It feels like another life…
And yes, I’ve been watching Dollhouse. No spoilers, please, I’m still somewhere at the start of series one.
I let my blogging lapse, yet again, which causes the perpetual problem of no readers. No audience means no desire to share, no sharing means no posts, no posts means no readers, and so on.
I’ve been to a couple more *camps since the Social Media Camp that inspired me to launch this blog. I’ve taken on a couple of small web projects outside of my main job. I’ve continued to enjoy the larp scene and I’ve moved to London (although technically, according to my address I’m now in Kent). The daily grind is set to involve a lot more programming in the near future, and the social media scene has exploded into pretty much everyone’s consciousness with its pervasive omnipresent outcries. I must have SOMETHING to say about it all, so I plan to make a fresh start and some reasoned social commentary. Even if it is just to boggle over the seeming popularity of the latest Apple hardware.
I’ve just been flamed. And kinda flamed back. Oh, nothing obscene or over the top:
“Egotistic much? wtf makes you think I’m referring to you and you alone?”
Somebody I follow on Twitter doesn’t appear to understand the feature that Twitter just removed, (the ones referred to by Stephen Fry as “new, stupid changes”) and has been reasonably vociferous in his not-caring about it. He believes that by creating a saved search of your own name you can recreate the removed functionality, which is incorrect.
I’ve been watching various people not grasping the change but going further than that and claiming that it’s no great loss because they didn’t use it. I should be used to it by now, but it continually baffles me when people who don’t see a use for something proclaim it to be, therefore, useless. I made this point on Twitter and received a direct message from one guy telling me to “READ” what he writes more closely and claiming that HE never proclaimed it to be useless. Um. Okay.
So… what has changed, exactly? Well, let’s remember how everyone talks about Twitter as being microblogging. Most blogs invite comments from users, most blog readers will read more than one blog. The comments, though, cause discussion threads in themselves and people can see comments from random strangers and converse with them. Imagine if the only comments you could ever see on a blog were the ones written by people whose blogs you read elsewhere.
Twitter as blogging doesn’t follow quite the same pattern, all the posts and comments are mixed up together with no real threading going on. By default, you don’t see all those strangers having conversations, you only see the people you’ve accepted into you fold of “people I consider worth hearing”. But if you wanted to, until yesterday, you COULD. Sure, it could get noisy, and a lot of the comments made little sense, but it was fun, it was interesting and it let you discover new users easily.
So, suppose @fredblogs is my friend. By default I’ll see him talking to the world at large, and directly to me. But yesterday I could flip a switch and see his messages to @jemimasmith and @abrownpaperbag. I might never follow through and look at jemima and the paper bag, but if I wanted to then I could. By the very fact that my friend fred is talking to them I’ve got a tenuous recommendation of them being worth listening to, talking to; just like if I find a funny or clever person posting blog comments to my mate’s blog. I’ve never understood the people who say they are new to Twitter and beg for followers – I feel the chances of finding the witty and smart people by randomly adding people you know nothing about it bizarre, but if people want to play it that way, good for them. I just wish *my* preferred method hadn’t been crippled.
Twitter have been a little taken aback by the outcry at what they perceived as a “small settings change” and claim it’s something that needed removing due to being unscalable. Me, I’m puzzled by this claim. I would have thought that a list of everything someone wrote was easier to retrieve than a list of certain things they wrote, filtered according to settings that will be different for every user. Indeed, I can still see that exact list, but only by clicking through to look at the individual feeds of everybody on my friend list, one by one.
We can still see “mentions”, that is, the Tweets that contain a username preceeded by the @ where the @ is not the first character of the message. This is leading some people to put the usernames elsewhere precisely to ensure that their message reaches the world. This is not a good thing. For one thing, not everyone is using it, partly because most software out there will use a “reply” button to insert the @[usernamestring] at the start of a message, and also because it no longer lets people opt out of seeing the replies. I presume they will peter out eventually, but time will tell. It’s kind of fun watching the story unfold, things like this happen so fast these days.
