cleaning off the spam

Every morning begins with me checking my spam bins. Tedious but true. People who get in touch with my website aren't email experts, and those messages which aren't one-line, misspelt and sent from an unlikely-sounding hotmail address are probably going to be in multi-coloured html and sent to a slightly random address. I exaggerate, but so do my spam filters, and if I don't check the filters, things get lost.

As a person who's written poems and comics about spam, as someone who finds delight in the random collision of words, and has had (over the years) a series of favourite spambots from Nanaimo to Hello/Hi, I'm probably one of the better selections for such a job. But still, the endless run of viagra, violence, fraud, diet, porn and phish grinds me down. It's like taking a dip in humanity's effluent, every morning.

But while I'm fishing the spam sewer for legitimate communication, I take snapshots of the weirder freaks in the stream. Most of them get filed in online communities with names like "spampoetry", but the ones with a side-helping of doodle (like this one) end up in my blogs.

will anybody use a ning?

I went to chat to a young volunteer who was keen to support a local youth council/forum group to make a website yesterday. They'd done some layouts in word, and wanted to know about "what was possible"?

It's very much one of those "how long is a piece of string?" questions. If you want to buy a web address, get some web space, and knock together something using the free templates provided, you just can, assuming you've got no problem with shelling out a few dollars, know a bit of html and are prepared to fiddle with the settings a bit. Setting up a blog and sorting out some photo hosting and tying it into a Facebook Group is even easier and completely free.

In fact, it's so easy, that the world is littered with built-and-abandoned websites, blogs, streams profiles and forums. So I asked them a few questions:

• What do you need the website for?
• What are the expectations of the young people?
• How will you maintain it?

They're going back to the group to ask about the first two (they'd already considered the third, well done!). I've also suggested that they ask around the group to find out:

• Which social networking site is most widely used and would they like a group set up?
• Is there a young person with experience of creating websites who could make them a website?
• Here's what I can do for you, is it what you want?

They were, however, disappointed. They wanted me to recommend a short training course that would teach the young volunteer how to make a website, ideally one run by the volunteer's manager's employer. Then she would make the website.

Maybe I should be running one. I'm sure I wrote one, a few years ago.

But, instead, I suggested that they set up a Ning. I'm in three or four, and I think they ought to fit the needs of a group of young people who want something to be:

• Separate from the main social networking sites
• Serious in appearance and use, but easily cutomisable and flexible
• Friendly to multimedia content
• Closed, only accessible to a particular group

I don't know if they'll go for it yet, but the last two groups I suggested it to did not, and I'm still not quite sure why not -- or why I don't use my Nings as much as I should, for that matter.

Although it might have something to do with the comment notification, which irritates me every time it turns up; it says there's a comment, but not what it says. It has that in common with Fiends Reunited; it won't tell you what's going on until you're actually on the site. And frankly, that's not very social.

risking the wrists

I'm breaking up the office at the moment, in anticipation of the upcoming office move, and in a pile of recycling I came across this doodle drawn at a conference. It's a good reminder, this one; don't stress, the stress makes the wrists worse.



I've had my brushes with RSI in the past of course; there's hardly a webmonkey from the turn of the century who didn't get it, one way or the other. I didn't get it bad; just some problems in my wrists and shoulders, a bit of pins and needles in a forefinger and thumb. But it's chilling when you get it; I remember being in absolute panic that the only way I knew to earn a living was being chopped off, removed, placed beyond my reach. Of course, the panic makes the pain worse, part of the trick is learning to approach your work in a way which makes it less stressful.

Therefore, I'm trying to take it easy, for this office move. Breath deeply and let it happen. Who knows, maybe it will all go well...

consultation and information

I'm clearing my office prior to an upcoming move and I keep on finding bits and bobs from all over the place. This is from the Oxfordshire County Council Consultation Team. It's introducing the the Oxfordshire County Council Consultation Tracker which allows the public to keep in touch with ongoing consultations.

The function of the snakes should I hope be fairly clear: they're reminding you that every consultation needs to have a clear, defined format, purpose, timescale, location, method and audience. Below the snakes I've added three notes:

• demonstrate and report effects of consultation
• management of the empowered - empowerment of the powerless
• increased communications is a normal outcome
  

The first note is very important for communicators: it's not enough just to listen and make changes based on what you've heard, these changes must then be feed back to the consulted body. The second is a reminder that the groups being consulted are going to have different levels of personal empowerment and expectations, and that these must be managed. In particular, those who feel marginalised and disempowered will need encouragement to participate. The third point is a warning; that a dialogue, once started, is likely to continue.

how many social networking sites can you think of?

Attended a talk about young people, social networking and contraceptive health, by Barbara Hastings-Asatourian, inventor of Contraception, the Board Game. Lots of interesting stuff, both from her presentation and the reaction from the workers.

One of the things she asked us was how many social networking sites we were aware of. For me, this was a question than ran and ran, throughout the presentation, and I eventually ended up with the list below:



Pretty scary stuff. In a world with so many social networks, how can messages like safer sex penetrate successfully?

This second page has some of my ideas, but I probably have to interpret:



Not sure of the significance of the woman on wheels? Let me elucidate:

1. Select a few big services and link up your service/message across them. Who's on the page? Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace -- Bebo should be there, too.
   
2. Use these services to network and make connections with other people working in the same area (either geographically or a topic area).
3. Join groups, post links, create stuff and generally use your social networks socially.
   
4. Targeted advertising on Facebook -- probably worth a try.
5. Don't put large amounts of resources into one thing; the internet is fickle.

During the session, Barbara encouraged staff to share their anxieties about social networking, always useful, and a lot of the regular anxieties you always see turned up; privacy, timewasting, social/work blurring, alienation, potential for abuse.

There was also a staff member who was more forthright about the value of social networking and online communication in general (including email!) "People aren't socialising properly, they're not learning the skills to talk face to face any more, they're just talking online and that's not real communication, it's all happening in their head. They're just sitting behind screens, tapping away, what's that doing to them, mentally and physically?"

An interesting question. I didn't answer during the session, though I had to bite my tongue hard not to; I remember my first time, on telnet, talking to people in America. It was amazing, and it didn't replace offline communication, it enabled it. It made it better, and broader and less parochial. For the first time I felt like a world citizen, even if only in a small way, in a small out-of-the-way part of the world. But, OK, what has it done to me?

1. Enabled regular contact with a broader and larger group of people
2. Created social contacts outside my immediate geographic and social area
3. Allowed me to hold onto friends I would otherwise have fallen out of touch with
4. Enabled me to sample broader sets of information and advice
5. Made it possible for me to revisit/rediscover/run away from friendships from the past
6. Made me a more flexible and thoughtful friend
7. Let me find out about far more things than I would have done otherwise
8. Added a new dimension to existing friendships
9. Helped me keep in touch with family members
10. Taught me new and interesting ways of socialising

Physically? I'm average.

twitter promoted to standard list

There are a bunch of websites I talk about to people who are running things like local youth projects, clubs, young people's centres, and so on. It's not a long list, because all these people are very busy either running work with young people IRL, or in the back room doing admin.

But is a useful list, because a Social Networking presence is both a point of contact and a way of promoting your work; engagement and participation, if you're lucky. It's less work and more fun than running your own website, and young people are often already there, on the look out for new contacts and things to do.

These websites used to be as follows:

• Myspace - the choice for young people's music projects, art, creative
  
• Facebook - for youth parliament, volunteering, young campaigners and sport (seniors)
• Bebo - good for health and social groups and sport (juniors)

These aren't hard and fast divisions, of course. There are some big campaigns on Bebo like It doesn't have to happen (knife crime), and there are lots of major, minor and local health providers on Facebook (like the Oxford Chlamydia Screening Project), and there's plenty more than music on myspace (the British Youth Council, for example). All the social networks have the tools to post tunes, picture, updates and so on, and all allow graded privacy, so you can let some people in, but not others. Often the only really key question is what do you use, and what do your young people use?

