typo(s), tendency and text

schroederkopf posted a photo:

schroederkopf posted a photo:

schroederkopf posted a photo:

schroederkopf posted a photo:

schroederkopf posted a photo:

schroederkopf posted a photo:

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.