unmediated

WiFi Fingerprinting

MAC address spoofing on wireless networks could come to an end with a new security technique that would allow network administrators to see a unique WiFi fingerprints for each device, reports Ars Technica.

Dr. Jeyanthi Hall, a researcher at Carleton University analyzed (pdf) the radio frequency (RF) signal of 15 devices and discovered that each and every device has its own unique signal. Even devices from the same manufacturer are unique due to variations during the manufacturing process. The signals were so clearly different from one another that she had a 95 percent detection rate with zero false positives during her testing.

MAC addresses are a unique, alphanumeric identifier assigned to each individual network card. Network administrators use these identifiers to distinguish between individual machines on a network and ultimately limit network access to approved machines.

However, savvy users quickly realized that they could easily spoof MAC addresses from other machines on their own devices to pose as someone else on the network. Although limiting network access to specific MAC addresses is very common, it is not considered the best form of network security for this reason.

Ars Technica says most admins now utilize user authentication and proxying in order to identify users rather than easily spoofed MAC addresses. However, if wireless hardware were to utilize this technology and combine it with MAC addresses, unique device identification could pick up steam once again, says Ars Technica.

Holovaty on Need for Raw Data

Adrian Holovaty has cornered the geek-journalist market. Today, he picks up on 9 Ways for Newspapers to Improve Their Websites and identifies the oppotunties that journalists are missing.

Fundamental shifts need to happen for newspaper companies to remain essential sources of information for their communities…[W]hat I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of [a story]..
when I’ve tried to explain the error of storing everything as a news article, journalists don’t immediately understand why it is bad. To them, a publishing system is just a means to an end: getting information out to the public…The goal isn’t to have clean data — it’s to publish data quickly, with bonus points for a nice user interface. But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible.

Jay Small adds that real change won’t happen until the “legacy media” dam breaks:

none of those tipping points will be reached until (a) consumer audiences and (b) advertising dollars abandon the legacy media en masse. We’re seeing interactive audience growth, and ad spending growth, but it’s only chipping away at the legacy media. The dam is holding for now. And that’s slowing the pace of needed changes such as what Holovaty suggests.

Expanding peer production to the physical realm, part one

A crucial aspect of peer to peer theory, the attempt to produce a theory that aims to understand peer to peer processes, and also a key differentiator between the more liberal and the more radical interpretations, is whether peer producton, the common production through communities, as evidenced in free software, linux and wikipedia, can be expanded to the physical sphere, and additionally, whether that expansion can be enclosed in the money economy.

My own take at the P2P Foundation is of the more expansive school of thought, we think that peer to peer has the potential, and even likelyhood, of becoming the new core of the next political economy, the one that will arise to save us from the very success of capitalism, and its corollary: the destruction and depletion of the biosphere.

Today, as if often said, we treat physical resources as if they were infinite, and the market does not bear most of these costs of negative externalization, and we artificially attempt to make infinite non-rival (even anti-rival) resources, scarce. A P2P-based society would simply reverse that trend, it would treat scarce resources as being scarce, and would free the natural abundance of a free culture. The key, in terms of human identity and desire, is to have a successfull shift from the accumulation of physical assets and resources, to the accumalation of immaterial ‘assets’.

If we ask ourselves, through what strategies and trends could we see an expansion of peer production to the material sphere, I usually give two answers, one is the ‘distribution of everything’. To the degree we succeed in expanding the distributed format, in intellect, productive capital, financial capital, we expand the space where peer production can thrive. Additionally, if we can envisage a process whereby the design phase of industrial production is separated from its physical production space, there is no limit to the use of open source methodologies in the design phase. We can easily imagine for example, the design of a car that would be vastly superior to the car designs by corporations. But the question remains on how to finance its physical construction. But we already see companies in the software industry, who successfully link their market-based aims and behaviour, with a dependence on a intellectual commons and an open source community, fruitfully building a ecology from which all parties profit. It’s a model that can be expanded to other sectors of the economy.

All of this above is a summary of my views so far, and a preparation for my review of an important contribution by Martin Springer, which is the subject of the next entry.

Barcelona’s inaccessibility mapped by mobile phones

How can new media be used to improve the world we live in? Since the introduction of the Digital Communities category in 2004, Prix Ars Electronica has been dealing more intensively with the socially relevant implementation of artistic and technological innovations.

[Thank you Antoni Abad !! for submitting this item]

Barcelona Accessible illustrates how 40 people with disabilities use mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city's streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of inaccessible Barcelona on the internet.

The result is a map of Barcelona’s inaccessibility for those confined to wheelchairs, a cartographic representation of the parts of town that are closed to people with handicaps. In this way, 3,578 architectural barriers and stumbling blocks have been documented on canal*ACCESSIBLE since December 2005

Samsung Brightens The Day

Until now, most mobile devices were near impossible to see in broad daylight, this new trend hopes to solve the problem.

[PC Exposure via digg]

Graffiti Research Lab's talk at ars electronica

Apart from the ShiftSpace presentation, the other Pixelspaces talk i really enjoyed was by James Powderly and Evan Roth (US) from Graffiti Research Lab. They developed the project at eyebeam in New York.

I didn't get this project at all before ars electronica. I kind of read about it here and there and thought "mmmh! throwing luminous thingies at buildings? So what?" But i discovered during their talk that there's more behind G.R.L. and i liked what i heard. A lot (though i wasn't really convinced by the "let's throw some luminous thingies at the tram" performance.)
My notes from their talk:

Roth explained that his fellowship at Eyebeam was based on a previous work: his thesis project at Parsons, the Graffiti Analysis system which makes visible the unseen movements of graffiti artists in the creation of a tag.

Powderly worked for a robotic company in New York and was until then thus only used to working on “leaving marks on the rocks on Mars.”

Their works has a lot to do with the hacking mentality. They don’t define themselves as graffiti artists but rather as graffiti engineers, a bit in the style of Q, the gadget guy who devised accessories for James Bond. Their work is an extension of the graffiti and aims to provide graffiti writers, street artists and protesters with new tools in order to help them take back public space and challenge corporate culture. All their work is OS, that was one of the requirements to work at Eyebeam.

They gave us an overview of the works they found most inspiring:

Zoetropes, by the Toyshop Collective, repurposed bicycle wheels animated and inspired by the zoetrope, a XIXth century device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures.

Darius Jones, a graffiti artist from Brooklyn, whose work is characterized by a perversion in the use of existing systems. He clearly has a certain eye for creating romance in unexpected places, making the city fall in love with itself. Street signs falling in love; images of the signage brought into 3D space, at street level; surveillance cameras surveilling themselves, etc.

Mark Jenkins, based in Washington DC, used mostly tape as its material. He leaves his tape kids all over the city as gifts to the world.

Such pieces are very temporal, they stay there only a few hours and their traces live on on the web. He ended up using LED Throwies as well (see his Jesus). His “embedded” works are a big success as well. For example his Homeless Guy makes us look back at ourselves and at how we interact with each other.

Banksy, “the exterior paint specialist”.

Both Banksy and Jenkins have taken over surveillance cameras.
“Boring”: Banksy used a fire extinguisher to paint the letters on the wall of a building because he didn’t think much of its architecture. He emptied the extinguisher and filled it with red paint.

They showed also images of Banksy's works in zoos. The artist is known for sneaking into the penguin enclosure at London Zoo and painting 'We're bored of fish- We wanna go home'.

Hacks in museum (some of the pieces he hung in some museum are now listed as part of the permanent collection. “Vandalized oil painting”. GRL showed some of Banksys's films. He tags up for a very interesting reasons. Apparently policemen wear caps that hide their eyebrows. Apparently eyebrows are such an expressive part of our face that it’s best to leave them in the shadow. But it means that policemen cannot easily see what’s up.

These artists have online equivalents: the Velvet Strike Team who conceptualized during the beginning of Bush's "War on Terrorism" a collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game "Counter-Strike".

A walk series of stencils.

Graffiti artists use the web a lot to document their work. Which can lead to some problems as some of them have been arrested via their MySpace page, some have even been busted out of their MySpace page.

Now how does the work of Graffiti Research Lab fit into this?

They want to provide graffiti artists with the tools that would allow them to compete with corporate advertisers. Powderly even added that the most interesting things done using the throwies or the Night Writer have been done by others with the help of GRL sometimes (as with the Throwie Talkie, a Throwie hacked to blink graffiti messages in morse code, an idea of Pat & Ward Cunningham) but often without it. A search about throwies on google shows that it's not about GRL anymore.

Jose Luis de Vicente asked them about their concern for the sustainability of the Throwies (each of them is equipped with a tiny battery). GRL seemed to be very concerned with the problem. They developed a solar-powered throwie but as it's 7 times more expensive than the "regular" one, it wouldn't be affordable enough for artists. Usually throwies do not stay in the environment as people like to throw them then they want to take them back home as a souvenir. But here again comes the problem of recycling: do we know if these people recycle the batteries correctly?

GRL gave a second talk during the Forum I – Interactive Art presentations. You can download the podcast.
Many images found on wooster collective and visual resistance.

THE PARTICIPATORY CHALLENGE

hands-on guidelines

"This essay is about participation in online collaborations and the potentials of extreme sharing networks in the unregulated commons. Current debates focus too much on what social tools can do and not enough on the people who use them. Motivations of the multitudes who add content to online environments matter a great deal. What follows here are hands-on guidelines and an outline of preconditions for online participation. Terms like: involvement, turn taking, network, feedback, or distributed creativity (1) are frequently applied to characterise this kind of social and cultural interaction. Today, people do not merely browse the web. Instead they give away information, expertise, and advice without monetary compensation. They submit texts, code, music, images, and video files in settings that allow for such contributions. They also re-mix each other’s content. Thousands voluntarily participate in open encyclopedias, social bookmarking sites, friend-of-a-friend networks, media art projects and blogs or wikis. This exemplifies the growing interest in technologies of cooperation. Swarms of users/producers form extreme sharing networks, supporting their goal to lead fullfilled and engaged lives.

This broad cultural context of increased content provision facilitated by the World Wide Web is the precondition for the emerging paradigm of the artist as cultural context provider, who is not chiefly concerned with contributing content to her own projects. Instead, she establishes configurations into which she invites others. She blurs the lines between the artist, theorist, and curator. However, it is surprising how little emphasis has been placed on the subtle motivations for taking part in participatory projects." From THE PARTICIPATORY CHALLENGE by Trebor Scholz [from: Krysa, J., ed. (2006) DATA Browser 03. Curating immateriality. The work of the curator in the age of network systems. Autonomedia: New York.] Trebor Scholz 2006 Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.

Activeworlds:

Geography and Social interaction in Virtual Reality

"Abstract: This paper examines the interrelation between the geographical and social aspects of virtual worlds. We examine the main geographical features of Activeworlds, a multi-user virtual environment available over the Internet. Activeworlds is not only one of the most popular virtual environments, it is also the only publicly accessible one in which users can build themselves, and thus shape their geographical and social environment. We examine, among other features, transportation, mobility, and property appropriation in this virtual worlds system. Further, we describe some of the influences, both from urban planning and science fiction, on the geography of Activeworlds. We also examine the social relations that arise from these geographical conditions, including the ‘rough and ready’ mentality of this ‘cyberspace frontier’. Finally, we consider the implications of this virtual worlds system for theories of the emerging geographical and social relations in virtual environments." From Activeworlds: Geography and Social Interaction in Virtual Reality by Ralph Schroeder, Avon Huxor, and Andy Smith.

"1.0 Introduction: The idea behind ‘30 Days in ActiveWorlds’ was to fully document the development of a virtual environment from beginning to end, as a plot of virgin virtual land which, it was hoped, would develop into a community and a fully-fledged new virtual world. The aim was not to create a dialogue of life in the virtual environment, such as the well-documented “My Tiny Life” by Julian Dibbell [1] or “The Cybergypsies” by Indra Sinha [2], yet the events that unfolded over the 30 Day period led to just such a documentation, and with it my conclusions about not only community and design in a virtual environment, but also views on the increasingly blurred boundaries between what is real and what is virtual." From 30 Days in ActiveWorlds – Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World by Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith; Social Life of Avatars, Chapter 8, Ralph Shroder (Editor), Springer-Verlag UK. [via Digitally Distributed Environments]

Designing for Mobile - Blue Flavor

Hot from my workshop at Webvisions yesterday, here is my 103-slide magnum opus on Mobile Design.

• Designing for Mobile: Bringing Design Down to Size PDF (3.6Mb)

My workshop focused on the mobile ecosystem, some of the basic fundamentals as well as dispel myths and jargon common to the mobile industry. As this information can be incredibly hard to come by outside of the mobile industry, it seemed like a good place to start.

Newspaper Manifesto

Editor and Publisher published a Winning Online Manifesto by Tom Mohr, director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University.

Newspaper industry leaders are frogs in a pot. The water’s starting to boil, and it’s time to jump. Only 19 percent of 18-34 year olds read a daily newspaper; 44 percent of them go to a web news portal. Broadband penetration has reached 57%. The blogosphere is doubling every 5 ½ months. Search provides instant access to the world’s information. User-generated content has turned the authority model of institutional media on its head. Peer-to-peer networks, tag clouds and reputation engines are fundamentally changing how people engage with content and communications.

Safa Rashtchy, Senior Internet Analyst for Piper Jaffray, has advanced the notion that these shifts in consumer behavior have precipitated a nascent shift in the marketing mix. He sees search at the center of a new marketing mix. Acknowledging a debt to his framework, I would expand the “center” somewhat to include all intention-based advertising (search, lead-generation advertising, and e-commerce).

Increasingly, smart advertisers are placing their first dollars in intention-based advertising. That’s because these ad dollars target consumers who demonstrate through their actions an expressed interest in the product or service being advertised. While traditional media are not completely replaced by intention-based advertising, they suffer lost market share.

These changes have begun to restructure consumer consumption habits and advertiser behaviors. Circulation has declined 12% since 2000, and the rate of decline is increasing. 3,500 newsroom professionals have lost their jobs, about 7% of the industry total, since 2000.

It is not beyond the pale for the $49 billion (2005) newspaper ad business ($47 billion of which was print) to begin to see accelerating declines in print ad revenue over the next five years. My rough projection is for 2010 print revenue to be just under $3 billion below its 2005 level. This loss must be offset by online. The $4 billion incremental revenue from a network ensures sub-two percent revenue growth from 2006 – 2010. Not robust, perhaps, but certainly much better than the alternative.

This migration path is difficult. The benefits of today’s actions will be seen in two to three years. It’s important to start now.

I have concluded that depends on an industry-wide understanding of seven key points:

• Local newspapers will not be the innovation source for top online products.

• "Local” is not, in itself, defensible online.

• The big money is not in newspaper websites, but in gaining access to top-tier product via partnerships with vertical online leaders.

• Moving newspaper websites onto common platforms will deliver improvements in quality, cost reduction, traffic and revenue.

• When networked, newspapers bring critical assets to the table that strengthen their competitive position vs. online-only players.

• The window of opportunity is closing; failure to act will compromise the future of the business.

• Ultimately, the key is leadership at the highest levels.

Jeff Jarvis says, "Journalism will become more collaborative — because it can, thanks to new tools; because it must, thanks to new business realities; and because it should, to build a new and respectful relationship with the public. So our challenge is to find the ways to help this happen. Jarvis says Saving journalism (and killing the press) is manditory in the age of Craig Newmark.

NewAssignment.net is a new approach to networked journalism. And who better to get the ball rolling than Jay Rosen:

The site uses open source methods to develop good assignments and help bring them to completion; it employs professional journalists to carry the project home and set high standards so the work holds up. There are accountability and reputation systems built in that should make the system reliable. The betting is that (some) people will donate to works they can see are going to be great because the open source methods allow for that glimpse ahead.

Free Mobile Blog Software for mobile blogging, is available using Melodeo, Shozu, SplashBlog, VoiceIndigo, YouTube and Spodradio. Journalism resources are available at Columbia Journalism Review, CRJ Daily, Paid Content, Online Journalism Review, Poynter, Transom, This American Life, and The Media Giraffe Conference.

Related DailyWireless stories include; CBS Goes Wireless, CBS Bluetooth Posters, Audio Book Sharing, Google Traffic on Cell, Advance to the Rear and Midnight in the Garden.

Semiotic Disobedience

The quirky weekly “Consumed” column in the NYTimes Sunday magazine this week focuses on Ian Bogost / Persuasive Games’ Disaffected!, as well as Molleindustria’s McDonald’s Videogame, both blogged previously on GTxA (1 2). From the article:

Skepticism about, and mockery of, the claims of commercial persuasion has a long history. And “Disaffected!” shows how the sophistication, goals and tactics of both admakers and anti-admakers have escalated in tandem. It can also be seen as an example of what Sonia Katyal, a Fordham University law professor, calls “semiotic disobedience” in an article to be published this fall in the Washington University Law Review.

Designing for concentric circles of adoption

Photo © copyright Fabio Prati.

My PiC has yet another great post on identifying who you should be “targeting” when you’re building a startup, product, community or all three.

The Pinko approach demands that you become a member of your community to truly understand their needs and the world from their perspective. In fact, this is the only way for you to really be able to genuinely respond to their feedback and criticism, otherwise you’re always approximating what presume they’re saying…

When I was at Spread Firefox and planning out our adoption strategy, I followed very similar principles (though I didn’t have a catchy framework like “Pinko” at the time). By seeing the existing community as made up of concentric circles of enthusiastics and early adopters, my goal was to create a black hole suction of sorts deeper into the inner core community:

My theory was that the more folks we could bring into the inner rings of the Mozilla community, the more devoted they’d become and the lower the incremental effort we’d need to exert to pull in more outliers, like their friends, coworkers and family members.

Tara’s argument very much mirrors this approach. By focusing your effort and outreach on a core constituency, just like in a presidential campaign (read: Howard Dean), you’ll be enticing folks with a truly valuable service that those same folks can then turn around and preach about with more convincing passion, integrity and self-interest than you could… the very reason that the Spread Firefox campaign was so successful; it relied on concentric circles of true-believers to spread the word. For its part it only had to focus on continuing to build a great product and delivery community infrastructure to support its core constituency.

So when it comes to community barn-raising and product development, keeping your design and development efforts geared to a tightly knit core of enthusiasts is the best way to create the first drop that will ripple out to the wider audiences that your VCs are constantly (and damagingly) telling you to go after. There’s simply no better way to effectively and organically build out to a wider audience than taking the concentric circles approach.

Google Image Labeler relies on crowdshop labor

Folks are buzzing about Google’s new time wasting playable Image Labeler. Philipp Lenssen says:

More than a game, for Google this is a way to tag images using human brain power… to improve their image search results. Two people finding the same tag can serve as validation the tag makes sense. I suppose for Google it’s not important that two people find the same keywords at the same time – they can simply let people tag the images and then add any threshold they want (like “4 people must have chosen this tag for it to become a confirmed tag”).

Both Search Engine Watch and TechCrunch made the connection to research conducted by Luis von Ahn at my alma matter that was first blogged about as early as December last year (written up in the Pittsbrugh Post Gazette in August 2005).

According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch, the Google technology is indeed based on von Ahn’s work:

Yes, Image Labeler is based on my ESP Game, which Google licensed. I’m not employed by Google, however, since I’m a full-time faculty member at Carnegie Mellon.

In my experience, I found the images were often too small to make out clearly, whereas in similar systems like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, you get much higher resolution photos.

Interestingly, Riya uses a similar but closed system of human tagging to populate its object search. It’s unclear how such a system scales for web wide results unless something like Google or Amazon’s tool find enough widespread pick-up and open up an API to the tagged images.

Schachter.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object)

Originally posted by fagette from del.icio.us/fagette, ReBlogged by Paddy Johnson on Sep 3, 2006 at 01:19 PM

Will Social Nets Be The New Monopoly On Music Rights & Earnings?

UK musician and activist Billy Bragg questions the role of social networking sites in today’s MediaGuardian. He argues that in the old days, artists had to sign with labels to get into record shops and to get paid. They usually kept only 10-15 percent of takings, with record companies covering manufacturing, marketing and distribution from the rest.
In an age of much simpler distribution, Bragg says that artists still receive only 10-15 percent of the record company share of sales on platforms like iTunes. Even taking into account the cost of ‘breaking’ an artist, Bragg questions whether artists need to sign away rights to record companies when they can promote and sell their own work directly online and retain their own copyright.
Social networking sites have a big part to play in this because artists “no longer wait to be discovered”. Bragg says the vast majority have no contractual agreements with everybody and that is in the spirit of the internet.
But he is critical of some social net sites that are making claims of ownership on this content and singles out MTV Flux: he claims a close reading of its terms hand MTV rights to transmit material “in perpetuity and gratis”, as well as commercially exploit, distribute, edit… without payment. “Such terms are unprecedented in the music industry and could have serious long-term implications.” Will social net sites allow artists to circumvent the record labels, he asks, or will they become a new way for them to keep their monopoly on copyright and earnings?
Plus, coincidentally, more on MySpace jumpstarting music careers on Variety. TV director and gig venue owner Peter O’Fallon: “The great thing about the Web is that there are no gatekeepers - no lawyers, managers, A&R people.”
Related: Audio Interview: MTV’s New User-Gen TV Service Flux

Mobile Web Usability

Wap Review writes:

My fellow mobilist and host of this weeks Carnival of the Mobilists, Daniel Taylor at Mobile Enterprise Weblog has posted an interesting piece on mobile web usability or lack there of. Daniel's article, Who Designs This Stuff? describes the difficulties and frustrations that he experienced trying to accomplish something on the mobile web that should have been easy - getting the arrival time of a airline flight.

el experienced are typical of the frustration that many users experience when they first try to use the mobile web. The good news is that the causes of some of these difficulties are relatively easy to fix.

Will Panasonic lead the professional HD camcorder market with AVC in 2007?

Former broadcast industry executive Tore Nordahl recently published some predictions on the AVCHD format in the professional and broadcast space. He believes that AVC will replace HDV, and in the very near future. In a recent essay entitled "Will Panasonic lead the professional HD camcorder market with AVC in 2007?", Nordahl opens with the bold statement "HDV is in trouble."

"Panasonic never joined the "HDV club" choosing to tough it out with the HVX200 DVCPRO-HD P2 camcorder (with success) while developing its AVC technology. Panasonic's decision not to spend on HDV R&D will pay off big in 2007, when I expect to see several Panasonic AVC-based HD camcorders both for semi-pro and pro use."

(Continued at FresHDV)

The illusion of control

Scott Adams recounts an anecdote illustrating the ‘illusion of control’ and how important it is to many people - even to the extent that it is the single defining characteristic of mankind which one might use to explain human behaviour to aliens:

“The maintenance man is moving the thermostat in our office today. I started talking with him about the “Thermostat Wars” [from Dilbert comics]. He told me about one office with 30 women where they could never get the temperature to an agreeable level. At his suggestion they installed 20 dummy thermostats around the office. Everyone was told that each thermostat controlled the zone around itself.

Problem solved. Now that everyone has “control” of their own thermostat there is no problem.”

To what extent is the illusion of control, rather than real control, what most people really want in their products?

Do they care that their personal data may be encrypted and held to ransom by a software company, so long as they feel ‘in control’ in everyday use (e.g. the ability to change the colour scheme)?

And how should designers respond to this issue? Are there any examples of products (other than, say, children’s toys) deliberately designed with fake controls to make the user feel in charge even though he/she isn’t? (Fake solar cell calculators are interesting, but not quite the same issue)

P.S. On the other hand, it’s worth considering the opinion expressed by the Audi A2 owner, that she didn’t find it a disadvantage having to take her Audi to a ’specialist’ in order to open the bonnet (hood). Is even that basic level of control (being able to see the engine) too much for some people? Is it because, say, a thermostat affects people personally (temperature) whereas a car engine is something dirty, difficult, complex, for someone else to worry about?

Future of news

David Weinberger boswells a chunky discussion of the future of news at Foocamp.

Adrian Holovaty from the WashingtonPost.com is interested in optimizing information collection. How do we get journalists to collect information in ways that machines can reuse it. Newspapers are a collection of information desperate for a framework, while Wikipedia is a framework desperate for information, he says. . . . Adrian says that the categorization onus should be on the reporter. All the info in it ought to be categorized so, if it’s a report on a mayor’s speech, we can see all the speeches by the mayor, all speeches about the same topic, etc.

The journalist’s responsibility as a citizen

When I used to call bloggers et al “citizen journalists,” many professional journalists objected: “We’re citizens, too.” Absolutely, you are, and that raises questions about your responsibility as citizens. Consider these three illustrations involving The New York Times:

Sunday’s Times carries a most eloquent essay by Michael Wines on covering the world’s poorest and sometimes intervening to help them.

How to respond to it is a moral dilemma that lurks in the background of many interviews. Reputable journalists are indoctrinated with the notion that they are observers — that their job is to tell a story, not to influence it. So what to do when an anguished girl tells a compelling story about her young brother, lying emaciated on a reed mat, dying for lack of money to by anti-AIDS drugs? Is it moral to take the story and leave when a comparatively small gift of money would keep him alive? If morality compels a gift, what about the dying mother in the hut next door who missed out on an interview by pure chance? Or the three huts down the dirt path where, a nurse says, residents are dying for lack of drugs? Why are they less deserving?

nalism, paying for information is a cardinal sin, the notion being that a source who will talk only for money is likely to say anything to earn his payment. So what to do when a penniless father asks why he should open his life free to an outsider when he needs money for food? How to react to the headmistress who says that white people come to her school only to satisfy their own needs, and refuses to talk without a contribution toward new classrooms? Is that so different from interviewing a Washington political consultant over a restaurant lunch on my expense account?

If it is, which is more ethical?

The same question was raised during Katrina, as journalists saw people in need and had to help. I think it is insane to argue that as journalists, they should not act. As citizens of the world, as neighbors, as compassionate people, the canons of their profession should not stop them. At the same time, though, as Wines points out, you can’t help everyone — and sometimes your reporting will bring help.

Now hear Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald on On the Media this week talking about turning child porn sites he finds in the course of his reporting over to the authorities. Last year, in a much-discussed case, Eichenwald, convinced one of his youthful subjects to testify against the pornographers. Now, in a new series, he reveals, with admirable transparency, that he turned in sites because it is the law:

Covering this story raised legal issues. United States law makes it a crime to purchase, download or view child pornography, unless the images are promptly reported to authorities and no images are copied or retained. The Times complied with the law, disclosing what it found to appropriate authorities.

What extraordinary intervention! The analogies aren’t perfect, but imagine a Times reporter encountering an 18-year-old who had been thrust into the illicit drug business at 13 as a consequence of his neglectful family and unscrupulous dealers? Would he help the young man leave the drug trade and find him a lawyer at a Washington firm who is “a former federal prosecutor,” as Eichenwald did Berry? Not likely. Would a Times reporter extend similar assistance to an 18-year-old female prostitute? An 18-year-old fence? A seller of illegal guns? No way.

But why the hell not? Shafer argues that this puts the next reporter in a risky position: Will sources trust him or see him an an agent of the law? I think the reporter who does not follow Eichenwald’s lead is in a riskier position: of allowing and thus even abetting crimes to be committed. And what does that tell the public about our role in our communities? What kind of citizens are we then?

Now to the third, inevitable illustration. I wish that On the Media had asked Eichenwald about Judy Miller and related cases, for the parallels are clear. She knew a crime had been committed and she went to jail not to reveal the criminal. Now, of course, the counterargument is, once again, that sources — especially if those sources are the ones performing the criminal act — will not trust reporters and reveal information that should be revealed if they believe those reporters will not protect them and will hand them over to the authorities. But what if the crime is even clearer than revealing classified information? What if it is child molestation or murder?

Where is the line? Especially in a time when any citizen can perform an act of journalism, can there be a line between being a citizen and a journalist?

: LATER: Jeremy Wagstaff disagrees and says journalists aren’t built to be citizens.

findability in the long tail

Fireside Chat: The Long Tail - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals): a great discussion about findability in the long tail.

The ABC of social innovation

In July, we guest-blogged for the Belgian These Days Blogs, creating a dictionary of terms related to the process of social innovation, which now increasingly takes place, ‘outside the corporate form’.

It was published in 3 parts: one, two, and three.

For more information, and more concepts, see our P2P Business section.

A useful add-on are the 10 Laws of Innovation, posted by John Thackara:

Power Law 1: Don’t think “new product” - think social value.

Power Law 2: Think social value before “tech”.

Power Law 3: Enable human agency. Design people into situations, not out of them.

Power Law 4: Use, not own. Possession is old paradigm.

Power Law 5: Think P2P, not point-to-mass.

Power Law 6: Don’t think faster, think closer.

Power Law 7: Don’t start from zero. Re-mix what’s already out there.

Power Law 8: Connect the big and the small.

Power Law 9: Think whole systems (and new business models, too).

Power Law 10: Think open systems, not closed ones.

MTV the Next MySpace?

An interesting article in MediaWeek wonders whether MTV Networks might have plans to build a MySpace-like social network out of various properties it’s acquired lately, including things like Xfire and Neopets. While MTV’s still-in-alpha Virtual Laguna Beach isn’t mentioned by name in the article, it can only lend more weight to the theory, despite the fact that it doesn’t have much of a social-networking component — yet.

The MediaWeek writer doesn’t seem to be reading 3pointD, or he might have made more of the following, which is buried toward the end of the piece: “Rumors persist that Viacom is cooking up a social networking play of its own—perhaps melding that trend with the virtual reality phenomenon. [MTV Networks president Michael] Wolf wouldn’t get specific, but hinted something was in the works using avatars (virtual representations of people).” Taking Virtual Laguna Beach into the social networking space could be quite interesting. That’s one feature Second Life and other virtual worlds could benefit from, if you ask us.

A-List Vloggers, Long Tails and Fairness

I happened upon a post on Nicholas Carr’s Blog this morning called The Great Unread. Although it’s about written blogs, specifically, I think the gist of it carries over into the videoblogging realm quite nicely.

As the Yahoo Videoblogging Group has grown, there have been repeated complaints about A-list vloggers - vloggers that get the hype, the views, the links, the magazine articles (also known as the usual suspects). This has led to some acrimonious debates over fairness in group dynamics.

Do A-listers exist in the vlogosphere? Is it a clique? An attention grab? Is it a question of who speaks the loudest and most often or is does it have to do with who came into the scene first?

Nic Carr calls the idea of a democratic and egalitarian blogosphere an "innocent fraud":

An innocent fraud is a lie, but it’s a lie that’s more white than black. It’s a lie that makes most everyone happy. It suits the purposes of the powerful because it masks the full extent of their power, and it suits the purposes of the powerless because it masks the full extent of their powerlessness.

elves about the blogosphere - that it’s open and democratic and egalitarian, that it stands in contrast and in opposition to the controlled and controlling mass media - is an innocent fraud.

The post goes on to explain why he feels that is,

and ends with an tale of A-listers merging with big media moguls while "blog peasants" look on.

There are a great many comments following the post, some in agreement and some railing against it’s perceived hyperboly. The gem that I found within it, however, is a link to an article written in 2003, considered an important document on the matter.

Clay Shirky’s Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality attempts to offer an objective view of a growing gap between popular blogs and what Nic refers to as The Great Unread.

In 2003, the most popular blog was Instapundit, blogging was still fairly young but growing quickly…much as videoblogging is today. I think some of the parallels are striking and would help to explain the growing disparity.

Rather than using a loaded term such as Innocent Fraud, Shirky refers to something called Power Law Distribution and how small historical moments are writ large over time as more and more people enter the arena.

A few people begin vlogging. They link to each other. Soon, others arrive on the scene and create their own vlogs. Their links reflect the vlogrolls of their predecessors with a few additions. As each new vlogger arrives, their vlogrolls are more inclined to include vlogs that have been linked to by the majority of the participants and less inclined to include the vlogs that are only linked to by a few. Oddly enough, the greater the number of options, rather than flattening the plane of attention, the results become more skewed toward the favorited vlogs.

In the section, Freedom of Choice Makes Stars Inevitable, Shirky writes:

Note that this model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for "solidarity goods", things best enjoyed by a group). It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however small and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.

1. there is no threshold for having a weblog
2. good blogs stay on top because they continue blogging (a difficult accomplishment in and of itself! It’s hard work!)
3. This one is important, in my opinion so I’ll quote directly:

the stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake.

Once a blog (or vlog) becomes popular, will the content creator become part of an elite clique that predominantly links to and associates with other popular creators or is it a question of numbers?

…as a blogger’s audience grows large, more people read her work than she can possibly read, she can’t link to everyone who wants her attention, and she can’t answer all her incoming mail or follow up to the comments on her site.

Video’s visual component also might ask the question, is it who is the most attractive or the most engaging/entertaining on camera?

I don’t think there are any direct answers to these questions.

Shirky asks and answers a couple of questions of his own that are worth considering:

Are there people who are as talented or deserving as the current stars, but who are not getting anything like the traffic? Doubtless. Will this problem get worse in the future? Yes.

- Anne

The Privacy Ceiling

Scott Craver of the University of Binghamton has a very interesting post summarising the concept of a ‘privacy ceiling':

"This is an economic limit on privacy violation by companies, owing to the liability of having too much information about (or control over) users."

It's the "control over users" that immediately makes this something especially relevant for designers and technologists to consider: that control is designed, consciously, into products and systems, but how much thought is given to the extremes of how it might be exercised, especially in conjunction with the wealth of information that is gathered on users?

"Liability can come from various sources... [including]

Vicarious infringement liability.

Imagine: you write a music player (like iTunes) that can check the Internet when I place a CD in my computer. You decide to collect this data for market research. Now the RIAA discovers that this data can also identify unauthorized copies. Can they compel you to hand over data on user listening habits?

Your company is liable for vicarious infringement if (1) infringement happens, (2) you benefit from it, and (3) you had the power to do something about it—which I assume includes reporting the infringement. So now you are possibly liable because you have damning information about your users. This also applies to DRM technologies that let you restrict users.

Note that you can't solve this problem simply by adopting a policy of only keeping the data for 1 month, or being gentle and consumer-friendly with your DRM. The fact is, you have the architecture for monitoring and/or control, and you may not get to choose how you use it.

Other sources of liability described include: being drawn into criminal investigations based on certain data which a company or other organisation may have - or be compelled to obtain - on its users; customers suing in relation to the leaking of supposedly private data (as in the AOL débâcle); and "random incompetence", e.g. an employee accidentally releasing data or arbitrarily exercising some designed-in control with undesirable consequences.

