Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

2008: the year in Infocult

It's the end of December, so time to consider the year's highlights.  Favorite Infocult topics from 2008 cover a variety of horrible grounds:

• Gothic in everyday life.  We've seen it in innocent cornfields and human flesh powering cars.  Cannibalism is always a favorite.  New developments: horror language in the presidential election, and concerning the economic crisis.
  
• Web 2.0 storytelling.  A new blog category appeared on the topic, Alan Levine and I published an article, set up a wiki, a del.icio.us tag, and examples kept flowing in.
• Uncanny valley Gothic, especially reborn dolls.  This theme picked up in January, and kept toddling along, getting links, attention, criticism, and shivers of fear.
  
• Crowdsourcing.  Although I haven't published on this yet, I've ruthlessly exploited the world for my own benefit.  You, Web, have been generous.
  
• Severed feet and the rise of the Canadian Gothic.  The feet just kept drifting onto the Pacific shore, while other bizarre things afflicted the brooding northern giant.
• Cold War Gothic has emerged as a new subtheme, surfacing from the gothic in everyday life topic.  This can include atompunk and spaceflight eerieness.
• Mourning deaths.  Arthur C. Clarke died, and so did my wife's father.
• Fearing the internet continues.  From academic technology to the scary sex-box, Infocult's founding meme keeps growing.
  

Anything we missed? Any recommendations for 2009?

(skull-gazing photo by Arnaud Leene)

Draculablog 2008 hiatus

The Draculablog won't run this year.  No time to do justice to Stoker's novel in Web 2.0 style.

Third Life: Intel CES talk

"Third Life" is what Intel's CEO is calling his CES keynote this week.  Not too much in common with our third life discussion last year.  Instead it looks more like social networking plus virtual worlds, maybe  with a dose of augmented reality, more likely anticipating faster wireless connections between devices.

Infocult in 2007: Web 2.0 and fearsome stuff

It's time for a glance backwards at Infocult in 2007.  We can use trackback pings (real ones) and comments (good stuff) to pick out themes which garnered the most attention.

Web 2.0, whatever we think of the term, is the leading business, be it one case study across several services or Controversies over Wikipedia (Citizendium and blogs, hoaxing Conservapedia).  Twitter blossomed into a leading topic  (first look, overview and reflections, fear of Twitter).

Second Life continues to get attention, especially from my brooding Third Life post (sequel coming in '08). 

The fearsome internet is our signature theme, and has been since the start.  Some examples: American parents' technology fears, fear of Twitter.

Mobile computing, ubicomp: I continue to place posts at Smartmobs.  Some posts live here, for example grousing about the lameness of American wifi, especially in hotels.

elearning: the overwhelming majority of my blog work on this score is at NITLE's blog, of course. Here at Infocult we reserve some subtopics, such as the case of Blackboard as silo, or serving silage.

How does this match up with your sense of Infocult, as 2008 looms ahead?

Seattle and Educause ahoy

I'll be in Seattle for this week, attending the 2007 Educause conference.  I'd be delighted to meet any Infocult readers there.

Problems with Google Reader?

Question: is anyone having problems reading this site via Google Reader?  I've received some email describing odd problems, namely rendering HTML tags.  Dan Dodge describes similar problems.
Could this be something stemming from an upgrade to either Typepad or GR?

Polar music: new entry, and new wiki URL

Scott Leslie points us, via Twitter, to Antarctic Data Jam.

events where we invite you to make songs, images, videos or just plain noise from raw weather data from the Antarctic. During the day there is a workshop and in the evening a performance. If you prefer to work at home, just find any kind of Antarctic data (we have supplied some, see left) and if you create something with it, bring it along to the event. The best will find its way onto the Antarctic Data Jam CD which we will market later in the year.

I'm not sure where their polar radio project is, or how to play with their "Pure Data" device, but it looks keen.  And I like that posthuman sound idea.

Meanwhile, the wiki has moved again.  Here's the new URL: http://apps.nitle.org/wikifarm/research/index.php/Main/PolarMusic. 

Comments about to hit milestone

Comments here at Infocult are about to hit a milestone.  As of today's today the number of comments stood at 1996.  2000 is only a few captchas away!

Conducting an ELI seminar today

I'm giving a presentation online today through Educause's ELI.  The topic: "Emerging Worlds: Transformative Technologies for Teaching and Learning."

I'm very excited about this.  For one thing, the audience is very diverse in terms of campus populations, including staff and faculty, and from all sorts of (American) institutions.  For another, I'm exploring a theme that's fascinating, the intersections between Web 2.0 and virtual worlds/gaming.

Burned by Quechup

For anyone who has received Quechup spam with my Gmail address: please delete at once.  Do not join.  And consider my apology!

I was sent a Q. invite by a trusted friend nearly a week ago, before this thing went postal.  Joined it, waited to see what happened.  Nothing did, for a few days.  Not atypical for the zillion Web 2.0 services out there. Then wham.

I'm galled at how many people it has hit, including several professional lists.

I'm definitely chilled at the prospect of any new social service, now.  I joined GrandCentral last night, and kept staring at the Google name, which glowed with talismanic power for me.