TEDx Bloomington was in the works for a long time

The content and sense of community exceeded expectations. The interaction with the TEDx national organization, however, made for a bittersweet experience. Without question, I’ll attend any future TEDx events here, but I won’t be organizing one again until the rules better integrate with local communities.

The Good

You didn’t have to look very hard to see the immediate impact TEDx Bloomington had on our community. Although organizers were nervous about sales at the start of May, a surge in the final week got us to a break-even point and gave Buskirk-Chumley a lot of life in the process. The crowd was diverse, bringing together a number of niche groups in Bloomington that might not have been in the same room otherwise. Like the Combine before it, the lunch voucher program sent hundreds of people into downtown restaurants for a couple hours midday to make new connections and process the morning sessions. Online, our active Twitter community created a trending topic in #tedxbtown, equally alive with real-time commentary and the promise of turning these ideas into action.

From top to bottom, the lineup was brimming with interesting and engaging speakers, wonderfully curated by Luci McKean and Christian Long. One topic moved nicely into the next, bridged and augmented by the videos from other recent TED events. Sarah Smith-Robbins, aka @intellagirl, was tremendous as the day-long host for the four sessions. She was everything one would hope for from a host: poignant, funny, articulate. One of the reasons the day seemed so effortless was the quality of Sarah’s transitions.

Spontaneous dance at the Buskirk-Chumley (video: Bob Molnar)

The talks with the greatest personal impact came in the “Learning” session. Most notable: Gever Tulley, author of 50 Dangerous Things, shared a philosophy of education that made my wife cry. The holistic arc Tulley described—exploring a broad topic, proposing and iterating a project, sharing the results, and reflecting on the process—would be ideal if it could be found in the public school across the street. This kind of educational opportunity is rare in Bloomington, unfortunately, and my family doesn’t possess the means to seek out a place like Brightworks.

TEDx didn’t let the talks live long on UStream, but high quality final cuts of all the talks will be uploaded to a YouTube channel by mid-June. That’s where you can find Steve Volan’s talk about living with Aspergers, one of a handful of strong candidates to be promoted to the rest of the world by the TED channel this summer. Ultimately, this is the biggest benefit the TED brand provides: the ability to showcase local minds on an international stage.

For me, spending all of those months in regular meetings gave me a wonderful perk: Most of the members of the local team of organizers are new additions to my life. I love listening to Kalynn Brower talk, because everything she says has an underlying energy that is infectious. Maarten Bout is certain to cross my path again and again, as his interests in parenting, theatre, and now the Combine overlap with mine. I got to spend some time with Gail Hale in her wonderful studio space, too. It is a sure thing that she’ll find me volunteering to help build the whatsits and whodads that comprise her sets for events like Lotus. Deeper roots in Bloomington is a great ROI for a year’s worth of work.

The Bad

My interest in TEDx Bloomington was to celebrate local community. That celebration began by helping co-curator Christian Long understand how the local tech scene had improved over the past several years*. I was delighted by how he embraced local organizers and our role in launching such a great event.

The other part of my mission was to find ways to include a broad swath of Bloomington beyond what we could fit in a theatre. Here, confusion and hand-tying created barriers that kept these activities, “Wisdom of Play” (WoP), from becoming what was envisioned:

The Wisdom of Play is a suite of community engagement activities designed around the theme of our local TEDx event, scheduled May 14. During the month of May, we plan a variety of public activities that explore play, experimentation, insight, risk, adventure, wonder, perception, and curiosity.

From conception, these public projects were intended to supplement the topics of conversation on Saturday. We wanted WoP to spread the ideas embedded in the theme in advance of the talks, allowing more people to participate in the community-wide discussion with some hands-on play. In addition to the projects that preceded—but did not compete with—TEDx Bloomington, an unconference facilitated the day after the main event would allow people to process their experiences and turn ideas into action. In short, the purpose of WoP was to help spread the ideas worth spreading.

WoP produced a smaller impact than expected. Planning was delayed as we tried to sort out the relationship between these activities and the organizing entities around TEDx Bloomington. The late start made it difficult to fund and grow awareness. When organizing something for the first time, there is always room for improvement. However, many of the hurdles were the byproduct of an unwillingness by TEDx national to embrace other local events.

TEDx has many rules guiding what the license holder can and cannot do. A lot of attention is paid to controlling their logo and domain name, of course, but WoP relied on neither. The rules are largely motivated by one fundamental TED concept: The event is free from corporate bias. Ignoring the gray area created by the corporate origins of many ideas worth spreading, it is pretty easy to accept this as a noble goal that should be supported.

The problem: the rules also broadly exclude participation in and reciprocation of other events in the community. It is telling that “other conferences and seminars” are lumped in with weapons manufacturers, ammunition and cigarette companies, online gambling, and sex-related businesses as unacceptable content for the official website. Ultimately, what prevented that site from acknowledging WoP projects in any way was a co-events clause emphasizing that TEDx events are stand-alone and not to be combined with other things.

Admittedly, WoP was pushing the envelope (although, there was precedent for it). Any attempt to operate outside of the prescribed TEDx window brought self-inflicted pain. We anticipated a clear separation of funding and parallel tracks for organizing, but not what amounted to a gag order. The assumption was that TEDx saw itself as becoming part of the local community. From my unique perspective as coordinator of this suite of seven projects, it doesn’t appear the rules are interpreted that way.

When our first attempt at grassroots funding failed—Kickstarter is another odd thorn in the TEDx side, btw—WoP lost a couple projects and had to scale back a few others. Thanks to the generosity of a couple dozen people, who donated money and time to the effort, we still managed to play a week-long game, decorate some t-shirts, build an arcade, create a comic, and convince thirtysomething people to talk about what they can do with the wisdom they picked up this month. All of the projects were worthwhile endeavors that didn’t get the opportunity to demonstrate their full worth.

The TEDx rules demand that “[y]our event must maintain the spirit of TED itself: cross-disciplinary, focused on the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world.” WoP shared that vision, with the added motivation of cultivating an engaged, playful and reflective audience for the Bloomington talks. The question isn’t whether TEDx was right to disassociate from these community projects, but why they would want to do so.

Next Year

The response to TEDx Bloomington has been overwhelmingly positive. Those who attended will likely rave about the on-site experience when tickets are available next year, and those who cannot go may again benefit from the high production value of the streaming video. The national speakers liked being here, as I’m certain you will see in the testimonials that will surface in the coming months. With a DVD to share, it will be much easier to explain and thus recruit sponsorship dollars in 2012. I’ll be shocked if the Buskirk-Chumley doesn’t sell out. In other words, there is no good reason not to expect another successful iteration of TEDx Bloomington in the future.

My added hope is that the quality of our event lends a voice to a conversation with TEDx national about developing new interpretations of their rules, to allow for mutually beneficial events to co-exist alongside the main talks. If they truly believe in their mission—ideas worth spreading—then it would help to acknowledge that doing so is a process that extends in both directions away from the stage with that familiar big red logo.

(And, because I love Chicago and harmonicas, here’s Yuri Lane, too.)

Kevin Olusola, playing “Julie-O”

Greg Pattillo and thePROJECTTrio, playing “Sweet Dreams”

Yuri Lane, playing harmonica on the streets of Chicago

I could listen to this stuff all day. In fact, I think I will.

James M. Titus isn't human, but he played one on Twitter

Organized by the Boston-based Web Ecology Project, the experiment called for three teams to program social-bots Twitter accounts that coule mimic human conversation. They selected 500 real users (I presume they had a way of confirming that), most of which shared an affinity for cats. Accounts like @JamesMTitus relied on a database of generic responses, focusing on the most responsive people in the target community. In the second week, additional bots were added to allow teams to try to thwart the efforts of other bots to be perceived as human.

