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On Virtual Life
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So this post is sort of spinning out of a Yelp Talk discussion that I have been involved in, and also just more general thoughts that have been occurring to me over the past year or two. It has to do with the nature of online identity creation and the role of social media (or new media or web 2.0 or whatever you want to label it) in providing the tools to virtualize identity, separating it from the limits of your body. Forgive me if it is too rambly to make any sense.
In the post the question was asked of why people bother to write another review of a business or restaurant on Yelp (a user-review site that Tipped very much emulates), and my response was that it depended on which audience you were writing for. Yes, when confronted with hundreds of reviews (most of them with 4 stars) the average user will simply read the first batch presented by Yelp's algorithm. The difference is when the user isn't just anybody, but instead somebody who is interested in your reviews in particular. They could be a friend, they could be a user who clicked through to your profile after reading one review they liked by you, they could be somebody who uses the reputation system of the site to focus on you because you appear to be a reliable reviewer in the eyes of the community. The point is that the focus narrows in from just anybody who has reviewed this place to a specific reviewer who has been targeted because they satisfy whatever criteria. This can result in everything from higher levels of trust in a specific users reviews to a higher conversion rate of people trying out the business in question as a result of that specific reviewers comments. And of course it suggests that the reason that people post reviews has at least as much to do with creating or maintaining their virtual identity as it does with helping other people find a good restaurant to go on a first date.
Additionally, despite the growth of some aggregation sites that attempt to connect one individual's various social media accounts together (see FriendFeed, for instance), most users have various accounts in various places. Although they may be separated in that the data is stored in different websites silos (Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc.), they tend to be generally accessible should the user provide centralized links to them (as I do, for instance, on the left hand side of this page). These sites all provide a platform for that individual to express themselves, to carve out an identity (or at least an imagined identity) and to establish their territory on the net. It's old news now to say that there is now a group of people who are accustomed to living and interacting via their virtual identities, be they their avatar in World of Warcraft, their profile page on MySpace or their playlist on Last.fm. What is more interesting is looking at how these different aspects of an individual's virtual identity are lashed together, how they overlap and intersect, and also how they can be kept distinct or distant from each other.
There are of course some scary potentials to be considered, and I have no doubt that the pessimist in me will come to the surface with some kind of screed against online surveillance and tracking (look at Phorm, for instance) in the near future. But there are also a lot of very enticing potentials that prop up concerning this experience of virtual identity. As of now there remains space to play with the concept, and even room for pranks and games to arise. The ability to separate identity from the body may be simply the next step in the development of human communications, which made the crucial separation from travel with the telegraph (and other, less efficient mechanisms prior to that) coming on 200 years ago. Before too long, could we imagine a lot of Max Headroom-esque face's on Facebook?
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Artworks
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Well here I am, heading into a week before my final exam of LSE, and what am I doing but snipping up newspapers and pasting pictures together. Very productive, no? But then again, as I included in my summary of Adorno and Horkheimer's influential Culture Industries chapter of their Dialectic of Enlightenment, the emergence of market-oriented commercial cultural forms tear asunder notions of the purposelessness of art for its own sake. So maybe I can couch my justification for indulging in purposeless art in the familiar Frankfurt School rhetoric of domination and power. That's right, I'm sticking it to the man!
I have, in fact, kept up a somewhat quiet practice of collage over the years, and as anybody who has visited one of my bedrooms over the past ten years can tell you, I keenly cover most any exposed surface with some kind of poster, cut out or flier that I've collected. Here is an example, this being my bedroom in Lucas Valley, California, where I had a lovely pushpin wall that allowed me to add and alter the arrangement to my hearts content. Looking at this picture, I'll offer just a few comments and observations. First of all, don't get the wrong impression; I brought every computer in our household into my room to pose for this picture, I didn't normally operate with a half-dozen computers at my command, although I did often work with two (my desktop and a laptop). Also, the artwork of several of my friends grace the wall, including photos by Matt Mimiaga and sketches by Alex Harris, Avery Monsen, John McKenna and Lindsay Meisel, among others. Finally, the method here appears to be much more layered than you'll see in future wall collages of mine. I think this is largely as a result of the pushpin board that allowed me to easily double up the value of a given pin, but also reflects my development in high school (notice that the punk rock posters at the back are gradually covered up by subsequent interests or trends that I fell prey to).
