Last week on the Howard Stern show, Howard was trying to grasp twitter.  He was explained how it was the new and fastest way to communicate with his fans, so he told his producer, Gary to post a video of his dog on the twitter account.  Throughout the show, Howard checked back with Gary and they had yet to figure it out.  Finally they posted a link to the video hosted on their own server.

The twitter timeline is exclusive to just text and links.  There have been third party workarounds that have become standards by the twitter community for pictures and music, twitpic and blip.fm respectively, but video is still anyone’s game.

One of the players is Seesmic. Seesmic takes the idea of Youtube video responses and combines them with the timeline and followers structure of twitter.  The functionality of seismic is identical to twitter, just adding video clips.  Where the profile pic is currently in twitter, it is replaced by a small playable embedded video. This is a really interesting design choice and something I could see twitter integrating into their own service eventually. Everytime a person posts a Seesmic video, it tweets on twitter with a link.

A person makes a video post and then others respond to it with other video posts. This allows for longer responses, but very boring video. Few on Seesmic seem to be asking, “what does video offer me?” Instead, they sit at their desks, with unkempt hair and miscellaneous posters on the wall behind them and just talk at the camera.

The biggest issue with Seesmic is that it offers no way to record while on the go other than a laptop with a webcam. Everyone is having these discussions while sitting at a desk on a keyboard.  Few are showing us pictures, events, anything other than a talking head. Imagine twitter without the smartphone and sms ability. It would be a lot of updates saying “reading emails” or “reading nytimes.com” and that is exactly what Seesmic is, but instead of a 2 second read, it takes 3 minutes to watch the video.

Another interesting service is 12seconds.tv. 12seconds.tv is basically identical to Seesmic, but allows you to posts a 12 second video post on your twitter stream from your mobile phone or computer. The 12 seconds limitation is similar to the 140 characters in twitter, adding some brevity to the videos. On Seesmic, I have seen 5-6 minute videos of talking heads. 5-6 minutes is a long time to hear someone ramble.  It is also a creative way to take strain off of the service’s servers.

A service that I see taking the twitter video crown is Qik.  Qik has the same functionality of Seesmic, but allows you to update from a wide variety of smartphones.  The Qik public videos are full of people at parties, concerts, conferences… doing things! It also uses the smartphones GPS and shows a map with the exact location the stream is coming from.

The discussion angle is still there, in fact even more so.  Qik videos stream live, so if Qik or Twitter followers see someone is streaming a video, they can watch and posted comments that show up live on the phone’s screen.


Seesmic is an interesting idea, but I do not see it growing outside of its current niche group while it remains tied to the computer.

Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences by Bowker and Star is an interesting look at different systems of classification and how these classifications effect people’s perceptions.  Bowker and Star define classification as “a spatial, temporal, or spatiotemporal segmentation of the world” (pg. 10).  The authors discuss several different classification systems but mainly focus on social and medical examples.  These include but are not limited to the Nursing Interventions Classification, the International Classification of Diseases, classifications of viruses and other illnesses, classifications in the work place, and classifications of race such as during the apartheid. 

There are many interesting sections and ideas presented in the text.  To discuss all of them would take much more space than this post would allow but several things jumped out at me right from the beginning.  For example, during the introduction they state that the “standards and classifications, however imbricates in our lives are ordinarily invisible.  The formal, bureaucratic ones trail behind them the entourage of permits, forms, numbers, and the sometimes visible work of people who adjust them to make organizations run smoothly.  In that sense, they may become more visible, especially when they break down or become objects of contention” (pg. 2-3).  This is true with any number of classifications.  When everything is going as it should and objections are minor we do not pay much attention to classification systems.  However if they become a problem whether it be moral, social, political or anything else than we become much more aware of them.

Another interesting statement that they made was that “each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another.  This is not inherently a bad thing –indeed it is inescapable” (pg. 5).  Prior to this book I did not look at classifications so severely.  Obviously, there are many examples where such categories have produced unfair, negative, or disastrous results but I did not realize that nearly every category does this, although usually in a smaller way.  Of course not all categories produce the kind of devastation seen in South Africa during the apartheid but they all notice something over something else. 

