Robot Wisdom auxiliary

i hope to collect here
various motifs
that recur in flickr pix

one purpose
is to formalise a tagset

another
to stimulate creativity




fog-steam-smoke

outoffocus-bokeh

jumping-midair

backlit-silhouette

litfrombelow

thrufence-thruscreen-thruveil-thrucloth

thruhole

inmirror

armslengthselfportrait

overhead-groundlevel-shootingup

offcenter-tophalf-bottomhalf

tilted

lyingdown

squatting

underwater-wet

intree

detritus

makeaface-fakesmile-showtongue

strikeapose

handgesture-thefinger-peacesign

shakinghead-wildhair-hairinface-veronicalake

eyecloseup

mask

paintedskin-writingonskin

props: cigarette




kooky cliches

colored wigs/hair

eyemakeup

striped kneesocks [20,000]

asymmetrical (face)




color cliches

sunset

flowers

feathers





shock cliches

nudity

weapons

suicidal

symbols: satanic-nazi-death

blood-wounds-deadanimals

bodyslime





from website photo cliches:

StatueGroping
SeeNoEvil
LynndieEngland
ImKingOfTheWorld
JawsAtUniversal
SnortingCocaCola
FalsePhallus
KarateKidPose

also: perspectivegiant

 
 
 
 
.

linkblogging (imho)
is about filtering the best content

thus making it more accessible
to others who might share your tastes




i filter hundreds of daily flickr pix
down to some dozens a day
(now approaching 4000 total)

some (but not all) of which
now show up on my linkblog mirrors
at tumblr and googlereader

and also fullsize (but still incomplete)
at flickriver
which has the additional disadvantage
of always starting with the most recent
so catching up on the early stuff
is inconvenient

but flickr's (flash) slideshows
can now be started anywhere
so i offer some 35 startingpoints below

allowing about 100 more/new/old pix
to be scanned in each cluster
so you can stop/start any time

and you can 're-fave' pix
without stopping the show
or stop and explore a particular photographer
even subscribing to their own feed

(there are nudes in the later/more recent
episodes, but not in the first ?half)

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(future expansion:)

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1. blog-view w/rss for 'faves' (this is so obvious!?!?)
   

instead of simple
content-rating schemes
that aggregate/average ratings
down to least-common-denominator
mediocrity

i'd like to see web2.0 sites
widely implement local 'mini-blogs'

that reformat just the content
rated highly by those minibloggers
you choose to subscribe to

along with their comments on that content
and, as well
those comments of others
that they think worth blogging/passing-on

so instead of a
degrading popularity contest
you can seek out
local-to-that-site 'pre-surfers'
whose tastes resemble yours
to filter the content

and then pass on
in your own mini-blog
the best of those several
that you subscribe to




so flickr should turn their 'faves'
into feeds/blogs
with bloggable comments too

and slashdot and digg
could solve their
too-many-comments
cream-sinks problem
by allowing mini-blogs
that reformat both the best posts
and the best comments
on a single scrolling page

and the poems-of-the-day sites
(or any x-of-the-day)
if they allow mini-blogs
would be effectively allowing
mini-anthologies
that they might even charge to have
printed-on-demand

or google groups
could inject new life into netnews
(instead of bleeding it silly)
by encouraging netnews buffs
to 'promote' the best postings




and since these services
are more-or-less generalisable
perhaps a meta-web2.0-service
could supply customised mini-blogging
to sites that prefer not
to wrestle with it themselves...?

20th century social science
can be caricatured
as 10,000 pseudoscientists
in search of something to measure

for if you tried to reconstruct
the 20th century human psyche
or diagnose the 20thC human predicament
based solely on those ten-thousand's
testimony
your reconstruction would be shallow indeed
not even recognisably human

abstract statistics on human lab-rats
or at best stilted case-histories
feigning 'objectivity' by suppressing humanity




but imagine we could offer them
ten million family snapshots to measure

to classify by apparent emotional relationships

to trace the emergence of character traits

toddler dances unselfconsciously
kindergartener mugs self-consciously
girl tween begs the camera to flatter her

adolescent grows surly
open personality closes up
too cool to grin

first love imbalanced
one leads, one follows

intimations of disaster
even in the wedding pix

tough guy transformed by fatherhood

etc etc etc

the classic literary themes
now accessible as objective data records

ready for a new strategy of 'measurement'

for each story
in our radial ontology

and for each player in those stories

and for each emotion
experienced by those players

assign a distinct emotion-color

with similar emotions
getting similar colors




we assume that most human branches
will have experienced some shades
of every flavor of emotion

