Brandymore Castle

Traditonal Publishers Still Hidebound

2010-09-14T15:56:00.003-04:00

"The idea that something that appeared in print is automatically worth paying for is nonsense." says Mark Coatney in Evaluating Time Magazine's New Online Pay Wall

This is an example of thinking from the traditional publishing world, where if something made it into print or was "published" it meant the content with through a lengthy process of adding value and checking quality, through the editorial, fact-checking and proofreading process. This was thought in the olden days to mean something. Yes, it did, but not always. That editors and fact-checkers were available or that they had a hand in content did not necessarily mean puff-pieces, fabricated stories, falsehoods, mistakes, typos never made it into that published content polished to shine like your grandmother's counter tops.

Publishing was a measure of trust and quality from the pre-network world. The network has a new set of criteria and indicators of trust and quality.

I find that often writers who do not get paid, who are passionate about a subject or cause and write on their own, are more timely, accurate and effective than authors working for a magazine. There is something about how writers are hired, directed and influenced within the publishing world that biases, distorted, subverts them and their content. Its not always money, or being paid to ghostwrite or pander or a puff-piece or just being paid to write a certain kind of article that the editor wants. Its something inherent in the process. It may be a consequence of the time it takes to polish a piece to perfection. It may be the idea that a piece needs to be polished. These requirements place their own burdens and biases on writing. Of course, it seems rational that a more polished piece is better, but that is not always true. Sometimes diamonds are more useful and beautiful in the rough than cut and polished.

Often published print authors come across as hired-guns, slick, indifferent, arrogant. They often know so much, they know too much, and become arrogant, infusing their writing with their opinions and indifference to reader's and other's views on the subject. The very act of being a "filter" means possibly useful information may be omitted. What if the filter is wrong? What if an author is giving advice, carefully researched and polished, so it looks good, but has become obsolete by the time it is published, has drawn the wrong conclusions, used the wrong sources of information, yet, speaks with an authoritative voice? This goes on without much accountability in the slow moving print world.

My own idea for payment, which I proposed back in the late 90's, was to adopt the "PBS model" of threatening to "take Big Bird away" or in other words, remove content after a certain time if not enough people viewing it online paid for it. The page would display the number of days remaining until the content is pulled, and the number of people paying for it, with the threshold, like one of those donation thermometers. Perhaps the pledgemusic model would work for publishing content as well as it does for music. Authors could offer additional items, such as autographed books, handwritten manuscripts or donations to charity for payment.

Angry Diggers and the Death of the Author

2010-09-02T10:13:00.008-04:00

Veteran users of Digg are upset with changes to the site aimed at reducing their influence. They have begun gaming the "voting" system

Angry Digg users flood home page with Reddit links

What is interesting about this is:

When I first encountered and thought about sites using voting systems to surface desirable information, I understood that all algorithms for voting can be gamed.

That to deter gaming, very sophisticated and arcane algorithms were required. That these discourage contribution because contributors never know where their work will rank nor why it ranks low or high (this is similar to authors puzzling over Amazon's ranking system).

I was surprised when sites based on user voting systems began to succeed by simplifying their voting to the thumbs up/down basic counts or other simple and easily gamed voting systems.

I believe that when users are satisfied with outcome of their vote, which for Digg means, contributors get their links or comments surfaced and readers feel that the surfaced content is useful, there is no reason to game the system. A little childish game playing might go on, but as long as Digg was a useful tool to most of its contributors and readers (perhaps the same individual, but I would guess the standard 2% participate as contributors and the rest are readers), the system was in equilibrium, running on "social balance."

Only a minority of pranksters might want to game the voting system. Until the contributors become dissatisfied.

I think it shows that simple voting systems can work, which was something I believed was unrealistic when I first encountered them. But through good social engineering, strict controls are not required, sophisticated and opaque voting algorithms are not necessary and the "helpful/unhelpful," "interesting/uninteresting," "thumbs up/thumbs dn" type of voting system is transparent and intuitive, and robust as long as users are happy with the results.

The controversy also reveals the differences in "publishing" model. Digg operated as kind of newspaper edited by a small group of contributors, who were opinion makers or controlled mindshare of an audience, gatekeepers, more like traditional media. It may appear democratic, but in reality was a traditional publishing model where a small number of contributors and editors create a filtered flow of content, like publishing or broadcast media.

The opposing model is the "grapevine" or social model, in which information flows organically, laterally, potentially exponentially, through social connections.

Authors do not like readers having a "custom experience" because it reduces the influence of authors. It makes their work pointless. I would not describe a customized information flow, such as provided by software agents or through user personalization, the same as a social information flow. Social media may reduce the influence of gatekeepers, authors, editors, publishers and broadcasters, but that is probably beneficial. I would not call that customized, but social. The social flow does reduce the influence of authors, but also makes everyone an author and the more influential authors will build social audiences, as they already do with followers on Twitter or through posts to pages on Facebook.

Authors won't go away, because they put time and effort into understanding something others don't have the time for or are unwilling, unable to put in the effort to learn. Authors generally notice things going on, and have something to say about events. Writers like Michael Pollan, for example, are not going to vanish because your Facebook friend told you all you need to know about humanity's divorce from nature and how important local food is at restoring your connection to the natural world. That friend probably isn't noticing, isn't thinking about things going on in the world in a careful way, that's what authors do for a living. And they often become evangelists for their point of view, something few people are going to become.

That's all I've got to say for now, readers.

How I got started writing haiku

2010-09-01T11:51:00.006-04:00

When I was about five years old I began having experiences of things that stuck in my mind. I would see something, encounter something, and I would freeze for a moment. When I think of it now, I realize this was "noticing" the whatever-it-was, but very intensely, compared to other things, for a moment.

I noticed the freshly washed sheets my grandmother had hung on the clothesline to dry, billowing in the breeze. I saw this from my vantage point sitting in the sandbox. It was memorable for some reason I did not consciously think about then.

I was never bored riding in the car on family trips because I was constantly entertained by noticing all the details of everything along the road, there were always things that raised interesting questions in my mind, drew out my curiosity, such as the light on the window in a shop in a strip mall, or the neon lights at night, the stars reflected in the window, the hum of the tires on the highway.

On one of my first trips to the beach, I ran down the big dune at Delaware Seashore towards the ocean, as I got closer to the water, I spotted something in the sand and came to an abrupt halt. It was a jellyfish half buried in the sand. For some reason this first encounter with death and fear of treading on it and being stung, stuck with me.

Over the years, I tried to write poems about my experiences or even make them into lyrics, but nothing ever worked out right. It never felt right. I always had to add something to the experience to make it a poem or song. In 2008, I was reintroduced to haiku by reading Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior while recovering from illness.

I was familiar with haiku from my school English classes, but never took it seriously. Even though I enjoyed haiku. I got the not so subtle message that haiku is a trivial form, not valued in Western poetry. For some reason, when I think of making something I feel the gaze or regard of this invisible audience.

For example. When get the urge to make a guitar because it would be rewarding in of itself without any external reward, I think immediately, yeah, by the time you build one, guitars will be going out of favor and no one will care, you'll be stuck building obsolete stuff no one cares about during a period of decline in respect and interest for the instrument (ironically, this did not happen, but the opposite happened in the last decade). I thought I would be throwing away any effort on a poetic form that was not even recognized as poetry (I have an irrational need for fame, not celebrity).

It didn't take long after reading Oku for me to realize that I'd been barking up the wrong tree all those years. I'd wasted twenty years trying to fit my experiences into forms that didn't fit. I started translating my experiences and unfinished poems into haiku similar to Basho's. It worked. The haiku was perfectly suited to capturing and conveying the kind of experiences I've had since childhood.

I said to myself at the time, I don't know if my haiku are haiku, or if they are really good haiku, but I was happy to have found a form for expressing my experiences in a satisfying way. This was more important than fame. It would have been wasteful for my experiences to have never seen the light of day, and they just kept bugging me to write them down.

I was given a book on haiku writing. This is when I first learned that what is central to haiku is not form, but experience. That my childhood experiences had a name, they are called "haiku moments" in the community of writers.

I always say I don't write haiku. I get asked sometimes by people to "write a haiku" and I can't. A haiku starts with an experience and if I don't have the experience (or can't borrow one), I have nothing to go on. So I don't get haiku contests or challenges. Art is an expression, its not a craft, although it may involve craft. I am sometimes inspired by other people's lives, so I steal their experiences for my haiku, when I've none of my own at the moment worth writing about. But to write a haiku to fit a description or theme provided by a contest seems to undermine what haiku is about, experience.

I've learned through this. I learned that I sometimes you have to wait for the right form to come along for your expression. Western poetry didn't cut it. I've learned that expression had to come from myself. I've learned that I can only do what I love and enjoy otherwise it will never amount to anything. I suppose the other thing is that there was some element of obsession and I had to recognize that, whatever it was there had to be some creative impulse that was driving me, even

perhaps against my will, to make these things.

I am always fascinated by Minnie Evans who began to draw after a voice said to her in a dream, "Why don't you draw or die?" I wish I could draw like Minnie Evans, but I am held back by my scientific nature. I could never see elephants dancing around the moon and if I did I would keep it secret lest people think I'm crazy. I find in writing haiku a way of expressing the mysterious nature of life in concrete terms, hiding the mysteries in juxtapositions, which must be unraveled in the mind of the reader.

Bring the Island to You Instead of You Going to the Island

2010-08-03T16:11:00.004-04:00

To those of us who are blind to the night sky, and deaf to the language of clouds, currents and ocean swells, it seems like a mystical or superhuman act.

I've always been fascinated by the ideas involved in Polynesian wayfinding. The idea of moving the island to you instead of you moving toward the island is so novel to anyone raised on Western thinking. We take so much of our rational, reductionist scientific beliefs for granted, our coordinates and maps, and compasses, as if they are the only way to navigate. While we ignore the most powerful navigational "computer" of all, the human brain. We forget in our "rationality" that there are other equally valid ways of "reasoning" about the world, coping with the world around us, that do not involve precise "facts", numbers and reasoning, but that use our powers of observation, pattern and cleverness. The NY Times has an article on the passing of an important Pacific traditional navigator, who helped restore navigational folkways.

Psychology and Politics

2010-05-28T14:02:00.002-04:00

I am disappointed by seeing a significant number of articles (mostly in the blogs, such as this article that makes an assertion and then follows with several anecdotes about mental patients to justify the assertion) on Psychology Today where the author is: employing psychology to support negative characterizations of persons holding political views different from the author's own; employing psychoanalysis at a distance to explain the political beliefs and policy opinions of others; using psychology to support speculation about the intentions of others whose beliefs about the world and policy differ from the author's; the labeling of people with opposing views as suffering from diagnosable mental illness, arguing or implying those views are a result of mental illness. Doing so without holding the same mirror of analysis up to their own self seems hypocritical and intellectually sloppy on the face of it.

I prefer inquiry that follows the rule of curiosity. Instead of characterizing or questioning, the curious person wishes to learn what another person's views are. An excellent example of curiosity-driven inquiry is Brain Lamb's interviews conducted for C-SPAN.

I believe in the importance of free intellectual inquiry, which is driven by curiosity about the nature of things, so it is not the political content of these articles that offends me, but the undermining the grand project of enlightened inquiry, to which I am dedicated.

As someone who has a lot of contact with the world of folk studies, I am aware that all people without any exception posses a "folk wisdom" about the world, which they absorb by osmosis from their family, neighbors, and community. Our opinions, decisions in life and as policy makers (whether you are a politician or a voter, or opinion shaper), are affected by this personal viewpoint, almost without thinking. I believe this is why so many articles of this type are emerging, and I would like to remind people to follow their curiosity in order to be led beyond our prejudices and ideologies that we may hold without even being aware of them. We also have to be careful about assuming our beliefs are automatically real or true and not conclusions about the world, possibly shaped by our temperament, folk culture and education.

Twitter's Game of Telephone

2010-04-22T23:16:00.002-04:00

I find the criticisms of Twitter, especially by literate people or authors tiresome. They are so wrapped up in their own cherished conception of what literacy, writing and authorship is, they can't see the creativity and value of Twitter's social sharing mechanism.

At its best, Twitter is like the game of telephone. That is where a child tells the child next to them something, then that child tells the next child, and after going through several children, a slightly different story emerges. I believe this is a _good_ thing. What I loved about "retweeting" when I first discovered it on Twitter, was how it was a editorializer's paradise. Tweets in the process of being retweeted simply begged me to rewrite them, reorganize them, expand or comment on the idea, adding my own ideas and thoughts to the original tweet. Perhaps even shifting it entirely into my own framework. I posted my retweet in the glorious knowledge that someone else might take my words and reformulate them. I welcomed this lateral change.

The social retweeting created a kind of sideways motion as a tweet passed through many hands unlike anything media has ever seen before. It is not commentary, nor sharing, but a process only a social network could produce. It was not an author reacting to another's essay. Or a commentator commenting on an original with an original of their own. It was more like the wiki process only sideways through time and information space. Each person contributed a small effort, made a small change, but the results were not collected together into a single document, but spread out through time and place.

This was something completely unexpected by me (I had worked on a blog system in the late 90s that enforced a limited content length but gave up on it as being impractical...who would want to use it? But combined with social following and sharing, that was something entirely different. The brevity of the post lowered the barrier to participation, but the retweet and the resulting game of telephone was something unexpected). Its a shame the new built-in retweet system discourages this fabric of editorializing. I suppose it was done in the name of efficiency, or perhaps fears about copyright resulting from the game of telephone. It would be a shame to bring such a wonderful experiment to and end out of such absurd fears.

(By the way, this game of "telephone" adds value, not noise to the signal.)

postprintproject

2010-04-21T19:41:00.003-04:00

The post print project is thinking about how mobile devices and networked media "could redefine how we do a couple of very basic things: how we tell stories and how we learn."
(postprintproject.com)

I'm fascinated with this.

I believe story telling is bound to the way our brains evolved and isn't really going to change much no matter what technology does. The networked and mobile space we inhabit could change how we learn and use information. I think it already has. I've been reading Jane Austen's novels as Gutenberg etexts on the iphone. The iphone is passable as a reader. I've not got eyestrain yet. I find it hasn't done anything new, but it has restored reading as a regular activity for me. I hate reading at the computer. I'm too lazy to go to the library (I'd have to drive across town to the central library where all the really good books are). Its just too easy to pick up the iphone, download a new book and start reading. That is different. I am unwilling to do this on the desktop computer.

I think the uniqueness will come from how mobile network devices let us assemble small bits of information together, get timely information, communicate with friends easily, or keep to ourselves in a private moments of reading or listening to music. It might influence learning by enabling people to draw together different sources right in the palm of their hand while they are experiencing something, which is often important for learning.

People want their life to tell a story

2010-04-18T23:27:00.000-04:00

People want their life to tell a story. When life diverges from the
story they wish it to tell, they become anxious and frustrated. Zen
Buddhism teaches desire is the cause if suffering. When we as the
fulfillment of the desire us threatened. By avoiding attachment to the
story our life tells, we can be free of suffering caused by our life
failing to live up its story. We are then able to enjoy our real life,
the one that just happens, without requiring it to tell a story. This
is the true story of our life.

This is not a passive attitude toward life. Life happens to us and we
make life happen through what we do and our choices. Life happens, we
make things happen, and chance and the cards we are dealt govern our
life.

Stop the Excuses for School Bullying

2010-04-07T15:32:00.001-04:00

Although I doubt prosecution will do any good, that is not the real question, it is just the only response a failed society has to clean up the mess its made, to lessen the shame of failing to provide a safe learning environment for Phoebe. Stalking, assaulting and verbally abusing an adult is a crime. It ought to be treated seriously when one child commits violence on another.

Bullying is a serious violation of human and civil rights of the individual. Those rights do not disappear just because a person is a child. Ensuring the right of an individual to autonomy and safety requires greater vigilance when a child is concerned, because they are less capable of defending their self or even prohibited from self-defense by school rules, which the bully does not care to follow, but the victim must to avoid being doubly victimized, first by the bully and second by the clueless school administrators.

The bullied child is often put in a situation with no way out. They are forced by law to attend the place of torture (school). They must choose between suffering the assaults of the bully or the punishments of the place of torture (school). They may see the only way out of their predicament to be suicide or violence. It is the school that ties the hands of the victim for the bully. In that way they are responsible.

Although children must be given room to make mistakes, it seems absurd on its face to classify bullying, a premeditated, systematic and consistent assault on a child, as a mistake. We are told teenager's brains are not fully developed. The victim's brains are not fully developed either, yet there is no protection for them, no consideration for them; the bullies are adept at manipulating the school rules, pulling the wool over the eyes of administrators and teachers, while the victim may be without the social tools to deal with them. Most children are not true bullies and they make mistakes in teasing, but bullying is not teasing. If we can't recognize the difference between teasing and bullying, perhaps the adults need to go to school. Our concern should not be for bullies, but should be for the victim of bullying. The bully has made their bed, let them lie in it. That is the best way for the them to learn the folly of their ways.

It is claimed the bullying was no more than that experienced by other children at the school. Are we to say she did not have a right to a safe learning environment because others did not either? Are we to judge and determine Phoebe's experience, moreover, by those who would bully her, who may have bullied her, who were indifferent to her and who are said to not be as sensitive to bullying as her? It only matters what the experience was to her.

Research into bullying at school and in the adult workplace shows a connection between bullying and the prevalence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is a serious matter with life long psychological and health consequences. Who will pay for these consequences over the lifetime of the victim, society? Are those who say a certain amount of bullying is just part of growing up willing to compensate victims?

Each child has the right to a safe, peaceful, comfortable learning environment without exception and it is the responsibility of society to ensure it as long as children are required by society to attend public school. If society cannot secure such an environment, then children should not be required to attend public places of torture (so-called schools).

(In reply to Should we be criminalizing bullies?)

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2010-03-25T14:52:00.001-04:00

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Twitter and Facebook

2010-03-02T13:11:00.002-05:00

When I went to Twitter today, it displayed a dialog

We were hoping you could help us make it easier for people to discover
their friends and colleagues on Twitter. Review your settings below to
make sure the people you care about can easily find you.

asking me to update my name, bio, location and email fields.

This suggests that both Twitter and Facebook are insecure about each other, seeing strengths in the other and weaknesses in their own service. Twitter feels threatened by Facebook's focus on a true circle of friends and colleagues. Facebook feels threatened by Twitter's capacity for marketing and building followers in public.

It suggests they may eventually become very similar in the features they offer, with Twitter integrating photos, video, circles of friends and Facebook making their content more public (which they are doing). Perhaps both sites will give users more control about who can see what content.

Irons in the Fire

2010-01-05T18:57:00.002-05:00

The blacksmith knows, when you have too many irons in the fire, the iron you leave in the fire will burn before you have time to hammer the iron you're working on. The expression 'having too many irons in the fire' comes from blacksmithing and stands for having too many tasks competing for your attention. I just realized how accurately it describes being overwhelmed by stressful commitments.

The trouble is, in life, we often need to put several irons in the fire. For example, you may need to go back to school for continuing education, but you can't go right away, so you make plans, you make an appointment for the required tests and schedule of classes, you anticipate months of class work. This one task, going back to school, becomes an 'iron in the fire.'

While you're anticipating going back to school, other things will come up, daily life, a new person, a new project, but all the worries of going back to school will still be on your mind. As life goes on, we collect more tasks and responsibilities that stretch out over time or will need to be done in the future, along with the task's we've already begun. Each becomes an iron in the fire, until we are overwhelmed by anticipation.

The irons, the things we need to do, but can't do right away but must eventually complete, the things we start but can't or won't finish, build up in the fire until we become overwhelmed, knowing we will have to abandon some of the irons to burn or abandon the iron we're working on.

Blacksmiths have a way of dealing with too many irons in the fire. They keep some of the irons out of the fire until they are ready, until they've hammered the irons they're working on. Maybe there is some way in life to keep some of those irons beside the fire, waiting, until the ones you're hammering are done, and the ones in the fire are ready. I'm going to try to mentally pigeonhole those tasks and responsibilities, setting them down beside the fire, but out of it, waiting their turn.

By the way, I've learned (to my surprise, since it is such a traditional, low technology craft), blacksmithing is an art that can teach us a lot of important lessons. It teaches that some things can only be learned through experience. Getting good at smithing requires using the hammer. It requires creating a muscle memory of simple moves, before you can make more complicated or sophisticated ones. It requires building up sufficient muscles before you can wield the hammer effectively. It is impossible to become a blacksmith just by being an educated person and following a series of instructions in a book cold turkey, at least not without going through the actual practice of making things. Blacksmithing, is a lot like Zen, it requires practice to realize.

I don't mean the kind of practice your piano teacher had you do as a child, although that is related, but the kind practice that means actually doing something, not as a study, but as a reality. You could purposefully make simple things to teach and strengthen your muscles, but the point is that you have to do it in order to learn it, to realize it, to gain the benefits of it. Talk won't get you there. Reading won't get you there. Knowing won't get you there.

Twitter and A Flock of Seagulls, Publishing in a Networked World

2010-01-05T16:25:00.006-05:00

I'm not going to name the site that got me starting writing this post. Its a sentiment I've seen on many sites with a traditional publishing orientation. They follow the old tradition from the age of print, where all submitted works are required to be "not published elsewhere," requiring "first print" rights and demanding every "reprint" (copy) should cite the publisher as place of first publication (what is this, vanity?).

These guidelines ignore the reality of the new age of immediacy, of information abundance, of venue abundance, the network. There is no scarcity in publication, there is no value in "first publication" or artificial scarcity on the network. The document is the conversation the conversation is the document. The old publishing world is gone, stop trying to hang on.

The attitude simply does not fit with a universe of networked information being shared and reshared by millions of people, winding its way in bits and pieces and fits and starts through the social network of friends, family, colleagues. The network is the world of social publishing.

Why? Because it is to difficult to find works online among billions of documents and uncounted trillions of ever expanding words. You just can search for things you do not know exist. The social network trades in attention, which is necessary to discover what exists, through your social contacts.

It just does not make sense to "publish" a work to a certain location (or a physical book), then try to get everyone to come read it through clever marketing. It makes no sense to prevent copying, since copies are the method by which information spreads through a social network. The idea of scarcity and exclusivity makes no sense at all in a socially networked world, unless by exclusive you mean being friends with the author.

The network, by the way, does not really need to worry about this issue of citation, since there is usually a trail back to the original author, through a 'retweet path' (if dutifully or automatically maintained) or through carrying authorship information with the work through the social network (as I've talked about here before).

As a poet, nearly every poem I write is immediately published to the social network, so I can't give anyone "first rights" to it, and moreover, that is meaningless. I noticed the Haiku Society of America states, at least for some submissions, " The appearance of poems in online discussion lists or personal Web sites is not considered publication." a much more adaptive policy.

What happens on Twitter is more like a flock of seagulls, making all references to publication, first publication, second publication utterly meaningless, as we tweet to others and they tweet back at us, retweeting and retweeting. I suppose the next thing, is they will want "first tweet" rights. I understand the goal is to keep your publication fresh, but that simply does not fit reality. It says something about a publishing world where the consumer needs to be reassured they are not being "cheated" by recieving old goods, which are turned over from elsewhere, similar to the way "shovelware" became a problem in the 1990s CDROM publishing era. I suppose the same problem exists with bloggers, twitterers, who merely repeat what others write, but I just don't see the problem. In a network world it costs nothing to unfollow or unfriend a source.

