Ponderance

What OS does Dr Evil use?

[Click to expand.] [Via Gadget Lounge]

We Make Money Not Art have an interesting piece on GPS Tron:

The player's movements in real space, which are tracked by GPS and transmitted to the phone's display, influence his/her position in the game. Each player is represented by a line that gets longer and longer. But the player's own line is never allowed to cross itself or the opponent's line. Which makes the game harder as time passes. The goal is to drive your opponent into a corner so that he can no longer extend his line without breaking the rules and losing. This is a game for two players who can be geographically distant from one another.

The game in itself is interesting, but looking at the image of GPS Tron digitally overlaid onto the cityscape made me realise something: Tron's light cycle sequence is the perfect expression of Michel de Certeau's notion of spatial resistance. de Certeau argued that top-down structures like the city were places, but everyday life created/allowed spaces within the city in which the individual's pathway and choices were not dictated by the system, but were subjectively driven, allowing for resistance against seemingly monolithic structures, rules and systems. Applying de Certeau to contemporary spatial politics can be problematic since de Certeau's writing didn't factor in the digital (which is completely understandable given most of his writing was in the 1970s). However, Tron shows us spatial resistance within a seemingly closed digital place. The light cycle competition is supposed to force players to compete with a kill each other. However, when Tron and his companions break out of their designated place, they start to create and traverse digital space. These spaces are created by the players' movement through the digital, but are subjectively enacted, not dictated by the system (or the Master Control Program in Tron's case). Tron, the harbinger of computer-generated special effects, also allows us to start imagining modes of resistance via 'the everyday', something increasingly important as the cultural struggles to keep and expand the public domain continue.

Well, Amazon's A9.com search service is all the talk of the town this week. Their big development is the extension of their Yellow Pages tabbed search function which now includes over 20 million images of shopfronts from major cities around the US. Here's how they didi it:

Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street. The whole process (except for the driving!) is completely automatic, making it fast and efficient. Block View allows users to see storefronts and virtually walk up and down the streets of currently more than 10 U.S. cities using over 20 million photographs. We are driving and at some point hope to cover the whole country.

I must admit, it is interesting to check out some of the shopfronts to places I visited in New York and LA, and the service may very well be quite useful when trying to find places for the first time. Being able to walk down the street in images is fun, too! I wonder if Amazon's other key countries--the UK, Japan, Germany--are going to be mapped?

A few amusing stories are already emerging on the back of A9's expansion ... Kottke links to an amusing story of a man who searched for his local pizza shop and found both himself and his family in the images! Meanwhile, Matt Jacobs wonders about A9's attempts to promote themselves through product placement. Apparently in The OC this week in the US, one of the characters said "So, I A9.com'ed Him Last Night". While a well chosen place to advertise, it's not exactly a sentence that rolls off the tongue. Googled is definitely preferable as a verb!

Update (30 Jan 2005, 9pm): Waxy has the clip from The OC in avi while A9 claims not to have paid for the mention. Right.

The NYTimes reports a new fake viral advertisement for a Volkswagen Polo which shows a suicide bomber trying to use the car, but the explosion being completely contained, ending with the tagline "Polo. Small But Tough":

Even as the British unit of Volkswagen prepared yesterday to confront the creators of a fake Volkswagen commercial circulating online, executives there said they were worried that the incident would not be the last. Rather, they said, it may set the table for more hoaxes and brand confusion. "The difficulty is, of course, that the general public may not know who is behind what they see on the Internet," said Paul Buckett, the head of press and public relations at Volkswagen Group U.K. in London. "And in the future it may not be easy to take legal action to defend ourselves. That's not just for Volkswagen, of course, but for any company or individual." Viral marketing, in which low-profile ads spread quickly online as people share them, has become an intriguing strategy for many marketers trying to look beyond traditional 30-second television commercials. But marketers are not the only ones taking the viral approach. Because the Web and cheap video technology keep making it easier for anyone with some knowledge and equipment to produce spots that look almost like real commercials, brand managers may find their carefully calibrated marketing messages increasingly being tweaked, teased, spoiled or entirely undermined. Consumers, on the other hand, can now wonder whether each supposed hoax is an authorized, but deniable, below-the-radar marketing ploy. The hoax at hand has set off a particularly sharp bout of distress since its appearance last week, because it looks almost exactly like a real commercial for the Volkswagen Polo, a model sold outside the United States, except that it portrays the Polo driver as a suicide bomber.

