NetDynam 2.0

well, i came away with the laptop, a flash drive for use with presentations, and an external hard drive to back up files.
even though i have a mac, and it has… ‘time machine’… i did not bring the dedicated external HD which i use for doing that.
so, you know what i’m going to say, don’t you?
yes, along with all the other bugs, the laptop got hooked on something internal, and would not restart.
well, there you go – i hardly ever restart or shut down the thing. it’s always just asleep wherever i go, so i can open it up and presto we’re moving.
but, just after my report of the strange ‘issue’ with the blog here, i noted that the laptop was feeling a bit slow and cludgey to operate. so i thought, hm, time to restart.
well, we got to the pretty pink screen, but then the little coloured wheel kept going round and round and never stopping for ages.
bugger this, i thought.
so i pulled the plug, a tried and tested mac repair method. but then, i am probably living in the past that way. oh, and of course, ‘pull the plug’ is a metaphor based on other modes of retaining power to devices – i actually turned it upside down a checked for a lever of some sort. there it was, click! up came the panel and out i pulled the battery, then replaced it.
bong! said the puter when i pushed the on/off button. so i went off to make a cup of coffee while it did it thing, but when i turned to the screen, it had not got past the blue one, and it was giving the grey circle for a few seconds and then jumping to blank, and then back again.

sigh.

software hangup on start-up pooh.
after a chat with the national apple line, i got an ‘appointment’ at the local mac shop at the ‘genius bar’ (these things are all new to me), so we hopped down to the local mall where saturday crowds milled and thronged. especially thickly in the mac shop, my goodness, it was like the easter show.
anyway, the young man tried his best. using the shop external HD, restarted and scanned the hard drive for problems, but it looked fine, so did a verify, all looked OK, but she still wouldn’t start on her own, and showed white and blue stripes instead.
have you backed up your data, he asked.
i waved my hand dismissively. for me, this means, to some degree, but not completely. i said: sortov.
so he says he will re-instal the OS.
ahh, but i was not aware that he was going to do a complete clean re-instal, and so when i returned 10mins later to retrieve the device, nothing was left on it. as if a new computer. not a log-in, not a software, not a firefox, not a copy of MSword with its attendant powerpoint thingamejig, all my filed fotos, adobe acrobat… many many things. gone.
of course, i can still go on.
i have the back-up files, yes.
but i came away without my CDs. in fact this may be the first time i have done that. so, now i have no image browser for example, or other little do-dads i was used to using.
i did download a free 30-day trial of MSword 2011 for mac, and it looks very zoovey. but i’m not sure i can afford the upgrade… however, i do need it to happily continue unabated…
yeasss, one of my students sent me a file made with open office, and while i could indeed open it, i could not write on it or add anything at all. read-write permissions granted notwithstanding.
and for now, we won’t go back into the horrid details of my talk in sweden. creating ppts on a mac and then playing them on windows has resulted in some quirks in the past, so i went and opened the file from the flash drive, on my colleague’s computer first. i then adjusted one or two slides. saved the file, and happily went off to the talk.
ahhh, but then the file would not open. and, i’d saved the new version by overwriting the old on the laptop too. tskie tskie.
so, while many brave and clever people tried to get my ppt to open in the background, providing a sort of dynamic tableau for my stand-up routine, i had to extemporise for 20 minutes. which at least i did OK at.
not to worry, i’d kept an older copy on the XHD, so we could still have it… but it appears that the swedish OS did naughty things to the file and corrupted it.
who knows these days, with computers.

anyway, we are still book-oriented… bought piles of them at the pragmatics conference… and now will need to send them back to oz in boxes. sigh. i was moderate, but him indoors was not. hence we have had to hire a car to get from here (london) to birmingham before heading off to lisbon. but we really will need to send them back before we leave for lisbon.

excerpt from Strategic Studies Quarterly : Spring, 2011:

the vast majority of nations will inevitably have something that looks and acts like a national cyber command, whether or not it initially bears that name. …

At the end of the day, both friends and enemies will be further incentivized to consider their own ability to demarcate in boundaries and defend in institutions their own national slice of cyberspace. Creating US Cyber Command is only one mark of transformation, but it further accelerates the state-level interest in acquiring greater control of the uncertainties of the rapidly declining cyberspace frontier.

from a long essay on the rise of cyber borders, increasing surveillance measures to ensure political and economic security of nation states, and the gradual ceding of these responsibilities to centralised military-style institutions..

and, in another area, but with similar direction, a short essay in New Scientist [13 July, 2011] on the increasing gulag-isation of interface/platform-users. we’ve come full circle… or at least going in the circular direction wrt cross-platform usability. apple is one of the biggest demons here, making it sometimes impossible to access material using non-apple apps.

