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Image via CrunchBase

It was a very timely selection of materials to read considering I was just cleaning out my home office closet and found several rolls of film that needed to be developed.  I’m not sure how old some of them are, but I do know that it may be difficult to find someone who still develops Kodachrome.  According to CNET, Kodachrome is dead.  Paul Simon must’ve seen that coming when he wrote the song, Kodachrome, back in the 70′s.

“Kodachrome, You give us those nice bright colors, You give us the greens of summers, Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!, I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph, So Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away!”

Kodachrome lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Image via Wikipedia

Well, Paul, it wasn’t Mama who took Kodachrome away, but it was the forces of the market.  And, unfortunately for Kodak — the Mama of all film companies –they just didn’t see it coming (or, at least, they didn’t see it coming so fast).  Digital photography was a ’disruptive technology’ (Christensen 1997) and Kodak lacked the nimbleness, what Christensen calls  ”dynamic capabilities”, and the ability to manage the change necessary to manage to the new paradigm. Granted, Kodak did several things that should have made a difference; they invested in R&D, set up a separate division focused on digital technology and even swapped out CEOs. In the end, I think you need to either motivate employees with the vision/purpose and some new incentives, or set up a completely separate subsidiary to drive innovation in such deeply established companies.

The boom in digital photography has done more than just render some companies obsolete, however.  It has provided less expensive photo production to millions of amateur photographers, allowed for greater and more expedient photo-sharing and created the phenomena of photography as social narrative. (Murray 2008)  You could argue that social networking sites like Fotoblog and Flickr were, therefore, quite inevitable. After all, people have always tended to want to publish (photo albums) and share (slide shows) their photos.  With the web, they can take that tendency to much greater scale.

In the case of Flickr, people sometimes share more than just the meaningful, crossing over into the more mundane. I found many pictures of things like laundry, contents of women’s hand bags (oddly fascinating), food, signs and other urban objects. There is some criticism, also, that Flickr isn’t really all that collaborative as most photos are not looked at very much by other users and the amount of comments (interactivity) is somewhat low. In addition, the community tends to provide non-critical and non-technical feedback which, therefore, doesn’t contribute much in terms of raising the bar on good photography.  (Cox 2008)

All in all, I see the ubiquitous nature of digital photography and photo-sharing sites like Flickr as an enormous boon to human interaction and to social networking. By sharing what we choose to see and capture in our world, with frequency and ease, we are able to speak a language than extends beyond mere words.

And…

Who on Earth asks these kind of questions?

Aktiv Grotesk!

Hmmm…that doesn’t sound right.  I’m guessing it’s Arial or Sans Serif and that there’s an easier way to figure this out in WordPress.

Meanwhile, I’m going to move on to commenting about the lecture at Kane Hall. Truthfully,  I really didn’t think about fonts or typefaces a whole lot before attending the lecture.  Sure, I have some font preferences and I try to be consistent within a specific document, but I’m afraid I hadn’t been terribly observant about the differences in styles. My major takeaways from the lecture were threefold, 1) fonts are actually an art form and, 2) changing font formats can dramatically alter the layout of the document and, 3) there are people out there who actually make money designing fonts!  In particular, Jean-Francois Porchez (the lecturer) designed fonts for a Spanish magazine, for Louis Vuitton and for Yves Saint Laurent.

Now, I think it would be fun to design a font for myself or, at least, to personalize my font choices a bit more.

Interestingly, the difference between typeface and font has blurred a bit with the advent of desktop publishing.  Prior to that, a typeface was a set of designed characters (cast in metal and used in printing process – like the keys in a typewriter) and each typeface was a particular size. Now, people refer to those as fonts or font sets and use the terms interchangeably.

These are a web sites I visited to look for my new Cheryl-font: Google fonts (free web fonts and there is a WordPress plug-in), Typofonderie (has nice fonts, but a bit expensive at 800+ euros) and Fonts.com (web fonts that are more reasonably priced).

Sail and Linotype Abstract are fun fonts for a blog title, but Open Sans looks more readable and professional:

Week 1 (this week, 2/20):

• Set up and linked domain name (http:www.liveaboardcommunity.com) to WordPress blog
• Almost settled on the design – so far, using only my own photography
• Completed blogroll links to other ‘liveaboard sites’ and a couple of interesting sailing web sites
• Drafted ‘About’ section and first blog post, but both need more work
• Posted first YouTube video
• Not yet officially ‘open’ as I’d like to get more content posted first – and, work on the design some more

Week 2 (week of 2/20)

• Finish design, ’about’ page and 2 blog posts
• Find someone to interview for the ‘liveaboard’ section

Week 4 (week of 2/27)

• Interview write up and blog post
• If it’s ‘ready’, begin to promote via web ring, twitter and FB accounts – social media integration

Week 5 (week of 3/5)

• Add another post or two
• Respond to comments
• Check stats 

Now, for the hard part: measurement.  I actually want to think about that some more. I’m not sure if I’d measure the # of hits, the comments or the # followers (the quantitative), or if I’d really rather measure the qualitative.  The purpose of having the site is to start a conversation and to learn more about myself and others who are looking at living on boats (either in marinas or cruising).  To that end, it’s more about the level of discussion and interation than the number of people who view the blog.

