Topic: Posts

I talk to people from time to time about working in cyberspace and successful new media participation. If I were a hipster, I might even say, “I do SEO,” but I’m not, and I don’t, really. The truth is that I don’t have a good, simple, answer to the question, “How do I succeed on-line with social media.” I do have a lot of ideas on the subject, as you might expect (many of which I’ve already written about here before.) The core of my approach revolves around a conviction that word of mouth--like offline--is the most effective way to promote events and products in cyber-space, with the corollary that “meatspace” connections are among the most powerful and valuable “cyberspace” resources.

During college I spent a long time reading and rereading an essay by Samuel R. Delany, called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue about the process of gentrification in Times Square and it’s affect on cross-class/cross-race social/sexual contact. The argument was that environments and geographies that promoted situations were individuals would come into contact (randomly, casually) promoted opportunity, satisfying social interaction, and interesting conversations in a way that “networking” opportunities (conferences, workshops, cocktail parties, etc.) couldn’t. In illustration of this, Delany describes situations from talking about philosophy in the pornographic theatres of the old Time Square to finding a vacuum cleaner repair service in the checkout line of the grocery store. Furthermore, “contact” between people of different classes (as was present in the pornographic theaters of the old time square,) promotes the destabilization of class-based injustices.¹

Contact has been an incredibly powerful and useful concept for me in a number of different contexts, because it provides an method for affecting social change in “every day life” and in creates a notion of “politics” that’s closer to “people interacting” and further from something tied to institutions of power (“government,” etc.,) which suits my disposition. I think, largely the internet is most powerful when it promotes something closer to “contact” and further from something that resembles “networking.” And by powerful, I mean a number of things: most likely to positively affect people’s work, provide meaningful opportunities for commerce and social relationships, to develop unique cultural environments.

While there are opportunities for contact on contemporary social networking websites, they mostly specialize at helping you find people who are actually quite like you, like people you know in real life, people who are interested in the same things you’re interested in, and people who are friends with people you know in real life. That’s not contact, in the sense provided by Delany.²

There is still, I think, contact. I think microblogging (twitter/identi.ca) particularly with “track” features,³ represents (or did) a move away from “networking” to contact. The communities that form around open source projects, promote contact, as they are often interest specific, and contain members with disparate skills and backgrounds. Once upon a time, general population/topic (ie. non-project specific) IRC channels (chat rooms) were an immense source of contact for their users.⁴

I’m not sure what this means. I remain convinced that contact is a useful and important way of looking at social interactions. I also think it says a lot about my interests in open source. I also think that as technologies and memes in cyberspace (eg. blogs, social networking, microblogging) develop in ways that promote “contact,” and eventually become “networking” opportunities not that the latter is bad, but it is an important conceptual shift. It’s also quite likely that we’d be able to see what ideas are going to be the next big thing based on the degree to which they promote contact. There are other implications I’m sure, but I’ll leave those for another time.

Two pieces of knitting news:

1. I’ve started knitting seriously on the cabled sweater I’m making. I (for various reasons) have one ball of yarn (for it) to last me the next month, which will--I hope--force me to work on other projects as well. It’s going well, after a few mishaps, that I’ve corrected for, and while I think my heart is still in color work I do quite enjoy this sweater.

2. I’m knitting a blue shawl. A second blue shawl. A few years ago, I knit a rather massive blue shawl, and now I’m making another. I’m nearly half done, but not quite. It’s progressing slowly, as these things do, but not nearly as slowly as I might have predicted. It should be done for the summer so I can knit sweaters all summer.

It’s a very odd knitting life I lead.

So I’ve noticed that my impulse on these shorter blog posts (codas) that I tend to just do my normal essay thing only shorter, which is more of an old habit than it is something productive or intentional. Weird. To help break out of this bad habit, I’m going to post some links that I’ve collected recently.

I saw a couple of articles on user experience issues that piqued my interest, perhaps they’ll pique yours as well: Agile Product Desgin on Agile Development and UX Practice and On Technology, User Experience and the need for Creative Technologists.

Cheetah Template Engine for Python. This isn’t an announcement but I’ve been toying around with the idea of reimplementing Jekyll in python (to learn, because I like python more than Ruby). Cheetah seems to be the template engine for python that looks the coolest/best. I need to read more about it, of course

I didn’t get to go to Drupal Con (alas), but there were a few sessions that piqued my interest, or at least that I’d like to look into mostly because the presenters are people I know/watch/respect: Sacha Chua’s Rocking your Development Environment Liza Kindred’s Bussiness and Open Source James Walker’s Why I Hate Drupal.