Editorial: “The rise of the splinternet”

Openness is the internet’s great strength – and weakness. With powerful forces carving it up, is its golden age coming to an end?

speaking of infographics and data visualisation [as i was in my recent comment to hoon's post] i was just about to note in a new post, a couple of websites which provide links and examples of data visualisation-related resources and discussions.
this was occasioned by my reading the essay on slopegraphs by charlie park..
start here, but the rest of the site is also of interest. an informative and well-written essay on tufte’s ‘slopegraphs’, what tufte referred to as ‘table graphs’. charlie park, in this post, muses that perhaps the name is why the table graph has not taken off as a means to usefully visualise dynamic changes in a range of comparables. he provides a number fo examples of how and where they have been used and discusses how to implement them as well. a good read for anyone interested in data visualisation in general, and slope graphs in particular.
found this via one of my twitter feeds, from one of my favourites, jeff clark, whose website neoformix, is in our blogroll,

but as for graphic visualisation tools, the really good site which gathers these together in easily digested slices of grouped-together-on-thematic-or-technical-basis reviews is visualising data resources
…also found via twitter feed.

I.

I don’t live in the stream, by which I mean social media is not a medium I use to put myself “out there.”

In noting this, it’s also–for me personally–worse than this in that the old school proto-social medium of email and email discussions have largely fallen by the wayside too. At one time I was very committed to expressing myself in those ways. My blogs remain, yet these are broadcast mediums, not social mediums.

Yet, I do spend sometime observing the stream. For one thing, I manage the social media effort at work. It’s not configured powerfully simply because I’m not charged with either living in “its” relentless stream, or, creating powerful value-added content. Both those aspects demand time.

Lots of time is necessary to effectively live in, and, leverage the, stream. At least, as far as I can tell this is so. Also, obviously, one requires a mobile tool, one hooked into the internet at, in effect, all times. Only then can one play in the stream in real time. I might describe this, based in my observation, as affording the animation of one’s presence.



The fundamental disposition given to this animation is the ability to react personally to another person in the same stream. The key differentiation here is, within the stream’s many-to-many first order mode, one implements a second-order one-to-one mode. One moves from the broadcast-communicative to the interpersonal-communicative.

II.

I posted a twitter capture, made from a very brief section of the Netdynam20 twitter stream. How could we typify the various tweets.

(from the bottom)

How to Use LinkedIn Today to Find Popular Content | Social Media Examiner | @scoopit http://bit.ly/mJhEJQ

Score one here for: many-to-many (MtM) and presumably value-added resource (VAR) and, implied, problem solving (PS).



The Dr Bex Lewis Daily is out! http://bit.ly/h6VROx ▸ Top stories today via @tokyo_tom @davidmccready

Score one here for: MtM, VAR; Side note: a second author is identified. To find out what the subject of the resource is, I have to click the link. I will term this an obscure VAR, or O-VAR.

Real-Time News Curation now can be done with LinkedIn Today – here’s a good start-up guide to it. http://lnkd.in/quDpqw

MtM; VAR; PS

r/t What do you say when someone asks: Why Should I Be On Twitter? http://bit.ly/9aXJSH

MtM; VAR; PS; side note, ironic, and this quality may be the hook to see what the answer to the question is, even if it is ironic that somebody would have to go find someone else’s answer.



Evangelize about the OPAC using “The Long Tail”

Hmmm. OPAC is Online Public Access Catalog. “The Long Tail”

An oblique specialist instruction: (I). MtM, so: MtM; Ob-I.

The Language Geek Daily is out! http://bit.ly/fTIHgv ▸ Top stories today via @awad @theglossophile @name_inspector

MtM; VAR Side note: the author has identified the nature of the resource, something about language.

Individuation as Differentiation not Dissociation rglongpre.ca/jungianlens/20… #cgjung #psych #photography #child #individuation #rgl

MtM; VAR; side note: hash tags galore, including one for the author. These help describe the underlying offer

TFI :: Lina Srivastava Discusses Transmedia Activism: http://bit.ly/k1RkMH

MtM; VAR

I scroll ahead through the wash of MtM; VAR.

