You may have noticed some makeover work happening at Interactions. I've moved from Wordpress to Movable Type which feels more like home after three years blogging with it elsewhwere. I didn't much enjoy WP if the truth be told...I've also got my blogroll up and running properly so now you can get a better sense of which blogs I read daily. The "About Annette" page has yet to be sorted out but there's only so much DIY a girl is able for. (Having said that, thanks to Keith for all the hard labour!).
Could any of the technically inclined bloggers out there give me some advice on a DVD recorder? It's time to send my VHS and DVD players to tech heaven and I'm baffled as to what I should be looking out for. The few things I have thought about are - size of hard drive, ability to copy from the hard drive to DVDs in various formats...what else should I be thinking about and has anyone got any recommendations?
I have an interesting presentation to make later this week. I've been invited to talk with some post graduate students about useful technical resources for making the dissertation process a wee bit easier. My post graduate training (Masters and now PhD) were undertaken using online library access and as a result I probably spent more time online in the name of "research" than was necessary (It was around the time of my dissertation that I started blogging, case in point!). I also hadn't a clue what software existed that might help me compile my ever expanding reading lists into Harvard referenced bibliographies. Right now I'm using EndNote for that latter task and it's revolutionised how I organise my material. One click of a button and out comes a formatted bibliography complete with citations in all the right places. I summarise papers using Mind Mapping software and I've found a great piece of software called MaxQDA for coding and analysing qualitative data (mainly interviews in my case).
But for students who don't have online access to an academic library I'm wondering what other resources are out there? I've used Find Articles quite a bit and have found some great material through it - but are there more reference sites that would be helpful? If you have ideas or references then please let me know.
Would somebody from PC World change the incorrect voice mail that tells you they are open at 10am on Sunday mornings? Having wasted my Sunday morning travelling from Liffey Valley to Blanchardstown in an attempt to buy a new computer, and having called them to check hours, I eventually gave up at 11.30am and gave my money to another retailer. Nobody answers the phones at PC World...but maybe they are one of a growing breed of businesses that neither need nor want new business? We're only into the second week in January and already I've maxed out on lousy customer service (all pre Christmas optimism seems like a distant memory now).
Online life these days seems predicated on the advantages of the knowledge economy, the value of knowledge management and the assumption that social networking and sharing is a great idea. Ellybabes has a very interesting post (and accompanying PowerPoint presentation) on Death and Divorce in the Digital World. In which she says:
In this new technological age, we are only beginning to notice some recently emerging issues caused by deaths and divorces amongst both geek and non-geek couples and singles.
Nearly everyone these days has large amounts of personal information stored online, whether this is their own websites and complex businesses down to simply e-mail and internet banking at the lower end of the spectrum.
In previous days, when a loved one died it was simply a case of notifying the relevant businesses (banking, service companies, etc) and details of savings and other important possessions were most often held with a solicitor or detailed in the person’s will.
She's asking some interesting questions about the difficulties presented by having so much of our lives online. In the case of death accessing password protected files and accounts can be hugely problematic. Adversarial separations can sometimes result in compromising material being published in cyberspace as an act of revenge.
Ellybabes gives a snapshot of the kinds of digital information that may need to be managed in the event of a separation (of either kind) and they include:
Shared e-mail accounts
Online calendars
Online subscriptions
Expensive PC’s and Display Screens
VOIP numbers
HTPC recordings / VOD accounts
Online DVD rental accounts
Blogs – Advertising revenue
Digital Photographs
Gaming Console profiles (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii)
Intellectual Property
I'm quaintly old fashioned in that I keep passwords for online accounts etc in hard copy format (remember those quaint things called notebooks!). But I haven't seen too many articles and blog posts on the difficulties presented by so much private activity now taking place in encrypted environments. I'm wondering what provisions you have made in the event of an untimely ending?
I attended a Tribeca Talks panel discussion this week on Cinema 2.0: Me, Myself and iPod – essentially a discussion on the impact of social media on the production of art (notably cinema and literature). The line up of panellists included
and moderator Georg Szalai (NY bureau chief and business editor at The Hollywood Reporter)
There were a lot of pertinent points raised about the relationship between the old, the new and the vast space in between.
I can’t do justice to the 90 minute discussion (and subsequent questions and answers) but I did capture a few points which I think it’s worth mentioning here – particularly in the context of Irish arts and cultural organisations – some of whom are out there using social media, many others of whom are ambivalent about the impact on the production of their artistic artefact.
The panellists addressed the issue of giving work away for free, particularly if you’re struggling to make a living in the first place. Kathleen Grace and her crew have created a soap opera about Williamsburg which is viewable free and online. They decided to forget about pitching to the studios at the outset and are hoping that it will be picked up (before they drown in credit card debt I imagine). It’s given them a direct outlet for the creation of their art and an instant audience for the work.
Novelist Jonathan Lentham created The Promiscious Materials Project which was specifically designed to distribute his work (at the cost of $1).
I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing my stories adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced in other voices, and I'm a fan of adaptations, apropriations, collage, and sampling.
