Hippo Dignity

So this is me testing out a new service called IMified, which allows you to access a whole bunch of web services (Backpack, Google Calendar) and your blogs from an IM service. It makes a lot of sense — I spend more and more time in chat windows, with friends, co-workers, even clients, and I’m nowhere near this service’s target market — but let’s face it, the text entry box of iChat isn’t exactly conducive to long deep thoughts. On the other hand, it gets one off one’s ass to post. We’ll have to see how this works out.

(ETA: No paragraph breaks, it doesn’t seem like, and I had to come to the Wordpress interface to add tags.  Still, an interesting 1.0.  Check it out)

Clive has posted a link to an interview about the whys and wherefores of his awesome blog Collision Detection, in which he discusses the ways the blog has made him, as a freelance journalist, a lot more findable for potential editors:

Google is the determiner of reality on-line and I know the way Google works. Blogs attract a lot of links; other bloggers link to you. You very quickly build up a huge amount of what’s called “Google Juice.” And sure enough, three months after I started the blog, with barely a couple dozen links pointing to me, I was already on the first page. Within a year, I was number one. Basically, I’m undislodgeable at this point in time.

Curious, I went and Googled just “Clive.” Our boy comes in at number five, just ahead of Clive Owen and well before Clive Cussler. More Clivey than Clive Owen! I’m so proud.

Ultimately, the meaning of a tool is inseparable from the stories that surround it.  Consider the similarity between what is involved in creating and using a tool and the sequence of narrative.  Even the chimpanzee picking up and peeling a twig to “fish” for termites requires the mental projection of a sequence, including an initial desire, several actions, and successful feeding.  The sequence becomes more complex where more tools are involved, or when the same tool is used in several ways.  Composing a narrative and using a tool are not identical processes, but they have affinities.  Each requires the imagination of altered circumstances, and in each case beings must see themselves to be living in time.  Making a tool immediately implies a succession of events in which one exercises some control over outcomes.  Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience.  In each case, one imagines how present circumstances might be made different.

– David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With

Proof of Clive’s theory that history now happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as videogame: the Zidane headbutt game. Created, of course, by someone at an Italian address.

I was heartbroken by the awful end of Zidane’s game, and career. But even I have to admit that it’s a pretty amusing piece of Flash.

The Internet doesn’t destroy the boundaries between the professional and the amateur: it just complicates them. You see that in the way Markos Moulitsas is getting depicted in the mainstream press as DailyKos becomes a political force to reckon with in Democratic politics, and you see it in the complex knots the networks are tying themselves into trying to figure out what they stand for in the age of YouTube and Rocketboom.

You also see it in the rise of perhaps the first true YouTube stars: the Two Chinese Boys. When I was doing research about online video earlier in the spring, everyone I talked to who had used YouTube recognized these boys immediately: their dorm room lip-synching to American pop hits is ridiculously endearing and, especially given their fondness for Yao Ming jerseys, globalizationalicious.

It’s not surprising that they’ve already been tapped for a “viral ad” by Moto . I was, however, surprised to learn that they’d recently graduated from art school, with sculptures of themselves mid-performance submitted as their final projects. Maybe I’m imposing my own ideas of what it means to be an art school student, but it does change my sense of what their videos are about when I know they were made by two people already spending all their time thinking about artistic production. What had previously seemed adorably naive now seems no less adorable, but more thought out and more pointed. My sense of them as amateurs-gone-pro has changed to one of pros-in-training-gone-pro. Which is a rather different thing, you will admit.

I’m also, I’ll admit, really tickled by the sculptures, which seem simultaneously to be a celebration of their bizarre pop-cultural achievement and a send-up of it. Are these boys the next generation Gilbert & George? We shall see.

How you can tell you’re in the Bay Area: the late night NPR call-in radio show is hosting a spirited conversastion about computer usability.

Home tonight, just in time for the temperatures to hit 90+.  Global warming, yay!

Talking to Tom a couple of days ago, I said, “I’ve been spending so much time with your former students, it’s starting to warp the way I think.”

He raised his eyebrows at me.

“I mean,” I said, “I find myself thinking things like, ‘I could wire my coffee pot so it turns itself on when I hit ’sleep’ on my alarm clock.’”

“Yep,” he said.  “That’s what happens.”

Part of the pleasure of working with industrial designers is watching the way they interact with stuff — people who make physical products think about those products very differently than most, in the same way I obsess over details of interfaces. I’ve learned so much about how the world around me is made, in the most basic ways, from working with them, listening to them, asking them questions. So it was a delight for me to have my MacBook get delivered to the office and watch the industrial design team examine it like doctors doing a physical.

I did refuse to let the mechanical engineer open it up, even though I count the day that her boss took apart an iPod nano among the more mind-bending experiences I’ve had at this job. But I wanted to take my new computer home in one piece, and I did. I’ve spent the weekend catching up on errands and sleep, and playing with the cool toys on the new computer. Unexpectedly, I have some UI complaints — the new iPhoto I find harder to use than the older version, and switching states in PhotoBooth is totally unintuitive — but overall it’s a pleasure to use.

Best of all, I think the built-in iSight could change the way people interact with their computers: it’s almost impossible not to have fun with it, to want to play with it, and once you get enough of an installed userbase, the opportunities for networked interactions get a whole lot richer. For now, though, I think it makes the relationship with the computer both more intimate and more performative — you want to watch it watching you. And of course it opens up whole new vistas of procrastination…

An RSS tool created by an English geek lets me track my new computer, designed in Cupertino, from its origin in China to its destination in New York. And it does so with something resembling grace:

What I love best about the intarweb is, in the end, its humanity — the little touches of humor or elegance in which you see the atavistic traces of the maker’s hand.

(Also, you know, new MacBook. Whoooo!)

Said to self, while struggling with a friend’s Kodak PhotoShare post — “Goddammit, why can’t she just use Flickr like a normal person?!?”