This problem of being disconnected from your digital memories and relationship is real.

danah boyd (apophenia) has blogged about why your online identity is precious with a cautionary tale:

When companies host all of your data and have the ability to delete you and it at-will, all sorts of nightmarish science fiction futures are possible.

Google, Yahoo, MS Live, Facebook, MySpace offerings are so convenient, engaging, useful, powerful and dominant that many digital immigrants and natives have years of thoughts, work and expression in the sole trust of commercial organisations. The ‘terms of use’ clauses typically impose all the onus on an individual, and “all care & no responsibility” for the service provider.

The same organisations have to manage the risk of system abuse and legal threats. However the impact from losing personal data is vastly more significant for the individual than the loss of the same data for the system owners.

Have a read of the comments and the personal significance of the problem/nightmare becomes evident.

How can system designers and developers to introduce a fair appeals system which restores a balance between system security, legal responsibility and legitimate identity security to prevent users being disconnected from their online history and relationships?

It’s another challenge for the myedna development team in creating a fair social networking space for educators - me.edu.au.

The last post which embedded a video destroyed the WordPress template. WordPress stripped and messed with the </object> and <p> tags.

You can turn off the wysiwymg (What You See is What You Might Get) editor in
==> WordPress > WP-Admin > Options > Writing.
  => Uncheck [_] ‘Users should use the visual rich editor by default’.

This gives a pretty stripped down editor but provides a very useful <code>tag which allowed me to embed the SecondLife video:

<code>
  <object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&file=http%3A//blip.tv/rss/flash/557674&feedurl=http%3A//HeyTC.blip.tv/rss/&autostart=false&brandname=HeyTC&brandlink=http%3A//HeyTC.blip.tv/” width=”400″ height=”255″ allowfullscreen=”true” id=”showplayer”>
    <param name=”movie” value=”http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?enablejs=true&file=http%3A//blip.tv/rss/flash/557674&feedurl=http%3A//HeyTC.blip.tv/rss/&autostart=false&brandname=HeyTC&brandlink=http%3A//HeyTC.blip.tv/” />
    <param name=”quality” value=”best” />
  </object>
</code>

The first cut of the video showed how much is was an unexciting talking heads are in SecondLife. May as well as have a simple audio file with a few pictures. I changed this using two techniques:

1. I heavily edited the video from 27 minutes down to 7 minutes. Should have been even more brutal. One of the losses was a loss of all the personal thank-yous. Why? A wider audience is not likely to know this and it also interrupted the interesting narrative that came out of each presentation.
2. The SL video was spiced up a bit with a few sequences of ‘action’ complementing the commentary. SecondLife is about doing and sharing. One snippet I liked was a recording of the party goers gradually appearing & being dressed in second life.

Unfortunately I edited the video first. I should have exported the audio and edited that in Audacity first. Audacity’s envelope feature allowed me to counteract the different speakers voices fading in and out as they moved away from / closer to the microphone.

Some problems with the videos:

• The light was different in different sessions (afternoon vs noon)
• The clips were not from the context of the speaking (see the very first clip & Greg Black does not appear)
• The me.edu.au SL box was obscured
• The names of party goes obscured the view in some clips
• Some avatars got in the way of the shot
• The camera dude (Teskat Teskat) got in the way of the shot, fell asleep (inactive) and at times poorly positione
• Boring clips

So Second Life recording tips in a nutshell:

re Pre Production

• Tech setup - use the best computer available, well tested.
• Have an second avatar recording just audio. The video recording machine will possibly crash with out of video memory / 2nd life crashes - under the load of 3D & video.
• Test audio setup ~ experiement with the ambient sounds / music / chat.
• Test the network setup:
• is firewall or proxy settings blocking chat
• what effect of your proxies
• firewall policies: do they ‘timeout’?
• Test the recording software. I used Camtasia 4 but there are free alternatives eg debugmode’s Wink or the new Jing from TechSmith (makers of Camtasia)

re the Shoot

• Avoid talking head presentations: plan a variety of set sequences.
• Think creatively & scout good camera locations
• Keep your video avatar awake and active.
• Master the keyboard controls from 1st person view to camera view.
• Keep lighting consistent

re Post Production

• Process and edit audio first, then add video second. Add cue points as necessary.
• The audio will determine the video shots required.
• Use a real video editor - not Camtasia.
• Set aside time to edit.
• Think about the output formats and end users. I’ve uploaded two versions to http://blip.tv/ one for viewing & one for editing. Unlike YouTube, you can download & mash these videos.

From that point I downloaded and installed the Second Life software, confirmed my account in email (it was in my junk folder) and logged in.