In the commercial, the driver pulls up to a busy outdoor cafe, exposes explosives strapped to his chest and pushes a detonator. His car, however, contains the explosion without cracking a window. The spot ends with the Volkswagen logo and the actual Polo ad theme: "Small but tough." The spot was sent to the London office of DDB Worldwide, a Volkswagen roster agency, by two people known as Lee and Dan. "We had no part in disseminating it," said Annouchka Behrmann, public relations director at DDB London, part of the DDB Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group. "We think it's absolutely disgusting."

Will there be more of these? Absolultely. Digital editting, cheap cameras and a world full of talented folk makes these things entirely possible and the 30-second spot is the perfect length to show off a budding filmmaker's skills without completely draining their time and resources! More to the point, some companies try to use viral marketing without acknowledging their own involvement. Mazda made some attempts last year, but they were pretty average and probably did more harm than good (never make a half-baked attempt via the ever-critical blogosphere!). At the other end of the spectrum there are homage ads or "customer evangelism" such as George Masters' wonderfully slick iPod Mini self-made ad. I think non-authorised ads are definitely here to stay, and the web makes viral distribution near-impossible to restrain or police. So how do we make sure consumers know the difference? Why, by educating them enough to tell the difference!!

The Polo Viral Fake can be found here in QuickTime. As you can see, very tasteless, but very high production values. More to the point, given some of the tastelss ads around, you would have to think for a minute to realise this is a hoax. Of course, given the fact that any link or suggestion of a link to "terrorism" could ruin a company, the educated viewer would surely figure this one out by themselves!

Yesterday was a lovely Australia Day, spent with good friends and, in many ways, quite similar to previous years: a slow start, Triple J's Top 100 countdown permanently playing in the background, a BBQ lunch before a few glasses of wine in the afternoon, heading down to the SkyShow fireworks and then chilling out for a few hours to let the mad traffic dissapate. However, when I got back to the flat I've been housesitting, I realised that my Australia Day was a lot more digital than it used to be. Case in point: the picture to right which shows my new Griffin RadioShark in action. The RadioShark is a nifty little gadget which is essentially a moulded plastic USB antenna with some very clever software which allows you to both listen and record analog radio directly to your computer's harddrive. It's been called the "TiVo for radio" since is lets you not only record, but also--with buffer use--to timeshift radio. Given that I always miss bits of the Top 100, I figured I'd give the RadioShark a decent task and set the timer to record all 100 songs. I arrived home to find all 100 songs remediated (from original digital CD, to analog radio, back to digital recording on the hardrive) with crystal clarity, waiting to be copied into the iPod for future enjoyment (the only drawback is that the PC RadioShark software will only record to wave or wma, so I'll probably drop quality a little converting to MP3 when importing to iTunes as I recorded to wma - my harddrive doesn't have the space for eight hours raw wave files right now!). In terms of the songs, I was really pleased to have two Missy Higgins songs in the top ten, but mildly disturbed to see that Greenskeepers' song "Lotion" made the countdown, albeit at number ninety (you know about "Lotion", don't you? The lyrics are based on Silence of the Lambs and there was a really bizzare video clip made which lip-synchs the lyrics with footage from the film. I think I find it most disturbing because I occassionally find myself humming the song and then realise what I'm humming!!)

Also during the afternoon and the Skyshow, I took a fair few pictures with my digital camera. Certainly the digital camera lets me take far too many pix since I inevitably delete about 85% of what I take, but it does allow me to take enough to guarentee a few decent ones. So, an hour after I arrived home, my Australia Day pictures were up on Flickr, being digitally distributed to anyone who cares to look for them. (Oh, and a personal note to people taking photographs of fireworks: turn your flash off; you can't take good pictures of light by drowning it with more light!) During the Fireworks, since none of us brought radios along to hear the broadcast, we also ended up listening via the nifty little on-board radio in Jen's new Nokia. And to completely geeky gadget it up, when the call came to wave our torches, no one had one at hand: but we did have an iPod and my little iBeam, which is a tiny torch plugin which connects to the iPod! (And, yes, we used the torch, not the laser pointer!)