2010-01-03T20:09:00.001-05:00

"Tyler Cowen: I don't think it's a useful description to say autistics are only focused on on thing, but I would say there's a lot of tasks you can give autistics, like picking out small details in locked patterns, or picking out different musical pitches, where autistics seem especially good at attention to small detail. So if you think of the web as giving us small bits, like a tweet or a blog post is shorter than a novel, if you think of that as the overall trend, like an iPod, a song is shorter than an album. It seems that we're now all living in a world where we manipulate small bits effectively, it doesn't mean any of us is just interested in one thing, but we manipulate these small bits to create bigger ideas that we're interested in, and those bigger ideas are synthetic, and I think it's another way in which we are using information technology to mirror or mimic capabilities of autistics without usually people knowing it. "

http://www.wrongplanet.net/article380.html

This is what I suspected when I envisioned Strands in the late 90s, before Twitter existed. That shortening the length of information might be another instance of the medium being the message, that it might broaden the number of people writing by lowering the barrier (less memory, organization required to write), and that there might be some way of using the "many small pieces loosely joined" to create some kind of better, large paradigm of writing than the book. And perhaps we could give to writing the same kind of flexibility we give to data in relational databases, for combining, recombining in novel ways, mining and analyzing.

What if we could create a Twitter Query Language? Enabling virtual documents consisting of projections and selections of real time status streams?

A can of snakes and haiku

2009-12-14T11:15:00.002-05:00

The Zen master Dogen says we ought "to be actualized by myriad things." I take this to suggest sympathy with the haiku and its process of creating, a poetic form centered on paying attention to things, allowing something to become 'ensouled' or noticed, and thus actualized. The haiku form it itself, has as its purpose to actualize things. For haiku does not exist to tell you about the poet's experience, but to recreate the poet's experience in you. Simply, a haiku is a "canned" actualization, like those joke cans of snakes, where when the hapless victim opens the can, a fake snake jumps out. It is as if the poet saw a snake, then made the joke can and gave it to you as a way of experiencing the fright he felt upon first seeing the snake.

(Who was Dogen? He was a thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master, and the quote is from a well-known passage from Genjo-koan).

Visualization, Flickr and Look Magazine

2009-11-19T18:54:00.002-05:00

I was thinking recently about the emergence of visualization as an important trend. Visualization is gaining mindshare rapidly among academics and information technology people. The overwhelming volume of data on the network is prompting this interest in visualization as way coping with this emergent, crushing tidal wave of data. There are billions of digital photographs online. I remember when I could see nearly every historic photograph with online access in week. There are trillions of texts and billions of images. The only way to make sense of this data, the only way to organize and explore this data, may very well be through visualization.

Visualization is not photographs or illustrations. It is making data visible. Numbers, statistics, metadata, information about texts or images, the activity of users, authors, creators, contributors, visitors, etc. It is using visual means to make this kind of statistical data and the architecture of information visible and comprehensible.

I like to think about how to organize and present images and text. I was thinking about visualization in comparison to the way magazines organized text and images. In the heyday of the photographic magazines, the images were the most important thing, so they were printed large and allowed to run freely through margins to the borders of the paper. The texts were small captions. This was an ideal, expressive and easy to comprehend presentation (note that presentation is not visualization). It allowed photo editors to engage in the creation of visual narrative, through the juxtaposition of images. Using montage and arrangement on the page, the editor could create a mood or a story. Although text was secondary, it is essential to understanding the meaning of the content in the images. A photograph is just a jumble of meaningless or misleading objects without context.

It occurred to me, that if a way could be found to tie the presentation of the photo magazine (Life, Look, etc.) to the idea of visualization, it could create a powerful new kind of experience. What if the presentation of pictures and text could be as satisfying and transparent as that of the picture magazines, but the mass of data the pictures and text are drawn from, from a collaborative photo and text site (Flickr, for example), could be exposed and explored through visualization? How could these two elements be combined?

Koans, Cavaliers and Facebook

2009-11-18T14:43:00.001-05:00

We are raised in a culture that teaches us to always look for answers or winners. We are taught to expect the purpose of a question is to find the answer. We expect the goal of a game is to win. In Zen practice, students are given questions to ponder in the form of stories, called koans. I was taken aback when I realized the purpose of the koan was not to find an answer to the question, but to measure the progress the student has made in understanding zen. It was a shock, for this rational and scientific minded person, to consider there might be some other purpose to a question than to find the correct answer. Although one can find cheat sheets with common answers to zen koans, there may be no correct answer to a koan. The answer, although interesting, is not the important point of practicing with a koan.

A koan is a measure, just as for those who believe in 'fortuna' culture (a common belief among Virginia cavaliers was that each person was born with a certain amount of forunta or good luck, which could be modified by charms), games of chance are measures of how much fortune one possess. The aim of games of chance, such as dice, is to discover how one's own fortune measures up to the other players, not to win. Sometimes a zen student will supply a stock answer to a koan, but the experience is missed if you get the answer to a koan from a cheat sheet. A koan is there to help understanding. When Helen Keller learned the meaning of "water," she experienced a profound moment of realization, which ordinary children might never experience when learning the name for water. If she had used a cheat sheet, she would have only learned that water is water and not that cold, liquid on her hands was water, her understanding, if you could call it that, would have been divorced from experience.

It was a new concept for me to absorb, how people are interested in tests telling them something about themselves, measures of who they are, yet I should not have been surprised, since such quizzes are popular on Facebook, such as what are your guilty pleasures, what would you do if you could go back in time, what superpowers would you choose, and the ultimate question is probably How Well do you Know Me?

The new manuscript culture

2009-10-01T14:32:00.002-04:00

In a 'manuscript' culture, the distinction between written and verbal text is not as sharp as it happens in a culture dependent on printing. It appears we are heading into a new era of manuscript culture as social networked content emerges and comes to dominate, as documents become conversations and conversations become documents. In a manuscript culture, such as the period in the West before the invention of movable type, or in China before printing became universal, manuscripts offered a 'more fluid transfer of information' where the copyist (think of 'retweeting' or sharing information socially), could make changes to the text, purposeful or inadvertent, could leave sections out or add new ones, combine with illustrations (as in illuminated manuscripts, perhaps similar to Storybird).

(References http://goodlifezen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/the-road-to-nowhere.pdf)

What's wiki got to do with medicine?

2009-09-26T13:54:00.004-04:00

The idea of cutting off blood flow to tumors and using 'diplomacy' to convince cancer cells to listen to the better angels of their nature are like the 'soft security' and 'human engineering' schemes used to protect wikis from vandalism. The run counter to the scorched earth policy of killing all cancer cells. But medicine is now looking to solutions in epigenetic therapy and other methods, which attempt to negotiate with disease instead of destroy it.

We're so used to locks and gates, slings and arrows, we forget other ways.

A useful poke

2009-09-05T21:51:00.001-04:00

I am trying to use Facebook more. I do not have a lot of use for the "poke" tool, which seems a bit childish. I wonder if it would be good to use the Poke method for content? What if you sent someone a book you thought they should read or you wanted to discuss. Sent a link to an ebook? Then they didn't reply. You might poke them about that post of content, not just generally?

My hands are small, I know

2009-09-01T20:13:00.003-04:00

My hands are small, I know
But they're not yours, they are my own
But they're not yours, they are my own
And I am never broken
--Jewel, Hands, Spirit

Twitter outage creates panic

2009-08-07T13:41:00.003-04:00

According to CNN, the twitter outage left users feeling as if they had lost a limb or left home without their cell phone. It is suggested Twitter needs competition to provide alternatives when an outage occurs, as they inevitably will. There were (or are?) a couple of alternative social microblog services available (is jaiku still running?). Of course, this won't help if multiple sites get attacked at once.

What would help is Google Wave. This outage is an incredible opportunity to demonstrate the potential for resiliency a "federated" or distributed social media system has. Content in the Google Wave universe is independent. Every user can have a copy of a bundle of posts, comments, content on their own device. Multiple copies can exist on different servers. It could be possible for a group to continue working, or at least work offline with their content, during an outage and then when connection is reestablished, the changes can be merged back into the conversation. This is what we can do with email now. We can read messages in our inbox (as long as it is not webmail) even when the network is unavailable. We can keep messages around as long as we want. We can write draft replies, take notes, resuse content through quoting or editing the text we recieve and at any time later, forward to others or send the revisions back to the sender.

What did I do during the panic? I just waited for Twitter to come back up. I only post once a day (if I am feeling up to it).

You can't just put content behind a blank wall

2009-08-06T18:16:00.005-04:00

I caught a discussion of Newscorp's new plan to get users to pay for online news content. It will be difficult to sell news online because there are so many fragmentary ways to get the news for free. If any scheme for getting online users to pay for news does work, it just has to be easy. No matter what news sources online do, they must make paying for the news easy and transparent like iTunes. As easy as putting a coin in a paper box at the corner bus stop. The pricing is not as important as convenience.

Also, the customer must have a feel for the worth of the content before they buy or they must get a cheap bulk subscription so the content is cheap enough to take the irrelevant, incomplete, incompetent or useless with the relevant, complete, competent and useful content. I hate sites that put up a poorly written summary and a login or subscription screen. It breaks the rhythm of navigation on the web when a link leads to nothing. It stops you cold and punishes the user for following a link. It would be a sad web of balkanized content with links as obstacles. If content is to be shuttered behind closed doors, it must be quick and easy to open those doors with some kind of universal pass like OpenID connected to a micropayment system.

It started me thinking again about how to get online users to pay for content again. You can't just put content behind a blank wall and expect it to work. No one will ever find it, be able to search for it, search engines index it. Its not enough to provide a meta data summary like a bibliographic catalog does. Meta data will never be the answer to our search problems, at least not as long as humans are responsible for providing it. Nearly everyone ignores meta data, fails to include it, or includes incomplete or incorrect meta data. Who is going to keep all this meta data up to date? No, this is unworkable. Meta data must be generated automatically from content and that is subject to a high error rate using current technology.

The solution google books provides gets much closer to a real solution to the problem of hidden content. Instead of trying to describe the content using faulty and hard to keep up meta data, why not grant access to a sample of content? This gets much closer to a successful model for selling content online. When I read a book in Google books I get a random sample of pages around my keywords. Each user received a custom sample of content tailored to their interests and needs. In my experience reading a few pages of a book without restriction, as I would in a bookstore, gives a feel for the content. I am more likely to buy the book if it proved useful repeatedly over several searches. Yes, sometimes I find what I want in the sample pages, but I generally bookmark the source, take down the title in my notes and will cite the source in any work derived from the information gleaned for "free" which is actually a fair exchange I think for citation and a link.

I do not understand the hostility and opposition to Google Boooks. I am willing to pay less but buy more books in electronic form for reference purposes. If I find an interesting book in google books but it is not one I would pay $30 for a hardback I would pay $10 to download to my book reader. If I have to pay $30 for one book, it is going to be the one I value most and need the information most, which I want to keep around for a lifetime, not a casual read or reference work.

There are books I would buy on the reader as convenient portable references. I would buy more ebooks at lower cost to fill out my "search space" of texts on my ebook reader. If a book adds to the information I have available on a subject but only partially or tangentially, I can't afford a $30 hardback, but I can afford three $9 works related to my subject to add to the search space on the reader

An idea I had a long time ago, when I was wondering how to pay for hosting my first website, was the "vanishing page" model. This would work a bit like PBS where content slowly disappears unless readers pay a small fee to keep it available. The individual reader does not pay for each content page, butsimilar to donations to PBS, a small number of readers or viewers pays for free access by others (this actually gives the donor a feeling of superiority, if it were not for me...). Mechanically, the web page would be publicly available to all readers and search engines but a count of page views would be kept. Each time the page is viewed the number of views or days left would be decremented by some amount. A button to make instant micro-payents would be displayed ok the page along with a thermometer displaying how close the page is to being removed from the site. If enough people donate, days (or credits, it could be a ratio of views to donations similar to bitorrent) are added to the life of the page, if not, it is replaced by a summary and a button to start donating again.

What we need are ingenious "social engineering" methods to get people to buy content online, similar to the ones used to manage "soft security" on wikis. We need soft methods, like Google Books, which gives readers a peek into books that might interest them.

Yoshihisa Maitani Dies At 76

2009-07-31T13:28:00.003-04:00

The man behind the Olympus Pen cameras, the OM-1 and the XA, Yoshihisa Maitani died yesterday at age seventy six. He lived to see his Pen camera system reborn as the Pen Digital through the work and enthusiasm of a new generation of engineers. The new E-P1 is not an exercise in nostalgia but a camera that acknowledges its ancestry while breaking new ground with its mirrorless design, compact lenses and in-camera digital image processing.

This photograph of my OM-2n looks a bit like a shrine in light of today's news.

My original XA-2 bought circa 1986. A classic camera and novel industrial design from Maitani's hand.

The ugliest Twitter post yet?

2009-07-22T16:29:00.004-04:00

New generation of farmers. RT @FMCorg: 40 farmers under 40 http://tr.im/tnjB (via @civileater via @ediblechicago)
about 22 hours ago from web

Things are getting ugly on Twitter. This tweet I posted to @farmfoody is more citation than message. It is filled with gibberish, the "retweet" code and the via's, the cryptic tiny url. Something will have to give and eventually meta data will find its way back to where it belongs, hidden somewhere outside of the message text in the message envelope.

Apologies from the Ministry of Information

2009-07-17T17:34:00.004-04:00

"Dear citizen, we recently discovered a problem with an ebook that you have purchased, the photograph showing the Dear Leader shaking the hand of the former enemy president has been corrected to show the Dear Leader shaking the hand of our new friends. We apologize for the inconvenience." -- Ministry of Information, 2012

How long will it be before our digital content is "corrected" for our convenience, not just pulling books from our electronic readers in the middle of the night?

I bought a Kindle 2, but I returned it out of concerns my ebooks would not be my own books, in the way my paper books are my own books. I was concerned about what might happen to my hundreds of dollars of books stored on the Kindle if amazon went bankrupt. I worried that if the Kindle did not do well, they would shut down the DRM servers and my content would become inaccessible. So I sent it back (also it was a bit small screen and I wanted to loan it to my parents on occaison, who are elderly).

Today, I found in my Twitter stream an article in the New York Times: Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others.

I never imagined this would be the start of an Orwellian world where content of the books I own is edited at the whim of a publisher or perhaps the government whenever a judgement is rendered in a lawsuit or a contract changes, or perhaps is misread and accidentally violated. We now enter the world of my cold war childhood, when it was common for Pravda to scrub undesirable persons from a photograph or restore them once they were rehabilitated, to change history to suit political circumstance on a daily basis.

What will it be next from the Ministry of Information in the world of Big Publishing, "correcting" our photographs according to the latest lawsuit or government edict?

HDR Chrome Effect in LightZone

2009-07-02T21:28:00.004-04:00

An popular effect is the HDR, gritty, "chrome" look. After watching a video on the technique, I thought I'd give it a try in LightZone.

This look is achieved without actual HDR, but by contrast, local contrast and saturation adjustments.

The steps in LightZone involve dropping a number of tools on the stack and adjusting them, which is a different approach than Photoshop or Lightroom.

Drop a Hue/Saturation tool. Set Vibrance to 100.
Drop a Sharpen tool. Set Amount to 500 and Radius to 50, adjust until you get a "comic book" or "chrome" look (strong blacks, faded, three-dimensional pastel colors).
Drop a Zone Mapper tool. Define points at 2 steps down from white, 5 steps down from white and 4 or 5 steps up from black. Push the white point up to where it divides the top step in two, leave the middle point alone, pull the black point all the way done to keep contrast. Later, you can adjust the middle tone contrast by adjusting the middle point.
Drop another Hue/Saturation tool. Pull the Saturation slider back, reducing saturation until you like the effect.
You may choose to drop a Relight tool to adjust overall brightness and graininess, but you may want to zero the Detail slider or turn off the Sharpen tool and use the Detail adjustment instead.

So you do not have to go through all of these steps, I created the HDChrome style you can download for LightZone here to use as a starting point. Download the archive file, extract the .lzt file and save it to your LightZone templates folder and it will appear under Custom styles.

Reducing saturation gives an image the feeling of a drawing, as if an ink drawing has (or photograph) has been tinted. Starting with a pastel image, mostly gray with touches of color gives this result, if there is texture, this will become the "ink" part. If you start with a metal object, like a car or motorcycle, it can enhance the curves and create the appearance the metal has been chromed, and enhance already chromed parts.

Twitter as Attention Machine

2009-06-30T18:39:00.002-04:00

I am reading On the Origin of Stories, a new book by Brian Boyd, which to make a long story short, draws conclusions from recent research into the mind and evolutionary psychology, that status is essentially attention (or at the very least attention is the currency of status). I can see how this applies to Twitter. The ability to 'favorite' another twitter's content is yet another way of bestowing attention. Twitter is an attention machine. When visiting a twitter's profile, being mentioned or retweeted in the stream of updates or being favorited are ways of gaining attention. A twitterer gains when a user with high attention favorites one of their tweets and more so, when they retweet.

Mixing Conversation and Story

2009-06-27T20:44:00.001-04:00

I realize now the real problem I have been working on and off for ten years now is 'conversation' versus 'story', but particularly applicable to journalism. In a way, conversation and story are like oil and water, they do not like to mix. Yet, stories are filled with dialog, or conversations, so why is that journalistic stories cannot contain dialog? Well, when it is an interview, they do. So what we need is a network tool that seamlessly integrates conversation (interview, written dialog, transcript) with story (narrative, reportage, essay and analysis). It looks like Google Wave has the closest technology to achieving this flexible confluence of conversation and story, even the potential for our conversations and stories to be both mobile and distributed. If every smart phone adopted Google Wave, and given that it works similar to email, which mobile computing already provides and is a robust and well-known commodity service, it promises quick adoption avoiding any centralized monopoly.

I envision the same tool could be used by a reporter to do an interview (dialog) and for personal self-expression (dialog, like Twitter, only sharing little bits of information, such as links). An interview consists of dialog, little snippets of information associated by place and time. This has the form of Twitter messages, but a chat application is much better for doing an interview than Twitter, so some new mechanism must be created to accommodate flexible use, moving between story and conversation, between longer and shorter length posts, between collaborative and authored posts.

Turning off the data tap for Routesy

2009-06-27T20:16:00.003-04:00

An interesting question about ownership and rights to data in public use has arisen, chronicled in Apple kills Routesy app, my iPhone gets less useful

Routesy is an iphone application using data provided by the municipal transit authority, through an agreement with a data provider. The details are in the article, if you care to read them.

I have to agree the company has a right to license predictive arrival times, since such information requires investment in research and development, formulating predictive algorithms and such information does not meet the requirement of being "obvious" and thus non-proprietary.

However, the ultimate solution would be an application that took GPS data from every iphone riding the metro at any given moment, if it can be identified as to which bus it is, then do the same kind of approximate arrival time calculations NextBus does, only through peer-to-peer networked computation. Let all the iphones on the bus line find their own position, communicate with each other, track the movement of buses, compare to published schedule and then present the approximate times to the riders. A distributed system of self-analysis. Since all iphones would be held in private hands, and the data shared between peers, who agree to participate by sharing data on their location, the data would be owned by no one. Each person would own their own location and decide whether or not to share it.

Google Wave and Portable Social Media

2009-05-30T20:30:00.005-04:00

A quick observation about Google Wave.

I wrote some time ago about the problem of social media losing its social context as it moves around the digital universe. I thought some mechanism should be created to enable the social context pertaining to a unit of social media to be portable, so it moves along with it. It appears that Google Wave associates the people who pertain to a document (the authors, editors, people with access to view or edit the content, etc.) with the content in a portable way, through its "wavelets" concept.

It seems possible to share or transfer a piece of collaboratively authored content across the Wave system and into other systems with its social context intact. If so, this is a revolutionary step in the evolution of information technology. It gets my vote as the first technology I've seen that truly could be called Web 3.0, as far as I'm concerned.

It would only be right, if you downloaded a image from such a Wave based system to your pc, that it would somehow preserve the social context, perhaps with XML sidecar or embedded meta data, like the EXIF standard for photographs. The content could be uploaded back into a Wave ecosystem with its social context intact, possibly even after local edits.

Is Your Life Poetry or Nihilism?

2009-05-27T20:20:00.003-04:00

ReadWriteWeb asks this question. Poetry is reflective. Journalism also should be reflective (if all journalism were like C-SPAN, we would be better off for it). I am sure we could and perhaps will find ways to mine activity feeds for patterns and other useful information. It may find uses in many fields and places in life, perhaps even in medicine. But the real reason why there is so little reflection on the web is simply because the structures and tools of the web encourage shallow interaction, quick posts, short content, quick reads, quick writes. This is an area I've given some thought to and posted to the blog about it.

What is required is not some new gizmo for finding patterns in bits of trivial data, but tools that encourage people to slow down, to be reflective and create meaningful content. My idea presented here has been of a "quick-slow" system. This system would recognize the importance of brief, concise posts when things are happening (like you've just landed safely in an aircraft with the landing gear stuck and want to tell your friends or the world) and longer, slower, more reflective posts. This system would allow users to post concise messages like Twitter does, but those messages could be expanded on, by expanding the text or by associating longer texts with them. The idea is not entirely new. About ten years ago, I played with a prototype application trying to combine blog and wiki elements. Later, I discovered a more successful project to combine blog and wiki, and an application exists called a bliki.

What I propose is a system like Twitter, which retains its immediacy through a connection to text messaging (cell phones) and the "stream of concise posts" format, yet also provides a way to extend those posts in a meaningful way. Perhaps a user's followers could be allowed to edit the extended content, creating a community of editors and contributors.

What we really need is to encourage people who grew up "network native" to slow down and think before the write, or at the very least, if they have to capture an event or thought with quick, impressionist strokes, they or others should be able to return later after reflection to revise. A kind of "slow news" for journalism, akin to the slow foods movement, asking people to sit down and think a while before they write. This may be asking too much for journalism, but a quick-slow approach could support both quick impressions (what's new) and reflection (analysis). Moreover, this could support a collaborative approach that mixes reportage (the initial concise post, possibly with a picture) and analysis (the associated post, perhaps by an analyst).

The poet Basho revised his haiku many times over the years, sometimes refining the wording and other times he would write a new poem, depicting the same experience from a different aspect. This kind of revision and reflection should be encouraged and supported by technology. Haiku are an ideal model. Brief, concise, experiential, yet through juxtaposition and the many hours of careful writing, they convey higher truths.

I see a number of people writing on Twitter in haiku form, quite a few who are just arranging prose in haiku form and really have no understanding of haiku as an art form (poetry has to say something to be poetry, and say it in a way that affects us). I want to be clear, there is a new form of haiku practice emerging on Twitter, which is akin to the the impressionist movement in painting, where haiku are written on the spot and posted to Twitter from a cell phone. This is a new development in haiku, since most haiku are written down long after the poet has left the place of experience (not always, Basho sometimes wrote haiku and left them behind, but nearly all the haiku that reach us were probably revised many times long after he had visited the location). It bears watching.

Something Must Be Going On

2009-05-23T16:32:00.001-04:00

The heart of OCD is a feeling of "not being right" or repeating a ritual until it "feels right." A creative mathematician experiences intuition as a feeling there is "something going on here but I don't know what it is" according to William Byers in How Mathematicians Think. You were probably taught in high school that mathematics is a rigorous and logical endeavor and that for every mathematical principle there is a proof. It was implied to you that mathematicians seek out new principles by following threads of logic from an existing proof to a new proof. You were taught a myth. Most mathematical breakthroughs began with an intuition. Only later, after the instruction was explored well enough to believe it was true, to believe it was worth proving, perhaps even after it was proved to the satisfaction of the mathematician was an "official" proof created for the record. Proof comes after the fact, not before it. An interesting relationship between obsessive compulsive disorder and mathematics.

