Listal

mildlydiverting on Listal

I've been trying on and off for a month or two to upload our records from delicious library on to listal. Not for any particular reason, just because it seems fun to have a list of my (Our! God, I've actually allowed the boyfriend to comingle his CDs and Books with mine, which explains the Prog and some of the History of Apple stuff...) huge physical media library up with the virtual library that places like last.fm and amazon generate.

Listal itself is fun, but a bit... pointless, so far. It doesn't seem to encourage sharing and loans, nor resale, nor easy discovery of reccomendations. It might just be that until this evening it hasn't known enough about me, so I'll withhold judgement for a bit. What I really need is a site that I can easily query from my mobile phone when I'm trying to remember if I actually own that particular discounted David Bowie advert, or a site that tracks my ownership behaviours and instantly improves my reccomendations on any given eCommerce site. I'd like a bit of promiscuity with my data, please.

What I will say is that the profile page that you're encouraged to use as your linking presence on the site doesn't feature your collection nearly prominently enough - it's well below the fold. Profiles on social networks are beginning to look so similar - here's the box with the picture and location, here's the favourite stuff box, blah blah - that getting the 'killer app' above the fold on the page that people are likely to enter at seems ever more important.

On a related note - actually, an entirely unrelated note - YouTube and Twitter, what's up with your error messages? They don't appear next to the submit button I've just clicked, but in a banner at the top of the page. They're sufficiently far in to my peripheral vision that I literally don't see them, and just sit there thinking 'Hmn, this doesn't work... I wonder what happened?'. I finally understand why my mother has problems remembering to check status bars. Please fix!

Back to listal. Other niggles are that there's no view that allows you to just see everything - it's always broken in to music, books, dvds... I'm too used to thinking in terms of streams of stuff these days, and, well, that seems artificial. I'm really confused by the Movies / TV / DVD categories too - are they assuming that they'll track download purchaces? Otherwise, how do I reclassify all my DVDs into movies or telly or other?

They provide the now ubiquitous tagging for organising your stuff, but really, with 400 odd books (and that's less than a third of my total library, at a guess) I simply don't have the ability to go through and usefully classify stuff. I could do with a batch processor, or a use of Amazon's classification system to broadly indicate the topics of my books. A cross between that and Amazon US's 'Statistically Improbable Phrases' would tell you a great ammount about the actual content in there, and be a good starting point for better organisation. Folksonomy is all very well, but only works contiguously - you need proper librarianship foo to retrospecively work through that ammount of data. Use the API's available to you! I can acutally see a multiple-select-drag and drop interface like flickr's organizr working well for that ammount of representation-of-things in this context. Some of the CD metadata is a bit borken too; more likely the fault of delicious monster, but perhaps its the time for a project like musicbrainz to take Amazon's dirty data on books and physical media instantiations and expose it publicly for community cleaning? I think the combining, cross referencing and curating of this kind of data is one of the most useful things to have come out of the open source wikipedia / freedb ethic of the last few years.

So, anyway; Listal useful in that it has let me get physical objects in to a virtual space. That's less impressive once you understand that I compiled the list by waving barcodes in front of the boyfriend's macbook, but it's another link in the chain of making my life networked, and finally becoming little more than a set of public data streams. Hmn.

Boing Boing: Airplane-Treadmill problem

Boing Boing: Airplane-Treadmill problem

Surely - and I may be wrong - planes derive their lift from the bernouille effect of air moving very fast over the aerofoil of their wings. As the plane would not be moving forward in space, there would be no airflow over the wings - the point of runways is to get sufficient speed of airflow to produce enough lift to let the plane take off.

What you have here, is a jet powered thing revolver?

Arresting

Sometimes, there are thoughts, that when you first encounter them are so very arresting that your world changes in a way that's initially imperceptible, but that you know will grow in to something extraordinary. They're literally dumbfounding; there's no response to them, and you feel a whole bunch of concepts slip into a new position as they settle in to your head. That is, provided your brain doesn't spit them out like so much conceptual ambergris.

