Monday, November 19, 2012
What Have I Done?
Sure, we all ask ourselves that sometimes. If you'd like to see some of what I've done, you could take a look at my shiny new multimedia resume infographic created at Visualize.me.
Social Media In a Nutshell
If you don't happen to have time or resources to take a graduate-level course in social media strategy, you can get a very good grasp on the basics by reading The Cluetrain Manifesto. If you get through such a course and think you may need a refresher later, without so much reading, bookmark it now.
The Cluetrain Manifesto is rather a remarkable document, and I'm beginning to understand that a lot of what we now know as best business practices around social media are summed up in it. As I read it, I see that a great deal of our required reading for my social media course is an attempt by the authors to convey the information in the Manifesto by watering it down into more traditional business-speak. It was first published in 1999, by a group of developers and other thinkers and writers on the world of high tech who saw what was coming. Since then, a long list of notables in the tech world have signed the Manifesto, and its site has been declared a "read-only landmark." You can read the whole book at that site, as well as the central tenets, some commentary, information about the writers and signers, buzz, discussion, and more. (You can also buy a paper version of the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's, and other booksellers.)
The central core of the Cluetrain Manifesto is a list of "95 Theses," basic ideas about social media, companies and markets that make up the basic message of the Manifesto. They can be summed up in the "Elevator Rap":
| when | ||
Markets | meet | Workers |
Through the Internet, the people in your markets are discovering and inventing new ways to converse. They're talking about your business. They're telling one another the truth, in very human voices.
| Intranets are enabling your best people to hyperlink themselves together, outside the org chart. They're incredibly productive and innovative. They're telling one another the truth, in very human voices. | |
Or you can join the conversation. | ||
Or, in even more succinct form, "If you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get....we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings - and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it."
The 95 Theses begin with basic definitions:
1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
They continue on, laying out a picture and a roadmap for businesses who want to survive and thrive on the social media landscape. Fundamental to this survival is the understanding that both companies and markets are made up of people who communicate, and with social media, communication is now more powerful than it has ever been before:
11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.
12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
13. What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called "The Company" is the only thing standing between the two.There's some straight talk:
20. Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.
21. Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.
22. Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.And some insight about the changing structure of companies in response to social media and the online revolution:
50. Today, the org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical. Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.
51. Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.And much, much more. This is powerful stuff, highly concentrated; companies that took this information to heart a decade ago have thrived in the modern marketplace, and there are many organizations who can learn a great deal from it in a short time...if they have the honesty and courage to take it in.
52. Paranoia kills conversation. That's its point. But lack of open conversation kills companies.
53. There are two conversations going on. One inside the company. One with the market.
54. In most cases, neither conversation is going very well. Almost invariably, the cause of failure can be traced to obsolete notions of command and control.
55. As policy, these notions are poisonous. As tools, they are broken. Command and control are met with hostility by intranetworked knowledge workers and generate distrust in internetworked markets.
The book (which is now available in a 10th-anniversary edition) contains further explanation and commentary on the ideas expressed in the 95 Theses, and it's also excellent reading - highly readable and full of useful food for thought. For anyone interested in social media, the Cluetrain Manifesto is a classic and a must-read...and you can get it free, so why wait?
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Seattle Cosmic Live-Tweet
As another part of my social media class, I live-tweeted my weekly game night last night. (Check it out if you wish by going to Twitter and searching for the hashtag #boardgamenight - you'll see tweets from me, @fishwatt, and a spectator or two.) This was a new adventure for me, as I've generally been a diffident tweeter and had never live-tweeted an event before.
A little background: Seattle Cosmic is a board game group begun by my husband and me in 2000. We play a variety of tabletop games every Saturday night, and for the first couple of years we recorded the games we played and a certain amount of commentary, added photos, and published a weekly report to our wiki. This was a fun way to keep track of what we'd been doing, and it really helped to grow the group in our early days as people "tuned in" to see our adventures each week, and it helped to keep members who hadn't been able to attend in a certain week involved by seeing what happened. After awhile, though, we got a little tired of spending so much time each game night to record what happened, snap the photos, write up the commentary, and so on. At various times, different members wanted to revive the newsletter, but it's never really taken back off.
Live-tweeting game night felt a bit like doing the newsletter again, although broadcasting it in real time. As it happened, I didn't end up transmitting pictures because I didn't want to take time out from playing to do it, but it would probably have made the reporting more vivid. As it happened, my husband couldn't attend, but he did follow the action via Twitter and did some "color commentary," including tweeting supporting information about the games we were playing, something else that could really improve the quality of the report if, say, two of us decided to co-tweet and cooperate. I had a couple of reports from acquaintances and friends who watched the tweets from a distance, and they did seem to enjoy them. However, I'm not sure I would want to live-tweet regularly. It felt a little intrusive, both to my game-playing and to the experience of other players in my games, who humored me but seemed a little annoyed at the distraction.
So, the bottom line is that I'm undecided about the utility of live-tweeting game night. In some ways, it was fun, but I'm not sure the distraction of my fellow players, not to mention my own divided attention, was worth the benefit. I may experiment with it again sometime, especially after I talk it over more with local players and those who would like to see further tweeted reports another time. I can see too, perhaps, how this might be a useful tool for discussion at an event where I'm not so directly involved and taking a more passive audience role. In any case, I'm glad to have had the experience and add live-tweeting to my social media toolbox.
A little background: Seattle Cosmic is a board game group begun by my husband and me in 2000. We play a variety of tabletop games every Saturday night, and for the first couple of years we recorded the games we played and a certain amount of commentary, added photos, and published a weekly report to our wiki. This was a fun way to keep track of what we'd been doing, and it really helped to grow the group in our early days as people "tuned in" to see our adventures each week, and it helped to keep members who hadn't been able to attend in a certain week involved by seeing what happened. After awhile, though, we got a little tired of spending so much time each game night to record what happened, snap the photos, write up the commentary, and so on. At various times, different members wanted to revive the newsletter, but it's never really taken back off.
Live-tweeting game night felt a bit like doing the newsletter again, although broadcasting it in real time. As it happened, I didn't end up transmitting pictures because I didn't want to take time out from playing to do it, but it would probably have made the reporting more vivid. As it happened, my husband couldn't attend, but he did follow the action via Twitter and did some "color commentary," including tweeting supporting information about the games we were playing, something else that could really improve the quality of the report if, say, two of us decided to co-tweet and cooperate. I had a couple of reports from acquaintances and friends who watched the tweets from a distance, and they did seem to enjoy them. However, I'm not sure I would want to live-tweet regularly. It felt a little intrusive, both to my game-playing and to the experience of other players in my games, who humored me but seemed a little annoyed at the distraction.
