unmediated

SIMAC is about music metadata, about what you can say of a piece of music, on what is hidden in a music file, in a collection of music files, and in the collective knowledge of a community of music lovers.

SIMAC's main task is the development of prototypes for the automatic generation of semantic descriptors and development of prototypes for exploration, recommendation, and retrieval.

Peffisaur is a free, multiuser MMS weblog. People can send MMS with their mobile phones containing photos and texts and it will be presented on the web page. Each user is also given their own page with only their postings on. It's all about sharing your daily life with others - at least the part of your life that you want to share and feel you can squeeze into your mobile phone.

Mbuni is a fully-fledged Open Source MMS gateway (MMSC) suitable for operators and MMS VAS providers.

In a speech Dan Gillmor has prepared for the World Editor's Forum annual conference in Seoul this week, Gillmor says competition between mainstream mass media and with people in the emerging citizen journalism sphere can make all journalists better at what they do. "We have a lot we can -- and must -- learn from each other....

"News organizations should be inviting the former audience not just into the process of commenting on the news, but also creating news reports. For that to happen, professionals need to open up -- in a number of ways."

Some of his advice:

• Offer respect for the good things citizen journalists do
• Help citizen journalists understand those best practices and principles of traditional journalism
• Point people to resources where they can learn more about how journalism works.

Tambur Messaging Gateway is an open source SMS/MMS messaging gateway platform. Tambur is used to integrate into SMSC and MMSC infrastructure provided by network operators, exposing their functionalities through an uniform, easy-to-implement HTTP based API. Tambur is written in the Java language, and uses the JBoss application server as its foundation.

"While I do think it's possible to 'move the people' with commercial products, the mass commodification of radical ideas and marginal practices is not without consequence."

VJIMAGEBANK...VJIB is an open “source” content community database of multimedia VJ artists. The audio, images and video clips (“contents”) on VJIB can be everything from nature to the most abstract video creations. All uploaded contents will b

Via del.icio.us/tag/unmediated

As we mentioned last week, the VDSL2 standard (100Mbps, 12,000 feet) has been ratified by the International Telecommunications Union. Tom's Hardware takes a brief look at Infineon's Vinax ADSL2+/VDSL2 solution, which they say is the first chipset to fully comply with the new standard (probably not the only ones claiming that, either). The VDSL2 frequency spectrum has been increased from 12 MHz to 30 MHz to boost VDSL's range, and increase speeds from 70/30Mbps, to symmetrical 100Mbps. Infineon says the chips should be available in volume by Q3; whether anyone deploys the tech is another matter entirely.

Via Broadbandreports

In Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Apple risks that a percentage of their users will cast off the shackles of prepackaged free or commercial software and start working on their own inventions. Spotlight, Automator and Widgets all involve aspects of programming, and provide a clear set of stepping stones for someone to develop more of an interest.

Free Internet TV is an Internet television tuner program that can receive over 750 online channels of daily and live broadcasts from around the world. There is no need for a PC TV card because the TV channels are streamed through your Internet connection.

(Free Internet TV! Only $19.95! ;) -kc.)

Via Meerkat: An Open Wire Service

Jeff Jarvis: " The essential difference - newspapers are institutional and blogs are personal, newspapers try to be dispassionate while blogs are passionate."

"...I speak not of the swarthy camera pirate with his heavy lens and professional press pass, but of the mild mannered college professor with the brand new camera-phone, the smiley housewife with the shiny Sure-Shot, the cocksure columnist with a thesis already brewing in the laptop. They are more than erstwhile tourists. They are the rabid bloggers, the plugged-in pundits, the citizen press corps - whip-smart individuals whose very nature drives them to post pictures, links and commentary."

Blogviz is a flash driven visualization model for mapping the transmission and internal structure of top links across the blogosphere.

It explores the idea of meme propagation by assuming a parallel with the spreading of most cited URLs in daily weblog entries.

Blogviz is currently a portrait of blogosphere’s topic activity during the first 64 days of 2005. Nevertheless, the model was developed to easily incorporate different timeframes. Blogviz will continue to expand in the future, to the possible point of including real-time data.

The interface displays each topic as a diagonal line from the first appearance of the topic to the last, charting the time in which each blog posted about the topic.

Will the current launch of mobile TV services hinder the uptake when the carriers launch the full service? The Register thinks so. “Despite these uncertainties, such is urgency of the 3G operators’ need to increase revenues and ROI from its network, that many are leaping into the market at the earliest stage and with inadequate technology. This risks disappointment with the results of the trials and a tougher job to convince consumers to test the full-blown mobile TV services when they emerge.”

Via MocoNews.net

Rodi or Rodia (Ρόδι or Ροδιά) means pomegranate in Greek. The Rodi program is a tiny P2P client/host (under 300K of binary code) implemented in pure Java. It's network use is similar to the bitTorrent concept. The program will serve the filesharing community with fast data delivery and serve the Open Source community by facilitating faster software deployment.

A quick rundown of Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman's great citizen journalism resource, 'We Media.

So last we heard, some high-tech honchos had gotten together to press Congress on the issue of the official digital TV switchover date. That legislation is now drafted, and sets a December 31, 2008 date by which broadcasters who’re still hogging those analog airwaves have got to give it up. One of the issues still unresolved is what to do about the nagging problem of the 20+ million American households that are still using antenna-based TVs, who are gonna be understandably disgruntled at the prospect of needing to go in on some new gear just to keep the tube a-pumpin’. Lawmakers are (this just in!) split down party lines, with Republicans favoring a subsidy for low-income households and Democrats favoring a subsidy for anyone who buys a set-top box.

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Via Engadget

You probably read somewhere about the troubles the Ventura County Star has had with unruly readers of its website posting naughty stuff in the user comments attached to articles. The website staff shut down the feedback mechanism for a while to take control of the problem; now it's back, under tighter control.

I hope people in the news business don't take this as an excuse not to open up articles to reader feedback. That would be a big mistake. This is a matter of implementation; get the system for dealing with bad behavior right and you can have a healthy, (...)

Entry continued...

Bravo to the students at Free Culture, who have just reached an important milestone: incorporation. As part of the process, they're asking the Internet community for advice on a number of key organizational decisions, while explaining the important role the student movement plays in the battle for a culture in which we can all be active participants:

Only a handful of students want to be activists, but millions of young people want to know more about why Napster got shut down, why their friends are getting sued, why they can share and remix some things and not others, why the TV news talks about celebrity trials rather than the issues in their own communities, how new technologies offer people new ways to participate in their culture and society (and why some people want to stop it), how this process has played out historically, why people can't afford medicines even though they’re cheaply produced, and so on.

in the news, and in our conversations, every day. We, as a generation, want to know about them. And inevitably, once we learn a bit, we want to stand up for what we see as right, and stand up against what we see as wrong. To bring young people into these discussions, I'm convinced, is at the heart of our mission.