Moreover, instruction plays a vital role in creative mathematics. Just as in other creative arts, a shift of frame is required to turn the ordinary into the novel. The author relates the story of how he along with fellow mathematician John McKay noticed something curious about a single number. If you express adding one to 196884 as an equation you get 196884 = 196884 + 1. On the surface, it hardly seems worth the interest of a mathematician. You can add one to any integer on to infinity, something obvious to even non-mathematicians. What is so fascinatingly curious about this instance? As Byers writes, "...these are not just any two numbers. They are significant mathematical constants that are found in two different areas of mathematics." The relationship of the constants could not be a coincidence, thought McKay, who began a line of inquiry leading to a series of conjectures, which went under the fanciful but telling name of "monstrous moonshine." I want to linger a moment on this point. Here we have a mathematician who sees something curious, which prompts a "gut feeling" something systematic must be going on, a suggestion there may be a relationship between two systems of mathematics, who starts inquiring into the possibility, and as he finds more support for the reality of the intuition, he begins to make conjectures about how the two systems might be connected through the curiosity he discovered. At this point, we can hardly blame a mathematician for feeling he was chasing "moonshine." But that is exactly what creative people do. They chase moonshine and rainbows. Yet, somehow they end up driving the process of scientific rational, mathematical and artistic discovery. McKay's conjectures were later proved.

Byers does relate mathematical creativity to artistic creativity, observing good mathematicians (the creative ones) are very sensitive to the feeling of something going on, and ties mathematical intuition to the poet's, quoting the poet Denise Levertov saying "You can smell a poem before you see it."

This is all a blow to anyone raised on the rhetoric of rationalism. The human mind is a reasoning machine. Human beings are rational actors seeking the most efficient path. This ought to be nonsense to any carnival barker or snake oil salesman, but for most educated people it is a conceit they sustain because they enjoy the belief they are rational. Reason has become a virtue and virtues cannot be questioned.

At the bottom of human irrationality may be rational decisions, observations, the machinery of the mind is not metaphysical, but the abstract layers above the fine grain of deterministic reasoning are irrational. The mind is connected to a body. People get "gut feelings" as their mind tries to tell itself something from its emotional, pattern recognizing centers. How else could the pattern recognizing centers of the brain communicate with this supremely rational being, other than by kicking it in the gut?

I take away from this you will not be a creative scientist, mathematician or musician unless you learn to use your intuition. Exercise your curiosity. Keep a childlike sense of astonishment about the world around you or the inner worlds you explore. Experiment. Follow instruction. Don't worry about the result, the path to a Nobel prize in mathematics is not by seeking that which is likely to win a prize, but by following up an intuition, seeing where the thread will lead, without any thought to where it will go, other than to satisfy curiosity and that feeling of something must be going on.

New Tools for Men of Letters (or Not)

2009-05-21T15:26:00.004-04:00

"The art of conversation, with its counterpart the dialogue as a literary form for presenting ideas, has also declined since the days of Galileo, while the art of advertising has advanced. Advertising is easily recognized as the literary form that most completely responds to the technique of the printing press, because it demands, above all else, a numerous and receptive "public" of readers."
New Tools for Men of Letters
The Yale Review, Spring 1935.

Sounds a lot like Twitter, does it not? The success of Twitter is largely due (as has been generally true of web services) because of the possibilities inherent in the medium for promotion and self-promotion, or advertising. Now, since helping independent farms survive is another fascination of mine, I believe using Twitter for self-promotion may be beneficial, but it is important to recognize how much our tools are influenced by advertising. Also, it is important to note how technology shapes culture. Technology often defines what is possible in art or culture, and then shapes its direction and expression (think of the woodcut or electric guitar and the idioms of graphic art and music that sprang from the technology). So Twitter is not always good for us, like eating too much cake, because it is a medium that "demands ... a numerous and receptive 'public' of readers" and authors that meet the demand. Of course, all good authors keep the audience in mind while they write, but Twitter and concise social messaging systems orient our writing and conversation toward the jangle of advertising.

We hear a lot of talk about conversation on the web, but there it seems very lacking in real conversation. I learned recently that Ward Cunningham when he originally envisioned the wiki, believed people would begin with conversation and then shape the results into an article, which would then be refined collaboratively. As it turned out, authorship on most wikis occurs in reverse, with articles being started then shaped by conversation (if we are lucky).

Ever since I made my first foray into the world of networked content and community, starting with bulletin boards and then moving onto the web, I have been fascinated by the idea of capturing expertise and knowledge "lost" in conversations. Forums, discussion groups, bulletin boards, message systems, all formats for conversation are ephemeral. When a person asks a question on a help forum, the answers they receive are generally lost. The web made it possible to ask a search engine a question and bring up one of these threads of conversation archiving knowledge.

Much of the knowledge of experts falls into the category of "folk wisdom" or "folk knowledge." This may upset some rationalists who believe all knowledge is found in books, which are the mechanisms that "separate us from the medieval" by storing knowledge without the requirement of memory. The reality is that many of the solutions for common problems coders face on a daily basis are not written down in books. A book is generally written by an academic about generalities or abstract theories. Or it is a technical cookbook about a particular language or technology. Many of the solutions for little quirks, bugs and problems solved with little tricks or algorithms are passed from one coder to another by oral tradition, sharing code, looking at other people's code or in forums. Coding is not the only professional or practice that this process occurs within, but serves as an example.

One of the great problems of the web is how to capture the knowledge being generated by this process of dialog about small problems. It is a Long Tail problem. It is a "exponential" problem because it consists of very small parts that add up to a larger whole, which exercise a large influence over our life (think of software controlling aircraft of a medical robot). It does not just apply to coding, but to any knowledge.

Not only would it be good to capture this knowledge in a better way than just stumbling on a solution in a forum or blog post, it might prove beneficial to author a work "conversation first," like the old carpenter's adage to measure twice, cut once (of course, real carpenters use a template but that is another story) .

In a way, Twitter achieves the conversation part, but as I've observed before, lacks the means to capture the essence of a valuable conversation (other than favorite tweets). What could be a first step would be to allow favorite tweets to be organized by tag and the browsed like a social bookmarking site. The better solution would be to enable Twitter users to create a wiki page for extending the thought or observation in the tweet collaboratively, perhaps allowing followers to edit the content. That is the idea I will be working on, if I can get some time away from farmfoody.org and folkstreams.net activities.

By Twine or By Time?

2009-05-17T16:53:00.003-04:00

I ran across an interesting answer in an interview about Twine:

[Nova Spivack] I think the above solution would work for this too. Basically you are asking for a new view of the content – not “by twine” or “by time” but “by popularity” or “by relevance to me”.

Notice the question being posed. What he is asking is, why don't you like the view our "intelligence" provided, why do you insist on these existing, simplistic views like by time or popularity?

The last is odd. "Relevance to me" is the primary criteria for all information I want to receive. Even if I don't yet know it is relevant, such as when a person I follow in Twitter shares something I've never seen before and would never have found on my own. Do you understand? Even that is relevant to me. Everything I want is relevant to me.

I understand what they mean though. They mean serendipity. Like overhearing a snatch of conversation in Twitter by seeing posts by friends of your followers, but who you do not follow. But it still is relevant to me, you're just increasing the chaos in my information feed. Perhaps what we need is a "volume control" on chaos in information filtering systems.

Moreover, I suspect that humans being humans, really want to order information in the ways they are familiar with, the way their brain was designed to process information through evolutionary psychology (hmm, this is a new kind of "design" process, contradictory to the meaning of design, but seems appropriate to say design, designed by evolution). The upshot of this is people still want to order things by time or popularity. What other measures are there than the one's we've known?

Authorship: When we buy a book because the author's name is on the spine or cover in 96pt type. We are buying authority.

Sharing. When we "hear it through the grapevine" from our friends. Another high trust information source.

Some finding aids are a form of recommendation, as when we used to go to the reference desk librarian and ask for a book on a subject. This is a kind of sharing.

Look at the role trust plays in gathering and accepting information. Yet, we trust the smartness of crowds (or at least the smartness of cliques) at Wikipedia. I use it all the time and find the information is always a good starting point, usually reliable for technical information.

With trust comes the opportunity for abuse of power. The power of authority to stifle innovation and knowledge, to be used for sustaining false views (think of how the view of the Amazon civilization by anthropologist maintained for a hundred years turned out to be completely wrong and opposite to reality, despite the application of the "scientific method" and mountains of "evidence" all chosen, selected by a reductionist process, which only knows what it measures, can only measure what it sees).

Trouble in dead trees and inky fingers land

2009-05-15T19:06:00.005-04:00

Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable

An excellent analysis of the situation newspaper based journalism is in.

I like the idea of micro-payments for content, such as New York Times articles. The only problem I have with it and why I would be reluctant to use it, is simply that I have to pay for the article before I've read it. Even if I saw an excerpt, it might not be enough to determine whether it is worthwhile or not. A solution for this problem might be found in social networking. I usually read articles my friends share with me (by sending a link in email or chat). I would be much more willing to pay for an article they recommend. Keep the price low and integrate with a social sharing system and it might work as long as the payment is by an "easy button."

The greater problem is content and authorship is changing radically with digital content available through the network, given the unlimited perfect copying and access without distribution. What we are seeing is a working out of the many pieces loosely joined paradigm described a decade ago. The newspaper started as a handwritten piece of paper passed around coffee shops in Enlightened London. I see nothing sacred about its continued existence.

The problem of journalism online is of course that Twitter is the new journalism but the content is too brief, chaotic and frequently idiotic. Micro-blog formats do encourage conciseness and sharp thinking, but they also promote a hyperactive and fragmentary view of subjects. As I wrote in my blog, there needs to be a "slow thought" or "slow news" or such movement (like the Slow Food movement), which you might say is what blogs already give, but not really.

Stackoverflow.com

2009-05-04T15:13:00.004-04:00

There is a good article on the principles driving the development of stackoverflow.com, a site where programmers get help with their coding problems on ReadWriteWeb.

I was particularly struck by the design points where Spolsky highlights the frustration created wrong answers and obsolete results.

I can remember when I was able to circumnavigate the web through a search engine for the topic of history of photography. It was that small. I could see everything there was to see about history of photography online in a week, a week of drudgery wading through duplicate results page after duplicate results page, until I had made sure I had seen everything about my topic. Although filled with a fair amount of junk and duplicates, I was still able to find a single web page if it contained sufficiently unique keywords, until about a year before Google emerged, I had relied on AltaVista to take me back to a web page in one go, when I could not remember where I had found a code solution on some obscure personal page, for example. Then the search engines began to fail me, and single pages I had found before became nearly impossible to find, but eventually, search engine technology improved and with Google, you could find that one blog page with the coding. That was one the solution to the problem of finding things.

Spolsky is right to observe the problem now is that search is failing to distinguish between correct and incorrect answers; between current and obsolete answers to technical questions.

When I first started programming using Microsoft Visual C++ (I was just a dabbler), I had a question about how to render bitmap graphics. I turned to the library of articles and code intended to help developers. I was happy when search quickly turned up an article on how to introduce bitmaps into your application. After an hour or two of reading, it slowly dawned on me the author was not talking about what I was familiar with, Microsoft Foundation Class applications. I was seeing unfamiliar code and unfamiliar techniques. I glanced up at the date. The article was from the mid 1990s. It was about coding C under Windows before MFC was introduced. The first, supposedly most relevant, documents search had brought up from MSDN was completely obsolete and about coding without an application framework. I had wasted hours reading the wrong articles.

Stackoverflow.com is an example of a great site. It is well designed, the developers learned the lessons of the last fifteen years of web technology and applied them. It is clean, beautifully presented and well organized site. I have to admit they did right what I failed to do with phphelp.com, which started by envisioning many of the same goals. They had to courage to go ahead with "soft security," collaborative editing, and content surfacing and valuing through a user voting system. Of course, with the volume of content and edits, such tools are necessary. What two humans could watch and police such a flow of content while doing their day job? User contributed and curated content is the only rational answer.

(By the way, it would probably be better to describe their principles as being informed by behavioral economics or an evolutionary branch of the field, than anthropology or social psychology, I feel the way people use voting systems to surface content, how "soft" social engineering strategies are employed on wikis, etc. to be close to the phenomena studied by behavioral economics, not just financial choices.)

Snowball, the Dancing Bird

2009-05-03T23:48:00.002-04:00

A video of a dancing bird has become the latest YouTube sensation. Some people thought the bird's performance was faked, but for me, it is not surprising, given the sophisticated ability birds demonstrate for manipulating pitch and rhythm in their songs, that a bird shows the ability to keep time with music. Neuroscientists, including John Iversen of the Neurosciences Institute, have studied the dancing bird and confirm it is capable of extracting a beat from sound.

What impressed me most about Snowball's performance is when he lifts his leg and gives it a little shake before bringing it down. As the investigators mention, it may be prompted by the pace being too fast to put his foot all the way down in time with the faster beat, but it piques my curiosity further. It appears Snowball is dividing the beat when he waves his foot, into two or three little waves, which if I am seeing it correctly, suggests birds are capable of division of the beat and perceiving and manipulating a metrical framework. This is simply astonishing were it be to true, but perhaps not unexpected given the sophistication of bird vocalization and communication. It is one thing for a bird to keep time with a beat and an entirely different for a bird to exhibit division of the beat.

When people sing (or compose a melody to sing) the tones are not of arbitrary duration. No one could sing a song consisting of a series of tones of arbitrary duration measured to fractions of a second. Could you imagine signing a melody: A 1000ms, F 1500ms, E 500ms, D 1000ms, A 1000ms? The human mind is not well suited for measuring duration in milliseconds on an ordinary basis (we can leave out extraordinary abilities some humans may possess or develop). What if someone asked you to pick up the pace to sign faster? Each duration would have to be recalculated down to the millisecond, in your head. For this reason, music is organized by relative measures of duration.

In reality, when people sing or play music, they use simple division of the beat to measure duration. This is usually achieved through the division of a steady beat by whole fractions, usually simple divisors, like two or three. The most basic division of the beat is by two. When a tone of shorter duration than the beat is required, the melody will use a tone one half of the beat, or one quarter or one eighth and so on, down to the ability of humans to resolve divisions of time. The other main division of the beat observed in music is by three. So for every beat you have the possibility of three tones, six tones, twelve tones and so on. The human ability for perceiving and manipulation this time structure is sophisticated. Musicians can anticipate the division of future beats, playing notes that persist across multiple divisions of the beat or create "holes" or silences for certain beats, playing with the listeners expectations (this is called syncopation). I have to wonder if the small movements he makes dividing the beat follow any ornamentation of percussion or melody in the song. In the background, another bird can be seen bobbing his head to the beat, in a clear parallel to human "head banging."

Although I would have to watch a lot more video to be sure, what I have seen suggests he may be dividing the beat and deserves further investigation. I would not be surprised to find that birds do erect a sense of metrical time in sound and can mentally divide the beat and even anticipate it, perhaps even perceive syncopation. It is fascinating to watch Snowball lose and pick up the beat again.

I did watch a couple of video clips. At about 2:00 into the following video he lifts his foot and waves time to the beat, but does not divide it.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s)

In the following video, notice how he keeps the beat when Stevie Nicks sings "ooh, ooh" on the beat? This suggests he has an expectation of the beat even when the beat is not marked by a percussive instrument. At about 1:05 he may have divided the beat with a wave. He does lose the beat more frequently when based only on Nick's vocals or less percussive sections. At 2:31 he appears to divide the beat with a wave again. And at 2:56. I'm not sure if he's just losing the beat or dividing it...but this is a seriously important question about the intelligence of birds. At 4:43 also.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYMBIGTteWA&feature=channel)

(Note: The time required for a complete cycle of A above middle C is 2.27 milliseconds and a sixteenth note at a metronomic pace of 60 clicks per second is 250 milliseconds, according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond 2009)

Graphic Recording

2009-04-18T20:01:00.004-04:00

I didn't know it, but all my life I've engaged in "graphic recording" when it came to exploring new ideas or learning. I never went as far as the artists who made a series of recordings for the sustainable agriculture and food conference, but my subjects were technical, and I was a technical kid growing up, so my "confections," as Tufte calls them, were more mathematical, graphical and textual in nature. I used them to illustrate things to myself, like working out visually how cycles represent waveforms in musical instruments. Now, I see them as graphic recordings. I was a bit ashamed of them, since I thought it meant that I wasn't a good learner and tried to suppress or limit them. That was a mistake.

The drawings are simply wonderful and I got put onto them by Brenda Dawson who tweeted about the graphical recordings made for the March 29 2009 conference
Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability at the University of California, Davis. How much better a "presentation" these graphic recordings make than a PowerPoint presentation!

These drawings are a lot like my vision for an information system, called Strands, which would be as thick and filled with complexity as the Talmud and as visually expressive as these graphic recordings. If only the web could be like this. When I think of Twitter and Tabloo, if they could be combined, I think we'd be close. Tabloo enables users to create visual narratives (through the structure and relationship, size and aspects of images) and Twitter enables users to create conversations out of small fragments of thought flowing continually.

Save the Gulf Branch Nature Center

2009-04-13T15:28:00.003-04:00

If you live in Arlington County, please help save Gulf Branch nature center by signing the petition available through Save Gulf Branch Nature Center.

The county is planning to demolish the nature center and leave a parking lot to save a pittance on the budget, totaling $132,057. Our county is blessed with numerous streams and stream valleys rich with wild plants and animals running through the urban landscape. In the 1600s this part of Virginia was described as the finest place in the world to live, with its numerous stream valleys and abundant wildlife set in rolling hills. It would be wrong to lose one of the few points of contact children have with nature. The nature center is an island for the preservation of native species. Moreover, the nature center, due to the proximity of human culture to nature, is an opportunity not found elsewhere to understand humans and their culture are not separate from nature, which could help dispel the destructive urge to recreate a mythic Eden.

I've lived here most of my life and was born in the district and came home to Alcova Heights where my family migrated to when Arlington was Alexandria County. I grew up spending my summers in Alcova Heights park. Doctor's Run, Four Mile Run, Lubber Run and the associated parks were my playground. Long Branch Nature Center was closer to my home, to my neighborhoods of Barcroft and Alcova, so I never visited Gulf Branch, being on the far side of Arlington for me, but through my experience with Long Branch at Carlyn Spring I understand why Gulf Branch should continue.

Olympus E-620

2009-04-12T12:38:00.010-04:00

I am collecting reviews and information about the Olympus E-620 here with the idea of replacing my E-510 with it.

Reviews

The E-620 (Four Thirds Photo)

Review includes sample images (all JPEG).

Techradar Olympus E-620 review

CNET E-620

The E-620 is a revolutionary camera. It combines one of the most compact and lightweight DSLR camera bodies with an articulating LCD screen for use with Live View. I cannot imagine a more portable and flexible camera. It is perfect for a vacation or for getting views from unusual angles. Mount the 9-18mm ultra wide angle and you have an incredible camera for reportage, with its wide all encompassing view and deep depth of field.

Olympus cameras are excellent starter cameras. The kit zoom lenses produce better image quality than most kit zoom lenses. You cannot find a better a value than the dual zoom lens kits.

If you are an average person buying a DSLR and not a professional photographer, the E-620 does not fall "behind the competition on most counts." The kit lenses are ahead of the competition, with designed for digital lenses that are not warmed over designs from twenty years ago, which are sharp from edge to edge and wide open. The 14-42mm and 40-150mm are the lightest and most compact lenses I've ever seen for a DSLR camera. I own and use them myself and I can go out walking, with one lens mounted and the other in my coat pocket. The quality of the kit lenses is more than sufficient for any purpose a family or amateur photographer could want, except for low light photography. The resolution of the lenses is higher than most lenses on the market, and 4/3 sensor is more than adequate for printing at 8 x 10 inches or less, which are the sizes the majority of photographs in the world are printed at. Most wedding photographers produce images at 8 x 10 or less. Think about it. I know a wedding photographer who several years ago shot weddings with a Nikon 990, a 3 megapixel camera. 3MP is enough for 5 x 7 or less and good enough for a few carefully processed 8 x 10s. The 4/3 sensor is many times larger than this one and is not much smaller than an APS-C sensor. At 8 x 10 or smaller, the majority of photographs, any noise due to the slightly smaller sensor is not going to show up unless at high ISO sensitivity. Take a look at my Flickr album. Do you see any noise in most of the pictures? Most people will be sharing images online or printing 4 x 6 with an occasional 8 x 10. The 4/3 sensor is more than enough to handle this, much more than enough, with the exception of high ISO photography.

Let me say something about 4/3 lenses. Before you stand in awe of the large lens collections available from other makers, consider that many of those lenses only work on a particular camera, there is something you need to know:

All 4/3 lenses work on all 4/3 cameras.

This means the best lenses made for 4/3 cameras can be used with the least expensive cameras. I can put the awesome 150mm f/2 on the E-410 (or in my case, the outstanding Panasonic Leica 14-50mm f/2.8-3.5 on my E-510). In other makers lineups, the best lenses may be unavailable on the lower end cameras because the mounts differ.

But I digress. The review agrees, the E-620 has "fabulous photo quality." The review goes off the tracks on several points.

though it offers competitive photo quality, it lacks the (admittedly primitive) video capture capability that Canon and Nikon have brought down to this price segment

Why is it not competitive to avoid releasing a poorly implemented, low quality video capability into the marketplace? It seems smart to wait. Perhaps the reviewer is unaware of the Micro 4/3 product, which will likely be the camera line Olympus will cover video with.

It has Olympus' trademark grip, shallower than its competitors' grips, which I find less comfortable; definitely a reason for you to hold the camera and give it a feel before you buy.

"Trademark grip?" Olympus cameras have several different grips. The E-510 sytle grip is the best I've ever used, and fits my hand perfectly. The E-410 grip is inspired by grips from the SLR period, and suited to the compact design of the camera body. The E-620 grip tries to be unobtrustive and suited to the compact design. You don't hold a camera by a grip, you hold it by the lens. The grip is to hang onto the camera and steady it. I can't imagine it being less comfortable than the Canon 450D, which is small and cuts into my hand like a knife blade. Admittedly, it is a personal decision.

The super control panel is a dream. It makes most of the menu digging unnecessary. Nearly all photographic controls are directly available with a single click of the OK button and a bit of navigation. They are correct to note the Exposure Bracketing settings are buried in the menu, which can be a pain.

Most professional photographers prefer Compact Flash cards and I prefer them to the fiddly little SD cards. The SD card may be easier for the user stepping up from a digicam, but if you transfer photos from the camera using a USB cable, you can simply leave the card in the camera and never have to worry about bending a pin on the CF card.

It powers on and shoots in 1.4 seconds, which does rank on the slow side for its class.

Once again, we have to put up with the idiotic "start up time" measurement. The power up time is slow because the world class dust removal system is operating on power up. Are you willing to sacrifice a few tenths of a second for hours and hours of spotting dust flecks or minutes each day of sensor cleaning? I am.

If you think this startup time is slow, I challenge you to take an E-system camera, turn it on and try to bring the viewfinder to your eye before the camera is ready to shoot. I can't do it.

This is a straw man. If you feel the need for instant start up, just put the camera in sleep mode. It will wake up immediately when you press the shutter button.

