Deepening Context and Content (cont)

For instance, here is an application I've talked about before, which one day I would like to build, what I have called a Content Engagement System, though I don't know if I really like this terminology. As with a standard CMS platform, a logged in user would be able to create a textual context, with associated images, video, documents... Within this textual context (which I will start referring to simply as 'context' since this translates roughly as 'with text', right?), another user can identify a phrase, and rather than linking out, the way a standard hyperlink works, link in. Sounds kind of odd, but this is essentially like adding a comment, except the comment is associated back to a phrase within the original context. In HTML terms, this is similar to a link to an anchor within the same page, and in a textbook we would identify this as a footnote.

Okay so far. A blogger posts something, which is then considered canonical, after which anyone else can add footnotes, and these offer an alternative view. A use case then: say I am writing a novel, which is serialized in weekly installments. The math is something like, 1000 words/week = 52,000 words/year, which then gets bundled up into EPUB or PDF and flogged off on Kindle, Smashwords or whatever. The idea is to create demand through serialization, then capitalize on the demand with the actual content.

But, and here's the thing. I want to engage my audience. And but, I want to entertain my audience. And but, a vocal minority within this audience typically demands something edgier; or racier; or, well, smuttier. Which, for the purposes of illustration, let's assume is not really my style. So what I want to provide is the canonical safe version of my novel, and a mechanism, a backstage, which allows the audience created by the canonical story to add (share) their own non-canonical additions to the story, which can then be linked to from within the canonical context as an alternative or supplement. This is similar to a literary parallax (events viewed from multiple vantage points).

More on this at some point. This is an idea I really want to pursue... but it is hard to articulate, so bear with me.

Deeper Context and Content

I've posted several times now about what I consider the differences between context and content, and why the word "content" kind of annoys me. It's okay, I don't mind being annoyed, and in the right context, content is fine. What I find annoying is that the two terms augment each other, but, so often, one is used when the other is more appropriate. For instance, if I have a web page that you can use to download a PDF of an article I have written, and this web page contains an excerpt of the article - the PDF is the content. Everything on the page, as far as I am concerned, is the context for your act of downloading. Of course, this is important if I am concerned about monetizing, since I have no problem with requiring a specific digital signature or some sort of payment; and I feel that everything else, the context, is like a smile. Why not give this away?

It's quite simple really. People require, create, digest and absorb context. But people like stuff. They like content, because it is something they can grasp onto, whether it's a PDF, an MP3, JPEG, AVI. Something "file-ish." The reason I bring this up, I suppose, is because, well, these things are easy. You can set up a microphone, you can use Prince, DocBook or FOP to turn your words into something more portable in a document format... then you can shade down your context a bit, broaden it, focus attention on the page content. Everything else is really just part of the transmission wrapper. The rest is just part of the vector.

I mean really, is a platform like Blogger or Wordpress actually a Content Management System? No, at best, these are discontent platforms. They separate us from content by masquerading context as content. It's not a bad thing, but I feel it's something we need to move past. You take good pictures, make a commodity out of your pictures. You tell good stories, make a commodity out of your stories. Allow people to focus through the context.

On The Jungle Planet

This is a picture my 3-yr old drew of Amberwood Entertainment's Rob the Robot, on the Jungle Planet. At left, you can see a tiger. The planet, apparently, has frightening red eyes!

Ontology of Dream Landscape

A couple things I have been thinking about recently, which come together in this: even dreams typically have a location, but it is a unique quality of dreams, at least the ones I have been having lately, to feature a location in isolation, that is separated from character or context; and: in matters of taxonomy, more than three levels is seldom viable in practical terms, but two is seldom sufficient.

In the work I am currently involved in developing a financial application, I see a three-level vocabulary emerging which I have witnessed in other domains, typified as category, type and subtype.

If I was attempting to describe an ontology of dreams, therefore, I imagine I would use a category of "location", a type of location name or "realm", and a subtype describing each specific "locale" within the realm. So, for instance:

/location/a_forest/one_of_many_paths

What I would like to do is build an API, attached to a cloud storage, to allow people to describe their own dream landscapes in these terms. More on this as it develops. Please comment as you see fit.

Context, content and getting over ourselves...

I am a huge fan of Lucas Gonze's weblog, where he wrote something recently which strikes me as quite profound.

Keep music from the web in the web. Don't go to a music blog, download a track, and then listen in iTunes.

Instead, he advocates bookmarking and playing music in the page that contains it, once again returning to fundamental link between URI and resource, between index and content.

What, for that matter, is a Content Management System? The term is a necessary evil; it's not like it is meaningless. But when you use this term to refer to WordPress or Blogger, I get an uneasy feeling, and reading Gonze's comment really cemented for me the reason why. The text on the page in front of you? It's not content. It's context. The page may provide content, but it is itself a context for whatever content it provides.

More on this later, just passing around the lightbulb moment, as it were.

Abie and Rondo Redux

Sorry, broke the link in the last post. A better title would be "The Adventures of Abie and Rondo..." And this link should work.

Abie and Rondo

Abie and Rondo is a serialization of children's adventures I am writing for Web Serial Writing Month this year. The premise is simple: brother and sister team Abie and Rondo travel to remote locations to right the world's wrongs. Irony abounds, and good times are had. I have recently added truly awful vector art courtesy of yours truly, along with pithy captions.

More than anything else, this is an experiment to see how much I can accomplish with very little effort, using the tools at hand (Blogger) without a great deal of modification (JavaScript hijacking the page layout). When WeSeWriMo is over, I will summarize my experience in some sort of "lessons learned" post.

Enjoy.

Because it's a while since I've 'blogged about Identi.ca...

Here's an idea: SourceForge is connected with a great community of open source developers; Twitter is connected with a great community of individuals, some of whom are open source developers. One of the great value propositions for me for Twitter is that rather than following an open source project, I can follow the projects creators, and receive timely information about updates, patches and the like... as long as I am actually logged into a Twitter client when the update in question is pushed out. There is a lot of noise.

Yammer is great for organizational transparency, or so I've heard from people who are using it, but it's a walled garden - I wonder what would happen if a similar approach were taken with an open source repository like SourceForge? What if an open source status network like laconi.ca were hosted and synchronized with the group of individuals with SourceForge projects? Then you could follow this entire list or a segment of this list, and get updates in a timely fashion without the background noise, or aggregate this stream into the broader stream that you might normally follow.

Might inject a bit of life into the open source community as well.

The other side of transparency

Really quick, I just wanted to jump in and say, with regards to Facebook privacy, there is another situation that I have yet to see adequately described. The situation I am seeing described is when you publish a piece of yourself, and it goes further afield than you anticipated, ie you share photos with someone with whom you had no intention of sharing.

But consider the obverse situation, when you publish a piece of yourself to your social circle, and it is withheld for some reason from a portion of this circle because of a change in privacy setting, or confusion about the impact of the privacy settings you have selected.

In many ways, this may create more distrust in the platform, when someone in your social circle feels slighted because they did not receive the expected update. Of course, this happens with email spam filters as well as social network privacy settings. In either case, it creates an atmosphere of distrust in the platform.

Tab Sweep - 2010 05 14

Dare Obasanjo on Facebook:

Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer’s Perspective

danah boyd on Facebook:

Facebook and "radical transparency" (a rant)

Not surprising that Facebook is facing criticism; I appreciate danah's demonization of transparency, and the distinction she draws between being exposed and exposing oneself. One of the things I appreciate about Twitter is that the level of exposure of any conversation I have there is dictated directly by the object graph of those involved in the conversation. If I want to curse and swear, I can engage someone in a conversation with whom this is appropriate. But there is always a risk of exposure.

Dare's point is also well taken on many levels, but particularly from my viewpoint, ontologically speaking, that Facebook is leveraging RDFa and not microformats, and that RDFa is an exponentially more robust technology specifically due to the use of namespaces. And what better way to identify arbitrary URIs as social objects than by using namespaces? In issues of transparency and privacy, it seems that disambiguation, ie clarification of social context will become increasingly important.

Reread danah's rant, especially the Zuckerburg quotes referring to the artificiality of sustaining a multiple identity. My own reaction to this is equally violent, and I call BS - all relationships in a social graph are virtualizations or supplementation of something that they are not, actual relationships. They are by definition artificial and demand disambiguation.

My travels in Flex-land keep coming back to the importance of namespaces outside the strict context of XML. Their time is coming; more widespread use of RDFa and the need for disambiguated rather than radical transparency are definitely indicative of this.

