A goldfinch, trying perhaps to convince me that he’s the prothonotary warbler (see below), was hanging on the nectar feeder that has been under the protection of a very aggressive hummingbird. The goldfinch was sipping a little water that was in the feeder to discourage ants from crawling into the nectar when the confrontation occurred. Here’s how it played out as captured by my iPhone.
Author: Paul (Page 17 of 146)
Few the past few days this bird has been living at our hummingbird feeder, sipping nectar and enjoying him/herself. Note a slender light beak, grey wings with no bars or stripes, yellow to white underside, no easily noticed eye bar or ring.
Candidates: Blue-winged Warbler dark legs, wingbars, eye line (not matching our bird) Northern Oriole aka Baltimore (Female) no white underside as seen on our bird, Summer Tanager (female) too heavy beak and markings off, your guess ???
Jeff Beam, Jeffrey Pomerantz and I are there in the picture showing one of the rare copies of John Cage’s Mushroom Book which will serve as a jumping off point for our presentation/project/happening/theatre piece at the CHAT or Collaboration: Humanities, Arts and Technology Festival early next year.
CHAT, which will take place on the UNC campus February 16-20, 2010, will showcase the possibilities for innovative, collaborative arts and humanities work enabled by technology by drawing together the region’s diverse digital resources in a series of performances, colloquies, demonstrations and training sessions.
We say:
John Cage’s Mushroom Book captures the experience of mushroom hunting through a collaboration between a noted mycologist (Alexander H. Smith), an extraordinary illustrator (Lois Long), and Renaissance man/visionary John Cage. Using scientific illustration and description, poetry, typography, and text the book is essentially an early multimedia event. We will re-capture the experience of their hunt and collaboration through a reinterpretation of the Mushroom Book: an interactive, three-dimensional, technologically-enabled multimedia experience.
This Happening will fulfill the as-yet unfulfilled promise to Dr. John Couch’s widow, by the UNC-CH John N. Couch Biology-Botany Library to make use of the Mushroom Book in the educational mission of the University. The volume was a gift from Mrs. Couch in memory of her husband’s and John Cage’s friendship. Dr. Couch was a world-renown mycologist for whom the Biology-Botany library at UNC was named. Couch, Cage, and others made a number of mushroom forays together. [revised/expanded JB 7/14/2009]
The book is discussed here in Cage’s biography, Roaring Silence (Amazon preview) page 235-236. also Cage on technology on page 237. (at UNC Music Library ML410.C24 R5 1992 ) In Conversations with Cage, John Cage says 10 lithographs were by Lois Long (the scientifically correct mushroom images) and 10 by Cage, himself ( “My texts … handwritten in five different litho crayon intensities (… superimpositions making much unreadable) … enabling the reader … to go hunting in my handwritten page.” (letter to Smith from Cage)
That’s dishes made with local tomatoes — not all of them contrived locally:
Chilled Yellow Tomato Soup (used local Yellows – Sungolds perhaps)
White Wine Gazpacho (used Cherokee Purples)
Watermelon and Tomato Salad (from Bill Smith) (used a variety for colors and textures) Subbed Thai Basil for regular and dropped the cayanne in favor of a dash Cackalacky Sauce.
Vegetarian Gumbo (used locally grown Romas) – you know this one Trinity (from Red Onion, Roasted Peppers, Celery) + Garlic + Okra + Maters in stock
I started this blog in August 2004. At the time, I made a commitment to post an entry per day no matter how brief and I kept that commitment for several years — I did give myself time off for weekends and I did post multiple posts per day in some cases.
In the past two years, I’ve been slowing down on my posts to once a week. Twitter, which you see on the left hand side of the blog, picked up the traffic for short comments. Delicious, which is also on the left side bar, picked up the interesting links traffic. Last.fm keeps my itunes listening current. Facebook mostly picks up tweets as its status updates but it’s there too.
I claimed that Twitter Ate My Blog! but it is more complicated than that. The interlacing of my social communication meant that different special tools (twitter, delicious, last.fm picked up a lot of what the most general tool (the blog) was doing — and better they have become part of the blog itself instead of separate disparate entities.
