mountain masala

flash apps coming to the iphone

read about it here!

teenagers and online networking

here are a few links about young people and online netowrking:

Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics (pdf)
this is a PhD thesis from dana boyd - source

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices - gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens' engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices - self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

My analysis centers on how social network sites can be understood as networked publics which are simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice. Networked publics support many of the same practices as unmediated publics, but their structural differences often inflect practices in unique ways. Four properties - persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability - and three dynamics - invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private - are examined and woven throughout the discussion.

While teenagers primarily leverage social network sites to engage in common practices, the properties of these sites configured their practices and teens were forced to contend with the resultant dynamics. Often, in doing so, they reworked the technology for their purposes. As teenagers learned to navigate social network sites, they developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites. Their strategies reveal how new forms of social media are incorporated into everyday life, complicating some practices and reinforcing others. New technologies reshape public life, but teens' engagement also reconfigures the technology itself.

 

Also a report on different age groups and social networking here.

I'll look forward to having a read. the four internet users in our house are all facebook friends, and I'm having the odd experience of finding out what my kids are doing, thinking and feeling in their bedrooms via facebook under the same roof!

you say you want a revolution

mike from redfishbluefish told me about the commercial "revolution" themes for wordpress, and we were both pleasantly surprised to find that they were going open source.

you can download the themes for free, and then pay if you want tech support. sign up for emails and get free tech tips.

check them out here.

blog widgets

i'm not quite sure what I've done here, but I've made a widget of my blog at widgetbox, so you'll see a new button on the right that lets you download the widget and put it on your site or blog or forehead. I'm still trying to work out why you'd want to do that. i was hoping that it would let people turn their blogs into dashboard widgets (for macs) and perhaps it does, but I'm still trying to work it out. at least it seems to be free...

more apple software

i thought i'd add a couple more Mac software bits that have come in handy this past fortnight. My iTunes collection has been bulging at over 12 Gb, and i keep having to shift it around in order to do video stuff. so i've been delighted to find a way to make multiple (hence smaller) itunes libraries using Libra. (i know, but that's what they called it). it's shareware. and there's a PC version. (having an iPod would certainly help)

the second thing was that in trying to get Final Cut Studio to fit on my Mac, I've had to play around with where certain things are installed, and re-install some part of packages. i discovered Pacifist which has been brilliant in opening an install package on a disk and letting me install one part of it, and if i wish, tell it where to go.

both very useful.

iPartition and iDefrag

because i have a partitioned hard drive on my Mac (i prefer this for working with multimeida projects), the de-fragmenting the 'project' drive is always an issue, and more recently, the need to resize the partitions (since OS X is fussy about what is on the boot drive/partition. having given up on Norton, i have been pleased to discover iPartition and iDefrag fromCoriolis Systems. I've bought iPartition which comes with iDefrag Lite. I'm able to make a boot disk which will allow me to re-partition the hard drive without wiping any data, and defrag the boot drive as well. of course, the application will defrag the second partition and external drive without the need for a boot disk.

it's been excellent value and i highly recommend it.

IT conversations

want to hear what Lawrence Lessig, Steve Wozniak, Doug Rushkoff and others are saying about the electronic world? audio of their talks over at IT Conversations.

They have a link to the Long Now project, which has certainly upped its web presence since I last visited.

How good is this - a seminar where the creator of "The Sims" talks with Brian Eno about "playing with time"! Go along if you're in San Francisco on monday!

looking forward to these mp3s.

i told you i had a pile of blogs coming.

digiculture news blog

this is good.

Protein Feed

just added it to my newsreader.

so much digital trivia. so little time....

cute overkill

apparently Cute Overload is the place to find cute, kitsch and sometimes funny stuff.

maybe....

an alternative to browser text?

If you're into web design, have a look at this:

With today’s release of sIFR, or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, we finally have a standards-compliant way to deliver rich typographical text in a flexible manner to over 90% of web users.

Link: Mike Davidson: Introducing sIFR: The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text.

Download whatever it is here. It's done with Flash and Javascript but I havent exactly looked at it yet!