Finally, when I got home to find the final episode of the first season of BattleStar Galactica waiting for me in High-Definition Digital, despite the fact BattleStar Galactica hasn't begun screening in Australia yet and is only up to episode three in the US. (It's something of a novelty to see UK TV watermarks on Torrent TV!) Oh, and can I just say, I've really, really enjoyed the entire BattleStar Galactica series (so far, if it gets renewed), and I thoroughly recommend it.

So, with all these little digitalities in my day, I think my everyday life is definitely becoming saturated by the digital ... and I'm quite pleased that it is. I hope you all had a decent Digital Australia Day! (It appears even Google did!)

Oscar nominations are out. I can't be bothered going through who will probably win this year, but I can tell you who I'd prefer to see win: Finding Neverland for Best Film; Johnny Depp as Actor in a Lead Role; Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, Pierre Bismuth for the Best Original Screeplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; David Magee for Adapted Script for Finding Neverland; Xiaoding Zhao for Best Cinematography for Shi mian mai fu/House of Flying Daggers; The Incredibles team for Sound Editing, Achievement in Sound and Best Animated Film; and Spider-Man 2 for Visual Effects.

I don't expect Finding Neverland will actually pick up any awards, but only because The Aviator and Leo seem to have charmed the voters. Of course, I should point out I haven't seen either The Aviator or Ray so a lot of these choices are based on a very, very enjoyable viewing experience with Finding Neverland and The Incredibles being very, very well crafted, albeit not quite as aimed at kids as one might have expected.

A state election, eh? At least Robert Corr's reminding us all why voting for Barnett is ... just silly.


Doesn't really inspire.

Guess what happens when a Calvin fan has too much time on their hands ...

See the full set here at the Something Awful Forum. [Via Waxy]

Some interesting guests are gracing Australian shores this year...

James Farmer has announced that the big guest for the first BlogTalk DownUnder, this May, in Sydney is none other than blog guru, and author of the Weblog Handbook, Rebecca Blood!

Meanwhile, Melissa Gregg points out that the feminist theorist extraordinnaire Judith Butler is in Sydney in June for the Australian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) Annual Conference.

It's seems like a great time to be in Sydney ... it's a shame Sydney's over 3000km from Perth! :(

The BBC yesterday ran an article looking at the increasing use of blogs in academia:

Until a few months ago, the attention paid to web logs, or blogs, focused mainly on politics and the media business. However, many in academia followed the web-diary of Salam Pax, the famous Baghdad blogger during the build-up to the war in Iraq. Now, the technology that has been an alternative source of news to many academics is being incorporated more fully into university life. Blogs are giving departments, staff and students the freedom and informality of tone impossible in scholarly journals or even the student newspaper. Blogging lecturers say the technology provides them with easy online web access to students and improves communication outside of the classroom.

While the article doesn't really say anything new--focusing on the benefits of immediacy and increased communication, and the possible negatives of abuse due to the more casual form--it's encouraging to see academic blogging getting more attention. I know that there's interest in incorporating blogs into further units at UWA. I'm looking forward to seeing what sort of response I get to my presentation "Blog This! Weblogs, Critical Thinking and Peer to Peer Learning" at the Teaching and Learning Forum in February.

[Via Scripting News]

Why weren't iPods around when I was a teenager looking for a casual job? I would have made a great iPod Loader:

The rising popularity of Apple's sleek iPod has created a new niche service: the professional iPod loader. There are housekeepers to tend homes and gardeners to tend landscaping. Why not iPod loaders to take care of music collections? For $1 to $1.49 a CD, the professional loaders will embark on the time-consuming process of copying a music collection onto an iPod, often providing a digital backup copy as well. "It's a booming aftermarket of the iPod economy," said Bill Palmer, a 27-year-old entrepreneur who has created a nationwide network of iPod loaders called Loadpod. Each loader picks up the iPod and CD's at the client's home, then returns a fully loaded iPod in a few days. The loaders say they are finding growing demand, especially after the holiday season, which increased the number of iPods sold to 10 million. Consumers are realizing that the digital wonder that was supposed to unify and simplify their musical existence actually eats up time, lots of it. Converting enough CD's to fill a 40-gigabyte iPod can take 60 to 100 hours, depending on the computer's speed. "The prospect of spending all this time was daunting," said Nell Eckersley, a 35-year-old educator in Brooklyn, who was excited when she received an iPod for Christmas. Then she began converting her collection of 400 CD's. "I spent all day Sunday doing it, and said, `This is crazy,' " she said.

