Rock Sheffield

A friend gives me a small pebble that he found at a beauty spot on the edge of town, browny grey in colour and worn smooth by time. It fits snuggly in the hollow of my hand as some pebbles seem to do. To me, and perhaps to him, it is simply a pebble - a gifted pebble at that. I flip it over and it becomes more - there is writing on it. Someone has written Rock Sheffield with a black marker pen and then drawn a blue square with FB inside it. The words re-hide or keep are there underneath as well. Suddenly, or so it seems to me, the pebble carries more meaning. It's face - I refer to it now as the face since it has now become the front of the pebble to me - is a text. And it's a text with a history and a future, both of course much briefer than the total life of the pebble, but still it has been drawn into a new set of relations, a Facebook page (someone set it up I suppose) and a project of finding and re-hiding, a thing with a journey in a human as well as a more-than-human world. Again, I'm thinking with that small pebble, it has become special.

Professor Hashtag @GuyMerchant

If anyone was in any doubt that written language is changing, or that children are active members of writing communities they need look no further than this story on the use of hashtags in their work. Asked by the BBC to comment on this phenomenon I was unremittingly positive, although as you'll see I refused to be drawn on predicting the shelf life of the hashtag! The origins of the symbol itself are interesting, and you can trace its history as a way of denoting a number through to its adoption by early programmers. Bringing the hash symbol to the practice of tagging (from meta tags) has been an interesting user-driven innovation. Hashtags weren't written into Twitter, they have just become a useful convention. Of course it makes your tweet, or your post on Instagram, searchable and also helps to define the audience, topic or conversation you are addressing. There are many other uses, too and I'm sure linguists have coded the various functions that hashtags perform. For me it's their adoption into language that is intriguing, and like @GuyMerchant the hashtag is primarily a written form. But new writing features do seem to enter spoken language, too. It's not uncommon to hear people saying 'lol'. And 'confused.com' has become quite popular. I've also recently witnessed a four year old asking 'go to the park hashtag orange slide?'. We live in interesting times!

Searching limits

At the CSU technology symposium, we were once again alerted to the ways in which our casual searching behaviours may be shaped by search engines such as the mighty Google. This time it was Judy O'Connell issuing the warnings. So we learn to be sceptical of the JFGI approach. But since then I've got interested in something else about searching - and that's related to modality. I've been using the image above a bit lately, and have got quite interested in its provenance. A contact tells me that it shows the warehouse inventory process - possibly at a shipping line. Well that's OK, so far. But what I really want to do is search for the image and find out more about it. Of course Google (can I still mention it?),will allow me to search for an image related to a word, but it won't allow me to search with an image. Hence the modality issue. So I'm wondering if anyone's come up with a way of searching with an image? Maybe they have. Since some photo apps can now recognise your friends, image matching should be possible - and of course images are tagged and labeled. I wonder.

Beware the wordle tree!

I'm getting rather cynical about Wordle - what does it actually do? A glorified word count, that’s all. It doesn't really produce a tag cloud based on a folksonomy, or an aggregate of our interpretations. It scans the document and produces something that looks like a tag cloud, treating words as data rather than words as ideas. However, I did like this post on visualizing tools as an accompaniment to reading (thank you, Ian). I also came across this piece on tagging, which is really informative. Cathy Marshall investigates the up and downside of tagging in Flickr, a subject that I’ve written about (but not in such an analytical way). Her argument implies that we could be better taggers (maybe?). It would be interesting to get students to tag learning objects, such as the paper Ian refers to, after a close reading, maybe using a better tool to build a folksonomy within a more focused affinity space. Maybe that could be achieved by ‘negotiated tagging’ in a learning space like pbworks?

Virtually planning

Planning the future, again! This is a snap of our first virtual planning meeting for the ESRC Seminar Series "Children’s and Young People’s Digital Literacies in Virtual Online Spaces". The hardest thing was arranging the dates. And isn’t that always the hardest thing in RL, too? There’s no getting away from it. As Willis says "Surprisingly, though, the place where anything is possible bears a striking resemblance to the physical world where what is possible is determined by cultural, legal, temporal and physical constraints "(2007). Maybe I’m not so surprised, after all. Anyway it was good to make some progress. We now need to find a good tag for the series, so we can do the Twitter, Flick mash-up thing; and I need to get back to writing about virtual worlds.

Tweety?

Just before checking out of the hotel in Nijmegen I wanted to archive two of the interesting things I've discovered. One is a mash-up which displays a scrolling Twitter-feed over the top of tagged images in Flickr, and it's called Twitter Fountain (see above). A great way of capturing and making public conference back channeling. The other is a Twitter app which allows you to create a closed community in a business or educational setting. That's called Yammer. Although I'm never to sure about closed systems I'm sure they can be very useful, and important in some contexts.

