While I tend to blog along the more social and theoretical sides of technology, I thought I would share a post that Phil Windley just threw up on his blog, featuring the top downloaded content on IT Conversations for 2007.

IT Conversations provides some of the most insightful interviews and programs, including a long time favorite, Tech Nation. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. Phil, in an executive director role, has definitely poured his heart and soul into it.

I actually met Phil several years ago while I was doing the Dot.Com thing in “Little Silicon” (a.k.a. Utah Valley, just south of Salt Lake City). He would host (and I hope he still does) a monthly CTO forum that brought some wonderfully intelligent people together to talk about geeky, but always fun, topics. While Phil might not know this, it was here that I first began to consider the connections between culture and digital life on the internet. (more…)

If you had surveyed the Facebook status of CCT students during finals you would have seen something strange. During finals you always see a predictable number of Facebook/IM/<communication device here> messages that are mildly suicidal. I must admit that I took to wandering around the library in the middle of the night (taking a “break” from writing my papers) and navigating to this LOLcat on a dozen or so catalog computers. (I have been informed that this is not funny, but at 4:30 am I found it hysterical.)

1st year students in CCT, however, had a different type of project ahead of them. There were requirements, of course, but nothing to restrict the form of the final. I think Tatyana’s Facebook status captured it best:

Tatyana is I can’t believe i’m writing a monologue as a FINAL PAPER. :P.

There is a tale of former student (and by “former student” I mean my friend Molly Moran, and by “tale” I mean she confirm the story) who turned in a maniquine covered in philosphy quote for her final; a sculptural piece of sorts.

As for me? You remember this guy right? Well, would you like to the biography of the Dramatic Prairie Dog?

I ran across this video piece from mobuzz.tv while running around the nets this morning. It seemed particularly salient given all of the research I have been doing on anonymous online behavior on craigslist’s Missed Connections (here, here and here).

The content we generate on the internet always has a context, even if we are attempting to distance ourselves from those contexts. As this newscast illustrates, it seems we are all still unsure about how to negotiate our relationship with internet “anonymity.”

On the lighter side, check out Craigslist Curmudgeon, a blog that extends shaming beyond the confines of craigslist by featuring some of the more rediculous posts.

Each time I finished showing my video, and the first question I was always was “How did you do the posts?”

“Oh, I just posted them to the website,” was my casual and rehearsed reply. The posts they are referring were those posted to craigslist’s Missed Connection section, quoting the various theorists that I included as a means for driving the narrative. Yes, the posts were actually there (Washington D.C., m4m), always accompanied with a little message low enough on the screen to be kept out of the shot, apologizing for the off topic nature of the post.

The next question I would get was one for which I had no rehearsed response: “Did anyone respond?”

The first time I was asked this I just laughed. “No, no one replied,” I said simply. Why would they? The content I was posting was not even close to a missed connection. In fact, craigslist users flagged and removed all of them within a few short hours. Except, what I said wasn’t true. When I finally did get back to the junk email account I used for this project, I found two unexpected responses that made me stop and rethink my argument.

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The semester is wrapping up, which means the last few weeks have produced an insane amount of academic product. I hope that some of it will end up here, but first I have to add some spit and polish. But here is one that seems ready.

For my Gender, Sexuality and the Body seminar, I created what Dr. Coventry calls a “Digital Storytelling Project.” I call it “One of the hardest finals I have ever had.” A Storytelling Project is basically a theoretical argument made in video format. In one vein of my semester’s worth of research on anonymous online behavior, I was looking at peer-to-peer regulation across digital and real world spaces, and in particular, public responses in the Missed Connections section of craigslist (A follow up of sort to some previous research).

Video after the jump. (more…)

Those who have been around me as of late, enduring my alternating states of exhaustion and over-caffeination, have probably also endured some conversation about LOLcats and their relationship to online communities. Imagine my surprise when Michael sent me this bizarrely accurate cross over.

Drop the cat and replace it with… Foucault? Or how about my personal favorite, Althusser!

Enjoy the best of them here.

If there is anything I have gotten good at over the last year and a half, it is how to launch an enterprise application. The rules include: have everyone in the same room, under promise, over deliver, work hard, and remember to breathe.

I am always fascinated with user behavior, but it is frequently hard to know what the user experience actually is. That was not the case this time.

A forum on Student Doctor Network gave us a unique look at how our users were experiencing our launch day. Pre-med students can be a demanding bunch, and of course it is only the worst comments from people with browsers in the most bizarre states that posted on the forum. However, if you are donning your thick-skin, it makes for an interesting read.

Recently I posted an entry on an idea I called the “Listening Application.” This idea has generated a number of conversations with peers of mine, many of which inevitably result in listing applications that seem like they might be “listening”, only to eventually rule them out.

For the record, here is a list of applications that are deemed to not be listening:

1. Facebook, MySpace or other Social Networking Sites
2. Instant Messenger
3. Email
4. Blogs
5. YouTube

I am not surprised that these applications are offered as candidates. When describing a theoretical application that is “gratifying, [and] deepens connections with its users while empowering them”, it is easy to think about the current social revolution that has enveloped the web by allowing users to easily produce and publish content. The ways in which the technologies listed above have deepened and multiplied connections between internet users are countless.

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katie didn’t just emailed me. Apparently the NYT is reporting today that Verizon is blocking text messages that it deems “controversial or unsavory.”

New media and censorship. Here we go again:

“No company should be allowed to censor the message we want to send to people who have asked us to send it to them,” Ms. Keenan said. “Regardless of people’s political views, Verizon customers should decide what action to take on their phones. Why does Verizon get to make that choice for them?”

Is text messaging an open space? What rights do we have to insist on outside of a Verizon/customer relationship? Text messaging is not subject to the same content allowances as voice communication, and I should point out that pornography has had problems gaining access to text messaging as well.
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gnovis, the online academic forum sponsored by Georgetown’s Communication, Culture and Technology program has accepted a short article of mine on the reliability of email.

Here is a taste:

By design, [SPAM] solutions block email somewhere along its path. This means email administrators must deal with the terrifying risk that legitimate email might fall through the cracks. This is far from trivial. If you were to choose between loosing one legitimate email and weeding through 100 junk messages, which would you choose? What about 1000?

Read the entire article here:

Pursuing Reliable Email: How can we leverage the user?

Or better yet, get involved!