Web 2.0 and the 2008 US elections

Watching the incredibly long line-ups of patient Virginian voters waiting in the early morning rain is really watching history happening. This election has shaken things up. Candidates in the future will not go through the same hurdles if they are not white, middle-aged and male. And youth have shaped the use of media with Web 2.0, texting, etc key to campaigns.

Regardless of the outcome, this election has made changes already in terms of the democratic deficit, voter fatigue and the crisis of confidence in the electoral process.

I was pleased to see my images used in this historic event through Flickr’s Creative Commons License:

“My Boots My Guitar “Wake Up America””

which James also embedded in his makepoliticalsnowviamedia blog providing a full list of clickable credits to the authors whose Creative Commons licensed works used.

A Gaggle of Web 2.0 Editors

I must admit that I have left glaring grammatical errors and sloppy spelling mistakes in my blog posts on a regular basis. I’ve noticed them but stopped myself from correcting them to avoid spending too much time online.

According to Marshall Kirkpatrick‘s ReadWriteWeb article, bloggers lose credibility, authority and lack legitimacy in their knowledge claims when they cut corners on editing grammar and spelling.

Kirkpatrick recommends gooseGrade which offers an open crowd source tool that allows readers to edit blog posts and suggest changes. Writers and editors can potentially earn credibility points by participating.

I’ve registered and edited gooseGrade’s deliberate errors just to see how it works.

It’s a great idea although it could become addictive to anyone used to correcting copy.

For some reason I used to think that blogs were a place where writers could be more relaxed about typos etc. I guess n0t.

Future of Film is Film less: Digital Multiplex not Cineplex

Adina Lebo, Executive Director of ShowCanada in “Rollin’ in the Rockies” about the 22nd Film Industry Annual Convention, Banff, AB claimed that the cinema of the future will be based in digital projection technology. In 2008 5000 Canadian theatres switched to pricey large digital screens. In 2009 that will increase by 150%.

HTML test: [digg=http://digg.com/url_to/story_on_digg]

read more | digg story

See also http://snurl.com/26ixa [oceanflynn_wordpress_com] , http://snurl.com/26i1s [www_filmjournal_com] , http://snurl.com/26iw9 [www_marxists_org]

Next Wave of Semantic Web: a Time-Relevant Widget

Zeldman suggested a plug-in to time-associate lifestreams (egostreams), microblogs, blogs, aggregators, social bookmarking, social media, etc. My use of a myriad of semantic web services has become a virtual mnemonic tool, a digital cartography of memory . . .

Visitd bloggersblog through my twittr stream http://snurl.com/25t6q [twitter_com] and read this post http://snurl.com/25t5r [www_bloggersblog_com] which referrd 2 this comment on http://snurl.com/25t5z [www_zeldman_com] about potential of a plug-in to time-associate lifestreams, microblogs, blogs: Flickr, Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, Twitter

read more | digg story

Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader

RSS is a big deal, as anyone who’s subscribed to even a few feeds probably knows. Once you get past just a few feeds, though, it can quickly get overwhelming. RSS can leave you feeling inadequate, brain-dead and uninspired.

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In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

NYT article on the at-risk lifestyles of high-speed, high-stress, high-adrenalin lifestyles of pro-bloggers chasing new improved on-line newstories 24/7.

Thanks to twitter and Steve Rubel’s lifestream for bringing this article to my attention.

“digg.com blurb: “Some professional bloggers complain of physical and emotional strain created by an Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.”

read more | digg story

This reminded me of an article by Kate Argyle (1996) in Rob Shields useful anthology entitled Cultures of the Internet. Argyle’s account of what happens when a member of a virtual community dies challenged notions of that Internet communities were blasé and that the Internet itself fostered  a culture of distance and indifference. See http://www.socresonline.org.uk/1/3/van_loon.html

Webliography and bibliography

Argyle, Kate. 1996. “Death on the Internet.” in Shields, Rob. 1996. Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies. Chapter 8. London: Sage. ISBN 0 8039 7519 8

The world’s 50 most powerful blogs

Aldred, Jessica; Astell, Amanda; Behr, Rafael, Cochrane, Lauren; Hind, John; Pickard, Anna; Potter, Laura; Wignall, Alice; Wiseman, Eva. 2008. “The World’s 50 Most Powerful Blogs.” Posted March 9, 2008. Updated March 14, 2008. << Technology << The Observer. The Guardian. UK.

