Eurovision 2008 in Elbonia & 5th Museum night, in Belgrade

Month of May, month of May -everything is lovely and gay. Culture in Serbia is meeting cold turkey (heard today one landed in Belgrade right from Ireland?!?) and more in preEuroTrash called Eurovision (contest for the best EuroSong). It’s not the fact that the official web site for Eurovision Belgrade 2008 is quite hideous but also the words of ignorance I came across yesterday of P. Schofield (British Broadcasting Corporation) at this Facebook group, where the creator is contemplating EuroSong contest “in Elbonia or wherever it is this year” (even more hideous for someone working in media, no?). Anyway, as I’ve missed this years Belgrade’s Design Week and lectures I wanted to attend ( Ascan Mergenthaler, CH, Herzog & de Meuron - Flowing into Landscape and Daniel Libeskind, US, The Architecture of Memories). But, what I won’t miss is the 5th Museum night (last year was organized through whole Serbia, and this year will be the same) and early drawings of Picasso, Air and Space Museum, History of computers exhibition, video installation, computer animation in Jewish Museum, Italian design in Superspace, Museum of Science&Technology and many other places through the city. Over 63 spots on May 17th from 6pm until the dawn, check the program and enjoy! I’m coming to take you to the Museum: )

TwitterFone: my first voice tweet

TwitterFone is new private beta service that converts voice to text and then posts it to Twitter in text and audio format. If you want to use it and spare your time, while on go or being busy, you need to verify your phone number with Twitter account. Then, TwitterFone will give you a local phone number to call (in my case is UK) to leave audio message. You have to speak clearly after the beep, then hangup: the audio message you send will be transcribed and then posted to Twitter along with a link to the recording. As you’re limited to 140 characters on Twitter, TwitterFone gives you time limit of 15 seconds on the recording. The service supports English only and is free for now. Users comments here, and this is my test message/tweet.

Radiohead Against Human Trafficking - ‘All I Need’ Video Now!

Radiohead released today a video broadcasting globally, which aims to raise awareness of human trafficking. The lead singer, Thom Yorke, and his bandmates produced a music video together with MTV EXIT (End Exploitation and Trafficking) for “All I Need,” a song from their In Rainbows album. The video was filmed in Australia by Oscar-winning cinematographer John Seale and director Steve Rogers.

The United Nations’ International Labour Organization estimates that there are around 2.5 million people in the world who have been trafficked.

“They’ve produced a video of two parallel stories running, one of a little boy in the West and one of a little boy in a sweatshop in the East, and the boy [in the West] ends up buying the shoes from the sweatshop. It’s actually quite powerful,” Yorke said. “It’s the sort of images I have in my head anyway. Sometimes when you’re walking down High Street and you’re looking at the incredibly cheap [sneakers], you sort of think, ‘Hmmm, well how did they manage to make that so cheaply?’ It sort of reminds me of one of my preoccupations, so I’m touched that the music goes with that. I think it’s great.”

& once again Thom

“I think it’s important for everyone in the West or on High Street to understand the consequences of our economic activity. You must be aware of the level of exploitation that’s going on,” Yorke said. “It’s part of our Western life, and one we should accept responsibility for. There’s no such thing as a free lunch or a free ticket to another country.”

I hope this is just beginning of raising the awareness of this issue around the world and involving more people in the campaign against human trafficking.

UNESCO publishes a book on Open Access to Knowledge and Information in South Asia

UNESCO office in New Delhi, as a clearinghouse for dissemination and sharing of information and knowledge in all fields of UNESCO’s competence, published ebook Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives – the South Asian Scenario. I wrote earlier that some of the major edu. institutions started to practice free flow of information (some didn’t yet) by giving the open access to their repositories of electronic documents, realizing that locked archives are keeping their users, mostly academics, researchers, away from the source of knowledge and information. For global institution for Educational, Scientific and Cultural affairs - UNESCO, open access is “ an innovative mode of scholarly communication within the digital environment, which is gaining momentum in developed countries that already have necessary information infrastructure.” One of the conditions for information structure is developed information society, and the book presents successful open access initiatives in the South Asia sub-region, available in the forms of “open courseware, open access journals, metadata harvesting services, national-level open access repositories and institutional repositories.” It is good to know about South Asian initiatives and efforts in making the knowledge and information open! You can download this book here.

Recent Twitter mashup resources

What is Twitter doing today?

