DLTQ.org

Turned 29 yesterday, March 22nd. Took some pictures. Day was ok. Had the worst of moods at times, though.

29 is such a weird number. Definitely not mid 20s anymore. Not 30 either, new beginning, cycle, decade.

Still, a few resolutions, a few things. I will make media about it the coming days.

Ok, 03:07 AM now.

Chris Weagel just notified me about this page, the about page of yet another video sharing site called Super Deluxe.

There, on paragraph 3, it says:

And unlike other video sharing sites, we specialize strictly in comedy. We’re not concerned with showing you some Norwegian kid’s video blog. In fact, with the free time we have by not paying attention to Hans, we’re able to corral the most original laughs on video online - from the big names of funny to the comic geniuses waiting to be discovered at their day jobs.
[screengrab]

Seriously, what is wrong with Hans?
And why single out the Norwegians?

This is bizarre, and incredibly funny. No, not unfunny like the Egyptians, but - you know - real funny.

geez.

Sometimes I need to make videos just to experiment with something.

The red thread in this one was lost somewhere.

Music by Röyksopp, in case you didn’t recognize it.

Music: “Hello Hammerheads” by Caribou. Buy it.

Cities. I am a city person - have always been. I am 28 years old, and I do not have a driver’s license because I have lived my whole adult life in cities. I am one of those. I rely on the pulse of the city to sustain me, to take me from the city centre to wherever I live. I rely on never living in the outbush of Australia, or in some American city where the bus leaves twice a day.

I love the architecture of a city. The social structures. How one new store here, a green area there, can change the dynamic of a whole street, or a whole area. I love how the city changes face - becomes something else at night. I love the fact that despite feeling that I know my city, I very often realize that - no - I do not know my city at all. There is always more to explore.

One of my favourite architecture books is “s,m,l,xl” by Rem Koolhaas and the other incredible minds at OMA. To me, this book is essential reading. [In my next life I will study architecture or city planning.]

In this life, however, I will try to figure out more about the architecture of information, and how the different services and agents of change affect each other.

One simple, almost banal observation is just the insane development we have had in the “vlogosphere” from 2004 till now. Back then having a successful videoblog could cause a huge economic burden to you. There was no Youtube back then, and no blip.tv. Today, you have those, and countless others, all wanting creative content, content that can - I guess - draw eyeballs to the site. Impressions.

This ecosystem of available destinations for our videos is really interesting. How will this develop?

I wish there were more “videoblogging think tanks”. But that’s another discussion.

I would Love to mix footage from Copenhagen with footage from your city. Please, if you have any footage from your city that involves travelling (bus, walking the streets, etc), let me know in the comments and we can together compare some of the aspects of these places.

Maybe we could play a game.

An architectural game in video.

Want to join?

I have explored twitter a lot more since my last post here on dltq.org, and I have also read a few other articles / blog entries on it. Here are a few:

Ross Mayfield: Twitter Tips the Tuna
Isabella Mori: More on online conversations
Andy Carvin: Can Twitter save lives?
Chris Brogan: 5 Ways to Use Twitter for Good

As you can read in the above blog entries, there are different ways in which twitter isused, and there are different visions as to how it Could be used. Here is one example of an exchange I had today:

sbraiden Reading the latest issue of “Develoments” & want to share. Brilliant, free 1/4ly magazine. Grab it: http://www.developments.org… about 2 hours ago from web

dltq @sbraiden: thanks for the link! - any specific articles you liked? i wonder how articles in publciations like this are further discussed about 2 hours ago from web in reply to sbraiden

sbraiden @dltq article called “the road to jubilee” on Bono’s use of the currency of celebrity to influence social/political change/debt cancellation 4 minutes ago from web in reply to dltq

This might seem like just another IM conversation, but it wasn’t. These messages are stored online, becoming parts of sbraiden and my identity on twitter, and we can both look back at them later on. Others could read the messages, become clued in to the conversation or join it.
I like the connections that are loosely connected. Where there are so many open ends that the geist can float throughout the network. Something someone said in a twitter a few weeks ago, maybe, could be the basis for a discussion at a later stage. And because you can link their twitters, their text messages to the system on their way to somewhere, when One Thought comes to their mind and they share it, with the person with their websites, blogs, identities - - because you can do this, you can have different layers of communication that together can become very fullfilling.

Even if I cannot sustain spending the time listening to your 45 minute podcasts every week, or read your 600 word blog entries, I can be connected to you via your text messages - 140 characters long - that are broadcasted to the system. If you take a look at some of my favourites, you will see the style of messages that I collect.

Loosely connected.

Where will the red thread enter the picture? How will we go from eternal fixation on the newest twitter messages on the system to a more focused, concentrated effort to deal with specific problems?

I first heard about twitter a few months ago when I had some communication with Chris Brogan over the whole network2.tv thing, and I noticed he had a twitter account. Later I also noticed that Schlomo uses this, and then one day I decided to join it, try this web2.0′y thing out.

I like it.

I like oneliners, snippets of information.
I like that I can receive notifications on my cell phone for free.
I like the flow of information, even though the signal/noise ratio isn’t too good. There is a lot of chatter going on at twitter, but the informal tone also helps, helps us communiate perhaps more spontaneous, share experiences with less filters.

Yesterday, I read a few interesting blog entries on twitter, and especially this one by Elizabeth Lawley gave me some ideas.

Here is one quote from her:

What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of interesting trends in social software usage–personal blogging, lightweight presence indicators, and IM status messages–into a fascinating blend of ephemerality and permanence, public and private.

(my bold)

She goes on to talk about presence (which Paul Kapustka also wrote about yesterday, although from a different perspective)

But status messages have no permanence to them, and require some degree of synchronicity–people have to be logged into IM, and looking at status messages, while I’m there. Because Twitter archives your messages on the web (and can send them as SMS that you can check at any time), that requirement for synchronous connections goes away.

Elizabeth also mentions the lightweight nature of twitter, which I really like. Twitter works for me because we are all confined to 140 characters. If my twitter includes a really long url, the system automatically converts it to a tinyurl, which is a very nice, simple feature.

There are quite a few points of criticism to twitter, and one of them is that it is a system that helps us stay in that “continuous partial attention” while we lose the important questions; cluttering our information flow. I don’t think it has to be that way, but I certainly don’t have the answers here.

Currently I am trying to emulate Robert Scoble’s experience with the information (over)load by adding all his 800+ friends to my own account.

How will our brains adapt to all this information? All these bits of data ticking in to our cell phone or computer monitor?

Will we be even more scattered, or will we manage to somehow gather things together in a better way than before?

I don’t know yet, but I will try get my own experiences with this.