Houston Congressman twitters from House floor

Just amazing. I wonder how many direct messages he'll get as the result of this post?  

techPresident – CrackBerry Addicts vs Twittering Sunlighters on the Floor of Congress

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Why not to buy an iPhone 3G

Tomi Ahonen has a long post asking: what's the big deal with the new iPhone? And points out that with the low (subsidized) price, the iPhone has switched market segments -- and Apple is not ready for the switch.

Now Apple abandons that strategy of premium pricing. It jumps into the fray of the mid-field. Partly the iPhone exclusivity will be lost when everybody has it (or can afford it). Partly the cool factor disappears when iPhones are on every table. Partly the very fickle nature of the customer tastes in the industry will bite back at Apple. They cannot wait 12 months for a new model (from year to year into the future) if they intend to take on mid-market Nokia, Samsung, LG and SonyEricsson model ranges - who release models every month, Nokia releases new models almost every week. I've said before, that it advanced markets the replacement cycle among young employed adults is 6 months - two new phones every year - such as in Japan, South Korea, and here in Hong Kong for example - so if the iPhone does not evolve and improve - it will soon suffer as a mid-field phone model. At the top luxury end, you can wait, but not in this crowded mid-field.

He reminds us that the US is the "backwater" of the mobile industry and that the iPhone is missing some of the basic features of European and Japanese phones. He also doesn't think RIM has anything to worry about.
Communities Dominate Brands: Apple iPhone 3G, what gives - great price but still..

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NCTE discovers RSS

NCTE Inbox Blog: RSS: Bringing What’s New to You

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Obama is a Mac, McCain is a PC?

Patrick Ruffini's latest thoughts on new media and the current campaign.

Obama, the Halo Effect, and What's Changed | The Next Right

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Monkeyfishing

My Way News - Scientists find monkeys who know how to fish

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Austin 3.0

Kristine and Joey from UT's ACTLab run down Austin's tech-creative scene, including coworking. They're a lot more plugged into it than I am (for now).

Austin 3.0 » Blog Archive » Austin’s Geek Summer “stuff maker” scene

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Two more approaches to mobile geolocation tracking

One is Citysense by Sense Networks. It anonymously tracks phones' geolocations and displays them on heat maps on your own phone:

Citysense is built on top of the company’s main technology platform, Macrosense. The company ingests billions of data points about people’s location from cell phones, GPS devices, WiFi, and even taxis. The company also collects geo-location data from everyone who downloads Citysense, or any future app (although, the company considers the data to be yours, and you can delete it from the database at any time).

The other is Buzzd, an app that was automatically bookmarked in the new Opera Mobile download. This one is opt-in and focuses on "buzz" around specific events, particularly music events. It's also location-specific, but it's opt-in and therefore not anonymous. Accessible via SMS and mobile browser.

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The phone is the new identity locus

A USA Today story about the new iPhone has this throwaway line:

The software add-ons have the potential to turn the iPhone into the pocket computer of the future, as essential, Apple hopes, as the keys in your pocket or purse.

The reason we put things on our key fobs is that keys have, until recently, been the locus of our identity. We use keys to get into our own private spaces (home, office) and shared areas. So we keep them on us all the time.

The phone is the new locus of our identity. I don't know about you, but my phone is on or near me all but 1.5 hours per day (they don't allow them in the gym). I stow my keys in my luggage when I travel, but my phone is on me all the time. Keys represent access, but the phone represents communication and self-mediation, connecting me to all of my contexts and contacts. I suspect that's already true for many people, so the line from the USA Today piece seems a few years late.

It's presto, change-o as new iPhone is unveiled - USATODAY.com

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The Austin coworking scene

Longtime readers may remember that I reviewed Zuboff and Maxmin's The Support Economy four years ago, and despite some of the book's problems, I found it to be very useful in thinking through some of the phenomena I had been seeing in a study I was analyzing. (That study is the basis of my second book, Network, out this fall.) In particular, it helped me to better theorize and analyze blurred organizational boundaries, horizontal learning, and recombinant relationships among employees of the same and different companies.

One of Zuboff and Maxmin's more interesting statements was that we would begin to see more federations, or organizations that come into being to achieve a specific project before dispersing again. One good example is that of a graphic designer who owns a sole proprietorship: when she is contracted, she subcontracts other specialists to do parts of the work, then provides the "face" for that federation until the project is over. At that point the subcontractors disperse. Some of them might be employed in her next project -- and she might in turn be subcontracted by one of these others in their next project. I'm currently conducting a research project on small graphic design shops, and we're seeing this quite a bit. And although the contractor/subcontractor relationship has been around for a while, technological developments are making it really take off: mobile phones, laptops, and high-speed internet connections in particular.

Certain trades, such as graphic design, web design, and marketing, are particularly amenable to this sort of work organization. These trades' work is largely comprised of one-off engagements and mediated largely through digital technologies. So we're seeing a lot of people who work when they like, where they like, especially as contractors or freelancers. In fact, they tend to get better wages that way, since they don't have to pay the company for overhead. (The tradeoff is that they have to supply their own benefits and find their own work.)

But it's lonely working in your home office. So we're increasingly seeing a phenomenon called coworking. Put simply, these contractors and freelancers arrange to meet with other contractors and freelancers -- say, at a coffee shop with free wifi -- and work in the same physical space on their different projects. If you're an activity theorist, you might think of these meeting spaces as the intersecting penumbras of the individuals' work activities. They're working on different projects, but in the presence of others in the same or affiliated trades.

But, importantly, these can also be collaborative spaces and networking spaces. Someone who works close to you on a different project today might become your subcontractor -- or subcontract you -- tomorrow. And even if that never happens, you might end up being their sounding board, critique partner, technical support, or drinking buddy. I think this trend bears watching.

One flavor of coworking is called "jelly"; it's informal and irregular. It got its name because its founders (inventors?) were eating jelly beans when they conceived the idea. (But it reminds me of the "gels" that Sheller discusses: "whereas a network implies clean nodes and ties, then, a gel is suggestive of the softer, more blurred boundaries of social interaction" (p.47).

As you might expect, Austin is one of the few places where Jelly has taken off in a big way. JellyInAustin is a website for coordinating (or "forecasting") Jelly meetups, and acts as a community site.

Affiliated is the Austin Social Media Club, which hosts leading thinkers on social media and proponents of coworking (there's a lot of overlap). SMC describes itself as "part think tank, part curiosity, all new media."

Since coffee shops are not necessarily the best place to cowork -- and certainly not the best place to meet clients -- at least two efforts are being made to create coworking spaces in Austin. Julie Gomoll's Launch Pad Coworking launches in September 2008; and Conjunctured is partnering with StartupDistrict.com to open up another coworking space this summer that is meant to anchor a de facto tech incubator. In Conjunctured's case, the idea is to provide independent contractors with stable collaboration spaces, but also stable relationships with other entrepreneurs. Coworkers could freely subcontract each other for jobs as short as two hours, could form more stable teams, and could share expertise and participate in mutual critique. If stable teams decided to develop their own companies, they would be encouraged to lease property nearby, creating a de facto startup district.

