Case-Notes from the Artsy Asylum

How to Hook Up With Nobody

You recognize what these sites could be right away when you see avatars like the one at the right. Hookup sites for old guys. Places where women over 50 can find "friendship."

They claim to be social networking sites because it's the hot buzzword.. Some are really message boards from the last decade, revenue generation schemes to pump money out of geezers, and in some cases glorified ezines where writers benefit from referral traffic to their get healthy, get cured, get love, get 20/20 vision overnight business.

Others are just dumb ideas.

Oh, people may go there. But it seems to me that it will be to try to find information, or to be entertained, or to try to make a love connection. Networking is sadly missing.

But Aren't They Cute?

First I looked at TeeBeeDee, insert eye rolling here. Tell the marketers to go home - it's a stupid website name. Yes, I see that the future is "To Be Determined" Thus TBD. Fine; but loose the extra string of vowels.

Can't look inside the landing page without registering and PS Cute is not what I'm looking for You lost me. Next!

Selling an image

On to Second Prime.com/ Lots of ad revenue. or lots of venture capital. Or both.

They're selling me an image of myself as a with it, business-suit wearing, sexy swimming, cruise-going lady of a certain generation.

I must be very active in their dreams, either writing my memoirs or doing back-bends because . .  Is that an ad for a Back surgeon or a Book surgeon?

And they're interviewing the "bodacious" among us. Clearly they're selling grannie something on every page. Even if it's a dream of her ideal self.

- and by the way - "Join our travel groups."

Lots of articles by social workers, pharmacists, optometrists. . .  oh I see where this is going. .  Next!

Ouch

We took a step back in time. My Boomer Place is stuck in web 1.0. 

Let's try for something more than "let's show grandma how to copy these sparkly images with fairy dust and send them to her new friends in the computer." Grandma was doing that ten years ago on Dephi message boards. We're ready to move on.

Granted  My Boomer Place does give one the ability to write about what's on your mind. The sad news is that most likely few people are going to see it.

Downright depressing.

No I'm not starting a better site for grannie, It's all a bunch of bunk and I'm more convinced than ever that alleged Social Networking sites confined to the baby boomer generation are a bad idea in the first place.

At 30 or 50 or 70 I'd always rather interact with people from a wide continuum of society. Why encourage ageism?. Why not network on twitter, facebook, blogs, you name it. Want to push my buttons, confine them to those under my photo in the where it says "Find Susan Here"

Please don't make me register for Grandmothers of 2 dot com to have a conversation. It's enough to make me feel curmudgeonly already.

Soup Sifting

One hour Soup maintenance; I'm just hoping this isn't like Gilligan's six hour cruise. Or was it two hour cruise? I'm sure all of you will tell me.

If it was twitter it would happen the day after it was scheduled, and about three hours later. We shall see.

And as the soup.io folks suggest, I'm not holding my breath.

But come on guys, in the meantime I don't have a place to stick the stuff I wander across that's not important enough to blog about but IS interesting enough to hold onto or comment on.

Which reminds me. What did I do with that stuff before there was soup?

Maintenance.

What Web Wows You?

If you love web 2.0 apps like Viddler, MySpace, YouTube, Google Earth, Joost, Facebook, Jaiku or Twitter haven't voted for the 2008 Webware 100 Awards get on over there and start voting!

There are ten categories this year including:

• Audio: Music, podcasts, audiobooks.
• Browsing: Browsers, start pages, RSS readers, widgets, runtime engines.
• Commerce and events: Retail, auctions, travel, real estate, concerts, conferences.
• Communications: E-mail, chat, voice.
• Productivity: App suites, to-do lists, groupware.
• Publishing and photography: Blogging, content management, photo sites.
• Search and Reference: Search engines, encyclopedias, mapping.
• Social: Social networking, family sites, recommendations, online worlds, contests.
• Utility and Security: Infrastructure providers, storage, online protection.
• Video: Video storage, playback, streaming, editing, and animation.

You can pick up to three apps in each category and the nominees are amazing. But time is running out. The last voting day is March 31st.