With the way that we think as humans, categorizing comes very naturally.  It can be helpful to get a better understanding of things in a time efficient way.  However, we must also be careful whenever we impose labels on things.  With the ICD or the International Classification of Diseases we can see that many of the categories are somewhat subjective yet standardization is necessary for institutions like the ICD to work.  How else could information be communicated across borders or even just from doctor to doctor?   A set of terminology is a must to bypass language or cultural confusion.  Bowker and Star state that “it is clear that standard forms are essential for the ICD to work and that these standard forms cannot be over precise or people will not be able to use them… Standardization procedures must be tailored to the degree of granularity that can be realistically achieved” (pg. 155).

One area that I had some difficulty with was the concept of Torque.  This the author’s define as “a twisting of time lines that pull at each other and bend or twist both patient biography and the process of metrication.  When all are aligned, there is no sense of torque or stress, when they pull against each other over a long period, nightmare texture emerges” (pg. 27).  

Overall, I found this book to be a very interesting, comprehensive read.  It certainly, as all the books we have read for this class have done, has changed my view and understanding of classification systems.  I look forward to our further discussion of the book in class.

 

 

Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star's Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences provides an interesting backdrop for me while I conduct interviews for my Oral History project. Whereas the goals of a medical classification system and a small set of interviews may sound at face value to be very different, I disagree. Both endeavors try to get at the hear of what truth is to  better understand a set of phenomena. The two practices diverge, however, when we look at the ultimate goals. Whereas a classification seeks to find the "Truth" of where medical conditions come from, my project is interested in the "truth" according to a particular person. While Big T truth sounds more trustworthy and worthwhile than small t truth, it is important to understand that both truths are not really absolute; they are highly subjective, constructive, and constrained.

For years, I always trusted official documents- archives, medical records, tax records and the like- because they were sanctioned by a governing body who I had believed was interested solely in the accuracy in the information it reports. But Bowker and Star paint a picture of medical classification, for instance, that is far different than I imagined. The book focuses a chunk of its work on the ICD, the International Classification for Diseases and many of the problems inherent in its structure. The authors point to several conflicts of interested between doctors, statisticians, and bureaucrats which serve to make reliable information impossible to attain. Doctors don't want to fill out forms for people who've passed away; they want to help the living. Statisticians want hyper-reliable information, but always want to limit the number of diseases to keep their numbers easier to work with. Bureaucrats want the process to run efficiently. Mind you, none of the groups here are malicious in their intent (at least I'm not suggesting they are) but it has to be noted that such a vaunted organization as the ICD has a great deal of obstacles in its path to get reliable information out to interested parties.

I think of my Oral History project in relation to the ICD because I initially thought the information I was gleaning in my interviews to be of a lower order of importance than the information groups like the ICD attained. But I no longer feel that way. Information of any type needs to go through filters- technical, social, and the potential of human errors. No type of information is strictly truer than other types, though some can be more reliable. And even this information must be held to high level of scrutiny.




In this picture taken from South Park, former Vice President Al Gore explains "Manbearpig" to South Park students, many of which don't believe in this far-fetched character. Manbearpig is a metaphor for global warming.

Information cannot escape the social grasp of those who wish to use it, manipulate it, or hide it. As long as we remember that, we can look at information critically.

Because "Big T" and "small t" truths are both constructed, I feel I must modify all truth with quotation marks. That's where I got the idea from the title. We should remember that the filters through which information must travel influence the sort of truth that emerges at the end.

BigTweet (BT) is a Twitter bookmarklet that allows users to post Tweets from any site. But lots of Twitter apps allow users to post from any site. What makes BigTweet special? For starters, as its name suggests, users can post big Tweets- up to 240 characters, up from the standard 140. Also, BT has a built-in tinyrl maker, which uses the bit.ly service, making posting from any site even easier- opening up a new tab with a tinyurl maker is no longer necessary.  BT makes posting to Twitter from any webstie quick, easy, and efficient.