Coworking is a really interesting trend, going beyond project-oriented organizations, beyond federations, and further toward entirely networked organizations. At the same time, it faces significant challenges in terms of accountability, reputation, trust, stability, and project management and planning. Those challenges are already being addressed with some emergent systems, practices, and expectations, but I expect significant further development. I'm going to be watching these developments closely over the next several months and will blog about them here when possible.

Soon I'll also be blogging about recent conversations with two members of Conjunctured. They're fascinating, and should provide further insights into the challenges above. In my view, we have to keep close watch on these challenges, not least because some of our students will be facing them soon.

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Supposedly the weak economy will bury landlines

Of course, the most expensive-to-serve areas -- the rural areas, where low population density and vast spaces mean that telecomm companies have to lay lots of infrastructure per person -- are also underserved by wireless companies. So I don't think landlines will disappear soon.

Survey: Weak economy will bury landlines as mobile phones become ubiquitous - Austin Business Journal:

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The expansion of the mobile social web

Est. 975m by 2012. That seems a little low given mobile phone penetration rates. How will they generate revenue? "advertising, subscription services, and premium upgrades." Ad revenue appears to be the most pervasive, but I wonder how long ads can support social networks. They need another revenue stream.

Mobile Social Web: 975 Million Users By 2012 - ReadWriteWeb

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STC tweets

At the recent Society for Technical Communication conference, they used the hash tag #stc2008 to categorize their tweets. I expect we'll see more of this at conferences and other public gatherings.

#stc2008 - Summize

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How to locate a mobile phone

A primer discussing the many ways to make mobile devices location-aware, and why it matters. (The main reason: contextual advertising.)

Location Technologies Primer

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An effusive Plurk review

I haven't used the serice, but Muhammad Saleem has.

Plurk: Unique or Just Another Twitter Clone? - ReadWriteWeb

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It's a sure winner?

Via Slashdot. Preston Galla at ComputerWorld is pushing the idea that

"If Google really wanted to deliver a knockout punch to Microsoft, it would integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs, and sell support for the combined suite to small businesses, medium-sized business, and large corporations. Given the reach of Google, the quality of OpenOffice, and the lure of free, it's a sure winner."

I strongly doubt that this would deliver a "knockout punch," that Google wants to compete directly in this space, or that a full suite is in Google's strategic roadmap. Let's take just the last point: Google's strategy is to enhance online collaboration and display through the web browser (desktop and mobile) in order primarily to enhance online experience -- and sell more advertising. Driving people offline during the drafting and collaboration process, and encouraging them to use features that can't be used with the online version such as footnotes, is counter to the strategy.

Slashdot | Why Google Should Embrace OpenOffice

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Status messages - not aggregation but capillary action

Confused of Calcutta speculates about the ways we'll handle status messages in social networks in the near future:

I think we’re going to see an explosion of activity in the status message related tool space, with two different sets of tools. One to do with personal “manual” input, one to do with automated input. In both cases, I think we’re going to see this explosion connect with a similar set of explosions in the visualisation space, so that we see more colour, more heatmaps, more timelines, more fractal representations, more radar diagrams, more tag-cloud-like diagrams …… but all to do with status messages.

Status messages with a difference. Not aggregated, not summarised, but built around a capillary-action publish-subscribe model. Truly personalised.

Wondering about status messages amongst other things

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NCTE discovers Twitter

NCTE Inbox Blog: Twitter: 140-Character Professional Development and Writing Tool

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TimeWarner Cable testing metered Internet bandwidth in Beaumont, Texas

$1 per GB for bandwidth going over the plan. Sigh.

Going Medieval: Time-Warner Begins Metered Bandwidth Testing

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Filtrbox

Filtrbox is out in private beta. It's a visual tool for filtering out specific content. The obvious app: ego surfing. From the site:

Filtrbox is an intelligent content and news monitoring service that does the work of monitoring the millions of blogs and online news sources for you. In one place. Stay competitive, save time, and keep everyone on the same page. Filtrbox is powerful and easy to use, and you can access the new content via the dashboard, email, or custom RSS feeds.

In practice, it's very easy to use. You search for a term and Filtrbox brings up three panes: a tagcloud of words that appear in the search results, a pane for refining the search, and a pane listing results. If your search is overly broad, you can drag tags into the appropriate spots to include or exclude them in the refined search results. This allows you to inductively refine the search until it looks solid. Then you can save the search and have it push results to your email box, dashboard, etc. Results are visualized in graph form.

Filtrbox is not a general search; it focuses on the blogosphere and online news. It is therefore well positioned for marketers, managers, etc. In an increasingly informated world, online identities are also brands, so Filtrbox could make a good platform for ego surfing as well.

filtrbox : home

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Microblogging platform 2: Plurk

Like Twitter, but with optional tags called qualifiers ("is," "feels", "thinks", "loves"). Can define smaller groups (cliques). Does not appear to push updates to SMS at present. People are characterizing it as "weird" and aimed towards the Neopets crowd, but that's just window dressing.

Your life, on the line - Plurk.com

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Microblogging platform 1: Adocu

Like Twitter, but allows only one word per post. Not a joke.

Adocu Is The World’s First Nano-Blogging Platform

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A welcome to arms

Luke: Dean Kamen's wonderful prosthetic robot arm - (37signals)

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The slippery slope of telecommuting

Higher gas prices -> one-day-a-week telecommuting -> constant telecommuting -> "extreme" telecommuting from different parts of the globe.

I am skeptical. Although some lines of work are pretty amenable to this sort of progression, others certainly aren't. And distributing work in this way tends to be accompanied by attenuated organizational structures and typically a shift to temporary federations of subcontractors rather than stable long-term organizations. Definitely we are seeing and will continue to see this sort of movement in some sectors, but I don't think it will catch on across the entire workforce the way casual Fridays did.

Instapundit.com -

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Android vs. iPhone: The bottom line

iPhone is Mac, Android is more like Linux. One focuses on control, the other on customization and openness. Oh, and of course Android is built to funnel people to the web where Google can leverage its own services and ad network.

Google's Android: How Will it Compare to iPhone? - ReadWriteWeb

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CFP: Technology-Focused Collaborative Research in English Studies (Collection)

Laura McGrath, who visited us at the CWRL some time back, is calling for papers for an edited collection on technology-focused collaborative research in English studies. Looks really interesting and timely. Deadline is August 31.

CFP: Technology-Focused Collaborative Research in English Studies (Collection) | Kairosnews

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Jaiku update

The recent FriendFeed discussion has prompted Jyri to do some damage control. They are focusing on the move to Google App Engine rather than maintaining and extending the current server.

Jaikido Blog | Making progress

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Android - I am 95% sold

I've been intrigued by Google's project to bring the Android mobile platform to market, but also worried -- Google has a habit of releasing beta software and taking on projects that don't quite get completed. But they demoed Android today. And one of many possible killer apps is Street View that uses the phone's internal compass:



Total game changer, especially for someone with no sense of direction.

Clinton strategy comes to fruition

Just before the Texas primaries, I speculated that the Clinton campaign would try to exploit the difference between primary and caucus results to argue that the caucus results were not representative.

Today, the strategy came to fruition. Here's the relevant paragraph from the report (PDF), which documents a nationwide pattern in primaries vs. caucuses.

