Fade to Play

I am taking photos at BANFF. They are available here on my Flickr page and some will make it to the website.

Yesterday was a busy day for me. I gave a presentation at the Media Annotations and Tagging workshop by MAGIC entitled “Playing tag in user-generated spaces” in which I discussed tagging in Facebook and Flickr.

I then attended a photowalk in Gastown (a section of Vancouver) organised by Kris Krüg that evening and afterwards we uploaded our photos to Flickr and and Facebook using appropriate tags to categorise our content. Some of us also became new friends/contacts on Flickr and Facebook.

After the walk Kris yelled out that we use a standardised tag “gastownphotowalk2″ to link our photos on flickr together. If you attend conferences, workshops, meetups, you will hear the organisers request that a common tag be used to link photos/blog entries related to the event. Although people believe in the power of the folksonomy, a little top-down intervention is very effective and sometimes necessary.

The result of using “gastownphotowalk2″ is that we are one of the hot tags of the last 24 hours on flickr. Sweet.

Check out our photos here.

Relevance: I am finding that I living what I research regarding tagging in flickr and facebook. It helps me better understand the culture of these spaces when I use these spaces daily because of my real world interactions and meetups. Having friends that live in these digital environments is quite beneficial.

Facebook just launched Facebook polling.

Facebook Polls are an easy way to get quick answers to your questions. Facebook Polls allows you to ask detailed questions, target them to specific user segments and receive real-time responses. You can target Facebook users based on gender, age, school, location, or profile keyword.

Relevance: Facebook continues to add applications and features to Facebook. It will be interesting to see whether researchers find a benefit in using polling on Facebook.

New FacebookOriginally uploaded by tyfn.

For all those Facebook users (re: addicts), the new look Facebook is out. Woohoo!!! I am excited to learn about the new features and to read people’s comments on the new groups interface, which provides alot more relevant information. Tara Hunt previously had uploaded screenshots and commented favourably about them.  I like them too.
According to the Facebook blog, the changes are:

1. A navigation and profile simplification—Ever feel like you couldn’t find what you were looking for on that long left menu? We’ve redistributed all these menu options into “Core Aspects” on the top menu, “Applications” on the left menu, Settings on the top right, and everything else at the footer of the page. As for the profile, we’ve added drop-down menus to the top of every user’s profile page, making it easier to get to the information you want to see. You can read more about the navigation changes here.
2. The introduction of “Inbox“—The former “My Messages” and “My Shares” pages have been redesigned to make the communication between you and your friends easier. Now you can send a group of your friends a message with or without a shared link, and easily track the ensuing conversation in one “thread” in your Inbox.
3. Network Pages—To make networks more relevant to their real-world counterparts, we’ve built out pages where network members, events, trends, and demographic info are displayed. Anything visible on a Network page is something that is already accessible to members of that network, and we’ve added additional “Publicize” options to groups and events that make it easy to distinguish what will and will not appear on your Network page. In addition, each page has a full version for members of the networks, and a public version—with certain kinds of information blocked—for people outside that network.

Relevance: Facebook created a group called Facebook Sneak Preview in order to gather opinions, get suggestions, and respond to feedback regarding possible changes to Facebook using screenshots. They listened to us and will continue to listen to make sure that Facebook remains Facebooky .

Last Friday (March 9) I attended a public lecture by Cory Doctorow at Simon Fraser University, presented by the Faculty of Applied Sciences Leonardo Institute. He is a co-editor of Boing Boing and his presentation was entitled “The Totalitarian Urge: total information awareness and the cosmic billiards” in which he spoke about privacy and surveillance in the 21 century.

A rough text of his speech is below (may not be perfect):

I am a tech person. My Dad is a teacher and programmer. As I was growing up and learning about computers, I thought computers would level the playing field. In the old days, universities had punch cards and provided each student with one in which was written a number that would enable them to be tracked and controlled. I view security as a funny thing. An attacker on a security systems looks for one flaw while a defender is always looking to defend everything. It may be seen as a losing battle.

I am here to discuss the winning and losing battle that is taking place on the Internet. I am a big Mark Twain fan and believes in scientific determinism. If you just know enough about the universe, could predict everything. Cognitive scientists believe that we have selective senses, our senses imperfect and flawed. We use them to make sense of the universe by writing things down.