Actually, BT can't entirely circumvent Twitter's 140 character limit, it just extends singular Tweets to two Tweets. This works, though, because large BT Tweets will show up at the same time, and will indicate which comes first by calling itself 1/2 or 2/2. This works for the most part, but it does provide problems as it can separate hash tags. If posting a big Tweet, and the hashtag is at the end of the post, it will show up on the second post, but not the first. I haven't found a way to get around the problem. If anyone knows a way around this, do tell. Still, the big post feature for BT is good for when the user has something to say that just cannot fit into 140 limit.

It's easy to change the size of posts from 140 characters to 240 characters.




To make Tweets large, the user must simply click on the "Posting" tab, and check the "240 character mode" option. Then, Tweets larger than 240 chracters will post  as number 1 of 2 and 2 of 2.

Another interesting, though less well-known feature of BT is its ability to let users post using 64 special characters distributed across two different pages at the click of a button. Performing this taks is simple; one must simply click the "Special Characters" button on the left side of the window which is directly under the "Text Control" button. Page 1 of the special characters looks like this:





The second page of BT's special character page looks like this and is equally easy to use:




Also, BT can post to Friendfeed as well, another social networking site.

Dragging the BT button to the top of the most recent version of Firefox was no problem at all. Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer are supported as well, though there seems to have been a small problem with IE (surprise).

Though BT is simple to use, its site added a tutorial page anyway. The tutorial explains the service while using it. The explanation of how to perform various things with the application are spelled out in the application. It's pretty clever.



Aesthetically, BT is Spartan, and not as in Frank Miller's 300 spartan, but as in bland-bordering-on-ugly spartan. But that's okay; the application's main draw is its usability, not its aesthetic design. In a future iteration, I'd be happy to see designer make the application at least a little more nice to look at. I'll take function over form any day, but I'd rather have both. And with many Twitter Apps looking increasingly sophisticated and sharp, it would behoove the makers of the app to make it nice to look at.


BT also has a FAQ page, though it's kind of short because it's such a simple application.



Twitter's prime academic purpose is to transfer interesting information. I know that, sometimes, I see sites, and intend to share them, but never do. BT works so seamlessly that it makes this transference of information easy. There isn't much to say here in terms of discussion, actually. When you find something you like, you can easily link to it. BT, and other Twitter apps like it, can help users add to the Twitter discussion. While the discussion is not a two-way street as it were, users' ability to put links in Twitter make the site an increasingly more important repository of information all the time. The more people use Twitter and the more easily people can put links on the site (thanks to the bit.ly tool), the better the site will be.

Looking at a list of Twitter applications on Squidoo, it's clear that many apps are limited. But practically speaking, BT can only be used sometimes, and in certain instances. While one could use BT all the time if he or she was interested simply in posting to Twitter, I don't believe that enables the full Twitter experience. Twitter, I believe, is much more interesting when I can see what everyone else is saying.

By fixing the one glaring flaw of BT- its lack of full Twitter functionality, this application could have become indispensable. It already has two notable advantages going for it in the form of its post from anywhere and its built-in url shrinker. Enabling users to engage in conversations with friends and see other people's updates would have been icing on the cake.

BigTweet is certainly a good application which does what it claims to do, and does it well. I just wish that it did a little more- that it would integrate full Twitter functionality into the application. Come on, people, make it happen! Still, I can recommend BT for anyone who just needs a little more space, and doesn't want to keep a special tab open to make urls shorter.

Friendbar v2 is an interesting application that helps keep you updated on Twitter and Facebook posts.  You can easily download Friendbar for free from Firefox.  Once it is installed the application appears in your toolbar.  Friendbar looks like a ticker tape where your friend’s status updates scroll a crossed the top of the page in the toolbar. 

 

With Friendbar you can log into Twitter, Facebook, or both and keep track of what is going on while you are doing other things online.  This way you do not have to keep jumping back to the actual Twitter and Facebook sites to stay in touch.  You can simply glance up to keep an eye on what is going on.  With the settings you can make have it beep to alert you when a new update comes in and it also flashes yellow. 