I know what we’ve been doing in the last few days, using new tools: Tweetscan -SE for Twitter posts in real-time and Twhirl, desktop client for Twitter that enables you to post from this platform to multiple micro-blogging services: Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. You might be interested in the following mashups, tools, applications, resources that could facilitate your everyday twittering:

- Quotably, makes conversations easier to follow.

-TwitterLocal, another desktop Adobe Air application that lets you to view tweets in your area (city, state, post.code, range of miles and search)

-Twixxer, enables you sharing photos and videos using Greasemonkey script.

-TweetStats, you can graph your Twitter status by hour, month, timeline. Service is a bit slow, usually three people waiting before getting your stats, and you can get amused with proverbs on patience. ah.

-GroupTweet, the concept reminds on google groups but this is micro twitter community made for sending private messages between you and specific group of your friends.

-12seconds.tv, short (12 sec.) video updates with your Twitter friends, for now in alpha version.

-multitweet.com, web based service - Twitter and Jaiku at one page.

-Twitsig, converts your tweets into images. Didn’t try this one.

Also, check out, via, the definitive list of the top Twitter clients and for Serbian readers there’s pioneering article (in Serbian) on micro blogging and Twitter can be read and seen in April ed.of PC press magazine.

i want you to get together: social thing, friendfeed

Everything live happening on the Internet with your friends, in all web sites you use, with interaction and posting utility from one social network to another, comes with livestream personal dashboard of socialthing. What I’ve noticed here is the lack of privacy, e.g. if you are protecting Twitter updates, even if you twit via social thing, they will appear in other social networks visible to all. For now, it’s private beta version and you need invite. Looks something like this:

On the other side friendfeed is more user-friendly and enables you to share numerous feeds with your friends. You can share updates with people you choose, protect your data, or you can choose to keep them in public, open for everyone. Lovely utility is commenting and discussion information and items among your friends. It’s free and open.

What will be the next interactive social feed (personal) directory?

Is My Space poor excuse for a social life?

Today I came across an interesting video, showing an irritated kid who was mocked and attacked by his older teen brother and his friends while socializing in his own private online space. The video was recorded by his brother with the intent of being “a documentary of how people can be obsessed by My Space.” In the video, the older teens are provoking the child into hysterical behavior and crying as he tries to defend his personal “my space”. They intentionally laugh at him and ask provoking questions, which makes the child hysterical. Teenage cruelty was expressed by classical passive-aggressive behavior with the goal of making this kid feel guilt, using strong accusations that his “obsession” with My Space is “killing us and our family”. The irritated kid was defending his private physical and virtual space, especially since for him My Space is a part of his everyday life (his friends to hang out with- social life).

Kids, and teens, are more often moving to the online playground during the early phases of their socialization and, using that medium, they build relationships and stay connected to their friends. Almost everyday the media talks about potential predators and bullying on My Space, but now I wonder if the real bullying (sometimes) comes from the family or the ‘closest’ ones (in the real world) , in some particular cases because they were not understood by adult culture.

Is My Space a poor excuse for a social life?

Twitter in plain English

More of videos. Common Craft this time presents micro-blogging service: Twitter (in plain English).

Gmail art -Russian version

I don’t use Russian language, but I really liked what global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi (Moscow) created for Google. Their promo video for Gmail suppose to attract more Russian people to use Gmail. This is how looks local version for global web service. Share & enjoy!

Twitter, never let me down (again)!

Twitter is down this morning (again). This time without notification that something went wrong. Server crash or something else? I tried to reach the api, help, and the only tray of the bird I got from Google’s cache of www.twitter.com (as retrieved on 27 February 2008).  Far that I’m experiencing mind panic attacks if “Twitter is down for more than an hour”, but I got a bit annoyed of my favourite micro-blogging form. After reading interesting blog post of top 10 signs that you might need Twittervention, I came this morning to thought that this is done on purpose as we should all get back and update our blogs more often?

Thank you Twitter, and you… What are you doing?

Poke me, poke you back: Facebook social networking context

How many times you have been poked by a friend, colleague, and affiliate? And what was your reaction? I had to write few lines on this as I am recently (massively) poked on Facebook. It was regular, surprisingly massively poking (not superpoking), not explicitly poked, but – just regular poke with two choices given: to poke back or remove poke.