Sacha’s because I’m always interested in how developers work, and we have emacs in common. Liza’s because Open Source business models are really (perversely) fascinating, even if I think the Drupal world is much less innovative (commercially) than you’d initially think. Finally, given how grumpy I’m prone to being, how could walkah’s talk not be on my list?

Anyone have something good for me?

I listened to the podcast of “After The Siege,” a novella by Cory Doctorow, the other week (I’ve been driving cross country and walking a lot, I’m going through a lot of audio.) It was really cool and I thought it would be good to post a few notes. (For those of you who want to skip right to the podcast, here’s the link, but I’d get the files straight from cory’s podcast).

The reading was done by Mary Robinette Kowal, and it was amazing. I very much enjoyed the story, but it was a bit rough for me, at least politically. The story science-fictionalizes stories from the author’s grandmother’s experiences during the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, to tell a story about contemporary American Imperialism. Politically, something about this comparison, seems a bit fraught; both in its scope, and in the way it understands American Imperialism.

I think it’s probably a sign that my politics come very close to intersecting with Cory’s that I get so riled up in response to some of his fiction. When there’s no chance that I’m going to agree with someone, the fact that I don’t agree doesn’t worry me. When I’m pretty close, it’s a more troubling concern. The story is, however, quite good, so go listen.

In the latest/forthcoming version of GNU Emacs there exists a daemon mode. The intent is to make it easier to run in one instance of emacs, and rather than starting new instances, you can run everything in one instance. Less overhead on your system, and everyone’s happy. Without daemon mode, you can still run in server mode and get nearly the same effect, but you end up with one emacs frame that’s the “host,” which means, if you’re dumb and close it (or it’s running inside of another process which crashes…) all of the frames close.

I suppose, as an interjection, that my attempt to explain why this is cool to a generalized audience is somewhat of a lost cause.

In any case, there’s a problem daemon mode doesn’t behave like anyone would want it to. This post explains it better than anything else I’ve read thus far, but it’s not all that clear. Basically when you start emacs --daemon it doesn’t load your .emacs init file correctly, and so things like display settings are off kilter, and can’t really be fixed. I resorted to running my “host” emacs frame inside of a terminal/screen session, because that worked and was basically the same from my perspective.

Nevertheless I’ve discovered “the fix” to the emacs daemon it to work like you’d expect. Run the following command at the command line (changing username and font/fontsize):

emacs -u [USERNAME] --daemon --eval "(setq default-frame-alist \ '((font-backend . "xft") (font . "[FONT]-[SIZE]")))" -l ~/.emacs

And then, open an emacsclient.

… and there was much rejoicing …

There are a couple of things that I can’t get to work reliably. Most notably, though the emacsclient works in terminal instances, it has some sort of problem with attaching new clients to X after an X crash/restart. No clue what this is about. Not quite sure what the deal is with this, but needing to reboot every time X goes down is a bummer. Other than that? Emacs bliss. For the moment.

Data, information, in the digital context is really important. Perhaps the most important thing. It’s a shame then, I think, that we’re, on the whole, so bad at managing data and organizing information so that it is useful to us in the future. I keep starting to write posts on the topic with clever lead-ins, and within a hundred words I realize that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. So I’ll spare the introduction and get on with the story.

A couple of weeks ago, I copied all of my music off of my backups (from iTunes and my days as a mac user), and onto my Linux machine. I’d never really looked at the files in years, becuase of course, iTunes abstracts all the files away, so when you play “digital music,” you just play “tracks” rather than having to interact with the realities of the files themselves. This is incredibly user friendly, and I think there’s something in the iTunes model that is pretty useful. That is, creating user interfaces that let users interact with intelligibly bounded data units rather than with file units makes a lot of sense.

Having said that, what ends up happening is that the abstraction of the data often means that we’re less in touch with what’s being stored, and we rely on (often proprietary) tools to keep track of the meta-data associated with our libraries.

As I was going through my Music Library, which I’m using with mocp and Rhythm box (minimally, for syncing, eventually.) I realized that my music was organized in an incredibly ass backwards way. Many “artists” had a number of folders given various alternate spellings of their names (with and with out “the” or with various ampersand forms), which is a trifle frustrating. And as I was looking over the files I realized that there were things that I thought I had deleted, but in fact hung around in my directory (this is a specific flaw with the “are you sure” dialogue in iTunes, but it’s still an issue).

I’m not done, but I know that the next step: going through the files by hand will mean that my music files will be much more well organized. Problems like this arise, largely, when we just rely on the computer to organize the files itself without input from us. While I like the “iTunes” way of accessing my music, I expect that my collection of music files is the kind of thing that I’m going to have around for the rest of my computer-using/music-listening life, and after only 5 years my iTunes has stooped being a part of my life. For sure.