but we have almost no evidence
of who what where and when




so if an artifact survives
that 'documents' a past emotion

let us light
an appropriately colored star
at that time and place

(a dimmed cloud
if these are
as usual
uncertain)

with unambiguous documents
shining in pure colors
and ambiguous
impure




and first let's map
the innovators of documentation

who purified an emotion-color
in a surviving artifact-document
for the first time

these stars will cluster strongly
around individual artistic geniuses

and cluster more weakly
across eras of more general genius

and the palette of colors
will gradually fill out
as overlooked
or taboo emotions are added




but even as more and more artifacts
survive
documenting more emotions
more clearly

we still have to doubt
the authenticity
of each particular depiction
that claims to pertain
to a specific branch
at a specific point

for publication usually
assumes a public
false
face




the advent of photography
meant that occasional
true faces
were captured at specific
times and places

and the advent of flickr
means that dozens of these are now published
every second
[rwwl]

Here's a first try at a 'heraldic-barcode-style' icon for pix on flickr-etc:



The blue-green-grey stripes in the background mean the background of the photo consists of approximately that mix of sky-vegetable-mineral. Other colors would be chosen to mean water, exterior-wall, interior-wall, furniture, etc.

The concentric inner squares represent two people in the foreground. The notches in the ne and se corners show their ages and genders-- the single square notch means the inner square represents a young boy, the double diagonal notch means the outer square represents a young woman.

Three notches mean middle-aged, four mean elderly, and babies with no notches are undistinguished for gender.

The central icon shows the main activity-relationship-- here just affection.

The coloring of the inner squares could represent their state of dress/nudity, among other things.

An outer frame could be colorised to symbolise if the pic has been photoshopped, hdr'd, lomo'd, b&w'd, or if it's all cgi, or acted out by (eg) dolls. (Dots in the outer frame might indicate rough latitude and longitude.)

accurate generalisations about
human behavior on the Tree of Life
are hard to come by
because data is limited
superficial and unreliable

but plummeting prices
for public data storage
and for semi-objective
data-capture devices
(cams, mics, etc)

open an unprecedented window on
human behavior now

millions of photographers uploading
hundreds of millions of candid pix
in a raw stream anyone can tap into [rss]

immortalising
instants of gaze

point at a tourist spot
point at a flower
point at a baby
point at a pet
point at a friend

pose them in front of the tourist spot
holding the flowerbabypet
making a crazy face
making a hipster face
making a happy face
making a sane face
a funny gesture
with hand, or tongue
jump wild
dance
flash some skin


or at a party, the mad snapper
making everyone selfconscious
(unless they already were)

human nature occasionally sneaking in
accidental private truth
crypto-ethnography
[rwwl]

i've been scratching my head
wondering where all the flickrblogs are

but i think i've figured out why
there really aren't any...

the natural procedure
for flickrblogging is
when you see a snap you like
you add it to your blog
with a short comment

and people who share your taste
subscribe to your blog
and scan it regularly
for new discoveries
they can add too
if they have a flickrblog

and the 'blog this' button works fine
if you're willing to set up
a (free) offsite blog

but flickr itself seems to discourage
this style of blogging
because their 'add to faves' button
doesn't allow feeds, or comments
and reduces everything to
75*75 thumbnails
which are almost worthless

or the photographers themselves
can submit photos to 'pools'
with narrowed themes
which are rss-subscribable
but hardly worth the bother, because:

the quality within a theme
varies wildly

and the requirement that
photographers submit their own
amplifies the ego factor
intolerably

so i fall back on
the raw feed [rss]

which is 95% uninteresting
but easy to scan for
those 5% with
something

which can be followed back
to the photographer's stream

(one could almost compile statistics
on the banality of users' lives
by classifying the pix they take)

on the flickr discussion boards they argue
that submitting others' photos
to a pool
invades their privacy
which seems to me
beyond absurd

(the 'blog this' button
can always be turned off)

mining flickr
for good pix
is an awful lot like
mining webjay
for good tunes

above each flickr pic are
icons for 'fave' and 'blog'

and 'fave' is quicker
but the only available view
of a person's faves
is 36 tiny thumbnails per page

no rss
no fullpage with 'next' button

(there's the flash slideshow option
where you can pause and mark faves
but it's clumsy for this)

so i opted to start a new blog
and use the 'blog' icon
which demands
an extra step at the start
to choose your blog from a menu
and at the end
to go back to the picpage

and you're stuck with squinting
at the tiny thumbs
and opening each one
that shows promise

and because flickr's pages
are loaded with formatting
they're slow to display

all of which is a drag
on 'zipless blogging'

but even with squinting
the 'faves' pages are useful
in exactly the way
Webjay playlists are useful

