Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

You may have noticed that each day, or a few times a day, I have been updating my Twitter page. I have been trying to keep it to once or twice a day so people who visit this blog can see what I am up to that day without the self important, every twenty seconds, updates that the program is prone to I am sure. I love some other people’s updates because they are very interesting people.

O’Reilly Radar also reports that presidential candidate John Edwards is on Twitter. That is pretty cool. The linked blog post also has an interesting discussion of Edwards being on Twitter.

Jill Walker’s posts about Twitter have been very useful. Like Dr. Walker I am enjoying logging my day. Adding a Twitter update to my morning routine has been a useful way to ask myself “just what am I doing today?”

There are a variety of ways to tweet. SMS, the web, and other ways. I have been doing it via my profile. I hate text messaging. There is a Firefox plugin so users can tweet via their browser.

There are some other fun things people are doing with Twitter: Twittermap is a mashup of Twitter and Google Maps. I added myself to it, but I haven’t seen anyone nearby yet. Twittervision gives a live feed of tweets from around the world. Twitterific is a Mac only widget for your desktop. Someone needs to create one of those for Windows. Oh there is one. It doesn’t track your friends tweets though.

I think there is a lot that can be done with Twitter. I like the constraint created by having only 140 characters. A writing project I am working on right now involves short bursts of writing like that.

Perhaps I should release it via Twitter when it is finished?

Via Jill Walker via Jesper Juul (I am so excited to find a blog of yet another person whose writing I love!) I bring you a wonderful quote from Eliot (via this essay):

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

Jill’s post about her daughter learning how to use Excel spreadsheets in fifth grade made me very excited. It is great to see how advanced the knowledge that children have about computers these days. As a child, I was the only kid in my class each year to even own a computer (Apple IIC-I just found it last spring in the closet. I have some pictures in my Flickr archive) in fourth grade I actually taught our principal how to use an Apple! When I was still doing the teaching program at Stockton I was shocked by how little many people in my education classes knew about Excel. I’m not an expert, honestly I hardly use spreadsheets, but a lot of people didn’t seem to know what they were! Sadder, a lot of the women in the class said things like “oh, my husband deals with those in our home.” So not only is it great to hear that Jill’s daughter is learning spreadsheets, but it is even greater that girls are being taught cool stuff about computers at increasingly younger ages!

I just wanted to announce to you all that the first 60-second digital camera story contest is now under way. A few friends are involved in the judging so I figured I’d pass the word on.

We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course.

We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second stories are works of fiction recorded by their authors as digital videos, less than one minute in duration. Files size must be 5MB, and work must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Entries are being accepted from now until June 8th, 2005.

There will one grand-prize winner, who will receive a one-minute supply of exotic chocolate, a one inch by one inch book of the winning work published by Spineless Books, and other one minute pleasures. The winner and fourteen runners-up will be published in the “Fifteen Minutes of Fame,” a permanent web shrine to the 60 second story form. The judges of the competition include internet writers William Gillespie, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton, Jill Walker and Rob Wittig.

See 60secondstory.contagiousmedia.org for the details, to watch some 60-second stories, and to submit your own.

From the makers of Online Caroline comes Planet Jemma. Looks very interesting. I just recently finished Online Caroline and am rather fascinated by it. I hope more is written about this but for now you can check out Jill Walker’s essay on Online Caroline and this article on Planet Jemma.

How I Was Played By Online Caroline

This is a rather interesting essay Jill Walker wrote for the new First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game book. Online Caroline is an interesting interactive internet site. It stars a women named Caroline whose boyfriend goes away on a trip so his company gives her a computer to be able to keep herself busy. What follows is fascinating. I won’t ruin the story for you (if you read the article Dr. Walker does a great job of summarizing the story) but this is a must read article and a unique website which you should check out.

There is a very interesting interview up on the Iowa Review website with New Media Reader editor Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Not only is this a good interview it is also partially done by Stockton College’s own Scott Rettberg with help from Jill Walker.