Participatory is the lodestare for those trying to steer the social networking juggernaut towards actual improvement of education. As described in Henry Jenkins’s Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (a white paper on the MacArthur Digital Media Learning site), participatory culture is our technologically-delivered hope for banishing passivity, instilling the kind of know-how that comes with activity, and promoting critical judgment about media.

Today, YouTube; tomorrow, MyYouTubeSpace? I’ve pulled together a little demonstration of something that can be done today with the greatest of ease, something that does its part to elevate video out of the realm of slack-jawed consumption. A slick little new service called Mojiti allows you to write captions and overlay them onto video that has been previously created and posted. Mojiti, then, lets you annotate someone else’s video–which is a way of claiming it, analyzing it, perhaps even transforming it. Participating.

Here’s an example. Before seeing it scribbled over, have a look at my victim-video, a little snippet from The Daily Show (via YouTube) that lampoons social networking websites. It’s mighty entertaining unto itself, and it features an upcoming star of our University Seminar series, Siva Vaidhyanathan:

And now have a look at my annotated version of the very same video. As you’ll see, I’ve discovered a hidden subtext to the piece - watch with amazement as I prove it to you!

I rest my case.

What did you do on your spring vacation? Me, I communed with ancestors — and not just the vividly alive ones. My mother had collected a good deal of basic facts and figures about her family and my father’s, and had fed this data into genealogical software installed on her computer. All that rich data was trapped on a local system; to distribute some of it to interested descendants, she would print out, collate, update, supplement…. Spring break: time to transplant the family tree online.

Thanks to the Mormons, the world of digitized genealogy is stabilized into basic metadata; most any family tree software ports its data into GEDCOM files. That allowed us to easily move all those dates and obscure birth locales to a web-based presentation, using a GEDCOM to HTML converter.

Actually, not just a presentation — really a dynamic social platform. The open-source package that I chose, PhpGedView, allows registered members to upload all kinds of supplementary information — photos, notes, what have you (and what *do* you have from those ghostly predecessors?). It pours out data in any number of ways — fan charts, calendars, relationship maps, you name it. It offers a customizable portal, with any number of ways to communicate with fellow registrants. And it protects the privacy of the living: unregistered visitors won’t know how old I am or where I was born or even my name, though they can browse to their hearts’ content among the dead.

A pedigree chart stretches back back back…

Notes from my uncle supplement data and an uploaded picture of his grandfather, a line-o-type operator in Salmon Idaho.

I particularly like the “on this day in your history” feature, because everyday is an anniversary of some event — a birthday, a deathday, a wedding….

Mark your calendars: plenty to commemorate in May — though Saturdays are oddly event-free.

Yesterday, Grace Parker (my great-great grandmother) turned 143. Meanwhile Gunilla ‘Golda’ Endler, another great-great grandmother (oh I have lots of ‘em) will be 152 later this month. Only a few photos currently festoon our family tree; my mother has diligently digitized many old portraits, but at huge resolution so she could print out copies for family members, so this work has to be web-optimized. It happens, though, that the tree already contains pictures of our April birthday girls: both Grace (my mother’s side, born in Kansas, died in Oregon) and Golda (my father’s side, born in Belarus, died in Sweden).

Happy birthdays, ladies — you’re no spring chickens, and I’m sure you never gave each other’s world much thought, but here you are, linked through one of those improbable combinations of American circumstances, and settled side-by-side on the web. Settled, at least, for now; despite those lock-in gazes, we know you’re both migrators.

Music promoters, child molesters, and now this. Rupert Murdoch’s social networking colonization, MySpace, is starting to be infiltrated by yet another band of predators. They tend to be around ninety years old, and most of them claim to be female. That ‘friend’ your sullen teen is busily adding to her MySpace collection may be none other than… a library?

