randomosity

Video on the other blog

We all know I love my gadgets. As I blogged earlier in the week one of the first things I picked up on arrival was a new disposable cell phone. I chose a little Sony Ericsson 530i from 3.ie because it allowed unlimited Skype usage. I have been blown away by how well the Skype functionlity is implemented on this phone and the mobile itself has demonstrated a few other neat features. My original plan was to get the cheapest thing I could for the interim and purely utilitarian considerations. Then come July 11th ponder the 3G iPhone. However, I have to admit that I am rather pleasantly surprised by the little 530i. Its a solid little phone and pure candy bar form factor. I am glad to be back to candybars and from experience will not use a slider or a flip in the future. I put a crystal case on the 530i to protect the screen (experience with my last SE).
The camera on the 530i is a common 2Mb. I love having a camera with me at all times and the resulting photos are quite fine. Being able to bluetooth these back and forth with my MacBook Pro is brilliantly convenient. And then I noticed that the photo menu offered an option to Blog This…
When I pressed the blog this button it was clearly linked to blogger and I figured (intriguing) I’ll attach this to my existing blogger account at some point and try this. As it turns out its much easier than this and I am very impressed.
To blog one’s life on a Sony Ericsson 530i with 3, you snap a pic, choose blog this and leave the rest to the phone. 3.ie creates a brand new blog on blogger for you, uploads the picture and then emails to your phone a special token. The phone is now linked to this blog. You claim your token via a browser and are then given the option of personalising the blog that was autocreated or simply linking the incomming posts to an existing blog. I happened to have an old one sitting around (NapoleonicTourist…unused since 2006). I pointed to this one and lo and behold there was the pic (not too exciting as I grabbed an image of the wood floor in the apartment). However, this is a very slick and smooth process. It would be very cool if I could send it to my own wp blog, but haven’t figured this one out yet…maybe. But as it stands…very cool and I am going to play with this, see what happens and make 3.ie a little richer for every post ;-)

As I read through my RSS feeds in Google Reader today, I was once again struck by the increasing number of familiar headlines. By this I don’t mean similar themes continue to be explored (although true - Hilary is clearly a bad, bad, bad woman and John McCain throws kittens into wells), but rather that I had already read the articles that were popping as new posts. My immediate thought was that Reader wasn’t catching my ‘mark as read’ flags, or that I had inadvertently created duplicate feeds. Alas, neither the case. These are the same posts…simply with different authorship claimed. Note that I am not even getting into the automated blog post piracy that is designed only to attract search engine attention.

When you try to stay on top of all your news feeds with a reader and attempt to strategically manage the multitude of feeds, the collapsing of feeds into headlines makes this phenomenon rather obvious. As I considered this, I realized that there is a certain tiering in the bloggosphere. Digg, Redit and other aggregators are at the lowest level and explicitly point to other’s posts. At the ‘highest’ level you have blogs that create absolutely original, thoughtful and unique posts. Between these there are all manners of variants. Review sites are somewhere in this milieu and they account for a substantial amount of this overlap. Some new gadget is released and the sites all tend to either hear about it or get their hands on it around the same time. Yet, it is interesting to note (when you have far too many RSS feeds coming in) post gravity and proliferation.

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Susan Nance, professor of US history at the University of Guelph, presented a fascinating paper “A Star is Born to Buck: On the Development of Rodeo Bulls in the 1990s” at the Rural History Roundtable today. Although Nance’s past work has touched on topics such as tourism under the Ottoman Empire and religious parades in interwar Chicago, her more recent work has focussed on accounting for the absence of animal’s stories in historical scholarship. The subject of her talk today is a transnational study of rodeo’s and performance with an emphasis on the contribution of the animal - most specifically ‘Bodacious’, the ‘World’s Most Dangerous Bull.