[Full NY Times Story]

[X] For some reason, suicidal bunnies are very funny!

[X] CNN: "Christians issue gay warning on SpongeBob video" ... apparently god-fearing straight folk don't wear SquarePants! [Via MeFi]

[X] Those wacky JibJab folk are back a flash take on Bush's Second Term. [Via Milk'n'Cookies]

[X] Boromir's less flattering scenes from LoTR: Catapult and Mortor. [Via LoneWolf]

[X] Want to say something special in a way that melts in your mouth, not in your hand? Then why not order some customised M&Ms? [Via Coolhunting]

At some point in the past day, Google released Picasa 2, a substantially updated version of their free image organising and sharing software. There are many updates, the most significant of which seem to be a lot of basic image editing and tweaking functions which will make entry-level photo editing a lot simpler. And there are some new fun tools, as well, such as the ability to make collages like this one:

There is also more obvious integration for uploading image to Blogger blogs, although you require Hello as well to achieve posting. Some impressive upgrades for a free piece of software.

Sick of reality tv? Then how are you going to feel about virtual reality TV? It seems that the Sims might be coming to a TV near you in the near future! Reuters has the details:

Electronic Arts, the world's biggest video game publisher, is considering an interactive TV show that would let viewers control the actions of the characters as in its popular game "The Sims." "One idea could be that you're controlling a family, telling them when to go to the kitchen and when to go to the bedroom, and with this mechanism you have gamers all over the world 'playing the show'," said Jan Bolz, vice president of marketing and sales for EA Europe. The proposed show, which might involve viewers voting on possible actions, is still in the early stages, but EA confirmed it is in talks with several TV production companies. Bolz declined to disclose any additional details.

Terra Nova has some interesting thoughts on the idea:

Now the first response to this must be: Genius.

I mean, this is surely a break-through. Game devs have taken a long time to wake up to the fact that eBayers are prepared to pay for someone else to play the game for them through to a certain point (ie up to the point where the Sword of Ultimate Vanquishing is available), and then they'll take it from there. Now EA are working on a way for people to pay to watch others to play the whole game for them. It takes a peculiar kind of intelligence to take an interactive medium and turn it into a passive and/or pseudo-interactive medium: "If you want your Sim to go to the bathroom, press 'ok' on your remote control, now."

While Grand Text Auto has some amusing notions of alternative "concepts being thrown around…":

* The Sims go to an island off the coast of Florida for a huge techno rave party, even though this has nothing to do with anything in the original game.
* The Sims encounter zombies and aliens in shows packed with gunplay, even though this has nothing to do with anything in the original game.
* The Sims will have to cope in near-future, post-earthquake Los Angeles. Alyssa Milano will make a special appearance in the first episode, sporting a bleach blonde mini-elf haircut.

Personally, I think it would work. It would have to be better than half the reality tv being produced now, and the novelty of a global interactive television game would probably at least make a successful first season out of the idea. Of course, I wonder what time slot it would be aimed at? What happens when bored viewers, trying to hot things up, start giving their Sims murderous impulses? Can you woohoo in primetime? And if the game was based on Sims 2 architecture, what would happen if the tv series got unintentionally modded? Could be fascinating!

Five friends out of Perth for a weekend getaway + four iPods = iGeneration! At least, that's how it felt as the many pods patiently waited for their turn to make friends with the iTrip and make those speakers sing! From Phantom of the Opera to Micheal Nyman to Run DMC, the pods made audible waves! :)

For those looking for a bizzaro iPod short-film-cum-dream-sequence, check out the quicktime movie iPod World. [Via Waxy]

Okay, so the flash Come Clean site is very kewl. If only Lady Macbeth had such a resource, perhaps she wouldn't have been the centrepiece of a tragedy! So, what do I have to confess?

See y'all next week ... [Via Random Panda]

Everyone is talking new stuff from Mac. The big news for the iPod Set: iPod Shuffle, a 512MB or 1Gb flash iPod mini-mini with no screen, the size of a flash drive (it is a flash thumb drive as well), so named because it's designed to shuffle all your songs, but it can play through normally, too. At $99 US, it's not a bad little gadget, but more of a novelty than an iPod ... of course, for the price, it makes a nifty thumbdrive! (Gizmondo has many a iPod Shuffle pic here.) Oddly, Waxy points to a Plastic Bag blog entry that notes US customers are adivsed "Do not eat iPod Shuffle", while UK customers are told "Do not chew iPod Shuffle"; I wonder why UK citizens wouldn't try to digest their iPods?!? Also, Gizmondo has a wonderfully satirical How-To for converting your iPod to iPod Shuffle here!