Scott goes on:

"Okay, so there is a penalty to having too much knowledge or too much control over customers. What should companies do to stay beneath this ceiling?

1. Design an architecture for your business/software that naturally prevents this problem.

It is much easier for someone to compel you to violate users' privacy if it's just a matter of using capabilities you already have. Mind, you have to convince a judge, not a software engineer, that adding monitoring or control is difficult. But you have a better shot in court if you must drastically alter your product in order to give in to demands.

...

2. Assume you will monitor and control to the full extent of your architecture. In fact, don't just assume this, but go to the trouble to monitor or control your users.

Why? Because in an infringement lawsuit you don't want to appear to be acting in bad faith... if you have the ability to monitor users and refuse to use it, you're giving ammunition to a copyright holder who accuses you of inducement and complicity.

...

But ... the real message is that you should go back to design principle 1. If you want to protect users, think about the architecture; don't just assume you can take a principled stand not to abuse your own power.

The third principle is really a restatement of the first two, but deserves restating:

3. Do not attempt to strike a balance.

Do not bother to design a system or business model that balances user privacy with copyright holder demands. All this does is insert an architecture of monitoring or control, for later abuse. In other words, design an architecture for privacy alone. Anything you put in there, under rule #2, will one day be used to its full extent.

I have seen many many papers over the years, in watermarking tracks, proposing an end-to-end media distribution system balancing DRM with privacy. Usually, the approach is that watermarks are embedded in music/movies/images by a trusted third party, the marks are kept secret from the copyright holder, and personal information is revealed only under specific circumstances in which infringement is clear. This idea is basically BS. Your trusted third party does not have the legal authority to decide when to reveal information. What will likely happen instead: if a copyright holder feels infringement is happening, the trusted third party will be liable for vicarious infringement."

Summing it up: any capability you design into a product or system will be used at some point - even if you are forced to use it against the best interests of your business. So it is better to design deliberately to avoid being drawn into this: design systems not to have the ability to monitor or control users, and that will keep you much safer from liability issues.

The privacy ceiling concept - which Scott is going to present in a paper along with Lorrie Cranor and Janice Tsai at the ACM DRM 2006 workshop - really does seem to have a significant implications for many of the architectures of control examples I've looked at on this site.

For example, the Car Insurance Black Boxes mostly record mileage and time data to allow insurance to be charged according to risk factors that interest the insurance company; but the boxes clearly also record speed, and whether that information would be released to, say, law enforcement authorities, if requested, is an immediate issue of interest/concern.

Looking further, though, the patent covering the box used by a major insurer mentions an enormous number of possible types of data that could be monitored and reported by the device, including exact position, weights of occupants, driving styles, use of brakes, what radio station is tuned in, and so on. Whether any insurance company would ever implement them, of course, is another question, and it would require a lot tighter integration into a vehicle's systems; nevertheless, as Scott makes clear, whatever possibilities are designed into the architecture, will be exploited at some point, whether through pressure (external or internal) or incompetence.

I look forward to reading the full paper when it is available.

Use of RFID in DRM

Via Dave Farber's Interesting People, a brief New Scientist article outlines Sony's continuing obsession with restricting and controlling its customers (the last one didn't go too well):

"A patent filed by Sony last week suggests it may once again be considering preventing consumers making "too many" back-up copies of its CDs...

Sony's latest idea is to place a piece of monitoring hardware inside the CD. Its patent suggests embedding a radio-frequency ID chip that could be interrogated wirelessly by a PC or CD player. The chip would record the number of times the disc was copied and prevent further recordings once it reached the limit. The device could also be fitted to DVDs. Whether Sony will turn the patent idea into reality remains to be seen."

Of course this will require new CD players and CD-ROM drives with the ability to read, write to and act on the signal from the RFID chip - which means its impact may not be very significant.

It's not clear whether the "permitted" copies have to be made onto "chipped" Sony-authorised discs (otherwise the technology seems rather pointless, as people will just make copies of the un-protected copies instead of repeated copies of the original) - if this is the case, then is this not just a sly "razor blade model" or "PRM" (in Ed Felten's phrase) attempt to make Sony CD-writers require the purchase of Sony chipped blank CDs in order to copy music?

And would this break the Orange Book standard for CD-Rs?

Future User Interface

"The future of user interfaces for computer technology looks fascinating and full of amazing surprises. After having showcased the eery magic of seeing images displayed into thin air, user interface researcher Jeff Han guides you to see how amazing will be working with computers once we will have gotten rid of mouses and will begin to draw and manipulate screen objects directly with our fingers."

FTC: Against Neutrality?

Majoras said there has been no demonstrated harm to consumers, that normal market forces would likely prevent any problems, and that new laws would cause more problems than they solve.

Majoras' comments come as the Senate is considering a massive legislative proposal to rewrite telecommunications laws. In June, a Senate panel narrowly rejected an amendment that would have slapped strict regulations on broadband providers. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has said he'll try to block a floor vote on the measure unless that amendment is adopted.

The Federal Trade Commission has formed an "Internet Access Task Force" to examine Net neutrality, reports Network World.

Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras Monday called on lawmakers to be cautious about passing a 'Net neutrality law, which could prohibit broadband providers such as AT&T and Comcast from giving their own Internet content top priority, or from charging Web sites additional fees for faster service. New legal mandates often have "unintended consequences," she said.

The FTC has published Promoting Competition, Protecting Consumers: A Plain English Guide to Antitrust Laws, to pitch its position.

Echoing the promises of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and congressional Republicans, Majoras said that "if broadband providers engage in anticompetitive conduct, we will not hesitate to act using our existing authority."

But Net Neutrality is not a new thing. It's the law.

Telcos are currently required to share their twisted pair on a wholesale basis to competitors. That regulation will largely disappear in a few years as fiber and broadband to the home are installed.

Then it will be a level playing field. Net neutrality advocates fear it will enabling cable and telcos to charge whatever they can and encourage them to create "walled gardens" of controlled access.

Related DailyWireless stories include; Advance to the Rear, Net Neutrality: Not Dead, Wyden Blocks Telecom Vote, Net Neutrality: Bridge to Nowhere?, Cable/Sprint Pole Dance, and Dirty Tricks for Net Neutrality.

Top Ten Video Sharing Websites

Light Reading has done a comprehensive comparison of the online video sharing sites, and come up with a list, based on features. The full list of all sites they reviewed with table comparison is here. Their top-10 list is:
1) Blip.tv
2) VideoEgg
3) Dailymotion
4) YouTube
5) Veoh
6) Google Video
7) Grouper
8) Jumpcut
9) AOL
10) Eyespot
Lotsa other details, charts, tables etc…useful.

Google "Showtimes" the UC Library System

The University of California's secret agreement with Google for book digitization promises to improve access to parts of its library collections, but the contractual restrictions UC has accepted may enrich Google's shareholders at public expense.

Digitizing the world's books, films, video, sound recordings, maps, and other cultural artifacts could, to quote Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, provide "universal access to all human knowledge, within our lifetime." So it's troubling to see public institutions transfer cultural assets, accumulated with public funds, into private hands without disclosing the terms of the transaction.

Basic principles to govern mass digitization and safeguard the public interest have been developed by members of the American Library Association (forthcoming; see also http://litablog.org/?p=200), and by the Open Content Alliance. UC even signed on to the OCA principles (disclosure: I've worked for the OCA), which are designed to provide a baseline for digitization projects, in its scanning agreements with Yahoo and Microsoft. Transparency is a primary value to both the OCA, and the ALA.

So problem one is that the terms of the UC / Google agreement are secret, and were arrived at with no public input. As an institution that receives state and federal funding, UC should expect and welcome public comment if its inventory is effectively being privatized. The president's office says it expects that terms will only come out after it receives the equivalent of a FOIA request. Since when does it take a FOIA request to get information from the library?

But it isn't just the public that is excluded–it's the rest of the library community. Mass digitization is very complex (see Paul Courant's brilliant new article in First Monday). Librarians must grapple with new and unfamiliar issues that can only be resolved through dialog with peers. Google appears to be doing all it can to prevent this from happening, imposing NDAs on libraries at the start of discussions about mass digitization. By isolating librarians from each other, Google dramatically strengthens its negotiating position, and UC negates the goal of academic openness.

The second problem is more complex. Mass digitization is expensive. Public institutions that wish to digitize their holdings usually need to partner with private firms to get the work done. As described in Marketing Culture in the Digital Age, funded by the Mellon Foundation, and written by my colleague Peter Kaufman of Intelligent Television, commercial investment in digitization can be good for all concerned.

But private companies, at least profitable ones like Google, don't work for free. So the public institutions need to pay for those services. Typically, they can't pay in cash, so they pay in other ways, with labor, facilities, and some type of rights agreement. In other words, public use of and access to the digitized cultural works is usually limited in some way to benefit the private firm. This has to be done in the open.

The recent Smithsonian/Showtime agreement is a case in point that clearly shows what can go wrong in such a process. To recap, Showtime convinced the Smithsonian to sign a secret 170 page, 30 year agreement which gives Showtime control of the Smithsonian's film and video archive. This particular saga has been widely covered elsewhere, but the roots of catastrophe are in 1) secret negotiations 2) exclusivity 3) length of term.

UC's agreement is probably not explicitly exclusive. But as a practical matter, scanning doesn't happen twice; libraries learned this when their material was microfilmed (as an aside, the microfilming was sometimes done badly, and to this day microfilm users suffer from those quality problems). This deal will be costly for UC in staff time and other resources, and the chances that another vendor will come through and duplicate the work are slim.

In the absence of the text of the agreement, it's difficult to know what specific clauses may affect the ability of California citizens to read online the books now in their libraries. But there is a plausible nightmare scenario that UC needs to act now to prevent.

From the University of Michigan agreement (obtained only as a result of public records laws in Michigan, and despite Google's best efforts) it is clear there will be restrictions on what UC can do with the digital scans. This is a critical issue. If this deal follows the pattern at Michigan, there will be limits determined by Google on how UC may share its digital holdings with other libraries.

If the scanning process is made efficient at all the universities now in Google's orbit, a book already scanned at Harvard won't be rescanned at Berkeley. So Berkeley may not receive a copy, and because of the restrictions on sharing its holdings, won't have an easy time getting one from Harvard. The student of 2012 will have a choice: go to the complete digital library, owned by Google, or go to the partial digital library of his or her own university.

That extreme scenario may not come to pass, but there are many other questions about the Google / UC deal:

* What more might UC be able to do if its scanning project were funded by the legislature or foundations, rather than by Google?
* UC says the "digitized books will be searchable through Google Book Search." Can anyone else build services that access this data? Or is it another case of "Google can crawl everyone else's data, no one can crawl Google's data?"
* What quality assurances will Google provide? How can we ensure this won't be a repeat of the microfilm experience?
* Will UC have copies of the full, high quality scans, or will certain information, such as image positioning data needed for searching, be kept by Google alone?
* What restrictions will be placed on UC's use of those scans?
* What will be the different treatments for material in copyright, or orphaned, or in the public domain?
* Is it reasonable to ask the public to pay a second time (or watch ads) for material already purchased, simply because it's now necessary to convert the format in which it is stored?
* Why haven't the Regents appointed a panel of advisors on this matter?

Clearly, UC's high level goals are laudable. The Google people I've met believe in the company motto, "don't be evil." And it is not really in the public interest to side with the publishers who are the loudest voices now attacking Google, and a primary cause of the all the secrecy. Yet by acquiescing to Google's demands for secrecy, UC has compromised the public interest, and set a dangerous precedent for the rest of the academic community.

Social Media and the Networked Public Sphere

Improving Civic Participation

"Can social media increase and improve civic participation? If so, in what ways? There's a lot being said and written about the subject these days, but it is difficult to get a clear overview of the opinions. I attempt here to collect viewpoints both for and against the premise that social media is creating a better public sphere, and analyze them in the context of what constitutes a public and its antithesis, a mass. In presenting what are sometimes extreme positions within this debate (too idealistic v. too critical), my hope is to begin to understand the reality that lies in the middle, and come closer to understanding social media's potential (and limitations) as a tool to bring about social change.

At a general level, we could say that on one side of the debate are those who believe that social media can increase civic participation and shift the balance of power away from the institutions that currently stand in the way of change. On the other side are those who warn that social media can only offer a reduced form of participation, that it diminishes the value of individual contributions, and that it leaves social systems more prone to manipulation by lowering their intelligence to the minimum common denominator (i.e., stupidity or mediocrity).

Thus, the debate can be framed in terms of whether social media can engender democratic publics that embody an intelligence and capacity for action greater than the sum of its members, or whether it will merely continue to support the production of anti-democratic masses of disenfranchised and alienated consumers. Of course, social media is a big label encompassing many different technologies, and even the same technologies can be applied differently in various contexts. But while features and applications might differ, the people contributing to this debate are obviously focused on the aggregated impact that social media is having on our societies rather than on specific examples of applications." Continue reading Social Media and the Networked Public Sphere by Ulises Ali Mejias.

Live motion 3D video camera

O'Reilly's Radar has a brief write up of a "3D live motion video camera that uses LIDAR technology to get a range-finding for every pixel" - you could "scan" an area and put all the 3D data in to just about any application, wow! Link & full image.

Related:
Google video tech talk about the camera - Link.

Originally from MAKE Magazine, ReBlogged by admeyers on Aug 16, 2006 at 04:08 PM

Designing for Mobile

Bluefavour has a presentation "on the mobile ecosystem, some of the basic fundamentals as well as dispel myths and jargon common to the mobile industry."

Why Videocommunication Didn't Catch On

WNYC's The Leonard Lopate Show: Why Videocommunication Didn't Catch On (July 25, 2006)
From the post:
Computer scientist Jaron Lanier looks at why—despite all the predictions—videocommunication never caught on.

Pretty interesting. Discussing the non-verbal cues that we are missing in video conferencing.

(I wish WNYC would have permalinks on their site for each of these segments. I would rather post on my own blog than on Delicious but for now I have to click on the Delicious link and copy the URL and so forth. - That's for you Brian, if you are listening)

Thanks Spencer..

Appropriation & Annotation

The latest issue of Harper’s features an excellent roundtable discussion on how video games might be used to teach writing. Though most of it will be familiar to anyone who has followed recent debates about “serious games,” it is worth reading. Among the discussants, Raph Koster stood out as particularly insighful, and his comments about new forms of literacy really struck home:

What we mean by literacy is changing. If you look at books like The Da Vinci Code, a lot of what it does is appropriation–of a painting, or a historical text–and annotation, with this whole cottage industry of providing the footnotes: the TV specials, the books. … Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy.

Appropriation and annotation (or, to use the popular vernacular, remix and tagging) have been at the center of my interests for a while now, but it’s nice to see them being discussed in a high-profile forum like Harper’s.

Koster’s comments echo the views of my friend Dan Perkel, who has been investigating “copy and paste literacy” on MySpace. Many people focus on the “remix culture” of appropriation and annotation as if it is something new–but these practices have been around since the dawn of culture. What is new, as Koster and Dan indicate, is the general rise in people’s ability to recognize and engage in these practices: their literacy.

The discussion in Harper’s ends with a kind of lament that a population highly literate in appropriation and annotation will squeeze out the “great artist” by flooding our culture with lesser-quality niche productions. I agree with that conclusion but not the explanation. The era of the great artist will come to an end, not because of overcrowded cultural markets, but because a literate population will recognize appropriation and annotation at the heart of all creative production, and it will reject the myths of the solitary genius and the original creative act that have dominated for the last few centuries. The great artist will disappear, but there will continue to be great art.

Location awareness and rendezvousing

Dearman, D., Hawkey, K. and Inkpen, K.M. Rendezvousing with location-aware devices: Enhancing social coordination. Interacting with Computers 17, 5 (2005), 542-566.

A very interesting paper directly connected to my current research about the influence of location-awareness on collaboration. It examines how location awareness impacts social coordination when rendezvousing.

This paper presents a field study investigating the use of mobile location-aware devices for rendezvous activities. Participants took part in one of three mobile device conditions (a mobile phone, a location-aware handheld, or both a mobile phone and a location-aware handheld) and completed three rendezvousing scenarios. The results reveal key differences in communication patterns between the mediums, as well as the potential strengths and limitations of location-aware devices for social coordination.
(…)
close observation of the behavioural and communication differences demonstrates that the technology available significantly altered how the participants’ managed their social coordination

Results about the functions of location-awareness were quite pertinent too (as in my case, they also found detrimental effects of it):

Having access to location-awareness information has obvious benefits. Users can make more informed decisions and have a stronger sense of ambient virtual co-presence. The participants in our study made extensive use of location-awareness information as a background communication channel to monitor their partner’s location (as well as their own) in an unobtrusive manner.
(…)
we observed instances where location-awareness information was extremely beneficial and other instances where it was detrimental. It was beneficial because participants could see their partner’s location and track their progress in an unobtrusive manner. This arguably provided the waiting partner with enough information to wait contently. However, when their partner appeared to be lost or not making progress, it was very disconcerting to the waiting partner because they did not have enough information to determine what the problem was. This uncertainty was strong enough in some cases to actually draw the waiting partner away from the rendezvous location.

Why do I blog this? this goes straight to my literature review.

The Sustainable Route raises issues

The Seven Maps Project - the most recent videoblogging project to receive funding via Have Money Will Vlog is now over and it was, in my opinion, a success. But, more on that later when Daniel Liss, the intrepid traveller, has had some down time. I’m going to be interviewing him about the process, his expectations and his thoughts on the results.

The latest project on the HMWV funding block is The Sustainable Route - another travelling vlog series that raises some interesting questions.

The Sustainable Route, proposed by Ashley Hodson and her friend Megan, hopes to create a dialogue about sustainability by meeting up with people who are involved in the sustainability movement, educating themselves and their viewers during the journey.

For those of you who don’t know much about Have Money Will Vlog, the site was organized as a way to solicit funds for video projects. Chosen projects are promoted by the site which asks for donations using the model of Fundable.org (if the proposed amount is reached, the donations will be paid. If not, the donations are not collected).

There is a Google Group devoted to the site that anyone can join with the provision that those involved in choosing projects cannot apply for funding themselves in order to preserve objectivity and avoid favoritism. Group members are asked to bring forward projects they have knowledge of as well as go through independent proposals and engage in discussions over the merits of each one until an agreement is reached on who to fund.

As a member of this group, I have seen many proposals, some of which have been rejected or sent back to the author for further development. This is one project that seemed destined to be a "pick".

Ashley Hodson is Ryan Hodson’s sister and Ryan is one of the founders of Have Money Will Vlog. Is this, as suggested by MissBHavens in our own comments, nepotism? Does it conform to the basic tenets of HMWV as an objective choice?

It was a difficult position to be put in as a group member. On the one hand, a project about sustainable technology would be interesting (although Daryl Hannah is already doing it on her vlog!) but, on the other hand, is it really an arm’s length assessment when those making the final call are relatives that are, not only helping to promote the cause but, helped with the proposal itself?

Whether or not the group as a whole decided the project would be a go is questionable. No sooner had discussions begun, we were informed that the project would be a go. The intro video that group members asked to see first had not yet been posted:

hey all
just a little update on this

on having her preliminary proposal video done by the end of this week/weekend
so you can get a better idea of where she’s coming from/what she’s planning.

she’s also building a google map for the trip.

jay and i discussed posting this project after the second week of august
to give people some breathing room after the 2000 we raised for daniel
and to watch 7 maps unfold (should be happening the second week in Aug)

then we’ll move forward on this one…

cheers
-ry

After this post, conversation about the project ground to a halt. I’d like to say that I posted my concerns to the group but I didn’t. I was busy with Seven Maps and I saw no indication that the project was moving forward until it was already in the works.

I think that Have Money Will Vlog is a good idea but this latest project has me concerned. From MissBHaven’s comment, I can see I’m not the only one.

- Anne

Jamie Boyle on the cognitive bias against open systems

(via boingboing)

Jamie Boyle, co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, is always worth paying attention to (c.f., The Second Enclosure Movement). Now he's written about the cognitive bias he has detected against open systems. The periodic diatribes about Wikipedia, the conflation of collectivism and collective action, the war against net neutrality all reflect this mindset:

Studying intellectual property and the internet has convinced me that we have another cognitive bias. Call it the openness aversion. We are likely to undervalue the importance, viability and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the past 15 years.

You have to design a global computer network. One group of scientists describes a system that is fundamentally open – open protocols and systems so anyone could connect to it and offer information or products to the world. Another group – scholars, businessmen, bureaucrats – points out the problems. Anyone could connect to it. They could do anything. There would be porn, piracy, viruses and spam. Terrorists could put up videos glorifying themselves. Your activist neighbour could compete with The New York Times in documenting the Iraq war. Better to have a well-managed system, in which official approval is required to put up a site; where only a few actions are permitted; where most of us are merely recipients of information; where spam, viruses, piracy (and innovation and anonymous speech) are impossible. Which would you have picked?

Thomas Malaby: Stopping Play: A New Approach to Games

Games have intruded into popular awareness to an unprecedented level, and scholars, policy makers, and the media alike are beginning to consider how games might offer insight into fundamental questions about human society. But in the midst of this opportunity for their ideas to be heard, it is game scholars who are selling games short. In their rush to highlight games' importance, they have tended toward an unsustainable exceptionalism, seeing games as fundamentally set apart from everyday life. This view casts gaming as a subset of play, and therefore - like play - as an activity that is inherently separable, safe, and pleasurable. Before we can confront why games are important, and make use of them to pursue the aims of policy and knowledge, we must rescue games from this framework and develop an understanding of them unburdened by the category of play, one that will both accord with the experience of games by players themselves, and bear the weight of the new questions being asked about them and about society. To that end, I offer here an understanding of games that eschews exceptionalist, normatively-loaded approaches in favor of one that stresses them as a characterized by process. In short, I argue for seeing games as domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations. This approach enables us to understand how games are, rather than set apart from everyday life, instead intimately connected with it. With this approach in place, I conclude by discussing two key recent developments in games, persistence and complex, implicit contingency, that together may account for why some online games are now beginning to approach the texture of everyday life.

• Link here... (PDF)
• Associated discussion on Terra Nova...

SIMVeillance

SIMVeillance: San Jose, by Katherine Isbister and Rainey Straus in collaboration with SIM consultant Chelsea Hash, uses surveillance cameras and the video game The Sims 2™ to re-present passersby within a game environment that mirrors a "real life" public space: the Fairmont Plaza in downtown San Jose. The SIMveillance game is inhabited by avatars of the people passing through the plaza who’ve been caught on camera. The virtual population grows throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Side-by-side monitors within the museum display contrasting images of the same scene: One shows passersby on the Fairmont Plaza as seen on surveillance cameras; the other shows the area using the computer game, with the strolling characters modeled from some of the people recorded by the cameras.

Straus conceded in an interview, "I think there's the potential for people to feel invaded." From the creators' standpoint, the uncertainty about how people will react is essential to the project's artistic value. "Part of what we're doing," Straus added, "is seeing what questions we raise and what people's answers are."

The work also explores the territory in which simulated-avatars co-mingle in the landscape with “the real” to produce a hybrid community with potentially unexpected results.

Further information in MercuryNews and Campus News.

How news sites should leverage user-generated video

The mix of user-generated content with the newspaper’s professionalism and existing infrastructure should enable newspaper sites to quickly become the dominant player for local events, Kevin J. Mireles says.

In-line tagging at LibraryThing

Tim Spalding has taken discussion forums a big step forward over at LibraryThing. The concept is simple but could make a real difference because it allows forum msgs to be aggregated in multiple ways. When you’re entering a msg at a forum, you can put a title or author in brackets and LibraryThing will take a stab at identifying what you have in mind. Think of it as in-place tagging. You can thus easily find all the posts about a book. And all the references to a book or author will be lilsted on that book or author’s page.

Because LibraryThing knows which books you own (because you’ve told it), it can feed you msgs about any of them. And, as Tim points out, this unhiding of msgs will change the temporality of posts: Rather than msgs fading into obscurity a few days or weeks after they’re posted, they’ll be easily findable and reply-able.

Very cool.

Snow Crash in SL: The Metaverse Comes Home

Virtual-world services company Rivers Run Red is busy these days. Having recently announced they’d be bringing hit pop band Duran Duran to the virtual world of Second Life, the news is now that they’re bringing the metaverse back home, so to speak, by working with publisher Penguin to create a virtual version of Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel, Snow Crash, to be distributed in Second Life, a world largely inspired by the book. Virtual copies of a portion of the book should be available starting next week.

Book publishing in Second Life, of course, has not been a smashing success. “Prim” books are unwieldy, hard to manipulate and often very difficult to read. But RRR and publisher Penguin seem savvy on this note, with the in-world version apparently offering only a sampler of portions of the text and excerpts from an audio version — with a special discount (presumably on paper-and-ink purchases) being offered to Second Life residents.

While it may only be a small step forward in virtual media technology, it’s a very cool undertaking nonetheless. Written in the years 1988 through 1991 (”as the author listened to a great deal of loud, relentless, depressing music”), Snow Crash foreshadows a Second Life-like metaverse (a term coined in the novel) with remarkable accuracy — especially given that even the Web browser was yet a few years out. Many of the emergent societal tropes that can be found today in Second Life were present 15 years ago in Snow Crash, from the ability to create one’s own fantasy assets (and the wide disparity between newbies and uber content creators in that regard), to the social pressure felt by residents whose avatars aren’t up to fashionable standards and even a feted inner core who enjoy special privileges not available to those standing outside the velvet rope of a virtual nightclub like the book’s Black Sun. Second Life creator Philip Rosedale has said, “Snow Crash has the closest practical resemblance to Second Life as it exists now: a parallel, immersive world which simulates an alternate universe, which thousands of people inhabit simultaneously for communication, play, and work, at various levels and variations of role-playing with their avatars.”

No word yet on whether this means a brand new print version of the book, but I’d assume that it does, since I think the current version of Snow Crash is in print from a division of Random House. Penguin’s involvement may mean only a new UK version. More details will presumably emerge soon. Meanwhile, 3pointD welcomes Stephenson and his seminal metaversal vision back to the metaverse. Good to have you.

Culture matters: designing for mobile and locative media

Technosocial Screens: Mobilities, Communities, Citizenships

screen, v. to show, or hide from view; to sift or separate; to shelter or protect

New interactive technologies promise to reconfigure relations between producers and consumers, public and private, physical and digital, local and global - and in these shifting scenarios the screen takes on a multitude of roles. Not only are screens changing size and resolution, some are becoming softer and more flexible, and others are disappearing entirely. Some screens offer a bird's-eye view of the world that we can hold in our hands, and others tell us where we are - or could be - at any given moment. Whatever the type of screen, we can be sure of one thing: people, places, objects and ideas are being screened at the same time.

Together we will explore some of the critical ways in which new media technologies shape, and are shaped by, our changing experiences and understandings of community and citizenship. What kind of shelter and hope can we expect from a world of everywhere and anywhere media? From what, and whom, are we protecting ourselves? How are these technological practices sorting our everyday social, cultural and creative relationships? What, and whom, gets hidden - or cannot hide? How can new media technologies explore different ways of belonging and being together? How can they encourage diverse and lively participation and representation around shared matters of concern?

robb monn: quality is a niche market

After yesterday's post, got this great email from good friend robb monn (you probably want to download his brilliant, creative commons-licensed album, hello mr. ohler), who has some thoughts about where Hollywood's going. I love some of the things in here, especially, "Quality is still after all this time a niche market," which is such a smart observation that it just kills me. Here's what robb sent in full:

Do you remember how in Life (Conway's Game of Life, that is) how the seeds grow and grow and then go black at the core and thenthe dead core expands too, catching the ring of vitality at some point and leaving only a few flitting bits oscillating?

My thinking is that the Empire is dying and it is dying right now when it is bigger than ever. As the core of the patterns die in Conway's Life the circumference of the whole life-explosion is still growing and until pretty late in the death of the colony it is larger, by pixel-count than ever even as it dying more and more quickly.

Hollywood is spending Spiderman II's money to make Spiderman III. It is what, three production cycles of total failure away from being broke? While there is more money than ever (or maybe not even that) if the apex of profits has been reached, or when it is reached, the fall will either be expected and very controlled or it will be profound and rapid, but either way I think that it will be a fall.

I don't feel like they know how to fix the system. The problem is the same as it has always been: they know how to promote just about anything that is unchallenging so that it stands a certain chance on the P&E, but they don't know how to make quality something that they can sell to consumers. Quality is still after all this time a niche market.... and seemingly it is more niche now than ever. The Third Man was a blockbuster. My grandparents (poor, 100% blue collar military family) dressed up in suit and party dress to go see each Hitchcock film when it came out. My other grandparents occasionally mentioned the 12 Angry Men with Peter Fonda that was produced for TV decades after it aired. While there has always been trash produced for TV and Hollywood that has done very well I think that there hasn't been a time previous to today when high quality programming (which is often relatively cheap when compared to The Rock or Triple X, say) is always considered to have at best an outside chance of getting made much less being financially successful. If Hitch were making films today I think his getting Strangers on a Train on theater screens would be considered by his peers as equivalent to his winning the lottery.

I think blockbuster, all-pro-all-biz Hollywood is a decadent mode that like all decadence is rotten at the core, unsalvageable.

Media HTML

Jay Fienberg emailed these interesting comments on the MP3HTML file format I made up a couple weeks ago:

I've been thinking about your MP3 embedded in HTML experiment, and I keep meaning to write you about it. Mostly, I keep wanting to write and say "no", and then think "why not?", and get stuck--so, I guess it's an interesting experiment, and it got me thinking :-)

BTW, Why not just embed HTML and other stuff in MP3s?

Part of my bias against this kind of embedded approach is that, generally, I like the idea of decoupling data / information from files. The nice example, I think, is being able to put a URL in my browser and get back lots of files that represent a "web page"--the browser decides to load lots of images and supporting files to give me a page that is not just what's in the HTML. (And, generally, I think the browser / hypertext interaction can be pushed further, with the browser doing more / different things with various forms of links--all without me, the end-user. having to worry about what is or isn't in one file or another.)

Along these lines, I could imagine an HTML based media format, e.g., application/xhtml+mp3, that doesn't necessarily embed the media data inside the HTML, but media players would read this type and expect different / specific elements representing binary media files that they then would do something with / download / play.

In terms of the potential to exploit this using existing browsers with Javascript, I think it's maybe comparable with the embedded MP3 approach--the Javascript can download external mp3s via HttpRequest.

Anyway, I think there's something to what you've done--maybe embedding vs external is just a matter of options, the way it is generally. In other words, if we have a way to declare something a "media HTML" resource that should be played by a media player, in principle HTML allows binary data to be either embedded or linked, and either should work.

I actually think that is the bigger deal: suggesting that there might be a viable "media HTML" format that's not too much weirder than HTML itself.

An answer to one specific point:

Why not just embed HTML and other stuff in MP3s?

Because you wouldn't be able to get at the HTML and other stuff without knowledge specific to MP3. If nothing else, we should be able to get out of the problem where every user agent must understand every media format.

There is a secondary problem which isn't directly related to format design: to get anything done, we need a strategy for avoiding the need for client-side software.

One last thing -- I love the coinage Media HTML. It's the kind of name which evokes the thing being named without any explicit setup or explanation.

Ryan Shaw reply to Jay Fienberg

What Jay Fienberg describes is basically what life would be like if the Flash NetStream API (and some syntax for binding it to HTML-defined boxes) were standardized, available in the major browsers, and scriptable from JavaScript. In fact, it is available in the 98% of browsers that have a Flash plugin installed, and JavaScript <-> ActionScript bridges work pretty well these days--but obviously it sucks that Adobe controls the API and all implementations. It would be nice if IE adapted its HTML+TIME code to support a NetStream API, and Mozilla shipped media playback capability (perhaps based on VLC or GStreamer) and standardized on the same API. Until that happens, though, using MTASC and some JS<->AS hackery isn't a bad way to go.

The NetStream API is new to me, and since I like to provide some sort of explanation when a technology first appears on my blog, here's some documentation.

NetStream - Flash 8 ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference

The NetStream class provides methods and properties for playing Flash Video (FLV) files from the local file system or an HTTP address. You use a NetStream object to stream video through a NetConnection object. Playing external FLV files provides several advantages over embedding video in a Flash document, such as better performance and memory management, and independent video and Flash frame rates. This class provides a number of methods and properties you can use to track the progress of the file as it loads and plays, and to give the user control over playback (stopping, pausing, and so on).

What Ryan is picturing here is a Javascript-accessible library for media rendering in the browser. In Internet Explorer the library might be accessing the underlying COM API to Windows Media Player, while other browsers would be accessing Flash. In either case there would be a standard API between the Javascript and the media player.

Inside track on the future of free content licenses

If you want an inside track on the future of free content licenses you could hardly do better than watch or listen to recordings of two Wikimania sessions -- Lawrence Lessig on The Ethics of the Free Culture Movement (particularly the last twenty minutes) and Eben Moglen on Document Licenses and the Future of Free Culture, which also features Q&A with both Moglen and Lessig.

You'll recognize this discussion if you followed Lessig's series about the history and future of Creative Commons from the end of last year.

What about voice?

I am not following voice-recognition and its potential applications but today I’ve been confronted to three papers about it in my daily scans. Even though it’s still R&D oriented, each papers delivered some promising messages about a technology that I am skeptical about (based on previous research project and research readings).

First there is this ACM Queue discussion by John Canny (University of California, Berkeley), which is actually a great piece about the future of HCI. Canny quote Jordan Cohen’s work (formerly of VoiceSignal, now of SRI International)

“The killer application is probably going to end up being some kind of interface with search, which seems to be the very hot topic in the world today; for mobile search especially, speech is a pretty reasonable interface, at least for the input side of it,”

This “search” concept is what I ran across this morning in a Business Week article by Steve Hamm, there is a presentation fo a curious application called TellMe about voice-driven Web information:

The idea is to create mobile search services that can make it easy for those on the go to find people, businesses, and information. That goes for any phone, but especially those equipped with browsers. A tourist might bark “restaurants,” “sushi,” and “downtown” into his cell phone and then see listings, read online reviews, make reservations, and retrieve a map with directions. “It has taken us six years to get to this point, but now we can really start to deliver on our original mission,” says McCue, TellMe’s CEO.
(…)
Skeptics point out that despite technology advances, voice recognition still turns off many consumers, who remember past glitches. But experts say that will change when systems combine voice, text messaging, and graphic info from Web pages. Each mode will be used for what it does best. “People will be using voice to launch into their search, and they’ll want to see the information on a screen,” says David Albright, executive director for marketing for Cingular Wireless, which is working with TellMe.