So, the bottom line is that I'm undecided about the utility of live-tweeting game night. In some ways, it was fun, but I'm not sure the distraction of my fellow players, not to mention my own divided attention, was worth the benefit. I may experiment with it again sometime, especially after I talk it over more with local players and those who would like to see further tweeted reports another time. I can see too, perhaps, how this might be a useful tool for discussion at an event where I'm not so directly involved and taking a more passive audience role. In any case, I'm glad to have had the experience and add live-tweeting to my social media toolbox.
Friday, November 16, 2012
#Waywire: Video Online Reimagined
#Waywire (the hashtag is part of the name) is a new specialized social media platform for sharing and monitoring video. It's designed to enable users to create a stream like Twitter or Facebook, in which they can upload video, share video found elsewhere, subscribe to curated streams, and so forth. Founder Cory Booker, also the mayor of Newark, NJ, describes it as a way to democratize news, or as he puts it, "The power of the people is more important than the people in power." In #waywire, you have a Pinterest-like board to which you can save footage from professional content partners like Reuters as well as clips captured by people on the scene via smartphones, say. You can select from directories that have been curated by editorial review, view by tags, see selections of trending video from other sites, and use #waywire's proprietary search algorithms to find relevant clips. In this way, you can create reports on breaking news or longer-term topics and share them with your friends or other subscribers. You can also link your #waywire boards with other social media platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn. Features planned for the future include the ability to edit clips on the fly, allowing users to create original video stories and mashups, and more direct linkage with other online video services that will allow users to post response video directly, for example.
On first look, #waywire's interface is a little opaque. I wasn't exactly sure what to do first, but I used a long-trusted rule of thumb: when in doubt, use the search box. A little experimental clicking, and I was setting up feeds, following suggested wires, and generally enjoying myself. I think it will take a little time to really understand how #waywire can interact and mesh with other social media platforms, but I think that will be its real strength, and certainly what the team envisions for the site.
Overall, I'm quite impressed. I think this could have great potential for a lot of uses that are much more organized than other major players in the video social media field. I think a lot of people will find it interesting to curate collections of video in the manner of Pinterest that they can share. More seriously, if a broad base of users embraces #waywire's potential as a grassroots news tool and activism platform, it could be an important game-changer in the world of news, breaking control of established and monolithic news sources and enabling lots of people to make an end-run around them to tell important stories to a wide audience. I think recent events, especially the role of media in the recent presidential election, have shown that we're long overdue for reform in news and information dissemination, and #waywire has real potential to be a change agent. I'll be watching its progress with considerable interest.
Why Blog?
I've been following with interest the various blogs of my classmates at the iSchool - such interesting people I get to learn with! A post by Kristin at Becoming Socially Acceptable has stuck in my mind, though. She says:
One reason, and the main reason my husband blogs sometimes, is to find connections. Somewhat counterintutively, it sometimes helps to broadcast your interests and ideas if your ideas are a little strange and need to find a narrow audience - harnessing Karim Lakhani's "broadcast search" idea, which I referred to in my crowdsourcing project. If you can send out a call not only in a public space, but that is persistent over time, you have a much wider reach and a better chance of your message getting to exactly the person who's interested in what you're saying, whom you'd be interested to talk with too. I certainly think that's a valid reason. I'm not sure that what I have to say is very unusual, but I like the idea of having a better chance of making contact with someone who'll like it or find it useful.
Another reason is to gain a sense of my time longitudinally, an idea that's motivated pretty much all journaling forever. It's so easy to lose track of what I thought a week ago, a month ago, last year, or even yesterday sometimes. Life moves ahead quickly, and faster all the time, and it becomes more and more expedient to surf the now and navigate the stream of information and experience as it goes past, ever in the present. There are definite benefits to this, if you can really manage it, but I think I lose things as well, a certain level of perspective and self-knowledge. Perhaps keeping better track of my path will restore some of that longer view.
Both of these ideas largely benefit me (although I'd hope the first one could benefit someone else if what I'm saying is useful to them), but I think there's a larger reason, and that is to take active part in the dialogue of the world. We have unprecedented tools to see the scope of humanity in the modern world, but they're of no use unless a diverse population steps up and takes hold of them. Every person who adds a bit to our story makes it richer, shows reality more accurately, doesn't leave the record in the hands of the powerful and their created vision. Is my life and my viewpoint Terribly Important in a traditional sense? Perhaps not, but that doesn't mean my voice, even in the aggregate, is useless. My life exists. Speaking about it is respecting my deeply held democratic viewpoint that everyone is worth hearing, every view is unique and impossible to duplicate, every story adds a dimension to history and to the fabric of human experience. Perhaps someone will find individual value in examining my particular thread, but either way, my thread holds the warp together in this little spot, and that's something.
In the age of Web 2.0 everyone and anyone is trying to get noticed for their 15 minutes in the spotlight. Is blogging in a saturated environment worth it? Are we really affecting change and being a guiding voice? If not, you should probably stop blogging.Hmm. It touches on why I've never successfully managed to blog for very long so far, and is making me consider once again why I should take the time or make the effort to blog now (aside from that it's a class assignment). After all, the world is full of blogs. Who needs another blog?
One reason, and the main reason my husband blogs sometimes, is to find connections. Somewhat counterintutively, it sometimes helps to broadcast your interests and ideas if your ideas are a little strange and need to find a narrow audience - harnessing Karim Lakhani's "broadcast search" idea, which I referred to in my crowdsourcing project. If you can send out a call not only in a public space, but that is persistent over time, you have a much wider reach and a better chance of your message getting to exactly the person who's interested in what you're saying, whom you'd be interested to talk with too. I certainly think that's a valid reason. I'm not sure that what I have to say is very unusual, but I like the idea of having a better chance of making contact with someone who'll like it or find it useful.
Another reason is to gain a sense of my time longitudinally, an idea that's motivated pretty much all journaling forever. It's so easy to lose track of what I thought a week ago, a month ago, last year, or even yesterday sometimes. Life moves ahead quickly, and faster all the time, and it becomes more and more expedient to surf the now and navigate the stream of information and experience as it goes past, ever in the present. There are definite benefits to this, if you can really manage it, but I think I lose things as well, a certain level of perspective and self-knowledge. Perhaps keeping better track of my path will restore some of that longer view.