Which led me to someone coming in for this chat, and starting by saying, "What about Twitter?" Received wisdom says Twitter is not popular with the right age group, not a good way of forming groups, and not a good way of disseminating information (as the updates are too short). Or had everything changed again? I went off to check.

Short answer; it's changed a bit. The age distribution has crawled down a little, and the emerging conventions for linking and topic threading have made it a more useful communications channel. And I've made myself a work Twitter in anticipation of it changing some more, and so I can demonstrate Twitter safely to colleagues.

However, as far as advising workers goes, I'll be sticking with saying (much as I do for blogs, in fact) , don't do it unless it's something you would do anyway. At the moment there's just not enough value added -- or enough of your local young people there to reach out to.

chasing accessibility

Part of the redesign work at the moment is improving accessibility. Not in the sense of making things sound comprehensible to as screen-reader or having adjustable type size; although that sort of thing is certainly on the cards, I'm expecting that to come in through design. My concern is mostly with content, and with making it more accessible to all.

To this end, I had a meeting with a specialist who helps young people with delayed language or learning difficulties access information. Very interesting. I was expecting that she would be producing translated materials, may even have some I could adapt. That wasn't the case, as the group of young people she supports has issues so diverse that each one needs an individual approach.

However, she explained, there are concepts which everyone can use, to make information more accessible to all:

• Cut up information into single concepts
• Step through each concept bit by bit
• Use subheadings to divide up information
• Highlight key words
• Use one sentence to say one thing
• Use active sentences and short, unambiguous words
• Use explanatory images, not decorative images
• Keep things clean and clear, without additional, distracting content
• Use CAPTIONED video

... a very useful starting point -- one that suggests perhaps a "simple view" style sheet? We'll have to see.

In the meantime, I obviously went off researching websites which provided good free information resources. for young people with LDD. Mostly, I just found people selling packs, but I did turn up this: Songs for Your Body presents Personal, Social and Health Education for Young People with Learning Disabilities through the medium of catchy songs!

writing for the web

While I was off work I had time to think about my skills. How are they doing? Are they still set to web 1.0? I decided a course was in order. I did a bit of research, then asked friends if anyone had experience of the various courses I'd identified. Learning Tree's course, Writing for the web, seemed absolutely appropriate and the company got the thumbs up from a friend who'd done their Technical Writing course.

The course was good stuff; informative, practical and focussed. At the end, we were asked to identify the three things we'd be taking back to the workplace. Here were mine:



Let's quickly reproduce that:

- Learning some sales techniques which may be used to sell/reposition services which are met with resistance
- Checklists for readability and accessibility which can be shared with authors who are not primarily writers, to explain necessary changes
- Formalised process for creating imaginary users, with research examples and background reading to back it up/add authority

There's a lot of writing coming up soon, as the website I'm editing increases in content by approximately a third. Obviously, I won't be producing all of this material, but I expect to need to a do a lot of rewriting, one way or another. It's often very hard to explain rewriting to people without things getting fraught. This course was full of good, non-judgemental ways to talk to people about improving writing and content.

twittering from the hospital

Had one of those nasty accidents on the way into work in late January. You know, the sort where you ask the Doctor if you'll be OK to make your meetings that afternoon, and he just gives a bit of a hollow laugh and says oh, I don't think so.

In the end I was taking painkillers in the hospital for three days, while the swelling around my wrist came down, with only a mobile phone (and various visitors) as my lifeline to the outside world. So I naturally twittered my way through hospital, and Loudtwitter, which at this point in time was shipping my tweets to my livejournal daily, propagated my twitters to my blog, keeping my friends up to date. Without my having to painfully call them all.

Unfortunately, I hadn't factored into my consideration the twitter-haters, my friends, the twitter haters. Not all of my friends, of course, but a significant minority of them, who loath twitter and enthusiastically share this fact with depressing frequency. A few weeks later, reading the umpteenth comment box rant pile-on about how stupid twitter is, I regretfully closed off my use of Loudtwitter. Lifeline it may have been, but it was not an elegant solution to the problem. Some people had liked it, but other people -- as had been the case when I first tried blogging by text message -- found it bewildering and infuriating. These are people who have chosen to communicate within a blog/journal environment, who do not appreciate communication by fragment, who do not enjoy the tiny bites of information that twitter delivers. It's not their mode. Forcing my twitters out of their native environment and into one that is journal-focussed was creating a jar, a communication difficulty.

So no more Loudtwitter for now. I'll have to come up with a new solution. And until then, not end up unexpectedly in hospital.

dealing with negative comments in blogs

How do you respond gracefully, factually and transparently to negative blogging without looking like you're overreacting, missing the point or being hopelessly heavy handed? Relying on your natural poise, grace and politeness isn't going to cut it in a formal situation (e.g. if someone's saying rude, inflammatory or inaccurate things about your service), and it certainly won't help in a situation where someone's being deliberately provocative. Like many information workers, I find inaccurate reporting, or personal prejudice being passed off as fact quite irritating. On occasion, in fact, it leaves me boiling with anger, hardly in the right frame of mind to put together a reasoned response.

This is where good procedures can really help, and I absolutely love this Air Force Blog Assessment Flow-chart, which steps you through the process, tells you what to consider in your response, and how to be graceful about correcting facts, take the opportunity to make positive contact, and know when to step away. Via Jeremiah and lots of other places.

Air Force Blog Assessment, originally uploaded by jeremiah_owyang.

... and here is the flow-chart in full. More details, including fully legible text, on the click-through!

thoughts about the keynote speech

The whole service conference was on last week, and I'm rounding up some of my thoughts from the speakers. On the whole, the conference wasn't very web relevant (apart from me -- I was looking at people's web needs during break time) but one of the key note speakers did exhort us briefly to use the web and not fear it (good man).

This was the other speaker, and he was a lot more traditional in his view of young people and youth work. However, some interesting insights:

• Deprived of actual war or threat, young people recreate a war in their heads This is more of an interesting thought experiment than a statement of fact. One to turn around and ask the person with a problem; are you approaching this problem as if it were a war? Is that the right response?
• Young people see themselves as threatened and expendable - "I might be wasted any minute." This is about the exaggerated sense of threat that many people feel, especially young people about violence other young people. We are widely told that violent crime, assault, etc. , all these are very rare but we all know victims -- how to square that experiential anomaly? The speaker tried statistics, but didn't convince.
  
• Young people don't want to do the shitwork that their parents did I hear this one. That's why we went to school, that's why we put the hours in. "Improve work" is part of the solution, but there are also complicated issues of status, gendered behaviour, and social climbing tied in with this. It's a challenge.

Useful stuff for the website? perhaps. With Connexions coming in, we have much more careers stuff, and so unpacking the shitjobs concept might help that content; bullying and personal safety information could benefit from advice aimed at lowering young people's perception of threat rather than the actual threat, and from encouraging ideas that don't draw on the easy roles of war (innocent victim, savage agressor, traumatised bystander) but instead focus on rethinking schoolyard conflict.

virtual voices - a final thought

This comes courtesy of Charlotte Black, with a timely reminder of why the most enthusiastic proponents of new media are (obviously) going to be the old media pofessionals.

virtual voices - emerging platforms

Skipping over a workshop where I made a podcast from the future with two media studies lecturers (fun and useful!), onto the afternoon lecture at Virtual Voices!



Interesting stuff in this panel from Derren Lawford, who edits the Panorama Website, but Simon Hankin (from the company that does the Skins site) had less of interest to me to add, while Charlotte Black, a commissioning editor for Channel 4, seemed rather unable to tell us what she did at all. Slightly odd vibe in that although it was about emerging platforms, the people up in front were all the New Media facelifters of traditional media, and lots of the people in the audience seemed concerned about where the new generation of media studies pupils were going to get jobs in a media world seeing "the death of the expert". Personally, I'm not convinced by this "death of the expert" business -- truly knowing your topic inside out is always going to be both rare and valued -- but the warnings against parochialism and the reasons for reporting from unpopular/ist areas were considered and useful. But with no-one on the panels from large independent online-only providers it was hard to get the full picture, and the small businessmen in the audience, especially, got very aggravated -- one buttonholed me after the event and told me it was a disgrace that public money had been spent on my attending the event. Like most education professionals, I'm always ready to challenge people when they put forward unconsidered views, and I had plenty to say to that.