Yes, of course these last pointed I quoted are recurrent, but as presented in this Speech Technology Magazine Issues, there are others applications:

Use your telephone or cell phone to talk with Google—search the Web for answers to your questions, extract the information chunks you need, and listen to the results…Rather than struggling to find the answer to a specific question by chasing links across a Web site, you can simply click a button on the GUI screen and be connected to a human or artificial agent… instruct your oven through your cell phones…

Why do I blog this? don’t know whether it’s apophenia but I ran across those 3 articles today. So what? I am still dubious about speech technologies but there seems to be confidence in this avenue.

adario strange: the nothing special

Here's an enjoyable article about the whole online video stampede from Adario Strange: The 'Nothing' Special. Not a lot of new info, but a different, slightly more arch perspective than the many business articles coming out daily, and choice passages like this one:

When everyone, everywhere, has their own video show, can anyone’s video really be considered something special anymore?

As the rising tide of reality shows and navel-gazing weblogs have proven, there is [a] large market for recursive ephemera.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is: demand for the artistry needed to make big entertainments is not lagging, though it may be shifting for now from the multiplex to netflix, from the networks to the net. And we'll still need people with money to put up enough to pay the artists in advance until a profit can be made. It's the middle men -- the ones that own the infrastructure and marketing machines -- that are in trouble.

Podcast Interview with Sun's Tim Bray and Radia Perlman

Last night I published the first part of my interview with two senior Sun Microsystems engineers, Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). The interview was to celebrate the 15th birthday of the Web this week.

Several commenters on the Slashdot thread about my post said they'd prefer to get the whole context, rather than just my write-up of it. So here now is the full interview as a podcast [37 minutes, 17MB]. The audio quality is not great at the start (due to a bad telephone connection), but it gets better after a couple of minutes. Note that this is instead of me doing a separate write-up of Part 2.

powered by ODEO

cussed

Some of the subjects discussed in the full interview podcast are:

• The past and future of the Web - and where Sun fits into the picture.
• Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and why Tim and Radia don't think it will be a major driver on the Web.
• Web-connected devices (music players, TV, games machines, etc) and the future of the browser.
• Web Office - do Tim and Radia think a browser-based office suite will ever be competitive with MS Office? Sun has StarOffice, which is a desktop alternative to MS Office. Will it go web-based?
• How does Sun fit into the Web 2.0 era we're currently in - e.g. social software, apps that leverage collective intelligence.
• How will RSS and ATOM be used going forward; and thoughts on Google's data format GData.
• Security on the Web
• Where will the Web be at in another 15 years?!

Key Quotes from Part 2

Some key quotes not featured in Part 1:

• Tim on media on the Web: "I do not expect the Internet to be a suitable medium for broadcast video, at any kind of acceptable level of quality that we've come to expect on our TV screen, any time soon. The architecture isn't built to do that and the bandwidth isn't there."
• Tim on Web Office: "Anything that can migrate onto the Web absolutely will."
• Radia on security on the Web and stopping the bad guys: "People ought to be trying to make it easy and cheap, rather than trying to make money out of security."

Hope you enjoy the podcast. I plan to interview more Web industry luminaries over the next few months.

Log On, Rez In, Drop Out: The 60s of Technology

Virtual snail race, or mere hallucination?

A week or two ago, I found myself describing the greater metaversapolitan area to a friend who had never heard of things like Second Life or There.com, virtual worlds or massively multiplayer online games, and who had only passing knowledge of apps like Google Earth and the concept of mirror worlds. I told her about the little business boomlet the sector seems to be experiencing these days, and the potential such places and applications hold for not only increasing our knowledge of the real world and the ways we connect there, but for making possible new modes of being and richer ways of interacting. A great place to get your fantasy on, and you can pull down six figures there, to boot, or so the marketing goes. Regardless, I said, it was exciting to be a part of it, to see this new thing unfold before my eyes, to be reporting on it from the front lines, so to speak, and to ride along and see just where it might go — even if it’s headed for a fiery crash, as some would argue, or a more mundane sputtering thud.

Her reaction was interesting: “It sounds like you’re living through the 1960s of technology,” quoth she. This strikes me as pretty spot on.

Now, as a point of disclosure / disclaimer, I should note here that I lived through only the last three and a half years of the 1960s, and have only patchy memories of the time. Of course, I share this last characteristic with a lot of people who lived through the entire decade, but in my case it isn’t because I was on drugs but because I was in diapers. That said, the era is by now pretty familiar to most of us, so I don’t mind commenting on it here. (And my parents were deep hippies at the time, so I have a lot of close knowledge through them.)

The more I think about it, the more I like my friend’s analogy. A lot of the concepts that are associated with 60s culture and counter-culture are also showing up in the metaversal sphere. Virtual worlds often create a hallucinatory landscape (giant snail races, anyone?) that would not be out of place in the most colorful acid trips of the decade in question. Virtual worlds are also being used as new avenues of personal realization and empowerment. There, you can be anything and anyone you want — or so it’s said. There’s something very akin to a sexual revolution in the offing, and many people are also exploring new approches to what we think of as “work.”

There is also an explosion of creativity. Much of the various forms and examples of art and creation that is coming out of the metaverse is truly new and exciting — though as much if not more is not very interesting at all, of course. But the moment has sparked a new flame under the broad class of people known somewhat clinically these days as “content creators,” and has in fact radically broadened that class by giving people new tools (even if they’re crude, as yet), which they are now using to pry open doors that hadn’t even been perceived before.

The metaverse at the moment is also a place where the received wisdom of established rights and laws is being challenged on a daily basis, and where people are struggling to find new ways to organize their society, as well as creating new kinds of communities that attempt to exist apart from those already established. And, as eventually happened to 60s culture, metaverse culture has now begun to be adopted by “the establishment,” much to many metaversal citizens’ chagrin.

Of course, many of the tropes that are kicked around about the 60s are in fact only partially true. Peace and love may have been the watchwords of the day, but the reality was somewhat more gritty than those words suggest. The same is true of the metaverse. A fantasy world where you can be anything, do anything and even make your living is only a very partial description of what’s going on in virtual worlds. The metaverse also sees its share of heartbreak, conflict and unfeeling bad governance, just as the 60s did.

The joyful uprising of the metaverse may also, arguably, have some ill effects going forward, just as could be argued of the joyful uprising of the 60s. Consider the fact that Linden Lab’s favorite management tool is known as the Love Machine, and their working philosophy is The Tao of Linden. Many SL residents would argue that the ill effects of these exactly match the analogous child-rearing practices that cropped up in the 60s, when kids were often left to their own devices because parents were afraid of corrupting their minds by providing too much authority. The reality was more mixed, with some people deriving great advantage from learning to be self-directed, while others floundered without guidance. The LL development process seems to suffer the same inconsistencies, if the complaints of residents are any judge.

The exciting thing is that the metaverse is happening at all, and for that much credit is due to the people at Linden Lab, There.com, ActiveWorlds, World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Google, MySpace, even Flickr and many other places. If nothing else, the 60s saw a radical shift in the way we approach culture and its creation, with many of the “gatekeepers” being swept aside in a move toward a more democratized and inclusive process (though not a fully democratized and inclusive one, to be sure). It could be argued, too (as John Markoff does in What the Dormouse Said), that this is part of what led to the development of the personal computer, and I’d further argue that the continued trend is part of what’s driving Web 2.0 apps — and the metaverse. Philip Rosedale’s original vision of Second Life seems to be of that place where you can be anything or anyone and do anything you like, a fantasyscape of dreams realized (or at least, virtualized). It’s a similar cultural shift, with technology now becoming a tool for personal expression in new and deeper modes, just as music, art and lifestyle were as a result of the changes of the 60s. You can now log on, rez in, and, if you like, drop out. It’s anyone’s guess as to how far-reaching the cultural effects of virtual-world and metaversal technologies will be, but it’s worth remembering that long hair and rock music was at one time thought to be a passing fad as well. Welcome to the 60s of technology.

Walled Garden or Prison?

The walled garden approach, adopted by most wireline and mobile telecom providers, has a number of key shortcomings says a new report by Pyramid Research; Transforming Telcos With IMS: The Telco Silver Bullet for an Applications-Centric World.

Eventually, voice and data will converge around an IP transport. The IP Multimedia System (IMS) is the multimedia architecture that provides interoperability. "The walled garden approach remains the preferred option for telcos, for a simple core reason: control," comments Svetlana Issaeva, the report's author.

Using IMS, carriers can track, charge for or block subscriber access to Internet-based services. They will be able to charge extra for preferred handling of multimedia traffic, and allow preferential treatment for some services and websites over others.

For all the advantages that the walled garden approach has, says the report, it does not take the full measure of the challenges telcos are facing. Walled gardens have a number of key limitations. The cost and ultimate price of quality of service and service customization and also the restrictions to subscriber choices make this model inadequate for ultimate IMS rollout, says the report.

IMS is the foundation for next-generation fixed/mobile convergence based on IP. It allows, for example, a single video clip to be played on a cellphone, laptop or television set. It allows interoperable messaging, data exchange and billing across different platforms (like a WiFi/Cellphone).

Sprint's commitment to Mobile WiMAX yesterday also brings challenges. The Average Revenue Per User could be under attack if users dumped Sprint voice services and went with Skype. iSkoot allows Skype calling on regular cellphones, for example. WiFi or WiMAX might provide a (cheaper) alternative route to cable or cellular VoIP services, resulting in a net loss of revenue.

The next 12 months will be critical for the future of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), as carriers begin to deploy IMS-specific systems and determine whether it can deliver on its promises, according to Heavy Reading analyst Graham Finnie.

Carrier vendors implement IMS around their own hardware and software:

• Motorola's IMS approach is based on their SoftSwitch platform for seamless mobility. Using their IMS core and MOTOwi4 wireless solution, Motorola provides IP-based voice, video, conferencing services, unified messaging, ringback tones and other SIP-based applications on multiple devices.
  
• Nokia's IP Multimedia Subsystem uses SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) to establish IP connections between terminals. The IP connection can then be used to carry any IP traffic, for example interactive game sessions or push to talk communication.
• Nortel's IMS system is likely to be a key piece of Microsoft's plans. It enables a subscriber to launch a video conference during a voice conversation, or access a personalized Video-on-Demand service subscription not just from their home TV, but online from a laptop, a hotel room or from a mobile phone.
• Ericsson's IMS system says it enables communication through various media, adapted to each individual's preference and provides a consistent experience across multiple access technologies.
• Lucent's IP Multi-Media Subsystem supports IP to IP session over wireline IP, 802.11, 802.15, CDMA, packet data along with GSM/EDGE/UMTS and other packet data applications.
• Hewlett-Packard has a a multimedia service to help carriers provide "triple-play" services of voice, video and data.

Control of the IP Multimedia Subsystem could become an thory issue. Consumers want "open" systems while cellular and cable operators prefer a closed "walled garden" approach.

Verizon, Cisco, Lucent, Motorola, Nortel and Qualcomm have collaborated over the last year to create A-IMS (Advances to IMS), meant to provide a foundation for the roll-out of both SIP- and non-SIP-based services in future networks, according to the companies.

The Sprint/Cable wireless partnership may have lots of tricky issues to resolve.

Consolidation in MobileTV?

The nascent mobile TV market in the U.S. cannot support the current number of players and is likely to undergo consolidation, according to Mobile TV: Analysis & Forecasts, a new report from Parks Associates.

The report specifically points to Crown Castle's Modeo and Aloha Partner's Hiwire as candidates for consolidation, with both companies planning to launch nationwide mobile TV networks using DVB-H technology.

Parks Associates cites several factors that make consolidation likely. In addition to DVB-H over Hiwire (700MHz) and Modeo (1.7 GHz), there's Qualcomm's proprietary MediaFLO (700MHz) and Sprint-Nextel's MobiTV over WiMAX (2.5 GHz), bringing the total to four.

This number is high by international standards, says Parks Associates, despite the fact that the U.S. has a relatively low cellular penetration rate. Italy and South Korea, by comparison, have just two networks each even though consumers in these countries show a stronger propensity for using mobile phones as multimedia platforms.

"If you do the math, there are four networks for four operators, and that isn't realistic because you lose all the advantages of network sharing," said John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates. "Consolidation would be a win-win scenario for the industry. Hiwire needs a network, and Modeo needs a more favorable spectrum allocation. They are a natural fit, whereas Sprint-Nextel has a large subscriber base to support its network and Qualcomm is dedicated to promoting its technology and chipsets."

Related DailyWireless articles include; Sony's WiFi Mylo, Microsoft Plans Wireless Music Player, Zing Go the Strings, WiFi Gremlin Music Player, Mobile Shopping, WiFi TV, MediaFLO Gets Satellite Backbone, Mobile TV: The Battle is On, New Mobile TV Flavor: TDtv, Verizon Goes with FLO, Global Mobile Television, T/W, Cingular: On Demand, DVB-H Headend Software, Intel On DVB-H, U.S. Gets MobileTV via DVB-H, The 700 Mhz Club, 700 Mhz Worth $28B, The 700 Mhz FCC Auction, Winner of the Triple Play, Satphones Localize, TiVo on a Stick, Clear Channel Podcasting, Multicasting the Olympics, WiMax Handsets, Laptop Television, Sirius Portable Radio, U.S. Broadband Policy?, XM Buys 2.3GHz, Sprint Gets Sirius, MPEG-4: Satellite, Cable & Wireless, Satellite TV on Cell Phone?, Sprint Bundles EchoStar, Satellite WiFi, DirecWay Modem Shares Access, Satphones Get Giant Antennas, U.S. Cellsats and FCC Approves Big Mobile Sat.

Open Taxonomy

As noted below, I'm starting to think again about how open source scenario planning might work. First issue to look at is the question of what it means to be open.

Not all open systems are open in the same way. Although most uses of the term open as a modifier for a system (open source, open society, open bar) reflect open's broad meaning of "freely available for use," the details of how each of these kinds of open systems operate can vary considerably. This becomes a real issue when we encounter -- or create -- new jargon. When we speak of "open biology," for example, what kind of open do we mean? One in which anyone is free to participate? One in which anyone is free to receive the results of research? One in which all research is shared? More abstract variations, such as "open future," only confuse the issue further.

Experts and insiders may grimace at specialized terminology becoming common language, but it usually doesn't help to attempt to narrow the terminology only to its root meaning. In most cases, the democratizing of the term (if you will) happens because the word or phrase expresses something important or useful in a powerful or colorful way. Moreover, the version used in the broader vernacular gains its utility by having a direct link to the original meaning. If we describe something as a "black hole," for example, we probably don't mean that it's literally a body of such immense gravity that nothing can escape, but the popular meaning builds on that core definition.

With that preemptory defense in mind, here's a taxonomy of open systems, derived from the original, technical meanings, but with broader application:

Open Source:

Original version: a category of software in which the underlying programming instructions, or source code, is made available at no cost to interested developers, usually with the stipulation that derivative work should be equally freely shared. (Example: Linux)

OtF version: a system that allows you to reproduce at no cost the underlying design, methods and instructions, as well as the results of the system (if digital), and allows you to build upon either without significant restriction.

Open Access

Original version: a category of scientific publication in which articles are made available at no cost to the reader, who may also duplicate and share the material with others. (Example; PLoS)

OtF version: a system that allows you to reproduce its results or description freely, and to build upon these results without significant restriction.

Open Standard

Original version: a category of technical design made publicly available and implementable, in order to guarantee compatibility across components. (Example: HTML)

OtF version: a system that allows you to build upon its results, including building compatible systems, without significant restriction.

This taxonomy allows for a re-examination of the concept of "open source scenarios" (OSS).

In my original OSS concept, scenario creators would make freely available the scenario model (the key question, potentially the structure of divergent worlds), the scenario narratives (the stories and descriptions of each divergent world), and the scenario drivers (the various uncertainties, driving forces, and catalysts of change identified by the workshop participants). This falls squarely into the "open source" definition above. A number of scenario and foresight professionals responded to the OSS concept with the argument that even among the clients willing to see the scenario narratives published, few would want to open up the list of drivers, as these are most likely to illustrate where an organization sees internal vulnerabilities.

An open access model would be more comfortable, then, as it would omit the scenario "source code" -- the driving forces, uncertainties, and the like -- but still make the results freely available for examination.

The open standard approach would offer up the key questions and, perhaps, the scenario structure, allowing other scenario creators to consider the same basic set of divergences. This is probably the least useful form of open scenario planning, but might have some application as a learning tool.

Receiver #16

Social Networking the Mobile Way

Receiver #16 wants to spark off some ideas about social networking the mobile way: clubbing, seeing your favourite band, sharing memories of a night out or playfully exploring the city, getting to know and experiencing, even creating, music – can mobile add to all these? And how does it affect how we get our friends together for joint action? Does it trigger emergent behaviour? Or is it the ideal means to pull it all together? What do *you* think?

Lee Humphreys: Out with my mobile - exploring social coordination in urban environments :: Tim Cole: The mobile phone as the next electric guitar (or any other instrument you want) :: Rudy De Waele: Connecting cultures through music :: Charlie Schick: One night - a global story of one night in the mobile life :: Antony Bruno: Where the long tail ends :: Karenza Moore: Come together - the use and meanings of mobiles amongst UK clubbers :: Frank Lantz: Big Games and the porous border between the real and the mediated :: Mark Curtis: Mobilising our meat based selves - social planning while on the hoof.

Why we (the US) don't get the (text) message

"Consider this anomaly: Ecuador, with a per capita GDP of $4,300, has the United States beat when it comes to a critical wireless technology. Americans may be 10 times as wealthy, but Ecuadorians send four times as many text messages.

The opportunities start with understanding economic and cultural factors that drive usage. Pay-as-you-go cell-phone plans offered abroad encourage text-message use, as does the fact that in most countries, fewer people own PCs on which to send instant messages and e-mail.

...The overseas ardor for SMS is not a quirk Instead, it's a leading indicator of what will happen in the United States. Rather than substituting for PC-based communication, as it does in poorer countries, mobile messaging Stateside will untether commerce, social networks, and other applications originally tied to PCs. When smart innovators translate services originated abroad to America's cell phones, we'll really get the message. "

Mobiles Lead the Way in Underutilised Devices

Catching up with this month's Wired at 33,000 feet, I was struck by a little snippet of a survey of Wired readers – thus highly biased, in the nicest possible way. These people are some of the most technically literate on the planet.

The question asked was; Which device or tool do you think you're not using to its full potential? Surprise, surprise, the mobile phone led the field with 27%, with runners up the digital camera (25%) and the computer (18%). Somewhat surprisingly, 2% actually cited their office chair – what was I saying about being technically literate?

But if that's the situation with Wired readers, what's it like for the rest of the population?

Usability of mobile devices, coupled with clever ways to educate users, are going to take centre-stage in the mobile phone sector in the next few years. As an industry, we need people to start using their mobile phones beyond voice and texting – that's abundantly clear, especially as they switch over to 3G.

Already, usability experts are at a real premium, with employers falling over themselves to retain their services – even on a temporary basis. If you have a tame usability person you're using, be very nice to them indeed and proffer a pay rise quickly, as we're just about to see demand way outstrip supply. Just a feeling I have, you understand.

Self Forming Content Networks

Fred Wilson writes:

When it comes to networks, the most powerful model is the self organizing network. That allows participants to move seamlessly between networks and takes out all the overhead of managing them.

en't seen self organizing media networks take hold. Adsense is a self organizing network for publishers and advertisers, but not for the readers/consumers. You can't put together a page that shows all the content that an email marketing ad has appeared on. You might be able to use search to do that, but it's certainly not a seamless process.

This is in the context of FeedBurner Networks.

Freedom to Tinker - The Freedom to Tinker with Freedom?

At Freedom to Tinker, David Robinson asks whether, in a world where DRM is presented to so many customers as a benefit (e.g. Microsoft’s Zune service), the public as a whole will be quite happy to trade away its freedom to tinker, whether the law needs to intervene in this, and on which side: ensuring freedom to tinker, or outlawing it in order to enshrine the business model that “most people” will be portrayed as wanting, given the numbers who sign away their rights in EULAs and so on.

“Many of us, who may find ourselves arguing based on public reasons for public policies that protect the freedom to tinker, also have a private reason to favor such policies. The private reason is that we ourselves care more about tinkering than the public at large does, and we would therefore be happier in a protected-tinkering world than the public at large would be.”

Many of the comments - and those on the follow-up post - look in more detail at the legal issues, with some very interesting analogies to freedom of expression and points made about the impact on innovation - which benefits everyone - when power users are prevented from innovating.

I felt I had to comment, since this is an issue central to the architectures of control research; here’s what I said:

“I think I’d ask the question, “Even if it becomes illegal to tinker with a device, what is there to to stop someone doing it?”

If it is purely the fear of getting caught, then tinkering will be stifled, to some extent. But power users will form groups just as they do now, and some tinkering will still go on. (If the tinkering is advanced enough, it will be too difficult for law enforcement to detect/understand it anyway).

At present much file-sharing activity is illegal, but it still goes on in vast quantities. The fear of getting caught is a major retardation to that activity, I’d suggest; there may also be an ethical component to the decision in many people’s minds. They’re told it’s analogous to stealing a CD from a store, and they believe or are persuaded, partially at least, by that. It seems immoral or unethical.

But does anyone seriously believe that tinkering with devices is unethical? (There are probably a few people who do, e.g. ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley)

Tinkering with devices will never seem immoral or unethical to the vast majority of the public, hence the only barriers to stop them doing it are a) fear of getting caught and b) lack of knowledge or desire. Most people don’t bother tuning up their cars or tinkering with their computers, even though they could.

Power users do, and in a future where tinkering is illegal, it will again only be power users who do it, and fear of getting caught will be the only reason for not doing it.

So what about this fear of getting caught? How likely is it that one’s modifications or tinkering will be detected by some kind of enforcement agency? The only way I can see that this could be carried out in any kind of systematic way would be if observation/reporting devices were embedded in every product, e.g. every PC reporting home every few hours to squeal if it’s been modified.

But we already have that! Or at least we will soon, and therefore it seems irrelevant whether or not it becomes illegal to tinker with devices. If every computer is ‘trusted’ and spies and reports on its user’s behaviour, whether it reports to Microsoft or a Federal Anti-Tinkering Agency is, perhaps, beside the point.

Architectures to prevent or stifle tinkering can be designed into products and technologies whether or not there is a law requiring them. The user agrees to
have his/her behaviour and interactions monitored and controlled by the act of purchasing the device.

Even if the law went the other way, and there were a legally guaranteed right to tinker, all that would happen is that manufacturers will make it more difficult
to do so by the design of products. Hoods (bonnets) would start to be welded shut, in Cory Doctorow’s phrase, (the Audi A2 already has this, sort of), backed up by stringent warranty provisions. You might have a right to tinker with your device, but no law is going to compel the manufacturers to honour the warranty if you do so.

This, I think, is the crucial issue: the points Lessig makes about the designed structure of the internet, the code, superseding statute law as the dominant shaper of behaviour in the medium, apply just as strongly to technology hardware. Architectures of control in design will control users’ behaviour, however the laws themselves evolve.”

Why Short Codes if you have the URL, SMS, Text, Phone Numbers etc.?

1. In print where space is scarce, you can imagine the following scenario. A lot of small classifieds in a newspaper can have one general QR Code and then for every individual classified a short code number. This way you can give an easy access to very small items (in a normal newspaper you can find items with a size of 0.5x3.9 cm)
2. In print this scenario is already in use, think about NZZimmo (Search with code from NZZ ad) for example, where you have next to every real estate ad in the newspaper a number which on the web you can type in to find more information about the object. With a short codes in your Kaywa Reader, you could now access this same information more quickly and easily without using a desktop computer.
3. As we haven't got yet the macro camera phones which are commonplace in Japan, we cannot go as small as 0.9 cm yet. With the short codes however we can provide a QR Code that is at the same time small and always of the same size.

Benkler on Calacanis

From Nicholas Garr's blog: Yochai Benkler on Calacanis's wallet.

Third Voice

Today’s Tech Crunch posts made me think about a startup concept that’s been kicking around the net for awhile now. Through a VC friend of mine I heard about a sad tale about a company called Third Voice. This company’s software did something similar to what recent releases OthersOnline and Diigo are doing. The basic concept was to provide a message board and chat service that allowed people to leave comments about a given URL. I thought it was a pretty good idea. The Third Voice would provide a way for people to get reviews of products or services, discuss recent news and find out about crooked websites or poor service.

A buddy of mine and I heard about the concept (and it’s demise) and decided to take a whack at it. I was setting up the technical side of things when I started to look closely at the business model so I could develop the software requirements. I noticed more than a few problems with the concept when I was putting it through it’s paces designing the spec…

When I was doing research and looking around, I noticed that most site that the product would be useful on already had discussion, either in comments or a messageboard/forum. People usually discuss things like news, new products, music, etc. Well all of these things already have comment boxes. I love the idea of putting up a way for people to talk about a web 2.0 product or story…but that’s what techcrunch is for right? Amazon for books, various music sites for music… It just didn’t seem like there was a need that wasn’t being filled.

We thought about the use for doing reviews of a site or it’s product/service. But then we’d have to have a way to moderate it somehow to prevent people from slandering their business rivals or to give a business owner a chance to defend himself (granted most “forums” don’t do this, but it only seems fair if the product would be used mainly for reviews and hints). And then when looking at the list of sites I browse on a regular basis…not many need “reviews”. It just didn’t seem to be that useful…

I also took into consideration the resistance from website owners. In the wired article about the demise of Third Voice people referred to it as “digital graffiti”. And I would assume that a web site owner would prefer to have someone on his comment board, giving him more page views and community loyalty than to have some 3rd party app making a living off of his content. The more I thought about that, the less I liked it.

The final problem I saw was adoption. Installing an IE or firefox plugin is pretty easy. But really, how many people have the knowledge or inclination to do it? The thing about a forum is it takes a large volume of contributing users. You have to include everyone, even the people who render themselves technically incompetent. I tried all kinds of ideas…downloaded app, browser plugin, bookmarklet… just none of it seemed easy enough to set up to where you could get a large enough volume of people.

It’s possible that I over thought these issues or was a bit risk adverse. There are times when I wish we had just done it and thrown it out there (and I guess it’s not too late). I will be very interested to see how OthersOnline and Diigo do. I considered a social networking system like OthersOnline, but my problem is that surfing habits aren’t all that indicative of personality or traits. Look in your browser History right now and look at the last 20 sites you went to. Are these the things you want to be associated with? (if you’re reading this in the evening and you’ve got porn in your history, you know what I’m talking about). I think Diigo could be very valuable, but it has some of the “digital graffiti” aspect to it. The annotation feature was something I’d considered previously and I think it’s a great, great idea. I think this product could really go far, if they can get people to adopt it.

Even with all of it’s problems, I think the Third Voice concept has a lot of merit. In a more offline context, the idea of being able to leave little warnings or notes or interesting comments at various places in the real world is very intriguing and would be good to model online. For example wouldn’t it be great if you could access (useful) notes / tips / trivia / warnings when you were in a strange city (”Warning: Do not flirt with the redheaded bartender, she’s prone to violence”). That same concept would be wonderful on the web. I’m glad that there a few people playing on the edge of this space so I can see how it works out. And RIP to Third Voice.

Review of Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins

I read Henry Jenkins’s new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide this weekend. The book is a short, smart, buttery read on a hot topic, and it is sure to draw both popular and academic interest. Jenkins is a multifaceted media scholar, a critic of vaudeville, fan fiction, comics, film, games, and more. He is also the founder of the Education Arcade, an MIT group interested in the intersection of videogames and learning. And so, even though the book addresses games as a minority subject, I offer this review to alert our readers to Jenkins’s current thinking. In a future post, I will attempt to address what convergence might mean for videogames with an agenda.

Originally from Water Cooler Games at August 1, 2006, 15:07, published by Pau Waelder

Thursday: The future is aggregation

A new study by market research group In-Stat and reported in MediaDailyNews finds that the market for online video will increase by tenfold in the next four years. The big winners? Content aggregator companies:

As one of its foundational premises, the In-Stat report notes that "within the very near future," individuals will control what, when, and how they see all the programming of interest to them. Furthermore, In-Stat asserts that this consumer-controlled delivery will be dominated by major content aggregators like AOL, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Apple--which are increasingly able to "blend professional video with their high-touch services that follow consumers from screen to screen," Kaufhold (Gerry Kaufhold, a principal analyst for Converging Markets and Technologies) says.

According to In-Stat, 12.8 percent of broadband-equipped households around the world are already viewing content via an online aggregator. And the raw numbers can only grow as broadband penetration jumps from about 194 million households in 2005 to 413 million worldwide by 2010.

broadcasters have to adopt two strategies in order to be competitive. One, we must unbundle our content to play in this space and, two, we must get into the aggregator business themselves, and I think this has to happen at the local level.

Funny the report doesn't mention youTube, the 800-pound gorilla of online video aggregators.

Social technology and the hidden dimension of time

Anthony Giddens, British sociologist and one of my long-time personal guiding lights, has characterized the primary interest of sociology as an effort “to explicate how the limitations of individual ‘presence’ are transcended by the ‘stretching’ of social relations across time and space.” It’s always seemed to me that the growing adoption of social technologies–like this very one here–into our communication practices (activities, coordination, exchange, commmerce, learning, etc.) serves as a direct reflection of this “stretching of social relations across time and space.” I’ve felt that these technologies line a frontier defined by concerns that touch our society and culture deeply. And that our very proximity to one another is shaped and informed by our use of these technologies to conduct our lives in non face-to-face communications.

We often speak of proximity as a matter of space, of closeness, nearness, even touch. We’ve seen that distance collapse, foreshortened by the spin of a mouse on the point of a click. Who among us is not a click away? But interestingly, I think, the dimension that’s transformed most by social media is time, not space. It’s time in the sense that the duration, episode, and rhythm of our interactions with others is radically lightened by social technologies, faciliated by a medium that has no “there” there, presented but not with a deep presence. It’s a strange thing, this discontinuous time of media. Things happen, but are not tied together, perhaps because we have such difficulty negotiating our availability and thus presence to others. Interruptions occur so frequently they become a continuity in and of themselves. We’ll have 16 tracks of conversation going but at different time signatures, and our presence to and in all of them will feel more fragmented than whole.

I don’t know what a p2p take on temporality might look like. I think the discipline is more inclined to spatial and visual maps and representations. But time and temporality are of paramount importance to production coordination, action sequencing and the organization of dependencies in the distribution of work, and so on. We have long departed from a simple “serial” time and temporality. But might the organization of social relations by p2p not better accommodate time than it currently does?

Why Wikipedia works (it's not the hive mind)

Dirk Riehle posts an interview with several active Wikipedians on "How and Why Wikipedia Works." Lots of detail, plus this interesting nugget (that Science Library Pad caught):

DR: What about the 'collective intelligence' or 'collective wisdom' argument: That given enough authors, the quality of an article will generally improve? Does this hold true for Wikipedia?
EB: No, it does not. The best articles are typically written by a single or a few authors with expertise in the topic. In this respect, Wikipedia is not different from classical encyclopedias.
KN: Elian is right. Also, most of the short articles remain short and of rather poor content.

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia, wiki

The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information we Consume

Abstract: This paper presents an overview of a broad selection of current technologies and services: blogs, wikis including Wikipedia and Wikinews, social networks such as Friendster and Orkut as well as related social services like del.icio.us, file sharing tools such as Flickr, and podcasting. These services enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content. It is argued that the transformations the Web is subject to are not driven by new technologies but by a fundamental mind shift that encourages individuals to take part in developing new structures and content. The evolving services and technologies encourage ordinary users to make their knowledge explicit and help a collective intelligence to develop.

It's not journalists versus bloggers

I was going to write some thoughts about Columbia J-School dean Nicholas Lemann's New Yorker hatchet job on citizens media, but Jeff Jarvis has done such an excellent job that I'll simply point to him. MUST read stuff.

Carnival of the Mobilists # 38

This week’s Carnival is at SmartMobs and a very fine job Judy Breck has done as moderator.

Congrats to Rudy and Stephanie for winning host and post of the month in the awards sponsored by Khosla Ventures for June.

From now on we’ll still to the new Monday morning timetable as it seems more popular with readers and hosts have the weekend to polish things.

News websites' "most e-mailed" lists can be deceiving

Chicago Tribune

That's because what motivates a person to e-mail a story is often different from what motivates that person to read one, says Steve Johnson. "Talk to people involved in digital publishing, and mostly they'll tell you that a story rises to the level of being e-mailed when it contains practical advice or cautionary tales -- on travel, say, or diet -- or when it has a 'holy-cow' factor," he writes. "Sometimes that means hard-news stories, as in, 'Holy cow, Israel is dropping bombs in Lebanon.' More often, though, it seems to be on the order of, 'Holy cow, a man tried to molest a cow.'"

Makes sense, and explains the breathless prose style of top headlines on Digg or Cosmo. --MM

Originally posted by Jim Romenesko from Romenesko, ReBlogged by migurski on Aug 1, 2006 at 12:29 PM

Contour: A Novel Technique for Modeling and Capture

I suppose the big game industry news of the day is the cancellation of the yearly E3 tradeshow (who gives a crap, it was just a big marketing fest), but more interesting is the announcement of a new technology for digitally capturing super-high resolution models and motion of actors, called Contour. See articles in the NYTimes and Wall Street Journal. It’s developed by entrepeneur and inventor Steve Perlman (veteran Apple guy, General Magic, WebTV) and to be demoed at this week’s Siggraph in Boston. See and read more at his website, Mova.com.

Instead of placing a mesh of glowing dots all over the actor’s face and filming her from various angles to create a moderately hi-res model and motion capture, Contour mixes fluorescent powder into the actor’s makeup, and captures monochromatic shaded images of the actor’s face while she performs under seemingly normal lighting conditions — made possible with modified strobe-like fluorescent lights. The result is an extremely high resolution digital model, photographed textures and motion capture of the actor’s face. (Animators have to manually add detail to places makeup can’t go, like eyeballs and inside the mouth). Effectively each grain of makeup is like a motion-capture dot, allowing for very very hi-res, and low-cost, capture — “volumetric cinematography”. Brilliant! (literally)

This has immediate applications to filmmaking, as the articles describe, as well as to motion-capture oriented videogames. On purely visual terms, Contour does seem to make major progress towards crossing the uncanny valley, for linear (non-interactive) playback of an actor’s performance.