Basically you start with a something like department store manikin which you can change every aspect of shape, colour, clothing and accessories. Funny thing is many people seem to make a stylised version of themselves online. Curious.

What I really wanted to be a translucent amorphous alien creature but couldn’t find the alien option.  It takes time to develop a good avatar (character).
The abuse I put my character through tickled my funny bone. Tried stop flying & Teskat Teskat (TT) ‘crashed’ to the ground. Tried walking around and walked straight into the octopuses garden in the shade. Found a bike and attached it to my head ~ a very tragic accident.

The key thing learnt was finding ‘terra incognita’. It was simple: the big blue search button.  Select ‘Places’. Type ‘terra incognita’ and click ’search’.  Found it. Double click it & I’m there :)

Second Life requires a lot of computing power: a fast CPU, lots of memory and a good video graphics card. I have all except a fast CPU so moving around lagged a bit. Setting the screen size to a smaller (800×600) really helps rectify this short coming.

Next post:audio chat - the core of the edna 10th birthday event in Second Life.

The Second Life’s event got people together from around the country and around the world. Another noteworthy point was a few people made some serendipitous connections that were followed up in first life.

Kerry Johnson and Mike Seyfang cobbled together a clever way of broadcasting this through KerryJ’s Second Life avatar - by using an audio mixer to tie together the speeches, music etc and send it via the computer and onto Decka Mah’s terra incognita.

I was tasked record the event in Second Life using video. The next few blog posts will outline:

• getting started with SL - disorientation, learning and blind luck.
• wrangling audio chat
• screen recording the event trails and tribulations
• last minute panic to get chat working with video
• publishing it online

I suspect that my hours of the day have just shrunk once again…

A bit of knuckle grease and lateral thinking Kerrie Smith and I have been able to solve this problem.

Step 1:

• Copy the Map Overlay ‘Country/Territory Detail’ table data
  [tip:set ’show rows’ to 100 at the bottom right of page]
• Paste the data into a spreadsheet
  [tip:I first pasted the data into MS Word first & then copy-paste just the table data into the spreadsheet. This allowed me to keep the data in a table structure]

Step 2:

• Get the Australian postcode information
  [tip:use this spreadsheet of Australian Postcodes and example Google Analytic data 320kb]
• Paste it in next to your Territory detail.
  [tip: make sure no leading or trailing spaces beside the city names]

Step 3:

• Associate the city name with the state / postcode using the excel function VLOOKUP()
  [tip:my formula =VLOOKUP(G3, $A$2:$C$13584, 2, FALSE)]
• Copy the formula to all the cities listed in the Google Analytics data.

Step 4:

• Sort by State
• Total each value on a State by State basis.
• Graph until your heart’s content…

Corrections & additions welcomed!

hth

Currently I’m investigating the reason why there are discrepancies between AWStats and Google Analytics - specifically the large differences between a common statistic Page Views.

AWStats bases it’s reports on what happens on the webserver. The challenge is to correctly interpret server hits into behaviour.

Google Analytics bases it’s reports on what happens on a web page. It’s challenge is data completeness. The permutations of browser, connection, computer, operating system and user settings can undermine validity of statistics.

The big conclusion is web analytics is not an accounting exercise but a spot-the-trend exercise dependent on many assumptions.

My challenge is to recognise and account for valid and invalid assumptions:

AWStats might be over reporting

• What is AWStats reporting as a page load? See http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_glossary.html which details a OnlyFiles conifguration list
• Are spambots and screen scrapers creating false page views in AWStats? (check individual pages statistics)
• Site administration still generate visits whereas Google Analytics does not.

Google Analytics might be under reporting because:

• Site blocking (eg visitors behind education institution firewalls
• Page loads interrupted causing the script not to be activated
• Firefox ‘NoScript‘ add-on which can block the analytics script
• Web browser cookies turned off
• Web browser javascript turned off
• A dynamic webpage built using AJAX undermines the assumption of what a web page / visit actually is. For example the new Hotmail/Live service does not require separate page loads to check different mail folders to view webmail.

Sources:

• http://web.uwaterloo.ca/documentation/AnalyticsvLogReader.php
• http://aonach.com/chatter/lies-damned-lies-and-web-statistics/
• http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_glossary.html

Do you have any further suggestions or corrections?

A proof of concept ignites innovation by exploring unproven ideas and new techniques in a managed creative, low cost, time effective way.

See past attempts:

• Defining PoCs
• The Shiny part of my job
• Scratch That Itch [from Process of Innovation blog]

What do you think?

A window of opportunity opened last week to put into reality our ideas for the last phase “Describe” automating key metadata elements.