unmediated

"Teach your avatar Ruby and double the population of Rubyists at once."

At the center of all great Live Web software will be one’s digital identity. Each end-user will control who has access to their personal data, who can use it and how.

hey ho lets go

Papers are sought for PerthDAC 2007 that will illuminate both the near and long term Future of Digital Media Culture.

I've seen this mentioned a lot when people talk about BitTorrent, but this bit from an announcement of BitTorrent 4.20 happened to push me over the apathy threshold:

It’s no secret that bandwidth concerns have been one of the more pressing issues surrounding the BitTorrent community. CacheLogic, which provides P2P caching solutions for ISP networks, has previously calculated that approximately 60% of a networks bandwidth is consumed by the BitTorrent protocol. This average varies according to the ISP, as some ISPs report less bandwidth consumption and other reporting more.

They're completely wrong about what the CacheLogic study says. The most recent numbers I could find from CacheLogic say that "P2P still represented 60% of internet traffic at the end of 2004" and "By the end of 2004, BitTorrent was accounting for as much as 30% of all internet traffic." Even if P2P has grown in the past 18 months to consume 99.99% of internet traffic, CacheLogic's own studies show that eDonkey surpassed BitTorrent in P2P traffic in August 2005. If CacheLogic's numbers are correct, there's no way that BitTorrent has more than 50% of internet traffic.

But that's the real issue here-are CacheLogic's numbers correct? Look at what CacheLogic sells: P2P caching appliances. Their entire business is built around reducing the amount of bandwith P2P applications use. And they are also the sole source of numbers saying that P2P applications are using lots of bandwidth.

I'm not saying that their numbers are all wrong, I'm saying that I don't know what the truth is. A press release from a company that has a direct and obvious profit motive from over-hyping shouldn't be treated as a solid fact. Unfortunately a highly-suspect number is far more attractive to a writer than saying "I don't know what the truth is."

CacheLogic seem to have been pretty successful at getting their numbers into the collective consciousness. Traditional media like Wired Magazine, BBC and Reuters trumpet the numbers as if they were a fundamental rule of the internet (like Rule #34: There is porn of it. No exceptions.). Then, the numbers are repeated ad nauseam until sites like Slyck News can pepper a story with them without even needing to cite the source, since everyone knows it's true.

Let's stop pretending we know things that we don't. There's nothing wrong with saying "I don't know," there is something wrong with pretending you know what you really don't. Let's get our numbers from someone who isn't trying to sell us a solution to the problem the numbers describe.

(For more skepticism about CacheLogic's numbers, check out Peter Sevcik's piece at Business Communications Review)

Tags: bittorrent pseudoscience lies damnedlies statistics skepticism

Oh, decisions, decisions. What belt shall I wear tonight to set off my new outfit? Hmm, the traditional leather? The one with the clamp fastener or the metal buckle? I guess I'll just settle on the one with the 3" video display where I can insert an SD card and play movies just below my belly button. Perfect. This bizarre new product from Egokast is just that, a 3" screen mounted in a stainless steel case that can be attached to a belt or armband to display either full motion video or a slideshow of photos. You can insert an SD card of up to 2GB in size and put an entire movie on there if you so desire. You certainly won't have to worry about getting noticed when you're out clubbing, but you will have to worry about your video selection. My choice? Footloose.

Limited to an initial run of 100, the Egokast One (without memory card or belt) goes for $279.

What kinds of videos are people watching online? It's sure not Lost or Desperate Housewives, even if downloads of traditional TV shows command most of the media's attention, thanks to Apple's bottom line.

At Supernova on Friday, Mary Hodder, CEO of Dabble, said she'd list the different varieties or genres of grassroots video her company is seeing on the Web, and here it is:

1.  Mini tv show-style  -- It's Jerry Time or Ask a Ninja
2.  Videobloggers:  telling their own life stories like Ryanne Hodson
3.  Genre guys:  snowboarding or car videos
4.  Commentary: Rocketboom or the Bush Blair video.
5.  Indie film shorts like Four Eyed Monsters
6.  Random.. silly.. funny.. ridiculous... ephemeral Tag: momwalksin  tag: lipsync
7.  How-to's that actually show you how to do something in detail or teach:  French Pod Class
8.  Remixs and mashups:  The Presidency Then and Now or Matrix Reloaded or Brokeback to the Future.
9.  Interviews like those at GETV.
10.  Parodies like the 8up commercial.
11.  AMV or anime music videos:  Loveless
12. music videos - lipsync sitting at the computer, dancing around with music playing, that in effect, remakes the artists own music video into ones the users like, that stars themselves. Here is Hips Don't Lie.

Mary forgot at least one:

13. Citizen journalism, like you see at Real People Network or Minnesota Stories.

Mike writes - "Sketching in Hardware ended yesterday, and it was awesome. We had folks from all over the DIY electronics spectrum talking bout creating tools for easy development of DIY electronics: David Mellis, of Arduino, Bjoern Hartmann and Scott Klemmer of Stanford, Nathan Seidle of Spark Fun, Tom Igoe of NYU, David Zicarelli, author of MaxMSP, and 20 other amazing people. We held it in Greenfield Village, and spent a long time thinking, talking about, and looking at the history of innovation as practiced by Edison, the Wright brothers, and Buckminster Fuller.

ed with a frantic makeathon where groups of folks (who had never worked together) were given two hours to invent new technologies. One group hacked a USB thumb drive, another group reinvented the telegraph using Flash and Teleo, another group made a smart train set of historical objects, where each piece in the set could call up its original location on Google Earth when put into the train set, another group made an RFID-enabled street lamp (as portrayed in the photos by Scott Minneman, of Onomy labs), and another group used our beloved Roomba to create a museum rover, using a controller made of foam rubber and bend sensors." - Link.

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MYSQ: My Style So Qute

Combine an interactive video booth with QR Codes. Perform before the camera and then download the 30 seconds video via QR Code to your mobile phone.

See MYSQ movie

An Interesting hybrid and surely the ultimate social killer app;)


Also via We-Make-Money-Not-Art

Btw what does the "L" stand for in MySQL?

Filed under: Culture, PC, Online, MMO

Young Chinese gamers won't have to worry about Fel Orcs, Forest Trolls, and Warp Stalkers when playing the Burning Crusade, so much as they will the newly appointed security guards patrolling the aisles at their local Internet cafe. It's campaign time again in China, and from July 1 through the end of September, the Ministry of Culture will be stepping up efforts to keep minors out of the nation's cyber cafes. In Beijing alone, 107 additional security guards, as well as newly trained middle school teachers will be supervising 71 such hangouts. Talk about a cruel summer.

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/feeds.joystiq.com/weblogsinc/joystiq?g=296"/>

News organizations might find a good model for online citizen journalism in this unlikely place: The Joke Project.