But, it does nothing to cross what one might call the uncanny valley of AI — how to generate believable interactive behavior. Canned motion capture sequences are of little help when implementing highly dynamic, procedurally animated interactive characters.

MTP, Portable Player Standard? Microsoft’s McLauchlan Sets Us Straight

Portable music player technology isn't as simple as it once was. With digital music files have come new restrictions from the music labels on how music is played and transferred, as well as discussion of various specifications for connecting devices to computers. In a June 16 story on Platform-Agnostic Drag-and-Drop Music Listening, I suggested lovers of independent music might be better off foregoing both Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Microsoft's preferred connection mechanism, the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP).

There has been a lot of criticism of DRM, but in the process, a lot of people have missed the details on Microsoft's MTP. I advocated using the older USB Media Storage Class (MSC) connection method because it's compatible out-of-the-box with Mac and Linux as well as Windows. But I did note that MTP isn't itself “DRM,” since many of its features are unrelated to music, let alone music DRM. That launched a semi-interesting debate with Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow, and in the process we learned many of you really can't stand Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow.

The best way to learn something about a technology, though, is to talk to someone who actually develops it. Dave McLauchlan from the Windows Media Devices Group at Microsoft wrote me privately to rebut some of what I said, make some corrections, and set the record straight on the Windows Media devices and specifically MTP. Dave is himself a musician — see his music site, and note that even though he works for Microsoft, his music is available on iTunes via CDBaby and in non-DRMed MP3 downloads. His response isn't the one-sided DRM advocacy you might expect, though he has some pragmatic points to make about DRM, as well. Most interesting to me is some of the insight he provides on how these technologies are evolving for music use. I stand by my claim that musicians should consider sidestepping labels and selling non-DRMed music direct to their listeners. But there's plenty to be learned here.

(Continued at CreateDigitalMusic.)

News is a constant

The latest Pew study on news usage is out (David Newberger does a great job picking the good bits) but this is what struck me:

The consumption use of news across media is fairly constant. Use of newspapers is shrinking. Says Pews: “…even the highest estimate of daily newspaper readership — 43% for both print and online readers –­ is still well below the number reading a print newspaper on a typical day 10 years ago (50%).” That leads some to believe that interest in news is thus decreasing, but Pew says that’s not the case:

The rise of the internet has also not increased the overall news consumption of the American public. The percentage of Americans who skip the news entirely on a typical day has not declined since the 1990s. Nor are Americans spending any more time with the news than they did a decade ago when their news choices were much more limited. In 1996, people on average spent slightly more than an hour (66 minutes) getting the news from TV, radio or newspapers. Currently, they spend virtually the same amount of time (67 minutes) getting the news from all major news sources, the internet included.

: Oh, and tell this to Jack Shafer:

But one constant remains: Local and community news continues to be the biggest draw for newspapers. And as was the case during the mid-1980s, roughly nine-in-ten of those who at least sometimes read a newspaper say they spend a significant amount of time getting the news about their city, town or region.

People who say they logged on for news yesterday spent 32 minutes, on average, getting the news online. That is significantly less than the average number of minutes that newspaper readers, radio news listeners, and TV news viewers spend with those sources. And while nearly half of all Americans (48%) spend at least 30 minutes getting news on television, just 9% spend that long getting news online.

I think that’s a bit of a red herring. The use of each medium is different: one passive and time-based, another directed and involved. Even so, it’s clear that the internet is not taking over news. It is remixing news time. Says Pew:

The web serves mostly as a supplement to other sources rather than a primary source of news. Those who use the web for news still spend more time getting news from other sources than they do getting news online. In addition, web news consumers emphasize speed and convenience over detail. Of the 23% who got news on the internet yesterday, only a minority visited newspaper websites. Instead, websites that include quick updates of major headlines, such as MSNBC, Yahoo, and CNN, dominate the web-news landscape.

To some degree, news consumers are drawn to the internet for the very reason that it does

not take much time to get news online. Most users say what distinguishes web news is its format and accessibility ­ the ease of navigation, speed with which information can be gathered, and convenience “at my fingertips.”

I wonder whether there is a way to get another measure of news: how many stories, how many topics, hoe much information, rather than just how much time. In other words: If you spend 30 minutes watching TV news, you get a handful of stories. If you spend 30 minutes online, you could get dozens of stories or you could spend a long time on one. Time is not the best measure. I want to know about the number of news nuggets mined.

Much more to dig into in the Pew survey….

: LATER: Nicholas Carr writes about the survey, too. He tries, as usual, to turn this into a confrontation, though I don’t think it is; it’s all a matter of degree and time but the trends are the trends.

(By the way, Carr never passes up an opportunity to snipe at me as his resident philistine, which is fine, and I’ve parried back. But I’ll also note that when we met at an Annenberg event, he didn’t have the guts to say any of that, face-to-face. I sought him and and joked that we were matter meeting antimatter. He did not discuss his apparent efforts to feud. But then he got back online and immediately brought out the rifle again. It’s odd to define oneself by what one is not but if you do that, I suppose you need to find or manufacture an opposite number. This is all beside the point. And that’s my point.)

University of Buffalo Points to Digitized Fingertip

The upcoming Siggraph conference, which starts Sunday, will see demonstrations of a boatload of interesting new technologies, among them a fingertip digitizer developed by researchers at the University of Buffalo’s Virtual Reality Laboratory (which has a bunch of other cool projects going, to boot).

A small thimble-shaped device worn on the tip of a finger, the digitizer is interesting as an input device. Imagine dragging your finger across the surface of a solid object and having it gradually take shape on your screen, complete with surface texture. While devices exist to do such things already, a fingertip is arguably a more intuitive and responsive device than any stylus or other peripheral. The UB lab has also developed cool stuff like a touch-based CAD device. Toss ‘em all in the pot and you could very well have a powerful interface that closes the gap between personal intention and what a computer understands. [Via What’s Next Network.]

Tabulator from Tim Berners-Lee

Father of the web Tim Berners-Lee is working on a new project called Tabulator: “the generic data browser which lets you do useful things with your RDF data the moment it’s on the web.” In his post this week Slicing and dicing web data with Tabulator he includes some screen shots including data browsing and an auto-generated Google Maps mashup. It can essentially get you code-free mashups.

It works by exploring the web of relationship between things, loading more data from the web as you go. Then, if you find a pattern of information you are interested in, it will search for all occurrences of that pattern and display them in tables, maps, calendars, and so on.

Think of all the different mash-ups people have made for putting things like friends houses, photos, or coffee shops on the web. Each a different mash-up for a different data source.

For data in RDF (or any XML with a GRDDL profile), though, then you don’t have to program anything. You can just explore it and map it. And you can map many different data sources at the same time.

Sticking and video gaming

With EdgeBomber, players can use tape, stickers and scissors to create their own playground on a wall. The system grabs the scenery and creates a virtual level for a jump'n'run video game. The playground is extended with items and enemies and is projected back to the original scenery. Add or remove stickers to decide the levels of the game. In the mixed media environment, the hero "Oskar" has to resist the attacks of Hubert and the Evil Sausage.

Edgebomber is in constant evolution, the developers keep adding new characters, new features, animations and gameplays (levels to solve etc.) It has already been exhibited in Germany (in Karlsruhe and Cologne) with success.

"On edgebomber we worked for the first engine release for approximately 14-20 days together with three coders. I was working on the illustration/visual stuff and another guy was helping us to animating the trees and the backgrounds," explains Richard Gutleber, one of the creators of the game.

"The idea was simple," adds Richard. "I grew up collecting stickers and screenprinting and while i was playing i felt that the haptic thing you got to do in real life was missing. I was totally addicted to glueing stickers (the nice smell of the vinyls) so we decided to put the things together, so the people have to move their brains and bodies and make there own levels and not only to play readymade (prefabricated) levels..."

Edgebomber was developed by Susigames.

Content Nation Speaks Out

Robin Good's Latest News labels the main feature of blogging as 'Helping Others See Beyond The Surface.' According to Robin this 'Makes Blogs True Digital Weapons Of Mind Change.'

Changing other people's minds, launching small and large Calls To Action, influencing and persuading others, providing insightful tools and pointers to facilitate self-discovery and personal understanding: these are the most powerful applications that individuals, small online publishers and passionate researchers can make of blogs today. Helping others see things from new and unconventional viewpoints.

Also read at Shore Content Nation, a commentary of John Blossom on 'A World of Personal Publishers Declares Their Influential Citizenship'

Nokia develops "self-destructing" phones

"Today, most cell phones and other small electronics are shredded instead of taken apart for recycling, because the disassembly time is too expensive for the amount of material reclaimed. In contrast, a process called "active disassembly" is all about creating gadgets that can break into their component parts just by being exposed to heat or magnetism. It saves money, and the materials can be recovered more efficiently.

Here is Nokia's outline of the disassembly processes they are working on":

Nokia Research Center, together with a student group from Helsinki University of Technology, the Finnish School of Watchmaking and the University of Art and Design Helsinki have developed a process for heat disassembly of portable devices.

a is to disassemble a mobile phone by a heat-activated mechanism without any contact. By using a centralized heat source like laser heating, the shape memory alloy (SMA) actuator is activated, and the mobile phone covers are opened.

The battery, display, printed wiring board (PWB) and mechanical parts are separated and can then be recycled in their material specific recycling processes. The required temperature for the disassembly is 60-150 ºC. If it were lower the phone could dismantle by itself, for instance in a hot car, and if it were higher the plastics would melt.

Laser heating is a feasible method due to its speed and precision. However, it requires investment in a proper disassembly line.

Copy, share, or die!

Annalee Newitz has a fun suggestion:

I mean, it's no accident that a horror movie like "The Ring" came out during the heyday of file sharing. Let's think about it -- the flick is about a haunted videocassette that will kill you unless you make a duplicate copy and show it to somebody else. It's like a nightmare analog version of BitTorrent. If you do not share your media, you will die. Creative Commons really should do a cartoon parody of "The Ring."

I've never heard of this movie though Wikipedia confirms the plotline. Clearly a multiple-plotline parody is in order:

• Character one must copy DRM media or die. Circumvents DRM, goes to jail, attacked by gang, dies.
• Character two must copy DRM media or die. Atttempts to circumvent DRM, fails, dies.
• Character three must copy DRM media or die. Realizes circumventing DRM is criminal, has moral crisis but in the end does the right thing, dies.
• Character four must copy CC licensed media or die. Makes copy, shares with friends and strangers, remixes, is remixed, lives long and prospers.

The characteristics of mobile Web 2.0

Thus, the characteristics(distinguishing principles) of mobile Web 2.0 are:

a) Harnessing collective intelligence through restricted devices i.e. a two way flow where people carrying devices become reporters rather than mere consumers
b) Driven by the web backbone – but not necessarily based on the web protocols end to end
c) Use of the PC as a local cache/configuration mechanism where the service will be selected and configured

Another way to look at this idea is to consider what is NOT mobile Web 2.0. ‘Broadcast’ content generated by the media industry which users are passively expected to consume: is not mobile Web 2.0. That includes most ringtones, most games, movie clips etc. Anything which does not have a user generated component.

When is the last time you were a client?

Via randomwalks/dj

Open Infrastructure

Some interesting thoughts from Tim O’Reilly and Jon Udell on the idea of Open Infrastructure. Tim recently had a conversation with Debra Chrapaty, VP of Operations for Microsoft’s Windows Live, where she noted that “In the future, being a developer on someone’s platform will mean being hosted on their infrastructure.”

Jon has followed-up:

The desktop isn’t the battleground it once was. I float like a butterfly from Windows to OS X to Linux. My home is in the cloud, and that’s the next frontier for the champions of free and open commodity infrastructure…We’ve already seen how open source software projects harness collective effort to produce quality results. We’re now seeing how open content projects such as Wikipedia do the same. Can open infrastructure be far behind?

Jon cites the Coral open content distribution network (CDN) as an interesting early case. Certainly a significant topic in the world of APIs and mashups: how can independent developers not become captive within an ecosystem dominated by the major players like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon and Microsoft.

Defining Global Neighborhoods; Call for Comments

Re-blogged from Redcouch.Typepad.com:

Shel Israel outlines Global Neighbourhoods, asks for comments:

To paraphrase Weinberger, I have several small pieces loosely joined.  Some of this has been written previously. Right now the assembly is whats important:

1. In some ways, Global Neighborhoods will be a sequel to Naked Conversations. I have great pride in the last book, but was never completely happy with the last section in which we attempted to paint a big picture that went beyond blogging into something called a Conversational Era. While accurate, the term has not caught on, nor do I think it is suited to describe the enormous fundamental change being created by a connected world. Global will attempt to paint a bigger picture of what the world, and large organizations will look like a few years down the line from today.  Naked Conversations examines the cause of the change.  This time I am more concerned with the effects of the change.

2.  Ultimately, what I see is a world forming in which powerful companies and even governments will have little choice but to yield the power they have to communities.  Communities will be the fundamental shapers of new products and services, of the meaning of brands and a good deal more.  The individuals who are most generous to these communities, who help the members most with matters of community interest, will be the most influential and powerful members of these communities. Some of these new influencers will be employed by large companies. But these spokespeople will not be one way conduits of sales and marketing from corp to customer, but will bring back to companies very accurate assessments of what the community wants most and is willing to pay most to obtain.

3.  Geography becomes irrelevant as people use the internet to interact with people who share common interests.  If two governments cannot get along, people start finding each other and ways to interact through social media.  The most passionate members of these communities become the leaders.  This works both globally and in the macrocosm.  If a neighborhood wants speed bumps on its street and the elected city officials ignore this demand, the neighborhood can use its blog to ally with an opposing candidate. It can start conducting marketplace voting block barters with other neighborhoods who may want a Stop Sign. 

4. Not only does the connected world make geography irrelevant, it also allows us to dwell in neighborhoods that are built on shared interests. People generally feel safest in neighborhoods where they share commonality with others. Even a gang member feels more safe in his own crime and poverty infested neighborhood because he knows the rules there.  He knows not only how to survive there, but others people like himself will support him in a great many ways. Because of the irrelevance of geography, we can each choose to join a multitude of neighborhoods on local, national and global levels. For example bloggers, hummingbird fanciers, pornography, religious organizations, political groups etc.  We may share greater passion in one over another and may be more active in one over the other.

5. The technology that has enabled all this connection and community empowerment s pretty much in place.  The costs are going down and the current number of quality teams with innovative ideas is rising. The entry barriers are as low as at any point in history. Tech, historically has clustered in a very few number of geographic locations such as Silicon Valley.  But with these diminished barriers, companies are forming all over the place, new entrepreneurial tech clusters are forming in new places such as Toronto, Cork and others TBD by the world tour are forming and growing in strength. If Silicon Valley remains the center of the universe, then the universe is rapidly expanding and the opportunities for small talented teams to get started is unprecedented. (This are will be the central focus of the world tour for me and is likely to be the longest portion of the book)

6. While the barriers to entry are low, the barriers to exit are higher than people realize. There are currently over 1600 so-called Web 2.0 companies. Most of them seem to have ideas that strengthen communities. Nearly all offer services online for free. A majority expect to make revenue and someday profits through contextual advertising.  There are questions as to how effective online advertising is even when they have extremely low CPM. Extremely few companies expect to remain standalones or endure to the point of an IPO. Instead they all aspire to be acquired, and in a great many cases by just three companies Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. This makes a buyer’s market and this leads to a good number of speculations that the current boom is in fact another bubble–one less spectacular than the last time around in terms of dollars, but one which will result in the entrepreneurial graveyards will be filled with good ideas that could benefit communities but can not adequately be monetized. (This section will look at the business models of several companies both pro and con). Of greater interest is what happens to large traditional companies like Microsoft, who see the end to their traditional business models and need to undergo a huge period of change to survive.  Will they be able to make the change or or will they succumb to Google’s more modern model and ability to execute faster.  In turn, with dozens of new Web 2.0 search companies rapidly emerging, will Google themselves be nipped to death by tiny new niche search companies forming all over the globe with amazing speed?

7.  Down the line, perhaps five and ten years from now, what will the world look like for end users who are organized along community lines?  What about the company of the future?  Will most products and services be delivered on line and if so how much of it will be free?  How will the evolution of communities impact diverse human rights and access to information across the borders of nations with diverse laws. How will this massive decentralization of tech startups impact the world’s economic imbalances?

Anyway, this is a first draft.  Robert and I had about 15 drafts of what would become the Publisher’s proposal.  The chapters themselves will come alive with the use of case studies, lots of case studies, as we used in Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.

This is the overview component to a critical document called the Publisher’s Proposal. There are many more pieces to it, including a TOC, a marketing section where we define the target audience, a Table of Contents, a sample chapter, and oh yes, the request  for an advance in lieu of royalties, which is my favorite part.

Please tell me what you think of this so far.  Is it a book that interests you? How can I make it stronger, tighter, more useful? Give me all the tough advice you can.  My skin is pretty thick and I want to write a very interesting useful book.

The Underground Blogosphere

Deep underneath the blogosphere lies a network that's just as big and powerful. It has a lots of participants, yet it's completely invisible to those who do not blog. It's the Underground Blogosphere.

The Underground Blogosphere is an intricate web of hundreds of thousands of emails that bloggers send to each other every day. In essence, they are "pitching" their latest posts in hopes of getting a link. Sometimes, bloggers are genuinely looking for good feedback, but more often than not all they are just looking for traffic.

There's a lot of irony in the Underground Blogosphere! For starters, I get more email pitches from bloggers whom I have never met than I do from PR professionals. Many of these same bloggers probably hate PR pitches, yet they're happy to dish it out themselves. What's even more interesting is that the Underground Blogosphere carries lots of emails from reporters. They too send links to their stories/blog posts. Now that's role reversal only a psychologist could love!

Some high profile bloggers (who I won't name) absolutely love the Underground Blogosphere. They find lots of links that are relevant to them. Others, are not fond of it at all. I sit in the middle. I find some gems in there that I might not normally see. However, I still prefer and thank those who continue to feed me links through del.icio.us. I never miss those. (To be completely honest, when I started this blog I was one of the most prolific members of the Underground Blogosphere. I sent my links to everyone. However, over a year ago I kicked this habit. Today I use it sparingly.)

I'm not sure what to do with the Underground Blogosphere. However, as bloggers, I do think it's important we start a conversation about it. Sometimes I wish I could expose my Underground Blogosphere to the world by publishing these emails to a digg-like site where you can tell me what's interesting. This might lead to all kinds of new things to blog about. Other days I want to set up a great filter that moves them all to a spam folder.

I am eager to hear how you feel about the Underground Blogosphere. Maybe there's a way we can pool all of our emails together into a new site that creates value.

Technorati Tags: Email, Underground Blogosphere

How Fast Does the Eye Transmit Visual Input?

What's even more interesting is what happens when those signals get to the striate cortex - all kinds of space-time FFT goodness! --MM

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, ReBlogged by migurski on Jul 27, 2006 at 11:08 AM

Atmospheric broadcasting

"The layer of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere, at an altitude of 50 kilometres, is already used as a radio reflector, bouncing low frequency radio signals from one side of the world to the other.

Researchers at Samsung in Korea are now working on a way to turn the ionosphere into an antenna and have filed a patent.

Samsung sees the system as a cheap way to broadcast signals, or communicate over long distances, without needing to launch expensive satellites."

Anne Galloway

Technosocial Screens

I'll be giving a keynote address at next month's BNMI Interactive Screen - Margins: Media: Migrations workshop & summit.

Technosocial Screens: Mobilities, Communities, Citizenships: screen, v. to show, or hide from view; to sift or separate; to shelter or protect

New interactive technologies promise to reconfigure relations between producers and consumers, public and private, physical and digital, local and global - and in these shifting scenarios the screen takes on a multitude of roles. Not only are screens changing size and resolution, some are becoming softer and more flexible, and others are disappearing entirely. Some screens offer a bird's-eye view of the world that we can hold in our hands, and others tell us where we are - or could be - at any given moment. Whatever the type of screen, we can be sure of one thing: people, places, objects and ideas are being screened at the same time.

Together we will explore some of the critical ways in which new media technologies shape, and are shaped by, our changing experiences and understandings of community and citizenship. What kind of shelter and hope can we expect from a world of everywhere and anywhere media? From what, and whom, are we protecting ourselves? How are these technological practices sorting our everyday social, cultural and creative relationships? What, and whom, gets hidden - or cannot hide? How can new media technologies explore different ways of belonging and being together? How can they encourage diverse and lively participation and representation around shared matters of concern?" [...] [blogged by Anne on Purse Lips Square Jaw]

The Long Tail Debate Overlooks the Snowball Effect

Lee Gomes at WSJ and Chris Anderson have gotten into an interesting debate about the validity of Chris’ thesis that the “long tail” represents a significant economic paradigm shift. Unless I’m missing something, there is one element missing from the debate that anyone conversant with Umair Haque should recognize.

The debate between Lee and Chris focuses on whether sales in the long tail for any category can and will make up a significant percentage of total sales.

The long tail theory is often misconstrued to mean the end of the hit/blockbuster. But in fact the hit/blockbuster is still a significant aspect of long tail economics.

What changes — and this is the missing piece — is that in a long tail market hits can more easily emerge from the long tail through the power of network effects, or what Umair calls the “Snowball Effect.”

When you combine deep online catalogues with sharing/online social tools/viral marketing/etc., it becomes easier for any given item to become a sales “hit.”

Just look at Chris’ book, The Long Tail. It’s currently #16 at Amazon (up from #17 earlier today before the debate hit Techmeme). It may well have been a best seller without the network effect, but Chris’ long tail blog and the conversation he has fostered during the period when he was writing the book and all of the conversation that has ensued post publication virtually ensured it would be a sales hit.

Fifteen years ago, it would have taken a large marketing budget to achieve the same effect.

Now Chris was able to create a best seller for the cost of a Typepad account.

So for me, the radical long tail notion is that it’s no longer necessary to “buy” a hit — you can leverage the socialization of the web — combined with the web’s unlimited shelf space — to generate a hit from the bottom up, virtually for free.

If the Internet levels the playing field for hit making, and dramatically increases the economic efficiency of hit making, that would indeed be a HUGE sea change.

Criticism towards mutual knowledge theories

Arnseth A.C., Ludvigsen S., Mørch A., Wasson B. (2004). Managing Intersubjectivity in Distributed Collaboration. PsychNology Journal, 2(2), 189 – 204.

The paper describes a very interesting criticism of a specific approach to the study of technologically mediated social interaction. The critique is about the notion of “share knowledge” (mostly Clark’s (1996) notion of grounding):

According to Clark (1996) grounding is the process through which shared knowledge is established in interaction. This process is dependent on the participant’s prior beliefs, their previous
knowledge, and the material artifacts that are available in any communicative encounter. The main assumption in the studies by Baker et al. (1999) and Dillenbourg & Traum (1999), is that different technological tools provide different constraints and affordances for the grounding process.
(…)
According to such a view, communication is conceived as a process of coordinating knowledge that the participants already possess. However, the efforts involved in arriving at a shared interpretation might require a reorganization of the knowledge that an individual brings to the situation. Nevertheless, social interaction is mainly the site where participants’ mental states are articulated and coordinated. However, the main problem with such an analytical practice from a situated perspective, is that it implies a disregard for the participants’ interpretative work (Ludvigsen & Mørch, 2003). Moreover, the management of intersubjectivity is treated as independent of the situation in which it occurs, the activity in which participants are engaged and the goals that they are trying to achieve.

In another paper “Making Sense of Shared Knowledge“, Hans Christian Arnseth and Ivar Solheim also give other critiques:

Our main criticism of Clark and Brennan’s model is that it retains a communication-as-transfer-between-minds view of language. Secondly that it treats intentions and goals as pre-existing psychological entities that are later somehow formulated in language.

Why do I blog this? using Clark’s theory as a framework for my research, I am curious of the critiscm towards it. However, I rather used his theory of coordination (coordination devices/keys) than the whole shared knowledge issue.

Video: Justin Hall on Passively Multiplayer Online Games

Passively Multiplayer is a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online.

Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.

Examples of avatars: virtual pets, animals, virtual humans, virtual fantasy characters, secret agents, athletes, movie stars, famous people, gangsters, soldiers.

Neat experiments on clickstreams. --MM

Originally from Waxy.org Links, ReBlogged by migurski on Jul 26, 2006 at 09:39 AM

Accidental epiphany: podcasts aren’t conversation

No matter how hard we try to shove the square peg into the round hole, audio and video files, by themselves, are not two-way mediums. In fact, the best we can do, is surround them with other audio or video files, text, SMS, toll-free numbers and other forms of media to attempt to make it a communication medium

It’s one way. Period. And it’s not time-shifted, either. PODCASTING is not time-shifted, like a DVD is not time-shifted. Things that can be time-shifted (like Live TV on the Tivo) are able to because there is an element of real time, passing right now. Podcasting is on-demand, because the audio or video file is always there. We can tell people to talk back, and if they do, it’s later.

I spent nearly 10 hours running a live concert and broadcasting and interacting with the listeners in real time. I say something, they say something back, I respond. The content of my live broadcast was affected by the interaction of the audience at that specific moment in time. Our podcast on the other hand, can’t do that, other than the interaction with the co-hosts.

Another discovery… the vibe is totally different when I’m live. Some folks have a tougher time at live than others– for me, it’s infinitely more natural than to pre-record.

So, portable wifi-enabled audio and video players and phones. Appointment based consumption and participation. Podcasting, the on-demand medium. If you add those together, you make better content and get better content. And it might be possible that MORE people would participate in the conversation.

Cuz now? It’s one-way dialogue. That bugs.

Digging Deeper::Should Community-Edited News Sites Pay Top Editors?

If there is one push-and-pull balancing act that defines news in the age of Web 2.0, it’s the question of how much power to give the audience, the masses, the collective mind, and how much control remains centralized. That balancing act has played a crucial role in the development of community-generated sites such as Wikipedia, Slashdot and even Google, where search results and PageRank depend on people linking to the most authoritative sources on a subject.

This is the so-called Wisdom of Crowds as described by James Surowiecki in his book by that name, but how do you motivate people to join these crowds online and spend countless hours working on the sites without pay? That question has come into sharp focus, after entrepreneur-provocateur Jason Calacanis made his indecent proposal to users of rival crowdsourced news sites such as Digg and Reddit: “We will pay you $1,000 a month for your social bookmarking” work, he wrote on his blog.

Calacanis (pictured here), who started the Silicon Alley Reporter magazine and blog publisher Weblogs Inc. (later sold to AOL), was very publicly offering to pay volunteer bookmarkers on these sites to leave the sites and come to work for him — for pay — at Netscape. Calacanis is now general manager of Netscape.com, the old home page for the old browser that’s trying on a new life as a group-edited news site a la Digg, but with an editorial layer. The idea behind these sites is that the users pick out news stories or blog posts from around the Net and submit them. People then vote on them — or “Digg” them — pushing the hottest ones onto the home page for the most exposure. If a particular news story gets enough Diggs, and gets promoted, it’s likely to get an avalanche of web traffic.

Digg is already in Version 3, is ranked at #100 in web traffic by Alexa, and is trying to move beyond its roots as a technology news site. Digg CEO and co-founder Jay Adelson (pictured below) was unmoved by the Calacanis offer to steal away Top Diggers by paying them. Adelson told me the offer would not affect Digg — though it might help spark the new Netscape.

“It’s not something where there’s a short list of characters, like a team, that if you buy them, you’ll win the World Series,” Adelson said. “It doesn’t quite work that way, but it could help with the submission quality at Netscape. It doesn’t affect us in any way.”

When I brought up the possibility of Digg compensating its top users monetarily, Adelson drew a sharp line in the sand.

“Oh no, that would be a complete destruction of what we consider to be the principles of Digg,” he said. “There will be recognition for the people who do a lot of work on the site, not just for being ranked a Top Digger. In the future, you’ll see other forms of recognition that are purely, you know, things that exist within the community. Certainly no monetary compensation or things like that, because what we don’t want to do is create this artificial hierarchy.

“I’ve thought about what to do with the real power Diggers, the ones who spend their whole day on Digg and really work hard, is there a way that I could show my appreciation. The way I would show my appreciation would be to never give them more power, more features than another user has. It might be something like a T-shirt, it might be a rating that they can show other users, but it has to be a level playing field.”

Hmmmm, $1,000 of cold, hard cash from Netscape per month… or a Digg T-shirt? Doesn’t sound like a level playing field to me. But Digg power users were split over the monetary offer. While many loyal Digg users were put off by the offer, some of them were still considering the money.

Derek van Vliet, a Toronto-based programmer who goes by the moniker BloodJunkie on Digg (and was ranked #2 among users recently), told me how he has wavered over the offer — ultimately deciding to take up Calacanis on it. Here’s part of van Vliet’s email to me, describing his thought process:

I love Digg. I believe Digg has the potential to change the way all media is aggregated. Through Digg I have met a large number of kind, bright people. I can’t put a price on those contacts. That being said, after taking a day to let it sink in, I am at the point where I am considering pursuing the offer. I really appreciate that someone is recognizing the value we Diggers, Flickrers and Redditers add to the online world. And that potential for more networking opportunities is very appealing to me.

I must admit, until now I haven’t given that much credit to myself for what I am doing on Digg. I give all credit to the authors of the content I link to. Obviously whatever value I have added to the online world would be nothing without them.

I have been aware for a while that sites like Digg and Flickr are making millions off of users like me, so I have been considering possible ways to share that wealth among contributors. I think of all the ways you could go (pay per post, ad revenue share, etc.), Jason may have the best idea with the monthly flat rate. If he is convinced that he will get a return on that investment, then it is a win-win.

An Uphill Battle for Netscape

While these 12 lucky people Calacanis and Netscape pluck out and pay might now have income where they were previously doing bookmarking work for free, the Netscape site itself won’t necessarily become a slam-dunk proposition for web visitors. So far, stories on Netscape’s home page have a scant number of “votes,” with some in the single digits; on Digg’s home page, the top stories have hundreds, and in some cases 1,000-plus Diggs.

Calacanis has hit some bumps in trying to change Netscape from a general news portal, similar to Yahoo or MSN, into a social news aggregator. A group of users set up an online petition complaining about the change in format, and the New York Times even filed a story about “sour responses” to the New Netscape.

Calacanis told me he expected some rough sledding with a revamp of the old Netscape.

“A small percentage of users preferred the old version, which we expected since we are making a significant change,” he said. “However, the old Netscape site lost one third of its users over the past year, so we had to turn that around and this is the best way to do that…Right now this is an experiment and in three to six months we will figure it out. My guess is most of the services will wind up paying the top users — including MySpace and Wikipedia.”

In a nod to the problems users have had with the redesign, the Netscape site has plenty of disclaimers such as this: “If the new Netcape.com isn’t for you, make sure to check out the free AOL.com [portal].”

Reactions to Calacanis’ offer to pay community members from other sites has varied around the web and blogosphere. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington called the offer a “sign of desperation more than anything” in a post titled “Huge Red Flag at Netscape.”

Aaron Swartz (pictured here), a co-founder of community-edited news site Reddit, had a hard time taking the offer seriously.

“When we first all saw it at the office, the first reaction was laughter,” Swartz told me. “It was so funny to see this guy who just a couple weeks ago said his site was going to take off and do some great things, to see him begging for users and fighting for users. We thought that was pretty funny. We’ve gotten emails from users saying that Calacanis seems to be missing the point, saying to leave the sites just for cash.”

So what motivates the users of Reddit to put in so much work for the love of the site?

“Part of it is a selfish motivation, that it’s useful,” Swartz said. “You vote up the stories you like because other people do it, and you want the best stories on the top. It’s a fun thing to do. I got addicted to it, to find things on the Internet, submit it, vote on things and watch the impact to get something on the front page and have everyone read what you submitted. Plus there’s a whole community that’s built around it, they know each other’s names and get a sense of who each other are. It’s a group of friends you share links with.”

Vulnerabilities, Strengths of the ‘Hive Mind’

In the middle of wading through the debate on paying social bookmarkers, I came upon an essay from virtual-reality pioneer, composer, author and tech guru Jaron Lanier titled “Digital Maoism.” In it, Lanier argues that there is a fallacy to the wisdom of crowds on sites such as Wikipedia and Digg, because the collective can be stupid too. “Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles,” Lanier writes. “Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania.” Plus, the Wikipedia community had stubbornly referred to Lanier as a film director in its bio of him, despite his objections.

Lanier rants against news aggregation sites for trying to get “more meta” than each other, with Digg and Reddit and Popurls — an aggregator of the aggregators — all taking heat from him for burying original authorship without someone taking responsibility for what’s coming up to the top. His conclusion is that collectives can succeed online, but require the guidance of some individuals.

“Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals,” Lanier writes. “These people focused the collective and in some cases also corrected for some of the common hive mind failure modes. The balancing of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing projects. There’s a lot of experience out there to work with. A few of these old ideas provide interesting new ways to approach the question of how to best use the hive mind.”

While Lanier’s expertise and background is in computer systems and human interaction within those systems, I was impressed with his awareness of the changing media landscape as well. When I queried Lanier to expound on his thoughts vis a vis Digg and news aggregators, he told me via email that he wasn’t as concerned with the question of whether social automation filters or human editors were needed to best filter the news flow. Instead, he worried that sites such as Digg and Reddit were signs of a deeper problem surrounding newsgathering — that we have more news analysts than people on the ground doing hard-nosed reporting.

“It’s true we have a surplus of interpreters of news, as from bloggers, so in a sense we have a gigantic staff of volunteer public analysts, but we are starved for raw data,” he said. “We can read what a blogger on the ground in Israel or Lebanon is experiencing this week, and that is important, but there are almost no unbiased investigative reporters of consequence helping us understand what is going on from a perspective other than that of an ‘ordinary’ person on the ground. This lack is in part a failure of the Internet to serve humanity.”

Lanier then goes a step further, blaming these aggregators for shooting out traffic to silly stories and news of the weird, and ultimately hurting the funding of important, investigative reports.