We try and ascribe causality to the universe. It is how casinos survive. People expect that if seven times the roulette wheel lands on black, the eighth time, it must be white. We believe that we become better by writing everything down. Psychologists believe that. People believe that you can control spending by writing things down. Cognitive therapy is just quantifying world around us. Understanding ourselves we do with empiriscism. Gilbert is obsessed with life and time-motion studies. However, T-M studies are more likely to be used against you to make you more efficient as a worker than, work for you. Does observing/writing stuff down make us freer or subject us to more control?

What are the new means of expression on the Internet? Usenet was part of the original Net that had administrators that regulated what people could talk about there. For example, in rec.pets.cats, the subgroups were regulated and new subgroups (e.g. rec.pets.cats.persian) were voted on by the membership. People were just talking about life with each other. The admins big concern was that porn would be placed there because they didn’t want congress to regulate (e.g. rec.sex).

.alt groups were created to enable people — anyone to create their own groups without needing admins. Surprisingly, the universe didn’t come to a halt with the creation of these groups, (e.g. alt.pavetheearth), people could talk about how the process of paving the earth in order that people could travel using high performance motorcycles. Everyone has fantasies but they tend to be solidary (eg. wearing underwear on your head — no one knows about it unless you tell others or find a group with similarly minded people). What these .alt groups did was make it possible to find common group with others through collective action. “Who else feels the way I do?”.

Now blogs exist. There are as easy to create and use as breathing. They link between each other and they have huge search ranks, and make it easy to attract people with same ideas as you. I was an advisor to flickr with Caterina and Stewart . They took the cool idea of tagging which means you can just apply any label you want to a photos. For example “me”, “cat” could be real or cartoon. “decay”, a pic of something decaying. This is now a popular tag. Before internet wouldn’t think it possible for these people to collaborate. Now collaboration is cheaper thanks to flickr.

Google understands the internet by making a copy and then seeing where has more links that others. Google counts citations, adds up and then creates a substructure of Internet. Each of us that have made a webpage have collaborated. YouTube and MySpace provide platform for people to work together (e.g. take YouTube video, locate audiences, locate works). The cost of being found is very cheap. Can find things that previously couldn’t be found. Search cost is very low on google.

Linux, Mozilla, Firefox, Apache, all of these things have been built by volunteers, people just doing something (e.g. like British people cueing). The free/open source software movement has created something incredible. The Internet makes it hard to control communication. People will use technology to seize information faster than you can block it (e.g. schools that block Myspace, countries that control radio/communication). The Internet informs ideology that less control = more efficiency. Should Internet operators be able to control the websites you see (e.g. pizza pizza now vs. Gino’s Pizza in 5 min) –concept of network discrimination. Before the Internet, we had AOL or Alex (Canada). When the Web came along it attracted wheat andchafe. Wikipedia does have problems — people fake creditials all the time in life, head of WIPO faked his age. How do we know that person didn’t fake credentials on Encyclopedia Britannica? Don’t know.

Both Wikipedia and britannica are useful but shouldn’t be used any more as a primary source any more than a dictionary. It is possible to add control at very low costs. You can keep track of everyone by just adding more RAM, servers, etc. That’s what we can do with computers.

For the US Visit program, visitors (except for Canadians) have to be fingerprinted and have their photo taken. If look at the web blacklists,
there is lots of misappropriation. All security problems benefit from public disclosure.

No fly lists — need to keep them off airplanes but not dangerous enough to arrest them. Paradox of the false positive.
_When you are watching everyone, you are watching noone._

Stasi (East Germany) had a file on everyone, didn’t know that wall was going to fall because when you are watching everyone, you are watching noone. Compared selective enforcement on internet with people that download with Soviet Union. You don’t have to prosecute someone for what they are doing, but what everyone is doing. He likes how email and browsers remember info for him.

RFID tags emit a beacon that specify information about them. The theory is that they only can be read at a short distance. When you excite a tag, they can read them from a distance. However, after you have left a data trail, it can be used against you. People can know all the places you have been. We are in a sense carrying identity papers that can be read without our will. The number of contexts in which you are required to identify yourself is increasing.

