2 posts tagged “flickr”

It's been a long time since I've posted here.

I find that I often explore a new tool, crawl inside of it and make it home for awhile, then move on.  There's a lack of friction with so many of the social networking tools.  I don't want to date, toss a shout out to a new band, or increase my network.  I don't think anybody hanging out over the Twitter watercooler really gives a damn about what I just put in my coffee or fed my cats.  In first life I'm a public figure, so in my second one I find myself compelled to hide.  Running a successful business means being swallowed whole by IMs most days in Second Life, and the lack of any truly tangible privacy tools there makes it really damned tough to get a day's work done.

So, I became a bit of a hermit.  Okay, a lot of one.  And I liked it.  (And yes, I admit that it's a real hardship holing myself up with Baron frigging Grayson to build and play ... ~cough~)

I really have enjoyed reinventing myself as a recluse the past two years.  I'm a workaholic, and having a partner that shares the same insane work ethic and obsessions has made it all the easier still.  So much for the best laid plans ~grins~

Second Life has been a grand retreat, but the past few months I'm finding myself drawn into a very different kind of playground: one that doesn't exist in a single online community, but rather spanning a handful of mixed media tools and sites.  It started when Baron rekindled a love of seeing the world through old film cameras again.  He began posting notes and discoveries on his own blog here, and some rather cool, kindred spirits were gathering round.  Several were people we'd aleady connected with in Second Life as customers, and those connections were rarely more than a handful of brief encounters because of the tendency to cultivate a precious reclusiveness for the reasons I talked about above.  But I noticed something odd happening here.  In sharing a picture and some personal nugget, we were swapping stories.  It wasn't a transaction.  There was no obligation on either end.  It didn't demand lengthy, real time responses, dropping things in the middle of an inspired work session to reply.  No, this was more like slinking down into a favourite old chair in a beat-up pair of slippers with a big mugga joe in your hand, and quietly inviting familiar hearts in.

This began to spill over onto Flickr when we started posting pics there too.  Same faces.  Same fun, easy-going way of connecting.  People that I once thought of as customers I now think of as friends.  You see there's this odd little backyard fence, and it doesn't inhabit a space between just two yards, but bridges many, making them feel like the same kind of small, intimate shared space instead of some overwhelming digital geography.

omidyar.net, Second Life, Vox, Flickr, Twitter ... they all feel like rooms in the same house right now.  Where before I once dreaded the demands placed on my time by the human interaction, I now find myself craving it.  I watch Thaumata's video blog about her grandma Dorothy and am moved in ways I cannot describe.  I see this tender, vibrant person, and not just a name on a posting.  I watch Arteer romp through digital playgrounds and master them and make them so much fun.  I see her pictures on Flickr and her little notes and often end up laughing or connecting to some idea in some new way, and I love it.

It's sort of silly to just share these two women, just two names, but they are both such marvellous examples of the very thing that made me want to come back and post today:  a sense of kindred spirits with elbows on the kitchen table, and people I'd love to know in first life.  Zeke Poutine, Riversong Garden, Pam Omidyar and Callie Cline were people I connected with that way several years ago, and the ability to dive into Second Life together and culitvate our relationship in new ways was pretty damned incredible at times.  Okay, so I admit that having Zeke as a fairygodmother-in-garters (her words, not mine, but damn are they good!) with the same insane fetish for chocolate has less to do with social networking and more to do with Adventures with the Estrogen Army, but that's another post for another day, and my five minutes are up.

Would love to hear how others are thinking and feeling about connecting simultaneously through mixed media and networks.  Maybe you'd consider sharing some of your own favourite digital haunts with me here?

WebBrain

This posting is more of a mental bookmark to guilt myself into sitting down to think long thoughts on this particular subject, because it's been tickling my brain for so long, and I'm prone to excessive bouts of mental wanderlust.  While I've been yammering about these core ideas for maybe four years now or so, at the moment, I'm like a kid in a candy shop eyeing them in the context of "Second Life".

Another 18 hour day working inworld and non-stop yesterday.  Having a house all to yourself on the weekend isn't good.  You forget to eat, take breaks, breathe ...  Yesterday was a mental marathon.  Lots of organizing inworld, and it only got worse when my partner came online around 3am my time and had one of the worst thinking infections I've ever seen.  You know those moments where you just cannot shut your head off, and everything you think seems like the next killer idea?