“There’s also the problem that professional authors need financial sustenance,” he said. “So the overall ecosystem suggested by the popularity of approaches like Digg ultimately starves out the sources of content it is intended to help you find. You or I might post an item that will become an overnight sensation on Digg, but that won’t finance a dangerous reporting mission in the Middle East.”

Fair enough, but the aggregators also play a role by bringing up stories at smaller publications or blogs that might not have seen the light of day under traditional media oversight. As for the problems with the “hive mind” and its fallacies, the folks at Digg realize their non-hierarchical approach has its drawbacks.

“The people behind Digg, we definitely see the limitations of the wisdom of the crowds and mob mentality issues,” Digg CEO Adelson told me. “The thing we think we’ll do better than anyone else is provide the tools to counter those limitations. It’ll be an interesting experiment and we’re really excited about where it’s going to go.”

What do you think? Should social bookmarkers and other community volunteers around the web be paid if the site is making money? What’s a fair compensation for them? Which social news sites do you like and what motivates you to participate? Or do you prefer professionally edited news sites? Where would you draw the line between an open editing system and one with paid editors?

(Note that MediaShift readers have already answered the Your Take question about why you work for free online. The answer: A sense of community motivates many of you.)

UPDATE: The debate took a nastier turn when Digg co-founder Kevin Rose made some personal attacks on Netscape general manager Jason Calacanis on the Diggnation podcast and on his blog. From Rose’s blog post:

Jason,
bq. Clever PR stunt, but man, in the end I believe it’s going to do more damage for Netscape than good. Ya see users like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations… Jason, I know AOL has given you access to their war-chest, but honestly, take that money and invest it into site development.

Calacanis has tried to make the debate less personal and says many social bookmarking news sites can succeed — it’s not a winner-take-all situation. But still, Calacanis takes a stab right back at Rose and Digg:

Kevin Rose is going to make millions of dollars (perhaps tens of millions) when he sells Digg to Yahoo (my best guess). When he does sell Digg — and trust me it will be sold before in the next 12 months — he will have done it on the backs of those top 50 members. Those top 50 members will get exactly… ummm….. nothing. If I was running Netscape as a startup I would create a bonus pool for these users in case the site gets bought. I can’t do that given our structure, so we’re gonna just pay folks. Kevin should do something similar.

While Digg’s Adelson says that I took his quote about paying with T-shirts out of context, I believe I included the full context of the quote. Yes, Adelson does want to show he cares about the top users who spend all day on Digg — but how he would do that is unclear when he categorically dismisses paying them.

Aside from the personal attacks, I think this has been a healthy debate about a subject that has interested me for years — stemming from the old AOL chat room moderators, who eventually sued the company for back pay for all their volunteer work. I don’t think there is necessarily a “right answer” about paying or not paying, and as one commenter notes, we are in the early days of social bookmarking.

But perhaps there’s a middle ground or hybrid model that could work, some sort of payment mechanism similar to the South Korean citizen journalism site, Ohmynews, where submitters are paid a small fee if their story rises to the top. Rather than dismiss every new idea as a crock, let’s keep an open mind and see what transpires.

My Content 2.0 presentation in London

Dierdre Malloy has synopsized my speech I gave in London - pretty dam well and there's a podcast (gosh I hate that term) - AUDIO RECORDING of the speech - as well.

I actually had a pretty good time giving that speech, though I wish my voice had been in better shape - so I could have serenaded folks more - to the tunes of Gilbert & Sullivan (who’s home was about 100 yards from where we were meeting.)

Anyway - just about everything in this speech - given on 06/06/06 - rings true and still bears the fruit of my insights and observations.

Enjoy.

Pink Tentacle: Device uses waves to "print" on water surface

The device, called AMOEBA (Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin), consists of 50 water wave generators encircling a cylindrical tank 1.6 meters in diameter and 30 cm deep (about the size of a backyard kiddie pool). The wave generators move up and down in controlled motions to simultaneously produce a number of cylindrical waves that act as pixels. The pixels, which measure 10 cm in diameter and 4 cm in height, are combined to form lines and shapes. AMOEBA is capable of spelling out the entire roman alphabet, as well as some simple kanji characters. Each letter or picture remains on the water surface only for a moment, but they can be produced in succession on the surface every 3 seconds.

Researchers at Akishima Laboratories have developed similar devices in the past that used waves to draw pictures on the surface of water, but those devices had trouble producing letters with straight lines (such as the letter K). Additionally, it took the previous devices up to 15 minutes of data input time to produce each letter.

The newly developed technology uses improved calculation methods for controlling the wave generators, relying on formulas known as Bessel functions. In addition to being able to draw letters consisting of straight lines, the input time has been drastically reduced to between 15 and 30 seconds for each letter.

Akishima Laboratories expects the technology to be incorporated into amusement devices that combine acoustics, lighting and fountain technology, which they hope to see installed at theme parks and hotels.

[Source: Fuji Sankei]

The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex: Avoiding Ender's Folly

ACE2006 Keynote: The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex

permalink
Keynote talk delivered at the 2006 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, 14-16 June 2006, Hollywood, California.
Slightly modified from the original Keynote presentation, available here:
http://research.techkwondo.com/files/presentations/ACE2006Talk_TheMilitaryIndustrialLightAndMagicComplex.pdf

trackback
Tim Lenoir. 2000. All But War Is Simulation: The Military-Entertainment Complex. Configurations, 8(3), Fall, 2000: 289-335.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/TimLenoir/MilitaryEntertainmentComplex.htm

Bruce Sterling. 1993. War Is Virtual Hell. Wired, Mar/Apr 1993.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/virthell.html

Julian Bleecker. Coherent Light: The Cultural Politics of Virtual Reality. Master’s of Engineering Thesis, University of Washington, Seattle. June 1992.
http://research.techkwondo.com/files/CoherentLightTheCulturalPoliticsOfVirtualRealityMastersThesis.pdf

tag cloud
military, entertainment, simulation, virtual reality, telepresence, electronic games, electronic entertainment, virtual worlds, ender’s game, orson scott card, ivan sutherland, katamari damacy, fan culture, 1st Life, 2nd Life, computer graphics, world of warcraft, play, playground, alternative games, social impact games, social practice, embodying social practice

abstraction
The relationship between military and entertainment is well-known and scarcely misunderstood. How has this relationship shaped the production and circulation of entertainment cultures in the early 21st century, wherein digital networked, massively multiparticipatory online games have become social life simulations? Is it possible to learn from the military’s eminence in translating 2nd Life experiences (training simulations) into 1st Life action (deployments and operations) so that we breech the 2nd Life/1st Life barrier so as to create tangible actions that mitigate 1st Life catastrophic failure? How can 2nd Life experiences offer productive couplings to 1st Life actions in a way that avoids the dramatic folly of the character Ender from the Orson Scott Card novel “Ender’s Game”?

ACE2006 Keynote: The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex

Design as culture work

"We can obviously no longer duck and cover. These times require designers and content-creators to become involved in the economic context of our work. Of course economics turns out to implicate culture and politics as well. Poisonous ideas can be found lurking in the mightiest global institution of all - consumerism.

Here's what I want to say. Consumerism demeans us. Nobody wants to be a consumer. The power relationship implied by the term should be unacceptable to everyone, if they were able to understand it. I picture a 'consumer' as something like a giant slug, a simple tube through which stuff passes from retail to landfill.

[...]

But back to business. Obviously, an all-out revolution against consumerism would be, shall we say, resisted. But a serious head-change is definitely in order. I propose that each of us actively redefine the success criteria for business to include the cultural and material costs and benefits of the product, as well as what we currently think of as 'the bottom line.' I'm suggesting that we find ways to help both kids and adults have access to this material and the means to understand it. I want every person in this country to know the unauthorized biography of every single thing they buy.

[...]

Design gives voice to values. Design suggests what is useful or beautiful or pleasurable or good or true. The affordances of a design suggest desirable actions. A design that has not engaged the designer's values may speak, but with a hollow voice. We know the rules of good design. But it often comes as a delightful revelation to young designers that brilliant design not only permits but requires the designer's personal voice.

And so we arrive at the happy confluence of responsibility and power. We are only the victims and servants of business as usual if we choose to be. This work of transformation - which I have come to think of as 'culture work' - must be approached mindfully and with great conviction and effort. The strategy of culture work is not straight-ahead revolution; rather it is to inject new genetic material into the culture without activating its immune system. By intervening in the present, we are designing the future.

I wish us all a great deal of courage, self-discipline, and clear-eyed hope."

Theory of Participatory Art

participation as activism

Suzana Milevska's essay Participatory Art: A Paradigm Shift from Objects to Subjects in the 2/06 issue of the journal springerin is a dense, theoretical discourse that raises questions regarding the intersubjectivity of the collective and challenges to the idealization and realization of "community" in participatory art.

springerin is a quarterly magazine dedicated to the theory and critique of contemporary art and culture addressing a public that perceives cultural phenomena as socially and politically determined. A special section of every issue (Netzteil) examines the potentials of new technologies and media.

Originally posted by michelle from networked_performance, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 23, 2006 at 08:18 PM

NYT on serious games

In the NYT, there is a good article by Clive Thompson about serious games or the inherent potential of games to be learning platform. Some excerpts:

Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change.
(…)
“What everyone’s realizing is that games are really good at illustrating complex situations,” said Suzanne Seggerman
(…)
Henry Jenkins, an M.I.T. professor who studies games and learning, said the medium has matured along with the young people who were raised on it. “The generation that grew up with Super Mario is entering the workplace, entering politics, so they see games as just another good tool to use to communicate,” he added. “If games are going to be a mature medium, they’re going to serve a variety of functions. It’s like with film. We think first of using it for entertainment, but then also for education and advertising and politics and all that stuff.”
(…)
This is the central conceit behind all these efforts: that games are uniquely good at teaching people how complex systems work.
(…)
But do these games actually work? Even proponents admit that it’s still difficult to say. “These things are just at the prototype level,” Professor Jenkins said. “We’ve just got one classroom here, one classroom there, where we’ve documented some benefits.” And without more studies documenting the effectiveness of the games, he said, “oxygen’s going to be sucked out of this.”
(…)
“Ultimately, a video game is just another medium for artistic expression,” he concluded. “Which is why I like this game in a weird way, because if you are going to play games, why not learn something important in the process?”

The article is also full of examples of this types of games.

Guardian column: Network 2.0

Here is my Guardian column this week (and here’s a nonregistration version). Snippets:

Witness the toppling of the TV tower: this month in the US, primetime viewing of broadcast networks sunk to the lowest level in ratings history: 20.8 million on average. At the same time, the open video-sharing service YouTube revealed that it is delivering 100m shows a day. No wonder BBC director general Mark Thompson just announced a major restructuring, tearing down walls between broadcast and digital for a “360-degree, multiplatform” world. “Much of what we call new media,” he said, “is really present media.” Yes, thanks to the internet, we are watching the end of linear television.

does more than destroy. It forces the media to redefine themselves, to discover their essence. Broadcast networks thought their value was in controlling precious distribution and content. But in this post-scarcity media economy, the real job of a network is to find us the good stuff. Doing that no longer requires owning studios or transmitter towers. Today, a network is born with every link. When you recommend shows to friends, you’re a channel. When your blog links to good reading online, you’re a magazine. When you share your iTunes playlist, you’re a DJ. Today, everybody’s a network. . . .

Simply put, a good network today will find the right stuff for you: no longer one size fits all, but one size fits me; no longer a prisoner of a 24-hour schedule, but primetime as my time.

As Amazon helps you find the right book, so the new network will be built on experience, trust and relevance to help you find the shows you’ll like. And in a world with unlimited content, there is an unlimited demand for such networks that filter and recommend. . . .

So the old networks - including newspapers, which should start acting more like networks - must transform themselves from closed to open, centralised to distributed, one-way to two-way. They need to learn to find and recommend not just their own good stuff but good stuff from the world, from fellow creators (who need not be competitors). This is a new and valuable service. And they need to learn to support these new creators by sending them both audience and revenue in distributed promotional and advertising networks. Consultant and blogger John Hagel puts it this way: “Audience-relationship businesses take these proliferating content options as an opportunity, rather than a challenge. The more options there are, the more value that can be created by organising, packaging, presenting and adding to these options for specific audiences.” So the big guys need to see themselves not as the owners of a network but as members of networks. For networks are no longer about controlling but sharing. They are not about broadcasting but about finding and being found. They are no longer static. Networks are fluid.

Aggregating The War

There's a video on YouTube simply called, "war." is a home video of a trip down the stairs and into the street with alarm sirens blaring.  Perhaps it was made in Israel (as the descriptive tag "16.7.06 war in haifa. hisbllah attak haifa" suggests), perhaps it was made somewhere else --we cannot be sure.

Is this news?  The comments posted by users suggest that it is purely an opinion piece.  Is this how news will be ultimately be aggregated in a post-YouTube world?

A very different community of interest can be found at http://www.bloggingbeirut.com.  This blog leads with the death toll from the conflict on the left side of the page above the scroll.  Is this how news will ultimately be aggregated in a post-blogging world?

The thought experiment here has nothing to do with the war or politics, it has to do with the aggregation of thousands of posts, blogs, video and audio clips--and how one might sort them out. 

Forget about technology for a second and just think about how you might accomplish this task by hand.  Would you organize items by type?  Good guys/Bad guys?  How would you know which was which?  Is there a civilian mother on any side of any conflict any where on earth who deserves to hold her dead five-year-old in her arms?  Maybe you could simply organize the content by "us and them," or by category or geography.  Could you imagine a linear stream of video content 24/7 from a war zone without pundits or talking heads sorting out the images for viewers?  How would people react?  It would not be like "C-span for war" because you would not be able to verify the authenticity or accuracy of the content.

If you spend a few minutes online this week, you will find literally thousands of items directly related to the current crisis in the Middle East.  What's new about them is how they are starting to be organized, how easy they are to find and how unfiltered they are.  Is this an inefficient system that represents an opportunity for smart businesspeople and technologists, or is this a glimpse of a possible future for the information age?

Perhaps it is neither.  It may turn out that people need to be told what the news is and what they are supposed to think about it.  The opportunity may simply be for existing news-gathering organizations to conscript the millions of people with home video cameras and camera phones and use their content in their existing news programming. 

This is not a new thought, but this week the world witnessed a "real time" up-close and personal view of a conflict unlike any other news presentation it has ever seen.  Maybe it was not organized the way we are used to seeing content organized, but, if you knew where to look, the view was prophetic.

DRM now the ‘biggest issue’ in preserving information for the future

The Guardian has an interview with Richard Masters, of the British Library’s digital objects management programme looking at the impact of technology on archiving. The usual worries about file formats, media incompatability and how to select what to preserve and what not to are discussed, but:

“The biggest issue is digital rights management. At the moment, acting as an honest broker between the public interest and the individual rights holders is incredibly difficult. Much more so than with printed material that is physically deposited on your site. Many electronic property holders lease material and specifically prohibit copying for preservation purposes. The law, as it stands, is on their side. The rights holders are terrified - rightly so in my view - that once it’s in the public domain it can be copied any number of times illicitly without any redress.”

Masters makes the “rightly so in my view” comment, but doesn’t make the point that if the same attitude had been taken to preserving books in the first place (”we can’t put them in a public library, someone might copy them!”), there would be no public libraries and no British Library.*

As I see it, as a member of the public, if my tax money is going to be spent in any way upholding copyright, I want that benefit for rightsholders to come with a benefit for the public interest, i.e. that the rightsholders must permit copies to be made for the public interest, with no DRM or other technical restrictions in place.

* In the UK, as far as I know, it is an obligation for all publishers to send copies of anything they publish to the ‘legal deposit libraries’ (British Library, University of Cambridge, Bodleian, Aberystwyth, Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin). I’ve done it; I don’t think I was permitted to send the books with the pages glued shut, so why should electronic media creators be allowed to submit DRM’d material?

YouTube - Steal This Disc

An indie director talks about how movie piracy affects him (NSFW audio)

(Well, it's not real but it's still funny.)

Interesting New Mobile Alert Technology

The All Points Blog flags this InformationWeek article about the wireless crisis alert system that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is building. As All Points points out, one of the technologies under consideration is especially interesting because it doesn’t need to track users’ locations to tell whether they should receive a message. Instead, an application on the device simply filters out messages that don’t apply.

Most location-based messaging systems track users’ locations and then send messages only to the users in the target area. The SquareLoop technology the DHS is considering does things slightly differently.

[SquareLoop] doesn’t track a person’s location. Instead, it relies on an application downloaded on the phone and the phone’s wireless receiver to filter messages, which contain a target location and time frame. The phone then determines if the message applies. “We don’t need to know where someone is because we’re pushing all that out to the edge of the network, really out to the cell phone,” [SquareLoop COO Joe] Walsh says. In response to a traffic accident or a biological agent release, SquareLoop can send messages only to those people in the vicinity of the affected area, even days afterward. Emergency response teams can designate, on mapping software, the area in which a given message applies. For those outside that location, the message is archived in case they enter it later.

It’s an interesting way to manage location-based messaging, mostly because it does an end run around a lot of privacy concerns that people have with such applications. It also doesn’t require a database to store users’ current locations, and should be able to broadcast the data quite narrowly. From the article: “People who live in Chicago wouldn’t receive alerts about an evacuation of the Sears Tower, for example, if they were out of town for some reason.” But if they returned while evacuation conditions still prevailed, they’d receive the message then.

So is this a “push” technology or a “pull” technology? A “push-pull” technology? Whatever it is, it’s potentially very interesting, and presents a nice model for one-way mobile communication. We’ll see how broadly it catches on.

Questioning Design

" Perhaps the most enduring joke (or truism) of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series was that the answer to life, the universe and everything was 42. Obviously, it's a pretty shoddy answer without the right question (the scheming mice of the book try to pawn off "how many roads must a man walk down"). The same problem confronts designers every day. We are taught that design is about finding answers to question and solutions to problems. Fine, but without the right question or problem, these answers become useless, or even damaging."

(Continued at IDFuel)

Embracing Web 2.0 in an Education 1.0 Universe

Yesterday I had the honor of delivering the keynote at the ThinkBright Summer Digital Institute, hosted by WNED public television in Buffalo, New York. The speech, "Embracing Web 2.0 in an Education 1.0 Universe," was a variation of one I've done previously this year, but with a greater emphasis on education. For those of you who are interested, here's a podcast of the speech, along with the accompanying Powerpoint. -andy

Blip.tv does it right

There has been so much talk about video hosting sites and business models and web2.0 downfalls that it’s been difficult to keep up.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable recently wrote about Blip.tv’s new funding and questioned the site’s focus:

For starters, Blip.tv’s terminology is questionable - the focus is on creating a “video blog”, and each video clip is referred to as a post. I’m not sure how wise this is: video blogging implies some kind of dedication, while most users of online video sites are quite happy to upload the occasional clip. What’s more, it implies that you actually appear in the video - that’s rarely the case with the most popular viral videos.

Dedicated videobloggers are, indeed Blip’s target user and it’s a wise move. Videobloggers are notoriously loyal customers and Blip is a big part of the videoblogging community. Vloggers are looking for hosting sites that will not keep their content in walled gardens, releasing it only on branded flash players. We want to use the formats that work best for us and we don’t want our videos to be considered "Blip" videos. We want our videos to be Ours. Blip does this nicely by offering a flash version for those that want it and access to the files in the format we upload as for our own sites. That way, we can make our content available in RSS feeds. Want to have your vlog featured on itunes? With YouTube, it can’t happen. With Blip (and sites like it), it can.

A Blip user is not necessarily a YouTube user (although some people will upload to both places - YouTube to get the audience and Blip to get the control).  Blip users are interested in creating their own audience - pointing them back to their own sites - and Blip does this well.

Many people have been wondering about the precarious nature of video hosting sites such as YouTube who receive funding yet, seemingly, have no business model. Reliance on advertising is sketchy and has been the topic of recent articles asking just how long a site can sustain itself on advertising alone. This is a real problem for sites that rely on viewer numbers to sustain their financial growth. Add to the mix the growing number of hosting sites (240 at last count, according the San Francisco Chronicle), and the fight for audience attention is on.

How can these companies expect to compete for advertising dollars? The answer is, they can’t. There will be a lot of closed up shops in the near future and users who have uploaded their content to these sites will lose their content - unless you’re uploading to a site like Blip.tv.

Blip.tv offers back up of content by crossposting to the Internet Archive. The videos are available from Blip in formats that can be downloaded and saved to your hard drive (or anyone else’s). Users are not bound to the site.

Likewise, viewers are not bound to the site and this will be increasingly important as more consumers use RSS and mobile devices. Unlike sites which require viewers to go to a particular website to view content (sometimes, having to join up as well), video offered in RSS readable formats are available in one location (or on one device). While viewers now tend to choose YouTube as a primary viewing site for video to avoid searching multiple sites, hosting sites that use RSS readable formats will not be required destinations in order to view the content.

Blip does not rely on viewership but on content creators. This is a huge difference between Blip and YouTube and, I think, it’s a difference that will stand them in good stead as other hosters fall by the wayside. By placing the focus on the content makers rather than garnering large viewerships and social networks, they avoid the pitfalls of competing for eyes.

Not only relying on individual vloggers, Blip.tv also provides video hosting services to companies that wish to have their own video sites as well as providing website creation and maintainence. The newest of these ventures is the William Shatner DVD Club - a site for sci-fi fans.

You can probably tell that I both use and love Blip.tv. That’s not a disclaimer. It’s a fact.

- Anne

Embrace your youth, "Fly" games with arms spread

Filed under: Culture

timeline visualization

a AJAX widget for visualizing time-based events from a simple XML file, without the need for software installation, server-side or client-side. users can pan the timeline by dragging it horizontally.
see also google trends & timeline of trends & history of programming languages.
[mit.edu (religion timeline example) & mit.edu (example list)]

News Online

The New York Times writes:

A new research paper seeks to answer a riddle for publishers, editors and even readers: when does new news become old news?

news article on the Internet, the answer is surprisingly long: 36 hours on average, according to the paper, “The Dynamics of Information Access on the Web,” which appeared in the June issue of Physical Review E, the journal of the American Physical Society.

More precisely, 36 hours is the amount of time it takes for half of the total readership of an article to have read it, the paper found. The physicist who led the research, Albert-László Barabási of the University of Notre Dame, said that the paper’s conclusion should give journalists hope, even in the era of instant news.

The Boom Heard Round Hollywood

When Amanda Congdon unceremoniously told the world July 5 she was leaving the popular Rocketboom video blog, it set off a frenzy the likes of which we've never seen in the social media universe. You would have thought that Teri Hatcher was announcing her departure from "Desperate Housewives."

Between July 5 and July 14 (when I am writing this column), Ms. Congdon's exit from Rocketboom generated a staggering 129 news articles plus personal appearances on several major TV news programs, including CNN's "Reliable Sources." Of course, this event was even more magnified in the blogosphere, where it generated some 2,000-plus conversations.

Since she announced her split with Rocketboom, Ms. Congdon has been coy about her future. She did confirm in an e-mail, however, that she signed with the Endeavor talent agency in May. Meanwhile, Rocketboom wasted no time in replacing their star with Joanne Colan, who at one time was with MTV Europe. Ms. Colan will surely see a boost from this smart career move.

Ms. Congdon's departure from Rocketboom and her move to Endeavor will go down as the shot heard round the entertainment world. She is poised to become the first personality to parlay her tremendous online fame into mega-celebrity in the offline world. I'm sure her phone is ringing off the hook and it won't be long before we see her pitching products on TV.

(Continued at MicroPersuasion.)

Distributed Revenue-Sharing Ad Platforms Are the Paradigm For Monetizing Social Media

I’ve been critical of AdSense of late, but let’s give credit where credit is due — AdSense, i.e. a distributed, shared-revenue advertising platform, represents the new paradigm for monetizing content. That’s why I remain skeptical that MySpace, despite being the current center of gravity for social media and despite its current off-the-charts traffic growth, will necessarily be a boon for News Corp.

Robert Young has an interesting post on GigaOm which got me thinking about this — Robert argues that traditional media companies should focus on building “socially-integrated media empires,” with News Corp’s acquisition of MySpace being the touchstone example:

At the end of the day, the media conglomerates should view social media much like they did the rise of cable TV. Cable eventually took half the market away from traditional broadcast TV, so the media conglomerates vertically and horizontally integrated their way into cable in order to buy back market share. They should do the same with social media by pursuing a strategy of social integration. Rupert Murdoch already made his first move, and it looks like NBC is about to take their first baby steps. Welcome to the new world of socially-integrated media empires!

As I said to Robert in a back-and-forth in the comments of his post, the notion of a socially-integrated media company assumes that media companies can “own” social media in the old media sense.

As I’ve argued before, the reason why News Corp is struggling to monetize MySpace is that most people who visit MySpace are not visiting “MySpace,” the News Corp media property — they are visiting EACH OTHER.

Contrast what News Corp is trying to do by directly monetizing the content it “owns” on MySpace (with the issue of ownership leading to incidents like the Billy Bragg brouhaha) with what Google did with AdSense.

AdSense has been so successful because it does not attempt to own either the content platform or the content itself — note that Google does not run ads on Blogger per se — they provide bloggers with a distributed, self-serve, revenue-sharing ad platform to run the ads themselves, and then Google takes a (big) piece of the action. But they don’t have to own Blogger to do it — owning Blogger simply allows Google to provide the blogging platform for free and thus drive more content creation that feeds AdSense.

News Corp needs to stop thinking in terms of “owning” MySpace’s page views — advertisers don’t want to advertise on those pages because News Corp doesn’t control the content. And MySpace users don’t want the ads appearing on “their” pages uninvited.

It would seem the real opportunity is for someone, News Corp or a third party, to offer MySpace users a platform like AdSense to monetize their content. In this scenario, MySpace is merely a free host, like Blogger — it gives them no advantage in providing this distributed ad platform.

As Robert pointed out in response to this idea:

Currently, if users place those ads on their pages, they would be in technical violation of MySpace’s TOS. It would be very interesting to see how they deal with such a situation.

News Corp could simply buy the new ad network, of course. But that wouldn’t really resolve the core issue.

It would indeed be very interesting to see what would happen. There is a BIG opportunity to monetize MySpace and social media — just not in the old 1.0 way.

DIY mobile art projection

The Graffiti Research Lab, the Eyebeam OpenLab and Paul Notzold have a fun Instructable on mobile outdoor projection - "Outdoor digital projection in urban environments is a great method for getting your content up big before the eyes and in the minds of your fellow city inhabitants. This tutorial comes out of trial and error and it works. But please be careful. Helpful comments on safety and alternative methods are encouraged. The majority of this tutorial is aimed toward using a 2500 lumen projector (or smaller)..." - Link.

Related:
DIY Backyard Theater - Link.

Originally from MAKE Magazine, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 18, 2006 at 04:48 PM

Sustaining Autonomous Media Networks – Part I

Originally from Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net - CULTURE AND POLITICS AFTER THE NET at July 18, 2006, 11:08, published by Marisa S. Olson

Proposed new service for moblog journalism

Last winter , Erik Sundelof, one of the Reuters Digital Visions Fellows at Stanford, talked to my Digital Journalism class about his project, which has now been the subject of a PBS interview:

While there are plenty of big news outlets such as the BBC that accept photo and video submissions from their audience, and phone services that let you send photos to moblogs or mobile blogs, the idea of one global service for submissions from every type of cell phone hasn’t caught on yet.

Sundelof has spent much of the past school year at Stanford developing a prototype of such a service, currently mocked up at InTheFieldOnline.net . I met him for lunch and he showed me how simple the system was. Take a photo or video with your camera phone. Send a text message with attachment to an email address, and voila! it’s posted to the site after just a brief delay. He’s tested it in rural villages in India, and with his parents in Sweden, where he grew up.

At the moment, he’s working on a “cooler version” of the service in the hopes of attracting Silicon Valley funding, or perhaps paying customers who run newspaper sites or other media outlets. His hope is to build an open source software platform — with programming code that can be improved and modified by anyone — to enable people to send in photos or video to central sites or to their blogs or websites of their choice.

Against Platform Monopolies: Platform Protectionism

Earlier today I described the concept of network effects and analogized it to gains from trade. I suggested that public policy should encourage open systems in order to maximize the gains to interoperability.

But there’s an obvious objection to this line of argument, which is hinted at in the IEEE article I referenced yesterday:

Surely it would require a singularly obtuse management, to say nothing of stunningly inefficient financial markets, to fail to seize this obvious opportunity to double total network value by simply combining the two.

In other words, if there are gains to interoperability, it’s in the interests of the firms themselves to make their platforms interoperable in order to increase their value. Firms, therefore, have the necessary incentive to maximize the value of their platforms with or without a platform monopoly.

The problem with this response is that it ignores the question of who captures the gains to interoperability. In a closed platform controlled by a single firm, most of the surplus flows to the platform owner, who is able to raise prices to capture the increased value. Apple is currently reaping the financial rewards from sitting atop a closed platform as it grows to dominate its market. On the other hand, in an open platform, competition pushes down prices. As a result, most of the surplus flows to the consumer. Given that price-fixing agreements are difficult to enforce (not to mention illegal), companies may rationally opt to keep their platforms separate.

The free trade analogy applies perfectly here: from an economic perspective, the companies choosing not to interoperate are behaving like protectionist firms. Free trade simultaneously increases total wealth and reduces the profits of the formerly-protected industry. Likewise, interoperability increases societal wealth but it reduces the profits of the firm that previously had exclusive control over its platform.

Of course, this analysis ignores the possibility of inter-platform competition. If switching between platforms is inexpensive, then inter-platform competition will drive down prices the same way intra-platform competition does. Unfortunately, a lot of technological platforms have high switching costs. Moreover, switching costs tend to grow over time, as users make more and more platform-specific investments. Once one has spent $500 on iTunes music, one is unlikely to purchase a music player that will not play iTunes songs, no matter how superior it might otherwise be to the Apple-branded alternatives. So once a market has matured, so that most users have made large platform-specific investments, the owners of the respective platforms are likely to enjoy considerable market power.

Of course, my argument here doesn’t fully answer the argument I laid out on Sunday, because any discussion of how to divide the profits from a platform is academic if the platform is never created in the first place. It’s possible that the only way we’ll get certain types of platforms is if we give the firm that creates them a monopoly on platform access. I’ll explore that question next.

hello, my name is "http://gonze.com/about"

Responses to my "my name is..." posting, all sent via MyLID.net messaging:

Johannes Ernst, the creator of MyLID, said:

What about http://gonze.com/ as your "My name is ..." Would that be better? ;-)
If so, http://lid.netmesh.org/wiki/Turn_Your_Blog_Into_a_LID_URL

That's a good idea -- it bothers me to not own my identity -- so I followed the steps above and converted my personal about page into an LID URL. My name is now http://gonze.com/about.

I did that by adding this code to the HEAD section of the about page:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://mylid.net/lucasgonze" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://mylid.net/lucasgonze" />
<meta http-equiv="X-YADIS-Location" content="http://mylid.net/lucasgonze?meta=capabilities">
<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://mylid.net/lucasgonze?meta=capabilities">

VirtualFlavius said:

Nice concept, but how do you integrate this into websites and why would all these marketing monsters give up their favorite registration form?

To integrate it into websites, the website developer will have to go to some trouble to install and use an open source package from each of the URL identity systems they want to support. (There are more than one). Some reasons why they might bother:

1. To prevent potential new users from going away when they learn they have to create yet another account. For myself, I have a strong preference for not going through the signup process again and again, and site has to really show its stuff before I'll bother.
2. To save on the development and infrastructure costs of maintaining a user account system. This is a lot of work for developers and gives them no edge over their competitors.
3. To prevent the security problems that are associated with maintaining user accounts. Any time you have user accounts you have a honeypot to attract crackers.

Marco Raaphorst said:

mylid.net is interesting. Would be great if it would be multilingual.

I'm glad somebody brought up internationalization, because this problem shows the strength of URL-based identity schemes like LID, OpenID and Yadis. The reason for URL-based identity technologies is to decentralize identity. Anybody who can run a web server has the power to mint new URLs, and since an identity is simply a URL, all those people can also mint identities. These people have the power to write servers in the language of their choice; nobody can stop them, nobody can freeze out their language by failing to support it.

Overall, I think that URL-based identity is as politically correct as it gets, and I dig it a lot. Still, I'd like to see more immediate benefits from these systems. It would be fabulous to be able to tie together my Odeo voice messages with the spam resistance of MyLID email, for example. PeopleAggregator addresses the issue of open identity by emphasizing the tangible benefits -- what can you do with an open system that you can't do with a closed one? -- and that's the path to victory here as with all open systems.

P.S.: to people whose messages I quoted in this public document, I did it because I'm pretty sure it's in the spirit in which your comments were intended, as part of the blog conversation.

Flash, FFMPEG and more..

Over at OpenVlog I have just finished implementing an automatic Flash conversion for video that is sent in. It was quite a task from getting FFMPEG running on Dreamhost with LAME and AMR support (you need to change your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable), understanding Ruby enough to get FLVTool2 installed and working (another environment variable issue) and building a fancy Flash video player..

I think it was worthwhile in the end..

A Sample: I love NY (click on the Flash Version link).

Next will be making thumbnails with FFMPEG so that I don't use the silly "Click Here" graphic anymore.. I suppose I should still say, "click here" as for some strange reason I can not get the mouse pointer to change over top of the QuickTime plugin. That is a story for another day but the gist is, use JavaScript instead of reference movies. The added benefit is that IE users don't have the extra alert.

Thanks to Cat and the FreeFormed.org crew for the impetus.

Social communication “eyeball” robot

Via News.3yen, this incredible Muusocia developed by ATR and Systec Akazawa. Described by news.3yen as a “social communication robot”:

The website claims that its “purpose is to make the existence consciousness of the person reconfirm who touches the Muu” …whatever the hell that means. The eyeball robot is aimed for RESIDENTS in nursing facilities and the like. The Muu has a general-purpose design which can be used as a receptionist or companion to the autistic using its ability to recognize person’s faces and voices and answer questions.
(…)
“Muu Socia has voice recognition, voice synthesis, speech processing and face recognition capabilities. And it starts bouncing around when something obstructs its view

A video about it here (.WMV, 5Mb).

Why do I blog this? yet another curious non-anthromorphic robot-like device a la nabaztag. Occurences of such artifacts are interesting to me because it shows the convergence between pervasive computing and robots. What about the user experience of such devices?

