It’s difficult for me to believe that we just finished week 6 at RIT. This has been the most intense quarter yet. In part that’s because it’s my last. Teaching one class for only the second time has contributed as well. But most of that time has been taken up trying to come up with ways to bring sustainable change to the School of Print.

Coming up with ideas has not been hard. It’s the doing and nurturing parts that take all the time.

One effort we’ve undertaken is to start a blog for the School. SPMEtcetera soft-launched earlier in the quarter. Our hope is to create a destination where the industry, alumni, and prospective and current students can discover all the neat things that are going on at SPM. The great part, from a sustainability perspective, is that all the writing is being done by student employees. We’ll make an official announcement about the blog later this week.

The other big project is the Open Publishing Lab. There will be a lot more about that soon. The good news is that over two years of planning will (hopefully) be coming to fruition in less than 14 days. We just need our teams to make it to May 3 and the innovation festival and then we’ll have a lot to talk about and show.

Sorry about that everyone. Sometimes I’m such a noob.

In my e-mail que this morning was an invite to reunion.com. It had been sent to me by an business associate. Being the Social Networking patsy that I am, I decided to go through the joining process. After registering, and avoiding the pay-to-play options, the website volunteered to search through it’s member database to see if any of my friends were already members. All I had to do was let it look at my g-mail address list. This seemed like a good idea at the time to my sleepy brain.

*sigh*

I unfortunately missed this little clause:

We’ll find your friends and family who are already members and also automatically invite any non-members to join (it’s free!).

I just failed the internet.

I also have a feeling that this “helpful feature” is going to create a lot of problems for reunion.com.

Update: as I expected the e-mails are beginning to flow into my inbox from folks who received the spam…

Julian Dibbell is going to be speaking at RIT this Wednesday. Julian, an associate editor at Wired, is an awesome guy and someone whose been involved in, and writing about, cyberculture for years. His latest work, Play Money, is an exploration of the various economic systems that have developed in various virtual spaces. At RIT he’ll be speaking on “Ludocapitalism – A few ways of making real money from a virtual economy, and what they mean.”

I first met while at the University of Chicago. Julian’s input was really helpful for me while writing my thesis. We touched base again late last year at the American Anthropological Association Conference. Again, I got a lot out of the conversation. So if you’ve got the chance, come out and hear him speak.

Here are the official details:

Julian Dibbell

• Topic: Ludocapitalism – A few ways of making real money from a virtual economy, and what they mean
• Time: 7:30pm (the talk will be followed by open q&a time from 8:30-9)
• Location: Liberal Arts (Bld 6), Room A205

I’ve been testing the new Wordpress interface for a while and just think it’s da bombiest! The user interface is clean, the new functions rock, and the .php seems pretty optimized (everything running faster, even on my slow server).

It’s amazing to think that I’m already done with the first three weeks of my final quarter at RIT. It’s been intense — and the reason that I’ve not been blogging. By the end of this coming week, I’ll be able to premier all the stuff that I’ve been working on.

Following up on the PictLens posting, I have two other cool bits of photo tech (admittedly the photos that you’ll see are not the best). First I give you a snowy RIT night:

What makes this unique is not what you can see, but what’s buried in the metadata:

Latitude: N 43° 5′ 16.844″
Longitude: W 77° 40′ 36.637″

This photo was take by my phone (which now has an active GPS chip in it thanks to the excellent work of others) and my coordinates were then encoded into it’s .EXIF file header and uploaded directly from the phone to Flickr. The only thing that currently stinks in this process is that Flickr didn’t recognize the GPS data when I attempted to place this picture on my map.

Here’s the second picture:

Alberto here is noteworthy because of the workflow that got him to Flickr. This picture was shot using my Kodak V705 and uploaded directly to Flickr thanks to the Eye-Fi Smart Media (SD/SSHD) card inside of it. Function both as memory and as a wireless modem, the Eye-Fi card routed the picture, via our home WiFi network, to the Eye-Fi site, and then pushed copies both to Flickr and the hard drive of the laptop I’m presently working on.

Both of these technologies have some interesting implications and tie into things that I’m working on at RIT, but I can’t quite talk about just yet. Soon though. Real soon.

My office mate just introduced me to the PicLens web browser plug-in. It’s pretty incredible. This cross platform plug in can grab a collection of photos, like those in my flickr account above, and converts them into an interactive (Apple aesthetic) gallery. The resulting user experience is elegant and totally engaging. Give it a try!

So I haven’t been able to update the site on any consistent base in a while. Life’s been really busy. Unfortunately, as of late, it seems like I only have time to blog around major, and often tragic, events. So, quickly (with RIT’s quarter drawing to its close, I have a mountain of grading to do) here’s some good things:

• My presentation at the American Anthropological Association’s national conference went well. It looks like I’ll get a journal publication out of it.
• The quarter itself has gone pretty well, in particular a lot of strides have been made at setting up a publishing research lab here at the school. More on that soon.
• Our (boy) cat Lewis, has made a full recovery after having two toes amputated because of a cancerous growth.
• I got a new phone/pocket pc, which has helped me get organized.
• I was a judge in a national variable data print competition.
• The blog helped me reconnect with an old friend.
• Dre and I are succeeding in getting out (and traveling) to see friends and family. At this rate, who knows, we might actually go on our Honeymoon this year.
• I was awarded my teaching rank (black sash) in Kung Fu.

I’m sure there’s more, but my timer is going off, reminding me that it’s time to get back to grading.

Word to the wise. This past week I nearly lost eight years of my life — my Wordpress mySQL database crashed and burned. Worse, I found out that my hosting company only keeps backups of the previous day’s data — so their backups of my stuff was corrupted as well.

Thankfully I had backed up my data in late August. That combined with the fact life has prevented me from posting much in the last few months, meant that I was able to reclaim any missing posts by looking at my previous .RSS feeds.

Moral of the story, install the Wordpress Backup Plug-In and have it send you e-mail backups of your data on a regular basis. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

THE LOOP has soft launched. A news r&d project, run by Rochester’s Gannett paper, the Democrat and Chronicle, the Loop is a college focused news magazine. What makes it unique is that the end result has been developed and created by a team of students from 8 of our area colleges (basically everyone but the University of Rochester). One of my students from the School of Print, Heather Hynes, is responsible for the visual design of the site.

My involvement with the project has been as an adviser and a researcher. Basically, I’ve spent a few days a week in at the D&C sitting with the team, discussing online content production, and getting their views on the news. This is all part of my grounding for the work I’ll be doing at Cornell. It also is material I’ll be bringing back to my courses this year at RIT.

Oh, and all the cool kids have installed the Loop Facebook App and follow the Loop on twitter.

Before I totally forget to mention it. YouTube announced last Friday that they will be enacting a revenue sharing program. That’s helpful in terms of reaching the community. What didn’t seem like the best idea was doing this at a Swiss Conference instead of in a video on YouTube. To my knowledge, nothing has been official posted there yet (at least no mention in the official YouTube blog, even though they made a post on Jan 27th, the day the news hit).

I’m interested to see how the following comment, excerpted from the article above, will fly within the community:

Hurley said that when YouTube started, he and the site’s other co-founders ??? Steve Chen and Jawed Karim ??? felt revenue-sharing would build a community of users motivated by making money, rather than their love of videos.

But that as the site has grown, they have come to see financial remuneration as a way of improving content.