jennybee.net

I love the old school futurism of this poem:

16-bit Intel 8088 chip by Charles Bukowski

with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
five one dot five one zero five
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
minus zero dot one two five one four one
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

Confused? This should help you out.

Perhaps I was a story teller in a past life because despite not being involved in the story telling community, one of the things I immediately noticed* about Plurk was its suitability for just that.

*Actually I believe @philcampbell mentioned it first and I agreed.

I tried it out once on Twitter but it didn’t really work. Plurk’s self-contained conversations are much more suited to it though.

Knowing that there was a small team of folk online and ready to go I began with:

Once upon a time on a dark night, something stirred in a Birmingham side street… what happens next plurkers?

It was greeted enthusiastically and a handful of people began contributing to the narrative.

You can read the story here.

The story was location-based so I thought it could be fun to plot the locations on a Google map. Someone on Twitter suggested the Birmingham side street could be ‘Needless Alley’ which is a real place in Brum. Perfect!

In creating the map I was inspired to add satellite co-ordinates into the narrative as a plot device so these were discovered engraved on the back of the protagonists watch in chapter one.

Quite how the map element evolves, and whether other web elements are invoked remains to be seen but I like the notion of layering the narrative in this way.

Because he’s a master of such things, @philcampbell suggested creating a podcast out of the story but I’m not best qualified to take this on.

What I do think could be fun though would be doing a live reading, with two or three voices and possibly someone ‘operating’ the google map etc. But we need to see how the story evolves first. What particularly excites me about this is that the story might be being ‘performed’ as it is being written by the audience.

We’ll have to see about that. For now though, come to Plurk and help write Jonny Snake’s destiny.

The concept of ‘folksonomic interface development’ was discussed briefly at yesterday’s Creative Coffee Club.

It’s potential thesis juice so I thought I’d scribble down what’s in my head around the subject.

Folksonomy is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

It captured my imagination because I recently labelled the entire contents of my Gmail inbox (groan) and I struggled to define a useful naming approach. I’d have liked to have been able to select some off-the-shelf labels to get me started.

Either way, my labels are forever in ‘beta’ and there will be plenty more hours spent re-labelling everything when I come up with a new genius way of managing my mail (delete button is probably the best option).

‘Folksonomic’ doesn’t quite describe what I’m interested in however (which is a shame cos ‘folksonomic interface development’ sounds really good!).

What I’m interested in is the notion that users of software might be able to alter the user interface and then share their changes with a community. The key word here is ‘users’. I’m not describing open-source development by software creators.

Imagine if in your favourite piece of software you can re-arrange functions and buttons. You can add and remove functionality. You can skin the interface to make it look pretty. Then you can publish your version of the UI for others to use.

That’s about it for now. Most of that thinking was done on the 159 bus on the way to work this morning. There is much more to be done.