Chris Brauer Media Project [BLOG]

Twitter interactive fiction

2009-06-17T15:36:00.008-06:00

When you sit in media symposiums or conferences a winning comment is always that people need to see beyond the broadcast capabilities of Twitter and use it as a social tool. Interaction in networks is key to creating connections. And connections connect.

But when you are writing short fiction like my Twitter account @twae you write very tiny books so the obvious route is just to storytell. Just a little storyteller who you follow for fun. But opening up my account to RT any stories addressed @twae for 30 minutes taught me a lot about the power of interactivity. Of course the storytelling capability is universal but we each have our own version from what we see. And catching glimpses of those various perspectives is an art on to itself.

My esteemed colleague Sean Hill @veryshortstory caught on to this very early and his invitation to post stories with the #vss hashtag is spot on. But when that other great Twitter storyteller Arjun Basu @arjunbasu tweeted good stuff (not stories) from the #140conf he ended up with a net loss of followers, some of whom took exception to his sudden interactive role.

But my experience was that 27 different authors participated with only the reward of a RT. It wasn't about the results, just the process. It might have been annoying to a few that an only occasional feed suddenly erupted in multiple tweets in such a short time. Maybe the blow was softened because these were still stories in the spirit of the feed. But the overall feedback was so positive and I think people really enjoyed giving a story a shot, in a different way to how they might enjoy reading a story. Interestingly the whole 30-minutes with lots of exchanges and @Twae references all over the feeds had no impact on my follower list. It just isn't about that when people get down to sharing ideas.

Twitter Fiction and Short Stories

2009-04-21T02:06:00.005-06:00

@Twae is my latest Twitter experiment. The early stages of any social media platform is a great time to try out new formats and styles before we all get hard-coded into predictable patterns of usage. Twitter demands that every post be less than 140 characters so why not try and create fiction and short stories (Twisters) in the format? Or if poetry is more your style try your hand at 5-7-5 Haikus (Twaikus) on Twitter.

Writing short stories on Twitter raises a number of initial questions so here is a brief list of lessons learned so far:

Writing in 140 characters: One of the most demanding early questions is whether you should post stories of exactly 140 characters or write stories of 140 characters or less. This has a big practical impact on the process as if you decide on the former you often find yourself writing to conform to the strict format instead of letting the creative process drive the length. It really is the difference between writing free-form poetry and iambic pentameter or haikus. Twister short story maestro Arjun Basu takes the exactly 140 character approach and dismissed it as an issue in a recent direct message exchange - "140 characters. That's the only rule." But for me deciding a direction on this has been one of the biggest challenges of the form. I have experimented with both and am inclined to think that restricting yourself to exactly 140 is actually pretty arbitrary given there is no history of the form and the software doesn't impose this limitation. To each his/her own.
Twitter is a rolling real-time format and this contrasts greatly with the typical editing process. This suits the conversational nature of the form very well but presents different challenges to a fiction writer. When you tweet a twister (will soon grow tired of all the alliteration in this social network, but not yet) it enters the public domain and remains in its original form unless you delete and repost. But if you do that all your followers see the same post come up twice and are privy to your editing process. Best idea is to craft your tweet in a text editor and paste it in to post when it is ready to go.
Is fine to base some of your stories on real-life experiences but in general keep your short stories fictional. It can create a lot of confusion for your followers (especially if some are old friends or family) if you mix and match real-life with fiction. But it might makes things more interesting!
Connecting with other writers in the format is a useful experience as it helps you shape your own posts and gives you an idea of alternate styles. On Twae I mostly follow those engaged with the medium and format and for the most part that makes my feed a rolling list of short stories. Other Twitter fiction writers that may interest you include: arjunbasu, instantfiction, nanoism, tweettales, astoryin140 and microprose. For something a little different try maureen (haikus).

See my other Twitter feeds at chrisbrauer, cutlines, and blogscholar.

Twitter Guide

2009-04-12T03:07:00.007-06:00

Twitter is the latest social network phenomena. By phenomena I mean it is reaching a tipping point in the public conscious, unlike say Seesmic or Qik, that might be hotter commodities in emerging social tools, but are still largely the domain of very early adopters.

As with all these tools the best way to find out if Twitter is for you is to give it a try. At the time of this writing Twitter seems ubiquitous in the mainstream media and it is likely that you found this article because you are trying to respond to all your friends demanding that you get an account. But Twitter currently has about 8 million accounts which means that only 0.001% of the world population tweet. It is still very early on the growth curve so anyone joining now can still consider themselves an early adopter.

Plenty of beginner guides to using Twitter out there. I started using Twitter about a month ago so plenty still to learn about using the tool but here are my five tips to-date for using Twitter:

Lifecasting and/or mindcasting: Lifecasting is summed up brilliantly in the Supernews animation "Twouble with Twitters" where a woman drifts by the screen and shares in a frail voice: "Found a parking spot". But mindcasters often take themselves and their ideas far too seriously and can be the equivilant of watching BBC4 in primetime - lots of people say they do it but hardly anyone actually does. Recommendation is to find a balance between the two approaches to tweeting.