We're incredibly lucky to have these smart, energetic, inspired young people talking face-to-face with other students about these issues. Check out Gavin Baker's post and lend a hand.

Younger US Users Ready For Mobile Multimedia
By Carlo Longino, Thu May 26 23:00:00 GMT 2005

More than a third of phone users age 13-34 are interested in mobile music, a new survey says.
By Carlo Longino

Music is the most interesting potential content service, according to a consulting firm's new survey, with 40 percent of the 1,000 mobile users between 13 and 34 that were surveyed saying they're very interested in receiving commercial-free radio over their handsets, with 35 percent interested in downloads to their device. Another 40 percent said they were interested in ad-supported video content, while under 20 percent said they'd pay $4 per month or 30 cents a clip for video content.

There are a few interesting takeaways here: first, mobile music is an area of interest, though that's no surprise to operators and service providers, who are working feverishly to get mobile download services going. Second, there does appear to be interest in mobile video -- but people don't want to pay for it. That means there's an opportunity here for mobile marketers to step in and seize some eyeballs. But respondents' price-consciousness could make one believe they're value conscious as well, and won't accept intrusive or gratuitous advertising. If users don't see mobile video (on a very general level) as being worth $4 per month, how much advertising will they accept to make up for it?

Nearly a quarter of those surveyed also said they'd be likely to switch carriers if their current one didn't offer "advanced, multimedia wireless content and services", meaning such content could become a powerful competitive metric.

So what to make of these numbers when taken alongside earlier figures from the UK showing somewhat disappointing data usage? For one thing, there's the implication that advanced multimedia content will attract a large number of new mobile data users, emphasizing the opportunity for revenue growth in this area.

Of course, it's easy to say that you'd love to have some service on your phone when it's just a survey, but it's another matter when it comes to paying for things. This relatively high level of interest doesn't mean operators can be complacent and lazy in their offerings. How many of these users can be converted into buyers if the failure rate remains as high as the 50 percent cited in the UK study?

Choice of content is one issue, and it would appear that users have an interest in multimedia content.But implmentation is another matter, and one operators will ignore at their peril.

Here's the latest audio from MAKE Magazine In this Make audio show- we interview Andrew Baron, the fellow behind RocketBoom- a daily 3 minute news show produced each day for the web, PSPs, phones and more. Want to make your own news show? Here's how. Right click or Control + click to download this MP3 to you local system or add the MAKE Audio feed to your podcasting application and get the show automatically! Show notes after the jump...

p>Cingular Wireless announced today it has set a new record for wireless text messaging in the fourth season of "American Idol." The company recorded more than 41.5 million text messages throughout the show's 12-week voting period, which is believed to represent the largest volume of text messaging in a single campaign in the history of the U.S. wireless industry.

The number of text messages in the fourth season of "American Idol" more than tripled the amount of text messages recorded in the 2004 season.

[via mobiledia.com]

GameDaily.biz has up a discussion they had earlier in the week with Frank Gibeau, EA's Senior Vice President of Marketing, North America. Mr. Gibeau holds forth on where EA is going (and therefore, where the industry is going) as regards next-generation platforms, the prices of future game titles, and the cost of making games. He also comments on Nintendo's position in the market right now. From the article: "I think the Nintendo customer is so entrenched and loyal that the company knows that they have a base of customers that they are building off of. Is it the same size that it was on 8-bit? Certainly not. They definitely have seen their market position erode in the face of market introductions by Sony and Microsoft."

Yes, this has been covered heavily. Not nearly enough noise has been made about how easy hacking this device is. Nokia has opened up almost everything even placing the graphics under a Creative Commons license. Nokia has also constructed a firm foundation to develop on. Underneath everything is a Debian based system with a 2.6.11 kernel. Debian is one of the largest binary distributions mainly because of its apt package management system. Apt will make it really easy to get new software and keep the installed software updated. A modern kernel means the device will be able to keep up with developing technologies like bluetooth and usb. The next layer is an Xserver. This is not a pda and Nokia has decided not to use technologies like Qtopia or Opie for  the application layer. This will make porting graphical apps much easier and with the addition of Gtk they will also have a consistent look. If you’re worried about the ARM processor support, just check out all of the programs that people ported for the Zaurus.

The best news for you is that Nokia has set up a comprehensive development site. It describes the underlying software layers and how to set up the development environment to emulate the device. It even has a walkthrough for how to port applications to the device. As an example they show how to port Gaim, which is funny because most places have reported that IM support won’t be released until 2006. If Nokia does a good job building in support for Microsoft htpcs, iTunes control, and Tivo control I think this device will be certain to take off. I’d like to see someone make an electronic programming guide that you could use to change the channels on the tv and schedule recordings instead of the intrusive on-screen-displays used by most cable boxes. If anything it will be nice to hang out on the couch reading news and ebooks without having to use my genital scorching Dell.

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Gail Nakada at Wireless Watch Japan, goes inside NHK, Japan's national broadcaster, at the NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratories open house yesterday.

The annual event is open to the public, this year's show focused once again on digital TV broadcasting with three floors of cameras, servers, receivers and handheld devices. She checks out mobile phones receiving digital terrestrial broadcasting using MPEG-4, H.264, scheduled to begin in Japan by spring 2006. Both Vodafone and KDDI had demonstration models.

Mobile receivers drew packed crowds herded into Disneyland-style long lines waiting their turn to handle an 801SH Vodafone/Sharp CDMA Qualcomm handset. No bigger than a conventional cell phone, the 801SH has a hybrid split-screen displaying images on the upper half with the bottom reserved for scrolling data feeds and Web links to programming, etc.

Don't you just love those reports from Wireless Watch Japan!

Via Daily Wireless

MacMerc.com has a sneak peak preview of iPodderX 3.0.
Now you'll be able to subscribe to vlogs, podcasts and blogs with the same client!


Wizards of Technology - PodCast 44 - 2005.05.26
Interview with August Trometer and Ray Slakinsky discussing the new iPodderX 3.0

iPodderX Version 3.0 will be available for download today at 7:00 PM.

iPodderX - Official Site.

Via Off On A Tangent

Over at the Media Center's morph blog, Dewayne Hendricks, who is on the FCC’s Technology Advisory Board, is starting a conversation on wireless technology and the future.

Via New Media Musings

I was intrigued by this extract from the Headshift weblog:

"The new Web 2.0 tools and services help create an ecosystem of connected people and information - as David Weinberger put it this week: The cure to information overload is more information, only it should become more ambient.

We need to let people organise their inputs by exposing all relevant information in granular feed form and then provide smart aggregation and tagging tools to create a personal eco-system of content, cues and links."