Example 2: Texas held a primary & caucus on March 4 and once again widely different results were recorded. Over 2.8 million Texans voted in the primary and gave Clinton a 100,000 vote margin over Obama, a 52% to 48% win. However, just hours later, the Texas caucus registered an Obama win over Clinton of 56% to 44% [with 41% of the precincts reporting, total caucus participation has not been released]. Allocation of the 126 primary pledged delegates were Clinton 65 and Obama 61. Allocation of the 68 caucus pledged delegates were Obama 38 and Clinton 29. Bottom line: Obama actually won 5 more pledged delegates than Clinton in Texas. Common sense begs the question if this result was truly in line with the will of the Texas voters.

My sense is that this is too little, too late. But you can see the argument coming down the pike: The general election will follow the same format as the primaries. This looks like an attempt to hold onto Clinton superdelegates and force a brokered convention.

Twitter + FriendFeed vs. Jaiku

A thread sprang up overnight -- on FriendFeed, so it's a little biased. The highlights:

• Jaiku is moving to Google App Engine
• People are using these conversations to hawk their own Twitter clones
• Folks are starting to speculate that Microsoft will buy Twitter just for the community. I wonder what they would rename it? "Microsoft Text Conversations"?
  

People's complaints about Jaiku:

• They hate the interface.
• It's too complicated.
  
• It's slow.
• Community evangelism has been lackluster, so the people just aren't there.
• 'according to rumour, apart from its port to Google AppEngine, it's now maintained as a "20% time" project.'

Many speculate that Jaiku fits into Google's Android strategy and we'll see a location-aware Android client.

Why isn't Jaiku discussed much as a serious Twitter competitor? I just took another look and I hate the UI. Plus it's ssslllooowwww. - FriendFeed

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Interessement

Wired's Danger Blog reports:

"The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that the discovery was a cover story to camouflage the real mission of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold War nuclear submarines," the Times of London and others report.

He was allowed to search for the Titanic -- but only after inspecting the wreck's nuclear reactors to see how they had been affected by being submerged.
Titanic 'Discovery' was a Secret Nuke Sub Dive | Danger Room from Wired.com

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Twitter addicts suffer withdrawal, blame everyone

Like many early adopters, I have become a Twitter addict for reasons I've discussed elsewhere on this blog. Now Twitter is experiencing a lot of down time, and Twitter addicts are getting all shaky and blaming everyone and everything for the troubles.

Jeff Jarvis wants Google to "buy Twitter and put us out of our misery." He reasons that Google should want it and could fix it. (Google already has Jaiku and Dodgeball.)

Steve Gilmour blames FriendFeed, which he implies was the "errant API project eating way too much of our Jabber (a flavor of instant messenger) resources" to which Twitter referred in its explanation of the downtime. Gilmour characterizes FriendFeed as being built on the back of Twitter, which hardly seems fair even if so much of FF's content comes from Twitter. It's not like killing FriendFeed will stop Facebook, Twhirl, AlertThingy, etc. from pulling content off, or BrightKite, IM, texting, and hundreds of others from placing content on.

ReadWriteWeb desperately looks for Twitter alternatives, looking at Pownce, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and BrightKite. Of these, only Jaiku and BrightKite accept SMS, and none serve the pipe function that makes Twitter so brilliant and indispensible. When I can SMS a service a task and have it passed on to Remember the Milk, and when I can direct-message someone and expect them to get it via SMS, then we will be in business. At present, all of these other alternatives fit into different parts of the information ecosystem.

My sense is that Twitter is going to have to (a) become more strict about the API and (b) figure out how to scale appropriately. But right now Twitter is the only service that does exactly what it does. BrightKite is the closest to it in a lot of ways, but it doesn't meet the sheer simplicity of Twitter and it doesn't perform the pipe function.

Oh, if you have a Jaiku invite, send it my way and I'll review the service in comparison to Twitter.

RESULTS: CCCC Theming Contest

Last week I announced a CCCC theming contest. As I explained, the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication always has a theme -- and given the sheer breadth of the conference, the themes always seem to be vague metaphors ("Taking it to the Streets," "Making Waves"). In turn, the themes inspire a lot of presentations with themed titles and, well, bad puns.

My challenge: to supply metaphoric themes for future conferences. The more outrageous, the better.

About the Submissions
First, a word about the submissions. I suggested that people submit themes via Twitter, blog comment, or FriendFeed comment. I received

• 22 entries via Twitter public stream
• 1 entry from a locked Twitter stream
• 1 Twitter direct message
• 1 blog comment
• 0 comments on FriendFeed

for a total of 25 entries.

The contest post on the blog got a total of 65 hits, 54 of which were unique. Unfortunately I can't tell how many came from FriendFeed vs. Twitter, but I notice a general surge in traffic to my blog from both.

The Entries
In no particular order, here are the entries:

• Samantha Blackmon: dang, I thought spinuzzi was the theme for the next conference! (Okay, I am not sure this was meant to be an entry, but I like the idea. CS)
  
• George H. Williams: CCCC2012 (St. Louis, MO): What's the matter with Missouri?
• George H. Williams: CCCC2012 (St. Louis, MO): What's that smell?
• George H. Williams: CCCC 2011 (Atlanta, GA): Writing as Kudzu +
• Bill Hart-Davidson: CCCC San Franscisco 2008: Championing Gay* Writes! (*Gay 1. adj. Happy, joyous) !
  
• Collin Brooke: CCCC 2012 (StL): MIssouri Loves Company
  
• Lee Sherlock: late entry #2 - CCCC: Composition or Compost? Recycling the Waste of Writing.
• Lee Sherlock: late entry into the theming contest - CCCC 2100: Writing in a Post-Apocalyptic Age.
  
• George H. Williams: CCCC 2010 (Louisville, KY) Writing/Reading/Race(ing) the Derby
• James Ford: San Francisco 2008: Battling the Front Lines of Mini-Meta-Metaphors While Peering into the Looking Glass of Hope and Change
  
• Collin Brooke: CCCC 20XX: Eponymic Neology (Every presenter must use their last name as a verb in paper title)
  
• Collin Brooke: CCCC 20XX: [Insert Theme Here]
• Lanette Cadle: CCCC--Textual Carnies: Knowing when to shout, "Hey rube!"
• Douglas Eyman: CCCC - The Completely Arbitrary and Idiosyncratic Theme Theme
  
• J. James Bono: "CCCC 200X: Writing Themes" (had to be done.)
  
• Collin Brooke: CCCC 20XX: The Audacity of Scope
  
• Collin Brooke: CCCC 20XX: Gone Engfishin'
  
• James J. Brown Jr: CCCC 2009: The Write Stuff
• Lanette Cadle: For the next 4Cs in Louisville: Decomposing the Center. Oh, I sense horses and compost metaphors for that.
  
• Billie Hara: "gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooaaaalll"
  
• Julie Platt: CCCC 2008: No Country for Bad Comp
  
• Andrew Mara: St. Louis 2012: A Rising River Floats Your Boat
• Alice Robison: CCCC 20XX: Growing Writing During Wartime: A Coalition of the Tilling
• Alice Robison: CCCC 20XX: Wiki! How? Developing Foundations for Metaphorical Constructions
  
• Bill Hart-Davidson: CCCC 2008 San Francisco: The Hills Are Alive with the Sounds of Writing

You can see how difficult it was for me to pick a winner. We have some really outstandingly bad ones here. But I called this contest and so I must award a prize.

