From the party like it's Q2 2007 department — here’s the complete & unabridged list of weird professional identity descriptions reproduced for posterity and against that unhappy hypothetical day when the pageoftext server should be unplugg’d from the DSL line or whatever of its proprietor:

• aesthetician
• chief dog food taster
• cleaner
• computer psychologist
• corporate irritant
• decomplexifier
• dishwasher
• digital janitor
• doppelgänger
• dude
• feedback loop
• finisher
• fireball
• fixer
• fluffer
• information interior decorator
• infrastructuralist
• informationist
• internet-human duct tape
• last mile
• mechanic
• minister of information
• navigator
• post-production
• punching bag
• queen bee
• roustabout
• slacker
• sorghum consultant
• technology evangelist
• utility man
• wire monkey
• utility man
• bomb snifing dog

The other pageoftext of note — the wikiclock — was almost 20 hours of out date at this writing.

(tags: descriptions names wiki work)

Links and commentary relevant to recent popular searches.

all your Harry Potter shit

Various search terms inventoried here. My only response here. Enjoy standing in line with a bunch of twelve year olds on Friday night.

Ann Arbor Community Farm address

Yeah, isn’t it cool that the street address isn’t anywhere on their website? Try 1525 S. Fletcher, Chelsea, MI — the entrance for the farm is actually one driveway south of the map pin here, it’s the wider drive with a cozy little curve coming off Fletcher Street.

Oddmuse page trails

‘Page trails’ are a dopey name for dynamic breadcrumb navigation. Handily, there’s a page trail extension for your Oddmuse wiki. I used it, but didn’t like the markup it generated (just a string of links with punctuation inserted via CSS, hence sloppy for text/mobile browsers) — although that’s an easy fix to the extension.

When it changed

A trip to the library is in order, probably the science fiction stacks. But first, pick a decade. If 198x, you are looking for some nicely aged William Gibson sprawl books. If 197x, you are looking for the Joanna Russ short story “When It Changed.” If other, start assembling your Harry Potter costume now and go get in line at midnight.

(tags: books community-farm narratives wiki)

Community Farm of Ann Arbor distribution:

• arugula, the rocket vegetable
• beet
• cabbage
• green onion
• kale
• lettuce
  • strong lettuce ← I am scared to touch this, for fear of being overpowered; in fact I don’t know what “strong” means in this context, but the implication is that it’s a synonym for “crappy”
• radish
• micro zucchini

So far I have pressed several items into service in the world’s weirdest vegetarian sandwich for tonight’s dinner. Arugula cries out for a good pizza, now that it’s cool enough to turn the oven on.

When I dropped by the mitten/ascalon compound to pick up our herbs, I drove through the great June 27 north Ann Arbor power outage of 2007, from which we’ve collectively bounced back to enjoy a super pleasant warm (but not hot) day. For details, see the wiki weather report for Ann Arbor and environs, courtesy of the Microcoworkers. A wiki weather report is a weather report powered by wiki technology.

(tags: annarbor community-farm food wiki)

Somewhere in Ypsilanti, Michigan is a place called Bill’s Hot Dog Stand, a place where — and I quote an anonymous wiki contributor — “two hot dogs and a root beer” make a great lunch under five dollars.

Where is Bill’s? Arborwiki needs to know. Can you help me find it?

→ http://arborwiki.org/city/Bill’s Hot Dog Stand ←

update 2007-06-10: Bill’s has been located and dissed; see the wiki page or this post’s comments for details. Thanks to Dan for the info.

(tags: food wiki ypsilanti)

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)

Some recent searches that brought people here, with links and commentary as appropriate.

annual film farm ann arbor

Film Farm is an annual student film competition hosted by M-Flicks. This year’s Film Farm X was held last night (Friday, April 6) at the Michigan Theater. Attendees vote for their favorite films in several categories, which are then showered with micro glory.

kabob palace ann arbor

Kabob Palace was a restaurant near U-M campus in downtown Ann Arbor. It closed in February 2007, but the kitchen and service started to fall apart long before that. From about 2001 to 2004, Kabob Palace was my go-to spot for big groups, since there was plenty of seating and friendly service. They made excellent mjaddra, simple and tasty.

oddmuse analytics

OddMuse is a very cool wiki engine with a modular design — a svelte core backed by a bunch of extensions which add particular kinds of features or black magic. If you want to collect analytics for your OddMuse wiki, just use Google Analytics. A bigger problem is making sense of the data you’ve just collected. By setting up clever conversion goals that track progress through your wiki and, in particular, your wiki login / edit / preview / save cycle, you can differentiate between visitors who show up and read versus those who actually make changes.

osx keyboard navigation menubar

Hit ⌃F2 to select the menu bar using a keyboard. You can then press arrow keys to navigate around, and type the names of menus or commands to jump to them. You can remap this keyboard shortcut in the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab of the Keyboard & Mouse settings in your System Preferences.

If you are a Quicksilver person, another (arguably easier) way to do this is to set up a trigger that looks like this:

and map it to a key combination of your choice.

slicehost jabber

Just do it! One fun use case: if you don’t feel like running mail on a slice, just send status or update messages via jabber.

(tags: annarbor feedback-loop lunch mac movies slicehost wiki)

One of today’s activities:

Collage of two images from RecentChangesCamp 2007: 1 and 2; a higher-quality image of the result.

Made in Seashore using a SmartNav plus a few labor-saving voice commands. This means, no hands. You move the cursor by moving your head. You click by saying “click” or triggering a button or puffing into a tube. The little tiny hotspots and buttons in Seashore are hard to select; slider controls are the hardest.

OS X is pretty easy to wrangle with this kit, after a learning curve. Some applications are better than others, with Quicksilver (not too surprisingly) coming in dead last. It’s a shame because Quicksilver really helps to cut down on mousing and typing, both at a premium when you’re not using your hands.

See grad student bkerr a4a project for more like this.

(tags: design mac media process self umsi wiki)