Some good things pointed out by the review.

The 2x multiplier (compared to 35mm). They note the coverage of the kit zooms is 28-84mm and 80-300mm EFL.

The 12MP does provide extra detail from what I have seen in RAW examples. The TruePic III+ engine improves on the already excellent JPEG engine Olympus cameras are known for. Many photographers choose Olympus because the JPEG output is so good they do not have to post process.

The one weakness of the E-620 is high ISO. It does produce a bit more noise at base ISO, but so do other high megapixel cameras like the A350. At high ISO, other APS-C cameras will do better, but you must ask yourself, will you see the difference in your prints or on the web?

Though it's a solid, serviceable dSLR, if you're looking for an easy-to-learn, entry-level camera, I'd steer clear of the Olympus E-620.

The conclusion seems contradictory. I believe the reviewer meant to say that for people stepping up from digicams they should consider the other makes, but that for serious, advanced photographers, the E-620 does fine. This seems complimentry.

The E-620 has many features that people stepping up from digicams should find beneficial.

* Image stabilization. All 4/3 lenses are image stabilized on the E-620. From other makes, pricey stabilized lenses are required. Image stabilization just works, without any need for the digicam shooter to know or do anything on any 4/3 lens.

* An articulating LCD screen. To take full advantage of Live View, an articulating screen is necessary. I want to warn digicam users: a DSLR is not a digicam, the Live View on ANY DSLR is not going to operate as quickly and easily as your digicam LCD view for shooting. This is due to the mechanics of the reflex and interchangeable lenses. The Live View cameras are improving, the E-620 is one of the best, but you will sacrifice some ease of use for a more capable camera, if you're willing to learn something about photography.

* Dust removal system. What they don't tell you is the time you save on "start up" will be spent in hours cleaning dust spots from your images if you don't have a good dust removal system. The E-620 has the best dust removal system of any DSLR camera. Some people will tell you it is easy to clean your sensor, but if you're stepping up from a digicam, you probably don't want to ever clean your sensor. I haven't cleaned mine in two years.

* Art Filters. I think digicam users will enjoy the art filters. You can see how the effects apply in Live View.

It seems the review cannot decide whether it wants to present technical information for experienced photographers or provide advice for those stepping up from digicams. If the camera is being reviewed for beginners, why bother to include the technical gibberish?

The E-620 takes good pictures. It will take better pictures than a digicam, if you're willing to learn a little about photography. You won't have to worry about cleaning the sensor or spotting dust in your pictures (dust is a part of life with interchangeable lenses). You will get extra detail with 12MP without going too far and getting too much noise, as 12MP digicams do. It comes with excellent kit lenses. You can use any lens in the 4/3 lineup, but most people will be satisified with the kit lenses.

If you expect to take pictures of your kids playing ball in the back yard at twilight you may want to get a Canon, because the E-620's one weakness is high ISO shooting. It's good, but with the slow kit lenses provided by most makers, high ISO is necessary for shooting in near dark or under poor flood lights. This affects any camera, but Canon is the high ISO king. You can always fit a faster lens, like the 14-54 f/2.8, or use the flash.

Previews

DPReview Olympus E-620 Preview

Preview includes sample images. Full-size downloadable image samples. This is the best of the previews.

Olympus E-620 Digital Camera First Impression Review

(Cursory review of pre-production camera. No image samples.)

DCRP First Look: Olympus E-620

(Review of pre-production camera. No image samples.)

PMA 2009: Panasonic GH1 & Olympus E620

Olympus' E-620 raises the bar for entry-level DSLRs

Olympus

Olympus E-620

If you're looking for raw images to compare cameras, try http://raw.fotosite.pl/ where you can download E-1, E-3, E-510, E-30, and I hope, E-620 images for comparison.

Life, Flickr and the New Panasonic GH1

2009-04-08T22:04:00.005-04:00

The HD video version of the Panasonic Micro Four-Thirds camera is coming out, the GH1, and it confirms my idea this camera has potential to facilitate a new visual journalism, citizen journalism, social media journalism, whatever you want to call it, and Panasonic is aware of it (as I would assume they were from the time they started development of the system).

According to Twice.com "fans who bring their Panasonic DMC-G1 cameras to Beck’s live performances will have the opportunity to take photos and videos at the event." Fans can submit photographs for inclusion on Jeff Beck's website.

We may be seeing the beginning, with Flickr, JPG magazine and others who may follow in their footsteps, of a new great era of the "picture magazine" recapitualted on the network (I say network, because it is not just the web or email, anymore but content is becoming social and available throughout the network on all kinds of devices in all kinds of human contexts) through camreas like the G-series and social photo sharing sites.

The process described in the article, whereby fans photographs will be allowed to bubble up through an edited system for display on Facebook or the artist's website is reminiscent of the collaborative rating system on JPG magazine bubbles up content, so it is brought to the attention of editors, who then use their critical understanding of the art, and the state of the art, to decide which images appear in the official magazine. A very similar process to Life or Look magazine, which catered to an audience interested in learning about the world around them visually, before television.

Twitter and the Principles of Illusion

2009-04-04T19:54:00.007-04:00

It is worth noting the two guiding principles of illusion are "suppressing context" and "preventing reflective analysis" (according to Tufte, in Visual Explanations). The first applies also to the ubiquitous photographic image, nearly all of which appear without context. A situation that apparently few people find troubling. A good example of the phenomena is the iconic image from the Vietnam war of the Viet Cong operative being summarily executed by a village officer. The photographer who took the picture often wished he hadn't because of the damage the image did when used out of context (as was the usual case). Several iconic images from the Vietnam war were frequently presented without context. It was left up to the viewer to interpret and may very well be people at the time did not want to know the context, enabling them to press the image into service of their political aspirations or personal, psychological needs. Visual media is inherently weak at providing context.

The emergence of email, web discussion forums, short messages, video sharing, all network native forms of communication create an environment hostile to reflective analysis. What is needed to alleviate this trend is a movement akin to the "slow foods" movement, perhaps a "slow media" movement, asking people to slow down, consider context and think reflectively within a network information ecosystem. The content of a Twitter stream can be informative, but it can also be trivial, and despite its benefits, it does not encourage reflective analysis. I personally find a tweets (Twitter messages) are frequently a touchstone for an innovative thought, connecting me to something I did not know and probably would not have had someone not passed on an interesting web link or thought out loud. But it would still be nice to pull wisdom from the ether by capturing tweets in some reflective and expandable form.

Although not yet a visual medium, these concise messaging and blogging systems are most attractive to television journalists. A quick turn Twitter before the commercial graces many newscasts. These context free nuggets are ideally suited to a medium described as a "wasteland" and it troubles me that networked content has been so eagerly adopted by television news shows. It points out the need for reflection and context in networked short message content.

I have explored this theme before (see Twitter Wiki, "quick-slow" bliki articles previously). The question is how to accommodate the fragmentary, context free units of networked content and encourage expressions of context and reflection to balance them. It is a daunting task because people often do not see a need for context or reflection and are often unwilling to bother with the story behind a photograph or take time to expand on a short message.

We need to accommodate the uses for which short messages are legitimate and when they are beneficial (such as the conciseness they encourage...concise writing requires reflective analysis before posting, you must know your subject well to pare it down to its essentials and wordiness often just adds confusion...we must be prepared for abuse of longer text forms connected to short text forms). But also we must make it possible for reflection to take place. The "quick-slow" approach to networked content systems encompasses this. We can then turn the two principles to our advantage, by encouraging their opposites context and reflection.

Biological Construction and Networked Content Creation

2009-03-17T13:20:00.003-04:00

The order and symmetry of biologically created structures, such as an egg or the human body, are expressions of how correctly those biological systems worked to construct the natural artifact. Biological organisms are collections of cells cooperating with each other. The order and correctness is an expression of the successfulness of the collaboration.

An egg comes out more egg-like when the biological processed working to make it cooperate and collaborate more correctly in its construction. I believe this has implications for the collaborative processes operating in networked software development and information science. The biological process of construction is inherently different than the one humans have inherited from their tool making and industrial heritage. What will we make of it?

Where are we going?

2009-03-17T13:17:00.002-04:00

The issue of whether people should pay for forums or not came up on dpreview. With the current economy, I expect how to pay the bills will be a growing question for many web services.

The problem is with forums there is perfect competition. Anyone can setup a forum and run it for next to nothing. If one forum decides to charge a fee, the users can flee to another forum. The only reason they might stay is because of the audience. For example, photographers pay for to host their photographs on Flickr primarily because it provides a rich audience of people who love to look at still photographs. Flickr is the Life and Look magazine of our time, it is the revival of the great picture magazines, not because of its technology (that helped orient the site in the right direction to succeed, just look at the abject failure of Picasa to be social---too little too late). Flickr just happened to be where most people who like to look at pictures gathered, mostly because of its blog-like streams of every changing pictures and social tools. It is easier to pay a small fee to use Flickr (perhaps even to "read" it) than it would be to overcome the "capital" costs of changing sites. Flickr users have a lot invested in Flickr and it might just cost less to stay and pay than to move elsewhere. Besides, there is no where else to move. The closest thing I could see to Flickr would be for every photographer to put up their own photo blog software and then join photoblogs.org, which would become the "magazine" and "social hub." This is a distributed vision of photo sharing online. I used to wonder which would be successful. But it really was simple, Flickr did it all for you, some for free, a little more for pay, well worth it to promote your photography.

Despite the somewhat juvenile and absurd environment of Flickr with regard to art photography (you know, the dozens of people giving out "Great Photograph" awards to pedestrian, derivative and mediocre images mostly to promote themselves or because they are too young to know what a derivative image is), it is useful to professional photographers and art photographers because Flickr is where the eyeballs are. It attracts people who still love still photography, which in this age of video, is a bit of a miracle that anyone takes an interest in photography. However, photographs can make the world sit still long enough for people to pay attention, and that is a very similar experience to poetry, which at least in part, is there to draw attention to things. I've heard from professional photographers they get an order of magnitude more requests or work through Flickr than through one of the professional portfolio sites.

One reason, perhaps the principal one, Henri Cartier Bresson and other great photographers became well known, was through their images being published in the great picture magazines. When television came along, the picture magazines went into decline. Photojournalism began its long decline at this time, for the simple reason people could learn about their world visually through television, a more attention grabbing (the barrier to entry for television was lower, you didn't have to be intelligent to watch it, a good example where low barrier of entry is destructive to society) and free medium. Without the picture magazines it was no longer possible for a photographer of acknowledged artistic merit to become known and their images have significance in society. The audience was gone. Flickr reestablishes this audience.

So the question still stands. Will people in the future pay for their online content. Pay to create it. Pay to consume it. What is happening now? People are already paying to create content. They pay for a Flickr account with better tools. They pay for services to create graphics, three dee art, property in virtual communities. A few sites charge for reading content, but not many. But given human history and the recent past, when most content was paid for, in newspapers, books and magazines (except for tv), it seems reasonable to assume the free ride will be over someday.

There may be a tipping point when a non-pay site is no longer competitive. When most good content has gone to pay sites and the community of interest for that content willing to pay is consuming all they can (this is what happens with books and magazines today), the other sources will be driven out in a kind of perfect competition. The free sites will be filled with garbage and what passes for content on local cable access.

The network is not the old traditional world of libraries and publishers. It will be different. Project Gutenberg. Open source projects. The collections of enthusiasts sick and tired of the crap shoveled out by the traditional content and software businesses have taken it on their own to produce quality products where the marketplace would not or could not. This is an order of magnitude different than the pre-networked world, where people could not work together, providing little bits of effort or expertise to collaboratively create a cultural artifact. This is entirely new and we don't know where its going.

As an aside, the idea of tipping or donation comes up. Frustrated with no way to fund my original website, I considered taking a modern high tech variation on the PBS approach. I considered (in the 1990s) creating a content management system where each article would have a countdown timer displayed like a reverse donation thermometer. If you didn't contribute something to the article, it would count down, when it reached zero, the page would be pulled from the site. Of course, the ability to cache networked content presents a threat to such schemes, the wayback machine can regurgitate considerable missing content and so can the Google search cache. What about caching? If the Wikipedia were to dry up funding and blow away today, would its content still remain available in a myriad of niches around the network? On people's computers, disks, servers here and there, in caches? Would it evolve another life in a peer to peer environment? Will all information become distributed over billions of cell phones and have no location at all?

Twitter is a 'starfish' enabler

2009-03-16T19:23:00.003-04:00

Twitter is a 'starfish' enabler. It's what makes Twitter powerful and empowers those who use Twitter. It puts individuals at the center of the star.

Twitter friends (followers) are more like information flows you choose, organizing the flow of information for yourself and others, curating, editing, creating than other social network friends, which are more passive, something you collect or at most create a space to explore. This is because friends/followers bring content to you automatically. It is the flows of information resulting from following that make Twitter different from other social networks.

I didn't know much about Twitter when we started designing Farmfoody.org and thought it was something to do with short text messages on cell phones. I am currently integrating Twitter into farmfoody.org, after having considered a Facebook social feed model and finding it overly complex and confusing. We need as low a barrier to participation as possible. Farmers don't have time for complex systems, blogging, social feeds with posts and comments and threads and six dfferent types of publishing and bold and italic.

Neither do people standing at a farm stand with a bag of white corn tucked in their arm have time for complexity. It turns out that the social bulletin system we were envisioning two years ago exactly describes the information flows in Twitter. The way your friends (followers) tweets (messages) aggregate on the Twitter homepage is identical to how we envisioned messages from our users collecting on the user's profile page. In our bulletin system, all the friends of a user receive a bulletin, similar to the "homepage" on Twitter, creating an information flow. The only difference is bulletins are like craigslist ads and expire. That original requirement for bulletings to operate as classified ads with an expiration date, similar to craigslist, held us back. I should have looked into Twitter integration then, since we would not have needed to develop one of our own.

A Twitter Wiki

2009-03-12T13:29:00.001-04:00

As the popularity of short, fragmentary messages grows, I have become concerned the public conversation may lose the capacity for thoughtfulness and reflection. At the same time, I would like to caution those who condemn Twitter or other systems based on micro content to not throw the baby out with the bath water. The long form newspaper article found in the New York Times or Washington Post contains a lot of material used to provide background for the reader, often at the end of the article. Not only is this text boring and redundant to the knowledgeable reader, it takes up previous space. The one thing the web is good at is connecting one piece of knowledge to a broader context of other pieces of knowledge. There is no sane reason to continue repeating background and further reading material in a long form newspaper article when on the web, a writer can simply link to the information.

The brief, concise texts of micro content can be connected to many other sources of information, some just as concise (a kind of "blizzard" of small pieces connected loosely) as well as to other longer, deeper and reflective sources. This loose, disjoint and connected type of writing is simply the network native way of writing and connecting information. It is beneficial, as long as both kinds of writing and forms of content are available and can be connected.

My concern is really with lowering the barrier of entry, enabling and encouraging those longer, deeper and reflective forms of writing. I recognize that there are benefits from shorter, more concise writing, which leaves redundant, expansive or source material hidden (properly) under a link or conntected through a network of tags or a network of people. Perhaps will will see fewer long texts divided up by headings and sections and more smaller texts connected together through search, tags and linkages into a variety of wholes, determined by the user's interests and needs.

About ten years ago, I was fascinated by the idea of a long text (article, book, etc.) entirely constructed of fragments, similar to the kind of texts you see posted on Twitter today, which could be freely rearranged similar to those magnets used to write poetry on refrigerator doors. I imagined that instead of writing a large text with a single coherent whole, they way books have always been written, the pieces of information on a topic could be combined to create a "book" in innumerable ways by rearranging those pieces.

It would be like taking all the paragraphs in a book, shaking them out on to the floor, and then allowing or enabling those pieces to be rearranged for each reader or interest. The pieces would be tied together by keyword or by search result and only lastly by links. I coded a small prototype application called Strands to test the idea, but work and life caught up with me and I shelved it. I was and am still surprised by the ease and rapidity with which people have adopted Twitter.

Not only are people using Twitter, despite the fragmentary nature of its texts, they are participating creatively in shaping the technology and usage of this kind of system based on fragmentary texts.

The use of tagging emerged spontaneously from the user base. Using "hashtags" brief texts can be connected to media, such as images and video, with the tag at the center of a network of content.

Also, I've noticed users are starting to fit the tag word into their text. Some examples are:

"Young Nebraska farmer explains how limiting direct payments would affect his #farm at www.nefb.org"
(Tweet from http://twitter.com/farmradio)

and

"farmanddairyGet four issues of #Farm and Dairy FREE! Click on the big promo on our home page: http://www.farmanddairy.com/"
(Tweet from http://twitter.com/farmanddairy)

At the heart of my Strands prototype were small texts connected by keywords. I wanted to create the lowest possible barrier of entry, so a user could create a keyword (essentially a tag, I called them "strand words") just by writing it into the text. In this system, what was essentially a tag was created by writing it (texts were scanned on post or edit for the presences of tags and any new ones added to an index), which is hauntingly similar to how people have started using tags on Twitter. They started out adding the tags to the end of a message, but have now begun incorporating them directly into the flow of text. I hesitated to continue working in this direction on Strands, partly because I expected people would find the tags sprinkled through the text troublesome.

My current interest is in providing tools or ideas that will encourage and enable a society addicted to short messages, however beneficial they may be, however native to the networked way of writing and reading in a connected fashion, to engage in greater contextualization and thoughtful reflection, to enable collecting some of the knowledge quickly flying by in the "Twitterverse" into slower, more reflective pools of knowledge, like eddies on the edges of a fast flowing stream.

The first tool I want to build is a "Twitter Wiki" enabling anyone to associate a text of any length with a Tweet and anyone to edit it. If I have the energy, I will post any experiments on my site or at least attempt to describe it.

Social Micro-blogging and bookmarking

2009-03-03T18:14:00.003-05:00

It hadn't occurred to me until I saw it being done that social bookmarking and social microblogging are both popular in part because the create flows of information edited and curated by experts.

One good reason to follow the bookmarks of a user belonging to a social bookmarking site is simply it is a source of good information. The bookmarks ought to be high quality and relevant in the expert's topic area.

It makes sense to follow the tweets on the homepage of a user belonging to Twitter (or any microblog system), because they represent a selection, an inclusion, of edited and curated information for free, usually from an expert.

A Twitter homepage combines the posts from a user's followers, which amounts to multiple levels of curation. Suppose a number of people practicing organic farming create Twitter accounts and post information they feel is important. Suppose then an expert in organic farming, perhaps an editor of an organic farming and gardening magazine becomes a Twitter user and then follows the tweets of those practicing organic farming. Suddenly, this user's homepage becomes a fountain of curated knowledge on organic farming.

The same phenomena occurs (without the vertically integrated curation) on social bookmarking sites. A social bookmark system is an example of horizontally integrated curation, since many hands organize, but one result does not necessarily flow into another, progressively filtering content. What if you could follow another person's bookmarks and aggregate the bookmarks of all your followers onto your profile page?

The question presents itself: Where did I go wrong?

I had thought of bookmarking as bookmarking and blogging as blogging, each highly personal, one organizing content for an individual's own use and the other for publishing (in a mostly traditional way, I tended to scoff at the idea of blogs as conversations, but they are, just not as flexible and immediate as microblogs). What I missed about the social aspect was the flows of information they create, which are curated. I envisioned years ago the idea of users collaboratively organizing the content of a website, but that wasn't all that great an achievement, since that is essentially what wiki users have been doing from day one.

I thought about applying it to all the content, thinking perhaps I could Tom Sawyer-like, get others to organize my stuff, but my second thought was, who would want to do that? I think most efforts to get users to organize content will fail and I think most efforts have, except where the social ingredient is in the mix. Collaboratively edited social content sites for news, bookmarks, short messages, do work, but through self interest in the flows of information they create. They become platforms for self-promotion.

There is no incentive for you to come organize my site. Flickr allows users to tag other user's pictures, to essentially organize content for another user, just as I thought would be possible, but I see no evidence it is being used generally. Except for the Flickr Commons, where there exists an incentive to surround historically important images with context, to tell their stories so they will be preserved and meaningful for society, where local historians can demonstrate their knowledge and where self-promotion is possible through the organization of other people's stuff.

Despite seeing the social ingredient at work in wikis and despite seeing the essentially (and pioneering) social organization of the CPAN library, I missed its importance. It's importance comes from the curated flows of information created by the social organizing, editing, contextualizing with narrative, selecting and filtering, that occurs in social media systems.

Twitter as curated news feed

2009-03-02T17:31:00.003-05:00

When I follow another Twitter user, their posts (Tweets) are included on my homepage, which is public. This amounts to creating a kind of "newspaper" news feed of content "curated" (selected and managed by me). The problem with this, is for example, that with our farmfoody.org Twitter account (established primarily for communicating announcements to users) is that it could become a kind of "mashup" of farm-food related news by following Twitter users posting on those subjects. However, that would result in clutter and chaos, since there is no way to organize the flow of content onto my homepage.

What is needed, is a way to tag posts. It would be nice if posts could be tagged according to topic and each tag converted to a tab, which would separate the streams of information, so there could be a #farm and a #food tag (using the hashtags convention) and a Farm and Food tab would appear on my homepage, allowing readers to chose the topic they are interested in following. I suppose they could just follow the individual sources, but what is needed is a curated aggregation to enable Twitter users to follow an "edited" flow of information through Twitter (like Reader's Digest?, it might even be possible for Twitter users to give a thumbs up/dn vote on what content should appear in a particular flow or to collaboratively tag).

If I could categorize posts based on farm or food topics, it would be useful to me and my followers. If the users I am following could tag their posts, it would be very similar and I would be relieved of some work (of course, merely following does in a sense create the mix, but it is all jumbled together). It is not important who organizes the content as much as it gets organized with the least effort possible.

I don't know if anyone is working on something like this, but it seems rational that Twitter would be working on some internal mechanisms for organizing that flow. The hashtags solution appears to not be scalable, since it requires following their user account (in order to scan for tags), more of a prototype.

Dynamic Range

2009-02-17T14:58:00.004-05:00

The Online Photographer has posted an excellent article, More on Dynamic Range, on the range of brightness in a scene, how it is captured as a photographic image, how to fit that range into the range of lightness levels recorded by the camera and express that range in the rendered medium, whether a JPEG image viewed on a monitor or a paper print.

He's right that dynamic range is the most abused, misused and poorly understood term in digital photography. It's the only short hand we have for "range of brightness values" or "range of tonal values," which are both going to give your fingers cramps if you write them often enough.

There is a lack of understanding by many photographers about the basic process of recording an image and producing a visible print from it. There are crucial, but precise, distinctions to be made, which took a long time and much expertise to establish in analog photography, so the confusion is not surprising.

The first thing to consider is the range of brightness in the scene (which the Online Photographer article demonstrates and discusses). It may seem obvious to some, but is often counter-intuitive, that a distinction exists between the range of measurable brightness values in the scene (and remember, most are reflected light, but some is direct from light sources or specular reflections, for purposes of exposure, it is good to consider only reflected light and not specular highlights, since they do not contain any detail or information) and the representation of those values as tonal values in the recording medium (in the camera, film or sensor).

The difference between the range of brightness in the scene and the translation of the brightness levels into tonal levels recorded by the camera (density in film, tonal levels in digital) is not immediately obvious, but the camera does not record brightness, but some analog of it, clumps of grain or numbers. To see the picture, the range of tonal levels must be translated back into a range of brightness values. We do this when printing a negative to photographic paper or viewing a transparency film slide through transmitted light (a projector or lightbox).

