The transliteracies-project, led by Alan Liu: http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu/category/research-project/. Don’t think I linked it before, from here.

Just a quick ‘reminder’: the web has been around for 15 years now… since August 6th 1991.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5243862.stm.

And in a sense it is still so crude… Things that people 15 years ago thought would be easy to do in 15 years time, is still impossible or difficult. We have MySpace where we’d hoped (well I certainly did) to have good and usable authoring tools to deal with the richness of texts, images, music on the web. But what do we do, we copy them and throw them into separate folders into folders.

Look at Sophie, a software project of the Institute for Future of the Book to understand what I’m getting at: http://www.futureofthebook.org/sophie/SophieIntro.pdf. I’m afraid I have to say that I don’t think Sophie will succeed (I mean: become successful = widely used), but the complaints voiced in it are spot on.

(I try to use VoodooPad, I tried DevonThink, I am blogging, but still everything is a mess until I write / have to write a text for a magazine, or do a presentation or lecture). (Hence my interest in Knowledge Management ;-)

(Browsed around a bit on MySpace; it is easy to understand why it’s so successful: it’s all about identity-construction, music plays an important role in that for teenagers, apart from the ‘profile’, the ‘friends’-thing, there’s the possibility to have music playing &c. &c. But I find it equally easy to imagine that in 2 years time MySpace will be abandoned, when a new gulf of teenagers starts to use some other service. It will survive, of course, just like so many other profile-sites for chatting & dating survive. (I might be wrong — I’m mostly wrong when I predict something). But it won’t be deemed as important as it is now. I don’t think people generally feel a commitment to a service like this).

Exciting news (well, for me): I’m on the program of the McLuhan-conference that takes place next year in Bayreuth, 14-18 February. I will be speaking about Esther Polak’s work, about GPS as a medium for art. The ‘line-up’ is awesome: De Kerckhove, Kittler, Pias, Zielinski, Broeckmann, Sloterdijk, Bolter, et cetera… Will be, well, very exciting to say the least.

http://www.americanstudies.uni-bayreuth.de/ls/conference_more.php?nr=1&program=1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book, about the book (with this title) by Mortimer Adler.

“The idea of communication directly from those who first discovered an idea as the best way of gaining understanding is the basis for Adler’s argument in favor of the reading of the Great Books. He claims that any book that does not represent original communication is an inferior source to the original, and, further, that any teacher, save those who discovered the thing which they are teaching, is inferior to these books as a source of understanding.”

Well, one has to be very conservative-minded to truly believe this. (Yet, in reading philosophy I do prefer to go back to the source.) It is hard to combine with ‘reading & writing on the web’ — though the web makes checking sources easier. But that’s slightly different.

Btw 1: Adler distinguishes 3 types (stages) of reading a book: structural, interpretative, critical.

Btw 2: More stuff from the business/communication perspective — definitely not my world –. A look at the book titles sez all… Annotation to books by Matt Vance on Minezone: http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/BookNotes.

I’m beginning to wonder why I’m looking at these things…. I’m just going through a lot of tabs that I opened while browsing & reading about blogging, tagging, reading & knowledge…

Found this great post: http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-to-read-lot-of-books-in-short-time.html. Title says it all.

It’s a summary of various methods from knowledge management, tips & tricks regarding how to process information quickly (well, how to parse it through the brain and only act on the important bits).

It sure isn’t novel-reading, it assumes text is just applicable information. One could ask the question if these methods, gathered by Matt Cornell, should properly be called ‘reading’ at all.

I use texts like this:
1. look at index, glossary, contents
2. quick look at a few passages, read conclusion
3. go read the book or part of the book, [or put away]; tag sentences with post-its
4. type (or copy-paste) (selection of) tagged sentences in blogpost, voodoopad or texteditor, for future use.

Does it work? I don’t know. What really counts is what I remember. And that process isn’t so one-dimensional. But I am happy with post-it-tagged books, and I can find quotes quicker now, and sometimes I remember texts better than I used to.

Btw: the methods mentioned by Matt Cornell also explain why I find it impossible to ‘properly’ read business books: too many superfluous sentences, too many skippable examples, everything get repeated. Those books are written for speed-reading.

Back in 1986 Michael Heim wrote in his book Electric Language: “A month in hyper-space can scatter the brain. Traditional books offer readers respite from hyperactivity. The book’s definitive, closed, linear argument lets mind and sensibility enjoy moments of inner harmony. Linear text offers the kind of contemplative thinking that goes beneath the surface” (xvi). Read “web” or ‘internet” or “blogosphere” for “hyperspace”. I’d say this is still true. But how much of this respite/contemplation do we need it to keep the world (and culture) running?

(Copy-pasted the quote from Dennis Jerz’s http://jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/blogtalk/index.html).