Large displays and spatial cognition

Larges displays and how they are perceived, experienced and used by people is an interesting topic, especially when it comes to the gaming experience. A paper I ran across lately about this issue:

Tan, D.S., Gergle, D., Scupelli, P., Pausch, R. (2006): Physically Large Displays Improve Performance on Spatial Tasks, In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 13 (1), 71 - 99 .

The paper describes a series of experiments comparing the performance of users working on a large projected wall display to that of users working on a standard desktop monitor. Results suggest that physically large displays, even at identical visual angles as small displays, increase performance on spatial tasks such as 3D navigation as well as mental map formation and memory.

Why do I blog this? it’s interesting to see how display features can impact cognitive processes for the users.

Omni Zona Franca:

Hacktivism and Networking with a Low Budget Technology

"How does the concept of "new media" function when technology is difficult to find? Is it possible to talk about hacktivism in geographical, political and social spaces where the lack of technology prevents from developing practices and activities that involve exclusively the Internet? ...

[W]e need to construct networks within the people. Without a real internet ... working on the island (a basic internet connection costs 6 to 10 dollars an hour, about half the average Cuban salary...). For [OMNI] the network is the city, the streets; the relationship between the peoples ...

The use of digital media and their forcing are definitely hacker practices that bring communication and interactivity. The creative use of digital media, in the Island available only from the black market if you’re Cuban and have no official reason to buy it) make the work of OMNI an action of critical, conscious and highly ethic hacktivism, which brings together all the media you can use, to experiment without limits and conditions ... Naked from every superstructure, technology becomes one of the greatest ways to realize social action..." From Omni Zona Franca: Hacktivism and Networking with a Low Budget Technology by Lucrezia Cippitelli, newmediaFIX.

analysis of top 100 youtube videos

A short blogversation last week about virals has prompted my curiosity to dig into YouTube and to carry out a systematic content analysis of the most viewed videos in an attempt to get under the skin of the viral phenomena. Put differently, I wanted to get a better grasp of what makes people tick when it comes to viral content with a strong emphasis on user generated content.

Carnivore -- new Version 2.2 now available

From -> alex galloway
Carnivore -- new Version 2.2 now available http://r-s-g.org/carnivore new features include the ability to log packets to a text file and the ability to record and playback capture sessions. questions/comments/suggestions always welcome.. + + + Version 2.2, July 2006 + moved java class files around so that there is a "core" engine responsible for all ... [more]

Carnivore is a surveillance tool for data networks. At the heart of the project is CarnivorePE, a software application that listens to all Internet traffic (email, web surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Next, CarnivorePE serves this data stream to interfaces called "clients." These clients are designed to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways. Use CarnivorePE to run Carnivore clients from your own desktop, or use it to make your own clients.

Originally posted by alex galloway from Rhizome.org Rare, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 13, 2006 at 09:12 AM

NEURAL N.25

new media art. emusic. hacktivism.

NEURAL N.25: new media art .Siegfried Zielinski interview. .Olia Lialina interview. Christophe Bruno interview. .Identity in the age of digital technologies. news: Ten-sided, ten identities in a blog, Emotion's Defibrillator, consciousness short circuit, Camera Obscura 2005/1-Inf, memetic photographic virus, Confess.or, one to many confessions, Difference Engine, extracting the metaphysics from the net. reviews: ..books / dvd / cd-rom: Satellite of Love; M.Eraso, A.Ludovico, S.Krekovic - The Mag.net reader; A. Cerveira Pinto - META.morfosis; M.Jahrmann, M.Moswitzer - Ludic Society Magazine #1 + #2; T.Corby - Network Art; V. Baroni - Postcarts; J.Juul - Half-Real.

emusic .Andrea Polli interview. Snog interview. Derek Holzer interview. news: 4'04" Sound not found, Pianolina, the interactive piano, Dewanatron, cranking electronics, eShofar, folk tradition and technology, Amy e Klara, machinic male - dicta. reviews: books / dvd / cd+: A.Hugill - 'Pataphysics; Microscope Session DVD 2.0; Live Cinema 01; G.Kiers+L. van der Velden - Sonic Acts XI; AGF.3 & Sue.C - Mini Movies; V.Moorefield - The Producer as Composer; Y.Kawamura - Slide. .cd reviews: Aphex Twin, Francisco Lopez, Luc Ferrari, John Hegre & Maja Ratkje, Autechre / The Hafler Trio, Doddodo, Howard Stelzer / Giuseppe Ielasi, Jarrod Fowler, Warren Burt, Hyper, Rf, Pure, Alvars Orkester, Miller + Fiam, Rlw, Crawling With Tarts, Scatole Sonore/Impro Ensemble, Product, Incidental Amplifications, Refractions.

hacktivism .Raqs Media Collective interview. Fernando Llamos interview. Hacking Biometrics. news: Monolith, copyright hacking, Un_wiki, Wikipedia radical polemic, Movie Mapper, The Brand Hype Database, Pneumatic Parliament, instant democracy, Zone Interdite, mapping secret territories. reviews: books / dvd / cd+:F.Stalder - Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks, B.Marenko - DiY Survival, M.Gerritzen - Beautiful World, M.Vishmidt + M.A.Francis + J.Walsh + L. Sykes - Media Mutandis.

Tuesday Topsight, July 11, 2006

I had the somewhat surreal experience last night of participating in a focus group on the California energy industry. My experience was odd because, about a quarter of the way through, the moderator was called out by the faceless folks behind the mirror, and when he returned, he asked that I, in essence, keep my mouth shut. I literally knew too much about the world of energy production, distribution and efficiency to make a good focus group participant. I was told that they'd love to hear what I had to say at the end, if there was enough time. I did manage to sneak a couple of comments in here and there, but I ended up being more an observer than anything else.

Some things about the focus group are worth noting, however. The primary California power company, Pacific Gas & Electric, is going all-out to make itself into a leading renewable/"green"/"clean" energy producer, with upcoming programs including state-wide smart meters, wave power, and a goal of 20% of California energy coming from wind and solar by 2010. More importantly, every one of the participants in the focus group (which included stay-at-home moms, retirees, pink collar workers, executives, and a few hard to categorize folks) wanted to see PG&E do more to drive to renewable energy. Even the one guy for whom lower energy prices was a top priority put increased renewable power as his number two. That the power company is trending green is heartening; that the citizenry is leading them that way is even more so.

• Phrase of the Week: "Aspirational Terrorists." David Stephenson notes the term in the coverage of the apparent plan to bomb tunnels between New York and New Jersey. The wording seems to encompass both those who talk tough but don't have realistic plans for carrying out their threats (so-called "jihadi bravado," a fascinating language mix used by the FBI) and those who may be a bit more capable, but have no direct links to existing groups and have yet to turn plans into action. This is an important piece of re-framing, as it is a sign the people engaged in counter-terrorism work are moving away from casting any possible terrorist cell as "al Qaida" (as if it were a structured organization with branch offices) and towards the "netwar" view articulated by John Robb (among others), in which "al Qaida" isn't an organization, it's a brand.

(By the way, if you haven't read The Advent of Netwar, by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, do so soon -- it's easily the best articulation of the changing nature of conflict I've ever read, and its observations about the role of guerrilla movements come across as prescient, given that Advent was published in 1996!)

• Of Red Suns and Ethnic Cleansing Online: Netwar of a different sort. Terra Nova links to reports of nationalist/ethnic conflict in Asian online games. One report tells of Korean Lineage players hunting down Chinese players, while the other discusses a virtual uprising in the Chinese game Netease over an in-game symbol looking something like the Japanese WW2 battle flag -- an uprising organized by a now-disbanded guild with a virulently anti-Japanese name.

It's probably a good thing that World of Warcraft doesn't allow the players who can speak to each other to kill each other (outside of easily-ignored duels). I could otherwise totally imagine "red state" and "blue state" players hunting each other in WoW as the 2006 and 2008 elections draw near.

• Participatory Panopticon goes Mainstream: Janet Kornblum of USA Today writes about the growing ubiquity of digital cameras and cameraphones, and the trend (primarily among young people) of posting images and videos of themselves for easy downloading by others. Kornblum's piece covers some of the same topics I've talked about in my various participatory panopticon explorations, and raises some new concerns, chiefly around young people telling too much about themselves, potentially ruining their own futures.

Most kids are posting for each other, but quickly are learning that the world also is watching.

Internet expert Nancy Willard has been warning parents about the possibly incriminating pictures their kids' friends may post online after graduation parties.

"Kids go to these parties, and everybody's going to have a camera," she says. "And when they finally wake up (the day after the party), they'll post all these really fun pictures on the Internet and maybe post names to go along with the pictures. Nobody has any ability to control what's going to happen with those images. And they can be damaging."

Such concerns strike me as artifacts of a pre-ubiquitous camera age ("ubicam?"). It's entirely possible that as we grow more accustomed to pervasive recording of ourselves and of others, and as more of the MySpace/YouTube/camerphone generation moves from school to the workplace, these worries will die down. There's a distinct scent of moral panic about these fears, as if stopping photos and videos of underage drinking or teen sexuality will somehow prevent the activities from taking place to begin with.

What if god is other people? Notes on trust and technology

"[I] have found with friends when you actually start talking [a problem] out you are really fixing and solidifying the conflicts: marking them. But if you were to go away for a couple of weeks or couple of months, other things may have started in your life, and you are not quite the same person anymore. And maybe you could just put aside your quarrel without ever having resolved it, because you are now both somewhat different people...[Y]ou establish a discontinuity, in which something new gets born."

Mobile Phones and Spirituality, on BBC Radio 4 in 2005

Getting to God: Technology, Religion and the New Enlightenment, Alex Pang's notes on a talk at the IFTF in 2004

Does Jesus do SMS?: Religion, Technology and Ubiquitous Computing, Melissa Ho's notes on a lecture at SIMS in 2004

The Surveillance Project

The Surveillance Project

"The Surveillance Project researches the ways in which personal data are processed. We explore why information about people has become so important in the 21st century and what are the social, political and economic consequences of this trend. Questions of 'privacy' and of 'social sorting' are central to our concerns.

Surveillance is 'any systematic attention to a person's life aimed at exerting influence over it' (James Rule). So The Surveillance Project studies everything from supermarket loyalty cards to police networks searching for suspects. We have a special interest in the surveillance aspects of post 9/11 quest for tightened security. While high-tech methods have become very significant, we also examine surveillance as face-to-face supervision or as mediated watching using video cameras.

Surveillance is not simply about large organizations using sophisticated computer equipment. It is also about how ordinary people - citizens, workers, travelers, and consumers - interact with surveillance. Some comply, others negotiate, and yet others resist. The Surveillance Project explores how expanding flows of personal data affect and are affected by everyday life."

A Slice of Second Life

My Second Life avatar, Abdi Kembla.

As it turns out, I was interviewed for the article, because my SL avatar, Abdi Kembla, is African. Most SL avatars tend to look like idealized versions of the people who created them, or bizarre fantasy characters straight out of the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars. So I decided to try something different and create an avatar modeled on a former child soldier from Somalia.

Here's my small contribution to the article:

Another real-world person experimenting with an entirely different SL persona is Boston-based blogger Andy Carvin. Last fall he joined SL as Andy Chowderhead, but he got “bored with it” and decided to create Abdi Kembla, an African refugee he modeled after photos he found online of former Somalian child soldiers.

“Previously, when I used my old Andy Chowderhead avatar, I found people were more likely to come over, say hello, and start a conversation. But with Abdi, people tended to just act as if I just weren’t even there,” says Carvin, who estimates that he spent between 20 and 30 hours in February and March exploring as Abdi. “The more I traveled through SL, the more I realized I seemed to be the only African-looking character around anywhere.” He adds, “I encountered gnomes, floating beams of light, characters that were shaped like boxes, elves, everything you can imagine — but no African-looking characters.”

"I think Second Life will be like the Web eventually," says Aimee Weber. "Almost everything cool will need to have a 3-d presence online."
In general, you can lump Second Life avatars into two categories: hot or fantastic. Women are mostly busty, hourglass-figured, and sexy. Men tend to be buff and handsome. “More often than not, people have a picture in their head of what they look like at their best: very few people want to have their avatar look like they just woke up, haven’t shaved, [have] bad breath, and gained a few pounds after the wedding,” theorizes Andy Carvin. Otherwise, avatars tend to be surreal — think Snoopy, dragons, and “furries.”

Better Game Characters By Design by Katherine Isbister

I've known Katherine Isbister for quite a while now; she wrote the excellent piece on Becky Schaefer's Lara Croft-inspired needlepoint art a few years ago. Katherine has a background in the social sciences which served her well when she moved over into game design. She now has a book out -- Better Game Characters By Design: A Psychological Approach.

One of the first times I met her was when she was working at a lab in Kyoto developing an effective virtual tour guide to the city. We had interesting conversations over ramen about how information can be packaged in an emotionally charged character. She then went on to teach a course at Stanford University, where I helped judge a contest among her students for best game character design (Tim Schafer was co-judge, and that's where I met him for the first time.)

Then she moved away to upstate New York to teach at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she founded a Games research Lab. Sounds like she is doing well!

Peter takes a look at the 3 new video blogging books!

blip.tv (beta)
Check it out!

Here are the 3 books:
Videoblogging by Jay Dedman and Joshua Paul.
Secrets of Videoblogging by Michael Verdi, Ryanne Hodson, Diana Weynand and Shirley Craig
Videoblogging For Dummies by S. C. Bryant

Here is the one that Peter didn't buy:
Hands-On Guide to Video Blogging and Podcasting : Emerging Media Tools for Business Communication

Remix as Cultural Repertoire Expansion

I’m often asked to provide a business justification for pursuing the tools and rights frameworks to enable remix culture. I have various stock answers for this, usually focusing on the potential for improved search or cheaper ways of achieving mass customization of media. This evening, while reading the introduction to David Hesmondhalgh’s The Cultural Industries, I came across another concept that I think gets at why media companies ought to embrace the remixing of their content. Hesmondhalgh, citing Garnham, points out that the media and entertainment industry is very high risk. To manage that risk, media companies attempt to build a diverse “cultural repertoire” or range of cultural products. Any given single production is likely to fail, but given a broad catalog of productions, at least one is likely to hit it big.

Allowing and encouraging remix is a way that media companies can expand their cultural repertoires not just at the level of individual works, but also at the level of the possible expressions of those works. Any given single production is likely to fail, but given a broad set of variants of that production, at least one is likely to hit it big. Electronic music producers caught on to this a long time ago–witness the number of remixes (for the street, for the club, for headphones) that hot hip-hop or dance singles receive. But even they are only scratching the surface of what could be achieved by relinquishing control over the creation of derivative works to radically expand their cultural repertoires.

Nokia Icon

Icon, developed by Lopez Revol , is a wrist band and a pair of rings.

The wrist band has an duochromatic OLED Display wich shows SMS, incoming calls, and can also works as a watch or show some dynamic graphics. The rest of the band is rubber, this piece is interchangeable, with different colors and sizes.

The rings are made for the thumb, they´re made of rubber, are flexible and are opened, so they can fit to many sizes of thumbs. They have a line that glow in different colors (red or white) when you receive a message or a call. Both of the products connect to the 7280 phone (exclusively) via Bluetooth.

reBlogged from Yanko Design

Weblog success is associated with the type of blogging tool used

In “Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology” by Du, H.S, Wagner C., explore weblog success from a technology perspective (weblog-building technology or blogging tool).

Based on an examination of 126 highly successful weblogs tracked over a period of 3 months, we categorized weblogs in terms of popularity rank and growth, and evaluated the relationship between weblog success (in terms of popularity) and technology use. Our analysis indicates that weblog success is associated with the type of blogging tool used. We argue that technology characteristics affect the presentation and organization of weblog content, as well as the social interaction between bloggers, and in turn, affect weblog success or popularity improvement.
(…)
weblog-building technology has a direct impact on blog content. Since blogging technology is designed for authors to reduce web publication and communication effort (Du and Wagner, 2005), authors can focus on writing while the technology takes care of publishing, storage, link creation, and so forth. The less time and effort authors have to spend on these ancillary tasks, the more time they should be able to devote to content, thus resulting eventually in better content. A similar argument can be made for social value. Blogging technology that automates link creation, that identifies recent visitors (possibly with clickable back links, such as in ModBlog), or maintains subscriber lists and syndicates their content, will help create and maintain the social circle of bloggers, by significantly lowering the effort to link to and visit other sites. Here, technology’s enabling character is reflected through its usability and sociability of supporting weblog success at both content and social levels.

Du, HS, Wagner C. (2006) Weblog success: Exploring the role of technology, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Vol. 64, No. 9. (September 2006), pp. 789-798.

TV franchises rule mindshare of college students, games trail by wide margin

Filed under: Culture, Business

/feeds.joystiq.com/~r/weblogsinc/joystiq/~4/513368"/>

tags + auto-classification + 3D : "cloud brain"

I've been toying with some concepts about tags, shared tags and the ability to uses tags as an engine for various things...trying to find any sort of emergent behaviour that may mesh well with my various interests. While it's easy through del.icio.us to see the crowd, I'm wondering how I can dig up the wisdom (see also, Clive's Slate article and his recent pong post).


So I tossed together an experiment in processing, using some of the parsing code I had from Shrunq, and a java library called Classifier4J. It grabs each and every URL available from my del.icio.us feed, and parses and classifies each. The result is a 3D representation of my tags, where their Z-location is based upon the "ranking" of the tag -- much like a tag cloud -- with the actual terms used for classification pulsing behind. Once it's loaded you can click to have it grab pages to test, to see how well random webpages match up to the classification that we've created.


I've already written about this, so I'll do an incredibly silly thing, and quote myself:

I've started to amass a bunch of links in my del.icio.us account. It's not just a bunch of random junk, but it's stuff that I made a point of noting that I had to remember -- at least enough to go to del.icio.us to post it. Tag clouds are cool, and it's a nice way to quickly see the tags, and thus, topics that are most interesting to me.

But I wanted to know more about each tag, to know more about what's under each: What makes that topic more important to me than that topic? How are my tags interrelated? Are there things that connect seemingly disperate topics -- such as "buddhism" and "J2ME" and "wifi"? That is, other than me?

There. I make a lousy quote. See the applet in action, read more, or watch the thrilling video. There are certainly some next steps to this -- just not sure exactly what.

If you'd like to check out a cloud brain based on your tags, let me know, I can build it from my laptop. I've thought about building it out so that people can request it online, and my server will automatically queue and create the necessary data files -- but I'll only write that if enough people are interested...

Originally from gravity monkey, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 12, 2006 at 02:40 AM

Newspapers in the future won't include paper

Lodi News-Sentinel's publisher says the newspaper won't include paper in the future. But that's not all.

The real change that electronic information will bring is "interactivity" — the ability for the news reader to become a publisher. We've always had letters to the editor, but when your opinion or home video flows as easily out to others as our news, society will be transformed.

It's not just that newspaper news rooms will be run more like TV, turning out stories when they happen. It's not just that "talk radio" will become very, very local. Those who care about news will be able to be their own reporters; they will influence our news decisions and decide more directly what community news will be covered. In addition, it will be possible to include everyone in a news conference; polls and elections could be put together on the fly; reaction to public policy ideas and shifts will be instantaneous.

The Long Tail

The Economist reviews Chris Anderson's book:

The niche, the obscure and the specialist, Mr Anderson argues, will gain ground at the expense of the hit.
...
The cover of Mr Anderson's book promises to answer the question: “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More”. But his book may alarm as well as help businessmen. Karl Marx once described a communist society in which “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes...to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.” Mr Anderson suggests that the long tail is bringing about something similar. The tools of media production—computers, desktop printers, video cameras—are now so widely and cheaply available that a generation of young people are becoming amateur journalists, commentators, film-makers and musicians in their spare time, rather as the philosopher imagined. Amateurs offering their work free of charge will contribute a significant portion of the long tail, so at the very end there will be a “non-monetary economy,” says Mr Anderson. If true, that could prove to be the most fascinating long-tail effect of all.

media space time tunnel

a large-scale, sculptural media installation build as a 35 meter tunnel of newspapers, magazines & 66 television screens broadcasting global television programs.
looks like a perfect physical reincarnation of virtual reality's infotube.
[balticmill.com & balticmill.com(mp4,video)|via we-make-money-not-art.com]

Toward Social Search

Beware: low flying web2.0 memes may strike at any time! We've been regaled relentlessly on 'social networking' and the 'wisdom of crowds', and there's certainly something to it - it wouldn't be raking in the investment cash otherwise. But will searches based on human recommendations ever knock the Googles and Yahoos of the world from their perches? Maybe eventually, but I'm not going to hold my breath just yet.

Research leading to Reading cellphone signals bounced off the body

There's some very interesting work going on with cellular technology includingLucent Technologies' Bell Labs "telesensing" technology that allows for reading cellphone signals bounced off the body. It sounds like very "science fiction-ish" stuff, but some of the potential applications are lifesaving.

According to the researchers, the technology can be used to develop monitors and/or sensors that could track fevers in people, to scan heart and breathing signals in order to figure out who would need treatment first in a disaster area and could be leveraged even in military or law enforcement operations.

Judging from the linked article, it seems that the research is going to mainly focus on health applications, and there is talk of having cellphones embedded with telesensing chips so that users can mointor their own vital signs.

Link: The Wireless Report

New study on effects of Internet use on social networks & neighborhoods

Keith Hampton has completed a new paper, e-Neighbors: Neighborhoods in the Network Society on the effects of Internet use on social networks and neighborhoods. It is under review for publication, so it isn't posted online yet, but Hampton will send preprints via email on request.

Abstract:

This study examines in detail the specific contexts where Internet use affords local interactions and facilitates community involvement at the neighborhood level. Studies of Internet and community have found that information and communication technologies provide new opportunities for social interaction, but that it may also increase privatism by isolating people in their homes. This paper argues that while the Internet may encourage both home-centeredness and communication across great distances, it may also facilitate interactions centered near the home. Unlike traditional community networking studies, which focus on bridging the digital divide, this study focuses on bridging the divide between the electronic and parochial realms. Detailed, longitudinal social network surveys were completed with the residents of four contrasting neighborhoods over a period of three years (suburb, apartment building, gated community). Three of the four neighborhoods were provided with a neighborhood email discussion list and a neighborhood website. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to model over time the number of neighbors recognized, emailed, met in-person, and talked to on the telephone. The neighborhood email lists were also analyzed for content. The results suggest that the Internet use has already been adopted into the maintenance of neighborhood social networks. However, neighborhood effects reduce the influence of everyday Internet use, as well as the experimental intervention, in communities that lack the context to support local tie formation. Early adopters of the Internet and active users of the neighborhood email list built larger weak tie networks over time.

Meme Therapy Interview

Jose Gacia at the weblog Meme Therapy -- tagline, "Life from a Science Fiction Point of View" -- interviewed me recently on a variety of subjects. The first part of that interview is now up, covering a couple of questions on technology and politics.

The function of blogging, and other political social network tools, is simply this: to counter-balance the official narrative, and to find the holes -- the failings and falsehoods -- in the elite worldview. That is to say, blogs serve the purpose of hyper- aggressive fact-checking, digging out even the most minute lies and misdirections, making it far more difficult for the political elites to construct a narrative about the world that reinforces their own power.

There was much more to the interview, and I'll link to subsequent updates.

(Meme Therapy has interviewed some very interesting folks in the recent past, including Dale Carrico on Technoprogressive Politics, science blogger Jennifer Griffin on the love of molecules, and science fiction author Alistair Reynolds. Check 'em out.)

MC THIS - Wearable audio / video DJing

LA based MC THIS has a pretty intense set up for mobile audio and video DJing… From the MC THIS’s page - “MC This is the only artist in the world who has brought visual projection from the interior to the streets, rooftops, forests and deserts in one step. MC This can project live images from 4 or more video sources, mix them, add effects to them and project them anywhere he goes on a number of unique screen surfaces.” [via] - photos & site.

Originally from MAKE Magazine at July 10, 2006, 20:55, published by Marisa S. Olson

TECH TALK: Video on the Internet: Niche Audiences

The real opportunity with video on the Internet is what the New York Times has called slivercasting.

In the last six months, major media companies have received much attention for starting to move their own programming online, whether downloads for video iPods or streaming programs that can be watched over high-speed Internet connections.

resting -- and, arguably, more important -- are the thousands of producers whose programming would never make it into prime time but who have very dedicated small audiences. It's a phenomenon that could be called slivercasting.
...
Indeed, the Internet's ability to offer an almost infinite selection is part of what makes it so appealing: people can find things that don't sell well enough to warrant shelf space in a neighborhood music store or video rental shop -- think of the obscure books on Amazon.com. The ease of digital video production and the ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections are sending the long tail of video into the living rooms of the world, live and in color.

Another way is to look at it as serving the needs of the long tail. This is what Mark Cuban has to say:

The reality of TV viewing is that people watch the same 15 to 20 channels over and over. They arent going to sit in front of their computers and look for video to replicate the experience of sitting on the couch or laying in bed.

at Broadcast.com, is that people will search , even if it takes some work, to find things they are passionate about that arent on TV. If you are into bridge, you will find websites with videos pertaining to bridge. If you are into Tall Ships, Collecting coins, whatever. The beauty of the net is that you can find any and every kind of video. Its the definition of Long Tail.

And those viewers wont care if they are watching on their PC screen, a laptop screen or even an IPOD. Post it and they will find it.

It is now time to take a closer look at the underlying technology that is making video on the Internet happen.

Tomorrow: The Technology

New Net Neutrality Paper

I just released a new paper on net neutrality, called Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality. It’s based on several of my earlier blog posts, with some new material.

Time to rethink CBC as public broadcaster

(People keep on mistaking "public" media for community and participatory media. They serve very different yet necessary purposes. Hopefully folks will realize this before deciding to raze the CBC's and PBS's of the world. -kc.)

The Clickless Interface

German Flash programmer and Web designer Alex Frank has created a really intriguing Web interface which, while not entirely new and not entirely 3pointD, is definitely worthy of note here as a technique that could be of use in future 3pointD applications. Frank’s site (which was flagged to me by a reader at the Kesser Technical Group) was a final project for a diploma in communication design at the University of Essen-Duisburg in Germany, and is called DONTCLICK.IT — and that’s exactly what you do there: not click. The entire site (once you get beyond a brief introduction) is navigated by mousing over site elements in different ways. While this is essentially what Flash is used for already, Frank has taken it to greater lengths than most sites do, so that DONTCLICK.IT becomes a neat experiment in interface design and site navigation. Worth checking out.

eightbar Reads Everyware

There’s a nice post up on eightbar about Adam Greenfield’s new book, Everyware, which I’m hoping to crack soon, and some of the things they’re working on over at IBM’s Hursley Park Lab in the UK, from which eightbar (as well as a virtual Wimbledon) emerges.

Adam’s vision of Everyware is one of almost effortless and unknowing interactions with our surroundings, surroundings that are actually networked devices receiving and broadcasting information, which is collated, distributed and presented to users (I prefer participants) in intuitive, helpful and appropriate ways. . . . The theme struck a chord with me simply for the fact that we use a lot of these technologies here in the Emerging Tech group in Hursley (well we are emerging tech after all) . Motes, Zigbee enabled devices, RFID and other funky Gizmos can usually be found spilling out from under Dave Conway-Jones office door.

Very 3pointD. I’m tentatively planning a trip to the UK in November. Perhaps a jaunt to Hursley is in order. A read of Everyware definitely is.

Digital First Sale Doctrine

Matt Yglesias notes last week’s ruling that services like Clean Flicks, which buy Hollywood movies, take out the naughty parts, and resell them to parents, are infringing copyright. On a policy level, I agree with his general take:

Overwhelmingly, the impact of a service like CleanFlix is to make versions of works available to people who otherwise wouldn’t be consuming them at all. Even in a CleanFlix world, authors of “unclean” content will still enjoy extremely close to 100 percent of the pre-CleanFlix market. There’s no reason at all to think that the existence of this sort of service will seriously reduce future production of new things.

Artists and so forth who think their interests are being served by pushing a strong-IP doctrine on this front are essentially dupes. The people who control the existing distribution channels for film have a very serious interest in using the new-style super-strong IP rules to insulate themselves from the winds of technological change. So, in essence, they’re pushing forward on all fronts, stomping on various totally non-harmful cases of putative infringement and attempting to radically curtail people’s ability to do what they want to do with content they’ve purchased.

However, on the legal merits, this is hardly an easy case. I haven’t been able to find the actual decision so consider this wild speculation on my part, but it seems to me that a literal-minded interpretation of the four fair use factors very well might find this is not a fair use—the “effect of the use upon the potential market” is the only factor that clearly weighs in favor of a finding of fair use.

Conceptually, the stronger rationale for finding that such editing is legal is the first sale doctrine, which holds that once you’ve purchased a copy of a work, you have a right to do as you please with that copy, as long as you don’t make additional copies. No one would claim copyright infringement if I went into business buying books, blacking out naughty words, and reselling the edited books. Clean Flicks has already paid Hollywood full price for each copy of the movies it re-sells—what business is it of Hollywood’s if they alter the copy before selling it?

The problem is that the first sale doctrine only applies to the physical original copy. But with digital technologies, accessing and modifying content often requires copying it. You can’t modify a DVD—all you can do is burn a modified copy. That means that even if Clean Flicks’s business is analogous to actions that would have been perfectly legal with 20th Century technologies, that doesn’t mean it’s legal. What you’re buying when you buy a DVD is just a physical piece of plastic, not the right to own one copy of the movie stored in the disk. Such over-literalism, it seems to me, is a mistake that threatens to cause a lot of mischief as more and more of our culture is distributed in media where copying is an inseparable part of accessing.

For example, an over-literal interpretation of the no-copying rule was responsible for MP3.com’s loss in court. Even though MP3.com was simply helping users to consume content they had legally purchased in more convenient ways, the judge focused on the fact that MP3.com was copying and “retransmitting” the content without authorization from the copyright holder. That logic eviscerates the first sale principle in digital media, because all manipulations of digital content involve copying and transmitting content.

All of which is to say that Clean Flicks ought to be legal, but it’s far from obvious that it actually is. It would be a good thing if Congress clarified the first sale doctrine to make it clear that it gives consumers the right to consume and modify the content they purchase in the format of their choice, not simply the right to do as they please with a physical piece of plastic.

Collective action, peer production, sociable media

A long, rich, quote-spiced post by Trebor Scholz explains collective action theories in light of peer-based production methods (e.g. open source, Wikipedia) and social media (e.g. del.icio.ous). You'll learn a lot more from this than from the scattered and disingenuously titled "Digital Maoism" of a few weeks back:

The social bookmarking site del.icio.us is a suitable example for the debate over individual versus network value. On del.icio.us, contributors, myself included, save bookmarks not solely because they support an imagined "del.icio.us collective;" they don't primarily want to support the Yahoo-owned project: they contribute out of self-interest.

Adam Smith talked about individual action that benefits the collective as the "invisible hand;" every individual contribution to the general productiveness of society intends to foster individual gain and is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."

While Smith is controversial, his notion of the invisible hand is useful here. A closer look at the invisible hand reveals that it does not exclude a simultaneous conscious support of a collective. The number of frequent contributors to Wikipedia, for example, is relatively small and their motivations for participation are not completely non-agonistic (pure sharing; higher goals; help humanity). Hanah Arendt argued that people have a keen interest in contributing to something larger than themselves but most contributors to this free encyclopedia are, however, driven by authorship pride -- and -- an urge to contribute to the public good.

An additional variant of motivation for participation is “agonistic giving,” which Benkler sums up with the sentence "I give therefore I'm great." Benkler adds other types of motivations: “individualist and solidaristic” (teams; assertion of my individuality) and “reciprocity” (p2p networks). In the context of sites like CiteUlike, del.icio.us, and others, I suggest that contributors are driven by a hybrid mix of motivations. They are not exclusively in it for themselves but they are also not completely driven by the idea of the greater good.

Convention for the Protection of Virtual Architectural Heritage

Sam Shahrani and Mario Gerosa have completed a Convention for the Protection of Virtual Architectural Heritage.

The document aims to lay a foundation for the conservation of our "virtual architecture", the environments and places that make up the synthetic worlds of video games. More commonly referred to as "levels", "maps" or "worlds", these environments are the stage for players' experiences in video games. Unfortunately, little has been done to protect, catalogue and analyze these game spaces, but such conservation is necessary in order to provide reference material for study. The goal of the Convention is to provide a framework for this vital preservation work, and to encourage further academic study of the principles of level design and the architecture of synthetic worlds.

Via videoludica and terra nova.

The cognitive life of things

In the following paper, Edwin Hutchins (proponent of the Distributed Cognition approach/framework) discuss what he calls “the cognitive life of things”, attempting to place this in the context of rich multimodal interactions.

Hutchins, E. (2006) Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things, presented at the symposium:”The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the boundaries of Mind” organized by Colin Renfrew and Lambros Malafouris at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University, UK 7-9 April, 2006.

Hutchins’s claim (which he developed in his book Cognition in the Wild) is that cognitive science was fundamentally flawed since its focus was to put cognitive properties inside the person and not in the social and material world. His book had been criticized about the very fact that he almost said nothing about the embodied practice of human in his examples (navigation). This paper tries to make distributed cognition less disembodied by showing how interaction are richly multimodal creating emergent cognitive effects. In this paper, the author also describes ths “cognitive ecology” concept:

By cognitive ecology I mean that all of the elements and relations potentially interact with one another and that each is part of the environment for all of the others
(…)
This rich cognitive ecology gives rise to some powerful cognitive processes. The embodied interaction with things creates mechanisms for reasoning, imagination, “Aha!” insight, and abstraction. Cultural things provide the mediational means to domesticate the embodied imagination.

Why do I blog this? this kind of argument is interesting to me especially when I think back about what I learn from my early cognitive psychology courses which were definitely disembodied (un-embodied at all I would say). I also like the development around the idea “Using the body to imagine the dynamics of things”, this connects to the things I’ve read about the affordance of space in socio-sognition.

