Recently in tools Category

Bradley talks about jumping onto the ultraportable train, so I thought I'd add a couple of cents.

For a couple of years now, I've wished I had something more amenable to note-taking at conferences that didn't involve wearing a groove into one of my shoulders. Not that my Powerbook is super-heavy, but add some books in there, and it borders on the inconvenient.

And so, I did a little research, and came up with the Nokia N800. It's got basic internet, a bare bones text program, and pairs up with a Bluetooth keyboard (unlike my iPhone, which has only the first of those three things right now). I was looking mainly for something I can stick in my bag quickly, carries a decent charge, and can use to take notes at a conference, outdoors at Panera, etc. And while they apparently don't make these anymore, Amazon still had some iGo Stowaway Bluetooth keyboards in stock. The driver comes preinstalled on the Nokia, and the two are bundled at Amazon. Made it pretty easy.

The whole thing set me back less than $300, which is a fair chunk of change, but which I'm hoping will be worth it in the medium run. To wit, I'm no longer thinking about getting an Air anytime soon. That I could get 6 or 7 of these Nokias for the price of a low end Air just sealed the deal.

Here's a couple of pics:

So far I'm pretty pleased.

If you're like me, there's a hole in your aggregator where Clay Shirky used to appear regularly. In a lot of ways, he and the rest of the Many2Many crew helped to spark my interests in social software, web2, and network studies. So it's been a little lonelier at Google Reader without him. The hiatus, though, had its consequences: this week, Clay's book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (Amazon) was released. I was lucky enough to be quick on the draw when Clay posted an offer to bloggers for a free, advance copy in exchange for blogging it, and although I'd hoped to do so before its release (thereby proving my Relevance and insider status), the sad truth is that the crossword tournament and other things got in my way. But here I am now. And here you are. Here we go.

This book will be largely familiar to those of us who have been reading Clay for a few years, and equally familiar in tone and style to those of us who read Gladwell, Johnson, Anderson, etc. There's a genre that's emerged in the past few years that I think of as PopTech (although perhaps sociologists would correct me, since I think these book "intrude" on their territory more than any other)--books that translate both sociological concepts and the technology industries for the more casual reader. I don't think of PopTech as a bad thing--my own attitude is a more open sociology/rhetoric of knowledge kind of thing. So it's interesting to me that these kinds of books are where "my work" is being done most actively. Okay, that's neither here nor there, except to note that the book works hard to be engaging to those who have little stake in the conceptual end of things. Again, not a bad thing.

The about part: HCE is about understanding the changes that are happening as a result of the net, web2, etc. "These changes are profound because they are amplifying or extending our essential social skills, and our characteristic social failings as well" (14). The big change that this book narrates is the move from institutions/organizations as the primary site of social interaction to a more bottom-up activity. In a sense, this is an answer to what Clay calls the "institutional dilemma"--we need institutions to direct our group efforts, to act collectively, but a certain margin of those institutions is devoted to actually directing those efforts (19). "New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action" (31).

One of the profound shifts that this book examines is the move from scarcity to abundance, a theme that you'll find in Anderson's Long Tail as well. But while the original thesis of the Long Tail dealt primarily with commerce and economics, Shirky's focus is on a more interpersonal scale. In an age of media scarcity, where access to publication and broadcast is limited, the "professionals" are those whose job it is to filter our media pre-publication. With social tools, more and more, it's instead "publish, then filter." But Shirky's careful not to suggest that utopia is just around the corner: "The limiting effect of scale on interaction is bad news for people hoping for the dawn of an egalitarian age ushered in by our social tools" (95). And that's one of the nice features of this book, overall, the fact that Shirky doesn't fall victim to the temptation to try and discuss these tools outside of their social context. It recalls for me his discussion of A-lists, power laws, etc., from the good old days. These tools may address technological or media issues, but that doesn't mean that our social or cognitive limitations have somehow vanished along with them.