(emphasis mine)

This reminded me of Ambient music. I used to be a bit of a Brian Eno fan - he was the guy who 'invented' Ambient music.

Time to coin a new phrase (I haven't done that in a while). Applied to RSS and blogging, Aggregator Ambience is when information envelops us but doesn't require our complete attention. We let Web 2.0 tools and services, along with our social network and serendipity, pick out the bits and pieces we want to pay attention to. It's what all RSS Aggregator developers should be aiming for, Aggregator Ambience. This is one of the strong points of Rojo btw.

Not unrelated is this discussion of the 'River of News' style of reading RSS feeds. As Dave Winer puts it: "...you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It's like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal."

The Ambience and River of News metaphors appeal to me because they are laid-back, almost Zen, ways of approaching the issue of Information Overload. No more anxiety, no need to pore over every single piece of microcontent that flows through your RSS Aggregator. Just chill out and let the information wash over you like a Brian Eno record.

Ahhhhhhhh..... now, if only I could live my life that way! Hmmm, maybe I just need to go listen to some Eno music :-)

/feeds.feedburner.com/readwriteweb?g=94"/>

Via Read/Write Web

The New York Times publishes yet another piece on the shifting entertainment habits that are having a major effect on our entertainment-industrial-complex (With Popcorn, DVD's and TiVo, Moviegoers Are Staying Home). Amazingly enough, with more entertainment options available to them, people are spending less time with older forms of entertainment.

Via The Importance of...

Jenny Levine reports on the good times had by librarians at the "Gaming@YourLibrary" presentation. I've always thought that videogames have a place in libraries, and The Shifted Librarian is making it happen (Gaming @ Your Library Sessions Blogged!). See also, Gaming Photos Up on Flickr.

Several people told me that they hadn't expected to enjoy themselves so much, and that you truly don't understand gaming until you experience it yourself. You haven't lived until you've seen a roomful of librarians competing against each other in Mario Kart and DDR! In fact, several people stayed after the second session ended just to keep playing (and I think Dan B. probably stopped to purchase a PlayStation and DDR package on his way home!). We even had a few extra minutes to let some of our staff play, including our executive director, Alice Calabrese!

Via The Importance of...

Wade Roush, senior editor for Technology Review, has created a blog for an article he is writing on on continuous social computing. The full article is now posted on the Continuous Computing Blog and readers are commenting on the article to help shape and inform what is eventually published in the magazine. He's using pop-up boxes to annotate changes and identify sources and comments throughout the text.

In thinking about Cynthia Miller's contention that newsrooms would be better off with more women in positions of decisionmaking, I wonder if the movement towards participatory, collaborative, open-source journalism -- as represented by Roush's experiment -- might create spaces for women to contribute in ways that weren't as accessible in older forms of journalism.

Carol Gilligan's take on feminist ethics contends that women's moral voice ..."speaks a language of care stressing relationships and responsibilities," whereas men stress a "language of justice emphasizing rights and rules."

The ability to collaborate, listen, and engage in conversation clearly isn't the sole domain of either gender. But if women historically have tended toward a way of relating to the world that exercises these qualities, then employing more women in newsrooms that want to develop news ways of doing journalism might be just one of the catalysts needed to propel us forward.

Cycling ‘74 offered a glimpse into digital music’s future last night at the San Francisco Apple Store, with one of the first public appearances of the JazzMutant Lemur programmable touchscreen controller working in concert with its software editor. Unlike conventional touchscreen tablets, the Lemur can support multiple simultaneous finger taps, making it, at least theoretically, possible to even play piano on the thing.

Product Specialist Gregory Taylor showed how easy it is to create customized control surfaces merely by dragging intelligent user interface objects onto a layout of the Lemur’s screen. The software ships with some 16 of these widgets, including the expected sliders and knobs, along with more experimental ones like bouncing balls that react to friction.

Once the interface is constructed, it can be downloaded in seconds to the Lemur over an Ethernet connection using Open Sound Control. The Lemur can communicate in both directions with the computer it is connected to and used to control anything in Max/MSP or Jitter that you’d like. The possibilities are literally endless.

Taylor explained that the Lemur was designed for “idiosyncratic interface control, because nobody wants to perform all the time on a laptop.” In fact, the Lemur should probably have been called the Chameleon due to its ability to transform itself from a mixing board to a drum machine to video controller, to a way to convert incoming email into MIDI data (gee, I wonder what my SPAM would sound like?).

Ed: The Lemur is now weeks away from shipping, with a price of US$2495. Much has been made of how expensive it is, but keep in mind this isn't just any old LCD touchscreen: anything cheaper lacks the ability to tap more than one place at once. Of course, I still can't afford one, but if you can, let us know -- and what's really exciting is thinking a couple of years down the road as these get cheaper. -PK

Photos by Lee Sherman..

Via createdigitalmusic.com

Greasemonkey script to play mp3s linked from a page.

: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says cable, telecom, and satellite companies just don't get the business model of the Internet, and that "the future of video is web television, not what companies are now calling IPTV." I would say he's a bit delusional on that one...
Anyway, Hastings said Netflix will start offering direct Internet service [in association with Tivo] this year, and will dedicate 1 to 2 percent of its annual revenue to the service over the next five years. With $506 million in annual revenue last year, that's roughly $5 million to $10 million for the offering each year.

Via PaidContent.org

Two weeks ago when I reviewed the Sony PSP for its movie and music prowess I was stunned by the clarity of Spider-Man 2 as I viewed it on that unit's small, but sharp, widescreen display. The movie was delivered on Sony's Universal Media Disc (UMD), a new proprietary format that in several weeks Sony put into the hands of 1.2 million users. I said this in the review:

If UMD proves to be a smash hit one area it can affect is the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD battle going on it Hollywood right now as it would force the studios to commit resources to the smaller UMD format while they hedge on the two larger formats…if UMD movie and album sales achieve Sony's wildest dreams as a market force it will increase the risk of success for all later formats and delivery schemes.

Well, the numbers are starting to come in on UMD movie sales and the results are excellent.

Since the introduction of the PSP two Sony titles have hit the 100,000 mark in unit sales, Resident Evil 2 and House of the Flying Daggers. Both titles shipped on April 19th, reaching these numbers within a month of release. To put that in perspective the first DVD title to reach 100K was Air Force One and it took 9 months to reach it.

Hollywood has taken notice on these numbers and all but one are jumping in with select titles that they feel will best play to the PSP's target audience of teens and twenty-somethings. The only studio sitting out right now is Warner Brothers and the reason is because they have a competing technology called mini-DVD. With the success of UMD sales Paramount, Fox and Universal, who previously agreed to support mini-DVD, have dropped it.