Broadcast and/or conversation: You can't decide to lifecast and/or mindcast without also sorting out an approach to interaction on Twitter. Fundamentally it is a social tool so just using it to syndicate RSS from your blog or exclusively as a "micro-blogging" tool doesn't take advantage of the platform. But equally most of your followers are excluded from the utility of your feed when all you do is @ replies, turning a broadcast medium into a one-to-one conversation with lots of people over-hearing. Recommendation is again to find a balance between the two approaches.

Multiple accounts: It is fast and easy to start new accounts on Twitter and this can also really help to sort out your messages and audiences. Watch this video interview with PR-exec turned Peggy Olson Twitter superstar Carrie Bugbee to understand how this can really help. Personally I started Blogscholar to tweet about academic issues, Cutlines to tweet about media issues and ChrisBrauer as my home base and main account. Recommendation is to start as many accounts as you need to keep your tweets and audiences engaged with that holy grail of 21st century media - hyperlocal/niche.

Twittersearch & Hashtags: Just as Technorati tags were a clunky implementation, there seems to be some sort of cache in the start-up media world in using unrefined methods to get everyone feeling like they are actually doing something to shape the tool. Twitter search is a powerful tool to follow conversations on Twitter where Twits engaged in the conversation include a hashtag (eg #G20) in Tweets to be included in the conversation stream on twitter search. This has endless possibilities for launching new campaigns online, generating buzz about a concept or just enhancing access to feeds on ideas for readers. Recommendation is to start your own hashtag, tell all your followers and friends, and experiment with this powerful tool.

Followers: Left the most important to many of you to last. Am actually really surprised at how poorly thought through this concept is in Twitter. One way to get lots of followers is just to follow a whole bunch of people, if they don't follow you back, stop following them. Do this 1,000 times a day and you'll have tens of thousands of followers in a month. That's the common method of countless marketing irritants on Twitter. This approach is promoted by tools like wefollow that measure only volume of followers as a guage of Twitter popularity. Another way is to bring (or impersonate) huge celebrity status to the tool and watch the followers fall over themselves to follow. But what if you don't want to be a spamming marketer and don't benefit from a priori celebrity status? There really isn't any other way except patience and commitment. Lessons learned from blogging tell you that if you stay consistent in your frequency of tweets, stay on topic, and interact regularly with your audience, they will follow, slowly perhaps, but they will follow. Hope you aren't really surprised that there isn't any credible "get rich quick scheme".

Follow Chris Brauer on Twitter

Hockey Night in Canada Theme

2008-09-01T19:47:00.014-06:00

My good friend Dan Sombach and I have written, performed and produced a new submission for the Hockey Night in Canada theme competition. Have a listen:

Clarity Capital

2008-04-30T09:25:00.008-06:00

When not working on finishing my PhD and teaching online journalism at City University I am kept very busy in my role as Director, Creative Industries for Clarity Capital. This involves recommending investments in the creative industries and developing web 1.0-2.0 strategies and sites for Clarity and investee companies. All of the design and development work is done through my company Smoothmedia. Clarity Capital has offices in Canada, Africa and the UK and a range of exciting and successful investments in diverse industries.

Working with Clarity Capital Executive Director Allan Dolan on the cutting edge of corporate web development we actively participate in the ongoing Internet revolution impacting operations, marketing and communications.

So far we have developed the following sites:

Homesteading on the Student Life

2008-01-16T02:20:00.001-07:00

Russian students attend teetotaler sex camp, Chinese students buy stocks, and when British students aren't busy inviting Bill Murray and Hugh Grant to crash their parties, they apparently turn off the footie to watch property shows and scream "BUY IT, BUY IT ... IT IS ONLY GOING UP!".

According to a survey by high street bank Abbey students are following their nouveau riche baby boomer parents down the line by putting travel plans on hold in record numbers to save money to buy property.

William Blake wrote that "in the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors".

Maybe UK students are taking the door thing a bit too literally these days. For reference Blake meant a door of perception a la Huxley or a Sir Walter Raleigh style gateway to the world. What he likely didn't mean is a weather-tight, energy efficient exterior door on a corner property projecting a handsome first impression.

"House prices have brought in a harsh new reality for students," said Nici Audhlam-Gardiner, head of Abbey Mortgages. "They now need to weigh up the benefits of travelling against jumping straight into a career and being able to afford to get on to the property ladder."

Swiss Cheese Politics

2007-10-12T10:53:00.001-06:00

What on earth is going on in Switzerland? The poster on the right is plastered all over bus stops, train stations and post offices in Swiss cities (except in Geneva where the campaign was banned by city council) in anticipation of federal elections on Sunday, 21 October. It is a rallying cry from the SVP (Swiss People's Party) to "create security" through the expulsion of foreign families who have broken the law. Activist groups in Switzerland and the United Nations have complained that it is blatantly racist but the SVP probably isn't worried about that as the party opposes Swiss membership in the EU and the UN.