Lentham described his online activity as an “analogue gesture in a digital cloak” because he is very clear that he creates the artefact and then allows it to be discussed, modified, mashed-up etc once that creative act has taken place.
Leadbetter posted 11 chapters of his book online and sought feedback and comments – he is incorporating some of those into the final draft and will credit those whose work he includes.
The panellists were in general agreement that creativity is a collaboration, and while the origination of the artefact (book, sculpture, video etc) may be the work of one person – the conversation that surrounds it (both before and after) is the way of entwining both spaces and expanding on the relationship between artist and community.
There was a lot of discussion about the future of the business of social media, particularly from Futurist Jerry Paffendorf (whom I could have listened to all evening and who focusses on ROA Return on Awesome rather than ROI..) on how online worlds are evolving and changing (virtual worlds are increasingly “opt in” and the mantra is “Don’t have sex with Google”) and and notably Brent Weinstein who heads up a division at United Talent Agency that specifically handles artists working in/with new media. There is money to be made and business models are evolving but Paffendorf described it well when he said
The currency we are using doesn’t know how to quantify what we are making
I really enjoyed the discussion, it got my own creative juices flowing and I came away with the following which I think are going to be pertinent issues for Irish arts and cultural organisations.
1 There’s no going back. An active, updated, interactive online presence is a must if you are a creative and it’s about driving traffic to where you will get paid even if in the short term it’s unlikely that you are making money.
2 Circling the wagons and adopting a defensive approach to creativity is self defeating. In the old days (6 months ago as Weinstein suggested) retaining and restraining may have worked – in this new era of social media community is where it’s at.
3 As one producer (in the Q & A) described it - people are in control of their ipod screens, their computer screens, their TV screens and ultimately their cinema screens. This model of drag and drop cultural consumption is only going to increase and impact on all other areas of media/cultural production. If creatives aren’t driving that traffic then they’re going to get stuck in a traffic jam that’s going nowhere fast.
4 There are no residuals on the internet so new ways of creating work and more importantly commissioning opportunities for this medium are going to have to evolve, particularly in countries like Ireland where we have a grant-aid culture.
5 Commerce, community and creativity co-exist in an internet age – the challenge for many creatives is how to make that relationship work for them.
The Tribeca Film Festival broadcasts a daily webcast on Youtube
I've just created a Library page on the site that includes PDF copies of papers that I hope will be useful to clients and readers. You can reach the library via the link in the sidebar or from the main page of the website. Enjoy!
I've signed up for the trial pro version of Feedblitz. My requirements are very simple I want
A customisable email header
The flexibility to choose from blog posts - I don't want everything I blog to go into the newsletter
The flexibility to send email on demand - I do not want to bore my readers to death with daily email
On the face of it Feedblitz offers the above but I've had nothing but hassle since I signed up less than a week ago. The user interface in Feedblitz is awful - utterly unintuitive and you can't access your dashboard without using the "back" button consistently.
The most annoying thing is that I have set the service up to send on demand (in my case I want a weekly email of selected blog postings sent to my list) but the service is still sending a daily digest as well as the "on demand" mail. I've had unsatisfactory communication from tech support. Firstly my email ended up in their junk folder (which seems odd considering it's the one I'm using to access my service and the one they are using to debit my credit card), then I was told that the daily digest on top of the on demand "can happen if you’re subscribed to your blog multiple times" (which I'm not...and even if I was why am I getting the on demand email with 4 posts included and the daily with only one?).
The attractive thing about the service (in theory) are the three things I am looking for (which cost $150 a year or thereabouts) so the fact that they aren't working (and that the Knowledge Base is returning a 404, the FAQ is pretty limited in its scope and tech support doesn't appear to offer any solutions) is not encouraging at this point.
I've a week to go with Feedblitz before my credit card payment kicks in and unless I can get some satisfaction on this unwanted daily digest then I'll be scrapping Feedblitz's service and going elsewhere.
There simply has to be a reliable rss to email service that can deliver what I want out there..If anyone has any suggestions I am all ears...
Apologies to subscribers who have received unsolicited mail over the last few days I am attempting to rectify the situation...
Update: If this weren't so serious I'd be laughing. Even though my settings are set (and I've checked) to "manual delivery" in the "turbo update" in Feedblitz, this post was emailed to the list just over an hour after it was posted...I've suspended my feed untill I hear back from Feedblitz...
Congratulations to the Arts Council of Ireland for being the first of the National Cultural Institutions to install an RSS feed on its re-designed website. The feed doesn't appear to be working at present but hopefully that's a minor technical hitch. I hope it's not going to be too long before the rest of the members of the CNCI follow suit - some of the websites of these major institutions are very poorly designed and I gave up trying to navigate through the National Library's site in an effort to find out more about their series of talks (I saw a printed brochure about them) but there's nothing on the site for an interested ticket buyer or if there is, it's buried somewhere very secret. Look instead at the New York Public Library's site with 8 different feeds for various areas of its activities...A quick scan of many of the websites of smaller Irish arts and cultural organisations reveals the same thing ... all this great activity going on, in secret, buried in the bowels of dusty websites ... let's not make it so difficult for interested people to spend their money on what you have to offer!
