Year: 2004

Categories
Weblogging

IT Kitchen menu schedule

A Schedule of the Daily Menus for the IT Kitchen is as follows, and you can sign up for Kitchen Duty here.

Appreciations in advance for those who join the fun:

October 25th: Smart Mobs? Or just Mobs

  • The issues of group behavior, for good and bad
  • Elitism and the effect of the cult
  • Impact of group behavior on events
  • The power of the link and Google as henchman
  • Significant events reflecting group behavior (Lott, CBS Documents)
  • Prevention or punishment
  • Bees and buzzing – popularity and popularity measurements and impacts on influence

October 26th: Here come de Cooks!

  • Collaboration and social software, IRC and its impact on weblogging
  • FOAF and other RDF vocabularies (ooo, said the bad word)
  • Virtual conferences and meetups
  • Pressing the flesh – meeting the virtual in reality
  • Group weblogs and wikis
  • Going beyond the weblog – friendster et al

October 27th: Frying Spam

  • ’bout what you think it is, comment, email, and referrer spam
  • How to not care and feed the troll
  • Stalkers
  • How to secure your site
  • How to secure yourself
  • Burnt or nicely browned – can flaming be effective

October 28th: The Stylish Webber

  • Site design and CSS
  • Validation
  • Importance of accessibility, and what are the major roadblocks
  • Working with generic designs
  • Are there Looks? And is this good?

October 29th: Slice and Dice

  • Syndication and Aggregation – the specs and the tools
  • Issues of Promotion and getting known, popularity
  • How much is too much in a syndication feed
  • Aggregation and multimedia
  • A History of weblogging
  • Favorite Memes of the past (remember Google bashing?)
  • The infamous syndication wars

October 30th: The Kitchen Tools

  • Introduction to the the different tools and environments
  • General how-tos
  • Basic discussions of trackback, pinging, buzz sheets, syndication feeds, and so on
  • Languages? We gotcher languages here! Tutorials and tips about the tools and languages.

October 31: Halloween Open House!

Whatever anyone wants to write about as long as its legal and doesn’t get the host busted

November 1: Beyond The Kitchen Tools

  • Extending the tools through plugins, embedded scripts, direct database intervention
  • Integrating with Web services
  • Weblogging style – or is there a specific style?
  • Long versus short, to link or not
  • Kicking the Baby Squirrels – is there a place for criticism in weblogging?

November 2: Biting that which can bite back

  • Copyright and DRM and issues of ownership, as well as longevity of content, and ultimate ownership
  • If a weblogger quits or even dies, do the pages fade, or can they be preserved by others? Should they be?
  • Do webloggers have an obligation to their readers?
  • Weblogs and the law – who will be sued first
  • Weblogs and the law – who will be arrested for treason first
  • Weblogs and issues of national boundaries and censorship
  • Weblogs and Politics and Politcs and Weblogs – oh my

November 3: Movable Feast

  • Uses and issues of moblogging, audioblogging, streaming, video blogging
  • Also digital photography, flickr, and photoblogging
  • Podcasting and garage band journalism

November 4: Weblogging Themes

  • Theme based weblogging such as poetry, gardening, cooking, technology, education, the publishing business and so on
  • Benefits of genre specific weblogging
  • subject specific weblogging
  • Online genres
  • Topic specific weblogging, such as focusing on feminism, national issues, specific events

November 5: Salt and Pepper

  • Are there ethics in weblogging? Rules and regs, or is this the ultimate free environment?
  • What are the taboo topics? Work? Family?
  • Should weblogs only be limited by law?
  • Accountability and the weblogger
  • You can say that here, but should you?
  • Making money in the weblogs – weblogging and commercialization
  • Sex sells – using sex in weblogs
  • Ads, subscriptions, tip jars, paid content, corporate sponsorship
  • Yeah, just where are the women

Evening of November 5th is the Cat Close Out and group sing-a-long

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

That “Where’s the women” thing again

The folks at Misbehaving noted the lack of women in the photos from the Web 2.0 conference. As Liz Lawley wrote:

Via Anil, I just saw Jeff Veen’s post on “What do these pictures have in common?” Be sure to click on the “See what you’ve won!” button. Like the first commenter, I wish he’d write the whole rant.