The first casualty, mini-DVD shows that the movie industry is not going to support too many different formats as multiple formats increase shipping and warehousing costs. This is why twenty years ago the studios dropped support of Sony's Betamax format, leaving only VHS behind. One format is simply more cost effective.

Email, text and Metcalfe's Law (again)...

In essence, email is not person-to-person communication because very often the sender senses - and exploits - that their message is really being posted to an inbox, not directly to a person.

On the other hand, texting is more real-time and more like "talking". The sender has a view that their message is going straight to a person, not to their inbox.

[...] With email, a great deal of emotional emphasis is placed on sending. With texting, the emphasis is on the receiving. The technical reason for this is that texting has always been push-based. Therefore, a sent message is immediately brought to the attention of the recipient who will have their device with them at all times. This immediacy quality is missing with email, which is why the perception remains that emailing is to an "in-tray", not to a person..

Paul Golding goes on to speak about the small success Blackberry had so far - in his eyes. He concludes about the use of mobile email.:

[...] There is also the possibility of reaching a tipping point where the number of active mobile email users creates a shift in usage patterns and our sense of time-sensitivity changes. Suddenly we might expect more rapid reaction to information changes than we currently do. There is no doubt that once exposed to mobile email and the "connectedness" it brings, it is easy to get used to.

I think the big difference between SMS and email is the amount, the size and most importantly the cost. Where SMS is often used for one-to-one personal short messages which are worth 20 Rappen, email is cheap and you can get a lot which is not really necessary. That's also why I think email push is highly problematic.

Push services should always remain expensive for the "pusher" somehow otherwise I think we will be quickly overwhelmed on "always on devices" like the mobile phone. Certainly you should be able to accept a push service, but only for a special purpose and easy to cancel. Somehow SMS and the Pager share the same origin, and I wouldn't want a pager for all the email I get. But if I can chose a push service for some time, why not.

Personnally I believe that push is not that important, and that pull services (RSS is the best example) are still much more friendly to overstressed humans. - Give us a break:)

Via Russell

Via All about Mobile Life

Where will Samsung stop? This is the SPD-50P5HD, a 50" TV PDP with a contrast ratio of 10000:1. It also uses the DNIe (Digital Natural Image Engine) to render the best possible image.

Satellite television viewers in the UK will be able to donate their time with little more than the touch of a button using a new interactive TV service on the Community Channel. The service was launched by James Murdoch, chief executive of BSkyB.

“It’s amazing to see how interactive television can be used to help people get involved in their communities,” said the James Murdoch at a launch event at BAFTA in London.

Created to mark the Year of the Volunteer, the interactive service enables viewers of the Community Channel to press the red button on their remote control and search for volunteering opportunities by simply entering their post code.

Interactive TV company Press Red developed the service. Funding was provided by a government grant from the Home Office.

Take a look at this. What do you see? A personal page, dashboard on an XBox! This is only possible now that the XBox 360 is designed for on-line interaction and digital identity.



I wonder if they have xHTML pages and embed their profile info into the pages? Where's the XFN? I doubt it's there!

This shows why a lower case semantic web approach is too limiting to solve ALL the challenges of DLAs.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm all into search engines spider the web and collect all sorts of structured data. I'm all into having microformat standards for getting all this structured data into sync.

But to think that this is the ONLY way - is itself a dogma.

We need to make sure that as micro-content evolves - that all forms of structure, devices and usage scenarios are supported. Not just web geeks.

So welcome XBox 360 to the on-line world of digital identity. May the force be with you - and would you PLEASE help save the Planet Earth for us - from those mean aliens?

"Lenslinger," a pseudonymous television news cameraman and author of the Viewfinder Blues blog, contemplates growing competition from the general public (Birth of the Personal Journalist):

Now, a new revolution is about to be televised. Tiny lenses are popping in the most unlikely of devices, powerful editing is just a laptop away and personal websites are racing towards critical mass. How long before my oversized fancy-cam looks like an early 80’s bag phone? About the same time the six o clock news begins looking like it was shot by a hopped-up junkie with a twitchy digital, I‘m guessing. The next ten years promise to feature a rapid breakdown of my chosen craft. Whatever new paradigm takes hold, it’s a safe bet the two-person news crew is an endangered species, driven to oblivion by technology and methods that are faster and cheaper, but not necessarily better. Hopefully by that time, I’ll have found more fulfilling ways to make a difference and a paycheck. Until then, I’ll be here in the media pack, one eye buried in a viewfinder, the other one keeping steady watch over a nation of digital interlopers. Now tell the accountant with the handy-cam to get the #&%% out of my shot...

Highly recommended: read the whole thing. via POMO Blog

Plotting the Story and Interactivity

"In this paper, the experience of the videogame, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, is analyzed by comparing two diagrams, one that illustrates the plot of the game's story and another that delineates the stages of interactivity. Performing a close reading of this game from these perspectives enables an exploration of how the game's story relates to the interactive elements of its gameplay...

...This interactive diagram was developed in a previous paper...and outlines the interactive experience of playing a game. Briefly, the experience is posited to have 3 stages: involvement - being initially introduced into the game; immersion--becoming comfortable with the gameplay and the gameworld; and investment--feeling compelled to successfully complete the game." From Plotting the Story and Interactivity in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time by Drew Davidson

Drew Davidson is a professor, producer and player of interactive media, exploring narratives and mediums across texts, comics, games and other media. Primarily, he is interested in conceptual interactive design, integrated narrative and interwoven media, collaborative design and development, applied media and game logics. His interdisciplinary theoretical interests focus on the performance of narratives between multiple mediums. He looks to illustrate how we interact with our stories. Davidson is intrigued by the way a medium can shape the creation and the reception of meaning and how a range of media can be utilized in order to communicate ideas. He explores how the juxtaposition of various mediums can be made into an additive methodology that allows for continual (re)presentation and critical analysis. He would like to see more collaborative, dialogic and interactive work between scholars that reflects the interdependence of authors, readers, texts and other media, in establishing value and meaning. It is important to him to discover the possible and myriad applications of interactive media that would compliment and enhance traditionally used mediums, in order to develop pedagogies which inspire newly viable learning, teaching and communication. Davidson brings a diverse and deep educational perspective to his professional endeavors. He is continually looking for new opportunities and challenges in helping to design and develop integrated and engaging high tech, rich media experiences for education and entertainment. He believes his experience, expertise and enthusiasm makes him invaluable in doing such work. Davidson focuses on how to integrate creative content, applied theory and media technology to create engaging and relevant experiences for people.

Drew Davidson is Academic Department Director, Game Art & Design and Interactive Media Design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and the Art Institute Online.

tv show tracker.

After a Georgia high school eliminated its student newspaper and journalism class because the paper highlighted negative stories, the student staff responded by posting their opinions and copies of the newspaper on a blog, Speaking Underground.

