So another over-long lapse in Leon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blogging.<\/p>\n
You may have noticed that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve added a little \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bookshelf\u00e2\u20ac\u009d widget to the sidebar of the blog page. This is something being run through a book based social networking site called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Shelfari\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know a lot about them but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m messing around with it.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been doing this a lot; messing around with so-called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Web 2.0\u00e2\u20ac\u009d stuff. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all very interesting, but like everything else about computers, feels embryonic. There is a critical issue of critical mass that seems to play in. With some sites, you go and sign up and literally nothing happens. With others you get deluged by so much cruff that you wonder why you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re bothering. The balance between seeming pointless because there isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t enough going on and seeming pointless because there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s too much, seems to be the really tricky thing.<\/p>\n
Something that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not the first to notice is the fact that the early days of interconnectivity with computers featured List-serves and bulletin boards and it was all about community. Now granted it was a community of people who knew how to use the machines, but it was a community. When the web and web commerce became practical, the internet became very much about individual action, but now with Web 2.0 its swinging back towards interconnectivity of people, and now there are a lot more of them. Many of them are not even nerds. So this is interesting. <\/p>\n
I intend to continue \u00e2\u20ac\u0153messing around\u00e2\u20ac\u009d with these sites, if only out of intellectual curiosity. So lets take a look at some of what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m doing:<\/p>\n
Flickr: This was the first site that I really started using. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a photo based social networking site. my id on it is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153leoningul\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Lame. I know. Anyway, I occasionally upload pictures that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve taken. I have a small group of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153friends\u00e2\u20ac\u009d on it. People I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never heard of come by and look at my pictures. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all good. What I try not to do, it use it as the proverbial digital shoebox. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t throw snapshots up there. I think about it more as a low stakes public gallery. A place where I can put up pictures that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve taken (or made) that I think even someone who doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know me would be interested in. In other words, there is a degree to which I see it as a public artistic activity. This may be pretentious but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how I feel.<\/p>\n
Facebook: This is the big, scary monster of social networking sites. What gets me about Facebook is that I had a dozen \u00e2\u20ac\u0153friends\u00e2\u20ac\u009d on it, almost before I was done signing up. I continue to add a couple people a week. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s silly. In many ways it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just plain stupid, but what it ties into is the totally irrational way in which people relate. It provides for a level of casual contact amongst a large group of people which has already lead to some really interesting things. In the short time that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been on it, it has already put me in touch with long-lost contacts and is starting to actually get me work. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that throwing a fish at someone is something I would miss if I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do it, but there are plenty of people in my life who I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t relate to much at all if I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have a context in which to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153throw a fish\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at them. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve also started playing chess on Facebook which is really cool.<\/p>\n
Second Life: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve just started on this. It seriously freaks me out. Second Life is a virtual environment in which you have an avatar that you move around and interact with people and stuff through. I haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t spent a lot of time in it yet, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m still yet to meet anyone. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even know how to look for a person. Frankly it feels like death. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know how to explain this, but it feels more like some sort of weird after-life, than a parallel life. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see how it goes. A while back, I had some time and I did a ten day free trial of World Of Warcraft, which is similar to Second Life except that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lot more structure and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re basically in a Tolkein-esque world fighting monsters. After ten days they wanted me to start paying money and I realized that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one thing to find something engaging and even engrossing, but paying someone to steal time out of my life was not something I was interested in. The weird thing was that I could spend hours in WOW doing something utterly mundane, while letting the mundanity of my actual life slip by, unnoticed. I think there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something going on here that is deeply interesting. Why are we willing to do as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153entertainment\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the very things we are seeking entertainment as a relief from? Anyway, I decided to see how far I can go with these things for free, and Second Life says that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lot available without paying any \u00e2\u20ac\u0153real\u00e2\u20ac\u009d money. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see.<\/p>\n
Netvibes: This is interesting. Netvibes is essentially a web aggregator. A place where you can pull all the various content that you access regularly on the web together. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been using Netvibes as my home-page for awhile now. I get my news and check in with blogs and other stuff through it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s widgets. However, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve just upgraded it and part of the new design is moving Netvibes towards a kind of social networking site. In addition to my own private Netvibes page, I now have a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Leon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Netvibe Universe\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that allows anyone to access an aggregate of web content that I, essentially curate. This is kind of interesting. You can check it out at www.netvibes.com\/leoningulsrud<\/a><\/p>\n SEE: Part of the reason that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been exploring this stuff is that we have a project at SITI Company that is an implementation of some of this technology. If this stuff is designed to allow contacts and networking across large groups of people, then there are certain things that we can do with our supporters and students, using this stuff. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re calling it SITI Extended Ensemble (SEE), and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the brainchild of Brad Carlin. In some ways SEE is more like the old school BBS sites, but already in it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s embryonic stages we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re finding out a lot of interesting things about how these things work. In just over of month of being public we already have 200+ members and some lively discussions. An interesting thing that keeps coming up is that we want to define SEE as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Not a SITI version of Facebook.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d You can check out SEE at: http:\/\/siti.collectivex.com<\/a><\/p>\n There are also things like del.icio.us, Digg and Stumble that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been doing in terms of finding and tagging websites. There are also a whole raft of things from Google that are completely changing the way the web is accessed. These are so integrated into how I use Firefox (my current browser of choice) that I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even think of them as websites. Perhaps this is the kind of ubiquitous invisibility that Web 2.0 will eventually evolve into, overall. I mean as cool as something like Second Life or Facebook might be, they will never be a part of how I go about my day in the way that something like Stumble or the various Google tools that I use are. In Second Life and Facebook, I guess I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m being asked to extend my imagination into them (which is fine I guess), but the more evolved tools are already acting as extensions and modifications to how my imagination and curiosity works. Eg: when I wonder where something is, my mind reaches for Google Maps. Luckily it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s on my iPhone so it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only a pocket away.<\/p>\n Whether any of this is good or bad I think is yet to be discovered. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in the stone-age. What I do know is that, like Marshall Mcluhan said: The new technologies are not bridges between us and our environment. They ARE the environment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So another over-long lapse in Leon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s blogging. You may have noticed that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve added a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[5,134],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog","tag-blog","tag-web-20"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leon.ingulsrud.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leon.ingulsrud.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leon.ingulsrud.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leon.ingulsrud.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leon.ingulsrud.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leon.ingulsrud.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leon.ingulsrud.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leon.ingulsrud.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leon.ingulsrud.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}