Archives...

I looked at all of the archives and then looked a little deeper- clicked around. By far the best usability is the Rossetti site, with Whitman, Dickinson,and Blake next.The Markup site receives honorable mention. Rossetti is fabulous. It is the most visual and easiest to navigate. The thumbnails of works presented in the various categories are very clever and a stunning addition. The tabs across the top of opening page provide orientation. Blake is also visually beautiful- how could you go wrong with such material, but I find the opening page with its one graphic and yucky small text and then "enter" is off putting compared with a site that balances visual "WOW!" with an index of what to do and where to go. the link to the Nines project is a great addition and is a fascinating side trip. Walt Whitman also has an accessible first page- initially it was my favorite and the etching of him is compelling. However, upon entering the tabs it is clear that the graphic designers went home after page one. It looks sort of lame and vacant inside, a let down. the possibilities of radiant textuality are such that those who do not/ cannot avail themselves of its potential to be both navigable and beautiful are just dropping the ball. The Blake site is kind of confusing, while the Dickinson site is very well organized, again it falls off in the design area. after visiting the Rossetti site the others appear bleak in comparison.Why can't they LOOK at the page and see that vast expanses of beige with unattractive fonts scattered across them make a reader feel bereft? What is up with the state of design on the Web? Now as tools, strictly to obtain information they all seem fine, and it is a miracle to have these riches a click away instead of in dresser drawers and basements and private collections all over the world. I applaud what is being offered. I am simply giving my visceral reaction to the materiality of these web expressions, holding them all to a high aesthetic standard and critiquing them from that perspective. I mean-- we are talking aesthetics here- poetry, art... and some of the greatest of these ever made.Their sarcophogi should be as lovely as the textual bodies they house. Strike metaphor. Not meant to be visited-- inside. I guess you could call these sites houses, more like. We have a dedicated home you may visit, for each of these notables, in which to wander the gardens, galleries, libraries, take the tour, and sit with and among the works of these artists. Now I prefer the experience to be total. I want the grounds landscaped lovingly and all the fittings to resonate. I want a mood evoked. I want to visit a dwelling that in its own artistry honors the art within , not just a peek in a window at a strip mall in a parking lot. Nor do I want to visit the artist's home and feel lost or disconnected. I want the just right balance, a place that invokes the muse but answers questions in English.

My malware is not working...

I have purchased Trend Micro virus protection for my laptop- but due to some error, I was notified by Best Buy that it was not functioning. 2 weeks later I am still waiting for it to be re-installed. I feel vulnerable, but my question is this: How effective is it, when fully functional, at repelling viruses, trojans, bots, worms, etc. I was so tempted to click on the "Attack Site!" anyway-- and see what was there. I just wonder if having the protective Trend Micro is like wearing asbestos? Or is it imperfect-- and by what percent is it ineffective?

Web 2.0- This is how We Dream

Lecture: Richard E. Miller, Dept. of English, Rutgers University

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KsEQnOkTZ0

You Tube video: History of the Internet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4

MALWARE:

http://doit.missouri.edu/security/make-it-safe/frontline/frontline-spring08.pdf

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/11/malware_digital_devices/print.html

The first article is an internet saftey security page from the University of Missouri IT department's online newsletter.
The second is a report about the infected Chinese photo frames from last year. when you connected them to your computer to upload photographs they installed a bot that could then commandeer your machine for nefarious purposes.

What's up with the Web 2.0 workgroup page, and what's that MEAN, anyway?

Does the address line display something different like "http://www.gotyouscammed.com/paypal/login.htm? I guess that would be a clue, if one read the address bar!

"hotnudeactresses and nudecelebritypost" Perhaps they deserve to get botted, or it's at least funny anyway.

"The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence"

"Folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to, its primary users. Folksonomies arise in Web-based communities where provisions are made at the site level for creating and using tags. These communities are established to enable Web users to label and share user-generated content, such as photographs, or to collaboratively label existing content"

Folksonomy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Some parts of this article may be misleading. Please help clarify this article. Suggestions may be on the talk page.

