in Ann Arbor, MI 48103
{ Tag archives }
Paraphrased for a new century and an old industry:
“To seek the timeless way we first must know the quality without a number. There is a central quality which is the rooted criterion of life and the spirit of man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be numbered.”
Here is a poem that you and I and whomever else wrote together by writing and reading this weblog, so why don’t you read it, out loud:
Photos of tulips in snow
by you and me and whomever elsequicksilver cube
ftff
anakin skywalker “you can try”
“paul ford” sitekit
quicksilver cube
frieze building
slicehost
slicehost
slicehost
animal crossing keep trees alive
ann arbor aerial photos
left behind at the fishbowl
brian
the possibility love is not enough
Certainly I’m being disingenuous — or at least strategic — with this poem. I made the poem from the most recent search queries that brought people to this weblog, in chronological order as reported by 103bees. But when I did this, I made some poetic decisions. For example, since my poem is a sonnet, I couldn’t include the evocative fifteenth query, which was “photos of tulips in snow.” That’s how it became the poem’s title.
Objection my poem doesn’t rhyme. So what? You wrote, or hinted at, the word lines of your poem in whatever you wrote about in the first place. And the merry brigade of googlers or jeeves-inquirers or what have you related the word lines to each other.
Objection intentionality. :P (alternate: intentionality is a cargo cult.)
Objection there is no demand for my poem. Your poem is a creative + generative activity. By imposing an order and sequence to the word lines in your poem, you can see new relationships between the things you have written about and others have searched for.
Enjoyed RecentChangesCamp 2007 even though I actually spent shockingly little time at the event both physically and mentally. Beyond the joy of catching up with everybody, I was struck by:
Every time I look at WagN it’s more awesome. Lewis and Ethan are doing some awesome stuff, and from what I saw of the next release (which is maybe a month out) it’ll soon get to the point where the user interface and interaction design monsters can come out of their caves and process it into something truly amazing.
One of the WagNeers plans to be in Ann Arbor in April, I’ll try to bring him to a2b3 or set up a fun event.
I was supposed to run a session on wiki analytics, which ended up being a few diffuse conversations. I had a dog and pony show from ArborWiki’s Google Analytics — primarily the goal and conversion issue: namely, what are the right conversions to track for a peer production or wiki flavored project. (There’s a really striking story to extrude out of the ArborWiki analytics and the conversion it’s tracking now.)
Regardless, I have a few people and projects to follow up with — and some thinking and action to begin — on this topic.
Dead tree book: The Change Handbook second ed., by Tom Devane, Steven Cady, & Peggy Holman — a giant, three pound tome of process arts methodology, of which the vast bulk is bunch of practitioners describing their methods. It’s very fun to page through. Be warned, though, that the book is extremely poorly edited, with dorky typos and usage errors throughout.
I kept a wordie list of things I overheard, which is a good executive summary of the event.
The Dumpster is a “breakup browser” — a net art presentation of weblog breakup posts. Lev Manovich calls it
a group portrait appropriate for the age of data mining, large databases, and global surveillance programs such as Echelon. The group ‘painted’ by The Dumpster … was created by the artist by searching though the digital traces that people leave online … each individual breakup experience becomes a point in a multi-dimensional space that we are invited to explore.
The Dumpster provides a very smooth continuum between [1] randomly clicking around to building cut-up style breakup stories and [2] (after you’ve figured out the spatial and color cues) deliberately structuring the narrative you create. It’s a serial kind of thing, where you have to develop a small amount of skill with the system in order to appreciate it.
So many of these things and/or their critics lapse into the weirdly spatial language of ‘exploration’ or ‘browsing’ when talking about what you are supposed to actually do with somebody else’s net art.
Fine, go explore the work, but how does the creator describe + measure conversions? This may seem like a non sequitur, but even if the creator/artist/whatever doesn’t care how many conversions/appreciators/whatevers there are, there’s still ultra value in quantifying what has to happen, so you can set up your page/work/whatever to prod folks in the right direction.