I've just stumbled across one such though. What if, by 2010, there is no address window in your browser? What if a user never has to see another URL again, ever? What if the web chooses to put its skeleton on the inside?

My god, it's full of stars.

Designweenie: Weblog

Twitterati

russell davies: johnson v eno: "twitterati"

Today's Neologism. Nice.

Keeping things in Perspective

Google Trends: Second life, YouTube

An interesting little search terms graph.

I find it rather extraordinary that there are two talk events running in London this evening about Second Life and virtual worlds. One is more academic, about identity formation and sociability in worlds; the other appears to be about generating PR for the music industry. The Immersion / Augmentation split couldn't be better illustrated if you tried.

Also, last night, Steven Johnson and Brian Eno went off on to an agreeable little diversion about SL in their ICA talk about 'The Ghost Map'. It has given me an idea, a little like Jones the Wireframes', but with more bottoms. Of which, more anon.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Voluntary code for blogs 'needed'

BBC NEWS | Politics | Voluntary code for blogs 'needed':

"Blogs and other internet sites should be covered by a voluntary code of practice similar to that for newspapers in the UK, a conference has been told.

Press Complaints Commission director Tim Toulmin said he opposed government regulation of the internet, saying it should a place 'in which views bloom'.

But unless there was a voluntary code of conduct there would be no form of redress for people angered at content.

He spoke during a session on free speech at a London race conference."

Oh. Oh. Oh dear me.

/me giggles at the silly man who doesn't really understand.

Terra Nova: cyber-sexdaq

Terra Nova: cyber-sexdaq

Just a little follow up from the post about SL sex the other day. Ren Reynolds has a very interesting discussion of virtual prostitution rates being a good indicator of cross-world coin worth - like the economics 'mars bar' rate.

RPI goes from Retail price Index to... Role Play... something...

I made you a cookie... but I eated it on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I made you a cookie... but I eated it on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Just occasionally I hate my other half.

He took a terrible, terrible photo of me pulling a face with his shiny new cameraphoneblackberryofevil, and it is now the number two google result for 'I made you a cookie... but I eated it.'

Great. Welcome to posterity.

Alan Yentob watches Deathline in Second Life

Alan Yentob watches Deathline in Second Life,
originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting.

Alan Yentob Flies in Second life

Alan Yentob Flies in Second life,
originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting.

Imagine... herecomeseverybody.co.uk

BBC - Press Office - Network TV Programme Information Week 49 Tuesday 5 December 2006: Imagine... herecomeseverybody.co.uk, BBC One, 10:35pm

Over the last couple of months, I've been occasionally helping out Zoe Silver, a director from the BBC Arts department, as she's been working on the latest edition of the arts show, Imagine...

Skipping to the end first.... Zoe's put together a really excellent programme about the creative culture of the web. It's not hardcore geek - that wouldn't be right for the audience of the show - but it's a great overview of the way the MySpace generation are changing cultural consumption.

The list of heavy hitter interviewees should give you a good flavour of how right she's got it: Tim Berners Lee, David Weinberger, Clay Shirky, Jimmy Wales, Henry Jenkins, Chris Anderson... I hope you'll agree that's a good mix of people, all of whom have really sound insights into the way the web is permeating everyday life, and how media is getting democratised.

There are some real grassroots voices in there too - David Firth, creator of Salad Fingers, was reccomended by m'estimable colleague David Thair, and looks to be in the final cut. There's Dickon Edwards, Girl with a One Track Mind, and some modern beat combo called the Horrors, too.

I'm eagerly awaiting a preview DVD - at the moment I've just read an edit draft of the script.

I got involved with the project back in July; someone somewhere asked someone else if anyone knew about the internet and might be able to find a UK video blogger, and that someone asked someone else, yada yada, and that person put Zoe in touch with me. It turns out I don't know any videobloggers (at least, I didn't at the time) but what I do know about is stuff on the internet, generally.