And please don’t post any comments about how there aren’t any women to invite; that’s part of what our sidebar’s for. If you ask, you’ll get recommendations. (Look what happened when I posted about the Microsoft event.) Clearly, the people making the invitations see what they want to see–and they don’t see the women. We’re becoming increasingly invisible.

What’s most depressing is that in every other profession in which women have been in a minority, percentages have been gradually climbing–including technical fields like engineering. Only in computing-related professions have the numbers been dropping.

Actually, according to the NSF, women are dropping from engineering, too, and that’s in some ways the problem – a close affiliation between computer technology and engineering.

Returning to the post, I thought the title was interesting: Even the men are starting to notice. The reason why is that among the political weblogs, the running joke is that some highly ranked male political pundit will write a Where are the women post every three months and is soundly trashed for thinking that he’s invented the concept; that he is the first to have noticed. He’ll then be not so gently reminded that if he hadn’t ignored the women that existed right in front of him, he would have seen that this is a topic that’s been brought up, again and again.

And again. Like now, among the technology weblogs. Having toes in both worlds means I get it from both sides. Where are the women.

Liz and Anil may have noticed the lack of women at Web 2.0 but at least there were some women at this conference. What they didn’t notice, or at least not that I’ve seen them notice, is that there were absolutely no women speakers at Gnomedex. Gnomedex that fabulous little meeting that bills itself as the geek heaven.

I examined the speaker list several times, and found that nope, not a woman (unless CJ is a woman…). Barely any women in the audience, in fact. Is it that we only notice the lack of women when the meeting revolves around industry leaders, rather than hands-on geeks?

Odd, regardless.

Joi Ito (who was just appointed to ICANN – sympathies and congrats, Joi) noted today that whatever lack of visibility women have in weblogging doesn’t extend to all online communities. He’s found that women have a strong presence in the Wikipedia and ponders:

I haven’t conducted any scientific analysis or anything, but Wikipedia seems much more gender balanced than the blogging community. I know many people point out that ratio of men at conferences on blogging and ratio of men who have loud blog voices seems to be quite high. I wonder what causes this difference in gender distribution?

I wrote the following in comments:

Participation in the wikipedia isn’t controlled by anything other than the person’s own interests and involvement.

Studies have been made of blogging and have found that 50% or more of all webloggers, journalists or ‘bloggers’ implied categorization aside, are women; however, men are given disproportionate attention. Why? Good question, someone let me know when there’s a good answer.

In blogging, there are many different factors that generate attention, including a person’s name (how well they’re known), wealth, status, etc –above and beyond the quality or amount of participation in the weblogs. In the wikipedia, attention is based on involvement and quality, no other factor.

What we’re seeing is probably the same amount of participation of each sex in both activities, but women are getting proportionate attention in Wikipedia.

Joi asked an interesting question in his post: …is it something about Wikipedia that attracts powerful women?

I think what’s more likely is that a powerful woman can’t be shut down in the Wikipedia community, but can be effectively ignored (or dismissed as ‘bitch’) in the weblogging community.

Not good, but I will say this: this isn’t just a ‘guy’ thing. If women didn’t work against other women in this community, and actively supported each other more, we wouldn’t be as invisible as we are.

Seems to me, we all have a lot of work to do to correct the inequities.

Categories
Photography Places

From a car window

Yesterday, I and my roommate attended my brother’s celebration of life for my father in Bloomington. I asked my roommate to drive over, because I had several scenes I wanted to try photographing as we were traveling.

I set a higher ISO, 640, and a very high shutter speed, 1/3200, and then set the camera to shutter priority, which means the aperture will change based on conditions. I used these when taking photos of the giant cross I’ve been desperate to photograph ever since I first rounded the corner and saw it hanging in the sky, like the wrath of God.

The cross is outside Effingham, Illinois and I’ve always wondered how many car accidents its responsible for. (Note the skid marks in the road in front of our car.) According to the facts I’ve found on it, its 198 feet tall and cost over a million dollars to erect.