One of my favorite posts from Shirky's site is "The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality," which has my favorite subtitle of all time: "Diverse. Free. Equal. Pick two." He goes into a little more detail in the book, of course, but of particular interest to me was his discussion of power laws, motivation, and collaboration in Chapter 5, where he notes that "imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them" (125), which I take to be a gentler translation of that original point. The book shifts at this point to talking about collective action, flash mobs, political action, cultural capital, and small worlds. And that's an awfully skate overview of those latter chapters, I fear.

What happened for me as I read through the book was that by the final couple of chapters, it felt like all of the narratives and terms really coalesced into the overriding message of the book. And the final chapter pretty well sums it up: "Promise, Tool, Bargain." Only one of those is technological, you'll notice, and each is as essential as the other two. According to Shirky, "The promise creates the basic desire to participate...After getting the promise right (or right enough), the next hurdle is figuring out which tools will best help people approach the promise together...Then...A successful bargain among users must be a good fit for both the promise and the tools used" (261). Of these, the bargain was the trickiest for me, and it's the trickiest of the three in general, I think. But really, it's everything from explicit contract to implicit, phatic exchange.

I'm not sure that there's a formula, though. In fact, let me change that around: I'm sure there's not a formula, but one of the things that Shirky discusses in the second-to-last chapter is how these new tools make failure "free"--if no one's interested in your obscure Wikipedia page, or your Meetup group, or your Flickr account, or your blog post, then if that's not part of your bargain, you just drop it/them. In traditional organizations (pace James Dyson), there's not a lot of room for failure, which translates into lost resources, or adds to that margin of costs. Online, though, if your group doesn't fly, or your discussion list fades, or enough people don't pay attention to you, then you just go on to do other things. Failure is free.

And this may be the most interesting part of the book to me. "Cheap failure, valuable as it is on its own, is also a key part of a more complex advantage: the exploration of multiple possibilities" (247). In other words, as much as this is a book about organization and about social tools, I left the book thinking of it as a book about social and organizational invention, and I mean that more in the rhetorical sense than in the corporate sense of innovation. It's a nice bridge between the more technical ideas (power laws, e.g.) and the concrete, practical examples thereof. And it's a book that would be accessible to those of my colleagues who don't think of technology as something they "do." The tools are only part of the equation; in many cases, we're part of it ourselves.

As a close, I think this book would/will be valuable for those who are looking to connect up rhetoric of social movement kind of work with technology and/or the language of networks (which is getting full-on buzz in my field right now, I think). Donna mentioned something to this effect last week, and I think she's right to call for this kind of cross-pollination. It's definitely worth reading, and it's a good entry point for folks in my field to some of these issues.

That's all.

The design doesn't exactly float my boat, but I think that I've reached the point where I don't need to rebuild, at least for a while. It's going to take me a little while to learn the new MT syntax and page styles--it took me way too long to figure out how to swap the positions of recent entries and recent comments on the sidebar, but I did eventually figure it out. MT4 is much widgetastic than MT3: a lot of the templates are basically paragraphs of includes, and little else, which necessitates drilling sometimes 3 or 4 layers deep to find the places I've needed to edit.

First blush, though, is that this is a much sharper version than any that I saw with MT3, so I'm looking forward to messing about with it. That may change once I dip into the style sheets, but we'll see. I can already see, though, how some of the workarounds we developed for CCC Online are going to be supported as features in MT4, so I'm pretty happy about that.

Oh, and commenting. I've enabled anonymous comments, along with a default captcha, so commenting will require clicking on the "comment anonymously" link, and puzzling out a handful of letters. It's a little extra burden, but the tradeoff it represents (no more greenlists, no more junk drawer purges, no more picking through 100s of pending comments to find the few that are legit) should be substantial.

And the auto tag cloud, I'm hoping, will inspire me to be better about tagging my entries as I write them, and to slowly work back through the opening 1000 entries, tagging on the way...

That is all.

Okay. The gauntlet has been thrown down. How best to talk about Kindle without falling prey to "snark, ennui, [or] carping about the DRM?"

