Not in my normal set of reads, but this month Esquire has an interview with Cerf. My favourite quote is this: Instant messaging and chat rooms have basically created a level playing field for deaf people. And the autistic. And terminally shy.
The last traditional speaker of the Eyak language died yesterday, making the language extinct. Eyak Chief Marie Smith Jones passed away yesterday at the age of 89, and as the last speaker of Eyak, her language dies with her. First Nations languages are especially at risk for this, for a number of reasons, but there are groups out there trying to save what they can.
Chief Jones’ obituary. She was the last living Eyak.
The Library of Congress has a Flickr site. And a blog. In their own words, “If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.”
I must have my head too far in the books, because it never ocurred to me that people just print fake versions of real degrees from real schools and sell them, but this sure looks like the University of Cambridge seal to me. Best of all, this one comes with a transcript. It does make me wonder, though - how prevelant is stuff like this? If I saw this framed, in an office somewhere, I would assume it was real - this is a real bricks and mortar school and a real emblem. I realize that anyone with photoshop could do something like this at home, but it is troubling to see something so clearly meant to pass as legit being sold on Ebay. Apparently you can ask for any school that you want. Ugh.
While cleaning up my desk in prep for moving next week, I found an old file folder from the mid-90’s, filled with scraps of paper, with stuff jotted down like my old ICQ number, and channel op instructions.
/topic#channel “newtopic”
/kick#channel “nick”
/mode#channelname+b”nick”
/mode#channelname+o”nick”
/msg NickServ Register “nick”
/msg NickServ SET KILL ON
Web 1.0 required a lot more memorization :)
In 1997, I watched as a number of the personal websites that I read particpated in a group notebook project, each decorating one page of a blank notebook, scanning in and posting the page they had decorated, before mailing the moleskine off to the next participant. The premise was a simple one - a moleskine, mailed from one person to the next, and each recipient decorating and/or filling up one page, and then finding someone to whom it should be mailed next, someone that they only knew in the context of reading each other’s personal web pages.
Two themes quickly emerged: the notion of connecting one’s screen life with one’s offline life, vis a vis giving out a real name/mailing address, to the person who wanted to send you the journal, and the notion of exclusivity and how that affects online relationships. That second theme is a whole other post!
It was the beginning of deciding who to trust, oneline - who could have your real name, who could place you in ‘the big blue box’. These experiments continued, in various formats, including two of my favourites - Where’s George, and Dropspots. I just got a Where’s George bill the other day, and dutifully logged in to register it. This is the second bill I have recieved with a Where’s George stamp on it, and as it turns out, the person that registered it has registered more than thirty four thousand bills. That is some serious commitment to outsider social connection.
Dropspots is new, and a little more personal than wheresgeorge - a harkening back to the whole moleskine journal idea. In their FAQ, they say this: Leave things of little or no financial value. Leave things that you’d like people to add to, or modify in some way. It is amazing to me the lengths to which humans will go in order to connect with one another.
Danah Boyd put together a wiki documenting the timeline of social networking software. It is funny to think that widespread use of the web is only about 11 years old, and that if we don’t write these things done, they will be lost. Funny, in the I was a Classics major in undergrad and we used to drive ourselves nuts thinking about how much was lost because nobody writes down what is most obvious in their day to day lives.
Wikipedia has a great list of social networking sites, for those of you who think that MySpace and Facebook invented social networking :)
This is the first time that I have ever set up a WordPress blog, and so far, there have only been a few surprises. I have never used MySQL before, or PHP, and every site that I have ever administered was built using notepad and a lot of ‘< ' and '>‘. One dropped bracket and the site stops working. Ah, the good old days, wading through nested tables to find the dropped bracket! I miss 1996!
Naturally, when I decided to put this site together, I opened up Photoshop, designed a site, redesigned it, cleaned it up, sliced it in ImageReady, coded a site around it, and put up the result as my index page, assuming (erroneously) that I would just drop WordPress code into the areas on the page that I wanted to be dynamic. I assumed that it would work like Blogger, which drops Blogger code into one’s own design.
[ed note: interesting....I hit 'Save and Continue Editing', but WordPress lost the next two paragraphs in the save. And I just had a sick flashback to the moment that the computer on which I had just finished my GRE essays crashed, thinking of which, to this day, makes me sick and a little anxious!]
It doesn’t though, and my pretty design is for naught, unless (or, lets face it until) I teach myself some PHP - enough to design my own theme. The theme aspect is nice though, and I have wasted spent the better part of the last week looking at all the theme options. They are all different, and yet look eerily similar to one another. It is the death of personal design, but at the same time, the level of design in most publically distributed themes is astonishingly high, so perhaps the true measure of the death of design is that such good work is being given away, free.
Since I started this entry, I have switched themes twice, because neither of the first two had all the sidebar info that I wanted. I can easily see themes becoming my new digital habit, in the way that font collecting was for me in the nineties.
Ah, Chank, the font foundry of my fondest youthful days.