Brian Kerr

Thus spake Ze (transcript):

Busting your cycle is where you take one aspect of your life that’s more or less constant and you purposely bust it. By temporarily breaking a routine, you can often experience the world in a very different way. If you bust the right cycle, this shift in perspective can often lead to elation and a sense of possibility.

Ze Frank busted some cycles: by going to the dentist (cycle: not having people fuck with his mouth); by going for walks at 5 AM (cycle: worrying about sleep), by applying peanut butter and jelly directly onto his face (cycle: sandwich-making).

I’ve busted a couple of cycles lately. I read science fiction, Sam Delaney Nova, Babel-17, Einstein Intersection, instead of your meathook information science. Pacific Standard Time instead of Eastern. Walked instead of bussed. Braindumped into index card instead of Hiveminder. Multnomah instead of Washtenaw. Rain instead of snow. No frost but up on the mountains.

And next —

(tags: self)

Just the facts:

1. ArborWiki
2. needs a better name, so please
3. suggest a better name.

(tags: annarbor wiki)

Via e-mail:

CRITICAL MOMENT is facing a financial crisis and asks you for your support!

Dear supporter of independent media,

Critical Moment needs your help. We need to raise $1000 in the next two weeks or we may not be able to print our 20th issue, due out the first week of January 2007. We have excellent articles on the fallout of Prop 2, radical Women of Color blogging, the Detroit Worker’s Center and much more.

Critical Moment recently had some advertisers pull out, and their online shop — which had been fulfilled by infoSHOPdirect — is collateral damage in the closure of Clamor Magazine.

If you haven’t been reading Critical Moment, check out the 19 back issues. It’s an excellent free community resource, and I encourage you to read it and make a donation to keep it active.

(tags: annarbor detroit labor media web)

Note: SIclops is not something I worked on. I just liked what it was trying to accomplish.

A few days ago, the SIclops aggregator stopped working (it’s the famously fickle+fragile Drupal aggregator); SIclops hasn’t allowed new user registrations in months. This is student project half-life at work. I don’t have any firm evidence to go on, but I am not expecting the site to last much longer. So if you want a list of all the feeds SIclops was pulling from, now would be a good time to download the list for your own reference (and compare to the SI.opml I maintain).

(tags: umsi web weblogs)

One recent project I’ve enjoyed: working with Jacob Glenn on an information architecture analysis for Arborwiki. While I’m not really into IA, it was a fun opportunity to think through the civic wiki structures that have developed organically at ArborWiki.

Hopefully some of the general strategies and specific recommendations we listed are helpful for ArborWiki — they’ll certainly be helpful to me 2007.

There is also talk about having another ArborWiki Work Session in January or so — let me know if you’d like to hear about it, although I will make sure that any announcements get spammed to all the usual channels.

(tags: annarbor design umsi web wiki)

BookMooch is a book-lending network recommended by Ted Ernst last night. Standard model: you earn points by sharing your books, and spend them by requesting books from others. Books are lent by mail, although Ted had an amusing story about an attempt to hand off a locally-lent book in person.

Mark Dilley wanted to see BookMooch integrated with Bookshelved wiki. I’d prefer an integration that made it easy to take a personal library or tagset from LibraryThing and post it for lending at BookMooch.

Update 2006 12 10: In a comment, John of BookMooch points out that LibraryThing integration already exists. Thanks!

(tags: books collective web)

Wordie is ‘like Flickr, but without the photos’ — a place to show off your wordhoard. Here’s my Wordie list. Ed is keeping a Wordie list for the National Library Agenda Summit. Wordie is also the place to go for 10¢ Words found in Epistemology Essays, Fictional beasties, or science fiction + junk lit neologism heaps.

(tags: media narratives web weblogs)