Perceiving my Facebok space as my friendly social networking interactive playground receiving willingly or not many requests, superwall posts that ended in ’shrinked’ version of my FB extended profile, I stopped and wondered in the past few days: “what is happening recently with poking?” I’ve been for long time on Facebook, but never had massive poking notifications daily. Why are my pokers, poking me all the time? Regularly..

Many dictionaries as well as Wikipedia Poke define as gesture of action of tapping and/or softly jabbing another person with the tip of your finger or a pointy object. This is usually done to gain this particular person’s attention, and is commonly used as a form of teasing, joking around with, or annoying another person.

And what is Facebook poke?

Facebook as social network defines poke as social utility that connects you with the people around you.
What is the purpose of this form of interaction with your friends on Facebook with two simple actions? If we exclude implementation of poking in higher education in learning and communicating processes , we can consider other implications. Removing the poke could be interpretted by the friend as ignoring the poke, but poking back simply invites your friend to repeat the cycle.

In social networking terms, poke is contextual, and the context of poke is dependent upon the current level of familiarity between the ‘poker’ and the ‘pokee’. I remember last year I was invited to a group “Enough with poking, let’s just have sex “, and ignored request for the membership as I observed then poking as friendly virtual gesture with friends and colleagues , usually denoting verbal phrase: “Hey , what’s up?” , or “Look at me!”, saying” ”Hi”, to someone you already know well or screaming background form: “Hey, I’m here, online!,” or “Hey, I’m busy but just poked you to say I didn’t forget this and that or will be back soon’, followed usually by message/email. And there are pokes that are expressing more than friendly, primarily school behavior with connotation: “I poke you and now you have to poke me back”.
Poking for fun? “I won’t pull your hair/ponytail – but I’m poking you” - elements of (naïve) and light weighted flirtation. Therefore, poke can be flirting. Poke can be “I am shy but won’t to say hi”.

There are numerous possible meanings and interpretations behind the poke and in social networking technologies context poke can be perceived as: 1. showing the {romantic*} interest for the other, 2. High visibility, Low pressure way of getting attention 3. a lightweight interaction.

An interesting range of it’s meaning but we always have to have in mind the social context and the level of intimacy between two communication nodes.

When I expressed annoyance at today’s massive poking, one of my colleagues wrote in his status bar on Facebook that poking is fun and is not giving up, and I truly believe his perceiving of Facebook poking as light and ‘on the run’ social utility.
I’ve asked my friends what poke mean to them, but they didn’t know to explain… they just poke. While I was writing this text, friend of mine, IT engineer, tried to understand concept of poking. He said that poke is subjective, it can lead to misunderstandings unless all parties agree on what a poke is or all parties accept that they can’t know what a poke is. Maybe.

:smile :

Do you poke, and if so, what would you do instead of poking on Facebook, in a real life?

Howard K. Martian, Extraterrestrial Anthroplogist

And now something completely different that made my day! Howard Rheingold in his Vlog series on digital culture and social media, now presents hilarious video from his archive (1976) posing as Howard K. Martian, extraterrestrial anthropologist. In this cyberpunkerish eposiode with elements of Monty Python & Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, equipped with a radiomike, Howard roamed the streets of the San Francisco examining the automobile cult.

Twitter for business communication and advertising

Until the next issue of PC press mag. is about to be released: an article on microblogging and Twitter  (for dummies, advanced users, researchers), today I just popped to the one from the many (of many) texts on Twitter - this time as a tool in business communication. Via Social Media Today,  Jeff Tippett explains what Twitter means to him in everyday biz. I would add here that beside mentioned two facets of microblogging , creating the (social) network and reading/sending messages (tweets), important factors are users’ interaction and sharing the information. Also, I see Twitter in business communication as SN tool for e- advertising, promoting self, idea(ology), product, info on the Internet (political purpose, education, sports, media, and biz institutions), as well as micro-blogging in real time from important political or economic spotlights. I am wondering will the events from previous week (several elections at the same time, different geo-spots, as well as the sports events) now Super Monday, Tuesday to Super-Friday, will occupy Twitterversum and outlive good old blogging form? Do you rather blog or twit?

Exlusive interview on V-Twitterizing, Para-twittering and beyond!