It's not too bad. I've been interested for almost 10 years in the possibility of a reasonably priced, portable screen reader. When I was at ODU, I remember having conversations with colleagues about the possibility of a Kindle-like machine upon which students could store texts from multiple courses, allowing them to search across course materials, link between them, annotate, et al. And it's genuinely exciting to see that Amazon is putting serious weight behind it--there's been little incentive, I fear, for the book industry to do so (and this despite some warning signs). My gut reaction, when I saw the announcement on the Amazon page, was to figure out whether I could get my hands on one, and how soon.

I've owned 3 or 4 iPods, including the very first model, and I'm happy with my iPhone, and that's not to mention my wireless keyboards, mice, presentation clicker, iTrip, etc.--I'm a fiend when it comes to gadgets. Adding the Kindle to my repertoire seemed like the next logical step.

And yet. One of the problems that I don't see a great deal of discussion about is that the book is an incredibly mature (and thus highly variegated) technology. Think about it. You can talk about the innovations like spaces between words, standardized fonts, apparati like TOC's and indices, etc., but fact is that our books today haven't changed that much from those in circulation centuries ago. And most of the real changes have been of degree rather than kind.

In that time, so many different rituals, habits, and dispositions have emerged with respect to books--the variety of ways that we use them is one of the keys to the success of that medium. And it's why the "death of the book" stuff in the 90s was so overblown. It's not just a matter of happening on "better" technologies, because they already exist right now. The book has had hundreds of years of cultural, social, personal, psychological, and aesthetic embedding--and that's not going to be dislodged overnight.

Contrast that with the emergence of the MP3 player. This could be oversimplifying, but there are 3 basic milieu for music in our lives: home, office, and car. For the vast majority of music consumers, the only thing wrong with the CD is that most collections exceed the bounds of easy portability/storage. The computer solves the storage issue, the MP3 player solves portability. But the experience of listening to music isn't really that varied. I might listen to it in a range of places, but the basic action is the same whether I'm rocking out on a road trip or want some soothing background in my office.

The uses to which I put books vary much more. It could be argued that I'm a power user of the sort that I disallowed above in my music analogy, but I don't think that I'm that unique in that regard. I think a lot of people use books in a range of ways, although perhaps not as often or as intensively as I.

So my trouble with the Kindle is quite simply that it only really targets, in pricing, restrictions, and promotion, one of the kinds of reading that I do. First, at 10 bucks a pop, I'm only really saving money if I'm a big hardcover bestseller reader (which I'm not). The books I buy that are more than $10 are those least likely to be prioritized by Amazon, like academic books. And I'm certainly not going to pay for blogs, but even then, most of the content is A-list, which is not where I hang out anyway.

Second, 200 books, which is what Amazon is claiming it will hold, is nothing. Seriously. If indeed someday academic books are part of this, the Kindle is really only the size of a decent bookcase. Last time I counted, I had 8 or 9 in my apartment, and that's not counting the wall in my office. And that's where the DRM will begin to drive me crazy, I fear. I already avoid the iTunes store when possible because I hate having to figure out which machine stuff is okay on. And given that I upgrade machines every couple of years, even a 5-machine permit is going to run out on me fairly quickly.

Third, "it's like an iPod for books." Well, no. I'm trying not to snark here. It's actually like an iPhone for books--the iPhone is a much more restrictive, expensive gadget, problems offset for me by what it does well. But I don't use the iPod features on the phone--can't sync with multiple machines. The iPod is really just a portable hard drive, running one piece of software, with a minimal interface. And it answered a complex of needs: the obsolence of tapes, the convenience of the Walkman, the fragility of the CD, and the size of the personal computer. The iPhone was a feature-heavy entry into an already crowded market, relying upon flash because the substance is pretty standard.

There are a lot of good posts out there about Kindle, and some of the other models that people have suggested are intriguing. In the absence of competition, though, I don't see Amazon moving too far away from the model they're currently working with. Which is too bad, because I'd still like to take it for a test drive. But I just can't see myself spending four or five hundred dollars for something that meets such a small portion of my reading needs. At the very least, I hope they think about embracing the epub standard.