you find someone whose
tastes look similar
as a startingpoint for exploration

(you can even pick a pic
or tune you like
and see who else 'favorited' it)




with Webjay playlists
you can send the whole list
to iTunes or Winamp
and check the ones you like
skip the ones you don't

and when Webjay fixes the bugs
that garbage your playlist
you'll be easily able to
aggregate your faves

and while giving each tune
a fair shake
is a lot slower than
scanning a page of thumbs

it would be quite comparable
to browsing with a 'next' button
if flickr offered that view
for others' faves

the most memorable comment i heard
during the Serrano "Piss Christ" controversy
was Frank Moore's
noting that the image itself was
beautiful (end of argument)

so the current "Britney Spears Pro-life"
hullabaloo [GoogleNews]
first makes me study the work itself
[flickr, 3pix]

and while i regret not yet finding
an unembarrassed photo
of the action end

i have to say
as art
i think it may be
the most powerful fertility image
of the last 20,000 years

the sculptor is evidently
school of Koons

playing the media
with serious intent
[2005 NYT] [mp3 interview]
but that won't matter
ten years from now

nonliving objects
on the Tree of Life
(Berkeley's "furniture of the world")
trace strict vertical paths
normally
unless moved by a living agent

human branches
twine among stationary ensembles
of objects
(settings, or locales)
growing more familiar
with each visit




at every point in time
a human branch
may have its eyes
open or closed

if open
they project a vector
in a given direction
normally halting
on a target object

as we trace
the branch's path
this gaze
flicks from target to target

with familiar settings
requiring less gazing
than unfamiliar ones




(flickr supports geotagging
for latitude and longitude
but has it anticipated tagging also
the direction the camera was pointing?)

i've noticed
when i think about a locale
my image of that locale
implies a point of view
not just in space, oddly
but sometimes also
a moment in time
when that locale
imprinted
for no obvious reason

This long post should ultimately clarify my "crystal tags" protocol
but it will take a circuitous path getting there

As the title implies, crystal tags can be viewed as Napster-for-URLs
or as a p2p version of del.icio.us
but the same principles will also apply to images (flickr), music, email, etc

To explore del.icio.us in particular
I'll consider what Robot Wisdom Weblog (RWWL) will be like
if I ever start posting it there, item by item, at del.icio.us

But first I want to admit that del.icio.us is still mostly baffling to me

(Could bloggers declare, say, the 13th of each month to be "I'm-an-idiot day"
and try to post that day about some topic that they secretly feel
everyone understands better than they do?)

I could fairly easily let del.icio.us take over the RSS version of RWWL
but it would feel a little like taking my string of pearls
and breaking the string
letting them scatter before strange swine
since most del.icio.us readers will see the items individually
with no context

and it feels too like I'm trusting my pearls to a site
with no visible means of support
who get nothing back from the bandwidth I gobble
except one tiny popularity-vote for each URL I post
and whatever useful tags I trouble to add
so I wonder will they stick around in the same format
or will they add gross ads...


What I'd gain back is the chance to scan my own blog there
and see how many others linked each URL, and who
and so possibly subscribe to their 'blogstreams'
(though so far I feel uneasy about this,
since I don't think most del.icio.us-ers
expect to be subscribed to this way)

This function is sort of a cerebral 'matchmaking system'
and it oughtn't be too hard for del.icio.us-the-site-itself
to find users with similar url-streams
and 'introduce' them

But this means everyone has to be self-conscious about what URLs they post
so maybe there needs to be an optional 'personal del.icio.us'
maybe "Del.icio.us Desktop"
that works the same but keeps less-public URLs offline
(your porn sites,
your secret identities,
your obscure specialties)

Flickr too could offer "Flickr Desktop" for private images
and Google could offer a "Gmail Desktop" that mirrors in synch
your online mail archive
but allows you to delete the online copies of your most sensitive mail


But if all these Web 2.0 online apps are going to be echoed offline
we'll want the possibility of allowing p2p access to friends,
with special permission-levels

so that your secret Olsen-Twins Fanclub can swap urls or pix or posts
or so you can let your new girlfriend explore your more private sides

And once we get this working a lot of the centralised functions of
del.icio.us/flickr/Gmail
become secondary
because you can swap directly via your own buddy-lists


On del.icio.us every URL is a (wasted) potential conversation
between everyone who linked it
and this function of hosting chats
on every topic under the sun
is a tricky one
because you generally want to keep the chat as open as possible
but then someone has to police for griefers and spam

But obviously, policing such chats is not a centralised function
it's a distributed one, with each chat having its own moderator(s).

16Sep: [reply]