Moving ahead a few years to New York City, and we find a somewhat different attitude in the collaging. First of all, the majority of the images are cut out from the New York Times, which provides a somewhat more political direction to the mass. It does include pop figures like Andre 3000 with Big Boi and other musicians like Neil Young and the Ramones, but you'll definitely notice a preoccupation with images from conflict, politics and strife. This was 2003-2004, and coverage of the war in Iraq definitely lent a lot of pictures from my newspaper source (there is a big cluster of war images on the bottom right), and on another wall there was a conclave of political figures who I had helpfully spoken for on index cards. Sadly in most cases you can't make out the words due to the poor quality of the digital photograph, but for instance Rumsfeld is saying 'Murder murder murder, kill kill kill' and Jacques Chirac is saying '[French Accent] But of course! [/French Accent]' - I always liked the one with GWB speaking a picture of a mushroom cloud. Returning quickly to the first wall, notice that at the bottom I've started to engage with and alter the images, particularly on the image of a surfer on a giant wave, where I added a pirate and a pirate wench, as well as a few others with added speech bubbles. This begins to mark the period where I have been not just collecting and juxtaposing images, but also altering them.
Unfortunately I don't have a lot of the images I was hoping to share available to me now. I'll certainly follow this up when I return to California next month, but for now I want to share a few of my more recent pieces, including the one I made today! This one, which was sort of an accidental overlapping, came to me as I went through a fat pile of Guardian newspapers before taking them to the recycling bin. The main image, which featured as a part of a standalone photojournalism piece that the Guardian presents in its centrefold, was of a woman in a Delhi landfill searching for scraps. The image of Pele came from another days paper regarding a potential film about the Brazilian footballer's life. Somehow the two images just seemed to mesh really well, both in the form that Pele and his Brazilian teammate created and the close color match between the soccer uniform and the Indian woman's dress. I dunno if there is a really conscious message from this piece, and I am loathe to even suggest any kind of meaning. I just found the pairing to be one that suggested itself to me, and will leave it at that.
The final pair of works I want to share were made last summer at St Malo beach, in Southern California. I had just returned from India where I was working for a business magazine, and I guess the publishing world was still on my mind because I ended up buying a ton of magazines down there. At first I had imagined I would put together a critique of modern magazine design and layout, but my ambitions were far too grand and instead of studying the pages, I had at them with a scissor. Most of the images that I cut out and used came from fashion and design magazines, and as you can easily see I was taken with the depictions of women. Sometimes this came out in rather brutal ways, for instance with the superimposing of a stylized skull covering Salma Hayek's face from a Compari advertisement - although she had been wearing a black dress I also found that I inked it in yet blacker with a sharpie. Other times, I had rather more fun with the images, for instance in Scarlet Johansson's speech bubble containing an Hermes scarf design or in the bizarre displacement of Keira Knightley's baby elephant feeding (which, by the way, was itself exceedingly bizarre in its own right) to a space of sterile and ubiquitous sameness: the airport departures lounge.
Incidentally, there was one work in the St Malo set that featured a man instead of a woman, and it is one of my favorites. A man wielding a large fishing rod, superimposed on a background of the open sea, reels in his catch: a massive block of bound waste paper. After I was done cutting up my magazines, I can't be so sure that the pile of cuttings and remaining pages didn't end up in some sort of similar situation, can I?
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Losing a Friend
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Last weekend a friend of mine took his own life. The news came to me relatively quickly, through an uncharacteristically terse Facebook message from a notoriously Facebook-averse old roommate of mine. When I heard the news I didn't really know immediately how to react. At first there was disbelief and shock, next concern and regret, along with a whole range of other emotions. There were little flares of anger, as well as deep wells of sadness, but I think that even now, several days later, I have yet to fully comprehend the nature of this loss.
