December 25th, 2008. I went to Istanbul for doing a 3 day workshop on networked information visualization, which was kindly supported by Istanbul Bilgi University. Worked with a diverse group of participants from various schools with backgrounds from visual arts to computer science. We covered basic network structure, network topologies, and clustering. We did hand drawn diagrams. Collected data by hand and by programmatic methods. Visualized relations using templates. As the final project, we worked on the database of the national elections in Turkey from 1960 to 2007. Turkey generally has 10 to 20 political parties per election. We looked at how the same representatives elected from different parties at each election. Above image shows the network of all the political parties between 1961 and 2007 (some parties do not exist today). The diagram is created by Mumin Aydin. Line thickness shows the amount of transfers between the parties. I didn’t know that politicians can change their ideology this much. Participants created network of political parties as well as cities connected by representatives. We concluded the workshop with a mini exhibition on the corridor, which was ironically overlapping with a conference titled Marxism 2008. Full documentation will be up sooner than later.
December 27th, 2008. Did a performance at the Gozel Geceler party, which was a technical fiasco. After the disastrous NYC Minitek Festival, this was the second time I had to go on the stage without sound / image check. Never recommended.
January 6th, 2009. New year’s first lecture at Bogazici University Complex Systems Research Lab. First, presented the principles for what I do, how I use the network structures and dynamics in my thinking and the network itself as the medium in my practice. Second, showed examples of work from 2005 to 2008. Discussed large scale networks and creative processes with Chris Stephenson, Haluk Bingol, Suzan Uskudarli, Onur Gungor and students from the Bogazici University.
January 28th, 2009.Basak Senova kindly invited me to do a presentation at the Upgrade! Istanbul meeting. I organized the talk around the criticism of micro labor in social network services. Started with a recipe on how to create a social network service. Followed with the measurability of the contemporary social environment, and discussed how even physical activities can easily be measured and are part of the digital cloud. Showed instances from the MYPOCKET project. Described the relations between a platform owner, an application developer, and a user in terms of the social web services. Showed instances from the Meta-Markets project.
January 28th, 2009. After the Upgrade! Istanbul meeting did a Meta-Control performance with Klaustro’s music at Peyote. A fascinating Istanbul night of electronic music and live computer visuals. Video above by Devrim Kadirbeyoglu.
February 05th, 2008. Did a 2 day Networked Information Visualization Workshop in Kayitdisi Events at Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul. Participants studied the structure of networks and did basic network visualizations based on hand picked data.
After today’s bailout rejection and the big stock market drop, I checked out the full red Map of the Market, there was one spot still green, guess what: gold (Barrick Gold ABX). It is time to go back to make things, sell things, and count the money by hand.
I decided to use this space more actively. Besides occasional updates, commentary, and links, I will also run experiments and share unfinished sketches. I guess like an extension of my studio.
To start with, I’ve added a MYPOCKET widget on the side bar. It shows what I buy everyday, and what will I buy next day. Yes you can always find future here, at least my future, before it happens.
Then I updated the typography, colors, link style, fonts size, and layout proportions. Back to defaults in colors, I used WC3’s web accessibility standard colors this time. Links #0000EE and underlined, visited links #552299. You’ve probably tried the search box logo before, if not do not hesitate to type your own name in the text box. Also did some background action, put the satellite picture of the most hated Incirlik U.S. army base in Turkey (map), this is by now the largest U.S. nuclear weapon base in Europe. Guess why?
I updated the blog to the new WordPress 2.6. Long waited plugin auto-update feature works really well. The editor is more stable. I like the new word count feature, this post is 391 words. It makes more sense in the post-Twitter world.
Cleaned up my drafts, deleted some of them, updated the titles. Now there are just 4-5 planned posts. I use these drafts like a notebook, paste things randomly, then go over them, and build into a post depending on my motivation. Sometimes a Twitter discussion can turn into a blog post, you never know.
I’ve been using Twitter more often. I gather some time related data from my online activity, I will write about it in a future post, planned in those 4-5 drafts. Added a twitter widget on the side, which posts the new entries to Twitter and shows my tweets here.
The Delicious widget has been flaky since the new version, which I don’t like. I am looking for an alternative, a more sincere social bookmarking system. The only reason I use delicious is that I have friends and people I admire who share bookmarks. No other reason really, if we all decide to move somewhere else, I am not going to think a second.
You can find more social web services I use in the Machine Readables list on the sidebar.
We all know who owns the comments. Comments belong to the person who writes them. The question for us is how much are our comments worth?
When you write a note in Delicious it propagates to FriendFeed, to Facebook, to Twitter, then to other social places on the web. Do you currently own it? No. Does your comment attract visitors and in turn generate ad revenue? Yes. Do you get anything from the ad revenue? No. What do they say? “In return you are getting the service for free”. Are you really getting a worthy service for all your comments, votes, photos, bookmarks, videos, and all your invaluable social connections? Think about it.
What we need is open contribution metrics at any service. To be able to debate on how much we give to a social web service and how much we get in turn, we have to be aware of the amount of our contribution.
User Labor Markup Language (ULML) is created because of this issue. ULML is an open data structure to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.
* Images above are shots from a sketch based on a cell packing algorithm in the Meta-Control series.