Seminal Granularity: I <3 the </>

It's no secret, I love me some XML, whether as an exchange format like XBRL, a messaging standard like HL7 or NIEM, or a document framework like DITA or DocBook. I am not sure what appeals to me so much about data-enrichment using tags, but it has something to do with reducing entropy by adding structure and meaning. In addition, I would rather model something using the sort of extension and restriction available in NIEM than the classical inheritance strategies presented by OOP. I have heard from several sources recently that the seachange from an object-oriented to declarative paradigm is underway, and I am pleased.

But more than this, I just love the angle brackets in a way I could never feel about dot-notation, and I am not alone in this.

I am attempting to develop a notion I am calling "Seminal Granularity." This notion appeals to my background in structuralist literary theory - "seminal" and "granular" are both agricultural references, both seeds, but whereas "seminal" has patriarchal overtones, granular is more mercurial. Between the two axes there lies a tension, bringing to mind a transclusive dilemma.

Simply stated, the transclusive dilemma is this: when faced with modifying an object, do you create a reference to the object for modification, a seminal approach which binds the new object to the original; or do you create a clone of the object, a granular approach which results in modification to the new object becoming estranged from the original, releasing the object through mimesis.

A viral licensed open-source project, for instance, is by design both seminal and granular. The project itself exists as a single seed, and it allows granular modification with the caveat that modifications are returned to the original seed.

Edit: there is also an odd kind of tie in with this short story, The Ice Box.

The transclusive dilemma is a real phenomenon; you cannot do both. Seminal granularity should be about finding ways to negotiate this problem. A wave can't be a particle either, right?

Talking Points: Collaboration and Documentation

A few years ago I wrote about a project I developed for my then employers, which I open sourced under the name CaseBook. The intent was to single-source end-user documentation which could be be transformed into internal and client acceptance test scripts. As I developed it, the project involved XML, Schematron, XSL and XQuery, hosted in an eXist database and accessed using webDAV.

At the time, I had barely heard of DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, but the approach I took shared some ideas with what I later came to learn about DITA, using concept maps, separation of topics into tasks and steps and so forth. In the mean time, DITA has gained a lot of traction, and my SourceForge page has been hit maybe 500 times.

I have been giving a lot of thought lately to collaborative writing. As Anne Gentle has pointed out on her JustWriteClick 'blog, DITA shines in environments which have a strong collaborative or Agile approach, since both of these emphasize timely repurposing and multipurposing. One of the problems I was addressing with CaseBook was collaboration between development, documentation and testing resources. Now, in part, this was because I was working in a small team, and had responsibilities in each of these areas.

I still think there is a lot of value in facilitating collaboration between these groups, and were I to develop this project today, I would start with the DITA Open Toolkit from day one.

In addition, for the last four months, I've been working with Flex, mxml and ActionScript. One thing that intrigues me about mxml is that it is XML. For instance, what if you could generate end user, acceptance or client walkthrough documentation automatically from the mxml source? Transforming mxml to DITA seems like a useful technique.

Any thoughts?

Working with Flex

For the past few months (since the start of the year), I have been working with Adobe Flex, in conjunction with a Java back-end leveraging Hibernate and Spring. The application under development is basically a public sector financial package, which does not specifically require RIA features, although UX has been established as a critical success factor.

I am following a fairly straightforward path to Flex, I suppose - early work with Action Script and other Adobe technologies lead me to Ajax, and then to Prototype and JQuery, after which I spent several years mired in JSP; and now I am back working with Action Script. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I will write more about my experience in future articles, but specifically I want to raise a couple points of interest here: as a team, we have settled on Cairngorm as an MVC framework. If anyone has any thoughts on Cairngorm and the alternatives, or thoughts about using Flex as a rapid development tool for public sector work. Also, it seems like Flex could easily become a de facto standard for certain kinds of non-RIA development because of the easy Eclipse integration, and I would love to discuss others' experience.

Please drop by and leave a comment - I have been invaded by anonymous posters!

Tab Sweep: 2010-02-03

Note: apologies to anyone actually reading this - I intend to collect and comment on things I come across during the week, then push the post out via Twitter on Friday. As this is a cumulative process, if the content seems light there will probably be more later. The alternative is to keep the post in draft for a while, but this seems lame.

From IBM's Smarter Planet: Education

School districts operate on tight budgets in good times, but when Pike County found their IT budgets sliced by 80%, they knew it called for drastic measures—or true blue-sky thinking.
A rural Kentucky district of 10,000 students, Pike County administrators had struggled with providing IT resources for its students, teachers and staff. Desktop computers were still running Windows 98 with failing CD and hard drives; and access to the district's portal, which houses the applications and information the students and teachers needed,was inconsistent.
Working with IBM Global Technology Services and Desktone software, the district developed a virtual desktop infrastructure delivered as a cloud service. Students now boot the existing hardware with a special CD that bypasses the operating system and connects them instead to a high-performing virtual desktop environment. This in turn links to the district's portal site with all of the tools and information they need. Pike County can double the life of its hardware—it's planning on using seven-year-old machines without sacrificing performance—while providing students, teachers and administrators with equal, transparent access to its assets.
The district estimates cost savings of 64% over five years, compared to the cost of servicing the desktops on premises.

Now, I'm a big fan of the work that Walter Bender has been doing at Sugarlabs, as far as live booting a Sugar/Fedora OS off a USB stick, and this is more of the same. A combination of live booting thin OS and cloud computing is very potent.

Another former OLPC employee, Ivan Krstic, who now works in core security at Apple, comments on martian sandtraps. I at first thought he was speaking of golf, but apparently not. Since he began working at Apple, Krstic posts infrequently, but invariably leads to spit-take.

Apparently Mike Cane is done with his eBook Test blog, declaring the Apple iPad a future contender, or something. The vision of the iPad/iStore/iBook etc is there, even if the reality is not, yet, but we can confidently say that, yes, the iPad will change the way we read. Though I'm still holding out for the new Pixel Qi technology from OLPC alumnus Mary Lou Jepsen.

From London writer Marc Nash, an excellent critique of Roberto Bolano's 2666 and the hoopla surrounding the global reading of same at #2666 on Twitter. I am taking part in this reading, but wish I had read Bolano's Savage Detectives first, simply because of 2666's sprawling nature. Comparisons with Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest and Finnegans Wake seems apt, based solely on the fly-leaf and first 100 or so pages.

Nice Valentines Day Cards, from Save the Children.

Axiom Attic: I

Somewhere between
over the sky and
under the ground
my roots lie

An axiom-tree, idiom-bird
climb climb soil
a thermal
buried deep

Twitter-stuff: thanks for all the RT?

This is just a quick reflection on normative behaviour and a short personal declaration. I don't thank people for passing along what I have to say, and, while I don't specifically hold it against others when they do so, I do question their motivation. And I have unfollowed people for doing it excessively.

I don't use Twitter for strictly promotional purpose, and if you do, more power to you, especially if you are promoting a product or service I actually use. But I wonder, what is actually happening when you publically thank me for passing along your message? Well, yes, I am getting the thank you, and there is some reciprocation, if one or more of your subscribers decides to add me to to their subscription lists, but this is not likely, particularly if you thank a number of people in a single tweet.

Basically, what I understand when somebody thanks me for passing along a message is "thank you, please do it again" - which is all fine and good, but to be honest, if you were to come out and ask me to "plz RT" or whatever, I would be less likely to do so, and the same goes for a lot of the "thx 4 RT" I see - it makes me feel like I'm being played. So please don't bother.

If you disagree with this belief, let me know. I'm not a rude person, I thank people all the time for all sorts of things. But I'm not going to thank someone for carrying on a conversation with me.

Tab Sweep 2009-12-14

Here are some things which I have been following in the last week:

• Bob DuCharme on the RDFS (RDF Schema) - Useful in theory, Bob summarizes RDFS and considers its more practical implications and application.
• W3C specification for EML (Emotion Markup) 1.0 - Silly, but that's the point I think. Mood is important though, and I keep coming back to this specification.
  
• Dynamic Planning for COIN in Afghanistan - via MCM at 1889.ca, who I believe uses systemic maps like this using grep and search and replace to build novel outlines.
  
• Google Launch of Living Stories - News thing (from SearchEngineLand @DannySullivan)
• EBooks and Backlists - past and future collide - (from Paul Witcover at Inferior 4+1 LJ) - When does an electronic publication go out of print?
• Google Enables Realtime Spam - Great analysis of the frightening implications of Google's move to open up to Twitter content (OutspokenMedia). Seriously, people were using 'blogs to googlebomb, how could microblogging not be more dangerous?
  

