One of the attractions of an Informatics degree in a new program is the ability to apply it to academia or industry. There is more financial relief in the latter, potentially at a cost of personal control over projects and location. There is more freedom in academia, but at the cost of dollars and increased political bureaucracy. I come from a family of educators, so there is also a genetic attraction to being a professor. Whether or not that decision keeps me at a university, the future of education will remain an important issue for me.

“Drivers of Change” (source: KnowledgeWorks Foundation)

One of my buried blog drafts contained a pointer to an interactive map itemizing the factors that are likely to influence public education in the next decade. The map, commissioned by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, is divided into five elements—a two-dimensional space listing Drivers and Impact Areas, and the factors classified as trends, hot spots and dilemmas.

Created by a range of experts and analysts, the map is a forecast of the future, and each element on the map represents forces that could affect learning in the next decade. Many of these forces can work in tandem, and they could also appear seemingly unconnected. Nothing is definite. We don’t encourage debating with the forecast, but rather encourage you to explore the map, think about what you’ve seen, and use the map and its interactive features for group and online discussion. Think of the map as a catalyst for conversation.

…

Public education in the United States is at a critical crossroads. The knowledge economy and globalization continue to challenge the basic industrial-era assumptions upon which most public schools, curriculum, and evaluation mechanisms are based. New interactive digital media are diffusing rapidly, even in lower-income communities, fostering a youth media culture that is crashing into schools and educators like a tsunami, raising issues of privacy, pedagogical relevance, and equity. Student performance is inconsistent across the country and average U.S. performance indicators lag disappointingly behind those of other countries.

Source: KnowledgeWorks Foundation

You can also download a PDF version and request a paper copy, which takes about three weeks to receive.

To facilitate the conversation, KnowledgeWorks also has a forum you can join and a library of resources to assist in deeper research. Futurist Eric Grant also maintains an interesting blog, discussing such things as the change in conversational tools and predictions that in 10 years half of high school classes will be taught online.

This is directly relevant to both informatics and parenting. Carter left public school largely because of a failure by the local institution to adequately address or even brainstorm about the issues and trends KnowledgeWorks identifies. I was particularly attracted to the End of Cyberspace and Strong Opinions drivers, which hint at the seemingly contradictory forces of increased personalization and fewer boundaries. I want to put one of the paper posters up on the wall of the new Ph.D. lab as the IU School of Informatics as inspiration and context for the work I do.

A video explaining the interactive map

Check out the online map. What trends most interest you?

Blip—The Twitter for Music

Blip was announced on May 9 as an extension of the Fuzz community. Fuzz is a music company that combines a label with a platform for artist promotion to active fans, as well as other artists.

While there really is only room for one Twitter-esque service in my life—despite having accounts in Pownce, Jaiku, BrightKite and others—I like the specific focus of this Blip implementation. It is about sharing music, building a personal library, and discovering new music through the activity of others. It is also building the short-message communication channel around an existing community, giving existing members a new way to interact while opening the possibility of the experience spreading virally to bring more people into the Fuzz fold.

I’m speculating on how effective this is going to be for me. I’m not one to listen to music online. I’ve got my safe collection of tunes, and I worry whenever my MacBook starts revving up the fan … a common response to visiting multimedia web sites. Blip isn’t presenting itself in that way, with very quick plays and only a little fan action (on initial loads of new music). I’m not getting the social effect at the moment due to Erik being the only one in my music network, and I’m not even certain I connected to his profile correctly—instead of “friends” one has “favorites.” I’m anxious to see if I can let the channel play in the background and hear the music others feed me. Assuming that happens, this could change the way I listen to music.

Blip passed two of my early tests easily. First, it has a sufficient sampling of Bob Schneider to scratch that itch. Boomshuffle, my most recent foray into online music, didn’t have enough Bob stocked out of the box to make it valuable. Second, it gave me something unexpected. One of my favorite performers is Stevie Ray Vaughan, a Texas guitar slinger who died at Alpine Valley, Wisconsin in 1990. I was there, also loving the rest of the bill, which included Eric Clapton, Robert Cray and Buddy Guy. A search for SRV gave me his final jam, with all of the great guitarists playing Sweet Home Chicago. After a while, I switched to the all blips channel and just let it play.

The Fuzz Manifesto

There is also a local music component to Fuzz. Bloomington, Indiana isn’t on the radar, but who knows what might happen if enough locals register and make the request to support our city’s musicians. Integration with Twitter and BrightKite—the location-based microblogging service—wouldn’t be a stretch and could give local H-T blogger Junebug Jenkins even more to write about.

Happy Mother’s Day (from the boys)

“Supermomma vs. the Grumpster” is the outcome of a brainstorming session with Carter in which we tried to think of all of the things Mom does for us and how we would feel if she weren’t around. Being partial to the superhero genre, we made Mom into the super person she is and gave her an adversary, the Grumpster, capable of sucking the joy out of any day.

The boys acted out the scenes we had storyboarded, with Carter even taking a turn behind the camera for a few shots. My eldest also gave the video comic an added touch by drawing some images of Supermomma and the Grumpster to help move the plot along. Thanks to some timely tips from Zach Legend at last month’s BlogIN, we had a blast with iMovie on Saturday editing our gift to Mom. Archie makes his composing debut as well, with a short clip of his Garage Band song used as the soundtrack for a scene midway through the piece. It’s the first YouTube contribution I’ve ever made, a milestone that threatens to slow my dissertation given how easy it was to publish.