There is an interesting dynamic that exists in the wake of someone's death. I've found myself talking with old classmates whom I have only irregularly (or hardly at all) spoken to over the past few years. It is sometimes a bit uncomfortable, given that the main reason for our speaking is such a sad subject, coupled with the fact that we sometimes have nothing else to discuss. I often find myself at a loss for words, even as the person on the other end of the line is sobbing. What is there to say? There are regrets - if only I had been in closer contact with him; if only somebody had been there for him - but these are hard for me to seriously entertain. I, and most of the rest of my bereaved friends, had fallen out of touch with our friend - and he himself had taken some steps to distance himself from people as well. Some have spoken bitterly about those who had remained in his life, that perhaps they were somehow to blame. This, too, is useless for me: I have never even met these people, and I am not ready to lay blame at anyone's feet.
I've found it much more useful to recall the fond memories of our friend. Although my mind sometimes wanders towards trying to imagine his last hours and minutes, I find it much more soothing to consider the times that he and I had shared together: our mutual struggles with overcoming the physical demands of the basketball team we had been teammates on; the time he took great pride in showing me and a friend around the winery he worked at, tasting from the barrel and emptying excess wine onto the poured concrete floor; walking down Lafayette Street with him and other old high school pals late at night after a night out on the town in New York City, joking and ribbing each other as we went.
Like I said, I don't think I've fully comprehended things yet, and I have sometimes ducked my responsibility. I failed to tell a mutual friend who was visiting London the day the news that her friend had died. I couldn't quite bring myself to share that and justified it to myself in various ways, mostly by figuring that somebody else would tell her later. I worry that when a friend called me up to inform me of his death that I came off as uncaring when I responded that I already knew, as if it were yesterday's news. I realized I was keeping this to myself, not telling any of my new friends here in London, even though I found myself really wanting to tell somebody. I finally did tell one of them, but through the somewhat cowardly medium of an instant message conversation, and even then almost as an excuse or explanation for why I had been glum and quiet last weekend.
Writing here now is helping some, and I hope that I'll be able to talk with people more about his death - both those who knew him and those who did not. Even now, I don't think I've yet fully determined how this has affected me, and I hope that I will be able to get it out in time.
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Had enough of the water-based stuff?
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Reading about seasteading got me interested in other maritime stuff, especially massive boats. Check out the 1,400 meter long Freedom Ship which promised to be a floating city that traveled the world complete with duty-free shopping (and no doubt casinos and prostitutes to boot!{/sarcasm}). That project has apparently been stalled, but is nonetheless interesting to read about.
Now we're drifting pretty far (haha, get it?) from the idea of seasteading, but I wanted to share a few other massive boats with you. The Knock Nevis is currently said to be the largest seagoing vessel, but apparently it doesn't 'go' anymore. Now a docked fueling station in the Persian Gulf, the Knock Nevis was somewhat too big to be useful - when fully loaded it sunk so low in the water that it wasn't able to navigate the British Channel! To top that, it was longer than the Empire State Building is tall. That's a hell of a boat.
The Emma Maersk is apparently the largest seagoing boat that does in fact 'go'. It is freaking huge, but can pass through the Suez Canal and Malacca Strait, which makes it much more useful for shipping purposes.
Finally, the MV Blue Marlin is probably my favorite of all. This thing is actually a special kind of ship called a 'semi-submersible heavy-life ship', and it is basically used like a tow truck for the ocean. Check out this picture of the Blue Marlin carrying the USS Cole battleship which was damaged in a terrorist attack in Yemen in 2000. How sweet is that?? It's also used to transport oil rigs and other massive pieces of equipment (I remember this close call when two massive cranes were floated into San Francisco Bay on a big boat similar to the Blue Marlin - they passed under the Bay Bridge with only inches to spare!)
So yeah, who wants to live on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean or on one of those massive boats with me?
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Seasteading on the Virtual Frontier
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Right, so I see I've fallen behind on postings again. Drat.
I decided that my efforts to post exciting and insightful posts frequently might be asking a bit too much. Instead, I'll satisfy myself by just posting interesting stuff that I come across on the net without necessarily talking as much about 'what it means'. So, without further ado:
Seasteading!
