typo(s), tendency and text

Thank you, dear reader, for bearing with me. It has been a long time, and maybe you have been so kind to let this feed remain in your feed reader. And: Hello to all you bots.

Yes, the last year has brought lots of changes for me. I relocated to Germany, started a new job as a PR writer at a software company in Berlin. And now, only a few months later I moved again! This time to Hannover, where I get to be a journalist *and* a techie at the same time. Happy, happy!

Well. Sadly, I had to leave one of my pet projects behind. But I hope, the good people in the HackBergen group will continue their journey towards creating a hackerspace. I still think this city need one.

While I was sad to leave the good views and great co-workers of Bergen, I look forward to not having to think so hard about the language I am working in. As a native German speaker, I find this very relaxing.

I will be back, on vacations and visits, so don't fret, Norway.

So long, and (needless to say:) thanks for all the fish.

I adapted the "Hello Dolly" plugin by Matt Mullenweg, filled it with Doctor Who quotes and changed the CSS a bit. No big deal, but if you always wanted to have Doctor Who (the tv series by BBC) quotes in red letters on your WordPress dashboard, you can grab the plugin on github. I have not submitted it to the WordPress repository, because I feel like the code is not original enough, and everybody can put different quotes into a ready made plugin. But if you like the same sayings that I do, it might save you the trouble to go through the wikiquotes section.

It was the sign up task for the WordPress development class at peer-to-peer university I so successfully dropped out of. (I am still studying computer science at the University of Bergen, though.)

Over the past two years, 3d-printing and -lasercutting has become easier and more available. The basic idea behind 3d-printing is that you need the material you want to model an object with, and a 3d-printer, 3d-drafting software and your imagination to make any object (the size your printer can print). The first company to provide a self-replicating open source hardware kit to assemble a 3d-printer for home use was Makerbot Industries. But since the field is young and the community working on it is still quite small, Makerbot came up wih the idea of creating a community where people can exchange their designs and howtos.

Designs have to be made to communicate with the printer, and to share those designs with fellow makers, there exists a social network called "Thingiverse". Once I created my profile there, I could choose between a few sets of tools which I frequently have access to. Thingiverse says it will show me what projects I can do with them. People upload their designs and tutorials to show people how to create new objects from parts and material with a chosen toolset.

As far as I have so far found out, there is no way of following a certain person or creating groups, which I think would be really helpful in terms of collaboration. Maybe this will be like the video below in the future...

FULL PRINTED from nueve ojos on Vimeo.

My recent gowalla activity

People around me have been getting into using GPS devices for games for a while with geoaching. But I never tried it, and haven't gotten a gps-enabled device before last summer with my android phone. Even then I tried foursquare a little bit, but not really. I didn't really get the hang of it.

Recently I have used gowalla a bit more, and try to get some fun or useful things out of it. So far I have only checked in at a few points, and not really used it. I wonder if most people use foursquare, because I can only find few contacts that I already know in Gowalla. A lot of people are making a lot of buzz around it. Basically the same people who talked about twitter a long time before I got to understand its uses. And today I love using microblogging.

Gowalla and foursquare use the gps-coordinates of your cell phone to find places nearby where you could be. You can also add new places. That way, you can "check in" at the cafe, classroom, workplace, museum, hotel etc. where you are. Your contacts will be able to see this. If you connected your account with twitter or facebook, everybody will get the message, too.

A whole different approach to locationbased services is Layar, a location-based video-browser for your surroundings. I have only tried this a little bit, because it is quite hard on the battery resources of my phone. And this really is a lot of fun. You can see where you are going, and where in your proximity someone tweeted something recently. This, again, is not so widely used in Norway, but in other countries people have created services for this Augmented Reality Browsing. Like aids to find a new appartment, for example.

If you want to learn more about new geolocation services, NRK beta has a good writeup on projects presented at the conference SXSW earlier this year. I refrain from writing about facebooks location services here (because, whoops, no longer an account there). But twitter allows geolocation for tweets now as well.

