Pictures in comments

You can now attach a picture to a comment. A number of users asked for this feature.

Changes to the way chat works

There is a new user preference on the account preferences page

[ ] Only accept new chat requests from bookmarked contacts

This option is unchecked by default, meaning that any other registered member can initiate a chat with you. If you don’t want unsolicited chats, you can filter your chats by selecting this preference option (registered members can access their account preferences with this link) so that other users can’t start a new chat with you unless you have bookmarked them. Checking the box won’t disable existing chats – but if you want to, you can suspend any existing chat by clicking the suspend check box in the chat window. This gives you complete control over who can chat with you.

Notification for bookmarked members and objects now includes comments and remarks

Notification checkboxes in bookmarked ‘Contacts’ and ‘Favorites’ now reads:

[ ] Notify me of posts and comments to this object
[ ] Notify me of posts and comments by this member

Registered members can access their bookmarks on Handmeon home page under the Favorites and Contacts tabs.

“Is the tacit model that of a museum with a catalogue raisonné?”—Phil

My reference to Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ was not to evoke or advocate a museographical model, but to point out that even a urinal (which is what ‘Fountain’ is) can be ‘serious’, and that serious can be ‘kitsch’, and that it is all just a question of point of view.

• The tacit model is that of a café.
• The tacit model is that of “sprezzatura” and the art of conversation at the court of Urbino in 1507.
• The tacit model is that of the French literary and philosophical salons of the 17th and 18th centuries.
• And the symbolist salons of the 19th century.
• The tacit model is that of the Spanish “tertulia”.
• The tacit model is that of the coffeehouse of 18th century England which Habermas credits with the emergence of the “public sphere”.
• And the coffeehouse of the 1960’s where folksingers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan performed.
• The tacit model is the fine old Irish tradition of boasting as an art form.
• And “playing the dozens” in the African-American oral tradition.
• The tacit model is Burning Man, book groups, Karaoke, amateur theatricals, and breakdancing.
• The tacit model is all those occasions where “self-consciousness” is experienced as opportunity rather than anxiety.

At the same time, the tacit model is also Wikipedia, and the Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales, and all round-robin storytelling, and Linux, and Lascaux, and graffiti, and the shrines and grottos of the French countryside. The tacit model is a coral reef.

But as Michael observed, there can be such a thing as too much meta-discussion, especially if there’s not much “there” there.

“Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock? ... Let me tell you, Sir, it was a very unseasonable question at least, — because it scattered and dispersed the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the HOMUNCULUS, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception.” — Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Sterne

I happened across an interesting article by Howard Rheingold entitled The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online. It’s worth taking a look at if you have any interest at all in the subject. He is a veteran of The Well and wrote a book about it. He’s talking specifically about “online communities” and I’ve been trying to figure out what the differences might be (if any) between what he’s talking about and what we’re trying to do at Handmeon.

Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, Jean-Claude Planchet/Pompidou Center

Phil asks “The host is supposed to be creating something of lasting value, a monument of some sort? Is that a burden? Seems that would produce self-consciousness and anxiety… Here we are socializing the presence of an unsolicited, kitschy knickknack. How serious can it be?”

There are several good questions and issues wrapped up together in this comment and so it invites a couple of distinct responses. (Michael has already offered some answers of his own in a previous post.)

As far as the Burns Supper Problem goes, we think the best solution is to make the system “opt-in”. I have come to believe that a Handmeon should probably never be handed on “unsolicited”, lest the recipient find the gift more of a burden than a treat. Essentially this would mean that you could only hand an object on to another registered member who has ‘coveted’ the object. This is an issue that we plan to address directly in the very near future. In the meantime, it might not be a bad idea to test the waters before offering a friend a Handmeon. For instance, you might send them a link to the object (there’s a handy “share this page with your friends” link in the sidebar of every sojourn) and invite them to register and covet the object, so you will know they are interested.

The question of “lasting value” is fascinating. I do think that lots of Americans feel a certain level of anxiety and self-conscious about certain categories of social performance, especially anything that might seem affected or elitist. It probably depends on what you are used to. There are people who like book groups, Karaoke, 10K foot races, amateur theatricals, or spelling bees. Some people form quartets and give free concerts at the local hospital, just for the fun of it. Other people put their photos up on Flickr, post their own YouTube videos, or even write blogs, all of which are little attempts do do something performative that is a little bit more special (dare I say worthwhile?) than watching television. I actually ended up enjoying the Burns Supper that I went to, though I’ll admit that I was a bit grouchy on the way there in the car. How serious is it? It’s all just a form of play. Some games are serious, some are fun, some are hard, some are funny, some are all those things at once. At Handmeon, everyone is the host of their own sojourns and is free to try to set whatever tone they feel is appropriate within the bounds of civility set out in the user agreement. Though, of course, they will have to talk their guests into it. We aim to provide tools to facilitate creativity and neighborliness. Seriousness is optional. “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.”