Both of these ideas largely benefit me (although I'd hope the first one could benefit someone else if what I'm saying is useful to them), but I think there's a larger reason, and that is to take active part in the dialogue of the world. We have unprecedented tools to see the scope of humanity in the modern world, but they're of no use unless a diverse population steps up and takes hold of them. Every person who adds a bit to our story makes it richer, shows reality more accurately, doesn't leave the record in the hands of the powerful and their created vision. Is my life and my viewpoint Terribly Important in a traditional sense? Perhaps not, but that doesn't mean my voice, even in the aggregate, is useless. My life exists. Speaking about it is respecting my deeply held democratic viewpoint that everyone is worth hearing, every view is unique and impossible to duplicate, every story adds a dimension to history and to the fabric of human experience. Perhaps someone will find individual value in examining my particular thread, but either way, my thread holds the warp together in this little spot, and that's something.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Crowdsourcing - Part 3 (Art, Finance, Etc.)
(This is Part 3 of the notes for my presentation on crowdsourcing for my INFX598 course in social media.)
Creative projects can also be
crowdsourced. One of the most famous crowdsourced creative communities is
Threadless. At Threadless, the public
votes on user-submitted designs; each week, a certain number of winners are
chosen for production and sale.
Designers whose work is selected receive a cash payment and credit at
the Threadless site and shop. Another example is Tongal, a site that brings
together writers, directors, talent, and production professionals to produce
video advertising projects for companies who contract a project. The community
at Tongal also participates in promoting and critiquing work.
One of the most ambitious crowdsourced creative projects is the film Life in a Day. Born out of a partnership between director Ridley Scott’s Scott Free UK and YouTube, the film is a user-generated, feature-length documentary shot on a single day—July 24, 2010. Asked to capture a moment of that day on camera, the global community responded by submitting more than 80,000 videos to YouTube. The videos contained over 4,500 hours of deeply personal, powerful moments shot by contributors from Australia to Zambia. This footage was edited and distilled into an amazing 90-minute documentary film that captures a vivid and fascinating portrait of everyday lives on Planet Earth.
One form of quasi-financial
crowdsourcing is the prediction market, also known as idea futures or event
derivatives. This type of project is based on ideas described in James
Surowiecki's 2004 book The Wisdom of
Crowds, although prediction markets pre-date the book. Essentially,
the theory is that aggregating many individual decisions under the right
circumstances can make estimates and decisions more accurately than any
individual in the group could make. Prediction markets seek to create the four
elements that are said to be required: diversity of opinion, independence (so
participants don’t know the decisions of other participants), decentralization
(so that individuals can use local resources in the decision) and aggregation.
Participants decide on issues and buy futures or make bets about what they
believe will happen, resulting in a market where ideas can be seen to rise and
fall like stocks. There are certain known types of failure to this system, but
in many cases it works very well. One of the oldest and best-known of these is
the Iowa Electronic Markets, which were introduced at the University of Iowa
during the 1988 presidential election and has often been used to predict the
results of political elections with a greater accuracy than traditional polls.
Another example is the Hollywood Stock Exchange, a virtual market
game established in 1996 in which players buy and sell prediction shares of
movies, actors, directors, and film-related options. In 2006, it correctly
predicted 32 of the 39 big-category Oscar nominees
and 7 out of 8 top category winners.
Crowdfunding is a way for many
individuals to network and pool their resources to support efforts initiated by
other people or organizations, usually by outright giving as opposed to
lending. Crowdfunding is used to support a wide variety of activities,
including disaster relief, art projects, small business startups, invention
development and, scientific research. Projects are usually reviewed and
approved by an organization for feasibility, then listed on a crowdfunding site
for a certain amount of time; donors can agree to give money to a project under
agreed-upon conditions, sometimes with special incentives provided by the
artist or business. Some of the most popular sites for this are Kickstarter,
RocketHub, and Indiegogo. A more specific crowdfunding site is Spot.Us, a
nonprofit platform for “community powered reporting.” Through Spot.Us, the
public can support journalists and newsrooms to Report on important and
underreported topics that may be overlooked by other news outlets.
Crowdsourced Art/Design/Development
Creative projects can also be
crowdsourced. One of the most famous crowdsourced creative communities is
Threadless. At Threadless, the public
votes on user-submitted designs; each week, a certain number of winners are
chosen for production and sale.
Designers whose work is selected receive a cash payment and credit at
the Threadless site and shop. Another example is Tongal, a site that brings
together writers, directors, talent, and production professionals to produce
video advertising projects for companies who contract a project. The community
at Tongal also participates in promoting and critiquing work.
Crowdsourced broadcasting, or
crowdcasting, is another form of crowdsourced creative work. Listener Driven Radio
is a technology that takes listener input via online or mobile applications,
analyzes song votes, comments, and other input, and automatically adjusts radio
programming in real time to suit the audience’s taste. LDR software is
currently being used by broadcasters in the USA, Canada and Europe, including
Clear Communications, CBS, and Harvard Broadcasting.
Instructables is an
encyclopedia-type project that gathers DIY projects from makers and crafters.
They submit detailed and illustrated procedures for ways to repair, repurpose,
and create an astonishing array of projects ranging from home modification to
clothing to electronics to food, and many other ingenious and original ideas
that would be hard to categorize. The Instructables community also encourages
and critiques projects, as well as offering variations and expanding on them in
commentary.
Some creative projects are
directly produced via crowdsourced information. We Feel Fine is described as
“An exploration of human emotion, in six movements.” Artists Jonathan Harris
and Sep Kamvar use automatically gathered information from blogs across the
Internet to create a dynamic, interactive visual expression of emotional
content in real time. Users can create different displays by choosing different
filters that can specify populations by area, age, and other demographic
factors.
One of the most ambitious crowdsourced creative projects is the film Life in a Day. Born out of a partnership between director Ridley Scott’s Scott Free UK and YouTube, the film is a user-generated, feature-length documentary shot on a single day—July 24, 2010. Asked to capture a moment of that day on camera, the global community responded by submitting more than 80,000 videos to YouTube. The videos contained over 4,500 hours of deeply personal, powerful moments shot by contributors from Australia to Zambia. This footage was edited and distilled into an amazing 90-minute documentary film that captures a vivid and fascinating portrait of everyday lives on Planet Earth.