Reader, Writer, User Points: Engagement Engines

This comes as a response to an ongoing discussion at weblit.us regarding user points and reward systems for online fiction readers. Essentially, the motivation for a user points system is to increase engagement by giving readers something to achieve. The downside is that in order to implement a points system, as a writer you need to produce more, or deny some of your readership access to writing in which they would normally participate. This is problematic.

The system I am trying to sketch out here works within a larger framework that I am proposing, which I am calling an engagement engine. It works like this:

A writer begins with a blank slate, on which she can add descriptions of people, places and things. These are big categories that structure the engagement engine. As a writer, you are able to write as much as you want, but you cannot publish a new person, place or thing until the system allows you to do so - shortly after you start writing, you receive a gift (much like a gift in a social networking environment), which upon opening reveals itself to be, for instance, a place. You use this gift to breathe life into one of the locations you have already privately given a description, and this location is now available for use in your story. After you describe your location more deeply, you receive another gift, and this in turn allows you to breathe life into one of the characters you have described. Now you have a place and you have a person. You can start to really tell your story.

In an engagement engine, multiple writers are supported. This is not essential to the points and rewards system, but I honestly think this is an important component in creating a community, by creating healthy competition and collaboration. As opposed to a content management system, an content engagement system, applies many of the concepts of game-play and social networks, and these work best if they operate within and encourage a wider community.

What really drives the engagement system is the act of creating content, so as you add more content to the system, you receive more gifts, which allows you to breathe life into more people, places and things. This may seem artificial, but I am hazarding a guess that it actually plays well to a strength of many writers that I have known: they are more creative when faced with restrictions and challenges. And there is no limit on the amount of detail, narrative and dialog you can write, or the number of people, places and things you can describe - it's just that you can't actually publicly use these people, places or things until the system has allowed you to breathe life into them. Which means you will want to use your best ideas, and that is what you do anyway.

So this is where the points system comes into play. As your story is published in serial and people read it, you collect extra points from them toward the gifts you use to breathe life into your creations. So you might say "I need 50 more readers before I can add this really cool story arc," and your existing reader base have an incentive to pass the word along, because they benefit from the gifts you receive.

The more readers read a writer, the more that writer can write. This defines story arcs, and encourages reader and writer engagement in an organic fashion. This is by no means a complete description of what I am describing when I say engagement engine, but it is a start. Please feel free to leave a comment with any questions.

Weblit-tle Town of Festivity, lend me your voice!

Hey!

Okay, look back to the start of November if you want the back story, but in a nutshell, Hallowe'en came and went and I managed to read a sum total of one creepy story online - although I know for a fact there were others - because my kids were already into the chocolate, and I was prepping a knight and a butterfly princess for further looting. So I sent out a request to the WebFic/WebLit community requesting that for the next big holiday season, ChristaKanzaNukkahTurkey, we get ourselves together and record a collection of festive tales, which we will then publish as public domain or Creative Commons NC for all to hear. People responded, and now that NaNoWriMo is done, the time has come.

So here we go.

Please send your seasonal tale to piers.hollott at gmail dot com, following these specifications as closely as you can manage:

• Easy on the swears. For my kids - they may be listening.
• 1000 words ~ 10 minutes, which is the length we are looking for.
• If possible 256 VBR mp3 would be ideal. I would like to put the collection on Internet Archive, and because they archive a lot of live recordings, they tend to be contiguous, meaning all files in an archive are similar in nature. If you are using GarageBand on a Mac, the best bet is to use the default setting (I have no idea what this is, but it will keep all Macusers consistent).
  
• Zip up your mp3 with a text version - I'll organize these as necessary, so word, text, even html are fine - not sure if I'll use them, but it would be good to make the archive searchable.
• Please include your name as you would like to be attributed and any other supporting info you might wish to include in a separate text file.
  
• Deadline Dec 18th or ASAP. I know some of you have already begun, and others have been busy with other things, so just let me know if this is a problem.
  
• I'm sure I am forgetting something, so comment if you think I have omitted anything.

The only thing I know I am leaving out here is artwork, which is not essential, but if you have any ideas, let me know.

Thanks,
Piers

What if a Brand were a Secured Namespace for Identity?

This is in part a response to an article on @mikecane's eBook Test, titled How Book Publishing Will Lose: eBooks Vs. Smart Digital Books, but it is also something I have been trying to articulate for a while. The question that haunts me is how to separate narrative concern from brand in a published work. So, I am asking, what if a brand were a secured namespace for identity?

Namespaces are an oft-maligned and misunderstood component of the plumbing of XML based representations of information, such as XHTML, DocBook, DITA and the like. When you create an HTML page, all of the tags you use to create the page are HTML tags, so you have no need for a namespace. When you create an XHTML page, or any other XML based representation, you may use tags from more than one vocabulary, so you use namespaces, represented by URIs, to discriminate between nodes in your document.

When you use a namespace in a document, you associate it with a prefix, which is used as a placeholder for the actual URI within the document. The URI itself must be unique, and often references a collection of schema or vocabulary documents.

What I would like to suggest is that a document representation of a text could be marked up using an appropriate namespace in order to determine an appropriate brand for the markup within the document. For instance,

<xhtml
  xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'
  xmlns:dora='https://www.dora.com'
  xmlns:diego='https://www.diego.com'
  xmlns:isbn='urn:ISBN:0-395-36341-6'>

  <title>El Camino Grande</title>
  <p property="isbn:number" content="123-456789"/>

  <p>
       <img src="dora:walking"/>
       <span actor="dora:actor">Dora</span> and
       <span actor="diego:actor" >Diego</span>
       walked down the road
       <img src="diego:walking"/>
  </p>

is very rudimentary pseudo-code representing a description of Dora and Diego walking down the road, along with a picture of each of them doing so. This is not production code, mind you, this is merely a sketch of an idea, that the namespace used in this case securely identifies an actor, so that information such as images associated with this actor are not available unless some blessed mechanism, such as the involvement of a digital signature, is involved. More than likely, this mechanism would also involve the ISBN, since it would be unlikely that licensing an branded actor for use by a reader in one text would allow access for all texts.

So if you have the correct signature for the actor and the ISBN, you access the namespace, and you are blessed for use of the associated branding, which might be images, type-faces and so on. In the case of the pseudo-code above, you would require two signatures, one for Dora and one for Diego.

Or would you?

Well, this is where it gets interesting. What if you have secured one of the signatures, and not the other? Can you still read the text? Ostensibly, since this is pseudo-code, yes you can, if you change the namespace in the header declaration to a namespace for which you do have access; for instance, if an open-branded namespace were available, this could be used instead. In this way, if you were purchasing a book about Dora and Diego, you could pay for the entire branding, a portion of the branding, or just purchase the book itself without purchasing the branding, and rebrand the book with an open brand.

And then let the consumers decide.

So what does this all mean? I honestly believe that, as electronic publishing grows as an industry, it will become more and more necessary to separate narrative concern from commercial concern. So, what if brand were a secured namespace for identity? How would that change the industry?

Prepare for Parallax: Files in the Cloud

Following up on a conversation with a co-worker this morning, something struck me as obvious. One of the things Sugar OS handles really well (either as sugar-on-a-stick or on the OLPC XO laptop) is simplifying the file/resource paradigm to make it consumable by children, by basing access on chronology rather than hierarchy, reminiscent of a search engine rather than a file system. Also, on Sugar you work with activities rather than files.

What struck me recently is that on the one hand, movement towards a cloud OS reflects a shift in consumer tastes from tasks like email (where you attach files in order to share) to social networking (where you pass around links and participate in activities in order to share), so when somebody asks me, in the context of a cloud OS, "but how will you be able to locate your files?" my initial reaction is this: either chronologically, or collaboratively (or possibly spatially, but that is a separate issue).

Think about it this way: was the document or picture I am trying to find something I touched recently? That should make it easy to find. No? Is it something I shared or created with another person or group of people? That narrows the field. As I add in more relationships with people who may have come in contact with the activity in question, I have fewer and fewer activities to sift through.

I think the desktop of the future will not be a desktop at all, it will be more like a shared light-box, emphasizing transparency. In order to find something again easily, you must give it relevance, and the best way you can do this is to share it, to make it available to the people with whom you already have instantiated relevant relationships.

Far more intriguing to me, while at the same time quite far out, is the idea of a spatial desktop, where the first question you ask when you want to locate a particular item is where was I? Where was I when I took the picture? Did I participate in this activity at work, on a plane, at home, in the living room or in the dining room? On the one hand, this sort of information might not be readily available for many activities, but if it were, how quickly would that narrow the field if you could recall your location when you took that picture?