Swiss President Micheline Calmy-Rey is worried that Switzerland's image as a "bridge builder and promoter of dialogue" was tarnished by violent demonstrations against the SVP campaign last week in Bern. But if you subscribe to the any publicity is good publicity school of public relations than maybe all this tension and worldwide coverage is a good thing for the SVP (known as the UDC in French and Italian).

The last time the SVP were at the center of such a political storm was when they led a call for the banning of minarets (mosques) in the country: "We don't want minarets," said SVP member of parliament Oskar Freysinger. "The minaret is a symbol of a political and aggressive Islam, it's a symbol of Islamic law. The minute you have minarets in Europe it means Islam will have taken over". Despite this almost absurdly simplistic rhetoric and action the SVP is currently leading in polls and looks likely to form the next government in Switzerland. The Guardian calls the SVP campaign "racist, Europhobic, isolationist - Switzerland for the (white) Swiss".

"Foreigners", many of whom are born in Switzerland but are denied citizenship, comprise a quarter of the Swiss workforce and make up around 20% of the population of more than seven million.

Football Sociology

2007-09-23T15:25:00.000-06:00

It is a great pleasure to sit in the Emirates and watch Arsene Wenger's Red Army play Total Voetbal. But for the sociologist the culture around the beautiful game can also be a goldmine of sociological insight and investigation.

For example, the unexpected and rapid departure of Jose Mourinho as manager from Chelsea to be replaced by relative novice Avram Grant. It was fascinating to see the initial press reaction and comment mania in the blogosphere. One particular exchange of particular interest to media ethics and sociology featured the Times Chief Football Correspondent Martin Samuel, the Times editorial staff and their online newspaper readers.

Let me explain. On 19 September, 2007 Chelsea held a series of talks that resulted in the replacement of Mourinho with Grant. On 20 September Samuel wrote a column for the Times that appeared in the daily edition and online. This moment was a massive one for football writers across the country and few are as influential as Samuel. Wenger famously said that Mourinho needed to do more entertaining on the pitch and less in the press room. An icon of the game was leaving and Samuel chose this moment to expound on a particular theory.

"There is no doubt that these ties are strong and, with Abramovich as owner, Grant as manager and Zahavi a trusted confidant of the pair, Chelsea are not so much Russian these days as kosher." (Samuel, Avram Grant appointment makes Chelsea no more than rich man’s plaything, Times).

On the evening of the 19th it was also very interesting to see how few online publications responded within half an hour to the news that Mourinho was on the way out. TV and radio were all over the story but the sleeping administrators of vaunted 24-7-365 online sites remained largely out of view. When Samuel's story went live on the Times site an initial well articulated reader comment was published by "David Silver" along the lines of "... in speaking with others and reading this story on the train we find it the most anti-semitic piece of writing in a major UK newspaper in recent memory".

To understand how this comment got there it is important to note that the Times' online editors review each potential comment posted to the site for approval. So this comment had passed the editorial gatekeeper for the online version of the newspaper. It was shortly followed by a response post by Koldo, Galway, Ireland: "... can in europe, in 2007, a newspaper have an opinion and a comment on israel and its citizen that it is not consider (sic) antisemitic". In typical dualistic fashion for online comments the debate raged on in the form of those claiming anti-semitism and those denying the charge. Yes it is, No it's not ... Yes it is, No it's not ... that kind of thing.

This is where it gets really interesting. Logging in to the story 15 hours later that evening the comment from Silver was deleted, leaving Koldo's response dangling as the first comment on the post, part of an online conversation now interrupted by the editorial staff at the Times. In fact several of the comments claiming anti-semitism in the article were deleted. For a reader arriving at this time, or anytime after, the comments now read very strangely as ... not it's not, no it's not, no it's not, etc. The readily apparent question at this point is who on earth is saying it is?? The remaining fragments of comment make up not so much a conversation as a bunch of censored letters from a warzone.

It is apparent that someone approved the comments, someone advised deletion of the comments, and readers (and history) are left with the remains. An email query to the Times editorial staff asking why the comments were deleted went unanswered. So what about the ethics of deleting a standards meeting comment posted to the public record?

In order to analyse the situation it was first necessary to get a copy of an archived page from the Times that contained the original post. Many Internet users are not yet aware that this facility is available through use of the Wayback Machine that keeps a daily archive of every indexed web page on the Internet.

Or at least that is what I thought. In trying to access a Times archived page from the 19th the software informed that the Times was blocking access to the Wayback automated archiver. Debate on the impact of the Wayback Machine on copyright and intellectual property has been going on since its inception. There have been several attempts to use archived pages from the Wayback Machine in legal cases as evidence and this has also been cited as justification for blocking it. But I had never actually encountered a mainstream media publication that took this approach, let alone one with a long-standing claim as Britain's "newspaper of record".