Although the Evil applications are readily apparent—in February, Anonymous hackers revealed government interest in infiltrating online groups—Tim Hwang also sees the potential for great good. A new version of this social experiment called “The Narrows” will attempt to construct a community where one does not yet exist, leading to the hope of using bots as connective mechanisms to help shape large online communities.

This immediately reminded me of a couple other projects related to fakery on Twitter.

Truthy

Truthy (@ truthyatindiana) is an Indiana University research project about detecting astroturfing and other misinformation around political topics. While it takes a little practice to understand the meaning of the network visuals—the site now offers a nice visual guide that explains some of the common patterns, with specific examples—the work has produced some new insights about political use of Twitter, as well as statistically confirming other assumptions.

One of the most relevant to my perpetually delayed dissertation is the analysis of the #gop hashtag, which clearly shows a polarized group.

Truthy mapped the network of activity around #gop on Twitter

An example of a grassroots meme, the #gop hashtag is widely used on Twitter, but in two very distinct ways. One cluster reflects use by conservatives, and the other contains liberal critics. People will retweet others in the same community. When they do mention those in the other community, it is typically expressed as a disagreement. This might support known patterns within political forums online, where members engage with opposing views while reinforcing information flow from their peers.

Cyc AI

The other is Cyc (@cyc_ai), a non-profit organization to manage and grow an ontology of general knowledge that can allow computers to reason like humans. The Cyc systems leverage natural language interface, detailed background information, and deep inference to create conversational knowledge. Cycorp and Cleveland Clinic Foundation built the Semantic Research Assistant (SRA) to answer clinicians’ ad-hoc queries. Cyc, which began back in 1984, is using Twitter to help train it’s information. Recently, the tactics have changed to use a variety of inquisitive wordings to prompt confirmation of data.

Cyc is using Twitter to help train its algorithms

The Twitter account claims to allow you to send a direct message and get an answer, but that hasn’t worked for me yet. The Cyc project isn’t without criticism, not the least of which is scalability and responsiveness to cultural shifts in meaning.

The Periodic Table of Little 500

Larry is a senior majoring in journalism and fine art who has a visual column in the IDS. In the past, he has drawn art depicting the changes on campus over four years and the hairstyles of IU presidents. Larry is also a coordinator of the Wisdom of Play’s Human Puzzle project.

Unlike some tables, this one doesn’t try to re-categorize all of the aspects of Little 5. Instead, the actual periodic table is replaced with names more appropriate to the week. There are some who would argue this meme should die: There are so many periodic tables, there is a periodic table of periodic tables. I’m a sucker for collections, however, and it is fun to look at all of the IU and Bloomington culture—past and present—retold in this form.

The musical duo of Kevyn Smith and Jeremy Johnson recently paid tribute to @BronxZooCobra, the joke Twitter account tweeting on behalf of a missing snake in a New York zoo (since found). A tweet from April 5—Enough! Tonight I’m busting out. Just like that new A&E show, call me “Breakout King Cobra.” Nothing can stop me!—turned into a half-minute song. That was the rabbit hole that led to a few hundred other tweeted songs, or “sweets.”

My WeSingYourTweets Playlist

The process is a “social experiment” that is both a creative spark and a way to use their talents to highlight interesting content they find on Twitter. Attention to their work got a boost when they sweeted the Real Housewives of Atlanta last November. The following month, NPR interviewed them about their project and asked them to do a sweetment of the top retweets of 2010. Well into 2011, they are still recording short-form songs.

Earlier this week, there was a great little interview with the musicians in Turnstyle that includes the following tidbits:

• Writing sweets is quicker than writing lyrics, because the narrative is fixed
• The melodic potential of a tweet is a key factor.
• They generate about 60 sweets a week, through a couple night’s work.
• They will keep doing sweets until it isn’t fun anymore. It’s fun now.

The project has already had a few thematic endeavors, including holidays (Halloween and Christmas) and the State of the Union, and plans to visit Twitter archives to tweet first posts from other people. In between sweets, the songwriters play for a band called Dave Hates Chico.

I wonder what it would take to get sweets for my favorite favorite tweets. Maybe they need to make a new sub-genre for overheards.

The Geek Zodiac

The Geek Zodiac was created by James Wright and Josh Eckert, posted to Geek Tyrant last week.

I’m a spy. Amy is an astronaut. Archie is a time traveler (lucky!), and Matilda is a wizard. Carter will be most happy to know that he is officially undead.

Famous Objects from Classic Movies shows you an object that appeared in a movie and asks you to play hangman to guess what it is. So, if you see a bowling ball and _ _ _   _ _ _   _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _, you might think of The Dude’s favorite sport and the movie that made him famous.

Famous Objects from Classic Movies

The icons are gorgeous (reminding me of another cool website) and the simple game is fun to play. As you type, it will fill in the blanks, giving you three misses before you lose. Most of my failures were with foreign films or ones made in the past decade—since we’ve had kids, our ability to get to the movie theatre is sporadic. The site is also integrated with IMDB and points to trailers for the movies. It’s great fun for a movie buff, and sooooo easy to keep clicking …

VSL was founded in 2006 by Kurt Andersen, Michael Jackson, Tim Nolan, Emily Oberman, and Bonnie Siegler. The idea was born from people being deluged with emails suggesting something to watch or read or do. With the advent of Twitter, information flows much more freely than when they started this project, but it is still amazing to me how many times VSL will point to something new. I followed their Twitter account for a while, but there is something special about getting that info in the email.

The information is placed on a map inside the application—which at present is available on Linux and Windows (Mac OSX is coming)—to provide context for a person’s online activity. The data is drawn from social networking services Twitter and Foursquare (through information announced on Twitter), as well as a dozen image hosting services, including Flickr, Twitpic, yFrog and moby. The application was actually released almost two months ago, but it has taken this long to get on the radar of tech blogs.

Creepy is a geolocation data aggregator making a point

Like PleaseRobMe and ICanStalkYou before it, Creepy exists to make a statement about sharing location intentionally and through EXIF data. Developer Yiannis Kakavas says this isn’t a tool for stalkers; it’s for self-awareness:

Just to be clear, the intention behind creating creepy was not to help stalkers or promote/endorse stalking. It was to show exactly how easy it is to aggregate geolocation information and make you think twice next time you opt-in for geolocation features in twitter, or hitting “allow” in the “this application wants to use your current location” dialog on your iphone.

Source: Creepy FAQ

Kakavas is a graduate student at Department of Computer and Systems Sciences studying security. In his blog, Kakavas links to instructions on how to disable location reporting in smartphones and on Twitter.

Is Sharing Location a Bad Thing?

Mike Melanson of Read/Write/Web acknowledged that location sharing isn’t for everyone, but it does have benefits that outweigh the risks for those who do:

I share my location all the time and for a number of reasons. It enables random and serendipitous connections to occur. I can look back and have all sorts of contextual information as I weave my way through the world. I can plug it all in to services like MemoLane and get a time-ordered snapshot of my own life, as I share it online. And in turn, it gets fed through algorithms and stuffed into features like Foursquare’s latest recommendation service, which looks at where I’ve been and suggests where I may want to go next. And that’s just the first step for what can be done with all of this location information.

Melanson also argues that public location sharing makes it easier to evaluate new places, like coffee shops, based on in-the-moment popularity as well as customer reactions. These tidbits of shared information aggregate in our brains as well, motivating us into relationships with our community.