The advantage of this approach is obvious as well. If you can't locate the actual picture, you can ask who else was there? Be prepared for parallax.

Twitter Retweet Follow/Unfollow

I really have only one thing to add to the ongoing discussion of the new Twitter Retweet integration, other than the obvious, that I use a third party client so I don't really care.

I am noticing that when somebody in my network retweets somebody who is not in my network from the Twitter home page, I see:

1. the retweet,
   
2. a message telling me "Wondering who this is? Someone you follow thought this was worth retweeting, which is why you are seeing it in your Home timeline."

Is this valuable? Perhaps! The obvious reason is that I may want to follow the person who is being retweeted... but the more obtuse value? I may want to unfollow the person who is doing the retweeting, based on the people with whom they keep company. This may actually be more valuable to me in the long run.

If Twitter gave me the option to follow the person I am not following, or unfollow the person I am following, I would absolutely love this feature.

More Semantic Silliness

<object>
<span property="dc:creator">Dan Brown</span>
<span property="dc:title">The Du Blinci Core</span>
</object>

...in which Tom Hanks plays a singleton node who discovers that he is somehow miraculously able to hold content, assisted in his search for meaning by Audrey Tautou, who along the way learns to re-purpose several hitherto erstwhile under-appreciated property attributes.
Sir Ian McKellen turns in a riveting performance as a priest who is actually an xml spy utilizing a Saxon transformer-implementation.

This perhaps is a film I would enjoy....

Sketches for a Group Membership Vocabulary

(Or the Strange Tale of RDFa and the Room with Two Doors)

I am sketching these ideas out here because I think they may be useful at some point, and I would really appreciate feedback; if this sort of vocabulary is already available somewhere, please ping me and let me know. And I'm going to save the RPG analogy for the end, because I know these can be deterrent. [ed. whatever! skip to the jump; it's funny!]

An activity I have had to address on several projects now involves profiling or gate-keeping groups of people or objects for the purpose of authorization or processing. For instance, in a CRM application, it might be necessary to tag potential customers as prospects, clients, inactive, etc. Or for a workflow application for a working group, it might be necessary to track people who are actively developing, people who have left the group, but are still useful resources and so on. I have yet to see a reasonable vocabulary for tracking these people. If such a vocabulary exists, I am sure it has many uses in a variety of contexts.

This vocabulary would have the following component(s):

Membership Status (mg:status):
This is the status of an individual, group or artifact within a larger community, given the following states, which should be mutually exclusive:

• unknown - this is a nicety and not essential. Undefined.
  
• prospect - potential only to be a group member.
  
• candidate - selected by an automated process to become a group member, but not one yet.
  
• nominee - recommended to become a group member by an existing member.
• initiate - has completed self-registration etc, but not yet a group member.
• member - an active member of the group.
• banned - removed from group by process with proviso of reentry.
  
• permban - removed from groupt by process with no proviso for reentry. TERMINAL.
  
• alumnus - a non-active former member of the group. TERMINAL.
• permanent - a member that can never be removed from the group. TERMINAL.

This list is likely not complete, but it represents a fairly typical group workflow model. When you enter the system, you are unknown, and are "promoted" to membership. At this point, you are ripe for the picking. At some point you may reach a terminal, but the majority of people will probably reside in the prospect and member categories.

So here is the RPG example:
A group of adventurers is exploring a location, when they reach two doors, one red and one blue. At this point, with respect to each of the doors, the two rooms could be described using the following RDFa-like pseudoterminology:

<room id="behind_the_red_door">
<member id="adv1" property="mg:status" content="prospect"/>
<member id="adv2" property="mg:status" content="prospect"/>
<member id="adv3" property="mg:status" content="prospect"/>
</room>

...and similarly for the room behind_the_blue_door.

Now, one of the adventurers discovers a key to one of the doors. At this point, this adventurer becomes content="candidate", whereas the other adventurers become content="intitiate" - they have an understanding of how to enter, but only the first adventurer has the key. However, since the door is now unlocked. Sicne the door is locked, only candidates can enter. When the first adventurer unlocks the door, the state of the room changes such that now candidates and initiates may enter (the state of the door in this case might be handled by a separate vocabulary - also this example hinges painfully poorly on the assumption that once unlocked, a door cannot be relocked).

At this point, adv2, the knight steps forward and enters the room:

<room id="behind_the_red_door">
<member id="adv1" property="mg:status" content="candidate"/>
<member id="adv2" property="mg:status" content="member"/>
<member id="adv3" property="mg:status" content="intitiate"/>
</room>

Naturally, the brave knight discovers that the room is full of a poisonous gas, and sensibly flees. The group of adventurers investigates the second door:

<room id="behind_the_blue_door">
<member id="adv1" property="mg:status" content="prospect"/>
<member id="adv2" property="mg:status" content="prospect"/>
<member id="adv3" property="mg:status" content="prospect"/>
</room>

Fortunately, the same key unlocks this door as well, and the door is unlocked. The knight is less enthusiastic, so the curious wizard enters the room.

<room id="behind_the_blue_door">
<member id="adv1" property="mg:status" content="candidate"/>
<member id="adv2" property="mg:status" content="intitiate"/>
<member id="adv3" property="mg:status" content="member"/>
</room>

So far so good. Mind you, this room is full of a tasteless and odourless poisonous gas, but nobody seems to have noticed. The wizard beckons to his companions to enter the room:

<room id="behind_the_red_door">
<member id="adv1" property="mg:status" content="candidate"/>
<member id="adv2" property="mg:status" content="alumnus"/>
<member id="adv3" property="mg:status" content="initiate"/>
</room>
<room id="behind_the_blue_door">
<member id="adv1" property="mg:status" content="member"/>
<member id="adv2" property="mg:status" content="member"/>
<member id="adv3" property="mg:status" content="member"/>
</room>

And now the diabolically cunning design of the room becomes painfully clear, as the combined effect of the gases in the two rooms becomes apparent, and the unfortunate knight, who has membership || alumnus status for both rooms, turns into a pillar of salt.

<room id="behind_the_red_door">
<member id="adv1" property="mg:status" content="candidate"/>
<member id="adv2" property="mg:status" content="alumnus"/>
<member id="adv3" property="mg:status" content="initiate"/>
</room>
<room id="behind_the_blue_door">
<member id="adv1" property="mg:status" content="alumnus"/>
<member id="adv2" property="mg:status" content="permanent"/>
<member id="adv3" property="mg:status" content="alumnus"/>
</room>

So ends the story of "RDFa and the Diabolic Room with Two Doors."

My Morning Archive

I am currently listening what I consider My Morning Jacket's finest live recording, live at the Palace in Louisville, KY, 2005-11-23, recorded nearly four years ago. I can tell you several things about MMJ:

1. Michael Mahemoff has written about Ajax design patterns, and has used MMJ as the intro to a podcast on the subject; also, follow @mahemoff on Twitter if you are so inclined.
2. MMJ are fans of the movie Ghostbusters, and have often played the Ghostbusters music pre-show. In the recording to which I am listening, they refer to "busting ghosts."
3. The recording I am listening to fits nicely onto a single CD if you strategically remove one song, otherwise, it splits nicely into a double CD. You supply the cover art.
   

The recording to which I am listening does not in fact have cover art, because it was downloaded from a selection of many live recordings archived at Internet Archive (archive.org) with the consent of the band. It was captured from a live radio broadcast, and contains a minimum of audience noise or flubbing. In my opinion, it is clearly superior to the live album released by the band's record label. I have listened to this recording around 100 times.

If you want to download the recording, check out archive.org. It will be there, because the Internet Archive is an archive of artifacts; nothing ever goes out of print on IA. In fact, Internet Archive is wholly remarkable, largely because of the vision of one person, Brewster Kahle. Look him up on Wikipedia. You could even use the Wayback Machine at IA to do so, because the entire internet is backed up there. This is kind of misleading. It's actually also backed up by the same organization as a secondary backup in Alexandria. How cool is that?

Also, the Internet Archive is poised to deliver some amazing things in the future, as well as the past. If you are not paying attention to IA, and you are interested in the future of culture, books and reading, pay attention, and do some research on the Open Content Alliance, archive.org, Open Library, Book Reader and Brewster Kahle. You will not regret this.

Tab Sweep 2009-11-10

For whatever reason, I have been reading up on Provenance Models recently (semantic models and vocabularies for tracking sources of truth, ownership and creative process), also a directory of book trade people on twitter and a post-modern literary review. Because this is NaNoLnkMo for me, and because I believe URLs should be human-parsable, I am not going to link to these. I am however going to close these tabs now so I can get some work done.