"While we understand that the administration wants Pebblebrook portrayed in the best light possible, that does not give them the right to silence the voice of this school," the students wrote. "It shouldn't be a secret that we have students who bring guns on campus or that we have teen mothers trying to juggle family responsibilities and school."

The students have posted PDFs of the newspaper and say, "We invite you to read BrookSpeak and decide for yourself how balanced the coverage was for news and feature stories by these first time student journalists."

What do you think?

Via CyberJournalist.net

Four Japanese TV networks are considering “a combined equity investment of more than 10 billion yen in Index Corp” according to sources. The broadcasters — Fuji Television Network Inc, TV Asahi Corp, Nippon Television Network Corp and Tokyo Broadcasting System Inc — expect to draw on Index’s technology to create their mobile content offerings.
Related stories:
Earnings: Index’s Earnings Jump 150%

Via MocoNews.net

Checking the role-out today of torrent search on bittorrent.com, one thing that definitely got my interest was their torrent rating feature. I'm liking this alot. It would be very cool if Prodigem (and lots of other trackers) could hook into this both to send reviews and to query. Joi Ito has more.

Via Torrentocracy Blog

This is an interesting idea: tagging photos with data from a GPS device, allowing to 'localize photos'.

The software is called Grazer and it is in its first version. Grazer writes GPS-GeoData into the Exif-Information of digital pictures. The tagging is done automatically. Only the time on the digital camera needs to be set correctly.
Future versions should enable to create virtual flights through geo sorted photos.
Grazer can be downloaded here.

Columbia, Northwestern, Berkeley, USC and Harvard along with two major foundations will spend $6 million to "help revitalize" journalism schools. "At a time when technology’s digital revolution is changing the news industry, the Carnegie-Knight Initiative will focus on preparing future media leaders to be analytic thinkers, clear writers and communicators, armed with an in-depth understanding of the context and complexity of issues facing the modern world," reads the press release. Also, Carnegie Corporation is sponsoring an ABC News Summer Institute that will involve 10 students—two from each of the universities involved. More...PRESS RELEASE -- A national initiative led by five of America’s leading research universities with the support of two major foundations will advance the U.S. news business by helping revitalize schools of journalism.

The universities will take advantage of the riches of their institutions by integrating the schools of journalism more closely with the entire campus in an effort to better teach, challenge and prepare the next generation of news industry leaders for an increasingly complex world. The initiative will experiment with curriculum and hands-on experience with the hope of creating a national conversation with other schools across the country.

Carnegie Corporation of New York president Vartan Gregorian and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation president Hodding Carter III announced the formation of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education here together with representatives of the University of California-Berkeley, Columbia University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Northwestern University and the University of Southern California. Presidents of the five schools have agreed to support this effort financially and institutionally.

The Carnegie-Knight Initiative involves three distinct efforts:

1. Curriculum Enrichment that will integrate the schools of journalism more deeply into the life of the university.

2. News 21 Incubators: annual national investigative reporting projects overseen by campus professors and distributed nationally through both traditional and innovative media.

3. The Carnegie-Knight Task Force, focusing on research and creating a platform for educators to speak on policy and journalism education issues.

At a time when technology’s digital revolution is changing the news industry, the Carnegie-Knight Initiative will focus on preparing future media leaders to be analytic thinkers, clear writers and communicators, armed with an in-depth understanding of the context and complexity of issues facing the modern world.

A study based on interviews with 40 of the country’s most prestigious news leaders indicated a need for schools of journalism to help reporters build specialized expertise that will enhance coverage of complex beats ranging from medicine to economics to international conflicts, and to understand the languages and cultures of distant parts of the world.

The report, undertaken for the Corporation by McKinsey & Co., also revealed a desire for journalism schools to help students understand and appreciate the ethical dimensions of their work as well as prepare them for the pressures they will face in a 24/7 competitive news environment. The news leaders voiced a need for the profession to depend on universities to channel the best writers, the most curious-minded reporters and the finest analytic thinkers to the news business. An executive summary is available at www.carnegie.org and www.knightfdn.org.

“This is an explosively creative time to be in journalism—if you are not in search of the past,” said Hodding Carter, president of the Knight Foundation. “These five institutions are proving this by doing something they’ve never done before: agreeing to work collaboratively on a major project for the greater benefit of all journalism educators.”

“Journalism is too important to this nation and our democracy to have the schools that educate its future leaders be anything but central to the universities in which they reside,” said Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York. “Our American universities, which offer the most enriching, challenging and academically excellent higher education in the world, can provide journalism schools with an unparalleled opportunity to engage with ideas about subjects such as history, philosophy, economics and culture that will help their students develop a passion for learning and knowledge along with the exemplary skills they will need to be at the forefront of the journalism profession in the 21st century.”

In the first two years, Carnegie Corporation is pledging $2.4 million; Knight Foundation $1.7 million. Henry Bienen, president of Northwestern; Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of UC Berkeley; Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia; Steven Sample, president of USC; and Harvard president Lawrence Summers have all agreed to support the initiative in its third year and there are clear indicators that the initiative is making progress.

Carnegie Corporation and Knight Foundation see these five highly respected universities as locations for experimentation, research and change. They also expect the Carnegie-Knight Task Force to commission research from other universities in order to spread to other journalism educators at other colleges the innovations that arise from the initiative.

This Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education was crafted by:

Geoffrey Cowan, dean, Annenberg School for Communication, USC
Loren Ghiglione, dean, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern
Alex Jones, director, The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
Nicholas Lemann, dean, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia
Orville Schell, dean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley

As part of the planning for the initiative, the five deans drafted a vision for change that seeks to renew the mission of schools of journalism much the same way that schools of business, medicine and law have renewed themselves at different junctures in history.

The “deans’ manifesto” clarifies goals for today’s schools of journalism and focuses on the centrality of the university in the preparation of tomorrow’s journalism leaders. That document is available in its entirety at www.carnegie.org and at www.knightfdn.org.

As part of this five-university journalism education launch, Carnegie Corporation is sponsoring an ABC News Summer Institute that will involve 10 students—two from each of the universities involved. The students will have eight-week fellowships under the guidance of ABC News and work with the award-winning ABC News Investigative Unit on a specific project that takes advantage of the students’ experience, learning and research abilities. The students will be trained in ethics, investigative reporting and digital journalism. The summer’s work will feature in a specific project underway at ABC News to mark the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Nicole Gallagher, director, news practices, ABC News, will head the summer institute. The names of the students involved in this initiative can be found on both foundations’ web sites.

Yahoo on Wednesday said it is testing its new PhotoMail service. This feature will be free and it will allow users to share a lot of photos via e-mail.

All the photos will be stored on Yahoo computers, enabling recipients to see a full-resolution image by clicking on any thumbnail. The service will be rolled out in a couple of weeks.