How serious can a kitschy knickknack be? In December 2004, Duchamp’s Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British artworld professionals. Jerry Saltz wrote in The Village Voice in 2006: “Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical state. It is a manifestation of the Kantian sublime: A work of art that transcends a form but that is also intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger.”

Amusing one-line review of Handmeon, pointing to the Boston Globe article:

Handmeon.com is a cool idea, perhaps showing that Web 2.0 entrepreneurs may be running out of ideas.

Well, I laughed out loud. He goes on to say, “Actually, I do think it’s a pretty interesting social experiment.” Thanks Pito, for taking a look. Your thoughts and feedback are welcome here.

Phil asked whether Handmeon members are allowed to created anonymous or pseudonymous online identities. THe short answer is, “It depends.”

The posts in Macklemoyle’s sojourn with Handmeons Hints provide some guidelines, but there was room for a lot of discussion in one of the comment threads raised some interesting questions about identity, authenticity, civility, and the uses and misuses of anonymity.

Do we need a water-tight policy or are guidelines good enough?

The blog’s been pretty quiet. We’ve been far from slacking off, but it doesn’t show here. Sorry about that. It’s going to change. This post outlines the topics you’ll see addressed in the next few weeks.

We’ve done a number of product updates, which I’ll detail in another post.

We’ve been thinking about how organizational structures influence online opportunities and costs, for both developers and the customers. You can expect to hear some “thinking out loud” on that topic very soon.

We’re starting to think about our second product, building on what we’re learning from Handmeon. At some point this may turn into a blog for Toliwaga, the company, rather than Handmeon, the product.

Mostly, we’re learning an awful lot about online interaction, and the intersection with mental models about online tools, particularly as they relate to the real-world. We’re right on track in the learning department.

Handmeon is about to get some fairly major structural changes. It’s not much in coding, but in presentation, education, and behavior modeling. A fancy way to say: We made a mistake in the original concept, and we’re going to address it, and it primarily involves asking our users to do things differently than we’ve been promoting to date.

Finally, there has been some great conversation about some of these topics inside Handmeon itself, and I’m going to promote some of those to the blog. We nearly installed forum software this week, but at the last minute decided to start with the blog. I see a need for forums at some point, but not yet. We want the blog to become a fairly public, and fairly transparent, window into our thinking about Handmeon and “the second product.” We’d like our fans to help us think out loud about these topics. We want to challenge your thinking, and have you challenge ours.

In other words, the blog is going to get more bloggy. Thanks for playing along.

Mitch Wertlieb at Vermont Public Radio conducted an interview with Jeff and Dwight this morning.

Are you sick of the throngs of shoppers packing the malls in these remaining days before Xmas? Do the constant barrage of TV commercials screaming “Sale! Sale! Buy now!” make you want to pull an Elvis Presley? (He once shot out his TV screen).

Well, maybe Handmeon.com is for you. It’s the antidote for anyone who thinks the Xmas season has become all about consumption and less about the meaning behind gifts.

The fledgling web site was created by friends Michael Yacavone, Dwight Aspinwall and Jeff Doyle, and Doyle says it was inspired by a gift giving tradition far, far from home:

Pamela Polston wrote a great article about Handmeon in Seven Days, Burlington VT’s alternative newsweekly. She coined the title phrase of this post, which made me laugh out loud. Thanks!

Src: East Carolina University

Handmeon is not an entirely new idea. The concepts behind it, it turns out, have been around for centuries. One of our main inspirations comes from the tradition of Kula, practiced by the island peoples of the Massim archipelago in the South Pacific, and documented by Bronislaw Malinowski in his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific. In Kula, participants travel up to hundreds of miles by canoe in order to exchange valuables such as shell necklaces and armbands. Kula articles never remain long with one recipient; rather they move from one hand to the next throughout a vast network of islands. The tradition serves to build and strengthen relationships between tribe members.

We found this attitude towards gifts to be refreshing. Ours is a society where giving seems to have been largely co-opted by commercial interests and turned into an act of shopping and consumption. Who was it, exactly, who decided that gifts start with person A and end with person B? Why shouldn’t person C, D, and so on enjoy the gift as well? How was it that re-gifting got a bad rap? Why is accumulation such a worthwhile thing to do?

