I wonder if either of my regular readers have noticed a subtle change to the way I’ve been posting recently? In the past, I’ve maintained fairly well defined barrier between my private life, and what I’m prepared to reveal online. In the past couple of weeks, however, I’ve let that slip. First, I drew attention to my Flickr account. An then I went the whole damned hog, and posted a link to video of myself online: Note on Modern Liberty. This in turn allows those who are prepared to click their computer mouse a couple of times, the chance to see family videos and the like.
In the past, I’ve been careful not to provide details of my social networking presence on the blog. This is not because I believe that in so doing, I can totally maintain my anonymity… for this is manifestly not the case. Rather, it is that a small degree of privacy is retained. If people want to know about me, they have to go out of their way to do so.
Furthermore, I had hoped that by refusing (until now) to put my face, or the comings and goings of my personal life online, I’ve built a bulwark against the cynics and the ignorant who seem to think that blogging is nothing more than narcissism (though ironically, this little bit of meta-blogging is pretty narcissistic). I can assert with some credibility that it is a much more outward looking project. Or its a scrap-book. Its not narcissistic to create a memento, even if its one for your thoughts.
(Now I think of it, I did put a bit of my face in a blog post once, but there’s nothing to note that its me).
So what’s changed? Well, I think it is seen as less geeky to have a blog, and to post messages to it. On the rare occassions on which I have to explain myself, it is increasingly my interrogator who comes off as out-of-touch, a luddite, lacking the imagination to see why I might find this sort of activitiy useful. Clay Shirky provides some usueful ammunition here – his lecture on “congnitive surplus” is the definitive smack-down to those who sneer “where do you find the time?” In Here Comes Everybody, he also explains how the question has shifted from “why publish?” to “why not publish?”
Second, I’ve noticed that even the biggest of bloggers allow some private moments into their public square. Jason Kottke recently posted a graph of his wife’s weight during her pregnancy, and Andrew Sullivan’s wedding photos are online. So I think disallowing my face from an little-trafficked, eponymous blog is probably unnecessary.
Finally, I’m struck by the idea of personal or organisational “channels”. I now produce YouTubes, podcasts, blogs and Twitters, all of which appear on Facebook without me ever having to actually visit the site. Its an experimentation in communication, self expression.
Tag: Internet Philosophy (Page 23 of 39)
At the fantastic and soon-to-be-essential techPresident, there’s a post on a new technological openness from Congressional Republicans. Although their site at GOP.gov carries pretty run-of-the-mill content, it actually has an extremely substantial API. For non-technophiles, the API is the Application Programming Interface, and gives all the information that programmers would need to interact with the site, and – crucially – to pull data from it. Nancy Scola notes that people have been wondering what the Obama Administration has in store for the whitehouse.gov site, and suggests that a robust API may be more important than ensuring that there are enough photos of the Obama’s for us to gawk at ( abug-bear from a few days ago).
And that raises the idea that for all the attention we’ve been paying whitehouse.gov, maybe thinking about the White House site as a destination is just wrong-headed. The focus should instead, perhaps, be on pushing clean data — and the engagement it can fuel — out from the White House , in the hopes of creating “government everywhere.”
Its Big Brother in reverse. A robust API removes another barrier to scrutinizing the government and legislators, something that will become ever more important as President Obama begins to spend the $800 billion or so in his ‘”fiscal stimulus” package, and the Senators and Representatives start to vote on any number of issues. There will be no escape!
I do think that the very fact of more information in the public domain will increase the trust people have in politicians, precisely because there is less room for obfuscation and drastically reduced room for corruption and misconduct. As I’ve noted previously, a Governmental cover-up is always worse, and much more annoying, than a Governmental cock-up. We saw an example of this earlier in the week, where President Obama made a swift mea culpa when it turned our that two cabinet nominees had not been vetted properly, and not paid their taxes. An early admission neutralises the story.
It also goes some way to restoring the trust that has been lost through the cock-up. Why? Because it avoids the possibility that Government spokespeople will have to engage in the sort of verbal and logical gymnastics, the mongering of letter-but-not-the-spirit technicalities, that characterised the Bush administration… and which still plagues New Labour.