Financial and Quasi-Financial Projects
One form of quasi-financial
crowdsourcing is the prediction market, also known as idea futures or event
derivatives. This type of project is based on ideas described in James
Surowiecki's 2004 book The Wisdom of
Crowds, although prediction markets pre-date the book. Essentially,
the theory is that aggregating many individual decisions under the right
circumstances can make estimates and decisions more accurately than any
individual in the group could make. Prediction markets seek to create the four
elements that are said to be required: diversity of opinion, independence (so
participants don’t know the decisions of other participants), decentralization
(so that individuals can use local resources in the decision) and aggregation.
Participants decide on issues and buy futures or make bets about what they
believe will happen, resulting in a market where ideas can be seen to rise and
fall like stocks. There are certain known types of failure to this system, but
in many cases it works very well. One of the oldest and best-known of these is
the Iowa Electronic Markets, which were introduced at the University of Iowa
during the 1988 presidential election and has often been used to predict the
results of political elections with a greater accuracy than traditional polls.
Another example is the Hollywood Stock Exchange, a virtual market
game established in 1996 in which players buy and sell prediction shares of
movies, actors, directors, and film-related options. In 2006, it correctly
predicted 32 of the 39 big-category Oscar nominees
and 7 out of 8 top category winners.
Another financial application of
crowdsourcing is to find workers willing to do small tasks for pay; this is
also known as “microwork.” Probably the most famous source is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site. On this site, users can select from hundreds of thousands
of Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs. As the name indicates, many of these
require image recognition, language processing, or other tasks that are
difficult to automate. Some require certain qualifications and pay slightly
better, but most can be done by anyone. Most tasks have a timeframe, but can be
done at the worker’s convenience, and pay a few cents each. Theoretically,
these small tasks will add up, but one criticism of this system is that it’s
often impossible to make a minimum wage doing the work, and so poses ethical
problems for hirers that can be complicated by the fact that workers in the
system are located all over the world. This model also carries concerns about
eroding expectations about job security and worker’s rights as it expands.
TaskRabbit is a crowdsourced work
source that matches people who have small jobs with local members who have had
a background check and are willing to do the job for the offered price. These
jobs include shopping, delivery, home repairs, research, pet care, and many
other types of work, which pay a market rate. Users can search jobs by type,
see normal rates and user ratings, and connect one-to-one. Some of the same
criticisms apply here, but many users seem very content with their results. EduFireis a similar site that focuses specifically on crowdsourced education, where
users can find independent tutors on a variety of subjects and contract with
them for real-time learning sessions.
Some types of crowdsourcing
produce money for a project instead of work. This may be in the form of direct
investment, loan structure, or another form of financing, but in small amounts
provided by many people. A site which provides intrinsic crowdfunding for
charities is GoodSearch; participants choose from over 100,000 schools and
non-profits, then use the GoodSearch interface to perform normal web searches.
Each time a search is performed, a small amount is donated to the chosen cause.
Powered by Yahoo!, the money comes from their advertisers.
One of the best-known microfinance
sites is Kiva, which provides a structure in which investors can lend small
amounts of money to entrepreneurs around the world. Each investor gives a small
part of the total amount needed, and intermediate managers and banks partner to
administer the loans, which the recipients agree to repay on schedule. Lenders
keep contact with the growing business by communication from the entrepreneur,
and can re-invest their money when it’s returned to them.
Crowdfunding is a way for many
individuals to network and pool their resources to support efforts initiated by
other people or organizations, usually by outright giving as opposed to
lending. Crowdfunding is used to support a wide variety of activities,
including disaster relief, art projects, small business startups, invention
development and, scientific research. Projects are usually reviewed and
approved by an organization for feasibility, then listed on a crowdfunding site
for a certain amount of time; donors can agree to give money to a project under
agreed-upon conditions, sometimes with special incentives provided by the
artist or business. Some of the most popular sites for this are Kickstarter,
RocketHub, and Indiegogo. A more specific crowdfunding site is Spot.Us, a
nonprofit platform for “community powered reporting.” Through Spot.Us, the
public can support journalists and newsrooms to Report on important and
underreported topics that may be overlooked by other news outlets. In Closing
Crowdsourcing is a huge topic,
and while there have been a lot of projects mentioned in this presentation,
it’s only a small survey of what’s happening in the field. The crowdsourcing
idea is growing and expanding into new areas and finding new applications and
forms all the time, and it’s an exciting and fascinating part of the
information world. Again, I’ve included links to all the projects mentioned in
the Tumblr, and further articles about crowdsourcing in my Scoop.It
page. Crowdsourcing is the living
proof that many of us working together can be stronger, faster, smarter, and
more creative than any one of us can ever be. It’s the face of the human race
at work.
We will live longer than I will, we will be better than I was;
We can cross rivers with our will, we can do better than I can.
-- Lykki Li
(If you have access to VoiceThread at the UW, you can see the presentation at http://voicethread.com/share/3675614/)
Crowdsourcing - Part 2 (Research & Information)
(This is Part 2 of the notes for my presentation on crowdsourcing for my INFX598 course in social media.)
A CAPTCHA is a website security
device that makes sure users are human and not virtual, to reduce spamming and
other malicious site interference. Almost everyone has seen the box where
you’re asked to re-type some letters before you can enter a site. reCAPTCHA is
a service that uses this effort, millions of times per day, to help identify
digitized text that can’t be read by optical character reader software. Words
that cannot be read correctly by OCR are given to users in conjunction with
another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to
read both words. If they give the right answer for a known word, the system
assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The same word is given to many
users to verify the answer. Currently, the project is helping create digital
editions of older issues of the New York Times and books in the Google Books
project.
Information Projects – “Encyclopedia” Type
The most familiar type of
crowdsourced project is the “encyclopedia” type, where a project provides a
structure and often editorial and other management toward creating a large
“anthology” work composed of public contributions. I will touch on some
examples, although I’ll discuss them quickly because so many of them are already
familiar.
Wikipedia is, of course, the
archetypal example of this. Another
example of this type of project is the recipe repository, of which there are
many online – RecipeSource is one of the oldest, while AllRecipes is one of the
most popular. There are also many sites that collect song lyrics contributed by
users, such as Lyrics.com. A crowdsourced project of special interest to
librarians is LibraryThing, which was originally designed as a tool for
cataloging a personal book collection, but has grown into a more
general-purpose database containing book information, demographics, historical
data on book collections of famous people, and more. Another important literary
project is Project Gutenberg, the oldest repository of e-texts in existence.
