogging and the web and listen to them on your iPod. Jorunn recommends Halley Suitt’s interview with David Weinberger, while noting how unfamiliar his voice was to her, despite having read his blog for years (and she’s even translated one of his books to Norwegian).

I couldn’t help noticing that Halley seems to be the only woman on the site. Oh, Mena Trott’s in a joint interview with her husband, which is good, but infuriating (women are palatable if they come with a man?) Apart from that, the only interviewees are men. Of course, it’s billed as a one-person labour of love, and obviously an individual is free to interview whoever he or she pleases, but I’m so tired of the invisibility of women…

[rights reserved]

No online streamed mainstream radio during the Olympic Games - due to rights restrictions. No BBC World Service, anyway, and no Radio Australia either. You can still listen to selected archives of programs, but no news. Ah well.

[if Bush blogged]

According to the highly reputable and most reliable news source The Onion, the CIA wishes Bush would quit blogging:

“Right now, the president insists it’s his right to have it, as long as he doesn’t work on it during White House work hours,” McLaughlin said. “But I believe we’ll be able to convince him, if we let him calm down. And even if we don’t, frankly, I can’t see the blog holding his interest for too long.”

Right ;)

[recommendations]

Sometimes Amazon.com’s recommendations are pretty surreal…

[teach yourself disco dancing]

Via Anders: Learn disco dancing the Finnish way! Very useful.

[easter!]

Have a hip-hoppy Easter!

[uninvited]

Thormod, one of my students, posted a cryptic link to this in his blog, writing nothing but “I think Jill will like this". He’s quite right. I do.

What is it? It’s The Uninvited. What’s that? Hang on, I think you’ll enjoy it more if you look at it before you read about what it is. Go on. Choose truth, then look at loss, memory, belief before going for the more factual parts. I almost cried at loss, primed by the theme of mothers and lost children, I was swayed by the repetitive music, the words spoken in a foreign language and the visually delightful subtitles, by the simple interactivity. Such a simple technique: a woman’s silhouette, pacing in a browser window, following your cursor. When you click (as words attached to your cursor beg you to do) a new, smaller window appears. You click again, and the window shrinks, and keeps shrinking, till the woman begs you to get her out of there, but there’s nothing you can do but keep clicking or abandon her and the site and so you click until she’s on her knees frantic because the window is too small for her to stand in and then she disappears.

You want facts? OK: it’s the Flash promotion site of a Korean film called The Uninvited, by B.O.M.film. The film only has a very minimal listing in the IMDB, and there’s not much information about it in English. Apparently it’s depressing. The film is about a man who sees the ghosts of dead children at his dining room table, and a young woman whose child was killed and whose narcolepsy causes her to falls asleep at odd moments. The website is partially factual and elegantly informational. These are not the best bits of the site. The promotion site won an award at Flashforward 2004, which coincidentally has links to lots of other interesting-looking Flash projects.

[don’t iron, and by the way…]

These bags have funny care labels.

[odd]

I might redesign the first page of this weblog to be more like this.

[stumbleupon]

I’ve been meaning to blog this for weeks: Stumbleupon. Sign up, add a toolbar to your browser (not Safari or Explorer for Macs; use Firefox or Mozilla instead) and click a thumbs up when you like a website. It’ll store the bookmark. Add a comment if you like. It’ll generate a blog for you, consisting of all your comments on websites you find, and it’ll collate the comments in connection with the site you commented on, so you can see other people’s comments too. Cooler: click the Stumble button on your new toolbar and you’ll arrive at a random site that people who liked the sites you liked liked. Dig deeper if you want and manually add people to your social network: friends or just people who’ve liked a lot of the same sites as you like. Join groups according to your interest, and get sites related to the groups. I suspect there’s more too, that I haven’t even discovered yet. I’m only just starting to use this.

But I love being able to click Stumble now and then. A lot of the sites I Stumbleupon are just the sort of sites I like.

This is the first time I’ve seen social networks used as a non-obtrusive foundation for something I want to do anyway. Friendster and Orkut and the rest just do the social network but it’s not for anything, you just collect friends, that’s all. Flickr lets you do something: share and discuss photos, using social networking as a basis. That’s cool, and is great for photoaddicts, but I don’t really have great unfulfilled photosharing needs. I do enjoy finding cool stuff on the web. Stumbleupon nicely does what I already do only better. And more socially. I love that.