Mindful of getting my money's worth for the tax payer, I stuck around to see the short film programme. Good thing I did, because I suddenly found out what it was that Charlotte Black (who'd done the selection of the films) actually does. The films were, without exception, truly excellent. Original, controversial, gripping, honest and clearly produced with the full participation of the young people involved. You can see them all over at South West Screen's Youtube Channel, but this one on homelessness is particularly standout. I'm already recommending it to projects in Banbury aimed at persuading young people to stick it out and successfully negotiate with parents rather than leave home:

virtual voices (3)

The News Panel was on next, which was a bit off topic for me, but I was interested to hear their take on user generated content. Perhaps predictably, it was depressing: Martin Fewell revealing that 90-95% of their public emails come from the same small set of people, and in the email equivalent of green ink; Vicky Frost hinting at the abyssal awfulness of many of the comments coming into comment is free. There was, among the media professionals, an (I felt not altogether misplaced) mistrust of the "popular" news story, admixed with a appalled fascination with the awfulness of their most voluble audience members. Tory blogger was also on this panel, and his relationship with the awful, cringeworthy commentators was quite different. They are not populist sirens to mollify, improve, or ignore but his validatory bread and butter, the underswell of common opinion setting the media deliverers to rights, righteously. Also, notably, compere Nick Roddick asked him to sum up something (I honestly forget what) in two words. We were there for a while.




Oh, and Martin Fewell had a few words about the dangers of pandering to the Youtube generation (difficult, they agreed, to maintain integrity when their managers all want them to get onto the "most popular" and "most read" lists) and he used as his exemplar of popular non-news "videos of cats falling off pianos". I think he probably meant this one:



Cat's a genius.

virtual voices conference (2)

I sketched this one during the keynote speech and housekeeping. The keynote was from a prominent Tory blogger who gave a Powerpoint presentation (in blue, with lots of swooshes) mostly about what his blogging circle ("the most influential political bloggers in the country") do. He also described anyone over 40 as "by definition, a technological luddite" --- hmm, how old is Tim Berners Lee now? ... and ... I'll stop there.

His "abuse magnets" list was quite interesting, though -- these being the comment-guarantor topics, if he posts them on his blog, he gets fights in the comments section. Put it into perspective: during a later panel, someone lets slip that 90% of their comments are identifiably coming from just a few people.

The owl is sad because internet owl was previously unaware of the thriving Tory blogger scene. IB's a typical blogger because he's assuming truth by saying things loudly and with conviction. I catch myself doing the same from time to time.

The woman saying "people in black are your friends" is telling us what to do in event of a fire. She's one of the organisers.

The internet is an angel in fishnets because it just is.

virtual voices conference (1)

I attended an event called Virtual Voices which looked to be helpful to the need to produce short videos, podcasts, etc. Here's the headline:

How can we develop young people's voices so they become the media literate content creators and storytellers of the future?

Virtual Voices brings the media industry together with young media makers and their teachers or tutors to attempt to answer this question and many others...

I guess, in this, I count as a "many other", being neither school-based nor in the media industry! But the line-up and workshops looked very relevant to the things I'm being asked for at the moment -- video, audio, and the chance to produce as well as consume media

It included workshops from Futurescape, PR Bristol and Radiowaves. All sounded interesting and useful.

I took notes in sketch form, as I usually do at events and meetings. For the next couple of posts, I'll be putting up my pages of notes, with relevant links and explanations.



Nothing much to say about this one: I arrived in Bristol early and stopped off for a bacon butty at the lovely Ferry Station cafe. She was the one serving the coffee.

the world is listening (for a flat £42 fee/school)

Still here, still looking. Inbetween struggling to persuade acceptable performance out of my new PC (oh, the joy of hardware upgrades), I've been attanding a New Media Inspiration Session (don't ask) starting local Youth Service blogs (to a ripple of disinterest) and feeling unusually lonely, despite the various links to other professionals doing similar things ... sole working, well, the problem's in the name, really.

Latest product to roll out of my intray is called Radiowaves (the world's listening) a "safe" blogging/podding/vidcast service for schools and students. Ministry of Justice approved, and currently being rolled out across the nation. Would it be a better solution for me than my current grab-bag of free services?

Having noticed the £42/fee per school and the prominent get-a-quote signs everywhere I get the dintinct impression that this is something designed to be used across a school network. A quick visit it "how it works" confirms this:

Safety and Control

You can see all students work and control what they put live to the public.

Student Web Pages

Each student has their own web page to showcase their work and for you to easily track progress

... so it's an educational tool, and one which assumes that looking at whatever's blogged is something that will be done as a matter of course, for monitoring and assessment purposes (in addition to moderation). Nice idea, not for me.

Of more general interest is sister-site numu, where students post their work in a "safe" (i.e., no comments) space. My hand hovers over play, but I'm not alone in the office today, and it's only very tangetially of relevance. I can see how it would be useful, though: myspace with most of the social function sawn off, to keep the young people concentrated on the music.

It's harder to decide what to saw off when the bulk of what you're doing is supporting independent development of socialisation, useful information sharing, peer support and postitive relationships among young people.

Anyway, radiowaves: shelved for now.

Dia Del Maestro Networking Site Fortnight: addendum

So, you think you've got it. You can post pictures, video, links, the works.

And then comes the day when you want to post an innocent little mp3 and though your Livejournal has been hovering on the edge of being able to do this for the last two years, it's clearly still not encouraging the practice, and though your various bucketing sites will handle any amount of video, audio is not within their remit. No, madam -- unless you're prepared to site through the nonsensical rigmarole of pretending to be a band, if you want to post audio, on your own hosting service be it.

Fortunately for everyone, I managed to find PodBean before I had to resort to registering myspace/djcleanskiesandthebabygoslings. It seems to work; it also seems to have no (free) competitors. It's not especially social, though; I can join groups or hit up channels, but I can't make contacts. It's a bit more like Blogger in that aspect -- more a publication channel than a social networking tool.

Fortunately it integrates quite nicely with your other blogs, providing them with a neat little embedded audio player:

Powered by Podbean.com

... which could do with a little finessing (a link to the blog entry it's from, perhaps?) but as long as it's working, I'm happy.

Just to catch up on what stuck and what didn't

sniff the air
Originally uploaded by Jeremy Dennis

I'm still on Facebook, but I've not gone looking for my colleagues. Bebo has gone down about as well as Myspace, i.e. I'll have one but I'm unlikely to do anything much with it. Del.icio.us just feels kind of pointless -- I'm using Tumblr when I just want to bookmark something -- Tumblr is also getting everything too embarassing for my Livejournal (ouch) but I worry that it's depleting the Livejournal. Something called Virb is too Beta to use yet, sorry, and Dandelife is great! But alas I DO NOT HAVE THE TIME (and never will). Yahoo 360 is never going to get used as it's essentially the same as my Livejournal except with a different set of bugs, plus ads and branding. YUK. LastFM is a big drag to use on my antique Macbook, but I'm persevering, for now. I've not gone back to Jaiku, because I can't take posting by text seriously. For the same reason, I'm still chirping away to Twitter. Freecycle and Flickr will be seeing more of me, the various Second Life types places won't.

For work, the two community sites identified as the most flexible, reliable and popular among the target age group (13-19) were Bebo and Myspace.

See you in the comments threads

Jeremy

day 14 : ... and now for all the things I'm not going to do

I'm not going over to Second Life, even though Teen Second Life looks like it's right in my (audience's) age group and interest area. Nor am I hitting World of Warcraft, despite its undeniable popularity with teenaged boys. Apart from any other considerations, I don't think the machines can take it, and oh I do not fancy grumpily twiddling my thumbs over an antique laptop, waiting for my new trousers to download.