Since 1975, Project Gutenberg has coordinated public efforts to digitize and
archive public domain works and provide them free to the public. Project
Gutenberg also uses a sophisticated system of crowdsourced effort to proofread
its books, and an affiliated project, LibriVox, is working on creating and
archiving free audiobooks of public works produced by crowdsourced effort.
Some projects begin as a
different type of crowdsourcing project, but turn into an encyclopedia-type
project over time. Ask Metafilter began as a project to create a large
community that would answer any question asked; it was an outgrowth of a larger
community blog, MetaFilter, where members would post anything they thought
might interest other people. Over time, both sites have become a huge
searchable repository for answers to a staggering variety of questions ranging
from technical problems to personal quandaries to where to find other obscure
information. If you need a more focused way to crowdsource personal issues, WotWent Wrong offers a website and app that lets users anonymously upload the
details of romantic relationship breakups, so that other users can advise,
counsel, critique, and offer closure.
Research Projects – “Mosaic” Type
Much crowdsourced research is
based on the idea that lots of people will donate small bits of time or effort
to a cause, especially if it’s one they believe in and the task is fun, and
those small bits of work add up. Crowdsourcing really excels at doing work
that’s easy for humans, but hard for computers to do, such as image recognition
and metatagging, and natural language
recognition.
 |
| A sample FoldIt puzzle |
One very effective crowdsourced
research project is FoldIt. Understanding the structure of proteins and how
they can fold is a key scientific problem in understanding many diseases and
finding cures for them, including HIV, Alzheimer’s Disease, and cancer. Solving
this problem has been one of biology’s toughest challenges, difficult and
expensive to research using computers. FoldIt enlists the help of users by
offering them a puzzle based on a protein folding problem. Humans can see
solutions to such a puzzle much more easily and faster than computers can, and
have fun doing it. FoldIt players have made great progress in adding to scientific
knowledge in this field, including solving the structure of a retrovirus enzyme
critical to developing anti-AIDS drugs in a matter of days, where it had
previously eluded scientists completely.
Another game project, Galaxy Zoo, enlists the
public in morphological classification of galaxies by asking them to look at
telescope photographs and identify galaxy types visually. Volunteers have
identified more than 70 million galaxies so far, most of which had never been
seen by human eyes before, since the photographs were taken and processed by
robotic cameras.
A CAPTCHA is a website security
device that makes sure users are human and not virtual, to reduce spamming and
other malicious site interference. Almost everyone has seen the box where
you’re asked to re-type some letters before you can enter a site. reCAPTCHA is
a service that uses this effort, millions of times per day, to help identify
digitized text that can’t be read by optical character reader software. Words
that cannot be read correctly by OCR are given to users in conjunction with
another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to
read both words. If they give the right answer for a known word, the system
assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The same word is given to many
users to verify the answer. Currently, the project is helping create digital
editions of older issues of the New York Times and books in the Google Books
project.
Another project that uses
language recognition is What’s On the Menu, the New York Public Library’s
effort to make its historical menu collection into a searchable database. Users
who log in can help identify dishes, prices, meal organization, geographic
information, and more from scanned selections from the collection’s 45,000
menus. Eventually, this information will be available for historians, cultural
researchers, chefs, educators, and anyone else to make new connections and
discoveries, and learn more about our culinary past.
Project Implicit provides visual
tests that the public can take to measure implicit bias and attitudes. By
asking users to choose quickly between images and words onscreen, the Implicit
Association Test makes it possible to measure attitudes and beliefs that
people are either unwilling or unable to report, such as prejudices that may be
unconscious or embarrassing. The information provides interesting individual
feedback as well as valuable research information about public attitudes.
PatientsLikeMe was created in
2002 as a way to help accelerate learning on amyotropic lateral sclerosis, aka
Lou Gehrig’s disease. Now its 80,000 members share personal details of their
medical history with fellow members in a network that not only provides
support, but data that is aggregated to track patterns and responses to various
treatments. For rare diseases like ALS, many doctors may only encounter one or
two patients in their lifetime, but PatientsLikeMe allows them to compare and
review treatments with thousands of other patients, helping them quickly
understand options and determine an effective course of action.
Often, crowdsourcing can respond
quickly in times of crisis or when other infrastructures have broken down.
Ushahidi is a company that provides
open-source software to enable collection, visualization, and dynamic mapping
of crowdsourced reporting of time-sensitive crisis information. It was
initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election
fallout at the beginning of 2008. The original website was used to map
incidents of violence and peace efforts throughout the country based on reports
submitted by 45,000 users via the web and mobile phone. Since then, Ushahidi
continues to develop and freely distribute its platform, apps, and services to help
coordinate social media and individual in-the-moment reporting of problems and
assistance routing for people dealing with situations like bombing in Mumbai
and the recent earthquakes in Japan and Haiti. Ushahidi is also being used by
human rights organizations to map incidents of violence, corruption, and other
issues of note that are often overlooked or suppressed in traditional media
reporting. Crowdsourcing can also help in the aftermath of a crisis – MapMill is currently enlisting the public to analyze aerial photos of places affected
by Hurricane Sandy, to help quickly identify and assess storm damage.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Crowdsourcing - Part 1 (Background)
(This is part 1 of the notes to my presentation on crowdsourcing for my iSchool class, INFX 598.)
Crowdsourcing is producing results by
harnessing the efforts of a large number of people, usually members of the
public, and usually using Internet technology. With crowdsourcing, large jobs
are cut down to size so that many people working together can achieve more than
a single person could do alone.
Effective crowdsourcing doesn’t happen
by accident, and it generally doesn’t arise organically. The key to effective
crowdsourcing is in engineering the means of collecting, funneling,
orchestrating, and processing a collective input into a useful output. Usually
those who use crowdsourcing apply expertise to break a large job up
intelligently, and then build a system that many people can use easily to
provide a part of the answer, as well as a system to interpret, collate, or
otherwise construct the desired larger project or result out of all the small
parts.
One of the earliest examples of crowdsourcing may
be The Oxford English Dictionary. In July 1857 a circular was issued by the ‘Unregistered
Words Committee’ of the Philological Society of London. This circular, which
was reprinted in various journals, asked for volunteers to read particular
books and copy out quotations illustrating ‘unregistered’ words and
meanings—items not recorded in other dictionaries—that could be included in a proposed
dictionary supplement. Quotations began to pour in from volunteers, and in January
1858 the Philological Society decided that, instead, efforts should be directed
toward compiling a completely new dictionary Renewed appeals to the public
followed later that year, culminating in a formal ‘Proposal for the
Publication of a New English Dictionary’. The OED still releases “Appeals”
to the public to solicit dictionary input on current word usage.