My own response to location has been mixed. When Twitter initially added support for geolocating individual tweets, I figured I wouldn’t activate that. While I haven’t experienced any direct benefit from finally doing so, my motivation to change my mind was the hope that localized trends—things being mentioned in Bloomington, Indiana—would benefit from myself and others flipping that switch.

Similarly, I signed up for Foursquare and Gowalla before I had a smartphone, which made participation from a clamshell cell phone extremely difficult. I stopped trying after Jim Bumgardner posted this great blog on becoming Mayor of the North Pole, due to the unreliability of the data that undercut the game driving the interaction on those sites. I picked it up again, though, after my wife bought me an iPhone and the barriers to participation were lowered. I do make a conscious decision not to link Foursquare to Twitter, though, but because I think it’s tacky and noisy, not insecure to do so.

Just like the dystopian cries that television makes us violent and the internet makes us lonely, critics of location sharing presume that sharing where you are creates a culture of stalkers.

The definition of stalking varies from state to state but most would agree it is a willful, malicious, and repeated following and harassing of another person that threatens his or her safety. According to a 1998 survey by National Violence Against Women, 8% of women and 2% of men reported stalking incidents. Less than half of those include threats of violence, and most are motivated by anger. Most importantly, most stalking occurs between people who know each other, not strangers. Women, in particular, are most likely to be stalked by a former partner in an intimate relationship.

More recent data claims 3.4 million Americans have been stalked. That’s a lot, but just 1% of the population. Stalking can be a serious disruption and can become a life-threatening situation for some, but there isn’t evidence that it is any more likely to occur now than it did prior to the Internet Age.

The flipside to the unwanted access to your location data is that the record is also available to people you do want to have it. This includes law enforcement officials, should stalking actually occur, who can use the digital footprint as evidence. It would make sense, too, that those who would opt to use information available to Creepy would also be sharing that information online. Having your friends know where you are can be a huge benefit, as well, and you are significantly more likely to have friends than stalkers.

Creepy may prove to be an interesting reflective tool, both in the way Kakavas intended—to get people to be intentional about their decision to share location information—and in taking a look at where you’ve been. I still contend that the next important wave of online tools will be ones that allow for personal and communal reflection. All this data we are assembling over time is going to reveal interesting things about ourselves in ways we just can’t see with our daily lenses on. That won’t happen without being willing to put yourself into the world and let your activities leave a mark.

One word summed up my day on March 31, 2009

Unlike her older brothers, Matilda was pink, giving the homebirthing experience two thumbs up. Carter was home but hiding in another room (a choice that makes him tear up two years later), and Archie was blissfully romping around a friend’s kitchen after a sleepover. By the end of the morning, though, everyone had been properly introduced. Matilda’s support system was at full power.

Where’s the Ma~ in BlogSchmog?

This blog began 11 years ago in anticipation of our first child. Carter benefited from new technologies, like digital cameras, and greater free time to watch his digital footprint grow quickly. Archie, our second son, had fewer photos and posts. Our most recent period of blogging slack came at a bad time for Matilda. She is well documented on our twitter feeds, but there are only a handful of Matilda-related posts here on BlogSchmog:

• Caption Contest—Enter your captions for our first Matilda Megan post!
• Boys, girls, science and marketing—There’s no surprise that we’re not raising girls who think dangerous science could be fun- we’re too busy telling them cleaning is fun.
• Born to Boogie—While I’m quite certain Matilda has her own special dancing talent, it turns out, most babies do. From the Ice Age to present day, dancing and music have helped us not only have fun and connect, but also survive.

That trend may change soon. Matilda came back from a trip north to visit her aunt with much more conversational English. She counts from 2 to 9, and will generally make a go at anything she hears pronounced once. Matilda also slips in an extraneous “h” when telling people where to sit, which sends Nanna into giggles.

My first Matilda-focused blog post will highlight her two-week-old comprehension of joke telling:

Ma~: Knock-knock
Us: Who’s there
Ma~: Daddy
Us: Daddy who?
(pause)
Ma~: Knock-knock

or

Us: Knock-knock
Ma~: Who there?
Us: Daddy
Ma~: Oh (claps) Yay!

Happy birthday to my latest two-year-old.

Welcome to the world, Ma~

Well, modern gamer fans can play that game, too. Here’s an interpretation of a traditional Mario Bros. adventure from a first-person perspective:

It took over 60 hours to render this into a 88-second video. 3dsMax, FumeFX, and After Effects were used to make this interpretation of a familiar game. Well done!

Thanks to Thalith Nasir for the twip (tweet tip).

The beautiful artwork by artist Adam Long are like postcards from the past, commemorating some of the notable events that have led to our present social networking culture. These include:

• The Notificator, a message vending machine at British railway stations
• CompuServe, the first computer time sharing service
• CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), a computerized answering system born in the Chicago Blizzard of 1978. It survives today as chinet.
• The invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee
• Q-Link, the predecessor to America Online, that connected Commodore computers together (see the 1986 promotional video).
• The 2003 launch of social network systems on the Web, notably Friendster, MySpace, and LinkedIn
• Tim O’Reilly’s FOO Camp, a hand-picked curation of interesting people coming together for a conference with no set agenda
• The launch of Facebook, which in 6 years would eventually get to 500 million users in July 2010
• Dell Hell, the name given to Dell’s poor customer service
• The launch of Twitter, which just celebrated it’s 5th birthday, and its coming out party at SxSW in 2007.
• A Burger King employee takes a bath in a BK sink, demonstrating to businesses that there is no controlling a brand anymore.
• The Sacha Baron Cohen movie Bruno met an early death. Twitter buzz is credited. Twitter is also assigned importance in international politics, with the U.S. State Department urging the service to postpone a scheduled maintenance to keep Iranian protestors tweeting.
• The “United Breaks Guitars” trilogy chronicles the poor customer service of United Airlines. Later, Southwest gets a tweetful from filmmaker Kevin Smith, who was deemed “too fat to fly.”
• NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer tweets from space
• Japan’s win over Denmark in the 2010 World Cup sets a record with 3283 tweets per second (tps)
• Charlie Sheen sets a record as the fastest Twitter account to reach 1 million followers.
• Rebecca Black’s video, “Friday,” is at the moment is approaching 38 million views (the artwork pegged it at 18 million) despite being widely panned

The Command Center opened last month with Tim O’Reilly, Brian Solis and others speaking on social media. PeopleBrowsr recently released ReSearch.ly, allowing access to 1,000 days of Twitter data and creating a focus on collective memory.

Ever since Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released, “Abe Froman” has been the most commonly used alias for when men want to anonymously check into motels.

It’s not true, but it feels true. That plausibility is what makes Daily Urban Legend a fun blog to inject into my regular Snackr news feeds. It tests my information fluency with regularity.

DUL is the work of Maggie Serota, who tries to make up a new fake fact each day to share with friends. Serota—a Brooklyn writer who has contributed to publications like The Onion A.V. Club, Radar, and NY Press—started this project as a Twitter hashtag (#UrbanLegendIJustMadeUp) but turned it into a Tumbler blog so she can include pictures.

Daily Urban Legend makes up new "facts" to share with friends

In addition to the Froman fiction, here are a few of my other favorites:

• Walt Disney was not cryogenically frozen after his death, but his cremated ashes are used nightly in the fireworks displays at Disneyland.
• The U.S. birthrate jumped about 16 percent in 1995 to reach a decade long high, just 9 months after Boyz II Men released their hit single “On Bended Knee.”
• Back in the 80’s, some cocaine shipments were smuggled into the country inside the sneaker phones given away with Sports Illustrated subscriptions.
• The only way Prince will communicate with others when it is not in person is via fax machine.
• 86% of all emergency room trips for children under the age of 10 are the result of swallowed board game pieces.
• By the year 2026, there will be more fictional lawyers practicing law on television than lawyers practicing law in real life. In related news: 43% of the defendants who choose to represent themselves in a court of law feel qualified to do so after watching the DVD set of the entire L.A. Law series.
• 2 pledges at a University of Florida frat party died after smoking soiled cat litter out of a bong during a hazing ritual.