Over the past three weeks, when there was blog silence, there was plenty going on. We were on a long for us vacation on the Left Coast and then moving our son into his new school, NC School of Science and Math, but the blog as still active — even though no new articles were being posted — thanks to Twitter and others.
Almost five years into the blog, it’s now updated more often with more information than ever before even when I’m off, I’m on. Scary in a way, but also reflective of the why we all work and play these days.
I’ll be teaching my blogging, social media, virtual communities course this semester only using video on the net. The syllabus is here.
We will view videos of lectures and other events pertaining to the class topics: Categories: Brainz!, Citizen Journalism and New Journalism, Cyberculture, Marketing, Remix (including legal issues), Simplicity, Social Networking research and theory, Vernacular Video and YouTube Anthropology. The viewings are presentations by some of the top experts in each area — the kinds of people, sometimes the exact same people, that whose papers and articles and books I would have had the class read in other years. We will not be viewing videos during class; we’ll be discussing the topics when f2f.
Class members will not be writing papers in response to the viewing, but instead will be producing (very lightly produced in most cases) video responses from their webcams, phones or digital cameras (such as Flips).
We will also have several guests during the course of the semester. These guests will not be lecturing but instead will be holding a question and answer session with the class over Skype. The class will have prepared for the session by having had watching a video by each speaker before hand. Among those who have agreed to visit us are: Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold, danah boyd, Fred Turner, Barry Wellman and in person, our Duke Law neighbor, James Boyle. The response from the potential speakers has been overwhelmingly positive. This has turned out a wonderful way for an expert to engage with students at a very low time cost and with on special preparation.
The class has not yet met, but the class members have already been helping design their course but voting on polls to determine how video intensive the course will be and on how the assignments and grades will be handled. — No, I didn’t use video for this part. I did use Doodle for the polls and email for contacting the class.
So participatory culture, vernacular video, simplicity all played a big part in the class already.
Yesterday was a good day in ink for me. I had a poem called “The mundane but discretely lovely details of our daily lives” featured in the Carrboro Free Press special “Waste” or trash issue and was listed in the TechJournal South as a technology maven — there were some pretty damn smart folks listed along with me too.
Neither of the publications are yet online although both promise to be. In the meantime, folks outside of the Carrboro area here’s the poem which some of you liked from Twitter and Facebook snippets (“Where dumpsters meet their dumptruck lovers and are raised in their arms like whales”). Thanks to the editors of both publications for liking me and the poem.
The mundane but discretely lovely details of our daily lives
The list on the refrigerator
gives all the signs of family:
peanut butter and tuna steaks,
garbage bags and red wine,
an offer to discount the mortgage.On the sill, a reddening pepper.
The green side in shadow
with a crip dried soap bubble
breaking the reflected light
like rose cathedral windows
warming the cold grey church–
hearts welcoming in a spirit–
exotic and solid as mango seed–
sweet pulp of these days;
like a map with too many details.Gods of a world too mundane for gods,
you blinded me. Now you amaze.So much, so small, and so irregular–
who will sing of you?
Who will tell your particularity,
your temporary insistance,
the way the pepper sinks in the sill
when overripe, how a drop forms
then falls from the faucet?
Only those who have been too wise
for too much of our lives,
who pause before you here
and for a moment know
that one beautiful fear.For you I will rise early
before dumpsters greet
their dump truck lovers
and are lifted in their iron arms
like passionate whales,
I will gather what is wasted,
what remains American,
and be forever true.
The jazz – mostly – band Equinox plays an original True to the Blues (by drummer Spence Foscue) at Weaver Street Market accompanied by hoopers, a juggler, small children, small dogs and off camera a pygmy goat.
