Blogtrax

I was steaming with anger! Flickr wouldn’t let me post to my blog likes its been doing smoothly for the last 5 years. 2 days in a row. That’s ourageous! I repeated that simple Post It keystroke time and time again. First patiently, then more firmly and then with expletives and finally with the plams-up appeal gesture so well rehearsed as a way of communicating with bad decisions from referees. How could this possibly happen? I tried again, hitting the keyboard hard, as I imagined that the faceless operatives at Flickr would sense my frustration telepathically through the keyboards. And then sotto voce ‘Come on you bastards!’

After an episode like this I usually manage to calm down again in a routine probably instilled in me way back in childhood. OK calm down there’s probably a perfectly good reason. Try another machine. ….same again. All right then look around Flickr and check the blog registration. No fine. That’s fine, so what’s really going on? Eventually I thought I’d check the boards (I don’t really like them which is why that was the last port of call) and lo and behold there’s a long long trail of similar complaints, reassurances from the Flickr people, advice from other bloggers and so on. I just put ‘Get it sorted’ and left.

Co-incidentally - I think - I went on and posted this on digital provenance using the Blogger picture function. The irony being that part of the digital crossing that I was tracing involved a direct reference to Flickr!
In the cold light of day, and in the reflexive spirit that is the Blogtrax project, I’ve been pondering on why the Flickr glitch was so emotional for me. Do I become socially or digitally dysfunctional when apps go out of wack? What would happen if blogger went down with the credit crunch/downturn/financial tsunami whatever? How many expressive tools need to shut down before one has to seriously reconsider one’s habitual identity performance?

Anyway it was so reassuring when coming around to posting these troubling thoughts to find a comment here. Sometimes Blogtrax feels like a lonely outpost on the digital frontier. Blogging has become so normal that its getting harder to ‘make the familar strange.’ Harder, but of course no less worthwhile because of that.

I think I half-promised to do something around social software, and since that’s more than likely to be the organising feature of the up-coming book, it could do with some attention. JG was of the opinion that the label ’social software’ was unhelpful, because many forms of software have a communicative (social) function, and may be used by particular bounded groups and also as work, or at the very least task-orientated affinity spaces. I think I’ve got that right, and it’s a good point to make, because drawing up a boundary may exclude all sorts of interesting stuff and depending on your point of view, that ‘other’ stuff becomes less interesting. Alternatively of course those vibrant and hugely popular tools and communities could simply be dismissed as only being social, being less in some way or another.

In the discourse around online communities the term ’social software’ is of course regularly used (not that that alone invalidates JG’s point), but I was using it in that accepted sense, assuming that people knew what I was on about. I ended up suggesting that it was something to do with community, participation, and low content software - in hindsight I could have said transparent. Transparent because there could not really be a blog at all until someone posted on it.

So I suppose the point of social software is to create a space for participation, for the development of community and that is its sole raison d’etre (irrespective of its particular software history). Isn’t this the essence of the killer MySpace - that has become so hugely popular. If MySpace is about anything, it’s about what people put on MySpace and how their individual stuff inter-relates. From Wikipedia, I got the singularly unhelpful line posing as a definition, suggesting that social software is

the use of two or more modes of computer-mediated communication that result in community formation.

At least that emphasises the importance of communication. Here, though, there’s plenty of ongoing discussion of social software. So much that you can almost abstract what it is from the examples given. On the linked page, for example, one discovers the list meme and that really does seem to pin it down through exemplification. So here goes:

I’m kicking off an informal poll: what are your top five favorite social software services currently in use? I’ll start:

1. (drumroll, please)… Flickr. Shocking, I know.
2. del.icio.us
3. My Web 2.0 — I tend to store everything in My Web 2.0 and only a subset of things to del.icio.us, but I use both frequently to find cool stuff.
4. Memeorandum — when I need news fast, which is all the time, this is what I use.
5. YouTube is emerging as a new favorite. I like that I can so easily embed video on my own blogs.

Have spent quite a while today moving all the posts over from Blogtrax (one) to its new home here. Hopefully this will help Guy and I in the long run when we use it as a database to help us write.
The next big task, (and the whole thing will have been pointless without this next step) is to categorise all the posts.
This in itself is of course an analytical process.
I have done about half with twenty more to go. It is all rather a lot of work and quite scarey as Guy might choose different catgories to me.

Hmm. Anya, how did you stay sane doing this?

And today I notice, you have a wonderful post on wearable technology.

Middle Earth Duck Pond
Originally uploaded by BobJack.

My ephemeral digital posts lengthen with time, expanding with a confidence to say new things, and garnished with a certain recklessness. More involvement with an online community of bloggers, readers (both known and unknown), and Flickr-sharers is a causal factor, put together with an increase in blog consumption. So my/our blogs evolve, including this one, as we develop heteronymic works, discover new voices, new ideas and new skills.

Dr Joolz has talked about the kind of osmotic learning that takes place around blogging: a bit of html, the subtle art of tagging and so on. Recently, I’ve been wanting to index my posts but found the Blogger advice too dense. Easy to get lost in the hinterland of geek technology. Then I got into Blogstreet, attracted to the neighbourhood/proximity concept, but I find I’m out of my depth there too. And most recently of all I’ve been looking at RSS feeds but can’t quite grasp how they work, or even if I’d have the time or energy to engage with them.

Is this technological hinterland a place to colonise, or is it best left alone if all you’re interested in is the writing? The trouble is the writing itself and the technology to write subtley infuse one another. Perhaps, to be lost in the hinterland is to wish for a map.

So, the farshah post (3 March) on my blog drew some comment - that was interesting, but consider my surprise when the image went ’straight to number one’ with 29 hits on my Flickr! That’s probably the way I tagged it (Lady Sovereign’s pretty popular, too!). Reflecting on this made me do a double-take. I’ve been trying to keep the focus on the blog and the blogging itself, but when you actually pick it up for inspection, you find it’s interlaced with so many other experiences, interactions and media. An intricate web of technologies. So Ruth sent me the photo-message of her tattoo. I emailed her to check out if it was OK to post it. She got back saying that was ‘cool’. I uploaded the image on to Flickr and then the rest is history (of course, in doing this I superimposed my own reading, but that’s not really the point). I’m thinking of the intricate web of mobile phone; email; Flickr; Blogger and ensuing comment. But even that doesn’t quite capture it - it’s too linear, because as I’m rather slowly and perhaps a little reluctantly discovering Flickr is a dynamic world in itself. Through tagging that image becomes part of the affinity-based folksonomy of the Flickr social world. Is Flickr in the study? I’m not sure any more. Well, I only have a handful of photos there and I’ve rather belatedly added TT and DrJ as contacts - I’m not sure I have the energy to engage with a new social network, but at the same time feel a bit awkward standing there, with only a couple of friends and this picture-sharing party going on all around me! I didn’t initially see my blog as a visual space at all - I was persuaded because it looked drab against others I was visiting, and, on a more theory-driven note, I was aware of the need to explore the affordances. At the moment it seems that the autoethnographic focus remains in tact, but the borderlands are rich and interesting and must not be neglected.