Look it up.

I came across a few interesting videos this week, ranging in topics. Here they are:

Outside In

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

More at GeekDad

Salman Khan

More at TED

The History of Twitter

Funny or Die’s take on the origins of Twitter (NSFW, thanks to Soulja Boy):

More at WebProNews

Sheehey’s Dunk

Greg Pattillo

More at PROJECT Trio

Building a visual language through free symbols

The site is intended to be simple to use and include images that are easily understood across cultures. These icons are highly designed, quality visual artifacts accessible from a few major categories:

• animals
• food & beverage
• healthcare & wellness
• people
• safety & warnings
• science & math
• sports & recreation
• tech & communication
• transportation
• travel & wayfinding
• weather & nature

The symbols are free. In fact, free distribution is a core part of the effective strategy to improve visual communication. The images are in Public Domain or available under Creative Commons license.

The Noun Project is looking for volunteers to translate their website into languages other than English, and eventually will implement a system where community members can contribute to the project as well. Think Urban Dictionary for icons.

Bacteria from a rare meteorite is not of this earth

On the surface, this seems like the kind of news that might warrant Comcast interrupting my regular programming for a special report. I’ve seen this kind of thing show up on Twitter before, however, so color me unphased for the moment. I can’t tell a Titanospirillum velox from a Paratetramitus jugosus, but fortunately there are some others who can (or at least make a more educated guess than I).

Their skepticism boils down to a few items:

• Hoover has done this before. His career is focused on exploring hostile environments on Earth in search of novel life forms, so maybe this just isn’t as newsy at the FOX headlines make it seem.
• Hoover argues that there is no way these could be of Earthly origin, but his logic isn’t scientifically convincing enough to be conclusive.
• Anticipating skepticism, the Journal of Cosmology had 100 other scientists look at the data. Their reviews are coming out later this week.
• The JoC has a history of wacky claims, which raises the plausibility bar even higher. Throw in a previous announcement that the online publication is ceasing operations in May, less than two years after they launched, and credibility takes a further hit.
• Related to that: Why wouldn’t something of this magnitude be in a more prestigious publication?

This is all circumstantial, of course, and doesn’t mean this paper isn’t accurate about its conclusion. However, neither does Hoover’s work seem to satisfy the questions that are already surfacing.

Like Mulder before me, I want to believe. The first time I see a tweet, my first reaction is: “It’s about time!” Proof of panspermia would have huge impact on a number of fields, not the least of which is theology. Some wonderful debates would be sparked, and perhaps will materialize anyway, even if the 100 other experts pan Hoover’s conclusions.

The issues of gender in this domain clearly haven’t been solved in the interim, so instead of synthesis and analysis, you get a list of topical links (a couple of which are more recent than 2008):

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Advice to men: “Learn to shut up and listen.”

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The most fascinating and perhaps most important of the links I had curated was reference to Corinna Bath’s warning that the semantic web may be gendered. Like the first phone books that listed the names of husbands in each households, the architects of such curations carry their biases into the rules the machines will use to create this knowledge. It also reflects cultural biases that have persisted over the life of digital artifacts, meaning the machines will reflect gender biases in the content they find, “learning” misinformation.

Coverage of reports like this one from 2005 and this one from 2007 in some key demographics are both reflective of imbalances of adoption and over-generalizing in documenting bias. This is what machines see, too.

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Code like a girl

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Dennis Howlett conducted a series of interviews with women in leadership, motivated by a McKinsey report on advancement of women. This was two years before Clay Shirky’s rant about women not self-promoting themselves enough.

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Among top tech blogs, few of the writers are women, but that doesn’t mean women don’t write and contribute heavily to the tech blogosphere. Orli Yakuel compiled a list of top technology blogs written by women.

* * * * *

The apparent closing of the gender gap is based on changes in work force, not pay—More qualified women are in higher positions demanding higher pay, but that doesn’t reflect equity with their male peers. This is problematic because it helps propagate the myth that gender issues have been resolved.

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Most organizations have to battle the problem of siloing, where small groups within the larger organization become isolated. Women are most likely to participate in cross-group communication, which is just one of the reasons gender inclusion is vital to the long-term success.

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Across all genders, there is a tendency for people to counteract traditional gender stereotypes when trying to impress someone during a negotiation:

Men’s strategy of behaving in a more conciliatory fashion apparently succeeded in producing a positive impression in the counterpart’s eyes. However, the women’s strategy of behaving more assertively failed to create a more positive impression. Instead, women who behaved more assertively, were judged more negatively.

Is that one of the reasons there are still few women corporate leaders in Silicon Valley?

* * * * *

Women are pretty good at science

Yet, academics are in bad shape, particularly in science, when it comes to creating female leaders. Too few women scientists achieve leadership positions, due largely to gender roles and chasing women away from science“>non-supportive culture. Just last fall, the Journal of Applied Psychology claimed to show a gender bias existed in letters of recommendation for faculty hires (in psychology).

* * * * *

The establishment of a dominant demographic for brands and marketing may also lead to the elimination of gender as a marketing focus.

* * * * *

A few organized efforts to support and promote women include: Girls In Tech, the BlogHer network, and WITI (Women in Technology International).
* * * * *

This just in: Women aren’t men.

The first part of my research is about understanding how people are talking politics right now. This will require a combination of examining existing artifacts—Twitter streams and the archived posts from two WebLab forums—and a inquiry built around new conversations. This summary will detail the plan for the conversation experiment.

Some inspirational music from Leonard Cohen: “Democracy“

“Lunch With Other” Experiment

Inspired by an activity suggested by Elizabeth Lesser—in which two polar opposites sit down over a public lunch with the intent of being curious, conversational, and authentic—I propose to explore the strategies and language used when two people engage in a discussion. This experiment will include four parts: a screening survey, a series of 1:1 conversations, pre- and post-conversation mood assessment, and follow-up interviews with participants.

Screening Survey

There are two key reasons for this initial survey. First, I can include a much larger participant group (in theory) than I’ll be working with during the later stages of this inquiry. This may permit some generalizations I won’t be able to get through the conversations I’ll analyze. Second, this serves as my primary means of slotting respondents into pair-able conversations.

The survey will include questions about:

• Self-declared affinity to political labels (e.g., “Conservative”)
• Indication of support for specific political issues (e.g., “How much do you support expansion of I-69?”)
• A short description of current personal politics
• A short description of a key political influence leading to current political philosophy

Since this initial survey is meant to help filter respondents for inclusion in the later stages, the questions here will have to reflect the dimensions being examined in those conversations (see below).

Recruiting for participation in this project will likely target local online forums (MoB Talk, Bloomington Online, local Twitter, and possibly the Herald-Times online comments) to focus on accessible participants who can easily be observed and interviewed. Because one key dimension for this work will be the effect of computer mediation, recruitment outside of Indiana is important, too. General social media, established political forums, and blog posts will spread interest in this initial survey across a wider demographic.

1:1 Conversations

From the participant group from the initial survey, a few dozen people will be invited to join the second phase of this study. Selection will specifically look for pairs of people showing polarized ideology and support of single issues. This will filter out moderate politics to allow me to focus on extremes during the conversations.