Click my "I Voted" badge to get your chance to cancel out my vote for Scrabbulous, 30 boxes, Viddler, Twitter and get your favorites some love.

Starfish Rules

I'm big on collaboration lately and it's not just that I have to be these days or I'd get nothing done.

Though granted I want to be productive and collaborating, whether it's through Startup Weekend, Second Life or the Frozen Pea Fund, provides a basic framework flexible enough, fluid enough, to work with whatever challenges I or others bring to the table.

Which brings me to Rod Beckstrom who started Twiki.net which provides collaboration software for businesses. Rod has just been tagged to run the National Cyber Security Center reporting directly to Homeland Security's Michael Chertoff.

Co-author of "The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations," he is probably best known as a tech entrepreneur. So what's he doing in - or for - Washington?

Aha - we're back to fluidity as in his book he recognizes the value of collaboration and having less rather than more centralization. Using the starfish and the spider as examples he believes that decentralized companies, organisms, or armies are

• nimble,
• creative and
• resilient

In team or user driven structure like wikis and even twitter where the users took the idea and adapted it to where WE wanted it to go - decisions are made much like a starfish operates. If some parts of the structure are cut off or damaged the entity as a whole not only survives but also regenerates.

Organisms (companies, groups etc) which operate more like a spider, in a centralized way, he argues would be squished (my word) by the same thing.

"Whether we're looking at a Fortune 500 company, an army, or a community, . . . The absence of structure, leadership, and formal organization, once considered a weakness, has become a major asset. Seemingly chaotic groups have challenged and defeated established institutions. The rules of the game have changed."

I think he's advising Chertoff that the US needs to be more like Web 2.0.

More like twitter, where if we don't like how we're getting updates delivered we come up with a new way of feeding it to ourselves or others.

More like our blogs. You send what you like to friendfeed or facebook or stumble, sharing the thoughts or resources without ME sending out a press release and without a thousand people reading every blog post.

And we do this network building, cooperative information sharing in ways that works for us and that have redundancies built in.

You the community take charge, we connect with each other on different networks via those little buttons on the side of the blog. If one folds the others remain because the format is that of the starfish.

And when it comes to security, community, connecting - cyber or physical - the starfish rules.

 

It Says I'm Alive

I punched the button on a website tonight and saw a map of a year long emotional and physical journey into Community.

Thanks to the skill and generosity of Damon Cortesi and his smart website I can see beginning in the spring of 2007 my discovery of a new world thanks to twitter.

 
Pausing to Think

Before I found myself in a hospital bed with a stroke diagnosis the weekend of September 8th 2007, my twitter journey was all pretty predictable.

Looking back, and with the help of the graph which gives a clear picture of my reticence, it seems that I took baby steps and felt my way. Entering a new community, the pattern of colors says that learning about interaction and people came first.

The Opportunity of Association

Meeting people led to working with the Electric Sheep and the Metanomics Series in Second Life, giving me opportunities to interact more. I see that in red and purple bars in the chart.

It was a time of slowly opening up, forming loose associations, then deeper ones.

And then the stroke, as small as it was, made me doubt my abilities to do that.

That part of the picture is hard for me to look at but also hard to miss. The graph from tweetstats  plots out for me, I see a painful picture of myself.

Pulling Back

The struggle with misplacing words, using spatial skills and feeling scared shows there is a dismal grey blob - shrinking somehow on the graph like I felt at the time. And then just as clearly comes my increasing efforts to test my abilities in the month following.

I needed some time, And then I needed some practice. I needed to focus.

And through the fall the twitter community nurtured me in that, forgave my lapses, encouraged my efforts.

What Elephant In The Room?

And then it gets red. And all I see is RED. The big red block is called cancer. And that's undeniable.

It happened in January. And it was like a dam bursting.

Both the sudden cancer diagnosis I received on December 7th and the twitter community's reaching out to me in such a generous way had stunned me.

I tweeted answers to questions and messages of thanks.

I tweeted silliness to relieve the worry and updates to try to inform.

I tweeted to a seemingly endless array of good people during long nights.