Google Latitude is an interesting service, which for me, only ever worked during a congress in Berlin where a some of my Google contacts where around at the same time. The only use case for me there is to find people and to see where they are without asking them. Otherwise I mostly have Latitude turned off. I don't want or need to send out data about where I am at any moment.

All my experiences considering I am still where Vegard, fellow student and blogger, is. It is fun to use, but its still very lonely. There aren't that many people using this, so checking in at ferries or class rooms or at my work place, is just a little bit pointless right now. Which is why I often forget to do that. What I would really like to try is geocaching and location-based games. That sounds like fun.

This post has been around in the draft queue for quite some time now. I have been thinking a lot about this, and now concluded to opt out of facebook. I deleted my account a few minutes ago, and the deprecated MySpace-account followed right afterwards.

Map of my Facebook "universe" - by Porter Novelli Global

In a blogpost about rethorics and the use of language in social media, my DIKULT110 class mate Ingunn gets into something that also bothers me about the extensive use of social applications the way they are designed by new companies and corporations. As a person  and in private it is bad enough, if I open up a social network of a kind, let's say on Ning, and as soon as I have everything figured out, and people are using this to connect and share, the company announces staff cut-backs and introduces fees to formerly free services. At the same time users of commercial social applications such as facebook seem to claim ownership of "their" facebook, aka their facebook account and which friend connections and activities, fan site and group memberships they collect and care for. There seems to be a gap between how companies design and lay out their communication services, and how they are perceived. The following (norwegian dialogue that Ingunn overheard was particularly interesting:

(blablabla hva skal vi i helga, vorspiel, ut, gutter blablabla, lage avtale senere)
Jente1: “Har du Facebook?”
Jente2: “Ja, jeg har hatt Facebook i et år, du da?”
Jente 1: “Ja, jeg har Facebook. Men [jentenavn jeg ikke husker] har ikke Facebook. Det er skikkelig irriterende for da må hun alltid tekstes i tillegg når det er noe.”
Jente2: “Å ja, enig, det er teit. Hva skal du ha på deg i morgen da?”
(blablabla shoppe blablabla)

Ingunniverset - Bestemor er død – hoho

Basically, in this conversation two girls are talking about their planned activities. Then they talk about if and for how long they have "had facebook", and one of them points out that her friend doesn't, and always has to be sent SMS separately if something happens. And how irritating this is. The other girl agrees: "its stupid", she says.

What this dialogue shows to me is how excluding the streamlining to sole facebook communication can be. And how important it is for group communication and social interactions, because it solves the problem of web 2.0 communication that is distributed. (Jill Walker Rettberg: Blogging, Polity Press, Cambridge/Malden 2008, p. 61ff.) Not being able to have all their friends as nodes in their network, irritates the facebooked teen friends, where their one important friend does not have a facebook account.

If I think about loss of data and connections, I can identify four or five services which would make me loose a lot of connections and data I need or care for, personally. This is bad enough. If you think about the punishment for abuse of copyrighted material in the current development stages of the international ACTA treaty, it proposes a three-strike-program where the last strike is about depriving people of their internet access. Which effectively means, denying people, their families and friends communications, workfare and their social life. Such a punishment would have a great impact on the life of many people.

It is still a privilege to use modern means of communications which is not granted to everybody, much less equally granted. As Jill Walker Rettberg discusses in her book "Blogging" (Polity Press, Cambridge/Malden 2008, p.52ff.) the access to means of communication have changed with the internet from a mass media/license approach to a situation where many people can own or at least frequently access means of communication. Depending on many factors, if you produce and publish content that gets attention - in theory, everyone can be heard, listen in to others and engage in conversation. My question is: How much control do people have over their communication when it gets more and more dependant on big networks that offer their services without a fee but also almost without any guarantees. People seem to have the need, will, skillset to come together in that way, but what if they suddenly find themselves cast out? What consequences does it have to be left out, to lose your photos, contacts and group memberships? Not to be invited to events?

The closedness of facebook towards users without profiles, business models which suddenly change, political changes... All those can affect if and how you can access, edit your own or other peoples social contributions or life logging. Peter Scoble found the following approach to this problem, where he himself uses other services than facebook who he thinks are dealing better with his data. And he hosts services himself where he can.