Read more about the topic here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_puts_a_muzzle_on_your_friends_goodbye_peop.php
On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog. So goes the old adage. The thing is, it doesn’t matter. What sets apart online activity from everyday activity is that if you do nothing you might as well not be there. You’re not even a part of the scenery, effectively you are absent. It is by your actions that you’re recognised and lurkers don’t really count for an awful lot.
The internet is a meritocracy: actions draw attention. It’s not necessarily clear what actions will have what consequences, and in the case of things that go viral it can be baffling, but internet celebrity is unfailingly driven by action, whether it be running a conference, pretending to be a Jedi in front of a movie camera, or contributing considered thoughts to something like the Microformats community. And so what if you’re a dog, or a cat? Fame could still fall at your feet. Go on, tell me you don’t know Ceiling Cat.
In my larping life I am a dog*. Well, sort of, I’m actually a beastkin:
Believed by some to be the closest kin of Humans. Beastkin are intelligent animaloid creatures who draw their ancestry from many of the wild animals of Erdreja. Commonly tribal in nature, and intensely close knit, these differing races are also incredibly diverse.
http://www.lorientrust.com/gameworld/races/beastp3.htm
And there’s something similar going on there. It’s the actions that matter, not what costume you’re wearing or what race you’re from. Players take on characters but the game works because there’s collaboration, teamwork, leaders and followers. We’re not rocking the world, we go home and forget about it at the weekend, but we play alongside people whose names we might not learn for years. In the same way you might not know the real name of somebody online, it’s largely irrelevant because you are judged entirely on your actions.
My little beastie just got made vaguely important as a conduit between her faction and the Healer’s guild. In terms of moving and shaking the world it’s no big deal, but then neither is having the top rated Youtube video for half an hour – still makes the creator mildly proud.
It’s interesting to note how being anonymous isn’t necessarily a barrier to make social bonds and being promoted by your peers. Game worlds, online, and real life. How different are they, really?
*No I am not a furry.
I’ve had Neil Crosby on various social media friends lists for a long time since way back when some of my Red Dwarf fan friends got friendly with the Buffy and Angel side of fandom, and although we’ve met in person a couple of times, we don’t know each other well. All the same, when I saw him mention Social Media Camp on Twitter I thought it worth a look and immediately signed up for tickets which turned out to be in very short supply.
Social Media Camp is in the tradition of bar camps, which are get togethers for geeks, where a conference is effectively arranged on the spot once everyone is through the door. The BBC has sponsored a couple, and there have been various others that have looked interesting but I have a very full calendar when you divide it into the time I spend on conventions, larp and general socialising fare such as parties. I’ve never been available when the interesting things were happening until now.
Once signed up, nerves set in a tad. I knew I was meant to volunteer or present, but at all the conferences and work based talks I’ve been to, the person on the stage really knows their stuff, and has well prepared slides. So the whole idea of presenting didn’t appeal, but neither did the idea of reneging on the deal. Right up until the night before I was considering pulling out, but in the end I turned up, Tweeting on the way to the effect that I was mildly nervous.
The venue was easy to find, and a great host to the event, but my vague idea of volunteering to help out melted away as I came in and was pointed at the badges, told it was a DIY affair, and directed downstairs for coffee (which I mostly don’t drink). People were gathering and doing the meet and greet thing and I felt out of place, and sat myself down wondering how early it would be reasonable to run away back home.
And then people started to actually talk to me. Terence had already replied to my Tweet, noticing it via the hashtag of #smclondon, and told me to discard the nerves, it would be fine. Kat joined in with him, enthusing about how it would be fine to talk, don’t be nervous, and just throw myself into it and enjoy. I signed up for the photographic scavenger hunt and relaxed.