I tweeted because I was alive.

I tweeted because people who cared were there.

It's truly a picture of the highs and the lows.

Graphic evidence never spoke to me this way before. A new world just showed its face. And the paths of our lives - divorces, births, job changes, moves, crisis, and joys - could be available to us all with the touch of a button. Truths and realities come in different wrappings in 2008.

How unexpected to see one's emotional life displayed in a graph that's really designed to show something else altogether.

So I'll be watching to see my future as it plays out by way of bars of color generated by an impersonal machine, but made possible by someone who cared enough to give us the gift.

For me - it's a sort of map of myself. And it's something I find oddly reassuring.

Upscoop Sifts Your Contacts

When writing about how you let your friends know what  social networks you participate in I could only tell you so much in one article. But there's more.

Including - upscoop - a service which identifies which friends are part of what network.

This puts the burden of finding you on your friends.

They - if they know about upscoop and are willing to give the program access to their friends lists - just let upscoop sift through their lists from various sources. Then upscoop provides an alphabetized list of friends links to their pages on whatever social networking sites they are registered with

Nifty? Yes. A little on the privacy-invading side?

Probably, There's a lot I don't know but it may go too far.

I think I'll stay with my practice of just showing icons with links to all my social sites for the time being, and I'll keep  a couple of aggregators running for the really nosy out there just in case.

That way you won't have to find upscoop to find me.  . . . But it was kinda nifty watching upscoop work.

Mitch Wagner and You and Me: on Social Networks

One reason I dislike TV news is that it's insipid and superficial. There, I said it. And even my non-insipid non-superficial friend from Information Week, Mitch Wagner, couldn't do much about the lousy teeny bit of time he was given in his interview on Fox news.

But he was well spoken, personable as always, and gave them the information in sound bite sized pieces which TV loves. He also gave us a little sanity and an overview of information and assured the fox folks that social networking was not just for kids.

It would have been great to have Mitch for about a 2 hour sit down about relationships in a connected age not a 2 minute pit stop before they went on to talk about Britney or something equally deep and meaningful. But he did get me thinking about where others participate online

My list is long and my excuse is that I have to know something about them if I'm going to explain to people what they're about. A small widget to link to these services is something I find handy and I place it in the blogs' side columns so that you'll know where to find me.

In addition I set up other services to aggregate some of the content of the sites - which in reality nobody but a stalker would want to keep up with. I use a few services like profilactic and to a less complete degree perhaps, onaswarm. Onaswarm even includes my twitter tweetings which can be prolific and overrun everything else and so maybe should be removed for sanity sake.

For the record, I'd like to see all the material appear at Onaswarm in a timeline instead of divided by social networks but just putting it all together is some kind of magic for me so I'll go with it.

In any case, by going to their site you can get an overall view of what your friends are doing, reading, bookmarking, uploading. Sounds kind of creepy now that I say it that way, but that's what it does so there it is.

With one exception that is. Because of facebook's setup not much if any facebook content comes through to outside. Aggregators simply give a link to find your contact at facebook or linkedin by signing in and going through the process of asking if you can connect and thus see the what they share there.

Another service, soup.io adds whatever content I want them to automatically collect each day like clips from all of my blogs, my youtube videos, anything I might add to del.icio.us, tumblr and flickr account. It also allows me to manually - and very simply - add images, articles, quotes or links I find along the way and want to show someone or keep for reference.

This clip shown here shows the top of my front page including little icons for various feeds I have coming in and a picture of a woopie pie. After a trip to Lancaster PA a twitter discussion started about food that some others were unfamiliar with. I added this and then sent twitter friends here where they can see not only the photo but a recipe and a story about the writer's PA heritage. Nice and easy.

Do I need all these networks, aggregators, link magnets, ways of staying in touch especially since I'm a bit of a hermit anyhow? Who knows, but for now I've got them and I'm learning about their limitations and potential.

But that gets us no closer to the question I started out with: What networks do you participate in and how do you let people know who you are and where you are? My take is that this staying in touch thing could be a full time job, even with technology working for me.