I am ambivalent about the cross, but it makes a wondrously good photo.

The weather hasn’t been great and I haven’t had much of an opportunity for Fall color photos. We’re getting effects from Tropical Depression Matthew, and probably will until Thursday. We need the rain, and I’m glad for it; but a few nice clear days before all the leaves are gone would be nice, too. Hopefully end of week.

In the meantime, the weather was relatively decent on the trip yesterday and I picked up a few color photos along the way including the following meadow scene, which I rather like.

I experimented with the settings of the camera as we progressed, and even used the windshield as a pseudo polarizing filter for a couple of shots. This didn’t lead to the sharpest photos, but I do think led to some interesting effects. And the color still comes through.

Categories
Weblogging

Podcasting

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

Now that you’re all thirsting for more after my little ode to the car wash, I thought I would move in for the kill with podcasting.

Eric wrote a great comment in the post associated with the Web 2.0 post:

Something’s been bothering me about this fuss over “podcasting”, and I think I’m figuring out what it is. The term “clever” is what did it for me. It’s really nothing to do with “timeshifting” your audio or anything like that – it’s just a “clever” way to use a sexy consumer gadget. It’s a rationalization for the iPod and for doing things the Apple Way.

Because, after all, when you strip it down and figure out what the meat is, it all actually gets easier when you’re dealing with things other than iPods. “Podcasting” would be a matter of hacking some batch files for my Archos; with an iPod and iTunes, you have to actually code to an API…

Podcasting is now the ‘hip’ thing, the stuff that tingles all the toes. Scoble is ga ga over it (note to self, tell Scoble about car washes), and Adam Curry is determined to become the Howard Stern of the garage waves. We are probably on the verge of a mass saturation of the Internet to bring down the routers.

i.m. orchard says he’s falling for the podcast hype. He writes:

With this switch of perspective, I think I’m falling for the hype. The key is to get out of the way: aggregate, queue, and play in the background. Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of awful crap out there, and lots of dorks eating breakfast and lipsmacking into the microphone as they blab (this is me, shuddering)—but as the number of podcasters expand, we will start to hear some blissful hams showing up with things worth listening to.

The key is to get out of the way. More good writing.

People talk about why they started a weblog, and say they were attracted to its unique characteristics. They then seem to spend an inordinate about of time trying to push it and pummel it into formats that we’ve had for hundreds of years. But you know, if it’s fun for folks and they get a kick out of it, more power to them.

But will it take off? Unlikely.

I can chuckle through a bit of twisted writing and mangled grammar and it can have appeal that goes beyond style and mechanics. That appeal could be because I like the person; or it could be because there’s bright specks in the writing and that makes the rest palatable. Heck, I wince to think of my own twisted writing and mangled grammer over the years, but I haven’t chased everyone away. Just most of the conservative Republicans.

However, I cannot handle a screechy voice, or excessive use of pauses (’uhm’, ‘ah’, ‘urh’), not to mention dead, pedantic tones and fake playfulness. Broadcasting, both visual and audio, is a skilled task that usually requires a great deal of training in addition to having a decent voice. Unlike writing, it’s much more difficult to ‘tune’ out the bad. I notice this about my own recordings, which is why I’ve only subjected you to these twice.

Additionally, as has been said elsewhere, audio files can’t be searched, or easily annotated with meta data, and can become significant drains on resources. As Scoble later wrote, because of Podcasting I need to be able to email around large files. Many email systems won’t accept files that are bigger than 2MB’s in size.

Omigod, I am visualizing being inundated with 10MB sound files. It’s enough to make you want to unplug. Viagra spam done vocally – there is a hell.

Still, teaching people proper podcasting behavior (think static location and ‘broadcasting’ the URI, as well as text translations of the audio, and never, even emailing podcasts to your friends) should take care of most of the concerns. And I for one wouldn’t mind hearing what some people I read sound like (and many of you who I’ve heard have very nice voices). As i.m. said, The key is to get out of the way: aggregate, queue, and play in the background.