After uploading the video, I got sucked into a few other mother-themed clips. The two below were my favorites: comedian Rob Paravonian singing an all-to-honest chilrden’s song, and Barats and Bereta with their own Mother’s Day tribute.

To mothers everywhere, we hope you have a great day filled with afternoon naps, crooked ceramics, and the absolute best tasteless muffins grateful family can bake.

Rob Paravonian offers up a realistic children’s song.

The ultimate M-Day card: Barats and Bereta

A map of digital identity. (source: Fred Cavazza)

Anonymity is one of the pillars of online communication. The ability to become someone else, mask some part of yourself, or lurk in the shadows increases paths to participation. The dark side of anonymity is irresponsibility, and we have already witnessed other social networks tackle Jon Swift problems by censoring their own communities to strengthen legitimacy. Even as we collectively accumulate personal profile pages that express our real identities, however, there are initiatives emphasizing anonymous disclosures. The Experience Project is designed around anonymity, asking members of the two-year-old community to connect through their experiences rather than extending existing social circles. In the end, though, this approach is about lowering barriers for people who could not otherwise participate in discussions. The impact of what is shared is dependent on the relationships we form with the identities we assign to ourselves and others.

The consequence of self-disclosure centers around the resilience of information.

Twitter, a microblogging service that exploded to a million members in about a year, uses the SMS constraint of 140 characters to lower the barriers to entry for potential authors. It is much easier to conceive of sharing a simple sentence or two than several paragraphs. The custom nature of the personal information stream (everyone can decide whose content they want to follow) implies a sense of control. However, the reality of Twitter is that the content is public. Even with private streams—where a member can require a mutual handshake before someone else can see their posts—the act of sharing content with anyone exponentially increases the likelihood that information will reach a public audience. The age of the intelligent web is here, and innocuous posts made in a semi-protected context one day can give rise to unexpected revelations in the future.

This has implications on future career paths, as comments in a Web Worker Daily article last September attest. Tim O’Reilly expects a Web 2.0 backlash and a return to private data. Perhaps. At the start of the year, Duncan Riley published a poll asking, should some things remain private in the age of lifestreaming. The nature of that flawed question led to a predictable response—less than 10% of respondents said “No”—and false evidence that we disclose too much about ourselves. A more relevant line of questioning would be what kinds of information should be private, for ourselves and from others.

Being naked isn’t only about what you publish online. Dartmouth’s Alice Mathias wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece last fall that the only privacy setting in Facebook that mattered to her friends was the one revealing if they are logged in. She speculated that the ability to search anonymously is significantly more important than remaining anonymous when other people search: “If our ability to privately search is ever jeopardized, Facebook will turn into a ghost town.”

Rob May had another take on the professional cost of social networking. Using the life of economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter as an illustration, May observed:

The web makes it easier than ever to connect with new people, but the flip side is that it also keeps us connected to people from earlier times… people who may not understand or support our goals. Is it possible that in some instances, social networks hold us back? In earlier times students could go away to school and carve their own path, but now with old friends judging every move we make, are we likely to be less unique, less aggressive, and perhaps not live up to our creative potential?

Molly Holzschlag prefers the term authenticity to transparency, criticizing the later as implying a reality that may not be present. There is some degree of self-censorship that goes into any interaction with the world, be it this blog, my Twitter account, or a conversation I have on campus. Throughout it all, I aim for authenticity. My own hypothesis is that greater transparency leads to more empathic censorship, not decisions to omit based on fear or power. Being open requires more awareness of our networks, which leads to a higher consciousness about communication.

Keeping track of locals depends on accurate self-disclosure.

My interest in Twitter revolves largely around microblogging as a conduit for strengthening local community. I routinely seek out Bloomington-area authors, adding them to a master list in the Hoosier Twitosphere and following many of them. Sometimes, it is reciprocated and our social circles join. We inspire each other through this ambient connection, planting the seeds of more meaningful relationships capable of addressing business, emotional and intellectual needs. None of this is possible without a transparent culture willing to share something as small but significant as their location.

The value of local connections cannot be underestimated. The impact of transparency is routinely exhibited on Homeless Man Speaks, a blog about a man experiencing homelessness in Toronto, as transcribed by a neighbor:

So, of course, the guy gets out of the car, of course he’s pissed at me, and I’m telling you, he’s six-foot-something and he’s got biceps that could crack walnuts. So he looks at down me and says: ‘I know you. You’re homelessmanspeaks.com.’

Small steps. The journey begins by gaining awareness of those around you.

What information do you keep private? What should others keep private?

We had a young man from the Obama campaign stop by over the weekend to pitch his candidate. He asked us if we needed a ride to the polls, and I thought he was nuts. “We vote across the street,” I chuckled.

This Tuesday—on the morning of the first meaningful Indiana primary in 40 years—we again made the familiar walk to University Elementary to fulfill our civic duty. When we got there, we were told that we had been moved. This is part of the remapping of the City designed to cull missing residents (mainly students) from the rolls and cut down on the overhead. So, rather than the less-than-.1 mile walk in my own neighborhood, we were assigned to Bloomington 16 … 3.3. miles to Meadowwood by car.