I guess the lesson from this is, interfaces for accessing your files aren’t always the best for organizing the files, and don’t entrust your organizing responsibility to a script.

Another story: PDF files.

When I’m doing research stuff, I have this way of collecting PDF files of articles. When I was in school I would make a folder for each class I took and then throw PDFs into one folder, title them productively (author[s] - title.pdf). This worked until I wanted to start reusing material, or drawing connections between various projects/class. And then--being a geek--I had projects that weren’t quite class related, where did they go? Never mind the fact that the file names were absurdly long.

So I switched to a new system where I keep a BibTeX database of all my files and name PDFs with their cite keys (which are: authorlastYEAR.pdf; if there are more than one paper by an author in a year I append alphabetical characters (eg. a, b, c) to the end in the order that they come into the database. If there are more than one author I take the first author/PI).

It took a few weeks of sporadic work get the files into shape, but the end result of that transformation is the fact that my PDFs are incredibly useful to me, and I never have to look very hard for any piece of data.

The lesson is to use your data no matter what the system is and make sure it’s still working, and then, when needed don’t be afraid to change strategies. On this level, organization really ought to be empirical.

In light of these two experiences I have come to the conclusion that it’s important to really get your hands dirty in the files. While the abstractions are nice, they allow us to be complacent. Touching your data, looking at the files, and deploying a system that is simple and both useful in the present and relevant looking forward is incredibly important. The particulars beyond that are more vague, still but we’ll get there in future posts.

Thanks for reading.

I posted a new story on Critical Futures today. It’s another one from the Knowing Mars novella that I wrote a year ago and that I had been posting previously. After a much too long break from posting fiction, I’ve decided that I have enough brain space to work through some projects there and bring it back to life. While I think my first six months was an unparalleled learning experience, I think a different strategy is in order.

My goal/intention is to slip into a Monday/Thursday schedule, of posting 400-600 words rather than the every work-day of 200-400 words. The word counts are mostly for my own thoughts and less of a hard guideline. It’s also helpful, because I think, that even if I run out of my backlog, which seems pretty likely to happen pretty soon. I feel like I could probably write the requisite 800-1200 words on Saturday/Sunday morning along with my non-fiction essays, no matter what my life is looking like. I’m not sure what the future will hold, or what exactly is going to happen with my fiction, but it’s going to be there.

One of my background projects, however (and I’ll write about the theory here in an essay,) is generate a few “curatorial” pages for critical futures (and I suppose for tychoish as well). Basically I want to give people an easier “in” to the stories that I post on the web. This includes more creative templates and some hand-compiled guide pages, and as websites become home to more and more information my thought is that curation is the only real solution to this, and that, in that, it’s really the next big thing for content. But that’s another thought for another time…

Check out the new Critical Futures story, “Knowing Mars, http://criticalfutures.com/2009/03/”

Thanks for reading, and do tell your friends/submit fiction if that’s your thing.

I wrote in “The Advertising Bubble” that one of the ways to more effectively monetize content and “do better on the Internet,” was to combine efforts with other content producers. The key thought here is that, people only have so much time, and cooperation can allow you and your fellow content producers to pool resources, readers' attention, and business strategies.

I’ve also thought of this post as the “just because Wordpress, can be installed in a handful of minutes doesn’t mean you should,” post. The tools (and skills) required to build websites are fast, easy, and non-technical (by now) so that anyone can have a blog, or a website, or (hell, with enough time/money) a full fledged social networking site to rival digg or facebook. Just because sites are easy to build, it doesn’t mean that we need to build new sites. Just because independence is possible, it’s not always called for.

There are a lot of readers on the Internet, but there are only so many hours in the day. And having a dynamic site with new content, is something that requires a lot of work. Lots of people can pull it off, but a lot of people (with really good things to say) can’t. This is sort of the dirty underbelly of the fact that the Internet (and open source) is a great democratizing force: because everyone speaks easily and freely, the challenge to being heard isn’t opportunity, it’s shear volume.

I talk with a lot of people about working with the Internet, about using the internet to promote and build various kinds of projects, about blagging, and about strategies for success. There are things that I can help people do better like having good designs, writing top heavy content (I’m bad at this), ideas for more content, strategies for posting regularly, places to network with the communities that you hope to speak to, and among other tactics. All of these things should help lead to success; but beyond persistence, creativity, good timing, and a little entropy I have no good way of beating the “volume problem,” given current conventions.

The solution of encouraging group blogs rather that individual blogs is a good start. Each bloggers’ responsibility to any given site is much lower than a single blogger’s responsibility to their personal site. There would be fewer (new) blogs as a result of the increase in collaboration, and possibly a consolidation of existing blogs. We would also expect to see blogs more tightly focused on niches rather than individuals: niche focuses tend to do really well on the web with regards to targeting audiences, so this is a good thing indeed.