My Stumbleupon name is Jill (fancy that) so my profile is at http://jill.stumbleupon.com/.

[ping pong]

Oh and this is hilarious: ping pong theatre in the style of Hong Kong fighting movies. Or a fight in The Matrix.

[låtlån]

Norwegians with Windows98se or newer, certain other software, a broadband net connection and a library card at Deichmanske bibliotek in Oslo or at Bergen Public Library can now “borrow” music from Phonofile’s collection of music with Norwegian copyright holders. The music is streamed to you when you “borrow” it, and only one person can listen to any song at any one time. Låtlån is a trial project that will last for six months. Pity it’s not open platform. (via Eirik)

[scholarship that uses the medium]

I’ve no time to read this now but it looks interesting: The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities. It’s a historical article, but not written in the conventional sequential way. It presents a summary, data, statements and ways of viewing it all. (via an Educause article that Matt linked to)

[makeover blogs]

There are makeover blogs, too, of course. Not merely The Date Project, but Tales of a Bathroom Scale or Searching for Mister Close to Right or Manhunting, possibly not recently updated because a man was found?

[tiny videos]

This is a wonderful month of daily tiny videos, Flashed, put together by Atsuko Uda and Aya Fukuda for Telenor in 2001, in Kabelvåg. Poke at the videos. (via Anders)

[googlehack]

Oh, now that’s an elegant version of a google bomb. The top hit on Google for “Bush’s foreign friends” is an art project faking Google search results. So if you do that search and click “I’m feeling lucky” you might, as I did, for a short while believe that Google has a mind of its own.

The creator of this is Douwe Osinga, who has a lot of other interesting art and poetry projects, many of which use Google. He also has a list of creative Google hacks, the latest of which will let you search for things that happened on a particular date. And since Google’s date search isn’t very good, your results won’t be those you’ll read in the history books. There’s also a weblog.

[barcode me]

That’s me. A barcode that tells you everything you’d ever want to know about me. My body, memories and ideas compressed into impeccable machine-readable format. If you feel the urge to store yourself for posterity, generate your own barcode now. Or you could, I suppose, look at other barcode art.

[lost doll]

Aw…. A little girl lost her doll a week or two ago at Disney on Ice in Oslo, and her parents set up a website and started an email chain to help find it - I haven’t seen the doll, but perhaps you have?

[sprayblogg]

Eirik Newth writes about Sprayblogg.no, a Norwegian service that makes it really easy to set up a blog and you can easily post to your blog by sending an SMS or MMS.

[invulnerable]

Ah. The Mac Observer actually moved on from the “Macs don’t get infected by computer viruses” and tried to figure out how many viruses actually exist for Macs. Out of 71000 known viruses, there are 553 Microsoft Word Macro viruses which could affect Mac users using Word, there are 26 that can hit Mac Classic operating systems, and there are zero known viruses that target OS X.

We’re like Superman. Impervious. Ha.

[soul sold?]

The students had written about apple.com and microsoft.com, and today we added screenshots. The first group happily cut, paste, saved and uploaded screenshots of webpages almost identical to the ones we saw two days ago, Apple showing iPods instead of iLife, Microsoft having added a few more stock photos of smiling white people. An hour later the second group screamed in horror when they saw that apple.com had changed, a lot: Pepsi bottles all over the screen? “Why on earth are they advertising for Pepsi?", the students asked. Tom Henrik had heard something on the news last night about Pepsi doing deals with all the cool kids, but strategy or not, this website looks ugly. And I love my Mac and hate Pepsi. I don’t want my Mac dirtied by a connection like that!

[silly evenings]

One of my students (Helge? Eirik? I remember where they were sitting…) told the class that Dagbladet.no, major Norwegian newspaper site, emphasises serious news before six pm and silly news and games after six. Explains a lot. Would anyone know of a seriousish reference for this?