Once a blog has reached the status as one of the top 50 it seems to enter into the realm of mass media, albeit an alternative and social mass media. It is encouraging then that rant-free blogs that serve as a thinking press, like Kottke and Crooked Timber, are so highly placed. Thanks to ReadWriteWeb again for drawing this valuable article to my attention. When I added it to my delicious favourites, a tsunami of key words were automatically generated. (The irrelevant synopsis is an excellent example of concerns re: poorly dugg articles that sparked debate recently in ReadWriteWeb.) papergirls.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/the-worlds-50-most-powerful-blogs.

http://digg.com/world_news/The_world_s_50_most_powerful_blogs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs

https://papergirls.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/the-worlds-50-most-powerful-blogs/

35 Ways to Stream Your Life

Wordspy describes lifestreaming as a way of aggregating a user’s online content. In two separate ReadWriteWeb articles MacManus (2008-01-14) and Catone (2008-02-29) describe what lifestreaming is and how to stream your on-line life using web apps. “Lifestreaming [applications] generally fall into two categories: those that help you keep track of and display your own lifestream and those that help you keep track of your friend’s lifestreams (or both). For the sake of clarity, we’ve focused mainly on the former for this list (Catone 2008-02-29).”

read more | digg story

Timeline of usage of the noun lifestream and related concepts

2003-07-23 “Much about parenting can be dispiriting. One is when your kids grow up and the fruit of all your stress and toil, all the theme-party torture you endured, is nary a raisin in the sun. That, my child, is why we take pictures. Incessant pictures. And video. Mind-numbing, life-streaming video. We want you to have hard evidence, suitable for a grand jury, that we cared (Young 2003-07-23).

2006-11-07 Jeremy Keith, a web developer living and working in Brighton, England posted a journal entry entitled “Streaming my life away” on his blog Adactio, his on-line home, describing how he had “mocked up my own little life stream, tracking my Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, and blog posts. It’s a quick’n’dirty script that isn’t doing any caching. The important thing is that it’s keeping the context of the permalinks (song, link, photo, or blog post) and displaying them ordered by date and time. … You can also find me scattered across these sites: … Lifestreaming via Jaiku (Keith 2006)”

2007-02-18 Mark Krynsky summarized what was being done in the name of lifestreaming in his blog “Lifestream – Could it be the next big thing?” He included his code and listed his feeds including http://feeds.feedburner.com/Krynskycom, http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/krynsky/videos.rss, http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/krynsky/recenttracks.rss,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/82524306@N00/, http://www.librarything.com/rss/recent/krynsky, http://feeds.delicious.com/rss/krynsky, http://digg.com/rss/krynsky/index2.xml

2007-03-17 Mark Krynsky uploaded his first post his new blog on lifestreaming. In January 2008 he described how he had created it because he had “already felt that Lifestreaming had the right recipe for becoming something big. [He] was so intrigued by this new concept but as is the case in most early web innovation, the information and resources were spread out all over the place. [He] felt it was a great opportunity to create a hub for all this data and so the Lifestream Blog was born (Krynsky 2008-01).” ReadWriteWeb authors referred to his blog in their articles.

2007-07-22 “Lifestreaming, like the movie Being John Malkovich, will allow you to climb inside the head of someone and experience their day via a digital smorgasboard of public text messages, blog posts, GPS-tagged photos and (thanks to mobile broadband and tiny videocameras) a live video stream of them as they move around their world (Mulley 2007-07-22).”

2007-11-06 Wordspy uploaded their definition for the noun lifestreaming (also lifestreamer n., lifestream v., n.) a “[a]”n online record of a person’s daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person’s online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos (McFedries 2007)” based on citations of lifestreaming as used by Young (2003-07-23), Mulley (2007-07-22).” The copyright (1995 – 2008) for Wordspy is held by Paul McFedries and Logophilia Limited.

2008-01-14 Richard MacManus published an article entitled “Lifestreaming: a ReadWriteWeb Primer.” summarizing what was being done in the name of ‘lifestreams’ as defined by Wordspy (2007). ReadWriteWeb.

2008-02-29 ReadWriteWeb published Catone’s article entitled “35 Ways to Stream Your Life” in which Catone listed and reviewed the following lifestreaming [application] that help users keep track of and display their own lifestream:  Tumblr, Onaswarm, Jaiku, Lifestrea.ms, Soup.io,FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, Profilactic, iStalkr, Correlate.us, ProfileFly, Second Brain, Explode.us, liveZuu, OneSwhirl, Socialthing!, iminta, Plaxo Pulse,, Identoo, Escaloop, Hictu, Life2Front, 30Boxes, Readr, Suprglu, Where is me?, Slifeshare, MovableType ActionStreams, SimpleLife, WP Lifestream, RSS Stream, oneConnect, Facebook (?), Socialstream and Jeremy Keith’s Lifestreaming Script.

Webliography

Catone, Josh. 2008. “35 Ways to Stream Your Life.” ReadWriteWeb. February 29. (2008-02-29)

Keith, Jeremy. 2006. “Streaming my life away” Lifestreaming via Jaiku. Adactio. November 7, 2006.

Krynsky, Mark. 2007. “Lifestream – Could it be the next big thing?” >> http://krynsky.com. February 18, 2007. 

McFedries, Paul. 2007. “Lifestreaming.” Wordspy. Uploaded November 6, 2007. (2007-11-06).  

MacManus, Richard. 2008. “Lifestreaming: a ReadWriteWeb Primer.” ReadWriteWeb. Posted January 14, 2008. (2008-01-14)

Lifestreaming Comes to Yahoo! with MyBlogLog Overhaul

Mulley, Damien. 2007. “Being Damien Mulleyvitch,” Sunday Tribune. July 22, 2007.

Young, John. “Mom, Dad: take pictures,” Cox News Service. July 22, 2003.