But with the Mark of the Best or the Mark of the Beast? This image was discovered on the steps of the One True Manning Hall at UNC – Chapel Hill this morning by the ever alert @taranga. A shadowy figure in round glasses and a fez. What could it mean? Someone monkeying around? Andre the Giant gone Morocco-academic?
ibiblio helps found open-source advocacy group
CHAPEL HILL – ibiblio, a conservancy of freely available information on the Internet based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a founding member of a new group aiming to promote use of open-source technology by the federal government.
The new group announced today, Open Source for America, is a cross-section of more than 50 companies, universities, communities and individuals holding that government can and should become more transparent, participatory, secure and efficient by using open-source software.
The group also holds that the open-source community can drive collaborative innovation for government; and that a decision to use software should be driven solely by the requirements of the user. For more information about Open Source for America, visit http://opensourceforamerica.org.
The term “open source” refers to software that is distributed with its source code, so that user organizations and vendors can modify it for their own purposes. Most open-source licenses allow the software to be redistributed without restriction under the same terms of the license. For more information, visit opensource.org.
ibiblio, accessed at www.ibiblio.org, was one of the world’s first Web sites and is the largest collection of collections on the Internet. It is supported by UNC’s School of Information and Library Science and School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
“We’re delighted to help explain and promote the rewards and benefits of open sources to the government sector,” said Paul Jones, director of ibiblio and clinical associate professor at both schools. “Open code is a giant step toward providing the kind of transparency and accountability that democracies require.”
Only two North Carolina universities are represented in Open Source for America: Carolina and N.C. State University in Raleigh. Others represented are the University of California’s Irvine and Merced branches; Carnegie Mellon; Oregon State University; and the University of Southern Mississippi.
ibiblio’s goals include expanding and improving the creation and distribution of open-source software; continuing UNC programs to develop an online library and archive; hosting projects that expand the concepts of transparency and openness; and serving as a model for other open-source projects.
School of Information and Library Science contact: Wanda Monroe, (919) 843-8337, wmonroe at unc.edu
School of Journalism and Mass Communication contact: Kyle York, (919) 966-3323, sky at unc.edu
News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589
Django Haskins plays “Blood and Oil” solo at Saxapahaw
We love getting out to Saxapahaw, an old but re-enlivened mill village on the Haw River about 10 miles west of Carrboro, for their Saturday music, farmer’s market and food. One of the nice surprises, and there are many, is that we run into friends from all over the area out there.
The farmers market is more of an artisans’ market than a vegetable purchasing place. Wine, jams, pickles, flat breads, new wave sock monkeys, and the like are all there and all local, very local, to the area.
The BBQ Joint brings a truck up and there is always ice cream (all local of course), but the big surprise for us this time out was the great food up at the Shell station aka Saxapahaw General Store. Yes it is a functioning quick stop store and gas house, but behind the grill something else is happening. Goat burgers, roasted veggie sandwiches, seafood specials (until they run out which on Saturdays is apt to happen), local beef, taters fried in duckfat (I donno why this is so good but it is), great greens, nice wine that you uncork yourself which makes for a great price. Ambiance? It’s a quickstop so you could be eating in a booth facing the motor oil and the wine is next to the fishing worms, but outside, if eating by the worms is not your ideal eating situation, there are some nice tables and while not quite a river view, a good place to sit in the evening. You could take out as a picnic to the music and farmers market or down to the river tho.
Thanks Heather and Tom LaGarde for putting on the shows and market, and of course Django for the music this time out.
Big Medicine returned to Quail Ridge Books where they first met Garrison Keillor and were asked to play on his Prairie Home Companion. A slightly new line up for the Meds but still a very good sound — except for the cash register keys occassionally clicking near my iPhone, but that’s what keeps the store open and the venue a cool one for unmic-ed bluegrass and old time music.
Just back from a walk around the new Dino Trail at the Museum of Life and Science. Beck Trench aka @10ch arranged an early preview especially for bloggers and tweeple that she could reach from the @lifeandscience twitter address. Over 100 of us checked in by 3:30! Too many to namecheck here bit check the hashtagged links. Our tweets are all tagged either #dinotour or #dinotrail.
