Greg Packer waiting for his iPhone (t minus three days).

Gizmodo says they're not what "we" expected…but I think these guys are a *lot* like the dudes who line up before video console releases. My co-worker Dr. Zur and I stopped by the 5th Ave Apple store during lunch today to say hi to liner #1, Greg Packer, he was pretty affable about the whole bizarre situation, including four people taking his photo (some without even asking!).

He reports that he's from Long Island and does not mind continuously answering the same five or so questions from curious onlookers, though I have to wonder how long that tolerance will last. I've got another picture of Greg and his unusual sign here. More about Greg at engadget, gizmodo, and cnet.

one of Hillel Kagan's Great European Torah Scholars

Hillel Kagan has finished up the Great European Torah Scholar portraits he's been working on over at art process (a site where artists share the evolution of their work), using, as you'll recall, one of the images I scanned in from a Kupat Ha'ir brochure as a reference. The paintings, along with Hillel's documentation of their progression, will be shown next month (starting July 7) in Sicily at art process's first-ever offline exhibition.

Hillel was nice enough to send me his statement on the series:

Jewish tradition as we know it today was formed in Europe. In point of fact without the influence of Europe the Judaism that is practiced would be unknown. This melding of an ancient eastern religious cult with the west, despite the inherent conflicting ideologies and more importantly and more likely because of those conflicts has given birth to a great and vital tradition of tolerance and compassion. A culture of interpretation and differing ideas yet in the main tolerant to difference and contributory to the bettering of the world. For over a thousand years Rabbis, scholars and thinkers from Maimonides and Spinoza to Buber and Kafka and countless others, have benefited European culture even while under duress
from their neighbours. It's in the spirit of that contribution that I've created this series of paintings.

Oddly appropriate, then, that he referred to images of the 21st-century rabbis who seem to have dropped into Brooklyn directly from the time of Israel ben Eliezer. Of course, when Hillel contacted me looking for the brochure I could only find a very small image, so it couldn't have been too much help. But hey, I think I can still say I helped art!

One of the things that most people don't understand about jokes is that they're all grievances. Every joke is a grievance. […] These grievance jokes are always getting rid of animus, and when jokes stop, then people are not getting rid of their grievances.

—Marshall McLuhan on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970 [via the "deeply linked" box.net widget, which ironically does not permit deeplinking to files it contains]

See, this is exactly what I was trying to say. Jokes are the cure to (or, as McLuhan would have it, the exorcist of) all life's ills.

After swearing (with horrible punctuation, no less) that I was far too cool and/or busy actually reading my books to have any use for bookish social networks, I realized last weekend that the one thing missing from my blog—and thus, my life!—was a "currently reading" widget, and perhaps even a list of five or so recently read books.

I tried to maintain such a list by hand when I was using blosxom, but take a look at my posting frequency and guess how well I did at maintaining that! No, I need something easy to use and semi-automated after initial setup.

So, after promising myself that I will never waste an entire day cataloging all the books I own or have ever read, I figured there was no harm in starting such a list incrementally. By simply adding books whenever I start a new one, I'm paving the way to some day having a list of all the books I've read since June of 2007. Certainly not a life biography of reading (considering the dramatic decrease in book consumption since, oh, I graduated from high school), but pretty cool nonetheless.

So I joined shelfari and LibraryThing, but quickly came to the conclusion that, despite shelfari's much slicker interface, I'd have to go with the more toned-down LibraryThing widgets. Shelfari widgets are cool and all, but they don't really match the decidedly 2D kenspeckle aesthetic.

As soon as I'd carefully constructed my "currently reading" widget on Sunday evening, however, LibraryThing went down! And they've been down ever since!

Was the import of my my amazon wishlist just too much for their database? (Perhaps you should alleviate LibraryThing's burden by buying me something!) Did their main read slave (seemingly the cause of the problem) read my anti-bookish-social-networking comment and retaliate accordingly?

No one can say for sure. But whatever the cause of the outage, compulsive book indexers everywhere have been suffering the loss of LibraryThing, with nothing to do but photograph melancholy stacks of unindexed books or—!!!—read.