We’re here! (@ Suvarnabhumi International Airport (BKK) ท่าอากาศยานสุวรรณภูมิ w/ 63 others) http://4sq.com/islz5H

Finally: person-to-private group, (PtPG) The only people who can peer deeply into the 4sq link are 4sq (Foursquare) members. (Foursquare is Facebook with geo-location; truly a stream-oriented medium.)

Skip one, then:

the amount of things I work out and get correct from fbs and tweets is insane. I should be a detective and people should fear me

Personal observation; (PO).

III.

This brief analysis devised a coding. The coding is crudely, ‘top level.’ One question raised by this top level coding is: what is the most it, were it fleshed out, tell us about the slice of Netdynam20 twitter stream?

Clearly, if one of Netdynam20′s user were living in the stream, as specified above, the coding might differ as more PtP, person-to-person, entries appeared. Also, even short of this, an account user could follow, mostly, people engaged in PtP exchanges, without participating, and the stream’s coding would reflect this.

Finally, it strikes me that there aren’t lots of layers possible in a 140 or less tweet. (Ruth Page’s Digital Narratives intrigues on this account. She writes, I’ve begun to look at hashtags (#) used in tweets. I’m interested in the way that people use hashtags to signal their membership of wider groups, and so to indicate aspects of their identity.) The value-added resources have to be checked out to qualify the hidden intention in many cases. The most common factor revealed when you do this I’ll code as: self-promotion, (SP) or, selling something (SS).

BTopenzone, a set up by BT (british telecom) providing hotspots about the country where you can either pay per set of time, or the insitution allows some measure of connectivity… we have had truck with now at several places.

first, at norwich as already mentioned in an earlier post.
then (now) in manchester at the local starbucks… well, that was interesting.
i could get online, but could not access any of my webmail sites.
panix and gol were blocked because they did not have the ‘certificate’ did i want to proceed anyway? yes, i did. but this did not matter. even netdynam.org’s gmail account could not be accessed, and on my bookmarks, the gmail icon was replaced by a BT icon. the nerve!

on the other hand, P could access his gmail perfectly well from there.

now at the conference, where everyone is accorded a termporary university account for the duration. apparently P could not access his pretty much global, through bluehost, email account. after much online discussion with the IT bods at blue host, it turns out that the uni of manchester blocks the port bluehost uses for email… not for other things though.

meanwhile, back at starbucks, P can access his global email there, and i can access my shell account. only. wah? is this security or is this just adhockery in action? i do not know, but it is not as easy as in scandanavia… where internet access is considered..er.. a human right. in the constitution of finland i believe. or maybe i’m exaggerating.

anyway, plenty of papers on the pragmatics of online interaction (as good as any cover term).

just saw one by a former colleague, whose main interest area is narrative, but she has now moved into looking at narrative and co-construction in the mediated enviromments of social media, such as facebook and twitter.

check out her blog, digital narratives on these topics.

OK, two things:

i’ve decided to start thread, by using the medium of blog in a somewhat analogous way to email list posting – we’ve discussed the differences, now i’m somewhat ignoring them.

2nd, one hears of “lulzsec” in passing, but only via twitter mentions do i manage to learn anything about it, and then only when a story gets written. usually in the guardian.

anyone know any more?
i will need to investigate in my spare time (of which i have some, but should be using for touring or reading or preparing – hell researching the various eddies of the internet seems appropriate use of time to me, and after all, if it’s a tale of RL hacking, i am always interested)

here’s a link to the latest article via one of the comments i particularly ‘resonated’ with

more later – this train is moving and shaking…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/11302588

wordpress and typekit get-together.
for now, it looks as if one has to pay for the plug-in.
but i like the idea, so i am trying here to embed the vid so that anyone passing can check it out

also been reading a newish book, “Just my type” by simon garfield.
very light reading with some history, some mild in-jokes we can all get, and a lot of talk about fonts. i am enjoying it very much and can recommend to anyone interested in typography, especially neophytes like myself – i mean, typography afficionados would probably already know all this stuff, like who is garamond, and how did those typeface new york, chicago and monaco get their names. what about baskerville? i think i could recognise it now. and helvetica takes over the world, ms calvert designs world airport… etc

This app searches Twitter for real-time snow reports and displays them on the map. Tweet the hashtag #uksnow, your location (postcode, town name or geotag your tweet), and rate the snow that is falling out of ten (0/10 for nothing – 10/10 for a blizzard). You can also include the depth of snow (cm or inches), attach a photo and add a description to your tweet.

