new kinds of parochial

Lots of talk seems to be taking place around the idea that you can take the same profile around with you, whichever social networking sites. Is this a great idea? It is. But I'm in two minds about it all. I don't know. Maybe it depends on how you take your profile from A to B. Because I sort of think one of the pleasures of the interwebs is the distributed personality thing. Where you are different parts of you, according to the nature of the platform you're on and the community you're in. There's an overlap of course, but the bits of me on Twitter and Facebook are not the really the same. So the idea that you centrally manage all your different profiles is interesting and would probably be useful. But it's still a rare thing that I want to tweet and update my Facebook status with the same thing, so it might just be about doing the same amount of stuff within a single space. And the idea that it might squeeze different communities, different tools and different bits of you together to create some kind of aggregated output I find a bit odd. Because I'm not sure that's the sum of all the parts. I dunno. Maybe it's not for me and the way I combine these things. Because OpenSocial, Youmeo and others seem to work that way. Perhaps it's about having the flexibility to combine in different ways. Maybe an eBay goes well with a MySpace and a Facebook. And a Twitter with a LinkedIn and a Flickr. It'll be interesting to see new kinds of parochial emerging. I want to try this portability thing out before I make up my mind properly, so I'm waiting to receive my Youmeo invite. I'll let you know. But right now, what do you think? (Thanks to Toby Maloy for the awesome data visualisation of Flickr tag mapping.)

paper view

Lots of things about paper have been popping up around the interwebs recently. Russell's written some really interesting stuff about turning digital things into real, physical things. Then there's the newspaper that the Really Interesting Group did. It was called Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008. Looked really interesting to me. I buy into the post-digitalness of it, I think. Still, I haven't seen a copy, so I can't really comment. But then Rishi wasn't particularly keen. Thanks to a tweet from Kristian, I saw Clay Shirky's take on newspapers and the business models they are trying to use online. Which is to say that they are trying to transfer old business models to a space where they can't work. There's this PSFK interview with Jonah Bloom about why Advertising Age have pulled an issue in March. And may consider doing more in future. And, lastly, another PSFK interview with Nick Bilton, editor in the New York Times research and development lab. Which sounds like a great job. "Paper is just a device," he says. Which goes back to something Shirky has said, in the post mentioned and elsewhere. To paraphrase, we need journalism, not newspapers. And there's no simple transition from business model A to model B. It's more like business models A to Z. Or maybe it was one to 100. I can't remember. And all of this is probably a long-winded, non-committal and aggregated way of saying: paper. It's the future of some things, and the past of others. If I was to hazard an unpolished thought, I'd say something like this. Paper: it's one of the future faces of distributed personality. It could be a mass audience thing, or a more intimate thing. But it might work better in future as the vehicle of individual expression rather than that of an institution of some kind. Which could also be completely wrong. Ho hum.

psychogeographical

Tash's lovely post about spaces in children's books got me thinking about a few things. It seemed to chime nicely with the fact that the entire world seems to have recently divided itself into pro and anti-Twitter camps. On the one hand embracing it and on the other pulling it down as a load of self-regarding old nonsense. Which of course some of it is. But really most of it is a brilliant thing. As long as you're using it for the right reasons. Which is not a way of saying there should be a protocol about these things. But recently I've seen a deluge of tweets about how to generate as many followers as possible and been followed by people who profess to have that interest. Which seems to totally, totally miss the point. I'm not sure what the value of artificially stimulating a community of interest. But maybe that's just me. Also, while some people may find it weird to follow others who you haven't even met, to me that's one of the most liberating things about it. You can glean interesting ideas, insights and that kind of thing. It's a headspace reporting tool as much as a here-I-am-now-and-this-is-what-I'm-doing one. Like Matt Jones says better than I can, there's a certain kind of ideal fuzziness involved. A sort of imaginative space about your physical space and your activity within it. And this brought me back to distributed personality and my half-baked attempt to tackle the overlap between social networking and active remembering. That got me on to the apps I've put on my phone like Toy Camera and RJDJ, and how much of an interpretive act is hardcoded into active remembering tools like these. Which brought me back round to Tash's post. Because it seemed like creating these interpreted and modified bits of content and putting them together into a meaningful, narrativised whole was completely to do with the imaginative act of reinforcing the little zone of "you". Assemble the creatively visualised data you have and these places and traces made permanently visible are a big part of who you happen to be in a sequence of moments, closely or disparately connected. They trace who you are becoming by how you capture stuff that would have otherwise disappeared. Full of details as intricate and complex as the houses belonging to the Onceler or the Moomins. Just maybe less realised in such a concentrated space. Not sure exactly what it means. But it felt interesting enough to write something about. So then. Yeah. (Oh, by the way, I pulled the pic off of Matt's Flickr stream. Lovely, eh?)