Archives for category: social media

Instagram

January 29, 2012 //
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This tweet caught my interest a few days ago: ” Instagram makes everyone’s memories look the same, just as Facebook does with people’s lives.” I have a couple of points to make about this statement, but no real conclusions.

What intrigued me most about the tweet was the second part ”…look just the same, just as Facebook does with people’s lives.” I had been thinking much the same about Facebook. I know it isn’t completely true. It isn’t that Facebook makes everyone’s lives look identical, but the framing of it creates a kind of uniformity, a blandness. My news feed is a mix (high school friends, PBS, the Dali Lama, people I know professionally, Charlie the Bassett Hound) but each element in the feed is framed the same way.

What about the first part – that Instagram makes everyone’s memories look the same?

I question the idea that Instagram is about memories at all. But when I think about the photos I share, some might serve as replacements for memories of trivial things. Loaves of bread I have baked. Like most casual photography, it complements memory. And obviously that is the most common use for photography.

Does Instagram make images look the same?

Instagram carries a burden of clichés. The clichés are largely visual, but there are social and business factors involved as well.

Visually, there are two main components to Instagram. First, the square form factor of the image. I like it; and as a purely formal choice, it is a good one.

The second, optional component when posting a photograph in Instagram are the filters. They seem popular with other Instagram users, but I rarely use them. I probably have more interest in using the filters that change the framing of the image, or make a color photograph monochrome, but the color changes and fake film effects bore me. I am sure there are photos on Instagram that I like better because they were processed through a filter, but I KNOW I see mediocre photographs that are even more mediocre because they were filtered. These are qualities of the medium that dominate what the viewer sees, and like the way Facebook “frames” updates, it seems arbitrary. And uniform.

Beyond the formal, visual, there is an awful lot of photo sharing on Instagram that falls into the category of non-technical clichés. Partly the result of Instagram memes. Photos of the ground, with the photographer’s feet popping up from the bottom edge (#whereistand) for instance. Other clichés seem to be the result of the popularity cycles built-in to the Instagram system. There is a popular page, where photos that have been well liked are displayed, increasing their ability to be found and liked more. This seems logical. I don’t think it is good, if what you want is creative diversity, but I guess it serves another purpose.

I prefer to browse the “news” tab, looking for images that are liked by people I follow.  This is a great way to find interesting images, “curated” by people whose images were interesting to me.

Instagram is an example of a tool that excels at a narrow form of sharing. Something I have been thinking about lately, and hope to write about soon.

 

Categories art, photo, social media, software

Mining the Social Web by Matthew Russell

March 13, 2011 //
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Mining the Social Web is a guide to using Python and related tools to make sense out of data from Twitter, Facebook, and other Social Media and Web data. Redis, CouchDB and the Natural Language Tool Kit are covered, as well as the APIs of the various services.

If you know how to program in any language, you can probably make sense of  using Python. It’s popularity, and the available packages that dovetail with the data miner’s needs, make it a natural choice for a book like this.

Russell covers a lot of territory. The chapter on microformats alone is enough to keep me tinkering for a while – recipes are always interesting. Email doesn’t strike most people as a particularly sexy Social Medium, but I found a new interest in what I can do with my own data there.

I am sure I am not the only reader who was a bit bemused at the inclusion of an example using Google Buzz, but it makes sense, really. Buzz is a fine place to exercise information retrieval tools. I found the discussion of text mining in that chapter very interesting. I am new to TF-IDF.

Russell’s approach suits me well, but I can see how it might not satisfy someone who wants a narrow focus towards greater depth. I found it fun to read, and it has motivated me to explore data in new ways.

If you want to find out more about the book, here is the O’Reilly catalog page for Mining the Social Web.

This is the third book I have reviewed as a part of the O’Reilly Blogger Review Program.

Categories books, social media

Stuff in the Cloud, Sometimes up in Smoke

March 12, 2011 //
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Considering the things that have happened in the last couple of months, worrying about my links at Delicious seems very trivial. But when I found the paragraphs that follow in one of my old drafts, I thought resurrecting the thread was worthwhile. I will follow up with a post about Tim Wu’s The Master Switch when I get a chance; I have been reading it the last few days, and the connection with what he discusses is what interests me about what I started out writing in the fragment below.
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I was an early adopter of Delicious, and was disappointed to hear that Yahoo was intending to close it. Yahoo did not make an announcement – the news came in the form of a “leaked” slide from a business presentation. A couple days later, the Delicious blog posted a response saying the service was not going away, and that people should keep using it. A good home, outside of Yahoo, would be the best thing, blah blah.

By the time I read the “keep calm and carry on” post, I had already moved my bookmarks to a couple of other sites. More importantly, I saved my exported file locally, and am working on my own application to solve the problem of a universally available bookmarking tool. I made a local copy of my photostream from Flickr as well, since Flickr is another Yahoo service. I felt like a panicky account holder taking his money out of the bank. Why all the fuss? One word sums up what I am after: autonomy.

The Gawker and SilverPop hacking stories helped increase my sensitivity to the idea that each of us needs to be more concerned about maintaining our own well-being on the internet.

We don’t want to lose valuable assets like years of links, in the case of Delicious, or to have our online identities usurped, in the case of the Gawker security failure. Of course it makes sense to take steps to avoid running into these problems, but like a run on the bank, the risk is a kind of stagnation.

If I never got in the habit of using Delicious, I know I would have saved fewer bookmarks. The personal artifacts of my links and tags would not exist, because I would have never bothered to preserve them. I never would have found the other users of Delicious whose areas of interest intersect mine, because a file of URLs on my desktop can’t take part in the “chance encounters” with other links that an online service like Delicious hosts. The loose interaction on sites like Flickr or Delicious lead to interesting associations. I don’t want to move all these nice things into a walled city like Facebook.

Dan Gillmor suggests we maintain our own outpost on the web. Your email is your email, when you pay for hosting at a company that respects your privacy, or host it at your own server under your desk.
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Categories community, personal technology, social media

Track Conversations in Twitter Using Bettween

January 6, 2011 //
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If you have ever picked up on a conversation between two other people, but wanted to “rewind” it to  the beginning, you will understand the problem Bettween is trying to solve.
Bettween | Easily Track and Share Twitter Conversations.

Categories quickies, social media

Library of Congress

December 9, 2009 //
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I hope everyone has the Library of Congress Flickr photostream bookmarked somewhere; it is a real treasure chest. In Flickr, everyone can help identify, tag, and otherwise enrich the body of knowledge about each image. Back at the LOC website, the uncompressed and un-commented images are preserved. Seems like an effective division of labor and attention.

The 1930s-40s in Color collection will give you an idea of while Kodachrome’s end is a sad thing. Unfortunately, the notes added to some of the images are, well, less than scholarly.

This image of the lovely Sangre de Cristo Mountains is worth the visit:
Sangre de Cristo Mountains, looking north into Colorado (LOC)

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Categories art, social media

select-a-tweet with Baker Tweet

September 18, 2009 //
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A delightful device – the Baker Tweet – brought into existence by the clever Wallaces over at Poke.

The problem it solves? Letting the followers of your muffins know when fresh ones are ready. All without needing to dust off your hands to approach a computer. Turn a nob, press a button.

This video is a fine example of “explaining by showing.” No words needed. Just a pleasant jazz guitar. Nice.

BakerTweet from POKE on Vimeo.

Categories DIY, food, social media, video