This is gonna take a while…

So, after six plus years and 3,085 links, to Diigo, I go. It’s sad to see something once so promising fall to bloat and bad design.

Secure wireless redirect

Good; that tells me what to do. Not as good: when I followed the directions, downloading a Java applet, checking the publisher, etc., then entering my username and password, a second error was raised (link through for text):

Timeout or wrong password?

I’ve been using the secure wireless (and recommending it to students) for about a year. Perhaps that’s why, even though I got this “failure” message, I connected just fine. In any case, the error message is problematic–is the problem a wrong password or a network timeout? Software shouldn’t ask users to distinguish these very different problems–especially when, by policy, we’re locked out after five failed logins. Better to say what’s wrong and allow us to correct the typo or report the network issue.

Finally, here’s some wording which could be a little better:

Authentication server error

“The credentials you provided cannot be determined to be authentic.” Hrm. This is from the new authentication server–again, a welcome change from the days of expired and/or self-signed certificates. We should drop the Official Style here: “Wrong username or password. Please try again” seems a reasonable substitution.

Thanks to the WIU technology people for the security push.

Right away, I’m wondering about notology: how much time we’ll devote to what not to do. There are lovely visualizations out there, but a lot of noise competing with the signal. Too many “infographics” would be better rendered as simple text with an occasional chart or graphic, rather than a gigantic graphic. Here’s an example, “Securing yourself from a world of hackers,” 1000 pixels wide and 3172 pixels tall. Another, “Profile of Mac vs PC,” is 947 × 3693. Both graphics approach interesting subject matter: password security is particularly welcome, and the Mac vs PC comparisons are funny. But execution is poor. Form seems the starting point, not content. (“Infographics are hot hot hot. Go get me one.”) Worse, I see plenty of of questionable how-tos high in Google search results. Again, I welcome suggestions for high quality sites.

I’m considering opening week work which features a few graphics, discusses their high and low points, and makes clear that visualization is not just prettying up (poor quality) content. Tying these activities to course objectives would set a clear path for the semester. For example, content in this password security graphic is weak:

• The headline “Securing yourself from a world of hackers” is alarmist and misleading. Any security professional will say “securing yourself” is impossible. Reducing risk? That’s possible. Unfortunately, bad content carries through to “How to create the perfect password”–no. There can be no perfect password; no security mechanism is perfect. The copy promises something which can’t be delivered. From a security firm, this is disappointing.
• The method for password generation and memorization is questionable. Try the mnemonic recommended here: it’s cumbersome at best. They generate ?LACpAs56IKMs” with five steps. Who can remember this? How is it more secure than other common methods of creating pseudo-complex passwords? If, as they recommend, it’s okay to write down passwords, why not just use randomly generated character strings? And it’s incomplete: they recommend testing passwords, but don’t say how.
• The authors call on a few sources (Schneier) but cite irregularly, truncating citations to base URLs or not including them at all. The graphic mentions NASA guidelines but there’s no mention of NASA in the sources. Not a good example for academic writing!
• Writing style is wordy and inconsistent. Some bullets use second person; some use third person. (“It is okay to write passwords down so they can be remembered” not “You can write down your passwords” or “Writing down your passwords is okay.”). Copy needs revision to bring characters and actions forward.

Etc. This maps to an objective about enhancing high-quality content through careful representation of data. Similar critiques could be targeted at others: effective design, knowing common visualization approaches, and familiarity with common visualization tools. (I guess it’s time to build out those objectives, eh?)

What “good” graphics should I include? Tufte’s well-known favorite, Minard’s rendering of Napoleon’s march? Staying meta, David McCandless’s What Makes Good Information Design? would be a good pick. I like both, but I think I also need some tables. Sometimes, tables are just better. A course in visualization which taught students how to make accessible, effective, well-designed tables would provide a very useful and transferable skill.

a, ad, adapt, add, apt, at, dad, dada, dam, damp, data, gamma, gap, jag, jam, jaw, ma, mad, madam, magma, mamma, map, mat, maw, pad, pajama, papa, pat, paw, pawpaw, tad, tag, tamp, tap, tat, wag, watt

(Yes, I know about T9Word. But just imagine texting with this vocabulary!)