Up to 300 photos can be inserted into a single e-mail and it can be sent to hundreds of recipients. Photos will be stored on Yahoo computers. When the e-mail arrives at its destination, recipients can open the e-mail and see thumbnails. It doesn`;t matter how many pictures you include, an e-mail is unlikely to be rejected by inboxes because each thumbnail is just three to five kilobytes.

More details

Via Physics Org

: PSP is emerging as a good video content platform, with innovation coming mainly from third party providers.
-- VBN: DVD Station, the rental kiosk company, will introduce a new service in June allowing DVD kiosk customers to download films onto personal media players including PlayStation Portable (PSP). The company says it is closing deals with two major studios to service films to DVD Station on a VOD basis.
-- NMA: In UK, PSP has created a video blogging Web site, playstationfreedom.co.uk, as part of its Summer of Freedom marketing campaign. The site is based around a competition that gives users the chance to win a year's all-expenses-paid trip around the world.

The Seattle Times put out an article on Videoblogging.
Read it here.
Here is a standard complaint in this and other articles:

Amateur vlogs (if that isn't a redundancy), like their blog cousins, suffer too much from "vlogghorea" (aimless rambling face-on into a camera).

This statement is ridiculous. Most videoblogs are well-edited and engaging AS LONG AS you are not expecting TV shows.
What are you going to say to someone who doesnt understand that blogs are about context?
Ill let Josh Kinberg  answer.
He is a rock in the Videoblogging community. His perpective is smart and to the point.

Its always funny to me to see articles like this because they make one
huge, wrongheaded assumption... the assumption being that mainstream
media is "compelling."

The truth for most people is that much of mainstream media is not
compelling, its just that there's little else to watch.

Just try surfing through your several hundred cable channels and tell
me when you hit a compelling program. My bet is that you could be
channel surfing for hours before you hit anything even slightly
interesting to you.

Mainstream media can only afford to treat us like demographics, when
the truth is that we are actually individuals. Vlogs can afford to be
way more granular than mainstream media could ever hope for, and this
is what makes them compelling.... well, at least to the audience
(however small or large) that the particular videoblogger is trying to
reach.

See, with guys like Josh, everything will be okay.
People just got to see that we have not only the right, but the ability, to show the world through our own eyes. You dont need anyone's permission.

The Current.tv blog is written by Robin Sloan, a member of the Current.tv web team. It’s about developments in the Current Studio, Current’s growth in general, and broader trends in participatory media. Current is a new, independent cable and satellite TV network which presents information about the world in a new way. [The Current.tv blog]

Via Cinema Minima

Despite the fact Adelphia is about to get sold, chopped up, and consumed by Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the company plans to release two speedy new service tiers in the third quarter, CED Magazine reports. Both 15 Mbps/2 Mbps, and 10 Mbps/1 Mbps will be offered. No word on prices, or whether or not the new speeds will migrate with the sale of the cable systems. As we mentioned yesterday, Cox has unveiled a 15Mbps tier in Virginia. Will Comcast and TWC soon follow suit?

A few weeks ago a company in the Netherlands named Nethercomm turned heads by offering broadband in gas-lines (BIG). Jim Baller informs us the company's website has been updated, and offers more detail: ultra-wideband signals travel via the gas line, offering users 40-100Mbps for what they claim is the same installation cost per customer as DSL, or a tenth of what it costs for a fiber to the home install.

Via Broadbandreports

Following the first implementation of Motorola's Mobile Video Enforcer (MVE) system this spring in Wilmington, N.C., municipal police agencies in Toledo, Ohio; Southold, N.Y.; Kernersville and Cary, N.C.; and Bossier Parish, La., are now using it.

"The Motorola MVE system offers great picture quality which is crucial when trying to demonstrate in court what happened at the scene of an incident," said Lt. David Holt, Toledo Police Dept.

Previously, Toledo officers used a VHS system mounted in police vehicles. "Officers had to physically take the videotape out of their vehicles and then it had to be cataloged and filed," said Lt. Holt. "If we wanted to locate something on a tape, we had to search through the entire tape looking for the specific video we needed. It was time-consuming and not very efficient."

The Mobile Video Enforcer ($5000-$7000) consists of a Mobile Digital Video Recorder (MDVR) mounted in an officer's vehicle and a Digital Video Management Solution (DVMS) ($2500) located at the police department. The MDVR captures full-motion, DVD quality video that features pre-event and automatic event-triggered recording capabilities. Each video also stores incident and criminal profile information.

The DVMS automatically uploads, archives, and organizes captured video from the MDVR units. Video clips and still images can be retrieved within seconds from the database in a standard format for training or evidentiary purposes. Key video clips also can be exported to DVD and played back on commercially available DVD players for court cases and evidentiary analysis purposes.

Motorola has a variety of public service infrastructure products, mobile terminals and mobile mesh networking.

SOHOware uses a MIMO antenna for 40Mbps video relays. They can also be used to make a wireless bridge to vehicles, creating automatic connections for uploading or downloading data so officers won't have to initiate a connection.

Their AeroGuard combines True MIMO performance with centralized control and management that simplifies network scaling from 1 to thousands of access points. AeroGuard says their combination of features makes it the choice for VAR’s who must support their customer’s WLAN data needs today and their roaming voice / video applications tomorrow.

As more municipal police departments and other law enforcement agencies turn to realtime video capture to support their officer’s activities, they turn to experts packages like these, designed to meet the unique archiving needs of each agency, says Police Technologies.

x264 is a free library for encoding H.264/AVC video streams. x246 has features such as CABAC and DirectShow encoding. It is released under the terms of the GPL, but this license is incompatible with the MPEG-LA patent licenses in jurisdictions that recognize software patents.

Netopticon report attempts to display works and actions that reveal, subvert and demystify systems of control in the network and the urban spaces. Works that vary from those taking the aesthetic and poetic approach, treating the systems of control and monitoring as intimate, personal and narrative subject to politically oriented projects inverting the use of technologies and the control means for countersurveillance.

With the development of the new technologies and their adaptation to daily use, the amount of informational traces left by an individual in everyday life is considerably expanded (starting from completion of registration forms for access to free accounts, online or phone payments, personal electronic correspondence, video recordings in closed circuits, etc.). Simultaneously, the ways and means of control, monitoring and storage of the information carried out by the state and commercial corporations have been multiplied and enhanced. The state justifies these practices in the name of self-protection, in attempt to defend the established order, its interests, ideology, and its structures of power to protect itself from the threats of hostile factors. The large corporations practice these methods with similar objectives of protection and expansion of their markets of influence, in the informational war against competition.

a collection of glitch-like visualizations of the web, generated from data collected by online "crawlers". the user decides what data the crawler should accumulate, from which website the crawler should start & how the data (e.g. IP number, domains, http headers, html attributes) should be visualized (by position & color mapping). the crawler follows all links on each web page it encounters, so that repetitive patterns in the visualization reveal the linkage structure of websites that link to each other.

