jill/txt

The group that hacked into Sarah Palin’s email, Anonymous, seems like something out of a William Gibson novel.

I’m not sure, but I might prefer to keep them in novel-space.

Forskning.no, a Norwegian web journal that publishes science and research news, has jumped on the newspapers-must-assimilate-blogs bandwagon and asked researchers to blog for them. Unfortunately they don’t seem quite sure what a blog is. Links are rare and clumsy, posts are long, the bloggers don’t respond to each other’s posts or to readers’ comments. This is a series of newspaper-style opinion pieces, not a blog. It’s not properly set up to foster the social writing and conversations that good blogs engage in.

It drives me crazy that the premier Norwegian publication for popularised science is trying to set up research blogs and not getting it right.

In one post, a professor of physiotherapy spends most of his blog post talking about his skepticism to blogging: unlike traditional media, he writes, blogs break the tradition that an assertion made in public should permit other people to respond to an assertion. Blogs, he continues, often tend towards the monologue, a sort of mumbling to oneself rather than engaging in debate.

Which blogs could he have read to get such a wrongheaded impression, you may wonder. Well, a newspaper blog, it turns out. The Bergen popstar Doddo’s blog about football, which, if you take a look, looks a lot more like a newspaper column than a blog. The professor criticises this blog quite sensibly, saying it’d be more interesting to him if Doddo wrote about something he’s an expert at instead, such as music.

So the professor does exactly what he’s criticising Doddo for and writes about something he’s not an expert at: blogging. Hopefully his next post will be about his research on physiotherapy instead.

Another of the research bloggers writes about waiting in line at the US embassy in Oslo and being sent off because her bag was too big. It’s quite a well-written little blog post, in the personal diary style, but what on earth does it have to do with research? Surely at least the first posts in a research blog should establish it as discussing research in some sense or another?

There are a number of things Forskning.no could have done to improve things:

1. Run a small seminar for the invited bloggers or at least sent out some guidelines explaining what blogging is. (Perhaps this was done: if so I’d love to see the guidelines.)
2. Tell bloggers to use links!
3. Foster a conversation. Ask guest bloggers to at least sometimes respond to each other’s posts rather than write with no context. If staff members are blogging too, they should be particularly active in this, especially in the beginning when you’re just starting to build a community.
4. Set up a technical system that makes linking easy, and where trackbacks work. Such a system should alert your bloggers to posts on other blogs that reference their post so that it’s easy for your blogger to respond either in the other blog or in a new post on your blog.
5. Insist that if readers respond to a blog post, the blogger should ANSWER, especially if their post, like that of the professor of physiotherapy, is about how blogs tend to be monologues and you hate mumbling monologues.
6. Pay bloggers. The professor of physiotherapy notes that this, like so many other outreach activities, is unpaid yet not really counted as “work” by the university. Seriously, if you expect researchers to put all this work into contributing content, they should be paid the same as a freelancer would be.
7. Correct typos and fix links and images shortly after a post is published (I’m assuming bloggers publish directly; as all posts are timestamped at 5 or 6 am this may not (but should) be the case.) Show the same professionality in proofreading the blog posts as with other articles on the site. If you want the blog to add value to the site you have to take it seriously and treat it with the same professionality as the rest of the site.
8. To start such a venture off well, make sure all or most of the first guest bloggers are experienced bloggers. This will create a foundation for future posts. Researchers who have never blogged or read blogs have no idea how to do it and need role models and examples.

Torill Mortensen is one of the bloggers Forskning.no promises will contribute. Torill and I are old cronies - we’ve both blogged for years, and we co-authored the first academic paper on blogging (yes! ever!), Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool. (In Researching ICTs in Context, ed. Andrew Morrison, InterMedia Report, 3/2002, Oslo 2002.) Since then, Torill’s written much more on blogs and of course on her main research field, games. I’m quite sure Torill’s posts will be lively and interesting, and not least, they’ll be blog posts and exist in the live web of blogs and social media. Perhaps that will pump some life into Forskning.no’s blog. Or not - it looks perfectly primed to stay a series of disconnected opinion pieces that doesn’t engage with blogging or social media in anything but name.

Other established research bloggers Forskning.no should invite to contribute are Espen Andersen, Marika Lüders and Eirik Newth. I’m sure there are others: who would you suggest?

And do you know of any examples of this kind of traditional media-driven research blogging being done well? And do you have any more advice for journals trying to set up viable “blogs” inside or beside their nearly-print-style web publication?

build a ROBOT cupcakes!