Well, Privacy International's Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies has got fur and feathers flying (as the nondescript kitten might say).

Hopefully we're all aware that any sense of online privacy is a delusion at best. Although I've admitted to being a little freaked out by Google Street View myself, I happen to think that the google might pose less privacy risk than other internet companies precisely because of the vigilante-levels of be-careful-what-you-tell-google conventional wisdom buzzing around the web. On the other hand, alt search engines's challenge to spend a day without google is so terrifying I can't even consider it, which might outweigh the previous point.

At any rate, I'm definitely not giving google my credit card number. They already know everything else!

Luckily, our friends at The Daily Show anticipated the Privacy International report after the release of Street View (I think Comedy Central's site is telling me this video will expire sometime in early July—so hurry up and watch it!):

update: Yup, they took the video down, so I've removed the embed code. Jerks!

I couldn't tell you why, but I can't stop loving this meme. Even more appropriate for kenspeckling than lolcode, I give you the loltheorists community on livejournal [via masters of media], featuring lol-riffic literary theorists, psychologists, computer scientists, media theorists, and moar!

It doesn't seem very moderated—the quality varies a lot and the better ones tend to have been posted earlier, so you have to dig for 'em. My favorites are below.

lolbarthes

lolfreud

lol p.k.dick

loleinstein

lolnietzhe

lolschrödinger

lollovelace

lolmcluhan

lolfoucault

Dave Weinberger's awesome presentation about his new book Everything is Miscellaneous at last night's equally awesome NY Tech Meetup (from which Sean has some choice quotes) reminded me that a blog post-load of new information related to my M.A. thesis topic (search and authority) has popped up since I posted it last month.

Cory Doctorow reviewed Everything is Miscellaneous (the first I'd heard of it) just a few days before I turned in my final draft (no time to read and revise of course), but based on Dave's hilarious presentation, his book would've been a gold mine for me. Namely, he discussed how metadata and hyperlinks create an infrastructure of implicit meaning generated by the users of digital information at large—an infrastructure that doesn't usually quite correspond to the top-down hierarchies created by more traditional authorities to organize print information.

This, of course, is exactly what my thesis is about (or maybe what it should've been about), because search engines leverage that infrastructure to create the measures of authoritativeness that inform their rankings.

delicious mold image from flickr user akeg

In other moldering-thesis news:

1. Google announced a forthcoming 'universal' search model that would integrate results from its ancillary search engines (book search, local search) into the results from its main "web search" box. I haven't read about this in terribly great detail, but it sounds like they're basically adding more editorialization to the results page along the lines of what Yahoo!'s been doing for awhile.

2. The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication published a special issue half of which concerns "The Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines" [via infothought]. A few choice quotes below…

~From the introductory article to the search-themed collection by Eszter Hargittai~

On the homogeneity of available search functionality:

Recent trends suggest that the search engine market is shrinking, with fewer large players guiding users' online behavior than ever before. This suggests that decisions made by just a few players in this landscape can have considerable repercussions for what material is realistically within the reach of users. Accordingly, a critical look at what factors determine inclusion and exclusion criteria in search results and how users approach them is increasingly important in order to gain a better understanding of how users' access to content is being mediated by a handful of commercial services.

On users' understanding of search functionality:

While a user may have experiences with a particular service such as Yahoo! or Ask, he or she may not know that the search services on these sites are called "search engines." This lack of understanding may seem implausible to some, but data from the General Social Survey (2000, 2002) suggest that users are not always clear about the concept of search engines, sometimes confusing them with Web browsers.

On search engines as "brokers of information":

Given their popularity, search engines are important brokers of information, and knowing more about how they represent content and how they are used is vital to understanding patterns of information access in a digital age.

~From "In Google We Trust" by Bing Pan et al.~

On the results of a study designed to suss out whether users' tendency to click on the highest-ranking results was due to the rank alone or also the perceived relevance of the abstract on the search results page by artificially moving the highest-ranking pages in a Google search lower on the results page:

When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. […] This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.

I'm still insanely behind in bloglines reading—partially burnt out post-thesis, partially busy with life-type things—so for all I know there's tons more updates. Maybe the moldering thesis can become a recurring kenspeckle feature!