Probably more significant is the release of the Apple Mac Mini, an absolutely tiny Mac sans keyboard, monitor or other periperhals, but tiny, lightweight and definitely affordable. Specs from Apple:

Inside its petite 2-inch tall, 6.5-inch square anodized aluminum enclosure, Mac mini houses a 1.25 or 1.42GHz G4 processor, 40 or 80GB hard drive, a slot-loading CD-R/DVD-ROM optical drive, 256MB DDR SDRAM and ATI Radeon 9200 graphics chip with 32MB dedicated DDR SDRAM — all whisper-quiet.

Connect your digital devices, such as cameras, iPod, printer, camcorder or keyboard to the Mac mini over USB 2.0 or FireWire. Built-in 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet and a 56K v.92 fax modem give you access to broadband or dial-up connections to the Internet. A headphone/audio line-out jack lets you listen to stereo sound.

The Mac Mini is tailored to tempt iPod users to move from Windows to Mac, and I suspect this very clever, entry-level version will sway more than a few people. Initial reviews seem to emphasise ease of use, and cuteness factor!

For other software releases announced at MacWorld, check out this article at Mac Central.

Finally, given saturation of Mac/iBranding, here comes the latest war of words and images between Apple lovers and haters:

[Click for full image iProduct @ Gizmondo]


[Click for full image Apple Hater @ Gizmondo]

It seems that the MacWorld 2005 conference has got some very, very cool gadgets being premiered and for the iPod Set, the new SmartDeck audio adapter for in-car player may be one of the coolest. SmartDeck not only allows an iPod to play in any casette-tape deck, but allows the tape deck controls (most likely in your car) to actually control the iPod! Details from Griffin:

SmartDeck is more than just a cassette adapter for iPod; it achieves truly seamless integration between iPod and cassette deck. Users can utilize the cassette deck's forward and rewind buttons to advance to the next or prior songs in the iPod playlist. In addition, pause and stop buttons do what pause and stop buttons are expected to do. When the user hits the cassette deck's Eject button or switches from Cassette to Radio, Griffin's SmartPlay technology automatically pauses the iPod.

While my iTrip is fine for now, I would love the added control of a SmartDeck!

Why, oh why, would Bill Gates be so silly as to beg the Creative Commons loving blogosphere to band together and make fun of him? Surely that's the only thing that could have inspired him to call copyright activists and reformers "new modern-day sort of communists" in a recent interview. As one would expect, throwing incendiary provocations has started an anti-Bill memefire, and thus Creative Commies are born! A very popular meme is emerging, visually meshing communist iconography with Creative Commons and/or Copyleft insignia. One result:

[Click here for larger version.] Find many more here, here and a T-Shirt here.

Update (5.30pm, 8 Jan 2005): For some wonderful Creative Commie button icons based on the Creative Commons license logo, check out Robert Corr's neat little effort.

We are the Knight's that say ... Shell? Well, they are if they're being fashioned out of LEGO! Check out the wonderful stop-motion LEGO scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail here. [Via Milk'n'Cookies]

Strange things have been happening in The Sims 2. Security Focus reports:

Entire neighborhoods of Sims are being mysteriously graced with eternal youth, while some characters are finding all their needs fulfilled by a single shot of magic espresso. Others no longer need to empty the toilet after potty training their toddler. Some Sims are being abducted by aliens when they glance through their telescope -- every time, instead of just occasionally, which is normal.

While these are all the results of player-developed game mods, many of the players experiencing these effects have never--to their knowledge--downloaded a mod. Except, they have. It turns out that when houses and the like are uploaded to the official EA Sims 2 Exchange, where players can swap and download real estate and Sim-skins developed by other players, any mods that were present in the creator's version of Sims 2 is also uploaded. Thus, when downloading new real estate, many Sims 2 players have accidentally ended up with mods which effect all of their Sims 2 world, not just the downloaded real estate. EA were surprised by this development and have warned users and now list any embedded mods in real estate, but apparently its been an interesting few months! An almost uncontrollable virally mutating simscape ... it's all too real! [Via /.]