Now browsing through Blogtalk-papers: http://blogtalk.net. (I’m not there, don’t ask why, earlier this year I thought about maybe going, then apparently decided not to, since I’m here, not there).

The blogtalk-presentations (happening now) are all online at Googlevideo: click from the program: http://blogtalk.net/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Program

Some links — very different btw — with somewhat web 2.0 related stuff:
http://sioc-project.org/
http://www.peopleaggregator.net/
http://structuredblogging.org/
http://www.newsvine.com/
http://www.blogdigger.com
http://itags.net/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.ourmedia.org/
http://www.digg.com/
http://www.techmeme.com/
http://wink.com/

And a very interesting small study of tagging here: http://itags.net/index.php/Study_of_tagging_with_bloggers”

Picked up the current issue of thee Irish magazine on contemporary arts Circa (Online stuff here: http://www.recirca.com. And come across a very interesting interview with of San Diego-based art historian Grant Kester — had never heard of him. His work deals mainly with collaboration in the arts. It seems he has a much more interesting view on the state of contemporary art than Jacques Ranciere — or no, more precise, might have an answer to some problematic point in Ranciere’s theories. Good links from his university homepage: http://digitalarts.ucsd.edu/~gkester/.

I’ve been spending (losing?) time the last three days by looking at various projects that one could call ‘web 2.0’, or, more precise (?) websites & softwares that try to use (cash in?) on the power of social networking. Mostly it’s applications that provide users with some sort of wiki- blogging, FOAF-networking, and/or tagging functionality — a particular blend (melange) of it, plus a nice (?) interface designed to appeal to a certain userbase. Or hoping to find a user-base. Some of them, I’d say, are nice & will succeed to find that user-base, others come across to me as a commercial wager that can either succeed (like MySpace) or be forgotten. Some are closer to the idea of the Semantic Web, others hope that order (or usability) will emerge from the ‘multitude’.

On a personal level — speaking about this particular user: me — I haven’t seen a project that I would use regularly myself. I might sometimes use delicious, upload photos to Flickr and I have an account on Technorati (that I do not use) — but all three services are in no way necessary. I could do without. This probably posits myself as an old-skool internet-user, generation 1994. If I need wiki-functionality, I’ll use a wiki myself. (Btw my provider has set one up for every user). I can publish using ftp, html &c. Of course I enjoy the functionalities that are available now. Yet most on them strike me as ‘not designed for me’.

It’s not that I am content with whatever there is: I would really like to see a better (= more aesthetically appealing) interface for reading RSS-feeds. A better way of organizing the feeds. And I love to see better content, especially for news & background to the news.

(Not reading newspapers every day, and skipping a few days of newspaper reading last week I missed that the chess-match between Kramnik and Topalov had started! I was extremely annoyed: I like to follow that, but it’s below (or above) the radar of all the web-sources I’m bound to check. I wonder if social networking would have helped here. Chess won’t pop-up that easily in my profile.) (Just to say that — I think — there will always be a need for ‘general interest’-publications = newspapers, and for human editors next to software-channeled editors).

Software-channeled (software/computer/algorithm) newsservices like Digg and Newsvine can work. Mankind has been experimenting with these sort of concepts for ten years now (chuck a lot of stories in a database, let users vote, analyze the voting and the user-behavior & then deliver the personalized content to the user). But I’m utterly unimpressed with both Digg and Newsvine. Not enough content and no content that has my interest.

And wrt Technorati. I hardly feel tempted to explore all the different functionalities (though I’d say the search engine and the tags work quite well). I’m not interested in my ranking (don’t think I’m ranked, did I ‘claim’ my blog at all?) And what keeps me from using it, is the feeling/impression that every action I perform there is part of a huge datamining-experiment. It’s mostly a ‘feeling’ — though it is a huge datamining experiment, but Google is as well & I use Google without too many second thoughts. (We’re not going to escape datamining. The question is: who is doing it, on what grounds, what is done with the data).

I’m also not so much into social networking: I like to write & read. Let’s say — radically — : it’s the texts, the content, that weaves the web; not the functionalities of the software. I’m happy if I can give my attention to that.

Wrt to attention: I still have to order the (new) Richard Lanham book about the economy of attention. And it seems Roseanne Stone said some important things about this in her lecture at the crossmedia-week, referring that we live in a ‘partial attention’ state of mind. That’s not multitasking anymore: we’re continuously partially paying attention to lots of things. Research learns that this leads to enormous stress. We know that, but what captured my attention is the apparent difference between multitasking and partial attention. Found on http://www.uzy.nl/2006/09/28/picnic-06-dag-2/. Will check for a more elaborate reference.

Maybe the disappointed, irritated tone of this entry is to be traced back to ‘too much browsing around’ and too little concentration.