Truth is it doesn’t matter.

If you are uploading your content to, and participating online with, you are giving a HUGE amount of ownership to services that, well, you really don’t control.

They can go out of business. They can delete your account. They can make money off of your content. They probably all have wacky stuff in their terms of services.

This is true for Flickr. For YouTube. For Twitter. For Facebook. For all of them.

I’ve been yelling and screaming about how Facebook has been treating its customers for a year now. Facebook already showed how they treat you by the way they delete accounts: they have complete control and you have none.

While this might help him in his particular case, with his particular focus and time budget as well as skill set, this approach might not be viable for a lot of other people. I follow this approach as well, but see its limitations. Many people don't even realize that "their facebook" isn't even theirs, as shown above in the conversation of the two girls trying to plan their weekend with their aquaintances.

So I can merely ask questions:

What is your take on this? If you could have anything you wanted, how would communication and interaction work?

After a few years of blogging, and now that I work with people who want to use this as a tool professionally, blogging feels a lot more like a chore than like fun. But something that I really enjoy, is tumblelogging. There are a number of services out there, the widest known is probably tumblr. I use soup.io. It has a really good working bookmarklet, which lets me easily capture all sorts of stuff on the web and put it into my soup. The metaphor soup work really good. Except when you complain about having befriended to few people if you are one day really bored, and are done with reading your friends' soup. Then you might write something into an IM window to a friend that sounds somewhat like this:

me: I wish I had more friends in my soup.
me: It gets empty far too soon.
friend: Sometimes you wonder what other people would think if they heard us talking about soup.

Okay, this pun might have worked better in German.

What do I use soup.io for? Well, I am member of five groups: The queer group, the feminism group, a group about a conference, the Tardis soup - and another one about the only noteworthy german-speaking meme that I can remember. I import my newest flickr images, my last.fm best-ofs and loved music, and a podcast that I really like. I repost frequently nice or funny pictures, videos, sound, text and pictures on feminist or queer topics, and fan art about tv shows, movies and books that I love. When I was a kid I really loved collecting cute things, and sometimes my usage of soup reminds me of that. Soup is a very special community, while tumblr is wider used and reminds me often more of blog networks like blogspot, wordpress.com or livejournal.

Soup feels a bit more organic, because you can repost everything & you can see friends post in the first, second and third degree - and every soupers posts. What contributes to this experience is the function of scrolling. Soup proudly brags about the fact that you can scroll endlessly and never get to the bottom, without "turning pages" like on many other blogs and websites.

self portrait split personality by atomicjeep

Anonymity, pseudonymity, identity management - important keywords for the discussion around the internet. They have been for as long as I have used the internet, and the topic still prevails. It seems like there are consistently topics being added to this discussion as technology becomes a more and more important part of everyday life. People have - depending on their level and type of experiences with communication on the net, different kind of approaches to the topic. Here are some thoughts about how I handle things and about my experiences. What are yours?

I started using the internet for good in 1998. I have been searching for and using information since shortly before the search engine Google became popular. I used information, and added to it. Both during my education and in my jobs, as well as in my spare time. I didn't have an online identity linked to jobs until later, and even then it was always for short times. I had my university email adress. But I always separated private and professional conversations, and they seldomly overlapped.

What always fascinated me most in the beginning was the pseudonymous approach to talking to people, and how much was still "me" with the pseudonym, or which facet of my interests was present. Of course also with the other people in the dialogue on forums and boards, IM or email communication.

In the last years with the major social networks like facebook, studiVZ (Germany), LinkedIn and others it seemed to become more and more important to people to always have their real name present. I also started doing that, although suddenly communicating socially seemed a lot more complicated than before. I am still not comfortable of mixing business contacts and friends in the same twitter stream, but it requires quite high maintenance not to do so. So, for now, it is problematic, but I still do it. That is the risk that I am taking.

However, if you plan some kind of professional discussion, and you want to encourage unexperienced people to use social media to make the quality of a service better, or make it available on other channels - what can we say to people?

