Today bloggers discuss comment ownership. They are debating whether comments should belong to the blog/service or to the commenter. Ironically the meat of the discussion is in the comment threads. Rob La Gesse deletes his FriendFeed account (all comments disappear), Robert Scoble declares that he owns his comments, Mathew Ingram asks if Scoble owns his comments, Hank Williams calls for a comment copyright mechanism, Fred Wilson points to Disqus, Disqus posts “Commenter Bill of Rights”, Josh Catone asks who owns your comment, does it matter where you leave them?

We all know who owns the comments. Comments belong to the person who writes them. The question for us is how much are our comments worth?

When you write a note in Delicious it propagates to FriendFeed, to Facebook, to Twitter, then to other social places on the web. Do you currently own it? No. Does your comment attract visitors and in turn generate ad revenue? Yes. Do you get anything from the ad revenue? No. What do they say? “In return you are getting the service for free”. Are you really getting a worthy service for all your comments, votes, photos, bookmarks, videos, and all your invaluable social connections? Think about it.

What we need is open contribution metrics at any service. To be able to debate on how much we give to a social web service and how much we get in turn, we have to be aware of the amount of our contribution.

User Labor Markup Language (ULML) is created because of this issue. ULML is an open data structure to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.

* Images above are shots from a sketch based on a cell packing algorithm in the Meta-Control series.

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Today my RSS reader NetNewsWire reseted itself, I lost all the feeds (500+) I’ve been collecting in the past years. I don’t know what happened, but all I get was the default feed list: mac.com, BBC, Wired etc. First of all, I said bye to NetNewsWire and removed it from my computer. Although I like its clean and fast interface, I can’t take this serious error.

Then I started to look for new feed readers.

Google Reader. Well I use it sometimes, but it is very slow for my reading. Also it manages the feed list really badly. For example, it uses RSS icon after RSS icon to represent the feeds, very bad. I can’t scan them easily. I think Google Reader developers are just lazy, why not just use feeds’ own 16×16 icons like many other readers do. Share, share with a note, star, tag are necessary for large-scale conversations (Greg Smiths’s post). But these features overlap with the services I already effectively use: Del.icio.us, Twitter, etc.

Attensa. Works quite fast, but it has a poorly designed visual interface that I don’t want to stare at much. Attensa’s AttentionStream technology combines content (e.g, authors, titles, tags) with your attention to provide a relevancy ranking. Sounds exciting but the interface does not surface this “underlying” technology well. Place of the numbers, color saturation, contrasts, and font size are all poorly composed I think. It may get better if I use it more, but current prioritized lists are not relevant to my interests. If you do machine learning, please show it, show the progress, what you learn about me.

NewsGator. Slow and poor information design. It has some filtering through AideRSS, which ranks feed items based on comments, Del.icio.us history, Diggs, Tweets, etc. But this filtering does not make much sense to me, because the popularity based ranking models can not match my diverse interests well. Also I read my favorite feeds just in time, so as a paradox, items are probably being ranked after I read them.

Fav.or.it. Tried a little bit, its interface is just confusing. Too much unnecessary information here and there. Comment reading is good. Integration with existing sharing services (Del.icio.us, Twitter etc.) is good. Reading experience is bad.

FeedEachOther. Many features, poor information design. Comment reading good, friend connection good, feed list (OPML) sharing good, readability bad. I don’t care much about feed recommendations, because I already find interesting and related feeds as I use the web. Again locked in sharing, no integration with existing services.

There are many readers out there, these are the ones that I found interesting enough to give it a try. There are also custom home pages (Netvibes, iGoogle, Live.com etc.) that act as readers, I just can’t touch those at all. Every reader has one or two unique feature that is good, but none of the readers is good enough to help me deal with the complex information flows. If you use something good, please post it in the comments. For now, I think I will stop reading feeds.

Update: Checking some of the console based unix feed readers on this list.
http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/i_want_the_mutt_of_feed_readers.html

* Images above are shots from a sketch based on a flocking algorithm that I was playing with recently.

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Today I am doing a 1 day RSS Ramadan. No feed reading until the sun goes down. I don’t know what it means, but I feel like I need it for the health of my mind and soul. Although some other interfaces may interrupt my information diet, this is no problem since the deal is between me and my “internet god”.

