bitdepth

I suppose 7 is a lucky number, and I can’t let an opportunity pass to start posting again, so what can be said about this blog turning 7?
It appears that a lot of my bloggy energy is dissipated due to Twitter and Tumblr as well as 43 Things. Maybe I’m not as focussed on writing or haven’t had the time to reflect and write properly. Are we all becoming addicted to smaller screens and the constraints of 140 characters?
There is the more instant gratification of sending something out and getting a response. It happens with a blog, but with Twitter you can send a few more out and it can feel more conversational. But I still do like to seek out writing that is longer and sometimes more thoughtful and I enjoy writing that.
The good thing about birthdays and anniversaries is that it gives you a chance to take a pause, reflect and think about where you are. So now I’m here, thinking that it’s good that I have a home on the web and glad that the tools and process for putting things here is so simple that I can move from computer to computer, or device to device and read, write and create in many different and simpler ways. So now it’s easier to create and connect with the amazing people that are out there (like you). Now it’s time to write something a bit more interesting than writing about blogging.

Bruce McDonald’s debut feature was the indie road movie / comedy Roadkill which took a heroine through rural Ontario looking for a band and the tag line for that film was “Move or Die”. His latest indie thriller / horror film, Pontypool has the tag line of “Shut Up or Die”. Based on the novel, Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess, it’s cleverly reworks the framework of a group of people trapped by infected humans outside. Instead of zombies, the threat in Pontypool is posed by “Conversationalists”, who become infected through language.

With most of the film taking place within a radio station during the morning show, it slowly increases the creepiness and establishes the premise as we get to know the talk radio host Grant Mazzy (in a bravura performance by Stephen McHattie), the engineer Laurel (Georgina Reilly in a great feature debut), and radio producer Sydney Briar (in a complex performance by Lisa Houle). The only other character to appear on camera is a doctor (played by Hrant Alianak) who has a bit of an understanding of what is going on. Embracing the constraints of a lower budget and a single location, McDonald manages to squeeze out a story that twists and turns and kept me gripped all the way through end credits.

One of the things that I really loved about the film is that it is unapologetic in being set in Canada, and that context is actually critical to how the events unfold. The film, as with most of McDonald’s work, has a sly sense of humour that keeps things from getting too serious and there are nice references to earlier films too. Toning down the multipaned over-the-top approach of The Tracey Fragments with a desaturated, but crisp look there is a breathtaking and elegiac interlude within the film that moved it out of the B-movie neighbourhood where it could have happily stayed. As I left the film, it changed my perception of language and it felt strange to speak, which is quite an achievement.

It’s Ada Lovelace Day and I’ve signed the pledge to create a blog post drawing attention to women excelling in technology following in the footsteps of Ada (the first programmer), so here are some women who excel in technology and inspire me:

Carolyn Campbell

Carolyn helps people learn online with the Nova Scotia Community College. Based in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, she’s passionate and works harder than anyone I know as a teacher, a designer, a programmer, and a manager. Carolyn told me why I should blog and started doing it before I did. She’s also active in Second Life and occasionally tweets too. Without her there would be a lot fewer people doing cool things online. We collaborated before and bounce ideas off each other often and my favourite project was making our three children together. That’s an ongoing project that’s going quite well.

Marie-Chantal Turgeon

m-c is an Montréal-based artist who I first found out about through a podcast and blog called Vu d’ici / Seen from here where she was one of the very earlier podcasters playing interesting music that expanded what I listen to (and made me want to create my own podcast too). She creates and inspires using the web and makes real, physical pieces of art and always has interesting things to say and show on her blog (and through her tweets). m-c is a driving force behind Creacamp which is happening quite soon.

Gia Milinovich

Gia is a highly talented UK-based American ex-pat geek who manages to combine a great attitude, drive and intelligence to popularise science and films. I first found out about her through her work on the web site to promote Danny Boyle’s film Sunshine and I still point my students at that site when I talk about the possibilities of promoting a film on the web. Following her blog and Twitter feed is entertaining as she combines the personal, professional, and scientific together that lets you learn and laugh as she brings endless enthusiasm and curiosity to whatever she’s interested in.

Lisa Rein

Lisa is a multitalented musician, XML afficiando, and all around political / technical / artistic activist on the left coast of the USA who always seems to be on the cutting edge of interesting and exciting things. It’s difficult to even piece together the wide range of things she’s done in the past few months. Years ago I found her through the videos of The Daily Show and other politically interesting things that she posted and found out that she was also heavily involved in technology, XML, Creative Commons and music. I really don’t know how she does it all and finds the time as I’d be happy to do 1/10th of what she does. Her latest exciting project has her serving as the Digital Librarian for Timothy Leary’s archives. You can keep up with her through her blog or her active tweets.