Beck has set up a page for participation called /dinosaurs that will allow visitors to upload their videos, drawings, links to their blog posts etc.
We took at trip over to lovely Carrboro to see and hear @steveburnett play theremin. Steve managed to get everyone in the room to play at the instrument and gave some generous explanations of how it works. His theremin and several of his effects boxes are from Big Briar and signed by Bob Moog.
We were over on the hill behind us called Southern Village eating the great food we’d picked up at the Carrboro Taco Truck (the one near Fitch’s) — great home made tamales pollo con salsa verde since you asked — and listening to the Ramblers or Watson, Hicks Carver and Newberry if you prefer playing some good old time music and telling very corny jokes. I captured a couple of songs (Piney Mountain a new old time song done acapella with Joe Newberry at lead vocal — above; Uncloudy Day an old old time song with Jim Watson at lead — below ).
I was in Charlotte yesterday to attend a memorial service for the father of an old friend when I ran into a whimsical statue of another old acquaintance. Hugh McManaway used to direct traffic from the median of Queens Road at Providence Road across from his church, the place where he used to eat (once the Town House Restaurant) and the grand old house where he lived most of his life.
Hugh was special. I’m not sure exactly how this specialness would have been diagnosed, but he was innocent and childlike in many good ways.
I first met Hugh one night as I was walking down the street later at night than I probably should have been out. As I walked passed Myers Park Methodist Church, I was met by a large man wearing a hat, raincoat and carrying some pamplets. He introduced himself and handed me the pamphlet which turned out to be some sort of religious tract. I didn’t get to read it before Hugh started talking telling me that he had a key to the church, I think he meant a chapel there. I was sure, for a second or two at least, that I was meeting some sort of prev and that the chapel invite was something else. But that was only for a second or two, Hugh’s voice, his body language and his eyes peering through what I remember were thick lensed glasses told me otherwise. Hugh was just explaining something that was interesting to him and he thought to me.
I saw him other times eating at the Town House where they delivered his meal to him. No money was exchanged. Hugh wasn’t eating for free. His trust fund paid the Town House as it paid his other bills. Hugh was alone by this time and, I didn’t know it, in his decline.
A few years later he would be placed in a nursing home, his house restored and declared historic home (for its architecture — not for Hugh).
Someone, not sure who (statue is credited to Elsie Shaw), memorialized Hugh with a highly polished statue placed at his station in the median. Soon, he became subject to good natured decoration and signs congratulating newly weds (usually those married at Hugh’s church, Myers Park Methodist) and flowers.
Did quite a bit of talking with Vadim Lavrusik for a fairly long article on “10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media” in Mashable which also features Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Sree Sreenivasan, and a couple of others. Very good company and some very good ideas for teaching.
More locally, The Daily Tar Heel has a nice story about how UNC Health Care has been using Twitter including their tweets during a surgery (Note: the DTH calls this “live surgery” as opposed to “dead surgery”? Isn’t that an autopsy?). I get a couple of expert lines which are slightly on topic. Basically I describe a “thick tweet” here: “Jones said the ingredients to an appealing update include mentioning someone else, featuring a link and adding a picture or video.” And I state the completely obvious:
Paul Jones, a journalism professor at UNC who has one of the most followed Twitter accounts in the Chapel Hill area, said gaining followers on the site requires posts that grab readers’ attention.
“Keep adding value, give people a reason to follow you,” he said. “The only people who will follow you are the people who want it.”
On another Twitter front, I did a little bit — not sure how much will be used — for WCHL about Twitter and Iran. In the parts selected I talk about how Twitter is difficult to block because it can be sent by cell, SMS, satphone, or a variety of internet protocols and interfaces (I did point out that the WTO protesters were hit with a total communications black out somewhat successfully) and later I talk about the social contract between social network service providers and their users and how users are free to leave and often do.