Brough Turner notes that the most common usage of video phones is “see-what-I-see”:

Note that “see-what-I-see” uses full-duplex voice, but usually only requires half-duplex video.

A common scenario for the business market is showing someone back at base info so they can add value to it and send directions for action out into the field.

Unfortunately, all the 3G networks are back-to-front because they make the downlink faster than the uplink (for technical as well as marketing reasons; the uplink is powered by a weeny battery and teeny DSP in a wobbly mobile box facing a number of difficult coding and timing problems I barely understand, whereas the downlink isn’t).

Apparently you’re supposed to be watching expensive football clips and not making your own videos.

Posted by Martin at 11:47 AM

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Comments: (post your comment)

Via Telepocalypse

Scheduled for launch in July by the folks at Squid Labs
"... IFabricate is a documentation and collaboration system that helps you record and share your projects with a mixture of images, text, ingredient lists, CAD files, and more. Documenting is fast and easy because you only have to list the high-level steps. iFabricate helps you link your projects to descriptions of tools, standard materials, and detailed sub-processes created by yourself and the iFabricate community. Incorporate helpful comments from expert-users to make sure your project always uses the best practice. Consumer electronics hacks, engineering prototyping, recipes, fine wood-working, and hobby projects are all equally ideal iFabricate projects..."

See related Worldchanging essay

The Sundance Group, parent company of the Sundance Film Festival and the Sundance Channel, has announced its intention to create a chain of specialty cinemas. [Movie Marketing Blog, The]

Via Cinema Minima

Bram Cohen's Torrent search has officially gone live. Now to answer the question we asked yesterday: will he be able to avoid lawsuits? If the site is ad-driven, he'll want to include pirated material and the traffic that brings (which it's doing right now). But by including pirated material, he faces the wrath of the entertainment industry and an endless flood of DMCA takedown requests.

Via Broadbandreports

There was rampant speculation a few days ago that Apple and Intel were in talks to bring OS X to the Dark Side which makes sense in a way that's only interesting to Wall Street. When folks realized that it was a story over a thousand years old, alternative theories emerged, like the one from Merrill Lynch, supposing that Apple was building a video iPod.

Apple had just quietly released an update to their iTunes software, allowing for the purchase of music videos. When you pair that with their recent introduction of their highly-scalable H.264 video codec, the idea of an Apple video device starts to make sense.

Only thing is, I don't think it's mobile. Or at least, i don't think it should be. If Apple is going to do something for consumer video, it needs to be big, take advantage of existing consumer behavior, and it needs to be audacious enough to change our definition of what watching video could be.

I've been spending a lot of time transcoding video on the PSP lately. Turns out it's a really nice way to watch short form video but the variety and selection of long form UMD stuff kinda sucks. PSPs are portable, with a nice screen, and I can whip one out and catch up with my favorite videoblogs whenever I want (although lately for me, 'whenever' seems to be standing in line at the DMV.) The whole process works rather well, except for the all important social aspect (unless you count the guy turning in his license plates behind you.) Folks like Justin Hall think that we'll figure that one out soon enough, and I agree, but in the meantime, I can't help but think of Drazen's little gem that politics happen on the couch. I don't watch much TV, but when I do, it's always with someone else in the room.

TV watching is social behavior and that's why I wonder if Apple's next big move isn't a WiFi-enabled, OS X-embedded LCD TV, with a hard drive to cache content. Think iMac G5 starting at 42 inches. Think of something big enough to be a TV, that takes coax in from cable or satellite, but network-enabled to allow for either the caching of HD content to it's hard drive, or the streaming of lower bitrate content from somewhere else on the network. Give it an interface that works either with a traditional "TV" remote for basic functions or with a desktop app for more advanced playlisting capabilities and suddenly Apple could have a dream device for the living room with predictably high margins.

Although the current crop of wireless media gateways and set top boxes are pretty cool, our home entertainment centers are getting kinda cluttered. Who wants yet another box in their living room? Besides -- how are you gonna set a set top box on top of your LCD TV ;) Bringing these functionalities into a single box could turn some heads. Using existing hardware as a hub to sell through your existing content marketplace would turn a tide. (And after a little searching, I wonder if folks are already thinking the same thing.)

I used to joke with broadcast engineers that one day, the TV would be little more than a really big peripheral device. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe TVs could end up being a lot smarter than I think.

Following trouble in Japan, reports are spreading that Cingular is also slowing down next generation network deployments. While each has a different excuse, it's reasonable to wonder if HSDPA technology is really ready for prime time.

Back in March when rumors first started spreading that NTT DoCoMo was delaying its HSDPA rollout, the reason given was that DoCoMo had discovered the technology wasn't working up to the levels DoCoMo expected. Earlier this month, when DoCoMo confirmed the delay rumors, it claimed the delays had nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with a lack of content ready for such high speed connections. That argument rings hollow as there's plenty of content out there. A more reasonable explanation might be that the rest of the HSDPA infrastructure wasn't ready. That is, there weren't any decent phones in production and not enough was being done to build services and applications that could really make use of the higher speed networks.

However, now rumors are spreading that Cingular is delaying its HSDPA rollout -- which the company had decided to move to, leapfrogging UMTS. Again, the reasons given aren't technical. In this case, the argument is that Cingular has too much on its plate, especially with the tremendous effort to merge its network with AT&T Wireless' -- a process that is ongoing and has run into some difficulties. However, with the growing attention Verizon Wireless has received with its EV-DO network, and the pending launch of Sprint's EV-DO network, it seems odd that Cingular would decide to slow down a next generation launch unless the technology wasn't really ready. In fact, with DoCoMo's investment in Cingular, it wouldn't be surprising if Cingular had access to some more detailed information out of Japan concerning the technology. Of course, it's likely that the technology issues will be figured out eventually, but it's a good reminder that new mobile technologies don't spring up in perfect working condition, but often take quite some time to get right.

We've long contended that the entertainment industry just doesn't get it when it comes to new technology. But don't take our word for it -- take theirs. Ed Felten recounts an article about a recent panel discussion, in which News Corp. VP Rick Lane actually said, responding to concerns that a broadcast flag would lead to incompatibility among TVs and other digital devices, "Compatibility is not a goal." Translation: "We are so ossified and resistant to change that we'd rather inconvenience, alienate, and anger consumers and stifle technological innovation than give up some control over our content and figure out new ways to grow our business." The industry is so hell bent on keeping content locked up behind proprietary walls that it can't grasp the idea that open and compatible is good for progress (e.g., the internet). Attempts to keep the content and media proprietary are just asking for trouble. As Felten points out, you don't want to put yourself between Americans and their televisions. Amazingly, the most egregious violations of this premise are being made by television networks.