• I’m still catching up from four very long and productive days at Computers & Writing. Madelyn got sick the night before the conference, literally; two times I woke to help her throw up, then get cleaned up, settled down, and back to sleep. (Poor girl. Something she ate, I think; she was better a day later.) So I arrived short on sleep, and did nothing to catch up during. A good problem to have: excellent sessions and conversation. Easily the best C&W I’ve attended. I’ll have a more complete post about the conference in a few days.
• The day before the C&C book award was announced for From A to <A>, we were #1,200,000 on their best-sellers. The day after, #141,000. So I guess a few people bought the book right away. Cool.
• In the next few days, I hope to put a few beers now in secondary into bottles: IPA, session pale ale, and spiced pumpkin honey wheat. The Saison Chris and I brewed May 7 is still fermenting away. After a week, it looked dead, but when I racked it, it woke up enough to build up a second krausen. I’ve read that’s typical of the yeast I picked (WLP 565): it has a tendency to stop and start. I hope so; the saison had only moved from 1.054 to 1.032 when I racked it after 12 days. I’d like to see it under 1.020 before bottling.
• My new profile pic on Facebook is this snap from our mothers’ day trip to the Peoria Zoo. We smile with our whole faces!
• We are in minimal child-care zone, now that WIU is out for spring and the girls’ day care is closed. Madelyn will be doing pre-K and YMCA day camp this summer in between our travel, and we’ve planned some playdate trading and babysitter time for the girls as well. For those of you in Macomb, we’re always looking for more of the former…
• Speaking of travel, we’ve planned a three-plus week road trip this summer. Arkansas, where we’ll meet my brother and sis-in-law to camp; northern New Mexico; Pagosa Springs then Denver, Colorado; Rocky Mountain NP, and maybe Rapid City after that. Many miles will be driven, trails hiked, DVDs watched, craft beers consumed.
• Madelyn and Amelia have been getting some grandparent time lately. Bits and Eric were here for five days or so last week, and my parents are coming next week. I’m very pleased about both visits, and I hope for more.
• My running injury troubles are returning, or continuing, depending on the way I think about it. Lately my feet have been bugging me. Erin was diagnosed with plantar fasciitis, so that’s on my mind. Suck. I think I need to start another cycle of swim and bike only pretty soon. But I want to finish being a Couch to 5K volunteer first. I haven’t made it out for as many runs as I wanted. Maybe half of them. Regardless, it’s been a lot of fun. Now if my body would just cooperate.
• I’ve been trying to update rsync on our Mac Mini today, which means I need to compile it. Which means I need developer tools. So, credit card in hand, off I go. No. fun. at. all. I can’t believe how shoddy Apple Store / Apple ID / Apple Developer / App Store / iTunes integration is. Trying to get an update for Xcode, I finally got a download started–then realized I had created a new Apple ID, rather than updating my existing one (despite using the same credentials). Great. Now I’ll have to log in and out to update different pieces of software.
• Making ice cream today, I overheated the custard. Gack, scrambled eggs. First time I’ve done that. Well, we get to see if Lebovitz’s prescription for that mistake–into the blender while it’s still hot!–is a winner.

