John Lacey » Social Networking

Crowdsourcing For Creative People

John Lacey — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:39:35 +0000

Crowdsourcing is a rather elaborate sounding term that actually refers to something that is both simple and quite powerful. In the past if you had a question you might ask one of your friends for their advice, perhaps you’d meet them for coffee or give them a call. Perhaps they could help you with your problem, perhaps not. Social networking technologies such as Facebook and Twitter have given us the ability to broadcast information to a lot of people with a minimum of fuss. In a sense crowdsourcing is like thinking aloud and seeing who has something to add to your thought.

I’ll illustrate this concept with a recent example from my own Twitter feed. I’ve been enjoying sketching in my little sketchbook lately but invariably I find that I end up smudging the picture itself. So I decided to ask the question…

I am clearly a n00b… but how does anyone draw with pencils without smudging their artwork and/or their hands? lol

I got some great responses – certainly information that isn’t in any of the art books I’ve been studying and not things I imagine I would’ve figured out for myself.

@ErinGibsonArt:

Place paper towel under hands. It works! RT @JohnLacey: how does anyone draw with pencils without smudging their artwork and/or their hands?

@leesawatego:

@JohnLacey draw on an easel; fix the drawing with fixative at diff stages; better pencils???

Erin Gibson is a very talented artist and someone I’ve come to know through YouTube. The thing I found really interesting though is that Leesa Watego is not an artist but as someone who is married to one still offered great insight into possible solutions to my problem. And with crowdsourcing you don’t need to decide who to ask (and aren’t constrained by the assumptions you make about other people’s expertise), you just put it out there and see what comes back to you.

Facebook and Friendship

John Lacey — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 06:03:15 +0000

There are as many uses of social networking services as there are users using them. While it can be tempting to assume that Facebook for example is just about playing Mob Wars and collecting ‘friends’ as if they were Pokemon (a notion popular with some media outlets), many people use such services to have heart felt interactions with people they care about. Sometimes these are interactions that due to a myriad of reasons – including geographical distance – just can’t happen by any other means.

People, in effect, opt in to a relationship with you. And the flip side of this is that they can also opt out of that relationship at any moment. Sometimes they just won’t have the time to devote to that interaction. Perhaps their (if you’ll forgive the expression) ‘real life’ will obscure their need or desire for online communications. Perhaps they are suddenly without the means to access the Internet. Some people will decide that they are suffering from data overload and quit using the Internet altogether. Some people will decide they have no need for the particular website or service and delete their account or profile. And as the user, the consumer if you will, this flexibility is desirable and empowering.

But as someone left behind it can be bewildering and heartbreaking. It may be some time before you even realise that a friend has left your social circle. You may not have any information about their motivations for leaving. If you haven’t communicated with them via other means you may not be able to communicate with them again. And if they’ve decided to abstain from online communications altogether it won’t matter how many emails you send, you may be left forever wondering what happened to them.

I respect each individual’s right to use or not use these resources as they see fit. I would just hope that if those relationships mean anything to you at all that you offer some consultation before an abrupt departure.

History: 140 Characters At A Time

John Lacey — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:13:17 +0000

According to Doug Gross (CNN):

Twitter and the Library of Congress announced Wednesday that every public tweet posted since Twitter started in 2006 will be archived digitally by the federal library.

The purpose, according to a blog post by Library of Congress communications director Matt Raymond, is to document “important tweets” as well as gather information about the way we live through the sheer masses of tweets on the site.

Nothing has made me quite as self-conscious about tweeting as the knowledge that those tweets will be recorded for all of time within the Library of Congress. But I do actually believe in the logic behind the decision. I truly believe that all that collective information tells us a lot about ourselves and each other and deserves to be recorded and studied. There is a part of me that can already imagine the historians and archaeologists of the future doing technological ‘digs’ in the way such professionals have excavated information about the past from artefacts exhumed from the ground.

My concern is that this information may be taken out of the context it was produced within – with it’s particular sense of time and space and audience – and be misconstrued in a way that is currently confined to readings of religious texts. Will some flippant tongue-in-cheek remark made on a sunny Sunday afternoon be used to explain a particular political persuasion? Will some injoke with a close friend be ‘reimagined’ as a grandiose conspiracy theory?

Social networking technologies are an important part of my life, but this blog is primarily concerned with creativity and art and I think there might be a creative lesson in this as well. If you are too preoccupied with what others will think of you, your efforts and your expressions, you’ll never get anything done. (It be might be worthwhile to revisit Nina Simone’s thoughts on this matter.)

And if you’d prefer not to enter the records of the Library of Congress at this time or in this fashion, you’ll have to make your Twitter stream private.

Hide Annoying Facebook Applications In Your News Feed

John Lacey — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 09:46:19 +0000

I’ve often griped about Facebook. But the truth is once you deny access to 90% of the Facebook applications and hide anything ending with ‘Ville’ from your news feed, it gets back to being friends sharing thoughts and images with each other. And that is something I can appreciate.

Hide Annoying Facebook Applications In Your News Feed
You can’t control which applications your friends are using. But that doesn’t mean you should be notified every time they find a sad virtual animal walking across their virtual farm…

Simply move over the offending item in your news feed. You will see in the top right hand corner the word “Hide” will appear. Click on “Hide”. You will then be given the opportunity to either hide items from a particular person or those that relate to a particular application. Simply do this for each application you wish to remove from your news feed.

Check Your Application Settings
With a new year upon us it is worthwhile doing a quick spring clean of the Facebook applications that have access to your account.

Go to the “Settings” menu at the top of the screen and click on “Application Settings.” From here you are given the ability to sort the applications in different ways.

If there are any applications that you tried out for 30 seconds before deciding they weren’t for you, simply hit the little ‘x’ beside the application name. You will be prompted to confirm this action or cancel. (You are also given an opportunity to give the application a rating out of five stars to let other people know what you thought of it. This is optional.)

Are Online Friends “Real Friends”?

John Lacey — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:49:41 +0000

Are online friends “real friends”?

I was a little amused that Plaxo (an online calendar/address book/organiser service) sent me an email to let me know that somebody I knew had joined their service. I clicked on the link and was presented with the following options.

You can choose between Business Network, Family or Friend. Though the suggested text beside ‘Friend’ is more than a tad condescending, especially for what is essentially a service for connecting and sharing information online.

Your real life friends. (Not your “social networking friends”)

But wait, there’s still more…!

Further down on the same screen:

Pulse is for real relationships. Please do not spam people you don’t know with unwelcome connection requests.

How do you know if a request is ‘unwelcome’ before you send it? Isn’t that the point of the exercise, to give the other person the opportunity to accept or deny the request at their discretion?

I hear the expression ‘IRL friends’ all the time. I understand the desire to differentiate between those relationships in daily life and those that exist online. I understand that there are different dimensions and dynamics to both. What I struggle with though is the implication that friendships formed online are in some way inferior, trivial or ‘unreal.’ If anything, I tend to think these relationships can be much more meaningful to the extent that they’re based on shared passions, interests and beliefs, rather than just the stuff of circumstance – a shared city, workplace, demographic.

Psychology aside, I do worry about the longevity of a web based service that would begrudge such relationships. As it is my friend, the new user of that service, didn’t fit neatly into any of the categories provided and I sort of gave up and closed the window. I don’t really use Plaxo anyway…

John Lacey » Social Networking

Crowdsourcing For Creative People

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