We Are But Zapatistas As IMPs

It struck me as I’m trying to plan my essay that more traditional taxonomic information architecures are something of a metaphor for representative democracies around the world. Taxonomic architectures offer a more regimented website structure and navigation – a website’s author surely trying to create something he/she feels will be of use to the site’s target audience, whilst this can be effective it’s not a true representation of what the audience want (well, it may not be, there’s no easy way to know with this structure which is the point). So, we figured that our online democracies could be made easier to navigate and more effective by allowing the users to collaboratively author their own information architectures.

As IMPs we are probably striving to produce/design things that are folksonomies, have tagging, give more user control, and something that over time becomes more representative of what the sites’ users want. All good.

Now think about democracy in our country. We vote for who we think can best represent our own beliefs to make decisions on our behalf. That’s alot of responsibility for a handful of people to have, and when you consider that a vote is basically a glorified popularity contest you might begin to think that maybe the people you vote might not have your best interests at mind. Were loads and loads of people attempting to participate in democracy to show they don’t approve of our England’s support of Bush’ illegal war in Iraq? Yes. Were they listened to? No. Obviously the amount of protesters isn’t the majority of voters but imagine if we were asked in a referendum or something, then more of a true figure of people against it would emerge. Since then it has emerged that some top guy in the American government admitted thatoil was a big motivation. Hmm (still looking for source to link to..).

In Mexico the Zapatista Army of National Liberation are fighting for a reform in the way that their government works to make it more of a participatory democracy than a representative one. I.E the decisions come from the bottom-up and the electorate have more of a say. Sound a bit like tagging and folksonomy? I think so.

There are some flaws in the metaphor, but meh.

An Almost Group Wide Project Problem?

I logged into my site’s own log in area and if I don’t log out or close the browser before going onto some other students’ websites I am already logged in! Without even registering, brilliant. I imagine maybe it has something to do with the virtual hosting, or the fact we are using the same table names, on the same server, or sessions not ending? Maybe there’s a php command that kills the session and gets rid of the data as you leave the domain or something?

I wonder if anyone has restricted parts of their site, such as an administrative section, dependant on user’s “access” level and if that still carries over.

Finished-ish

I think I got everything working. Dreamweaver isn’t very happy with a few things but I’m not very happy with Dreamweaver on a few things so it’s kind of mutual.

As far as I know I only need to make cosmetic changes now, maybe work on accessibility or something.

Play with it, add stuff, let me know how you get on: I-Comic-U

Democracy Through The Internet

Check this site out: http://myfootballclub.co.uk

The site has 53000 members who have all paid £35 and now they’re buying a football club where all members will have an equal say in things like player transfers and team selection.

MyFootballClub has agreed a deal in principle to purchase a controlling stake in Ebbsfleet United FC. Placed 9th in the Conference, Ebbsfleet United FC is one promotion from reaching the Football League for the first time in its history.

MyFootballClub members will also have the option to buy 100% of the football club in the future for a fixed price.

It made me think to an article I read at The Guardian’s website about, in parts, an economist called Ronald Coase , this is a section from the article (full article here) and I think it perfectly illustrates why the new ‘Web 2.0′ is potentially so exciting.

Ronald Coase had noticed something odd about capitalism. The received wisdom, among western economists, was that individuals should compete in a free market: planned economies, such as Stalin’s, were doomed. But in that case, why did huge companies exist, with centralised operations and planning? The Ford Motor Company was hailed as a paragon of American business, but wasn’t the Soviet Union just an attempt to run a country like a big company? If capitalist theory was correct, why didn’t Americans, or British people, just do business with each other as individual buyers and sellers in the open market, instead of organising themselves into firms?

The answer – which won Coase a Nobel prize – is that making things requires collaboration, and finding and linking up all the people who need to collaborate costs money. Companies emerge when it becomes cheaper to gather people, tools and material under one roof, rather than to go out looking for the best deal every time you need a few hours’ labour, or a part for a car. But the internet, Tapscott argues, is radically lowering the cost of collaborating. Companies – certainly big companies – are losing their raison d’etre. Individuals, and tiny companies, can collaborate without corporate behemoths to organise them. Considering how many of us spend our weekdays working for big companies, and then spend our weekends giving our money to them, this is a far-reaching thought.

This blog isn’t very informative, I basically just copy and pasted from other sources but I think both are thoroughly interesting (I wonder if the term ‘wikinomics’ will ever catch on? if it hasn’t already?) and worth thinking about.

In terms of my project, I am so almost done it’s ridiculous the small things that are holding me back. Such as layering divs, and positioning footer divs! I should know this kind of shit from last year! Basically got to find a way of linking to the latest uploaded comic (and the previous/first/next) based on a URL variable. I’m sure it’s possible so I’m not that worried. After that I can look at maybe sprucing up the profile page and changing the colour scheme – shit, maybe I might have time to check out the (presumably) shit accessibility of my site!

Want to have a mostly working version of the site up so I can pass the link around some forums and try and muster up some kind of feedback (and get some people using it, testing it in ways I can’t even think of etc).

Small Update

I think I have more or less given up on the function I was trying to achieve that I wrote about in the last blog.

Not enough time, need to get the other areas of the site working properly before working on that again I think. Shame!

If you’ve never read a newspaper, and you want to be all you can be. Join the army.

I got the new Gay For Johnny Depp album ‘The Politics of Cruelty’ at the weekend. Absolutely stunning. What’s more there’s a very strong chance I’ll be putting them on in Bournemouth in the new year at iBar. Brilliant!

Wednesday is the birth of a new club night. Robot.Robot.Engage! is the name we’ve given to a new night run by our fledgling promotions ‘thing’ in Bournemouth. Sam from Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly is DJ’ing and apparently that scared Fat Poppadaddys enough for them to try and poach both Sam and the whole night. Scumbags, how can the Uni actively endorse practices like this whilst simultaneously hindering what we are trying to do by not allowing any promotion of other venues on the Campus or in the student magazine (who have been very supportive to us).

Anyway, I came across a problem in m project the other day. I want to let users upload images to their own cache and then have the browser display them, thus adding greater interactivity and a reason to register to the site (only members can save, or publish, what they upload). Oh, it’s an online comic book.

Although apparently PHP_SELF can be used for sending images to itself it can only display the various attributes of the image and not the image itself (not without saving the image to the site first, which I don’t want to do). At least that’s the impression I get from Matt and The Internet. Javascript doesn’t seem to be able to do it, either. All the research I did seemed to suggest Javascript can be dynamic but not quite as dynamic as I wanted.

I ‘ve been pointed in the direction of something called AJAX:

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is not a technology in itself, but is a term that describes a “new” approach to using a number of existing technologies together, including: HTML or XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, The Document Object Model, XML, XSLT, and the XMLHttpRequest object. When these technologies are combined in the AJAX model, web applications are able to make quick, incremental updates to the user interface without reloading the entire browser page. This makes the application faster and more responsive to user actions.

Hopefully I can find what I want to do rather quickly because I don’t want to spend too long on this because although it was initially one of the important functions of the site I realised I could easily survive without it, people will just have to register to play on the create.php page.

Time clearly isn’t on my side.

Second Life

Here’s my avatar, finding it difficult to make it look less like a freak, and I can’t get rid of that damn afro. All second life needs now is a headset so you can fully immerse yourself, then it’ll be getting closer to the Metaverse or whatever it’s called.