Break-in tweets

For some unknown reason I was quite excited to find Twitter over capacity this morning. It was almost as if my small tweet was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Probably not true at all. And then this afternoon I came across this story of someone tweeting a burglary! It could be the start of a media avalanche, as new moral panics break out: obese tweeters, criminal rings on Twitter, sex tweets, Twitter predators and suicide tweets. I hope not. But as groups of us experiment in using this service for our own purposes (narrow concerns?) the idea of inline tagging, the so-called hashtags, becomes an increasingly attractive option for filtering out and filtering in to your timeline. I’ve already removed one or two people, just because their tweets don’t interest me, and I’m open to finding new people whose tweets might be music to my ears.

Blog's 4

four
This blog was four years old on Monday, and is made up of around 1000 posts. I reckon it has become more focused during this time, and certainly readership has grown. The template's been modified a number of times, and I'm forever playing around with the sidebar! Since Blogger brought in a tag function I've been working with a relatively small set of labels. The most frequent tags are education with 45; social networking with 44; and digital literacy with 42. My blogging practice is closely tied in with photosharing on Flickr and allconsuming which I use for my bookshelf, music and video favourites. Occasionally I'll pull in something from YouTube. I use netvibes for feeds from other blogs. This nexus of practice has developed over time, and I expect, will continue to develop.

Tagmashes

Another Master
I'm trying to unlock the significance of tagmashes. A tagmash builds a sort of subject heading by combining search terms in a folksonomy - and then storing them. So 'joined' search terms become a persistent and useful category. Thingology reports it like this: "there is no good way to search for 'France during wwii.' The tag Vichy covers some of the ground, but not enough. Tagmash provides an answer. Tagmash: france, wwii (france and wwii) Tagmash: france, wwii, non-fiction (kill the novels) Tagmash: france, wwii, -fiction (much the same)." You can see all this working by following the links on the Thingology blog. There's also a commentary on tagmashes here. It seems that clusters, as used in Flickr, do a similar thing but they work on a frequency count, whereas tagmashes are derived from meaningful combinations generated by users. If I've got it right what we have here is a great example of knowledge building in a social network.

Lip gloss

No, I do not take medicines for this.
Originally uploaded by ♥ Eve ♥.

Last October I posted here about a joke birthday present from Ruth – the Peppermint Schnapps flavoured Mullet lip balm. I’ve had a few comments on the picture on my Flickr stream, and lately one from Eve who is a lipgloss collector. She has nearly 300 different ones. The picture above (shown with permission) shows part of her extensive collection. It’s tags are ‘lipgloss’, ‘lip’, ‘lipsmackers’, ‘smackers’, lipsmacker’, ‘collection’ and ‘lipbalm’. She also belongs to the LIPGLOSSADDICTION public group. So, just like the padlock example I wrote about here, we again see social networking in Flickr as a way of creating an affinity space for niche interests. Don’t worry about me – I’m not about to start a collection, but I’m intrigued by this aspect of photo-sharing!!

Attention!

weighty sign
People clearly have different motives for signing up to a photosharing site. My original motivation was to create a bank of pictures online that I could use on this blog. Since then things have changed a little - friends, family and a few online acquaintances will, from time to time, visit and comment on my photostream. I enjoy playing a small part in this community. This is quite a typical story of social networking. I’m aware that for others popularity/ attention is a strong drive. If you’re one of those, then Thomas Hawk has 10 tips for getting attention that you might like to look at. But of course it’s not a simple divide between attention-seekers and the rest. I quite regularly check on the popularity of my pics (mostly because it’s an accessible feature and partly because it’s nice to get some approval). The fastest climbing picture in my ‘views’ count is shown above. It’s a quite unremarkable picture of an icon on my daughter’s door. Posted on January 8th it’s now at Number 11 out of the 200 listed why? I guess it’s the tags. I’ve noticed ‘home’ and ‘house’ always attract attention (interesting)… ‘sign’ isn’t exactly a crowd-puller. So I guess it must be ‘weights’ and ‘lifting’. Now I’m running an experiment. I’m going to give the same tags and title to a random image and see how it goes on the ratings. There’s nothing better than a bit of attention, after all.

MySpace (again)

Souvenir table
At last some common sense! Sameer Hindujar’s study shows that teenagers are more alert than they are often given credit for. He says ‘some of the threats allegedly posed by MySpace and its ilk may be a bit overhyped.’ There’s also this on social networking, and an interesting look at tagging as an online social practice (here) Many thanks to Sarah for these!

Shoes

shoes
These are not Global Positioning shoes although they are pretty cool. If you want the GPS shoe, it looks like this – also pretty cool! That’s from the Platial blog. Now Platial is described as ‘The people’s atlas’ and it is – it’s social networking and mapping. That’s a bit of a different take on things than simply geo-tagging photos on Flickr. Here’s the Platial frontpage and here’s Sheffield with the potential for community mapping with information, events etc. And then Mapkit allows you to publish a map on your site/blog – but I’m not sure why I’d want to use that on my blog, but I can see where it would help others.