For better or for worse many of us seem to enjoy tweeting kernals of information in 140 characters or less. The the Pew/Internet and American Life Project reports: 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others.
Whatever you blame (or credit) the microblogging craze on (nimble-fingered gaming, instant gratification, Google, or ubiquitous digital multi-tasking) we seem to have bought into the Internet text version of the late eighties concept behing the late eighties TV series "Short Attention Span Theatre." The show featured disjointed bits of movies and commentary woven together into something that did not require viewers to concentrate, and might not convey deep meaning or pithy information.
You can follow Fedora community twitter-ers who regularly share news, information and updates. If you would like more followers from the Fedora community please share your twitter (or other) microblog URL on this list:
I spotted a way cool web service at the [http://annualmeeting.nsdl.org/ National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Annual Meeting] earlier this week in Washington, D.C.. Paul Allen, Assistant Director, Information Science, [http://birds.cornell.edu/ Cornell Lab of Ornithology], presented the NSF-NSDL funded project Visualizing Biodiversity Online. The Biodiversity Analysis Pipeline is a collaborative environment for students to create and share analyses and visualizations of biodiversity data and is due to launch later this month and will utilize Fedora as a storage layer.
Project description: The Biodiversity Analysis Pipeline (BAP) is a collaborative, interactive online environment in which students, educators, citizens, resource managers, and scientists can create and share analyses and visualizations of biodiversity data. It is built to support inquiry-based learning within a "Web 2.0" environment, allowing analysis results and visualizations to be dynamically incorporated into web sites (e.g. blogs) for dissemination and consumption beyond the BAP environment itself. BAP allows anyone to access, analyze, and visualize the huge volume of primary biodiversity data currently available online. BAP provides access to powerful scientific analyses and workflows through an intuitive, rich web interface based on the visual programming paradigm, similar to Yahoo Pipes. Analyses and visualizations are authored in an open, collaborative environment which allows existing analyses and visualizations to be shared, modified, repurposed, and enhanced.
Behind the scenes, BAP is based on the Kepler scientific workflow software which is used by professional scientists for analysis and modeling. BAP brings that scientific power to new audiences by consolidating the same workflow components used by scientists into pieces that have more intuitive meaning, and by providing components specifically targeted to these audiences. Because BAP provides tools for original data analyses rather than visualizations of predetermined analyses, it empowers users to develop new and valuable results. Those results can be exposed as dynamic web resources, in web contexts unrelated to BAP itself. Finally, because of the generality of the Kepler scientific system upon which BAP is built, this online system can be extended to science and engineering disciplines beyond the environmental sciences.
The photograph I use to identify myself in the Fedora Commons network and in other social networks is, well, sort of real. If you ran into me on the street you would learn that I am not purple and red. Some might argue that this photo misrepresents me (a good thing in my view). I would say in favor of graphic obfuscation that it allows me to broadcast an image that looks somewhat like me while not going in the complete opposite direction--using generic images like "sunset over the ocean" as visual identifiers. These types of representations make me feel like I am supposed to be able come up with an impression of a person from a random photograph. One of the many conundrums in social networks is that we want to be friendly, open and personally engaging to foster collaboration and connection while at the same time protecting the few shreds of personal privacy that we have left out there on Web 2.0 in 2008.
Creatively enhanced images work very well as personal visual identifiers. Here are some ideas: invite a second-grader to create a whimsical portrait of you that can be scanned, use artistic filtering tools to turn realistic digital photographs into digital works of art, draw a digital self-portrait of your own, or use an out-of-date photograph from the family archives. These techniques will make you "personable" online, and yet slightly mysterious at the same time. Who wouldn't want to work with someone like that?
Beyond images, there are people who proudly point to the fact that they are not referenced on the Web, and who put effort into keeping themselves off the Web. A Google query on most peoples' names, however, usually turns up something. I even found an infamous great grandfather of mine, who I knew nothing about, on the cover of a 1928 TIme Magazine. How should a reasonable person participate in useful professional networks and just plain fun social spots on the Web?
Easily discoverable personal profiles on MySpace and Facebook often reveal enough to leave some of us wondering how these folks will ever find gainful employment (this stuff stays around, and often multiplies, for a long time). Hoping for a first date does not seem like a good enough reason to tell the world-at-large a lot more than almost anyone would feel compelled to share when actually on a first date. It is possible to construct a generic personal profile that both explains who you are and what you are interested in without telling all PII (Personally Identifiable Information, Wikipedia article).
According to Wikipedia here are some items that should not be added to personal profiles in professional or social networking sites:
- Full name (if not common)
- National identification number
- Telephone number
- Street address
- E-mail address
- IP address (in some cases)
- Vehicle registration plate number
- Driver's license number
- Face, fingerprints, or handwriting
- Credit card numbers
- Digital identity
So skip lots of fields, have fun with your digital footprint, and be sure to register to add information and ideas (and a personal visual identifying image) to the new Fedora Commons Wiki.
It's a big wide web out there. Here's a snapshot of how others are reflecting out news and information about Fedora.
Campus Technology
http://campustechnology.com/articles/67073/
"Although today there is a wide range of commercial solutions available (each of which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars), there is also a thriving open source community called Fedora Commons, targeting digital asset management in higher education."
Digital Koans
http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2008/09/09/new-fedora-commons-hatcheck-newsletter/
Fedora (software), Wikipedia, article (updates welcome!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_(software)
Media Shelf Blog, Matt Zumwalt
http://yourmediashelf.com/blog/2008/07/03/the-missing-sync-for-fedora-commons/
Less Talk, More Code Blog, Ben O'Steen
http://oxfordrepo.blogspot.com/
Content Sausage Blog, Nature Network, Carol Minton Morris
http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/UC0AF3996/2008/09/09/designing-media-access-for-scholarship
Peer to Peer Foundation Wiki, article
http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Fedora_Commons
Please email me with additional Fedora web citings!