In the end I wound up attending a talk in each slot, and even presenting one, entirely off the cuff, in a later slot. It was barely on topic, being about live action roleplay, but it was something I felt confident enough to describe and it seemed suitably geeky, if not quite linked to the “media” side of social media, and the handful of people who came to listen seemed to be engaged.
The venue was great, the talks were interesting, the food was lavish and free drinks abounded. Everyone I encountered was friendly and enthusiastic and perhaps the most uncomfortable experience was during one of the discussions where the younger members were put on the spot and confronted by people demanding to know “So what pisses you off? How do you feel about people marketing to you? How should we be doing it?” and so on. Sure, they put themselves on the spot and invited it, but it felt uncomfortably confrontational to me. The highlight talk for me was Terence Eden’s talk about working with porn, although I’d expected something a little different from the description, somehow I’d expected it to be more about how porn dominates the internet and how no social media site or application can escape it, and how best to deal with that fact. But it was fascinating and well presented.
It was interesting to note that I seemed to inhabit an overlapping but different social media network corner, and some of the things I mentioned such as audioboo were exotic and barely known to others, while they had shared knowledge of blogs I was unaware of. I like that narrow overlap, though, it invites a wider range of conversation and sharing.
It was a really good day and I definitely intend to sign up for more things along those lines in future, where my calendar and finances allow. Kudos to Vero for pulling it all together.
People:
Vero: http://www.thatcanadiangirl.co.uk/
Terence: http://shkspr.mobi/blog/
Kat: http://www.safetygoat.co.uk/blog/
Wikipedia says:
“A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.”
It goes on to describe blogs as covering topics such as news, or being online diaries.
I’ve always disagreed with the latter part of that. I don’t think that an online diary has the same sort of feel as a blog. To me, online diaries are an older entity, something that grew out of personal homepages many years ago, and blogs are about making a log of something. I mean, sure, the ship’s log on Star Trek is something very similar to a diary, but to me I’ve always had a dividing line between the two, albeit a blurred one.
Since around 2001 I’ve had an online journal, and when friends started to set up theirs, too, I moved across to Livejournal. I’m still there, with the obvious username, and it’s the only place on the internet where I hide from colleagues. They can see my facebook updates, what I send to Twitter, my last.fm profile and any number of other things, but livejournal is, essentially, online socialising for me. It’s way to relaxed, introspective and uninformed for me to count it as blogging.
In my head, a blogger is reasonably sure of their authority when they write, and writes to a defined topic. There is, no doubt, a strong sense of community surrouding it, but at the heart is an aim to inform and a sense of competence.
That’s what I intend this to be. My focus is new media, a wide ranging topic, and I will bring my own slant to it, so while people are talking about setting up events such as smclondon, I’ll bring my helping-to-run-Eastercon perspective to it, and I’ll talk about communities with reference to those I move in, and should it be appropriate I’ll start spouting off about gaming and the likes. But the articles are intended for public consumption, and they are, in my head, articles, while my livejournal is, and will continue to be, random spouting about anything at all.
Thanks for reading, please say hello.
I spent Saturday at Social Media Camp London, and as a result I’ve been inspired to start blogging. Some might say I’ve been blogging for years, but I disagree (more on this later).
So this is a short introduction to the new blog, which is currently a little ball of unformed clay ready for moulding as I decide what shape this will take. I intend to make it vaguely professional in its skew, but add some personal flavour too.
Who am I, then? I’m Max, a web developer. My current job title is (no bullshit!) CSD, FM&T, A&M&M. Translated that is, client side developer for future media and technology, audio and music and mobile department at the BBC. VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS BLOG ARE MINE AND NOT NECESSARILY THE BBC’S. I live in Peterborough and commute daily to London (something which will change when I can convince somebody to buy my house).
I have no spare time as I spend most of it engaged in working, commuting, getting involved in the science fiction community or larping. Yeah, I guess I grew up to be a geek. Assuming I count as grown up, that is. I sometimes wonder but then I am 35.
This is a good enough start, right?
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