This article contains weasel words, vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed. (September 2008) ______________________________________________________________________________________

What’s a weasel word?

Wikipedia:Avoid weasel words: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This page in a nutshell: Avoid using phrases such as "some people say" without providing sources.

Weasel words are words or phrases that seemingly support statements without attributing opinions to verifiable sources. They give the force of authority to a statement without letting the reader decide whether the source of the opinion is reliable. If a statement can't stand on its own without weasel words, it lacks neutral point of view; either a source for the statement should be found, or the statement should be removed. If a statement can stand without weasel words, they may be undermining its neutrality and the statement may be better off standing without them.

For example, "Montreal is the nicest city in the world," is a biased or normative statement. Application of a weasel word can give the illusion of neutral point of view: "Some people say Montreal is the nicest city in the world."

Although this is an improvement, since it no longer states the opinion as fact, it remains uninformative:

• Who says that? You?
• When did they say it? Now?
• How many people think that?
• How many is some?
• How many is most?
• What kind of people think that? Where are they?
• What kind of bias might they have?
• Why is this of any significance?

Weasel words don't really give a neutral point of view; they just spread hearsay, or couch personal opinion in vague, indirect syntax. It is better to put a name and a face on an opinion than to assign an opinion to an anonymous source.

What is the difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0 anyway? ( The following is taken from the web 2.0 explanation page) RSS: One of the things that has made a difference is a technology called RSS. RSS is the most significant advance in the fundamental architecture of the web since early hackers realized that CGI could be used to create database-backed websites. RSS allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes. Skrenta calls this "the incremental web." Others call it the "live web".

It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else's site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And - as a result - friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs.

In many ways, the combination of RSS and permalinks adds many of the features of NNTP, the Network News Protocol of the Usenet, onto HTTP, the web protocol. The "blogosphere" can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, the conversational watering holes of the early internet. Not only can people subscribe to each others' sites, and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments…If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect…If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls "the wisdom of crowds" comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value.

While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls "we, the media," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important. Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as "infoware" rather than merely software.

This fact leads to a key question: Who owns the data? Much as the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade. One can see early signs of this countervailing trend in open data projects such as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, and in software projects like Greasemonkey, which allow users to take control of how data is displayed on their computer.

It's also no accident that scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and now Ruby, play such a large role at web 2.0 companies. Perl was famously described by Hassan Schroeder, Sun's first webmaster, as "the duct tape of the internet." Dynamic languages (often called scripting languages and looked down on by the software engineers of the era of software artifacts) are the tool of choice for system and network administrators, as well as application developers building dynamic systems that require constant change.

http://www.railsonwave.com/assets/2006/12/25/Web_2.0_Map.svg

See below for map from this link:

More on wiki

I thought "this is so easy!" and scarily so. Truly anyone could do this. If all students performed this exercise they would really wonder about the source's reliability. But, what I use Wikipedia for is pretty verifiable-- in other words, I look for book titles, or other names of related people that i could explore some other way. also, I am curious about who spends a lot of time writing articles and doing scholarship for this forum. Are they shut ins? Elderly, retired, out of work? It is a certain expression of altruism to make free public knowledge but who has the time?

Editing Wiki

I made a small and tentative addition to the page about Katherine Hayles. I felt a bit like a tagger or grafitti artist writing on a wall. it would take some getting used to!