Ironically I first announced on Twitter.

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MYPOCKET, my new project launched on Turbulence.org, discloses my personal financial records to the world and predicts the future spending. To make the predictions I created a custom software that explores and reveales essential patterns in the daily transactions of my bank account. Sometimes I verify the predictions, sometimes I don’t mind, sometimes I am not conscious, sometimes the predictions determine my future choices, creating a system in which both myself and the software adapt one another.

MYPOCKET presents a three part interface to a living physical/digital process, which got many dimensions of responses from friends and colleagues. Some said “I want to use my bank transactions as well” and actually one of them sent a year of his bank transactions, some asked if I “want to start a new web service?”, some asked “what kind of a portrait is this?”, some compared to network visualizations, some read it as a “call for transparency in global economy”, some found it “brave!”, some found it “banal and intriguing”, some were excited to see what my rent is, some found the prediction model lacking. I am excited to hear all these and replying individually. But here I will try to address a few things.

I create systems, which mostly end up being complex. I couldn’t find a unified way of presenting a complex system yet. So this work ended up having a three part interface: a list, a graph, and an object.

First part is an RSS feed for predictions and actualized bank transactions. RSS feed is the most contemporary interface to a flow of data. Don’t even think about it, hook up your RSS readers to my bank account, on your handheld, on your laptop, on your whatever reader, you can reach my daily updated bank transactions anytime anywhere. An artwork, as open as it can be, not only for humans but also for machines.

Second part is a graph showing the dynamic relationships between transaction items and their effects changing overtime. This is the way I wired up the transactions to make the predictions. When the graph is processed, it generates a list, a list of predictions. Now rewind. When our activities are recorded, they are not always stored in a pure list format, they are in relation to other lists, which makes a graph, that is subject to analysis. For example, your activities in a social network service, or your bank transactions in the database of a financial firm are in the form of a graph, yet to be analyzed.

Third, predicted objects, objects whose being is predicted as a result of deliberate analysis + living. After a predicted transaction happens, I mark its receipt. Each marked receipt is a unique object, not only because it contains unique transaction information, but also its existence is predicted. Here I refer to master Duchamp’s readymades, the brilliant idea of 20th century art, found objects. If readymades –mostly mass produced objects– are found in the past, predicted objects are found in the future.

While creating this work I was highly inspired by today’s security politics and military condition. I will finish with a “poem” by the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:


The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing


From the collection of Rumsfeld’s poems on Slate.com.

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Turbulence MUST raise $25,000 by December 31, 2007.

I’ve been reading and learning from Turbluence for the past 5 years. They not only publish but also organize events and support artists (see the past comissions). Turbulence is unique in their effort and a great motivation for networked arts. We owe them a lot. No need to say, supporting experimental art practice has no monetary return in the “free market economy”. So please support Turbulence if you:

• are one of the thousands of people who regularly visit Turbulence, Networked Performance, Networked Music Review and / or New American Radio ;
• are one of the hundreds of teachers who use Turbulence works in your new media / digital art courses;
• are an artist who has received a Turbulence, Networked Music Review or New American Radio commission;
• have presented at or attended Upgrade! Boston (Art Interactive or Massachusetts College of Art and Design), Floating Points (Emerson College), or Programmable Media (Pace Digital Gallery) … now is the time to give something back…

or

You don’t know us but you support experimental practice in the arts… Please PLEDGE NOW!

WHAT TURBULENCE ACCOMPLISHED IN 2007

In addition to an exceptional year of supporting artists through commissions, public events, and our world-renowned resource, Networked Performance, we started a second blog called Networked Music Review (NMR). On it you will find in-depth interviews with sonic artists and musicians; world-wide events highlighted in real time; a “Weekly” post spotlighting interesting works, artists and conversations; a monthly newsletter which summarizes each month’s activities; and much more.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT IN 2008

On November 15, NMR began launching fifteen commissioned works, several of which will premiere live at Programmable Media II: Networked Music, a 2-day symposium at Pace University, New York City in April 2008.