During the third DIKULT110 plenary session (norwegian), Linn Søvig from Kaffehuset Friele told us about the coffee company trying out to get into dialogue with customers and potential customers of new coffee products on facebook. Facebook is the most used web2.0 platform in Norway, and often times mistaken for being the web2.0. In terms of identity management, Linn told us that she created another facebook identity in order to split her own  very active private online persona from her professional persona.If I remeber correctly, she also said that she encouraged her coworkers who want to take part in the discussions, to do the same.

This touches one of the most important problems of linked personal communications on the social web as our way of expressing ourselves, but also adding to a common knowledge our personal views on life and society gets decompartmentalized.

What does that mean?

In my experience and opinion, this means that people more and more use their real life name (+ maybe a nick name linked to it) across all social network platforms that they use. The point of this post is not to act as if this is a new phenomenon. What I want to say is that this is not "manageable". It is confusing and requires a lot of profile maintenance. I myself look in awe at some of the people I follow who manage the distinction daily.

There are people talking about post identity (german), claiming that the online persona falls into many bits and pieces in the many feeds that it produces. This is probably true for the (still) relatively small percentage of people who use more than 3 or 4 social networks/applications. But even this concept gets challenged when there are scientists developing textual/rhethorical analysis (video of talk at 26th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, english) of personal writing patterns, making it possible to identify the author of a certain texts.

I don't have a solution, although I really see it as a problem, that the many and constantly changing facets of a person and his/her interests should be visible/accessible to anyone. It should be possible to express yourself, to learn about new phenomenons and to share interests with groups of people, without being put on the spot by anyone who can use a search engine or figure out, how social networks work together.

For me, personally, I see no other way than using my "official persona" and other pseudonymous personas under different circumstances and changing/altering pseudonyms every once in a while. ut what do I tell others who have yet to learn about social media and are scared what their coworkers, neighbours, boss and bankers might think of their different personality facets and interests? What do you tell them? How do you handle these things yourself?

Ever since the content production and distribution industry has figured out that copies of text, music, film and pictures are not that easily to compartmentalize and contain as on analogue media, strategies have been discussed of how either digital copies can be compartmentalized and contained as well, or how payment can be organized in a different way.

Micropayments have been discussed since the late 1990's, but have not yet really become a real factor contributing to revenue for online content. There have been different payment solutions implemeted, and some have become widely used. But bloggers, podcasters or smaller news magazines had no real alternative to advertisement besides their content.

June 2010: Enter flattr.com. Founded to give people the opportunity to give for content on the internet made by others, and get back for their self-made content. The company is based in Malmö, Sweden. I was very excited to try it out, since the service was building on a different kind of interaction opposed to selling. You would literally give people credit for what they were doing, and if you got peoples positive attention with your own content, they could "flattr" you back. On the websites you can find all "things" that you can flattr, and websites can use the flattr API to connect their content production to flattr automatically. Flattr takes 10 percent of the amount of money that you load on to your account. Where social network platforms integrate flattr to let users get flattrd for ther submitted content, flattr and the platform provider share the 10 percent of the revenue.

What I saw during the first time of the public beta (it still is in public beta) were relatively marginalized online news media incorporating flattr into their websites. The lesser german newspapers "tageszeitung" (taz) and "jungle World" started using it. Being either opposed to a lot of ad content, but also not seen as a good environment for many campaigns by advertizers. The taz has made the observation that their flattr income got up to 1000-1500 Euros within the first months, and that the income spiked in july, and then went down a bit from there. They share their insights into the flattr revenue and how they can use to see what users flattr here. Tim Pritlove, a quite popular podcaster in the german tech blogger scene, works on projects like Mobile Macs, Chaos Radio Express and Not Safe for Work. In the medienradio podcast no. 32 he talks about his revenue which has been about the same amount, adding 1000 euros to his monthly income.

I myself have gained 1.09 Euro via 7 clicks on the flattr buttons on this blog in may. Since then I haven't blogged much, and have apparently not gained much attention or merit with flattr-aware users.