I remember the first time I got kind of interested in this idea was whilst reading Snowcrash, the inimitable cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. In it the villain, a megalomaniacal magnate who circumambulates the Pacific with the Raft, a city worth of boats lashed together with a massive oil tanker and decommissioned aircraft carrier at the core.
Later, I remember reading about the Pirate Bay's efforts to purchase Sealand, a micronation of challenged legality that exists solely on an old World War II era sea fort in the English Channel. Ultimately they were unsuccessful, but TPB is said to continue to have designs on finding some location where they can operate outside existing national intellectual property laws.
Somewhat different, but still tangentially related is the Free State Project, an effort by Libertarian Americans to collect in large enough numbers in New Hampshire to influence the politics of that state to be more like the tenets of Libertarianism. Again, the idea here is to find refuge from perceived tyrannies of governance by creating, or in this case adopting, a new state that better serves the interests of a group.
So, enter seasteading!
This came to my attention when I learned that Peter Thiel, of PayPal fame, donated $500,000 towards the establishment of a permanent community living in international waters. This sounds pretty outlandish, I know, and it probably is. But there is in fact some science behind it. The proposed seasteading platform would be based on existing SPAR platform technology, used by oil drilling rigs in deep water. Using a complex arrangement of ballasts, anchors and water tanks, the platform is held in place even amidst the tides of the ocean, and because the majority of its bulk is underwater, it is surprisingly sturdy against waves and other surface problems like wind or storms. I have to admit that I find the concept very interesting and exciting. Check out the blog and their introduction to seasteading for more info. If you want a bit more cheerleading, check out Libertarian rag reason's profile of the project.
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Under the Influence of Marketers
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I went to an event with some pals of mine yesterday called Under the Influence. Thrown by an 'integrated marketing agency' called Iris, it promised to be 'the thinking man's pub crawl'. With five pubs in Borough Market converted into mini marketing salons, it did provide a good opportunity to meet and greet and keep up appearances for industry folks, but I have to say that for me it failed to really deliver in terms of getting me to think or introducing me to new ideas and technologies.
I attended mostly events in the Dip Inn, which was focusing on short form content and digital marketing. The main thing that struck me was that the speakers (most of whom I wasn't aware of, not that this means much) didn't seem to have an intense mastery or esoteric knowledge of new media or the internet. They seemed like they were well enough informed, threw out references to all of the hot "Web 2.0" applications they could manage (Twitter, Seesmic, YouTube, etc.), but I was frequently given the impression that they didn't quite get it - that they were just sort of touching the bases but didn't have any depth of knowledge about how people used these sites. This became particularly clear in the last presentation, when RocketBoom co-founder Andrew Baron discovered that surprisingly few people in the audience were familiar with TechCrunch, among the most influential and highly-trafficked blogs out there (of which there is, of course, a UK edition).
This lack of personal investment in tech was becoming increasingly clear to me on Twitter. Although most of the people talked about Twitter and how brands or products should think about approaching it, there were woefully few active tweets coming from UTI. I even tracked 'under the influence' and 'uti' while I was at the event and only received a few messages, although I myself sent quite a few - especially 'overheard at UTI' messages with the latest eye-rolling observation made by the speakers or audience.
I guess what I came to realize is that in a lot of cases these folks only have to be more 'plugged in' than the corporate clients that they are working for, which isn't a very high bar to cross - after all some of these folks were probably the ones who convinced brands that they absolutely had to be on Second Life last year. I don't mean to slag the whole lot off, I'm sure there were many very intelligent and connected people both attending and speaking at the event - I actually quite enjoyed Matt Smith's chat, and I finally got a chance to meet vlogger Sarah Meyers (although she was not presenting). On the whole, though, and certainly among the presenters, I was decidedly underwhelmed.
Talking afterwards with my friend Grumblemouse, we decided that we should really focus more on tech and startup events at this point, or else go for the fully-fledged intellectual salons and lectures. The marketing and creative events are striking me as somewhere in-between, half a step out of whack, and full of, as I frequently tweeted, the dreaded 'suits.'
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On the Campaign Trail
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Well I don't want to become yet another Presidential Election blog, and I don't intend to, but I did think that it would be fun to share the bizarre dream that I had involving the two Democratic candidates last night. And in order to get it all down before I forget it, here we go.