[science fiction citations]

The Oxford English Dictionary is brilliant for finding examples of how words have been used in literature, but it’s not so hot for science fiction and network terms. The digital meaning of “avatar” isn’t in there at all, for instance. To remedy this, volunteers, fans and OED freelancers are collecting citations of the usage of science fiction terms, asking for information from all of us, and hoping to incorporate some of this material in future editions of the OED. If you’re curious about a word Science Fiction Citations is a useful, though incomplete, source. Or perhaps you’d just like to browse?

[same difference]

I don’t know, I really can’t see that much difference between the “before” and “after” photos at awfulplasticsurgery, another single-topic blog. Don’t most people look radically different from photo from photo anyway?

[music]

Musikkonline.no sells digital copies of music (9,50 NOK a song) where copyright is held by Norwegian companies. Ridiculously they’re not selling them as mp3s, but insist that you use Windows 98 or newer, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. Still, if you’re into that kind of stuff, you might want to pop by during their celebration of the 75th anniversary of Tono, because during that week (24-29/11) you’ll be allowed to download their music for free.

Phonofile is another Norwegian service that lets you buy mp3s, but which is primarily targeted at professional users. It seems that you can quite easily buy the rights to reuse the music there too, which could make things easier for artists and others who want to use other peoples’ music in their own productions. Oh, and yes, they’re the same company that lost that case trying to stop a portal from linking to filesharing software.

[beware]

Three students in Sydney are facing jail sentences for having shared mp3s on the web. A primary piece of evidence against them is the essay the student who started the filesharing site wrote for his information technology law course. The essay topic was “open source software licensing". (via Fibreculture, where the discussion continues)

A few days ago, Shelley Powers got a phone call from the tax authorities: they’d read her blog and used statements she’d made there as (informal) evidence that she should be able to pay more than she was paying.

Because we always write the truth and nothing but the truth in term papers and blogs, don’t we?

[prom]

I got invited to the Prom! Goodness. What shall I wear?

[mobile video blogging]

The Danish site albinogorilla.dk lets you set up blogs you update from your phone - and claims to be the first service to allow not only text and images but also video, from your phone, of course. Can’t find a blog with video yet, though.

[sales]

This had me roaring with laughter. The way the seller’s font gets bigger and bigger as his frustration mounts is especially moving: Ebay listing for “Collection of 26 Beanie Babies from Ex-Wife”. I’m glad to see thedrunkensailor got lots of money for his tools and beer. (via Scott)

[full text search]

Yesterday Amazon.com made the full text of 120000 books searchable. If you want to find books that mention cybertext, for instance, search books for cybertext, just as usual. The day before yesterday that search listed books with cybertext in the title. Today you also get all the books that mention the word. And a link to an image of the page the word’s on so you can see the context.

Wow.

I first saw this in Blogg og bibliotek. They’re librarians, and enthusiastically complain that libraries are constantly playing tag to catch up to Amazon. Danah Boyd points out something I’ve often thought: finally, books are becoming as easy to search as the web. Such a relief.

[money]

I’m reading Mrs Dalloway (it’s wonderful) and as in every British novel set in upper class 19th or early 20th century Britain they keep talking about how much people have a year. To keep his Indian divorcee, her children, and himself, Peter Walsh needs a job that will pay at least £500, he thinks, which is the same sum as Woolf herself believes a woman needs a year to write, £500 a year and a room of her own. I’ve always wondered how much £500 a year is, and it’s not excessive, it turns out, certainly not enough to keep servants today, though you’d be able to afford a room and kitchen of your own, and payments on your student debts too: in 1923 £500 had the same purchase power as £17949.01 today. That’s about what they pay us while we’re working on our PhDs in Norway, so yes, it’s enough to write.

You’ll find more converters for historical values of money in many different currencies at a very useful collection called Current Value of Old Money. There’s even a converter for the historical value of Norwegian kroner, from 1865 to today, kindly provided by Statistisk Sentralbyrå, which really has a very impressive website.

[bushblog]

George Bush has got his own official blog. He doesn’t post himself, of course, someone called “GeorgeWBush.com” does the posting. (via Jon, who also links to other US presidential candidates with blogs)

[web design]

Anders has made an intro to web design for the media department in Oslo that’s excellent: no coding (plenty of that elsewhere) but instead a discussion of rhetoric, goals, organisation, architecture, colours, links and so on. There are lots of images, links to sites exemplifying various designs or concepts, suggestions for further reading, and it’s both simple and rich in detail, with a lot of very practical and also theoretically foundational information.