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In my continuing effort to direct you away from my blog, I am compelled to note Bill Turkel’s follow-up to a post I referenced last week. In this one he ponders our conscious creation of “islands of stasis” and why an anachronistic mode of research practise persists. More importantly his ‘punchline’ refers briefly to how to make use of tools, such as Zotero, efficiently to comprehend our private research processes. He muses “that measurements of your Zotero bibliography will be most useful to the extent that they are fed back into your research in a useful way.” This is very powerful observation and activity, but also dangerous.
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My apologies if this sounded like I was challenging Jared Diamond to a wordoff ;-)   Michele just pointed me to wonderfully candid article

explaining why office workers should appreciate their surroundings and pity the poor fools that consider the coffee shop their workplace. While I number amongst those blighted souls and blogged last year on why I like the mobile life, Sathnam Sanghera’s ode to office bliss, raises some notable and worthy points.
I was particularly struck by Sanghera’s anecdotal reference to people working at home starting to form groups so they can work at home together. Man is indeed a social animal. I like working in a public space, even if I am not interacting directly with other people. I like having them around. By that I don’t mean to objectify others by any means, as having people in your immediate proximity can often run counter to productivity. But, everyone has their own levels of tolerance, and I sense that Sanghera is accepting this broad stratum of individual workspace demands. He highlights a study by Benjamin Markham¹ that underlines the fact that workplaces end up being counterproductive by being too quiet. The silence itself becomes a distraction.
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1. Sorry, but I can’t find the source for his reference [↩]

The consistently thought-provoking Chris Brogan explores how current digital tools provide for greater freedom in employment and life in general. Chris makes some prescient referrals to technologies and ponders why one should focus on being more mobile or consider being more nomadic. His post explores the equation from the perspective of the nomad. I wonder what the perspective is from the other side - from those that would consider the nomad’s services. He raises the critical question about data security and I wonder if this doesn’t extend to a larger question of trust. I have only rarely been on the nomad employing side of the equation, but even by appreciating the nomadic perspective, I am challenged to feel comfortable with the nomad. It’s not really about the results - or about my level of trust. I agree with Chris and with Mark Harrison who affirmed that the nomad should be paid for delivering results. What concerns me is the breadth of digital relationships.
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I just happened to take a quick peek at the camera stats at Flickr today. I had uploaded and explored this data on ManyEyes a years or so ago and perhaps not surprisingly noted that Canon dominated the point-and-shoot market and that Nikon and Canon were battling for dominance in the DSLR market…all according to Flickr postings which may create some skew. Intriguingly when I took a quick look at the posting numbers by camera today, there’s something else very interesting happening: fewer people seem to be using the most popular camera models. Is the market diversifying on a model or manufacturer basis?
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Check out AideRSS - an exciting new tool to help manage information overload. It takes your existing RSS feeds, ranks posts and returns a list weighted by perceived quality.
Wonderful paradigm shifting technologies are supposed to streamline our lives and allow us to rise to new creative heights. The promise of the paperless office was to provide electronic communications to free us from distractions and the minutiae of the deskbound cubicled-existence. Mobile technologies were to unchain us from the physical offices to let us quickly complete necessary tasks while simultaneously participating in those pasttimes that we want to. You could ’seal the deal’ while watching your son’s soccer game for example. But, for all the promise, we now deal with more information and have to find ways to cope with greater engagement in more tasks than we have ever faced.
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Leo at Freelance Switch offers some great advice for those struggling to write or fighting with the distraction of their too-connected existence. I’ve got my hand raised here. Knowing that it’s a problem I have to solve I thought I’d share Leo’s suggestions in case you can relate.

In the post, he focuses on creating a morning ritual and offers a variety of tips to help make the writing happen. The biggest challenge for me (and clearly how I found the post in the first place) is the temptation of falling into my RSS feeds. Staying away from email and RSS is a maxim that I have to force myself to stick to. I am totally in sync with his belief that the morning is the time to accomplish the writing task. I know that I flag by early afternoon and try as I may I just can’t crank it up. I’m going to give the preparation and minimization of distractions a try and see what happens. Make sure you check the comments on this post as well, there are a few nuggets in there as well.