From: npdoty@gmail.com
Date: 5/19/2009 10:17:00 PM To: Jessamyn Conell-Price Bcc: https://bcc.npdoty.name/
Want to know the next big thing? After Twitter and location-based services, it's going to be re-blogging.
Have you been reading your little sister's re-blog? Or her friends' re-blogs?
By allowing re-publishing and commenting with as little as a single click, Tumblr is letting people feel ownership from what is largely curation. I do it a little with delicious and Google Reader, but these girls are doing it voraciously with re-blogging of photos and quotes.
And why not? Although I think technically this is done pretty poorly (copies of things leads to all sorts of problems and I already have a lot of issues with Lynn's friends and trying to track down the original of anything, since it may be several links deep), but the basic idea is smart. Everyone should be out there curating the web, not just a couple of big-name bloggers like Kottke. Add your comments and then (once the technical challenges are solved) compare your comments to everyone else's. Start a conversation on top of the web instead of in it.
Paragraph fingerprinting (CMU) and quotation finding (Google) are some techniques to bolt this on to existing practices. That might be more pragmatic than the Xanadu-style alternative. But I think an enhanced Delicious is where it's at (URLs as actual universal resource locators) -- it's just a question of who gets there first.
Labels: curation, re-blogging
From: npdoty@gmail.com
Date: 2/23/2009 05:45:00 PM To: Sam Maurer Cc: Jessamyn Conell-Price, Nathan Doty, Seth Fitzsimmons, Ryan Greenberg, S Hein, Zeina Nasr, Timothy Paige, Steph Pakrul, Andreas Weigend Bcc: https://bcc.npdoty.name/
(Looping back in the digital exhibitionists, in case they have input here.)
Regarding exhibitionism and subjectivity: I'm not sure there's any way around the fact that I control this. Since it's on a web page that I control, I don't see how I could prove to you that it's automatic or genuine, even if it really were. Short of a government-implanted chip, I think there's no way to stop me from potentially lying to you about my location, and if it ever got to the point where I couldn't lie about it, hide my location at certain times, I'd be really unhappy.
But I think I see your point, that there is a difference in degree here. The more automatic the updates are (even if I have the power to turn them off, or distort them), the more realistic the image of myself is portrayed. The more I have to remember to update, choose to only in certain circumstances reveal my location, the more my persona is curated.
There's no choice but for my online persona to be curated, the same way that my "real life" persona is. But the more automatic and implicit I can make these updates, the more realistic (and richer) a persona I can present. That seems like a worthy goal -- I'll work on getting updates to happen more automatically, and on building the habit to press that button each time I look at my phone. And maybe I can document on my page when my location was last updated -- it's not real proof, but it would be a start.
On Feb 23, 2009, at 2:51 PM, Sam Maurer wrote:
Maybe you could make a useful distinction between active and passive engagement with the information? If I have a routine that involves potentially being in the same location as you with any regularity, then I will want pull access to the information. But if I live far away and am just casually intrigued, either because I like to know what my friends are up to (c.f. facebook news feed), or because I have a thing for geospatial information, then I will want push notification of your major location changes. I guess people who live near you could want a combination of active and passive engagement with the information, but people who live far away are more likely to just want passive engagement?
I'm a little bit worried that the updates aren't automatic, though! I think this eliminates a lot of the digital exhibitionism component, because you might start subjectively tweaking your claimed location. And there's nothing to stop someone from using this as just another aspect of a carefully curated online persona. Thoughts?
sam
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 5:10 PM, Nick Doty wrote:
I think since Fire Eagle currently doesn't give access to history I can't write code to do this (compare the current location to a past location). I'm also not sure that Fire Eagle supports notifications like that, though maybe XMPP allows for this. Seth?
But would you want to be notified every time my location changes significantly? I would think my friends would want more of a pull question than a push one: "where is Nick right now?" rather than "let me know whenever Nick moves". The latter also seems a little "creepier", though I'm not completely sure why.
On Feb 23, 2009, at 1:59 PM, Jessamyn Conell-Price wrote:
Can I be notified every time your location changes significantly*?
*standard for significant change to be determined
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 1:54 PM, Nick Doty wrote:
Labels: privacy, curation, fire eagle, exhibitionism, npdoty.name, location