I’ve instantly added it to the curriculum for next year’s web design students. They’ll love having it in their native language, and it’s excellent quality. That, a book of HTML and CSS, and some essays and sites online. Should do it.

[william’s blogging]

William Cole’s started blogging! I know William from Hypertext conferences, and it’s good to see he’s joined the blogosphere.

[save face]

70 things to say when you’re losing a technical argument.

[relativity]

The theory of relativity explained in words of four letters or less. It reads a little like Cat in a Hat, only with fewer rhymes and less impressive rhythm: “I can hear you say, “No way. That can’t be!” But I tell you it is.” compares quite poorly to “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW! It is fun to have fun but you have to know how,” especially if you get into the beat when you read it. You need to draw your breath after the second “Look at me!” for maximum effect, and keep the pressure on the “me” of course, until you get to NOW! I suppose you already knew that, huh? “But I tell you it is” is good, you know, with the same insistence as “it is fun to have fun” but the phrases leading up to it don’t quite do it, do they?

Of course, Cat in a Hat, while metrically perfect, doesn’t explain the theory of relativity. (via Elouise)

[frost]

My friend Lars lives far, far North, further North than I’ve ever been, and when he walks across his garden to check on his potatoes the earth crushes beneath his feet, like scorch marks, he writes. I remember frost, but it’s not here yet. We just have rain. For years I assumed Lars would move South again, back to the rain and the wind, but I think he’s happy where he is. “Ting ser annleis ut sett herifrå", he writes, “things look different from here.” One day I’ll visit him, and perhaps I’ll see things differently, too.

[fur]

I know you’ve been longing for a furry laptop forever. Or would you prefer a pink apple on your white iBook, with matching accessories?

[martian romance]

“Knowing what I now know about Martian history, of course, it all seems crystal clear to me. But at the time I was surprised how quickly I was able to pick up Martian with just a smattering of Klingon and Basque.” (from one of Alex’s completely true tales of his life)

[notes]

I photographed bits of my notes from DAC 2001 at Brown before throwing them in the recycling bin. It is amazing how you can completely forget something though you have obviously been paying attention. I rarely take such careful notes these days. Anyway, the slides and text for Stuart Moulthrop’s closing keynote are at his website, so these notes are nothing but decoration.

[gender revealed]

The Gender Genie is scary: it can tell I’m a woman from what I write. Apparently I (as a woman) write relationally (with, me, you, us, here, his) whereas men write informationally with lots of categorisation (it, they, the, a, more). Informal testing (by me, on a sample way below statistical significance) demonstrates that mens’ personal emails are far more relational than their blog posts (also, fiction is more relational than non-fiction), whereas I write the same everywhere, it seems. Or I do now. My MA thesis was probably written by a male, the Gender Genie thinks. Back then, of course, I was still stuck in the master discourse, trying to write the way I thought “they” wanted me to write. Obviously I thought they wanted me to write like a man.

[manhunting]

Manhunting has a series of amazingly hilarious transcripts of dates with men met on the Internet. It’s research, of course.

[stats]

A message on Fibreculture today asked for links to statistics about Internet usage and there are several useful-looking suggestions in the answers so far. NUA has what appear to be good statistics on how many people are online globally, though they’ve not been updated since last year.

Norwegian statistics are available from Norsk Gallup’s section on Internet stats (19% of Norwegian households have broadband net connections as of July this year, VG is the most popular Norwegian site (2 million unique hits in February) and while half of the total pool of Norwegian men use the net daily, only a third of all Norwegian women do the same. 68% of Norwegian women and 79% of Norwegian men have access to the net. Also, far more people have access from home than from work or school (Powerpoint report, May 2003) Statistics Norway reports that 23% of Norwegians read books every day, which is up four percent from five years ago. They also have a page collecting all their statistics on ICTs.

[realism]

I always thought Mary Poppins was strictly fanciful and, you know, a musical, but have a listen to the IBM rally song (ca. 1931) and the bankers singing in Mary Poppins will seem utterly realistic to you. Of course there are many more productive aspects of IBM’s corporate history having been published online, as Matt points out.

