October 2005 Archives

Barrista, while preparing a latte: "So, what do you think of the news paper?"

Customer: "I don't like it. I'm a creative writer - more so I am a poet. There is no fucking room for a poet in the paper."

Silence.

Barrista, looking up: "There is no room for a fucking poet anywhere."

In one of the comments to Jill's post on selling our souls to Microsoft, someone who appropriately label themselves "a number in the line", i1277 asks:

"Yeah, and why is it that the Google Maps for Norway suck so much?"

Yes, WHY is that? Well, I think I know.

You see, Norwegians are kind of non specific about many things. If their toe hurts, they'll say: "My foot hurts". If they have a problem with the software on the computer, they'll say just that: "My computer doesn't work."

This has become a life style for us Norwegians! We're holistic and proud of it. We see and think in big pictures: the smaller details will always work themselves out, somehow. This extends to geography, naturally. Growing up on Askøy, this little island outside Bergen, I never ever lived on a street with a name.

Instead, we lived in zip codes. "5305" Florvag, 5307 Ask, 5310 Hauglandshella. That's it! Your name, your zip code. Sometimes, you'd add a "stativ" number - a dedicated spot on the main road where collection of postboxes were grouped together for the benefit of Mr. PostMan who had better things to do than running around finding houses with no numbers. But even without a "stativ" number, you'd get mail.

Some years after I left Norway in 2000, my parents address suddenly got a tad more specific: The Little Hill. This was only just, since they do indeed live on a little hill. Not only that, their house is built on a little hill, on top of the hill!

Mr. & Mrs. Mum & Dad

Little Hill

5310 Hauglandshella

But wait, there is more. Norwegians will surrender to common standards, when pushed. Last week, my mum told me that they now have not only a a street name, but also a number!

Growing up in Norway is likely the reason why I remember every turn and land post after one trip to a destination - I rely completely on my inner navigation system to get somewhere. I can tell you about every store, interesting house or turn on the streets I've been to. Sometimes, I can even tell where streets will connect even if I haven't been through those intersections. But ask me for directions that include street names and numbers - I won't have a clue.

It will probably take the Norwegian mapmakers years to plot all the new streets and numbers onto the maps of Norway. Now, you too know why Google maps for Norway suck.

Martin Spernau who is writing an (very exciting!) article for TEKKA, gives me some praise for my editorial efforts in helping him with his writing, over at Traumwind. In this context, he mentions that "Blogging will not teach you how to write, because it lacks (constructive) feedback."

So what do we learn from blogging?

Jill writes about wishing to delete here entire blog and become unGoogleable. She points to an article by Wired describing how some people hide from google:

These unGoogleables don't post online, blog, publish or build web pages using their own names. They're careful about revealing information to businesses, belong to few organizations that can leak personal data, and never submit online résumés -- all common ways that Google captures your data.

"Gotta be an early adopter, ya know. And unGoogleability might be the next bit thing" says Jill.

Having a public voice comes with a price. Once, a single dad who happened to have kids at the same school as Mr. Teen, googled my name and suddenly tried to chat me up via my email inbox. One time in a bar, I guessed who someone's favorite composer was, and since then the person thought we were destined. Soon I had comments in my blog.

Being unGoogleable might seem like the solution to problems like this and other kinds, but perhaps Jill is wrong. The next big thing, I think, is changing how we handle information. I think we'll see more and more technology that will aim to protect sensitive data, technology that will change the way people access information. Instead of you having no online presence at all, people who want to find out about you will need permissions to access your data. At this time, the key to this are communities.

You can already saw the beginning of this in Friendster, Orkut etc - where you may set the way people see your profiles - making information available for friends, friends of friends, everyone. Flickr takes this one step further and will allow people to make private groups between each other regardless of status (friend, contact).

These systems are just early pre-cursors to what is to come. It may be easy to dismiss them as chatty, hidden "dating" tools or popularity contests - for what else do they offer? The next generation will give us a new wave of content management and social software systems, building on these ideas, offering people ways to connect, collaborate and build new relationships by offering their subscribers a genuine, sincere experience. In these systems, permissions will no longer be tied to degrees of friendships (friends of friends, friends, family) because the relationships we have are much more complex than this. For instance, Jill is my friend, but I might not want to share the same information Jill has access to with my friend Peter. Instead of degrees of friendships, we'll see systems with permissions that are tied to identities rather than groups, and content tagged for this purpose. This is so much more complex, and very hard to do. But it will happen, and what this will do to blogging remains to see.

In the meantime, we'll just have to use common sense and watch what we say or write, online as we do in real life.

Sometimes, being a Soprano in the Scandinavian ensemble group Stambandet borders on the blissful. This is my second year there, which means I've got most of the Christmas concert repertoire (lyrics + music) memorized so well, that I can enjoy the singing without sticking my nose into all those dots on the paper. Hurray! I love that feeling of mastery. So at tonight practice, I felt very blissful.

What is the strangest, most bizzare search string that lead someone to your blog?

This string, absurdly enough, ranks Bloggerdydoc first at Google:

do norwegian elkhound have purple tongues

Hmmm, I have to admit that I'll have to get back to you on that one...