And for those of you who aren't sure what I'm talking about here's a brilliant explanation of RSS in Simple English from Common Craft.
There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.
What happens when you combine Mindmapping with Wikipedia? You get WikiMindMap a tool that presents the information you are looking for in Mindmap form. I searched for information on "psychoanalysis" and got this series of branches.
Clicking on any of the branches then brings up more detail which means you can keep all of the information in one place. I love this "whole system in the room" approach to managing information and this is one gadget I'll be coming back to again and again.
Then there's Flickr which I use from time to time and do newspapers count if you don't pick them up via RSS?
I still haven't taken the leap to Facebook or MySpace and I don't have a Twitter account - I'm ambivalent about them and maybe I'll write a longer, more considered post some time about my ambivalence.
And I'm also sure that as soon as I post this I'll think of a bunch of other applications I use that I take for granted...
Last weekJohnnie Moore, Matt Moore and I had a conversation about the shadow side of organisations. Part one of this is available as a podcast (click here) - show notes will follow and thanks to Johnnie for all the technical work. I hope you find the discussion interesting and do leave comments and feedback.
Here are the show notes. Warning: These are unreliable. The timings are approximate and this is my paraphrasing of what was said. Don't take them it too literally. This was a conversation and not as linear as even these rough notes might suggest.
The elephant in the corner
0.00 Introductions and what this is about: the Elephant in the Corner and things that don’t get talked about
0.50 Annette asks Johnnie what prompted his focus on this? Why now? Johnnie describes a client conversation that may have pointed to his own shadow side… the “deep sense of ranklement” that suggests that there’s something for him to work on…
3.25 …and prompts Annette to look at how this might also be seen as a shadow on the client side “what job was your sense of shame doing for the organisation for which you worked?” Why does the shadow need to be hidden? Do we collude in scapegoating people inside organisations, or consultants that advise them?
I'd almost given up trying to read the Irish Times online because of the amount of advertising busyness (particularly the flash stuff) you have to wade through to get to the text. So I've become a big fan of Adblock Plus the lovely application that gets rid of advertising noise on websites. Have a look at the difference between the Irish Times home page without Adblock Plus and then with it - almost makes reading the paper online a possibility again doesn't it? I realise that free content sites have to make a living with advertising (Irish Times is not a free content site) but is there really any point if the advertising inhibits readers digesting your content?
First the interview and now this wonderful video which explains the web in all its complexity in just over 5 minutes. It's from Michael Wesch a professor at Kansas State University (check out the blog Digital Ethnography).
The second piece - a vision of students today is a really thoughtful piece on teaching - I was interested in the questions it asks about what learning is and where it happens. I thought the piece was a call to reach people where they are and not where we would like them to be.. see what you think.
This video was created by myself and the 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007. It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in. We created a Google Document to facilitate the brainstorming exercise, which began with the following instructions:
“… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.”
Over the course of the next week, 367 edits were made to the document. Students wrote the script, and made suggestions for survey questions to ask the entire class. The survey was administered the following week.
I then took all of the information from the survey and the Google Document and organized it into the final script portrayed in the video which was all filmed in one 75 minute class period.
I'm on the way to New York where I will be for the 10 days or so and am looking forward to another visit to my favourite city. I'll also be attending the New York regional meeting of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations where I'll be presenting on the 'cyber system in the mind'. I'm going to do a swift overview of social media; reflect on some of the issues presenting in my therapy and consulting practice arising from internet activity; offer a case study and some some hypotheses about the scarcity of psychodynamic practitioners online. (So far I have only come across one other - Irish man- Mark Dowds who is based in Canada these days). I'll post some of my thinking here after the event along with links to the sites I'll be referencing in the presentation and some other resources. I'm hoping to catch up with Terrence Seamon for a cup of coffee during my stay and if anyone else out there is interested in getting in touch please do drop me an email.
Are there any seasoned Skype users out there who can help me with a question? I've purchased a Skypein number which I am trying to forward to a landline. My Skype credit is down by 12 cent (that's European cent) as soon as the call is forwarded and before the call is answered...there's no reference to this cost on the Skype site that I can see and it seems ridiculously pricy to be charged this amount just for the call forwarding on top of whatever it costs to make the call (I was seduced by the promise that it would be charged at local rates)...on top of that I understand you can redeem a 'voucher' for a voicemail account but you have to mail Skype for this and they don't appear to want to answer my requests for help so perhaps a citizen Skyper can help me out on this one? I'm a fan of Skype to Skype calls but am so far unimpressed by both the customer service and the charges ... anyone any wiser than me?
I have been having far too much fun with this new application which turns text into a word cloud. Just for laughs I inputted a 15,000 word document I wrote on my research topic of disappointment and Wordle created this lovely image - it's totally addictive - you can change colours, shapes, sizes...go on over there and try it..
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Interactions - Creative Strategies for Business in the Technical Stuff category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
