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I’ve suggested that we need to become community organizers, and given you a tool to help you get started; my assumption being that we need to get our own community going before we can start helping others organize and manage theirs. I’m fairly certain that my suggestion has caused a good deal paranoia and paralysis, because you don’t know how to make a community or how to use the tool. I’m equally certain that the real problem is that you’re looking for an easy solution when what’s required is simplicity; all you have to do is share something. It can be a link, a picture, a thought, an idea, a tweet, or a LOLcat. It really is that simple; share something on a daily basis and community will happen. It’s not easy, because it feels new, different, not something you’re used to doing, but it is simple, sharing is always simple …

‘Tis the gift to be loved and that love to return,
Tis the gift to be taught and a richer gift to learn,
And when we expect of others what we try to live each day,
Then we’ll all live together and we’ll all learn to say,

When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come out right.

Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Gifts>

photo credit: Nesster

Oh well, my real point is that we can’t turn off the electricity, so I may as well post this.  This Tweet just in form Michael Wesch: “Chacha … new ways to cheat on exams / new reasons to write different kinds of exams:  http://chacha.com/“.  You got a cellphone or a laptop, you got a question? Thanks to ChaCha you got an answer.

Identity increasingly operates like information; for many of us identity is not just physical. Who you are is a function of who you know, what you know and how effectively you can use that knowledge. You can be Steve Jobs or you can be the Fake Steve Jobs; either will work, you get to choose, but you have to deliver. At today’s count there are 203 Shakespeares registered on MySpace. It’s easy stake a claim but writing the next Hamlet or even Troylus and Cressida may prove a little more challenging. The key phrase is ‘the next’ because ‘identity’ is different than ‘reputation’. Reputation like resume is situated in the past, a history of supposed successes and failures. Identity lives in the now, and increasingly in the future, it is a measure of capacity and comletence, of what are doing and can do.

Creating and maintaining an identity when you become a artist.

Writing Students and Professors Fight to Keep Theses From Being Freely Available Online from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Brad Wheeler In Search of Certitude

A little exploring of Issue #0 led me to this NY Times article which we can file under the "If you thought Second Life was strange try New York City" heading.

I’m not sure that the retro-design trend makes sense, but there are some interesting possibilities in the no button approach.  Click below for a brief description or on the above picture for the original concept.

E-book concept combines leather and multi-touch – Engadget

photo credit: OrangeLimey

As I mentioned I’ve been doing some stuff for a couple of local arts organizations and not surprisingly cost of service is an issue.  In other words it pretty much needs to be free.  This isn’t a problem in and of itself; there are more free services than I can keep up with, but there are some issues.  Free often means that you’re paying with screen real estate; for a quarter of the screen they’ll let you post content on something that looks like your site.  That seems fair but there are individuals who object to shilling for the corporate blogosphere, so I’ve been trying to stay with ad free; that’s not really a problem but there’s another issue that is, you might say ‘technical’.  Power comes at the price of knowledge.

I don’t suppose that it’s exactly news that simple things don’t do as much as complex things, or that the more you want to do and the better you want to it the more you’re going to have to practice.  In tech terms if you want a simple blog Google gives you Blogger and you can pretty much figure it out without any prior experience.  It’s a fantastic interface and you can look like a professional blogger in a matter of minutes.  What you can’t do is turn it into a content management system or a Wiki.  You can use WordPress.com, which is also free, and comes close to something like a simple CMS, but the interface requires more effort and knowledge.  If you want a Wiki WetPaint is about about equivalent to Blogger in terms of ease and obviousness. If you need more power try Wikidot, but again a less friendly UI and a steeper figuring-out curve.

It’s tempting to make parallels with information, and suggest that you get what you ‘pay’ for; pay in this instance equaling effort. TV news isn’t as in depth as newspaper news, but then again it’s much more immediate. The real point however, is that things are getting easier.  Things you couldn’t do a year or two ago are now possible with just a bit of effort, and a year from now pretty much anyone* will be able to do them.

*Standard Caveat: Anyone with, electricity, computer access, a cell phone, etc. and we should remember that more and more people fall into this category.