I am in the airplane and got stuck, still on the land, as the captain announces that ‘we have some software problem’. Passengers got a bit upset and some geek made a comment: “Yeah, they’re probably using OS $MS”. I laugh and start to tweet sending text message via mobile phone on this situation in the plane, from my seat. Got instant feedback tweets and DM (direct messages) from my Twitter friends (followers) who got worried :”Oh, are you ok? Are you safe? What’s going on with the software? Pls let us know when you land..” etc. One of the primer of micro-blogging phenomena, Twitter,  is useful communication tool, that enables you to have interaction with your friends and share the information in the form of short 140 chars. updates,  in a word:  ’on the run’, “always with you” social networking service. I’ve already talked/wrote about it before, and with hidden guilty become twittaddict (Twitterers will understand this passion) placing behind regular blog posts.  Twitterizing and twittaddict are (my) new lingo terms I invented as being the part of everyday twittering.One of the example how Twitter can be great/useful tool when you’re on the road, travelling, and beyond, is my Twitter friend - RoadHacker, IT specialist, massive twitterer who I met and noticed that he was ‘life casting’ from all over the USA doing his IT work and micro-blogging by creating and using video: v-tweets.  I got inspired by recent research (to be published) on Twitter, and got an idea to create para-twittering e-view, so I’ve asked him few interesting questions on Twitter in Twitter timeline and here’s the outcome.  Listen, watch and Enjoy!    

The Commons: Flickr and Library of Congress

The Library of Congress began last year first collaboration with Flickr and now has launched its pilot project called The Commons. Yesterday they announced a partnership that will put photos from the LoC’s collection online in a social environment and users to interact with them. LoC started organizing historical photograph collections through Flickr offering 3000 photos (so far): two sets of digitized photos from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and photos from the George Grantham Bain News Service. “The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.” By tagging or commenting.  From official web site Library of Congress you can find more information about this project, as well as on the blog of LoC.

Also interesting additional information on new tagging initiative - The Commons  says that these photographs from the Library “represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Facebook: entire video of the piece CBS’ “60 Minutes”

Thanks to SmartMobs here’s from the last night 12 min. video of CBS correspondent getting insiders information on Facebook and related issues directly from Mark Zuckerberg.

Btw, I really slept on the on a mattress on the floor. For months. How about you?

Quote of the month

Actually this quote, that I just grabbed, is the quote for the first 20 days of January 2008. Why only for the first 20 days you ask? Because. One cycle ends, the other begins.

‘Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds’ - Albert Einstein

Will you save the energy over the upcoming holidays?

Since I will be far, far, far away trying hardly to use my mobile gadgets, I have the question:

Can you manage to get completely analogue and turn off your computers for the Holidays? Frankly?

credits: Randall Munroe

Have a great Holidays performance!

FaceBook mssging among friends and ID impression management issues

It all started few days ago when I read at IT Serbian forum a story on case of the fake digital identity and image(s) of super blond young female who represented herself as cute little blondie, that blogs, twitts, has Facebook profile, dropping university for the sake of modelling etc, etc. In the meantime, she/he was advertising all huge biz enterprises in Serbia on the blog and when IT people and geeks revealed the identity as fake one, she/he confessed about this behaviour as ‘transition period’ as she/he is moving to work for one/new Serbian social networking site (advertising again). Hideous saga went through forums and other online media, but what is left behind is hundreds of male population in Serbia dreaming of her character and the image he (her inventor) created.

With little effort everyone can be anyone on Web. Nothing new is happening, as in offline world. Even real people, adults, have impression management issues in social networking sites evaluated in social contexts. Here, we have example of sweet little blond: in Serbia social context it is the model of neo turbo-folk culture where fake (layout: hair, eye color, pumped lips, implants everywhere, fake complexion, fake smile, gestures) and glittered are highly-rated as trendy and ‘in’ which teens blindly follow. Having that in mind, it’s not difficult to create such digital ID, being presented also at Facebook (”oh, you have only eleven photos, where is the twelfth, i thought you were posing for the Calender?” - as one of the adult Serbian male commented). This issue also deserves and needs to go deeper into psychological analysis of human behaviour and social dynamics in this particular context where female/human is not respected or because of the false prejudices and bad jokes on females with blond hair.

So, yesterday we had Facebook inner circle messge discussion (among few friends who are familiar with the case) , interactive thread on fake identities, misuse of female image in marketing purposes, impression management issues and friending: fake or real? One of the IT managers commented that sometimes, in this case, it is better to have real virtual friends than fake friends in the real life, where the others agreed with him stating that they know many of online people from the city, communicating through other mediums (mobiles, IM’s) and that is even better if/when virtual friend becomes a friend in real life (lot of examples on this variation). One of my friend and colleague who was (and still) for long time at Myspace (MS addict) and moved to Facebook confessed that at first was sceptical and didn’t think at all to join this SNS, but after awhile he finds FB more serious social network with more options for networking with people.