So first the three of us (plus unidentifiable advisers) were sitting around in some bedroom in a house, talking about various issues that have been brought up in the race so far. Suddenly, we are gone from the house and the three of us are seated in a weird balcony row looking over what would appear to be a local town's little league diamond, but instead of baseball the turf below was fitted with a number of tennis courts. Odd..
Nevertheless, we continued to talk, and now I am able to recall some of the things we talked about. First I brought up Howard Beale from Network's infamous tirade, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!' which Obama and Hillary seemed to happily recall and chat about, twisting his anti-authoritarian rant into something that they identified with from the perspective of their campaigns (maybe this is somehow related subconsciously to the latest "scandal" about how some Americans have become bitter?).
The real juicy bit, however, came next when the games began below and the national anthem was sung. I didn't stand or sing in my dream (I probably would have at least stood up and been politely silent - or who knows, maybe even sung along! - in real life, but I digress), and both the candidates called me out on this. Obama, of course, has been dinged for similar issues earlier on in the campaign, so maybe that's why dream version of the candidate was sensitive to that issue, but I didn't apologize. Instead, I brought up one of my favorite Simpson's episode references, when the whole town decides to sing a song, "not a hymn to war like our national anthem, but a sweet soothing hymn," which turns out to be the Canadian anthem (giving big ups to my Canadian friends)! They end the episode singing, hands joined, forming a Maple Leaf. Hilarious.
Somewhere around here is where I wake up, but I can't recall much more of the dream. I don't know what in the world it all means, although I do think that the appearance of Obama, at least, might have been prompted by an episode of the Boondocks I watched prior to bed that included Tom Dubois, who bears a striking resemblance to the junior Senator from Illinois..
By the way, I'm officially non-committed, although tons of my friends do their damnedest to draw me out on the subject. All I can say is that probably 90% of my friends are pro-Obama (some vehemently so), and as they say, birds of a feather.. I am certainly not interested in voting for Hillary, although this is as much for my discomfort with the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton axis issue as much as it is anything to do with her specifically as a candidate. I also remind people that, when it comes down to it, I'm not a registered Democrat, and anyways I've already missed the primary in my state (California). Whoever the candidate becomes, I'm pretty confident that California will go for the Democrats, whether I vote for them or not, so we'll see what kind of statement I make in the ballot box come November.
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TV on the Internet - Timeliness is Key
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I've no doubt bloviated on this subject in past incarnations of this blog, and I don't necessarily intend to rehash or revisit any of those arguments, but I was thinking today (as I often think on a Sunday) about the migration of television content to the internet and the various triumphs and pitfalls of this delivery technique.
I don't have a television in my flat. By that I mean that there is no display screen that sits separate from any other function, normally on an elevated counter or in a purpose-built recessed chamber of a cabinet. I do watch television, but this takes place on my MacBook with content coming in via the internet.
I've started to become more pleased with the range and quality of television that is available to me through the internet, and especially that of news and/or current events programs. I watch the news live on BBC World via RealPlayer, and every Sunday evening I sit down to watch Meet the Press on MSNBC's website. Between this, I also catch up on some other entertainment programs via Apple's iTunes (most notably Lost, but also some stuff from Adult Swim or Comedy Central). All in all, I have pretty decent access to television through my computer, some for free, some at cost; some live, some time delayed; some legal, some, well, not.
This is good, and I think that there is a bright future for the delivery of television content via the internet. The production values of most television shows is very high, and I tend to believe that although there will no doubt be viable challengers who emerge from the internet video milieu, high end programming like Lost or Heroes will be successful online so long as it is amenable to the viewers desires. That last bit is the real clincher.
Like I said, I download episodes of Lost from iTunes, at $1.99 a pop. I don't mind paying the relatively low price for a product whose quality I trust. However it is absolutely essential, in order to retain customers like myself, that the show be easily available at a reasonable price in a timely fashion. There have been times when I've gone online on a Friday morning to find the latest episode of Lost (which airs on Thursday nights in the USA) only to discover that it is not yet available to download. When I check my favorite Torrent Tracker, I find no such difficultly in locating a good quality file to download, and since the price (free) is right and I can't be bothered to wait for the people at ABC/Apple to get their program together, I am highly tempted by my alternative options.