This unique video joke site -- launched recently by a Web editor with whom I've been working, along with a couple of documentarians -- captures short clips of ordinary folks telling their favorite jokes on the street or in other simple settings.

The jokes are rated from "squeaky clean" to "extremely naughty" and are fairly timeless, although they occasionally dip into current news. They held a "DaVinci Code" joke day, and they're scheduling a Bush joke day for July 4.

If you're in the mood for a laugh, check out the site's archive and index. They also blog their jokes.

All in all, it's a creative approach to a universal subject, with viral potential and a sensible business model (video syndication).

So where does the citizen journalism come in? It's in the fascinating underlying motivation for the project, which refers to itself as a "joke-u-mentary." The creators clearly are not just having fun. They're also exploring the folkloric quality of humor, and compiling intriguing statistical findings.

Furthermore, they're also trying to to capture something inimitable about the joke-telling process -- for instance, by dwelling on the teller's own reaction in the seconds after the joke ends. Perhaps that's what's most compelling about this site: the nicely affecting way it puts a face to a story.

Imagine now if news organizations were to try to capture the same feeling for local coverage. They could gather short, thematically organized video clips of residents talking about anything from favorite pet tales to local history, from gardening tips to hometown heroics. That could make for compelling content, even if captured not by professional cameramen or journalists, but rather by the residents themselves using fixed video recording facilities (a la StoryCorps's idea for recording "outposts" -- see their FAQ).

These video outposts could be in a location(s) anywhere in town, such as in a local community center, a library, or perhaps in the lobby of the news organization's headquarters itself, all with nice promotional opportunities. I'm no video technician, but I'm thinking it could be housed in a compact, phone-booth sized space: a simple digital camera setup, posted guidelines or theme suggestions, a single push button to start the tape rolling, and a countdown clock for the finishing point.

I think a local news audience would love it. Perhaps someone out there could give it a try and let the rest of us know!

Meanwhile, this guy walks into a bar ...

"So if you aren't really into citJ, try viewing it as a way to learn what's news to people on a real-life level, from the daily grind to watershed events. Look at it as context for a community. Don't expect it to mirror mainstream news, because that's not the point. It doesn't need to aspire to the same goals."

In Cannes, advertising and media executives have seen the death of paid media advertising:

All week at Cannes, advertising and media executives have grappled with the implications of virals which have reached millions of people via the internet, often by-passing traditional media. A few have involved no spend on media, offline or online.

With the success of viral video content, courtesy of YouTube — in some case with millions of views — it’s starting to dawn on advertising and media companies that brands no longer need them to reach and interact with consumers on a large scale:

One of the world’s biggest advertising agencies has urged marketers to learn from consumer-created content on websites such as YouTube.com, which now has greater reach among some US audiences than MTV, the music broadcaster.

But not only are ad agencies and media companies being cut out of the loop — the brand owners themselves can’t even get between consumers and their direct experience with the brand:

Consumers are hijacking top global brands using blogs and online communities but advertising companies are trying to find ways to embrace the revolution rather than fight against it.

The Internet has turned the traditional world of advertising on its head with a growing shift of spending to online from print and TV. The Web is giving millions of consumers an outlet for their views on products and brands, bypassing traditional media.

“Our audience has gone from watching commercials to making them,” said Mark Tutssel, the chief creative officer for Leo Burnett Worldwide, a division of Publicis.

“We’ve gone from monologue to dialogue in a nanosecond,” he added. “Marketers are no longer in control. The consumer is.”

So what does it mean to “embrace the revolution”?

“Citizen media and consumer generated content are here to stay, so marketers must learn to let go of the control they think they have over their brand in the open marketplace of ideas,” Tutssel said.

I think that companies need to forget about advertising as “persuasion” — in fact, they “let go” of marketing entirely.

In a post-advertising era, when the consumers are in complete control of brand perceptions, there’s only one effective way to “advertise” — create REALLY great products and services that people love and that offer an unrivaled experience, i.e. make stuff that people REALLY want to buy.

The product is marketing and marketing is the product.

Interesting use of small tagclouds for comparing: Topics | Dries Buytaert

Dabbish, L., Kraut, R. (2004). Controlling Interruptions: Awareness Displays and Social Motivation for Coordination, in Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 2004, ACM Press: Chicago, IL. p. 182-191.

The paper addresses the notion of awareness with an interesting angle: how would awareness displays might interrupt and then impact people’s activity (leading to performance problems. The authors used a very simple game to investigate whether “team membership influences interrupters’ motivation to use awareness displays and whether the informational-intensity of a display influences its utility and cost“.

Results indicate interrupters use awareness displays to time communication only when they and their partners are rewarded as a team and that this timing improves the target’s performance on a continuous attention task. Eye-tracking data shows that monitoring an information-rich display imposes a substantial attentional cost on the interrupters, and that an abstract display provides similar benefit with less distraction.

This study has direct implications for design:

To balance the tradeoff between the amount of information presented and the incentive to use that information, electronic communications systems could regulate the awareness information they provide based on an interrupter’s inferred motivation to use that information. For example, in designing a corporate instant messaging client, one could apply these results by presenting a workload awareness display of a target’s activities only to people
internal to the user’s project or company, and no such display to people outside the company.

y, the “away” and “busy” messages which various instant messaging clients use are too temporally coarse to provide sufficient information for synchronizing interruptions.
(…)
Displaying information about a remote collaborator’s workload helps both parties if that information is in an easy to process format and the potential interrupter has incentive to be polite.

Why do I blog this? because my research is about studying how certain awareness tools (bringing mutual-location awareness) influence collaboration in terms of producing a mutual intelligibility. Taking into account interruptability might be an issue, however, in the activities I studies, it’s less continuous so interruptions are less important.

Toewie by Jelle Husson (postgraduate in eMedia in Belgium)

Toewie is about a 3d game for pre-school children. Most 3d games are being navigated by means of the arrow keys for movement, and the mouse for looking/direction. Because this is quite complicated, especially for very young children, Toewie will be controlled differently. The idea is to build a real life puppet and put some movement sensors in it. When the child interacts with the puppet, the 3d character on screen will perform a similar movement.

Why do I blog this? I am following lately how tangible interface can be used as innovative game controllers, this is a relevant example.

Omidyar Network led a $1.5 million round for non-profit social network YouthNoise, which started in 2001 as a global online community for Save The Children. Other investors include a consortium of the Surdna Foundation, the Rappaport Family Foundation and Virgin Mobile USA. YouthNoise spun off in 2004, creating a network for ages 16-22. YouthNoise.com carries only youth-generated content and focuses on social action. It has 113,000 registered users from across the U.S. and more than 170 countries worldwide; the site averages about three million page views per month. (via SiliconBeat)
Update: An earlier piece, actually, from the SF Business Times (via MSNBC.com) says the company plans to raise another $3 million this year; a third round, possibly in 18 months, would go toward international expansion. Omidyar invested $500,000 this round and will add $1 million if YouthNoise raises $2 million. Other first-round investors and amounts: Surdna Foundation $400,000; Rappaport Family Foundation, $100,000; Virgin Mobile USA $100,000.
Dena Jones Trujillo, an Omidyar investment manager, suggested the plan to make the non-profit self-sustaining and set up the first-round pitch for funds. Trujillo: “Without capital upfront to build those revenue streams, they’re never going to get to the point of self-sufficiency because they’ll spend all their time fundraising.” The article by Sarah Duxbury includes some good detail on the non-profit search for investment capital.