The Six Apart buy-out of LiveJournal has transitioned from rumour to reality in a few short days. Six Apart, are repsonsible for the most widely used high-end blog platform (by high-end, I simply mean, requiring some coding skill to set it up and keep it running). LiveJournal, by contrast, is one of the easiest of the free blogging platforms and is widely considered the most socially and community oriented of all blog tools. So, what's going to change now that Six Apart owns LiveJournal? Well, for LiveJournal users, at least, the short term looks fine according to Six Apart's LJ Acquisition FAQ:

Q. What is going to happen to LiveJournal and its current users?

A. We acquired LiveJournal because we like LiveJournal just the way it is -- it's an awesome product. We will invest in the further development of LiveJournal and help it expand its reach around the globe but our plans do not include removing the free level, plastering the sites with ads, owning user content, etc... We think the LiveJournal community is unique and vibrant. We welcome LiveJournal users to the Six Apart family, and promise to keep the LiveJournal culture and quality which has earned their devotion.

Brad Fitzpatrick, the guy selling LiveJournal, is full of optimism (and employment), too:

Do you trust them?
I totally trust Six Apart.

Ever since LiveJournal got big and popular, a number of companies have been offering to buy LiveJournal. I suppose it was inevitable, but the more I talked to everybody, the less interested I became in selling. With a few exceptions, nobody seemed to "get it", and people's ideas for LiveJournal's future were generally lame. I started to realize that selling LiveJournal would mean killing LiveJournal, so I didn't. Then one day Six Apart contacts us, we start talking, and here we are. I know you may not necessarily trust me when I say they're a cool company, but I'd ask at least that you give them a chance before you start rioting in the streets. I have a lot of confidence that this union will produce cool things. Ben and Mena, the founders of Six Apart, have built a great company and hand-picked a lot of great people. Over the past couple months I've come to know their executive team really well, and they're people I feel confident taking over control of my baby. They've already shown that they'll defer to me on issues of community, fearful of doing anything that'd upset people. As for the rest of the team, I've only started meeting them all, but my mouth hit the floor when I saw some of the latest stuff they have in the works. If you want to run for the hills and backup your journal and move to another service, feel free, but hopefully you'll be back in 6 months when we've proven ourselves.

Why didn't you just grow LiveJournal more and/or hire your own management team?
Easier said than done. Finding a good management team is next to impossible... I couldn't find anybody I'd trust as much as Six Apart. Most people that approach you and say, "Hey, I'd like to manage your company" are really just in it for money. I wanted a group of people that understood what I'd built and appreciated it for what it was, not what it could be if it could only extract more money from its users. So in the end I realized Six Apart was just what I was looking for. Plus having a bigger pool of co-workers is more fun and more productive.

Now, that's it for the polite 'everything's okay' merger annoucements, but what I found more interesting were Mena's comments about what LiveJournal currently means:

A Vicious Circle

I believe that LiveJournal has, unfortunately, received a bum rap because many have considered the postings on LiveJournal to be trivial. It's sort of like a vicious circle: Journalists make fun of webloggers saying that they only post about their cats, webloggers make fun of LiveJournalers saying that they only post about high school angst and LiveJournalers make fun of webloggers saying that they are SUV-driving yuppies who think they have something important to say (and I'm generalizing). The fact is, webloggers and LiveJournalers are in essence doing the same thing: they are posting their thoughts to people who are important to them. For some webloggers, it's 100,000 people, for others it is 10. For LiveJournalers, it may be 30 people, it may be 3 (or a combination of some number). And this is where it gets interesting. We started Six Apart because of Movable Type and Movable Type started because I wanted a blogging tool that would make it easy for me to have a creative outlet to publish to the world. But, it turns out, I didn't want to publish to the world -- I wanted to publish to the people who I had been reading for years and respected, who, in turn became my friends in the offline world. I made friends through my weblog and realized that I was more comfortable writing to this subset. That isn't to say I didn't still like writing to the world at large. Mena's Corner is meant to reach as many people as possible. And, I'm comfortable with that. What I'm not comfortable with is posting pictures of my best friend's baby on my public weblog. That's why I also keep a private weblog. For the past year and a half, we've been advocating TypePad as a tool to use if you want to keep a public or private weblog. We have users that have tens of thousands of readers, while others password-protect their family weblog and allow 6 people in. Weblogging is not just about publishing, it's about communicating.