Originally uploaded by hello naomi

I might have to make some of these cute robot cupcakes I found on Flickr, via Thimble. Their creator, Naomi, bills herself as “a post graduate uni student who programs robots to play soccer by day and a ‘cupcake ninja’ by night” and has the most fabulous collection of insanely decorated cupcakes I’ve ever seen. Fellow geeks may also appreciate the Space Invader cupcakes.

So for the robot cupcakes - do you think you simply use marzipan to which you’ve added food colouring? Of course, to really make these perfect you’d want to use those edible googly eyes that Evil Mad Scientist figured out how to make.

In all the talk about the death of newspapers, people frequently argue that local news will still be of value, and more than that, the hyperlocal stories that couldn’t be covered when space (on paper) was limited. Bergens Tidende, our local paper, has a shining example today of how a local newspaper can gather and report local news simultaneously by coordinating reader participation in a very easy-to-contribute mashup focusing on an issue of huge importance to Bergeners right now, though it’s of absolutely no wider interest.

You see, we’re currently building a light rail system through Bergen, and the road works and constantly changing detours are of course causing major traffic problems. Bergens Tidende is doing the conventional reporting and interviews, but also set up a map where people can double click to show where they’re experiencing problems and where they can quickly enter information about what the problem is. They’ve even thought of anti-spam measures: you enter your mobile phone number and instantly receive an SMS with a code that you then type into the website to confirm that you’re an actual person and that you’re a different person to all the other people who’ve entered their comments. Your identity is not posted to the website. It all works beautifully smoothly and took no more than a couple of minutes in total. And now I can go and look to see whether other people are annoyed at the same temporary intersection as I swear at all alone in the car whenever I drive through it. [Update: Hm, the website I saw right after entering my comment gave a nicer interface for reading other comments than the one I can find now - could be smoother.]

Actually this is the sort of thing the city council should provide for us to tell them where potholes are too big or pedestrian crossings need to be renovated. Though perhaps having a disinterested party doing it (the fourth estate) is actually a very good thing.

Did you ever think of playing oboe when you were a child? Probably not; in fact, it’s pretty much impossible for a child to play a standard oboe, with its complicated mechanics and steep lung requirements. My sister is an oboist in Kristiansand symfoniorkester, and on a crusade to recruit new oboists - because orchestras of the world struggle to find them. Marion’s found tiger oboes, oboes specially designed so children as young as six can play them, and she’s just starting up the first ever kids’ oboe class at the Kristiansand kulturskole. Being a performer and story-teller at heart, Marion has decided the black and yellow striped kids’ oboes are clearly relatives of tigers - and so she’s written a story about how the oboe got its stripes, and has even struck a deal with the zoo where the young oboists get to play music for the tigers and visit the zoo regularly.

So far there are no hits on google for tiger oboe, but if Marion has her way that will definitely change. Here she is in on NRK Sørlandet at the launch - at the zoo, playing for a tiger, of course!

Every book I’ve read about baby sleep - apart from Gina Ford who already has the perfect schedule worked out for you - recommends keeping track of when your baby sleeps for a few days or a week so you can see the patterns and figure out a schedule that meets your baby’s needs and natural inclinations. But tracking sleep on paper is a total pain, even with printable charts. Thank goodness, we live in the age of the web, and there’s a web 2.0 style webbased service that can help: Trixietracker.com.

I’ve been tracking Jessica’s sleep, food and nappies for twenty-four hours, and the little graph is starting to fill up most satisfyingly. When I’ve tracked a full week, it will start showing me averages - how many hours a day does she sleep? When is she most likely to be awake? How does she compare to the other children whose parents are tracking them?

I’m certainly a sucker for feeding in a few numbers and seeing them transformed into pretty graphs - or, in this case, clicking a button on my computer or iPod touch when I put Jessica down for a nap and when she wakes up - but the real value of such a service is in the aggregation of all the data. Nicole at Taking Care of Baby writes that with a whole year of data on her baby, she can find answers to whole new questions:

[B]ecause it is so quick and easy to enter information into the computer, the data points accumulate, and fascinating patterns emerge. Then it becomes possible to answer these kinds of questions: does an earlier bedtime make for a longer night’s sleep? What time has he been going down for his nap lately? If he nurses longer during the day, is he less likely to wake up at night? Should we move from having two naps to a single nap? Are we less tired now than we were a year ago?