We’ve been writing about this for quite some time so it’s fun to see the NYT’s Richard Siklos wrangle with an essential reality (and find a way to work in Sumner Redstone’s fish): for all the fuss and the double-digit, sometimes triple-digit growth in online revenues, new media revenue isn’t close to material for traditional media companies. That doesn’t mean the gains and the revenues aren’t real. In fact, the inclusion of online revenue has helped some “print” units show a profit. So what does this say about the future financial impact of broadband, mobile and the like? Siklos: “The optimist’s view is that the spoils from this new frontier are still very much up for grabs. … The less-cheerful view of the traditional media companies is that all their online efforts will not translate directly into more revenue or fatter profits.”
I’ll opt for the pragmatic view: without their current investments, experiments and full-force efforts, traditional media companies wouldn’t have much of a long-term future. Period.
Still, I really liked reading about the fish.

At my session today at Supernova, with JD Lasica (Ourmedia) as our moderator, and Jeremy Allaire (BrightCove), Jonathan Taplin (USC Annenberg Center), and Robert Levitan (Pando), I mentioned some stats and ideas, and I said I would blog those items. The are below. The first two sets of stats focus on video hosting sites (places where users can upload video) and their use, as far as uploads and user visits or traffic. The third set of data reflects trends in the types of video we see users making and posting online, with an example or two of that kind of video. 1. Users per day/Uploads per day on a few sites we have seen info about: ClipShack : 2200 users per day. (source: AdBright). Google Video: 12.5 million users in month of April. (source: 089.html">Washington Post). Grouper: 8 million users per month (source: PR News but on Alexa, that traffic appears to be a one time spike, where their traffic seems to hover around 3 million users per month) and 500,000 registered users (source: Alexa). Ourmedia: 28,000 users per day (source: AdBright). Vidiac: Streaming 2 million videos per day and 3 million users per month (source: Silicon Beat Comment by Adam Beat) Vimeo: 20 thousand users per day (source: USA Today, 11/21/05) and 50,000 registered users (source: Vimeo's about pages) YouTube: 50,000 uploads per day, serving 50 million videos per day, with 6 million users per day (source: You Tube Fact Sheet). 2. There is a list ranking the top ten video sites by market share or traffic, published by Hitwise), May 24, 2006. (Several of the traffic stats found in articles, press releases, advertising, etc., also credited Hitwise for the numbers): 1. YouTube 42.94% 2. MySpace Videos 24.22% 3. Yahoo! Video Search 9.58% 4. MSN Video Search 9.21% 5. Google Video Search 6.48% 6. AOL Video 4.28% 7. iFilm 2.28% 8. Grouper 0.69% 9. Daily Motion 0.22% 10. vSocial 0.09% 3. At Dabble, we are seeing different video genres coming up over and over. Users, as opposed to top down TV video producers, seem to work in areas that are accessible and interesting to them. They are not just copying mainstream production styles. The list below is in no particular order as far as prevalence or audience viewing. We just see them a lot: 1. Mini tv show-style -- It's Jerry Time or Ask a Ninja 2. Videobloggers: telling their own life stories like Ryanne Hodson 3. Genre guys: snowboarding or car videos 4. Commentary: Rocketboom or the Bush Blair video. 5. Indie film shorts like Four Eyed Monsters 6. Random.. silly.. funny.. ridiculous... ephemeral Tag: momwalksin tag: lipsync 7. How-to's that actually show you how to do something in detail or teach: French Pod Class 8. Remixs and mashups: The Presidency Then and Now or Matrix Reloaded or Brokeback to the Future. 9. Interviews like those at GETV. 10. Parodies like the 8up commercial. 11. AMV or anime music videos: Loveless 12. music videos - lipsync sitting at the computer, dancing around with music playing, that in effect, remakes the artists own music video into ones the users like, that stars themselves. Here is Hips Don't Lie.

It's called "Screens," a new blog about the convergence of television and the internet. Rex jokingly calls it a "Lost Remote killer."

Mark Glaser at Mediashift has a solid wrapup of this past weekend's Bloggercon IV, held in San Francisco. Glaser writes he was pleasantly surprised at the diversity of topics this year. Rather than ignoring new advances in podcasting, tech, social networks and the like, Glaser writes: "BloggerCon has embraced (those new technologies) and tried to go beyond the rudimentary arguments of bloggers vs. journalists or even just defining who a blogger is." Our dear LR friend Terry Heaton was there discussing how writing about his wife's sudden and shocking death helped him cope with tragedy. He also shares his always insightful and amusing thoughts on the session about making money online.

MP3s of all the Bloggercon sessions, free to download

Clay asked me, what my working definition of Participatory Media is. Since I didn't think he would like my riff on his jello and nails comment, I came up with this:

Broad definition:
A participatory medium is one which encourages audience participation in the creation, distribution and consumption of itself.

My specific spin:
A medium with similar properties to mass media (audio and video) with the addition of social interaction interwoven into the creation, distribution and consumption of it.

Even better might be how Wikipedia defines it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_Media

I suppose that after having taught a course called "Producing Participatory Media" a couple of times, a definition should just roll off of my tongue. Fortunately, the concept itself has changed and grown quite a bit since then (ahh, the sweet pace of change in this interwebbed world).

Perhaps one of my former students would be better at answering this question?

makeTV
Despite that I absolutely loathe people calling webcasting, streaming and the like "TV" this site is interesting.

From the site:
MakeTV to Watch TV: MakeTV is a live broadcast channel open to both viewers and producers. (Wish I could copy & paste but they used Flash for the site so I can't. Oh well..)

Essentially, anyone can plugin and stream to anyone watching the content from this site.

Strange that the stats show 0 Total Broadcasts and 0 Viewable Archives.. Wonder what the deal is..

Split Screen
I love this (v)blog. All split screen video art. Now complete w/RSS and Enclosures..

From the site:
Split Screen is a weblog dedicated to the art of the split screen and multi-layered visuals, as seen in movies, music videos, commercials and other media based on moving images

This RFID in Japan post says "less than two weeks ago,NEC announced that they developed a system that combines rfid and surveillance camera.The system can continuously track people or vehicles.The system uses a camera and RFID in a complementary fashion.When a camera recognizes a moving entity,the system reads information from an RFID tag (carried by a person or a vehicle).Also,it uses RFID to track rough positions of moving entities when they cannot be detected by a camera.The system automatically switches between camera-based and RFID-based tracking".

