I’m George’s Blog

Just a quick post before I dash off for the bank holiday weekend…

Blogradio is now online!

This is only the version 0.1 release but I’ve completely rebuilt it using Open Source ready to release the code and installation instructions to the world. For those that don’t know what Blogradio is…

Blogradio combines the most recent Blogger.com audio posts into one online radio station to provide an answerphone for the world.

Better yet, visit the site, click the big banner at the top that says ‘Click to play’ and listen in using iTunes or whatever application you prefer.

If you hear something you like, you can find the author’s blog by clicking on the link under ‘Currently Playing’ or ‘Recently Played’.

There’s lots more to do but take a look, have a listen and see if you like.

June’s going to be an exciting month:

June 4th: Kurator: Curating, Immateriality, Systems
A conference exploring the curation of immaterial production and digital media. Organised by my old tutor, colleague and friend Joasia Krysa and ending with the DATA browser 02 book launch.

June 24th – 30th: The Show: Two
The final year show for the second years on my M.A.

June 29th – July 1st: Submerge 2005
The graduate show for digital media courses across the Southwest. Featuring the Exploiting Potential symposium on intellectual property and digital production where I will be presenting this paper: Comparing Creativity in the Creative and Software Industries.

Today’s reading list comes courtesy of Iain Aitchison:

Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller’s The Pro-Am Revolution
Douglas Rushkoff’s Open Source Democracy

Both available as PDF downloads, these two Demos think-tank policy recommendations make interesting reading if you don’t mind the uneasy feeling that they haven’t researched every recommendation as much as they should have.

I’d also like to recommend Matt Webb’s presentation on Embedded Development, really interesting in relation to the conversations I was having with Kris Cohen about where user-centred design research sits when the audience becomes the designer.

I thought I’d share a doodle I drew during the presentations by potential new heads of department.

Being really interested in phenomena that engage their audience in their mode of production (e.g. Open Source Software, Flickr, generative production, net-art, etc.) I spend most of my time at college contemplating software and online communities. I often get a lot of grief for this practice and I’m still not quite sure why, maybe it’s because it reminds people of the course’s old name – Computer Related Design. So imagine my delight to discover that for my latest brief I had been paired with Kris Cohen, a research fellow at the University of Surrey’s Sociology Department, Incite. Kris is currently researching photography on the internet, in particular photoblogs and Flickr and was effectively looking at my research (and dissertation) topics from a different angle. It was hard for us to stop talking during the 4 day project but the expectation that we would present something last Friday pushed us into quite an interesting experiment.

We spent most of our time looking at the difference between successful and unsuccessful attempts at making creative production more open or public and decided to create an experiment designed to extract people’s aversions to things like public publishing and Copyleft. Choosing Sociology as the test field for it’s strong academic ties and history as a peer-reviewed science we transferred a 1970s sociological study (including coding) from an impenetrable online archive to this Flickr account. We then interviewed several sociologists to see how they felt about the process of tagging (which is already common practice for many sociologists), interlinking and then publishing their data in a public space. We also wanted to get some feedback from the Flickrati to see how they felt about Flickr being used to tag text in this way. There are some comments over at Flickr and some on Kris’ blog and we have started to collate the responses for further study. Hopefully when we’ve both had time to digest last week’s conversations and interviews you’ll hear from us again.

I’d also like to give a big thank you to Kris for upgrading my Flickr account to a Pro account – I’ll be moving my old photo archive (colour and black and white) over just as soon as I get a chance.

Since posting the topic of my dissertation I’ve had some great responses from people I already knew and some that Google must have led my way. As part of the college requirements I had to produce a 1000 word draft that I wasn’t going to upload but because of all the interest I feel I should give something back. It’s really just a very brief summation of two of the books that have formed most my research to date: Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar and McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto. Ideally I’d like to just reference Raymond’s A Brief History of Hackerdom rather than waste words trying to summarize it in order to bring the average R.C.A. reader up to speed but re-writing it certainly helped me to digest it better. Anyway, download my draft, then read the whole of Raymond’s book (which really should have been, and be, required reading for both my undergraduate and postgraduate courses) then read A Hacker Manifesto to get to grips with the politics at play.

Also, if you’re interested, I’m hoping to present a paper based on my research so far at the Submerge 2005 symposium on Intellectual Property and digital production, 1st July 2005 at The L Shed, Industrial Museum, Bristol, U.K. more on that as it evolves.

Sorry things have been a bit quiet recently, I’ve been moving all the sites I host with my friend Adam at adamandgeorge.co.uk to a new server. I just wanted to say something about the election before it’s too late so I’ll take the easy route and quote my own comment on pidices.org:

Uh oh, the big day is coming, is anybody ready? I know I’ve had enough of Labour and Conservative attacks and counter attacks. Enough of unsubstantiated claims about what the ‘other’ party will do to ruin this country. Enough of the parties trying to scare you into voting one way or the other. It’s enough to make me want to vote apathy but I’m sticking to my guns and voting Lib Dem as I believe it’s the only way we can move this country out of the political stalemate Labour and Conservative are in. I can only hope that through some inexplicable shift in voting patterns the Lib Dems get into opposition in order to scare the hell out of other the parties. Somebody help me!

If you’re worried about your vote letting the Conserva-torys in through the french-windows then take a look at another fantastic B.B.C. resource to find out your constituency’s swing potential.