With the settings you can chose to have replies, direct messages, text, pictures, or text and pictures scroll at the top of the page.  The pictures come from people’s Facebook albums the shots are small but if you hover the curser over them a larger image pops up with information about where the picture came from and whose it is. If you do not want to see the updates you can hide them while staying logged in to Twitter and Facebook.  If you select text only the posts are very similar to Twitter in that they include the profile picture, name, the person’s actual name, where the post came from either Twitter or Facebook and how long ago the post came in.  If no new posts are coming in than it scrolls back through past posts.  You can chose how many posts it will scroll back through.  You can also manually go forward or backward through the posts.

There is a button for replying, re-tweeting, and sending direct messages right on the post itself and there is also a URL button that automatically shortens the URL of the site that you are currently at and puts it into the post. You can easily log into or out of Twitter and/or Facebook on the Friendbar.  The size of the bar itself is adjustable which is very helpful because the standard size is, in my opinion, a little too small. 

With the settings you can chose; the ticker scrolling style between fade, slide, or no effect, the background color of the bar between blue or gray, how many messages it plays back through, and how many seconds each message stays on the screen for.  It also gives the option of playing a sound when a new post comes in.  There is also a button that brings you to a list of your Facebook friends so that you can invite others to use Friendbar. You can chose whether or not to show the quickpost or the Lucky Site button.  With quickpost you can type in something in advance and then just hit the button to post it.  However it adds more to you message such as “Twitter / Home, http://bit.ly/173kD. Sent from my Friendbar.” There is a Google and now Twitter search bar, where you can chose which of these two you would like to search. Also you can adjust the number of tweets made by Friendbar from low which is forty an hour, medium which is sixty five and hour, or high which is 90 an hour.  Here there is a link for help and information about Friendbar.  Once you are on the help page there is another link for Customer Support where you can ask questions, share ideas, report problems, and give praise.  Friendbar employees will actually respond to your posts with answers and advice.  Other similar applications to Friendbar include Twitter Toolbar, Yoono, Twits Like Me, Twitter Friends Bio, and The Twitter Toolbar.

One problem with the application is that it crashes.  You can still post but it stops showing you updates from Twitter and Facebook.  When asked a Friendbar employee said that “We have found a quirk with a specific type of proxy server. We are testing a fix now. Hopefully this will be fixed in our next release… We've seen similar issues when users have a proxy set up in their Firefox network preferences. If you select No Proxy it seems to work. Please try that and let us know. We are trying to see if there is another workaround.”  Also the application is good for keeping track of what is going on at the moment.  It is hard to catch up with what people said in the past because  you see the posts one by one and in reverse order of the way they came in so conversations are hard to follow.  Plus if a new message comes in you are interrupted by it. The application is good for staying in touch while doing other things and to easily post and reply to others but not particularly for speed even though you can chose how quickly the messages scroll. Currently there is not yet a way to mark items as read so it scrolls back through everything each time.

There were several other problems in past versions of the application but Friendbar has assured us that they have been fixed.

UPDATE: All of these issues have been fixed in the latest release!

• Problems with very large Facebook Accounts: If your Facebook account is really large, say over 500 or 1000 friends (depends on the speed of your CPU and your network), Friendbar will not work well. In fact, if you have that many friends, we don’t recommend using this release. We know what we have to fix, and we’ll do it in our next release, which should be ready in a matter of days.
• Broken links: If you see a link in a Facebook update or Twit with a period or a “)” at the end - e.g. if the link was at the end of a sentence or in parentheses, we don’t do a good job of stripping them out in this version. We’ll fix this as well.
• Need for a Facebook Account: Some people just want to use Friendbar to read their Twitter feed, but right now you need to log into your Facebook account. We’ll change the next version so that you can use it just for Twitter.
• Buttons: Its unclear whether some of our buttons are active or inactive due to the graphics we use. We’ll fix them to make them clearer.

 

I feel extremely excited to bring to my readers a short tutorial on LibraryThing.  It is an extremely useful tool for readers and authors alike.  LibraryThing is a Web 2.0 application that is analogous to Myspace and The Facebook.  While Myspace links users up by common friends and acquaintances, and The Facebook links users up by geographic areas, schools, colleges, corporations, etc., LibraryThing links users up by their personal library.

    Similar to other social media websites, upon signing up for LibraryThing, one is asked to create a user profile that will serve as their homepage.  

