(with special apologies to Bill Shakespeare, of course).

Allo’ Darlin – Kiss Your Lips

A summer that started off poorly has been generally pretty fun of late – good friends, good times, renewed friendships and old acquaintanceships blossoming; good weather, sun, and life. After the slow and miserable end of the school year, I’m enjoying a well-deserved period of relaxation. And I’ve been loving Allo’ Darlin. Pure pop perfection, as in the song above. And really, a true summer song. Other songs, like ‘If Loneliness Was Art’ or ‘Woody Allen’ are wrenchingly and beautifully twee.

On the subject of summer music, I made a summer mix and posted it here.

I’ve said it before and will say it again – I love and want to live in Montreal.

Phonogram looks interesting, and I don’t even like comics.

I’m about halfway unpacked, but I can’t wait to print and frame and hang my wall decorations. Using old photos I’ve taken, which sounds narcissistic, but fun and encouraging.

Tech Lust

Two big events today – Apple’s announcement of the new, ahem, iPad, and President Obama’s first State of the Union. Though the latter is far more important in terms of effect on people’s lives, I wasn’t actually around for it, so I’m going to focus on the iPad instead.

Just a few thoughts:

• This thing is designed with the K-12 education sector in mind. Think about it – have a library of books on it, you can write documents and presentations on it, do simple calculations…all in a package that’s intuitive, in which you drag things around with your fingers (kids seem to like to touch and feel the things they’re learning). Winner
• This blows up the old modes of thinking about Operating Systems. It completely abstracts the user from the inner workings of the OS. As a friend noted, this is as big as a shift as the jump from the command prompt to Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). I suppose one could say the iPod and the iPhone did this first, but those were in different market segments, so they weren’t really challenging that paradigm – just saying it didn’t apply to portable devices. Winner
• That being said, I’m not sure this is as big of a challenge to netbooks as would be needed to kill them off. Besides the obvious Mac vs. PC issues, as well as the difference in price (at $499, that’s basically the high end of a netbook these days), it only appeals to one of the two types of netbook users. The first type is those who use their netbook primarily for web browsing and checking email. Maybe this is done in front of the TV or while traveling. On the other hand, as I sit in my graduate classes, I see a 40/40/20 split between netbooks, macbooks (and pros), and gigantic Windows laptops (they’re always gigantic, if they’re not netbooks, though this may be a consequence of a direct comparison to their little brothers). All of these people are furiously taking notes on their machines.

  The iPad simply wouldn’t fill their needs, at least not until software catches up. Sure, you can plug in your iPad to the keyboard dock, but you don’t get the same mobility that you do with a netbook. Moreover, I think writing a paper on one of those might be a bit of a challenge.

  So it is geared more toward the casual web browser/email checker. And man, that thing is beautiful for it. I can no longer sit and watch a movie and do nothing else at home because I’m constantly looking at my iPhone or laptop. The iPad would be so much more enjoyable to use than either because of form factor. NEUTRAL

• I love the eReader functionality. First, it’s using an open format, meaning a) no new format to deal with and b) the possibility of standardization, so what you see on one device will be the same on other. Great. I just hope it also means that you can load other eBooks, much like you can load non-iTunes music and movies on an iPod.

  I also love the appearance, and despite some of what I’ve been reading, I think the page turning animations are great and make it more book like. I also think the tone of the page and text seems just about the right contrast, and the store looks much better than Amazon’s (though I wish it had Amazon’s review base). Did I see in some of the pictures that books are going to be $4.99? That’s kind of hard to believe, but I’d love it. What cracks me up though – since the iPad runs any iPhone app, you could theoretically have both Apple’s iBook app and Amazon’s Kindle app on there at the same time.

  Some things that we need some more information on, though, and I think these are particularly important in ensuring these are usable in the higher education realm: can you highlight? Can you cut and paste text? How about notes? I think to be useful, it needs to be just like Preview on OSX: cut and paste swaths of text, highlight, underline, take notes. I doubt much of this functionality is there (reportedly it’s in the Kindle, but I’ve seen some disgruntlement on that front).
  WINNER, but that could change.

• Background wallpapers on the application screens – about damn time. This better migrate to the iPhone!WINNER
• I don’t know how I’ve gotten this far without mentioning the name. Really, iPad? That was about the worst of the possible names (I personally liked Canvas or MacTablet). Were there no women involved in the name selection process? Or no guys who’d ever seen a feminine hygiene product commercial? Twitter and Facebook are lighting up with jokes about it (now with wings!), as well they should.

  But wait – people thought the iPod was a dumbass name as well. And, more recently, the gaming community was aghast at the Wii’s name, especially since the codename up to that point had been the much more awesome Nintendo Revolution. But you know what? now everyone just calls it the Wii and the iPod. Sometimes the former prompts sophomoric jokes, but most of the time it doesn’t. I think the same will happen here.LOSER – but that will change.

