Moved

This blog has moved slightly. The new URL is http://www.soulsphincter.com/. Please adjust you your feeds, bookmarks and notes accordingly. I hope you will remain with the project for the coming few months when things will be quiet as the thesis gets done. Following the defense of the thesis this blog will be reborn and we will all be happier.

There are Always Videos

Things have not been exactly hectic on this blog in recent months. Doing the final stages of a PhD thesis is cutting into my time to write about anything else. However, I have no intention of giving up blogging. In fact in recent weeks I have been reawakened to the amazing opportunities and learning experiences that blogging makes possible. At the same time, it is time that restricts my ability to produce content here. I have a lot of ideas (too many) but bringing them to form and fruition is not something I can invest in at the moment. This has resulted in an increased focus on my Vlog. Video blogging is not logocentric in the same way a written journal-type blog is. Blogging videos is quick and there is no end of inspirational films on the net. So, I urge any readers of this blog who have found some resonance with what I am concerned with and their own interests to check out Soul Vlog. Here is a taste of my taste in the moving image;



9 is a computer animated short film by Shane Acker released in 2005 as a student project. Tim Burton saw the film and was so impressed by its artistic vision that he went on to produce an almost feature-length adaptation called 9 (2009), directed by Acker and distributed by Focus Features.

A lot more is HERE

More on the Other One

While writing here has been sporadic lately, I have also added stuff to my teaching blog, Augmented Reality. A short explanation of my research work and a text on Virtual Worlds, Culture and Technology.

Blogging Refelections

This blog is over six years old. So I have been blogging for quite a while. In retrospect I have noticed that recently my blogging practices have changed. I have always felt that this blog was my primary web presence; loading it up with everything from family snapshots to lecture notes and lesson plans. Lately this has changed. I currently post on four blogs, this one, a teaching blog called Augmented Reality, my video blog SoulVlog and the blog of HUMlab, where I work, perform, explore and experiment. With this fragmentation of blogging I have noticed that 'what I post and where' has been affected. This blog has taken on more of my personal interests, my observations and argument, critique on events and politics. SoulVlog is just videos, but that has branched out into my main interests; music, art, marginal cultures, travel, philosophy and film. Augmented Reality is pure teaching, I use it to post lesson plans, lecture notes and for presentations. I started Augmented Reality to use in conjuction with the 3D web browser, Exit Reality in a presentation. Since then it has been taking on an increased role in my teaching. HUMlab is a group blog and I do not post as often as I would like to. Presenting work in progress is difficult in a blog context, so I tend to post events, publications and more thought-out things there.

Finally added to my own mini-blogosphere is my Twitter site (I really like Twitter). So-called 'micro-blogging' is totally different to blogging. I use Twitter more as a networking tool, to follow the work and ideas of people who I respect or am interested in. I also use it to post relevant information based on the professional interests of those I follow. In short I think Twitter is a community building medium, but a community of interest rather than participation.

Twitter and the Spheres of Life Art and the Other Thing

I have been using Twitter for a couple of months. I have it running while I am writing my thesis, post thoughts, cut and paste sentences from the text, write poetry and of course, watch what others on my contact list are writing.
I think Twitter, which falls within the concept of micro-blogging (as far as I understand) has great potential for art, teaching, group work, business and more.
This morning I can across Gregory Chatonsky’s beautiful work L’attente/The Waiting, an emotive and evocative use of Twitter:

Gregory Chatonsky’s work L’attente/The Waiting (warning, Flash-heavy), part of a series called “Flußgeist”, the “spirit of the flow”, mashes up twitter posts with Flickr photos whose tags match keywords in the tweets, along with an ambient soundtrack (pulling in data from Odeo) and video footage of urban pedestrians waiting at the lights, lost in thought, walking, or just standing around.

I have a Twitter reader on the right hand side of this blog. I have tried to run it from my phone but it has not worked yet. I must be doing something wrong. I will spend more time on setting up mobile Twitter soon. It rocks!

Wiretapping Sweden

Wiretapping Sweden (2008)
Documentary about the blogosphere reaction to surveillance laws passed earlier this year in Sweden. The documentary in English is a good introduction to the information economy of Sweden. A high quality copy of the video can be obtained by clicking here.