This is the challenge that television programming will face online. Given the opportunity to pay a fair price (or to get advertising supported access) to my favorite shows, I am willing to play along. But if you can't provide a superior service in a timely fashion, then users are likely to stray to the numerous alternative options that exist.
Obviously there are difficult business decisions in play here - the networks have local affiliates to deal with and that no doubt explains, at least in part, why the latest episode isn't available online as soon as the first broadcast on the East Coast - West Coast affiliates haven't had a chance to gain their advertising revenue yet. But as a viewer with multiple options for viewing the content, I'm not interested in these internal problems; I want the show, and I want to watch it now. If the network can provide it to me now, I'm happy to take it from them. If they are not prepared to give it to me now, because of their affiliates making noise or other reasons, then I am ready to take my revenue-generating consumption elsewhere.
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I Warned You
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Well I warned and I threatened, and due to my desire to avoid working further on my various essays for school, I ended up installing the WordPress blogging software onto Blunks. I'm still tweaking things for now, but expect this old skool CuteNews blog to go the way of the dinosaur sometime today, tomorrow, or over the weekend!
You'll notice two major differences. One: the blogging software will be way better, will do a much better job of resolving tags and categories, and will include easier support for pictures and video within blog posts. It also will give me more control and better analytical information about just who, if anyone, might be visiting Blunks.
The other major difference, I'm sad to say, is that our stubbly shorts-wearing pal eating the Blunks banner will be gone, and in fact the whole look of the site is likely to be a lot more polished new media-y as opposed to the scrappy, if crunchy, if righteous look that we have had for all these years.. It's definitely a major change and to some degree a sad passing of an era, but at the same time I think that the benefits will outweigh the nostalgia. Maybe I'll erect a museum type page further inside blunks to retain our friend with his one missing arm and the other one that stretches all the way around the border of the site..
Anyways, don't say I didn't warn you!
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Oh, Canada
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There are a fair number of Canadians in my program at the LSE, which should come as no surprise given their Commonwealth status. I've made good friends with many of my Canadian classmates, and am quite fond of them - they're a fun and good-natured bunch, not to mention pretty smart. One of them even taught me my new favorite rude euphemism for Canada: America's Hat.
Although my past few years abroad have actually led me to appreciate many things about America that I didn't really recognize when I was a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-war, anti-globalization, commie liberal college student stoner in New York, I've found that making digs at Canada just comes so reflexively for me here. I really don't mean to rip on Canada when I am having a pleasant conversation with my Canadian pals, but the derision just seems to spill out of me constantly (usually it has something to do with that lady on their money - but this line works less and less now that the Canadian dollar is basically at parity with the American dollar!). For their part, the Canucks tend to take it in good spirits; they're probably used to it by now.
Still, despite the fact that America has clearly been going through a rough patch of late, and despite the courses I took last term that attempted to convince me (mostly unsuccessfully, at least for now) that we are living in a post-national world, I find that this practice of dissing Canada (and it's mostly in good humor, even accounting for the subconsciously anxious sense of superiority) comes automatically and without prompting. What's up with that? I'm glad that my Canadian friends aren't easily offended, but I have to admit that I wonder how these uncontrollable outbursts affect their perceptions of me.. Sorry Canadian friends!
And do you know what the worst part of this all is?? I've never even been to Canada!
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San Francisco to roll out the blood-red carpet
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Although stuck in a bizarre April snow storm here in London, I watched with a rather bemused grin as the Olympic torch attempted to traverse the city to celebrate the Beijing Olympics. Within minutes of setting off from Wembley, the relay suffered its first setback, which was only a taste of what was to come. All in all, more than 30 people were arrested along the route for demonstrations against China, mostly related to its actions in Tibet. Things in Paris the following day didn't go much better for the organizers.