At the very least, the Kindle is worth watching, and I hope that someday I'll think it's worth owning. That is all.

And only a little bit of carping.

Tonight's entry is prompted by the arrival today of several entries in Google Reader, the most recent entries fed there and published at the Kenneth Burke Journal:

The KB Journal is, unfortunately, one of the only journals in our field that is (a) using RSS feeds, and (b) using them correctly. Exhibit A in how not to use them comes from the Project MUSE journals. I was excited to see that their journals had feeds, until the first one arrived. Basically, they feed a link to the table of contents page for new issues. This is okay, I suppose, but differs little from sending announcements to email lists.

What the KB Journal does (and Written Communication and CCC also do) is to create entries for each article, with more information than the fact of its existence. Hell, even the author and title would be an improvement. I use a reader to skim a lot of sites, and to make decisions about whether to follow up. Using them to draw readers to their site, as MUSE does, is to make a bunch of Web 1.0 assumptions about eyeballs, traffic, stickiness, etc. With the MUSE journals:

• I don't know what I'm getting until I've loaded their page
• Unless I have an immediate need, I'm likely to forget their content, since there's little point in bookmarking random TOCs
• I can't bookmark an article to return to it when I have time
• I can't bookmark one to download to my office machine, where my access to MUSE is automatic
• I can't look back through recent articles
• I can't use the journal in any way other than I'd use it if I saw it on a colleague's shelf

But you know what? At least they HAVE. A. FEED. Even if MUSE is doing it wrong, at least they're trying to do it. There are so many journals in our field that haven't even bothered to create feeds that it should be embarrassing to us. And we all know who they are, including some pretty unlikely suspects, journals that should be at the forefront of providing this kind of access.

Here's what it takes to provide a feed of recent articles for a journal:

• A free account with a blog provider like Blogger or Wordpress


• The ability, for each article, to:
  
  • copy and paste relevant information into a textbox
  
  
  • Click on "save" or "publish"
  
  

That's it. You don't need crazy designs, blogrolls, any modification whatsoever. It doesn't have to be integrated into a larger site or do anything fancy. For pretty much any journal, with readable files for the articles, I could post a new issue in roughly 15 minutes. Four issues a year? Maybe an hour total. One hour. Per year.

You can't tell me that the resulting increase in circulation, were our field to cotton eventually to the notion of RSS readers, wouldn't be worth it. And the benefits to us?

Here's what I see when I go to List View for my Written Communication feed:

Not only am I notified when new articles are published, but I have access to the last three or four issues of the journal at all times, from any computer. And I can star them for future reference. Want to follow up on a title? They're expandable:

This functionality currently exists for a mere handful of our journals. If the time spent gnashing our teeth about the overwhelming amount of stuff to read were spent instead putting together feeds for all of our journals, you know what? All of a sudden, we'd be able to manage that load much more easily. And I'm not kidding when I suggest that it's really that easy. It is. There's a lot more that could be done, but if our journals would take the tiny step of being responsible for RSS feeds at the point of production/publication, the resulting benefits would be colossal. And that's not me being hyperbolic. Imagine being able to open a browser window and being able to search, read, and bookmark abstracts from the last year or two's worth of journals in our field. Seriously, how much easier would that make our academic lives?

And yes, we have been doing this at the CCC Online Archive for the past 2+ years: http://inventio.us/ccc/atom.xml. But my point isn't to gloat--it's to ask instead why the heck our editors, including many for whom this should be obvious, haven't followed suit.

And that's all. I could get a lot snarkier about this, and I could name names, but let me instead close with an offer. On the off-chance that someone's reading this who wants help setting a feed up, please let me know. Honestly. I'd be happy to show someone just how easy this is.

For the last couple of years, I've been pushing CMap to anyone who'll listen. A concept mapping tool, CMap is a fairly easy tool to pick up and use, it's free, and it's available in a rainbow of OS flavors. I've found better tools, but often, they're OS restricted, or they cost money.