Modern crowdsourcing takes many forms, and new
forms are being devised every day – as I researched this presentation, I kept
finding new topics to include! So this presentation is not comprehensive by any
means, but I hope it will give you an idea of some of the ways the
crowdsourcing model is being used.
Before moving ahead, though, I’d like to clarify
a few terms that will help me discuss crowdsourcing. First, many people apply
the term “crowdsourcing” to projects that offer prizes or other incentives to
the public for solving a specific problem. One early example is the cash prize
offered by the French military in 1795 for a new method to preserve food, which
spurred Nicolas Appert to invent modern canning techniques. A modern version
is the Ansari X Prize, which was offered to induce a non-government
organization to develop a reusable commercially-viable manned spacecraft. In
the strictest sense, however, this is not so much crowdsourcing as what Karim
R. Lakhani of Harvard Business School calls “broadcast search”: soliciting a
solution from an as-yet unknown individual by widely publicizing a motivational
reward. It’s asking a broad audience for a solution, but not using the
collective power of many individuals to produce that solution.
I’d also like to define “explicit” and “implicit”
crowdsourcing. Explicit crowdsourcing describes projects where people knowingly
and actively participate in a project, while implicit crowdsourcing harnesses
users who are doing a different activity and don’t necessarily know what work
they may be doing for third parties who need information they provide. Examples
of each of these will be coming up.
I’ve coined two terms
to describe types of crowdsourced project, “mosaic” and “encyclopedia” types.
In a mosaic-type project, participants do small tasks that aren’t very useful
one by one, but that can be patched together into a cohesive large work. In an
encyclopedia-type project, participants contribute small pieces of work that
may be useful on their own, but are combined into a larger work that resembles
an anthology or an encyclopedia. Again, examples will be upcoming.
Finally, for future reference, I’ll be
publishing my notes for this presentation as a series of blog posts on my blog,
Fish Who Answer the Telephone. (As you can now see if you're reading this!) I’ve also collected links to all the projects I
discuss in a Tumblr, and I’ve started a Scoop.It page with more
articles about crowdsourcing, if you want to read even more about it.
(Next: research and information projects benefit from crowdsourcing!)
Friday, November 9, 2012
Calling Technorati
YXPKBXHUNYBN
Pardon me, the rest of you, but Technorati is looking for a claim code in my feed, so that was it. It was not a finger spasm, nor someone taking down a gagging fit in dictation.
Thank you for your indulgence.
Pardon me, the rest of you, but Technorati is looking for a claim code in my feed, so that was it. It was not a finger spasm, nor someone taking down a gagging fit in dictation.
Thank you for your indulgence.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Good advice from Chuck P
Here's a column containing some excellent advice from author Chuck Palahniuk. His words are geared toward writers, but there's good food for thought here for any creative type.
Twenty years ago, a friend and I walked around downtown Portland at Christmas. The big department stores: Meier and Frank… Fredrick and Nelson… Nordstroms… their big display windows each held a simple, pretty scene: a mannequin wearing clothes or a perfume bottle sitting in fake snow. But the windows at the J.J. Newberry's store, damn, they were crammed with dolls and tinsel and spatulas and screwdriver sets and pillows, vacuum cleaners, plastic hangers, gerbils, silk flowers, candy - you get the point. Each of the hundreds of different objects was priced with a faded circle of red cardboard. And walking past, my friend, Laurie, took a long look and said, "Their window-dressing philosophy must be: 'If the window doesn't look quite right - put more in'."
(Reposted from here.)
13 WRITING TIPS
by Chuck Palahniuk
She said the perfect comment at the perfect moment, and I remember it two decades later because it made me laugh. Those other, pretty display windows… I'm sure they were stylist and tasteful, but I have no real memory of how they looked.
For this essay, my goal is to put more in. To put together a kind-of Christmas stocking of ideas, with the hope that something will be useful. Or like packing the gift boxes for readers, putting in candy and a squirrel and a book and some toys and a necklace, I'm hoping that enough variety will guarantee that something here will occur as completely asinine, but something else might be perfect.
Number One: Two years ago, when I wrote the first of these essays it was about my "egg timer method" of writing. You never saw that essay, but here's the method: When you don't want to write, set an egg timer for one hour (or half hour) and sit down to write until the timer rings. If you still hate writing, you're free in an hour. But usually, by the time that alarm rings, you'll be so involved in your work, enjoying it so much, you'll keep going. Instead of an egg timer, you can put a load of clothes in the washer or dryer and use them to time your work. Alternating the thoughtful task of writing with the mindless work of laundry or dish washing will give you the breaks you need for new ideas and insights to occur. If you don't know what comes next in the story… clean your toilet. Change the bed sheets. For Christ sakes, dust the computer. A better idea will come.
Number Two: Your audience is smarter than you imagine. Don't be afraid to experiment with story forms and time shifts. My personal theory is that younger readers distain most books - not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter. Movies have made us very sophisticated about storytelling. And your audience is much harder to shock than you can ever imagine.
Number Three: Before you sit down to write a scene, mull it over in your mind and know the purpose of that scene. What earlier set-ups will this scene pay off? What will it set up for later scenes? How will this scene further your plot? As you work, drive, exercise, hold only this question in your mind. Take a few notes as you have ideas. And only when you've decided on the bones of the scene - then, sit and write it. Don't go to that boring, dusty computer without something in mind. And don't make your reader slog through a scene in which little or nothing happens.
Number Four: Surprise yourself. If you can bring the story - or let it bring you - to a place that amazes you, then you can surprise your reader. The moment you can see any well-planned surprise, chances are, so will your sophisticated reader.
Number Five: When you get stuck, go back and read your earlier scenes, looking for dropped characters or details that you can resurrect as "buried guns." At the end of writing Fight Club, I had no idea what to do with the office building. But re-reading the first scene, I found the throw-away comment about mixing nitro with paraffin and how it was an iffy method for making plastic explosives. That silly aside (… paraffin has never worked for me…) made the perfect "buried gun" to resurrect at the end and save my storytelling ass.