 

One of the most important steps in creation of the home page is choosing one’s personal library.  This is what links people to other users.  The user’s benefit is having access to people who have libraries similar to theirs.  Users can browse these libraries, giving readers ideas for potential future reads!  These libraries could even have reviews written by other users and links to their personal blogs.


 

    One can see above my small library.  It can be viewed as a list or as thumbnail images of the respective book covers.

    Arguably, if one observes, one may conclude that LibraryThing's target audience is young adults, typically women.  This is because the consumers who buy books are mostly women.  The age of the demographic is apparent because the users of social media are typically young adults and teens, aged 16-34.  This is based solely on observation.

    

Using the interface feels like the user is at the card catalog at one’s local library.  This adds to the ease of use because library users are used to the classification system used by library before the incorporation of the computer to organize library’s collections.  If one looks at the tabs that look like hanging folders in a filing cabinet, these are the main links with which to navigate the site.  They resemble the Rolodex type tabs of the library card catalog.

    An additional unique and fun characteristic of LibraryThing is the tag option.  Traditionally, there are many ways users can search for books, the typical user searches for books via the author or title.  However, one can browse books via genre, or keyword.  These keywords are usually non-specific for individuals.  One can browse the keyword “romance”, “fiction”, and “bestsellers” on Barnes and Noble's website, and get results that look like this:

 

    One can see here, we have 12, 508 items.  It doesn’t feel very specific.  LibraryThing offers keywords created by USERS, not book marketers, sellers, or librarians.  Some keywords one would probably never see on Amazon or Barnes and Noble's website are:



I don't think one would find a subcategory of comics under the heading of love and fiction on bookseller's website.  This application allows the community of users to control the method of searching for books. 

A third interesting characteristic is LibraryThing’s Early Reviews.  LibraryThing has agreements with several publishers.  As a way to generate buzz about future books, publishers release future copies of books to LibraryThing.  LibraryThing then releases these copies for free to selected users who sign up, and in return, users must write and publish reviews of these books.

    I haven’t personally used many Web 2.0 applications, however, I feel LibraryThing is probably the most specialized.  Also, other applications seem to supplement social media websites, LibraryThing is in of itself, a social media website.  I really could go on singing the praises of this creation, but I am limited by space.  I am an avid reader, but if one asked me, “What have you read that you enjoyed in the past?” or “Who are your favorite authors?” I would not be able to answer them.  I tend not to remember the book after I read it, or the author or title.  I don’t think I am alone feeling this way.  LibraryThing provides a personal database of user’s personal library and a way to compare libraries with like-minded readers.  It also offers users the ability to search for new books to read by comparing libraries with other readers who show similar taste.  I don’t feel the site needs any improvement, except increasing the amount of users.  This is because the more users, the more I benefit from searching their libraries for the wealth of potential information!

In Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star dissect and analyze the system of classification and standardization in information infrastructures. Sorting Things Out focuses mainly on classifications and standardizations on the commercial and bureaucratic levels, but Bowker and Star state in their introduction “To classify is human. Not all classifications take formal shape or are standardized in commercial and bureaucratic products.” In order to further understand Bowker and Star’s theories and to open discourse I posit the following questions for the discussion:

1. Bowker and Star state “Remarkably for such a central part of our lives, we stand for the most part in formal ignorance of the social and moral order created by these invisible, potent entities. Their impact is indisputable, and as Foucault reminds us, inescapable. (p. 3)”
   
   What “formal ignorance of the social and moral order” do you think you have had with a classification or standardized system in your personal life?


2. Throughout Sorting Things Out Bowker and Star give many examples classifications that have an often hidden moral and ethical consequences. Bowker and Star assert “We have a moral and ethical agenda in our querying of these systems. Each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. (p. 5)”
   
   After reading Bowker and Star, are there classification systems that you participate in but now feel segregates or discriminates against certain people?


3. Bowker and Star make a distinction between classification and standardization. They suggest that classifications often become standards. Bowker and Star state “The systems we discuss often do become standardized; in addition, a standard is in part a way of classifying the world. (p. 13)"
   
   What types of standards are in your information ecology?
   
   What classifications make up these standards?