Sunday, 6th August, 2006

To Do

Purely for my own benefit, a list of all the things that are currently mulling around my head as Little Ideas That I Must Get Around To™ and keeping me awake at night, although there is, in a sense, some part of this which is a "Hey, anyone want to get involved?"

Group Blog

There has been a notion somewhere in my head for quite a while to try and expand the blogging system that I've got here into something else — something bigger. To some extents, some of the recent debates (both here and elsewhere) have made me wonder if there's an opportunity to explore the idea of a colaborative, salonesque (Thanks Koan!) conversation-space approach to collective thought.

I'm currently writing up a whole proposal on this — I'll get back to yous when I've finished.

Research

I don't think I've mentioned this before — or maybe not in this way — but one of the things I know I need to do is plough some of my mental energy into a more structured form of research.

One of the underlying things that's been interesting me for a long time, is how this weblog here — and other online re-presentations of 'me' — figures in my head. How I react to the characters and personas that I inadvertently create when I get involved in online spaces. What that whole Graham-Kisa-Siobhan diagram was about the other day. What it means when I choose one particular email account to send something from. How that makes me think about me.

And, of course, how that makes others think about them.

So I made a (very) tentative, rough proposal the other day to the Head of Research at Uni, and the reaction was positive

Worksheets

Each year, I seem to find myself being the default Final Cut Pro training monkey at work, and each year it laments me greatly that I never actually get around to making clear, simple worksheets on how to do basic things like editing, capturing, and exporting films to the web/DVD.

I am so going to do it over the next couple of weeks. If anyone would like a copy when they're done, let me know.

Self-Promotion

I am shite at blowing my own trumpet. Really

And I'm equally as annoying in my lamentations that "No-one ever sees what I do" as I am shite at the aforementioned trumpet-blowing.

Not wanting to be overly immodest here or anything, but recently I've been looking through some of the stuff on my hard disk, and realising to my self that actually, some of the things I've made are fucking fantastic.

Stripey films, swirly images, effective (if inefficient) clumps of code...

I'm sick to death of all of them existing in a small vacuum — so I'm going to be hugely aggressive in promoting them over the course of the next few weeks.

In a similar vein, one of my greatest character-flaws (after the self-obsession, the arrogance, the vanity and the drunkeness, of course) is how I always chicken out of getting involved in opportunities that come my way. Just recently I've missed on a fair few opportunities to be involved with things because I got cold feet and chickened out through moments of self-doubt.

And I'm annoyed with myself enough to do something about it

Linkage Map

All that dicking around with maps and links between people and groups yesterday, left me with a profound desire to have something automated running that would do something similar.

There is, of course the wonderful Flickr Graph which tracks links between people, but I want to build something else.

It occurred to me last night that a "Six Degrees of Seperation" thing might be quite interesting in Second Life, so I'm envisaging something that creates little coloured balls based on an avatar's unique key, and then links them altogether based on who's got who in their friends list.

To add yourself to it, you'd just fly around until you see someone's ball you recognise, click on it, and it'll add you to the map and draw any links to people that you're connected to.

Might be good, might be shit — but I'm leaning towards the former.

School Web Stuff

Ah, Real Paid Work™

After a flurry of development activity at the start of this year, and a resulting website that bloody works for a change, I've let any further development slide a little — spending the majority of my time tweaking bugs and hand-holding people through the log-in process.

Just very quickly, here are the things I'm wanting to concentrate on:

• Making the 'projects' section a lot more easy to use, and edit.

• Upping the efficiency of the uploading scripts, making them handle more stuff, and making them much more 'me friendly' by logging somewhere what they're actually doing.

• Making the initial log-in process a lot more self-explanatory. There was a lovely article¹ about making the sign-up process more fun by having tutorials instead of blank pages, and I really need to do that — considering that I could have potentially five-times the userbase in September, and I can't hold that many hands.

¹ Somewhere ... sorry, can't find it now.

I don't get you The ones without balls wouldn't be on the map

Too Many Cocks Spoil The Brothel?

Oh, I know — that's a totally irrelevant title, and a reference to men's bits and whore-houses has nothing to do with the amount of TV=based groups on Flickr ... but it's funny And when have I ever passed up the opportunity to make a quick quip as opposed to making a Firm And Serious Point™?

I would like, if I may, to present you with the result of yesterday and today's obsessive-based work...

(PDF version is here — I might make it clickable at some point)

Before I delve into any analysis of this, I should, perhaps, explain what I've tried to do here, and note some of the, ahem, discrepencies in it.

As I mentioned yesterday, the idea behind this is to try and map all the various TG/TV (and, sometimes TS) groups that there are on Flickr, by starting at trannyflickr, drawing a link to each admin, then linking to each of the TV/TG groups they belong to and repeating until I come to a dead end.

Mostly I follwed that to the letter, but I took some 'artistic licence' in a couple of few places:

• Although I referenced them on the map, I didn't list the admins of some of the groups (like LGBT and Life's A Drag for example), figuring that although there was an element of 'tranny' to them, they were actually much more to do with general diversity.

• If an admin wasn't a tranny, then I didn't follow their links.

• The prude in me took over and decided not to map a group if it had an erect penis as its group icon

• I limited the number of admins of the Top 20 Tranny Pics to those who had a photo in the pool this morning — because it would just get all a bit too silly. Also, I didn't follow the links of anyone who only got on the map because they had a photo in that pool. Because I'm lazy.

• I left out any group whose photos weren't public to me - which is why the Transpocalypse Now! group appears, but some others don't

As well as all those, there are ways perhaps that I could make it a lot better/more informative — like making the size of the pink blobs relative to either the member numbers, photo numbers, or extent of the discussions within each group...

...but, you know, I'd like to have some form of life

The questions I'm now thinking about, in relation to this map, are (a) "Does this tell us anything useful?" (b) "If so, what?" and (c) "How do I feel about that?"

The first thing that springs to my mind, is God there are a lot of groups. There's general chatty places (like 'trannyflickr'), more specialised places (like 'Crossdressers in Lingerie and High Heels', and places that are specifically about a group-intent/art-project (like 'Sometimes...')

Despite any knee-jerk reaction I might have, I don't necessarily think that a large number of groups is a Bad Thing™. We're a wide and diverse community, and the chances of us all fitting into one little bracket are slim-to-none. Having said that though, I have to confess that I'm a little bemused by certain of them — most specifically the ones that seem to be just clones of each other, with the same pictures and the same members in each.

The more I look at it, and the more I think about it, the more confused I am as to what I actually think about the issue — and whether or not there's an issue there at all.

Does it matter?

/me goes away to drink coffee and think for a bit