So, does that mean LJs are basically being "kept" as small-scale social blog spaces? And, more to the point, is Typepad going to get shelved as the "other" Six Apart platform if, as Mena implies, LJs do it better? Prior to the official announcement, the most detailed and, to my mind, accurate look at the possible downside for LJ users after the buyout was Danah Boyd's, where she worried:

My biggest concern is that a merger will stunt the cultural growth on LiveJournal that makes it so fascinating. My second concern is that Six Apart will not be prepared to deal with the userbase and will initiate practices that are more detrimental because of fear. [For example, what's the best way to handle an LJ community dedicated to cutters trying to outdo each other via images?] It takes a resistance-based culture to support a community of resisters and Six Apart is by no means a resistance-minded company. My third concern is that LiveJournal will shift because of investor value. It's already compared to blogging, but as its own entity, it doesn't have to be evaluated on those terms. If bought by Six Apart, i'm concerned that SA's investors will evaluate it on SA blogging's terms instead of in terms of LJ. My fourth concern is that fear of control will limit the evolving identity production/consumption that makes LiveJournal so valuable for youth and marginalized populations. It's already far too public for more people, but easy access to LJ from MT/Typepad could be a disaster for many LJers.

Most of the LJs I read are more social and, indeed, more about community, but I suspect that, at least in the short term, Boyd's concerns might be upfounded. However, as Movable Type integrates various "improvements" to LJ, will it just start to look like Blogger? Of course, being a Blogger user, that doesn't strike me as entirely bad, but I do think LJs are better suited for social uses. Of course, given Microsoft's foray with MSN Spaces and Google owning Blogger, at least Six Apart's acquisition of LJ should ensure a solid and competitive future. Of course, the only other platform I'm considering for the future is WordPress (I need categories!).

The US Pew Internet & Life survey recently handed down their newest report on the place of blogs in online life [PDF]. The BBC jumped on the report with an article titled " Blog reading explodes in America", which notes that blog-reading is up 58% last year. Still, that means that only 27% of Americans are reading blogs. Apparently only 5% use RSS aggregators (I wonder if that includes Firefox's livelinks?) and only 38% of Americans have actually heard of blogs. I wonder how that compares to, say, newspaper readership? Still, it would appear that blogs are becoming more and more integrated into both the US and international digital landscape. It's a shame there isn't anything as large as the Pew Internet Survey in Australia; it'd be interesting to know how comparable blog reading is down under.

PS How often do people get fired for what they write in blogs? I was surprised that it happened often enough to have its own term: dooced.

A little late, but Happy New Year everyone.

On a personal level, 2004 was a very up and down year. On a career level it was a pretty decent one. On an international one ... well, a US election, an Australian election and a Tsunami don't exactly make for a brilliant time for millions of people, but 2005 has to be better!

And it was nice to see ABC news (in the US) proclaim Bloggers people of the year! :)

And now, the immediate to do list for 2005:
1. Finish writing PhD.
2. Secure full-time employment after finishing PhD.
3. Find somewhere to live, near uni, earlyish 2005.
(That should keep me going for a while...)

Moments in digital culture which made me happy from technology, to mashups, to breakdancing transformers!

1. Firefox 1.0 - The world needed a better browser, and got one.
2. Flickr - So much more than photos, and it got me snapping again, which I'm pleased with.
3. The Grey Album - Mashed Beatles and Jay-Z with a whole lot of copyright controversies to boot! (And the Grey Video, too!)
4. The Sims 2 - So very much to talk about as Simlish takes over...
5. One Night at the Hip-Hopera - Queen mashed with millions of 80s and 90s moments, filmic and musical.
6. Bloglines - RSS. The only way to read.
7. Images from Mars - Wow.
8. GMail - 1Gb of mail, a whole lot easier to read!
9. My iPod - How did I live without it?
10. Breakdancing Transformers - :)

Films that I saw for the first time in 2004 (some may have been released earlier elsewhere) and enjoyed immensely ...

1. In My Father's Den
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. Lost in Translation
4. Somersault
5. Hero
6. Spider-Man 2
7. The Incredibles
8. Touching the Void
9. Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
10. Kill Bill 2 (Although Kill Bill 1 was still the better film).

Biggest Diasppointments: Godsend & The Stepford Wives