As we can perceive, social processes provide individuals with contextual frame through which they can properly socialize with other participants. All computer-mediated communication sites have the feature that allows participants to articulate and publicly display their relations to others in the system which makes chain of the friendship. We all agreed on that, most of us though, that social network sites are not digital spaces disconnected from other social venues. As the outcome from the last night discussion: today’s meeting in the real world with regional editor in chief of PC Press magazine, just few hours after our virtual talk with other participants on this issue.

It is interesting to mention here, in one of her talks earlier, danah boyd observed that participants must negotiate when being on social network sites thought four key rolls: persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences.These elements help participants to structure context but they also make it more difficult to manage collapsed contexts. This is exactly what have happened in this case and the previously described cases (posts) in virtual communication in the local venue. Also, regarding the latest NewYork Times article, researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, came to conclusion that while “people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.”

re-evaluate your real/fake online/offline friends.

Science Blogging Anthology!

Conference time is approaching. Today Bora updated everything you need to know on Science Blogging conference (program,
wiki..). There’s going to be another Science Blogging Anthology and should be published and ready for the event. Nominations for the most interesting and best posts are still open until December 20th, so you have just few days to nominate via submission form one of your own posts or one from your favourite science blogger.

upcoming conferences: SN portability and more…

You may find these three conferences interesting, as it’s getting closer:

• SocialNetworkPortability, Webcamp in Cork, Ireland on the 2nd March 2008. The topic of this workshop will be social network portability, within the 5th International conference on Social software: Blogtalk Corc 2008.
• Another one is in UK- Open Knowledge conference (OKCon) , it will take place on Saturday 15th March 2008. It’s the annual open knowledge conference, in London, UK. Wiki page.
• And IA Summit Miami- Experiencing Information 2008, April 10-14, 2008, Miami, Florida, USA, focusing to information architecture and users, and “how can we design information environments that best support these users and activities?”

Will be back with more information as I am stucked between practice - meetings, consulting, searching for PhD scholarship for my research [ any institution, organization interested, please write me on this email : danicar@linuxmail.org] and urge and respect to the others not to go behind deadlines.

To FB or not to FB? Are we friends or ex-friends?

First I want to reply to the post of my Twitter friend and colleague George Frink with whom I DM’ed via Twitter lately on SNS and other issues, and here I have the need to explain, actually clarify his latest post as response to my previous Online friending. The point is that I never said that virtual world relationships are “nonexistent”, real people are behind their avatars, names, user-names etc., as well as social networking on Web at certain aspects are re-establishing our analogue connections and establishing or fostering new connections with people we meet or will meet (both online or offline).

What I was stressing out is that certain group of people, SNS users - e.g. in Serbia, Belgrade, groups from teenagers to adult are networked online all the time, living in pretty obvious proximity in the city, and yet they rather communicate via chat communication channels, social networks, exchanging messages, poking each other, etc. and never (or rarely) appear in analogue world socializing with their virtual friends from the hood. I was reported also by the parents who were complaining, giving up from their kids who spent hours and hours online with their friends, probably not understanding the process, how they are all networked either playing games or chatting, while they could meet in real hood surrounding or some caffee or community center.

This is also a problem for older population of SNS users in Serbia: they rather send messages via Facebook (email is now passe, as well as the usage of text messaging) or MySpace - you can see them hanging online and participating in all given applications. ” If you don’t have Facebook profile- you are not ‘hype’ “.

Also, in this case, it is hard to draw the line between their real and virtual identities as ‘being somebody’s friend at Facebook’ is not ‘hype’ but also group limited issue - “you can be formaly my FB friend but I have smaller group of friends in the (FB) city with whome I poke, virtual fight club, hug, send to each other drinks, chocolates, etc.”. And there are collectors of ‘friends’. Nothing is virtually different considering users behaviour as it is in real life, just instead of face-to-face communication, when is very possible and given/gifted by geo-spots, they choose secure virtual playground. Why?

