So about this social networking thing….

Actually I have no idea of how to lead into this conversation. I’ve had accounts with all the the social networking sites, if not from each of their very beginnings, then from pretty early on in their respective developments. Each site--friendster, orkut, myspace, facebook, virb--has a different crowd, and in it’s own way that’s kind of interesting, and I’ve never felt that using one site necessarily precludes using another one. But over the last little while, I’ve been thinking about this whole social network thing, particularly in light of ravlery Here are some thoughts:

• People join and use the social networking sites that their friends use. College students use facebook. Hipsters, musicians, and high school students (at least in the US) are more likely to use myspace, for example. This is why features don’t matter, it’s all about the crowd, and the truth is that most of these sites look and behave more or less like the others, and the features converge.
• I think there are a couple kinds of social networking sites: the ones that center around a profile (facebook, myspace friendster) and those that center around an activity (twitter, ravlry, livejournal, vox, viddlr[sic?], etc.) The latter ends up being much more successfull in the long term, because these sites and communities work their way into peoples lives. It’s sort of interesting that people and companies have managed to capitalize on the social aspect of the Internet that always used to exist on Usenet and IRC, and also create a niche for the profile-based sites. Though interestingly, I think these profile based sites sort of fill the role that the “personal homepage,” used to fill. That is before people realized that personal home-pages were kind of lame.
• Social networking sites that are about collecting friends are doomed to fail, because collecting friends is boring, and because at some point, everyone realizes that their threshold for “adding” new people to their “friends” is so low that it turns out it’s kind of creepy and then we walk away and try and forget it.
• The less control a company/website gives over someone, the better people will feel about that site. Truth I think if you could access livejournal over gopher or a command-line/terminal it would be pretty awesome. But seriously think about it. Many people have started saying that facebook has jumped the shark when they gave users control over how their profiles looked.

So that’s what’s on my mind. It’s interesting I’m pretty religious about checking ravelry (and LJ) these days, and while I still keep an eye on facebook, I’m not as into it as I used to be. I think it’s interesting to see how these things develop mostly because I’ve pretty much given up trying to figure out what’s going to happen next.

Onward and Upward!

I’m still basking in the glory of having finished my graduate applications in one fell swoop yesterday and today. We’re driving off to points westward in the morning. Very early in the morning. So early in the morning that I should have already gotten through a sleep cycle.

Rather than experience this accomplishment with a frenetic high, the release of stress over this, has made me sort of worn out and tired. I took a long nap this afternoon and I’ve been pretty tired all evening, to the point that I’m not quite able to judge if I’d be tired enough to sleep. So I haven’t.

But don’t fear, I’ve already recused myself from the early driving shift if I need to, but I might not. And I want to be able to go to bed at like 9:30 or 10 tomorrow so that I can get up at like 5:00 and write the following morning.

Just incase we get snowed in, I’ll have enough podcasts and audio on my ipod to last me for the next 4 months. I discovered that the last time I synced my ipod was before labor day (the last time we made the trip for points westward). And while I listened to a lot of content, I certainly didn’t empty my stash out. If that’s not enough, I’m also brining a hard drive with video content, mostly because I’m being indecisive about what I want to bring with me, and I’m uncharacteristically low on on-computer video content to watch.

Other than the application wrap up and some errands (so: oil change, bank, post office) and the aforementioned nap, I didn’t get a lot done today, which I think is totally acceptable. I did go through and reorganize a lot of the files that I work from day in and day out, and I refrehsed my todo lists, which was much needed. I also spent some time to draw up a very basic site plan for the new TealArt Web site. I’m closer than I thought, I think, but I still need to have a sit down with amy about drupal but I don’t think things are that far off. Good news.

Well have a good day, I’ll post more when I’m settled.

Onward and Upward!

In about ten minutes I’m going to run out to get the oil in my car changed. I’m only going to take my ipod and knitting and a book and a cup of tea. Zoe has another engagement, as I have her downloading what will probably amount to the next 4 months of pod-casting listening. Seems I haven’t synced my ipod since Labor day, the last time that I went west to visit family.

When the oil in sparky the wonder saturn is changed, I’m going to mail off the last of my graduate school applications. They’re all done and sealed up.