[tokens]

Miles Hochstein has published his life as an autodocumentary in photos, year by year. I leaf (clicking) through this stranger’s photo album to realise that my album is almost the same as his: myself as a baby, child, teenager, student, traveller, parent. His photos are as much mine as my own photos are, substitutes for memory, tokens of having lived. 1999: “But actual memories? I’m afraid I don’t have any… just photos. (via Metafilter)

[bots]

Bots and automated characters are going to be the first kind of digital media we explore in this Autumn’s classes. Obviously we’ll look at Eliza and read some of what her creator, Weizenbaum, wrote about her in the sixties. Aurora’s lent me one of her interactive dolls for the students to play with, too. It’s fascinating seeing how 100 spoken phrases and a basic motion sensor gives the illusion of personality. I’ve been exploring AIM bots too. Liz wrote about SmarterChild, which I’m rather enjoying, and Runabot.com both lists other AIM bots you can chat with and explains how to build your own. I also found The Jack Principles, of the Interactive Conversation Interface (iCi), provide a set of rules for creating believable interactive characters. The same company have demos of telephone bots, for instance Katie who takes orders for a mail order company. Though of course this is a planned demo it’s amazing. Katie the bot even suggests an alternative for an item that’s out of stock, saying she bought one of these dresses for her niece and her niece loves it! A robotic niece, I assume.

[halfbakery]

Have you come across the Halfbakery? They collect, critique and vote on half-baked ideas, fictitious inventions. The Film Noir Home, for instance:

One of the commentators suggests an extension package for a daytime serial effect, which given the time and effort I might have been able to relate to Elouise’s recent post on blogs, time and closure:

There are, of course, nights where my brain does this with no wiring at all. Tonight might well turn out to be one of them.

[the world as a blog]

Go look at this map of the world that dynamically displays blog posts, as they’re written, glued to the appropriate place on the map - it’s awesome to watch. For your blog posts to show up here, you need to have the GeoURL metatags in your index file, and to ping weblogs.com when you post. (via Frank)

[fotolog.net]

Have you seen fotolog.net? It’s a community of photo blogs. Thousands of users post their photos daily. Each user has a page of their own which shows their most recently posted photo, in addition to thumbnails of their previous five photos in the left column, and thumbnails of the most recent photos their favourite other users have taken in the right column. Underneath there’s a guestbook with comments from visitors - and that’s it.

It’s a really simple though very satisfying system that relies almost completely on visual links, and it’s a pleasure to roam around it, moving from one photographer to the next. I started with Jon Hoem’s fotolog page; it’s nice seeing photos of bits of Bergen I hadn’t noticed, and Jon’s a good photographer.

[macropayments]

Why does it cost three times as much to buy one article online from the New York Times as it does to buy a whole newspaper, on paper, in Norway? And it’s nearly six times the cost of an Australian newspaper. Do American newspapers cost a fortune, or is the online price of a single article totally out of proportion here? US $2.95 for an article hardly counts as a micropayment…

[history]

There’s a brief interview with Noah in the Guardian, where he talks about the New Media Reader. Noah remarks that “People think of new media as something without a history", and says that a motivation for compiling the New Media Reader came from discovering that hardly anything on the syllabus he wanted to use to teach new media was still in print.

[cooking stories]

I just discovered that Loobylu has a cooking section, Celebrity Chef with recipes with stories and lots of those gorgeous illustrations her blog is speckled with. I want to bake the Princess Meg Birthday Celebration Cookies.

[dagbladet and blogs]

Dagbladet (the more cultural of Norway’s two major tabloids) has started up a newspaper weblog. Jon writes about it, I haven’t time to look at it now (coat, lock door, get bike, fetch book from library, daughter from after-school care, dinner, bath, story, lullaby, thesis) but must say that a photographer from Dagbladet came and photographed me today and a journalist has been asking questions and there’ll be a piece on weblogs and web diaries soon. The weekend, maybe, the journalist said. I get to play the part of the serious researcher (forgot to put on my fake beard-and-spectacles) and others get to be the self-revealing tell-it-all-on-the-web sell-the-story characters.

[transl8it!.com]

Of course there’s an online translation service between txt lingo and English: transl8it.com. Could come in handy ;)