We sat down a week or so later in the rubbish wine bar under my offices, and I proceeded to empty my head of the history of what, back in my day, we knew as cyberculture. Poor girl; two hours with me after a couple of glasses of wine, talking about the internet... I think I must have terrified her; I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Anyway; I've been acting as an informal 'web native' advisor - every so often being around when the production team has wanted to check the wording on the voiceover is right, or when they've wanted to set up a blog, or register a domain name.

I have to say, though, that the most enjoyable thing about the whole experience happened about a month ago after Alan Yentob, the presenter (and notionally my boss' boss, or possibly my boss' boss' boss), had a chance meeting with the DG in a lift.

According to rumour, they chatted briefly about the show, and as he left the lift, Mark Thompson said 'Oh, have you heard about Second Life?' The next day, I got a phonecall:

Zoe: Hello, me again. Now, do you know about Second Life?
Me: /laughs
Me: Yes, yes I do. I was wondering when you'd ask that.

So - Alan wanted an Avatar, and to visit the world for the show. My attempt was frankly rubbish, but Alan liked it enough to commission Kisa Naumova to create a proper version for him, and to manage the shoot in world. She did a fantastic job (I'm really proud of her!) - even getting K's new band Deathline to put on a gig for the film. Apparently, Kisa gets mentioned by name!

I'll pop a couple of screenshots up on Flickr, and link to them later. But for now, I urge you all to watch BBC One on 5th December at 10:35 pm.

And if you look really closely, you'll see 'me' in the background of one of the shots...

EDIT: 9 Dec

Natalie d'Arbeloff got in touch to point out I'd missed her off; so here she is. Stuart at Feeling Listless has gathered together all of the relevant links from the show in a stirling display of public service spirit, too.

Alan Yentob watches Deathline in Second Life,
originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting.

Alan Yentob Flies in Second life,
originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting.

BBC - Video Nation - Filming Skills - Recording Sound

BBC - Video Nation - Filming Skills - Recording Sound

Hey! Kids! Making video for YouTube?

Watch these useful guides from the BBC, on how to make your footage look better.

Musiccubes

BBC - Radio 1 - Musicubes - Constructor

M'estimable colleagues at Radio 1 are up to bonkersness again.

Super Public, Super Sexy

I'm making my Monday rounds of my RSS feeds, catching up on a few long-unread folders. David Hayward, at Functional Autonomy, is running a very interesting series of thoughts on privacy, and transparency, in a world where social networks and online behaviour destroy conventional notions of the public/private sphere.

His discussion of Danah Boyd's apophenia: super publics, and her throwaway comments about sexual privacy in a recent talk caught my attention.

I've recently become an 'expert' in Second Life. By expert, I mean someone who spends time there, actively thinks about the experience, and reads enough secondary literature around the subject (blogs!) to be able to contextualise it for busy media executives in a series of pithy soundbites. So, not especially expert by my own standards (I'd want some kind of PHD in the area to really consider myself approaching an expert in any field), but more than enough expert for the purposes of my job - moreso when you consider it to be an extension of the social aspects of living an internet-mediated life.

When I opened my Second Life account, I had the intention of keeping it very, very seperate from the rest of my online identity. After all, the fun of an alternate existence is playing with the boundaries of your behaviour, and exploring what it might feel like to be a different version of yourself.

Any internet identity used to be good for this kind of self-extension/obfuscation; Usenet of yore was full of nobody-knowing-you're-a-dog. I suspect the compressed, disembodied nature of online communication coupled with the being-someone-else-ness of the online space goes some way to explaining why heated arguments and griefing are more frequent in virtual commons than in real world public spaces. I should incidentally relate that someone-elseness to the disembodiment of the internet experience; the having your head in a different place to the rest of you.