There is a quote that “Give me 6 lines in anyone’s hand and I’ll find a reason to hang them”. What happens when people are using your biometics to do bad stuff? What happens when you are part of the population whose biometics can’t be read. At Disneyworld they are fingerprinting people and searching bags. There is the option to show photo id, but not everyone is aware of that. One time when I was arguing with the people at the entrance to Disneyworld about only having to show id, their was a 10 year boy behind me that said. “Everyone has to show id”. That is when it hit me. Disney is conditioning our kids to believe that being fingerprinted all the time is ok. Face recognition software is being used more such as the Superbowl. We are sleepwalking into a surveillence state (eg CCTV cameras). A CCTV camera only records. Only stops muggers that don’t have good judgement to stop because they are on camera. Parents can track kids with mobile phones and Myspace. Technology can serve us or enslave us. Can join ork to create a better canada.
Digitalcopyright.ca — can sign petition.

Relevance: Excellent synopsis of some of the issues I should be concerned with regarding privacy today. It gets me thinking about how to control my environment rather than be controlled by it.

symbol from Creative Commons Canada

On Thursday I attended a talk by Tina Piper from Creative Commons Canada as part of the Brown Bag Lunch Series organised by the Faculty of Land and Food Systems.

Topic: Introduction to Creative Commons

The freedom of the Internet has challenged the role of copyright. What should copyrights look like when information can be moved so freely? Should we continue to protect intellectual property and authorship the way we always have?

Creative Commons offers an alternative to traditional copyright. Creative Commons is a non-profit group that write licenses which allow authors/rights-holder to alter the conditions of use on their copyrighted works. A Creative Common license can fit all sorts of purposes, adjusting for uses, sharing, modifications, and commercial uses. The application of modified copyrights have huge potential and ramifications within an academic context.

Tina Piper is a co-Director of Creative Commons Canada and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University. For more information on Creative Commons, visit http://creativecommons.ca

I took some rough notes that are below.

• Under copyright law, you are given a bundle of rights (transfer, copy, assign) = ©
• Under creative commons you can give away some rights, the basic idea is that you decide what others can do with your work (e.g. I give you the right to do X).
• Public domain means you have no rights.

• Why is a creative commons important?
• Valuable to access a pool of creativity. (e.g. seeing a cool photo on a blog)
• We build from the past (standing on the shoulders of giants quote didn’t begin with Newton, it has been used in a variety of forms prior to Newton).

• In the beginning UK publishers wanted copyright to last forever, instead got 14 years But now some works in US can be copyrighted for 95 years.

• In Canada, 1924, copyright law, 14 years. At present 50 years with exceptions for certain media.

• Most of the Internet is copies (e.g. sharing files, papers, photos). So online usage is no longer unregulated.

• The desire of creative commons is to “Create like it’s 1790″ in which copyright is not perpetual creative commons has created a standardised set of licences that people can give to anyone in the world. It gets you thinking about what copyright is (e.g. flickr). Series of symbols (e.g. share alike, noncommercial, attribution).

• People like being attributed for stuff that they create
• Creative Commons is about creating a community and then creating a set of principles to govern conduct.

Relevance: As I use Creative Commons for my Flickr photos, it is good to learn more about it as my knowledge is quite limited

So Saturday night I said goodbye to my friends both new and old at Northern Voice and headed to Starbucks to do some work. This was a mistake. I felt awful. My head was hurting, my nose was stuffed, and concentrating on anything was incredibly difficult. I went home and slept for the next 12 hours. Unfortunately waking up didn’t make life any easier. I lay in bed for the rest of the day too sick even to make to the dining hall for dinner. After another restless night, I finally left my bed Monday afternoon to go work out at the gym. I am now have a cold and all the medication I’m taking isn’t working as well as it should.

I thought I was alone in my pain. That maybe my immune system was all messed up. But, thanks to the blogosphere (darren via Brian), I learned that this _moose flu_ infected at least 20 people.

In spite of all this, I loved Northern Voice this year. It rocked. It helped that it was on campus and in the most beautiful building on campus. I can’t wait to go again next year.

During my undergrad I learned German. In addition to the textbook, there was a CD with German on it to supplement the lessons (I had a CD walkman) and I spent many hours in the lab doing tests and watching Deutsche-Welle TV. I also bought a shortwave radio so that I could listen to Deutsche-Welle radio through shortwave.