Number Six: Use writing as your excuse to throw a party each week - even if you call that party a "workshop." Any time you can spend time among other people who value and support writing, that will balance those hours you spend alone, writing. Even if someday you sell your work, no amount of money will compensate you for your time spent alone. So, take your "paycheck" up front, make writing an excuse to be around people. When you reach the end of your life - trust me, you won't look back and savor the moments you spent alone.
Number Seven: Let yourself be with Not Knowing. This bit of advice comes through a hundred famous people, through Tom Spanbauer to me and now, you. The longer you can allow a story to take shape, the better that final shape will be. Don't rush or force the ending of a story or book. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes. You don't have to know every moment up to the end, in fact, if you do it'll be boring as hell to execute.
Number Eight: If you need more freedom around the story, draft to draft, change the character names. Characters aren't real, and they aren't you. By arbitrarily changing their names, you get the distance you need to really torture a character. Or worse, delete a character, if that's what the story really needs.
Number Nine: There are three types of speech - I don't know if this is TRUE, but I heard it in a seminar and it made sense. The three types are: Descriptive, Instructive, and Expressive. Descriptive: "The sun rose high…" Instructive: "Walk, don't run…" Expressive: "Ouch!" Most fiction writers will only use one - at most, two - of these forms. So use all three. Mix them up. It's how people talk.
Number Ten: Write the book you want to read.
Number Eleven: Get author book jacket photos taken now, while you're young. And get the negatives and copyright on those photos.
Number Twelve: Write about the issues that really upset you. Those are the only things worth writing about. In his course, called "Dangerous Writing," Tom Spanbauer stresses that life is too precious to spend it writing tame, conventional stories to which you have no personal attachment. There are so many things that Tom talked about but that I only half remember: the art of "manumission," which I can't spell, but I understood to mean the care you use in moving a reader through the moments of a story. And "sous conversation," which I took to mean the hidden, buried message within the obvious story. Because I'm not comfortable describing topics I only half-understand, Tom's agreed to write a book about his workshop and the ideas he teaches. The working title is "A Hole In The Heart," and he plans to have a draft ready by June 2006, with a publishing date set in early 2007.
Number Thirteen: Another Christmas window story. Almost every morning, I eat breakfast in the same diner, and this morning a man was painting the windows with Christmas designs. Snowmen. Snowflakes. Bells. Santa Claus. He stood outside on the sidewalk, painting in the freezing cold, his breath steaming, alternating brushes and rollers with different colors of paint. Inside the diner, the customers and servers watched as he layered red and white and blue paint on the outside of the big windows. Behind him the rain changed to snow, falling sideways in the wind.
The painter's hair was all different colors of gray, and his face was slack and wrinkled as the empty ass of his jeans. Between colors, he'd stop to drink something out of a paper cup.
Watching him from inside, eating eggs and toast, somebody said it was sad. This customer said the man was probably a failed artist. It was probably whiskey in the cup. He probably had a studio full of failed paintings and now made his living decorating cheesy restaurant and grocery store windows. Just sad, sad, sad.
This painter guy kept putting up the colors. All the white "snow," first. Then some fields of red and green. Then some black outlines that made the color shapes into Xmas stockings and trees.
A server walked around, pouring coffee for people, and said, "That's so neat. I wish I could do that…"
And whether we envied or pitied this guy in the cold, he kept painting. Adding details and layers of color. And I'm not sure when it happened, but at some moment he wasn't there. The pictures themselves were so rich, they filled the windows so well, the colors so bright, that the painter had left. Whether he was a failure or a hero. He'd disappeared, gone off to wherever, and all we were seeing was his work.
For this essay, my goal is to put more in. To put together a kind-of Christmas stocking of ideas, with the hope that something will be useful. Or like packing the gift boxes for readers, putting in candy and a squirrel and a book and some toys and a necklace, I'm hoping that enough variety will guarantee that something here will occur as completely asinine, but something else might be perfect.
Number One: Two years ago, when I wrote the first of these essays it was about my "egg timer method" of writing. You never saw that essay, but here's the method: When you don't want to write, set an egg timer for one hour (or half hour) and sit down to write until the timer rings. If you still hate writing, you're free in an hour. But usually, by the time that alarm rings, you'll be so involved in your work, enjoying it so much, you'll keep going. Instead of an egg timer, you can put a load of clothes in the washer or dryer and use them to time your work. Alternating the thoughtful task of writing with the mindless work of laundry or dish washing will give you the breaks you need for new ideas and insights to occur. If you don't know what comes next in the story… clean your toilet. Change the bed sheets. For Christ sakes, dust the computer. A better idea will come.
Number Two: Your audience is smarter than you imagine. Don't be afraid to experiment with story forms and time shifts. My personal theory is that younger readers distain most books - not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter. Movies have made us very sophisticated about storytelling. And your audience is much harder to shock than you can ever imagine.
Number Three: Before you sit down to write a scene, mull it over in your mind and know the purpose of that scene. What earlier set-ups will this scene pay off? What will it set up for later scenes? How will this scene further your plot? As you work, drive, exercise, hold only this question in your mind. Take a few notes as you have ideas. And only when you've decided on the bones of the scene - then, sit and write it. Don't go to that boring, dusty computer without something in mind. And don't make your reader slog through a scene in which little or nothing happens.
Number Four: Surprise yourself. If you can bring the story - or let it bring you - to a place that amazes you, then you can surprise your reader. The moment you can see any well-planned surprise, chances are, so will your sophisticated reader.
Number Five: When you get stuck, go back and read your earlier scenes, looking for dropped characters or details that you can resurrect as "buried guns." At the end of writing Fight Club, I had no idea what to do with the office building. But re-reading the first scene, I found the throw-away comment about mixing nitro with paraffin and how it was an iffy method for making plastic explosives. That silly aside (… paraffin has never worked for me…) made the perfect "buried gun" to resurrect at the end and save my storytelling ass.
Number Six: Use writing as your excuse to throw a party each week - even if you call that party a "workshop." Any time you can spend time among other people who value and support writing, that will balance those hours you spend alone, writing. Even if someday you sell your work, no amount of money will compensate you for your time spent alone. So, take your "paycheck" up front, make writing an excuse to be around people. When you reach the end of your life - trust me, you won't look back and savor the moments you spent alone.
Number Seven: Let yourself be with Not Knowing. This bit of advice comes through a hundred famous people, through Tom Spanbauer to me and now, you. The longer you can allow a story to take shape, the better that final shape will be. Don't rush or force the ending of a story or book. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes. You don't have to know every moment up to the end, in fact, if you do it'll be boring as hell to execute.