Orwell's Diaries as Blog

The diaries of George Orwell ( born Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) are to be published as a blog:

From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco [recovered from a life-threatening lung haemorrhage], his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

The Link is HERE for the Orwell Diary Blog.

Images from Past 18 Months of Blogging

And here is a slideshow of 299 images from this blog since December 2006...A trip down memory lane.

Blogging is Good for You (Part 23)

Blogging can help you feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face, new Australian research has found.

The research, from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, found after two months of regular blogging, people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who didn't blog. (ABC)

The paper Distress, Coping, and Blogging: Comparing New
Myspace Users by Their Intention to Blog, is published in CyberPsychology & Behavior and is available for free.

On Blogging and Pamphlets

Blogging is an interesting field (is it a genre, medium, or style??). I am glad it is being researched and it should be taken seriously. In recent weeks I have noticed that my own writing on this blog has become lists and links. I send out signs of what I like and what I think will be of interest to those with whom I like to identify. I have been doing this because I want to attract readers but at the same time I am very busy with research and writing, teaching and what we used to call when I was a nurse (my previous life), the Activities of Daily Living. Today at lunch, which was also a pause in hectic day of packing and moving my office (during a snow storm as well), we discussed blogging. It was not a deep philosophical discussion and we did not attempt to answer any of the big questions, but we did discuss content and method. How one publishes a blog and why. I found this interesting and I thought about it afterwards; my writing on this blog is an activity I perform as part of the mutliple activities I do each day; reading, writing, speaking, teaching, meetings, family, shopping, my life in online 3D worlds and so on. This blog is almost 5 years old and has become a record of my development (or lack thereof) as a PhD researcher. I really enjoy keeping a blog, but I realised today that I have become a reactive rather than an active blogger.
I watch other blog's content (The RSS feed is my guide), I collect links to place on my blog (basically what del.isio.us is for but with a social narrative attached on the blog that you don't find with del.icio.us), I do not really follow up posts or follow topics beyond the generic classifications of the tags. If I was an Elizabethan pamphleteer I would be the guy sitting at the back of St Paul's yard watching what was selling on other peoples stalls and then printing some of them. The following the herd is exactly what pamphleting is/was against and why it is/was so interesting. I have decidied to take a more pamphalet apporach to this blog, I will continue with the Friday Downstreams but will try to write more stuff of substance and see where it takes me.

Pamphlet: Non-periodic printed publication of at least 5 but not more than 48 pages exclusive of the cover pages, published in the country and made available to the public. UNESCO

Visibility Low, Mood Content

I returned to the office this morning with my mind and body still operating on Christmas time. I have been sleeping late and long over the break and did not sleep until 2am last night, only to wake at 7am for a return to 'the real world'. It is not something I have come to terms with yet and it may take a day or two to adjust to. But nonetheless it is great to be back at university. The next six months promise to be most exciting with a 'new' HUMlab opening, two thesis chapters to write (already well planned), teaching, online and offline creative projects and the distant promise of Spring.
This morning's RSS brought me a very interesting post on Floating Prisons, and Other Miniature Prefabricated Islands of Carceral Territoriality at Subtopia:

The deeper I get into it, the more I realize an entire book could probably be written about the subject of floating prisons -– and who knows, maybe in another dream one day I’ll write it –- (there is probably already some magnificent mini opus out there that I have -- for at least the time being -- overlooked) but for now, let’s just settle for a quick and dirty Googleized survey.

I recommend it as a way of putting work into perspective. I may be institutionalised but at least I can go for a walk when I want to.

Welcome to the Wolves of 2008

Welcome to the new year. 2007 was a great year for this blog and its author. I look forward to 2008. The coming calender year will be the final full year for my PhD which means a lot of hope work over the coming months. I am hoping going to defend my thesis in the first half of 2009 but this means 2008 will be a time of writing and little else for me. The other projects I need to organise/control for the next few months are teaching a half time course (14 hours of lectures and an exam) and working with Second Life (HUMlab Island and Second House of Sweden). However, to open the proceedings for the new year, a new game:

WolfQuest (Free Download)

Learn about wolf ecology by living the life of a wild wolf in Yellowstone National Park. Play alone or with friends in on-line multiplayer missions, explore the wilderness, hunt elk, and encounter stranger wolves in your quest to find a mate. Ultimately, your success will depend on forming a family pack, raising pups, and ensuring the survival of your pack.