There are a number of possible dimensions to explore with each pairing:

• Affinity to ideological labels (liberal, moderate, conservative)
• Spectrum of support for a single issue
• Scope of single issues (local, regional, national, global)
• Age of participants (18-29, 30-44, 45-64, 65+)
• Locality (Indiana, Not Indiana)
• Mediation of discourse (face-to-face or computer mediated)
• Prior knowledge of Other’s affinity (i.e., does a liberal know she is talking to a conservative?)
• Deception (i.e., misinform people about the other person’s ideology)
• Purpose of the conversation (political issue, non-political topic, seeking understanding)
• Preparatory information (i.e., talk around a particular news article)

My initial strategy will look to capture information about eight kinds of conversations across three key variants: ideology, mediation, and purpose.

Each participant in this phase of the study will be asked to have four conversations over a span of a few weeks. In two of the conversations, they will be matched with someone considered a polar opposite, by virtue of ideology and perhaps other factors, such as stance on a key issue or age. In the other two conversations, they will talk with someone who is similar. Their conversations will either be primed—we’ll provide some article to discuss and ask them to match a picture with their presumed ideology and stance on the issue—or the pair will be simply asked to get to know one another. Future iterations of this study could delve further the nuances of presumption and the nature of the task.

The start of each paired session will be recorded, with a transcript used for content analysis. Conversations can last longer—I want to allow them to reach comfortable closure—but I’m most interested in comparing the first thirty minutes of discourse. For those in primed conversations, an article about the topic of conversation will be sent to them in advance.

Mood Assessment

Due to the desire to assess mood and preserve as pristine the initial stages of discourse, participants will be separated prior to their conversation. As part of the paired conversations, a short survey will be administered to each participant—at the start and immediately following the discussion—to gauge each person’s mood and the perceived mood of their partner. Mood will be determined by selecting among eight faces, arranged in a circle, representing possible expressions and avoiding issues with semantic interpretation of terminology.

Those in primed conversations will also be asked to select from four possible descriptions of the politics of their partner, guessing which one is accurate. The options will derive from the mix of ideology and support of the single issue being discussed. This will be repeated at the conclusion of the conversation as well.

Follow-up Interviews

After the conversation and survey data has been analyzed, specific participants may be invited to individual or group interviews to explain their strategic decisions during the discussions and provide more insight into their own political philosophies and activities. The purpose of this part of the inquiry would be to clarify and deepen the understanding of key findings from the previous data.

Expectations

The findings from the survey will be most useful in trying to answer three important questions:

1. How strongly are single issues aligned with political labels?—My assumption is that, in our current political landscape, positions are defined by the affinity to a label, rather than contributing to a flexible definition of that label (e.g., conservatives oppose gun control).
2. What common influences lead to shared political views?—I expect to find some words, ideas and experiences expressed by participants will show strong associations with descriptions of one’s personal politics. This also includes finding links between political descriptions and labels.

I would love to add a third question, looking at potential shifts between political background and current politics, but I think that is a rabbit hole better answered by existing research that points to family as a key factor in social learning. That said, I do expect to find some examples of a negative experience leading to a political shift.

Analysis of the conversations will look for differences in the eight types of conversations (primed and not primed, similar and different ideologies, face-2-face and computer mediation) to see if any conclusions can be made about the effect these dimensions have on discourse. In particular, I’m asking:

1. What distinguishes polarized from kindred discourse?—I expect to see more aggressive and defensive language, a quicker declaration of position, and less willingness to change in discussions between polarized individuals than kindred ones.
2. What distinguishes computer-mediate discourse from face-to-face conversation?—My hypothesis is that the mediation has much less impact on political discourse strategies and language than polarized participants, but people will prove to be bolder and more task-oriented through the computer than in person.
3. What impact does focused purpose have on political discourse?—The conversations that prepare by reading a specific article to act as a catalyst for their exchange will be less diverse in the topics they discuss and less empathic in how they converse.
4. How is discourse affected by knowing the politics of your partner?—If polarization is the dominant factor, then being accurate in guessing the ideology and single-issue position of the other person will not dictate discourse strategy as much as which politics you assign. I expect that the conversations that aren’t primed will be more exploratory and adaptive than those where the participants are asked to assign a political view to their partners.

At this level, the expectations for polarized discourse will be tempered with the awkwardness of personal exchange between two strangers. The characteristics of the exchange won’t rise to the level of systemic polarization, as described by conflict theorists Dean Pruitt and Jeffrey Rubin. However, I expect that some of the seeds of systemic conflict will be observable, such as increased sarcasm, more generalizations, and diversity of tactics to prolong engagement.

The end outcome of this inquiry will be the ability to articulate some of the dynamics of political discourse, as they relate to the political labels, advance preparation, and relational language. Understanding these factors may help guide development of a framework for the design and critique of political forums.

GeekDad

So far, so good. Technically, I missed a day, but I posted twice the previous day, so I’m still on track for 1000 posts in 1000 days. Plus, I haven’t counted the few articles I wrote for Wired‘s GeekDad blog:

• Girls Benefit from Video Game Co-Play—Researchers at BYU found evidence to support that playing video games are good for girls, when played with a parent.
• Five Year Mission: Boldly Singing Where No One Has Sung Before—A fun interview with an Indianapolis band trying to create an original song for all 80 Star Trek episodes from the original series.
• Metropolis Reborn With Live Music—An account of my trip to see/hear IU musicians play a live score to the science fiction classic Metropolis in the restored IU Cinema.

For a while, the once-a-week pace is going to have to do. Eventually, I’d like to double or triple that output. Turning Snackr back on and setting up Twitter to stream to my desktop has been great for information flow. There is a lot of relevant Geek information that comes through those pipes that could become short pointer blogs, if not fodder for something bigger. Having survived several weeks of daily writing, though, I know I’m not ready to throttle up yet.

SociaLens

Before GeekDad gets more from me, I need to work SociaLens into the routine. My pal Christian Briggs has been carrying the load on content creation there, and I’d like to help. In addition to the geek content, Snackr also brings me a steady supply of relevant links to share about organizations and technology. One small but important step taken last month was when we hooked our diigo group into our Twitter account. One of my goals in March is to elevate one of those items into a blog post to get the writing train running on that track.

BlogSchmog

As for this blog, I have achieved the same eclectic production as I had a few years ago. Here are some of the topical highlights from a month of writing in February:

• Design Assignments—One of my goals for an HCI design studio course I am teaching is to do the assignments I am giving to the students. I have tried to turn these into blog posts as a way of processing the content and sharing more detail about the information that went into the research or concept.
• Dissertation—The biggest motivation for blogging was to help process and document my final evolution of a doctoral dissertation. The previous 18 months were so fraught with change and indecision, I felt I needed to be more committed to daily thinking on this important project. While I did manage to flesh out a number of thoughts on polarized political discourse, one big insight is that daily blogging isn’t going to magically produce my research by year’s end. I need to devote more time to this during the day, rather than waiting to think about things at 11p.
• Product Reviews—This used to be a staple for me a few years back. There is never a shortage of new websites and applications to examine and critique. I enjoy this exercise, but I’d prefer to limit this until my dissertation is fully developed. The best of both worlds are systems supporting discourse.
• Local Happenings—Since it is the season for basketball, a few posts focused on my Hoosiers. I also processed some thoughts on the Herald-Times paywall. The biggest local event for me, though, was the collapse of higher brain functions upon seeing Meg Ryan in person.
• Reflections—Once in a while I will post something that is about me or my favorite things, but I rarely write about being a dad anymore. I’d like to revive the Papa Journal, just to continue to have some record of what my kids were like before they grow up.