• Software: That New York Times app was the killer one for me. Can they just license it to other newspapers please? I really would love to see the local paper in this kind of format and only in part because they have no online presence – they’re crusty old luddites over there. I still like the feel of newspapers, of sitting down on a Sunday morning with a paper over a luxuriously lazy breakfast. I don’t do that anymore, because I don’t like the newsprint, or the cleanup, or paying the damn bill. But integrated into the chunk of my funds that already goes to Apple, in a format that allows me to dig deep into articles, displays high resolution images and videos and (hopefully) interactive graphics – an amazing re-imagining of newspapers’ halcyon days.

  MLB shows that they know how to leverage new technology. The NBA has a very minimal app, minus any interesting stats. Where the hell is the NFL or NHL? Again, they need to license some of MLB’s technology, because that app was amazing.

  Finally, that Brushes app isn’t really my thing, but I see it’s potential more for touching up documents or taking notes. People can’t exactly write with their fingertips, but they can draw, and a good chunk of notetaking is drawing tables, charts, pictures, arrows, etc. When the inevitable notetaking apps appear, they better include some kind of hand touchup feature, and they should base it on Brushes.
  WINNER

• This is already far longer than I wanted it to be, so the next few items will be as brief as I can be. First, some additional things we need to know, in addition to the highlighting issues above: Can we sync an iPhone or iPod to this thing (like through the dock connector to USB cord? In other words, can the average person completely ditch their computer and have just this? Because it would be wonderful to start an eBook on here, move it to the iPhone and have it open in the same spot (assuming the eReader app is integrated into the iPhone/iTouch) while you’re out and don’t have the means to carry the iPad, and then have it open back up to the place you left off on the iPhone. True portability, in other words. This might require Wifi syncing.

  Are we going to see an HDMI out dock? What about notifications? Will we ever see some kind of status screen, perhaps on the welcome screen or in some app that will stay on when plugged in? Can iBook show videos or any interactive charts?

Final thoughts. This is, in my view, a very solid product (though it doesn’t actually fill a glaring hole for me, so I won’t be picking it up). It has a really great price point, and I do see it as a first step toward a new computing workflow. Furthermore, it’s far better than any of the Windows competitors or eReaders in numerous areas. Expect to see some copycats in a couple years. Hopefully they’ll be better than the Zune.

And it’s not too late to think about v2.0. Remember, the original iPhone had about 8 apps. It was simply a phone with a great web browser, media player, and hardware. It was only through subsequent updates, mostly software, that it transformed into the juggernaut it now is. I see the iPad in the same way. There probably won’t be too many hardware changes (maybe a camera or two, a faster processor, way in the future some tactile feedback). But software changes – almost limitless. Assuming a better processor – not that this one isn’t a screamer – multitasking will be a must. Improvements in user interface. Some of the note taking issues I mentioned above. Magazine integration into the eReader. And so on. And I think that that’s when it will match the iPhone in market share. Like the iPhone, market share in a market segment they created.

I Can’t Hardly Wait.

Fish market Fruit

Ah, another day of reading not quite concluded. Measurement of identity today. Good stuff, but no new research ideas. The funniest thing I’ve read all day, however, is this guideline for Beckites and Tea Partiers explaining the folly and lack of self-interest in their protests.

On the other hand, great music came out today. I’ll focus on some of these as the week continues, but today I’ll look at Charlotte Gainsbourg’s IRM. Here’s the video for Heaven Can Wait, the first single off her new album:

Charlotte Gainsbourg is the daughter of long-time crooner Serge Gainsbourg, sort of a French version of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Leonard Cohen. She hasn’t had much success in the U.S., as far as I know (though she gained some traction with her last album). But in this case, she teamed up with Beck, he of “Loser”, “Jackass” and “Tropicana” (and many, many better tunes), who produced and co-wrote the album.

His influence shows on this song, which is definitely far poppier than the rest of the album. This song has the percussive emphasis of some of Beck’s early work (I like to call it the drummy side of Beck) mixed in with a decent tune and some nice horn touches.

But the rest of the album is really intriguing insofar as it offers a new direction for Beck’s future work. See, Beck basically has two sides: the drummy side of early albums and 2008′s Modern Guilt, and the folksy side of Sea Change and Mutations. See the difference:

and:

Not sure what I like better, but that’s beside the point. I think this album, for the most part, is reminiscent of a stripped down version of a mid-00′s Air album. Those albums were spacy and futuristic, a 2000s musical version of the 60s fantasies of the future. (Being from the 2000s, of course, they were much darker than anything the 60s would have conjured.) But this album, as I said above, is a stripped down version of this. It’s still spacy, but it subtracts the airy, atmospheric elements of Talkie Walkie. This points to a potentially interesting new direction for Beck.

Shared Experiences

I’ve been reading this evening about the development and study of shared memories (Halbwachs, Pennebaker and Weeden). I am sincerely intrigued by the notion of shared memories: that there are constraints imposed by society that shape how an individual person remembers things, and that as people tend to interact with their peers, those social norms are both reinforced and altered in subtle ways – thereby impacting the individual’s memories, since memories are always viewed through the lens of the present. Additionally, major, shared events like 9/11 or the fall of the Berlin Wall have different impacts on different generations: most notably, if the event occurred while you were between the ages of 12 and 25, you’re more likely to remember many details of it, in fact, to have a flashbulb memory – one in which you remember where you were when you heard about it. Obviously, for most Americans, the big recent events were 9/11 and Obama’s inauguration.