u

Labor and Pedagogy in the Academic Marketplace

Concerns raised are valid good heads-up observations. Byrne however, to my mind, is on the most productive track ("Learning to Love Powerpoint") and he offers his piquant twist on what to make of lemons. Use it for art, dammit! Whack the master's ankles with his own stave-- or at least nibble holes in his shoes. Art has always subverted the tools of domination because it can flow under the door and waft like smoke and change shapes and re-purpose. After all, Foucault has prophesied and it has come to pass-- Orwell too-- why would we expect anything other than power replicating itself endlessly, and with our good help and complicity, using whatever tools evolve? Plain old paper can be a dumber-downer if submitted by the purile and subservient to the erudite scrutiny of the complacent and comfortably housed. Nothing is new under the sun, not really. While Tufte ("Powerpoint is Evil") charmingly belabors the obvious, Byrne makes hay. Noble's concerns ("Digital diploma Mills") let in a frisson of anxiety- mild terror to be clear. Could power get more powerful as it lives inside technologies that connect inside the physical world? It is already the postmodern Yahweh-- that which cannot be named and whom before we are less than worms. Not that it is a bad thing to critique the Shoney's Big Breakfast Buffet of super-size me American educational trends. However-- just because your tour bus stops there doesn't mean you have to eat "hashbrowns" (euphamism) with extra sausage gravy and wash it down with coca-Cola. There's usually some fruit. Or you can strike a Nihlist pose and smoke a Camel outside, or you can anticipate reality and bring some granola bars with you. Byrne has his granola with soy flakes, flax, and almonds too, and he is not having a 3000 calorie biscuit just because everyone else is. This is what you must do. I do not know what we will do when surveillance becomes intolerable, with its "standarization", its streamlining, its "business model" and "ThinkWave" programs (excruciating new torture for high school teachers who must be electronically accountable to parent-stockholders in an almost moment-by-moment report of their child's "progress" benchmarks). And yes, perhaps they could get along with no teachers and just use software, and return to the mid-Victorian goal of molding a middle class through standardization and uniformity and then deliver this grand project via computer. But then we might see revolution, and people taking it to the streets and schools under trees and an alternate economy in which education would circulate unregulated. How many systems might undergo a change? it's hard to tell. Everything seems tentative-- glaciers and asteroids and LIBOR financial instruments... Byrne's way is really practical. Don't be scared. Be alert. Make the best of it and see what shakes down.

TRANSMORPHATIONS...

I looked at W. Bradford Paley's page- he is the author of TextArc and he calls it his "gentle obsession" although he credits others for supporting his project in important ways--with the java code, with the graphical cacheing, with the archive to work with, and the bandwidth to host his display. It was very interesting to look around within the TextArc site and to try its various permutations. I agree with Meg that it makes me feel a bit underpowered; my brain doesn't have enough wattage to see what this is really good for. (Yet?) Although every time I encounter one of these "texts" that use the affordances of linked computing in innovative ways I feel my mind stretch just a bit more. Coming from a text-based literacy as I do, these discursive objects that morph and change are a bit strange. (I decided to look at "Alice" because that already inhabits a bent realm. Funny, the TextArc treatment made Carroll's drug trip of a story seem "normal" because all the examples undergo a uniform semantic fractalization.)
This is from Paley's bio-page which offers a link to a really interesting visual representation of scientific paradigms and where/how they overlap and intersect: "Map of science collaboration:
opens pictorial feature in the journal Nature
Katy Borner's Places & Spaces exhibition (currently at the New York Hall of Science commissioned an “illuminated diagram” presentation of how different paradigms of science interact and where in the world science gets done. The work was a collaboration between Kevin Boyack, John Burgoon, Peter Kennard, Dick Klavans, and myself. One of the two images in that display (Kevin's Dick's and my own) was chosen to open the journal Nature's annual pictorial review as a two-page spread. Follow this link to read a short discussion of the image and related work. " Paley has very broad interests that link together through this visual/mental mapping technique.
The Gender Genie coded all my writing samples as "male" (about 10 separate pieces), but all were theory related academic essays-- even my long papers about females, such as Helene Cixsous and Katherine Hayles. When I submitted one paragraph from the Helene Cixsous text it did code "female" but that particular snippet a quoted her prose. When I (on-purpose) wrote something to be first person and descriptive it did finally code "female". Just goes to show you, assuming the algorithm makes a valid-ish frame-- nothing is perfect; nothing neutral, or ideology-free-- that academia priviledges the male persona as authentic, and so-called "female" writing is other-than. At least I can convincingly impersonate a male when I write for school, which must mean I am learning something.

More...TextArc

The associations enabled with this form seem to be semantic because the words are isolated. This gives the reader a certain ability to exercise a type of critical faculty but also denatures the text and completely decontextualizes words.