[http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16148/1/opm-v1.01.pdf]
[http://dig.csail.mit.edu/TAMI/harveyj/provenance-final/paper.pdf]
[http://www.highspotinc.com/blog/2008/12/a-directory-of-book-trade-people-on-twitter/]
[http://www.fictionweek.com/fwliteraryreview/fictionweekliteraryreview.html]

Instant Metafiction

It has been a hectic month so far, for a variety of reasons, and I'm glad that I deferred/diverted my plans for National Novel Writing Month this year. Kudos to all of you who are participating, and particularly to those of you in the Weblit community who are simultaneously keeping up with serialized writing. This is quite frankly an amazing achievement!

Several months back, I invested some time (okay, a weekend) in developing a framework for what I call "Instant Metafiction" - which I was planning to use for NaNoWriMo this year. I have mentioned this before, but, because I want to capture the project properly before moving on (and eventually taking it to the next level), I am going to describe it in a fair detail here.

The idea was to make it possible to create a finished product resembling metafictional works inspired by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Mark Danielowski's House of Leaves, which are characterized by narratorial insertions like footnotes, endnotes and sidebars. To do this, I would use a source document conforming to the DocBook document specification, typically used for technical manuals, which provides ample opportunity for annotation.

Using this approach, I could then use the standard transform package to generate a final metatext as an ePub version, an XHTML version, or a PDF version from the same source. Using DocBook would facilitate two other things, scheduling and crowdsourcing.

Scheduling is handled by using Blogger as a backend. Like many 'blogging platforms, Blogger allows you to date a post in the future. When the day arrives, the post is published. Conveniently, Blogger also uses labels, so I was able to label all posts I wanted to serialize with the same label. With a handful of lines of XQuery hosted on Google AppSpot (using Java and Saxon 8 to run the XQuery), I could now take the Atom syndication from Blogger, and convert it into DocBook.

Crowdsourcing is also handled by Blogger. Like any 'blogging platform, Blogger allows comments, which are then published in a separate syndication. A small modification to the XQuery used to extract the main Atom feed allowed any comments authored by me to be added to the DocBook source as a sidebar element (I had by this point chosen to focus on sidebars instead of endnotes for sylistic reasons).

By ignoring any other comments, the final metatext remains my own; however, if someone comments on a chapter, I can comment back with a response. And this response gets integrated into the metanarrative as a sidebar. In this way, as people read the narrative, the story is deepened. I am not sure how successful this would actually be, but it seemed like fun, and the tools are all free.

Beyond a weekend project using free technology, this approach offers several advantages - using an existing CMS can be limiting, as it is hard to extend its functionality unless you are familiar with its plugin hooks, and you are hosting your own deployment. This was not something that appealed to me. To my mind, integrated crowdsourcing may be a very important facet for serialized online literature, as it encourages deeper engagement, and it breaks down the barrier between author and audience. And it is something print literature just cannot do.

I would be happy to discuss any of the ideas and approaches described above further. This is definitely a project I will revisit in the near future, when time is more plentiful. I am just looking for a good excuse to do so.

Memory and Games: Book as Single Page Application

From time to time I find myself finding a use for Jeremy Ruston's TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki is what has been dubbed a "single page application" or SPA, because what it really amounts to is an HTML page, complete with a JavaScript active layer which allows one to add, edit, show, hide and reorder content layers. When you have made the desired changes to your TiddlyWiki, you use your browser to save the entire file. I have found TiddlyWiki to be especially useful for creating information on the go using a USB device.

One of the things I appreciate about my workplace is the "leave one; take one" bookshelf, where recently I discovered a copy of an old Steve Jackson game book called "The Crown of Kings" - sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, except you roll dice a lot, and you keep track of your Stamina and Skill statistics; you fight monsters as you explore. I believe there were four or five books in the series, and you could carry your "character" over from one to the next. The sort of thing you couldn't publish as a book in this day and age, because this sort of technogy has been subsumed by FaceBook and iPhone applications.

But this book does something that completely blew me away, that I have never really seen in a web application: it relied on memory. See, when you start the game, you consult an appendix which contains all of the various spells you can learn, indexed by a three letter code, along with Stamina cost and effect. At various points in the story, you are given a choice of several three-letter spell codes you can cast. You select a spell by its code, and go to the appropriate page, where you pay the cost and the resulting effect takes place.

But the trick is this - you can only look at the appendix one time, at the beginning of your adventure. And if you forget what all the spells do, you can injure yourself, or do something foolish. The game does not actually test your ability to be a warrior in real life, but it does test your problem-solving ability, and it tests your real life ability to remember important details.

Well, any book can be like this. If a book forces me to flip around, I need to remember what page I was on, in order to return to it. This is a disadvantage of a print book, of course. Book applications remember things for us. Browsers bookmark for us. We do not need to remember as much. I honestly do not think this makes either medium beter, just different.

But this got me thinking about how different forms of memory work. Imagine I can add annotations to a book I am reading. I get a pencil and I scribble notes in a margin. Over the years, these fade, or I lend the book to someone else, lose it on the bus and buy a different edition, which has been annotated by someone else.

Now imagine I can add annotations to an online book. I can add semantic tags to deepen the meaning and store the details of these tags in a data store for my next reading. I can share this information with other people, adding to the meaning of the book as a whole, without actually changing the book's narrative. If I am an author of the book, I can even retag the book to change the book's narrative.

But what if I add semantic data to the book that is purely transient... it evaporates as soon as I close the book, but it persists as long as I have the book open, as I flip through the chapters. How would that be?

I imagine something slightly more interactive than your average book, but less interactive than the simplest of video games. Perhaps a detective story, where you are the detective, and as you add semantic data to the narrative, the narrative reveals itself in more depth. And then, what if two people could arrange to read the same book, at the same time, so that the narrative evolved along two separate axes?

This would be a book as a single page application.

Inspirations: these are our stories

I have mentioned before that being a CBC lovin' Canadian, it just wouldn't be Christmas for me without the Vinyl Cafe. When I lived in the States, NPR and the Prairie Home Companion filled the same need. Radio plays and this kind of entertainment fill our need for oral history. These are our stories.

But I also like stories about swords and sorceresses, steampunks and spaceships. I grew up with the original Hitchhiker's Guide radio show, before it was a book or a PBS marathon, and any number of terrifying radio plays about criminals and evil twins, which I probably should not have been listening to. These are also our stories.

Edit: this post was unfinished... I got too creeped out thinking about the story about the guy who shares his heart with his evil unborn twin, and... umm...

NaNoWriMo and Weblit-tletown: What's in a Name?

I am so happy for everyone enjoying National Novel Writing Month this year! I wish I could take part, but I rebelled against it due to time constraints: I wish I had more. Instead, I wrote an open letter to the weblit community, asking them/you to follow up NaNoWriMo this year with a contribution to an Audio Collection of Holiday Weblit. The two projects are very different, see. NaNaWriMo encourages a "Don't look back until you are finished, lest your writing turn to a pillar of salt" attitude, whereas the Audio Holiday Weblit project encourages a "tell an entertaining story, but make it short and sweet" attitude.

I am so prepared to be shocked and blown away by the weblit community with both of these projects. As I said before, if you read it out loud, they will listen, and I honestly believe this. I also believe in things like Internet Archive, Creative Commons, and Huffman Coding, though I have yet to see any of these in real life. Internet Archive, for instance, lends any project credibility, because it allows you to turn a collection of things into an artifact, just like that. Not great for distribution, mind you, but great for credibility.

What's in a name? I have mentioned that I am taken with the name #weblit-tletown (as in "of Bethlehem"), because it is festive and vocal. Is this a sucky name? You tell me. There is a great discussion taking place at weblit.us at this very moment about why people use pseudonyms when they write. Many good reasons. This weekend, I am going to compile and publish a list of stakeholders (ie people who plan to contribute a recording) - please use whatever name you choose, and correct me if I slip up. It can be confusing. Apologies in advance!

Audio Fiction Content Guidelines

Okay, so here's the story so far...

Hallowe'en came and went, and I was frustrated that while I had time to discover some great seasonal weblit fiction, I did not have time to read it, so I posted an open letter to the weblit community requesting that, this winter, we collect our holiday stories into an audio collection of some sort and distribute it, so cool people can listen to your voices over the holidays and share them with the people they care about.