But I’m really interested in sub-cultures and how they develop, especially political sub-cultures. Often, these can be ethnically or regionally based, like the varying ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia or, say, the South today. Or they can be political sub-cultures, like the online left leaning communities surrounding websites like Daily Kos or those fetishizing Glenn Beck’s musings. (Was that a little biased? See, that’s why I’m not studying AP).

As these sub-cultures evolve, they develop their own cultures. According to Weeden, whose interpretation I favor, culture is just a set of practices and signs and symbols that are intelligible to the relevant group, and are thus subject to fluid reinterpretation and change. This is great when the sub-cultures are internet-based fandoms or idolation of Emile Lagasse. But when they focus on the political realm, they tend to impact how someone views the world. As the community deliberates, each individual’s memory of an event, be it the stimulus package or the attempted Christmas Day bombing, is affected by that conversation. New norms develop that are not necessarily based on what actually happened, but on the reinterpretations of those events by the community (there’s a whole other question about whether those interpretations primarily occur at the elite level and trickle down or at the grassroots level and percolate up, but I’m going to sidestep that one for now).

So what happens when political discourse is relegated to two teams that mostly only talk to themselves? Well, hmm – “death panels”? The unquestioning belief that the stimulus was more damaging than helpful? The “Cornhusker Kickback” – a term I’m sure 75% of the country, including a good chunk of those that are politically involved, have never heard. I’m sure there are a number of these on the left as well, but I don’t feel like looking them up.

The point is relatively clear, and not all that novel: polarization, combined with the new marketplace for ideas, allows people to conduct a political conversation only with those who think like they do. So while the people in the picture above are all sharing the experience of seeing the Cardinals kick some old man Favre ass, there isn’t a corollary in the political arena, because interpretations will soon branch off into partisan and polarized directions (again, the same thing happens in sports – it just doesn’t matter as much in terms of tangible effects on people’s lives).

The point of all this is that I wanted to describe a research idea. People in my line of research have seen this visualization, which succinctly shows the relationship between blogs. But it does this at a single historical moment – now – and not through history. In other words, it doesn’t show the development of those links – if left-leaning blogs slowly link more and more to left-leaning blogs and right-leaning blogs to their peers, etc.

The second part of this research project involves tracing not just the links to other websites but the actual positions taken by the blog authors themselves. (This was inspired in part by this article chronicling the fight between Little Green Footballs (LGF) and its former ideological peers in the warblogger community (incidentally, some of the websites mentioned were objects of a section of my MA thesis, and yes, some of the namecallling was pretty disturbing).

So the question, then, is as follows: do online blogging communities tend to decrease their links to ideological foes as their ideologies gain rigidness? In other words, is there a correlation between online communities converging on an ideological center and a relative increase in outbound links to other sites within the community? I suppose the ideological convergence doesn’t have to mean ideological conformity, maybe just drifting toward the mean on the part of a given blogger would count.

I think they will. (Of course, LGF’s ideological shift is actually an exception to my theory.)

Now who wants to give me time/funding to pursue this? Or point me to research that’s already been done on it?

One year on

So I started writing this on the 20th, but then I was too sick and busy to finish. The same thing occurred on the 21st, and the 22nd, which then stopped me from writing anything on those days (or really having any time to think about it). But today is my do nothing day, which I have commemorated with a string of viewings – movies, Conan’s last show, lots of eels videos and Lost montages. Basically a day getting lost in youtube to get over a killer sinus infection.

So, back to the picture. I scrapped what I’d previously written because it was filled with lamentations over the end of health care, the general cowardliness of Democrats in Washington, and how everything was going to come crashing down – that the system was obviously going to fail, because if there aren’t 60 votes to fix a problem as drastic as health care, then how is anything going to being done?

But you know – that’s just defeatist. Of course I’d be happer if the Democratic candidate hadn’t disdained things like campaigning or knowing that Curt Shilling was a Red Sox pitcher and not a Yankee. But that doesn’t change what has occurred in the past year: a rush to bailout banks and automakers to try to stabilize the economy, a stimulus package that was smaller than what experts believed was necessary, SCHIP, Copenhagen, the Cairo speech, Guantanamo’s slow closure, Afghanistan surge, etc. And 4th and an inch on healthcare on the goal line.

Normally, such grave times would be met with calls for unity, for working together toward a moderate approach – or at least putting faith in your leaders. But there’s been so little of this, from either party, or from the Tea Party morons, or the press. And that’s what I think is hopeful: that Obama was able to get that much done without a very stable working environment. And as the economy gets better – because it must, eventually, get better, right? – that will ease, and the real issues will get tackled. At least that’s what I have to be hopeful for.

And just for that, to make up for the last few days:

Crazy Guy at Inauguration

Attack of the Pigeons