In the weeks following Grant's appointment Chelsea executives spoke out about a need to stop anti-Jewish chants at games, insisting the club would not tolerate such actions "whether in written correspondence, on the chat pages, on posters or banners or through singing and chanting". Jewish publications ran several stories warning of potential racism. Samuel - who reportedly has Jewish ancestors (if it matters) - wrote another column, this time insisting that Grant's hiring had nothing to do with his faith but was instead just a typical old boys club act. Samuel writes: "Chelsea believe that much of the negative reaction to the appointment of Grant is suspect, but that which is tainted by prejudice can easily be identified and acted upon or ignored, and the rest does not deserve to be disparaged so glibly". Would that be glibly as in accepting comments from your readers into the public domain, subsequently deleting these comments, offering no explanation for the actions and ignoring further public queries for clarity on the process?

So if a tree falls in the internet forest with no one to hear it and it is later dragged away and all evidence of its existence erased, does it make a sound?

Review Crucial Gizmo

2007-09-17T08:51:00.000-06:00

Caveat Emptor!! Let the buyer be very aware when they deal with the company Crucial. They are a big market player in portable media storage. I had heard pretty good things about them that led me to buy two Crucial Gizmo 2GB USB drives on the Web. Never again!! While one worked fine the other one came with a cap that wouldn't stay on. Contacted customer service and they insisted on sending a spare cap even though I told them that the cap from the other drive didn't stay on either despite it fitting fine on the other drive. Not surprisingly the new cap wouldn't stay on either. In contacting Crucial again I was informed that "Your cap issue is not covered by your warranty so we would not be able to replace this drive for you" and the fact that the goods arrived with a manufacturer defect in the plastic casing was not their responsibility.

In their words: "The warranty that you have with this module covers you for any drive defect that would stop the drive operating it does not cover any issue with the cap of the module." Oh OK. The manufacturer of the cap takes no responsibility for a defective cap. Genius. All this for a $20 USB drive. It's like this company has never heard of the Internet and that customers are not helpless in the face of gross injustice. Screw you Crucial. Hence this post.

Glastonbury 2007

2007-06-20T08:50:00.000-06:00

They say some people are suckers for punishment. But how can it be bad if it feels so good? Eleven years ago Manic Street Preachers bassist Nicky Wire entered Glastonbury folklore with the quote: "They should build a bypass over this shithole". But low and behold if it isn't those same Nicky and the Preachers playing the Pyramid stage this Sunday. It is just too good to stay away. And on this subject I can speak with a little bit of authority given my tent's position in the flooded plains of somerset circa Glastonbury 2005.

This year I've learned from all the mistakes from the last festival and am rip-roaring-ready to make a whole bunch of new ones. But I won't be watching the Manics on Sunday evening as Beirut is playing the jazz stage at the same time. Of course it is always a matter of opinion and taste but feel free to download my crib sheet for the Glastonbury 2007 festival recommendations and must sees.

Forces of Nature

2007-05-26T08:33:00.001-06:00

Albert Einstein once wrote that "reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one". The incredible exploits of Wim Hof (aka the Iceman) and Manjit Singh (aka the Ironman) suggest that perhaps we live far too literally, encased in our self-made glass boxes, framed by a self depreciating sense of what is possible in life.

Hof and Singh share a philosophy that anyone can "move boundaries" in everyday life. The physical and mental achievements of the two beggars belief.

In 2002, Hof, 47, swam under the polar ice without any supplementary oxygen for an incredible six minutes and 20 seconds. In January he ran a half-marathon above the polar circle in Finland barefoot. He is currently climbing Mount Everest in shorts!

Singh, 57, recently managed to pull a 7.5 tonne aircraft four meters using just a rope attached to clamps attached to his ears. Previously he pulled a double-decker bus with 54 passengers for 55 meters using just one hand. He holds world records for squats in an hour (4288), step-ups in an hour (4235), fingertip push-ups in one minute (152) and parallel bar dips in a minute (124).

Both are humble men of lean build who attribute their success to keeping fit, meditation, consciousness and explosive physical power. Reading about their lives should convince anyone that the old standard that we as human beings can do anything we put our minds to is a powerful possibility that can explode the confinements of "reality".

Supernova and Sun Gods

2007-05-09T08:09:00.001-06:00

Your typical supernova occurs when a massive star suffers gravitational collapse resulting in a transient luminosity comparable to an entire galaxy. It is probably the root of the phrase "going out with a bang". What makes it so incredible is that after about a month all the matter fades away through the powerful vacuum of the resulting black hole.

Nature's largest thermonuclear bomb goes off in spectacular pyrotechnics followed by nothingness, vast substance silence.

That's what makes the recent images provided by NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory so unique. This time it appears that when supernova SN2006gy occurred the star spewed its remains into space over 70 days creating a radiance 100,000 million times as bright as the sun.

"'In terms of the effect on the universe, there's a huge difference between these two possibilities," said Dr Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley. "One pollutes the galaxy with large quantities of newly made elements and the other locks them up forever in a black hole."

