infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

One of my research projects this semester is an oral history of the TV-Smash events that took place at the late, great Austin coffeeshop Mojo’s Daily Grind. With oral history, comes the work of transcribing interviews. In the past, I’ve recorded interviews on cassette tape and typed them into Microsoft Word. This makes for pretty tedious work, starting and stopping the player, while I scramble to type. It took me three to four times as long as the recording to transcribe with this method. This semester, I learned of a device called a “transcription machine” that allows you to operate the cassette deck with a foot pedal, but I took a different approach. I recorded the interviews using the voice recorder on my digital point-and-shoot (mostly because I didn’t want to check out a tape recorder from school), transfered the audio files to my computer, and typed them up with the transcription application Transcriva.

Good gravy, Transcriva is awesome. I can’t say that it makes transcription fun, but it streamlines the process substantially. It allows you to play back an audio file and type your transcriptions in the same window. Keyboard shortcuts allow you to stop and start the audio track while typing. (You can also rewind and fast-forward through shortcuts.) It links your text with points in the recording, so you can find your place in the audio by referencing the text. And you can set it to “backtrack on pause,” so it autmatically rewinds a second or three each time you restart the audio. It took me a while to get a hang of some of the keyboard shortcuts, but I’m certain I picked it up faster than I would learn to use the transcription machine. The full-featured version costs $19.99, but the trial version has all of the features I need. If you do oral history or ethnographic work, I highly recommend this little OS X application.

Update: It turns out I do need the full-featured version of Transcriva after all. It disables the audio playback functions after 20 minutes (of audio, not use). Unless you’re transcribing very short segments, you’ll probably want to pay the $19.99, which is pretty inexpensive for such a useful package.

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I found this post by Ross Mayfield proposing a “power law of participation” through Prentiss’s del.icio.us bookmarks. In the post Mayfield suggests a hierarchy of online activities that follow a power law distribution. At the top of the curve are activities with a high level of engagement done by only a few users, such as moderation and discussion-leading. At the bottom of the curve, are low-engagement activities done by many users, such as reading online and marking a text as a favorite.

I ain’t buying it. I have a few problems with the impulse to use power laws to explain everything on the Web, but my criticisms of this conceptualization are unrelated to my issues with power laws. First, many of the activities he describes seem to be orthogonal to each other. Reading and subscribing [to a feed] are largely consumptive activities, while commenting and tagging are production (in a cultural-studies sense.) Mayfield himself criticizes most long tail applications for emphasizing consumption, so why is he conflating consumptive and productive activities? I don’t see how adding an RSS feed implies a greater degree of engagement than creating keywords and tagging a page in del.icio.us. In addition, he attributes more engagement to activities that imply greater degrees of social power, like moderating a list. Of course, it depends on the volume of the list, but it seems like writing blog entries and creating content requires more engagement than filtering out messages as they arrive. Finally, what social science training I have leads me to wonder, “How do you operationalize engagement?” I don’t think engagement can be measured the same way that book sales can be measured. I’m not sure there’s such a direct connection between participation and the number of users.

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My students in the “New Communication Technologies” class I’m TAing this semester are taking their last exam tomorrow. Yesterday, I conducted a review session while the professor was presenting at an open source workshop. A few weeks ago, I had given lectures on social software and open source modes of production. RSS was on the review sheet, so of course one of the questions yesterday was “What’s RSS?” Geeky readers may be snickering at this point, but explaining RSS to undergraduate film majors is surprisingly hard. When I explained it as a way to track blogs to see when they’re updated, students ask, “Is that like when Facebook emails me to tell me when someone’s left a comment on my page?” No, it isn’t.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they ask this when I can’t expect them to know the differences in the underlying technology. Their eyes glaze over when I use phrases like “machine-readable metadata format.” Students seem to get the concept of metadata when I explain that IDv3 tags are a metadata format for describing the content of mp3 files, but they don’t really seem to get that RSS is a way to describe the content of a blog. During research presentations last week, a student said that Brightcove will have RSS feeds, “so it will be really easy for bloggers to put video on their site.” I think one problem I have with explaining RSS to these students is that I give the RSS feed too much agency. It isn’t the RSS feed that tells you that a blog has been updated. The RSS reader tells you a blog has been updated after it checks the RSS feed. I guess I don’t even make this distinction in my own mind.

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New York magazine has an interesting piece by Inside.com founder Kurt Andersen on the business side of the current generation of internet media. I’m hesistant to call it Web 2.0, since that term implies a raft of technologies and design philosophies that don’t necessarily apply to some of the projects he describes. (For example, I’d admit the blogging phenomenon as Web 2.0, but for-profit blogs just seem like niche media properties, a low-overhead version of the trade press.) The primary point he makes, which others have made elsewhere, is that the new businesses like YouTube resist taking a lot of venture capital money. I do wonder, however, how a business like YouTube, which is heavily dependent on bandwidth and server capacity, can operate for long without a serious cash infusion, not to mention the inevitable intellectual property litigation.

Andersen quotes John Battelle, a founder of the Industry Standard saying “I have the same tingly feeling I had with magazines.” I’ve got to say, that some of these projects give me the same feeling of dread I have with magazines, but I worked at a technology publisher during the dot-com crash. At the end of my three-year publishing career, I was the only editor out of a dozen that was still working in the office where I started. Oddly, Folio, a trade magazine for trade magazines, named the CEO of my former employer one of the executives of the year, saying he turned the company from a “dot-com disaster to a new media player.” Fair enough, but it was no fun being mired in the wreckage of a failed business plan.