In the digital realm, the image rendered from raw capture data or printed to paper is the output, which must be translated into reflected or transmitted light so we can view the image. A complication in digital photography is the JPEG image, which places limitations on the original data. It would not matter either, if it were a TIFF image, since all images rendered from capture data have contrast curves applied to fit the image within the range of tonal values the format is capable of storing and to be "pleasing" to the eye. Linear-data is not pleasing to the eye because it contains too large a range of tonal levels and corresponding brightness range. It won't "look" like the original scene as the eye saw it.

When you are talking about dynamic range, you first need to ask, which range? Is it the range of brightness levels in the scene, capable of being captured by the sensor as input, capable of being rendered to output? Is it the range of brightness or tonal values you are considering?

The scene has a range of brightness values.

The recording medium (film or sensor) has a range of brightness values it is senstive (ISO comes in here) to and a range of tonal values it uses to express those values. The brightness levels are translated to those tonal levels (whether represented by density in analog film or by numbers in digital data).

The output medium has a range of tonal levels it is capable of storing and expressing as brightness values when viewed.

The complications come because of the need to match the range and step of tonal levels in the input to the output. Further complicating things is that the JPEG image has its own set of curves and translations, when printed the printer paper and inks place their own set of limitations and curves on the translation. The environment in which the image is viewed has its own limitations and effects on the brightness values percieved.

The capability of a camera or sensor cannot be judged by looking at a random example of output from a camera's JPEG engine. That would be the equivalent of judging a film by the quality of processing and printing from a randomly selected corner drugstore.

The Social Book

2009-02-11T15:30:00.002-05:00

Should books be a calm refuge from the hubbub of the network or should they be part of the flow with constantly updated social activity right in the book? As ebooks become social that is an important question. Do people want to curl up with a good book to get away from it all, or will they want to constantly stay in touch with the author and other readers? I do not have the answer to that question, but it is clear the next step in electronic books is to make them truly dynamic, with more than just the ability to search full text or submit HTML forms. The next step in ebooks will be the integration of the social network, bringing community inside the ebook. As we begin to read books on devices ranging from the iPhone to Kindle, the possibility for connecting the text to its context of authors and fans, of creating a social context for the work in the same way Twitter creates a social context, grows.

A thought occurred to me reading about Why is OpenOffice "profoundly sick"? http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10129764-16.html that development on an office suite is no longer challenging (and has not been for a decade) to most coders. I believe this is why there is so little interest in coders working on it. But making OO into a platform for ebook publishing and integrating the social network into document creation, sharing and reading,

This is already happening piecemeal. I've gleaned information from histories of chats I've participated in, collected postings from forums, email, to use in a document and I see others doing it as well. We already are writing in a social environment. Wikis are another existing socially networked writing environment and have been since day one.

If you look at the emergence of source control services like Assembla or Google code, online "forges" for producing software, I don't see why that can't happen with ebooks. It might be a better approach than creating a desktop application.

Think of how one could incorporate content from Twitter flows, Flickr photostreams, every fourm thread, QnA question answered well, everything gleaned from the flow of socially networked information directly into ebooks through some curation and publishing process. Anything can become an ebook, and ebooks can be small or large, read on the iphone or Kindle.

User Curation of the Archive

2009-01-29T15:05:00.006-05:00

We need to enable people to curate collections. This means blogging the contents of an archive, which can be as simple as a blogger selecting certain items (by surrogate, typically a picture but also 3D rotatable image or video) and posting them to the blog along with any caption available through the collection's online database. They don't have to say anything original to be useful. The basic requirement is that archives places their collections online, giving access to potential curators outside the archive. Curating is anything a user does to create context for the cultural artifact, commenting, annotating, writing that contextualizes the artifact (like wiki pages).

User curation of the archive helps people feel connected with the archive and its contents. Involving non-academics in the archives is important for the continued existence of an instituation and the collection, the value of which exists partly in the memories of people and in the objects themselves. I learned from genealogy that people only preserve what they care about, and that people care about things when they have meaning, and stories give artifacts meaning.

The context becomes a bigger and bigger net as it grows, bringing in more people from search engines. The effect of this net can be powerful, as I learned soon after getting on the web in 1995. I put a collection of family photographs from the middle 19th century online and within a few months several relatives of the people in the photographs had found them and made contact with me. After over 120 years of separation. This was when the web was very small, the users a very small percentage of the population. My idea to cast a net with the pictures and captions had brought in the catch I desired, helping to identify individuals in the images and reconstruct the family history, both photographic and genealogical.

I was intrigued by a project Social Media Classroom. It shares features with ones we envision for Folkstreams, as a platform for creating access to archives, but we also recognize that our site is mostly used in the classroom and that features of our site are shared with features of a classroom, such as the "contexts" accompanying our films, including transcripts.

Archives will, through online access, become an integral extension of the classroom. There will be less of a distinction between archives and classroom (and the public).

Content is the person

2009-01-22T17:33:00.003-05:00

In discussions about farmfoody.org, the idea came up that recipes represent people in a way similar to the way avatars represent people, only much richer because they contain search engine friendly content. The recipe becomes a way for people to explore farms by navigating to the profile the recipes belongs to, then exploring the connections between users (producers and consumers who are friends).

Content is the person. I think we will see more of this as social media continues to expand an evolve. This can be seen, again on Twitter, where the person is represented by the content. When you go to a person's Twitter page, you see mainly their content. The "profile" is in the background. This allows Twitter to prominently display information about the content stream, because they do not have to deal with ten different kinds of content under ten different categories. Tweet streams have following friends, followers and the number of updates counted. If there were ten types of content on the page, if each time personal information was updated, what would constitute an update? It is clear updates mean the number of posts. Following, followers, post stats. That's it. Clear and concise.

Twitter succeeds by not being all things. It is a tool. Putting the profile in the background the content on the page. We can speak of a "Twitter page" because we know what is on it, unlike a Facebook page, which has almost anything on it. People know what you mean when you say "go to my Twitter page."

Our thinking about the direction farmfoody's features should go in are being directed by these concerns.

Thoughts on Twitter

2009-01-21T22:41:00.005-05:00

I've been thinking about why Twitter is successful. And why some other services that attempted to compete with Twitter by offering "improved" features, like Jaiku, were not. Twitter had the first mover advantage. In the last month or so the buzz about Twitter has spread to average people through use on cable television networks and by cases where people reported on news events through Twitter by cell phone. Those are well and good, but there are other reasons for Twitter's success.

One is the simplicity of its presentation. The real estate devoted to profile and "friends" or user to user relationships is compact. The profile is brief and concise. The friends (following) and followers are represented by badge-like elements showing the number of following and follower users, with the numbers linked to listings. The followers are displayed as compactly as possible, represented by tiny icons arranged in rows and columns. The various kinds of posts are filtered by clicking a navigation menu item in the sidebar.

Twitter reverses the idea of a profile. The content is the profile and the profile becomes background to the content. When someone visits a person's Twitter page, they want to read the latest posts. The user goes straight to the posts. Most sites make you go to a profile and then to the content. If they like the content and want to know something more about who is posting, they can look at the little profile box containing the name and brief bio or click the link to visit their website. This difference contributes significantly to the usability and attractiveness of the site compared to other social networking sites. Twitter is a tool, not a "Swiss army knife" like Facebook, so it can take this approach. It should be a lesson to any designer or developer, even of more complex, layered sites.

The typical jumble of posts in the Twitter message stream explains why the developers of competing sites saw room for improvement. When replies enter into the message stream, it becomes a single-threaded discussion. It seems reasonable to let users reply directly to a message, creating a threaded discussion. Twitter might look similar to Facebook's Wall, where certain posts may have comments posted to them, creating a limited kind of threaded discussion. I believe this misunderstands how people use Twitter and why they use it. If Twitter users were looking for a simple, online threaded discussion forum, there are plenty of free microforum services to be found.

I believe Twitter users do not want a threaded discussion because they value the immediacy of tweets. There may be a way to capture conversations going between cell phone users in an intuitive and simple way, but I'm not sure what that is. Activity posts, like "What is Steve doing now?" are unlikely to elicit conversation, but as I've seen on Facebook, they sometimes do burst into conversation. I believe friends use the posting of completely uninteresting and unimportant information about their activities as a way to touch base, through a brief conversation. It's like talking about the weather. It may be possible, if the interface is sufficiently transparent, to support threaded discussions. Facebook does a good job implementing the thread as a collapsible series of posts below the post.

One thing in passing, it is clever how Twitter enables linking to other user's Twitter pages through a Wiki-like notation for Twitter-name on replies (using the @ symbol, @twittername). It helps solidify the username as not just a name used for authentication, but as a symbol representing a person. In a way, wikis have had this from the beginning, since it was traditional to create a page using your own name, which could be linked to in "talk page" discussions, and the like.

Friendship Rot

2009-01-21T18:25:00.001-05:00

I may not be the first, but I have noticed something on social networks that hadn't occurred to me, although it should have, if we have link rot, why not rot in the relationships between friends? I've noticed on our farmfoody.org site there are some lapsed users, since their email addresses are bouncing. It occurred to me that they still have friends but no longer participate in the site. These are ghost relationships suffering from what could be called friendship rot. I suppose Facebook must have millions of people who no longer participate but have accounts and friends. It must have a terrible friendship rot problem. I suppose this form of relationship rot extends to LinkedIn and other sites that depend on navigating networks of relationships between people.

Growing List of Adapters for Panasonic G1

2009-01-19T17:28:00.003-05:00

It looks like the G1 is shaping up to be the manual focus lens fanatic's dream camera. A growing list of adapters is available from http://www.rangefinderrestorations.com/photo_posts/G1adapterlist.html or at google docs directly.

I'd like to see an inexpensive adapter for Contax/Zeiss. I have the 50mm f/1.4 although I could use the Contax to 4/3 adapter with a 4/3 to m4/3 adatper.

There is a lot of talk about using C-Mount cine and television lenses for ultra wide angle work, which is interesting, but I wonder how they will compared to the planned 7-14mm lens?

I'm still waiting to see the HD video version of the camera.

I'll be watching.

Information Evolves and Other Stuff

2009-01-15T15:22:00.004-05:00

I've learned to avoid precategorizing anything in my bookmarks.

I don't make a category unless it is necessary, unless I am using it. For example, I need to bookmark Amazon web services, so I create an Amazon Web Services folder, but I don't create a Web folder, with a Web Services folder inside, which I then put the AWS folder in. I don't have any other web services bookmarks yet in Google Chrome so I leave this for later. It just creates more folder depth to dig through before it's needed.

I also try to avoid adding a bookmark just for reference. That just leads to clutter, where I can't find the bookmarks I use on a daily basis, because when you categorize information according to its classification or how it relates to other information, you lose how it relates to you, to useage. For example, if in browsing the web I find a half dozen interesting resources on manual focus lenses, but for cameras I don't use, the bookmarks will obscure the resources I use for manual focus lenses for cameras I do use. What I do now is add bookmarks only when I use the content or need the content now, not for reference or anticipating future use, placing them in the categorized heirarchy. The others I place in Uncategorized (what a wonderful idea, that Uncategorized anti-category!) awaiting the day they become useful and can be categorized, or I place them in a special heirachy called Reference. I don't know if a parallel heirarchy will work but it does keep them out of my way.

I hate digging through deep categories. Yet, for proper categorization to find things later, when you've forgotten where they are, they need deep categories. If I have have five different web services providers, each one needs its own folder and there will be clutter if I just create them all at the same level. So I need to create a Web Services folder, which then adds another annoying, slowing, confusing layer to finding what I want and to my thinking. I want Amazon Web Services when I want it, not digging through Web, Web Services to get to it. What if I use it every day? I have to dig each time.

This brings up another issue: information structures evolve.

One of the problems library scientists create is through this need for pre-creation of categories. They must predict every category that will be needed ahead of time. I was once told I needed to create "name authority records" for every photographer in a database I envisioned of 19th century photographers, before a database collecting names from old card photographs could be built. At that rate, the database would never be built and besides the whole purpose of the project was to collect the names so we could see who was doing what and look for patterns. If we had an authoritative name for each one, we wouldn't be doing the research.

Don't engineer. Evolve. Evolve. Evolve.

We don't need architects and engineers, we need some new job description with a new name, evolvineer or something, for the person who creates a framework for information evolution (maybe like the game Spore?). Perhaps databases like multivariate or Lotus Notes will help get us there.

The Aperture Pin on Minolta Lenses

2009-01-11T17:30:00.005-05:00

Manual focus lenses from the 1970s on usually have a mechanism to adjust the aperture during exposure so the lens can be held wide open while focusing to improve brightness. There is usually a pin extending from the lens into the mount throat or mirror box area. When mounting a legacy lens to a modern digital single lens reflex camera, this pin can sometimes contact surfaces in the mount throat, or possibly the mirror. It is dependent on the individual lens and camera model, so there is no general rule that applies.

Since I purchased my Olympus E-510, I've collected a number of Rokkor lenses for Minolta cameras (and a X-700, which is a very nice 35mm film camera): 50mm f/1.4, 58mm f/1.4, 50mm f/1.8, 200mm f/4.5, 45mm f/2.0 (This lens makes a very compact camera mounted to the 510 and I like the color and rendering quality of despite it being very inexpensive lens.) Due to the small viewfinder and lack of focusing aids, such as a split prism, microprism collar and ground glass I was used to in my film slr, I found it difficult to achieve critical focus reliably. Since I wanted to use the lenses wide open or nearly so, this was the case. The result is much better when using the lenses stopped down or with a larger viewfinder of the E-3, according to reports.

The aperture pin does need to be filed down for the E-300, E-330 (I posted a guide to Minolta Lenses on Four Thirds Cameras, covering this on ebay, the source information is the Rokkor Files page on Olympus). My experience is with the E-510 only, but I suspect it applies to all E-x10 and E-x20 series cameras, as well as the E-3 and upcoming E-30. I did have to very slightly file the aperture pin on my 45mm Rokkor. I used an emery board to remove the build up of enamel, which was sufficient for the pin to clear the lens mount throat. The pin cleared nicely without having to file the metal down.

All mount nicely without modification except for above. I believe the same would be true for the newer cameras. I do have to tighten the adapter set screw (This is a small hex screw that applies pressure to keep the lens tight to the adapter, since there is no lens mount locking mechanism as there would be on a Minolta camera.) for the heavier lenses, otherwise, they can unexpectedly dismount while turning the focusing ring (especially if the ring is stiff from age).

Olympus Offers "Proof" Photo Contest

2009-01-10T12:47:00.007-05:00

I like Olympus cameras. Ever since I saw and handled the OM-2 at the camera shop, when I was a teenager deciding on my first SLR camera (not that I could afford the OM's) and very impressed with the compactness of the OM-1 and OM-2 and performance of Zuiko lenses, I've had an affinity for Olympus. In recent years they have produced some amazing digital single lens reflex cameras, such as the first ones with Live View and the legendary E-1. But their marketing efforts have fallen short of what is necessary to explain the advantages of Olympus and Four Thirds photography.

Olympus is running a photo contest, asking for images offering "proof" of the ability of their weather resistant cameras to go where most cameras cannot. This is at least heading in the right direction, emphasizing the extraordinary weather sealing that Olympus cameras have, the experience Olympus has with making tough, water-resistant cameras. If I wanted to take a camera with me while exploring caves, I would choose the E-3 hands down. If I wanted to continue shooting on a rainy day, I would choose the E-3. If I wanted to shoot waves standing in surf. If I wanted to photograph off-road vehicle races. If I wanted to visit Africa or some other wild place. It would be the E-3 (or E-1).

Some will say weather sealing is not really important. How many photographs are taken in bad weather? But we really don't know how many photographs or what photographs might be taken if all cameras and lenses were weather sealed. It's like saying you don't need ISO 64000 becuase photographers got along fine with ISO 400 for years. Having ISO 64000 allows you to explore realms you never could before, in ways you never could before.

Henri Cartier-Bresson introduced a whole new vocabulary for photography, which he could not have done without the availablity of high speed black and white film and a small, unobtrusive camera to make "street photography" possible. Not every photographer needs high sensitivity or extraordinary weather sealing, but both give the photographer new possibilities to explore.

Blogging the Archives

2009-01-03T02:49:00.005-05:00

A vital interest of mine is access to archives. I've been interested in the possibilities inherent in the web and network for increasing access to archives and enabling a greater number of non-academics to browse, organize and surface archive holdings. One of the most significant ways of exposing the holdings of an archives is blogging the contents.

We really haven't got there yet, but I've noticed a small trend, which I hope signifies the beginning of exponential growth, of people blogging artifacts. I do not remember the first site I came across where a blogger was posting pictures of artifacts, usually photographs from an online catalog of a museum, but here are some recent finds.

Illustration Art

All Edges Gilt

If we could just get every artifact in the world's museums and archives photographed or scanned and online, give the tools to blog the contents to millions of ordinary people interested in telling the stories of these cultural objects, think of how rich that would be. I don't know if people will do this, but I do know that ordinary people have a lot to contribute. Academics cannot know everything, they are an isolated individual, no matter how expert they are, and there is a very Long Tail out there of family members, amateur historians, hobbyists and who knows who that know something about cultural and historic artifacts. Maybe they will be willing to contribute. It will likely be only two percent, like Wikipedia authors, but that small percentage can do a lot of good.

As an aside, author and developer Liam Quin has a site, fromoldbooks.org which has great potential to provide fodder for bloggers. The interface to this digital archive of old book scans is easier to use and better than ones I've seen institutions deploy.

I wonder, also, if this phenomena is not somehow similar to the Cinematheque, not just an archive, but concerned that people actually view or interact with the artifacts.

Update: Shorpy is a commercial site, which shows how successful blogging the archives can be. The site appears to have developed a following, with, I imagine, readers checking in each day to see what new photographs are posted. The blogger acts as curator by selecting images that will be of interest to the readers. Arranging them into albums, possibly by narrative (using Tabloo would be a good way to achieve this).

This fits exactly with the idea of people being able to easily find images of their local area in the past and the idea of "blogging the archives" at its most simplest and effective. The power of simply posting images and their captions, without any commentary, is surprising. It is encouraging to see people are interested and willing to participate in the interpreation and "unpuzzling" of old photographs. One of the pleasures of old photographs is rediscovering what lies behind the mysteries the images present.

Why Tag Clouds are Beating a Dead Horse

2009-01-02T14:20:00.004-05:00

Tag clouds are dead. I don't want to mince words. I've been waiting for a long time for someone to say so, to let everyone see the elephant in the living room. What interests me is why tag clouds are dead.

About ten years ago I was working on a prototype web application. It never saw the light of day. But it was called Strands and consisted of a wiki-like content management system that allowed anyone (it was based on SoftSecurity) to create pages, to post and edit content. Any author could include single keywords in the text. These would be automatically scooped up and entered into an index. You could display the posts associated with (containing) any keyword listed on a page like search results. The idea was that content could be navigated in any number of ways according to keywords added by users. It's wasn't social. It didn't know the user who contributed the keyword. The idea was to destroy hierarchy and create a user centered order to information, something close to the folksonomy (but not quite because it didn't care about who submitted a keyword). One version did not allow linking between pages, no "wikiword" links, the idea being that all navigation was by keyword links, either in content or on the "strand" pages listing all content belonging to a keyword.

One of the other ways of navigating considered was by popularity of keyword. The system could generate a list of keywords based on how many posts contained or were associated with them. You may start to find the elements of this system familiar. "Strands" are posts listed by tag. Keywords are tags. Navigating by popular keywords is a tag cloud. The ideas for this system partly developed out of work I'd seen on the web where posts were ordered by single keyword. The other reason was I have a terrible time categorizing anything, I can't decide which category something could go in. I am incredibly bad at and hate categorizing anything, so I decided the wiki element would let visitors to my site categorize my junk for me.

If this were not a blog, I'd spare you all this personal history, but it does show you why I am interested in the question of why tag clouds suck.

When I visit a website with a tag cloud, I tend to pay close attention to it. I noticed that I never bothered clicking on them, never used them. When I thought about why, one of the things I noticed was that nearly every tag cloud consisted of a number of large tags I could count on my hand, and the rest were undifferntiated in size. One of the solutions that came to mind was displaying tags by popularity on a logarithmic scale, which could help increase the difference between the less popular tags. I'm not that great at math, so I would need to leave it to someone else to work this out. But the idea is to create greater differentiation visually among the less differentiated tags.

The other problem with this is there are only so many font sizes that are easily usable on the web. This worsens the differentiation problem.

The other concern I had devevloping the keyword based application was that chaos would ensue. People tend to prefer order. Would it help or hurt for people to be navigating by tag? Tags don't always apply to the subject. Their strength is freedom, freedom from controlled vocabularies and rigid meanings, but without those restrictions tag-chaos can reign. Wikis always had a kind of randomness to them and so do tag structured and navigated content.

I almost never click on tags in Wordpress blogs for this reason. It usually produces a result that widens not narrows my search. Nielson observed that clicking on a link has a penalty, and the trouble with tags is they have an uncertantity penalty.

The closest I've ever seen to a realization of the keyword based navigation idea is a photo gallery developed by Alex Wilson some years ago. You can see it still in operation here. It's a great idea and an excellent implementation, I don't know why I didn't go ahead with my own version instead of abandoning it (doubly, since the eventual goal was for organizing photographs). It makes the homepage a tag cloud and each detail page with a photograph displays a vertical row of thumbnails to photographs linked by tags, which is very similar to the way the Strands pages listed posts according to tag (like Flickr pages with the tags next to the image). Alex recently switched to a standard gallery system for this exact reason, that visitors and customers apparently found the tag-navigated album confusing.

I love tags. I use them like I feel they were supposed to be in this blog, I just write any significant word that comes into my head about the subject. I don't care that they create long lists of tags, since I only use them as a memory aid. They are terrible for people navigating the site and categories would probably be better. Tags aid memory, they aid discovery and exploration, but I'm uncertain that they are good finding aids.

I'm sure others have observed this before, but I've kept quiet about it, so I may be late the party, but still, it's a useful discussion, to dissect why tags ultimately fail to live up to the (strange to me) hype they received. Every new web technology seems to be annoucned like the second coming.

So, yes, tag clouds are beating a dead horse. Even the little sets of tags next to blog posts don't really do much for me, not even on my own site, or they don't seem to do much for visitors in my view.

The other thing that tortured me developing the keyword based navigation was whether to allow spaces in keywords, which would prevent combining keywords like chicken+soup and create confusion (sepearte keyword threads of navigation) between "farmers market" and "farmers_market." I worried a bit about misspellings, but not too much since I didn't like controlled vocabularies.

References: Tag Clouds_Rip and ZigTag supposed to solve these problems.

Facilitating the Conversation

2008-12-10T17:47:00.007-05:00

I was prompted by something Andrew Shafer of Reductive Labs said (on the FooCampers list, so I won't reproduce it here, since it was forwarded to me) about the quality of communication among software developers. He was talking about how communicating the overall design and intentions of the project is vital, so the developers are not left guessing about how the application will be used and what its architects think it should do. What is important is the existence of a conversation between the leaders of a project and the developers writing the code. This hits very close to home, because our farmfoody.or g project is essentially there to improve the flow of information between producers and consumers of food, to enable a conversation.

It occurred to me the solution is to throw away the flash cards and bulleted design specifications and just facilitate the conversation. Why not use social networking tools for developers to communicate? (You can get a sense of another approach from his post Working Together… with Techology). This sounds like an amazing experience using software much like the "multiplayer" networked text editors (SubEthaEdit) that have cropped up in recent years that let a group of connected people edit a text document .