Insane Gerrymandering: We traveled 3.3. miles to vote.

To get there, we had to pass several other more reasonable options:

1. Bloomington 9 (Bell Trace)—0.9 miles
2. Bloomington 10 (Stone Belt)—1.1 miles
3. Bloomington 8 (St. Mark’s)—1.7 miles
4. Bloomington 7 (Unitarian Church)—2.8 miles

That list doesn’t include the three campus locations that were all nearer than Meadowwood, the location east of Walnut furthest away from us. Heck, several Perry Township polling centers were a mile closer than the one we were sent to.

What is the logic of that? And to whom to I write to lodge a complaint? In a different situation, that might be a deal-killer for participating. Who does this help?

Having been in a daily groove for the Fall semester, it is a bit disheartening to see all the unclaimed days in our BlogSchmog calendar. That sad fact is one of many things inspiring some change this summer. Here’s a few things that have been slowing down Firefox for me, waiting to become blog posts …

Women and High Tech
I met Joyce Boadt at BlogIN last month. She is working on strengthening the community of women involved in technology, managing a discussion blog on issues of gender and tech. She launched the online forum at the start of the year with the following backstory:

For those of you who don’t know me, I was there at the very beginning of Women & Hi Tech. We had monthly meetings and divided these meetings between professional development programs and “working meeting” where we worked on various projects and proposals. However it was the networking and discussions that occurred before, after, and even during the meetings that I remember most. We spent a lot of time talking about why an organization like Women & Hi Tech was needed. We were able to share our experiences and challenges we faced as women in male dominated fields. I hope that these discussions and even this blog can recapture that feeling again. I’m looking forward to meeting more of you and learning from you.
From Women & High Tech blog (January 30, 2008)

Reminiscent of the way relational-cultural theory came into existence, with a bunch of like-minded women exchanging stories at their kitchen tables.

Twitter Apps
When my Google Reader use dropped off the map in February, so did my diligent monitoring of all things Twitter. Lately, though, there has been a surge of interesting third-party development for the Twitter community, some of which are filling a real need. I haven’t used Twitter Snooze yet, but the idea is that you can temporarily turn off the tweets of noisy neighbors. I’ve come close to doing this when people I follow tweet from conferences, but the disposable nature and current size of my information stream makes it sort of pointless. It is a service that fills a need, though.

Even more exciting, though, is a trend toward third-party Twitter APIs. Summize launched on April 4 as a search tool for Twitter content. They have a great browser plug-in to add it to the search options (along with Google, Yahoo, etc) and their own API to allow other developers to glean content. One early success from that API-of-API access is Twistori, which extracts searches for Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Wish and Feel to create a flow of Twitter messages using those words. This evolution is exciting to watch, especially with a backdrop of slightly more sophisticated critiques of Twitter (witness the somewhat clever AltText Video analysis of the medium). I have a number of Twitter projects on the burner right now, including one I hope to bounce off of Tweet Stats creator Damon Cortesi this week.

Looking for Inspiration
In about six hours, the polls open on the most meaningful Indiana primary in a generation. Having been underwhelmed by the last several weeks of campaigning by the Democratic candidates—where are you, Barbara Lee?—I may not know until I pull the lever whether I’m going to help Obama or Clinton pull out of the Hoosier deadlock. But I am more certain about the local candidates I’m supporting, most notably County folk Geoff McKim and Sophia Travis. I’m also going to try to push Baron Hill out of office again by voting for Gretchen Clearwater.

The most inspiring thing I have encountered occurred within the week. Marty McCrory tipped me off to news of Central Washington players helping an opponent score the winning run.

Tabs closed.

Preparing to see Barack Obama

The Pre-Game

Barack Speaks to Bloomington

Reflection

BlogIN—an outgrowth of conversation within the Smaller Indiana community—conducted a 15-session unconference on April 26 at the School of Informatics IUPUI campus building. Zach Legend, who also hosted a few sessions on video blogging, shot and edited a YouTube video on the event.

Although there were initial hopes that hundreds of people would attend, the few dozen who did participate seemed active and enthused. Many of the sessions were focused on marketing of blogs, but there were also sessions on improving blog writing and multimedia. Both Amy and I came away impressed with Zach, an ISU graduate who gained some local notoriety as the unofficial-turned-official videographer for the Indianapolis Colts. His sessions on how to create internet video were both accessible and inspiring.

I hosted a session at the end of the day on Identifying Local Bloggers, a topic near to my heart and potentially my dissertation work on local use of technology. Another Bloomington blogger and active twitterer live-blogged some notes, for which I am grateful since I couldn’t do that and moderate at the same time. Always a fan of the overhead document projector, I created a concept map in my notebook to share on the screen as we talked.

My notes from the Identifying Local Bloggers session.