But before we go, a couple more places to shove in, last-minute:

Upcoming.org, which enjoyed popularity with a few of my friends a while ago, has now become Upcoming.yahoo.com, although I couldn't find it from the rest of My Yahoo. Maybe that's yet to come. I easily found out a whole bunch of neat things I'm doing or might want to do and it's easily nicer than Facebook's event organiser. It's not very social, though, (although that may be me feeling less social after a solid fortnight of this) and I'd hesitate to promote it to young people because it's a locator -- primarily for the events, but it also works on the individuals.

Threadless, currently crashing my browser, is a design networking place where I'm a long-term lurker, first time purchaser. Or would be, if the t-shirts had actually turned up, which they haven't ... and Deviant Art is a big online art community which I know that some of my friends use. But I'm out of time and it's not really my scene (images sorted by popular should explain).

And then there are the communities for people into toys, comics, David Bowie, and oh it just goes on and on, stretching out forever. There's no sense I could ever sign up to everything I'm interested in, though I have no doubt I'd find interesting people in all these places.

Last but not least -- let's mention blogger. I've had this blog for a few years now, and subscribe to a few friends blogs via a feed aggregator, but I've never once used it to find people, ever. Blogger isn't about other people. It's about you.

Signing off and socially overcommitted,

Jeremy Dennis.

Day 13 : the focus group hack the nanny-ware

Something different today. 9/10 young people turned up to the A.N. Web Workshop (I have a couple a year) and I asked them, where do you live on the internet?

Only two laughed and said they didn't live anywhere on the Internet, and, on further questioning, one of them turned out to be trying to hide his blog. A couple were on one-note joke sites like sloganizer -- which they had great fun typing my name into. Workshop leader, please leave your dignity at the door. The blogspot I mentioned, a couple of myspacers who didn't want to show off their profiles and a couple of bebo babies who did, a home-made homepage, a favourite shopping site and Tagged, the mere mention of which made the rest of the room groan.

My idea was that we'd look at the sites and assess what made them appeal to the young people, but my borrowed office environment had blocked all non-work-related sites and done their damnedest to disable the browser on the sawn-off laptop they grudgingly provided (to a background mumble which augered ill for whoever had told us having an internet connection in a meeting room would be "no problem"). While the adults are sharing site-blocking funnies (did you hear the one about the legal department having all emails about sexual harassment blocked?) the young people are on the laptop, finding a proxy site that isn't blocked. It takes them less than 30s.

Of course, the proxy site is teeming with nasty adverts and toxic pop-ups but the young people don't give it a second glance. They're here to check their messages, see if anyone has left them "love" (a Bebo thing) and count their myspace friends. Then they remember that they're not supposed to be showing us their myspace pages and we end up on mine instead. "Only 19 friends in two years? That's rubbish, that is."

As the borrowed laptop disappears under a torrent of spyware (I try to fix it, but discover I don't even have enough privileges to bookmark pages) and I haul the last young person off its twitching corpse, I feel weirdly gratified. They really are all online, just like the future promised. They're keeping in touch with friends in different towns, swapping music recommendations and providing each other with emotional support. This is madness!

.. and this is Tagged, the only unfamiliar name to come up all day. It's another video posting site, and I suspect its popularity with the group may be to do with none of the blocking programs knowing about it. Another I'm not going to join, I fear -- but then, I don't spend my life in a world where Youtube is eternally locked behind a wall of nannyware.

Californians may wish to know that Tagged is currently looking for a Director of Advertising Sales, an Online Sales Ad Executive, a Senior Software Developer and a Software Developer - Release Manager, and that if you join their team, you can expect a competitive salary, performance bonuses, generous pre-IPO stock options, full health benefits, 401(K) plan, and perks like a well-stocked kitchen, gym membership, monthly massages and various offsite activities.

I get a cheese and pickle sandwich and some terrifying jelly sweets, shuffle together my research and the new design notes, and hop the bus home. They want the site to look tasteful.

Truly, times have changed.

Verdict: I'm going to post a cat video because I can.

day 12 : the music scene

I'm already a member of a music community site, although I didn't join it to meet people. Emusic is a subscriber downloads site which takes advantage of the enormous enthusiasm people have for recommending music to each other. New, old, obscure, you name it, they have a (certain subsection of) it, although being both DRM free and 100% legal leaves their product prone to winking on and off like solar lights in the rain. Another friend on the service finds this intensely aggravating, but I'm more amused; with the amount of music available I'm never going to run out of new, interesting things to download, so the only loss is to the labels. And to emusic, of course -- who should really rename their "save for later" function to "you can save it for later but it may not be available then, are you sure?".

Two, if you count myspace. I suppose that I should. But actually, I'm hitting LastFM today. A site so oldschool, you have to download software for full functionality. No hitches with that, though, so all's good. I figure out scrobbling, build a profile, and set up a suitable soundtrack to go looking for people I already know by. Here, though, is where I hit a snag. It defaults to stealing my address book and spamming all my friends with an "invite". Nah, I don't think so. So I mince through my own address book and pick out the LastFM users by hand, and it's tricky enough that they clearly just want me to give up and just do the spam thing. I also skip over the people who I've drifted out of touch with, those whose email addresses don't instantly recall their name and those who are just a bit too famous. Nah, I'm not going to meet anyone here.

That said, though, it does the music stuff really sweetly. Right now it's pissing down with rain, I'm feeling kind of grim and playing artists similar to Radiohead. I've already had to express my love for tracks twice.

Verdict : It's about the music, not the socialising. Which is fine.

Bank Holiday Weekend

Hammock SuccessOriginally uploaded by Damian Cugley

Stop! Hammock Time!

Too bad it never stopped raining.

day 11 : In which I discover something I had all along

I've had a yahoo address for a long time. Ever since I got aggravated with hotmail over something and snapped straight over to their nearest competitor, like you do. At the time, Yahoo came with Geocities, and I built a site in odd half-hours, skill-building, like you do. And, good grief, it's still there! Nothing is ever forgotten online, is it?

At the time there was crude interactivity via guest books (remember those?) but I turned all that shit off. Even though a trickle of people have come to me from that site over the years (including being BoingBoinged over some mildly rude toy photos --proof that you never can tell what other people will find interesting) it wasn't a place for interaction or social aggregation. It was about display.

But given as how I've been blasted with various messages about how Yahoo is "embracing the web 2.0 concept" every time I've tried to log in to my email during the last quarter (and no, I still haven't managed to upgrade to the new mail -- the advert reload click is just too annoying) it's no surprise to discover that there's a blog buried in there. Quite deep, and no crowing about it yet; meet Yahoo 360, Beta.

It looks very smooth and modern, the feed aggregator is handy and it integrates smoothly with Yahoo's most shiny toy, Flickr. [Edit: Comments suggest that I may be wrong about that -- I didn't try to do much with it.] Although it'd be kind of embarassing if it didn't. Oh, and from the look of it Yahoo messenger is intended to run in the sidebar, although I don't really message, not since that time I got overexcited and started breaking things. So I don't know if that works.

I have a contact before I've finished building my profile, and it is actually someone I vaguely know. Although whether that was some sort of automatic thing or involved personal volition is open to debate, as no social interaction follows.

Apart from that aggravating ad banner at the top, it is quite pleasant and seamless to use. It loads quickly, which for someone used to Livejournal's endless lagging is refreshing, but probably only points to scale of use rather than effectiveness of programming. If Yahoo 360 was struggling under DDOS attacks and 185, 493 posts a day, it might well have similar problems.

Still, not really doing anything anywhere else isn't doing. I go look for people and the discovery that the search is based on geographical area, sex and age, following which you get to browse a lot of photos, tips me off as to what this place is actually for. Oh. Oh my. Thank goodness the photo I reached for first had me looking rough, nasty and several years out of date.

Verdict: I like the frog, but will probably flee as the IM hook-up scene isn't for me.

day 10 : linked out and washed up

Today I hit the first knot. The first snag. The first site I look at and think "I can't do this". The site in question is Linkedin and it's an online CV repository. Or Business Community, as it likes to style itself. The ads are for cars, the news is in American, and two (or possibly three) years ago it was being hailed as MySpace for grownups. It look like Friends Reunited and one glance at the sign-up has me starting to sing the "lie lie lie about my identity" song.

