Archive for April, 2010
we went for a 10km ride around the neighbourhood this afternoon. when we got to the south edge, we stopped on a bluff overlooking the valley for a rest. the first thing Evan said was “hey! tim horton’s!” (someone had thoughtfully tossed a Tim’s cup there…)
I took the bike apart to give it a good scrub this afternoon, to make sure the last of the winter grit is gone so it doesn’t wear components down prematurely. Winter grit is evil to bikes. Evil.
2010/04/17: Break a rule today! Centered composition is generally considered boring and taboo, but can be interesting. Try it! #ds153
gorgeous blue sky on a beautiful spring day – perfect for a bike ride. I took the long route home, heading down to the Bow River before climbing back up and out of the valley.
we spent a LOT of time in the swimming pools while in Mexico. Evan’s favourite one was the infinity pool at Pelicanos – you could swim up to the edge (where he is in this shot) and be hanging over the sea wall overlooking the beach and ocean. Lots of fun.
we picked up the photos from the waterproof camera we bought in Mexico. Some pretty decent shots in there. We really need to move nearer to the ocean…
Ning’s new boss announced that free Ning communities are gone. Not a big deal. It’s a company, and they’re free to do what they want. I’m guessing they’ll just piss off their users, and the few people that pony up cash to stay will not be enough to keep the company afloat. Add Ning to the deadpool. That’s the risk of using a third-party-hosted service. It can disappear or change, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.
I’m finding it extremely difficult to care about the Ning announcement. If you use hosted (especially free) solutions, that’s just part of the game. Things change, move, wither and die.
There are lots of apps out there that could easily replicate Ning’s functionality – even for free – but they still don’t solve the core problem that Ning address, that made it so attractive to its users in the first place.
You don’t need a server, or any technical skills at all, to start and manage a Ning community. You only need to be able to fill in a form on a web page and click “Create »” That’s all. (well, and a credit card now…)
WordPress/BuddyPress and Drupal and any of a long list of others can provide the functionality of Ning. But, in order to protect yourself from another potential service change/interruption, you really need to provide a server. At some point, you need a Dreamhost account or something similar. You need to copy files to the server. You need to configure a database and tweak things. This is where the people that use Ning in the first place are lost. They can’t/won’t do this. We can argue until we’re blue in the face, saying it’s easy, saying it’s cheap, saying it’s necessary, but the vast majority of people simply don’t want to manage the technical layers beneath what they see in the web browser. Ning is betting the company that these people will reach for their credit cards to prevent having to deal with technical stuff.
Sure, there will be other hosted services that will attract some of the people fleeing Ning. But none of them can offer any form of guarantee that they’ll stay running, or that they won’t change in ways that their users won’t like.
The Boy’s school is having some awesome-sounding live-action Pirates! show today. Canons. Swords. Pyrotechnics. Sounds like a blast, and I wish I could go watch.
The parents group blocked the school from offering yoga as part of the phys ed program because they didn’t like the message it sent the kids.
Glorifying violence and robbery are fine. Just don’t try to get the kids to have a greater understanding of their own bodies.
Some really strong headwinds on the ride home – steady at nearly 50km/h, gusting to 60 or more (weather advisory warned of 90km/h gusts). One heck of a good workout. I survived, and rode the entire way in the big ring.
I started gathering some links to some good examples of engaging online interfaces to museum, library, historical and organizational collections, and figured it would be handy to post the growing list online as well.
- Science Museum Brought to Life (thanks to a timely tweet by George Siemens)
- Sputnik Observatory – Themes and Paths
- TED Talks – Themes
- Flickr Commons – US Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, Galt Museum, Powerhouse Museum
- Glenbow Museum – Mavericks
- SFMOMA – Interactive Features – Frida Kahlo, Making Sense of Modern Art
- Google Books – Public domain collection (eg, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle)
Any other really good examples of these kinds of collections made available online? Ideally with interfaces that make it possible to view the collections in great detail, to reuse parts of the collection in new works, and/ to integrate with external resources.
I’ve been thinking about the distinction between filtering and curation lately. “Social media” is described as bringing a form of curation to the internet, when it is really providing layers of filtration. What’s the difference? Filtering is crap detection, wheat-from-chaff separation. Useful and important, but only the first step of curation. Curation is when a knowledgeable expert crafts an experience based on their understanding of context, in order to guide others through a collection. Curation is so much more than simple crap detection. Examples?
Crap detection
Twitter is a great platform for crap detection. People whom I trust post links to stuff. They typically suggest either a) the links are good and worth reading, or b) the links are crap and worth avoiding. Useful things, and important in raising awareness. But not curation.
RSS readers are great for crap detection. Resources are linked to by people that are trusted on some level. An example is the Fever˚ Hot dashboard, showing the most commonly linked resources across all 355 subscribed feeds:
The Most Awesome Thing Ever is a multiuser thing ranking system – letting people choose which of two options is more Awesome, storing the win/loss scores for each, and ranking the Things by Awesomeness. It’s simple, straightforward, and an effective filter. But it’s essentially mindless.
Filtering is critical, but it is just the first step.
Curation
The Sputnik Observatory is a great example of a platform for curation. A collection of videos on a wide range of topics, with paths crafted by experts and novices alike. The Observatory provides a set of paths to lead people through a series of videos, winding their way through a narrative that builds as each node is viewed.
This goes beyond simple crap detection. A basic star-rating system would have solved the crap detection problem. Instead, Sputnik went beyond that to provide a set of tools that essentially let people construct narratives through the collection, building a story and context. That is where curation gets its power.
Another fantastic example of curation is the CBC Radio 3 Artists Series – where an artist is brought into the studio to share some of their favourite music and tell some stories about the background and history of their band and career. This is completely different than a “Top 10″ type of show (crap filtering), as it provides context and meaning that are only possible when crafted by such knowledgeable experts.
Curation is a profound act of creation, of teaching, of learning.