But I think about spending time in the mornings or during the day reading weblogs, and I’m reminded of those who say they get all their news through blogging, and now we’re talking about loading blogger podcasts into our audio devices to take with us while we drive or walk or hike and I wonder where this particular world will end.

Will it even invade my car wash? Pink and blue and yellow prose competing with pink and blue and yellow foam? Seems a shame somehow. But what do I know? I think car washes are cool.

Categories
Places

At the car wash

My favorite place is not at home in front of the computer, or out on some trail somewhere, taking photos. It’s not in any city or town, in the country, or along the water, though you get close with the latter. I am in my car, but being in my car doesn’t make it my favorite place. And the place loses its magic if someone else is with me.

My favorite place is the car wash. In the middle of the car wash to be exact. I love the car wash. But before you start with, “Lady, you need a life”, give me an ear, an eye, and a sec of your time.

The excitement of the car wash starts when I move my car on to the rail and put it in neutral; I have lost all decision making power at this point except which wash I want. Do I want the wash with the pink, yellow, and blue foam, or just the pink and yellow? Do I want that clear liquid rinse they say is a wax, but how can it be when it isn’t waxy? Does my underbelly need washing? I don’t know, is my underbelly dirty?

After this decision, though, I am free from any further need for action as soon as the car starts moving forward until I respond to the bright green DRIVE light at the end.

I am isolated in the car wash. The radio is off to prevent interference with the wash sensors, and the cellphone doesn’t work through all the equipment. The wash is too short to start any task, no matter how small or trivial. If it was a bit longer, I’d feel guilty for the ‘wasted’ time, and probably whip out a notebook or some such thing, in order to do something useful. But the wash is over before this activity can be made worthwhile; so I sit and do absolutely nothing.

Nothing except watch the two young people scrub my front and back bumper and windshields to remove the corpses of tiny little creatures who zigged when they should have zagged. After that is the water spray, and I am moved to hum a note or two from “Singing in the Rain” during this event. The excitement begins to build within, anticipating what’s to follow.

First comes the big soapy strips that move back and forth across the car and take off the initial layer of dirt. They remind me of great dark blue tongues, bigger than a cat’s, even bigger than Mick Jagger’s –reaching out and licking across the glass and the metal, the tips lingering on the warm metal at the end. Following these is another shot of water, for the initial rinse, but it’s nothing to get excited about; mere foreplay made more mundane by what’s to come.

The car moves past tubes set into the wall and bright white, pink, yellow, and blue foam squirts out all over the car; pulsing to some internal beat; swirling together into a purple color that slowly drips down the sides of the windows; softly teasing small bubbles, sparkling in the light, glide past me as I look out. Always bright white, pink, yellow, and blue. Never all white, or all pink. I imagine a study was made in the past and the car wash people discovered that people respond better to different colored foam. I know I do – it wouldn’t be magical if the bubbles were all white.

But the moment doesn’t end when the foam ejection finishes. No, next comes the lighter blue yarn like threads that spin around very fast, along the the sides and top; following the contour of the car in a passionate but surprisingly gentle grasp. They start in front of my car and part ever so reluctantly as the car moves slowly forward, never losing the grip they have on the sides as they glide compellingly towards the back. At the end, they give a saucy little flip to the rear, a pat of appreciation and familiarity in passing.

Of course, once the blue threads are finished, the fun part is almost over and the excitement begins to wane. The car is rinsed with one clear water rinse and then another, followed by the wax, and though it’s pleasant, it doesn’t tingle or give one a thrill. Still, there are those fun little fans at the end, moving up and down and across the car, chasing water droplets across the hood and the windshield. A final fun and piquant moment before the green light comes on and I’m booted out.

What’s best about the car wash is that all during this experience, I don’t have to think about what tasks need finished, or what improvements need to be made in my life; who I have pleased or disappointed or let down. I don’t have to read the opinions of this wit or another, alternately cheered and depressed, calmed and angered. I don’t have to hear the bad news on the radio, or listen to even sadder news on the phone. I am slipped out of time.