BrightKite becomes useful

BrightKite's iPhone app now accesses the iPhone's GPS data. As you may remember, BrightKite was one of the early location-based services (LBS), but it didn't have an app for the iPhone launch or a way to extract GPS data. To update your location, you had to actually type the address. I quickly gave up on this. But the new app grabs the GPS data, which may give BrightKite a new lease on life as it competes with Loopt, Moximity, and other LBS.

Android's target

FastCompany repeats what many others have said: that Google's Android operating system is really targeting Windows Mobile, not Apple's iPhone. Well, sure.

On the other hand, initial reviews of T-Mobile's G1 have consistently said that it's a worthy competitor for the iPhone, although not as integrated or intuitive. This is terrible news for Apple, since Android is going to be deployed on several phones produced by several OEM's. If the very first one to be a worthy competitor, what happens when several OEMs compete with each other in refining the experience?

Going laptop-less

Abilene Christian has started a new program in which every student is given either an iPhone or an iPod Touch. (Those with iPhones have to foot the bill for their own service plans.) ACU supplies custom web apps that can be used with these handheld devices. Students can access campus maps and data in the cloud as well as class schedules, calendars, and so forth. They're a lot cheaper than laptops, and battery life is better (once you turn off 3G and rely on the campus wifi).

Obviously mobile devices are not substitutes for laptops or desktops ... yet.

Going paperless

Peter Merholz justly claims, "I called it!" The paperless office is back.

Let me take the occasion to make my own call. Unless the current economic straits are disastrous, we'll see an acceleration of this trend, with paper -- like email -- becoming primarily a way for younger workers to accommodate older ones. Of course, the worse the economy gets, the more older workers will delay retirement and the more paper will be used for routine communication.

A new ecology of work

A couple of weeks ago, Not an MBA posted some thoughts about the new ecology of work and its repercussions. The conclusion:

My feeling is that it’s time to compare notes, to look at these missing pieces and others, and to make sure that they are addressed in ways that benefit and serve the workers. Forget about the tags “coworking”, “Jelly”, etc. for a moment, and consider the near future in which work and workplace is increasingly defined as a network of intentional local spaces, and as communities of working peers with something in common beyond the accidental fact they work for the same company.

Right. I suspect we'll see some really interesting changes in sectors whose organizational structures are beginning to resemble rhizomatic networks rather than hierarchies. (In fact, there's a book on this issue of networked organizations.) And there's a lot more thinking to be done about how mobile telecommunications and cheap digital tools are reconfiguring workspaces and consequently work organization.

"The candidates may not have used online search while they were debating, but we sure hope they will every day they are in office."

ReadWriteWeb reviews how people Googled during the debates. Lots of fact-checking.

The Obama iPhone app

Talk about target marketing. The Obama iPhone app makes it easy to donate and call friends to persuade them to donate. Obama's campaign has been consistently adept at leveraging technology users.

No-so-Smart Mob

From BoingBoing: "A man robbed an armored car outside a Monroe, Washington bank and used a dozen unwitting accomplices to act as decoys during his getaway. He hired the accomplices on Craigslist and instructed them to wear very specific clothing."

How to survive ...

Not long ago, we were treated to blog posts on how to survive a zombie invasion. Now people are getting serious about how to survive a global financial meltdown. There's some overlap.

Surveying location-aware services for the iPhone

I'm late to the party on this, but TechCrunch has a nice overview, including Austin's own Moximity.

Droid Sans

Here's a story about the design of the default font for Google's Android.

C-SPAN's hub for the debates

I received an email yesterday letting me know about how C-SPAN will cover the debates Web 2.0 style:

I remember reading a post of yours a few weeks ago about the Web 2.0-friendly hub C-SPAN had launched for the two party conventions. I don't know if you've heard about it yet, but C-SPAN just announced the other day that they're going to launch a similar hub for the presidential debates; they're going to be following Twitter tags and monitoring blog posts that cover the debates. Here's the clip where they announced the new launch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwM3aikjdi8

Anyway, I thought this was something you and your readers would find interesting.

I do. Unlike the conventions, the debates I will probably watch live. But I'll also want to see what people are saying and tweeting about them, and I do like C-SPAN's approach of bringing these all together.

Network advanced copies arrived today

My advance copies of my new book Network arrived today (well, probably yesterday, but I didn't check my box yesterday). I'm happy to say that they look beautiful and that I am really excited to get this book out there.

Amazon is still showing the book as "pre-order," but I expect that will change soon.