NEC developed system that combines rfid and surveillance camera

The Zypad WL 1000, a new wrist-worn PC has been demonstrated to the military forces. This device, which can run Linux or Windows CE, is a hands-free computer which handles wireless networking and GPS tracking. It should be available in July for about $2,500 and could be used by healthcare or law enforcement personnel.

Links: Primidi, ZDNet

What if They Built an Urban Wireless Network and Hardly Anyone Used It?, asks the New York Times.

WiFly, the extensive wireless network commissioned by the city government that is the cornerstone of Taipei's ambitious plan to turn itself into an international technology hub. Access to WiFly's wireless network, built with Nortel's wireless mesh nodes, costs about $12.50 a month.

Despite WiFly's ubiquity — with 4,100 hot spot access points reaching 90 percent of the population — just 40,000 of Taipei's 2.6 million residents have agreed to pay for the service since January. Q-Ware, the local Internet provider that built and runs the network, once expected to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year, but it has lowered that target to 200,000.

That such a vast and reasonably priced wireless network has attracted so few users in an otherwise tech-hungry metropolis should give pause to civic leaders in Chicago, Philadelphia and dozens of other American cities that are building wireless networks of their own.

"Content is really key," said Darrell M. West, a professor of public policy at Brown University who conducted a survey of how well governments use the Internet. "It's not enough just to have the infrastructure. You have to give people a reason to use the technology."

To that end, Q-Ware has developed P-Walker, a service that will let subscribers with Sony PSP portable game machines log on to WiFly to play online games and download songs and other material.

The company has also developed a low-priced Internet phone service. The handsets cost about $200 and allow users to call other mobile phones for just over a penny a minute; calling a traditional phone costs less than half a penny.

Ultimately, Q-Ware expects its network to communicate with more devices, including MP3 players and digital cameras.

Taipei claims to be among the world’s top three cities for broadband infrastructure, with PC penetration of 88% and an 83.6% household penetration rate of Internet usage, of which 79.3% are connected to ADSL broadband.

By July 2006, wireless broadband Internet access will reach 90% coverage of the entire city through 4,200 access points, making it the world’s number one wireless networked city. Nortel has built Asia’s largest Internet Data Center in the Neihu Technology Park. This center will facilitate smooth broadband communications between Taipei and the rest of the world.

Related DailyWireless stories include; Big City WiFi Clouds, Taipei's Cellular Hotspots The World Largest WiFi Cloud, Taipei Unwired, The Global Hub, Transnational Media Production and City Clouds: Becoming The World Cup.

 

The New York Times' TV critic, Virginia Heffernan, has started a blog about online video. ...

Charlie Stross is sharing some notes from his latest project. They're a nice glimpse into how one really smart writer thinks about the future:

6. History inserts itself into our lives, seamlessly. When did you last get through a day without hearing some kind of off-hand reference to 9/11 or the Iraq war? Kids these days are learning about Margaret Thatcher in history lessons at school. In ten years time there'll be some other iceberg-like intrusion of History into the zeitgeist: the question is, what? (My money's on something energy or environment related, and big.)

g to get into the head of a 28-year-old British professional circa 2016... "You were one year old when the Cold War ended. You were thirteen when the war on terror broke out, and eighteen or nineteen when Tony Blair was forced to resign as Prime Minister. You graduated university owing £35,000 in student loans, at a time when the price of entry into the housing market in the UK was over £150,000 (about 4-5 times annual income; the typical age of first time buyers was 35 and rising by more than 12 months per year). Unless you picked the right career (and a high-earning one at that) you can't expect to ever own your own home unless your parents die and leave you one. On the other hand, you can reasonably expect to work until you're 70-75, because the pension system is a broken mess. The one ray of hope was that your health and life expectancy are superior to any previous generation — you can reasonably expect to live to over a hundred years, if you manage to avoid succumbing to diseases of affluence."

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 09:59 AM)

That's what I call them. Recently I received this statement.

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem—too many speakers!—is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this..

(Continued at PressThink)

The Improbable Orchestra (IO) is an interactive audio installation designed to make digital music accessable to anyone. This page describes our third, much improved version of it that we built in 2004.

What a neat idea! I would love to try it. --L.N.R.

Originally posted by tasmo from del.icio.us/tag/art, ReBlogged by LNR on Jun 26, 2006 at 01:14 PM

WinFS cops it

Microsoft's most ambitious software plan - to base Windows on a native database - has died again. The feature was originally touted in 1991 for 'Cairo', which Microsoft then described as an object-oriented operating system, built on top of Windows NT. Cairo was sidelined as a result of Microsoft's focus on the internet, and the evaporation of the Apple/IBM Taligent OS. But the idea, reborn as WinFS, was revived in 2001 as one of the "three pillars" of Longhorn, now Windows Vista.…

[A file system completely based on metadata is the wave of the future... but like fusion power, it always appears to be 10 years away. /t]

Originally from The Register, ReBlogged by Tom Ritchford on Jun 26, 2006 at 04:53 PM

sigh. "UDE has announced that certain cards will enable you to get in-game World of Warcraft items. The cards will have a scratch-off section, similar to a lottery ticket, that contains a unique code. After scratching off the foil and revealing the code, you'll be able to enter the code into a website. Your online World of Warcraft game character will then receive a special in-game item. So far Blizzard is planning on all the in-game items to be purely cosmetic."

"While in Barcelona, i visited Plagiarismo, an exhibition about the appropriation and re-formulation of other artists' ideas. The idea is not to criticize the practice but to demonstrate that plagiarism is an essential component of culture.

The show tackles an important issue: the limits of copyright. As curator Jordi Costa says: "The current legal limit is so restricitve that it doesn't allow other artists to elaborate provocative proposals of cultural critics.""

Mexican-born Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Homographies combines twisted modernist aesthetics and surveillance technology.

The huge installation features 144 robotic fluorescent light fixtures controlled by 7 computerized surveillance systems. As people walk under the piece, the light tubes rotate to create labyrinthine patterns of light that are "paths" or "corridors" between them.

The presence of a single person in the space is detected by the light fixtures as a magnetic frield of influence. When two or more people are detected, the system rotates the fixtures so that "light corridors" are created between them. As many people walk in the court, the light reflect the influence of all of them creating complex patterns similar to isobars.

Every few minutes, the system enters an "interlude mode" showing random orthogonal arrangements.

Plasma screens on the gallery walls show the tracking systems with an overlay of data.

In Homographies the "vanishing point" is not architectural, but rather connective, i.e. it is determined by who is there at any given time and varies accordingly. This gives a reconfigurable light-space that is based on flow, on motion, on lines of sight, —an intended contrast to the modernist grid that currently organizes the court.

