I think the extent to which this changes publishing is pretty minimal, and the substance of the book is not really my area, but the project is interesting to me because there are many instances where what you want is commentary on a fixed text – e.g. classic works, journal articles, where a wiki wouldn’t make sense. You’re not a co-author, you’re a commentator. For this GAM3R 7H30RY project they came up with their own interface to do this. As far as I know there isn’t a standard setup for textual commentary / criticism.

The way they have it set up is decent, but seems like it would be very difficult to set up. What I’d like to see is a design where you can upload either a PDF or plain text as the “original” and have blog style comments on the side – referencing a particular point in the text and displayed as close as possible to that portion of the text. There is also a possible need for a wiki instead of comments. Another option would be inserting the comment like comments in word processing applications – it pops up when you roll over the little triangle.

I think this would be a very useful project. Any programmers out there?

After that, a tag was agreed upon in the back channel “hyperlinkedsociety.” This, I think, probably suffered from a lack of pre-coordination more than the back channel because even people who use tagging sites may have missed it there. An announcement would have been fine for that too I suppose, it just didn’t happen.

It seems there is more value at a conference like this one for tagging photos rather than web pages mainly because everyone heard the same presentations and wrote down the links they want to visit. Other types of links probably need more context in a blog post so Technorati tags would be good for giving a bit more exposure to all bloggers who post about the conference, not just people visiting the blogs they already know.

Now I’ve certainly looked up other books and not been inclined to purchase them, but it will be interesting to see what impact this has as availability increases. I can definitely see it having the opposite effect when you can preview a shoddy book you might have otherwise purchased or borrowed. Not that I’m an ideal book consumer. These days I only buy books that I’ve read from the library or in some format before and I know I’ll need to reference in the future, except the (very) occasional novel.

This brought my thinking up to a higher level on this subject. After all, hypertext was only a theory or highly specialized application when I was born and it has make a profound impact on the world today. There will certainly be more killer apps to come. In fact, I think I’ve seen a glimmer of it already.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been around for decades. I know some people who work in that field, generally, trained geographers who use specialized tools. One small advance toward meaningful GIS usage is Zillow.com. Their slogan is “your edge in real estate” and they really deliver with (at least in my area) extremely detailed house value information. It’s not every day that a “web 2.0″ type application comes along that not only will my mom find interesting, but extremely useful. I think that’s a very important test. A lot of ideas are not ready for prime-time and that’s fine, but it’s interesting to find one that is.

Fortunately, everything seems to be coming around again. Now, usually when people say that sort of thing about tech in the 90′s they’re thinking of the “mistakes” particularly in the market, but I’m talking about the actual good ideas. In looking up references for my thesis I came upon the papers from the “Third International World-Wide Web Conference” from 1995 at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Darmstadt, Germany all abstracts here. Even the style of the page – plane vanilla html with blue links – is new again.

To quote a few ideas and titles from the abstracts (my comments outside the quotes)

* “Cooperative Work On the Network: Edit the WWW! – There is a real need for a tool to enable effective collaborative authoring of documents on the WWW” – Hello wiki
* “NCSA is adding support for group and public annotations to its HTTP server and Mosaic client.” – Remember that? I’d say social bookmarking added the needed component individual value.
* “to enable individuals without specialized knowledge of library cataloging or markup to create records for describing and accessing networked electronic resources of various types”
* “Why should web technologists care about intellectual property?” – That seems painfully obvious today, but interesting that it was apparent right from the start.
* “Although HTML identifies structures within a document, it does not allow the semantic content of document sections to be specified explicitly.”
* “Using the Web as a Survey Tool” – Standard practice now

Even Yahoo! is new again Best Web Bigco of 2005.

Happy “new” year

What is facial recognition technology? How does it work, where did it come from, and why is it considered a “security solution”? This talk will unpack the black box of automated facial recognition, examining what it says about the development of information technology in a security-obsessed society.

Kelly Gates is assistant professor of media studies at the CUNY, Queens College. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled, Our Biometric Future, which traces the social construction of computerized facial recognition and other biometrics from their late nineteenth century antecedents to the preoccupation with these technologies in the immediate post–9/11 moment.

It was an interesting topic & I’m addressing the surveillance issue in my work on social bookmarks as well. She said, and it seems obvious, that facial recognition technology has been used by and marketed to government and corporate entities for security, surveillance, and access control purposes.

But Riya is a departure from that. It’s a consumer use for the technology that does not necessarily link information from a database to that face, just a name. In a way it could be empowering to know where your own image is on the internet – although that wouldn’t give you control it could be helpful to be aware of. Although, it is somewhat disconcerting to think that a potential employer (or a stalker, or ex) could find images of you at a party or other situations.

What I hope is that long term there is more of a general tolerance for people’s full multifaceted existence. Clearly no one is only a professional, they are also a friend, a confidant, a wife, a sister, a colleague, a mentor and many other roles, moods and in many different situations through life. Also, everyone had an adolescence. While I’m glad I didn’t have a blog when I was 15, when I’m in a position to hire someone in the future, if their adolescent angst pops up on archive.org it will probably be a commonplace rather than an offense and I won’t hold it against them.

The Daily Mashup really has something good going on. It’s just a combination of Flickr Interesting, Delicious & Furl popular and Yahoo news most clicked. A simple daily internet zeitgeist. If I didn’t have lots of things to get done I’d make it my home page.

I’d love to have a customizable version of this with lots of display options for any feed view full text, mash up with other feeds in a cloud, pick out the popular things within several tag feeds, and so on with a nice fast ajax interface. Maybe I’ll hack something together until this exists.

To clarify, I don’t think this should be anyone’s sole interface to the web leading to tyranny of the masses. Search is still incredibly valuable & someone has to put these sites on the map in the first place and when you’re talking about specific tags you can find the rare gems also.

My area of interest has been new technologies and the internet, but when it really got interesting is when I started looking at the history of communication technologies from writing to printing to electronic communications like the telegraph, then the radio, TV, etc. Each of these was once new and it’s interesting to see the similarities between the “old new” and the “new new.”

I’d like to highlight a couple books that I’ve found interesting lately on this subject.

When Old Technologies Were New (link to worldcat) by Carolyn Marvin, 1988 is a fascinating and detailed look at the new media in the late 19th century from a social standpoint; for an academic book it’s very readable.

New Media 1740-1915 – an edited collection, Gitelman & Pingree eds., 2003. I wanted to cite the article “Scissoring and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking and Recirculating” by Ellen Gruber Garvey in my blog paper – but it didn’t quite fit in – although it may make it into the next version. I had a good time reading about Zograscopes and other old new media. I actually bought this book, and I’m very selective these days. I usually read it first from the library then decide.

Hope someone finds this interesting & if you’ve read something along these lines let me know.