Honorable Mentions
Really, all of these were strong contenders.

• Bill Hart-Davidson: CCCC 2008 San Francisco: The Hills Are Alive with the Sounds of Writing. Bill's entry evoked the Austrian countryside, and I imagined the loud scribbling of thousands of scholars. Like locusts, only less productive.
  
• Alice Robison: CCCC 20XX: Growing Writing During Wartime: A Coalition of the Tilling. Alice's was appropriately contorted in order to lead to the pun, plus I detect a Talking Heads reference. I really liked this one.
  
• Julie Platt: CCCC 2008: No Country for Bad Comp. Julie's entry is current, but not too current, and I can imagine the many presentation titles that would be yielded by the "country" metaphor.
• Lanette Cadle: CCCC--Textual Carnies: Knowing when to shout, "Hey rube!" Lanette's pun on the title of Textual Carnivals is a great inside joke, and of course it keeps alive the sneaking feeling that we composition teachers aren't really doing any good. (For non-comp people, this sneaking feeling is FALSE.)
• Collin Brooke: CCCC 2012 (StL): MIssouri Loves Company. Not technically a metaphor, but I am a sucker for a good pun. Short, to the point, sums up the feeling of a Saturday late morning session when there are more presenters than audience members.
  

But there can be only one.

The Winner
The winner -- who will receive a certificate fit for framing, plus a bottle of beer or 'chup, is:

• James Ford: San Francisco 2008: Battling the Front Lines of Mini-Meta-Metaphors While Peering into the Looking Glass of Hope and Change.

James' entry really captured the spirit of the contest. Not only is it a metaphor, it is a hopelessly mixed metaphor with many components that can break off and launch themselves with sickening thuds into the titles of multiple presentations. The martial metaphor at the beginning of the theme is totally at odds with the placid one at the end. The visual metaphor is present, as it so often is, and we see the themes of the Obama campaign come in almost verbatim for that hint of trendiness, the trendiness that seems so current when the conference is planned but so stale by the time it actually arrives. Speaking of stale, "looking glass" references Through the Looking Glass and thus the attenuated ties with literature that compositionists still, er, enjoy. And the brilliant "mini-meta-metaphors" tarts up the self-referential "metaphors" with not one, but two prefixes that pretend to add layers of meanings while actually subtracting meeting.

Well done, James. Well done.

Twitter's scaling issues

I saw this article on Twitter's scaling problems earlier on my mobile and immediately (of course) Twittered it. The gist is this: Twitter's ever-more-frequent downtime has to do with the fact that early on, they greatly underestimated the complex issue of one-to-one and many-to-one connections. "The issue is that group messaging is very difficult to achieve at a grand scale," Nik Cubrilovic points out, and "Twitter is unique in that it needs to parse a large number of messages and deliver them to multiple recipients, with each user having unique connections to other users." Basically, Twitter is doing something that has never been done before at this scale. "Every new Twitter user and every new connection results in an exponentially greater computational requirement."

Cubrilovic goes on to say:

Some of the best web applications are able to efficiently solve very complex problems to produce simple results for users (Eg. Google). The success of these applications is due to the innovative efforts by developers to solve large technical challenges, where they have often had to break new ground for solutions. For Twitter to reach a similar point of reliability they too will need a very comprehensive, ground-breaking solution.

Okay, let's stop there. At about the same time Twitter came online, Jaiku was unveiled by two former researchers from Nokia. Like Twitter, Jaiku was conceived from the ground up to work with mobile phones through SMS. Like FriendFeed, Jaiku pulled in activities from other services and called them "activity streams." And like JotSpot, Jaiku has been acquired by Google and has entered what looks to be a long period of reengineering, rescaling, and rebranding similar to JotSpot's. (JotSpot recently reemerged as Google Pages.)

I wonder if Google is even now working on the same scaling issues that are plaguing Twitter. They certainly have the expertise and the hardware to scale. I just hope it doesn't disappear into the Google maw the way Dodgeball did.

(n.b., Jaiku was founded by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen. Jyri Engeström is the son of Yrjo Engeström, a name familiar to anyone with a passing interest in activity theory.)

(n.b., I have not bothered to discuss services such as FriendFeed and Pownce as competitors because they do not update via SMS. They do what they do decently, but SMS is a must for this space.)

Twitter At Scale: Will It Work?

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Of course they do

I blogged yesterday about how Opera reports that a high percentage of Opera Mini use in the US goes to social networking sites. Maybe one explanation is the phenomenon in the article below. If people become concerned about their bosses reading their company emails, one obvious way to deal with it is with a relatively inexpensive mobile device that does not use the company's networking infrastructure at all -- a device like the iPhone, consumer Blackberry, Android phone, or even my aging Samsung A500M. To paraphrase Princess Leia, the more IT tightens its grip, the more packets slip through its fingers.

Slashdot | US Firms Read Employee E-mail On a Massive Scale

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Bad news for Blackboard? Google Pages is an easy way to generate public or private course sites

I did this one in about ten minutes. UT apparently has a Google Apps Professional Edition subscription, making it easy to make these pages public or confined to utexas.edu users. Will have to seriously think about using this in the fall.

Spinuzzi - sample course page (spinuzzi)

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Twitter went down several times, and they don't know why

I had assumed that it was just high demand, but "The truth is we're not sure what's happening." I should note that yesterday was also the "TwitOut" led by Robert Scoble, in which people boycotted Twitter for FriendFeed; doesn't look like that put a dent in usage at all.

Twitter Blog

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Google Sites open for business

The former JotSpot, which I had hoped would become a robust project management system, is instead a free collaboration space. As I speculated a while back, this might be useful for transient collaborative projects such as student group projects. I'll have to take it for a spin later, but here's the link.

Official Google Blog: Google Sites now open to everyone

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Am I a typical Opera Mini user?

I wonder because of these interesting survey results from Opera, which makes the browser that I use, Opera Mini. The results are in line with my usage:

According to Opera's survey of the more 11.9 million Opera Mini users in March, almost 41% of mobile traffic now goes to social networking -- up to 60% in some countries, including the US.

Yes, I spend a lot of time checking Slandr (a Twitter web-based client), FriendFeed, Facebook, MySpace, etc. in addition to reading news and checking email and calendar. All this usage comes at odd moments, such as riding the bus, waiting for an event, or, er, the moment I get up. My sense has been that I use the mobile web more than others, but I wonder what Opera Mobile users (who I imagine to be more continuously connected than most) are up to and how that group resembles others who will hit the market soon via their iPhones, Android phones, and consumer-end Blackberries.  I imagine Opera's raw data would be fascinating to look through.

Report: The Mobile Web is the New Hangout - ReadWriteWeb

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Email failing

Quote of the day:

There's too much wrong with email. 14-year-old girls know this. I'm just trying to catch up.

Sure. I'm finding myself using Twitter's direct messaging more for on-the-fly contacts (and I really wish Twitter would buy some new servers to compensate). Email is good for moving large texts and small attachments, but it doesn't work well for short conversations, group conversations, public conversations, or especially mobile conversations. That's why people are expanding their media ecosystems; email no longer serves as a best-fit solution for the many communication tasks that we've funneled through it.