Video.

The installation was premiered at this year's Sydney Biennale, Zones of Contact, which runs until August 27.

See also another very similar work by Lozano-Hemmer: Standards and Double Standards (except that this time, belt buckles are following visitors) and Marie Sester's spotlight beam that tracks gallery visitors.

Another surveillance-inspired installation (via information aesthetics and rhizome): Invisible Sphere, a 5.5 foot diameter sphere covered with video monitors and surveillance cameras. Each monitor displays live video feed from a camera placed on the opposite side of the sphere. The sphere can be rolled around in its environment.

Graduation show of the IDII in Milan, project number 8.

Ana Camila Amorim's uni.me project is a mobile communication service that supports the user in the management of their social network and the definition of who, how and how much others can access to them and their information.

The main touch point of the service is the so-called "Presence Phone". Each element on the screen corresponds to a contact and its size represents the amount of communication shared between him/her and the device’s owner. Contacts are organized around tags.

Other people availability to you is visible by the color change of the bubbles. In case a contact is not on the visible area of the screen, you can search for it based on name or related tag. Several tags can be combined in order to reduce the number of results. Once you've found the contact, you can open the contextual menu where one of the options is ‘see details’.

The notification of missed communication appears in a pop-up window listing the missed events by chronological order. Events are identified in relation to the current time (e.g. 5 minutes. ago).

Incoming calls will be notified in full screen with clear information: name, photo, company logo, most recent tags (personal, automatic, local and communication) and last communication event.

Text messages can be responded through the dedicated inbox on the contact detail, by adding a field on top of the previews message. Other people can be added to this message and copies of it also appear on their inboxes.

uni.me comprises of:

1. Personal card

Each user is issued with a single ‘identifier’ that responds to all of his/her digital communication needs (voice, text). When initiating communication the caller/ sender uses a single ID and a distribution engine diverts it to the most convenient device according to the callee’s preferences.

Contact initiation can be done either by online invitation or card swapping. By accepting a uni.me card and approaching it to the phone, the receiver allows the link to be created. Each uni.me card has a RFID tag, that when in proximity to a NFC enabled device, validates the user in the card owner’s contact list.

2. Hot spots

uni.me also allows you to communicate their level of availability to different people according to your context and willingness to be reached. This definition can be done manually or automatically by defining different profiles that are activated during specific periods of the day, or by location awareness or other day to day events. RFID tags placed in different locations (working place, home, cinema, church, etc.) allow the phone to be aware of its environment and adjust accordingly.

Video scenarios.

DONE!
Click HERE for the Video Archives!

Hey all!

are eager to see what they missed at Vloggercon, that’s why I'm working dilegently to get all the tapes digitized, compressed, (looking good!) and uploaded. They'll be up soon!

More Later,

Ryanne

I need this:



[Thanks Boris...]

Just looking up something else, I stumbled across this quote from Ted Nelson. From ‘Ted’s ComParadigm in OneLiners’:

“A frying-pan is technology. All human artifacts are technology. But beware anybody who uses this term. Like “maturity” and “reality” and “progress”, the word “technology” has an agenda for your behavior: usually what is being referred to as “technology” is something that somebody wants you to submit to. “Technology” often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to “the guys who understand it.”

This is actually almost always a political move. Somebody wants you to give certain things to them to design and decide. Perhaps you should, but perhaps not.”

Perhaps not, indeed.

Use Pipdipchip writes: "Early this year, Linksys stopping using Linux on its popular WRT54G models. Users were unable to upgrade to third-party firmware, one of the best points for buying a WRT54G. A way was found to get Linux in a WRT54G but it required adding a JTAG interface which was too difficult for most users. However, now a way has been found that only requires upgrading your bootloader via TFTP. A huge upgrade for those with a WRT54G version 5." This is also being discussed in our Linksys forum.

Ex-AT&T Broadband CEO Leo Hindery lamented this week that portals were leeching money from ISPs and mega-corps (Disney, etc.), and that of AOL, eBay, Google, MSN, and Yahoo - four would either fold or be bought off. Of course despite the problems with Excite@Home, Hindery still sees a world where the incumbent ISPs (perhaps hand in hand with mega-partners like Disney or Time Warner) run and offer everything themselves: the portals, the content, and the VoIP, TV, and data services.

Warner Bros. began selling its movies and TV shows over the Internet video site Guba.com Monday, marking the second deal the studio has made to distribute content over Web sites that have offered pirated video in the past.

Guba.com has featured mainly user-generated video clips for free or as part of a subscription, some of which were unauthorized clips from TV shows or movies.

I think this has to be be one of the oddest pairings since the Roxio and Napster deal. I find the video quality TERRIBLE (Use this link, and then click trailer), and the movies are extremely over priced. Does anyone think this will work?

Read More

SL machinima-maker Pierce Portocarrero caught some footage of a protest in the virtual world of Second Life today, held to coincide with the world’s third birthday. The protest was being held to voice some residents’ dissatisfaction with the new registration requirements (or lack thereof) we mentioned earlier today. I haven’t heard the narration on this yet, as I’m still at the Supernova conference, but the footage is engaging, and gives a good idea of what it’s like when a bunch of SL avatars get together for a protest — which is not an unusual thing in itself.

avatars, governance, kids, Second Life, security

CNet’s Daniel Terdiman has been on a bit of a 3pointD-style road trip lately, visiting five states with a carload of travel gadgets that help connect him to the rest of the world. Fun, interesting reading, including a few good 3pointD insights: “While I would reach my destination exactly as planned, I had absolutely no idea how I got there. I couldn’t even have begun to tell you what roads I took, or how to get back from there without this digital helper.”

3pointD, earth, GPS, Technology

Have any thoughts about “integrating cartographic data with geo-tagged knowledge repositories” and how “the emerging Geospatial Web will revolutionize the production, distribution and consumption of media products”? If so, you may want to be in touch with Austria’s Know-Center project, which is seeking chapter submissions for an upcoming book on the geospatial Web. There’s a whole list of possible topics in the submission guidelines, including:

• State-of-the-art and emerging trends of geo-browsing platforms
• Knowledge acquisition and management in a geospatial context
• Knowledge relationship discovery and management (e.g. matching geospatial relationships with semantic or temporal relationships)
• Knowledge-intensive, location-based services
• Marketing of products and services via the Geospatial Web
• Content, annotation and ontology services as enablers of the Geospatial Web

Submissions are due by October 10, 2006 — so get to work.

3pointD, earth, GPS, mapping, Tagging

WHAT IS THE 1 SECOND FILM?
THE 1 SECOND FILM is a 70mm non-profit collaborative film bringing thousands of diverse people around the world together to create film history: 'The biggest shortest film ever made.' Virtually anyone can help produce this film by donating $1 or more. Our end-credits are estimated to last 90-minutes and will include a feature-length 'making of' documentary.All profits raised by our finished film will benefit the Global Fund for Women.