My philosophy for unconferences is that it is important to come out of a discussion not only with ideas on which to ruminate, but also a list of tangible things we can do and encourage others to do. Tangible in this context means doable by a single person in a reasonable amount of time. In order to find local bloggers, we may need to build some centralized directory or special search algorithm, but no one person is going to do that in a reasonable amount of time. What might be reasonable is creating a Doodle poll and inviting people to schedule a brainstorming session for that project. The tangibles we came up with included:

• Announce a theme for Indiana bloggers to write about next month.
• Write a blog post about this topic: the value of knowing the local blogosphere
• Place blog entries in a local context (i.e. if you write about the value of Prius, include local statistics of use)
• Schedule a meeting to talk about a common content strategy for Indiana
• Generate an aggregate list of all local bloggers (such as an export from Smaller Indiana)
• Create a new Twine for Indiana bloggers

I was thankful Amy came with me for the afternoon, as it was great to share this experience with her. There is another blogging event coming up in mid-August, again hosted at IUPUI. This one is a two-day conference that will feature individual sessions on marketing, community building, legal issues, podcasting, web analytics and other relevant topics. There will also be a few panel discussions—Hyper Local Blogging, Dealing With Comments, Blogging Platforms, and Blogging & Journalism—and an unconference component. Registration is $49 online, but I have some discount cards for any locals interested in attending.

Zach Legend
* ISU grad - took name from “Larry Legend”
* didn’t like to write, but found YouTube was a great outlet for expression
* got a contract doing videos for the Colts
* keep it 2-3 minutes (”get it done”) - short, for viewers (”how short can you make a video”)

Capture sounds and images:
* Tech is great: small digital camera w/ mic - no lights, higher tech (”I don’t even know what an audio feed is”)

Get is off the camera:
* connect device (typically with USB)
* copy file to hard drive, into separate video
* import into a video editor (Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, etc)
* edit stuff - lots more footage than what is used
* save movie file to HD (Windows = .wmv)

Publish it:
* YouTube allows 100 MB max
* “The internet is a whole new beast.” - trying to capture things and get it out faster and faster
* get account, log in
* “Upload” link - title, description, select video category
* Tags are important
* browse to video movie file - click upload, “and go have a drink” (it can take a while)
* embed code, so you can blog it (but it may take a while longer until it is available)

Future
* looking for more opportunities, expand away from Colts (only 20-week seasons)
* “worked my tail off” to get to a point where I can ask for money
* a wedding video takes about 20 hours
* look for product placement - “It’s a new medium, trying to get money out of these things”
* Can edit tags - sometimes, change tags to people in the news (”sure, you make some people mad, but what do you have to lose, it’s just YouTube”, “try to keep hot”)
* you can turn off comments - “YouTube are mean people” (go to their page, and they don’t have a single video)
* You’ve got to have a thick skin - “you made it, it is your expression”
* video is under my control - if I stutter, trip, etc you’ll never see it on the video

* “At Notre Dame, I twice caught ticket takers not saying ‘Welcome to Notre Dame’” - head usher saw it and apologized, got to go through the tunnel and into stadium - usher had been using Zach’s videos for the last two years as a training video (”Notre Dame Blue Gold 2008“)

Oh, the things one can do with some archival video and an editing app.

I’m anxious to get home to the family (I’m typing from the Indy airport, waiting for the final leg of the journey back) and get through a dense two weeks of coursework. Dissertation focus comes next.

I’m also in the market for a good summer gig, preferably telecommuting or local user experience research and design.

There are several of Kevin’s pajamas:

He snapped lots of photos of Carter, although many of them are closeups of his teeth. Here’s the only one that isn’t full of teeth and doesn’t include menacing gestures:

Seven self-portraits so far- mostly of Archie’s feet and the back of my head:

Archie has invaded my face with the camera, resulting in lots of fodder for future hilarious family albums, and giving me an idea of how I appear to my kids. I included them the first time I wrote this post, but thought better of it. Suffice it to say, you can tell I miss Kevin.

Notes:
Richard Edwards of the New Media Program at the IUPUI campus for the School of Informatics will be speaking on “Citizen-Generated Content: The Rise of Video Mashups in the 2008 Election”

lots of types of media (blogs, wikis, etc) that are out there - I’m concentrating on video mashups

showing the “change” video — compiling all Presidential candidates mentioning the word “change”
* if there is an “emerging auteur” of mashups, it may be Hugh Atkins

* combinatorial, collage artists, DJ and VJ culture (turntablism, remix … add unique spin to it)
* what are going to be the consequences of this particular media form - the mashup - and how we make up our minds about particular candidates

Example 2: “Vote Different” (Phil De Vellis as “parkridge47″)
* March 2007
* 1984 Mac commercial with Hilary Clinton playing the role of Big Brother
* “you’ll see why 2008 isn’t like 1984″
* close with an Apple logo shaped like an “O” (for Obama)
* pseudonym refers to Clinton’s address, implied Clinton’s role of Big Brother (spawned a search to identify the creator)
* media pundits thought this signified the start of the YouTube election (Phil De Vellis has as much power as James Carville) …
* never before did a video mashup matter

Example 3: Coldcut vs. TV Sheriff, remix of “World of Evil” (2004) from Revolution:USA website
Actually began 3 years early, in 2004
* first election in which video mashups mattered … trying to influence Bush-Kerry
* 10-second snippets uploaded to a web site - Cold Cut’s “World of Evil” as background
* done by local LA DJ (TV Sherriff)
* RUC instructions - prior to YouTube - had very easy-to-follow instructions on how to take video clips and mix into a video mashup

Types of political video mashups
From 2004 …

Parody/Satire
* sappy 70s love song duet soundtrack - video of Bush singing to Tony Blair
* taking existing genre, and edit existing video on top of audio