Observe a Twitter stream and categorize the presumptive intent of each Tweet. The framing questions could be:

1. What is the tweet implicitly asking me to do in response?

2. What are the other clear contextual features I can infer from a Tweet?

3. What would be the top level categories that could be used to describe a general intent-plus-effect of a Tweet?

This last question could be visualized as sorting Tweets into different boxes based in the information in the Tweet, and, ‘safe’ inferences we would make in the light of the qualifications posed by #1 and #2. Because I’ve narrowed the categorical focus to a top level, the sense of sorting would be to derive very general categories that do not overlap.

What interests me are combinations of factors and features discoverable as a matter of knowing more fully user intent. A blunt question about this is: what is the payoff for observing and/or participating in your own Twitter stream? Implicit in this would be a behavioral economic qualification of intent. There are lots of other directions too, so I wonder about personality factors, enabling tools, affectual elements, etc.

Here is the Netdynam20 stream from 8:35 a.m. EST (USA).

library2 Library 2.0 Ideas

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well, just checking in before i go…

off to europe for 6 weeks come monday.

mainly to follow him indoors about the UK as he squeezes as many conferences into a month as he can. as for me, i have one in sweden next week, then spend time with fellow appraisaler who lives in the same town (vaxjo) before heading to the UK to meet up with P there.

colleague in sweden and i did a co-analysis of 20 wine tasting notes by the same critic, and using the appraisal framework. she was doing her phd on this wine critic, and wanted to see whether her idea that wine tasting notes needed to have further semantic categories used in order to fully analyse the texts would be borne out. i thought it would, so volunteered to undertake this small research project.

last year i presented the results at a local conference, but this time, i will be presenting it again in lisbon, where the annual SFL gabfest is taking place at the end of july. my colleague can’t come, as she is still on leave after being treated for cancer, but it would be good to refresh memory of the work, and also to discuss potential publications arising from it.

meantime, i have not completed the presentation for next week’s iconicity and intermediality conference there, but i’m almost done. i have all the ppt slides i think, but i need to organise them better, add a bit here and there.

and, for lisbon, i have also to complete the analysis and ppt for the 2nd paper i’ll be presenting there as well as the one of the wine appreciation… but i will have some time between conferences to get that into shape.

apart from the wine language presentation, the other two are based on my earlier netdynam list analyses. oh yes, we live on in conference papers and the occasional publication i manage to get together.

and then there’s NEXT year’s SFL conference. being held in sydney. so i am part of the gang helping to prepare for that. for example, the organisers should make some sort of presentation at the previous year’s conference to advertise the next year’s… so there has been some mad flyer designing happening so that we can all take some with us to distribute at conferences.

what i have done is to make a basic blog for the conference organisers to use for announcements and updates. all but one of organisers do not work at the designated university. so, getting stuff onto the official uni-run website (which we need for registration and payment purposes) will entail going through a middle man. hence i thought best to have one where we can all contribute various items that do not need to go past the scrutineers etc.

and i have blogs to mark as well – i mean posts to the media industry contexts blog site. this is their final assignment for the course, so a lot of reading for me.

anyway, please see my relative silence as sign of need to be distracted by other matters.

will try to post updates of my progress during my travels.

[taking the dslr too!]

i was lead eventually to the video art clip embed below, first by checking out the link on a twitter feed from ‘creative review’ proclaiming today’s obsession, “the new aesthetic” -

so then i scanned – rather than read – the piece on the featured blog, imprint magazine which described patric king’s observations re the approach and technical mediation of the new aesthetic as:

Partially-downloaded images, pixellated surfaces, blocks of mosaic color, broken wireframes, pinned maps, censored images, polygon battles, software glitches, imagemaps, depth maps, unfolded 3d texturemaps, and graphs.

this meant i needed to go to the source, so the next step took me to the blog called “The New Aesthetic” which features a number of examples of this fractellated vision. all different, all slightly akimbo.

and yes, hands on hips, it looks between one’s legs at a vision of the world.

jumped then via the link under the still image, to the vimeo site making the queen (her majesty)’s image out of fragments of video, a collage of moving patches, sort of like picasso-braque meets video meets jigsaw technology.

why look at a still photo when you can have movement?

Content is Queen from Sergio Albiac on Vimeo.