The other opposite FB scenario is happening these days (I hope it’s not due to my previous post) with adult group of professional computer users (web designers, programmers, bloggers, information professionals, etc.), who are quitting their Facebook accounts. One of the example is my colleague and friend, highly respected designer, who yesterday shut down for good his FB account because after months and months of networking with others, having virtual drinks, etc. he realized it’s getting tiresome, and he doesn’t find any interest in staying at this social network where everyone (in his network) was ‘posing’, trying to be ‘hype’. ‘His fellow commenter’s shared and approved his opinion as it’s better for them to socialize via Flickr or Last.fm, or some other vivid discussion group. This also goes to my statement on real, analogue identity versus ‘hype’, ‘fake’, neo -”Neo’ matrix created identity for common user of SNS in this part of the world. Analysis on this issue will and goes deeper to sociological, psychological and geographical level of research for this kind of phenomena and behaviour. Real friendships will strengthen no matter what, fake one that would lessen either in real or virtual life would happen the same, in the same environments.

So far, someone’s largest social network is it’s own web site or blog. Couldn’t it be any better, useful and safer place for people to find you and contact you, if needed?

credits:http://xkcd.com/300/

Online friending: information overload and simulation of life

Facebook friending or something like this*: friend requests, group invitations, cause invitations, world’s most abstract invitations, My Lil Lohan invitation, circle of trust, risk, true or false invitations, gifts invitations, birthday calender, friends for sale (the person is no longer friend), southpark character invitations, sketch me, characterize me requests, harry potter, wishabi, twisted Xmas requests, zodiac animal, counter, smile, bless you, hugs, hug me, kiss me, requests to some quizzes: how classy are you?, are you a great kiss, are you romantic?, are you hot or not? cute or sexy?, are you normal? etc, etc. also can be seen some of it here.

Online social networks became more than interacting playground, messaging and friending, also more than writing. The growth of SNS expanded into new ‘neo’ age of online multimedia forms of behaviourism - talking, clicking, poking, exchanging comments, homemade videos, fun walls , super walls, chain emails**, racing, pillow fighting, (human) petting, participating in subnetwork within network.
I came to the moment in my hectic life, to face one lovely day bunch of requests, invites, causes, groups notifications, chain funwall messages coming right from my Facebook friends. Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, (in previously posts mentioned) makes implications on how: “people [are] projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

We are chosen and we choose. My friends are mainly former students, colleagues from analogue life, present colleagues, professors, friends from both analogue and digital life, and future colleagues and affiliates. Age ranges from 22 to 60 years old. Some of them I didn’t meet face to face yet, some of them sent me email because they are reading my written word, some are friends from other SNS, or micro-blogging sites. Many of them are people from real life, before FB, many of them are idle, and, as extreme, many of them with (I guess) free time are overwhelming (those who are not into exploring digital culture, social web, or similar) with many applications I cannot/won’t handle. ***

“With social networks, there’s a fascination with intimacy because it simulates face-to-face communication,” Dr. Wesch says.

Many of friends from analogue world are very serious, personal and intimate on FB applications including virtual matrix of subnetworks of network (such as Human pets application). On this subnetwork I will write separately. By creating hybrid masks they are making fundamental distance. They are safe to connect with others through weak ties simulating the physical space and communication flow through distance. Why? Because it’s safe.

One of FB friends (and friends in analogue life) reported me on the other communication channel how he feels safe(r), even communicating, chatting with friends around the block in the same city area, rather than meeting them face to face. Why? Because he can think before writing a feedback through IM or other virtual communication forms, avoiding potential conflict, embarrassment or avoiding to reveal the true ‘behind-the-screen’ character identity, playing Neo or any antipode self made hybrid character with opposite attributes. By this hybrid simulation, this adult is lost in own virtual matrix, teleporting items, people, hybrid-related communications or relations to the offline world.

Some of us are creating this way our social relationships online, I am asking: will this paradoxal effect start to create the way we relate to each other in the offline world as well? We spend more time ‘networking’ and ‘talking’, ‘getting together’, and the fact is we spend less time - getting together, networking and talking, while expanding definition of a * freind* to imply people we rarely meet (from offline world) or we may never meet (from online world). Therefore, I have fundamental question: will our analogue friendships in the real world strenghten or they’ll lessen as we loose ourselves in hybrid structures of online * friending* ?
*Apologize to my FB friends on “notworking” in all these games, tests, invitations. I’m cleaning FB space due to application and information overload. Everything reasonable, creative and inspiring is welcomed!

