NetDynam 2.0

Resource map by Sallie Goetsch (src), via WordPress Asylum.

Absolutely painless upgrade to WP3 here on ND2.0. The only chip in the pile was learning that our venerable–by our standards–theme is not compliant with some of WP3′s added functionalities. The only ones I’ve identified are the extra widget areas, and, the menu builder.

WP3′s new features bring some power user capabilities to the masses. Although, in noting this greater power, it is only afforded to those who can grok the basics of how WordPress works under the hood. For example, custom post types provides a way of breaking out content from the either/or of Post/Page, but, it’s most beneficial application involves situating those custom “types” within dedicated Divisions within a layout, using their loop.

Closer to our wheelhouse here is the revamped taxonomy function, that could be deployed to classify tagged texts. WP3 also integrates WordPress Multi-User; although ND2, multi-user as it is, is also minimalist in approach.

The WordPress 3.0 feature set was finalized a long time ago. The one addition I would eventually like to see is easy play list podcasting. The kludgy workarounds which use plug-ins are hit-or-miss–mostly miss.

Feature guide via Sixrevisions

Smashing Magazine’s Highlights of WP3

Taxonomies explained at 1stwebdesigner.

one of the lectures i’ve been watching recently on the video lectures site (see blogroll for link to their homepage) features a young eastern european guy who’s been working in conceptualising the dynamics of the web, the evolution of networks/ links, and how ideas or topics spread through networks.
it’s one of several on the topic of social media and theorising or graphically representing social networks, sentiment analysis, and so on. they are not as professional as those on TED, featuring presentations from conferences all over the world, and so to some extent you need to check out the ratings given by other viewers to determine whether the lecture is going to be rivetting or not…
a good resource anyway.

so, in the absence of any intervening comments, as usual, i am powering ahead

i’m posting this as a new post, instead of a comment, as it features old material relevant to the present project.

actually i went on a search for mike’s posting of the role and function matrix.

because one of the perspectives for entering the realm of affordances for users, is to look at what type of user (aka wordpress ‘role’) allows and constrains what blog activities, or, in other words, what acts are afforded these users.

it seems mike was a little ahead of us. no matter. i’m still catching up.

anyway, i think that the following post and its comments are certainly grist for this particular mill, and quite eminently quotable in parts. note mike’s disappointment with some of the affordances of the blue…thing…
see
the collaborative environment

well, i sort of bit the bullet and sent in an abstract for a paper at a local conference on multimodal discourse analysis taking place later this year. the focus of the paper is the affordances (or not) of the blogging medium, and i’ll use a couple of wordpress themes in the first instance to illustrate the potential channels made available for users – depending on knowledge experience and role ascription of course.

having done so, i now face the prospect of at least reviewing the copious literature on the topic and related areas, see for example (one of the speakers) john bateman’s extensive online bibliography, especially the link to the multimodal and computer-related list



so if any one of you is interested in contributing to the project, i’d be happy to collect comments, pointers, and so on to add to the substance of the presentation – and possibly, if i can, publish a paper on the topic. the presentation (if the abstract is accepted that is) will only be able to set out the main areas of interest of some sort of wobbly framework i have in mind, but if there is continuing interest, then a written paper in acknowledged collaboration with you, my colleagues here, might also be possible. with me, though, once the work is done, it is done. archived, and not thrown away, but enhanced and tarted up is sometimes not on the cards. however, in this case, i will need to do the work should the abstract be accepted and given continuing motivation, publishing is also a good *idea*.

here is the abstract for comments anyway:

Mediated personae: Towards a description of blog affordances.

The interweb is now populated by an intense variety of blogs allowing users an interactive facade which in the first instance mediates their communication with others and presents a persona to the wired world. The blog interface allows and constrains the type of interactive events afforded to users, and, depending on what role function each person is accorded, users may adjust the way the blog interface and their projected persona appears to the public.

In this paper I present the basis of a framework for the comparison and description of blog interfaces, and propose a means of categorising these communicative interfaces according to a number of different dimensions. For the purposes of the investigation on which the framework is based, these dimensions mainly refer to the textual and interpersonal/relational functions blogs may afford. The nature of the affordances which blogs provide is seen as a product of ways in which blog structure and management options allow or effect certain interactions for users, but moreover they can be used to channel and project certain identities for their administrators. In this sense blog structure is conceived as a matter of expression, with content the allowed or potential events that users may enact or interpret given the constraints of the medium.