I think flattr is a very interesting project, since it is not yet clear how it will develop in the future. My guess is, that there will be some people who will gain a lot of popularity and good connections to their audience, and that the big heap of people will always be paying more than they gain. The difference between this content monetization model and the traditional copy-based model is, that this can be turned around impromptu, if bloggers or podcasts suddenly gain a lot of attention. Another positive point is that everybody is equal on the payment side. You can give money to projects, and give back to the community by that. And by giving content to the world, you gan get back by the community.

Something that might not be positive, is that "flattr" might be perceived as positive acknowledgement - as the "like"-button on facebook. Hard debates, criticism or confusing communication could get their flattr-button ignored. There it could be an incentive for content producers to streamline their way of expressing themselves.

I decided to make the social network profile of the organization I chose as a case, HackBergen, a flattr account. The reasons for that are that HackBergen both has to think about new ways of getting project funding, as well as being part of an international community about the projects that people want to work on. Where thingiverse implements flattr into its 3D object design-sharing community, and where other hackerspaces have flattr accounts, it might be good to give something back, as well as make it possible for people to show their appreciation for stuff people do at HackBergen.

More sources:

Podcast at medienradio (german)

Blog on a masters thesis on flattr (german)

Flattrs blog

There have been a lot of announcements about companies and organizations which have decided to join in conversations i social media. What mostly follows these announcements is some form of collections of rules or commitments to these conversations, which are mostly service statements or rules for the employees sharing knowledge and conversing on behalf of those companies/organizations.

While those all have their (mostly) legit purposes and are certainly not all bad, I would like to talk about something else. I would like to talk about the reasons why public service organizations and public administrations should commuicate and share their knowledge and experiences. Of course, tools like Fix my Street are viable for communication between citizens and authorities. But besides brushing up their image and making things easier - publicly funded institutions have a great pile of knowledge they are accumulating. Knowledge that doesn't belong to them, but to all people.

Often you see that digital information is not structured openly by governments. Open means here, accessible, widely usable by all citizens, or all kinds of applications build upon them.  Projects like data.gov.uk try to change that. I think that there are also boundaries for the involvement of governments and authorities. Obviously you should not build all the trust on you in a closed, privately owned network like facebook alone. But getting involved in wiki projects, funding projects on accessibility to digital data in and outside of public libraries (you know, the book storage), would be important. Here is a list of things that I would like to see:

- All public* data amassed and produced by governments should be published, well searchable and using well-formed APIs that everybody can learn and use.
- Every publicly funded employee that has special public knowledge due to their work should be allowed to talk about it.
- There should be no pressure for publicly funded employees to do so.
- Every organization should on every level reviews what information "is out there", and what they can do to enrich and further discussions.
- In doing so it should be clear to everybody, that citizens are the real stakeholders of these organizations, and that they serve the public, not the public serves them.

This is a very quick blogpost, that assumes a lot of givens and ignores a lot of boundaries. The given is that we talk about a western democracy form, and the biggest boundaries are set in existing national and regional laws and directives. So, of course, these have to be taken under consideration. So, please accept my idealistic approach for now. The aim is to overcome the view on social media by many bosses and information departments, that social media are merely some kind of automating aparatus for magically viral campaigns. Presences on social media are fragile and have to be maintained.

That being said, the royal crown prince coupe is really popular on twitter. (Not with me. )

Two fellow students, dillettantene and nomonym, have discussed whether the norwegian PST, a national police agency for security, should have a facebook page or not. After all, what positive image could an organization that works by spying on people deserve? I found an article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an US-based organization that aids people in expressing themselves digitally in the name of free speech.

The article claims that it has become part of the guidelines of US immigration authorities to evaluate applicants, also based on their activity in social media ny befriending them without telling them who they are.

In other words, USCIS is specifically instructing its agents to attempt to “friend” citizenship petitioners and their beneficiaries on social networks in the hope that these users will (perhaps inadvertently) allow agents to monitor their activities for evidence of suspected fraud, including evidence that their relationships might not live up to the USCIS’ standard of a legitimate marriage.

Applying for Citizenship? U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Wants to Be Your “Friend” - eff.org, october 12th 2010