Today my RSS reader NetNewsWire reseted itself, I lost all the feeds (500+) I’ve been collecting in the past years. I don’t know what happened, but all I get was the default feed list: mac.com, BBC, Wired etc. First of all, I said bye to NetNewsWire and removed it from my computer. Although I like its clean and fast interface, I can’t take this serious error.
Then I started to look for new feed readers.
Google Reader. Well I use it sometimes, but it is very slow for my reading. Also it manages the feed list really badly. For example, it uses RSS icon after RSS icon to represent the feeds, very bad. I can’t scan them easily. I think Google Reader developers are just lazy, why not just use feeds’ own 16×16 icons like many other readers do. Share, share with a note, star, tag are necessary for large-scale conversations (Greg Smiths’s post). But these features overlap with the services I already effectively use: Del.icio.us, Twitter, etc.
Attensa. Works quite fast, but it has a poorly designed visual interface that I don’t want to stare at much. Attensa’s AttentionStream technology combines content (e.g, authors, titles, tags) with your attention to provide a relevancy ranking. Sounds exciting but the interface does not surface this “underlying” technology well. Place of the numbers, color saturation, contrasts, and font size are all poorly composed I think. It may get better if I use it more, but current prioritized lists are not relevant to my interests. If you do machine learning, please show it, show the progress, what you learn about me.
NewsGator. Slow and poor information design. It has some filtering through AideRSS, which ranks feed items based on comments, Del.icio.us history, Diggs, Tweets, etc. But this filtering does not make much sense to me, because the popularity based ranking models can not match my diverse interests well. Also I read my favorite feeds just in time, so as a paradox, items are probably being ranked after I read them.
Fav.or.it. Tried a little bit, its interface is just confusing. Too much unnecessary information here and there. Comment reading is good. Integration with existing sharing services (Del.icio.us, Twitter etc.) is good. Reading experience is bad.
FeedEachOther. Many features, poor information design. Comment reading good, friend connection good, feed list (OPML) sharing good, readability bad. I don’t care much about feed recommendations, because I already find interesting and related feeds as I use the web. Again locked in sharing, no integration with existing services.
There are many readers out there, these are the ones that I found interesting enough to give it a try. There are also custom home pages (Netvibes, iGoogle, Live.com etc.) that act as readers, I just can’t touch those at all. Every reader has one or two unique feature that is good, but none of the readers is good enough to help me deal with the complex information flows. If you use something good, please post it in the comments. For now, I think I will stop reading feeds.
Today I am doing a 1 day RSS Ramadan. No feed reading until the sun goes down. I don’t know what it means, but I feel like I need it for the health of my mind and soul. Although some other interfaces may interrupt my information diet, this is no problem since the deal is between me and my “internet god”.
Turbulence MUST raise $25,000 by December 31, 2007.
I’ve been reading and learning from Turbluence for the past 5 years. They not only publish but also organize events and support artists (see the past comissions). Turbulence is unique in their effort and a great motivation for networked arts. We owe them a lot. No need to say, supporting experimental art practice has no monetary return in the “free market economy”. So please support Turbulence if you:
are one of the hundreds of teachers who use Turbulence works in your new media / digital art courses;
are an artist who has received a Turbulence, Networked Music Review or New American Radiocommission;
have presented at or attended Upgrade! Boston (Art Interactive or Massachusetts College of Art and Design), Floating Points (Emerson College), or Programmable Media (Pace Digital Gallery) … now is the time to give something back…
or
You don’t know us but you support experimental practice in the arts… Please PLEDGE NOW!
WHAT TURBULENCE ACCOMPLISHED IN 2007
In addition to an exceptional year of supporting artists through commissions, public events, and our world-renowned resource, Networked Performance, we started a second blog called Networked Music Review (NMR). On it you will find in-depth interviews with sonic artists and musicians; world-wide events highlighted in real time; a “Weekly” post spotlighting interesting works, artists and conversations; a monthly newsletter which summarizes each month’s activities; and much more.
WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT IN 2008
On November 15, NMR began launching fifteen commissioned works, several of which will premiere live at Programmable Media II: Networked Music, a 2-day symposium at Pace University, New York City in April 2008.
In addition to launching 20 commissioned works, other upcoming highlights include Mixed Realities, an exhibition and symposium at Emerson College, winter 2008; and Re(Connecting) the Adamses, a major exhibition co-presented with Greylock Arts (Adams, Massachusetts) and MCLA Gallery 51 (North Adams, Massachusetts), summer 2008.
This book is recommended to me by Amazon.com today. Among all the spam recommendations I get from Amazon, this is probably the first book I care. Amazon’s recommendation algorithm is probably getting better by adapting itself to my shopping behavior.
If I buy this new book, I will give feedback to the algorithm and increase the weight of its possible scores about me. In other words, I will let Amazon to do better predictions about my future shopping behavior. If I keep getting good recommendations and buy whatever is recommended, I will adapt to Amazon’s recommendation software. Me adapting to the software from one end, the software adapting to me from the other end… is there a meeting point somewhere? Is this the peak of a conflict? Do I work for Amazon or Amazon works for me? Because of this bidirectional adaptation I am politically ambivalent in my position. A position in the informationally generated life.
This is an interesting encounter. The description of the book goes:
Today, in the twenty-first century, we witness the emergence of a new class of beings: organisms that are first imagined and then–through the agency of biotechnologies–brought to life. What once was myth is today a medium.