The New York Times just did their 36 Hours on the “Research Triangle.” Like most locals, I had plenty of beefs with their selections, which I have to admit are all pretty good. They did end up at the Cat’s Cradle. They did drive through the Sunshine Biscuit drive-thru. They did like my favorite parts of the NC Art Museum. They did discover Fathers and Sons — and the Scrap Exchange. They also took some very nice photos. They did miss the best BBQ, the best taco trucks and a lot more by staying in Raleigh too long. They missed out on a lot in Durham and in Cary. But for a sort of 30-something kinda visit to the area, it wasn’t all that bad.
First, it occurred to me that my own past 35 hours in Carrboro was a more walkable and more fun time than they found spending too much time in the car. In fact, the wonderful “It’s Carrboro” song gives great shoutouts to many of the treats of Carrboro. Just visiting those would make for a nice 36 hours of visit. You’d want to add the biscuits from Neal’s, a coffee stop at the Open Eye, beer stop at Milltown, another stop at the Station, and a great dinner at Acme, Glass Half Full, Provence, Aki Hana, ice cream at Maple View, and a trip to Johnny’s for crepes, tacos, coffee, wine and atmosphere. And you could walk all of it — if you were timing things right during the 2nd Friday Art Walk so you could party at Wootini and hear klezmer music at Carrboro Creative Coworking.
How would you lay out your unique visit to Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, HIllsborough, Pittsboro and/or Raleigh?
Yes a video intense course should have a vernacular video description. I’ll be building the whole syllabus in this same way. Here’s hoping my vernacular video skills pick up a bit as I get further into the course.
When I teach about social capital theory — thanks to Nan Lin –, I always talk about the action of social capital is what makes it real. Thousands of friends mean little until they are successfully called into action for some cause. I prefer good causes.
This past weekend, I got to see and to be a part of a successful social capital call when Carrboro neighbor, Ioana Sherman won the Intuit Small Business Grant Competition and received $25,000 to help start her music business.
Here’s what happened:
I stopped over at our local 3rd Place, The Weave, for a tweetup with pals @boraz and @mistersugar to welcome (and meet) @cogscilibrarian who had just moved to our area to become the librarian for the J-school. Already several layers of social networks and social capital situated there.
On my way to look for a table, I noticed a woman talking to people and handing out small flyers. She was explaining why people should go online (yes there is free wifi in this 3rd place) and vote for her friend. I heard someone say, “You don’t need these flyers; you just need to talk to Paul Jones.”
Like Satan, I appeared at the mention of my name.
The tale told is an international one, one best told by Ioana Sherman herself here in her not quite 4 minute video entry to the contest. Briefly, Ioaona was born in Romania and became an accomplished musician. She also has a gift for teaching. She started a small business teaching kids traveling to their homes. She needed an investment to convert her house, at least part of it, into a studio/classroom. She had a great plan, a good background, a proven market, a good startup success record, but no funds. She learned, not sure how, about the Intuit Small Business Grant contest. She made her inspiring video and was getting great feedback online.
While the judging counted for a lot in the contest, community ratings account for 40% of the judging criteria!
Her neighbors were out drumming up votes.
@mistersugar, @boraz and perhaps @cogscilibrarian and I all tweeted:
Ioana Sherman is running for an Intuit grant to start a music studio. Http://tinyurl.com/ioanavideo Please vote for her project & retweet.
and
Ioana Sherman needs your vote in the Intuit Contest Look here http://tinyurl.com/ioanavideo View, vote (all 3 buttons)
Our tweets are automatically repeated as our FaceBook status, our FriendFeed, on our blogs and so forth. Soon there were a lot more people viewing the video and casting votes for Ioana. She had already attracted a strong and dedicated following through her own social network (as the comments on the video show), but we did add some votes.
Ioana’s final count was: Inspiring (1422) Useful (1389) Funny (1363). By far the largest response among rated contestants.
Today I got this tweet from @intuit:
Intuit @SmallJones @PaulTimmers Your votes helped Ioana Sherman win $25K in Intuit’s Small Business United grant comntest http://bitly.com/SBUWin
BTW @intuit uses Tweetdeck
Was great to be a part of Ioana’s story and to see social capital in action.
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