The resultant set of dimensions is conceived of as a potential means for both analysing individual blogs, and providing cross-comparative material for classifying sets of blogs by function. The framework will be illustrated here by reference to a number of themes available in the WordPress blogging interface, analysing the ways in which each of their designs affords user activity.

in tandem with accounting for some of my lack of regularity in posting here recently, i now report that i’ve recently started another blog for (mainly) a gang of four fellow linguists. actually, i did not set it up, P did, but he is one of the fellow travellers anyway. i merely enthemed it and diddled with the extras, then started the conversation. it’s called inter-stratal tension, which is a sort of in-joke for systemicists.

while P is engaged in more practical and everyday pursuits involved in delivering lectures, attending to university admin matters, fielding student enquiries, dealing with blackboard and its drawbacks, etc, i and the other three indulge in some entertaining back& forth about aspects of the conception of the lexico-grammatical system as we see it.

because we are indulging, and because we know each other to be iconoclasts in some way, we have not made the blog public, i.e. we have not annouced its presence to other systemicists. thus, for example, there are only 2 recognised members who are also authors, plus 2 admins (me and P). there are no subscribers as yet, and comments are restricted to those who are registered and logged in…

the other day, however, someone who is not a user managed to post a comment which was obviously a bit of a joke. calling themselves ‘webmaster’, with a link that lead to nowhere, the comment read something like: “please send me a list of contacts as i have a question for you”. now, with no email address, nor a link leading anywhere, there was obviously no possibility of sending this person anything anyway…

i wondered how this person could have subverted the settings so that s/he could make a comment and have it approved (as it was in the comment log) without being a subscriber or without it needing to be approved by moderation. and without leaving an address – actually there was an email address under the wording, but the address seemed invalid anyway.

i checked out the IP address, even though these days one can easily make out one is neither here nor there. but for interest, and i spose, almost unsurprisingly, it was a russian server:

http://www.ip-whois-lookup.com/lookup.php?ip=188.168.84.224

anyone got any ideas on how this was done?

there is a hole in wordpress somewhere i guess, and some people know how to access it.

Screen capture of part of the interface. Keyword search=privacy. Lexicalist

ABOUT. Lexicalist reads through millions of words of chatter on the internet to analyze how certain demographics talk and what kinds of things they talk about. We currently break this information down into three kinds of demographics: age, gender, and geography.

METHODOLOGY. Lexicalist works by analyzing rich sources of information online, including blog posts, news sources, and social networking sites like Twitter. Each bit of information is subjected to rigorous natural language processing, which includes a likelihood distribution of being authored over all geographic, age and gender demographics.

All of the statistical results displayed here are then normalized against the volume of information coming from each demographic to see what words are most commonly associated with certain populations. The result is a descriptive snapshot of language as it’s used today.

src

Lexicalist is worth investigating. In fact, it potentially is a time sink/waster for the lexically minded. I wish I knew how a descriptive snapshot relates to language usage. This seems to me to be more a question of the relations between a particular form for methodical description and some particular frame for usage. Presumably there is a relation born by natural language processing.

Okay, over at Wikipedia, the treatment of NLP includes:

Tasks and limitations

In theory, natural-language processing is a very attractive method of human-computer interaction. Early systems, such as SHRDLU, working in restricted “blocks worlds” with restricted vocabularies, worked extremely well, leading researchers to excessive optimism, which was soon lost when the systems were extended to more realistic situations with real-world ambiguity and complexity.

Natural-language understanding is sometimes referred to as an AI-complete problem, because natural-language recognition seems to require extensive knowledge about the outside world and the ability to manipulate it. The definition of “understanding” is one of the major problems in natural-language processing. src

‘Context is to understanding, . . ‘

(I added Lexicalist to our links.)

(Pwn (below: Various pronunciations) is a leetspeak slang term derived from the verb “own”, as meaning to appropriate or to conquer to gain ownership. The term implies domination or humiliation of a rival, used primarily in the Internet-based video game culture to taunt an opponent who has just been soundly defeated (e.g., “You just got pwned!”). It was popular among Counter-Strike gamers before spreading through the more general Internet world. The past tense and past participle, pwned, may also be spelled pwnd, pwn’d, pwn3d, pwnt, poned, pawned, or powned. Source: Wikipedia )

Enterprising parodists on May 19 created a Twitter account and feed to mock BP, BPGlobalPR.

Chris Matyszczyk reports (5/26) from CNET,

CNN did contact BP and asked the company whether it might feel its image was being polluted by this rogue global PR force. BP reportedly said it had seen it, but was sure that people would realize it’s not really the company’s work.

Perhaps this underestimates people’s notions of what is and isn’t possible in today’s often ugly, cynical world.

Still, I know there will be sticklers among you who will attempt to invoke Twitter’s fake pages policy. It reads that impersonators “should not be the exact name of the subject of the parody, commentary, or fandom; to make it clearer, you should distinguish the account with a qualifier such as ‘not,’ ‘fake’ or ‘fan.’”

It’s unlikely Twitter will get too picky about this, given that it gets some nice PR (happy to help, as always, chaps) out of it all, and given that BP seems unlikely to complain. BP has made its first wise PR move in allowing this site to gush black humor while the nation’s beaches are threatened by a far more painful darkness.

90,000+ followers, and counting.

Sometime in the next few days, BPGlobalPR’s following will surpass in number BP’s number of employees worldwide.

BP America’s Twitter following? 8,000 or so.

Although the official feed doesn’t offer any black humor, it’s funny in a different way.