My biggest challenge for March will likely be when my routine drastically change for a week during Spring Break. I want to have my initial dissertation research proposal submitted by then.

An overlooked part of the process of blogging is reflection. Each month, I try to look back at the artifacts I have created and look for patterns or insights.

One of those humans happened to have a video camera on Thursday. Moving to the edge of his seat in the sky (actually the seat of a fellow passenger), he captured a few minutes of the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery:

This was a unique perspective of Discovery‘s final shuttle mission. There are a number of videos available from the ground view as well as the one we watched showing the camera attached to the shuttle. All of these people sharing the experience of a major technological achievement by documenting it with other major technological achievements.

When I was my eldest son’s age, the first spaceworthy shuttle—Columbia—had just been delivered to the Kennedy Space Center to prep for its first flight (That wouldn’t occur for another two years). Elsewhere in space: Bryan Allen pedaled the Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel, Voyager I completed a flyby of Jupiter, Pioneer 11 passed Saturn, and Skylab came back to earth. It was also the year of Three Mile Island, the Ixtoc I, NORAD’s false alarm, and a crash of a DC-10 at O’Hare. Science is hard.

We only have two more chances to see this again. My boys watched the last Discovery launch with me on my laptop, after being reminded on Twitter that the lift-off was imminent. We waited less than ten minutes before NASA flight command reported the shuttle was officially in space. It takes more time to watch an episode of Phineas and Ferb than it does to leave the planet.

Incredible.

However, at the end of a packed week filled with celebrity sightings and digital fluency games, I’m looking at a tight deadline to remain on track. Thus, you will be treated to links to all of the open tabs in my current session of Chrome. This serves two purposes: A blog post filled with some things of recent interest, and reclaiming my computer before a weekend of dissertation work.

Current Events

• Crowd Laughs When Congressman Is Asked: Who’s Going To Shoot Obama?—What happened and didn’t happen when Republican Rep. Paul Broun was asked this question at his townhall meeting.
• Homeless Man Daniel Morales Finds Daughter Through Twitter—The 58-year-old participant in the Underheard project (homeless Twitterers given prepaid cell phones) gets a call from his daughter.
• Researcher reports on animals’ reflective minds—To the question of whether non-human animals have metacognition, UB’s J. David Smith says the answer appears to be “yes.”
• The Wiki Strikes Again: German Official Drops “Dr” After Wiki Investigation—erman defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has said he would remove the “Dr” from his name while a plagiarism investigation of his PhD took place. Where did this investigation originate? Wikia, the for-profit wiki project started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
• Salary Survey—Learn what members of Information Architecture and User Expereince community reported and see the trends in IA titles, salaries, and activities.

Relational Politics

• Study shows how metaphors shape the debate about crime fighting—Psychology Assistant Professor Lera Boroditsky and doctoral candidate Paul Thibodeau have shown that people will likely support an increase in police forces and jailing of offenders if crime is described as a “beast” preying on a community. But if people are told crime is a “virus” infecting a city, they are more inclined to treat the problem with social reform.
• Political Voices: Political Engagement Through Text Sound Poetry (PDF)—a paper from Wesleyan researcher
  Celeste Hutchins.
• Even in a crowd, you remain unique, life scientists report—The size of the group strongly predicts the individual uniqueness in the animals’ voices: The bigger the group, the more unique each animal’s voice typically was and the easier it was to tell individuals apart.
• 10 Things Your Parents Told You That Still Apply to Social Media—Adages from moms and dads are applied to online common sense.
• Are we more — or less — moral than we think?—Emotions are key: Those facing the real dilemma were most emotional. Their emotions drove them to do the right thing and refrain from cheating.

Organizations

• Complexity theory for managers—After applying a metaphor of NP-Complete math problems to business: Teams led by good managers are competent and not micromanaged.
• ‘Telecoupling’ explains why it’s a small world, after all—Telecoupling is about connecting both human and natural systems across boundaries. Jack Liu said that telecoupling is a way to express one of the often-overwhelming consequences of globalization.
• US cities using tech to cull ideas from citizens—New York and cities around the country are trying to follow the example of private companies and use technology and the Internet to harness the wisdom of citizens and create virtual civic forums.

Technology

• The Story of Twitter—Jack Dorsey tells Stanford about how Twitter came out of his experience at Odeo.
• Finally, Sweet Sleep for MyBlogLog; Another Yahoo Service That Could Have Changed the World—Blog community and data widget service MyBlogLog, acquired by Yahoo 4 years ago last month, will finally be put to rest by its parent company on May 24th.
• New Baby Essentials: Domain Name, Twitter Account, YouTube Channel—Better to plan the baby’s name based on what domains are available. That’s why the service Babysquatter was, well, born. Using Babysquattter you can check out which names are available and even block the awful name your MIL wants by showing it as unavailable.
• bloom.io: Start-Up Proposes Visual Instruments for Social Data Expression—Conceptual thinker Ben Cerveny and visualization-guru Tom Carden, both from Stamen Design in their previous life, have just launched a new visualization venture, called bloom.
• Got an Old Computer? Jolicloud OS Can Now Make it a Zippy Cloud Machine—Jolicloud, the Operating System that primarily serves netbooks, today expanded its support to include computers as many as 10 years old. If you’ve got an old desktop computer with as little as 348MB of RAM, it could be fun and useful again.

There were more, but this is no longer a “quick little post.” Now searching Google for “Tabaholic.”

Amazed that my brain let me tweet this

That is what happened today, during an afternoon SociaLens meeting at the Scholar’s Inn Bakehouse. I recognized her immediately on the street outside, as she passed by the big glass windows, and was indescribably elated when the door swung open and she rounded the corner with John Mellencamp. In those few interim seconds, I managed to grab my iPhone and ready a camera. That is as far as my brain would take me.

What followed next was a series of catastrophic brain synapse misfirings that caused the following:

• I couldn’t stop staring.
• I forgot which button allowed me to capture a picture.
• I didn’t notice I was taking a video, but became convinced this needed to be a photo.
• I forgot how to toggle away from the video. Got great footage of my foot.
• I forgot how to operate the zoom.
• I became concerned that I was being too obvious about taking a photo and shifted into stealth mode, as I was clicking the picture.
• I wondered if they wanted me to take their picture. I say “they” because at this point my brain still registered that pop icon John Mellencamp was even in the room.
• I decided to play it cool.
• I still could not stop staring.
• I began replaying ten minutes of dialogue from Sleepless In Seattle in my head.
• I noticed we now had a third person at the table (my business meeting had begun). Meg Ryan had opened the door for him.
• I tweeted a message to share with the world, misspelling @scholarsInnBake in the process. I’m fortunate that was my only mistake, as things went fuzzy after I finished typing “Meg Ryan.”
• I wondered if that is really Meg Ryan.
• I stared at Meg Ryan.
• I considered getting up to look for a napkin, perhaps on the counter near where Meg Ryan is leaning.
• I wondered if she wanted anyone to approach.
• I decided not to approach.
• I wondered if she now thinks no one in Bloomington is friendly.
• I stared at Meg Ryan in a friendly manner.
• I remembered I am married. Name rhymes with something.
• I felt guilty, and then decided that if Christopher Walken or Antonio Banderas walked into Scholar’s Inn Bakehouse with John Mellencamp, this would be her blog post.
• I wondered how Antonio Banderas and John Mellencamp met.
• I stared at Meg Ryan in a friendly manner.
• I wished I had some device with a camera.
• I noticed other people were still sitting at my table.
• I pretended not to stare at Meg Ryan.