Sod this. I need something reassuring. Something cosy. Something fluffy. I hit the Wikipedia list of notable social networking websites in search of Web 2.0 Nirvana and find Dandelife.

After I've recovered from the shock of having my eyeballs massaged by dreamy green fields and nodding Dandelion clocks, and stopped boggling at how beautiful the web can look if you don't let people chose their own skins, I start poking around the rather bizarre set of functions, and rapidly discover the coolest thing ever. My personal timeline. Ah, sweet, sweet ego porn.

It has its own slang ("you have a new fan!"), a tidy feed aggregator, happy relationships with your twitters and flickrs, but none of this is as pretty or impressive as the timeline. That just rocks. And here! This is something the web can do for the world.

Think of a future with no bookshop units stuffed with thick shiny books covered with words like "uplifting" and "inspiring", jacketed with faces of ordinary people with awkward smiles whose stories you may wish to dip into, but don't want to buy and keep. Think of the trees. Think of the Oxfam Bookshop, bursting at the seams with unwanted publishers' makeweight.

And if you're thinking of writing the story of your life, do it somewhere searchable, rateable and easy on the eye. Don't do vanity press, do Dandelife.

43 things + del.icio.us and tumblr up a tree, K.I.S.S.I.N.G

I get in and my gmail is howling under a medium-sized burden of Facebook messages. Invites to gigs, a virtual gin and tonic and ... blimey. An announcement that my cousin has gotten married. On their 10th anniversary! Awwww. I've not heard from her in years.

Still, it's all more stuff for the bloody to-do list. In my case: 43 things, which of course comes bundled with allconsuming and oh a few other things probably but to be honest I initially started using it to track consumption over a christmas, and I wasn't exactly expecting to use the to-do list but actually I have and I get a little warm feeling every time someone cheers me on. Or whenever I give a cheer. I have to say, though, that I have not met a single person through it, nor do I use it religiously, nor do I use it for everything. I have a sneaking suspicion that I see it as a sort of well-meaning but somewhat naggy aunt, who always wants to know how I'm getting on with things and is full of woolly and rather random advice. It's also a place for full-blown whininess and things that are just too boring for words, which I try to avoid cluttering up any actual blogs with.

The end of the day comes. I harvest the best of my del.icio.us links and toss them into the Tumblr. Ooh, that was slick. Ooh mama. But will I still be doing it next week, Friday, tomorrow?

Day 8: everything's bebolicious

My next "work contact" site is a place called Bebo. Mostly I hear about it from parents: my kid's on Bebo, is this good? Frankly, I have no idea, but heck, it's the work of the moment to discover that they request (optionally, but I'm kind of appalled that even the boxes are there) far too much personal information, claim to be aimed at the 13+ market but have a cloyingly tween feel -- stickers, treats and trainerish "skins" abound, there are lots of funky web badges and skins, and the bands that hang out there remind me of dim memories of Smash Hits and Just Seventeen. Also the advertising. Intrusive. Unpleasant. Ever-present. It feels ... like a magazine.

All this is instantly forgotten though, as I discover that Bebo has an integral Whiteboard. Instantly my fascination with crude drawing tools takes over. It's nothing special but damn it's cool to be able to doodle on your home page. Too bad that those friends of mine who are on Bebo already aren't using it any more -- especially as they're cartoonists.

From the schoolyard to the geekfile I go to sort out having a del.icio.us account already. Astounded I don't have one already? Consider the following statements:

• I'm in no danger of running out of cool things
• I can use a combination of google and site searches to find things again if I need to
• I don't know in the present what I will value in the future

It's smooth slick, easy and tidy, slithers through my work firewall with cheerful disdain and intalls itself into my life 2.0 with nary a flicker ... but there's no social aspect at all.

I do a few half-hearted seaches, but it's frankly no more fun than using google, and I'm not going to play guess the user name to look to see what my friends think are cool as I've posted four awesome things to the Tumblr already today.

Also I find myself reaching for it over a site I've found for work reasons and stop, wondering. Will I use it for work? Should I? It feels like a work tool, in the same way as some of google's online tools do; not part of the social web, but part of nomadic OS. Portable favourites.

And about that fun.

Verdict: I'm off to watch a gig instead.

Day 7 : in which I finally hit the hotel

Hello Habbo. Monday morning first thing I blearily stumble into the hotel, having downloaded Shockwave and balanced a suitable laptop on top of a pile of pants.

I go into the Lobby first. After a moment of confusion, I realise the way communication works means you have to sidle up to a stranger's sprite and then talk to them. I watch somone trying it for a bit and gather (through the crude body langauage of basic emoticon) that it didn't go well. She disappears -- teleporting into a different room -- and suddenly ALL CAPS EXHORTATIONS TO VISIT HOTGIRLZ1101 interrupt us. Ah, you can "shout" and all the room will hear. I decide to try the cafe.

In the cafe, Billy stands out through his ability to speak in full words. I go over for a chat. Speak up, he says. I try again. Speak English, he says. This continues for a bit, until I realise that the counter between us must be borking my communication somehow. I sulk at a table for a bit, with Billy's pitiful requests for conversation pooling around me. Staff, probably. I decide to try a publicly-available, privately-built room.

It's pretty bare inside. Furniture costs, decor costs -- even interesting clothes cost, little micro-payments that are dribbled out through your mobile phone (if you opt for the premium service, which I haven't). There are a bunch of people talking, one of whom impatiently greets me and tells me to come in. The conversation is about whethr blondz are skankz or hos, or f wr all bein totly nfair to blond chix who rnt tht bd srly xcpt Linda hahahah soz no lol

I make it through a few lines of this before my coffee starts curdling and I'm compelled to find the Habbo cityport and see if I can throw myself off a cliff (I can't). Then I check out the FRANK drugs bus (closed), the Childline Zen Garden (empty except for a staff-member on a walk cycle and a single Habbo stood silent and abandoned by the doorway) and am considering looking for the Adviceberg (where I can find the people from Sexwise) when I find myself absentmindedly wandering around at the top of a towerblock, trying to get into an abandoned lift shaft. Fortunately, right at that moment, I get a crash.

You left the hotel! admonishes a small, mustachioed concierge, How could you!

I decide the Adviceberg can wait for another day, and (lacking the time to Flickr), opt for Facebook. My brief visit reveals that there are at least four separate Facebook communities dedicated to bringing back the Budweiser frogs ... but also one called Communist Frogs Will One Day Conquer The World, for those who acknowledge and accept the existence of our commie-frog overlords. So it's not as All Gone Wrong as I feared.

Verdict: For the gameboy generation, which is not me.

And on Sunday, I rested

Fate of the Hutch 2
Originally uploaded by Damian Cugley.

Actually, that's a lie. I spent an active day in the garden, putting up a fences, turning compost into a new bin adapted from an old rabbit hutch, clearing an old dead bed out from behind the shed, attaching trellises, planting a rose (golden showers) weeding and mulching and all the things you kind of need to do after three solid weeks rain and a bit of a back fence SNAFU.

Don't just take my word for it, though; you can follow the whole thing on Flickr, as recorded by my housemate Damian, who often makes me feel like the subject of a documentary.

My Flickr Stream is a visual diary, and a place where I can find lovely eye-candy. And, of course there are people I only know through it and several friends who I keep up with exclusively through there -- the visual types, who like to chat while looking at pretty pictures.

Verdict: The place where you are subject, critic and author.

Day 5 : Did you notice the Livejournal?

Day five; the end of the first working week of the Dia Del Maestro Network Sites fortnight. It's only fair to introduce the yardstick. The measuring post. The big weird uncle of social networking sites whose unlikely bosom I have been nestling in for the last ummumble years.

Livejournal. The very name makes grown programmers cry and parents of teenage goths everywhere sigh theatrically and then admit that they have one, too -- and one for the cat. When I first joined it, it was by invitation. It took me a day to see the obvious application, pass all of my friends invites and tell them that we had a new socialisation tool, and that they would need it for organising parties.