My plan is to write a post each night in November, breaking the project down into various topics in order to facilitate a discourse, and I hope that by the end of the month, we will have reached consensus about all the important points of the project, and we can roll the November energy into December and have something available for download mid month. This is entirely doable, because you are all talented people, and because I believe this is a valuable thing that needs to be done.

I want to table two issues, then finish with a few suggested guidelines about content.

1) Writing this out every night is meant to build momentum, but also, I want to organize like an agile scrum team (google as necessary). Everything I have seen of the weblit community demonstrates that you work individually, but also through constant collaboration. With this in mind, PLEASE leave comments whenever and wherever you like. I will find them. Then, each Sunday in November, I will assemble and report progress. This week, for instance, I will compile a list of involved parties.

2) The next step is to reach out to the reader community. One of the dangers with collaboration is that we create walled gardens and mutual admiration clubs. Writer. Reader. When you read one of your stories out loud, you become a reader.

Content Guidelines

Roughly speaking, 1000 words is about 10 minutes read aloud. Any longer than this and we run the risk of losing audience attention. Short and snappy is going to be our best approach. 15 minutes at the very most.

Audience appropriate means no swearing, rough language or sexual content, and violence should be limited to snowballs and abusive ghosts. There is no need to censor ourselves, but there is also no need to place a limit on our audience. Plus, holiday, festive etc.

I will repeat that people excel at downloading mp3s, but, semantically, like pdfs and epubs, audio files are walled gardens - they don't let meaning out - so I think we need to provide the source text of our stories to make the whole package searchable. This could be as simple as a supplemental RSS or Atom stream, or all sorts of Dublin Core and Open Provenance. This will be determined.

And of course, these are just some opinions that I am trying to flesh out. When all is said and done, we will put our voices together and we will see what happens. Please add your two cents.

Is Audacity Enough?

I am going to keep this short, cover some technical issues, and attempt to further open a dialog. For more background on what I am talking about, please refer to the previous post - suffice it to say that I want to try and give weblit a voice this holiday season, and I am going to post each night this November in order to sketch out a plan of how we might be able to do it. And please, please comment... it will only encourage me.

1) Do you have experience with grass roots recording? In the past, I have recorded using a cheap microphone and Audacity, a freely available tool which allows you to record, edit and splice mp3s. It is nothing too fancy, but it works, it is cross-platform, and it is available under a GNU GPL license. Ideally, I am thinking that results will be best if everyone involved in a project like this uses the same tools. Please leave a comment if you can recommend a different recording tool, but remember, keep it simple and freely available. I would love to recommend a tool with built in audio processing like compression and reverb, so that we all sound great, but, I don't have much experience in this area. If you do, please speak up.

2) Distribution and contribution: torrent or stream or podcast, or some combination of these... part of the reasoning behind using mp3 as opposed to ePub or PDF is that people already know how to distribute mp3s. People excel at distributing mp3s. I am thinking a torrent would be ideal, but again, speak up. Many options are available. This will most likely become a separate post, but I want to raise the question here. As far as contribution goes, obviously, there is the contribution that the weblit community would be making; in addition, however, I would love to allow donations as long as these 1) are earmarked exclusively for a charitable organization chosen by consensus, and 2) all money raised in this fashion is accounted for transparently. Not necessary, but it would be great to be able to demonstrate value in this way.

3) Length: I am thinking 10 minute stories would work well, and I'm not sure what this would be as a word count. Depends how fast you read, right? But a dozen contributers at 10 minutes a piece is two hours, which strikes me as a reasonable benchmark.

4) Endorsement: again, I am imagining something grassroots and community oriented, however, also something that extends beyond this community. One option would be to try to contact higher profile authors who are also friendly to the creative commons cause for guest spots. Painting with broad strokes here, but this would be one way to reach out beyond the immediate weblit community.

5) How do you define weblit? Additionally, I believe it is important to make available the source text in an appropriate format along with the audio feed, since audio is not searchable, and presents a semantic walled garden. Again, I would like to open this topic up for discussion.

6) Lastly, because I am keeping this short, what's in a name? My initial request is for weblit to share its voice, and I think this is a sufficiently engaging meme; however, code names are cool. In keeping with the holiday theme, I am kind of taken with #weblit-tletown (as in "of Bethlehem"), because it is still tagged as "weblit", contains a truly awful play on words, and as far as code names go, it is sufficiently inscrutable. Or perhaps it's just stupid, and I admit, I have a terrible sense of humour. SO, come up with something catchier.

I really believe that this is a valuable thing to be working towards, and I am prepared to develop this idea for at least the next month, and we'll see where it goes. But please, leave a comment, negative or positive. I want to hear your voice.

November! Stuff! Nonsense! Weblit, let me hear your lovely voice!

I'm going to keep this short, because my plan is to write something every night of November, and I don't want to run out of de profunduses and bons mots. At least, not until December. I have written previously about my plan to cheat National Novel Writing Month by crowdsourcing metafiction, and well, yes, I still plan to do this, just not right now, as I want to focus. my attention. on other things.

And as mentioned, the crowdsourced metafiction was a cheat, while at the same time a tribute to several novels I love, notably Nicole Brossard's Mauve Desert (google it, get it, read it); which I didn't want to sully with too much nonsense.

But I'm very serious about the "Weblit I want to hear your lovely voice!" thing, so I will repeat it again, and not shut up about it until someone actually tells me to shut up about it, and so, it is this:

If you love weblit, there is at least a fairly good chance you love Hallowe'en, because, well, who doesn't? and Hallowe'en indulges the weblit spirit of DIY, of creating a persona, and of getting paid through contribution and merchandising. Possibly with candy. And if you love weblit, you probably also love to tell a story, and there have been discussions elsewhere, in a ton of different places (I'm seriously not going to link to anything this month - it's going to be NaNoLnkMo for me - just saying) about the role of online writer as storyteller, return to an oral tradition, Mikhail Bakhtin and the carnivalesque (totally use bing this time, just to shake things up a bit) and so forth.

And yet, when I twitter and yahoo! around for some SPOOKY STORIES this All Hallow's Eve, I find that I have barely enough time to read two TERRIFYING TALES, before I am called upon to adjust a scabbard and straighten a butterfly fairy's wings, and we are out the door in search of medlar confits. When what I really want to do is snag a podcast or torrent, and download an hour's worth or so of NAUSEATING NARRATIVES, which I can then listen to while I am otherwise employed as haberdasher.

So.

What I am humbly requesting that all you weblit folk do is this: grab a microphone and the appropriate technology, and record a 10 minute story which you have written for the next holiday season, ChrisKwanziKah or whatever you want to call it, in your own voice, and make it available under some sort of creative commons non-commercial license. Then we'll collect all your stories and create a torrent or live stream them.

If you read them, we will come. Laeti triumphantes! Seriously. I think this is really important.

And then when that works, we'll start thinking about next Hallowe'en.

Calling all weblit-ers to the campfire...

This is going to be quick, because we are getting our costumes together, and all that. A knight and a butterfly fairy, thank you for asking. Thank you, Weblit-ers, I love all the weblit Hallowe'en fiction I have just found; but to be fair, I wish I had the time to read it all. I mean, it's Hallowe'en, and I just don't have time to Twitter or Google or Bing... so maybe I'll put on a mix tape of the "Monster Mash" or surf through channels or torrents until I can find "It's the Great Pumpkin" or something. Whatever.

And Christmas is coming up, and we need to start planning that too. And I am a Canadian, and that sort of a Canadian, so I can guarantee that, like every other Christmas, I will find myself preparing drinks or peeling potatoes or wrapping presents while listening to Stuart McClean reading "Dave Stuffs a Turkey" (okay, I'm not going to link to things, just Google if you have to).

But here is what I would like to be doing, this Christmas, or next Hallowe'en: listening to your lovely voices, Weblit-ers. Listening to your lovely voices. I think http://freeeday.wordpress.com/ is a fantastic idea, and I cannot wait, but you know what? Your voices will not be heard over the singers; but what if, what if you got out a microphone and read your stories out loud, just two stories a year, a spooky one and a jolly one, and then curated them into an easily accessible podcast? For an hour or two, while I was mixing drinks or filling bowls with candy, I could take a moment with my family, around our campfire, and share your lovely voices and stories.

And I would love that.

#PRSuccess! @dangerbird Records: yay!

I'm very pleased with the independent music industry, and I would like to spread some of this love directly to everybody at Dangerbird Records, home of the Silversun Pickups, Bad Veins, Darker My Love... a roster of great bands.