In the past couple of days, though, I've seen a couple of different entries over at LifeDev on concept mapping (or mind mapping) tools that have shaken my faith in CMap. Exhibit 1: Bubbl.us:

Bubbl.us is quick and easy to use, with minimal cognitive overhead. Really. If I wanted someone to experiment with concept or mind mapping, and didn't want to spend any time on the software itself, it'd be hard to go wrong with this option.

Exhibit 2: Thinkature:

Thinkature is a more complicated app, to be sure, but a couple of points worth making. First, the interface is a lot more flexible, and includes things like being able to upload images and to write directly on the surface, like a whiteboard. Plus, and this is the biggie, it allows for real-time collaboration. I'm not exaggerating when I say this feature opened up all sorts of possibilities in my teaching mind.

Again, there may be tools that are better out there, but free and online? Not that I've seen so far. So if you're a c-mapper, give these a test drive, and see what you think...

(LifeDev on bubbl.us and thinkature)

As the regular reader will remember, this year's MLA kicked off with a stirring rendition of the second chapter of my book manuscript, with the unusually expository (for me, at least) title "The Rhetorical Canons as an Ecology of (New Media) Practice." Gee, I wonder what the talk was about?

Hee. Today was also the 3rd step in the epic self-transformation that will see me turn from a reader of conference papers to a speaker of conference presentations. I worked from an outline and from the slides, but otherwise, did not script the specifics. I think it went okay, but I do have to confess that the fellow in the 3rd row who used his cameraphone to take snapshots of each of my slides, and whose phone rang not once but twice during our session, was a bit of a distraction.

And yet, it was he who inspired me to go ahead and try out SlideShare, which is basically a YouTube-like service for PP presentations. Keynote exports to pdf, which I can then upload and turn into a shareable Flash doodad.

(Update: The doodad was taking serious download time, so I'm replacing it with a link to the SlideShare page instead. Those readers uninterested in unnarrated PP slides may now breath an appropriately grateful sigh of relief.)

The pdf option, far as I can tell, preserves original layout and font better, and has the virtue of being about 1/10 the size of a PP export. So even though there's no support for a Keynote native presentation, it works out just fine.

The slides themselves are probably a little oblique without commentary, so I'll use ProfCast when I get back to Syracuse and offer a full-service version. In the meantime, suffer in silence. I'm done with my talk, and have a much more leisurely conference ahead of me.

That is all.

One of the telecoms is running commercials featuring the myriad conversations that might be ruined by the dreaded "dropped call"--you know, like when you start singing "Jimmy cracked corn and I don't care" to Jim, your future father-in-law. Boy, I can't tell you how many engagements that's ruined for me personally.

Anyhow, I was feeling like my calls had all been dropped this weekend. When I recommend RSS readers to folks, I recommend Bloglines almost exclusively. I've been using it for years now, and never had much call to complain. Until this past weekend, where a day or two's worth of feeds weren't picked up. And in the land of NotADayGoesBy, that puts a serious crimp in my inventional processes. I rely upon the ecology of feeds I've developed to supplement my more immediate life, particularly when it comes to topics for blogging.

And so I'm flirting with Google Reader right now. I'm already seeing ways that it may change my reading habits, based on things like download/upload times, refresh intervals, etc. We'll see how it goes. I can manage two different readers for a spell, switching back and forth and using liberally the "mark all read" feature on each.

It's funny, though, how all it takes is a little hiccup in a service to start me down the path of looking at other options. Bloglines has benefitted from its relative invisibility for me over the past couple of years--as long as it worked just fine, I had no reason to think about changing. I don't really use it to its fullest capacity, so if I'm going to be looking at the full capacity of a reader, it doesn't really cost me much to shop around. And in the meantime, I'll be checking individual sites more often than normal, just to see what I've missed in the past few days.

That is all.

For the most part, this is just a placeholder for links to Elaine Peterson's Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy, to David Weinberger's reply and Tom Vander Wal's reply as well. I've got some work and at least one meeting before I can turn to them, but turn to them I will. It shouldn't take too much sleuthing to figure out where I'm going to weigh in...