Faster Future: Publishing possibilities now and beyond: How many 14 year olds use email?

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Reading :: From Teams to Knots

From Teams to Knots: Studies of Collaboration and Learning at Work
By Yrjo Engestrom

Yrjo Engestrom is, of course, well known for his work in developing activity theory via theorization and empirical cases. I've reviewed several of his pieces on this blog as I've worked through my own thoughts on AT and my own studies. When I found out that he was publishing a new book with Cambridge University Press this year, I immediately preordered it and waited for it with anticipation -- and dread.

The anticipation came, of course, from the fact that Engestrom is such a leading thinker in AT and produces both theoretical constructs and empirical research with expertise. The dread comes from the fact that I had just sent the final manuscript for my upcoming book, Network, to Cambridge UP. Network is my own attempt to theorize (and criticize) AT by putting it into dialogue with actor-network theory via a study of a telecommunications company. It also seeks to develop AT to better address knowledge work. And it discusses and (gently, I think) criticizes Engestrom's own attempts along these lines. So while one part of me was eager to see how Engestrom has developed his work, another part of me worried that his new book would make mine outdated before it could even be published.

I'm happy to report that Network is still relevant -- and that Engestrom's From Teams to Knots is a new essential text for activity theorists.

Engestrom's book revolves around the question of how to understand, study, and theorize collaborative work and collaborative learning in knowledge work. The book is based on the many articles and conference presentations published by Engestrom and his research teams over the last few years, and almost every chapter is firmly grounded in empirical work. (One partial exception is Chapter 9, the bulk of which involves the analysis of a Tony Hillerman novel.) As Engestrom moves through the chapters, he moves away from the notion of teams and towards the notion of knots, "rapidly pulsating, distributed, and partially improvised orchestration of collaborative performance between otherwise loosely connected actors and activity systems" (p.194). He persuasively argues that this form of collaboration has become more prevalent than traditional teams due to ongoing changes in organizations, particularly the phenomenon of co-configuration (in which products adapt to customers, supported by ongoing conversations between customer-product pairs and the company) (p.195).

To deal with such changes, Engestrom develops some elements of activity theory.

One example is that of "runaway objects," partially-shared large-scale object(ive)s that bind together multiorganizational, multiactivity fields and that "require new forms of distributed and coordinated agency" (p.208).

Another example is that of mycorrhizae, or subterranean, "horizontal and multidirectional connections in human lives" (p.228), something that is "simultaneously a living, expanding process (or bundle of developing connections) and a relatively durable, stabilized structure; both a mental landscape or mindscape (Zerubavel, 1997) and a material infrastructure" (p.229). Engestrom characterizes this concept as used "in the same general sense" as Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome (p.228). However, Engestrom tends to fixate on the metaphor here (mycorrhizae as the "invisible organic texture underneath visible fungi" vs. rhizome as "a horizontal underground stem," p.228) rather than the theoretical concept that underlies the metaphor. Consequently, Engestrom reads Deleuze and Guattari's concept of rhizome as developmental and substitutes his own as a more developed and empirically grounded developmental account.

And this is where I breathed a little, selfish sigh of relief. Engestrom's work here is definitely important and useful work, and I plan to use these theoretical constructs in my future work. But one of the criticisms of AT that I make in Network is that activity theorists tend to focus on development to the exclusion of the sort of antigenealogical splicing that is described in Deleuze and Guattari and in actor-network theory. Here, Engestrom continues that path by taking development -- or weaving, to use the term I coin in Network -- as the central feature to investigate. So, although I really wish I had been able to read this book beforehand and incorporate its concepts into my own manuscript, I still think Network will have a contribution to make after all.

But enough about me. If you are at all interested in AT, you really should pick up From Teams to Knots. It develops AT in solid ways and backs the work up with solid case studies.

Wisdom = broader search of larger database

When older people struggle to remember names, phone numbers, etc. they sometimes assume that they are merely "getting old" and the mind is not working as well as it used to. But according to this article,

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The clutter of information makes older brains process information more slowly, but also more thoroughly, making them better problem solvers.

Memory Loss - Aging - Alzheimer's Disease - Aging Brains Take In More Information, Studies Show - Health - New York Times

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CCCC Theming Contest

Update: I changed the deadline to May 23 because I realized that a monthlong contest would be crazy. I now have 19 entries as of 5:52 AM May 20, 2008.

On Twitter, I noted that CCCC's theme this year ("Making Waves") led many to employ strained analogies in their panel proposals. This is not a new phenomenon: a couple of years back, as Colin pointed out, the theme "Taking it to the Streets" launched hundreds of similarly named panels.

This is a recurrent issue. When I was SIGDOC program chair, we decided to forego a conference theme because of these tendencies. But CCCC is prety well locked into supplying conference themes. And the broad nature of the conference means that these themes tend toward the broadly metaphorical rather than the specific ("Making Waves" rather than "Improving Editing"). It's the broad metaphors with no specific referents that cause the problem.

But surely we can do better than "Making Waves" or "Taking it to the Streets." So I announce the 2008 CCCC Theming Contest. Here's the ground rules:

• Entries should be one sentence or phrase that supplies a metaphor appropriate for a CCCC theme. It's got to be a metaphor. Make it fit within 140 characters, like a tweet.
  
• Metaphors should be broadly applicable to writing, or at least as broadly applicable as the actual themes above.
• The more outrageous, the better.
• But obscene, bigoted, or otherwise unacceptable entries will be deleted.
  
• You don't have to be a CCCC member to participate.
• Entries are due by June 18. (CHANGED: May 23.)
  
• Entries can be submitted in the comments of this post, via Twitter (@spinuzzi), or in a comment to this blog on FriendFeed. Twitter preferred.

All right? Let's take it to the streets and make some waves!

Scoble on FriendFeed vs. Facebook

He sees the two services as analogous, but one is open and the other is closed. He also thinks that Facebook's walled garden + Microsoft's search = locking Google out of the web. I think he goes a little over the top here, but you be the judge:

Can the open public Web fight back? Yes. It’s called FriendFeed. Notice that FriendFeed replaces almost all of Facebook’s killer features with open ones that are open to Google’s search.

So, now, do you see why I’m so interested in FriendFeed? It’s our only hope to compete with Microsoft’s new “buy enough and keep it closed” search strategy.

Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive Why Microsoft will buy Facebook and keep it closed «

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Special issue of TCQ: Posthuman Rhetorics and Technical Communication

Andrew Mara and Byron Hawk are putting together a really interesting call for papers for TCQ. Here's an excerpt:

According to N. Katherine Hayles, we have always been posthuman. Ever since the first social organization, the first use of fire, and the first development of language, humans have lived in and with systems. Even before its emergence as an academic field, professional and technical writers had been writing and living in organizational systems. Even when the profession is imagined as an isolated endeavor or end-of-the-process set of tasks, technical writers still must operate in larger, complex rhetorical situations. Many theorists have been trying to come to grips with this kind of situatedness from Michel Foucault's attempts to develop an archeological method to understand the human sciences to Bruno Latour's development of actor-network-theory to understand science's place within a complex social order. Professional and technical communication's emergence as a discipline has been marked by similar attempts to identify and articulate these systems perspectives. From Carolyn Miller's "Genre as Social Action" to Clay Spinuzzi's Tracing Genres through Organizations, the field has been trying to come to grips with the complex, and increasingly automated, systems a writer, text, and reader encounter, affect, and live in.