Anyway; it turns out that the ideal position of keeping part of my online life seperate is untenable.

I shouldn't be surprised, really; I'm not noted for public discretion about what would be considered to be my private life*. Furthermore, I suspect that the more 'real' an avatar or alternate identity feels - and that's strongly related to the (visual, rendered, realised, identified) tangibility of the representation - the harder it is to partition off the existence of that self-shard. I think that Danah Boyd probably reached that conclusion well before I did.

Ishi - my current otherself - got off to a wobbly start in the seperation stakes. A comedy misunderstanding between myself and Alice meant my real name got attached to a Second Life product. Picofame followed, and I met a few people in Second Life who understood where my other Mildly Diverting internet identity lived. A friend who only knew me in world* could attach my real name to my avatar after seeing BoingBoing, and use google to find me elsewhere. My notoriety at work as being 'girl who knows about the internet' led to helping out on a machinima shoot for a fairly well known arts presenter, and more admissions to in-world friends about my out-world life.

But why seperate? Well, basically, sex. I'm fascinated by smut; those who know me well** know this. As I started spending time in Second Life whilst on holiday (both literally away from home, and on holiday from the work-play and social work-play of Warcraft) I had the time to investigate (indluge in?) the seedier aspects of the world. It's nothing unusual for me; I've investigated (indluged in!) some of the seedier aspects of first life too; luckily there are few permanent digital records of this though.***

David Hayman is perceptive around the intersection between shame and privacy:

If there?s anything in my life I?m really, actually ashamed of, it usually indicates that I don?t understand it well enough. Subsequent investigation shifts myself around that thing, either eradicating it from me or giving me a more confident foundation in that aspect of myself.

Whilst most aspects of my sexuality have shifted myself around them over time - I'm most of the way through adjusting to being post-gay (or, if you like, have come out and gone back in again) at the moment - there are still some aspects that I feel not exactly shame, but more... insecurity about. These are precisely the areas of self-formation that become attractive loci of exploration in a safe, alternate identity-space; playing with the thing that frightens you renders it powerless. When you couple that with the colourful group of people I hang out with, some of whom are much more concerned with privacy and seperation than I am and trust me not to violate their boundaries, then also consider that I am being asked to expose my online identity in a professional context, it becomes more of a tricky course to negotiate.

It does revolve around trust.

Giving a presentation over the summer, I was asked to demonstrate embedding a youtube video in a blog. I did; this blog sat on the projector behind me. Someone made a casual joke about my self description in the sidebar. Not about liking girls, but about being too serious. Does that person now have significant information about me that might affect my future career? It depends how prejudiced she is against serious people, I suppose; I do not have enough one-to-one experience of the way she thinks (either through talking to her, or through her online presence) to make a decision about the amount I trust her. Ages ago, I demoed Bittorrent to a producer here; my dowload list was rife with smut; embarrasing, but I trusted him just enough to make a nervous joke of it. I gave an adhoc demo of Bloglines to another group of people; they probably noticed the folder of feeds labelled 'smut', but in this case I trusted them all enough that I didn't compulsively make a joke of it. I've joined a few networking groups in SL that might impact on my professional life; I wonder, occaionally, if anyone might raise an eyebrow at the other groups I belong to. Which one do I worry about? The one whose honest reaction I can't judge.


The moments of flustered embarrassed panic I have each time this happens boil down to:-

• having exposed something that transgresses a perceived societal taboo (etiquette breaches)


• the potential this exposure might be used against me professionally


• in ways I might not be aware of in a system where reputation is hidden


• do I thus trust these people enough not to weild that power over my professional reputation I have just inadvertantly given them in ways that might negatively impact me?

Then, last week, I was asked to demo Second Life to a producer, and also to make a few clips to illustrate another talk. I made an alt, fresh and clean and innocent. But I didn't use her.

