Thursday, July 21, 2011

Context+

Here are a couple initial thoughts about Google Plus:

1) I would really like to be able to create some content (like a photo album), and publish this to my circles, using different contexts for different circles. Fine grained, but I think this would be really cool. When you post on your blog, you post photos and then you write a story, and you think the story is the content. But when the post comes up as a result of a google search, it's the pictures - the real content - which you see. With short posts (Twitter, Posterous, Facebook, Google+), it becomes more obvious that what is readily shareable is videos and pictures (my content), not words (my context).


2) Because I can't access Twitter during the work day due to a firewall restriction, I appreciate how several techies I follow collect a week's worth of tweets into "Short Form Fragments" - why couldn't Google+ automatically do this for me, collecting a weeks "stream" into an automatic blogger post? Again, this would be very cool.

Friday, July 01, 2011

Canonical Context

The word canon has a literary meaning - in this context, a canon is a set of writing felt by someone to embody and exemplify the norms of those works which are non-canonical. An anti-canon is just a canon appointed by someone else to oppose a hegemonic canon.

In mathematics or informatics, a canonical form is a normative way of expressing or describing an object, so again, a norm created by a group to facilitate sharing of concepts.

In Superman comics, Star Wars books and so forth, "The Canon" refers to the fictional history which is considered (ostensibly by the publishers) as normative by the audience. Other histories may have taken place in alternate realities, parallel storylines and the like, but the canonical events are the ones which "actually" took place, and the chronology within which they are taken to have occurred. Fan fiction, for instance, is non-canonical.