I was shaving this morning and all of a sudden I understood the Semantic Web. Shit. I hope I don't become of those RDF zealots.

My insight was that it has to do with bringing the level of abstraction expressed in web pages closer to the level of abstraction in the formal sense of hypertext. Hypertext, I have learned over the past couple years, is about connections between ideas rather than connections between things you view in a browser. The Semantic Web is intended to make a closer mapping between ideas and things you view in a browser.

Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi Telecom (USA), Inc. announced that Hitachi will demonstrate a broad range of real-world FTTP (Fiber-to-the-Premises) applications at Supercomm 2005, June 6-9 in Chicago, Illinois.

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[This feed contains only short descriptions of the articles. To read the full article, please click through.]

he European Commission has urged EU member states to accelerate the switchover from analogue to digital broadcasting. The Commission expects the transition to digital to be well advanced by 2010 and has proposed a deadline of early 2012 for phasing out traditional analogue terrestrial broadcasting. The Commission also calls for a co-ordinated approach to making freed-up spectrum available across the EU.

Consultant Vin Crosbie says what happened at VenturaCountyStar.com, which had to disable comments on stories because they became abusive, wasn't surprising because history has shown "unmoderated online discussions naturally degrade into cacophony."

"Any news organization website that publishes anonymous, unmoderated discussion forums will get the risks and results doing so deserves. The organization might not have staff to moderate forums; but, sorry, there is no free lunch. There are very good reasons why the editors of a letter-to-the-editor and Op-Ed pages verify the identities of contributors (even those who want the newspaper to give them anonymity) before printing their letters or comments. And just because sites that aren't owned by news organizations publish anonymous, unmoderated forums doesn't mean news sites should, too. Newspapers, broadcasters, and news magazines have special responsibilities to their readers or users, responsibilities those other sites don't have. Those responsibilities are not just to prevent libel, but to foster high quality discussions."

Kevin Maney, who has covered technology for 20 years at USA Today, writes that the blog bubble will pop but that the trend of consumers creating content is here to stay - even if it is overhyped right now. Kevin sez...

So, yeah, blogs are cool. Anything that gives people a voice benefits society and makes us all better and smarter - and, as bloggers have proved, makes established information outlets more accountable. But blogs don't seem to be the second coming of the printing press. They're just another turn of the wheel in communications technology.

More likely, a few years from now, after the blog bubble has normalized, we'll look back and say that this technology made a difference and that our total fascination with it seems quaint.

I agree. Consumer generated media will become part of the fabric of the entire media landscape. The one quibble I have with Kevin's article is where Larry Downes, professor of information economics at the University of California-Berkeley, says that reading blogs will go the way of serendipitously surfing the Web. This is where RSS comes in.

As the technology gets easier (keep an eye Microsoft) people will  be able to read more content than they did before. This will lead to an increase in blog readership, but it won't be equally divided among all bloggers.

Janet Murray asked for the answers I would have given to the questions I posed to Warren Spector, Neil Young and Tim Schafer at the recent GDC panel, Why Isn’t the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories? I found it useful for myself to write these out, to clarify my own thinking, and to hopefully get feedback from anyone interested.

I’ll try to be succinct and specific. These answers are informed by my experience over the past 13 years developing interactive characters and stories and closely following the industry and academic R&D in the field, helping me identify what I believe is important and what’s not. (Also I’m guessing these would be answers similar to what Michael would have said had he been given more time to participate in the actual panel discussion.) For some background on the panel, you may first want to read what the panelists said: 1 2 3.

Lisa Nakamura is giving the talk Subjects & Objects of Interactivity: Racial Formation and Media Convergence at UC Riverside's Global Interface Mellon Workshop, this Wednesday (May 25) at 5pm. She'll discuss the interface-like logic of Jennifer Lopez's 2000 video "If You Had My Love."

Originally from Wired News, reBlogged by ts

The musical video-game genre gets an infusion of new blood this year, with games that let players sing and dance, spin a turntable or play rock guitar. By Chris Kohler.

A couple of weeks ago, when working on the entry about salaries for bloggers, Tristan Louis did a quick analysis of the entries in a day slice. Many people pointed out that this was a small slice and was not representative of what other blogs where doing.

From there, he ended up with two questions basically bugging him: first, how many entries does the average blog produce on a daily basis? Second, what is the size of those entries?

To answer the question, Tristan analyzed the A-list of the blog world.

Thank you Tristan !

Via Smart Mobs

Rands in Repose has written the best post about web apps I've read this year. I'll pick out the highlights here and finish with some thoughts on re-inventing the page metaphor. Also you may want to check out the Web Apps Compendium v1.0, a great attempt at listing out all the main web apps on the Web today. 

What is a web app? Simply defined, it's a software program that runs in a Web browser (proper definition here). What are they good for? Rands explains that there are two main advantages of web applications: 

1) Zero installation and no upgrades for the user.

2) Access anywhere with an Internet connection (which Rands terms "no baggage")

The main benefits of web apps then are: they're cheap to maintain and they empower users. So why, Rands asks, "aren't they everywhere?"

Good question, but then I've met loads of developers who still think web apps are too limited in functionality, compared to desktop apps (applications you install on your PC). And that really is the main drawback of web apps - they're constrained by the limitations of the browser. But wait, Rands might say - this is where Ajax comes in. 

I like Rands' concise definition of Ajax: "improved interactivity within web pages". He believes that due to Ajax, "the interface of web applications can vastly exceed your expectations." That's certainly true of Gmail and Google Maps, still the two quintessential Ajax apps.

One thing I'm wondering though: with all the current activities around synchronization for desktop apps, is that lessening the gap between desktop apps and web apps in terms of "no baggage"? When I say synchronization, I mean desktop apps that use Internet connectivity to allow users to synch their data over more than one PC or application - which solves the "access anywhere" issue for desktop apps. An example is Newsgator Online. I'd be interested in hearing some developers opinions on that...

We're Not in Pages Anymore, Toto!

The best part of Rands' essay, for me, was this statement:

"Stop thinking of a web application as a collection of pages.

The back button is not a bug in Ajax, it's a flaw in the browser metaphor."

This was one of the themes of the Web 2.0 for Designers article I co-wrote recently with Josh Porter. We wrote that the Web is no longer a collection of "pages", but a flow of “microcontent” units distributed over dozens of domains. Rands refers to "objects" instead of microcontent, because he's talking about web apps in a programmatic sense. I'm looking at it more from an information unit sense. But we're essentially on the same, er... page.

In summary - web apps today are aggregators, remixers, search interfaces, tagging and bookmarking apps, news s