Computational Culture

The social network thing is not at all rocket science. Back in the good ol Friendster days I was seeking around this stuff for only a few weeks … and lost interest.

Some months later I joined Open BC -now XING- in order to find interesting business contacts. So far for the masterplan, but in the end after being for 1 year a frequent user I lost interest, I made no business within this community. And even worse I still receive many many request for friendship nowadays! If you look at my activity level you should no that I am not anymore interested.

In the meantime I used Flickr, YouTube and Last.fm for the pure reason of media management and feeding my 5 or so different wordpress blogs. This was efficient and FUN! But I did not really get deep into social involvement.

I missed MySpace completely because the interface was a complete desaster of design - for my very personal taste-. At least I grabbed user names for my bands. Just to be sure to be prepared for a record deal with a major label.

And now for facebook? I missed it in the beginning because I was so fed up with all this Web2.0 service overload. I still have invitations for Joost, Twitter, Pownce, etc. everything from “media-galore” to “teenage micro-blogging”. Never used them, I have no time, I have to work. BUT something happened 3 weeks ago. I got addicted again! It started when Facebook announced the great and damn smart “Open-API-Applet-Move”. I checked in with a pseudonym just to get a feeling for the technical stuff going on there. I discovered very good groups overthere by accident, joined in, pokin around … in addition to this I was part of real good event in firstlife: the summer school semantic web. I met talented and interesting people there who meet now in Facebook. The rest of the story is straightforward: I enjoyed so much the social patterns in this special interest group that I had to change from pseudonym to my real name. And then the heatwave started again. I received invitations of very very good friends, I became part of 3-4 interest groups, people gave me positive feedback on actions, walls, my photos, etc. Social gratification by people whom I trust for their own great work and passion! I explored actively further applet features, and finally I am IN! I am so facebooked!

The other way around.

Straightforward.

(Image source: Wikipedia)

Yesterday we were discussing a little bit about Lucene and its several bindings. At the end of the day I found myself heavily pretending to have programming skills in a great variety of different languages. Since I am not the young researcher anymore the list may look quite impressive. But this is not the point. I am just curious about the relations between “preferences for programming languages” and “personal psychograms, socialization”. I wonder if the premium choice is a matter of taste or age or experience or maybe it is just driven by tasks and needs and what implications for the education of students result from this within these days (e.g coping with the demands of future High Peformance Computing).

Here is my list of languages I wrote more than 10 lines of working code with: Basic, Pascal, Lisp, Cobol, C, Karl-III, Common Lisp, Modula2, Scheme, C++, Perl, Python, Java, Processing, Pure Data.

On the wishlist: Matlab, Ruby.

And guess what? This list of a 30-year relationship to computers makes me feel nostalgic.

I have been presenting this morning at the Summer School Semantic Web. It is exciting again to meet Ph.D students at the beginning of their career in the Semantic Web field. The directors of this summer school know what makes the research world goes round.

The program is dense and it has a strong focus on the development of social skills - on top of the technical stuff-. Collaboration, leadership, presentation, self-marketing and FUN are key issues if you aim at becoming a “big shot” in your field. Being addicted to the things you work on and enjoying this kind of life is the “take-home-message”. I feel very comfortable being here with all these people!

The slides of my talk.

PS: Iberia gave me a free upgrade from economy (research) to business class!

Lisa Rein does research on Second Life. I met here at CHI2007. If you want to see what we have been talking about and why BluetunA is related to Firstlife check out her video posting.

C4 started this blog/website November 17th 2005. After such a long time we have to think about reconstruction. Taking into account internal and external feedback we hope to satisfy the needs of all stakeholders and users even better in the near future.

Lots of work ahead: Redesign, update of content, people, relations …
No time for the summer slump slowdown!

PS: feel free to send your wishlist via email or comments to this posting.

Mark Sandler informed us that they’ve started videoing their seminars and making them available from their web site. Just click on these video seminars!