Here’s what my co-presenters and I offered:

• Steve introduced the panel, explained how we came up with the idea, and noted that we organized it using Google Docs and social media, not blogging.
• I said blogging isn’t dead, but commenting is. I identified two reasons: the chilling effects of trolling, and the fracturing of communities caused by social media.
• Virginia pointed out that Web 2.0 reified the idea of blogs. Great point; blogging may be dead in that it is ubiquitous (at least in style). We need to recall ntions of blogging which see it as thinking out loud together. She plugged Academia.edu.
• Carrie noted that academic blogs might be dead; a lot of bloggers who focus on other spheres are going strong. When we ask students to blog, exigence is often muted or lost, and blogging becomes just another form of boring academic writing. But we can encourage students to find exigence through their own spaces, like her students’ blogs, Pint-Size Pixels and The Indie Kind.
• Liz offered this superb couplet: “Blogging is dead, as dead is it could be / it killed the hipsters, and now it’s killing me.” She noted that after blogging every day for five years, her blog is now cryogenically frozen. Her most popular posts were on disturbing topics, raising questions about readers. I really liked this analogy: blogging is dead in the same way Latin is–we identify it as virtuous and see strong benefits for other forms of writing from it. But it doesn’t connect directly with our vernacular discourses.
• Brian suggested we see blogs as flow-based media (e.g. Ridolfo’s rhetorical velocity), tracing vectors of literate practices through them, rather than seeing them as finished products. These media are sedimentary: they can be stirred up periodically, only to settle down, and they accrete over time.
• Andre: if blogging is dead, why does Nielsen Media identify 76,000 new blogs in the past 24 hours? This raises questions about commercialization: are these real blogs or simply ways to repackage content (for example, everyone on Fox News has their own “blog”).
• Brendan identified blogging as “other,” invoking the idea of the “Buribunk” which records everything about everyone’s life. Some of that life-streaming has moved to social media, which is fine. So what’s left? Reportage made blogs famous. Maybe that’s where it needs to stay.

Here are some of the conversation threads. See also the #cwcon #e13 Storify page Dennis Jerz generously made for our session:

• We didn’t define “blogging” or “dead,” and I think we did a good job working that back into the discussion productively. For example, Bob Whipple asked if Blackboard “blogs” are really blogs. I think most of us agreed they aren’t.
• Many of the panelists discussed ways social media are competing with blogs. But blogging is a genre, and many social media are platforms–they work only in specific ways, and their content is wedded to specific forms. So the content on blogs is much more portable. Dennis Jerz pointed out the move from blogs to social media is often from open systems to closed commercial products.
• Troy Hicks turned the discussion to RSS, which has a big role in blogging, since it’s the primary engine for notifications and blog-to-blog and blog-to-other-media remediation. Several people pointed out that Dave Winer’s “Scripting News” remains a very popular blog; its content drives that. I noted that Facebook takes a one-way approach to RSS; feeds used to be available but aren’t any longer. Brian noted that while Twitter still offers RSS, they’ve changed their API to reduce the capacity for getting data out of Twitter. (Awesome tweet from Mark Crane: “Facebook is the Roach Motel of RSS.”)
• The search capacity of Facebook and Twitter isn’t very good, and their interfaces focus on the present moment. Combined with social media’s limitations on RSS, and the stabilizing influence of the permalink, this makes them far less permanent than blogs. Is this a feature or a bug? Carrie and several other people weren’t sure they wanted tweets to be permanent. Matt Burton pointed us to Storify, which can suck in social media and facilitates adding commentary. A bunch of people immediately began playing with it. (Including me.)
• Carl Whithaus gave us a great sound bite: “Not only is blogging dead, Twitter is too. And Storify is the zombie life of both.”
• Maybe we should have subtitled the panel: Yes, No, Zombie!
• Should we really care if blogging is dead? If the writing on blogs is transient, it would be fine for a blog to live and die, having served its purpose. As Harriet from B/StM said, “You guys are talking about bloggings as if it was a marriage!” Maybe we should be looking at the number of people who’ve tried blogging, not those who still are.

Feedback, corrections, additions welcome, though I don’t expect to edit this so much as help Dennis’s Storify effort. And please point out if I’ve misrepresented anything; things moved fast, and I was moving between three conversations much of the time–and loving it. After the session, I said to anyone who would listen, “I hope I never give a long talk again.” Please, let’s see more conferences in the field follow those who’ve realized the value of short talks and conversation.

My thanks to Steve Krause for pulling it together, and all the presenters and audience members for making this the most enjoyable conference presentation I’ve ever been a part of.