Here's my "badge" or widget from profilactic, just to give you an idea. Oy!

Building Community Through Images

What is it about adding yourself to - or seeing yourself in - a block of people connected to other people connected to other people that makes those ties feel stronger?

Is simply the gesture of putting yourself in the company of others that does it for you? Or is it what we take from that gesture different with each of us?

I was updating my "friend block" at facebook last night and started wondering: Why and how does showcasing your community of readers, showing images of your network, creating a place to be seen create more of that feeling of belonging?

Would you rather remain impersonal and  distant from these people - or be part of the parade of images; in some way connected to a group, a blog, a neighborhood, a loosely or more tightly woven community of people?

Think of MyBlogLog and how it show a block of images of who's read your blog recently.

• It makes the blog owner feel good.
• It makes the reader feel good to be included.
• It makes the other readers happy to be in good company
  

Would something as simple as a frappr widget work the same way? Here's an experiment. Let's see . .

Would you feel differently about that string of photos if you - and people you know - were included?

Does it matter WHO the others are? Is it a matter of being seen with the RIGHT  people or is simply being seen enough?

For most of us, even if we don't know the answers to why it feels good to be connected - to be included in a certain image block or collage - it remains a fact that it does.

So where else could we link with images? Flicker groups are one option. But are there others? Where is your picture shown that you'd like to pass on to us? May we join you?

Note:

To be included in the frappr slide widget go to the map link, add yourself with an image you'll appear too.

To be included in the facebook friend block make a friend connection with me at facebook (dont forget to tell me how we know each other when you click connect)

Tis the Eve of Saint Pats

This is a wee re-run from another time, but a pretty image to download and a kind thought for you nonetheless

Sure  'tis Saint Patrick's Day or nearly that, and therefore time to wish you and all yours Many Blessings, Much Cheer, Food and Drink Aplenty, and a road cleared of rocks - or at least boulders.

And what better way to mark the day than with a wee gift download of 2006.03.10.patrick.pdf ,  yes, you've guessed it - Green Artistamps.

HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY!

 

May those who love us love us,

And those who don't love us,

May God turn their hearts,

And if He doesn't turn their hearts,

May He turn their ankles,

So we'll know them by their limping.

 Irish Prayer

  

Can Twitter Be Explained In Plain English?

From Lee and Sachi Lefever comes this great video that explains the basic appeal of the micro-blogging platform twitter - in essence what it is about it that is interesting as one first gets into it.

 

Then in the a perhaps even more interesting comment section of Twitter in Plain English viewers discuss what it is about Twitter and the video that piqued their interest

On the other hand, Dean Shareski a well known tweeter who has risen to the top of the tweeterboard as @shareski totally disagrees with the simple presentation. He writes in his blog:

"I know, he can’t share it all in the time constraints of that format, but I’d have to say that if I didn’t know what twitter was, I’d watch that video and say, “that sounds stupid”. That’s how I‘ve always felt about any explanation."

The thing is - I agree with both points of view. Twitter in Plain English tells the basic story of twitter. And twitter works just that simply for some people - and probably for most of us in the beginning that's exactly how it functioned, and how it hooked us.

Even Lee Lefever's introductory story of how person A follows person B and learns about their taste in sports or books hints at something about how twitter goes beyond what one would initially expect and  - like a virus we're not protected against - quietly and without warning deepens our involvement.

There's the hint in even the most simple explanation that we may hear about other people too, thus expanding our network, our base of friends, our caring about other people we have never met.

So the power of twitter is really in seeing the potential and acting on that. It's in the connections and the sharing that comes after the snippets we share. It's in the follow through. And continuing the conversation.

That story might be a bit much for Commoncraft to take on in the In Plain English series.

But it could be a Commoncraft play in three acts, showing the trickle down effects of the twitterspere.

I'd love to see that story. It might feature some of my twitterfriends, sitting at a long table extending out into the distance. The conversation would just keep going and the ideas would keep flowing. Because that's the way it is in real life too. It happened to me.

photos by Bill Reynolds, taken in Austin TX in February 2008.See more at flickr