While at UBC I have audited German in order to keep up with my comprehension. I supplemented my learning by listening Deutsche-Welle online or n-tv. I wonder how my experience would have been different had I had lessons for an iPod.

This article in the Globe and Mail by Madlen Read (Associated Press) discusses how mp3s/iPods are being utilised in educational settings.

Whetstone, 18, and Zollos, 17, are students in Kathy O’Connor’s class at Tidewater Community College in Southeastern Virginia. O’Connor got an $11,000 grant from the school to lend her students iPods so they can practice their Spanish conversations anywhere — not just sitting in front of a computer.

“I get a lot more listening in than I did before,” said Whetstone, who estimates that it’s increased from about 30 minutes a week to 4 or 5 hours.

Students are using MP3 players to listen to downloaded books, textbook study guides and language labs on-the-go. Books and personal stereos have always been portable, of course, but audio books are easier to carry around in MP3 form. A typical 300-page novel might take up 12 CDs, but only a tiny portion of an MP3 player’s memory and prices for audiobook downloads are mostly comparable to audio CDs.

Relevance: There is continual diversity amongst educators among those that see mobile devices for their value as educational tools (e.g. lectures as podcasts) and those that see them as distractions from one’s education (e.g. banning ipods or laptops on school grounds).

I am both a public and a private person. I have a facebook account, a flickr account, this blog, publicly broadcast my MSN address, take tons of photos whenever I leave to upload to facebook and flickr, and my mobile phone number is easily available online. I like being accessible 24/7 and have no problem sharing aspects of my life with the world. I consider myself a media whore and would have no problem appearing on reality TV.

At the same time, I am a private person in the real world. I don’t really stand out in a crowd. I don’t attend rallies, don’t wear t-shirts that announce my political affiliation, and spent my undergrad studying in a library cubicle or in a corner at Starbucks. I felt really strange when a friend interviewed me last year for a story she was writing and she used a digital recorded to record our conversation.

That’s why I am intrigued with an article on ‘lifelogging’ by Scott Carlson in which he discusses his experiences wearing a digital recorder around his neck while going about his everyday life. He also interviews a number of experts and researchers that are doing lifelogging research.

The first day I came home with a digital audio recorder hanging around my neck, along with a sign that said “Warning: This conversation may be recorded,” my wife shook her head in a way that conveyed deep embarrassment. Then she said: “Have you ever heard of Nixon?”

On the train to work, my fellow commuters did double takes and snickered. People sat down next to me, then got up and moved to another seat. One woman saw my sign and hushed her friends: “Look, he’s recording.” Another fellow told me that someone was going to beat me up over my little stunt. Once a conductor gave me such a severe look that I thought he would throw me off the train at the next stop.

In the grocery store, clerks asked me if I was doing some kind of crazy university study. Sort of, I replied. “You’re recording your life all the time?” people said. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

Good question. I had been asking a handful of researchers the same thing. Many of them are documenting all their conversations, movements, ideas, and correspondence through audio recorders, digital cameras, GPS trackers, pedometers, brain scanners, and other gadgets. The data they collect are mainly fodder for research, as they try to figure out how people might organize and make use of a deluge of information collected in business, medical, and social settings.

Relevance: A recent interview for NPR by Gordon Bell about his lifelogging project is available here. I can’t imagine doing this myself nor do I know how I would react if my roommate or a cool friend became a lifelogger. As become a more digital society and where surveillance becomes more commonplace, will this type of personal invasion become more acceptable?

On October 24-25, NMC will host an online conference with keynotes by Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs and danah boyd who researches on youth, social networks, and digital spaces.

This online conference is informed by the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, a two-year project in which the NMC is helping to explore the impact of digital media on our lives in a variety of ways, and encouraging dialog among experts, visionaries, and thought leaders from around the globe. This unique event will expand that dialog beyond the project and reach out to an international audience.

You can read about the 50 million dollar donation by the MacArthur’s Foundation for a broader initiative on Digital Media and Learning on danah’s blog as well as the official notification here.

Relevance: I attended the NMC conference when it was here in Vancouver and I am interested to follow the types of projects that will be funded by this new initiative, perhaps there is the opportunity for PhD funding for research in mixed realities and pervasive games.

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