My bit is: blog commenting is in a bad way because of trolling (for large blogs) and social media’s tendency to fracture communities (for small ones). Here’s the whole thing, which I want to cut down a little to ensure it fits in the three minute window I’ll have to speak.

When weblogs first emerged, both collections of original writing and aggregation-model blogs like Slashdot, I remember thinking blogs were going to revolutionize online discussions. Sophisticated moderation and rating systems would prevent the legendary problems of Usenet newsgroups. Comments would be, to borrow Slashdot’s moderation categories, funny, insightful, interesting, and informative, with off-topic, troll, flamebait, and redundant discourse pushed aside.

Of course, this didn’t happen. Blogging was able, in large part, to overcome spamming. But blog commenting leaves much to be desired. Sure, there are some pockets of success. Relatively small weblogs, like many of those in our field–Alex Reid’s, or Steve’s, or Brendan’s–still have success with comments. Brendan, for example, often has authors commenting on book reviews he writes. But overall, blog commenting is in a bad way. Does that mean it’s dead? And if it’s the interactivity of comments that makes blogs different from plain old web sites, then what? If the interactivity is gone, is a blog a blog?

I see two things hurting blog comments, for two different kinds of blogs:

For big blogs, trolling lowers the quality of discourse and discourages participation. I’m talking not only about trolling proper–4chan-style stirring the pot for laughs at someone else’s expense–but posts which are made with little regard for any politeness or community. Aggressive, hastily written, disrespectful, whatever. A visit to any large blog, or site which has adopted the comment-after-story style of blogging will show this: Huffington Post, ESPN.com, or scores of newspaper sites. Moderation can tame trolling, but the investment required is considerable. And many blogs and sites which seek to emulate blog style have simply shut down commenting in response. Frankly, I’m not sure what alternative they have.

For small blogs, aggregation by other media has affected public spaces on blogs. Back when I used to write on my weblog more than once a month, I enjoyed robust discussions regularly. But these discussions fractured when I started replicating my posts on Facebook as notes. I’ve watched many blogs make the same transition. Similarly, for Twitter users, retweets or directed messages can replace trackbacks or comments, splitting up what used to be one community. Yes, in some cases, the frequency and depth of discussions increases when blogs are aggregated in other places. But at the least, the gated-community effect of Facebook and Twitter moves some discourse from blogs to parent sites. There’s room for more research here: how are these services affecting blogs “native” comment and trackback interfaces? This would be interesting to consider for large sites, too.

I’ve talked about blogs big and small, which implies, of course, that there’s a middle space where commenting can thrive. And perhaps services like Disqus or Facebook Connect will end up finding it. Blogging is still a young medium, and the social media interacting with it are even younger. So perhaps five years from now things will be very different.

So (after the jump), here’s the first one, for the town hall: “More code please, we’re geeks!” In which I argue that we’ve got to keep working with code, and suggest a framework for doing so.

Some my first involvement in Computers & Writing was engagement in email discussions, or maybe I should say holy wars, about the way we should approach web authoring. The TechRhet list returned to this topic in February 2011. I don’t want to reopen those holy wars today — at least not directly — since I agree with those who wrote in February: code wins. Sure, we probably aren’t opening Textpad and typing <html> <head> <title> anymore; but we are and should be engaging code directly. As Karl Stolley suggested: nobody is arguing against learning code in writing, but lots of people are doing just that in practice.

So if we have a theory-practice gap, then what? We need a framework for engaging code.

In an essay I wrote with Jeff Rice, we point out that unlike print, the web doesn’t hide its markup. Marshall McLuhan said that was a characteristic of type. As he wrote, “Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.” But we don’t live in a solely typographic world any more. Our world is configured of code we can express and read: markup and other kinds. And this code is available via View Source, through cut and paste code made available for embedding, and infrastructures designed for reapplication.
I borrow the way forward for us, then, from McLuhan, in three parts: reading, expressing, and configuring code.