Handmeon, like Kula, puts the emphasis on the experiences we have with gifts and the stories that are passed along with them. Kula valuables are not just shells; they’ve become something greater by virtue of their journey and the people with whom they’ve sojourned. Some of them have names and dates carved on them which are hundreds of years old. Like Kula, Handmeon objects are passed from hand to hand (or by post if you must). The canoe is optional.

Unlike Kula, which relies on the oral tradition to recount history, Handmeon borrows from the blogging world, letting you tell stories in words, pictures, audio, or video. While Kula valuables circumnavigate the Massim archipelago in prescribed clockwise or counter-clockwise fashion, Handmeon articles are free to travel throughout the world. The site keeps track of where, when, and with whom a gift has sojourned, with the help of Google maps. The result is an online history of the gift’s relationship to the community, a sort of digital provenance.

In Kula, only two type of things are used as gifts. Soulava (shell necklaces) travel in a clockwise direction around the archipelago, while mwali (shell armbands) travel counter-clockwise. Here again, Handmeon is less constrained; examples are quite diverse. Brass Flamingo started its journey in Vermont and now resides in Texas. It’s a metaphor for unchecked human desire, with posts that explore the possibilities of post-consumer consciousness. Other examples include an Ovation guitar, several pieces of artwork, a stuffed Doberman that raps Jingle Bells, a rock from Mt. Washington, and a votive candle from the Watergate complex. A Handmeon gift can be anything you can attach an ID sticker to, but it’s best for beautiful, peculiar, or one-of-a-kind cultural artifacts—in other words, something that can carry a story.

It occurs to me that giving somebody a Handmeon is a little bit like inviting them to a Burns Night Supper.

Maureen wrote a post on the Heritance.org blog entitled Handmeon: a new relationship to museum objects? It’s about Handmeon, the meaning of objects, and possible applications in the world of museums.

Heritance is a not-for-profit organization that coordinates a network of museum professionals who provide skills, knowledge, and services free of charge to museums in some of the poorest and most remote regions of the globe. Full disclosure: Maureen, the Executive Director of Heritance, is my wife.

Maureen writes:

Imagine a museum where in addition to viewing the collections on display, you could access a website associated with each object. Furthermore, imagine that you could gain this access on or off site and participate in the “writing” of the object’s story yourself whenever you felt like it.

It probably sounds iconoclastic to speak of a visitor “writing” the story of a museum object. But why not? The art you encounter in museums are “merely” objects. Their meaning is imparted by all of their appreciators, regardless of their credentials. Just like the meaning of any number of things in the world.

The idea behind Handmeon is that the content and history and social network associated with the object is the primary source of value and interest in the object. That is why each successive owner is invited to participate in bringing the gift into existence. You might say that the object is, in a variety of senses, a pretext.

Maureen has turned this notion on its head by extending the concept of shared ownership to include sharing the right to interpret the object, even if the physical object remains shackled to the pedestal in the rotunda. Sharing the act of interpretation opens the object by embracing difference. Over the last few years, we have seen the blogosphere whittle away at the effective monopoly of mass-market broadcast journalism. Maureen observes that the same process could be brought to bear on the interpretation of the past. This is particularly significant because Heritance believes it matters who owns the past:

Museums are generally thought of as stewards of culture and heritage. But history is not a simple mirror of the past. Our perception and interpretation of history, and our place in it, is constantly reconstructed through a social process of collective recollection. This continuous reinvention of the past is part of the process by which communities define and shape their present and their future.

We believe that museums can serve a vital role in community evolution, both as catalysts in the process of self-definition and self-determination, and as role models in the transparent and inclusive processes essential to open democratic societies.

_Heritance Mission and Objectives executive summary

Our little startup broke into the public eye today, at least locally, with a great story in the Valley News, Creating a ‘Gift Ecology’.

I couldn’t be happier with how Alex Hanson told the story, and the aspects he highlighted. James Patterson shot a bunch of artsy photos, and we don’t look too dorky. The printed version (page C-1, the top story in the Close Up section) has a second photo of Jeff at the computer, with my face poking into the upper right corner.

It’s a fun start to spreading the word on something that clearly rings true for a lot of people.

I wrote in an email: “This season, if you’d like to give a gift to many people, some of whom you don’t yet know, sign up at Handmeon.com and turn something beautiful into something moving.”

Turn something beautiful into something moving™ – this may get real traction.

We launched Handmeon on the afternoon of August 9, 2007. At the time we restricted use to invitation-only guests, though we approved everyone who signed up on the wait list. We did this so we could go on vacation and not worry about the server melting. Those first users really helped us shake down the site, and we went on to fix a lot of early “gotchas.”