I think I’m experiencing some delightful cognitive dissonance reduction, but I’m pretty upbeat about this. I started the process feeling pretty good, and I had a bit of a slump in the middle, and by now I’m feeling pretty good with it. I’ve had some good interactions with a couple of faculty that I have a lot of respect for, and while it’s always a crap shoot, and what not, I feel like I have a pretty good shot at a few of the schools I’ve applied to. Late February and early March is when I’ll start to hear.

Until then there’s not a lot that I can do. I have a research project that I will be working on in Janurary. I’m going to read more fiction, because it’s good for me. I’m going to write fiction as best I can for the next six weeks. Latter will happen later.

I’ve also come to realize that until I have a good idea of what kind of pages and presentations of data that I need to have, I’m not going to be able to make any real progress on the TealArt setup. Everything set except for the content and the plan, which is a good place to be in for this project, so maybe I’ll take a notebook with me and see what kind of planning I can get done while I’m out.

Onward and Upward!

1. Books
2. Yarn
3. Fountain Pens
4. TextMate
5. Ibprophen

Note: This is reader participation day. I supply the five things, and you have to figure out what the list is.

Sorry that I’m low on creativity this morning.

I’ve submitted two applications today, to IvySchool and SouthernPrivateResearchSchool, and I’m prep-ed to fill out the forms for the third and final (FormerGloryNorthesternSchool). I’m going to pick up some USPS mailer things on my way to work in a few, and get things sent out tomorrow morning/afternoon. Everything is in order and all that’s left is a bunch of busy work left to do. That’s not unimportant, and it’s a bunch of time, but I’m looking forward to returning to human status again. Quite Happy.

I’m going to be working in the shop again today, so if you’re around, stop by. I’m going to be cutting a steek (ie, cut an armhole where previously there was none) on demand tonight, probably at about 6/6:15pm CST.

In the mean time, read this by Jared Axelrod, it looked cool when I clicked the link, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it, but I hope to.

Have a great day!

Onward and Upward!

I was talking to an old friend the other day about astronomy and stars and what not. He’s become interested in visual astronomy, and I’ve been doing some reading about near earth astronomical phenomena for the fiction I’m writing.

Recently I’ve realized that I do a fair amount of my outlining and brainstorming in instant message windows. I suppose whatever works, but it is a bit odd. Sorry to all of my bored friends out there.

Anyway, so I was talking about why the hell I decided to spend time looking at information about nearby stars, particularly, you know when you’re writing vaguely space-opera-ish stuff, and I realized that it was all about hyperspace.

Mostly that I don’t like the concept.

It seems that there should be some cost on traveling between great distances. Otherwise, from a story perspective it’s all one place. If you can get between one planet and another in a few hours, or even a day or two, and its reasonably economical, then is there a lot of difference between going to Epsilon Eridani (or something further) and Kansas?

Not so much.

And if that’s the case, it has all sorts of implications about population sizes, cultural transmission, and the like. Mostly that it wouldn’t change things all that much. If going to EE is like going to Kansas, then in our minds it might not be very much different than going to Kansas in our own minds, and thats, well boring (Nothing wrong with going to Kansas, and I will be in a week, nevertheless…)

So for instance in Station Keeping, there has to be faster than light travel, but there are still relativistic effects. People spend lots of objective time traveling from place to place. Going out to the area of space that Hanm is in, if they’re from the core, basically means leaving everything behind. SK is the closest I get, but I really do think that putting some sort of narrative cost for all the wizz-bang of SF is a no-brainer. Circle Games, the precursor to the novella I’m finishing the edits on now (and some other future projects) had FTL, but that was the least of it’s problems. Eh.

Anyway, omitting FTL has of scores of implications for population dynamics and cultural transmission, but it’s fairly clean cut. Without hypers-pace, I’m also dealing with social and emotional experiences that are very historically relevant, but not contemporarily (I’m playing with emigration as a sort of general theme in the novel). And not having hyperspace makes this much, much, easier, and frankly pretty cool.

So yes…

Onward and Upward!

I guess this is in the larger theme of posts about my blogging process, identity, and purpose.

What’s a Wednesday morning before christmas without a little bit of healthy existential angst?

Though the merging of my old TealArt posts into tychoish muddies the water a bit, I think I’m going to pass an important marker in my blogging soon.

Sometime later this week I’m going to pass the 900 post marker. Having 600ish of my TealArt posts helps this, but it’s noteworthy to point out that I’ve posted so much to tychoish in a bit less than 6 months. One of my big struggles with TealArt was finding the time and energy to post. Now I can hardly live without it. That’s the Journaling Instinct, I guess.