"When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA"

good numbers for global markets

Xiph QuickTime Components (XiphQT) is, in short, the solution for Mac and Windows users who want to use Xiph formats in any QuickTime-based application, e.g. playing Ogg Vorbis in iTunes.

eWeek, Chris Preimesberger : "A group of bloggers meet to discuss citizen journalism, the need for better blogging tools and more."

something to read, later...

James Powderly, GRL, Eyebeam in NYTimes Video. hot!

Like the ailing—but much alive—character prematurely tossed onto the meat wagon in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, newspapers are right to shout, "I'm not dead!" In their dying, the best newspapers are plotting—and experiencing—rebirths as multip

Is narrative storytelling a harbinger of things to come? "It can be," Weldon responds. Some people say reliance on narratives represents little more than dumbing down to readers and is part of "a last-ditch effort to save the industry." Others, however, "say this is what's going to save newspapers," she notes. "Some people contend that it's a good thing. It will [give] people a reason to read newspapers because they can't get this content" anywhere else. And a good narrative can hold a reader's attention regardless of whether the medium used is newsprint, a website or podcasting. Says Weldon: "We've got to stop worrying about how the news is delivered."

Glitchy sends along a link to an interesting technology I hadn’t heard of before: 3D shape search. Apparently, a company called UGS Corp. has just bought a 3D shape search technology from German IT services firm software design & managment. UGS’s new Geolus Search product (formerly geolus SHAPE) “allows manufacturers to quickly locate 3D models of digitally defined parts from large heterogeneous data sources on the basis of geometric similarity,” according to a press release.

The technology, which seems to have current application in the manufacture of machine and automobile parts, could serve to enhance content creation through existing 3D model markets like Google’s SketchUp Warehouse, the third-party SketchUp models marketplace, and things like TurboSquid — open markets for 3D models of various kinds. It’s hard to envision the situations in which people will actually need to search for something based on its 3D geometry rather than some metadata, but I’m sure those situations will emerge. Interesting, in any case, to see the emergence of a new 3pointD technology like shape search.

3D Web, architecture, design, Google, Search

DALSA announced today that it has successfully fabricated and delivered the world’s highest resolution image sensor chip.

The new ITU-T Recommendation T.851 offers better (and faster) compression by introducing a new (backward incompatible) alternative Q15 arithmetic coding. Color precision is increased to maximum 16 bits per color component.

The change is only in the final lossless entropy coding stage. Thus current JPEGs can be losslessly encoded to use new algorithm and the lossiness of this new variant (the blockiness etc…) will be same as that of existing JPEGs.

Work on the new compression algorithm was started in 2004 by ITU-T Study Group 16. An alpha open source implementation is available.

Official results claim around 10% improvement in ratio over old JPEG. StuffIt’s JPEG recompression technology deserves a mention here, they claim a 30% better ratio by taking a similar approach. Thomas Ritcher posted some comparison results with both JPEG and JPEG2000.

What happens when someone using a new technology finds it to be so enticing that they feel compelled to indulge to an excessive degree, disrupting their lives and fracturing relationships?

Design For the Computer Obsessive, a project by Joe Malia graduating student in Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art in London, centers on the role design can play in guiding these individuals through their turbulent affair with the technology.

For example, Private Public is a series of objects that highlight the privacy we sacrifice when using mobile technological devices in public spaces.

By wearing the mobile phone scarf, you can venture into public spaces confident that if the need to compose a private text message were to arise the object could be pulled over the face to create an isolated environment.

Meanwhile, devoted PSP players can explore their passion in complete privacy (though i can’t garantee they’ll be unnoticed) by using a similar model specifically designed for the gaming console.

See also: Crispin Jones’s Electrophile, Christain Palino’s Peripheral Needs.

Originally from we make money not art at June 21, 2006, 10:31, published by Marisa S. Olson

Just how much more can we do with less?

I recently read an article which discussed a company which went to a 32 hour work week with no drop in productivity. (the story is taken from The Time Bind by Arlie Hochschild)

While this example would not scale over an entire economy - a steel mill, for example, is unlikely to be able to replicate it - it fascinates me that a company could cut 20% of one of it's most critical and expensive inputs (human time) and not change its outputs. While not in the same category as Factor Four it is in an unexpected domain. How much more slack is there in the system?

Is it possible that the inefficiencies in our economy are so large that, in fact, we could tighten 80% of our resource use right out of the loop over a period of fifty years, without developing any radical new technologies (although, of course, we will!). The poster child for this idea in my own understanding is a roll of kitchen plastic wrap a friend bought at a warehouse store. This roll is a two thousand square feet and was purchased for around six dollars, replacing 20 rolls of 100 square feet each, with correspondingly larger purchase, packaging and transportation costs. It is an identical product, of identical utility, simply bought in a larger size.

This might seem like a trivial example compared to green buildings and zero emissions polyester factories and so forth. But what would be the net environmental impact if all products simply dropped the two smallest sizes they were available in? The social impact might hit the poor quite hard at first, but lower long term prices might restabilize them in unexpected ways. Could we really cut 5% or 10% of our national environmental impact simply by never buying anything except in the Super size? It sounds silly, but when you start counting trips to the store, and packaging, and use of temporary alternatives when basics run out. If such huge savings are possible from small changes, what kinds of savings would be possible from big changes?

The more I look at the world around me, the more I realize that a relatively small set of behaviors would have to change to solve nearly all of our environmental problems. From the current status-quo those changes look untenable, but they are not: insulate what is heated or cooled, streamline what is pumped, buy the efficient model. These basic truths are repeated over and over again in different environmental frameworks - everybody has their own way of saying "do the right thing."

If one does not look at demand side reduction, it is easy to assume that we are really in trouble. "Use less" has become contaminated with a thrifty penny pinching mindset. But "use smarter so you get equivalent or better service for less energy" - and we need a catchy mantra for that - might be a very simlar world to the one we live in now, just with the waste taken out.

Diesel hybrids, high performance buildings and pervasive industrial efficiency efforts could reasonably half our nation's energy use. Studies at different times estimate the benefit and potential at different levels, but the savings are huge. But somehow the concept of the "negawatt" - a unit of energy saved replacing a unit of energy generated - seems to have failed to penetrate far enough into the environmental discourse to becoming the defining goal of our movement. New wind capacity is many times more expensive than energy efficiency, but because it is a "more" solution, rather than a "less" solution, somehow it gets higher billing than green home construction.

I feel like the concept of "doing more or the same with less" needs a new brand, a new word, a new identity. Efficiency is too cold and doesn't capture the "picking gold up off the sidewalk" quality of doing the same work in 32 hours as forty, and being happy with it, or cutting your heating bills by 75% and being warmer.