How esoteric is that??!

I made comments on the following project blogs this evening:

Comment #1: Jasmina Ljutic, privacy, video (feb 8)http://jljutic.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/the-final-stage-of-online-privacy/#comment-34

Comment #2:Emilee Sahli, Internet access, a human right? (feb 8)http://emileeasahli.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/the-specifics/#comment-18/

Comment #3: Katie Hornung, The Yellow House, business (feb 8)http://khornung.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/the-yellow-house-pie-lady/#comment-25

I learned that:

1) My classmates are a very creative bunch

2) I need to update my project blog with the progress I’ve made and my timeline/project plan

3) It will be very entertaining and informative to see the completed projects

Image via Wikipedia

Jürgen Habermas, one of the most influential philosophers of our time, stresses the need for massive involvement by the people in democratic society and emphasizes, in many of his works, the corollary importance that the ‘free press’ plays in keeping societies democratic. Focusing on the use of blogging and social network sites (like Twitter) to generate grassroots involvement in political initiatives, this week’s readings remind me of his philosophy and the positive role that digital communication can play in the democratic process.

In the world of democracy, the internet can function as the workbench and social networks as its tools.  And, these digital tools, like physical tools, can be used for both the social good and social not-so-good. They can provide the ultimate platform to both engage the “common” people in the political process and to more closely monitor (sometimes in ‘real time’) the activities of the elite and the government, but also have the potential for misuse.

For the first time in recent history, citizens have these very powerful, new tools at their disposal for political campaigning and fund-raising, popular discourse and, even, to fuel political uprising.  From a political campaign perspective, the Howard Dean campaign “Blog for America” (2004) is a great example of a campaign that allowed, possibly for the first time, the ability to collect a large number of small campaign donations.   This means that elected officials would not be beholden to large campaign contributors who often come calling post-election for ‘favors’.  In addition, there was active dialogue and community-building that took place during the campaign which allowed for the type of open discourse that is needed in any free society.

Citizens also benefited greatly, in my opinion, from the advent of ‘fact checking’ sites that were posted prominently on the web. There, the average citizen could check the veracity of statements made by their favorite politician while on the campaign trail.

It is also important to note – though, not mentioned in the articles we read this week – that YouTube has created an outstanding mode of free advertising for politicians.  And, the greater the access to low-cost campaigning, the less barriers exist for the less wealthy to run for office.

Finally, the ‘tweets’ made on Twitter during the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings in 2011 are another great example of the power of the individual when publication of thoughts and ideas are put in their hands. Although many of the ideas were ‘retweeted’ from main stream media, the amplification of those thoughts and ideas were done selectively distributed by the population, and, thus, were not government-controlled news feeds.

So, what about the social not-so-good aspects?  Well, I see several areas where things could go awry: 1) misinformation could spread like the proverbial ‘wildfire’ in the digital world, 2) intentional mischief could result in confusion and frustration, leading people to mistrust sources and sites and, perhaps, even lead to violence 3) the growing ‘digital divide’ could thwart access to democracy if we don’t work to ensure inclusion.

By and large, though, this type of citizen journalism and active participation in the political process can only be of massive benefit in a democratic society. It allows a forum for participants to exchange ideas, raise money for candidates, pass along timely and critical information to others in the ‘community’ and to quickly galvanize people when action is needed in the ‘real world’.

Most have been around for 5-6 years and give tips and personal information on living aboard. Some people are ‘cruisers’ and others just live at the ‘dock’. Here’s an example called “We Live On A Boat”.  Design-wise, it has a nice photograph and clean layout, but it seems pretty generic and looks almost like some of the pages that are ‘under construction’. In addition, I don’t really care for the ad links at the center of the landing page.  The content is interesting and I like the ‘best of’ box on the right-hand side. Another blog I found is one called the Lifestyle Sailing Blog.  It has a nice little sailboat icon and good, clean layout.  The content, though, is not quite as interesting as the first example. Then, just when I decided that my blog will take a much different approach, (writing about the process of moving from living on land to living on water) I found this blog called From Land to Liveaboard. So, I’m a little disappointed that there are so many similar blogs, but I will just ‘embrace and extend’ by thinking through my approach to ‘differentiation’ and by providing links to all the other liveaboard blogs that I find.  Originally, I had hoped to make this more of a community (social network) than a blog, so perhaps that becomes the longer-term project.

Where do we draw the line between self-expression —  on blogs, social networking sites or, even when writing up book reviews — and work responsibilities or career aspirations?  Especially, when doing things anonomously may mean giving up earned credibility in ones area of expertise, but using ones experience means exposing identity.