Brainstorming at 3am (coffee and sleep deprivation a lethal combo)

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So, another pretty neural meltdown, and it left me grasping at straws for ways to try to capture some of this exotic mental windfall fruit that lands everytime you shake your noggin' that hard.  The first thing that occured to me was that I'd love to create a HUD that let me just press a button (like on the handheld recorder I used to take into meetings and keep by me during the day before high tech made that such a yesterday thing) and simply start talking, then have that little self-chat snippet piped out to the web db suite I've been creating for inworld CSM relief.  Would also be nice to teach it how to snag a handful of chat from the kind of brainstorming sessions that melted my right hemisphere last night when my partner decided to get brilliant again, and didn't stop.  The SL chat log is a nice start, but barely a tickler when it comes to the ability to easily snatch snippets from meetings and simply store that into even a flatfile db to be queried via the web after the fact.  (I know I've talked about this idea twenty times before and have stored snippets of conversations in notecards, on the backs of napkins, in wordpad ... but I'll be damned if I can pull them all together and find them when I need them, let alone see the common threads when there's 20 pages of raw chat text).

This is where "The Brain" comes in.  (I keep warning Kitto that I want to bend his ear on this, and probably his brain, because -- and you can insert a whiney three year old voice here -- it's really, really, really important whether I can adequately articulate it or not).  So, back to wanting to store hundreds of pieces of chat in a way that makes them more accessible, and why this makes me think of "The Brain": as my own was failing, I kept thinking "why stop at a db?" when what I was really pining for was the ability to not simply save these little brainstorming junkets for future retrieval, but to be able to see the relationships between the little content mcnuggets visually.  Topic maps, ontologies and folksonomies, oh my.  I love using "Personal Brain" to dump key artifacts from my head (recipes, family tree, business articles, pictures, favourite web digs, videos, books, articles, music, allies) and then to be able to see this unexpected garden of context come out of places where none had existed before, at least not in my active thinking.  The nice thing about Personal Brain is that I can suddenly see very clear lines between ideas and resources and allies and knowledge capital and put them all together, and when it comes to the kind of brainstorming that happened last night, and that continues to happen cumulatively over a period of months, this can be the secret sauce.  There's a reason we keep coming back and hitting on the same things again and again, and while we cannot always see the links, a tool like Personal Brain would be a slightly orgasmic connector to have access to in a business context here.

If you've ever seen or used the "Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus", you already know what I am talking about.  Look for a word, and it's presented in a visual cloud of related words.  It's a smarter database, one that you can crawl through visually, and it recognizes the relationships between sometimes seemingly disparate things and allows you to fall down the rabbit hole into the most magical mental places.  It leads to significant "Aha!" moments as you are able see right there, in a "data cloud", a picture of things pulled all together.

This is where I will fail today:  I'm too tired to really get into the nuts and bolts of this tool and how and why it would be the next killer mash-up in SL, but I want to, because it's important.  It must be, because I keep coming back to it again and again.  Hence, the mental bookmark to remind myself to think out loud in a more organized way, and in a way that might even draw a little feedback that will help me find the ultimate prize:  a pipeline out of The Brain that allows me to connect to other people's Brains, and, God help me, embed it into SL, to facilitate the cultivation of a kind of delicious community intelligence.  Four million people (and these aren't just potential customers, but I'm thinking now of the kind of collective wisdom I thrive on in terms of Better World Island and Ubuntu style projects).  Give me "Google Map"  (come on, if they can map the moon, they can map Second Life), and add to that "The Brain", and what the hell, maybe even Trisenx's "scratch-and-sniff" olfactive marketing tools so that I can taste the pizza I'm eating in that virtual meeting and smell my partner's cologne now and then ~winks~.  Aye, now there's the Holy Trinity of embeds in a Second Life mashed-up Utopia.

The age of spiritual machines is more than just a frighteningly compelling/repulsive bit of Kurzweil thinking out loud, it's my daily playground, and I find myself getting drawn into the guts of the "community think" level of Second Life and resources, and getting more and more agitated about my current inability to use or create tools to effectively build bridges and connect it.

I was noodling this more than a year ago at omidyar.net, and I know I confused the hell out of people when it came to why I was even excited about this in the first place, which means I either need to find a better way of explaining why this is important to me when I take the next run at it, or I need to be able to do a show-and-tell (without spending about USD $15,000 on the enterprise version of this puppy or trying to cram a round peg into a square hole with "Web Brain" if it's even still alive).

If you happen to be reading this, go ahead and hold me accountable.  Make me try to explain this in English in a way that actually makes you give a damn (something like "Sue, give me an example for crying out loud, and keep it simple").  At the moment, I'm just thinking out loud again so that maybe I will, because I have a hunch this is one of those important things.