So, today I am going to party, which I found out about through Livejournal (although there was a back-up email), organised by someone I met through Livejournal, where I'll see some people who I know will be there because they said so, on their livejournals. We arranged lifts by mobile -- slack, but we did leave it a bit late.

This is only possible because of Livejournal's excellent privacy tools, which allow you to finely grade friends according to physical location, emotional closeness, in fact any damn reason you please (I have a friends filter called KillBoingBoing which removes everything (and everyone) I read 'for interest").

Of course, I use it for far more than that. I use their friends page as my primary feed aggregator, the scrapbook for sharing photos with friends, and keep up with distant friends and collaborators through their livejournak. It can do all these things, and even better than that ...

If you use Livejournal, you never run out of things to complain about -- and it's never your job to fix them*.

Verdict: Central to my Life 2.0.

*Yes, you can make it your problem if you want. The LJ volunteer community is waiting with open arms!

Day 4: there's another Jeremy Dennis, on Jaiku

I'm having a busy day, so obviously I stop and do an ego search. Particularly now ex.plode.us has reanimated that concept in my Brain 2.0 ...and I pick up the scent of another one. He's on Jaiku.

Jaiku???

A quick search finds me a lot of ding-dongs in techie blogger which roughly read like this:

I heard your blog-gang are junking their Twitters and getting Jaikus. Flame and
Fume! Some blather about Ruby on Rails. How dare you? I'm still using
Twitter! I'm not! Jaiku is loadz better! I heard your blog-gang are junking
their Jaikus and going back to their Twitters! LOL!

OK, I'm being harsh. But I swear, some commenters really read like they miss the way flame wars used to be, you know? So I join Jaiku and run a quick people search to check out the competition. He is:

• Playing Starcraft 2
• Watching The Office Season 3
• Watching DL.TV from [his] ipod onto a digital projector

... and his mates are all feeds from Twitter. Some of them are web celebrities -- look, there's Scott Kurtz. Ah (penny drops). You can use the people search on Jaiku to find people's Twitters, blogs, etc.

Other than that, if you're like Jeremy, Jaiku may well be for you. It has "channels" covering a bunch of standard interests, and nothing about the name suggests that you might be a wittering twit (which is sort of implicit in Twitter's nomenclature). On the whole, it seems like an altogether more serious place. Which is kind of its downfall ...

The first time I decided to try the posting by sms thing (October 2004, using an LJ utility) I knew it was a fairly bonkers idea, that was likely to confuse and mystify. Twitter embraces the absurdity; Jaiku is SRS website for SRS people.

And, given that I'm pretty secure in my identity as a wittering twit, and my excessive social connectivity leaves little time for stalking, I'll probably be sticking with Twitter.

Verdict: OK BYE!

Day three: I [fail to] enter the Hotel and Explode

You might be thinking to yourself, what is this person doing with her life?

You might be thinking to yourself, clearly this is a no-job, no-hope, no-life wastrel!

Wrong, my friend, wrong. Meet the news:

Over the next three months, in Habbo Hotel, trained advisors from [x] will be hosting regular [x] advice sessions to provide you with confidential information on [x]. Habbo is an interactive online community aimed at children between the ages of 14 - 18.

Not that I work for [x], oh dear me, no. In fact the [x] is merely representative. There are lots of organisations offering Information, Advice and Guidance within Habbo. Just ask Mr BBC. But is this the future of information provision to (young) people or is it just handing more wealth to the information haves while missing the information have-nots?

And, most importantly, do people trust information told by them by a shock-haired sprite with a 2 1/2 dimensional friendly smile?

These, unfortunately, are questions that'll have to wait for later, as I can register, but not access the Shockwave-powered hotel through my company firewall. I'll give it another go this evening.

But in the meantime, I spot a thing called Explode which looks like it'll be almost as fast and easy as Tumblr was -- and I'm not just saying that because it's a friend's latest start-up. That's "Friend" in the Livejournal sense, although I think I have on one occasion been in the same pub as the person in question. Wouldn't really be able to pick him out of a crowd of young entrepreneurs, mind.

So: ex.plode.us. A social search that whiffles through a bunch of social sites pulling out interests and people. Doesn't need a new sign-up, it'll use one of several other sites (and yes, that's where the information's coming from, too).

I get annoyed by a monkey and find a lot of people I know already. And go home and forget all about logging onto Habbo hotel after getting excited by planting mixed alyssum and cooking a tasty fish stew. Sometimes Life 2.0 just can't compete.

Day 2 : I has a tumblr

Initially I was tempted to write this entire post in LOLspeak. But while buying an exciting new book today, I found "evil cat stickers" for sale in Borders, so that fad is over. I suppose I joined lol_bees and created evol_wasps just too late, hm?

So yes, today I create a Tumblr, presumably meant to be the companion piece to your Twitter and your Flickr. It's essentially a hacked-off blogspot with almost no options. None of this hassling you to upgrade templates (yes, alright, I'll get round to it), in fact, nothing of anything much except a slickity-slick design and a super-fast interface.

You also (and forgive me for being picky here, but) can't find other Tmblrs without logging out and going looking for them from the Tumblr home page. At which point you can't add them as friends because you're not logged in! Guess that makes it -- like a blog -- something more orientated towards production than consumption. Ah! No, I seem to have cracked that. Probably something to do with not running the latest version of windows explorertm or a glitch of a similar value.

Well, I've added one random stranger, but it's still not the easiest place to find people. Apart from the anything else, just as in real life, the ability to add friends seems to come and go at random. I'm sure there's a lesson there for us all.

Ooops. Just Tumbled again. With a LOL_owl, no less. (This one). Have to admit, it is kind of addictive.

Dia del Maestro Network sites fortnight

Tuesday this week was Dia del Maestro, the day of the year when a bunch of countries that care (not the UK then) celebrate their teachers and give them gifts. It also happened to be the day that Facebook started bothering me about a Barbecue I may or may not be going to in July. No, June. I'm pretty sure it's June.

Anyway, after the fourth email, I thought right, I'll look at your damn events page then.

At this point, anyone who uses Facebook will be pointing at me and laughing. Seeing events on Facebook without being a member? Oooh, Grandma, can I help you to your virtual zimmer frame?

Given that I've not had a college email address since 1993 (yes, Virginia, there was an internet in 1993, it was just mostly full of muck, mud and furries) no, I'm not on Facebook, the online community where less nimble students and employees discover to their astonishment that their tutors and bosses are in fact quite likely to be in the same "networks" as them.

We-ell, I wasn't. I am now. Isn't it nifty? I can now spot out teenagers going to the same gigs as me. Join a Flashmob. Upload photos nobody else can see. Tell the world about my "status".

Hold your breath, world: Jeremy Dennis wearing a new dinosaur t-shirt.

Not that any of this matters, as actually the only reason to have a Facebook is if people you know have one and use it. To which the answer is probably yes (it certainly was for me). Other than that, the features work, the ads are unobtrusive and the design won't actually make your eyeballs run away bleeding.

So Facebook = a win. Best feature -- its killer feature, in fact -- is unquestionably the way it takes a quick anonymised shuffle through your webmail address books to see if your mates are already at the party. Will use in future? Possibly.

I'm probably not going to be organising my Barbecues on it any time soon, though...

you can't save them all

So there I am, stuck for two-three-four weeks (I forget) without a camera, and because I can't just reach for the camera I find myself looking at things harder. You'll have to look now, the thought goes, you won't be able to look later. Which brings me to the idea that perhaps the camera I keep in a pocket is a way of speeding up my movement through the day; looks nice? Oh, snap it, check it out later. Interesting toy/gizmo/garment? Take a photo, you can make up your mind later and in meantime, you've fixed it harder in your memory -- both actual and auxilary.