Intertextual, Political “camp”
* deals with intertextuality (requires understanding of something)
* “The Apprentice” - the ultimate job of president, with Donald Trump firing him
* by True Majority Action ( “showGeorgeTheDoor.org”) - “we’ll fire Bush together, and have some fun along the way” … sponsored by Ben Cohen (Ben & Jerry’s)
* you can participate, not just passively watch

Recombinatory, Reconstructed
* Bush State of the Union
* “By custom, we meet here to threaten the world.”
* “The American flag stands for corporate corruption, … etc. and rape”
* “Our first goal is to show contempt for the environment”
* There is a website that collects reconstructed State of the Union clips

Remix aesthetics & mashups:
* participatory
* activist
* collage/bricolage - some of the best mashups are doing it with 1-2 videos, very creative
* performative - type of performance art, demonstrating a process as well as a product
* DJ as media creator - not a lot of articles on video mashups, so much owes to recombinatory tradition of DJs, academics would need a foothold in that field

Changes to user-generated content:
* celebration of web 2.0 (Time Magazine Person of the Year = You)
* social networking
* DIY media - citizens on the bottom creating media on their own and sending it up (elicit tensions between that and top-down logics of traditional media)
* materials going through the Internet are low resolution, even as homes are upgrading to high definition

YouTube and CNN Debate - media flows and moderation
* “hybrid media ecology” - internet portal and established cable operator, produces novel media flows
* over 300 videos submitted to CNN
* if ask people under 30 if the right questions were chosen, they would say no … CNN chickened out
* at the last minute, CNN decided to assign the task of selection to a senior employee (cut for odd reasons of vulgarity, questions too outside the box)
* ended up encouraging citizen content, but in the end being afraid of it
* are authentic questions coming to the fore when our gatekeepers are so powerful

In hybrid media ecology,
* The Daily Show and Colbert Report
* growth of “power pop politics” (Obama Girl, Hilary Clinton on SNL, “Huck and Chuck”)
* Not new -> Bill Clinton proving his street cred on Arsenio Hall by blowing a sax
* Blurring boundaries

Web-based campaign media:
* Hilary Clinton at a cafe, Bill walks in, selecting some table jukebox music, ordering -> to pick her campaign theme song
* allegory to the Sopranos ending … complete with a staredown from a mobster

The celebrity-citizen:
* Obama’s speech, set to music by someone from Black Eyed Peas
* “Yes, we Can”

Participatory media: Andy Cobb’s “John.He.Is”
* many parodies of
* spoof with John McCain speech providing the lyrics to the song
* “Bomb, Bomb Iran”

paratexts and critical digital intertextuality
* Jonathan Gray, Edwards and Tryon
* on its own, it has no particular value … but it might solidify or push a certain notion of a candidate
* Reese Witherspoon from “Election” with Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama clips - with Hilary = Reese
* use of meaning of 1999 film “Election” to describe the 2008 Democratic campaign
* media has picked up on this as an interesting insight

Mashups as Rhizomatic texts:
* non-linear
* non-hierarchical
* anarchic
* networked
* ‘open’ texts - demands that someone takes work and remixes it

1000 Plateaus

1) Allegories of citizen empowerment (Edwards & Tryon, 2008) - do not want to deny that more citizens than ever before have had an impact

2) The need for new approaches to media literacy (Henry Jenkins, Howard Rheingold, et al) - can ask questions about how are we dealing with this type of participatory media culture

3) The role of mashups in deliberative democracy:
* the perpetual beta of political video - popular culture, social networking, civic engagement and political participation
* the limits of Eisensteinian intellectual montage (”montage should lead to the emergency of a new idea”) - we are seeing the limits of montage
* YouTube as knowledge space

Questions:
* Do mashups create “information cocoons?”
* Are mashups like “customized information?”
* More like propaganda or more like wikis? (Infotopia)

Abstract: From 2007’s Phil de Vellis’s “Vote Different” to 2008’s Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can,” video mashups—as a form of political discourse—have become extremely popular in this election cycle, and signal the rise of the “YouTube election.” The proliferation of video mashups relate to the growth of online video sharing, remix culture, social networking and DIY producers actively engaged in creating “citizen-generated content.” This talk examines the recombinatorial and generative logics behind video mashups and the discursive strategies utilized by remix artists to examine the effectiveness of political video mashups as tools for candidate advocacy and political change.

Biography: Dr. Edwards is an Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Science in the New Media Program in the School of Informatics at IUPUI. He received his Ph.D. in Critical Studies from USC’s School of Cinema-Television. From 2002-2004, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. His scholarship focuses on social and political uses of new media and new technologies. He has published several articles on new media activism, and is currently working on a series of projects focused on exploring civic engagement in multi-user virtual environments

Thanks to Aunt Meg we have a scapegoat for everything. Mess on the couch? Aunt Meg did it! Cat vomit? Aunt Meg did it! A few days ago we read Book of Bad Manners by one of our favorite authors, Stoo Hampleand the kids ended each page with a resounding “Aunt Meg did it!”

Archie doesn’t completely grasp the passing of the buck- his chanting is generally followed by, “See? I burped and said ‘Aunt Meg did it’!”

Then the other day we were watching the History Channel. Carter and I were learning about Egypt and paranoid government officials, when it cut to an oilfield covered with flames. The narrator tsked while talking about so much oil that it could spurt gas out of the ground to burn.