It may just be a matter of confluence. I've come across a couple of blogposts talking about playlists in the past week or so, 43F has featured a couple of tips and tricks entries about iTunes playlists, and Bloglines just announced a playlist feature as well. Seems like I'm seeing them a lot recently.

My first thought was that it's one of those metaphors (taken from radio?) that's quickly becoming stretched beyond its original meaning--my fave example of this is Jakob Neilsen's complaint about the shopping cart metaphor. But I'm more of a descriptivist than a prescriptivist.

And playlists have more than a little in common with tagging. In a lot of ways a playlist can be little more than a unique tag. In iTunes, you drag a song over to the playlist and add it, but this is only superficially different from adding a tag to the songs you want on the list, and then opening up the page of all items tagged thusly. The music doesn't move or anything.

It's interesting to me because one of the things that I didn't really get to a few days back in talking about tagging was a quibble that I had with defining tagging as the addition of "descriptive" terms. Reason for that is that one of the first uses for del.icio.us that ever made sense to me was when I saw Jill Walker use it in a talk (at the MEA conf) as a quick way of gathering up the links for the sites she was talking about.

In other words, my first "click" moment with del.icio.us was seeing it used as a way to gather certain bookmarks into a playlist.

In the strictest sense, this isn't descriptive tagging, since the playlist/tag refers to a particular context rather than anything intrinsic about the resource itself. More and more, I've been thinking about making a distinction between descriptive tagging and what I think of as procedural tagging, or tags that function in some way other than simple description.

The best account of this I know of (and there may be others, certainly) is Bradley's discussion of using del.icio.us as a teaching tool. I tried something similar in my networks course, but I didn't really think it through to the degree that Bradley does there. In other words, procedural tags can be used to set aside certain bookmarks for course reading (and not others), they can be tagged for particular units (or multiple, to indicate connections), with due dates for reading the texts, etc. You can tag a set of resources for a talk, as Jill did, tag them with someone's name if you want that person to find them easily, etc. Right now, the Teaching Carnivals are assembled every couple of weeks (in part at least) through procedural tagging. None of these particular tags are descriptive in the strictest sense, although the Carnival tags come fairly close. They point outwards, connecting the bookmark to some additional context.

Over at the CCCOA, we use tags as keywords for CCC essays, but we also have some hybrid tags, so that you can look at all of the articles from a particular issue, or see which of the articles are converted CCCC Chair's Addresses or Braddock Award for the best in a given volume. What del.icio.us calls tag bundles, we might also call playlists.

What's got me thinking tonight, though, is the place where the smart playlists of iTunes go beyond descriptive or even procedural tagging. Certain of the tags in iTunes are variables. For example, "Play Count" is a tag that increases by 1 every time the particular song is played, and "Last Played" and "Date Added" are simply automatically attached to the song by iTunes itself, as opposed to the 5-star "My Rating" a user can apply. Where the playlists go beyond this is in allowing users to set rules for the playlist that are based on these variables. Merlin's entry is focused on keeping an iTunes collection manageable, but I find myself wondering about how much of the smart playlist idea is transferrable.

Here's where I'm stalling out a little. I have a sense that there's something to this, but I'm having trouble figuring out how it would function outside of my head. Part of me thinks that there's a degree to which sites like digg already accomplish what I'm talking about. In other words, I think about the variables that could be assigned to a blog entry or essay, and how a playlist might incorporate them, and digg does some of what I'm after. I could also be creative with the RSS feeds from interior pages of del.icio.us users (add something to the playlist when User X tags it with Y). But it seems to me that there are other functions that might be of use as well. It'd be interesting to have a smart list that captured bookmarks on topics that had crested a certain number of users, or that had attracted steady attention (a combination of Date First Tagged and Frequency). Or even one that fed resources tagged with a user's top 5 tags, but allowed that top 5 to change over time, so that as that person's attention shifted to new issues, so would the feed.

No grand conclusion here, except to say that there's something here in the mix of procedural tagging and playlisting that may be worth pursuing. And I would, given time enough and skillz. As it is, though...