Collectic: collect access points and combine them in a puzzle

Thanks Cyril for pointing me on Collectic: developed by Jonas Hielscher as a part of a graduation project for the Masters program Media Technology at Leiden University in 2006. I met Jonas in Utrecht few months ago (are you in Basel now? stil in game stuff as I see) and I am always intrigued by what this guy is doing.

he game is developed for the Sony PSP and uses the standard features of the console, especially scanning for wireless access points to the Internet.

cTic can be played anywhere, where WLAN access points can be found by a PSP. The objective of the game is to search for different access points, to collect them and to combine them in a puzzle in order to get points. In the game, the player has to move around in her/his local surrounding, using her/his PSP as a sensor device in order to find access points. By doing this, the player is able to discover the hidden infrastructure of wireless network coverage through auditive and visual feedback.The game is designed as a single player game, but it can be easily played competitive after each other or at the same time with two PSPs.

A video here.

Why do I blog this? I like this idea of a game played with regular console features enhanced by some software components. Besides, the game concept is quite simple and funny and discovering network infrastructure that way seems to be a cool experience. I am looking forward to test this!

sound reactive equalizer t-shirt

the t-qualizer is a t-shirt with a built in graphic equalizer panel that is sound sensitive. as the music beats, the shirts equalizer lights up to the beat of the music. each frequency of music will activate a different equalizer bar, just like a normal equalizer.
the digital clock t-shirt assures that no one will ask you what time it is.
see also noise shirt & wearable display clothing.
[glowgadgets.co.uk & iwantoneofthose.com & uberreview.com]

Originally posted by infosthetics from information aesthetics, ReBlogged by Tom Ritchford on Jul 9, 2006 at 10:19 PM

discarded talk: the revolution was not televised.

I had to come up with a three minute rant for the Alliance for Community Media workshop on "Evaluating the PEG (Public Access) Model of Community Media." This is the rant I decided not to use:

For years we talked about the coming media revolution. This revolution was going to put the power of mass media in the hands of The People. The People were the individuals and small (non-business) organizations who were ignored, marginalized, and disinfranchised. They were going to use television to allow people to take over the airwaves and make their voices heard. They were going to produce, organize, and take action. Most importantly, this revolution was going to happen because of us.

Well the revolution happened and we weren't there to broker it.

The revolution came in the form of blogs and iMacs and cameraphones and MySpaces and YouTubes and it had the full backing of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Rupert Murdoch, and the Fortune 500.

The revolution wasn't broadcast quality so we thought the revolution wasn't worth our time. The revolution was agnostic and equally exploitable by all so we said the revolution had no ideology. The revolution reduced all of our paperwork to one click agreements so we said it was too irresponsible. The revolution didn't route through us so we thought the revolution wasn't the real revolution.

The revolution was unorganized and we didn't know how to deal with it.

But now's the time to start dealing with it.

Because although more folks are talking, they still need models for organization and effective action.
Because although anyone can blog, the power laws still apply.
Because although everyones actions are becoming more explicit, no one's holding our institutions more accountable.

Most of all, because the revolution is here and it looks just like any other day.

Mobile Phone Development » Blog Archive » 2006 Mobile Data

Research and Markets have a report on 2006 Global Mobile Data usage. Here are a few insights…

• Current mobile technologies are not well suited for economically viable business models for mobile data
• The lack of suitable infrastructure has hampered the growth of mobile data
• The business models that these (mobile) operators offer are hopelessly inadequate
• very few sustainable models are currently in operation
• The rest of the world is waiting on MVNO models that provide content providers with the freedom to distribute their own products and manage their own billing and customer service.

There are some real opportunities here for third parties (such as Yahoo, Google etc) and brands to take over where network operators have failed. However, one of the greatest barriers for them is payment. The only convenient way to pay is currently premium SMS which network operators control (and take a huge profit share). Maybe some large payment provider such as Visa, Mastercard or Paypal needs to create/invent a convenient, global and cost-effective mobile payment system. Only then will off-portal services become viable.

Embedding control in society: the end of freedom

Henry Porter’s chilling Blair Laid Bare - which I implore you to read if you have the slightest interest in your future - contains an equally worrying quote from the LSE’s Simon Davies noting the encroachment of architectures of control in society itself:

“The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people.

“We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment,” he says. “That architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the Government to have control.

“That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They’ve bought the Government’s arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively. And that is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom.”"

My blood ran cold as I read the article; by the time I got to this bit I was just feeling sick, sick with anger at the destruction of freedom that’s happened within my own lifetime - in fact, within the last nine years, pretty much.

Regardless of actual party politics, it is the creeping erosion of norms which scares the hell out of me. Once a generation believes it’s normal to have every movement, every journey, every transaction tracked and monitored and used against them - thanks to effective propaganda that it’s necessary to ‘preserve our freedoms’* - then there is going to be no source of reaction, no possible legitimate way to criticise. If making a technical point about the effectiveness of a metal detector can already get you arrested, then the wedge is already well and truly inserted.

Biscuit packaging kind of pales into insignificance alongside this stuff. But, ultimately, much the same mindset is evident, I would argue: a desire to control, shape and restrict the behaviour of the public in ways not to the public’s benefit, and the use of technology, design and architecture to achieve that goal.

Heinlein said that “the human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire”. I fear the emergence of a category who don’t know or care that they’re being controlled and so have no real opinion one way or the other. We’re walking, mostly blind, into a cynically designed, ruthlessly planned, end of freedom.

Related: SpyBlog | No2ID | Privacy International | Save Parliament | Areopagitica

*Personally, I have serious doubts about the whole concept of any government or organisation ‘giving’ its people rights or freedoms, as if they are a kind of reward for good behaviour. No-one, elected or otherwise, tells me what rights I have. The people should be telling the government its rights, not the other way round. And those rights should be extremely limited. The 1689 Bill of Rights was a bill limiting the rights of the monarch. That’s the right way round, except now we have a dictator pulling the strings rather than Williamanmary.

Handheld Augmented Reality

PDA + Studierstube 4.0

Handheld Augmented Reality: A standard, off-the-shelf Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) constitutes a cost-effective and lightweight hardware platform for Augmented Reality (AR). A PDA provides a simple, well-known user interface, and is fully equipped with a touch-screen and camera for providing a video see-through Magic Lens metaphor of interaction. In our Handheld AR framework, all interactive processing is done exclusively on the PDA without relying on a server infrastructure, which makes this solution highly scalable. Because of the low cost and suitable ergonomic properties of the PDA platform, massive multi-user AR application become possible for the first time.

It is the goal of this project to demonstrate the first multi-user AR applications with dozens of simultaneous users.

In our Handheld AR framework, all interactive processing is done exclusively on the PDA without relying on a server infrastructure, which makes this solution highly scalable. Because of the low cost and suitable ergonomic properties of the PDA platform, massive multi-user AR application become possible for the first time. It is the goal of this project to demonstrate the first multi-user AR applications with dozens of simultaneous users.

Our software framework Studierstube 4.0 represents the first attempt at creating a complete solution for AR on PDAs. It operates cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Windows.CE) and addresses graphics, video, tracking, multimedia playback, persistent storage, multi-user synchronisation and application authoring tools.

Online Video -- Moving Forward..?

This morning Dan pointed me to an article in Today's NY Times about Nobody's Watching. Nobody's Watching is a sitcom in the form of a reality show about creating a sitcom. (A bit convoluted, no doubt).

Nobody's Watching is a pilot that hasn't yet been picked up by any networks but has been posted on YouTube. This online posting and the subsequent audience response that it has garnered has the networks rethinking their decisions. Taking a look at the YouTube page, we find that the show has had more than 300,000 views and more than 600 comments. While not huge numbers compared with television audiences, these are big big numbers for any online video.

Based on this, I am betting that the networks are about to learn something about the possibilities of online video. I am also betting that they get it wrong...

Stephen Speicher in Engadget's The Clicker: The Clicker: People are watching "Nobody's Watching" writes:

"Now, make no mistake, the likelihood of this show rising from the heaps and living to the tender age of two (err... episodes) is about as likely as Stephen Colbert replacing Tony Snow as the current administration's Press Secretary, but really that's not the point. This experiment shows that people will watch, comment on, and enjoy pilots on the web in a way that today's traditional broadcast systems won't allow. What's missing is the networks taking the next (obvious) step: instead of spending multiple years and countless dollars trying to determine what to show the viewing public, why not let the audience decide? Put the pilots on the internet before you make the decision. Not only does this give a more accurate assessment of what people might watch, it has the potential to dramatically speed up the decision process.

and

"Yet, despite their best efforts, the entrenched powers behind modern broadcasting just cannot get their heads around the potential of the internet. This is evident at every turn. Whether it be the pulling of the wildly-popular "Lazy Sunday" clip from YouTube (and then later re-releasing in a harder-to-find corner of the NBC site) or the treatment of the internet as a dumping ground for dead projects, the current regime views the internet as, at best, additional revenue. More often than not, the internet is considered a nuisance.

Exactly right, given the opportunity, people will tell you exactly what they like and what they don't. There is incredible value in this, should the networks decided to start paying attention.

YouTube is an incredible phenomenon. If you haven't yet explored it, I suggest you checkout my playlist: Interesting videos from YouTube. It shows a wide range of what YouTube has to offer (the good and the overwhelming bad), from Nobody's Watching to home videos about cats and everything in between.

Speaking of online video, "research" has brought me to: Where the Hell is Matt and Rocketboom's version. I personally respond to the freedom offered by "regular people" to just have fun with the medium. I also think there is power in how these folks are referencing each-other.

Last, I have to make plug for Ze Frank's The Show. Ze gets it, he truly engages his audience! He shows that the possibilities for audience participation and feedback are endless. On his wiki member's of his audience (now participants themselves) have taken it upon themselves to transcribe every single one of his daily shows. Ze even fits in time to play chess by vlog as well as inviting and showing audience member's doing their "Power Moves".

So.. Online video, starting to move forward? YouTube becoming more than just drivel?

Incredible..

Disturbing..

Perhaps both. And that is how it should be.

people and the public

An excerpt from The Power Broker, Robert Caro's 1974 tombstone on Robert Moses:

Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people. ... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just the public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons - just to make it a better public."

I'm reading this to fill in some backstory to Death And Life Of Great American Cities. Aside from being a dramatic account of urban renewal and destruction, the world of the 1920's and 1930's is a perfect context for similar "social architecture" taking place on the web, right now. Net Neutrality, User Generated Content, and Social Software all gain historical continuity from this story. Perkins's quote above throws an especially harsh light on the ink spilled over (Stamen client) Digg, which is one of a few examples used by writers like Nick Carr and Scott Karp to demean the quality of user-submitted Digg stories, MySpace profiles, and blog entries.

The interwar years are fast-becoming one of my favorite historical periods all-around, partially because so many of the lessons of that time are being forgotten as that generation passes on.

Excerpts of Toshio Iwai’s interview

Pixelsurgeon features a nice interview of Toshio Iwai.

In projects like Tenori-On, how important is the physical interface - the thing you touch and hold? How does it affect the act of making music?

ruments are characterised by their physical interface, such as the key of a piano or the bow of a violin. And these physical interfaces give important direction to the way they are played and the sound itself. However, as long as electric instruments are concerned, this aspect is not emphasised very much. In the Tenori-On project, we started from thinking what is the reasonable interface for an electric instrument or digital instrument.
(…)
For the digital instrument, interface, exterior design, software, sound and so on are independent each other. I am examining the way all of them naturally unite, just like in the violin.
(…)
The design of the visual interface is very important. The flow of time is not visible and very difficult to handle, but by expressing it visually it can be understood and handled by everybody. Moreover, music can give different impressions when it is expressed visually. (…) Since it became possible to make sound electrically or electronically, the synthesizing of sound has been separated from the visual world. However with the senses we are borne with, we think it is more natural to experience sound and vision at the same time.
(…)
As everybody wants to touch instruments or toys which he or she hasn’t seen before, when I design something, I am trying to create it so that it is very attractive at first sight. And when players touch it, it can be instinctively understood and they can be pulled into it very strongly and start trying to create their own designs in many different ways.

Why do I blog this? because of current research about tangible interfaces I am interested in Iwai’s work; which I found great. Elektroplankton is fantastic (easy to handle and I discover new features everytime I play). What he is describing is very intriguing: how to create new musical instruments (new objects then) with simple affordances, linking sound and visual patterns to engage people in playful activities.

See also his blog about tenori-on, a brand new musical instrument / musical interface for the 21st century which I have been developing under the collaboration with YAMAHA Corp.

The Unspoken Word

"But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?"

     —Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet

The idea that tomorrow is a destination, an "undiscovered country," is the lifeblood of classic futurism. We wish to see where we are headed; we want to know what hidden shoals to avoid, and which strong currents to follow. It's this idea of the future as a place just over the horizon that allows us to imagine the "end of history," to fear getting to the future as a race to be lost, to see tomorrow as a land we have yet to conquer.

But what if we instead imagine tomorrow in wholly different terms. What if tomorrow is a word we have yet to speak? The future can be an ongoing conversation, filled with phrases and pauses, debates and soliloquies, a conversation in which all of our voices can be heard. A conversation is larger than any single sentence, although each word is important. It has a narrative and flow, but can head off in surprising directions (although often quite predictable, in retrospect) as new ideas occur to us and new participants enter the scene. A conversation may have had a beginning, but it need not have an ending, as long as we have something to say.

If the future is an undiscovered country, it belongs to none of us (except, perhaps, those who we might displace when we take possession); if the future is an unfinished conversation, it belongs to all of us, as it only matters as long as there are voices to be heard.

The notion of tomorrow as a land just out of reach is an artifact of an age long past, when those who sought to change the world did so by seeking out its most distant edges, whether for trade, treasure or empire. The concept of the future as conversation, however, resonates with today's world, where changes come through mutual creation, collaborative innovation, and the growth of our networks. Inspiration is far more meaningful than exploration in today's world; anticipation -- of the next word, of the next moment -- far more powerful than expectation of what's over the horizon.

An undiscovered country could be found and given name by a lone explorer; conversations, by definition, require more than a single voice. Some speakers will stand out, to be sure, and individual voices may guide the course of the discussion, for a time. But a conversation is not owned by any single person, no matter how vocal; the words move on, the subjects shift, and in due course the conversation bears little resemblance to past debates.

This isn't simply philosophical mumbling. How we speak shapes how we think. As long as we speak of the future in geographic language, we'll continue to look at our choices for tomorrow in terms of ownership, demarcation and, ultimately, limits. Where is the future when there no more lands left to discover?

A conversational metaphor for tomorrow has neither the history nor the breadth of the geographical metaphor, and we will likely speak of horizon-scanning and frontiers and such for some time to come. But it is to our benefit to pay attention to the words we use, and what they truly mean, rather than allow the language of exploration and conquest to remain as unexamined jargon, words that unknowingly shape our vision. It's more important now than ever before that we as a civilization learn how to build an understanding of how the future is shaped into our present-day decisions. We shouldn't let that understanding be created through language with diminishing relevance to our lives, our ideas and our tomorrows.

Public Radio Wrestles with Digital Future

I love NPR, and public radio, as much as anyone, but I have some qualms with the way its material is shared, or not, on the web. I understand (unlike some, apparrently) that public radio is operating with limited resources and that the shift from a broadcast to a My Time model is a complicated one. Furthermore, I understand that NPR’s web strategy is complicated by the question of how to integrate member stations and that many well-intentioned people much smarter than I are working hard to ensure that public radio’s values thrive in this new world. But there is something ridiculous about breaking a significant story while keeping in the dark the vast majority of the world that didn’t happen to be listening to the radio at the right moment.

Last month, I heard Scott Simon on Weekend Edition refer to an NPR report alleging, once again, that Lance Armstrong used performance enhancing drugs. He made the story the centerpiece of both his commentary as well as the sports segment of the show, but I missed the report itself. I visited NPR.org, and the Weekend Edition page, which informed me that “A listing of today’s stories will be posted at approx. 8:00 a.m. ET.” Two hours later, there was still no mention of the story. Isn’t there a way to share material, especially breaking news, so I don’t have to base my life around Scott Simon’s schedule?

While whining about NPR and its web strategy, I thought I should revisit Mixed Signals, the NPR blog. (It doesn’t mention the Armstrong story, either.) Most of the posts appear to have attracted no comments. (An exception is this story about the look for a new obbudsman in light of Jeffrey Dvorkin’s departure.) Speculation why the lack of participation:

• NPR maintains an oddly-crafted comments policy: “Comments are reviewed and edited by NPR prior to display. All comments will be read, but not all will be posted.” No, plenty of us review comments before they are posted, but this makes the blog sound more like letters to the editor than a two-way conversation.

• There’s an off-putting legalistic addendum at the end of the comments section with a link to a lengthy terms of use policy:

NPR reserves the right to read on the air and/or publish on its Web site or in any medium now known or unknown the e-mails and letters that we receive. We may edit them for clarity or brevity and identify authors by name and location. For additional information, please consult our Terms of Use.

• There is no clear way to imbed html in the comments– so we don’t really know who the commentators are, nor can they easily point to other places. Also, no trackbacks—shouldn’t every NPR story have a trackback?

• NPR seems to shift their blogger every few days. I understand group blogs, there are some good ones, but they require a sense of community that Mixed Signals has yet to develop.

Lucky for me and others concerned that public radio makes it in the digital era, NPR has convened the Digital Distribution Consortium (DDC), a six-member working group tasked, says Jake Shapiro, to “think through digital distribution services that would benefit from a greater degree of coordination across the system.” As part of its transparent process, the DDC and has started a wiki, while Todd Mundt of Michigan Public Radio and Jake Shapiro of Public Radio Exchange are blogging the meetings. Jake describes the group’s first week of work:

We’ve decided to organize our efforts by writing a business plan for an ‘entity’ that would perform these services, describing the markets it would target, its products and services, revenue model, competitive position, strategic partners, risks, technology and operational needs, expenses and investment requirements — a full picture.

We’ve agreed that the character of the service is ‘enabling’: it should help a wide variety of stations, networks, producers, and other partners offer digital content to existing and new audiences across multiple platforms in innovative ways. It should leverage the collective assets of a more broadly defined public media field to create a significant presence online, increased relevance and engagement with audiences, and new sources of revenue.

bio & emotion mapping

an interesting research project which explores how one can make use of the real-time biological information of the human body. several wearers record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) (a simple indicator of emotional arousal) in conjunction with their geographical location. this is used to plot a map that highlights points of high & low arousal, & visualizes where people feel stressed or excited.
the Greenwich Emotion Map project attempts to invent new visualization strategies to represent this data in the context of neighborhoods & communities.
see also bio-responsive server & coca-cola world chill map & gps drawing.
[biomapping.net & emotionmap.net]

Why Do Innovation Clusters Form?

Recently I attended a very interesting conference about high-tech innovation and public policy, with experts in various fields. (Such a conference will be either boring or fascinating, depending on who exactly is invited. This one was great.)

One topic of discussion was how innovation clusters form. “Innovation cluster” is the rather awkward term for a place where high-tech companies are concentrated. Silicon Valley is the biggest and best-known example.

It’s easy to understand why innovative people and companies tend to cluster. Companies spin out of other companies. People who move to an area to work for one company can easily jump to another one that forms nearby. Support services develop, such as law firms that specialize in supporting start-up companies or certain industries. Nerds like to live near other nerds. So once a cluster gets going, it tends to grow.

But why do clusters form in certain places and not others? We can study existing clusters to see what makes them different. For example, we know that clusters have more patent lawyers and fewer bowling alleys, per capita, than other places. But that doesn’t answer the question. Thinking that patent lawyers cause innovation is like thinking that ants cause picnics. What we want to know is not how existing clusters look, but how the birth of a cluster looks.

So what causes clusters to be born? Various arguments have been advanced. Technical universities can be catalysts, like Stanford in Silicon Valley. Weather and quality of life matter. Cheap land helps. Some argue that goverment-funded technology companies can be a nucleus — and perhaps funding cuts force previously government-funded engineers to improvise. Cultural factors, such as a general tolerance for experimentation and failure, can make a difference.

Simple luck plays a role, too. Even if all else is equal, a cluster will start forming somewhere first. The feedback cycle will start there, pulling resources away from other places. And that one place will pull ahead, for no particular reason except that it happened to reach critical mass first.

We like to have explanations for everything that happens. So naturally we’ll find it easy to discount the role of luck, and give credit instead to other factors. But I suspect that luck is more important than most people think.

Networked journalism

I think a better term for what I’ve been calling “citizen journalism” might be “networked journalism.”

“Networked journalism” takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.

I carry some of the blame for pushing “citizens’ media” and “citizen journalism” as terms to describe the phenomenon we are witnessing in this new era of news. Many of us were never satisfied with the terms, and for good reason. They imply that the actor defines the act and that’s not true in a time when anyone can make journalism. This also divides journalism into distinct camps, which only prolongs a problem of professional journalism — its separation from its public (as Jay Rosen points out). In addition, many professional journalists have objected that these terms imply that they are not acting as citizens themselves — and, indeed, I believe that the more that journalists behave like citizens, the stronger their journalism will be.

In networked journalism, the public can get involved in a story before it is reported, contributing facts, questions, and suggestions. The journalists can rely on the public to help report the story; we’ll see more and more of that, I trust. The journalists can and should link to other work on the same story, to source material, and perhaps blog posts from the sources (see: Mark Cuban). After the story is published — online, in print, wherever — the public can continue to contribute corrections, questions, facts, and perspective … not to mention promotion via links. I hope this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as journalists realize that they are less the manufacturers of news than the moderators of conversations that get to the news.

This came to me on the drive back from Media Giraffe with Jay Rosen: the mobile master class. Somewhere in midConnecticut, we were talking about how journalism can, should, and will work when we can all join in and it hit me like a lightning bolt: this isn’t about citizens or amateurs vs. professionals. We’re all in this together. Journalism is a collaborative venture. Journalism is a network.

: LATER: Terry Heaton points us to earlier thinking in this vein. Just to be clear: I’m by no means trying to claim any provenance in this, only indicating a shift in my own thinking.

: LATER STILL: Chris Nolan adds in email:

Stand-alone journalism depends on an audience of people who understand that connection. The web is a flexible medium so readers come and go quickly. So there’s a contradiction: The newsroom has left the building but no one site can really stand alone and prosper by demanding that readers come to it. The business challenge is to make that flexibility part of how we do business if we’re going to grow and keep readers, Smart guys like WashPo’s Jim Brady and Yahoo’s Neil Budde know this; that’s why they’re not demanding exclusivity. That’s also why Spot-on’s pushing the syndication part of our business ahead of everything else. We want to go to our readers wherever they are, rather than wait for them to come to us.

Neuros: ‘Freedom by Design’

Following on from the last post about the Neuros MPEG4 recorder, looking on the Neuros website reveals something pretty unusual for a company involved in consumer product design - a clear statement of design philosophy, ‘What do we stand for?’ that’s heavy on content and light on vague rhetoric:

“Your Digital Rights and Why They’re Important to You

Throughout the history of technology, Hollywood has fought innovation at every turn. Even technologies that benefit the studios, and that we take for granted, exist only because someone fought the studios for their very existence

…

The more such legislation [e.g. Analog Hole Bill] gets passed, the less innovation consumers will see, and the fewer options you will have for enjoying your content

….

There are two opposing forces at odds here. On the one hand, there are exciting new technologies that offer more and more choices for consumers to access and enjoy digital media when and where they want it. On the other, there is Big Media and a few of its powerful allies working behind the scenes to limit consumer choices to when and where they want it. How this all plays out will depend on how the rest of us respond in the coming days, weeks and months.”

The statement even exhorts customers to get involved with the EFF and to get in touch with their elected representatives, which is again a great initiative.

This is just the kind of intelligent engagement by product designers & engineers with the political implications of - and influences on - their work for which I’ve been looking throughout the ‘Architectures of Control’ project. Whether it meets the kind of criteria proposed by Jennie Winhall’s ‘Is Design Political?‘, I don’t know, but by standing up for users’ rights in such an open and frank way, and indeed structuring its business around that philosophy, Neuros seems a lot closer to real user-centred design than the vague waffle so often promulgated as such.

Impressive.

Please stop pretending you know how much bandwidth BitTorrent uses

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)

Flavors of grassroots video

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.

The Joke's On Us

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 ...

Advertising In the Post-Advertising Era

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.

Tagclouds for comparing

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

Awareness and Interruptions

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: Puppet game controller

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.

What is Participatory Media?

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?

Split Screen Video Blog

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

Combines RFID and a surveillance camera

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

Charlie Stross on the Future

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)

The People Formerly Known as the Audience

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)

io: the improbable orchestra

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

Surveillance light fixtures

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.

Connecting, disconnecting, reconnecting people

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.

Interesting quote from Ted Nelson

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.

Design for technology addicts

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

How Much More Can We Do With Less?

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)

Massisively Multi-layered Learning from Virtual Worlds

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">

Will My Mother-in-Law Blog?

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."

Avatar-Based Marketing

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.”

Attention Scarcity and Marketing

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).

Too hip for words

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 them and put the results up on YouTube et al. Go ahead and put the CNN bug in the corner; by all means, take credit for providing the grist for the bigger mill that is the creative community on the internet. If you do that, your stuff will be everywhere and you’ll be cool for helping to make it happen.

And since I’m giving unsolicited advice to CNN, I wish they would also put up Howie Kurtz’s Reliable Sources online so I don’t have to skip church to watch it, thereby going straight to hell, and also don’t have to bother recording it — and also could link to what’s said in it. I want to subscribe to the show and every week I’ll watch it, together with commercials — I promise — on my iPod. And if there were a particularly great clip, I’d even put it on my site (with CNN’s brand and advertising) if you’d let me. I’d help promote and distribute the content that is never seen again once it’s on and off the air. Wouldn’t that be ever so hip?

FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Sorrell warns of e-communities ‘threat’

Media owners must find ways to attract and retain talent and create stand-alone digital divisions in order to compete in the era of internet blogs, open access and online communities, Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP, has warned.

(Tonight we're going to party like it's 1999. -kc.)

"Seeing by Sound"

"The technology is part of a wave of software and hardware which has evolved as laptops, mobile phones and PDAs converge into powerful handheld computers.

They're having a profound impact, allowing the blind to navigate streets in unfamiliar cities, to having e-mails read from their mobiles and identifying colours.

The "Seing with Sound" technology was developed by Peter Meijer, a Dutch scientist, and is available as a free download on his website. "

10 Commandments for Java Developers

10 Commandments for Java Developers

Good rules.. Unfortunately, for me, I don't follow them ;-)

"There are many standards and best practices for Java Developers out there. This article outlines ten most basic rules that every developer must adhere to and the disastrous outcomes that can follow if these rules are not followed.

Media Should Evolve Into Marketing Services

I increasing believe that in order to survive and grow in a digital, networked, social, participatory world, media companies need to evolve into marketing services companies. Here’s what’s driving me to that conclusion.

Advertising took another significant step yesterday towards graduating from paid media placements (i.e. traditional ads). Ironically, it starts with a paid media placement on The Huffington Post:

HUFFINGTONPOST.COM THIS WEEKEND LAUNCHED A video ad promotion featuring seven TV ads, all selected for their high “viral” potential–meaning some quality that makes them likely candidates for e-mail forwarding. So far the ads, produced by agency JWT, are purely voluntary viewing; visitors have to click on a small video screen on the site’s right-hand side to see them.

JWT, formerly J. Walter Thompson, purchased the ad space for this pilot initiative, which will offer TV ads for Ford, JetBlue, Levi’s, the Partnership for a Drug Free America, Scruffs, and Billy Collins–all chosen for humor or novelty value.

This is the future — advertising that is worth watching not because you are forced to do so through interruption, but because the marketing message itself is entertaining or useful.

And thanks to the fully networked Web 2.0, viral marketing is no longer just a buzzword. Sharing has gone mainstream.

(Continued at Publishing 2.0.)

Standards for Users

When I think of standards I think of the Stephenson gauge. Two pieces of steel laid at 4' 8.5" apart carries rail traffic for 60% of the world's railroads. The standard has been around for centuries, allowing easy interoperability between rail lines from different companies and countries, creating new and cheaper opportunities for commerce around the world. Railroad companies did not always believe in the power of standards but eventually came together for big contracts and their rewards.

Next Friday I will lead a discussion at Bloggercon IV about the affects of standards on the lives of users. How can cooperation and interoperability lead to happy users, increased profits, and more participation online?

In the world of railroads companies varied the width of their rails to force a transfer of goods from Company A using the trains and workers of Company B. These increased costs meant more direct control over commerce by the companies laying the lines, but ultimately made travel by rail unreliable and costly, forcing customers to utilize other methods of transport such as a river barge. The arrival of cross-country travel and military contracts in the United States eventually forced standardization and better options for users.

In the online world we rely on a few standards to make life easy for users. The W3C activity around HTML provides a common base for implementors and authors. We still have to tweak our pages for optimal use in each browser, but a common baseline reduces some of the work involved in deploying all over the world.

The world of feed aggregators interoperates using the OPML file format for subscription portability. Users can post to their blog and backup their entries using the application of their choice thanks to standards such as the MetaWeblog API and the Atom Publishing Protocol.

Open standards create open competition, eliminating lock-in and allowing users to pick the best services for their wants and needs. The door remains open, but companies focused on their users believe you are happy enough within their walls you'll never want to head for the doors.

What are your experiences with standards or the lack thereof? What new standards and interoperability would you like to see companies develop to thrill their users? Bloggercon is part of the user-centered summer of love. Let's chat about the things you love and hate about your experiences online and how collaboration and standards can help.

Floating Points:

Locative Media, Perspective, Flight

The primary concern in locative media has been, understandably, location. This has been a great new leap in terms of art, technology, science and narrative. Locative Media Art consists of artworks utilizing locative technology to trigger artworks in a specific physical space.

Locative media art goes back to early experiments such as Telepresent by Steven Wilson in 1997 that was an object equipped with GPS left to be communally interacted with and moved while continually sending images via the Internet.

Another key development was the GPS drawings of Jeremy Wood in 2000 in which he discovered that by tracing his movements as he drove or walked with GPS that he could form shapes formed by the sequence of plotted movements. Other projects worked with Geo-Annotation which placed a comment or reflection on a physical location (similar to what hikers for years would do at posted signs on certain trails). Then came the project 34 North 118 West that was the first locative narrative.

34 North 118 West was a mapping of a four block area of Los Angeles where the primary non-passenger rail yard and related infrastructure at the turn of the last century and the original grand passenger station of Los Angeles (La Grande station) once stood. The majority of the buildings are the same but have changed in usage in time, state of disrepair and who has come to live and work in them in waves of development and housing.

Other buildings were destroyed over the years and only the ghosts of historical information and personal accounts remain. The project created a "narrative archaeology" as the layers in time were to be agitated into being. In one place would be narrativized data from 1936 a few hundred feet from a spot before a building that triggered something from 1910.

Now groups such as the C5 collective are doing work such as the GPS mapping of the entire great wall of china and then placing the coordinates in another location. This type of work creates a layered commentary and plays with form and semiotics as well as referencing the Situationists who developed absurd commentaries like a walk through the streets of Paris following a map of another city..." Continue reading Floating Points: Locative Media, Perspective, Flight and the International Space Station by Jeremy Hight with Alexander van Dijk, Hz Journal, #8, June 2006.

Reciprocation, Open APIs and caching data coming from web services

Stewart Butterfield must be proud of himself!  He deserves a good nights rest after this on-slaught - attacking his integrity, best intentions and strategy.  Brad Horowitz must be proud of him - as well.

Reading over the comments (I posted the #112 one) on Michael Arrington’s original, slanderous post - it seems to me that Stewart’s so-called ‘change of heart’ is exactly the right answer. 

Reciprocation.

Of course  Its somethiing I completely assumed, but was pointed out to me (thanks Tara and Chris) was not necessarily being granted by Zoomr.  Many debated this issue and I think we’ll go over it at Bloggercon IV - as well.

So lets be clear.

Open APIs are a two-way street and Stewart and Flickr have set a precedent - as they’ve done so many times before - on demanding that any commercial vendor who wants a commercial key, MUST also provide clean, clear, open APIs - going in BOTH directions - from their system.

That seems not only fair but smart.

Now regarding WHERE a user’s data is stored, this is the old ‘data storage in the clouds debate’ - rehashed.  Antonio Rodrieguez points out that it’s completely reasonable to leave an end-user’s photos in Flickr, [via Doc] while accompalishing the tasks (in Tabblo’s case - hard copy printing) - at hand.

But let me point out a simple thing. 

Its really hard to create a compelling end-user experience when you’re linking to external sources.  We’ve been trying it for over a year now - with some sucess, but in general if you want to include (let’s say) your external blog in some other service - its far from satisfactory experience.

DLAs (digital lifestyle aggregators) like the PeopleAggregator can easily handle data being stored - wherever.  We’ll eventually even have a formal VFS (virtual file system) to keep track of where the hell all your stuff is.

But all data stored from some remote web service needs to be cached - as no end-user is gonna be happy waiting for their pages to update - while pulling in data from that remote web service.  This is a crucial UI issue.

So as the dashboard category grows (Pageflakes, NetVibes, Superglu, etc.) expect to see further and further sophisticated caching of data coming from web services - just to make these dashboards usable.

Now where does that put us in the Open APIs debate?

Right smack dab in the middle of it.

Cause once we have Open APIs moving in both directions, and we’ve given our end-users the ability to move their stuff around - we ALSO need to give them the ability to cache this data - so they’re not waiting for their remotely linked pages - to update.

This is where Tucows comes in.

They have launched a ‘Feedcache’ service - which I believe can be expanded to become a personalized ‘web services’ cache service - for ALL to use. I had a great conversation with Ross Rader about this - a couple of months back - and like all good ideas- this idea’s day has come.

:-)

 BTW I have pitched Antonio’s service to several of our cleints and they all say “sign me up!” So congrats to Antonio!

social behavior in 3D worlds

a visualization tool set that represents the evolution of 3D virtual environments, the distribution of their virtual inhabitants over time & space, & the formation or diffusion of user groups inside them. the visualizations are particularly valuable for analyzing events that are spread out in time or space, or events that involve a very large number of participants.
a chat log bar graph provides an overview about how many citizens & visitors participated in an event. a spatial distribution visualization traces & aggregates trails of groups on an automatically generated 2D map.
see also pedestrian levitation & mobile phone trace map & micro-fashion network.
[indiana.edu(pdf)]

Apple's Intel Transition: A Brief Developer's Guide

A few of my friends have been making the OS X/Intel transition, and I have been kicking around some notes while I learn what works and what doesn't. Here's a brain dump of some of the advice I've been giving people.