Even in the US, we send more text messages than we make phone calls

That's what this story on texting points out. Among other things, it indicates that literacy is taking new shapes. As I've been saying over the last couple of years, these new shapes have been understudied and need to become more of a focus. And I mean by actual empirical researchers, not just people who grumble about MySpace supplanting great literature.

The Neanderthals died because they never quite figured out how to divide labor across large social groups?

That's one possible reason, according to this National Geographic article.

Cheap mobile phones for practical deployment of lifesaving technologies

Popular Science has a short article on how Dean Kamen (of Segway fame) is partnering with Nokia on an innovation challenge. Kamen's stake is to improve bottom-up organization in developing companies so that they can more easily deploy lifesaving technologies: water purifiers and generators. From the article:

Each purifier and generator provides enough power and water for a village; but, with one million villages in India alone, deployment is a challenge. In the past, Kamen has worked with multinational companies to launch his inventions, but the top-down approach of a big company doesn't mesh well with the million-village scale of this project.

The developing world has a high number of cell phones per capita -- the counterpoint to having very little in the way of landlines -- and the idea is that software running on Nokia's platform could be used to network and control a village's small-scale power and water supply.

Google Docs in the classroom

I mentioned on Twitter that I use Google Docs in my classroom, and someone asked me to write a short blog post about it. So here it is.

We're blessed at UT because at the CWRL we have several computer-assisted classrooms and the freedom to use these with various types of software. Last year, in the spirit of exploration, I had students write and submit papers using Google Docs, the web-based office suite. Google Docs allowed me to avoid the usual stack of papers as well as the email ping-pong that occurs when students email drafts to me. It also was easy to use -- basically it has the same level of capability as Microsoft Works -- so the learning curve was relatively shallow.

But I was more interested in the collaboration aspects. GDocs allows you to share your document with others, meaning that many collaborators can look at the same document and even edit it at the same time. It automatically allows features that you have to turn on in Word, such as edit tracking and comments. Paired with a project management system such as Basecamp, GDocs was a great way to support the dreaded group project. That's how I used it the first semester.

An added bonus was that I could embed my own comments in the document. That meant that I could review drafts and even insert grading comments directly into the text. (UT does not allow me to post grades on an off-campus server, so the grades are handled through UT's own gradebook application.) So I began to think about using GDocs for all assignments, not just the group project.

Last spring, I decided not to require GDocs. Instead, students turned in papers. It was a nightmare: versions floated around, it was hard to track which version was which, I had to wait until classtime to hand back comments. These are all common and unremarkable issues, but once I knew there was a better way, they seemed intolerable.

So this semester, I required all students to turn in all assignments on GDocs. I simply assign labels to them to differentiate the different classes and assignments (and I have one red label "_TO_GRADE" to track what I haven't touched yet). So far it's working well.

An added bonus is that I was able to lead students through peer reviewing via GDocs. Students inserted comments in each others' papers. When I reviewed the drafts later, I commented on these comments as well. It worked quite well.

I don't believe I've used GDocs to its maximum extent, but it's worked very well so far.

Questions? Drop a comment or drop me a line.

Reading :: Soldiers of Reason

Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire
By Alex Abella

In the Foreword to this book, the author tells how he gained access to RAND. "One of the managers," he tells us dramatically, "confided that he thought agreeing to this book was either the brightest or the dumbest move RAND had ever made" (p.3).

Interestingly, I read the Foreword just days after I mentioned to a RAND contact that I was about to begin the book. His reaction was unenthusiastic; he had not read the book, but seemed to imply that those who had were not impressed. Not great, but not terrible, more of a wash.

That's a pretty good summary -- both of the writing style and the book's content. The book is full of hyperbolic statements and characterizations like this one:

RAND's hawkish views of Soviet intentions, distilled in Leites's works and Nitze's jeremiads, fit the paranoia of the age, the national terror over an impending nuclear conflict, the abhorrence of anything that wasn't true-blue American. Nevertheless, RAND analysts believed that with hard work, dedication, and sacrifice -- and the prescriptions issuing from Santa Monica -- there might still be a future worth living. One of these RAND prescriptions would pull the world from the brink of possible nuclear annihilation, while another would rewrite the basic concepts of social welfare, politics, and government in America and the West. (p.39)

Yet the book itself is just okay. Abella is curious about RAND, but that curiosity leads him to attribute all sorts of things solely or primarily to RAND that seem to have deeper and broader roots. For instance, he attributes RAND's development of rational choice theory with "redefin[ing] the foundations of public policy by assuming that self-interest defines all aspects of human activity" (p.52) and noting that "RAND people were the primary practitioners of realpolitik in America's intellectual world" (p.96), while seemingly unaware of the interplay with Machiavelli and Adam Smith (neither of whom, I hasten to add, was a RAND analyst). For Abella, RAND seems to be the obligatory passage point for these fundamental shifts, but RAND is only one vector for the development of these ideas.