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Street Tech points to a blog post that relates a story about purchasing a Dell from a retail outlet. When the customer finalized the sale, the salesman asked him if he wanted to spend $20 to have the store techs remove all of the trialware from the machine. I imagine the folks at Dell can’t be too happy about this since I’m sure they have contracts with AOL, Real, and a variety of other ISVs to put trialware on their machines. Potential DMCA violations aside, this proves how little interest Dell shows in caring for their customers is vendors are offering to fix the computers out of the box. I had a lame sales job at Dell one summer, and customers would often ask to have their machine shipped without Real, AOL, or other trialware. Although there were multitudes of customization options available, these trial packages were non-negotiable, often raising the ire of customers. Fortunately, there’s a script called Dell Decrapifier that removes these packages for customers able to find it online.

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I really despise CAPTCHA, the little tests some sites use to determine if a user is a real person or spambot. It’s frustrating to leave a comment on a blog and then have to decipher warped letters and enter them in a text box. Regardless of my annoyance, these tests really fly in the face of accessibility. Blind people and others that use screenreaders are unable to pass these tests, since they deliberately use images that cannot by read by software. When Austin Indymedia considered implementing a CAPTCHA system in response to a heavy spam problem, I protested vociferously, arguing that a project like Indymedia that works to be as inclusive as possible shouldn’t use a technology that excludes persons with disabilities.

An Ars Technica article reports a developer has developed an anti-spam system that doesn’t address CAPTCHA’s accessibility problems but makes the process of proving your humanity more tolerable. KittenAuth presents users with a three-by-three grid of images and asks them to pick out three kittens. It’s CuteOverload meets matching! Hopefully Samantha will ditch her CAPTCHA system for KittenAuth anon.

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In the past year or so, I’ve all but quit reading newspapers on- and off-line. Nearly all of my online reading comes from blogs or relates to my research. While I watch Keith Olbermann for a little variety in my media diet, I’ll clearly see articles on a relatively bounded range of topics. Because of this, my drawers were really showing in a meeting with my chair this morning. We were talking about copyright and digital music, and I wondered out loud what had happened with Apple Computer’s agreement with Apple Records that it would not go into the music business. She told me, “That trial is starting right now. It’s been in the news.” Wow, I’m surprised I missed it, considering all of the technology blogs I read.

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Maybe this Robert Scoble post titled “the Role of Anti-Marketing Design” explains why so many people can tolerate the profound ugliness of MySpace. He thinks that sites that are too slick alienate users. Unlike Scoble, I would argue that Google and Craigslist aren’t ugly, they’re just minimal. MySpace is in a whole different category. It’s weird to think anyone would think MySpace is less corporate when it’s riddled with ads, even if they don’t know that it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

However, this post at a design blog called Whitespace argues that ugly design gets too much credit. (Both of these links come from Lost Remote.) The author doesn’t really address the issue that most internet users don’t go to Web sites for the design - they go there for the information or the experience. Google and del.icio.us give users the information they’re looking for with minimal effort, while MySpace users presumably visit the site to connect with friends and acquaintances. While it makes for a funky experience, MySpace’s promiscuity in allowing users to embed their own stylesheets, scripts, and media also probably give it an edge over other YASNS like Friendster. If any design facet matters to most users, it’s the information architecture. If they can’t find what they’re looking for they’ll go away, but ugly color composition clearly doesn’t turn away the millions of users on MySpace.

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Newsweek’s current cover story is a trend piece on Web 2.0 technologies. Unsurprisingly, “The New Wisdom of the Web” emphasizes personalities behind the companies over the technologies that fall under the rubric of “Web 2.0.” It emphasizes Flickr and MySpace, while mentioning del.icio.us, YouTube, and Google Maps mashups.

I’m not sure I would classify MySpace as a Web 2.0 project - it seemed behind the curve two years ago, and it’s most salient characteristics are its hideous design and kitchen-sink approach to features. It’s true that it attracts a ponderous number of users, but the only thing two-dot-oh about it is its emphasis on social networking. It doesn’t add any value to information or combine different services in an interesting way. Most of all, MySpace emphasizes linking to content on its own site. It encourages bands to upload their music to the site (under iffy copyright license) or users to create blogs mostly invisible to the rest of the Web. To contrast it with del.icio.us, which is a useful tool for finding information online, MySpace is a data cul-de-sac. I do wonder if this ability to corral audiences is what attracted News Corp. to MySpace.

In general the article does a good job of explaining how Web 2.0 enables end users to share and filter information

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In an earlier post, I joked that the sites Kevin Kelly calls “consensus Web filters” won’t catch on until they get a cool name like “blog” or “wiki.” I just ran into a practical reason “consensus Web filter” is a lousy name for this kind of site. I just tagged the “digg vs dot” site that compares stories on digg.com and slashdot.org, and I didn’t have a nice tag to describe it. I, of course, tagged it “Web2.0,” but that doesn’t quite describe what the site is up to. “consensuswebfilter” is too long and uwieldy for a tag, while “CWF” won’t make sense to anyone but me.

Although I have zero influence over computer industry buzzwords, I propose to call these sites “bubblers,” because they enable the most popular links to “bubble” to the top, and, as far as I can tell, the only other colloquial use of “bubbler” is for drinking fountains. So tell your friends: “consensus Web filters” are now “bubblers.”

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