Katie Schwartz

Katie is an all-around great dame, who writes and blogs and tweets from Los Angeles, California. I met Ms. Schwartz (electronically) through her blunt, hilarious, personal and wonderful Twittering. She shoots from the hip and has a gift for writing and inventing perfect and new words and always makes me laugh out loud even though I’ve mainly only had contact with her via chunks of text of 140 characters or less. Those tiny gems led me to her blog and other writing which unsurprisingly revealed that she’d done stand-up comedy. I think that she may also be Jewish and a feminist. A Blackberry-toting writer who uses technology to connect and write, she gets things done with a wide range of projects including a filmed theatre production – Three Dames With A Clue, and the inspirational blog Dear Thyroid. Whether it’s an essay or a tiny text message, I always am glad to hear from her.

Five years ago today Flickr started and it changed the way that people view and share photos online. It also was the first place that I really used and understood tagging and folksonomies. I joined in August of 2004, and the photo of the walkway in Sackville, New Brunswick is the first image that I uploaded to my photostream.

A few minutes ago I uploaded my 9,211th photo (my 7,451st public one) to Flickr and I’m so glad that Flickr is still around to let me share photos with the world, my friends and family. It was a different world in 2004 and while I signed up for Flickr fairly early, it took me a while to upload my first image. When I would explain how I found this neat place to put photos online it would often result in a blank stare or the question, “why”? But now in the age of Facebook, not many people wonder about sharing photos, videos or other parts of their life and Flickr laid much of that groundwork for me.

While sharing is a lot of fun, it’s the community that got me hooked with a diverse range of people whose images I enjoyed seeing and commenting on. When people started commenting on my photos it really started to make a lot of sense. Then the group of friends grew as did the groups and I started taking photos just about every day. Flickr is a wonderful way to communicate how you see the world and it transcends language and crosses borders.

The evolution of tags makes it much easier to find photos and since I fairly compulsively tag my images, I can also find something much easier online on Flickr than I can on my hard drive. The free form tagging or “folksonomy” that is created is a vast pool of information that grows and provides a more valuable context for photographs. Tags give you a way to identify photos and group them together with others who use the same tags for events and places. With the Flickr API (Application Program Interface), there is a wonderful range of applications and sites that enhance and use the millions of photos there. My favourite (and essential) add-on is Frasier Speir’s Flickr Export for iPhoto, which is how I upload photos, tag them, and add them to groups and sets.

I still check in with Flickr every day and upload photos every week. The evolution of the site has continued with the addition of location-based geotagging, the fascinating concept of interestingness as a way to find photos, and video. But Flickr is about the images and the people and it’s still what keeps me there. Happy Birthday Flickr!

I know it’s late for these lists, but I made it a while ago and just remembered that I didn’t write about. Each year there are many films that I view and one of my ongoing projects is to catch up on older films that I haven’t seen or films that have received critical acclaim. They get added to the list and then when they show up it’s usually a pleasant surprise. If I like a director or actor I’ll try to find more of their work, which is how a lot of the films that are on my list got there. The most interesting films I discovered in 2008 (in reverse historical order) are: Day Night Day Night, Monkey Warfare, La Moustache, Little Fish, Bright Future, Esther Kahn, All About My Mother, La Haine, I Can’t Sleep, and Pierrot Le Fou. Four of the films are English language, four are French language, one is Japanese and one is Spanish. Most have a degree of ambiguity and all of them are well-shot. The cinematic world is so much easier to explore now that there are so many films on DVD. Continue reading “Top Ten New-to-Me Films for 2008″ →

At the recent and wonderful Podcamp Halifax, the first session that I attended was Joel Kelly’s “Unfriend Someone Today“, which was all about pruning and managing the people who you count amongst your friends (online). There was a great discussion and I kept thinking about the number of people I follow on Twitter and how I add (or remove) friends with various social networking services. It also was strange to see many people in person who I follow on Twitter, but I hadn’t met in person.
I’m most stingy about following people on Twitter and more open in following people on Flickr, and Facebook is somewhere in the middle. With the social networks where I have fewer friends, I’ll check in on them several times a day, where I’m not so picky it will be every few days or longer before I check in.
Continue reading “Friendly Rules” →