So about a month ago, the Silversun Pickups played here in my home town, and @dangerbird, who I follow on Twitter, were giving away tickets to the show to people who sent them funny pictures. And but two days after the show, I discovered a message in my gmail *Spam Folder*, because that's where gmail likes to put direct messages coming from Twitter.

Fail.

So whatever, I was annoyed, but the show was great, no big loss. I emailed Dangerbird to apologize for any inconvenience, and those nice people responded by mailing me the SSPU vinyl back-catalogue.

Success.

And what a success! Three albums you say, but wow, Swoon on 180gm vinyl, split over two records so there is less loss of fidelity on the inner tracks. Carnavas on vinyl! The packaging is exquisite. So, thank you Dangerbird!

But a success too because I'm going to do that much more to promote their label. I'm going to pay that much more to check out other bands on their roster. And here is a big one, I'm going to retweet them like crazy.

Like I said, I'm very pleased with the independent music industry.

Check out Dangerbird's latest mixtape, containing Daytrotter sessions, Patsy Cline covers, wall-to-wall goodness. Follow them on Twitter, if that's your thing. They're nice people.

Mauve Desert, ABA', Cheatsin' NaNoWrMo

Mauve Desert is one of my favourite novels, a translation of a roman(ce) by QuebeCoise author Nicole Brossard. I read Brossard's novel in translation, but the book itself is a translation, the story of a fifteen year-old girl who navigates the baroque night-roads of the desert; the story of the middle-aged academic who discovers her writing in a second-hand bookshop and translates it. The narrative is presented twice, or presented and represented. Mauve Desert is one of the most thought-provoking and beautiful books I have read, and well worth reading.

Mauve Desert follows the form of a musical sonata, follow the pattern of theme-diversion-restatement. Mathematically, this translation could be expressed as ABA'. This pattern can be found in novels by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, as well as... well, if you start looking for this pattern, little by little, you will go insane.

A narrative that retells itself, a book that draws attention to itself, is, by definition, metafiction. And the ABA' pattern implies a more subtle pattern; once you perform a translation, you can perform it again, and again... ABA' becomes ABA'BA'' becomes ABA''BA'''...

And I intend to create such a thing. Every year, when National Novel Writing Month rolls around, I
try and I fail, primarily because of life and other things, lack of preparation and so forth. So this year, what I want to do is crowd source my attempt.

In short, I intend to create a simple narrative right here on this here sight, soliciting comments on each chapter as it is published. I will then respond to these comments as annotations to the original narrative (ie as footnotes, sidebars, endnotes and other such typographical madness), in such a way that these annotations will appear within/without/interrupting the text of the original narrative.

Are you with me so far?

When all is said and done, I will then use things like Atom, DocBook and ePub to repackage the whole mess in the form narrative-annotations-annotatednarrative. If that doesn't get me to 50,000 words, I don't know what will.

Thoughts on the WebFinger Protocol

This comes as a response to Dare Obasanjo's post Some Thoughts on WebFinger and Personal Web Discovery. I am not going to summarize what WebFinger does, other than to paraphrase, WebFinger allows you to associate more of your identity with your email address. Smart, right?

Dare suggests that WebFinger might be more useful in making your online identity portable, rather than for its intended usage for end users. Which I agree with. I would like to keep all of my online identity in one place, but I have to take issue with the use of an email address for any purpose other than sending and receiving email (and I admit, I use my gmail address for plenty of authentication out of necessity and convenience), because it encourages and softens people up for abuse by the password anti-pattern.

If there's one thing I appreciate about Facebook, LinkedIn and their kind, it's that they shield people from my email. I don't want to ever give anyone my email, because I want to be able to turf it if I need to, at which point, people can still find me on Facebook etc. But, it's true, having an uncommon name is a mixed blessing. WebFinger seems like a good idea, but it also sounds kind of like it's grooming people for the password anti-pattern. We should be telling people "Don't give away your email, don't give away your email password..."

(From my comment on Dare's blog)

This what my daughter thinks about gatekeepers:

The News Garden and the Wire

Full disclosure: When I created this 'blog, the name "eardrum buzz" was a catchy phrase, and there was always the possibility that I might get a bit of free publicity if electro-hipsters Wire decided to sue me over fair use of the title from one of their songs. So I am guilty also of link-baiting with the title of this post.

What if Twitter were to take the direct access they have to their own data-flow and shift focus to curation? What if Twitter presented not only currently trending topics but also mined this data further, to provide analysis of the people who trended the topic?

Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed, and I find myself agreeing almost exactly with Robert Scoble that FaceBook is just not an appropriate place to conduct public conversations, even though creating a space for conducting semi-private conversations is not such a bad thing.

I go to Facebook to catch up on current affairs in my personal sphere, such as people's birthdays I might be missing. It is a garden where I can share news with friends, but... there is no discussion. Facebook will have to offer me a great deal more in the way of current affairs in the world at large for me to check in more often than once a week.

By drawing resources away from FriendFeed, is Facebook setting its targets on Twitter? No more than it already has. Twitter and FriendFeed are both networking tools; Facebook is not.

But what if Twitter shifted away from the notion of connecting me with existing contacts? The Suggested User List is a step in this direction, though arguably, a misstep. The thing Twitter really offers me that I find nowhere else is the immediacy of trending topics. And by immediacy, I mean that by the time a topic has trended, it has developed to the point where it cannot be ignored. In this sense, immediacy describes a combination of presence and latency.

But, this still has more immediacy for me than than CNN.

So.

What if Twitter were to shift focus to curation? In other words, when a topic trends, what if Twitter told me what group of Twitterers originated the topic? I could use this information. If Twitter did this for me, I would rely on trends and the public stream more than my own personal network, because this would cut the distance between me and an ostensibly reliable source of information.

And I would follow these people.

If Twitter curated a list of the users who have consistently been involved in the early phase of trending topics, clearly, these would be people I would want to follow (if I was interested in these topics), would they not? My assumption here is that by the time a topic trends, it has become reliable. Perhaps by the time a topic trends, it has already become stale. I would argue, it has become stable.

But this would be my ideal Twitter. A public stream that brings me closer and closer to the immediacy of "What is happening, right now."

Links for 2009-07-31

@jayrosen_nyu: Last night, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen twittered something that struck me as very profound:

I grew up in a chaotic household. Television ordered my attention and gave it flow. Family life couldn't. This is one reason I study media.

I grew up in a household that was at times less than stable; attention has never been one of my strengths, other than the occasional attention I have paid in the past to things like computers and Rubik's Cubes. Hell, many of the important things I have learned in life were learned from Sesame Street, and I take great enjoyment now from sitting down with my son and learning about the world of polar bears and four-winged dinosaurs from Nova. I can't imagine a world without this influence. Marshall McLuhan described the television as being like a "bomb in the classroom", and I believe this to be apt on multiple levels.

In this week's "Rebooting the News" podcast with Dave Winer, Jay discusses his inspiration for the week, Marshall McLuhan. "The subject may require you to go very far afield," he comments on McLuhan. "Marshall McLuhan was willing to see the destruction of the world he preferred, which was that of the literate man..."

@davewiner: Dave Winer created a prototype for what has become the blogosphere, and has said some pretty profound things also. What struck a chord with me recently was the idea that, like a wire service, the internet can provide us with a "river of news" into which we can dip to keep abreast of current affairs. "Perhaps the river of news is omniscient," he wonders in last week's "Rebooting the News" podcast.

I have personally spent so much of my life dealing with the anxiety that something is happening somewhere, and that I am missing it. The twitter paradigm, for want of a better phrase, seems to be that the online world has become broad enough that if a meme needs to find you, it will circulate until it does. This is not just cold comfort.

Like journalism, the face of literature is changing, as the media through which these are transmitted are changing. If you aren't following the Rebooting the News podcast, do so. It's become a high point in my week, and I strongly recommend you start rebooting.

Marshall McLuhan steps outside his frame of reference, and Woody Allen pulls him back in.

On the proper use of quote with html attribute values...

A very short rant.

When your HTML tags contain attributes such as "...width='10%'>", please, please, please use quotes around the value. There may come a time when somebody has to take your code and turn it into XHTML, which requires quotes; moreover, there may come a time when somebody has to take your code and generate it on the server side using JSP or ASP... which will not take kindly to that "...10%>".

So please, use quotes around your HTML attribute values. Or my son will kick you.