I feel like this may be a quirk of human evolution: we are well programmed at the deep levels to be able to identify "more" - more food, more land, more water, more cattle. But identifying an invisible entity like "better insulated" is more subtle. A windmill pumping out electricity is a "tangible more" but a lot full of well insulated houses is an "intangible less." The low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency simply garners less press, less attention, less buzz.

Can we change that by branding? Can we change that with new tools and new markets which trade "less" as "more?" as Amory Lovins and others have suggested? How do we make it as good business to save power as generate power, given that the environmental benefits are as large or larger? These are not new questions.

What I see in my minds eye is a garbage bag full of waste and two gallons of gasoline attached to two thousand feet of plastic wrap, divided up into 20 small tubes. Every day customers buy that product, over and over again, unthinking and unknowing. And we wonder why the waste continues!

(Posted by Vinay Gupta in WorldChanging Essays at 08:18 AM)

Workshop: Near field interactions
This is a call for proposals for a workshop on user-centred interactions with the internet of things at Nordichi 2006, October 14 and 15, 2006 in Oslo, Norway.
http://nordichi.net.dynamicweb.dk/

The user-centred Internet of Things
The so-called ‘Internet of Things’ is a vision of the future of networked things that share a record of their interactions with context, people and other objects. The evolution of networking to include objects occupying space and moving within the physical world presents an urgent design challenge for new kinds of networked social practice. The challenge for design is to overcome the current overarching emphasis on business and technology that has largely ignored practices that fall outside of operational efficiency scenarios.

What is imminently needed is a user-centred approach to understand the physical, contextual and social relationships between people and the networked things they interact with.

The mobile device as early enabler
The mobile phone is likely to play a key role in the early adoption of the internet of things. Mobile devices offer ubiquitous networks and interfaces, enabling otherwise offline objects at the edges of the network. Near Field Communication (NFC: http://www.nfc-forum.org/aboutnfc/) is a mobile technology that has been designed to integrate networked services into physical space and objects. NFC introduces a sense of ‘touch’, where interactions between devices are initiated by physical proximity.

In use, the mobile phone brings with it a history of personal and social activities and contexts. It is in this evolution that we see user-agency and social motivation emerging as an interesting area within the internet of things.

Workshop goals
In this workshop we intend to build knowledge around the hands-on problems and opportunities of designing user-centred interactions with networked objects. Through a process of ‘making things’ we will look closely at the kinds of interactions we may want to design with networked objects, and what roles the mobile phone may play in this.

We will focus on the design of simple, effective and innovative interactions between mobile phones and physical objects, rather than focusing on technical or network issues.

The primary questions for the workshop are:

What kinds of common interactions will emerge as networked objects become everyday?
What role will the mobile phone have to play in these interactions?
How do we encourage playful, experimental and exploratory use of networked things?

Some secondary questions are:

What interaction models can we bring to the internet of things? Do the fields of embodied interaction, tangible, social, ubiquitous or pervasive computing cover the required ground for designers?

What new kinds of social practices could emerge out of the possibilities presented by networked things?

How will the physical form of everyday objects and spaces be transformed by networks and near field interactions? How this would be reflected in users’ behavior?

How can the design of physical objects help in overcoming potential information or interaction overload, and how does search or findability change when in a physical context?

How can we move beyond commonsensical features such as object activation or findability?

What kind of user-communities will co-opt the technology and how will they hack, adjust and re-form it for their needs?

Workshop structure
Each workshop day will begin with a keynote presentation from invited experts. On the first day, participants will each give a short presentation of their position paper, no longer than 5 minutes.

Then groups of 3-4 people, each with different skills and backgrounds will then work on concepts, scenarios and prototypes. Prototypes may take the form of physical models, scenarios or enactments. We encourage the use of our wood, plastic and rapid prototyping workshops to create physical prototypes of selected concepts. We will provide workshop assistants for the creation of physical models.

Outcomes
The outcomes should be in a range of implementation styles allowing for a variety of outputs that speaks to a wide audience. A report will be written on the workshop, and published on the Touch project website and in other relevant channels.

Call for participation
The workshop is open to participants from human factors, mobile technology, social science, interaction and industrial design. Practitioners and those with industrial experience are strongly encouraged. Prior research work on embodied interaction, social and tangible computing would be particularly relevant. Participants will be selected based on their relevance to the workshop, and the overall balance of the group. Space is limited to 25 participants.

Call for short position papers
Application is by position paper no longer than two pages. The position paper can be visual or experimental in design and content. The themes should cover an issue that is relevant to the design of interactions with everyday objects.

Deadline for papers is 1 August, selected participants will be notified on the 9 August. The workshop itself is October 14 and 15, 2006.

Papers and any questions should be submitted to timo (at) elasticspace (dot) com before 1 August.

Organisers
Timo Arnall is a designer and researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design (AHO). Timo’s research looks at practices around ubiquitous computing in urban space. At the moment his work focuses on the personal and social use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies, looking for potential interactions with objects and city spaces through mobile devices. Previously his research looked at flyposting and stickering in public space, suggesting possible design strategies for combining physical marking and digital spatial annotation. Timo leads the research project Touch at AHO, looking at the use of mobile technology and Near Field Communication.

Julian Bleecker is a Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication and an Assistant Professor in the Interactive Media Division, part of the USC School of Cinema-Television. Bleecker’s work focuses on emerging technology design, research and development, implementation, concept innovation, particularly in the areas of pervasive media, mobile media, social networks and entertainment. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in computer-human interaction. His doctoral dissertation from the University of California, Santa Cruz is on technology, entertainment and culture.

Nicolas Nova is a Ph.D. student at the CRAFT (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) working on the CatchBob! project. His current research is directed towards the understanding of how people use location-awareness information when collaborating in mobile settings, with a peculiar focus on pervasive games. After an undergraduate degree in cognitive sciences, he completed a master in human-computer interaction and educational technologies at TECFA (University of Geneva, Switzerland). His work is at the crossroads of cognitive psychology/ergonomics and human-computer interaction; relying on those disciplines to gain better understanding of how people use technology such as mobile and ubiquitous computing.

Technorati Tags: blogjects, conference, design, innovation, mobile, motility, RFID, sensors, spimes, transdisciplinary

Futurist in Residence Jerry Paffendorf from Electric Sheep Company a Second Life content/consultant company was part of a panel session at SuperNova2006’s Wharton West Workshop titled Massively Multi-layered Learning from Virtual Worlds today.

The MMOG’s of today like Wow is very expensive to create and maintain because of the time spend by game designers to create content for the users. The general consensus among the panelist was that hardcore gaming MMOG’s like Wow will blend more with user generated worlds like Second Life for a hybrid format of MMOG’s in the future. The hybrid MMOG’s will benefit both game producers and users by lowering the cost of development but also by adding more sustainability for the users by allowing them to create their own content and hence creating an army of game designers.

