DigCCurr2007 in town

DigCCurr2007 an international symposium in digital curation is taking place in Chapel Hill this week. Check out the website for a list of presenters, chairs, and advisory board members — the latter being a group of advisers to an IMLS-funded UNC-CH School of Information and Library Science grant to develop a graduate-level digital curation curriculum, PI Helen Tibbo (my academic adviser).

I created a del.ico.us tag for the event, digccurr2007, in case you’re interested (and let’s see if anyone uses it!).

 

The end is near (and it features Erik Estrada) …

So, there is a new reality tv show coming out that features Erik Estrada (yes, Ponch) and other, ummm, celebrities, La Toya Jackson, Jack Osbourne, Wee Man and Trish Stratus — I have no idea who the last two are — “playing” reserve police officers in Muncie, Indiana, armed (or “propped”) with actual guns and badges.

So, this is how civilization ends then?

If you prefer to watch, rather than cower in fear in a dark closet, as I plan to do, then check out Armed and Dangerous on CBS, whenever that might be (I did not find any mention of it on a quick search on CBS.com, though I did not look very hard because disgust prevented me from really trying).

Wait, and don’t law enforcement officers have sort of an on-going image problem already (i.e., YouTube citizen police videos, etc.)? I can’t imagine LaToya Jackson as a rookie cop helping to improve that. Ridicule? yes. Respect? Yeah, not much. Now, if it was Michael, then …

Oh, and Ponch wears a toupee. Maybe it wil help him in his reserve police officer role (he could flog someone, right?).

 

Final Project: When the Cook gets Cooked …

I made a project blog for my JOMC 490 final: Don’t Hate Alone. It is a very general introduction to Anti-Fan online communities, and a more thorough look at one community in particular (Rachael Ray Sucks at LiveJournal, mentioned in this blog on November 27th).

 

Dead or Alive … Celebrity ‘Fun” Game

Yesterday, a classmate presented on a new social networking site, EONS, targeted for those fifty-plus in age. Founder Jeff Taylor’s tagline phrase is “boom boom boom,” which I can only imagine was test marketed and revealed to be a very catchy phrase for those fifty-plus (not at all), and signs off his invitation to participate letter with, “Let’s live to 100 or die trying.” Yes Jeff, let’s.

I shared that “slogan” with my ninety-three year old grandmother and my sixty-one year old Dad, and to paraphrase their very similar responses and to clean up this post a little (both are senior-saucy and have long forgotten that cussing is bad — or, in the case of my father, never caught on to that), I was told to go to hell.

Well, although neither of them will be partaking in the site, I did find some fun stuff for me, the non-targeted under-fifty crowd. That is, the EONS Dead or Alive game, under the heading FUN, of course. You have ten-plus categories of celebrities to test your knowledge of “is she/he or isn’t she/he” (dead or not). Categories include male movie actors, female television actors, male rock musicians and journalists. Ah, I love a site that targets a certain community (in this case, fifty-plus) only to drive home the community’s shared “context” (in this case, the pleasure of facing one’s own mortality). I liken it to a weight watchers community that presents your vice (chocolate, carbs, what have you) as a “fun” way to pass the time, or at least keeps pointing the presence of your “vice” out to you and the rest of your community …

 

Rocky Blog in 2006

Rocky Balboa, the sixth film in the installment of Rocky films, will premier on December 22nd, thirty years after the original (1976 …). And, unlike the first Rocky (or the second, third, fourth or fifth, which premiered in 1990), Rocky fans can now blog their excitement for their collective favorite come-back kid. [Okay, kid is my problem with the whole Rocky Balboa thing. Sly Stallone turned sixty this year, one year younger than my Dad. I'd prefer to not see my Dad get punched in the face, so it is only fitting that I would also prefer to avoid watching a sixty-year old Stallone get batted around.]

Anyway, here is the Rocky Balboa blog. I have yet to find a Rambo IV-dedicated blog (projected release 200 , but I imagine it is only a matter of time before a devoted online community forms around a shared Rambo love. (and again, this was not possible for the most recent Rambo release, Rambo III, because that was way back in 1988).

 

Trading Spaces on Craigslist

The TLC show, Trading Spaces, makes me cringe (most of the time). People show up at your house with a gallon of paint, a jig saw and some particle board, and transform a room in your house from bad to usually worse …

Now, instead of signing up for the show and being forced to redecorate your neighbor’s home in exchange for a little unstyle-makeover on your own, you can buy a piece of the Trading Spaces handiwork via Craigslist (Raleigh NC), from a show featuring Hildi Santos and Amy Wynn.

You can read a post on this episode at Television Without Pity.