Before anyone cries that I’m trying to suppress individuality (or expression, or identity), this is very much not the case. I think static websites are really important, my suggestion isn’t that people shouldn’t have websites it’s that they shouldn’t blog on them (by default). Given the state of syndication and aggregation content, it’s even possible for folks to have personal websites that aggregate their content from a number of different sources,¹ we get individuality and dynamic content without dividing efforts or audiences.

There are other solutions (curation springs instantly to mind) to the “volume problem,” and I’ll get to those soon. In the mean time, remember: group blogs are the future.

Onward and Outward!

I read something a few weeks ago (the problem with being slow to process things from blogs that post regularly), about digital ebook readers and the future of digital books.

I guess my thoughts are best summed up in a couple of points, basically that electronic texts will succeed as they: develop unique and presentation methods (hardware and software), and as the commerce/distribution models become more transparent.

1. Words on screens don’t work like words on paper. They just don’t, and we need to develop new ways of reading/writing that engage the medium better. We got prose out of the transition to bound-books, novels out of printing press (loosely;) the success of ebooks, I think will require some sort of new way of writing/reading/interacting with text, and no ebook implementation has gone there.

2. The potential for profit of digital goods is immense: distribution/production costs are much lower than their material counterparts, because printing, delivery, etc. aren’t factors for digital things. There is, however, value and work that goes into publishing texts, and we need some way of supporting creators. I’m not sure that the existing publishing/content industry’s models make a good example to follow, and “micropayments” (the stock alternate response) don’t seem to really work. I tend to think that fellowships funded by a subscription model/tax on connectivity is more the way to go. But that’s me.

At the risk of sounding vague (or overly polite) I had the chance to read/hear a few writers describe the mechanics of their work recently. To clarify, by writers I mean “fiction writers,” and by mechanics, I mean how the story happens (character, plot, narrative, conflict, development) rather than things about process (how writing happens) or business (how to live/publish). This was, as you might imagine, kind of awkward because the people who write the stories aren’t the best judges of what actually happens.

There are lots of reasons for this: readers are complex and contextually constrained (as are authours), and creators are too close to the story and the characters to really see have a productive perspective on what we’re writing. We can talk about what we meant to write, how we intended for a story to work, but while short measures of this kind of analysis aren’t harmful, longer amounts of this kind of talking is pretty unproductive because it detracts from the reader’s freedom and the ability of the text to stand on its own.

This isn’t to say that I’m opposed to writers talking about their work, but I think there are some kinds of discussion that work better. The first is your critical focus: it’s great when people talk about the ideas that linger in their minds when they’re writing the story. These are the big issues that your characters represent/grapple with, but stated in more concrete terms in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books, this would include nationalism, interstellar colonization, the challenges of a massively overgrown population, the problem of survival on a different world. In Cory Doctorow’s latest (Little Brother) the list of critical issues includes: political action, post-9/11 police powers, law enforcement statistics, youth identity. There’s lots of stuff to talk about, without talking about the character or plot development process.

The second kind of conversation is about process. Fiction writers aren’t the only people who write, and are certainly not the only kind of information workers in the contemporary world. As a result how we work, how we are able to summon creativity, how we manage both creation and business are all things that have a broad appeal, and a lot of my writing about productivity and process here falls into this layout. While there’s such thing as too much process talk, there’s a way to write about work and process that empowers and encourages lots of other people who do similar work. Where as talking about critical issues provides the opportunity to engage the content of the story, talking about process gives you the chance to communicate your experience of telling the story, without needing to offer analysis’ of the text itself.

Maybe my response is my way of dealing with both “being a writer,” and believing in idea that “the author is dead.” Maybe this is sound advice, just because: I’m not sure.

Interestingly these two areas also represent the areas that writers often find work talking about/writing columns about. The best non-fiction writing that I’ve read from fiction writers are often essays that they write about what they interested in (and also write fiction about,) and while I don’t have experience at fiction writing workshops process of one sort or another is a big part of what happens at workshops, I’d expect.

I think part of the issue is that the mechanics of stories, is something that we both know a lot about intellectually, and something that we have to do very instinctively. I know what makes characters work, what holds plots together, I can talk a lot about how to make stories and characters better, but when I’m “creating,” it’s all gut instinct and I have to go back and edit (even outlines) into shape. My current goal, is not to “learn more about writing,” but “hone my instincts” (or “feel better”) about writing. Maybe the instinctive writing approach means that (at least of our own writing) our ability to explain what’s happening becomes a bit…

I’m not sure. All very interesting. Onward and Upward!