And how can the real world learn from what’s going on in the virtual world? Some of the issues raised were increased gaming type of leveling in workplaces with reward systems and quest solving that are going to be modeled after your favorite online game.

Another issues raised would have more social benefits with virtual quests with real world problem solving capabilities like having players do scans for certain patterns to complete a quest and that those patterns actually were x-ray images and the quest was helping doctors diagnose cancer patients. I like the idea of problem solving in the virtual world is directly linked with real world benefits but given what level of training it takes to help doctors scan x-way images that idea might have long prespectives.

An interesting project developed by Michael Frumin at Eyebeam Research and Development but not mentioned in the session that I'll bring up since I didn’t blog the story from Jerry’s speak at Where 2.0 is the idea of creating a metaverse by merging a Google Earth like application with a Second Life universe of user generated content.

The Second Life Future Salon posted about the first successful implementation in Google Earth of a Second Life avatar and how that avatar was printed from virtual world bits and bytes into real world atoms and physics.

"http://feeds.we-make-money-not-art.com/~a/wmmna?a=5brUt0">

The latest fad in P2P isn't P2P at all. Some clever soul has created a simple interface that allows the layperson to search using Google for Mp3's. 

Something tells me this won't last long. "Quick and dirty website allowing you to search Google for MP3s. No need to remember all those funny codes and parameters."

Funny codes and parameters indeed. A few quick tests with the G2P interface show that it does find files containing the artist name, and with an extension of "mp3". The trick uses a default behavior of the Apache webserver to identify pages that have been indexed in Google containing the standard Apache boilerplate that is generated when a published directory has no index file.

While Google, quite obviously, passes the "substantial non-infringing uses" test layed out in U.S. court decisions, the G2P interface does not.

[via Digg]

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ion solo (experimental) is one of the most exciting developments in videoblogging. It’s an open source java app that plays rss feeds with videos in a beautiful, full screen UI. Check it out!

By Robert Niles: OJR talks with Plagiarism Today editor Jonathan Bailey about what's happening with scraper sites, the DMCA and the battle to protect content online.

My suegra left her first comment on a blog yesterday. In a voice mail thanking her, I encouraged her to start her blog:afterall, she's a bright, witty woman with a lot to say about the state of the world. But will she? Will blogging become the next email, as some predict– an Internet activity that everyone does? Or is merely a geek activity more appropriate to debates about the validity of the Battlestar Galactica Season 2.5 conclusion than to mainstream discussions?

These questions are coming to the fore a bit more. Can those of us like Ethan , who are "who are enthusiastic about the read/write web" take heart in the recent Pew Iternet Study that found that 57% of adult respondents have created and shared something online? Are we sobered by the release of research like Eszter Hargittai's that shows the number of folks actually engaging with blogs and read-write web devices is astonishingly low? Jakob Nielsen makes similar points in a discussion with Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine:

You are extrapolating from your personal experience. This is invalid. You are not an average user….

Jeff responded,

Who would have thought even a year ago that the BBC, The Guardian, CNN, CBS, and other major media would need to run to catch up with this wacky thing called the podcast — and that once they did catch up, they’d serve them to large and devoted audiences.

And who says we need to create for the average anymore? Who the hell is average? No one is. The beauty of this new world is that we can create and serve in many ways for many people and needs and interests.

And Jakob responds in a comment :

That will work only for the people who are most fanatic, who are engaged so much that they will go and check out these blogs all the time. There are definitely some people who do that — they are a small fraction.

[UPDATED: I meant to add: with RSS' spread into mainstream products like IE7, the New York Times' MyTimes, and Yahoo, won't that tiny fraction grow exponentially?]

Relatedly, John Dickerson, in his article on Lieberman challenger Ned Lamont, asks whether blog-driven challenger Lamont has

tapped into a winning political movement, or does he just have a bunch of supporters who can type quickly?

Like Ethan and Jeff, I'm an optimist– I think the blogosphere is certainly more than quick typers. But, per Eszter and Nielsen's challenges, where's the data, Pew phone studies notwithstanding? In a similar vein, see the comments left by Eszter and Pat Aufterheide in response to my post about Saul Hansell's optimism that MySpace is a media literacy tool:

Eszter: "I am not sure who are all these people he is talking about who are or will be participating actively enough to learn. But it will be interesting to follow and find out."
Pat: "The evidence at the outset of this phenomenon gives us no guide."

HBR writes:

Second Life is just one of a growing number of three-dimensional virtual worlds, accessible via the Internet, in which users, through an avatar, are able to play games or simply interact socially with thousands of people simultaneously. By some estimates, more than 10 million people spend $10 to $15 a month to subscribe to online role-playing environments, with the number of subscribers doubling every year. Millions more enter free sites, some of them sponsored by companies as brand-building initiatives. Many users spend upward of 40 hours a week in these worlds. And as the technology improves over the next decade, virtual worlds may well eclipse film, TV, and non–role-playing computer games as a form of entertainment. That’s because, instead of watching someone else’s story unfold in front of them on a screen, users in these worlds create and live out their own stories.

line, “you want sustained engagement with the brand rather than just a click-through” to a purchase or product information, says Bonita Stewart, responsible for interactive marketing for DaimlerChrysler’s Jeep, Chrysler, and Dodge brands. “Avatars create an opportunity for just this type of engagement.”

Fast Company Blog writes about a talk given by John Hagel:

The challenge he posed is: The new scarcity = attention; there has been a profound shift in busienss economics from shelf space as the key scarce resource to people's time and attention and the key scarce resource.

do to/for (because there's opportunity as well as challenge) to branding, marketing, metrics?

According to John, marketing was formerly based on the three I's -- Intercept, isolate, inhibit -- and instead it should be based on the three A's: attract, assist (develop understandingn of context both pre and post purchase); affiliate (mobilize people to help deliver value)

This, says John, is an inexorable move from product and vendor centric promises (buy from me because I have great products or because I am a great vendor) to a customer-centric promise (buy from me because I know you as an individual customer beter than any one else and you can trust me to confiugure the right bundle of products and services to fill your needs as they evolve over time).

Yahoo News, one of the world’s most popular news aggregation sites, plans to launch a citizen video-journalist news service at the end of June that will act as a collection and publication site for news videos generated by the public.

CNN is trying to be hip. Take from a guy with a gray beard: There’s nothing more pathetically cringeworthy than an old fart trying to be with it. (Just ask for my son’s reaction when I play hiphop in the car.)

But that is what CNN is dying to do with its new video podcast called The Grist. They announce that “this isn’t news, people, and it certainly isn’t important” as they show wacky clips and try to deliver wacky lines from a would-be-wacky host (Jarrett Bellini, a media operations feeds coordinator, according to MediaWeek).

I’ll tell you what would be a lot cooler: Take all those wacky, unused clips and put them up online so anyone can download and remix