TextArc and Gender Genie

I had some trouble with TextArc but also found it fascinating. first the technical problems. It seemed to want me to disable activex filters and then when I tried that my computer scolded me and told me to re-reconfigure my security settings and it still would not let me apply activex.

p2p filesharing: a kid's eye view

According to Lawrence Lessig, in Remix, his latest book about the intersection of copyright law and culture (2008) because of the new affordances of technologies we have moved from what he calls a ReadOnly to a ReadWrite society. This has enabled the formerly passive consumer of media to become an author, a re-mixer, in ways not imagined when copyright law was established. He treats peer to peer (p2p) music filesharing as a particular case of a popular practice that our kids engage in which puts them in the category of criminals. He argues that it is critical to figure out how to de-criminalize p2p file sharing while still compensating artists for their work. “to the extent that kids view the laws regulating culture as senseless, or worse, corrupt, that makes them less likely to obey those laws” (283).Lessig calls himself a fighter “against copyright extremism” (293) and offers many stories about ordinary citizens who purposely or inadvertently transgress copyright protections. He says “there is no justification for the copyright war that we wage against our kids… let’s get on to the hard problem of crafting a copyright system that nurtures the full range of creativity and collaboration that the Internet enables: one that builds upon the economic and creative opportunity of hybrids and remix creativity” (294).

So… about p2p music filesharing—I asked two students, both 17, about the practice. James told me he has downloaded about 8000 songs to his computer in the last year. He understands it is not legal, which is why he had to hurry up and harvest as much music as possible before somebody turns off the tap. For now he doesn’t need to add any more to his stash:

“It will take me a while to hear all of what I already have” he says.

He starts to talk about Yoyo Ma.

“I’m learning about him right now—he’s so fascinating. He’s got a broad perspective and he’s considered the best cellist in the world. “Ecstasy of Gold”, from that movie the Good the Bad and the Ugly—one of the greatest westerns, right? The piece is by a guy named Ennio Maricon. Yoyo Ma is playing it with the Roma Symphonetta and it is the best thing I’ve ever heard. Before I discovered what’s out there” (meaning the Internet) “I used to listen to System of a Down and now I see that stuff is lame, commercial—I have expanded my horizons to a world that I have to know. I am studying music theory; I want to learn instruments, besides the guitar and harmonica. I like Mahler, and Brahms and I have Iron Butterfly’s songs on solo piano and Crosby, Stills and Nash’s music played as bluegrass, and complete discographies of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and the Byrds and bob Dylan and Pink Floyd—and a lot more. This is what I want to do with my life now—something about music.”

Are you stealing this from these artists? I ask him.

“Well, maybe—I guess you could say that” James replies. “But it’s not like I’m depriving anybody of sales—I don’t have any money. I’m in high school—I don’t have a job and no transportation and no time to have one either. So nobody is losing money on me—I am just learning about music however I can. That’s how I see it.”

I also asked his friend, Melanie, what she felt about p2p filesharing.

“Sure, I have some songs I downloaded. Not like James—I’m not a freak like him. But my family doesn’t have that kind of money. My dad works two jobs as it is, and my mom has had some health problems. I just want to be part of it. Know what my friends listen to. I can play music while I do homework and that is great. The world is such a negative place right now, and music helps you feel better—right? Why is it wrong for people to share? I think maybe if it was affordable people would subscribe to it” (p2p) “like cable—so musicians could get money, but people could still afford it. I can’t just go out and buy $20 cds all the time. I guess I’m breaking the law but I don’t think they’ll find out and I’m not that important to them. I just need to be part of what my friends listen to and all that.”

These kids are using the music they download for education and for building a sense of community. Both regard access to this music as transformative and central to their sense of self. We must find a way to reward the innovation and creativity of artists while at the same time acknowledging people, especially young people’s need to be connected, to sample culture and use it to grow, to learn, to develop, and to stay connected. Like Melanie said “The world is such a negative place right now” and we are bombarded with the technology-culture at every moment. Why is it wrong for people to use the tools available to mix their own tape, so to speak, of what surrounds them?

Bluedillygal's very own blog

Here it is!