In another post, she writes about how she realised from looking at her baby’s sleep charts that he never sleeps more than twelve hours in a 24 hour period, which Trixietracker also shows her is below the average for children his age. So if he naps for a long time, there’s no point in having bedtime at the regular hour. The creator of Trixietracker, Ben MacNeill, has even created different kinds of visualisation to help show different kinds of pattern - such as the sleep scatterplot.

The author of Parentonomics (a book by an economist who apparently tried applying economic theory to his parenting - how do incentives work, for instance?) called this kind of analysis data-driven parenting.

I think it’s unlikely I’ll keep tracking Jessica for a whole year or even a whole month. And to be honest, parents have always noticed this kind of pattern without a year’s worth of exact bookkeeping of their child’s habits. But I’m definitely going to do it until I get my first seven day averages. And perhaps I’ll make a habit of tracking Jessica for a few days every month or two. Looking back, I really can’t remember how my twelve-year-old slept when she was four months. In retrospect, I wish I’d saved some record of that to look back at. SoJessica may well end up with printouts of her Trixietracker data in her baby journal.

Virginia Heffernan wrote about (video-based) web serials for the New York Times recently; she follows up on her blog with a list of recommended serials to try. She’s not been impressed by web serials after lonelygirl15, but continues to be eager to follow the form: “I just suspect that Web video is better — so far — for painterly productions than for narrative ones. So far.”

If I could watch these on my iPod Touch (while nursing) I’d probably watch ‘em all. Unfortunately the iPod doesn’t have speakers, so I’d need those finnickly little headphone things which are a total pain, especially while nursing. I suppose it’s bizarre that I never listen to music on my iPod any more - but you don’t want to wear headphones when you’re with a baby. At least, I don’t. So for me, the iPod is now purely a reading machine.

I’m officially on maternity leave again and doing even less blogging - but I’ve been reading blogs more than I was. I’ve found that my iPod touch is a fabulous blog-reading tool for motherhood: it’s small and light enough to be easy to read while nursing, even when I’m lying down and have the lights off trying to convince Jessica that it’s time to sleep. And Google’s RSS reader works beautifully on the iPod, rendering the images and text of most blogs very clearly on the small screen. And while it’s very hard to blog myself while nursing, it’s easy to click the little “share this post” button in the Google reader - so if you want to see some of the blog posts I’ve particularly enjoyed, you can check out (or even subscribe to) my shared blog reading.

I love this photo of Jessica I took this morning - despite the focus being on that cute tuft of hair instead of her face, and the framing being wonky. She’s four months old now, and absolutely wonderful. We’ve got to know each other so well I can almost always tell when she’s sleepy now, and put her down just as she wants to go to sleep, which is fabulous. Unfortunately that doesn’t work at bedtime, which is a bit of a mess, still. She’s just started reaching for things, very, very slowly - you can really see her brain working so hard to tell those hands to grab something. She’s smiley and laughs sometimes, she can roll a Bergen RRRRR right at the back of her mouth, she’s remarkably calm and can spend 20-30 minutes on a mat on the floor amusing herself just looking at things or with her baby gym. She used to roll from her tummy to her back but hasn’t in a few weeks. The other day she rolled from her back to her tummy, but hasn’t repeated that. And I’m absolutely loving having a baby.

Sveip is a television show on NRK 2 that deals with the web and what’s going on online. Siv Helberg, one of the anchors, called me yesterday and asked whether I’d be interested in doing some pieces on blogging with them, sort of based on my book - starting with the elementary sides - what is it, how do you do it, how many people blog, where do you find blogs - and moving on to other issues like blogs in politics and so on. I think it sounds like a lot of fun - especially the idea of doing a short series, which would mean more time to actually delve into things instead of always starting at the beginning.

The journalist asked me what topics I thought would be good, and I thought I’d turn the question to you: what are the most interesting developments in blogging these days? What specifically Norwegian things should we look at?

I’d love to hear your opinions!!

Alex Halavais just blogged the unsyllabus for a class he’s teaching this semester on communication, media and society. I take it the idea of an unsyllabus is taken from the unconference concept, where participants brainstorm topics and organise discussions instead of listening to predetermined speakers neatly orgranised in a fixed order. I attended an unconference last May; the second day of the Personal Democracy Forum in New York was set up that way, and it worked pretty well, really. I imagine a course with a student-built syllabus could also work really well, though as Alex notes in the syllabus, it’s not going to be less work for the teacher.