 

RMA, online and all over

I was trying to explain acronyms to my friend I-Teau the other day, the acronyms that your friends wrote on the back of the wallet-sized school photos you exchanged back in middle and high school. I-Teau, having spent those years in his native Thailand, didn’t know that, pre-dating the text message, LYLAS was “lov-ya-like-a-sister,” or that RO meant “rock on/rock out.” A book I pulled out of a clearance bin at Urban Outfitters last year, 2gether 4ever: Notes of a Junior High School Heartthrob, includes a glossary of note-speak. The book itself is a collection of notes exchanged between the author, his friends, and his conquests back during their middle school years.

Now, a new website allows others to share their archival artifacts of childhood and adolescent angst, embarrassment and heartbreak (or hormonebreak). At Get Mortified.com, you can post your own tales, letters, poems, diary entries, or photos of your “youth;” submission guidlines being, among others, that your contributions were created during your youth and that they are your own “intellectual property.” And just as in their youth, posters’ can be judged all over again; this time by readers of the site rather than just those kids in your sixth grade homeroom.

I unfortunately am a tosser, rather than a hoarder, so I am pretty confident my mother’s attic contains no boxes filled with teen-aged correspondence written on liner paper and containing i’s dotted with hearts. I do, however, have those wallet-sized photos of long-unconnected friends. From the messages on a few, circa eighth grade, it would seem that several friends were wishing me “Good Luck with Bobby.” Now, if only I could remember exactly who this Bobby was …

 

Haters, round two

In an earlier post, Don’t Hate Alone, I made mention of some online anti-fan communities. I forgot to mention that pleasure trove that is You Tube user comments, for both supportive adulation (i.e. imagined, “Daniel Craig, he’s so foxy” — author, me) and anti-fan sentiment (i.e. actual, “He’s the worst Bond actor imaginable. Ugly, charmless, completely non-heroic looking too. Can you imagine Craig’s Bond saving the world? More like saving stamps. Bleh.” — author, moogmoo, three months ago).

 

Blogs for Kids and Panic for All

I just had my first exposure to imbee.com, tagline, ” the first secure social networking and blogging destination for kids.” While services are “free,” to share your content (i.e., to interact with other users), a credit card and parental registration is necessary. Parental control allow mums and pops to facilitate (or surveil, your choice) their children’s’ imbee.com doings and undoings, including who can and cannot view their children’s’ online user generated content. E-Content summarized the new service in a June 2006 article. The target audience is children aged 8 to 14.

Since I cannot get on the site to view anything, I cannot comment on content, design, etc. However, my only “beware the moral police” comment is that, from what I got off the nightly news when I used to watch it, aren’t a large percent of abuse perpetrators known to their victims? And, if so, imbee.com may provide parents some relief, but not all. And anyway, although Dateline on NBC would have me believe otherwise, what percentage of kids contributing online content in some fashion (12 million per a Pew study cited in the E-Content article) actually have been the victim of an Internet predator? I think the imbee.com idea is great, but fail-safe? Hmmm….

In my search of statistics, which was pretty much fruitless, I did find a Registered Offenders Blog, from the National Alert Registry. Ummm, in addition to providing “news,” though no dates provided in what I can only assume are chronological listings, you can perform a free sex offenders search in your zip code. Supposedly, I have 207 in my 27701 zip code. For you 1990s tv fans, it appears that 90210 only has 3. Anyway, if you want to know more about the actual location of those offenders, then it will take a $10.00 access fee.

$10.00 dollars here and a credit card there; keeping kids safe is quite a business model ….

 

To be (a blog) or not to be …

I have been creeping around some Google blogs to see if there is any current news on the status of the lawsuits filed by some American publishers against Google in light of the Google Print Libraries Project. Alas, lots of blogs (see the right side bar here), but not much info on my pursuit.

Also, as one would expect, I assume you cannot leave comments on any of the thirty-plus Google blogs’ postings, from the four that I opened. So, in the spirit of the essence of the blog, I propose a new naming structure for dealing with blogs that might allow some expected blog-type features, but not all:

• Buddy Blogs: Blogs that allow comments only from registered users,
• Baby Blogs: Blogs that serve the sole purpose of distributing developmental details (photos a must) of one’s newest and cutest, whether that be human, canine, feline, etc. (Sad to report, I could find no Babyster.com out there, to complement Catster.com or Dogster.com).
• Bully Blogs: Those blogs that don’t allow for reader contributed commentary. Why bully? Because it seems they are keeping the playground for themselves.

Of course, in continuation of the alliteration, there would be the bullshit blog, of which I would count myself in …