Accept no substitutes
Links and notes from JOMC 191.8 Virtual Communities
A new press release out from the School of Information and Library Science explains a bit more about the Louis Round Wilson Knowledge Trust and lists more members of the Academy.
I was there last week with Jimmy Wales and Brewster Kahle among others for the ritual induction in the Rare Book Room of the Louis Round Wilson Library. Appropriately, the induction took place under the Round dome at the center of the Rare Book Room.
Google announces Google.org
We hope that someday this institution will eclipse Google itself in overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems.
– Sergey Brin & Larry Page
Jay Rosen posts here and on the NandO Editor’s Blog in the continuing conversation with Melanie Sill (and others).
It’s all about Jay’s “filter from god” comment which Melanie heard second hand. What I think is being danced around is Don Shaw‘s concept of agenda setting in the newsroom.
Note to NandO blog software folks: You still aren’t handling trackbacks correctly.
I blogged a little about the sessions that I attended at the ConvergeSouth conference on Saturday. After seeing the discussion at the News and Observer Editor’s blog, I wish I could have made it over on Friday too. There NandO editor Melanie Sill opines on the filtering role of newspapers based in part on her reaction to Ted Vaden’s blogging about Jay Rosen’s talk at Converge (got all of that? good because there’s more).
But Sill hears back from Rosen in the comments (and others). There’s also a broken Trackback to Ed Cone’s blog.
Now that’s blogging for you.
[This post is also on the JOMC191 site]
Yesterday, I was up early to ride over to Greensboro (formerly known as Greenesborough) for the ConvergeSouth conference with MisterSugar, Corey and Marcella. Luckily Weaver Street Market (in Southern Village) opens at 7 and has the coffee brewed and ready at opening.
The conference took place on the NC A&T campus in a couple of very nice newish buildings. Everyone there was helpful and I was having a pretty mellow time. Lots of good folks from G’boro including especially Ed Cone, Sue P, making it all happen in a very community spirited way and more coffee.
The first session, for me, was with Duncan Black aka Atrios. He was lost for a while but a guy named Shaka (as in Shaka Zulu) found him and brought him to us. The crowd had many more women and people of color than most tech or blogging conferences that I’ve attended (one in Cape Town was a notable exception) and the conversation was highly inclusive and smart. That said many of the questions at blogger conventions have a kind of sameness to them over time.
Following Atrios, I went over to Jimbo Wales’ talk on collaboration. Predictably, this drew on a lot of the same material that I had hear/seen during his talk in Chapel Hill on Wednesday. This time I wasn’t in charge of the room or the arrangements, etc so I actually got to pay more attention.
One thing that both Jimbo and Brewster Kahle reminded me is that Wikipedia and Archive.org both have three times the number of sysadmins as ibiblio does, but that almost all of their sysadmins are volunteers while both of ours are full time. Wikipedia has only two paid employes; Jimbo’s assistant and a lead software developer.
Jimbo ended at a place where discussion should begin: What parts of the wiki experience of broad collaboration should bloggers adopt?
Lunches appeared in bags. So I sat down and chatted with Kirk Ross about the Independent’s new political blog, Dent, there Kirk tries to post at least a brief note every morning as well as articles of more import.
WillR was pitching a Common Memory wiki or history of Chapel Hill wiki so that folks could understand how long various issues have been out there trying to be resolved by various councils and the context in which various decisions have been made, wisely or unwisely, over the years. Talked a little about how to build a successful community.
Ruby and Brian were there on out to a wedding after Ruby’s session. Ruby was much in demand having been a session leasder both days. OrangePolitics was getting serious and proper respect at the conference.
Also ran into and chatted a bit with Dave Winer whose session was just after lunch. Winer is in rare form these days, taking the first question about his recently announced sale of weblogs.com to VeriSign and making a little joke. Q: What will you do with your $2 million from VeriSign? Winer: That’s 2.3 Million and I’m going to put it in my savings account. Classic Winer ensued in a session that I think mostly pleased the crowd and pleased Dave. Lots of discussion by many voices — perhaps the most of any session that I attended.
Next I went to the Podcasting session by Herb Everett. The room was really really cold. Despite Herb’s enthusiasm, I was not so excited about podcasting basics and about good microphones as I probably should be so I slipped out to Sandy Carmany‘s political blogging session.
Sandy is an elected official, a City Council member in Greensboro, who blogs about her daily interactions as a council member. Sally does something like this with her listserv, but Sandy has even broken news (most recently the appointment of a new City Manager) on her blog. Many people involved in G’boro politics in the session as well as WillR from Chapel Hill.
Much made of being in touch with the voters and opening up government (it was not widely noted or was noted before I joined the session, that the appointment of the Manager was in a closed session).
WillR outed me as Mr. Sally Greene. Many people there know of and read Sally’s blog and website. I talked a little about how a site or blog can be used to provide deep background on an issue that might not seem clear at first and how a well researched and presented paper or essay can help frame the issue’s further discussion.
After a long break for coffee (and beer for some), about 10 of us convened for dinner with Dave Winer at the Undercurrent, a place too nice for most of us. So nice that some pretty spiffily dressed folks were there celebrating homecoming (at the local high school?). I spent a lot of time hearing about RadRails: a Ruby on Rails IDE from the creators Kyle Shank and Matt Kent– both of RIT and both interning at IBM in Raleigh.
Back in the dark rain with MisterSugar, Corey and Bora. Hearing the story of Bora’s coming to the USA as the Serbian horse-whisperer. Quite a wild tale and he got out just in time.
Bora also reported that Fred’s FaceBook study (and Bora’s follow on) came up several times during the conference.