Makes you think that maybe stars are just hanging out in the universe deciding if they want to quietly into the night or live on in former self fragments of planets and asteroids. In fact maybe our humble planet earth is the result of just such a choice 4.5 billion years ago. And maybe the ancients weren't so crazy with their sun gods of Apollo, Helios, Ra, Inti, Surya and the rest after all.

Scrubs Air Band

2007-01-31T08:59:00.000-07:00

As a kid my friends and I spent two weeks practicing our New Kids on the Block air band routine for Hangin' Tough. We performed it at the epic annual Battle of the Air Bands in front of all the teachers and cool kids from participating schools. Everything went well until bandmate Steve slipped out of Jamie and my hands trying his second backflip and crashed off the stage into the power cord feeding the music. A short roundtrip to the hospital took care of his injuries but our pride never recovered. Thankfully the art of the air band didn't die with our stage demise and the cast of Scrubs tackles it with their usual offbeat charm and skillz.

Blogger Hacks

2007-01-31T08:01:00.000-07:00

Blogger Beta is a minor upgrade for Blogger users who have their own domain and do not use the hosted option. But thankfully the software has been around long enough now that hacks have been created for virtually any missing functionality. The following is a round-up of the ones that are used on this site. All are free and most can be easily modified.

In order to get Labels to appear on the right navigation column I followed the steps documented in the Blogger Guide to FTP Labels
Comment functionality in Blogger is a bit clunky. Follow this guide to integrating comments using Blogkomm. This is one of the most challenging hacks to implement but worth it if you make the effort.
For search engine optimisation I reversed the order of the page titles on permalink pages using this hack from Freshblog. So instead of all my page titles leading with the blog name, the search engine friendly titles start with the title of the story.
Post titles are clickable on the home page of the blog thanks to another Freshblog beauty.
My list of archive months was getting a bit lengthy and taking up unecessary space in the right navigation so it was useful to implement this drop-down-menu solution
Thanks to 3spots and Freshblog for the very cool Popmarks button you see on the bottom of each post that allows users to bookmark or subsribe easily to RSS without all the clutter of buttons for the various services. It took a bit to customise it to my needs but it is easy to customise what services are available through it so I think it will really come in handy in the future.

Sometimes you just have to laugh

2007-01-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

The best work Tom Hanks has ever done is in classic Money Pit moments. Watch two comedy scenes from the film.

The Surreal Life

2007-01-27T10:37:00.000-07:00

Surreal is a beautiful word that has been hijacked by continuous flagrant misuse so that little apparently remains of the original meaning. In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930) Andre Breton states that the surrealists strive to attain a "mental vantage-point (point de l'esprit) from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low, will no longer be perceived as contradictions."

It was my misfortune to be woken today by a BBC radio broadcast where no less than two segments in a row featured interviews with people whose experience, attending a large rock concert and gaining celebrity at breakneck speed, were "so surreal". Basically it is serving as a somewhat upmarket replacement for "unreal" when it is so much more.

Surrealism is based on stressing the subconscious or non-rational significance of imagery arrived at automatically. It challenges through startling juxtapositions and exists at the nexus of reconciliation between representation and perception . Something is surreal when it reveals something that is disturbingly true but defies our habitual thinking and logic. This is generally something that we seek in our lives as we look to expand our ideas and perspectives in interesting ways. Poor surreal - caged like a wild tiger. Let's hope we can free it before it gets bored in the zoo. Some are already getting started.

"When it comes to art and literature, surreal more accurately means "super real". We'll examine how the wildly original Surrealist movement was -- and, for some, still is -- more than a school of art and literature. It's a way of living a life that embraces childishness, the importance of dreams, and the idea that everything happens for a reason."

Theory of Everything

2007-01-26T16:53:00.000-07:00

Tensions in academia between science and social theory are largely the result on an over-inflated sense of righteousness and self-importance from both sides towards the other. Sometimes they have far more in common than they are willing to admit.

For example here at Goldsmiths computing research is developing an algorithm for beauty, assuming that by analysing beautiful things it will be possible to create beauty through rules-based models. The assumption that beauty can be contained in variables and fixed definitions is almost laughable to social theorists considering the subjective experience and context. And the technology, as almost always, seems grossly optimistic. After all image recognition software can barely decipher (looking for a job?) what objects are in a photograph let alone identify the social and cultural representations that go into ephemeral beauty.

But the real issue is not if it is currently possible to do such a thing but whether it is possible at all. To that question the scientific community would advice constant testing and advancement, moving forward all the time, largely discarding the notion that not all variables in beauty can be eventually counted. When unaccountability is apparent science devises names for things that can be inferred like Dark Matter. Basically we don't know what it is (or its partner in darkness Dark Energy) but we know it is Dark Matter. After all in all the known universe only about 4% of total energy density can be seen directly, about 22% is inferred as dark matter and the remaining 74% inferred as dark energy. It sounds a bit like how sociologists view society with about 4% of what is going on obvious and directly observable, the rest inferred. Journalists love the idea by describing anything that is not observable as "the dark matter of ...".