With that in mind, I buy a Fuji disposable (with flash), pull one of my Ilford disposables out of the photoshelf and make a mental note to buy a Tesco's Value Camera the next time I'm in Tescos (and forget, of course, what with my memory being impaired). At one time I used nothing but disposables, and after experimentation, decided those three were the best. The Fuji's surprisingly faithful, with excellent colour reproduction. The Ilford is the superior fixed-focus black-and-white option, good for both bright exteriors and indoor portraits. Tesco's Value Camera produces colours so vivid they almost look cross-processed, with a lens so cheap it smears a variable distortion over a good quarter of the image. The toy camera fan's choice.

But disposables don't work for me any more.

I'm too used to looking at things close-up, in the dark, across the road and underneath stuff. I've grown accustomed to gilding my shots with little snippets of ambient sound. And naturally when I get them processed I want CDs, to avoid the faff of scanning, and that's expensive. I'm spending twice as much on the processing as I do on the cameras, and even though I'm processing at Boots, where extra expenditure means free shampoo, it's not consistent with my current "I must stop spending so much money" drive. I'm catching maybe a quarter of the shots I see, and the rest are blowing away, rustling down the street like prematurely withered leaves. You can't save them all, but I'm sure I could manage a better percentage.

I see pictures, ocassionally take them. More often think: no, it won't translate. In the end, it's an oily skin on the brackish liquid in a soaking tea-cup that sends me to the shop, thinking: I must find something to preserve that sickly rainbow. It takes me until 6pm to find a workable camera, so in the end, I miss the rainbow.

I still haven't finished off my Ilford disposable.

a groin, a gun and a rose in the gutter

Let the sad sounds come and loss be recorded. My camera was stolen, whipped from my pocket, flat battery and sticking zoom and all, at a replacement loss of £180, of which my insurance will cover £80. Payable to my co-mortgagee, whose name is listed first on the insurance.

You think I care about that? I also lost a full memory card. Thirty-five pictures of Action Men modded into weird art-pieces for a Soho gallery fundraiser, and one of a wet rose petal in a Soho gutter.

This is what I remember off of the memory card: photos I took that will never be seen.

Shot 1: Red rose petal crumpled slightly into a rough approximation of a heart, caught in a burst of sunshine between showers, stuck to a damp pavement. Photographed looking straight down, so that the cracks between the slabs draw straight defining lines from the top of the shot to the bottom. Location: Soho square.

Shot 2: In the foreground, the black trousers of an Action Man who had been minimally modded by having a funny hat stuck on him. The hat's not visible, though: you have big boots, black trousers in that fine weave they use for doll's clothes, with a small plastic automatic pistol (also black) poked into a thigh pocket. We're too close to see his perspex case, but beyond, in perspective, about five more cases stretch back along the featureless white wall to an untidy alcove desk cluttered with postcards, fliers and books, behind which, in profile, a trendy-haired young man is sitting, staring intently at something which although hidden by the side of the alcove and angle of the shot, his posture implies is a computer.

Shot 3: Tight close-up on the unclothed groin of another of the modded Action Men, the viewfinder held steady against the perspex case fox maximum stillness and closeness. This one has had stylish little cartoons, jaggedy-headed and a bit wild-looking, drawn all over it (except the head) in what looks like red and black permanent marker. It's kind of reminiscent of a Haring performance piece, which is half the reason why I concentrate on the groin; the other half is that I want to capture the elaborate ball joints of the hips in all their unnecessary sophistication.

... and at this point I become aware that I've missed a shot, maybe two. The next one I remember is one where I had difficulty persuading the autofocus not to blur the wrong bit of a dramatic perspective shot. Then the one where I had problems getting just the right angle on the Action Man who'd been laid out in a miltary coffin. I'm skipping the easy shots, only remembering the ones that fought back. I remember that I took a lot of close detail shots of clothes, hair, painting and accessories, but the content drifts when I try to think what. I find myself instead constructing the lost shot by remembering the doll as a whole and then trying to guess what I would have photographed, given the camera and my interests, and the fact that I was in a bit of a hurry.

I edit on the fly, discarding the out-of-focus and uninteresting using the postage-stamp-sized preview window, so most shots I saw two or three times. There were some that really worked for me; a close up of the elaborately-stitched belting on a graffiti superhero mod, another of a plastic guitar streaked with the dolls long hair. Things like that mostly; accessories isolated and made huge, pulled up out of doll-scale by the application of close attention.

I'd nearly filled the memory card when the battery gave up, meaning that the full memory card went with my camera. Leaving me with not with digital images or physical prints, but the absence of photos, not-photos, little dotted lines around the empty space where the photos should be. The memory's attempts to see again that rectangular slice of space/time. A return from evidence to the first-hand account with all the dislocating innacuracies and disturbances to continuity that invariably brings. Am I rememberering the actual photos, or just filling in with a likely "memory", given knowledge of my taste, interests and eye?

On the other hand, this theft dropped my pictures out of the collection action (this image is mine!) and into somewhere not so far from the action of photos you see in an exhibition, or a library book, or on a friend's wall, where the typical viewing experience is the act of seeing, a time (of variable length) of consideration, followed by (hopefully) a lingering memory, fading over time. You don't expect to remember everything from a gallery visit; but you'd expect the odd stand-out image to remain, even to recur, days, maybe even years later.

It's tempting to think that their loss performed an acceleration on the erosive action of memory, dumping the generic and uninteresting, leaving only the most stand-out still visible to the inner eye. But I suspect that the mental attempt both to reconstruct what I took and to minimise the importance of their loss has resulted in a sort of mental overexposure, which both fades the deficiencies of the shots and intensifies their satisfying thisness. They've become the ones that got away, idolized and overemphasised by the poingnacy of loss. They stand a good chance of becoming the photos I'll never forget.

Consider the example of an old television advert, that most disposable of artpieces, which I found by accident one day looking for some blank space on a VHS tape to record some cartoon over. "That's fantastic," I thought, "I'll have to make sure I don't tape over that." And of course I did, mere moments later. As a result, it's branded on my mind.

The screen is blank orange, and you can hear morning sounds; cars in the street, birds. A woman starts speaking, and she starts talking and it catches you by surprise at first because there's no picture, just that orange colour, and by the time you tune in, she's saying:

and I can hear him moving around downstairs
and I'm painting my toenails
bright orange
he's already leaving
he's gone

It was for cosmetics. Boots No7, to be precise.

photograph as pause point

There's so much going on at the moment, I don't know that I can stop. It's all run, run, run, along to-do and to-be lists that aren't easily escapable. And while I know I ought to be sorting out this or changing that, realistically this is not going to be a good time, no matter how well I organise it. It's not going to be controllable; but there's still the desire for the semblance of control.

Into the pell-mell dash, then, come the desperate need to stop and think; but not too deeply, because at such times we are flirting with depression and withdrawal and all those other things jobs and responsibilities and the need to eat lunch will not allow for. Actions which force slowing down and consideration, but which also speak of control, appreciation and organisation. Spotting something precious or wonderful or unusual; that's positive, yet disconnected. The act of composition, framing, that takes a moment, and a certain distance. Ideally, you find a subject which needs repeated attention, like this meadow, where you can enter an intense meditation on the physical appearance of the world, excerpted from time and necessity. Freed from the to-do list. Into the ungovernable moment you can insert, like a spacer card, a frozen image of beauty, peace, pleasure.

As times darken, and become more difficult, and complicated, and the urgency of the to-do-list comes knocking and will not be silenced, there is a faster more intence space where photographs take place, where the camera is not so much meditation, but mediation, between the photographer and agonising experience. The sad inevitability of being unable to save a baby bird, a long but necessary walk to pointlessness and heartbreak, the marathon emotional churn of funerals and other sad social occasions, the camera can set them back to arms length, allow focus on chosen details, return a semblance of control to a situation you would not have chosen. It can even be redeeming, snatching beauty from the darkness or finding company and interest in a lonely and despairing space. It puts purpose back into the moment; at its best, the photograph rebadges a bitter or painful experience as a positive, creative one. One marked, and conquered.

At the funeral, there was a big pond full of huge goldfish, and after the service, out came the cameras, photographing lillies, wavering feet over the water, half-familiar people scattered in semi-random groupings. The cameras provided distance, context, and a purposeful excuse to hang around. To be there. To belong, and to have a job; but also to observe and be an outsider.