An equivalent of Twitter for programmers would be interesting. A social activity and message feed to keep everyone in the loop. Why not post messages about activity into a feed. This already happens with users signed up to version control services (like Assembla or Sourceforge), but through email. It needs to be through a unified social feed or "wall" some call them, where notifications about code commits, coding activities, etc. can be distributed to a group of "friends" or "followers" of the thread of development. Instead of each project posting a feed, each developer would post a feed. Or perhaps both, with users being able to "follow" a project and also keep up with "friend" developers, which could cut across projects. The latter would be useful because it would help developers keep an eye on allied projects or perhaps a mainstream of code their project fits into, merely by adding that project or an individual developer from the project to their friends (or perhaps they would be "fans" of the project to keep personal friends separate...the terminology doesn't matter).

It should be very possible to build a social "stack" on top of existing "pastebin" applications to achieve this.

Use of Detail in Novel, Haiku and Photograph

2008-12-09T11:15:00.004-05:00

I was thinking about the difference between novel writing and haiku poetry. In a novel, detail is included, in a haiku, detail is omitted, except for those exquisite details that distill from the experience to represent it.

The advice to writers is to write what you know. A novel or haiku starts with a preexisting experience, something from the life of the writer or from an intense experience ("haiku moment," which is distinct from just having an idea or taking one from memory), which is like a photograph. The haiku may be more photographic than the novel, since the novel requires the author generate much more of the picture. In haiku, the reader supplies half of the picture. This is like painting compared to photography, where each begins with the scene, but the camera captures the scene and the painter generates the scene. Each process may be equivalent, since the photographer manipulates the scene through the camera in much the same way the painter manipulates the scene naturally through the process of constructing the image. One just requires more skill at capture time than the other, the camera instantaneous and automatic, the painter lengthy and detailed.

Setting out to write a novel, the author must collect experiences in the smallest detail for inclusion in the story. A novel would be painfully brief if it were not for rich detail filling the pages. The novelist must pay attention to how people speak, the language they use in conversation, the detail in the world around them, like a reporter, recording detail for use in the novel. It is said Steinbeck used reports from a government official detailing the conditions of people living in camps as source material for his novel.

The haiku writer needs to cut down the details, from the uncounted numbers filling the poet's surroundings, to just those expressing the experience. Many details are left for the reader to fill in, which can make haiku from another time or place opaque.

In photography, interestingly, detail is an artistic problem. The camera records the scene with an unblinking eye, including things running counter to our photographic idea. It records with greater detail than the eye, in some sense "possessing" the subjects. Detail that comments on or is contrary to the subject or intention of the photographer is called "subversive detail" and is sometimes the bane of photographers or may be beneficial. Think of taking a picture of a magnificent cathedral with a line of garbage trucks on the street in front. This is a classic example. The lowly trucks create a cognitive dissonance with the soaring cathedral. Whether they should be included or not, is a question. Should the photograph remind us of the connection between the gritty realities of life or should it lift our emotions up to the heavens? Both are possible intentions. Street photographers frequently use subversive detail to enhance their photographs, the classic example being persons on the street appearing to interact with or be watched by persons on posters or advertisements (as well as the irony of the subject of one photograph interacting with the subject of another). Subversive detail gives rich layers to photographs and can be exploited to make comments on the subject.

It is fascinating how questions of detail emerge in three art forms, prose, poetry and photography.

MuseScore

2008-12-06T16:55:00.004-05:00

I am trying out MuseScore (http://musescore.org), an open source, free software for music composition and notation printing. It is the most robust and full featured of the open source music editors. It has a few bugs and some way to go before its features threaten the commercial competition, but it looks promising.

I like the way it displays the score as a big page you can move around by dragging. I am still using an older version of Cakewalk, and it drives me crazy scrolling horizontally to read a song lyric. With MuseScore I can read music as if it were printed on a sheet of paper without scrolling. In Cakewalk, I get lost scrolling through the score, but in MuseScore I can immediately see where I am.

Using Cakewalk's linear display it is difficult to compare measure to measure in a song. If I want to compare the melody in the fourth measure of the second verse to the melody in the fourth measure of the first verse, I must furiously scroll back and forth. Or print the score out for easy comparison.

Connecting Farms to Eaters

2008-12-03T17:13:00.004-05:00

I've discovered local food and connecting producers to consumers came up at the WhereCamp earlier this year. I thought with the growing interest in theorizing about local food and connecting eaters to the people who grow their food, I'd gather up some links here.

You can download a PDF filled with some of my early theorizing (I'm revising my "manifesto" but have not finished, for release at next year's season). It is available as a PDF Farm Foody: A Social Network Connecting Independent Farms to People presenting my rationale for how the social network benefits the family farm and society. My vision of "leveraging the network" as a way of helping small farms compete in a big agriculture economy falls not far from the idea of "How do we create an incentive system stronger than the federal incentive system?" asked by the WhereCampers. You can read about their ideas in a wiki summarizing the discussion.

Food Talk at Wherecamp 2008

When we started brainstorming and developing farmfoody.org two years ago, we understood it had to be easy for farmers to use, not take up a lot of their time, and had to offer utility. I am currently in the middle of a development cycle ready to release what I call a "social feed" and other sites refer variously to as a "wall" (Tom likes to think of it as a "barn wall") enabling and encouraging members of our social network to interact with each other in small, ad hoc social groups.

There are some other sites out there beginning to combine mapping, farms and food. We wish them good luck in their endeavor.

More Thoughts on Technology and New Visual Journalism

2008-10-25T14:34:00.004-04:00

I truly believe there is potential for creation of an online media publishing system centered around the style of visual journalism cameras like the G1 can create. The rhythm of shifting from video to still photography in the hands of a capable, creative visual journalist, could be expressed through an architecture and presentation suited to it. The combination of video and still images have the potential to create in the viewer a sense of surroundings, a picture of the whole event, seen two different ways.

The mix of still and video is suited to the idea of "quick-slow" development, where first captures can be uploaded for rapid presentation with little or no information and then later, more images can be added, stories added to flesh out the first blush images. Video can be edited to explain and give context to the event or stories can be added to give context to the visuals. The combinations are endless, given a sufficiently flexible system.

Brief posts of video or stills can flow onto a stream of consciousness, blog-like, photostream-like, until there is time to reflect on the event, compose stories to give context and explain the images by adding them later. The needs of journalism, immediacy and reflection are met.

By the way, I feel that Flickr represents, not a "photo sharing" phenomena, but a "photo looking" one, which essentially fulfills the function of the great picture magazines, Life and Look. The popularity of Flickr, I believe, is due to the same phenomena, an audience who enjoys learning about the world and getting their information visually.

Panasonic G1: A Camera for the New Journalism?

2008-10-25T12:59:00.004-04:00

I am very excited about the Micro Four-Thirds format and the G1 camera from Panasonic. I have not decided whether I will purchase one or not, since my decision depends on the specifications and performance of the lenses. I am intrigued by the possibility of mounting the 7-14 ultra wide angle Panasonic has in their roadmap. It could make one of the most compact, lightweight and portable ultra wide angle kits to be found in any camera system. The 4/3 sensor size and lens design could provide very good edge sharpness for UWA work.

I truly believe the G1 (and G1 with HD video) could be an online journalist's dream machine. With its articulating LCD and Live View, it can easily move between video and still photography. It is extremely small and lightweight, perfect for carrying all day or unobtrusive photography. The twisty LCD and live view means images can be had from all angles and heights. It is the perfect combination for online photo and video journalism once it can shoot HD video. This camera would be a great way to record events and then quickly upload both video and stills for distribution online, through media sites, blogs or social networks.

Not only does it promise to be a camera for the new journalism, it has the potential to satisfy creative photographers wanting to work with legacy optics. With the right set of adaptors the m4/3 cameras may be able to mount a greater variety of lenses from different manufacturers going back a half century of lens production than any other format in the history of photography. And it may very well do it with better quality.

The EVF promises quick and critical focusing for manually focused legacy lenses. I hope it will be simple to navigate the frame, choose a focus point, click a button and zoom in 10x for critical manual focus, then click and zoom back out for composition before tripping the shutter. Currently, most digital SLRs and terrible at manual focusing because of their small viewfinders, lack of focusing aids and autofocus orientation. The G1 could be a manual focus dream.

As the image quality of the electronic viewfinder improves, I believe they will come to replace optical viewfinders. I hope to see viewfinders with "heads up" displays offering live histograms superimposed upon the scene as well as other information, selectable at a touch of a button, just as the rear LCD screen offers today. Who needs autofocus and old fashioned exposure meters when you have live zoom and a live histogram? Well, maybe that's not for everyone, but it would make a cool camera for photographers who like to drive their cameras the way driving enthusiasts drive their sports cars.

I am very interested in the possibilities m4/3 opens up for the new journalism. In concert with all the new photo sharing, microblogging and social media websites, this category of camera could really add up to something revolutionary. I envision there may be online tools created just to suit the kind of journalism made possible by compact, hybird still/video cameras, the first of which is represented by the G1. We are not talking about taking still captures from a video camera as an afterthought, but a tool specifically designed to operate in both regiemes, easy to take anywhere, use any time by any citizen journalist, the captures ready for distribution through the network. The output of both video and still images from the same event, captured as the journalist thinks appropriate, create the potential for a new kind of presentation and visual narrative. We may see the rise of online versions of the great photo magazines Look and Life, where generations learned about the world through pictures before television chased them from the newstands.

(Some links: Panasonic, AnandTech, Imaging Resource, just google around and you will find a lot of buzz on it).

The Sound of Melting Snow

2008-10-22T14:53:00.003-04:00

Through the window comes
the sound of melting snow--
a warm breeze.
-sek, Oct 2008

It may seem a bit odd, a haiku about early spring just as we are heading into winter, but this one is based on an idea I've been kicking around for some years, trying to capture the experience of listening to the sound of snow melting from all directions through my window on a warm later winter day. I wanted to capture that feeling of prescience and anticipation and only now was able to compose a haiku around it.

Yellow Leaves

2008-10-22T13:23:00.003-04:00

Yellow leaves arranged
on black branches--
exquisite in the rain.
-sek, Oct 2008

Also, more in the Western tradition:

Yellow leaves arranged
on branches stained
exquisite in the rain.
-sek, Oct 2008

The use of rhyme is not typical of haiku.

Transforming Conversations to Knowledge

2008-09-25T19:47:00.002-04:00

This problem of how to transition ephemeral, but timely, information found in forums, Q and A sessions, all the forum-like forms on the network from Usenet to Twitter is one that fascinates me. I've thought about this for a long time without really coming up with any good mechanism for capturing the knowledge and experience of the forum, the group, from scattered individual, unrefined forms, to coherent, refined forms maintained by the community. I think that the idea of automatically transitioning content created by an individual into community property is a great idea. It may meet with some resistance from individuals. But I think it is a good solution to this problem, since anyone can start a conversation that does not just spin out into the oblivion of old forum posts, but can become a seed that grows into a well maintained, coherent, concise source of information.

Where does my interest in this issue come from?

As soon as I got my first website up and running, I wanted an email discussion group. It wasn't long until I was using Smartlist to maintain my own email discussion list. The discussions provided a wealth of information that was otherwise lost or scattered among messages---high signal to noise. One of my tasks was to glean the best information from the list and edit it to create a concise summary of the conclusions drawn in the conversation, which went into a single web page.

While working as a tech support person about ten years ago, it was my practice to glean solutions from our customer forums and distill them into concise answers I could repeat to future customers who experienced the same problem.

I thought there must be some way to automate or smooth this process of collecting the knowledge contained in conversations into a concise article form. It would be necessary to create some kind of bridge from forum to wiki. I thought about this on and off over the years, and tried creating a few tools to help with the processing of forum threads into articles, but until I stumbled across this idea of automatic promotion from individual post to wiki page, I could not see a way to do this that people would actually use.

It really seems this would work well with the quick-slow rhythm of a bliki, to automatically promote "blog" posts to "wiki pages" according to some criteria. I'll have to think about this some more.

In any event, there is another mechanism for easily capturing knowledge from users. We are seeing entire sites developed around a question, like Facebook's "What are you doing now?" or Yammer's "What are you working on?" or Whrrl's "What are you doing and where are you doing it?" with a threaded discussion or map being the result, which is then shared with friends. Sites like del.icio.us use self-interest to capture knowledge from users without their realizing they are doing the sites work for them. For social bookmarking, by giving users the opportunity to store and organize their own bookmarks, they provide the material for communal organization (or discussion, etc. if you take it further).

Capturing and Refining User Expertise

2008-09-25T00:23:00.001-04:00

One of my longtime interests has been how to create a system that captures the knowledge of experts and refines it into a single resource. I was attracted to wikis early on by their communal authorship, but found the lack of structure unsuitable for my needs. What I wanted, for two of my early efforts, one a site intended to help family photography historians answer questions about old photographs and the other a site for programmers to find help with coding questions, was a way to let users engage in a Q and A and then somehow capture and distill the expertise into a more traditional article format (like a wiki page), which could be maintained by everyone. I wanted to capture the expertise emerging from the group discussion through some mechanism.

I ended up developing a content management system for the coding site, which had the ability to "fold" a comment thread attached to an article back into the article for editing. I also developed a tool, which could take a forum thread and turn it into an article text for editing. These solutions required a lot of manual effort to whip the unruly comments into a coherent article.

All along I wanted to introduce the communal editing feature of a wiki to this process, but I faced the obstacle of how to overcome the distinction between communal content and content owned by the user posting it. I racked my brains to design the system to somehow enable a transition from personal content to communal content, so that question and answer sessions centered around a code example or problem, could be "folded" into a more communal source of information, refined and with conclusions. But never found a solution.

Originally, I had wanted to develop my coding help site as a Q and A site like Experts Exchange. This explains why I needed some way of converting the knowledge captured by the Q and A session, if there were a solution, into an article form. A QandA session usually results in exposing a lot of valuable knowledge from experts. I wanted a way to capture and refine this so people could learn to code better from it.

Stackoverflow.com a Q and A site for coders. It is simply excellent in design and execution. What fascinates me most is their concept of a "Community Post." When a post is edited by more than four users, it it promoted to a Community Post, which is editable by every user and no longer belongs to the original owner. Apparently, they use a wiki-like versioning system for their posts, so the original post is owned by the original posting user, subsequent versions I suppose are owned by their editors (the user who revised it), and after four unique edits becomes the property of the community.

This mechanism provides a smooth transition from traditional _authorship_ to the communal writing style of the wiki where the community is the author and authorship is anonymous. I wish I had thought of it, since the original idea for my site was a "code wiki" that would not just provide solutions to programming questions but help coders learn from the results and improve their skills. I don't want to rehash my failures with phphelp.com, but to highlight an innovative way of providing a smooth transition between individually owned and communal content.

One of the questions raised by this is authorship. People like attribution because it builds their reputation. So in a wiki environment, they lose their attribution. A user's post becomes a community post. So what happens to a user's credit? One solution is to create an indirect proxy for credit in a communal authorship environment, so that good authors get "badges" or "reputations" that they wear independently. Instead of a "byline" for your post, you get a badge representing the amount and effectiveness of your contributions.

Which is better? Everyone owning their own content or communal content? It really depends on the audience and goals of the site. Some people prefer to own their own content and share it. This is how most social media sharing sites work. You own your content and your friends own their content and the site provides a way of sharing it. Social bookmarking sites also enable users to keep their own content separate from others and then the content is mixed and matched through tag navigation. A wiki-style system generally views content as communal. Stackoverflow solved this problem with a novel mechanism for transitioning content from individual to communal status.

It occurred to me this mechanism might be valuable in a so-called bliki system, which is a blog and a wiki combined. In a bliki, users create quick, timely posts like blog entries connected to dates, but they can also edit the content of posts to create and reference wiki pages. This enables users to make quick sketchy entries like a blog, but then later, reflect on those entries with longer posts. This is called "quick-slow" in bliki terms. What if this process could be facilitated by automatically transitioning the "quick" blog post into a "slow" wiki page? Instead of making a blog post then creating a wiki page linked to it with extra information, the blog post would at some point transform itself into communal content, from blog post to wiki page. Authorship would still be retained because each post would still exist in the wiki history. Anyone could go back to the original blog post to see who posted it and what it was about.

Whrrl to Worlds: Social and Geographical Surroundings Networked

2008-09-22T23:49:00.004-04:00

I suspected there would soon be a site attempting to give users a handle on their social and physical surroundings. To combine social and geographical "peripheral vision" enabling people to know what their friends are doing and where they are. What you are doing + where you are = an event, which represents a profound change in the way we use the web/network. And there is:

http://www.whrrl.com/

"The people you know. The places they go" is their slogan.

The first question whrrl asks is "What are you doing right now?" There is nothing special in this since Facebook has used the same question to power The Wall (social blog/feed system) for some time. Next, you are asked "Where in the world are you?" Whrrl combines a social activity feed of Facebook with the lightweight asynchronous message system of Twitter or Jaiku with elements of various mapping systems.

Whrrl enables you to discover and keep in touch with your social and geographical surroundings. The only thing lacking might be three dimensional street level mapping to place you right in the representation of the physical world you and your friends inhabit.

As Whrrl's tour says "You can interact with everything" in the world around you. But not only can you interact with elements of the physical and geographical world, labeling, sharing, evaluating the physical world, the traffic on the street, the quality of a restaurant you've just eaten dinner at with a simple thumbs up and down voting system, you can also see immediately what your friends are doing and where they are, as well as share this "virtual content" overlaid on the world with them. Who knows where this will end? A merging of Whrrl with the virtual world, a kind of "Second Life" that follows you around in the physical world, populated with your friends, your friends of friends, familiar landmarks and points of interest overlaid with commentary?

Interestingly, for every point of interest, you can mark whether you have been there or indicate a desire to go there. This could be powerful marketing data. Think of how valuable it would be for the Baguette Box in Washington, DC to know how many people indicate a desire to visit? How valuable it would be to know where these potential visitors live. Do they live across the country or nearby? Who are they and what are their demographics?

In many ways, this is the same vein as farmfoody. We envisioned how helpful it would be to enable people to tell their friends about a great roadside stand they found, potentially while they are at the stand by using their cell phone to access our site. Although we have been reluctant for a variety of reasons to allow rating of independent farms, the ability to communicate this kind of information. We have a good start, we are going in the right direction, but we need to get moving, to bring this kind of combined social and geographical approach to the world of farmer's markets and independent farms.

Social Realms: Sharing and Publishing Become One

2008-08-29T17:36:00.003-04:00

There is an increasing recognition of the importance of 'social realms' within the context of social networking. Some social sites started out as "walled gardens" where only friends could see social content a user posts. Other sites started out with all content posted being public like a graffiti wall. Social site builders are now recognize there should be many fine graduations of control over viewing and sharing social content. These social realms extend out from the user in concentric circles, from the being able to see their own content ("me"), to friends, to friends of friends, to networks or groups of friends, and finally to the public.

Blogging was always seen as a form of publishing. The new systems emerging now are centered around "social blogging" or "social news feeds" and are called by various names. Facebook merged their "wall" application and their "mini-feed" application in a single feature called The Wall, an example of one of these new forms for facilitating social interaction between small groups of friends in an asynchronous manner (as opposed to chat or telephony). Like Twitter and Jaiku, they enable "social peripheral vision" or seeing what your friends are doing and passing brief notes back and forth to keep in touch or coordinate activities. These posts are not publishing in the traditional sense and are not considered publishing, since in theory, the posts are intended for friends (although some sites offering these services create a kind of public feed everyone can see).

The Wall on facebook has all the elements of Jaiku or other similar sites, a series of blog-like posts limited to a brief snippet of text in reverse chronological order with the ability for users to comment on them. What makes them social is that the posts are seen by your _friends_ who are the only ones who can comment. So you could post about going to the farmer's market on Sunday and a friend could comment by asking you to pick up some tomatoes. Another friend could comment they will be at the same market and will meet you there. Comments are an important feature because they enable individualized topical conversations. If friends could only post to the "circle of friends" feed, the conversation would become disjointed. Social posts are the start of conversation.

This just emphasizes the need for social realms that determine the scope in which social content is accessible. Facebook offers several social realms for Wall posts, your own, your friends, your friends of friends, your network of friends, the public.

The last is interesting, because it brings us full circle. Most platforms were publishing platforms before the social networking craze, then there emerged platforms for social sharing but without any publishing. Now the two platforms are converging into a single platform for sharing with granular control over the social realms into which any piece of content goes, from sharing with a circle of friends to publishing to the whole world and every gradation in between.

Publishing has a completely different feel to it than social sharing. It requires different tools, ones which facilitate authorship, but have no need for defining the social realms in which the works of authorship will be consumed. I had watched the emergence of Twitter and Jaiku but failed to see their signficance, since their posts were so brief. I saw them as being limit blogs, and idea I had toyed with in the late 90s, but bloggers were more interested in longer and longer posts, being literary types. They were interested in publishing. It was finally understanding the social use of these short-message systems (it is no accident the popularity of SMS correponds with the popularity of these small message blog-like systems) to keep people in touch socially that I understood their usefulness. It makes little sense to critcise the inane or brief posts to Twitter as not contributing to human knowledge or letters, the purpose of these sites, as it is said of Jaiku, to maintain social peripheral vision (something I didn't even know I needed and still feels uncomfortable in the "buddylist 24/7" way it is presented). Maybe someone should start a site called "Tome" for long posts of intellectual brilliance contributing to the total of human knowledge, a mirror image of Twitter. Or perhaps that was what Blogger was supposed to be.

The convergence between sharing and publishing, which began with the original c2 wiki and the lowering of barriers to a read/write web, is emerging as a powerful new metaphor for interaction. Publishing will come to be seen as just sharing with everyone. All content, all media will be social and social realms determine the intended audience.

At farmfoody.org, we will be moving quickly to provide our users with this kind of close-knit interaction, which eschews the private message metaphor derived from email and the blog metaphor from publishing. A graffiti wall is too public and random to be of much use, private messages are stultifying and open to abuse since anyone can send a private message across social realms. The blog was intended for publishing, the feed for syndication, but this new format, the social feed or blog, converges sharing and publishing into a form easily digestible and controllable by users.

Micro Four Thirds: The New "Rangefinder?"

2008-08-05T11:26:00.003-04:00

Olympus and Panasonic have announced a new camera format based on the 4/3 image sensor format and compatible with the Four Thirds lens mount. Without a mirror and using half the normal flange distance, Micro Four Thirds cameras have the potential to be incredibly small, very similar to the 35mm rangefinder cameras popular in the late 1970s. Read the announcement of Micro Four Thirds at dpreview.

The new cameras will employ a live view LCD screen and electronic viewfinder. The shorter lens flange will mean smaller lenses. An adapter for existing Four Thirds lenses is envisioned.

Revenge of the Round, Red Tomatoes

2008-06-12T01:58:00.003-04:00

I believe the contaminated tomato debacle unfolding over the last week has something to tell us about the factory food system, which supplies much of what we eat. It is fascinating how this came to be embodied in the shape of our tomatoes. A lot of people are asking the question, just what kind of tomatoes are safe to eat? One answer, we are told by news and government, is to suspect our round tomato friends of harboring salmonella. I had to stop and ask why is this? Why round tomatoes?