So what next? Well it shouldn't be too surprising that the torch would visit North America, and if you think about it the choice of San Francisco as the only place in America to visit does make some sense for historical and cultural purposes. San Francisco has one of the highest populations of Chinese-Americans and it has the oldest and possibly most significant Chinatown in the USA. On the other hand, San Francisco is notorious for activism, protests and demonstrations, and it is pretty foolish to expect that they wouldn't follow the example of the Brits and the French.
As a matter of fact, as I understand it the San Franciscans are stepping up to the challenge and no doubt hope to prove their mettle as protesters - they even got started a few days early! The route of the run through SF is much shorter than those of Paris and London, but that might only mean that there is an ever more concentrated burst of activism, and if posts on Craigslist and other sites are any indication, people in the Bay Area (and the rest of the USA) are going to be giving the torch quite a reception.
Naturally many people in the Bay Area are disturbed by the impending protests, and some are even calling for the torch relay to be scrapped entirely, but I suspect it will go on with the heavy security coverage that really makes the whole thing so farcical. Some say that we should separate athletics from politics. Ok - then how about we remove all of the references to nationality in the Olympics and simply celebrate the champions removed from their nationality? Obviously the Olympics are in fact a highly political event, and always have been - even in the ancient games in Greece, city-states competed against each other for political prestige and bragging rights. Let's stop fooling ourselves, yes?
What I'm more interested to see (and I'll sign off with this), is whether there is an appreciable difference in the reception of the torch in its upcoming legs - the next stop after San Francisco will be Buenos Aires and from there to Africa and Asia - and whether, controlling for a variety of factors, there can be seen to be some important differences in the way that those nations want to be seen as being friendly and grateful to China as opposed to Western nations that might be more happy to allow their people to register discontent through angry protests like we've seen. Just an interesting geo-political note to end on, and I look forward to seeing what happens in San Francisco.
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In My Spare Time...
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While I am very much a full time student at the moment, I have also been working with an interesting and fun website called Tipped. Tipped is a local search directory with user reviews, quite similar to some sites in the United States like Yelp, and I am working with them to grow the user community, build buzz for the site and help it establish itself as the preeminent site of its kind in the UK (there are several direct competitors in the space right now).
Part of my job has required me to keep abreast of what's what in the worlds of social networking, user-generated content and a boatload of various other Web 2.0 buzzwords, and I have to say that for all of the millions of blog posts on the subject (here I am adding one more!), the usefulness of Tipped, like many other interactive sites, boils down to the vitality of the user community. There are a ton of directory sites out there that can tell you the address of any pub in Shoreditch or hotel in Piccadilly, but what dynamic sites like Tipped can do that the static directories cannot is provide qualitative information from its users.
The more users you have that are writing more useful reviews, the further you get from the directory and the closer you get to a sustainable service that can foster a successful community. From a business point of view, it is a lot more affordable to have your users rate and rank the venues than to employ an editorial team to go around and try them all. On the other hand, there is very much a real question of if and how you can reward users for their contributions - obviously you don't want to pay or bribe users to post reviews, but at the same time you do want to ensure that they feel like their contributions are valued, that way they will stay at the site and contribute more. This dilemma is one that all websites based on user-generated content are having to wrestle with, and it's one that I am thinking about a lot - expect further posts on this subject in the future.
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Right, let's try this again
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As any of you who may be out there have no doubt noticed, this blog has died off once again.
Well, as they say, to every thing there is a season, or whatever.
At any rate, I have once again picked up my blogging mantle (and I'm sure this has nothing whatsoever to do with trying to avoid working on my term papers), so keep an eye on this space, I'll be updating things more frequently.
But what will I be posting? Over the years Blunks has seen a lot of different themes to the blog, from my political rants early on to my musings on new media and technology more recently. I don't think that either of those subjects are out of bounds, but I also suspect that I won't be doing as many in depth posts as I have done in the past.
More than likely, there will be interesting links, odd thoughts that occurred to me, stuff that pisses me off and whatever else I feel like posting. I'm hoping to do one post a day, but no doubt there will be days when I don't. Boo-hoo.
Who knows, I might even update the blog software (I'm currently using an old skool version of CutePHP, and thanks goes to Alex for having installed the thing), but don't get your hopes up - at least you can make comments nowadays.
So anyways, stay tuned.
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