To own experience, and not to be defeated by it.

I decided to build a wicker man on Flickr

In which my titling habits produce an odd call-and-response feel to my 2004 solstice celebrations, when I report them a year later. Click on "next" for six photographs to read the full story.

terrible things with pictures

Given that my face is public property I often forget that other people don't like seeing their face staring back at them from the internet. Which is a bit of a shame, given just how you'll always find me with a camera at parties.

Usually, I feel quite confident about judging what the good pictures are, and what sort of level of privacy they need. The lovelies go to Flickr, for publicacious ultra-exposure to adoring masses of tag-surfers. Except for the ones featuring children/houses/other personal items, naturally, which are screened discreetly behind privacy features. When I'm just out to let someone who is inconveniently not in the same city leaf through a set of photos or pictures, Livejournal's scrapbook, for all its, uh, scrappiness, does the job rather well. The privacy features over there can lock a gallery tight to one other person, if you feel so inclined. And plenty never make it off the hard drive/photo shelf, because I just don't think that they look good, and by that I mean the photo, not the individual in it.

Whomsoever I photographed (on my own time!) I photographed because I thought they looked good.

Consider this one: I love the balance between the eau de nil tights, and the lavender wool, and that tiny glimpse of the pink pink shoes. What I forget is that the subject might object to having her head cut off, might feel (against all evidence!) that her knees look odd, or that she just doesn't like being photographed.

Perhaps there's a sense that I've excerpted the photo from the individual, that it represents something removed from their identity.

Although it has to be said that every photograph of myself I find on flickr, whether recognisable or not, whether by me or not, I obsessively tag jeremy dennis.

freedom of digression

Communications, delivery of information. Which bits of information I go looking for, and why. And why, so often, I end up looking for what I want on google images.

the desire to wander

There are things I need to know this march: where high heeled wellies come from, what to do with a solitary bee that's come out of hibernation too early, and the relationship between stroke and migraine. But I don't need this knowledge for my day-to-day existence. I can be briefly amused by the high-heeled wellies, forget about the bee, and believe my doctor when he says the migraines don't and won't increase the stroke risk. But I'm not after the information I need for survival. I've looked for that online, of course -- my job involves providing that sort of how-to-get-a-job, how-to-spot-a-villainous-landlord, how-to-convince-someone-you-need-medical-attention information, and plenty of people provide it (and use it) online, but this is never going to be the bulk of someone's internet use if they're a regular user. They, like me, will be after the information that enriches life, that surrounds the bare facts with details, reports, pictures and personal histories. For this, the internet, with its scattering of (on the one side) incomplete, misleading and badly-spelled blogrumours, message board and opinion pieces, and on the other intimidatingly technical papers escaped from extranets and subscriber services is the ultimate reward for the enthusiastic amateur, people into informal learning techniques and self-motivated research. Ironically, this sort of information fiddler, the person who goes gathering odd news stories, strange histories and interesting facts, will also be the person best able to track down the information they really need, when they need it. They have the skills, the Google Fu.

But one of the central problems with my job is that I'm often not dealing with the expert users. I'm looking at first-timers, people with limited access and little time, inexperienced, and at sea in the online information swamp.

freedom to wander

The trouble is that attempts to organise information often seem only to obscure it. Put things into categories, and people get lost between whether an STI is a health problem, or a relationship problem. Any attempt to be comprehensive leaves you with more data than can be feasibly grasped. Go for the Q&A approach, and it's all to easy to frustrate people by losing them down blind alleys. It's also too slow; even the least experienced user is accustomed to google's expertise at delivering you exactly what you want on the first search. But, on one site, a full text search only works if you're smart with the words you use; that too, is another technique you have to learn, before you can stop getting far too many results, or the wrong results. So getting the user to the information they want is a headache, and in the youth information area the result has been a plethora of bizarre interfaces, all aimed at gently herding the user to the information, while keeping them entertained on the way.

But, herding the user is actually entirely counter to how the web works. We're talking self-motivated research here, we're talking user-lead navigation. Or at least, we should be. The user needs to be in control, especially in difficult areas where they is a lot of alarmist disinformation. Otherwise, they're pretty much justified in going off and looking somewhere else; asking their mates, perhaps. Maybe someone with mad google skillz who can dodge the bullshit and hit the paydirt.

optimised to wander

This isn't great, though. It doesn't encourage independence, increased confidence, better life-skills and all of those other intangibles but usefuls that help round out an individual into someone mature, autonomous, balanced. We don't want grabbing knowledge off the web to be the province of a few geeks and willows who are lauded when useful and despised for their knowledge at other times. Being able to find information online should be a general life-skill.

But all this herding and ringfencing and directing of inexpert users is not encouraging them to use the internet. They may get familiar with a few sites and some sites trade on this, keeping users inside their "online experience". But this is the province of people marketing a product, and information is not a product, no matter how tempting it is to market it.

The really good web architectures should reinforce the strengths of the medium by enabling a more efficient method of wandering; a more scenic route with more pretty pictures, colourful facts, mysterious-looking sidetracks and hopeful-looking vistas. They should tempt the users into exploring the potential of the medium; more pied piper than sheep-dog.

So good old google, while is gives much the expected results on the basic search, quickly drifts into the weird and wonderful with the images, and provides breadth and currency with the news search. The visual cues help organise thoughts and spot sites which duplicate content; broadening, rather than narrowing the approach to information.

foregrounding the errors

One of Flickr's games is called favourites -- you put pink stars on the photos you like the best, and they get made into a slideshow of everything you like. I expected this to produce a lot of very good photos, but actually ... no. I'd picked things that were low resolution, out of focus, over-exposed, greyed out ... and, now I come to think about it, I post imperfects myself.

So, in something as undirected as viewing a photograph, the theory is that imperfections can mediate (direct, control, persuade) the experience of the viewer. Whether it is an attractive in-point, like bad teeth in a beautiful face, or alienating, like an accident in the depth of field, yanking the viewer back to the artificiality of their experience, they represent the moment that the author visibly contacts you:

"I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are the only markers left by a solitary life" (Danielewski, House of Leaves)

At which point he uses some written errors of his own to draw attention to the fact that what is presented as biographical criticism is in fact a fiction written by him, the author, like Sebald with his deliberate "mistakes" -- "important writerly adjustments to the historical truth" (Guardian obit) making sure you see the artificiality of the performance. Which brings up the problem with this. Go and talk to the photographer (if you can) and chances are they meant something entirely different; the thing you see in the style, the slips and errors isn't the photographer but your impression of them. And anyway, when I'm wandering through pictures of ducks or amsterdam on Flickr I'm not trying to find out things about the photographer (nor ducks or Amsterdam, for that matter) .

But even if they're not a directing force, or even biographical scarpas, mistakes are evidence of the author's hand, and as such, comforting -- a reminder that we are not alone with the subject, but listening to a story told by another person. So maybe pursuing the mismatched subject or uneven composition is actually a way of gaining an illicit social contact with the person who took the shot. Illicit because the other can't control the contact as they are unaware of it happening. Then maybe my attachment to shots like this and this and this come about not because I'm gravitating towards some artistic ideal but instead because I crave social contact -- albeit a contact so light the other person need know nothing about it. Looking for that "you, you, you" to compliment the "I, I, I" of blogging.

Which is all well and good, but then, why do I post my own mistakes? Is it just a question of passing out copies of the things you like in the hopes of being given more of the same? Here's Murakami on the uncertainty of autobiography:

"I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere deep inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning to mud?" (Norweigan Wood -- not an autobiography, but autobiographical)

In the time-displaced tangle of blogging, it's hard to know what is important, what you'll want to remember. Hard to avoid the anxiety that if you only select what you think is best or finest you'll end up like Krapp*, fast-forwarding through your great works in a frustrated frenzy, obsessively going over and over the scraps you can find of the person that used to be you.

And perhaps also that only selecting the best creates a wrong impression; better content, perhaps. But not really you.

*Samuel Beckett, Krapp's last tape.