Notes:

1. Mark Krynsky, an  Independent Internet Professional wrote this entry in “What is a Lifestream? It’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it. Mine is available here. Most people that create them choose a few sources based on sites that track our activities such as Del.icio.us (bookmarking), Last.fm (Music we listen to), Flickr (photos we take) etc…Then you can either find software to host your own, or find sites that provide a platform for you. Many people have been writing about Lifestreams and the potential value they offer for ourselves and others. Some of those people are Jeff Croft, Jeremy Keith, and Emily Chang. It appears to be a concept that is gaining quite a bit of steam. I was inspired to create a blog for the Lifestream concept after doing a little research which I wrote about on my blog. Most of the information I found was pretty scattered and there wasn’t a central repository of resources so I thought I should create one. I feel that beyond the self expression of allowing people to track their actions in a passive manner there will be many more exciting technologies that will surface from the backend data aggregation that can occur from people supplying this information. I plan on providing information on this site as it relates to Lifestreaming and related technologies in general.”

ReadWriteWeb include these categories in their menus: Products, Trends, Digital Media, Web Office, International, Events, Jobs, Archives.

Popular tags for ReadWriteWeb suggested by them are google, facebook, microsoft, amazon, yahoo, social networking, twitter, search, semantic web, mobile web, myspace, video, music, mobile, privacy, blogging, advertising, opensocial, data portability, youtube, innovation, digg, startups, rss, politics, linkedin, health, flickr, dataportability, conferences, apple, social graph, open source, obama, mp3, itunes, iphone, internet, tv, apps, api, social news, social media, OpenID, openid, kindle, ibm, citizen, journalism, web 2.0, viral, marketing, tagging.

Their Digg code is:

‘http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/35_lifestreamin_apps.php&#8217;;
digg_bgcolor = ‘#ffffff’;
digg_skin = ‘compact’;

I would add egostreaming to lifestreaming and other related words suggested by Wordspy which include blog, celeblog, egocasting, lifecasting, microblogging, microchannel, micro-fiction and nanopublishing.

Subject Categories suggested by Wordspy
Computers > Blogging > lifestreaming
Computers > Communications > lifestreaming
Sociology > Lifestyles > lifestreaming

I would add mashup to the list of tags suggested by ReadWriteWeb: products, lifestreaming.

Lifestreaming Comes to Yahoo! with MyBlogLog Overhaul

Nutrition and Vitamin-rich Caribou and Seal: Benefits Outweigh Mercury Risk

Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans researcher admits that migratory sea mammals, particularly ringed seals and beluga, continue to be poisoned by mercury at increasing levels from unknown sources. The benefits of Inuit food: caribou, whale (beluga) or ring seals, rich in vitamins, nutrition and low in oil are greater than the health risks.

read more | digg story

Google, YouTube and Smirkoff: Pseudo Hiphop for the Conspicuous Consumer Sells

Chester (2007) illustrates how the Google-sold media ad Green Tea Partay on Google-owned YouTube (viewed 3M times) featuring a pseudo-hiphop-for-the-conspicuous-consumer cleverly conceals an ad for Smirkoff Vodka.

A single tab (window) in Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 presented as a single ‘page’ on a computer screen resembles the classic print-version newspaper more than the classic web page from the 1990s. With Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 blogs (and even your very personal Gmail) and ad-enhanced content there is a cacophony of voices, a postmodern irony to the conflicting messages in advertisements, news, opinions, reviews, classified ads displayed within one frame. We became used to the classical (but now largely outdated) unique web pages in one frame, window or tag that presented information from an author from a specific standpoint with virtually no peripheral advertising. As powerful search engines like Google using complex algorithms to connect information seekers to information providers combine with a brilliant ad-service, the boundaries between page-frame-window author and paid-publicity have become so blurred that the argument in the content of the page can conflict with the products and services sold on the page. In one blog, for example, articles, reports, studies, entertainment, infotainment, advertisements, news, opinions, reviews and classified ads all appear to have resonance, when in reality their messages diverge completely. The confusion is even greater when the content-author is not clearly identified.

We can no longer say that “the media is the message” because the rhizomic media network of Web 2.0 sends mixed, often conflicting messages.

Unfortunately, in the one area where conflicting ads are absent — academic journals — the exclusive, proprietorial nature of most of these require registration or pay-per-use. They are not easily accessible and are relegated to the realm of the deep Web or Internet (once called the Invisible Web).

The solution will probably not come from more policing of Google-like service providers. In an ideal world readers might be compelled to become increasingly sophisticated in distinguishing sources and might engage in more robust critical thinking. In a dystopic highly materialistic world-view we are only one click away from buying more of what we don’t need.

read more | digg story

Related entries on Speechless

Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. 2007. “Synset, Semantic Web, CBC and Alberta Oil.” September 28.

Filed in Blogosphere, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Learning from users, New generation social marketing, SEO, Web 2.0, collaborative, energy, ethnoclassification, ethnoclassification: faceted tagging, findability, folksonomy, folksonomy:faceted tagging, search engine optimization, semantic web, social bookmarking, tagging