The boys two voices raised as one:

Aunt Meg did it!

This is the cookie we sent her for her birthday- Apparently, “Aunt Meg did it” was too much for the cookie person to grasp and so it reads “Aunt Meg dit it” whatever that means.

Me: who’s there?

Archie: Love!

Me: Love who?

Archie: Love you Mama!

Battletweets is a group Twitter game, currently in development.

According to the FAQ, Battletweets is a team-based game for the Twitter community. There are plans to host different weekly activities, such as web scavenger hunts, pic & post, trivia, wikijam, and others. Initially, the beta release will feature two established teams the rest of the world can follow along. Winning teams earn badges, with the hint of other more substantive prizes possible as the game develops.

I have two very diverse opinions about the kind of use for Twitter that Battletweets proposes. Since it is a good news / bad news kind of thing, I’ll start with the bad:

Battletweets will produce a lot of noise.
For the same reason I think Tweet 140 is a good idea with bad consequences, my big concern with using Twitter as a platform for a game. The value of Twitter for myself and many others is primarily its ability to help members feel connected to others despite gulfs of both time and space. Each person can shape their own information stream by following only the other members they want to know about. If the noise becomes too great, they can stop following, maintaining control over their stream. When the noise becomes mixed—which includes both frequent directed conversation (@replies) and artificial content (like making a goal to use all of the available 140 characters, a twoosh or perfect tweet)—that separation goes away. People I want to or even must follow now have a split identity that cannot be separated. One is the individual whose connection is important, and the other produces high-content noise that has no relevance.

Battletweets will engage the community.
It isn’t that Twitter games are inherently bad. Minnesotan Aric McKeown has been using Twitter for a local version of Where’s Waldo, sitting in local coffee shops and tweeting clues to his whereabouts ("Hide ‘n Tweet"). The Least Dangerous Game is something that would work well here in Bloomington as a means to mix online and offline, and to create awareness about local businesses and organizations. Battletweets may do some virtual-physical mixing, too, but even if it doesn’t, the games are task-based group activities open to the world. That means, people can engage on several levels, befitting their interest and available resources, and connect to people simply by paying attention to what they contribute. If Battletweets takes great care in their games to emphasize the phatic nature of Twitter—to base the games around revelations of individuals about their day-to-day identity—these games could enhance the content of the personal information stream.

What I find most compelling about Battletweets at the moment is their development process. When I first visited the site, there was a logo (with a needless reflection of the image) and two buttons, one linking to their twitter account and another with a contact email address. On my second trip, they added a FAQ and a currently-dormant link to a blog. They also have a little progress bar to show where they are in their process, a nice little use of tech culture that is very effective, provided it continues to move. With my recent fascination with startup companies, I decided to pay attention mostly for the promise of transparency.

Andrew Hyde kicks off Startup Weekend 2.0 in Boulder, Colorado.

About 70 people begin pitching ideas for startup projects in bulk Friday night at the sixteenth Startup Weekend event since last July. Creator Andrew Hyde leveraged his experiences in the first fifteen weekends to iterate his concept. Changes for the 2.0 format—being tested under fire in SW’s return to Boulder, Colorado—include:

1. Multiple Projects
   Each weekend group is no longer limited to just one company. All equity decisions will be made at the event.
2. Build on a Project
   An existing company can recruit a few some brilliant tech minds to spend a few hours working to make their project stronger.
3. No Company Required
   Every project will be different, but there will be no requirement to incorporate a company.

In a post on the Boulder 2 blog, Michael Gruen reported that Andrew shared two primary reasons for the adjustments:

Reason #1: Who here can name three companies we’ve launched?

Reason #2: The SEC and Blue Sky Laws prohibit this many unaccredited investors from investing in a company

I’d like to think the reflection session the Bloomington founders had on our final day together, which generated a nice list of strengths and weaknesses of the format, factored into the decision.

In making these changes, founders are also looking at other ways to tinker with the format. Laura Fitton and Tara Anderson will be broadcasting portions of the weekend on Mediacasters.tv, connecting this small group of entrepreneurs with some investors, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and technologists not physically in the room. The first day show had some audio issues. Despite the tech hiccups, there were people following the pitch session, and input from chat rooms were being relayed to the registered attendees.

Andrew has also been looking to make some organizational changes. Tyler Willis was originally going to be the facilitator in Bloomington as Andrew took a break from his heavy travel schedule, but Founder Prime wound up in Indiana anyway. This week, he posted an open call for a CEO. If you are interested in running the show for the next year or so, look over the PDF document describing the position. I’m certain the rest of my life would get in the way of taking on those duties myself, but whoever does pick up the reins is in for a very satisfying adventure. My one experience with Startup Weekend has me itching for more, and many of the local connections made in City Hall in February are active more than a month after we met.

Until we are in a position to bring Event Herder into the visible spectrum, or Indianapolis gets the green light for it’s own event, I’ll scratch that itch by following the new process online.

Some good regional tech news to push out to people at the Bloomington Geek Dinner tonight at Michael’s Uptown Cafe tonight at 6p: Indiana is having a Blog conference next month (two of them, actually There is another one by Blog Indiana in August at IUPUI).

Blog IN event coming April 26
Mark your calendars. It’s official. We’re having a Blog IN on Saturday, April 26 from 1pm to 5pm at IUPUI School of Informatics in Indianapolis. Our goal is to attract as many bloggers as we can from around the state for a half-day of fun, learning, relationship building, tip sharing, and more.