Although the description has caused confusion, my first thought was that by “round red tomato” they were talking about the class of nondescript tomato one finds commonly in the supermarket produce section, piled high in a bin. Typically, these are large, as nearly perfectly spherical as the tomato board can blandish producers into making them, bland looking orbs sold in the supermarkets and funneled by the ton into the fast food system to be slapped onto burgers. They are the perfect food to fit the machine.

A second later, it occurred to me that if I were to go to my local farmer's market or farm stand looking for tomatoes and I found some decidedly out-of-round, oddly shaped heirloom tomatoes, that I could very likely be assured they were uncontaminated. They are too imperfect, too delicate for the factory food system, and very likely grown on a local farm or garden. Their shape was a key to identifying their probable origin in a distributed, local food system. By the shape of the tomato I could judge its origin and quality, since I knew that no sane commodity grower would grow such a tomato, unfit for the fast food joint, unfit for the average consumer (who has lost contact with farm and garden, with whole food) frightened by a few blemishes, odd colors or funky shapes.

I can't promise you won't get sick from locally grown tomatoes. The independent farm system creates something big agriculture lacks: firebreaks. The decentralized nature of independent farms and their localized customer base create firewalls capable of containing an outbreak. The factory food system grows enormous numbers of a single crop and distributes the harvest through a sprawling food processing system, which spreads and amplifies even a small outbreak in one field across the nation, into all sorts of processed foods, just as happened with contaminated lettuce. It is the nature of the system, which has only dominated for a handful of decades, that has changed our relation to food and presented this problem of “wildfires.”

Although an individual tomato patch might become contaminated, the effects would be isolated to the one farm or local area. There is far less chance of cross contamination on the way to market. The farm down, in the other state, the road is unlikely to suffer the same contamination. A farm depends on its reputation. Any taint or question about its food and the farm will be devastated. Independent farms rely on their reputation to bring return business, unlike big agriculture.

Perhaps it is fitting the warning comes in the form of these alien orbs, signaling with their perfect roundness and flashing reds, the revenge of the round red tomatoes. Although at first glance, the oddly shaped heirloom at the farm stand might seem more alien, those are the fruits that piqued my curiosity when as a child my parents took me to visit farm stands. They were outstanding in the multi-lobed beauty, looking ready to burst. They were bursting with flavor, at least when we got them home and started the barbecue.

Haiku, Senryu or Other: Does expression or form matter most?

2008-06-09T18:11:00.004-04:00

It doesn't matter to me whether I write haiku or senryu or whatever, as long as what I am writing is a satisfying expression of my need to share experience and thought. It would do no good to say a particular poem of mine is senryu and show me how to make it haiku, or to say I should withdraw it because it is not haiku.

It isn't the form of poetry that matters. I'm not trying to write haiku, I'm trying to express myself. That's a crucial difference. Beginners want to know how to write haiku. But I what I tell you is that you want to find the form that enables you to express yourself, not learn to write haiku or iambic pentameter. You need to learn from these forms the form that suits you best, or a form in between no one has ever imagined yet. Each form you may take something from, you may move toward one or the other, or among them, but there will be a form that liberates your expression and you should use whatever form that is. Haiku is the just form of expression that gets closest to perfectly expressing what I need to express.

Some of my poems may be failed haiku, but they are not failed expressions, if a poem I thought was a haiku, is not really a haiku, but expressed perfectly what I wanted to express, I am satisfied with not bothering to to classify or "correct" it to meet the requirements for haiku.

If making it more legitimately a haiku would improve that communication or expression, I would gladly do it, but without that reason, I would leave it well enough alone.

I am mindful when writing of an experience I wish to share, to write it as I think a haiku should be written, consisting of statements about concrete objects, which taken together erect in the mind of the reader a metaphor that creates a satisfying "buzz."

Degas and the Little Dancer

2008-06-06T00:44:00.002-04:00

I recalled the story of Degas's sculpture the Little Dancer the other day. For a long time I have looked upon it as an example of how creativity really works and some of the misunderstandings about creativity our society perpetuates.

It might surprise you to know that Degas was not a sculptor. Although he made a number of sculptures, none of them were ever shown to the public except for the dancer. For a long time Degas was frustrated that sculptors were failing to explore what we now call realism in sculpture. It appears that Degas' interest in photography may have inspired him to envision a new vocabulary for sculpture, which depicted the subject as it really was, instead of attempting to inspire people with an idea or vision of what ought to be. Most sculptors of his time continued to work in this tradition of heroic or uplifting sculpture. Oddly enough, this is akin to "socialist realism" of the 1930s, which demanded that art earn its living by bringing about social change or improvement in society, otherwise it was not worth the effort. If art was not uplifting the individual or society, it was not worthwhile. The art world was astonished by the little dancer, many critics were disgusted and offended by its realism. It was revolutionary and introduced realism to sculpture. Degas had a truly innovative vision for sculpture and despite not being a sculptor he decided that it would be up to him to realize this vision.

An article on Degas published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the quality of his work politely, saying "the artist's armatures were often inadequate." (Timeline of Art History, Edgar Degas (1834–1917): Bronze Sculpture http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/hd/dgsb/hd_dgsb.htm 2008). My understanding is that this was an understatement, that restoration artists working on the original wax sculptures found them to be very fragile, falling apart. This may be due to their intermediary role in casting a bronze, but I believe it is another piece of the puzzle demonstrating Degas was not a professional sculptor. It is believed Degas had help from friends who were sculptors from time to time while creating the Little Dancer.

There is a website, the Daily WTF?, devoted to sharing the coding mistakes (among other things like funny or confusing error messages) of naive, inexperienced or confused programmers. It occurred to me that if a Daily WTF? existed for sculptors when the Little Dancer was presented to the world, Degas would have made the front page. It certainly would not have met with approval from professional sculptors in his day. The site could be viewed as akin to group of master craftspeople getting together to laugh at the mistakes of apprentices and lesser craftspeople.

What is the lesson in all of this? What I came to understand was there is a difference between craft and art. Sculptors have "doing things correctly" as the measure of themselves and their profession. Sculpture should be done the "correct" way otherwise it should be regarded with contempt. Degas showed that one does not need to meet this standard to create a significant work of art that demonstrates the possibility inherent in a new artistic vocabulary, in this case, the introduction of realism into sculpture.

Degas was frustrated that sculptors were not exploring realism in sculpture. When he saw that they were not going to do something about it, he decided that he had to step in, despite not being a sculptor. The sculptors were capable of creating refined, polished, correct works according to their traditions, but they were not up to creating a revolution in art. In fact, their devotion to craft made it more difficult to (and less likely) to create an artistic breakthrough.

It happens that many good creative people restrain themselves out of fear. I know there are people who had ideas for innovative software applications, which were created in private but never released, because the code might end on the Daily WTF? Or whatever equivalent they imagined existed within the programming community at the time. They could have released their code to the wild and might have been influential and garnered attention for their work, but they failed to do so out of fear. This is not unique to software, but afflicts all creative activities.

It is the fear that you're not good enough to write a novel unless you're as good as the best novelist. It is the fear you're not good enough to make a film, because you're not as good as the best filmmaker. It is the fear you're not good enough to paint a significant painting, make a significant photograph, write a good story, because you're not equal to the best practitioners in the field. But that's not what art is about. Art is about the idea and you only need to be good enough to get a revolutionary idea across to succeed, not live up to the expectations of a craft community.

I am reminded of Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition appearing in a 1759 letter, he asks “why are originals so few?” His answer is that “illustrious examples engross, prejudice, and intimidate” creative people into silence. He goes on to say that we must not imitate the works of a great author, but should imitate the method or understanding by which their great works were arrived at. He asks authors to not become overawed by authority, to “let not great examples of authorities browbeat” you into dismissing your own ideas, your own creativity. He says we should “reverence” ourselves so as to prefer the “the native growth” of our own mind and “the man who thus reverences himself will soon find the world's reverence to follow his own.” Only by not being “strangers to our own abilities” and not “thinking meanly of them” can we learn to “cherish every spark of intellectual light.” Degas was an accomplished painter but not an accomplished sculptor, so how did he manage to revolutionize the vocabulary or sculpture? By not deferring to authority or exhibiting “diffidence” to his own ideas about what sculpture should be.

We teach people the wrong thing, we teach them to be perfectionists, to do things the correct way or not at all, but we don't teach them about Degas, we don't teach them that the creative act is more important than perfecting the craft, but then most people are engaged in some kind of craft or another, because that is where they derive their income and the world is mostly concerned with ensuring people earn a living. I know some people will argue that it is possible to perfect one's craft and to be a great artist. I am not arguing against that possibility, but it is rare, and doesn't apply to Degas.

Degas perfected his craft as a painter, but his ability to paint did not help or hinder his task of demonstrating the possibility for realism in sculpture, which required that he move into an area that was not his practiced expertise. He didn't have to perfect his craft as a sculptor to create a sculpture that was a declaration of a novel idea. Just as a sum can be greater than its parts, a lesser work can be greater than the best works of the day. It is greater because of its intellectual light, it's daring and reach, not the quality of its manufacture.

Is Hollywood the "Shadow Government?"

2008-05-29T02:13:00.004-04:00

Increasingly, as so-called intellectual property becomes more prominent in the economy of the information age, is the entertainment industry becoming our government?

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11885

Copyright is beginning to destroy our culture and exterminate the arts until Western art will be an empty shell, if it isn't already.

On second thought, this is easy to defeat. Just take an empty media player with you and fill it up from the network once you arrive at your destination...most people will probably fill it up with "pirate" editions since those will be the easiest to obtain. Someday, there won't be any source other than the network anyway. Or, as one person commented, mail your ipod to you.

I have to agree with the other comments that this is a futile effort by hidebound executives to put their finger in the dike. What troubles me is that this erosion of our culture has been going on for a long time, since the introduction of recorded media. I've said before that we should consider avoiding recorded media, that society should return to entertaining itself by playing our music, singing, gathering to hear music played locally, similar to the local eating movement. The invention of the phonorecord, despite the positive of being able to preserve music, has done a great deal of damage to the existing music culture. In the 19th century most people were in a band, played piano, sang in a choir, perhaps many still do, but when I compare our culture and attitudes toward music to a society like Ireland or others relatively untouched by recorded music, there is much greater participation. Everyone sings or plays a musical instrument it seems, and it's not shameful for ordinary people to join in and sing even if they aren't up to "professional" standards, yet the same culture produces some of the best singers and musicians. Recorded music appears to have eroded the incentives to play and sing, and created disincentives to perform publicly, reduced the outlets and venues, turned performance into an industry, much like farming has been turned into an industry.

It is strange to hear music of any and all genre coming at you from random directions and sources. It's like food, with technology, there are no seasons. Hearing music without the musicians divorces it from its culture and locality. One car goes down the street thumping out rap, the next blaring Latin rhythms, a country song, rock, pop, jazz. Which is the real music? Which is the real feeling? I think this is something that recorded music has done, cut us adrift from musical culture, musical practice, musical community. When we can have any music at our fingertips, played back as a card board cutout of the original through speakers, its volume controlled by a knob, it is like food disconnected from the seasons, from growing, from cooking.

Guide to writing haiku

2008-05-27T00:44:00.001-04:00

Empty sheet
of paper--
guide to
writing haiku.
-sek, May 2008

Farm Food: A conversation connecting food to people

2008-05-17T19:00:00.008-04:00

It occurred to me that farm food is about more than finding fresh vegetables. We don't just visit a farmer's market or roadside stand because of the fresh vegetables. We go there to experience a sense of community. At the market we get to relate to real people. To meet people. To talk to vendors who know what they sell, care about what they sell, and can answer our questions. A supermarket produce section is like a warehouse peopled by stock movers who know little or nothing about the produce they sell. You may find a knowledgeable individual here and there, but the system is designed to move produce like boxes at a warehouse. The produce guy at the supermarket is not there for conversation. The relationship gets very personal when you have the same grocer for many years, when you visit the same roadside stand, when you buy vegetables or eggs from a neighbor with a microfarm.

I always remember how refreshing it was as a child when my mother would take me to the grocery store to buy meat for hamburgers or roast. We would always ring for the butcher behind the mirrored wall of windows above the coolers. A real, live human being would come out from behind the supermarket slickness and suddenly the store seemed more real to me. Here was a real person we could talk to in a big empty store. There were employees in the store, here and there, to be seen occasionally stacking products on the shelves or moving boxes. There were the checkout people. There were customers pushing their carts about the aisles. But you didn't hold a conversation with these people, you couldn't ask anything of them or get anything from them. No relationship existed with them. But the butcher was someone, the last person in the supermarket you could engage in conversation with, interact directly with, to build a relationship, however small.

We would ask him to grind our selection of chuck for us. We didn't trust what went into the prepackaged ground beef and wanted to pick the piece of chuck with the marbling and amount of fat to meat we wanted (invariably, we wanted more fat than lean offered, but less than the real fatty stuff). He would grind our beef and return it to us in a white paper package, or later, in the same kind of Styrofoam and plastic wrap package the prepackaged meat came in. What I liked about going to the butcher was that we could participate in the making of our food. We could choose the cut of meat we wanted. Inspect it for the marbling, fat content, redness, etc. and then the butcher would grind our beef to order. There was something to seeing the cut of beef before it was ground, still whole, like a steak, which gave a feeling of satisfaction, knowing that it was a good cut and where the ground beef came from, unlike the prepackaged ground beef. It was a social interaction, requiring conversation between producer and consumer, which was very satisfying. Even a child could notice. We came away with ground beef we felt comfortable with, arrived at through a negotiation, had our say in the process, did not have to take what was offered to us. It felt good.

A farm is a lively place of growing things. It is more of a happening that never stops than a location. A farm is not a depot for food where we pick it up and move on. It is a center of activity, socializing and participation. The farm offers the same kind of interaction I enjoyed at the supermarket butcher's.

As the driving force and principal developer behind farmfoody.org, I am beginning to realize a social network connecting farm to garden embodies what I enjoyed as a child about going to the supermarket butcher. It is a model for why we enjoy visiting, shopping for produce at farm stands, farmer's markets and local farms.

The Inuit Paradox

2008-05-14T19:55:00.003-04:00

"How come the people here, who for long periods eat nothing but the meat from one type of animal, are healthier than we are?" Andreas Viestad, author of "Where Flavor Was Born," poses the nutritional question in Where Home Cooking Gets the Cold Shoulder. This is another example of how an evolved system is superior to an engineered one. It shows the connection between culture (cuisine and taste) and nutrition. A food culture that survives, survives because the people are still alive to continue eating according to their food ways. This is also another way in which folklore affects us.

The more distance you put between yourself and the nutritionists with their reductionist theories, the better your health will be.

I disagree with the statement by nutrition researcher Harriet V. Kuhnlein, who says "Every time you process or cook something -- anything -- you are likely to be losing nutrients at every step..." This is not true for cooking tomatoes, which liberates and makes certain nutrients more bioavailable. We don't know what the tradeoffs between raw and cooked are.

It is worth noting the author's book is concerns flavor. Because taste is an important determinant in the choices a food culture makes. We suspect that in pre-scientific socities people somehow discovered what foods, what parts of the animal, were the most nutritious and the higher status or wealthier people (quite the opposite in the West, where eventually wealth meant less nutritious foods) ate the best parts. It turns out the best parts provide critical nutrients not found in other parts of the animal.

Traditional cultures cannot afford to waste any part of the animal and therefore generally eat liver, brains, etc. that are undesirable to most Americans or modern Westerners. These parts have gradually disappeared from the Western diet because they are "yucky" to think about. These parts can be an acquired taste. So it leaves open the question, were these pre-scientific people guided by taste or by observing people were healthier when they ate these parts? Maybe it is simple as a large number of groups eating different diets, the ones with a better diet survived, and their choices became a food tradition.

Nature and culture

2008-05-12T16:44:00.002-04:00

Nature and culture are connected. Art emerges in nature. I like to photograph the happenstance or "found art" in nature, which is is just another way of saying that art naturally emerges in nature. The potential exists in nature for the creation of art through the juxtaposition of elements according to natural laws and emergent patterns (what we used to think of as chance). This is what I try to capture in my nature photographs.

If you'd like to know more about how nature and culture are connected, read William Cronon's Uncommon Ground.

Namespaces for Tags

2008-05-11T05:33:00.002-04:00

I've been thinking about "namespaces" for tags lately. Sometimes tags become too random, disorganized, or numerous to be relevant or useful. One way of cutting through the clutter is to create more than one set of tags. I've seen this on at least one website, sprig.org, which offers "togs" or an alternative set of tags to classify posts by. The difference is these tags are restricted to a particular concept, types of ecology-related terms, such as "organic." What this secondary set of tags produces is in reality a set of tags under another namespace "Ecology."

It is possible to organize tags into namespaces, each representing a concept. This would not be imposing hierarchy on tags, but creating nodes representing concepts. So that Ecology might contain organic, carbon free, sustainable, etc. and Mathematics might contain number, equation, factor, etc.

I organize my photographs in Photoshop Elements using tags. I chose to avoid using tags like categories and instead only create tags for qualities of the image. I try to create tags that describe the image the way an art historian might classify works by their elements or an archivist might classify images according to social use. An image depicting people at work is an "occupational" for example. A painting might be "abstract" and "nature" and "patterns."

Here is a partial list of my tags. I try to create tags for

a) Qualities of art, such as Landscape or Pictorialist
b) Things that can be seen in photographs, concrete like Aircraft or abstract like Patterns
c) Subjects, categories of subjects, concrete like Nature, Sky or abstract like Time

Abstract
Aircraft
Automobile
Birds
Butterflies
Concrete
Flowers
Impressionist
Landscape
Leaves
Nature
Patterns
Photos
Pictorialist
Plants
Rain
Shadows
Sky
Snow
Time
Trees
Urban

I can see some benefit in putting these in a namespace, limiting the tags in this space to reduce clutter. For example, tags on Buddhism would not be found in great number in this set (unless a) you have a lot of Buddhist photography or b) you attach tags from a Buddhist namespace and then they wouldn't be in the set). I don't know how successful namespaces might be for tagging. Programmers love namespaces, but ordinary people find them confusing. I like the idea of tying namespaces to concepts.

I think namespaces would come in handy when choosing tags from a list, like when you show all labels in Blogger's interface. You get one long unreadable list of every tag you've used. Sometimes I love tags when I can just enter the key words that are in my mind while writing a post, but sometimes I hate them when what I really want are categories. I read an article the other day by a graphic artist who designs for the web who continued to use the web safe palette long after it was not technically necessary. He argued that artists tend to choose colors from a comprehensible and memorable palette of colors, such as the Pantone set or the set of colors defined by the various oil pigments. With 16 million colors there are far more colors than anyone could recall or discern. For every "olive green" there are hundreds of colors in between that and the next discernible color moving in either direction on the color wheel. It helps to have a standard color when envisioning or communicating "olive green" to others. I think tags are afflicted with this problem.

Simplicity and Community

2008-05-09T19:27:00.004-04:00

Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow is a really good overview of how community grew on Flickr and some of the philosophy informing how social community works.

At Flickr, we’ve worked very hard to remain neutral while our members jostle and collide and talk and whisper to each other. Sharing photos is practically a side-effect. Our members have thrilled and challenged us—not just with their beautiful photography, but by showing us how to use our infrastructure in ways we could have never imagined.

This is the same principle that operated when the web was born. It was simple, open and flexible enough that people could put it to unintended uses. It wasn't overdesigned. The net itself enabled people who "shouldn't" or "wouldn't" want to connect to find each other. It enabled people to find information they "shouldn't" need or want to find it. It enabled people to find, and share, what was important to them.

As I just wrote, the content, the pictures, the things we share on a site like facebook have little to do with the success of a social utility, they have everything to do with keeping up with your friends, which involves photos, but it is people, keeping up with what friends are doing, whether gardening or photographing, engaging in activities, like who can create the best compost heap or who has the best fashion photograph, that sustain.

The sculpture demonstrated a fascinating idea: given fewer rules, people actually behaved in more creative, co-operative, and collaborative (or competitive, as the case may be) ways.

It should not be surprising, given that HTML was a simplification of rule heavy SGML. Given fewer rules, anyone could make web pages and share them. Every time the network or web has grown, information technology has grown, it has been through a simplifying moment. It is also why the Wiki has touched such a nerve online and been very inspiring to what became called "Web 2.0" applications. It reminds me of a cool new online note taking tool Luminotes. I find its overall simplicity refreshing (for example, its simplified set of text markup options set off in oversize buttons and the brilliant recasting of the one-page-at-a-time-wiki into a scrollable set of note cards). Is the ideal website a tabula rasa like wiki, like a blank page available to users without any structure? I doubt it. Since that would just be a whiteboard or "graffiti wall" there has to be some simple rules aimed at organizing the activity toward some basic interests, as Flickr does.

It is true, corporations think they can "add community" like adding new delivery routes or buying an aircraft to open up a new route. You don't add community, you grow it. At farmfoody.org, we have to keep lines of communication open to independent farmers, many of whom have a low opinion of the usefulness of anything online. It takes a lot of time, commitment and personal touch to grow this kind of community. You have to show why getting online is important, and be ready to answer the inevitable questions.

Some thoughts on social networking

2008-05-09T06:41:00.003-04:00

I've been working on building a social networking site, but because of the angle we approached this (we sort of backed into it) it did not have many of the features of a "normal" social site. As we have developed the site, I've used more social networking services in order to study them and thought about some of the decisions we've made.

The essence of social networking is helping people keep up with what their social group is doing and sharing interesting things with them. It's not really about the content, the pictures, the classified, the video, the recipes. What keeps people coming back to the social network is curiosity about what their friends are doing. Or they are notified of some new content related to a friend's recent activity, photos from last night's great party or the new baby.

We gave ourself quite a task, since a core audience for our network consists of people who are very stubborn about getting online. Many do not even have or want an email address, let alone a website or a social network membership. We had to justify participation in the site through self-interest that was very different from the typical reasons people sign up for a social network. But I am beginning to think that the same principle applies, that the fundamental reason for belonging to a social network is keeping up with people. At least, it is what keeps people coming back.

The more public aspects, the posting of messages, the publishing of event information, these are all useful aspects of a social network, but they are more part of the "myspace" style network, which has a large public publishing (some might say exhibitionist) element compared to some of the "facebook" style sites, which are walled gardens of interaction.

The information that flows inside the social network is as important as the information that is accessible by the public. This is the rap on social networking, that much of the useful information user activity generates does not become part of the public web, which means others cannot learn from it, search it or preserve the conversation for future generations. However, using a "share" model, it may be possible to expose content to the public sphere when the user desires. So the information is by default within the walled garden of the network, but can easily be shared to another network or on the public web. These patterns are emerging on facebook and google reader's shared items.

The RSS reader is a private experience containing information that is an internal flow unavailable to the web. The syndication sphere is entirely separate from the web and opaque to web search, unless that content is already on the web. So the share function is essential to get that information back out into the public, or perhaps it was generated from an internal group working on some project with its own RSS feed, items of which could be shared with the public at the reader's discretion.

With the information generated within the social network, a person may share a link with their friends, one of whom may share it on their "page" to the public web. This is more a part of the keeping up with friends and sharing content with friends than it is putting something on your profile page for the world to see, whether it's the equivalent of a "high five" or a concert schedule, this is really external to the network and its social use.

A social network is about enabling friends to keep up with what each other is doing (social peripheral vision, it's been called) and share information with their friends. These are the two fundamental themes of the social network. This is why monetizing is so difficult. The only way to monetize this activity is if somehow the act of sharing information can create revenue or incoporate commerce.