Alex has a history of innovative teaching - and grading. Back in 2002 he had students give each other’s contributions karma points, much as Slashdot and other discussion boards allow. This didn’t entirely work, as he explained in this blog post, but, well, don’t you love people that not only try out interesting ideas like that but also blog about them so the rest of us can see how it worked, and what worked, and what didn’t work?

The tyranny of digital distance is most often experienced by people outside of the United States, who are expected to wait a season to watch the next episodes of a TV series they’re interested in, who are blocked out of online content because the advertising sales haven’t been worked out for their country, or are banned from buying videos or certain songs on iTunes because intellectual property rights have only been cleared for the US. It’s immensely frustrating to be refused access to cultural works that you know are only being blocked for legal or commercial reasons - and there are many ways around the artificial blockages, as we all know: illegal downloads, buying a US gift card to iTunes (on ebay, for instance) and faking a US billing address, or using a proxy server so that the US website thinks your computer is in the US and gives you access to the content.

US residents face these problems less often - but Friday’s opening ceremony was an example. NBC has exclusive rights to broadcasting the Olympics in the US, and because of the time difference, they chose to delay broadcasting the opening ceremony for 12 hours. Of course, lots of people wanted to watch the ceremony live - and despite NBC’s hounding YouTube and various other sites into deleting the many uploaded videos, a lot of people found international video feeds. The New York Times quotes one watcher who watched a Brazilian feed:

“It wasn’t the best quality,” Ms. Neary said of the video feed, “and I’m sure it will be better on TV, but to watch that flame go up at the same time as the rest of the world was a beautiful, moving thing.”

I’m not that crazy about the Olympics, to be honest, but I do think that the internet makes us more aware of the whole of our planet - and as Ms Neary says, knowing that you’re watching something at the same time as everyone else is important to our sense of being part of the same world.

Another aspect of these cultural blockades where being outside of the US has been an advantage is baseball. In the US, if you’ve moved away from where the team you support is based you often won’t be able to watch their games because the local television stations won’t broadcast them. So MLB.tv lets you subscribe to watch all baseball games - except local ones, because the local television stations have exclusive rights to them. If you live outside of the US, you have no local games - so you can watch every baseball game live, no holds barred.

And watching television through your computer every bit as good as watching them on television if you have your computer hooked up to the TV, like we do. There’s no noticeable difference, so long as you have a good quality feed or download - except you have more control over what you watch and when you watch it.

I would love to go to the Academic Barcamp that’s being held in Urbino in Italy the week before Festival dei blog - I’m not sure how much of it will be in English, but I’m sure some of it will be. (via Luca Rossi)

I don’t think I’ll be doing much conferencing while I have such a small baby, though. I know Lilia’s been to a conference with her baby and her husband, and it mostly worked out pretty well, but I honestly think I’d feel miserably stuck, not able to give my baby the attention she needs or focus properly on the discussions and ideas at the conference. When I try to blend work and family I usually end up miserable.

One of the things I love about blogging is that it combines immediate publication with the archive - and that the people who are directly involved in something discussed on a blog will very often show up and add their point of view to whatever the blogger wrote. So something that was posted and discussed months ago can be brought up again later, and the discussion will still be there, archived. And people involved in the issue can comment on it at any time, often re-starting the debate.

Today I found a comment in my moderation queue from Dan Britton, a co-author of 200 pages of (pro-copyright, anti-government regulation) statistics. Dan Britton explains that while he can see how the section on piracy, for instance, might be interpretated as having a political agenda, “it’s really not intended to be a political tool at all, or at least I never had that impression when I was working on it”. Interesting to have a bit of an insight into the process of making the book - though I still think there’s reason to be aware that even statistics may be skewed.

Good heavens - apparently high school Norwegian textbooks say that Norwegian bloggers often call a blog a “vlogg”. No, nothing to do with video logs, this is supposed to be a short form of “vevlogg”, which would be an optimistic translation of “weblog”.

Turi Marte gets back at her Norwegian teacher - or the textbook - by naming her school blog “vlogg” and laughing at the idea that such a term is actually in use.

Meet The Truants. A guild of academics who are also trolls, taurens and orcs - and who wrote the articles in Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader.

This wonderful graphic is from an article about the guild and the anthology in Dagens Næringsliv yesterday. The full text of the article is online, but to see the image properly you have to buy the paper - or buy a PDF of the article.

Oh, and if you’re interested in joining the Truants, and you’re a researcher of games playing on the European World of Warcraft servers, contact Torill Mortensen, our excellent guild leader.