We are planning some fun surprises to help raise awareness about the power of blogs (and bloggers) to make a difference in our state. We also want to help newbies get started, so the event will have something for veteran bloggers and tire-kickers alike.

More information will follow in the coming week, but the plan is to spend an afternoon in late April hosting an unconference-style gathering of bloggers publishing from Indiana. Here in Bloomington, we have a sizeable blogosphere, much of it coming out of the IU School of Informatics. It isn’t a great time for most students—the last Saturday before finals week here at IUB—but it is a great opportunity for local bloggers to make an impact on forming interest and setting policy for Indiana technology and communication.

I’m going to be talking to the SOI administration to see if it is possible to sponsor a bus to the event and include other local bloggers for the ride north. Join the Smaller Indiana discussion group to keep in the loop.

Related to this … Smaller Indiana is planning a coordinated pre-event event on April 14 (the first Monday after returning from CHI in Florence, Italy, for many HCI students and faculty). Indiana bloggers are being asked to gather at the Circle monument in Indianapolis at noon that day, rain or shine, armed with laptops with the hope of live-blogging the event. For those of us who won’t be able to make the hour drive north in the middle of a school day, Bloomington and other satellite cities are going to plan our own version of the noon gathering. As SI organizer Pat Coyle wrote,

“We want to show the world that Indiana is a tech-savvy location.”

This Friday, our Indiana Hoosiers will attempt to start their season for a fourth time. It is appropriate to view 2007-2008 in this way since it may be the only way we’ll get to see Eric Gordon play that long.

The first season ended well, granted against a mostly pushover non-conference schedule, with an 11-1 record. The second went almost as well, 11-3 against tougher conference foes. The lone losses being two to Wisconsin and one to non-conference Connecticut. The third season started on February 23 with two wins in the post-Sampson era, but wound up 3-3, including a very disheartening one-game performance in the Big Ten conference tournament. The decline under Dan Dakich has everyone worried, including the NCAA selection committee, which gave the 24th-ranked Hoosiers an 8th seed. When the team starts season four anew with their 9:40pm game against Arkansas on Friday, the fate of the Hoosier will likely be tied to which Gordon will show up.

Our star freshman hasn’t played like a star of late. For the full season, his per-game numbers are still glowing: 21.3 points, 2.5 assists, 3.3 rebounds, 1.3 steals. He is shooting 44% from the floor and 85% from the free-throw line. However, his season shows a definite decline, especially after Sampson departed.

Season 1 (Non-conference):
11 games, 48.2% FG, 43.7% 3pt, 86.5% FT, 3.3 Reb, 0.883 Activity
Season 2 (Sampson / Conference):
14 games, 45.4% FG, 36.8% 3pt, 85.0% FT, 3.1 Reb, 0.707 Activity
Season 3 (Dakich / Conference):
6 games, 34.5% FG, 15.9% 3pt, 80.6% FT, 3.5 Reb, 0.649 Activity

Activity: ratio of assists + steals + blocks to turnovers + fouls

Gordon’s incredible start is even better considering he played only 12 minutes against Tennessee State before suffering an injury. He already had 8 points, 2 rebounds, a steal and a block before sitting out that game and the next one. Perhaps he set a standard that a freshman isn’t expected to sustain, but for one talking about leaving for the NBA after one year, it isn’t outrageous for fans to expect consistency. No doubt, Eric Gordon still gets to the line, makes his free throws and finds a way to get his 20 points. But he is taking more shots and doing less away from the ball in getting there.

The notable decline is in the long-distance shooting, where his attempts are up and his makes are down, from 43% to just 15%. Same is true closer to the basket, going from 48% down to 35%. He is getting to the line more, but even his free throw shooting has dipped. Gordon rebounds a bit more, but steals are down, turnovers are up. So far, it looks like the Indiana program has managed to Bracey Wright this guy.

For Indiana to advance and pull a Duke-like upset over North Carolina in the second round, Gordon needs to regain his shooting touch and his production when not shooting. That, or one of our other guards needs to start playing like a wannabe NBA lottery pick.

Along the way, we listened to the Twentysomething Special of the Prairie Home Companion on NPR. I’m not a huge fan of the show, but Garrison Keillor sang a song about the future, reminiscing about living back in the day when Starbucks had free Internet instead of having the ‘net piped into one’s central nervous system through spinal implants. It seemed a fitting soundtrack to our love-hate relationship with technology—and the absence of it—as we tried to get out of the pastoral countryside of the Palmetto State.

Beneficiary: Access to Information
The fact that I could pack an object the size of a book, tie it to a wall with a cord, and have the entire world come to me is impressive. Even without the network connectivity, 120 gigabytes of storage allows for a lot of functionality and productivity. Not to long ago, even a 12-hour car ride would only allow for about 2-3 hours of work until the battery died. Now, you can plug a computer into a car with a socket adapter in the lighter.

Casualty: Dependence on Access
Despite preparation to allow me to orbit the dark side of the moon—the time away from Internet access—I am constantly amazed at how much I use the Web for little references. Can’t remember a particular coding function? Google. Need a firm definition or specific reference for a paper? Google. Need to ask someone a question? Email, or Twitter. Don’t have Internet access? Suffer. Not a lot of closure on the road until Interstates get free wi-fi, or Insight Comcast offers free cards for portable net access. It all compounds if your destination doesn’t have Internet set up properly.