That's what makes the as yet untested theoretical physics concept of a "Theory of Everything" so engaging as a scientific topic. Personally I would not be happy with any theory of everything that doesn't definitively explain why all belly button fluff is blue or why bullets fired into the sky never seem to hit anything on the way down. And from what I have read this one doesn't seem to be able to do that. Instead it is a hypothetical theory that would make any postmodern proud. The idea is that everything around you is made up of tiny strands of energy that vibrate at different frequencies. Kind of like all the people on earth vibrating in their own frequency to make up the complexities of social life. It grafts together quantum mechanics with relativity in an attempt to explain the fundamental interactions of nature. It brings a new meaning to being strung out if we consider that if the universe collapses on itself after expansion (a Big Crunch) superstring theory suggests that the universe can never be smaller than the size of a string before expanding again. If you are imaginative you can imagine us all just hanging out on that string, chilling and waiting for the universe to get a bit bigger so we can fit a few couches in.

To date superstring theory has launched a number of best-selling scientific texts and television programs, most notably The Elegant Universe, while continuing to struggle with the fact that it makes prediction that cannot be tested. But in an academic paper appearing in the January 26 edition of Physical Review Letters a test has been proposed. It involves use of the incredible Large Hadron Collider, a subatomic particle collider scheduled to be fully operational in early 2008. Weaving under the borderlands of France and Switzerland, the CERN based 27-kilometer tunnel will collide bunches of protons and observe the results. It takes a proton around 90 microseconds (one millionth of a second) to travel around one uber half-marathon lap of the circuit. In tests of the Theory of Everything observations will input to substantiating the canonical forms of string theory.

“Our work shows that, in principle, string theory can be tested in a non-trivial way,” said Ira Rothstein, co-author of the paper and professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon. Now that's some postmodern dark matter.

Paul Halliday

2007-01-26T08:23:00.000-07:00

Photo by Paul Halliday

Visual sociology is a still emerging but exciting form of social practice as researchers seek to harness the powers of multimedia to contribute to understanding social life.

At Goldsmiths College, University of London my colleague Paul Halliday recently completed a 20-year photographic project of London faces and public places first inspired by a series of walks around Greenwich with his late father that opened up a new way of thinking about history, place and memory. As a module leader in Live Sociology Paul inspired my own first attempt in Deptford at exploring visual practices as an input to sociological methods.

Paul leads the MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths and outlines his approach to his London photographs on the project website:

"The work is a kind of auto-ethnography of my day-to-day life harnessing the power of photography to speak a language that resonates with a part of my on-going experience of being a Londoner - in a city that fascinates, infuriates, perplexes and at times leaves me utterly lost for words. A city that I have a deep sense of shared belonging with, that continues to intoxicate me, and that I am happy to call my home."

Civil Liberties in the UK

2007-01-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

As a teenager in the process of establishing social and political consciousness I was swept away by John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and questions of "the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual".

Witnessing the erosion of civil liberties first hand in London over the past 10 years is only slightly less startling than the appetite for public acceptance that accompanies it.

In June, 2006 Steven Jago was arrested for carrying a placard without permission bearing the George Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act". Police seized Jago's photocopies of Henry Porter's expose in pop culture magazine Vanity Fair on the erosion of civil liberties in Britain and termed it "politically motivated material".

Porter's story is a fascinating piece of journalism featuring thunderous email exchanges with Tony Blair on questions of liberty. In this contradictory land of the Magna Carta and Superman CCTV Porter's quote from Labour peer Baroness Kennedy resonates: "What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state".

In a continuing political spin culture of "war on terror" respect for civil liberties has taken a battering. In a 2007 survey of British Social Attitudes by the National Centre for Social Research, 80% of citizens support detention without charge for more than a week, 25% back police holding suspects for up to a week without letting them see a lawyer, and seven in 10 support compulsory identity cards for adults. In December, 2005 a peace campaigner was arrested for reading out names of soldiers killed in Iraq within half a mile of Westminster.

In the storm and rush to contain through legislation and law, liberty has found an unlikely ally in the form of UK director of public prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald : "It is critical that we understand that this new form of terrorism carries another more subtle, perhaps equally pernicious, risk. Because it might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. By that I mean it can tempt us to abandon our values. I think it important to understand that this is one of its primary purposes."

London is a city and scene of contrast, on one hand priding itself on a steely business-as-usual response to the transport bombings and on the other accepting glaring changes in the relationship of society and the individual without compliant.

Macdonald reflects: "London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'."

Cynical Capitalism

2007-01-16T12:10:00.000-07:00

One of the most annoying things about living in a capitalist culture of consumption is the way third rate shysters can follow a successful and legal path to material success. Of course everyone loves a good spammer, filling his pockets and your inbox with trash that earns on 5 in a million. That's a sweet five for his flourishing trade. The larger question is why this spamming is a successful social and economic act. But this is not strictly an internet issue.