This special issue looks to extend the position that professional and technical communication has always been posthuman. By acknowledging this, we hope to open possibilities for thinking about rhetorical action in organizational, institutional, and technological contexts. As organizations become more complex, technologies more pervasive, and rhetorical intent more diverse, technical communicators need to develop multiple approaches to mapping and acting within these complex rhetorical situations. Philosophical, ethnographic, technological, or qualitative methods can all contribute to a larger understanding of the ways documents, technologies, and human actions affect/are affected by these larger distributed environments. Articulation theory in cultural studies, actor-network-theory in the sociology of science, GPS or data visualization in technical communication, and organizational theories in management are all posthuman rhetorics that enhance our understanding of the contexts in which writers think and act.

To submit:

Send inquiries, proposals, or completed manuscripts as .rtf or .doc attachments to the guest editors: Andrew Mara (Andrew.Mara@ndsu.edu) or Byron Hawk (bhawk@gmu.edu). Proposals are due by July 17, 2008. For accepted proposals, first-draft manuscripts will be due September 25, 2008, and finished manuscripts March 12, 2009, for publication in Winter 2010. Please contact us as soon as possible if you would like to serve as a reviewer for this issue.

Looks like a terrific issue.

Facebook, facing its decline

I blogged recently that I thought Facebook might have turned the corner -- not in a good way. TechCrunch elaborates.

Facebook’s Glass Jaw

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An overview of OpenID

OpenID has been on my radar forever, but I haven't bothered to try it out because nobody was using it. Now that's starting to change. The Inquisitor has a brief overview.  

OpenID At The Tipping Point: What You Need To Know

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Powerset is live

You can use natural language queries to search Wikipedia. I have played with this a little in beta. Not yet sure how much I will use it, but it might be a good way to go if you prefer to ask questions rather than select keywords.
Powerset

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Android developers receive $25k for projects

And the projects look pretty interesting. Google has an uneven history of supporting its projects, but the mix of open development, developer incentives, and the capabilities of the platform make me optimistic that this platform will be useful and used. Personally, I'm waiting to see the Android phones come to market in 3Q or 4Q before determining whether to go with an Android phone, iPhone, RIM, or other. But if even half of these described apps reach even half of their potential, Android is going to be well in the lead for my purposes.

Fifty Android Developers Get $25,000 Each: The List

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Managing personal projects the Spinuzzi way

I recently received an email asking for suggestions about personal knowledge management. Since I like to reuse my efforts, here's a modified version of what I suggested.

Personal knowledge management is by nature an idiosyncratic thing, so my ideal ecosystem will be different from others. That being said, I came to the conclusion a while back that omnibus solutions don't work all that well: usually software will do one or two things exceptionally well but is mediocre at other tasks. So I've been gravitating toward mashup solutions that preserve interoperability as much as possible.

Also, I've gravitated toward solutions that leverage mobile tech as much as possible: services that offer mobile interfaces, services that take and send text messages. That's mostly because I'm not working consistently in an office, and I like to check the calendar and set tasks on the fly; your mileage may vary.

So here's the criteria I have for applications:

• Tags. If you're going to work across services, you need to be able to filter everything via the same set of tags (or labels, in Google's terms). Tags allow you to specify project, role, etc. and to bring the same shape to data across services. Currently there's no way to synch tags across services, so I do this by hand, and ruthlessly prune. With a little initial effort, you get unanimity in tags across services. When it works, you can pull everything relevant into the same view. You can also assign the same data to multiple tags, meaning multiple roles and projects -- something that early web-based PM software such as Basecamp wouldn't allow.
  
• Mobile interface. Mobile interface accessible through a mobile browser, SMS (texting) interface preferred.
• Stability. Got to have uptime; preferably an established brand that will not disappear tomorrow.
• Data portability. Don't want to get trapped in a particular service. When necessary, apps should be able to share. Open APIs.
  
• Developer community. I don't write applications, but it's nice that others do. So I tend to use services that are supported by large user communities that develop plugins and etc.
  

So here's what I currently do:

• Email: Google Mail. I use GMail's tags (aka labels) extensively, and I like that I can assign colors to tags so I can visually scan through messages as well as filtering by tag. You can set filters to autotag messages. GMail also has a great mobile application if you like to check email via phone.
  
• Tasks: Remember the Milk, rememberthemilk.com. RTM has a GMail plugin so that you can see email and tasks in the same window. It also has tags. The tags aren't color-coded, but you do get a tag cloud, which is nice for seeing which projects are more fully developed. Mobile interface too.
  
• Documents, outlines, notes: Google Docs. I collaborate extensively, so the sharing features are great. With Google Gears integration, you can work offline as well, although you might prefer authoring in Word and uploading. Tags are color-coded in the same way as GMail, and I use the same tags and colors across the two. I dump all texts into GDocs that aren't confidential -- notes, ideas, outlines, chapters. I also coordinate complex collaborations in a spreadsheet. An excellent search feature also allows search-as-you-type. Again, the big advantage is tagging, which allows you to filter by project, role, or whatever. Mobile interface too.
  
• Calendar: Google Calendar. Same as above, plus GCal accepts appointments and sends reminders through text messaging.
• Trip scheduling: I haven't used it yet, but I intend to use TripIt: <http://www.tripit.com/>. The big news is that when you get a trip itinerary emailed to you, you forward it to TripIt and it parses the email, creating a unified view that you can access via mobile and share with individuals or the world. TripIt accepts airport reservations, hotel reservations, etc. and offers granular control so that you don't share everything on the itinerary. If your acquaintances also use the service, TripIt will inform you when you and they are in the same city and for how long.
• Notes. I've been using my blog to think out loud about tech issues and to review books; the book reviews in particular become raw material for my articles and books. The blog's an important part of the ecosystem, but it's not attached to particular projects, so I don't tag blog entries the way I do everything else.
  

Depending on your work habits, you might check out other more unified solutions. There are several desktop solutions such as CircusPonies Notebook <http://www.circusponies.com/>, Curio <http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/>, and DevonThink <http://www.devon-technologies.com/>, but I've found them to be rather limiting.

Do you want to discuss your own information ecosystem? Leave your take in the comments.

DeskAway

Sahil Parikh, founder of DeskAway, wrote to me about his company's product:

a project collaboration service for small distributed teams. We are based out of Mumbai, India and while most people were concentrating on the outsourcing business, we decided to put our energy into building something scalable that people across the world could use. We are live with paying customers - mostly from US, UK, France and India. DeskAway's main goal is to eliminate guesswork  - when multiple people start working on multiple projects/activities together.

DeskAway follows the familiar Basecamp model for web-based project management, but it adds several features, some of which have become common in more recent web-based PM software and some of which I haven't seen.

• Contact sharing
• Team blog
• Robust time tracking
• Reporting and analytics for project summaries, project timelines, time tracking
• An issues summary for managing and tracking breakdowns
• Project wiki

I have not yet signed up for the free trial, but hope to do so soon. It looks like an interesting product, and I like the emphasis on reporting and analytics.