Reading code means language awareness — knowing how to read code, and where to find it, but also the different forms it comes in. We think first about markup and source code, but we need to consider standards, specificiations, documentation, APIs, and other texts which supplement code. In fact, much of code reading is these related texts. We know from Agile development that when writing, we need to keep pushing software out the door, rather than obsess over these supporting texts. However, as we learn and teach, they can be a focus. So we need to pay attention to associated reading, developer tool kits and frameworks, as well as what might be called “the code itself.”

Expressing code means writing code and sharing it. More to that, it means not avoiding code. The big advantage we have now over ten or even five years ago is tools which allow us to build, test, and distribute software very easily. AppMaker, Google Docs, WordPress, and a host of other software is built with this platform architecture in mind. For example, I used Delicious to build an annotated index of course readings. Derek Mueller used the Google Docs API to build writing center scheduling software. I could mention many more interesting projects which leverage a small amount of coding knowledge for large results. Here’s the payoff: expression means working with the smallest bits of code possible. Experimenting with uses of hashtags or at-handles on Twitter. These small expressions offer low barriers not only for doing, but for discussion too.

Configuring code means understanding its social, mental, and physical infrastructures. How does code fit into larger systems? How does it function as writing? Here two focuses are necessary: transfer and sustainability. We must ask ourselves, what am I doing to allow connections with other contexts, both in terms of learning and general engagement? Kristin Arola’s work with templates comes to mind here: are we approaching with templating in general, or only in connection with a specific use — say, adapting WordPress as a low-end CMS for a community literacy organization? We need to explicitly address these movements from general to specific in research, experimentation, and teaching. What can be carried to other contexts from our work? How much energy will be required to adapt this code? to maintain it? to improve it?

And as you can tell from the overlap here: we are much better equipped to do any of these things when we do all three of them. The engine for learning code is comparison, and we should engage it as often as possible. Here the old model works: hack, view source, hack, test, repeat.

I’m happy to talk more about any of these ideas in our discussion. Thanks.

Edit 5/20: I forgot to post the slide deck for this talk.

Joy.

Everyone involved wants as little to do with the whole thing as possible. Some quotes from emails and web pages:

• The University is not responsible for the web site and questions should be directed to the Procurement Call Center at 866-455-2897.
• The Procurement Policy Board (PPB) is responsible for publishing the communications reports only. Please do not contact the PPB.
• You may contact the Procurement Call Center at 866-455-2897 with systems questions and/or issues. Please do not call the Procurement Call Center with questions on reporting requirements.
• The communications may contain information or opinions that are not that of the Procurement Policy Board.  Communication reports should not be construed as statements of fact or policy that have been adopted by the Procurement Policy Board.

Don’t blame us–don’t even ask us who to blame!

I would like to know if similar requirements are in place in other states. This seems like a giant hassle with very limited return. I could understand doing this for, say, all purchases over $500–but for every purchase? For every inquiry about every purchase? From my place in the cheap seats, this looks like just another hoop I’ll have to jump through–and another set of forms to deal with, and more time spent on paperwork, not actual work. From a vendor’s perspective, I wouldn’t be happy to see my conversations with prospective clients summarized and posted on a web site my competition could see. And I’m wondering how anyone thinks this law can be enforced.

What about interface design? Here’s a screenshot. Implementation leaves much to be desired: the interface looks and functions like a 1998-era web form, clunky in appearance, and shoddy in logic. For example, I entered a phone number in simple ten digit format (3092982212) and it was flagged as an error–without indicating the format to be used. The first time I tried to enter a report, it was rejected because my user profile wasn’t complete. Information I entered during registration wasn’t carried over into my user profile. (Where did it go?) Communication reports can’t be edited once they are submitted. Why not? At the least, amendments should be possible. Humans make mistakes! (That’s all when I was able to use the system. The first two times, it simply bonked.)

I could go on. It’s one thing to ask state employees to keep their work in the public eye. I’m completely on board with that. But there is little to applaud here.