_________________________________________ 
/ ArbCamp is coming up soon! It's a       \
| one-day event we're organizing, to be   |
| held on Saturday October 27th at WCC.   |
| The challenge is to try to attract a    |
| diverse or interesting crowd, keep      |
| everybody in the same space for a few   |
| hours, and hopefully make a bunch of    |
| connections and cool ideas, not losing  |
\ (too much) money in the process.        /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 _________________________________________ 
/ For me the major reference point is     \
| RecentChangesCamp, both the 2006 and    |
| 2007 versions. From 2006, see the       |
| budget; ArbCamp will be smaller, but    |
| this is about the right level of        |
| financial transparency to shoot for.    |
| The 2006 wiki at one point had scanned  |
| receipts for expenses, but I can't find |
| that page tonight. From 2007, see notes |
| from 'What to remember for future       |
| events', which I remember as a          |
| frustrating and productive highlight of |
\ RCC 2007.                               /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 _________________________________________ 
/ The key here is that there's a certain  \
| kind of unstructured structure you need |
| to pull off an event like this, and     |
| it's a larger, more diffuse, amount of  |
| work than you'd expect. And if all else |
| fails, just do everything in public,    |
| and hopefully someone will make         |
\ corrections as things go awry.          /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 _________________________________________ 
/ The other reference point is opening    \
| space, or open space technology         |
| (dorkily abbreviated OST) -- but        |
| whatever you call it, it's just a       |
| pattern of bringing people together in  |
| a certain way. Many people have spilled |
| many words about open space stuff, but  |
| a really good starting point is Michael |
| Herman's very concise 10-page guide to  |
\ organization and invitation.            /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Links

• ArbCamp
• RecentChangesCamp
  • 2006 — Budget
  • 2007 — What to remember for future events
• Michael Herman — Inviting guide (PDF)

(tags: annarbor arbcamp invitations process web)

Back from a presentation for SEM Group at SPARK; here’s the linkdump.

People

• Facebook Sees Flood Of New Traffic From Teenagers And Adults
• Jon Udell | Facebookizing the Web, Webifying Facebook
• LinkedIn; bkerr @ LinkedIn
• The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin, by WS Burroughs
• I HAS A STIK

News

• The Facebook Blog | Facebook Gets a Facelift

Groups

• Groups: Primo Coffee, Coffee Primo, █ ██ ████ ████████

Events

• Event: Growing Hope Beer Tasting

Applications

• Facebook Developers
• Applications: 4cast Weather, Friend Wheel, Scrabulous, Vampire
• blog.pmarca.com | Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in
• FaceReviews
• J-Squared Media
• Inside Facebook
• Facebook Application Smashing

Advertising

• Facebook | Advertise
• Boring ad networks: fbExchange, Lookery, VideoEgg | EAP for Applications, RockYou
• Master of 500 Hats | Facebook Advertising Sucks? Nope, CPM Sucks. (and Widgets = Advertising 2.0)

Income

• Marketplace
• Applications: Mosoma, Books

Taking action

• Application: Causes, Causes | Amnesty International USA
• Project Agape
• Irrepressible.info
• Application: Razoo Speed Granting

Q&A

• Funding: AppFactory, Altura Ventures, SocialMedia

(tags: facebook interaction media networks psyops remediation web)

Here are three quick rambly sketches of Facebook applications I want — and yes, I’m working on Facebook stuff, but these are applications I want to use, not make.

(1) A flyer tool for group / event promotion. Ideal workflow: point it to a group, get a full-page lo-fi flyer suitable for printing and posting at the cafe or bulletin board. This flyer wouldn’t need to contain much more than a giant Facebook F, the group’s name and picture, some community_indicators — such as number of members, unattributed snippets from wall postings or discussion boards, etc. — and a cheesy “you’re invited!” message. Lots of interesting groups for cafes, venues, and locations, and a flyer is a cheap way to link Facebook to meatspace.

(2) A pageoftext.com style micro wiki application. Individuals and groups already have a strong set of communication tools: posting walls, discussion boards, messaging, and so forth. But for certain kinds of conversations, a wiki scratchpad would be awesome. The generic use case is a way to dodge the Facebook group officer control tower stuff: only officers can make certain kinds of changes to the group, but it’s a hassle — and a risk(?) — to make everybody an officer.

(3) Hunt the Wumpus. With a tileset like this, and anybody who shows up on your profile gets to take a turn (so that the Wumpus never goes unfed).

(tags: collective facebook interaction media networks process web)

The best networks are the ones that generate a new way of thinking about some part of the world. This way, the network and software and people stick with you, even when you’re not near them. There’s a sense of availability: that the new way of seeing, or measuring, has some nontrivial half-life — that it persists — once you close the laptop and stand up and start walking.