**Dare to send me any of “forward to your three or seven friends …or…etc” chain funwall messages!

*** Dear friends, if you didn’t check the Beacon box to turn off Beacon, you can do it here. For those who didn’t read FB apologies on privacy concerns, also here.

Analogue vs Digital is not equal! Offline Weinberger’s discussion

My old professor of world literature had theory on analogue and digital world , even nine years ago when the Internet started to grow and expand. As an active computer consumer, I asked him weather he would prefer to read novel as eBook or in paper form if he had to choose, he would say: “I don’t go with computer in my bed”, denoting that Gutenberg galaxy would never loose its value as well as analogue comparing to digital is not the same, as many people put the equal sign between these two antipodes.

As David Weinberger said “..real world pizza tastes better than virtual food” in the trailer for tomorrow’s session (for those around the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard Law School). Weinberger will tomorrow, December 5 at 6:30pm lead an offline discussion on “Is the Web Changing the Nature of Leadership?” as part of his Web of Ideas series in the Berkman Center’s conference room. It will be discussion on how Web “affects our ideas about ourselves and our world”.

Sounds familiar from previous posts on analogue and digital, or better to say versus digital? Matrix world and self-made virtual identities in real life does not exist. And if they do, identities are ego-oriented to their narratives from the virtual life. Once they step out from the same matrix -they are not the image they created, in offline world. You’ll read more about social aspects of web, online interaction and behaviour within social networks in upcoming posts.

Second life? No! or How did I quit…

Actually I was never active in Second Life. I joined few months ago, created avatar, started to explore, to investigate, participated/ audit few lectures and that was all. I never had any intentions to go deeper: sell, buy, use entertainment facilities, or interacting per se with unknown people. I was usually invited to events (education content).

Second Life, beside server, metrics and other bugs, have many other failures I described here. It is column in Serbian though, for those who speak Serbian - it is realistic and full critique on SL with some stats.  It is very easy to quit something that doesn’t have the future. With simply: uninstall!

BlogOpen in Serbia, live

Today is South East Blog festival in Novi Sad, BlogOpen, regional bloggers meeting with interesting guests. For those who cannot come to Novi Sad, here’s the link to live broadcasting via Blog.tv (thanks to Blogowski). At this early afternoon Stephanie Booth talks on blog consulting and marketing. Also, for updates check BlogOpen web site. And you can follow me via Twitter, as I’ve been more micro-blogging due to busy agenda. Soon you’ll read more from me about burning issues happening. Thank you for the patience.

Science Blogging Conference - update and registration

If you didn’t register yet, here’s the chance. Yes, I’m coming to the Conference and will be flying over the pond (second time around, same place, different event)  and East coasters will have a chance to meet me and talk on academic web 2.0 issues, science blogging, and everything else at the Conference. And beyond. Looking forward to see Tar Heelians and other folks.

experiment in cyberspace: mutating genre meme

I have been tagged by Bora with a bit complexed meme, more as blogging and scientific experiment in cyberspace evolution and I’d like to see how it has progressed so far, from ‘my grand-grand parent’ to parent. Here are the rules, and my answers:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

* You can leave them exactly as is.

* You can delete any one question.

* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.

* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

* You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.

My grandparent is Flying Trilobite.

My parent is A Blog Around the Clock.

The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is:

Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

The best neo-noir SF film in scientific and cyberpunk dystopias is:

Bladerunner by Ridley Scott.

The best sexy song in rock is:

Rose rouge by St Germain

[edit] as I mixed genres, above is more jazzy-groovy.

The best sexy song in rock is:

Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode.

The best cult novel in ex-Yugoslav fiction is:

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kis.

I am tagging the following people,this time my Twitter friends, to do the same:

Curt Hopkins

Anatole Fuksas

Uldis Bojars

Paul Jones

The secret of 2 millionth file on Wikimedia Commons

From Wikimedia Foundation listserv officially comes happy news that Wikimedia Commons now has over two million files. Since March 2007,  Commons routinely have over 100,000 files uploaded every single month. It is becoming more and more common to have over 5,000 files in a single day, since Commons is still a very young project,  say administrators from Commons.

Now comes the exciting part. The 2 millionth file on Commons was an audio file. From the Commons database was extracted that the 2 millionth file on Wikimedia Commons comes from Serbian Wikimedian -Nikola Smolenski who uploaded this file on 03:34, 9 October 2007. Congratulations!