That trajectory deteriorated further, for what seemed like hours, until Meg and John gathered their food a few minutes later and calmly crossed College Ave. Brain functions are only now returning.

Throughout most of the encounter, I sensed Meg and John were staring at me. I was sure they were chuckling about how funny the 42-year-old schoolboy was, getting flustered in the presence of a movie star. Later, I realized there was a big television screen behind me, so it’s possible they were watching ESPN.

I’m sure I’ll do better next time around. The Patterson-Gimlin quality shot I have to commemorate the encounter would take several highly-trained forensic specialists a week to verify that it resembles Meg Ryan. I know better and consider it a sign from above that Indiana is destined to win tonight.

Hysterical Hoosiers, a social media group aimed at customizing and coordinating student chants at Indiana University sporting events, enters its second week with a huge rivalry for the Hoosiers. Tonight, the #8-ranked Purdue Boilermakers come to Assembly Hall to face a maturing team of athletes and one of the biggest, loudest, and most fervent student sections in the country.

Chants For Purdue

1. IU FREE THROWS—While IU players are shooting free throws, hold our arms in an “I” and then down into a “U” after the point is scored.
2. TEAM HUDDLES—When the team is in a huddle, hold one arm out (like we to are in the huddle) and chant “1, 2, 3, HOOSIERS!” when they break.
3. BOILER UP SPOOF—Replace Purdue’s meaningless chant with “BANNER UP” (clap clap)
4. KELSEY BARLOW—If the sophomore guard is shooting free throws, mimic his choke sign and yell “Choke!”
5. DUNKS—Chant “That’s a “Pritch” Slap!” for Tom Pritchard dunks, and “You got Shee-bagged” if Will Sheehey dunks.

Source: “preliminary purdue chants” (2/22/2011)

The crowdsourcing of chants began when Adragna (@tonyadragna) was featured on a IU podcast to talk about his internet radio show. In the conversation with Scott at CrimsonCast, the idea of organizing chants was hatched. Facebook and Twitter pages soon followed, generating support from almost 800 online Hoosier fans in the first week. “The reason we wanted to organize chants was because some of IU’s chants lately have been weak,” Adragna recalls.

The debut didn’t go as planned. Not only did Northwestern beat the Hoosiers, but the groundswell of support for the chants didn’t materialize. Still, their blog post describing the chants for the Wildcat games managed 3,000 views.

“We learned that you have to take the fan’s input,” says Adranga. The channels to do so are currently limited to online communication, but in future seasons Hysterical Hoosiers may spread their message and coordinate activities through signs and t-shirts. The group recently teamed up with the IU Athletic Department’s official student section, The Crimson Guard, and can now expect support from University Twitter accounts to get the word out about chants.

One concern is whether this form of organization will correct or exasperate the trend toward vulgar fan behavior. There are some notorious cases of inappropriate activity by student sections, so momentum in a positive direction is welcome. “We monitor all of the chants,” reassures Adranga. “We will make sure the chants we put up are appropriate.”

New chants aren’t the only buzz around fan activity for this big game. The Crimson Guard has declared today to be a “Stripe Out” game, with fans in designated sections of Assembly Hall wearing either red or white. Thanks to the new general admission seating for part of the student section, some Hoosier fans started camping out for front-row seats more than a day before tip-off. The #assemblyhallcampout tweets have been flowing, and even AD Fred Glass stopped by to check in with the campers.

Source: Josh Bowles, IU SportsCom

Over a decade ago, my hatred of Purdue solidified after watching a Boilermaker guard—Todd Foster, I believe, now an assistant on the staff—celebrate an upset win in Assembly Hall by jumping up and down on the Indiana map at center court, where Bloomington would be. I’ve been rooting for Purdue shutouts ever since. Bad seasons are salvaged by beating Purdue.

Bring your voices, students. I’ll have to listen for “BANNER UP!” while watching the game on TV.

Born out of that experience—and iterated during a furious Startup Weekend session last November in Indianapolis—is a new web tool to make it possible to experience multiple panels at once: through shared notetaking.

Sneak Peak at NoteSee

NoteSee is a conference note sharing application, helping attendees (and remote fans) get more value out of information events.

Most people take notes when they’re sitting in on the sessions and panels. With their laptops out, they’re making great use of their Evernote or Simplenote accounts, typing out their lightbulb moments as discussions and presentations are happening right in front of them. Sometimes you get so wrapped up that you forget to write, or your laptop dies. Sometimes, you can’t even make the panels you want to attend.

source: “About NoteSee“

NoteSee (@notesee) helps stretch two scarce resources—time and money—by providing a feel for the content of a particular conference through a set of notes from audience members. That may help conferences with future registrations, or create fans of certain speakers who follow them to another conference.

Since 2007′s SXSW conference, many people have used Twitter to comment on events. Michael Jensen and Danny Sullivan once developed LiveTwitting, a tool to leverage Twitter’s direct messages to aggregate short-form comments into a live blog without flooding followers with tweets. That site went offline in 2008, however.

“Twitter is a phenomenal back channel tool for giving you a feel for a conference session,” explains Tim Skaggs, one of NoteSee’s two developers (Darby Frey being the other). “The problem lies in the fact that it is an uncoordinated stream of information that can seem incoherent when seen by someone who is not actually present or viewing.”

“Following just the hashtags makes me want to cry. I get very little value from that information,” says Smith, who is the lead designer for NoteSee and a familiar face in the Indiana startup scene.

The team feels their application fills a real need not addressed by the few other tools currently available. Neil Thomison, who oversees business development for the project, points to Lanyrd, another pioneer in this event support domain, as a tool attempting to scratch a similar itch. That site allows you to track favorite conferences and see who else is attending. “I think this is a great companion to NoteSee,” says Thomison, “but I know that good notes can provide really valuable information from the perspective of the audience member. It’s like getting a textbook in school with intelligent notes, smart questions and thoughtful answers in the gutter.”

The tool isn’t limited to helping people attending over-scheduled events. Sometimes, due to expense or conflicts, it isn’t possible to travel to every interesting conference on the calendar. “Just because we don’t go doesn’t mean we want to miss any valuable information,” says Thomison.

Right now, the team is focusing their efforts on providing support for tech conferences—next month’s SXSW in particular. All multi-track conferences could potentially benefit from promoting a NoteSee community, as could other shared experiences where note taking is important. “We’ve pondered focusing on universities and cataloging notes for college student courses,” says Thomison.

The initial Beta launch will include the core functionality, sufficient to make is useful to SXSW attendees. Future iterations might include the ability to merge or summarize notes, creating a single master document for a given panel or talk. A stronger sense of social connection among notetakers will likely be cultivated as the system evolves.

The project is currently recruiting initial members, perhaps even forming a “NoteSee Panel Junkies” team of power users to help populate the site. You can reserve your invitation by visiting their website. “Strong user engagement right out of the gate will be key for NoteSee,” says Smith. “We’re hoping the early adopters will be excited to seed our system with notes, and that way we’re creating value for new users.”

The next Indianapolis Startup Weekend, by the way, is scheduled for April 8-10.

On Tuesday, the local internet spontaneously combusted with a promising new use for Twitter: Cheerleader.

Using Twitter and Facebook to brainstorm gameday chants

From a new blog for Hysterical Hoosiers, the organizers explain the project:

Those of you students who have been to games this year, our atmosphere has been awesome. However, we can create an even more hostile environment. Each game, we will look players up on facebook, twitter, etc, and try and get some more personal info and dirt on a lot of thems. A couple days before each game, I will post chants we need to start up when certain players touch the ball, are shooting free throws, during time-outs, etc. Spread the word so we can make Assembly Hall the most hostile place to play in the country!