In addition to launching 20 commissioned works, other upcoming highlights include Mixed Realities, an exhibition and symposium at Emerson College, winter 2008; and Re(Connecting) the Adamses, a major exhibition co-presented with Greylock Arts (Adams, Massachusetts) and MCLA Gallery 51 (North Adams, Massachusetts), summer 2008.

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This book is recommended to me by Amazon.com today. Among all the spam recommendations I get from Amazon, this is probably the first book I care. Amazon’s recommendation algorithm is probably getting better by adapting itself to my shopping behavior.

If I buy this new book, I will give feedback to the algorithm and increase the weight of its possible scores about me. In other words, I will let Amazon to do better predictions about my future shopping behavior. If I keep getting good recommendations and buy whatever is recommended, I will adapt to Amazon’s recommendation software. Me adapting to the software from one end, the software adapting to me from the other end… is there a meeting point somewhere? Is this the peak of a conflict? Do I work for Amazon or Amazon works for me? Because of this bidirectional adaptation I am politically ambivalent in my position. A position in the informationally generated life.

This is an interesting encounter. The description of the book goes:

Today, in the twenty-first century, we witness the emergence of a new class of beings: organisms that are first imagined and then–through the agency of biotechnologies–brought to life. What once was myth is today a medium.

Eduardo Kac
http://www.ekac.org/

Alain Badiou
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/badiou.html

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I am wordless today. This image better tells what I feel.

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I just came to San Francisco. I will be around for a week or so. Great weather here.

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Today ~42 million people are voting for the new government in Turkey. 14 political parties and 699 independent candidates.

New York Times says “Election in Turkey May Be a Watershed“. Unfortunately a conservative coalition will form the new government. But there will be independent leftist representatives against Muslim bourgeois. Let’s see what happens tomorrow.

UPDATE

AKP won the elections. This is another sign for the rise of Muslim bourgeois in Turkey. Independents got more votes (blue color on the map) compared to the past elections but not as much as expected in Istanbul. Unfortunately, the rising leftist candidate Baskin Oran couldn’t make it.

The Turkish TV channel NTV released a great real-time elections visualization tool. I watched these maps as the votes were being counted on sunday night. It was quite nice to see the emerging destiny of the Republic of Turkey as a movie.

1st party AKP’s distribution.

2nd party CHP’s distribution.

3rd party MHP’s distribution.

Independents’ distribution.

Source of the images: NTV

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I am currently having Oolong Tea and I felt I should post something. It’s been a while. This is going to be a whatever comes kind of post.

I sometimes feel like I am not interested in anything when I hit the network. You know all that news, stats, things, books, art works, discussions, links. I suck all that stuff and the network hits me back, makes my stomach bad. That’s why I drink ooolong tea to feel better.

I recreated Nam June Paik’s 1961 recipe “Composition for Poor Man” in Brent’s new initiative Promiserver, a server for writing and evaluating experimental micro-contracts. The original recipe goes like this:

Summon a taxi, position yourself inside,
request a long ride, OBSERVE THE METER.

And here is my version:

if taxi_arrived
   if in_taxi
      success "request a long ride"
   else
      breach "position yourself inside"
   end
else
   "summon a taxi"
end
success "OBSERVE THE METER" if taxi_moving

We discussed how to evaluate this promise at Brent’s blog post. Promiserver’s debugger will probably be the first socially conscious debugger.

I will be in Detroit in May 26th - 28th. I will perform some of my visual artifacts in the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. It is going to be exciting since Detroit is the birthplace of US techno.

Today I played with the ruby screen scraper library WWW::Mechanize. It is quite handy and fast if you want to programmatically browse the web. Who doesn’t?

Tim O’Reilly asks “What Does It Mean For Public Space to Go Digital?“. It means “A Stock Market in Life“. I designed this market so that in the future when public spaces have hit counters like web sites, the exploitation of our life becomes visible, so debatable.

I think in the future everybody will know every other person in the world. You go out for a dinner, from the waitress to the taxi driver, the policeman, the chef, other people sitting in the restaurant, the speaker on the tv, you know all of them, say hi to everybody. Zero degrees of separation. Super rhizomatic society. Fully contagious. Do we need cell phones? Internet? Is it peaceful? Do we need to organize anything?

I should better go sleep.

View from my friend Mey’s balcony, Istanbul.

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