There are plenty of networks that change the way you work. When you find one, you grow into it over time, and it grows to fit you, like a glove.

But there are fewer networks that change the way you are. A network like this is life-changing in some small way. Maybe it gives you a way to relate to people you wouldn’t otherwise notice. Maybe it gives you a new measurement, so you can go out into the world and try to change it. Maybe it teaches you to slow down, or to speed up, or to remember, or to forget. When you find one of these things, celebrate it. You’re lucky.

(tags: collective representation web)

Thinking about the relationship between

1. sites or services that don’t generate easily digested text content and
2. strategies their proprietors use to squeeze a weblog or similar attention stream out of whatever does get generated.

Sometimes [1] is because there’s not enough text — maybe a video site — and sometimes it’s because there’s too much text — like a wiki. Any wiki weirdo can glaze over at RecentChanges, but it’s data, not narrative.

Ideally, there’s a weblog or proto-weblog that serves as a single, high-level summary of what’s going on: if you’re going to watch just one thing, that’s the thing; or if you’re trying to understand the service and take the community’s pulse, it’s what you load up and skim over.

So here’s what I got, relevant examples culled from my personal web haunts.

If there are any bird’s-eye blogs you think are particularly effective or ineffective I’d enjoy hearing about them.

AboutUs

AboutUs has a daily stream of featured wiki pages on its front page, and a separate log of conversation and cool stuff called the DailyBuzz. There’s a separate AboutUsWeblog.org, which is a Wordpress blog that republishes some of the featured pages — but not all of them, or at least not on a regular schedule — along with random clippings from the DailyBuzz and the occasional free-form blog post. Blog posts are typically written in the hasty, careless tone that pervades the AboutUs house organs — if you listen, you can hear the copywriting sausage grinder whining away.

CommunityWiki

The CommunityWiki used to have a cool front-page faux weblog as described here, but apparently it didn’t get exported to the future.

Hiveminder

Two prongs for Hiveminder: a Best Practical weblog which has announcements about all of the company’s products and some human interest stuff, and Hiveminder News for product-specific notices. Both blogs are written in a fun and sometimes digressive “friendly programmer” voice. The Hiveminder News is baked into the product, and the updates are usually nice and terse, with the occasional longer introduction for a new feature. Awesome!

Plazes

The Plazes crew keeps blog.plazes.com, which is the usual jumble of product announcements plus publicity and corporate updates. The thing I appreciate about the Plazes blog is that is showcases the mashups, integrations, and art projects people have done using the Plazes API and feeds. These community_indicators are signs of life for the service, but they also do a better job of demonstrating what Plazes is all about than the Plazes site itself can. For a service which you need to have an active network and client software in order to really enjoy, seeing some of these projects gives a hint of what the experience might be like.

Revver

Revver (aka Commie Youtube) has a very active blog that streams a mix of service status crap and surfaced videos. Seems like a few missed information interior decoration opportunities, though: the blog is buried in footer navigation on the main Revver site, its branding is way off — the header is a video thumbnail montage which fundamentally looks like crap, and you have to work your way beneath the fold in order to find the new Transformers-esque Revver logo (which appears only in the little tiny video rolls in the sidebar).

(tags: design media remediation representation web weblogs wiki)

I blame del.icio.us digg ma.gnolia reddit slashdot stumbleupon etc. for everything. Lists: easy to write, easy to read 7 ways 10 ideas 20 projects 51 snake-oil objects ideally functioning as some shim for your Amazon affiliate id or shiny ppc bait or science knows what other gummy phosphorescent batshit. Lists considered harmful — headlines considered harmful — social bookmarking considered harmful — points, ratings, stars, popularity considered harmful. You are considered harmful. (8 things considered harmful!) That’s it — that’s all. Net extremely hoseled. Get off my lawn. Close the laptop. Stand up. Walk into the sea. Breathe.

(tags: web weblogs)

What should local media cover? What’s local, and which media?

Here’s an answer:

Little League (text messages), church carnivals (database), downtown characters (multimedia), car washes (video), profiles of people who cook my food and wash my vegetables (multimedia), neighborhood business owners (podcast), garage sales (map), changes in local and state laws (database), local school activities (calendar), local politics (blog), local natural beauty (slideshow), school lunch menus (database), localization of national issues (enterprise stories, databases, multimedia).

Reading this list — and thinking about what else you’d like to append to it — makes you realize how many projects there are, waiting for somebody to be present, able, and excited. Arbor Update, ArborWiki, MiTechNews podcasts, Teeter Talk, Downtown Ypsi, the Mangy East Quad Blog, the Frieze Building Blog, etc. and so forth right down the list(s) — these projects are all essential, but even in our little rust belt reality-distortion-field map blip there’s room for so much more.

(Now back to your regularly scheduled term-paper addled radio silence.)

(tags: annarbor media narratives web weblogs writing)