Nancy’s Blog

I’ve recently been introduced to Sophie, software for creating “books” that incorporate text, images, video, and audio:

Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins….Funded by grants from the Mellon and Macarthur foundations and the University of Southern California, Sophie is free and entirely open-source.

So far, I’ve only played with it a little. Friday I’m going to see the products of an archeology class that has used it — will write more then. The most serious limitation is that it requires its own reader, so it cannot (at this point, anyway) be used to produce “papers” on the web. But it looks intriguing. Well worth checking out.

Friends for sale: Buy and sell your friends as pets! You can make your pets poke, send gifts, or just show off for you. Make money as a shrewd pets investor or as a hot commodity! Friends for Sale is the bees knees!

Learned about this when I discovered that I had been “bought” as a “pet.” It took me a while to figure out how to disable this.

I can’t believe that people find this amusing — buying and selling people as pets? Without their knowledge or agreement? I know, I know, it’s intended to be fun, funny. Well, I find it disconcerting — tasteless. It was hard to even find out what it was, and how to opt out. Surely something like this should be an opt-in feature.

If I wanted to spend the time — but I don’t, life’s too short — I’d write a critique of Facebook from the perspective of a non-fan. Actually, someone must have done this, but life’s too short to spend time on this.

( I joined because that was the only way I could see content, and needed to know what was going on, for my research.)

But it leaves me curious about what such an app and the other Facebook functions and apps (1) mean about the people who find this interesting or amusing and (2) what these are doing to - or reflecting of — contemporary social interactions, at least among Facebook’s adherents.  Yes, I’m sure there are serious analyses of Facebook somewhere, but it doesn’t happen very often that something that is very popular just completely baffles me. I could imagine my friends and I doing this in high school, when we were bored and our lives revolved around our social group. But — grownups?

Suggestions for how to do this?

My recent high school reunion led to calls for a class website.  We want old and new photos and text, the “what have you been doing since graduation” stuff.

People vary a lot about how interested and tech savvy they are. When I put photos on flickr group only a handful joined –see below.

So we want a site with the following requirements.  My question is: does anyone know of a site or service that makes this EASY?  E.g., a wiki would do IF there’s a really easy, accessible one.  Or maybe someone has created just this for alumni groups.  But we’re all savvy enough to be suspicious of any site that looks like it’s harvesting email addresses for spam.

What I’m looking for:

• Some sort of front page on which everyone has a short profile, with links to more info.
• For each person, a place for text AND photos, with easy uploading/adding.
• They can update their own info for themselves, or I can do it for them.
• Easy, easy, easy.  Did I say easy?
• I think registering for Flickr was a barrier. So either no registration, or clearly registration for this site only — I suspect some were suspicious because for Flickr they needed a Yahoo id and worried that Yahoo was going to suck them in and re-use their email etc.
• Free!
• An easy way to link this site with email addresses so people can be notified when info is updated. This is not a group to subscribe to RSS feeds or check frequently, just for fun.

I haven’t used things like Yahoo groups etc so dunno whether something like that would work. Or whether there’s something designed just for this purpose.