What if when you share news about a music group with your friends, you get paid a small amount by the musical group, just like a Google Ad? This would monetize the social activity itself.

Red, Yellow, Orange

2008-05-08T22:14:00.004-04:00

Contrary to the popular idea that red and yellow are colors signifying danger because poisonous animals display these colors as a warning, another theory says that "mammals developed the ability to distinguish between red, yellow and orange in order to identify ripe fruit." according to an interesting article, Red and Yellow Kills a Fellow.

Although it is popular today to see McDonalds and other fast food joints that advertise their food with red and yellow as a metaphor for the supposed dangers lurking within fast food, in reality fast food restaurants were safer places to eat than choosing from unfamiliar eateries and diners, which used to be referred to as "ptomaine Tommie's" prior to the emergence of clean, safe fast food places like White Castle or McDonalds.

There must some other explanation for the ubiquitous red and yellow cardboard french fry, popcorn boxes and "golden arches" and red and yellow sign, and this sounds like a reasonable one. It makes sense that humans would be attracted to the reds and yellows of fruits. We don't run screaming from the table when presented with pasta and tomato sauce or yellow squash.

The vibrancy of red and yellow is probably the real reason we are attracted to the fast food signs.

Simplicity

2008-05-08T08:57:00.002-04:00

I found an interesting comment suggesting Lego blocks as an example of how simplicity could make software better. The poster argues there are "no complicated things" in the universe, but that things often merely seem complicated, an illusion our perception of the phenomena, and that if we just look closely enough (reduce it to parts---reductionism) a simple, linear, non-paradoxical design emerges. "Just look closer" the argument goes and you will see the simple, discrete, isolated building blocks of the seemingly complex system.

This is the reductionist argument.

The poster says this of Lego:

Let's take LEGO. Do you need to test LEGO package? Ofcoz, not. Do you need to test EACH (of hundreds) piece? No.
You have:
1. Global design.
2. Common interface to connect bricks (piece) to each other.
3. Pieces specification.

The problem with this analysis is it ignores that in real complex systems, wholes are sometimes parts and parts are sometimes wholes. Object oriented programming, tries to encapsulate each piece of information or action in a single "Lego block" isolated from all other software components, connected through standard interfaces like the pegs on a Lego piece. It is wrong to apply a mechanistic solution like that of the Lego blocks to information. Software is essentially information, and pieces of information can relate to each other in paradoxical ways, just as numbers and theorems in mathematics can. It's difficult for a Lego block to be a part and a whole, although each block is a whole that can be a part, but there is less chance for paradox and feedback in the Lego block system than say in the atmosphere or the soil.

In the soil, we have a physical system, but the "parts" that are interacting are not "real" but emergent, such as "fertility" that cannot be located in any one place. Thoughts in the brain cannot be located at anyone one place or time either.

One of the major problems I see with the building block approach to software, the object oriented approach, is that it tries to sever the very feedback loops that make a complex system interesting and useful. It fights against complexity until it creates more confusion or rigidity than it is sometimes worth. There is an entire field of study in computer science centered around the "object relational mismatch," which is just a fancy term for the reality that applications are constructed using inflexible objects and relational database systems store information in ways that can be retrieved paradoxically.

In a relational database, parts can be wholes and wholes can be parts, yet there is no system I know of that can capture this kind of complexity, no application or computing framework that can take advantage of the capacity for paradox and feedback in the database. No, the application must have its rigid, isolated objects, where an address book entry is always an address book entry and its parts are its own business and cannot be part of another entity.

In a database, some entities do not even exist until a question is asked. A new unnamed entity is created by the answer to a question the designers of the database never considered and could not foresee. Very likely "expert system" approaches will one day resolve this problem, applications being developed using coding techniques that are capable of handling paradoxical relationships.

So, I do not believe enforced simplicity and borrowing design principles from mechanistic systems like Lego blocks are effective. Complexity exists, we can't put our heads in the sand, plug our ears and continue pretending it doesn't exist, some day the object oriented paradigm will crash and burn and some new one that takes complexity into consideration will emerge.

The Wiki and the Farm

2008-05-07T05:06:00.005-04:00

There has been a flurry recently inspired by Michael Pollan writing about a vision of people becoming producers and consumers in society. He argues that industrialization created a division in society between producer and consumer, with the consumer essentially at the mercy of producers.

I've thought about how once there were many producers of food, but as agriculture industrialized, we began to call the things we did "industries," a hog farm became the hog industry, wheat farming became the grain industry, raising beef became the cattle industry. All the little myriad farms producing our food were replaced by large commodity farms based on economy of scale through centralization and industrialization (the use of petrochemical fertilizer, mechanized harvesting).

Some of the changes introduced by industry have been useful, for example frozen peas are by and large much better quality than fresh or canned peas. Peas must be picked at the very peak of sweetness, which only lasts for a day or two. This requires a massive and quick harvesting effort. The peas must be quickly frozen to preserve their sweetness and quality. If the peas were sent to a market, if they were picked over a number of weeks, the quality would suffer. The frozen pea is picked at the peak of sweetness and frozen in one quick, mechanized operation.

On the other hand, we by creating industries out of the various aspects of farming, we have lost something in the translation. We lost the intertwined way plants, animals and the soil interact with each other on the farm. This interaction was replaced by massive inputs of petrochemical fertilizer and pesticides to feed and protect the weak, sickly hybrids raised in huge monoculture beds required by economies of scale. But we lost another thing, which Pollan touches upon, the intermingling of producer and consumer that existed before industrialization. It is easy to see the small farmer as a producer, but it takes a little more digging to see the web of producers and consumers. The farmer produced food that the blacksmith ate, but the blacksmith shod the horses the farmer pulled his plows and harvesters with. At every level, people were producers and consumers.

The blacksmith is a recurring figure in my thoughts. Without a blacksmith the community would grind to a halt. The blacksmith also represents the complex web of production and consumption in the community before everything became an "industry," demonstrates the interdependencies in the community. The blacksmith must eat. The farmer must shoe his horses. No one can escape the individual and direct relationships that sustain them by shifting responsibility to some distant industry. The blacksmith also represents the connection between culture and nature, through the implements he fabricates for the farmer to work the fields and reinforces the true meaning of cultivation, which means to cultivate the land and to cultivate the person through culture.

After industrialization there were only classes of producers and consumers. There is always an imbalance, whether in farming or the music industry between producer and consumer, with a small number of producers creating things and a large number of consumers consuming things. The producers dictate what is produced, how it is produced and the consumers are passive or only through large numbers do they influence what is produced.

What does this have to do with wiki? The moment the first wiki was born, it made everyone and anyone who came along into an author or a reader, a producer or consumer. The wiki by definition commingles production and consumption, producers and consumers. The wiki was way ahead of its time. The contribution of this idea may be more important and lasting than the wiki as a way to manage content. The wiki's greatest contribution was to awaken people to a new reality, that in a networked world of digital information, post-industrialization is possible, that people can become producers and consumers again.

Pollan argues we should start gardens to lessen the division in our society between producers and consumers. By gardening, we can become producers as well as consumers of food. It is worth noting that maintaining a wiki can be likened to gardening, so perhaps a wiki is a garden, where like the real garden, is a place of reconciliation.

Even Things Happen

2008-05-05T16:30:00.000-04:00

I think we are at a moment like the discovery of irrational numbers, which were rejected by the Greeks as incomprehensible. It seemed crazy to believe in negative or irrational numbers, but once mathematics was past this reluctance, these kinds of numbers were accepted into the concept of number.

It is important to note the Greeks had an idea of number, which did not admit such things as negative or irrational numbers. Yet, in time, these concepts of number would come to be accepted by mathematicians and taught in modern elementary schools.

We are at the moment in science, where it is difficult to see the forest for the trees. We are so close to science as a reductionist process we fail to recognize there are other processes that can lead to scientific understanding. To most people, reductionism is science.

But we are beginning to discover another approach to understanding complex systems in the natural world, which goes beyond reductionism. Science is starting to recognize the reductionist approach fails to explain all aspects of reality. This new science of the "irrational" and complex, recognizes that things are much more occurrences than they are things. An occurrence is something that happens over time.

Even a stone plucked form a stream, held in the palm of the hand, science tells us is less solid than it appears. At the smallest levels a stone is nothing more than infinitesimally small particles, flitting in and out of existence from the "vacuum state." Even a stone is a kind of occurrence.

Science has been like the glass half full. With the discovery of the physics of chaotic systems and complexity theory, it can be a full glass. Equipped with the new science of the complex we can see nature is not a clockwork, that things are ephemeral an connected, but not just interconnected like the parts of a machine, but intertwined paradoxically, in feedback loops, or parts that are wholes and wholes that are parts.

We like to think of as things as things we can take apart, but they are actually occurrences. It will take a while for people to get used to this idea, just as it took a very long time for new concepts of number to become the stuff of elementary school mathematics.

If you find it difficult to see things as occurrences, think of how a food can be more than the sum of its parts, because the sum of its parts consists of its interactions with other parts and wholes in its environment, which means that a food is more an occurrence than a thing.

We must recognize the physical thing we study is inseparable from an occurrence, that even things happen.

Ira Glass on Storytelling - Part 4

2008-04-16T17:39:00.007-04:00

This reminds me of the advice to songwriters and musicians to support the song. The song is everything and everything, every element of the music, the words, the accompaniment is in service to the song. A song is not about you, it's not a showcase for your ability on the guitar or drums, it's not a place to showcase you, but to submerge yourself to the song. Beginning songwriters are often admonished they must "generalize the particular," which means that although the seed of every song is you, that it must be constructed or expressed in such a way that it touches others. No one is interested in your particular situation, but if you find those aspects of your life that are resonant with theres or universally with humanity, then you have a work of art, a song. I find this advice useful to nearly every creative activity possible, since genuine creativity always starts with the characteristics of the individual and their experience, creativity must start with what is unique about you, but it also must be bent (or you are lucky your expression naturally are) until it is resonant with humanity.

Much bad poetry is about me, me, me and my woe. If you're writing poetry to express poor poor pitiful me, please try to make it interesting and relevant to someone else if you're going to foist it on others. Otherwise, keep it to yourself. This is not to judge what is good or bad poetry, but a laundry list of your troubles is not a poem, it's not a significant work of art and it's not going to be compelling to anyone but yourself.

Ira Glass on Storytelling - Part 2

2008-04-16T17:38:00.018-04:00

Abandoning ideas is one of the most difficult things a creative person can do. It is also one of the most important. I struggle to give up on ideas, since they are like my children. Zen teaches us to avoid clinging to our desires. It's like being fired, you can't move on to greater success or another project unless you leave the present one behind. Getting fired can be the best thing that happens. Killing the lesser idea, killing the lesser job, allows you to move on to the greater one.

I rarely throw away an idea. That is one habit creative writers exhibit, especially songwriters, they keep every scrap of an idea they write down and use them years later in other works. An abandoned idea is not always abandoned, just sleeping or waiting to find the right fit with another idea. Songwriters usually keep notebooks filled with scraps from overheard conversations or ideas that come late at night, at breakfast, in the shower, on the train.

Hitchcock, who said "Drama is life with the dull bits left out." would have agreed with Ira. In television or any form of moving pictures it is important to remain engaged with the viewer. The boring bits need to be left out.

I doubt the same thing is true of games that take place in three dimensional environments. It is not uncommon for a player in a first person shooter to experience a lull in the fighting against the aliens or whatever, or moving from one area to another. There is a lot of choice when, where and how to engage the enemy, and thus create action. The boring bits are integrated into the environment and a 3d video game (really a simulation) is unlike a movie, in that the environment is the narrative. This is like architecture, in which dimensional space is used to manipulate feelings of the person experiencing the space. Moving pictures need to supply a passive subject with constant interest or they will lose interest. But in a game, the player is always making the next move.

Ira Glass on Storytelling - Part 3

2008-04-16T17:38:00.017-04:00

This is a very real phenomena where you know you have artistic intuition or what Ira calls taste, but you lack the experience or ability to realize that taste.

He says "do a huge volume of work" which goes against the grain of most rational advice. Why would you want to continue to repeatedly crank out poor quality work, work that does not live up to you vision, your taste? Isn't it a failure to create works that do not live up to your taste? You didn't become a creative person to make bad stuff you became one to make good stuff. I fell into this trap and am still struggling to get out of it. I always felt that I should only do good work otherwise I must be wasting my time. It always bothered me when I couldn't get through a song on the guitar without flubbing a note. I know musicians, even great ones, do this all the time and no one in the audience knows the difference or cares, but I know and I do. This is a kind of perfectionism, which stifles creativity, because it stops you artificially, it stops creativity by making a mountain out of a mole hill. It's always been a bit frightening to think that every artist no matter how great has a lifecycle, that they start out creating "diamonds in the rough" sometimes their most compelling, but technically flawed work, then become successful and do compelling and technically good work, then later in life tend to create highly technically proficient works that have no soul, or the compelling nature of their early, flawed works. It seems like a cruel paradox designed to frustrate the creative person. But I'm getting off the subject.

You've got to do a lot work. You've got to do a lot of copying. Many commercial artists spent hours _tracing_ the figures in comic books to train their hand and eye, to get the proportions right until they could draw them on their own. Copying for a creative person is like training wheels, but they don't often tell you that. They don't want you to think of them singing for a cover band, tracing figures in a comic book, copying a painting. There are dangers in all of this, since you can just create a lot of bad work and never learn anything. Or you can start copying and keep copying and never learn to do anything that comes out of you and your influences.

I've been afraid over the years to do a lot of work. I thought it was best for me to create a small number of really good works, by studying and calculating and then making that one great work and showing it. This hasn't worked out too well since it doesn't give you the opportunity to practice. It's difficult for me to accept that I'm going to essentially throw good ideas away. That I have this great idea nobody's ever had for a photograph or a story, but that if I create it now, I lack the skills to make it live up to my vision. It frustrates me to know that perhaps later, with more experience, I might be able to do better, to make it live up to the vision, but by that time it's already out in the wild and I can't take it back. When you're still practicing, a lot of good intuitions are going to create works that don't live up to your expectations or vision and that's sad, but that is the reality of being creative, that it requires destruction and abandonment, that it requires this period of practice when great ideas fall short of what they could have been. It is part of the paradox. Because for some artists, their early works no matter how flawed may actually turn out to have the greatest success over time and later works no matter how polished and practiced do not move people as much as the flawed but moving ones. That's perhaps something to cling to, that you early works no matter how far short they fall from your vision or technical mastery, may be compelling and moving.

I tend to quit when I reach that point of frustration that my intuition or ideas are solid but the realization and the skills required are lacking. Sometimes it is just a matter of hitting your head against a brick wall until you find the right form of expression. I spent years trying to capture life experiences in poems, stories and songs until I realized I was trying to cram square pegs into round holes. The experiences were brief, intense intuitions about the natural environment, which fit perfectly with the size, form and intention of haiku. All the other forms didn't fit, they were too long, demanded to much explication and metaphor. The haiku allowed me to do what I had always wanted to do, recreate the experience for others, not describe it, not say what it was like through metaphor, but for the reader to actually re-experience what I had experienced.

There is a balance to achieve. There is a successful watercolor artist who started out with good ambition and intuition for painting. He spent a couple of years painting up a storm, making thousands of water color images, but when he attended shows, he could tell his paintings were missing something the other watercolor artist's paintings had. His were good. The other artists thought he had talent, but in reality his paintings, even after two years of exhausting work, were mediocre. He attended university classes in painting and art theory and afterward, his paintings improved technically, but more importantly, in the ideas they expressed. He devised a new method and visual language within watercolor technique based on what he had learned about painting, design and art theory at the university, applying them to his paintings. He became a success both artistically and financially.

To get good at something creative you need to do a lot of work, practice, but you also need to know when to stop and think, evaluate what you are doing. You have to practice, since it is hard to create art works when you lack the necessary skills to create them, but you do not need to become a virtuoso to create lasting art works. Art is about the compelling nature of the work not the technical mastery.

Ira Glass on Storytelling - Part 1

2008-04-16T17:07:00.012-04:00

I found this series of talks by Ira Glass very helpful. My high school English class also emphasized the essay paragraph and really never taught story telling. I somehow absorbed by osmosis that anecdotes were something to be avoided, but I agree with him that anecdote is the seed of the story. It's not a story yet. As Ira says, next must come an explanation of why you're spending time reading this anecdote, which he calls the "moment of reflection."

In this example, he takes advantage of the dual meaning possible in the events of the anecdote. Waking up to a quiet house might mean a pleasant Sunday morning or might mean the house is too quiet, abnormally quiet, with ensuing consequences. The example is setup well for a suspense story...it remains to be seen whether this anecdote followed by reflection is applicable to other types of stories. I suspect it is.

It's always been an obstacle to my writing, that I find material I know is compelling, but get stuck attempting to discover the story within it. For a long time, I tried to turn some significant life experiences into songs, Western poems and stories, but despite these experiences being compelling, there never seemed to be enough there to make a complete song, poem or story, until I rediscovered haiku. Immediately I recognized that I didn't need to write more lines, that what I had was perfectly sized for haiku. Not only that, but the intense, personal experiences involving intuitions about nature were the stuff of haiku.

It was also important for me to accept that whether or not the haiku were "correct" or great art did not matter to me, what mattered was the haiku for perfectly expressed what I was trying to express and what I was being compelled to express. I was satisfied that I was able to express, realize and convey my experience with fidelity and satisfaction without any regard to external requirements, such as "needing" to write down the experience in a Western poetic form because it was the only "legitimate" way. I don't care so much if they are "good" as much as I care that they represent and communicate my experiences accurately and effectively in a way that is satisfying. I can't get them out of my mind move on until then.

Ready to fly

2008-04-15T18:27:00.001-04:00

Maple seeds
and songbirds--
ready to fly.
-sek, Apr 2008

Fresh or Cooked?

2008-04-01T21:08:00.005-04:00

In recent years tomato sauce was in the nutrition news. It turns out that cooking tomatoes makes Lycopene more available than in fresh tomatoes.

This went against the prevailing grain of nutritional thinking, which said that fresh was always better. Nutritionists argued that cooking reduced the amount of vitamins in food. They backed this up with scientific studies showing that cooking vegetables (or fruits like tomatoes) does reduce the amount of vitamins. An obsession developed over "keeping as much of the vitamins" in your food as possible. Steaming was touted as a way to avoid "losing" the vitamins into the cooking water. The typical English way of preparing vegetables was dammed as washing away nutrition. New technologies were advanced in an attempt to retain as much of the nutrients (known ones) as possible. Some radical eaters adopted entirely raw diets hoping to not lose a single molecule of nutrition. The trouble with this view, was that it overlooks the reality cooking can make certain nutrients available that are not available in fresh foods.

Why bring this up? I've been reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (well, actually I read it in two days and lent it out and haven't seen it since). I had thought of this before reading his book, but I was reminded of this "paper vs. plastic" debate brought about by nutritionism and of the importance of culture to eating. The question is, how do we decide what to eat, fresh or cooked? It seems to me that food culture provides the answer to this question. A cuisine or food way develops over a long period of time to satisfy the nutritional requirements, the survival, of a people. Embodied in this food way must be the right balance between fresh and cooked.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the cooking and crushing involved in the canning process makes the Lycopene in tomatoes more available than fresh, since canned crushed tomatoes are frequently the base of pasta sauces. Because Lycopene is fat-soluble, serving cooked and crushed tomatoes in an oil-rich sauce is thought to make the nutrient more available.

If we look at Italian cuisine, we are probably going to find an optimal balance of fresh versus cooked tomatoes, otherwise the people eating according to the Italian food ways would likely be very sick. That the cuisine offers a lot of cooked tomato sauces attests to the nutritional value of sometimes cooking away those vitamins. Here is a food way that encapsulates nutritional knowledge that food science took centuries to get around to counting and measuring. Ignoring the wisdom inherent in Italian food ways is another example of nutritionism and the reductionist view of nutrition, which only considers the parts we can count and measure. It ignores what our senses, our taste and smell can tell us.

The reality is that cooking foods makes available nutritional elements unavailable in fresh food, and very like fresh food contains higher levels of other nutritional elements than after cooking. The right answer is a balance between them. We really do not know yet what nutrients are made more available by cooking, combining or processing foods. Food traditions are a good way to make the decision, given that nutritional science is still in its infancy. We can make use of hundreds or thousands of years of food tradition to answer this vexing question: fresh or cooked?

Blowing on the spark

2008-04-01T19:31:00.002-04:00

Blowing on
the spark inflames--
a haiku.
-sek, Mar 2008

Hybrid rose

2008-04-01T19:30:00.002-04:00

Hybrid rose--
blue sky without rain.
-sek, Feb 2008

Tomato Seeds

2008-04-01T18:21:00.003-04:00

I don't need
a tomato
that rides
well,
a transcontinental
traveler.

I just need
a tomato
grown from
grandmother's
seeds.

I don't need
a tomato
perfectly
round,
a spherical
aberration.

I just need
a tomato
grown from
grandmother's
seeds.

I don't need
a tomato
blessed by
the grower's
association.

I just need
a tomato
grown from
grandmother's
seeds.
-sek, Mar 2008

Notes on Uncommon Ground: The Mythic Eden

2008-03-28T18:43:00.004-04:00

Our approach to nature is framed by the narrative where

"...an original pristine nature is lost through some culpable human act..."

"The myth of Eden describes a perfect landscape, a place so benign and beautiful and good that the imperative to preserve or restore it could be questioned only by those who ally themselves with evil."

Echoes the appeal to nature. The similar religious zeal with which science is protected from dissent by accusing those who question prevailing thought as either delusional or malicious. This similar approach to questioning emerges from Enlightenment thinking, ironically, since this is the source of the "question anything" admonition, yet is also the source of dogmatism, once an idea has been baptized as "fact," which can only be questioned by the allies of evil (witness the scientists who say a "new dark age" is threatened by advocates of intelligent design. The imperative becomes hysterical when the prevailing identification with an idea is threatened, the new idea threatens the utopia the person has invested in, whether religious, natural or scientific.

The most popular images in photography, since the middle of the 20th century, are pictures (surrogate realizations) of that perfect, benign and beautiful landscape depicted in the mythic Eden. These are the images of Ansel Adams, which directly contradict the humanist, compassionate, images of the social realists who vociferously rejected his work as a betrayal of their conception of art as a means for bringing about social justice. He may not have thought of it, but perhaps his critics were right, he was unwittingly bending photography to an anti-humanist agenda. One thing is sure, without the emergence of the mythic Eden into the popular consciousness in the post second world war era, his photographs would be obscure, known to only a few collectors. It was with the emergence of the cult of wilderness, centered around an "Edenic narrative" that his photographs gained wider significance. This remains the prevailing wind filling the sales of photography, perhaps it is time the wind changed.

(refer to p.37, Cronon, Uncommon Ground)

Notes on Uncommon Ground: The Appeal to Nature

2008-03-28T18:30:00.004-04:00

"This habit of appealing to nature for moral authority is in large measure a product of the European Enlightenment."

Explains why "science" is used as a non-negotiable trump card against dissenters--one must be delusional, ignorant or malicious to oppose "scientific truth" used as a cudgel by opinion shapers to silence their enemies.

My ideal of nature has always been the one that suits humans, which we have every right and obligation to construct and maintain in order to sustain our existence. This includes the city, which I love, the suburbs, like Arlington with its special character, where I was raised and live and also love, and the country, which I am not so much in love with, but respect and enjoy visiting.

(refer to p.36, Cronon, Uncommon Ground)