What's yours?

This is Maddie, who usually charm the guests at Casablanca in Harvard Square, but sometimes visits Chez Henri late at night. Susanne (to the right), is Maddie's Godmother. I, too, want to be Maddie's Godmother..

For a while, I've been addicted to Deleteme. Deleteme started out as a inventive game on Flickr - when you add your best picture to the pool, you will receive comments from your fellow members. The goal of the game is to get your picture into the prestigious group vault: 10 saveme's and you're in - 10 deleteme's means your pic is GONE. This honor is bestowed upon you in the form of a combination of tagging and commenting on your photos.

But wait.. how did this happen? Didn't Flickr give us tags so that we would be able to search each other's photos..? Did Flickr management have any idea that what they really gave us was semantic chaos..?

Tags are used for everything. At Flickr, people use tags for signatures (tagging pictures with their own names) or they use key words in an inventive "google ad words sense" - guessing words that might receive high hits (sex, nude, future new girlfriend) and therefore lead to higher view rates on your photos.

The Deleteme group doesn't care about this form of tagging. Only two tags count: Save and Delete. Everybody jumps at the opportunity to pick on each other photos - sometimes in the most brutal and humiliating ways. I cannot tell you how many times I've chosen to take off my 10 delete tags and accompanying comments so that my mum won't have to cry when she suddenly visits my stream and to protect any other innocent visitor who might not get the point of this game.

I have to admit it took me a long time before I was brave enough to let them just be. By then, I had finally gotten two pictures into the safe (which obviously helped me feel much better about myself) ... A fellow Flickrite (Big Vern?) noticed that I deleted my awful delete tags, and advised me to leave the comments as "visible scars". "Be proud!!" he said in a discussion thread.

The facinating thing is that people vote not only for the quality of your picture: if you ever left a bad comment on somebody's lousy photo, you've asked for trouble. It is sort of against the rules to delete pictures as revenge, but in Deleteme, rules are increasingly hard to enforce, and delete comments are encouraged anyways, so...

But if your picture doesn't always win when it is good - how does it win?

A common survival tactic is to be nice to people on your side of the water, yet merciless, brutal and cruel to the rest of the world. This means that if you post your photo after 6:00 pm, the Europeans will already be sound asleep while your friends (whom you've gained a lot of goodwill from by leaving sweet little comments on their photos) will help you save your precious contributions. Psychology and Stragegy combined: When the Europeans rise and shine, it's too late - they've lost their chance to delete your work.

With a community like this however, inevitably you'll have an obligatory Civil War where strong personalities clash together in verbal wars. That's when the powerful admins decide to use their banning powers: Suddenly, you're out. Unwanted. A thorn in the admins eyes - your visa in Deleteme land has expired.

This happened to the mighty Thomas Hawk. He gathered the other rejects and thus, a new Deleteme tribe was born: Deleteme Uncensored

Uncensored. Now, there is a message! The main difference between these two groups is that while Deleteme Classic is all about commenting on the photos, Deleteme Uncensored is all about the message boards. At Uncensored, the photos often turn stale in the pool before they get deleted or saved - while everybody chats and enjoy each other company (or not!) in the threads. At Classic - the group attacs your photo and that's that. And thus, there is no formal group memory, like the threads at Uncensored provide.

I am mentioning all this just because I find the social activities, hierarchy and strong personalities in these groups dazzlingly fascinating. Be warned, the trolls are here and sometimes ruin the fun with juvenile verb usage and stupendous behavior. Yet, in some ways they also contribute.

Everything can happen at Flickr. For instance: The latest group fun is now to send each other postcards via snail mail(!). Don't ask me how we got from Digital Photography to Postcards in the mail .

Lisbeth points to the Vancouver International Digital Festival. Inspiring!

Brendadada sent me a link to this amazing site and project in the UK: Seven Stories

L-Girl who moved to Canada writes about fear of terror in NY:

Perhaps you are lucky (or stupid) enough to be able to ignore the war. But the fear still effects you. You pass through security checkpoints several times a day. Your neighbour has been visited by the FBI because he attended a peace meeting. A young man in your town was arrested for wearing a t-shirt that said Peace. A sign in your public library warns you that your browsing habits may be reported to the government. The airline you used last month has admitted to sharing their customer database at the government's request, against their stated policy.

If you speak out against these injustices, you are accused of being unpatriotic, even of supporting the terrorists themselves.

In New York City, I used to wander into office buildings that have beautiful lobbies, with interesting architecture or art, or public plazas. Can't do it anymore. Can't bring a backpack into Yankee Stadium. If you carry a backpack (and now a stroller or a briefcase) on the subway, you might be searched.

On any given day, these indignities might not add up to much. But taken together, they must take a toll. And we can imagine what that toll might be. It might start out as stress and fear, but no one can live in a permanent state of heightened anxiety. Stress gives way to acceptance, fear yields to helplessness. Even our righteous anger gives way to cynicism if we aren't careful.

Now imagine living without all that.

I hate to say it, but this is beginning to sound like sinister history soon will repeat itself.