I wouldn’t have posted about this except that I’m closing in on another milestone as well, and I figure, what the hell. What’s another odometer effect?¹

Sometime a bit after post 900 (I guess a week or two but that’s just a guess), my weblog writings of the past 7 years will past the 300,000 word mark. Egads. I always was a bit wordy. And the funny thing is that there’s another year or two of data that was lost…

One thing that dave and I have been talking about is how to jump levels in terms of another kind of milestone about readership.

One thing that I’ve been pretty conscious about with tychoish is regular posting. If I want to make a go of this, I figured, posting often is the key to making that work. If there’s never new content, who’s going to come back? It’s not like I don’t have things to say, it’s just a matter of getting it out there.

One thing that I’m seeing is that regular posting will get you to the top of your class, and allow you to make the most of what you already have, but if you want to jump levels you have to do something else. What that something else is, might be another issue.

Probbly the best thing is to be on the cutting edge. If you’re the 1st whatever, it’s easier to make it than if you’re the 20th. But assuming for a moment that we don’t have time machines or ESP…

Part of it is having friends. Getting links from other blogs, even smaller ones drives traffic, and user participation (I guess to backtrack for a moment, I’m measuring blogging success as a function of comments and traffic). Another part is participating in forums and other blog comments which can help a lot. There has to be a strategy out there for choosing the right places to participate and get involved--from a game theory/social dynamics perspective--too big and no one will click on outbound links, to small and no one will see it. For instance, my inbound traffic from ravelry, has gone down slightly has ravelry has grown. I’m still loving raverly, mind you, but I think this is just how the world works.

The other strategy is to work on additional projects. For a while, because there were so few podcasts, doing a regular podcast would drive a lot of attention to your work, but in this vein collaborative blogs, guest blogging, twittering, youtube contributions (and so forth) are all ways that you can sort of draw attention to your blog, but aren’t connected to y our blog, I guess, if that makes sense.

This whole marketing thing is clearly not my thing, but I think I get the concepts on a pretty basic level, so it’s sort of fun to play with the ideas. And of course, I do want tychoish to make it. Even if it doesn’t it’s still a great deal of fun, so it’s not like I’m going to stop… but, it’s worth a shot.

Onward and Upward!

I’ve talked about the subject of pseudonyms before here and my recent discussions with dave about blogging these days have sort of brought this subject up again. So here we are.

I’ve always thought that the idea of pen names, which I suppose is really want I’m talking about here, are pretty cool. Because of the way that draw attention to the role of the writer without necessarily drawing attention to a particular writer. As a scholar (to be) of identity production and development, I think the use pseudonyms is particularly fascinating: even if it would be difficult to envision a formal research project (in the empirical sense) that would look at pseudonyms.

I’ve also long enjoyed the Internet custom of using handles and nicknames to operate under. This is something that I think a bunch of early cyberpunk picked up on, and something that was true on the real Internet, at least for a while. People still use handles, but they’re less like a mask and more like a badge. As far as I can see; context matters, of course.

For a long time I was big on using my “real” name online for TealArt and for other projects. It’s a unique enough name and I had/have little to hide, so it seemed like a good idea. More recently I’ve become a little bit more concerned about controlling what turns up on google under my name. At this point, in the first ten, I only have one link, (at number 4) and it’s old enough that it won’t reflect poorly on me in the future. It’s old enough that in six to ten years when it really matters, people might not even think to connect me with that link.

And so for these reasons I am using and continue to use a pseudonym. Also, my academic projects and my internet/fiction writing projects are pretty separate, at least in my mind. I mean that’s not true, the reason I’ve been able to get back into fiction writing is because I can draw on social science stuff on a conceptual level, but being successful as a blogger/sf writer and being successful as a social scientist, and quite possibly the former could impede on the later. As I get further into both the bogging project and the fiction writing, the more it seems to make sense that sort of stick to a pseudonym.

Changing names is hard, particularly, when in a very real sense “marketing” is an issue, which is compounded by my additional project of a layer of anonymity. I mean choosing a pen name also draws attention to that (as this draws attention to), but I think that’s kind of cool.

Anyway. tycho garen it is.

See y’all around.

Onward and Upward!