The WolfQuest experience goes beyond the game with an active online community where you can discuss the game with other players, chat with wolf biologists, and share artwork and stories about wolves.

Explore four square kilometers of alpine wilderness on the slopes of Amethyst Mountain in Yellowstone National Park, running across open meadows, through dense fir forests, and along sheer cliffs. Hunt elk. Follow scent trails to locate elk herds, then sneak up on the herd, find the weakest one, and begin your attack. Pursue your prey and sap its strength while dodging its counterattacks, to make the kill. Harass coyotes who try to eat elk carcasses, or just for the fun of it. Chase and eat snowshoe hares. Earn Experience Points for bragging rights with other players.

I have not yet played WolfQuest but it reminds me of Endless Forest; the anthropomorphic story line of animals in an organised system with a development that seems to suit human concepts of time.

Welcome to the Blogosphere Nicke

I would just like to welcome Nicklas Hållén to the blog world. Nicke is a new PhD candidate with the Department of Modern Languages/English Literature at Umeå Univeristy. He started a blog, Nicke's Tea Party on the weekend and I'm sure it will be an interesting read over the coming four years of PhD work..

Touchgraph: The Google Browser

This is the Google browser touchgraph image for this blog. Quite amazing although I have not yet had time to go through it all. Clicking on links opens other networks as well URLs are color coded in the column to the left. The website summarizes it like this:

The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google's database of related sites. What a cool toy.

2K Blogs

The final list for the 2000 bloggers project is online. A drop in the ocean really but an interesting one.

Feed Issues

If you have been receiving the RSS feed for this blog or you are interested in starting a feed for it, please (re)subscribe using the Bloglines or Feedburner icons to the right. I know that the Bloglines feed had not been working very well but it is all better now. I have not tested Feedburner and if anyone has problems with it please let me know.

Ahh...I see

When I finally realized that I did not have to do the xml myself and it was just a matter of creating the widgets in the window made for widget creation then things got a lot faster. All the stuff I wanted to keep is on now. Comments are proving tricky as the haloscan widget program wiped out everything on the blog. Will try again when I hear back from the haloscan people.
Over the coming weeks I will tune and modify things. Some of the color schemes look a bit dodgy. Need to organise the links better and the tracker is not working.

Ch Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes

Just going through a complete change here. The new google formats have forced me to make some adjustments to this blog and they are not going as straight foward as I hoped they would. The template rewrite will take a few days but I hope to get everything back as it was and with lots of extras........

Recent Postings on the HUMlab Blog

I have been making a few contributions to the HUMlab blog recently. I decided to link them here just to keep things rolling along during an uninspired moment of blogging.

The Del.icio.us Life Part 1.

The Working Life of Links

Creative Commons: Choice and Trust

Lets get Nabil out of Iraq

I know there are hundreds of thousands of 'Nabils' in Iraq today, but I heard his voice on the radio this morning describing the conditions he (and the whole of his country) are living under and felt moved by it. His blog details such horrors as the neighbours being blown away by mortar shells while Nabil and one of his brothers were playing soccer in their adjacent backyard. Murder, torture, kidnappings are just part of the everyday it seems. He writes:

I live in fear everyday, I wake up in fear, and I sleep the night in fear too, few days ago I stopped going to college, because the road to college is very dangerous, fake police check-points are everywhere and at any moment they can stop me and ask for my ID and once they see that I'm a Sunni they would have me killed or kidnapped or tortured, because they can figure it out from my name and my address (my district is a sunni district), and the 2nd reason why I stopped going to college, is that in Monday (20th Nov. 2006) two police patrols attacked our college building, and opened fire on the outer gate of the college for nearly 15 minutes, then they stopped after they injured some guards of the college, and they left immediatly without giving excuses for what they did.

Nabil, who is 19 years old, is trying to get out of Iraq to continue his studies (and being alive) in New Zealand. Both his parents attended Cambridge University in the 1980's and his brother has made it to New York. While there is a flood of refugees streaming out of this disintegrating country we can help one of them ourselves by donating to Nabil's Escape Fund which is also linked to his blog.