Odd-Hume

From an early age, Alex had been good at floating, at first in water, then a few feet above the ground, then higher as he learned how to channel his magical energy at the school. This, apparently, would be very useful when they hurled him, as they did, later that day, into the Teertsi Hole, where he had been floating ever since. Apparently the hurling had worked, and then the plan had gone awry.
For all he knew, however, many days had passed since they had catapulted him into the Hole. Time passed very strangely therein, and he had a vague feeling that he had missed several meals since his entrance.
"I should be hungry, though," he speculated to the void.
And well you should.
Something had answered him. Not aloud, but silently, as if speaking behind him.
"I should be very hungry," Alex tried again.
I should think so. I am.
"I am ravenous," Alex announced.
As am I, the voice responded silently.
"Oh crap! You're going to eat me now, aren't you?"
In essence, I already have.
A moment later, Alex realized that he had been conversing with the void itself.
Not to worry, however; I eat only plants. Animals disagree with me.
"You are a vegetarian void?"
Call me a... Herbivortex. Call me Odd-Hume, for that is my name. That is what the other intruders call me.
"Other intruders? The Teertsi?"
Yes. They used that name to summon me, and they use that name when they call me. Odd-Hume. It will do.
"Call you?"
To feed me. I am always hungry.
"Well, I'm pleased to make your acquaintance, Odd-Hume! I think we need to talk further."
And later that day, Alex was ejected from a tear in the sky that opened over Galvany Fields and Azure Spires, and he floated to earth, making his way swiftly to his Head Master's office as soon as he touched ground. In Head Master Peeps' office, he explained how the united peoples of the twin cities could summon the Herbivortex Odd-Hume, and feed her themselves, and they should have to pay tribute to Teerts no more.
He was fairly certain Odd-Hume was female, whatever it was, though whenever he tried to picture her, he had a flash of a giant, nebulous cow, with horns that spanned continents.
And that is how Alex of Galvany Fields, student of magic in the College of Dweomer at the 'Varsity of Azure Spires, became a hero.

Eight Years Later

And now, Alex understands, as best he can, the source of the cloying sound coming from the other hilltop, as he watches the Lutanists assembled behind the Starcatchers playing their foul instruments, and strung to these instruments by vibrating cords are wingbound lancers, men whose very clothing forms wide wings. By some enchantment, the cloaks worn by the lancers collect and focus the sound, so that they are lifted from the hilltop, soaring into the air at great speed. As they do so, Alex watches in horror and disgust as the proud eagles of Galvany fall to their lances.
And then the Starcatchers strike, and all hope is lost.
The star-kites they have unwound fall short of the eagles' attack, but they had never been intended as snares, leastwise, not for the eagles. An unfortunate wind has blown the kites much closer to the hilltop on which Alex stands, and, distracted from the eagles' demise, he watches in amazement and then growing alarm as the star-kites swoop down at the mages less than a stone's throw away. The kites are attracted, they must be, by the mages' magic. And whenever a kite strikes a mage, that mage falls down dead, first the mages of Oakenshore, and then the less powerful crop mages, and among them, Alex's father.
And thus ends the battle of Galvany Fields, and so began the Teertsi occupation.
If it weren't for the events of that day, of course, Alex would probably have stayed in Galvany Fields, and become a crop mage like his father. This was a bitter truth.
Eight years later, to the day, Alex found himself in a dilemma. The plan, developed and embellished in secret, had been simple. The plan had in fact been so secret, that Alex, involved as he would become, had had no knowledge of it until he had been called to his Head Master's chambers earlier that day, only to be met by a taskforce of mages and government officials.
"The plan is this, and there is little time, so listen carefully," Head Master Peeps had instructed him, before continuing: "We are going to hurl you into the Teertsi Hole as it opens. When you get to the other side, we are going to pull you back, and you are going to tell us what you saw there."
Stupid plan, Alex had thought.
And just how are you going to do this? How are you going to hurl me?"
"By catapult, of course."
"And... pull me back?"
"Rope."

Starcatchers

And of course, Alex was well aware that many had not, that many of the poverty stricken members of society, who had before relied upon charity for their well being, had simply died of hunger. Many had been killed by the policemen of the occupying force during the early uprisings that took place in the first year of the occupation. And many had attempted to leave the Delta, though few had succeeded.
So the cities had adapted to their oppressors, and, in secret, planned their downfall.
"Filthy, oily bastards! Why?" Alex was weeping now. And of course, there was no answer, although he couldn't shake the strange feeling that someone, or something, was watching him.
The Starcatchers open their silvery cages, and shimmering star kites are released, stretching out into the sky on silken filaments. These filaments are attached to the cages by miniature winches, which the Starcatchers spin out rapidly. There are only a dozen or so.
What initially draws Alex's attention to the hilltop on the other side of the fields is the sound, which he initially thinks is coming from the group of Starcatchers. He can barely make out what they are doing, but the sound seems to come from the strange boxes they are holding, or from the bright kites rising from the crowd.
"The kites! The kites! They're trying to snare the eagles!" He yells out, and the other farm-folk join in the chorus.1
Silent they become as the mages of the Oakenshore Guild and the remaining crop mages pool their energy and cast out devastating curses to the opposing hilltop, obliterating several of the Starcatchers on the spot. Flying above the kites, the eagles descend on the hilltop, similarly bent on carnage.
The cacaphony from the other hill only grows. When he was a child, Alex had watched, horrified, as a group of older boys tortured an alleycat for their own amusement. This sound is similar, but worse, pure but awful, a cross between the sound of music and the sound of agony.

Eight Years Earlier

First to arrive was the mage army of the Oakenshore Guild, who after a brief, uneasy parley with the crop mages (who had retreated to a hilltop overlooking the battlefield), turned their efforts to the ground assault, hurling bolts of lightning and explosive curses against the Teertsi shock troops.
Soon after arrived the nimble lion-riders of Galvany, who were able to destroy much of the Teertsi ground offensive, distracted as the shock troopers were by the Oakenshore magic. With the lion-riders came birds of the sky, great eagles, which swooped down on the battlefield, plucking soldiers up and hurling them at their allies.
The lion-riders set up a whooping battle cry, rallying and re-rallying as they tore the Teertsi to pieces. From the vantage of their hilltop aerie, Alex and the other farm-folk joined in the rallying cry. His chest nearly burst with pride as he watched the tide of battle turning.
That battle had taken place eight years ago now, almost to the day. In actual fact, it had been eight years exactly.
"Eight years of occupation! Eight years paying tribute every year to those filthy oily bastards!" Alex yelled out into the void that surrounded him, but no answer came.
Every year since the occupation, on the day of the Autom Feast, the Teertsi Hole had reopened, and every year, a tribute of flour, lumber, preserved fish and various other goods was taken back to Teerts. There was nothing the Delta-folk could do about it, either, for the Teertsi were among them now.
And in many ways, ironically, the twin cities of the Delta had prospered since the occupation. The Teertsi occupation had ended the war between Galvany Fields and Azure Spires, for one. And though the Teertsi themselves were not hardworking, the people of the two cities had had to work that much harder in order to prosper, and many had risen to the challenge.

Chaff Demons

Alex's father and the other crop mages now agreed that it was time for action, and so, strengthening and redoubling the hexes they had made on the chaff demons, they sent them at the intruders. But the chaff demons were no match for the Teertsi ground offensive, and again and again the straw men were beaten down, trodden underfoot or exploded into nebulae of hay, only to be brought into being again by the tireless crop mages.
"We can hold them! Keep them together, lads!"
Alex prayed that his father was right. He was almost too young to believe that his father could be wrong.
When the first wave of shock troops met the straw men in combat, they had smashed them with brute force. The crop mages pooled their guile and arcane energy, and the straw men were whirled back into being, forming larger and more powerful homunculi, which seemed momentarily to push back the Teertsi ground force. But then Alex had witnessed a terrifying sight, as some amongst the ground force drew forth lit torches, and set their comrades ablaze. Such was the nature of the Teertsi armor that it protected the wearer from the flames, while feeding the blaze. Alex watched as the burning soldiers tore a swath through the straw men, which kindled almost immediately into towering infernos, exploding from within as the crop dust took.
Trolls, Alex had seen, on one memorable (and quite frightening) occasion when he had traveled with his father to the Mithwood, to trade with the people who lived there. But these invaders, in many ways troll-like, were different. The trolls had been ruthless, but had only been protecting what was theirs. These people were relentless, intent only on breaking through to Azure Spires and neighboring Galvany.
And eventually the crop mages and their allies had had to do just that: to let the Teertsi pass through, and hope that they had given the twin cities of the Delta adequate time to prepare their defenses.
Had this only been the case, the occupation would have ended there, but there had been strife between the cities, and so the cities were prepared for attack, but not from this direction, and the reinforcements they mobilized were delayed.