Now this is a little embarrassing. Like the PG-13 cheap laugh, when the spunky granny grabs the mic and roks da house. Or like Helen Gurley Brown. Hey, Westmont Public Library is with it! Who I’d like to meet: You :) Westmont Public Library’s Interests: Books, Graphic Novels, Magazines, Music, Movies, Video Games. Status: Single. Zodiac sign: Capricorn. (Why are many of these MyFriendly libraries Capricorns? As in Tropic of? Isn’t that a Graphic Novel?) MyFriendly libraries tend to have other libraries in their friendspace. So with one click, here were are at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library. Interests: General — helping people. instant messaging. RESEARCH yo! Books — the ones inside me. You go, Tom Ford! And Brooklyn College Library is in the house–or, as ’she’ puts it, BC Library — Here on Your Space!

And check out that sassy 100-year-old, the Tonganoxie PL:

As an Xer happily removed from the MySpace generation (though my friends in bands almost dutifully keep pages there), I don’t really understand the appeal. The pages are ugly and ungainly; text can be impossible to pick out against garish image backgrounds, tinny sound files unspool the moment a page opens — it’s all reminiscent of wayback web hideousness, which all too often isn’t so wayback. Still, for better or worse, this is space that teens of all ages build . I guess it’s easy to share music, real-time flirtation, self-branding, endless LOLs. Mostly MySpace seems like high school online — full of chatter, hormones, and the pursuit of popularity. “It’s an unphysical way of hanging out.” Sure kid, great, but someday you’ll want better unphysical spaces. Tonight, at least, MySpace times out constantly. Hey Fox, buy some servers!

As they say, the kids love it; 46 million members just can’t be wrong, can they? Isn’t this democracy? And aren’t libraries at the core of democracy? At least these libraries are trying–but in MySpace they have little to offer, aside from a campy Hello! Nothing to build here, nothing to interact with or collect. To be fair: some libraries link to ‘blog’ entries, like, say, the one posted by Angela at the New Castle-Henry County Public Library listing teen movies, pizza taste-offs, and - spa night? Hmmm… Or the Tanganoxie Public Library’s list of their New Music CD Collection (topped off by Kelly Clarkson! Breakaway! LOL!!) But it’s very unidirectional. Information emanates from the ancient single female Capricorns to all you undifferentiated kids. The full extent of the idea is to show up In Your Extended Network.

This is piggybacking, really, on the idea of social software–just showing up when you should be interacting. Of course, just showing up to the party is a hoot when you’re 90. Links back to the OPAC, indexes of holdings, announcements of teen-centered activity: that’s fine, but how about the actual music? Can I bring library images or videos into MySpace? Can I build immediate links to cool passages of my favoriate favorite favorite books? Can I make a montage out of those awesome graphic novels? How can I collect anything other than a thumbnail picture of the library–a cute little building facade to add to my friends collection? When libraries stop billboarding and start actually transforming themselves into MySpaces–then we’ll have something.

Well, it’s a first step, and Rome wasn’t built in a day–even MySpace wasn’t built in a day, though it might seem otherwise. Here’s the 100 year old Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library: Who I’d like to meet: Anyone! Really! Well, put it like that, & you might be irresistible. A bit pathetic, but, whatever, popular. Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library has, at this writing, 163 friends.

It occurs to me that I haven’t highlighted pictures snapped along the way lately, and that’s just not right - it’s been a vivid if peripatetic season. Ranging over the last two months and stepping backwards chronologically, I’ve been most thankful for San Francisco:

…after drinking up kulcha at the Met like a good New Yorker:

…after wandering and wondering around Harlem:

…after drinking up kulcha on the Lower East Side:

…after getting used to being back in New York in the first place:

Now that we’ve returned to Maine, my camera battery is too frozen to function. For the time being, you’ll have to imagine an icy Portland for yourself, or see what more intrepid shutterbugs are seeing here.

Scott & the ladies go cruising - along with 500 other gay families. All aboard!

In which someone turns 40, someone turns 39, someone works the road & refuses to wave. In which Maine is warmer & we sing less but dance more than in years past. In which the sky is clear and bright all weekend, & we once again escape the Fourth.

I’ve posted a set of photos from the steamy & beautiful Cabot/Melnik wedding in Deerfield, Mass.