Bill Wolff’s Composing Spaces

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) has announced its 2008 Give One, Get One campaign. This year individuals have the ability to Give One (for $199) or Give One and Get One (for $399).

In coordination with this announcement, OLPC has released a video of students talking about how much they like their laptop have provided a link to their Flickr photostream, which contains images of students using OLPC laptops all over the world. (Disappointingly, this open source project has not provided others with the ability to embed the video or Flickr slideshows.)

The New York Times has also announced a new ad campaign by Taxi to promote the Give One, Get One campaign.

Readers of the blog will know that I purchased an OLPC last year but will also know about my concerns about its marketing. Students, however, are usually quite taken with the little laptop. Much more needs to be said about all of this, but I have to run to class (where I am showing the laptop). More later.

This about says it all:

On November 6, 2008, reports began circulating online and on TV that Sarah Palin did not know (or could not grasp the idea) that Africa was a continent and not a country. The story, embedded with other Palin-McCain-infighting-related revelations that were, according to FoxNews’ Carl Cameron (see below), “put off the record until after the election,” seemed a bit too juicey to be true. And, indeed, it turns out that it wasn’t true at all, but according to The New York Times, the result of a convoluted Internet-related hoax:

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

Now a pair of obscure filmmakers say they created Martin Eisenstadt to help them pitch a TV show based on the character. But under the circumstances, why should anyone believe a word they say?

Read the rest of the article for the full story—a story that is eerily similar to that of YouTube sensation LonelyGirl15.

The New York Times‘ article lays much of the blame at the feet of MSNBC, but it should be noted (for fair and balance reasons) that Fox new’s uber-insider and close Bush friend, Carl Cameron, also reported the story on air:

Google continues to make AIM and Yahoo! irrelevant:

I am really enjoying the sharing of applications and sites on Twitter. A few have come across lately that I thought I would share here.

A few weeks ago Matt tweeted about Picnik, a free, robust online photo editing application that integrates with photos on Facebook, Flickr, myspace, photobucket, and many other applications. I showed it to my Writing, Research, and Technology students last night because many were having problems gaining access to Photoshop from home for basic photo editing work (creating banners, adding text to images, and so forth). They loved it.

Today Hannah (who blogs at Hannah’s Notes on New Media) pointed to Tweetdeck, which is in public beta. Tweetdeck “aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.” Organization is achieved by creating user-defined searchable groups.

The mining of tweets is already happening with some spectacular results. For example, Perspctv’s 2008 presidential election coverage mashed together data mined from tweets, blogs posts, news feeds, CNN’s national poll of polls, and other sources to create dynamic visual representations of election-related data in one easily navigated dashboard:

Perspctv has just released a search function that allows users to create their own dashboards based on individually-defined search times. It mines blog posts, tweets, Google search volume, and news mentions. For example, here is the visual representation for the search terms, Obama, media, and race:

I can see wonderful applications of these applications in Information Architecture and related courses.

And, for all us amature photographers out there who dream of one day making it, Melissa pointed to The Digital Journalist. It looks to be an outstanding resource.

An article in the November 10, 2008, edition of The New York Times by Carl Zimmer, “Now: The Rest of the Genome,” discusses the thoroughly fascinating (and exceedingly difficult) of mapping the human genome. The article includes this gorgeous graphic, “Mapping the Epigenome” (click image to enlarge):

Upon first viewing the image I was struck by how closely it resembled W. Wilford Bradley’s TextArc (which I have discussed before) representations of texts (click image to enlarge):

Visual representations of data, texts, and, as we see here, human biology, show us just how inconsistent linearity is with how texts work and humans think. That is, linearity is not reality.

I am startng to try to find new assignments and conceive of new graduate courses that will asks students to compose in non-linear forms, to create multimodal compositions that build upon and then move away from (read: destroy) traditional metaphors of writing, which, despite having revision built in to them, are too constrained by their text-based geneologies. Any ideas you have are greatly appreciated.

Update 11/11/08 9:24am: Melissa responded to this post on my Facebook feed, but I want to add her suggestion here because it is spot-on: “You could probably glean a few ideas from http://www.vectorsjournal.org/ or from Mark Bernstein w/ Eastgate.” Gave Vectors a quick look over breakfast. I’m going to have to spend much more time there. Thanks, Melissa!

I have recently gotten into a Sunday morning habit of reading PostSecret and then the New York Times on my cell phone in bed while listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. Its a nice way to ease into a Sunday that is usually a mix of work and errands and football. Gets the mind working but in a very relaxing setting. Here’s what I’ve been thinking today thus far.

1) Post Secret is an incredible site for a number of reasons. I like it most for personal reasons. So many of the secrets are about relationships, such as from today:

Read the rest of this entry »

Otherwise known as, This. Fucking. Election:

Many of you will remember the hilarious WAZZZUUUP Budweiser TV commercials. For those of you who don’t, here it is.

60 Frames found the original actors and has rewritten it so the characters find themselves struggling to deal with a controversial war, a lack of medical insurance, and a crumbing economy.

Despite the polititcal context of the ad (Change is coming at the end of the ad) this kind of rewriting (or recontextualizing or rehistoricizing) of established texts has a long history. Think Wide Sargaso Sea, The Hours, and, more recently, The Jew’s Daughter and RedRidingHood.

As I am getting ready to begin a video project next semester, I find videos like the one above interesting because they can show students the flexibility of video texts. Most of the students in my Writing, Research, and Technology course will understand the malleability of written text (that is, if they have taken the major courses in the recommended order). I suspect their ideas on video will be quite different.

h/t americablog