Lizkdc Dislocation

On Sale Now: Zombie Kurt Cobain

Oh, no.

This is F*CKING CREEPY.

Hello again, you beautiful and damaged young man.  BTW, you're going to die young, fueled by unbearable misery.   Then we're going to dig up your corpse, animate it, and sell you all over again.

Are there gameplay levels for heroin addiction and orphaning your child?

Roast in Hell, Guitar Hero.

I think of Kurt a fair amount, oddly enough. I think of him because of that old '90s crowd of mine, the one with the handsome men and charming bohemian women, and leather jackets and the long vanished DC bars and the amazing music, the good years and the horrible, heartbreaking years, the addictions and the split ups and the people who just disappeared and the one who died.

Which all makes me a big fan of Dave Grohl. Grohl's the guy who decided it was worth it to keep on struggling through the painful ironies of the world, and make music, and get dicked around by music execs, and be a father, and get to have lines in his face and pay a mortgage and have cocky twenty-something musicians tell them they grew up listening to him. There goes my hero. Stick that in your Wii.

Twitter's Two Weeks: "Over", and Now, the World's Attention

Here's a startling and ironic juxtaposition

From the headlines of last week:
Twitter hype punctured by study (BBC)
"Nobody Tweets" (Harvard Business Review)

Both pieces responded to the same study, and both took a skeptical look at the hype surrounding the Fail Whale, and with good reason. A nugget which drew special attention was the discovery that 10% of Twitter users--the power tweeters--produce 90% of the tweets, while most users sign up, tweet a few times, then don't appear to speak again. 

Was this a sign that Twitter was yet another over-hyped plaything of the knowledge classes, a successor to the Blackberry in acting more as a sign of belonging than a tool that would actually be of use in the larger culture? And scariest of all for the immensely reputation-sensitive wired classes, was Twitter's aura fading so fast?

But wait! Just as the critics began drawing a bead on the tool's limits, the ground shifted with the dramatic events in Iraq.

Social Media: Recession-Fighting Machines?

Late winter grass blades, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Will social media help us from the worst economic downturn of our time?

One of the key destructive effects of a market collapse is that things of value aren't being connected to, and exchanged by, people who would value them. The contents of social media are people, their skills, creativity, insights, and communities, and the most powerful thing that media can do is help those valuable brains, hands, and hours not go to waste.

Wordle me this, Batman!

I made this Wordle by entering the text of this blog's front page.

It cracks me up.

You know, if we'd had this shit way back when I was an English grad student a) I might have finished that doctorate and become an academic, which is a horrible idea b) post-modernism might have got itself over with in like two years and Michel Foucault would have sloped off and run a coffeebar or something, which might have been a happier ending for all.

Usability in Everyday Life

Yes, this is a card sort for our kitchen.

Our three months without a kitchen saga is almost, almost at an end!  Three and a half months of microwave food and Roche Bros. takeout is about to come to an end!

My theory is this information architecture exercise before moving everything back in will lead to optimal grouping of supplies into areas that are handy to use and reasonably well-organized.

Or, at a minimum, diminish household post-move battles along the lines of "you put the cheese grater *where*? Are you *mad*?

ETA: and in the name of blog continuity--yes, where to put the lobster pot is an actual problem.

Technology Question of the Day: Does Google Make Us Stupid?

IMG_2188.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Zakim Bridge and drawbridge

Nicholas Carr asks a serious question in the current Atlantic, serious for those of us who write, edit, research, or otherwise try to produce high-quality information for a living.

Does spending an increasing amount of our time online actually detract from the quality of our thinking process? 

What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Of course, I have a counterargument.

Gracias, Bostonist

IMG_2076.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Riding the reflections,  Fort Point Channel (ICA with DBomb walk)

Excited because this image was picked as Photo of the Day on Bostonist blog.

Good Morning, Scum (Warren Ellis, Twitter)

A while ago, on a whim, I put Warren Ellis on my Twitter follow list.  He's a British sci-fi novelist/comics technomage I dig partly because of his work but partly because of his psychotically affectionate embrace of all things Internet: blogging, photopool, message boards, music-sharing.

But anyways, he gives awesome tweet. I tend to check Twitter over my coffee and there among the earnest exchanges about micro-content and social media is Warren's stream of the bizarre and profane.  Hee.

Crowdsourcing and History (Flickr and the Library of Congress)

Willie Hoppe (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress.

Willie Hoppe [no date recorded on caption card]
Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA 
Persistent URL:   hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.11144
 
Today's Boston Globe featured an eloquent article on crowdsourcing by historian Stephen Mihm, "Everyone's a Historian Now."  Among his principle examples are the advent of high-quality historical articles on Wikipedia and the Library of Congress' photo project on Flickr.

The intersection of Wikipedia and history has received a great deal of discussion among public intellectuals, but I hadn't seen someone do what Mihm does and pull together the strands from a number of influential sites across the web and talk about the potential for social media to significantly change how history is done.

The Flickr discussion drew me in because I've been fascinated with the LOC Flickrstream ever since it debuted a few months back.  The concept as originally stated was to leverage the knowledge of the Internet commons to help the Library expand its knowledge about the significance and reference of the thousands of orphan images in its archives.  The Flickr community was asked to collaborate in adding tags, notes, and comments to this collection.

TwitterFlattery (Election '08)

IMG_1681.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

TwitterFlattery: Barack is now following...

By the time the next election rolls around, post-2008, social networks will have moved beyond the young and the wired just like text messaging and email before them.

But just for this moment in time, I must confess to grinning when I signed up for election updates and got this.

In the blink of an eye, a few years later, will this look as dated as the photos in the JFK Library of folks gathered round their cabinet black and white TV, men in tie and jacket, women in skirts and heels, watching little Kennedy and Nixon heads square off?