Television viewers almost have to shield your eyes to watch the new "quiz shows" dominating the late night UK digital airwaves. These guys take it to a whole new level by asking questions like: "Name 13 items commonly found in women's handbags". Viewers respond in mass at 79p per minute on shows like The Mint and Quizmania but miss obvious answers like balaclava and raw/Rawlplugs (trade name for plugs that allow screws to be fitted into masonry walls) . But of course only a portion of viewers can get through the jammed phone lines and most of the money is made from those who don't even get a chance to compete.

Blogger Guide to FTP Labels

2007-01-09T18:32:00.000-07:00

It is odd what gets you inspired to blog again ... and again ... and again. Everyone knows that the trick to succesful blogging is to write quality posts frequently. But sometimes it is just not interesting enough to participate regularly and the Blogger revamp addresses a key issue in opening up the imagination of 21st century bloggers.

Tags have long been an innovative form of taxonomy. Let the users define the terms is a sharp turn from the controlled thesaurus prevalant in so much corporate software. But the successes of Wikipedia and Technorati amoung others has opened up a new set of terms for meta (information about information) tags and descriptors.

In Blogger what is really cool about the idea is that authors can add tags to content and have these "Labels" (categories or tags in disguise depending on your perspective) appear on the site, providing visitors with a crucial piece of access and navigation. Users of tools like Movable Type will be familiar with the ability to create categories for posts but allowing for unlimited terms to describe content extends this concept further.

The following is a guide for how to insert a list of Blogger Labels on every web page of your FTP hosted Blogger blog (like on the right side of this blog under the heading 'Labels'). This interests those who use their own domain names as opposed to the blogspot.... urls of hosted Blogger. The new GUI for Blogger is largely only available to clients with the hosting solution but workarounds are very easy to create for those with domain names.

If you want to add Labels to your externally hosted Blogger blog follow these steps:

Add a few Labels to blog posts. Just do a couple as these will be test labels. You can add labels at the bottom of each post. Seperate labels with commas, don't use spaces between words (underscores instead) but try and limit yourself to one word labels.
Background Research. There are a couple of key blog posts on the Web for this idea at this time of writing. The first comes from David Nicholson (Where Magic Lives) in the form of a guide on how to include a "Label Cloud" of Labels where most frequently applied terms appear biggest and least referred smallest. The code for this example comes from a customized install of an exchange between David and a user in the comments at the bottom of the post. Meanwhile Andrew Huey was working on his own solution to getting labels on a left or right navigation as a PHP include. Another Good Source is Freshblog that lists some of the latest hacks available to hosted and unhosted alike.
It is important to note if your blog posts use an .html extension (or other) or a .php extension. If you use a .html extension you must add the following code to your .htaccess file (ask your host if you don't know where this file is).

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

If you are using a .php extnsion you don't need to add this info to the .htaccess file.
Open up Notepad or another text editor. Copy and Paste the following code into Notepad and read step 3.

<ul class="labels">
<?php
define('PREFIX', 'url prefix');
define('SEARCH_DIR',
'absolute path to Labels folder');
define('THIS_FILE', 'cloud.php');
if(file_exists(SEARCH_DIR.'_cloud_include_cache.html') &&
filemtime(SEARCH_DIR.'_cloud_include_cache.html')>(time()-(60*60)))
echo file_get_contents(SEARCH_DIR.'_cloud_include_cache.html');
else
{
$output = '';
$files = array();
$dir = opendir(SEARCH_DIR);
while($file = readdir($dir))
if($file != '.' && $file != '..' && $file != THIS_FILE &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;& $file != CACHE_FILE)
{
$files[] = $file;
}
closedir($dir);
asort($files);
foreach($files as $name)
$output .= "<li><span style='color:#990000'>----{-</span><span class='flower'></span> <a href='".PREFIX.
htmlentities($name)."'>".
htmlentities(str_replace('.php','',$name))."</a></li> ";
echo $output;
$fp = fopen(SEARCH_DIR.'_cloud_include_cache.html','w');
fwrite($fp, $output);
fclose($fp);
}
?>
</ul>
You must customize this code for your Blogger FTP weblog. Customize the text url prefix with your own web page prefix for where the labels folder is on your server (eg. www.yourdomain.com/blog/labels would equal 'blog/labels'). Next put the absolute web path to your labels folder where the text in place of absolute path to Labels folder(eg' /www/www/...'). If you use a .html (or other extension) replace the .php code with your extension (eg '.html'). Consult your ISP or support documentation if you don't know this path. Optional is also to replace the color or style options on the appearance of the Labels list in your left or right column.
Save the file as labels.php and FTP into a root blog directory on your server.
Customize Template. Less effort here. Insert the following code in the right or left column of your blogger template as desired and read step 6.

<h2 class="sidebar-title">Labels</h2>
<p><?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."location of .php file"); ?></p>
Customize the formatting in the h2 class as required. You need to leave the second and third line but replace location of .php file with your location (eg. blog/labels.php).
Test the output by publishing. You should see a list of Labels in Blogger. Other things to keep in mind are that you can delete the file (_cloud_include_cache.html) that will appear in your label directory if you want to see changes on your blog Labels list. This file is automatically created to make it so users will not reload the list everytime they visit the web page. The script is very easy on your server and only checks for changes every 60 minutes unless you delete the cache file.