I also began to distrust Abella's characterizations of leading RAND figures from the glory days of the past. Invariably, these figures were portrayed as larger than life, with larger-than-life eccentricities and tragic flaws and blind spots. As often happens with this sort of text, the closer we get to the present day, the blander and more colorless RAND researchers get -- just as the miracle-working patriarchs of the Old Testament make way for the people you see at your local synagogue or church. I began to wonder whether the larger-than-life figures from the old RAND were more the artifact of temporal distance than faithful characterizations, and whether they became larger than life because they were mostly dead, known only through documents and recollections, unable to talk back to Abella's characterizations.

In any case, this book was interesting in spots, but I would seek out corroborating histories if I were to use it as a source.

Reading :: Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
By Peter Kent

When I recently Twittered that I was reading this book, I received two or three replies suggesting that SEO was "snake oil." SEO is certainly vulnerable to this claim: search engines are secretive about their exact algorithms, which seem to change frequently, and much of SEO consists of following good web design practice in any case. But this book makes the case that there is a there there: You really can do some things to boost SEO.

SEO, or search engine optimization, "refers to 'optimizing' Web sites and Web pages to rank well in the search engines" (p.14). The author, Peter Kent, argues that although many companies offer SEO without real expertise or measurable outcomes -- and many web designers will claim to build SEO sites without anything to back up that claim -- SEO is actually achievable.

One basic way to achieve SEO, Kent says, is simply to follow web standards: use validated markup, make sure images have ALT text, make sure the META tag is properly filled with keywords. (Coincidentally, these are the same measures you should take for ensuring web accessibility.) But other ways include registering links with web directories; getting reciprocal links; and examining keywords to see which ones will capture traffic to your site, then weaving them into your text and META tags. The latter was most interesting to me, since it involves actual research and some degree of what might be regarded rhetorical analysis.

In all, this book appears to provide a solid foundation for SEO. It doesn't tell you everything you need to know, I'm sure, but it gives you an idea of what SEO is and how it differs from snake oil.

Assistant Professor position, Emerging Communication Technologies and Digital Media

Are you in rhetoric or a related field? Do you study digital media? Are you an assistant professor or about to receive your Ph.D.? And have you ever dreamed of working at a Research I university in the (self-proclaimed) music capital of the world?

You may be in luck. We're hiring. I'm the chair of the hiring committee.

Don't hesitate to contact me over email if you have questions, and please disseminate widely to your graduate students, friends, etc.

The Department of Rhetoric & Writing (DRW) at The University of Texas at Austin is accepting applications for an assistant professor position in emerging communication technologies and digital media, including video and gaming, and with emphasis on production.

DRW faculty members have the opportunity to teach a wide array of courses designed to contribute to the undergraduate major in Rhetoric and Writing and the graduate concentration in Digital Literacies and Literatures -- all with the support of our nationally renowned Computer Writing and Research Lab (CWRL), which operates state-of-the-art computer classrooms. As a member of the DRW faculty, the selected candidate will be expected to teach at all levels of our curriculum, to direct dissertations, MA reports, and honors theses, to publish actively, and to offer service to the Department, the College, and the University.

The successful candidate will demonstrate both a scholarly and a pedagogical commitment to the intersections of rhetoric and technology studies and should have completed a PhD in rhetoric and writing or a related field prior to start date.

The DRW boasts a dynamic, collegial, nationally and internationally recognized faculty with interests in the history, theory, and criticism of rhetoric, composition theory and pedagogy, technologies of writing, visual rhetoric, empirical research, writing in the disciplines and professions, rhetoric and poetics, and language and literacy studies. Sub-units of the DRW include the Undergraduate Writing Center, the Computer Writing and Research Lab, and the College of Liberal Arts Writing Across the Curriculum Initiative. Teaching load is 2/2; salary is competitive.

Application deadline is October 31, 2008.

Email a letter of application, curriculum vita, dissertation abstract, and statement of teaching philosophy (no longer than one page) to Search Committee Chair Clay Spinuzzi at clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu.

Also submit three letters of recommendation via U.S. Mail to:

Clay Spinuzzi, Search Committee Chair

Department of Rhetoric & Writing
1 University Station B5500
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-0200

Position funding is pending budgetary approval. A background check will be conducted on successful candidate. The University of Texas at Austin is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.