In a sign of the evolving value of media channels, the blog showed up after the Facebook and Twitter pages. By the end of the day, the Facebook page already had over 100 “likes” and the Twitter account had almost 400 followers.

The Hysterical Hoosiers Twitter account has caught the attention of the IDS, an IU newsman, a local sports bar, sports podcasts, the Crimson Guard, and the Big Ten Network. They are all dwarfed by Tom Crean, who is an active Twitter user himself (although he tends to tweet in bursts). This project would get a shot in the arm if he passed a link along to his 25,000 followers.

The suggested crowd actions will be curated and displayed on the new blog. The few visible in the timeline only reference Tijan Jobe and referee Jim Burr, but there is time to get the crowdsourcing in line before Saturday’s game against Northwestern. My big concern is a lack of good taste.

I’ve lamented this before: fans have great potential to be boors. Having more people swearing at referees or being classless in targeted taunts would not be a good outcome for Hysterical Hoosiers. More intimidating than being clever with words (mean or otherwise) is having a large crowd do complex things. I’d love to see this evolve into using the crowd to play Tetris in the stands, passing large blocks down the rows instead of waving Big Heads during free throws.

I think this is a creative way to elevate participation in and enjoyment of the games in Assembly Hall, as long as this is about crowdsourcing and not mobsourcing.

UPDATE 2/16: Founders Zach Litzelswope and Tony Adragna added a podcast explaining the project. They credit Bill Simmons with the idea, set their sights on being better than the Cameron Crazies, and talk about how some of these ideas might debut on Saturday. On a more ominous note, there may major fuzziness area about what is inappropriate (e.g., statutory rape) as a chant topic.

Many of these status updates had to do with interesting moments in Twitter, related to research in the service, but I also find my personal Twitter museum has collected a number of profound, hilarious, and striking status updates from others around the world. Here are fifty of my favorite Favorites …

this superbowl needs more vuvuzelas.—@djbender

Apparently there’s a sequel to Super Bowl 44 today – do I have to know anything about the other Super Bowls to prepare for today?—@trobinson79

After a brief flirtation, I’ve turned away from Quora. It’s too structured to be social and too closed for open talk. Also, it’s boring.—@shelisrael

I mean really, Mubarak should have done that speech while sitting in a swiveling chair and caressing a white cat. #Jan25 #Egypt—@KarlreMarks

The Spider-Man musical doesn’t need to close – it needs to be the next season of Survivor.—@moonandserpent

Assembly Hall just went from being the loudest place in America (after Hulls 3) to one of the most quiet (as Watford shoots free throws)—@IUSportcom

Now that the astrological birth signs have been recalculated, thousands of awful lower-back tattoos just become even more regrettable.—@justinkeller

My 5th grader has a paper due. It needs to be double spaced. She very carefully typed 2 spaces between each word.—@MacksMind

Glad they’re making Great Gatsby in 3-D. My favorite part of the book was when Gatsby threw knives at the reader’s face.—@BorowitzReport

I guess “A Christmas Carol” will forever be known as the episode where the shark jumped Doctor Who.—@lmcalpin

Google Wave Lesson: If a product is named as a Firefly reference, expect it to go the way of any Joss Whedon show.—@jeffcatania

If my quick glance at my twitter stream is correct, Brett Favre & Wikileaks are building a mosque in NYC.—@bmk

someone should submit The Economy to kickstarter.com—@jingman

Do all these muscles make me look fat?—@OldSpice

I’m glad I never have worry about forgetting whether or not Jesus saves. Thanks, bumper stickers and billboards.—@cmbeck_

The Emergency Alert System on the cable is preventing me from watching the local stations which will show me where the storm actually is.—@bubbas_brain

Discussing with my lawyer a new idea: adding “Agree to Disagree” option to my EULA dialog box, and let the user use the soft anyways.—@migueldeicaza

The cure for boredom is curiosity. The cure for curiosity is worksheets.—@alfiekohn

DON’T MAKE ME CRITIQUE YOUR COMPLICITY IN MALE PRIVILEGE. YOU WOULDN’T LIKE ME WHEN I’M CRITIQUING YOUR COMPLICITY IN MALE PRIVILEGE.—@feministhulk

If plastic bags live for thousands of years in a landfill, they’re like little time capsules. Why don’t we encode cool info on them?—@jingman

I saw a guy playing Solitaire on the iPhone. That is wrong in so many ways.—@SoundSystemSDC

Hotel internet is to internet as rice cakes are to oreos.—@clifflampe

Calling Butler “America’s Team” at this point is like commenting on a blog post with “First?!!!”—@tacojohn

My biggest fear of traveling back in time is that I’ll waste it explaining what it is that I do for a living.—@cmbeck_

incessant drumming. Me: Stop or I’ll have you committed. @cmakice: what’s that mean? Me: locked up in a room. @cmakice: Oh. With drums?—@amakice

One of the most painful things about being an academic is that no mater what you research, there’s always someone telling you how dumb it is—@whazlewo

wouldn’t it be great if we all pitched in to help people even when there wasn’t a disaster?—@aschweig

#Twible Ex 20: G’s Top 10. No gods, idols, blasphemy. Keep Sabbath holy & love Mom. Don’t kill, cheat, steal, lie, or look @ Xmas catalogs.—@janariess

Jim Zorn suspended practice, called investigators. Forensic experts determined white substance unknown to players was goal line.—@chucktodd

the Nobel Prize for Obama is really a Most Improved Player award for the USA.—@muchosalsa

Johnathan Frakes is directing. Yesterday, he called me Number One. My heart made a noise that sounded like awesome.—@NathanFillion

Why is the “default” image on most sites a male silhouette? I find it offensive when women are represented as a shadow of a man.—@zephoria

how many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? eh, it’s this really obscure number. you’ve probably never heard of it.—@treyp

When I take my pants off in public I’m being lewd. When I willingly do it in airport security i’m a patriot.—@cmbeck_

I always wondered how I could make “obituary” rhyme with “millionaire” and now I know. Thanks country radio!—@ryanvarick

My 6 year old son got a new watch. It’s 3:10 everybody.—@theaudioprof

@trotzke and I are now Bonsai buddies. Something he doesn’t know: I’m going to grow the hugest bonsai ever!!!—@BigDaveSmith

if nice guys finish last, then who would win a nice guy contest?—@StephenAtHome

wisdom of a 4 yr old: “the most important thing when deciding where to eat is if it has a gumball machine”—@mtwolf

Looking up the synonyms for unique.—@trotzke

@oprah ur caps r on, btw—@THE_REAL_SHAQ

Hey Twitter, you’ve been Punk’d. @aplusk is really a 14 year old kid who lives in Encino.—@SoundSystemSDC

@amakice I suggest the online moniker of Ma~—@benfulton

Hoosier Music Mt. Rushmore: Axl, Michael Jackson, Mellencamp, Wes Montgomery. Suck it, Hoagie Carmichael.—@SnailTrax

OH: Me: what are you doing? Archie: taking the onions out so I dont taste them. Me: they’re onion rings.—@amakice

OH: Nanna: “Is that his name? French Fry?” Archie: “Yes.” Nanna: “For Certain?” Archie: “No. French Fry.”—@amakice

Time to reset the Illinois governor sign once again to “This office has been criminal-free for 0 days”.—@dickc

I’m standing in the foot prints of giants.—@whazlewo

Charlton Heston is dead? Who is goign to take the gun out of his cold dead hands?—@zebtron

If you’re reading this now, I can only assume it’s because your family is boring the crap out of you.—@StephenAtHome