FOUND play at The Mill, 6th October 2008
Remember FOUND, the five-piece innovators from Edinburgh? They are off to the South by South-West festival in Texas, and are raising money for the outing by producing a new album. In a RadioHead style gambit, they’re giving punters the chance to choose what price to pay for the collection. I’ve gone for £7.50 because
- I’m short of cash; and
- its pretty much the amount I would have spent for eight songs on iTunes.
You could spend as much as £49 if you’re flush.
Their online marketing techniques remind me a little of the MC Yogi tactic discussed earlier: a little something for free (or in this case, below the market rate) might lead to new paying supporters later. Appallingly though, their Flickr photos fall foul of the same Creative Commons malaise I whined about yesterday. Since I know the musicians personally, I’m going ahead and reproducing one of their images without fear of retribution. But guys: It doesn’t have to be this way.
I’m a fan of Creative Commons, the fantastic project that provides ready-made licences, with increasing degrees of freedom, that you can bestow on any content you create.
One thing I find amusing and irritating in turn is the inappropriate use of these licences. Over on Flickr, I see countless examples of people giving their snap shots an ‘All Rights Reserved’ licence, as if they are part of the Getty or Magnum elite.
There are thousands of examples of this, so I hate to pick on anyone. But the latest example I have come across just happens to be the Flickr group for The Last Tuesday Society, a bizarre yet highly successful events company based in London. Now, I’ve been to a couple of events that they have put on, and they are great fun. Sexy, risqué, warped, funny. They upload literally hundreds of snap-shots for each event they run, but Mr Victor Wynd uses a simple domestic camera with a built in flash, so, to be frank, they’re not all that impressive. And yet bizarrely, there’s no way I can reproduce this photo, or that photo, or even this photo, because they are All Rights Reserved.
And that’s just silly. The people taking and uploading the photos is in the business of promoting events, and so it would be in their interests for their images to be seen by as many people as possible. Especially photos like this, which would, I’ll wager, sell a fair few dozen tickets if they appeared on a large news website or even in the Metro, or londonpaper, or London Lite.
And its not just companies that are guilty of this particular misunderstanding. At the risk of alienating certain friends of mine, I do wonder why the images for mkultra, strangerpixel and rossfadam are not given a more liberal licence. Doing so would surely bring their work to a wider audience, and may even increase the rate at which their images are used for editorial or illustrative purposes. As we saw with the case of MC Yogi last year, providing some work for free (however high the quality) can lead to greater exposure, and paid for contracts, a short way down the line.
Amusingly, a more liberal approach has worked for me. I recently found that one of my photographs has been included on the popular Schmapp website. It is actually a rather average image, poorly lit and unimaginatively framed. And its inclusion is also unlikely to make me any money. However, it does mean an increased exposure for my Flickr stream, and also fulfils a particular purpose for the community. A net gain all round?
The Botanical Gardens in Sheffield, September 2008
Meanwhile, down the rabbit hole, The Printed Blog is a US newspaper created entirely from blog content. The founders are currently “beta testing” the newspaper at “select locations”.
It reminds me of Things Our Friends Have Written on The Internet. The Main difference being that The Printed Blog is a paid for product, not a labour of love. I know Blurb.com offer a blogbook service.
As the internet becomes exponentially more popular, and the international credit-crunch hits home, newspapers have been identified as a failing industry. Clay Shirky criticises their business model in Here Comes Everybody and Andrew Sullivan has been chronicling the possibility of a newspaper “bailout” to save the New York Times. Its odd that a publication that uses twenty-first century technology to supply its content, should be experimenting with a twentieth century sales and distribution model… so I’m not confident it will succeed.
What could redeem the project, is if the publication is launched as a customisable, subscription product. For example, I could select the blogs or newspapers I like, and some system compiles a customised newspaper that is printed digitally and despatched to my door. It would be the first step towards the dynamic electronic newspapers from science fiction – Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, which I just finished reading, includes such fantastic technology.
(And yes, The Printed Blog does have a blog).