DeskAway - Project Management Software, Project Collaboration Software, Task & Issue Tracking Software

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RescueTime data suggests Microsoft is still on top

That's the upshot of this (unscientific) data mining from desktop app RescueTime, which sits on your desktop, monitors your application and website usage, and allows you to tag those uses for your own self-analysis. I've used RescueTime for a while now (after switching from Wakoopa), and am really interested in the results and the potential for large-scale characterization of volunteer participants' application use. Of course, this initial report is also a way for RescueTime to indicate how it could sell this characterized data to app developers and presumably advertisers.

Early Adopters Still Spend More Time With Microsoft Than Google, Facebook, or Skype. But For How Long?

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Unified Activity Management is brought to the consumer

Michael Muller had a terrific talk about UAM at SIGDOC 2007. It's nice to see this fascinating approach being brought to Lotus Connections. UAM has a surface resemblance to lifestreaming (e.g., Facebook's activity streams) but is focused on bottom-up characterization among teams.

The AppGap » » IBM Lotus Connections - A Video on Activity-based Computing: News, views, and reviews of Work 2.0 tools, apps and practices

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Kinds of Twitter messages

ReadWriteWeb teamed up with Summize, a Twitter search engine, to characterize Twitter messages (tweets). From a scholarly point of view, this makes Twitter into a vast corpus. Here's the interesting news:

What we found is that there are three main types of conversations going on. First, there are status updates of every day occurrences such as, "getting coffee," "check out this post on X," "going to sleep," or other mundane life things. Second, there are short term memes where many people talk about some event before, during, or after it. These conversations are usually short lived -- ranging from a few minutes to a few hours. For example a TV show like "Lost" will have some buzz, before, during, and for a short time after the show airs, but will drop out of the stream very quickly. We saw that happen with "LSD" when the drug's creator Albert Hoffman died last week. The final type of discussion we see on Twitter, are long term memes. These are topics of interest that people talk about for days, weeks, or even months. Politics or new video games are great examples of these longer term discussions happening on the platform.

What People Say When They Tweet - ReadWriteWeb

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The question that political strategists need to begin asking

On TechPresident:

A Washington State state delegate named Suzi LeVine, looking for an easy way to organize her state’s Obama delegates, turned to free wiki service Wetpaint, which helped her quickly build the Barack Obama Delegates site. This is one of those sites that serve such an obvious function that we wonder how the delegates could live without it. So why haven’t supporters of the other candidates done anything similar?

techPresident – Obama Delegates Learn To Self-Organize

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Cellphone spam

Not a bad idea when built into the service and sharply targeted, as in Blyk; awful when broadcasted across phones that do not have unlimited texting plans. Frankly, this seems really boneheaded on the spammers' part: how many people will be eager to buy a product after having to pay for an unsolicited ad? Unfortunately, the result will probably be telecomms implementing overaggressive spam filters to avoid customer claims against them:

Now some consumers, like Ms. Lightfoot, are monitoring their cellphones more aggressively for unwanted messages and, in some cases, demanding refunds. Computer security companies have developed products to help fight mobile spam. And AT&T, Verizon and others are making it easier for customers to block unsolicited messages and keep spammers at bay.

Spam Moves to Cellphones and Gets More Invasive - New York Times

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Overlaying real world and game

I had thought of this sort of concept a while back, but it's interesting to see it being applied:

Using an iPhone or Google Android cell phone, Parallel Kingdom knows of a users physical location enabling a virtual character to move around in that area of the virtual world. Users can attack, trade, or mingle with people around them, and can pick on friends, build kingdoms, go on raids, wage war, or establish economic empires.

Parallel Kingdom: Role Playing Via iPhone or Android With Location Mashup

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filtering social media

An initial proposal for bringing some discernible shape to the streams being generated by social networking and social media tools.

Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media - ReadWriteWeb

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The Next Right

Patrick Ruffini, who has been blogging at his own site and at PrezVid, announces a new joint venture called The New Right. It's meant to spark a netroots movement for the right to counterbalance the established movement on the left. Ruffini explains:

Part of the problem is structural. When the conservative blogosphere first emerged, we were in the midst of a political upswing, with back-to-back-to-back victories in 2000, 2002, and 2004. Political activism wasn’t going to be a comparative advantage for the right online. Most were content just being pundits or media critics. This trend was reinforced by the blogosphere’s success in scalping Dan Rather, part of a series of new media-driven events that arguably changed the trajectory of the 2004 election.

Ever since then, a radically different set of circumstances has dominated our politics. It’s one that requires a substantially different response — one that requires us to stop being pundits and start being change agents.

Put simply, the party, and in many cases, the movement, has lost its moorings. Earmarks exploded ten-fold, and it wasn’t under a Democratic Congress. In this winter’s primary, we saw the once mighty fiscal-social-national conservative coalition turned in on itself, with economic conservatives pitted against social conservatives. And too many of the “experts” in the Presidential campaigns this cycle failed to modernize the way the party does business, clinging to the old top-down rostrums of direct mail and fundraising-by-cocktail-party in an increasingly networked and crowdsourced world.

It’s no wonder that Joe Conservative outside the Beltway feels that none of his self appointed “leaders” are listening to him. He looks to Washington and sees a leadership class that is too often arrogant, timid, divided, and technologically behind the curve. It’s no wonder why this year more than most his wallet has been sealed shut when it comes to supporting Republican candidates — even the good ones. 

Ruffini really gets these tech changes in political organization, strategy, and analysis, and it should be interesting seeing how he applies his knowledge in the new venture, no matter what your politics.

Patrick Ruffini :: Introducing The Next Right

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Work smarter, not harder

An argument for firing workaholics. Bottom line: no virtue in working hard if you can't prioritize, can't get things done, and inadvertently cause the crises you solve. 37Signals diagnoses workaholism as a symptom of perfectionism, and I think that's true, but it also results from getting locked into a tactical, reactive stance.

I should link this from my syllabus, since I regularly tell my students they are graded on results rather than effort.

Workaholics fixate on inconsequential details - (37signals)

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iWAC 2008 presentation - "Learning to Cross Boundaries"

You're coming to iWAC 2008 in Austin, right? Here's my slides. Some are similar to the ones I used in Santa Barbara this February, but the emphasis is on horizontal and vertical learning this time.

A rare story: China outsources manufacturing to US

LA Times, via BoingBoing. A (rare) story about a Chinese businessman who has invested $10m in a South Carolina  printing-plate factory:

His main aim is to tap the large American market, but when his finance staff penciled out the costs, he was stunned to learn how they compared with those in China.

Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg -- less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants. U.S. electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn't have to put up with frequent blackouts.

About the only major thing that's more expensive in Spartanburg is labor. Liu is looking to offer $12 to $13 an hour there, versus about $2 an hour in Dongguan, not including room and board. But Liu expects to offset some of the higher labor costs with a payroll tax credit of $1,500 per employee from South Carolina.

I wouldn't take this as a larger trend, but it does point to some of the (short-term) advantages the US still has in the manufacturing realm, particularly a reliable public infrastructure.

Chinese firms bargain hunting in U.S. - Los Angeles Times

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Conjunctured signs a lease

I blogged about Conjunctured a while back because the concept was interesting to me. Conjunctured is a "co-company" in which independent freelancers "come together to collaborate on the projects they feel most passionate about." As I said in that earlier post, this org structure sounds a lot like Zuboff and Maxmin's "federations," but even less hierarchical.