Why? Practically, because it was too much fuss to send through money and objects and yada yada. But also because I realised that, you know, Ishi is me now. That's me; the more salacious things I get up to online are probably more fun for being a bit secret and furtive, but shame is probably not a healthy reaction to the situation. It's not to everyone's taste, admittedly, but each to their own. The fact I'm out there enjoying these spaces and playing at the edges means my colleagues don't have to; in a funny way, it's valuable experience. It makes my presence in Second Life authentic. I hope, in some way, that my willingness to expose vulnerability there renders a reciprocal trust dynamic.

More from Danah Boyd:

A reporter recently asked me why kids today have no shame. I told her it was her fault. Media is obsessed with revealing the backstage of people in the public eye - celebrities, politicians, etc. More recently, they've created a public eye to put people into - Survivor, Real World, etc. Open digital expression systems coupled with global networks took it one step farther by saying that anyone could operate as media and expose anyone else. What's juicy is what people want to hide and thus, the media (all media) goes after this like hawks. Add the post-9/11 attitude that if you hide something, you are clearly a terrorist. Should it surprise anyone that teenagers have responded by exposing everything with pride? What better way to react to a super public where everyone is working as paparazzi? There's nothing juicy about exposing what?s already exposed. Do it yourself and you have nothing to worry about. These are the kinds of things that are emerging as people face life in super publics.

I'm not deliberately foregrounding my sexuality in these professional situations, you understand; it's incidental. It's just one aspect of the cloud of data on me, my tastes, my behaviours that is now present for all time on the internet. In that stew of data on me, my sexual life is as weighted as my musical tastes, or my reading materials; it's all noise, just data points and only relevant if you want to make it so. Added together, though, it will probably tell you if I am someone you'd find entertaining to have a chat with in the pub.


It's just crystalised gossip. How terribly, terribly significant.



* Much to my Mother's disgust, and I suspect my father's amusement. Hi Dad!
* I suspect findable on Google due to an unusual nickname, but trying would invade her privacy; this is about my relationship with my otherlives. It's all about me. Me me me.
** And in some cases, for values of well approaching 'met me whilst a little too drunk once, and heard it all anyway'
*** My ex was less lucky. I'm not doing *that* google search in the office though.

Call for Papers: Women in Games from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog

Call for Papers: Women in Games from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog

I would really, really like to prepare a paper for this on gender performance / perfomative gender and virtual worlds.

It's a shame my academic knowledge is ten years out of date.

Honest in a Second Life Article

FT.com / Arts & weekend / Magazine - Get a (second) life: "Given the camaraderie that had developed between us and my looming deadline, I decided to ask if either of them wanted to have sex with me. Laura immediately offered to ?give me the full works? in return for L$1,200 upfront - about $5 in real money. Things quickly came unstuck. For one thing, I had neglected to buy any virtual genitalia, which came as a disappointment to Laura when I took off my pants."

From an article in the FT - quite a nice, honest view of the world that doesn't shy away from mentioning that yes, a lot of it is about sex. I think this is one of the only mentions of the more adult aspects of the world I've seen in big media...

Are You an Average YouTube User? - Mashable!

Are You an Average YouTube User? - Mashable!

An interesting - and cleverly done - study of user behaviour on YouTube.

The foregrounding and public nature of social networking sites should, theoretically, make this kind of information much easier to come across.

I particularly like the fact that these average active users spend about an hour a day watching clips.

Crystalising a line's walk

Sketch Furniture by FRONT

This is extraordinary. I love the looseness of the lines they make (which, of course, are invisible to them) and the way the slightly tentative shapes still feel wobbly in the plastic furniture produced.

God, we live in interesting times.

More Cats

More Cats

This is an important public service, you know. Particularly this one.

http://www.knitemare.org/cats/270916538_37c1904290.jpg

A week later and this is still funny

CATS!

'Im in ur survr, steelin ur dataz'.

This kept me awake giggling at 1am this morning. Damn cats. What is it that makes today's memes so sticky, so appealing?