Beneficiary: Trip Planning
There are so many tools for planning a trip, where you can plug in dates and cities and get a detailed list of driving directions and suggested stops along the way. Even NPR has a trip planner to tell you where their member stations are along your route. It is possible to roll your own planner, too, using Google Maps. However, …

Casualty: Preparedness
… Printing web pages is not a habit. All of those great web tools only work offline if you have a hard copy of them, or if you remember to make a PDF version (configured properly) that can be viewed on a laptop.

Do people still reserve their hotels in advance? I can’t remember many vacations where my dad took us on a road trip without knowing ahead of time where we were going to land each night. There weren’t as many options back in the day—Holiday Inn was the standard, with Ramadas being the high end and Howard Johnson’s being a regular stop for their fried food more than hotel space. We knew what we were going to see, brought along everything we needed in terms of maps, and we practically used a sexton and slide rule to define our itinerary. That is not my experience as an adult, where the plan of action is to pull off when tired or needy and pay the bucks needed for a room. This is complicated with kids, who got to experience a Holiday Inn “kid suite” on the way south last weekend. Trying to do specific searches on the go is difficult; there are no road signs for kid suite.

Beneficiary: Navigation
Google et al means we left without a proper road atlas. The exponential amount of stuff we have to drag along for a week-long trip with kids leaves little time or room for the norms of travel. We have gone through almost as many road atlas books (thanks to crazy kids) as mailboxes (thanks to crazy driving on the highway were we live), so the idea of having a GPS device tell us where to turn is wonderful …

Casualty: Memory
… Unless you don’t have a GPS system. Which we don’t. The last low-tech atlas is missing most or all of several key states, which is one of the reasons we floundered a bit after our Best Buy run. Even if we did have a GPS option, odds are good it would be less instructive than it is a crutch. For travelers, I suppose memory isn’t a huge issue—by the time I get back to Savannah, there will probably be another new Talmadge Bridge. For local travelers, though, does the GPS fade into the background, or is it the navigational equivalent of letting your cell phone remember all of your friends’ phone numbers?

Beneficiary: Just a Phone Call Away
Of course, the cell phone has been a great asset to travel. In theory. My dad’s few attempts at spontaneity with hotels required frequent ramp exits and stops at lobby desks. In. Out. In. Out. Until a room was available. Now, every hotel has an 800 number. You can call, ask and get routed to a convenient place to watch cable TV for the night, often with high-speed Internet access to boot.

Casualty: Customer Service
The problem is that the people manning these services are dependent on whatever is in front of them on the screen. We tried to find a kid suite from the Holiday Inn reservation line. The service person on the other end apparently didn’t know South Carolina geography as well as I did (which, honestly, was pretty much limited to following the signs on the interstates we were driving) and couldn’t think outside the box to help us. She couldn’t do a search for kid suites and give us some options. She kept suggesting hotels a couple hours in a different direction from where we were traveling, and she lacked any ability to use the route map on the Holiday Inn site to tell us the only kid suite on our route was the same hotel in Corbin where we were introduced to them on the way down, or that there were 19 Holiday Inns between Clinton, SC and Knoxville, TN. If only Interstate 26 had wi-fi.

My friend Tim is in the middle of his annual pilgrimage to the Big Ten Tourney for men’s basketball, now permanently placed in Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. Had I not given up all financial resources to return to graduate school, this would be a sacred weekend for me, as well. Archie was a baby the last time I got to go (2004), and I’m still in a bit of withdrawal. Some of the flavor of the 2002 tourney was captured on this blog some time back ("Man To Man").

Tim—whose Illini barely survived Penn State in the first round—snapped the above picture as a way of saying “Hi” and reminding me that the Indiana program was sullied recently by a phone call scandal. Incredibly funny. I hope he remembers to call when the Hoosiers win this thing on Sunday (which, unfortunately, would be a first in the 10-year history of the post-season tournament).

Twitter is deep enough that the LeFevers could do a couple follow-ups.

I just realized, btw … I haven’t blogged in over a week. Hurmm.

Over the weekend, I finally made good on a months-long pledge to build a website that would archive tweets from local twitterers. The Indiana Twitosphere uses a WordPress platform and Charles Johnson’s great RSS plug-in, FeedWordPress, to keep tabs on the individual contributions of over 150 known Hoosier twitterers. Most of these people are from Bloomington and, more specifically, the IU School of Informatics, but I expect to test the limits of the plug-in by doubling that total by summer.

I started a Twitter group on Smaller Indiana to help spread the search into other parts of Indiana. Doing so could make the Twitosphere project bend a bit or break under the stress of other cities. Another Twitter project I am involved in threatens to do that just within the School of Informatics, so I am a bit wary about scaling up to statewide involvement.

There are some restrictions that keep the Twitosphere from being comprehensive and 100 percent accurate. The baseline for the project are the 2,686 posts that kicked off the site today, including some early adopter accounts that were so dormant their 20-tweet RSS feeds dated back to January 2007. It is unlikely I will take the time to go back and fill in the missing pieces, but Twitosphere should allow me to keep a master list of local Twitter members and build a nice repository for later research.

Are you twittering?