For other interesting Blogger functionality Check out the Beautiful Beat guide to getting recent post functionality on Blogger FTP blogs and the Blogger comments guide (Blogkomm) on this site. Phydeaux3 (followed up by WebWeaver's World) offers an elegant Label Cloud for any Layouts Compatible Templates (blogspot. ... domains).

Living London

2007-01-08T19:01:00.001-07:00

When considering life living in London I am equal parts Samuel Johnson ("bored of London, bored of life") and the Guardian's Lucy Magnan ("sit in a bathful of your own sweat and burn twenties"). But there is a quiet sensitivity to the city that is often underplayed. As life moves in a buzz, most of what you find comes later, like after the shutter clicks. London demands reflection.

Alberta, Canada

2007-01-02T17:28:00.000-07:00

Back in 1999 I took a trip to within 100km of the North Pole to experience a slice of real Canadiana outdoor spirit. Coming back for Christmas from my Phd studies in London this year made me realize that this spirit lives in every outdoor ice rink, ski trail and breath of cool fragrant oxygen. It's a case for the senses really. Pine needles on the snow, looking at the stars once again but only seeing them for the first time and community, a forgotten word save the politicians. Make no mistake the reality of a Canadian Christmas at the lake is people popping by for a skate or a hot chocolate, children dancing in snow forts above their ears and friends shoveling the walk for friends. It really is like that.

Tiger Woods

2006-10-06T08:30:00.000-06:00

Last week I went to the Grove golf course near Watford to watch Tiger Woods. There was a golf tournament going on as well of course, or at least I think that's what those other players were doing walking around with stern expressions looking much smaller than they do on TV. But like many other spectators the point of the whole thing for me was to watch Tiger Woods play golf, not to watch golf. I crouched awkwardly on steep embankments, got three holes ahead of him to wait at the front of the ropes and loved every second of the experience.

Tiger Woods Live is not smaller than he looks on TV. He is immense in his concentration, guile and focus. Physical and psychological power radiates from him like no athlete I have ever seen up close in person. French rugby back Thomas Castaignede wrote about his experience following Tiger on the same day as "a masterclass no sportsman should miss". Dan Bern, an American folk singer in the spirit of Woody Guthrie with the satirical wit of Lenny Bruce, penned a tribute song to Woods way back in 1998 when Tiger was not yet number one in the world.

Sometimes I wish I was Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods
Sometimes I wish I was Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods, Tiger Woods

If certain girls don't look at you
It means that they like you a lot
If other girls don't look at you
It just means they're ignoring you
How can you know, how can you know?
Which is which, who's doing what?
I guess that you can ask 'em
Which one are you baby?
Do you like me or are you ignoring me?
Do you like me or are you ignoring me?
Do you like me or are you ignoring me?
And all you need to do that
Is one good pair of big balls
Balls as big as grapefruits
Balls as big as pumpkins
Balls as big as mine

But even though my balls are big
Sometimes i wish they were bigger
Even bigger
Big as the wheels on tractors
Big as the golden arches
Big as the Golden Gate Bridge
Big as the state of Kansas
Big as Mars and Jupiter
Big as the swing in Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods

Reflections on 9/11

2006-09-11T23:13:00.000-06:00

It feels fitting on the fifth anniversary of the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre in New York to watch the film United 93 -- an informed fictional account of the only plane not to connect with its target on that fateful day.

What strikes the viewer is the suffering of the innocents as the plane descends into the Pennsylvanian countryside. Everyone fights for their lives and are shocked to find themselves in the situation. We have all run the thought experiment of what you would do in the last minutes of your life if the end was inevitable. Most of the actors in the film declare their love.

Is it interesting that North Americans (perhaps westerners) can so easily understand the context of the film. Innocents are caught in the crossfire of global political tension and the result is tragedy. But we don't seem to be able to extend this to people from other lands and cultures. Over 40,000 civilians have been killed in the was in Iraq. One can imagine if they could make movies that reached North American audiences the same impact would be felt.

The photo that accompanies this post was taken three weeks after 9/11 on a trip to New York for a friend's wedding. It is absolutely true that if you visit the site when people are thinking about what happened a fog hangs in the air. On the plane from Toronto to New York an Egyptian man sat three rows behind me. I noticed him as soon as I got on. I watched his movements as he went to the bathroom with his bag and was about to say something (feeling guilty of racial profiling later) when a 10-year-old kid between us told the stewardess: "... that man has been in there for a while and he has a turban". She banged on the door and there was some excitement in the plane before he emerged a minute later. Turns out he was a Coptic priest with piles.

Nothing speaks with greater urgency to our understanding of the world than 9/11. Perhaps it is because it represents the anarchy of the unpredictable. A bomb on our plane is no different from a sudden bomb in our house. The continued tragedy of the innocents does not speak well to the development of humanity.

See also Evil Genius and Misinformation and Spin on the Chris Brauer Media Project