Number Eight: If you need more freedom around the story, draft to draft, change the character names. Characters aren't real, and they aren't you. By arbitrarily changing their names, you get the distance you need to really torture a character. Or worse, delete a character, if that's what the story really needs.
Number Nine: There are three types of speech - I don't know if this is TRUE, but I heard it in a seminar and it made sense. The three types are: Descriptive, Instructive, and Expressive. Descriptive: "The sun rose high…" Instructive: "Walk, don't run…" Expressive: "Ouch!" Most fiction writers will only use one - at most, two - of these forms. So use all three. Mix them up. It's how people talk.
Number Ten: Write the book you want to read.
Number Eleven: Get author book jacket photos taken now, while you're young. And get the negatives and copyright on those photos.
Number Twelve: Write about the issues that really upset you. Those are the only things worth writing about. In his course, called "Dangerous Writing," Tom Spanbauer stresses that life is too precious to spend it writing tame, conventional stories to which you have no personal attachment. There are so many things that Tom talked about but that I only half remember: the art of "manumission," which I can't spell, but I understood to mean the care you use in moving a reader through the moments of a story. And "sous conversation," which I took to mean the hidden, buried message within the obvious story. Because I'm not comfortable describing topics I only half-understand, Tom's agreed to write a book about his workshop and the ideas he teaches. The working title is "A Hole In The Heart," and he plans to have a draft ready by June 2006, with a publishing date set in early 2007.
Number Thirteen: Another Christmas window story. Almost every morning, I eat breakfast in the same diner, and this morning a man was painting the windows with Christmas designs. Snowmen. Snowflakes. Bells. Santa Claus. He stood outside on the sidewalk, painting in the freezing cold, his breath steaming, alternating brushes and rollers with different colors of paint. Inside the diner, the customers and servers watched as he layered red and white and blue paint on the outside of the big windows. Behind him the rain changed to snow, falling sideways in the wind.
The painter's hair was all different colors of gray, and his face was slack and wrinkled as the empty ass of his jeans. Between colors, he'd stop to drink something out of a paper cup.
Watching him from inside, eating eggs and toast, somebody said it was sad. This customer said the man was probably a failed artist. It was probably whiskey in the cup. He probably had a studio full of failed paintings and now made his living decorating cheesy restaurant and grocery store windows. Just sad, sad, sad.
This painter guy kept putting up the colors. All the white "snow," first. Then some fields of red and green. Then some black outlines that made the color shapes into Xmas stockings and trees.
A server walked around, pouring coffee for people, and said, "That's so neat. I wish I could do that…"
And whether we envied or pitied this guy in the cold, he kept painting. Adding details and layers of color. And I'm not sure when it happened, but at some moment he wasn't there. The pictures themselves were so rich, they filled the windows so well, the colors so bright, that the painter had left. Whether he was a failure or a hero. He'd disappeared, gone off to wherever, and all we were seeing was his work.
(Reposted from here.)
Monday, October 15, 2012
Please allow me to introduce myself....
Wealth? Hardly. Taste? Well, perhaps. Certainly a healthy (albeit skeptical) curiosity and a sense of humor, I hope.
I'm Marty Hale-Evans, a writer, editor, artist who doesn't art as much as she'd like, and graduate student in Library and Information Science at the University of Washington School of Information. (The iSchool is my school!) I'm the co-author of Mindhacker and a contributing author/editor of Mind Performance Hacks. I'm a voracious reader, unrepentant thinker, and compulsive discusser. I've been online since about 1985, and have been very involved with social media since before there was a term for it; this may be what I end up doing when I finish my MLIS, but I haven't quite decided yet. In other news, I love dogs (and have two of them), tabletop games, comedy, culinary experimentation, mid-century design, color theory, pop music (usually vintage), good coffee, information for its own sake (there's no such thing as trivia), and words used well.
In this space, I expect to be talking about some of the same ground as we touched in the books: thinking, communication, technology, creativity, media. However, this is my "book," so I expect my own opinions will be more to the fore, and I reserve the right to explore tangents.
And what about those fish, you may ask? Well...it came to my attention some years ago that Fish Who Answer the Telephone was the title of an old book, and although I've never read it, it became something like a koan for me to imagine it. What were these fish like? How on earth did they do it? Who set out to put them in such a position, and why? Why would someone want to call them, and what would motivate them to answer? For that matter, how would they answer, and in what language? It's provided me with no end of imagination fodder, and now it seems like a good metaphor for we who approach technology and communication channels that seem ever newer and more alien, with motivations and expressions that may seem idiosyncratic and hard for anyone else to understand, yet with the intention to make that strange connection to the world. Somehow the image has ended up more powerful than the sum of its parts, and I hope my explorations here will prove the same, and as curiously delightful to whomever may be looking in.
I'm Marty Hale-Evans, a writer, editor, artist who doesn't art as much as she'd like, and graduate student in Library and Information Science at the University of Washington School of Information. (The iSchool is my school!) I'm the co-author of Mindhacker and a contributing author/editor of Mind Performance Hacks. I'm a voracious reader, unrepentant thinker, and compulsive discusser. I've been online since about 1985, and have been very involved with social media since before there was a term for it; this may be what I end up doing when I finish my MLIS, but I haven't quite decided yet. In other news, I love dogs (and have two of them), tabletop games, comedy, culinary experimentation, mid-century design, color theory, pop music (usually vintage), good coffee, information for its own sake (there's no such thing as trivia), and words used well.
In this space, I expect to be talking about some of the same ground as we touched in the books: thinking, communication, technology, creativity, media. However, this is my "book," so I expect my own opinions will be more to the fore, and I reserve the right to explore tangents.
And what about those fish, you may ask? Well...it came to my attention some years ago that Fish Who Answer the Telephone was the title of an old book, and although I've never read it, it became something like a koan for me to imagine it. What were these fish like? How on earth did they do it? Who set out to put them in such a position, and why? Why would someone want to call them, and what would motivate them to answer? For that matter, how would they answer, and in what language? It's provided me with no end of imagination fodder, and now it seems like a good metaphor for we who approach technology and communication channels that seem ever newer and more alien, with motivations and expressions that may seem idiosyncratic and hard for anyone else to understand, yet with the intention to make that strange connection to the world. Somehow the image has ended up more powerful than the sum of its parts, and I hope my explorations here will prove the same, and as curiously delightful to whomever may be looking in.
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