The GSO BlogCon Blog is gathering various impressions of ConvergeSouth.
Hanging with Jimbo, Brewster Kahle and others at the Wilson Knowledge Trust founding meetings [more on this at another time]. In the meantime, The Daily Tar Heel has an article on Jimbo’s talk yesterday.
Brian Russell of audioactivism.org has a podcast version of Fred Stutzman’s talk on Facebook. Talk about Fred’s talk can be found earlier in the blog.
A mysterious blogger sends me his live blog of the talk today by Jimmy Wales. We’ll have the video up on the ibiblio speaker pages by mid-next-week.
While folks here are panting for a sub-$1000 laptop, MIT under the guidance of Nick Negroponte have come up with a sub-$100 laptop with wind-up power. The target is student populations in the 3rd world — millions of them. The MIT laptop is supposed to be on schedule for a world demo at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis on November 17th.
[from News.com]
“Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detailed specifications for a $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations.
Negroponte, who laid out his original proposal at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, said MIT and his nonprofit group, called One Laptop Per Child, is in discussions with five countries–Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa–to distribute up to 15 million test systems to children.”
[…]
The machines, which will run a version of the Linux operating system, will also include other applications, some developed by MIT researchers, as well as country-specific software. “Software has gotten too fat and
unreliable, so we started with Linux,” he said.[…]
much more detail in the article and in these
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/29/129235
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/1290/050928mitlaptop/
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=171201349
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1935
Who: Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
When:3:30 Wednesday October 5
Where: 209 Manning Hall
What: A talk about the world’s most popular encyclopedia and news source,
Wikipedia and Wikinews by the man who invented and sustains them.
More about Jimmy and Wikipedia
Sponsors: ibiblio.org
School of Information and Library Science
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Scholarly Communications Working Group
Poster in PDF form here (with new location)
See Jimbo on CSPAN’s Questions and Answers (September 25, 2005 and online archive)
The University of Alabama, reports Karen on the jomc191 blog, is offering a Facebook like service for Bama Parents. MyBama doesn’t show Freshman Connection or Family Connection as yet. For now it looks like a portal. Perhaps the Connection is hidden.
One may ask why? But the echo answers why not?
Josh Roseneau’s Thoughts on Kansas blog has a Fred Stutzman inspired look at the self reported political leanings of students using Facebook at Kansas University. He also compares his findings with Bora’s look at NCSU and finds: KU has fewer liberals than UNC, though it’s a more uniform distribution (among the center three) than NCSU.
Fred has additional FaceBook observations, with measures to back them, on the ibiblog. This is a very lengthy and wise follow up on Freshman behavior in regards to privacy and disclosure.
One interesting fact that Fred points out: Of nearly 400 personal websites reported “Not one freshman reports using his or her UNC provided webspace.”
Just observing my students, I notice that reliance on UNC services such as mail and webspace has declined and in many cases vanished entirely.
We require that students have an ONYEN and that they recieve mail at a unc.edu address, but more often than not the unc.edu address is a forward to an account (yahoo, hotmail, gmail etc) that the student has had since high school or earlier.
Similarly, students with web space take advantage of a service that they have had before coming to UNC and expect to have after leaving UNC.
Why? In part because the Only Name You’ll Ever Need (ONYEN) is only temporary. It vanishes when you leave UNC and with it your email and website — and without forwarding of either.
Students — and other users — see their websites and email as more of less permanent (â€I want my friends to find me†etc) and the UNC solution as transient.
[end of comment on ibiblog]
The virtual communites of UNC students are mostly privately managed by free email services, web hosting services, blogging services and photo services — as well as, and I don’t recall if Fred has measured this, Instant Messaging services. Of these services, UNC offers only email and limited web hosting.
Heard in the hall. “This class is always boring. I’m glad I can work on my Facebook profile for an hour”
“Your profile is so awesome.”
“I need to catch up with Julie’s”
Heard at the Daily Grind. “Can’t talk now. Not sure about this weekend. Just check my Facebook. I’ll put it [presumably the weekend plans] there.”
The slides from Fred’s presentation are in PDF [correct link to the presentation] The slides from Fred’s presentation are in PDF and the talk will be podcast by Brian Russell at audioactivism.org on Monday.
They know all about us — because we tell them.
the ibiblio blog has covered Fred Stutzman’s Facebook study about the self-reported political orientation of the UNC campus earlier on.
Fred will be talking about that and more tomorrow Friday September 30 at noon o’clock in 208 Manning Hall.
One new observation from Fred: 85% of incoming Freshmen had a facebook account on day one of class.
Hear it all tomorrow. Slides may be available online (when they are I’ll add a link here).
Looking forward to traveling over to Greensboro to visit with Ed Cone and company and to take part in the Converge South 2005 Conference. I even signed up for dinner with Dave Winer who is always a lively conversationalist. Should be a blast.
Should Bloggy be invited too?
Doc pointed to this in a note about the contest there. I am far far far from a fashionista and for shoes I’ve worn only black Bass Weegens for decades, but the writing on Shoe Blogs by Manolo is witty and occassionally delightfully nasty (as in the Gallery of Horrors and his (?) comments on the famous and poorly shod.
Who: Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
When: 3:30 Wednesday October 5
Where:Freedom Forum Conference Room209 Manning Hall
305 Carroll Hall UNC-CH
What: A talk about the world’s most popular encyclopedia and news source,
Wikipedia and Wikinews by the man who invented and sustains them.More about Jimmy and Wikipedia
Sponsors: ibiblio.org
School of Information and Library Science
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Scholarly Communications Working Group
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