Conjunctured has now leased a coworking space, which is great. But what stopped me was this:

We were excited about being a part of such a cool community, both in 501 and in east Austin (the city’s fastest growing part of town). Here are some shots of the space we were tweeting about here, there andeverywhere Tuesday afternoon.

After soliciting feedback from potential coworkers via Twitter DMs, emailing people who have filled out our membership questionnaire and making some select phone calls to loved ones and advisors, we decided to bite the bullet, throw down a deposit and sign a one-year lease.

It makes sense that a distributed co-company would use such distributed avenues. Twitter in particular.

Conjunctured » Blog Archive » Scouring the city for a space.

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Microsoft possibly targeting Facebook?

Yesterday I basically opined that Facebook is bloatware and might be vulnerable to the lightweight, single-function, interoperable applications that are currently colonizing it via activity streams. Today Microsoft's bankers are rumored to be nosing around Facebook. Somehow this makes sense.

Potential Microsoft Move Leaked

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GDocs now allows CSS for document styling

A big step toward Word-level formatting. Of course, you have to know CSS in order to take advantage of it. My guess is that this step is transitional, and a point-and-click style editor will wend its way down eventually.

Google Docs: Style Your Google Docs with CSS

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Twitter Blocks

I mentioned that tools such as Twitter need some sort of aggregated view. I wasn't really expecting Twitter Blocks, and it doesn't really get the job done, but it is fascinating. Thanks to my spotter for passing this on.

Reading :: Quests

Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives
By Jeff Howard

Jeff Howard, an alum of the Computer Writing and Research Lab, recently published this interesting and unusual book that brings together game and narrative, gaming and literature, design and criticism. It aims to reach several different audiences, including digital media theorists and game designers, but in many places it works the hardest at reaching instructors who want to incorporate videogame design into their literature classes.

If you're thinking this is a fairly narrow audience, you're right. And at some points, the book has a hard time maintaining its balance, switching from inside baseball on lit crit to code snippets to discussions of the Aurora Toolset. It can be dizzying.

But the book does achieve its purpose: it draws direct analogies between literary quests and game quests, demonstrating how quests must be implemented differently in the different fiction environments, and discussing how to make that transformation in ways that lead to better games and better interpretations of the literary texts. And although the switches between environments can be dizzying, Howard manages to make things look easy. His low-key writing style and chapter organization help us to know when we're on familiar territory and his analogies help us across unfamiliar territory.

Even though the book is pitched at these specific audiences, you might pick it up if you have a background in one area (computer-assisted instruction, literature, game theory) and want to see how the other areas can help you out. It's an unusual book, but an illuminating one within these areas.

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Ambient intimacy; thoughts on Facebook's future

Jeff Jarvis meditates on the term, linking to Leise Reichelt. The notion has been at the top of my mind lately, as I've been ramping up my set of Twitter friends and checking my Facebook via mobile phone.

As Jarvis and Reichelt both argue, the (life)streams of updates we get from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. allow us to keep up with each others' moods, activities, and interconnections in ways rather different from face-to-face contact, email, written letters, or phone calls. That doesn't necessarily mean better, but certainly different. Like Jarvis, I've reconnected with friends and former students who would not be on my radar otherwise. I've also found opportunities to network and think through shared problems.

I find to my surprise that my media hierarchy is tilting sharply toward Twitter. Now I check it before my RSS reader: some of the people I follow on Twitter can be counted on to post the big tech headlines. For a small circle of friends, I receive their updates via SMS, allowing me to anticipate their day and text them condolences or congratulations. We arranged an impromptu game of Mario Kart online yesterday via Twitter -- another killer app that had not occurred to me. And Twitter's direct messaging function allows me to text people without knowing their mobile numbers as well as archive interactions.

The mobile integration is critical here, since (a) I am on the go so much; (b) unlike my computer, I own my phone; it is a more private space; (c) SMS takes so much less bandwidth and is so much less obtrusive.

Okay, so what does this mean for Facebook? Here's the thing: Facebook is to Twitter what Emacs is to the Unix | operator. Facebook has attempted to become a platform in its own right, a place where you can run an  unlimited number of apps and extensions that take advantage of its network effects. Twitter focuses on doing one thing well, with stripped down functionality. It's open API allows it to take in and push out text along a variety of paths (it's how I update my tasks in Remember the Milk, for example).

I recently thought that Facebook's approach made a lot of sense: you supply a platform, you lock people in with network effects. BUT -- people follow my Twitter updates through Facebook's activity stream (via FriendFeed). So what happens over a short period is that Twitter colonizes Facebook, exploiting its network effects. People are setting up Twitter to update their Facebook status. And using Twitter rather than Facebook to direct-message each other. And those apps that you can access through Facebook can generally be accessed through other services too. At some point -- and I have reached that point -- Facebook becomes a dispensible middleman. FriendFeed becomes unobtrusive connective tissue for one's many web services, Twitter becomes the preferred communicative medium.

All this suddenly makes me wonder whether Google's loss of high-profile executives to Facebook is a matter of getting the wrong people off the bus. If Facebook becomes Emacs, it's going to become too restrictive for many users, and Facebook's threatening ad revenue growth is not going to be sustainable. Meanwhile, targeted mobile ads show surprising strength, and Google has a much more realized mobile ad strategy right now. Ask me what I think in a month or two.

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Ambient intimacy

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BlykWatch

In response to my earlier post on Blyk, Ricky sends me a link to his weekly BlykWatch. Fascinating. If you want to know what ad-supported mobile might look like, here it is. And if you wonder how people might react to the ads, well, let's just say that I'm sure that different demographics will respond differently.

SMS Text News » BlykWatch

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Blyk experience suggests ad-supported mobile phones are more than viable

Meant to blog about this last week:

Blyk announced last week that they had reached the 100,000 subscriber level in the UK. For those who do not read our blog regularly, Blyk is the radical UK youth-oriented mobile service provider, who offer free calls and free SMS text messages, to youth users (absolute age limit 16-24, membership by invitation only) in exchange of receiving up to 6 mobile advertisements per day.

Not only do subscribers tolerate the ads, they have reportedly asked for more of them. Response rates are 29%, which is incredible for advertising.

So I've been thinking about this. Would I enter into this sort of bargain, in which I received free mobile service in exchange for six ads per day?

On the one hand, I'm already seeing ads through the mobile web interface. They're not impairing me. And I already receive a lot of text messages via Twitter, GCalendar, etc., so I don't think it would take much cognitive overhead to process them. Six messages a day doesn't seem like a lot to process at any rate, certainly compared to a hefty monthly phone bill.

On the other hand, where does Blyk get the marketing information? I assume that with response rates that high, ads are highly targeted. Would I need to fill out a detailed questionnaire in advance? To what extent would my communications and choices be monitored? I'm sure this information is available; I'd need to go over it with a fine-toothed comb before committing to such a service.

At any rate, I'm only able to speculate at this point: Blyk is only in the UK right now, and I'm way outside the target range of 16-24. But it's a model to watch.

Communities Dominate Brands: Blyk hits target 5 months early, 100,000 youth members VERY happy with mobile ads

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