• If you have more than one Mac, .Mac is the best $80 a year you can spend. The syncing alone is worth it over and over and over.
• Jumpcut, Steve Cook's clipboard management app, is really hitting it's stride.
• TextWrangler is still free, but I always end the day with both SubethaEdit and Textmate both open. For smaller text files, Yojimbo works the way you always wanted stickies to work. I love the .Mac syncing - my notes and PDFs are always where I want them to be. It's also very smart about encrypting passwords, serial numbers and notes you want to keep private.
• Fence is still a work in progress, but it's a very slick Cocoa/Atom uploader that works best with Typepad and Vox.
• This is a little exorbitant, but I also check a lot of configuration files into an svn repository, which TextDrive makes very easy.
• If you do any perl at all, it's worth it to blow away /System/Library/Perl and just reinstall all your XML modules. I install Plagger and Catalyst and all the good ones get picked up along the way.
• Lightroom Beta 3 is Universal (from Adobe).
• Macsaber (of course).
• I also have my Activity Log on all the time, so that when a PowerPC app pops up I can upgrade or replace it immediately. I notice a performance hit when Rosetta comes on.

Auto-Translation

The Economist writes about the "Babel Fish" dream:

Within the next few years there will be an explosion in translation technologies, says Alex Waibel, director of the International Centre for Advanced Communication Technology, which is based jointly at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and at CMU. He predicts there will be real-time automatic dubbing, which will let people watch foreign films or television programmes in their native languages, and search engines that will enable users to trawl through multilingual archives of documents, videos and audio files. And, eventually, there may even be electronic devices that work like Babel fish, whispering translations in your ear as someone speaks to you in a foreign tongue.

14 Steps to Reinvent Journalism at First Monday

Here is the abstract from my paper:

This article builds upon open source/open content literature and applications to develop a framework from which academics, citizens, critics, journalists and the media industry can collectively develop a sustainable model or models to save quality journalism -- possibly by reinventing journalism as it has traditionally been defined. This article provides that framework, not so much as a theoretical construct, but rather as an annotated checklist to guide those interested in reinventing journalism.

The paper contains 14 steps that each individual or news organization should consider before making the open content leap. After reading an earlier edition of the paper, when I was talking about 15 steps, Mark Hamilton at Notes from a Teacher wrote:

If this piece doesn't kickstart your thinking about media, nothing will.

Bryan Murley at Reinventing College Media did an online interview with me that should be running soon. I'll let you know when that is posted.

The paper is long and a bit academic, so what I will be doing in the next few weeks is breaking out each individual step as more of a manual for reorganizing a news organization, if not totally reinventing journalism.

Solar Powered Mobile Phone

The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (the largest labs for applied sciences in Germany) has rolled out a prototype sun powered mobile phone. 21 talks reports.

Under the leadership of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, scientists from various institutes are working on technologies that will make it possible to achieve greater power densities and, when combined with batteries in hybrid energy systems, extend operating times.

At the Hanover Trade Fair, the researchers will be displaying new energy storage technologies, micro-fuel cells, and information on the opportunities offered by "energy harvesting," or drawing power from multiple energy sources available in the environment of the device."

Other solar powered ideas ...

Nokia exhibition flashes future phones

More on "The Future of Mobile Design"

Nathan pulls the dirt on YouTube's EULA

People With Ideas >> Blog Archive >> YouTube: ALL YOUR VIDEOS ARE BELONG TO US
"YouTube: ALL YOUR VIDEOS ARE BELONG TO US"

Got picked up by The Register as well:
YouTube owns YourStuff | The Register

Google Maps v. Thinkpad

Miyagawa has released a hack to allow the Thinkpad's accelerometer to control Google Maps. You can check the source out of his svn repository.

Miyagawa writes:

My recommendation is to choose Satellite mode, with the 3rd Zoom level. It makes me feel like flying in the sky, just as birds. Because of Google Maps JS library prefetching images, sometimes you have a delay (latency) moving, but other than that, it is quite fantastic.

The Last Mile Bottleneck and Net Neutrality

When thinking about the performance of any computer system or network, the first question to ask is “Where is the bottleneck?” As demand grows, one part of the system reaches its capacity first, and limits performance. That’s the bottleneck. If you want to improve performance, often the only real options are to use the bottleneck more efficiently or to increase the bottleneck’s capacity. Fiddling around with the rest of the system won’t make much difference.

For a typical home broadband user, the bottleneck for Internet access today is the “last mile” wire or fiber connecting their home to their Internet Service Provider’s (ISP’s) network. This is true today, and I’m going to assume from here on that it will continue to be true in the future. I should admit up front that this assumption could turn out to be wrong — but if it’s right, it has interesting implications for the network neutrality debate.

Two of the arguments against net neutrality regulation are that (a) ISPs need to manage their networks to optimize performance, and (b) ISPs need to monetize their networks in every way possible so they can get enough revenue to upgrade the last mile connections. Let’s consider how the last mile bottleneck affects each of these arguments.

The first argument says that customers can get better performance if ISPs (and not just customers) have more freedom to manage their networks. If the last mile is the bottleneck, then the most important management question is which packets get to use the last mile link. But this is something that each customer can feasibly manage. What the customer sends is, of course, under the customer’s control — and software on the customer’s computer or in the customer’s router can prioritize outgoing traffic in whatever way best serves that customer. Although it’s less obvious to nonexperts, the customer’s equipment can also control how the link is allocated among incoming data flows. (For network geeks: the customer’s equipment can control the TCP window size on connections that have incoming data.) And of course the customer knows better than the ISP which packets can best serve the customer’s needs.

Another way to look at this is that every customer has their own last mile link, and if that link is not shared then different customers’ links can be optimized separately. The kind of global optimization that only an ISP can do — and that might be required to ensure fairness among customers — just won’t matter much if the last mile is the bottleneck. No matter which way you look at it, there isn’t much ISPs can do to optimize performance, so we should be skeptical of ISPs’ claims that their network management will make a big difference for users. (All of this assumes, remember, that the last mile will continue to be the bottleneck.)

The second argument against net neutrality regulation is that ISPs need to be able to charge everybody fees for everything, so there is maximum incentive for ISPs to build their next-generation networks. If the last mile is the bottleneck, then building new last-mile infrastructure is one of the most important steps that can be taken to improve the Net, and so paying off the ISPs to build that infrastructure might seem like a good deal. Giving them monopoly rents could be good policy, if that’s what it takes to get a faster Net built — or so the argument goes.

It seems to me, though, that if we accept this last argument then we have decided that the residential ISP business is naturally not very competitive. (Otherwise competition will erode those monopoly rents.) And if the market is not going to be competitive, then our policy discussion will have to go beyond the simple “let the market decide” arguments that we hear from some quarters. Naturally noncompetitive communications markets have long posed difficult policy questions, and this one looks like no exception. We can only hope that we have learned from the regulatory mistakes of the past.

Lets hope that the residential ISP business turns out instead to be competitive. If technologies like WiMax or powerline networking turn out to be practical, this could happen. A competitive market is the best outcome for everybody, letting the government safely keeps its hands off the Internet, if it can.

Wednesday: Of robbing banks and broadcasting

Chris Anderson talks about his concept of "scaling down" in a provocative post this morning. He rightly states (he's always right) that digital businesses can be efficient enough to deal at very small levels, and he adds, "a small percentage of a very large number can still be a big number."

I call this "scaling down", and it's a core Long Tail competency. Traditional businesses target the top end of the market--the biggest hits and the richest customers--for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: because they think that's where the money is. If you have only so many salespeople and only so many marketing dollars, such a discriminating approach makes sense. But the lesson of the Long Tail is that, as Nobel physicist Richard Feynman predicted, "there's a lot of room at the bottom."

This is why all this "web stuff" is so counterintuitive to broadcasters and other forms of mass media. They're Willie Suttons all! The web's a very different marketplace, and he who gets this will find business success downstream.

(Good to see other folks thinking about scaling down. -kc.)

The ethical surplus and its monetization: quote from Adam Arvidsson

A very clear quote from Adam Arvidsson:

“Informational capitalism is characterized by a growing separation between production and valorization. The production of immaterial values like knowledge, affect and sociality increasingly takes place in autonomous processes of technologically empowered communication that unfolds among users themselves. Their valorization occurs through the ability to appropriate a share of the global surplus, which is distributed on financial markets. The ability to accumulate an ethical surplus therefore becomes a necessary condition for the ability to appropriate surplus value. Therefore recent forms of brand management, that intervene directly on social communication without relying primarily on advertising and other forms of propaganda are becoming a central managerial technique for the information economy in general.”

Augmented Reality - My Name is Madison

My Name is Madison
Artist - Matthew Slaats

Taking Madison, WI as its subject, My Name is Madison is an Augmented Reality Game that allows users to explore and interact with the urban landscape from a multitude of perspectives. This project approachs the city as a layered environment. Players understand the development of place through the eyes of history, culture and fantasy.

Using GPS enabled hand held computers, participants take on the roles of both recipient and creator, performance in context. While walking about the streets, they are provided with information that enhances their understanding of the environment and then gives them the tools to create their own interpretations of place. Documentation of these events will be posted to www.mynameismadison.blogspot.com.

The project opens as a part of the Games, Learning and Society Conference taking place in Madison, WI June 15-16. www.glsconference.org

Originally from Rhizome.org Raw at June 13, 2006, 06:05, published by nicholas economos

Type announcement
Genre participatory, telepresence, event
Keywords game, conference

decentralized blogs+aggregators ecosystems vs integrated hosting/viewing communities

There are now a lot of video hosting sites. The best known of these sites is YouTube. All of these sites are patterned after Flickr. Flickr is a community where members upload files to their own accounts.

There are also a lot of blog aggregators. Sample aggregators are Memeorandum and Technorati. All of them spider and mine RSS feeds to identify hot hot stories and topics.

With Flickr-like sites, the uploading is motivated by the presence of the community, because this creates a built-in audience. The more popular the site, the bigger the potential audience, the more incentive there is to upload.

With Flickr-like sites, both the hosting and the viewing happen on the same site. If you make a video and you want to maximize its popularity, you need to upload it to any site where there is an audience. You can't host it yourself because then there will be few potential viewers.

Blog aggregators don't suffer from this pattern. There are a lot of blog aggregators, in the hundreds is my guess, but there are many more hosts, and all the aggregators share the same pool of potential hosts. Independent hosts depend on the aggregators for viewers, aggregators depend on independent hosts for content.

Aggregators are more efficient in that a creator only has to upload each file once in order to reach all of their audience.

This issue is really common, and I figured it needed a URL. So that's what this blog entry is: a single URL that any aggregator can take advantage of. Needless to say it's not worth the trouble for me to upload this text to a bunch of different sites, and anyway that would defeat the purpose by giving the same item a bunch of different URLs.

More Thoughts, and Questions, on Multi-Platform Media

As I mentioned earlier, I'm trying to gather my thoughts, and some data points, before Thursday's Silverdocs panel on producing for multiple platforms. Four of my questions:

• How will mobile video content be different from wired video?
• What do audiences want– and how much money and time will they commit?
• How will the act of creating for the mini-screen alter a filmmaker's approach to larger, stationary, screens?
• How big of a role will user-generated/participatory content (such as Bus Uncle and the like) assume?

Here's where I'm looking for help:

Way back in the early days of mobile video (fall of 2005), iMedia's Roger Park laid out 4 questions, three of which still seem to be open:

• How do marketers track the mobile TV audience?
• Will consumers be willing to pay for content that is front loaded with sponsors?
• Will other networks and studios jump on the mobile TV bandwagon?
• How might the networks charge for commercial time within this mobile channel?

Informa issued a report last week projecting demand for mobile video: From Reuters:

The soccer World Cup in Germany will provide the catalyst for TV services on mobile phones to start taking off, but real growth will occur over the next five years, an industry report said on Wednesday.

Informa Telecoms & Media predicted some 210 million mobile TV subscribers worldwide by 2011, with the Asia-Pacific region leading the way with 95.1 million subscribers followed by Europe at 68.7 million.

"(By) the 2008 Olympics, we'll all be much more prepared to watch TV on our phones and by the 2010 World Cup the infrastructure will be mature and one in 13 mobile phone users worldwide will own a mobile TV handset," said David McQueen, senior analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.

McQueen goes deeper on his own site:

the soccer World Cup has provided the spark for the launch of a number of broadcast services in Europe, led by 3 in Italy and Debitel in Germany, across DVB-H and T-DMB networks respectively, which it is hoped will ignite a raft of further launches and subscriber uptake..

Informa Telecoms & Media's new released "Mobile TV: Broadcast and Mobile Multimedia" 2006 Strategic Report, handsets built with mobile-broadcast-receiver technologies are expected to find their way into 10% of handsets sales by 2011, representing an expected market of 120 million phones.…Informa Telecoms & Media expects DVB-H to take the largest share of that market…

McQueen asks some of the questions I would like to explore on Thursday;

But ultimately will anyone actually use a mobile TV service and who is it to be targeted at? There are some major issues underlying the success of mobile TV: how, when and for how long will content be consumed whilst on the move and, moreover, how much will users be willing to pay?

and reminds us of the limits of physics:

An initial cause for concern about the viability of the mobile TV service is over the length of battery life achieved on a mobile broadcast device. Trials have shown devices to have up to 4 hours continuous TV play on one battery charge, which should be enough to satiate most consumers' TV viewing in a single day. Indeed, some trials have shown an average viewing time of around 3 hours a week, well within current battery limitations.

So, what kind of programming does the average viewer want to watch during those 3 hours? For that matter, even high consumption urban nomads will "only" be able to view 4 hours at a shot. Thus, long form video is possible but unlikely.

…the success of mobile TV is also reliant on the availability of desirable, popular content to the end user which will determine, to a large extent, how fast consumers adopt the services and devices.

On DLMag, Aaron Azerad explores the alphabet soup of DVB-H, MBMS, and DMB:

A technology which is currently up at the plate for testing is DVB-H (Digital Video Broadband-Handheld), which skips by mobile networks and is broadcasted right to mobile hand-sets. Another alternative which is up for consideration is MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service), which instead of bypassing uses the mobile network to transmit television signals. Yet a third choice is also added into the factor of using DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) which would serve as a modified version of digital radio currently being used in South Korea, with Germany and Britain looking in… The United States has even jumped in offering their own solution to Mobile TV offering a broadcasted technology called MediaFlo.

Just what are folks doing with all those mobile devices?

I'm in Philadelphia, excited to attend the Hyperlinked Society at my old haunt, the Annenberg School. I chatted with some good folks last night, many of whom are likely to blog the conference during the course of the day. I may be sharing Joe Turow's nervous energy, and woke too early this morning.

Meanwhile, I am beginning to prepare for my own conference responsibilites at next week's Silverdocs, where I will be chairing a panel entitled "THE FUTURE OF REAL: E-MEDIA, I-MEDIA, WHAT MEDIA, WHOSE MEDIA?" on Thursday morning. The organizers describe it thusly:

Why should documentary filmmakers care about pod-casting, video i-Pods, mobile phone content delivery, VOD, broadband, cross-platform distribution? Are digital distribution technologies opening up new audiences and new sources of production funding? Or are they simply asking media artists to provide more versions of their content for the same-or less-amount of money?

The panelists are to include:

Linda Good Bryant, Multi Media Artist and Activist
Albie Hecht, President, World Wide Biggies/Shine Global Foundation
Debra May Hughes, President and Chief Operating Officer, Public Interactive
Clint Stinchcomb, Senior Vice President of New Media, Discovery Communications

My goal for the panel is to get beyond the hype of mobile and multiple platform distribution. I'd like the panel to paint a picture of what audiences and filmmakers are doing in this chaotic new world and am particularly interested in actual data. To wit, Nokia reports on how 18-35 year olds in 11 countries are using their mobiles:

Two thirds of people globally say a music-enabled mobile phone will replace their dedicated MP3 player, according to research from Nokia.

What's more, one in two people are already using a mobile phone as their main camera, while a third are using it for surfing the web.

Specifically, 44 per cent of respondents use a mobile phone as their primary camera…With Nokia optimistically asserting that 67 per cent of people globally now download a percentage of their music,… 36 per cent of respondents claim they are browsing the web on their mobile devices at least once a month.

The CEA reported last month that:

the most common activity for portable entertainment devices is listening to music (94 percent); however, this may be due to the lack of video capability and content. CEA estimates that only 15 percent of total digital media players shipping in 2005 were video capable, but that tide is quickly turning. This year, the percentage is expected to double. Owners of devices that do include video capability are twice as likely to engage in watching activities, choosing music videos (37 percent), movies (37 percent) and TV programming (21 percent). …Seventy-one percent of online portable digital media device owners plan to purchase entertainment content that can be played back on their device, spending close to $68 on content in the coming year.

I'm curious to learn just want kinds of programming people are watching? Will this apparrent even split between short (music videos) and long form (movies) continue? Will long form become more popular as batter life increases? Are audiences interested in serious non-fiction content, which is the concern of my day job, or will the preference be for user-generated content with a social commentary spin, like Bus Uncle? (Rowland Soong uses the phrase "spontaneous media exposures" in his summation of all things Bus Uncle.)

Mizuko Ito on anthropology and design

The last issue of Ambidextrous has been released. Among the different articles, there is a relevant interview of Dr. Mizuko Ito (the interviewer is Danah Boyd). Some excerpts I like:

DANAH: Fabulous! Can you tell me more about what how you see anthropology being relevant to design?

think there is a role for anthropology along all of the steps of the design process. But of course I would say that. Anthropology can help inspire new designs by providing profiles of users and stories about contexts of use. Anthropologists can play on design teams as designs get developed to sensitive designers to culturally and context specific issues. And finally, anthropologists can evaluate the effectiveness of designs through studies of actual use in context, either prototype, pilot, or after product roll-out.

DANAH: So what advice would you have to young aspiring anthropologists who want to study socio-technical practice and get involved in designing new technologies?

This one is tough. Be prepared for some blank looks from people in your discipline - but a lively audience of practitioners and technology designers who are eager to hear stories from the field. The challenge is to be multilingual and interdisciplinary while also maintaining commitment to ethnographic perspectives and methods.

Why do I blog this? that’s sometimes a feeling I have while working with a social science perspective with designers. Though, I am wondering whether going beyond telling stories because I feel there s much more to do.

Amnesty's Amazing Ads

Originally posted by Jason from Signal vs. Noise, reBlogged by ts

Amnesty International launched a new ad campaign that is incredibly creative and powerful. The tagline is "It's not happening here but it's happening now" which is hammered home with these transparent ads. The ads "transport" issues in countries like Iraq, China, and Sudan to your local landscape. This is one of the best awareness campaigns I've ever seen. [Thanks jk]

Cap Mounted Display

People into baseball cap like me could be interested into cap-mounted display such as the one designed by Lars Johansson and Niklas Andersson. One of their MSc student (Fredrik Nilbrink) designed a prototype:

This project’s purpose was to investigate the truck operators needs and to see how modern digital technology can help to reduce the paper work and increase the productivity and make the operator’s working situation better.

I: Cap Mounted Display
A monocular display unit is mounted on an ordinary cap. The unit also contains microphone, earphones, camera and Bluetooth units. The device is voice activated.
(…)
He [Fredrik]] took apart a pair of Sony Glasstron VGA-glasses to get the monocular Head Up Display we wanted for this project. On top of the cap a web camera was mounted.

Why do I blog this? a cool hack here but I am wondering about its usage in a real-world setting.

Vloggercon 2006 is sold out! [Flickr]

Michael Meiser posted a photo:

I'm posting this here because blogger.com has gone to pot.

24 hours till vloggercon!

Hopping on the plane tomorrow morning.

I wanted to share my thoughts on meeting over 400 vloggers and vlog fans for the first time.

In a word.

Vlogebrity!

Vlogebrity is the term.

We have a little saying amongst vloggers, "We are the media".

And so by proxy we are also our own celebrities.

What does vlogerbrity mean?

It's the long tail of celebrity.

It is more niche than blogebrity, and yet far more powerful a celebrity.

It's about strong bonds.


Imagine if you will.

Tomorrow and Saturday I will meet for the first time 150 or 250+ people I've never met in person, but whom I've gotten to know intimately through video blogging over the last 2 years.

They are from all over the world, Norway to Australia, and pretty much every continent.

I know their names like I know the names of old friends.

I know their faces, their personalities, their mannerisms, their humor, their interests and passions.

When we meet we will recognize each other. We may shake hands, but like old friends our introductions will be very brief and we'll dive into specific topics and detailed subjects based on our shared interests.

There won't be silly icebreaking questions. No, "So what do you do?" or "Where are you from"... No idle "get to know you" chat. Just diving into the common subjects we share.

Vlogebrities have known backgrounds.

Vlogebrities have shared history.

The shock of meeting all my vlogebrity friends at once face to face. This is the thing I'm most looking forward to at vloggercon at this moment.

This is on the surface what I want to capture and understand. Because in studying vloebrity it will tell us something about the future.

A future where we're all the media, where we're all celebrities to someone, mentor's, peers, and friends of people the world over.

Regardless of geography.

Another step in the progression of the global village.

I relish this idea.

Vloggercon is going to be a completely unique, great and erie sort of culture shock that is probably completely unique to video blogging. I'm expecting a powerful sort of deja vu.

With Introductions a side (almost unnecessary) vloggercon will be about getting right down to business.

It may sound like a preposterous thing to say, but I ask you to consider, that never before has such a large group of people whom know each other so well met for the very first time.

Actors may meet and they know each others faces and characters, but they don't know each other for who they really are.

Intellectuals, writers, scientists and infinite professional groups may know each other by reputation, by exchanges of writing, even by photos, but again they don't know each other as intimately as vloggers. They don't know each others voices, facial expressions.

Vlogebrity is powerful voodoo.

Unlike hollywood celebrity, which gives a powerful false sense of knowing people, vlogebrity gives a true and powerful sense of knowing. But how true is this celebrity? How much do we really know each other? We shall see.

Needless to say vlogebrity is a very unique type of celebrity. An intensely personal sort of celebrity.

Vlogebrity creates powerful bonds and friendships.

...and I expect since we all know each other so well while never having met, that the conversation will be so furious at vloggercon I seriously hope I don't loose my voice. ;)

So soak up and take note of the power of vlogebrity. Breath it in, think about it. What is the truth of it, what is false. As McLuhan famously said the medium is the message. If we are the media, then what does it say about the future, what does vlogebrity say about the future of a truly global culture of closely bonded niche communities.

To me this says one thing. This new world that is evolving that is bonded by a democratic, open, participatory media system, a property fundamental to the internet. It is fundamentally going to make the world a much more human/humane place then a world shaped by cars, and TV, radio and newspaper. The world is becoming more human.

We are truly living in the future in many respects.

And yet we're living very far in the future.

7000 video blogs is nothing.

The massive popularity of a Youtube, (which I've never seen anything like in all my .com years) is impressive, but really it is nothing in the big picture

This is not about a 2.0 .boom. We've barely entered an era that's going to play out over the course of generations, perhaps this whole century.

What happens in the first 7000 video blogs is fun and very interesting, (not to discount the very much related and very important blogging, podcasting and photocasting)... but in order to understand the true power of open acess media / new media, it's impact on the world, we have to listen carefully and study carefully, because the majority of it's power, of the possibilities for change lie below the surface. They have yet to be discovered.

The question we must ask, is what happens when the other 99.99% of the world has access to not just rich media, not just blogs, videos, photo, and VOIP communications... but the tools and applications, the project management tools, the wiki-collaborative writing tools, the processing power, the connectivity?

The reason I like vlogging, is not because I'm a videographer, it's because I'm a student of media. It's not because vlogging IS the future. Who knows where we'll be in 5 years. Who knows if vlogging as we know it will even exist. The reason why I am fascinated by this thing is because it is an opportunity to look into a window of a *possible future*, to understand something about how media shapes our culture and our identities now and how it will like the inventions of the printing press, the radio and the television before it.

If mass media nationalized and mobilized the world, what will internet mediated media do?

And therefore the reason why I'm going to vloggercon is two-fold. Both to understand, study and interpret this fundamental change in the way the world is connected and how it will change the world.

And secondly and just as important to collaborate and discuss with others to distributing this future. TO make it available to as many people as possible.

This initial success, this web 2.0 boom is a a misnomer, a distraction to what is truly significant to what is going on here. Myspace and Youtube the current media darlings of this space are but short sited mischaracterizations of this era, false gods at best. Who is going to bring this evolution to the other 99.99% of the planet? The majority of the planet that doesn't speak english, or one of the five more popular languages. Proprietary, walled garden systems fundamentally lack this capacity. I suspect it will evolve as has open access media out of open source software as it is the only model flexible enough to bring these technologies to the rest of the world.

And don't even talk to me about "big media"... they lack the vision to see beyond delivering plastic disks and DRM laden content to .0001% of the world. That's some sever myopia.

Oh, and here's a random but very cool vloggercon promo from the vlog, The Memeing of Life.

Watch it: Vloggercon Promo from Mark Raheja, The Memeing of Life (Quicktime, .mov)

So! I'll see you all at vloggercon!

:)

-Mike

Keywords: vloggercon, vloggercon2006, vlogebrity



Photo From: laughingsquid.com/2006/06/03/vloggercon-2006/

laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/vloggercon_flyer.gif

Why the Social Networking Backlash WILL Happen

A generation is about to learn the hard way about the downside of posting your entire life online. An article in the Times shows the tip of the iceberg:

Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

Young people may be naive but they are not stupid.

The generation just hitting puberty will watch the class ahead of them get screwed out of college admissions and job offers as a result of too much online social networking.

And they won’t make the same mistake.

(Backlash? Sounds more like a course correction to me. MY question is "how long will it be until the RECRUITERS adjust?" -kc.)

Identifying topics for the Identity Mashup

Mashing Up a Commons is new essay I just put up over at Linux Journal. It's a pretty big one: almost 3,000 words. But asks a big question: Is it possible that, for all our talk about The Commons, the Net doesn't have one yet?

The short answer, I think, is no.

Creative Commons and related efforts have gone a long way toward building out the kind of infrastructure we need before the Net is a truly public space, rather than a vast collection of private ones. But we need more.

I have some ideas about that, which I think are good to bring up ten days in advance of the Identity Mashup, which the Berkman Center is putting on at Harvard Law School. I'll be participating in that, and in Cambridge that whole week (although I'm mighty tempted to head West for Bloggercon). And I thought, given the speed at which things are moving toward Identity 2.0, the Identity Metasystem — or whatever else we end up calling it — that it would be good to start talking ahead of time about some of the ideas that we'll bring up there. Talking, that is, out here in The Commons. Or whateve we have that passes for one.

Why Google is actually right with this excel/word stuff

A lot of bloggers are saying the excel/word replacment strategy of Google must have some secret purpose. Not. They forget about 1 simple thing.

First, of course, the majority of people who use excel and word don’t need any advanced features.

What they do need is an easy way to store everything in one place. Office hasn’t solved that problem. Almost every small organization I talk to has an unsatisfactory, frustrating solution to where they keep their files. Mostly stuff just gets emailed around a lot.

That is the problem GoogleOffice can solve in 1 stroke. A basic Word and Excel is enough. And if it’s stored in 1 place (no more duplicates! No more version control nightmares. No sotware to by and install.), that’s enough motivation for 50% of all Office users to switch in the next 5 years.

Central storage, no software to install, basic features. And of course compatibility with Office.

It’s really that simple. Which small group with limited means would *not* adopt this? I know all of the ones I know would. It’s cheap. It’s easy to maintain. And it solves a *real* problem that they *all* struggle with right now.

Wearable rhythm communicator

Volume of over Lumen is a rhythm communicator for several people.

Each participant wears a silicone collar which sends a rhythmically arranged sound. A particular sound is generated for each participant according to an analysis of their voice. LEDs in the collar create a halo of pulsating light that radiates around the wearer. If another partecipant comes within the range of the collar, he or she can hear the sound generated by the collar worn by the first person. But if he or she comes within the range of several collars, then it's a mix of the various sound compositions that will be heard.

By their own movement in the area participants can modulate their own sound experience, as well as the acoustic experience of the other collar wearers.

Electronics are visibly cast in the collar: resistances, transistors, diodes, conductive strips and other elements have a functional as well as an aesthetic role.

A work by Martin Bellardi and Anne-Christin Delakowitz.

Check the collar at Sonambiente in Berlin until July 16.

Via rhizome. Bottom image.

The Future of Blogging

"New podcast. Dan Gillmor and I participated in a moderated discussion about the future of blogging. I think it came out pretty well."

How To: DV Video

Here's an introductory set of features written by SimplyDV's Colin Barrett and drawn from the many articles written for UK video-making magazines and also from the text of his book - Digital Video for Beginners (Ilex Press, March 2005).

Sousveillance/Surveillance

Interventions

[...] For an intervention on images, and in a sousveillance / surveillance context this time, Austrian activists Quintessenz created an anonymous surveillance system that uses a face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of people whose images are recorded (via Wired).

New Scientist reported today on a video surveillance system that scrambles people's faces to protect them from unwarranted monitoring. Developed by Swiss company EMITALL Surveillance, the algorithm of the technology singles out any people in a video feed, on the basis of their movement, and disguises them digitally while leaving the rest of the scene intact (Videos 1, 2 and 3). Only those in possession of the encryption key can unlock the scrambled regions and identify the people shown on-screen.

The system can even use different encryption keys to scramble the identity of particular people under surveillance, says Touradj Ebrahimi, founder of EMITALL Surveillance (thanks Emily!)

More broadcast disruption: SVEN - Surveillance Video Entertainment Network, a real-time video performance system that detects when people look like rock stars instead of criminals. Once a potential rock star is detected, music video effects are triggered so the surveillance stars get a treatment worthy of Cecil B himself; TV Predator, a picture frame that attacks the tv and prevent it from working properly; OiTV, a misbehaving attention-seeking TV. [blogged by Régine on we-make-money-not-art]

Bricolab: bricolage, p2p-brut and collaborative authorship

A landscape of bricoleurs

Peer to peer communication is every bit an act of bricolage - of tinkering, re-ordering, re-combining, de- and re-constructing existing elements into new and unforeseen forms, only to pass them along the chain to be further transformed. The participant in peer to peer culture, whom we might call a ‘bricoleur’, is ever part of an endless dialogue, an evolving process that reaches beyond and before their contribution.

This takes some adjusting to, and nowhere more so than in the world of media and the creative arts, where the spectre of authorship, and the draconian intellectual property rights that trail closely behind it, loom heavily over the most seemingly throw-away proceedings. But as consumers increasingly refuse to take a passive role and those in the communications industries gradually come to accept the full possibilities of participatory culture, or CGM (consumer generated material), the transition towards a peer to peer model, and thus a model made up of a fluid, mobile network of bricoleurs comes ever closer.

The Bricolab project

Bricolab.com is a group of interconnected sites designed to foster creative collaboration via Open Source Culture, social networking and web 2.0 technologies. Made up of a blog, set up for resource sharing and commentary on p2p creativity, a wiki for community collaboration and a Project Space for community forging, blogging and file sharing, Bricolab is a free, open space built on the back of the Open Source applications MediaWiki, Elgg and WordPress.

The PocketPacket project

While the project is ultimately an open culture jamming session, which will evolve in response to the community that will ultimately shape and reshape its function and form, the first community project to be launched from Bricolab is the PocketPacket project. The PocketPacket is an experiment in ‘p2p-brut’, which is to say p2p in the raw.

Essentially a means of taking p2p to the streets, the PocketPacket is a downloadable set of posters, stickers and postcards to attach to community dictated monthly projects, to be dropped off in public spaces. The first of these projects is that of the PocketPedia.

PocketPedia

The PocketPedia is a simple, street level project designed to make the gift of free GNU Wikipedia articles to strangers, delivered by means of the PocketPacket to trains, buses and other locations of extreme boredom. It is a small gesture that at once provides hand-selected, and personally endorsed reading material for commuters the world over and draws attention to peer to peer alternatives. All are welcome to get involved, and can do so via the PocketPacket website.

Future projects

Future PocketPacket and Bricolab efforts will arise from the community. Current suggestions include the distribution of home made original and derivative art, and creative commons licensed mp3 cds composed and remixed online.

(Image courtesy of atom.smasher)

Media chaos, round 2

Bob Garfield of NPR's On the Media is back with his Media Chaos Theory, Round 2. Bloggers Jeff Jarvis and Terry Heaton are among those interviewed.

Yes, many of us have written about the disruptive effects of the new technologies, and the need for old media to reinvent their business models during the digital transformation.

One man's Chaos Theory is another man's opportunity -- it's called democratic media, or the personal media revolution. (mp3)

Marshall McLuhan

tomorrow is our permanent address...

…McLuhan claimed some decades ago but nowadays we are simply already immersed and embedded …Arthur C. Kroker (editor of ctheory) states that we live in the electronic culture that he (McLuhan) prophesied. And since he wrote about it, technology has become more pervasive, but silent. It’s invisible. An elder article (written 2005 to remind McLuhan’s actuality 25 year after his death) gives..(an) overview on McLuhan’s opinions and as well both the enthusiasm and critique his thoughts evoked.

"For the first time, the central nervous system has been 'exteriorized," says Kroker, U Vic's Canada Research Chair in technology, culture and theory. "It is our plight to be processed through the technological simulacrum…in a "technostructure" which is nothing but a vast simulation and amplification of the bodily senses." McLuhan’s early (1960s) wake-up call about the extent to which people’s very identities are determined by the tools that they themselves invent can be listened to via these two links of the old recordings.

The Medium is the Massage; with Marshall McLuhan.
Long-Playing Record 1968.
Produced by John Simon.
Conceived and co-ordinated by Jerome Agel. Written by Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel.
Columbia CS 9501, CL2701.

[posted on mind the_GAP*]

‘Labels on digital content should spell out how easy it is to move from gadget to gadget’

A warning label mockup*

The BBC is reporting that the All Party Internet Group (APIG), a cross-party group of MPs, has made some intelligent - and interesting - recommendations about explaining DRM more fully to consumers:

“The MPs’ report made several recommendations and called on the Office of Fair Trading hasten the introduction of labelling regulations that would let people know what they can do with music and movies they buy online or offline.

This would ensure that it was “crystal clear” to consumers what freedom they have to use the content they are purchasing and what would happen if they do something outlawed by the protection system.

The same labelling systems would also spell out what happened in the event of a maker of DRM technology going bust, if a protection system became obsolete or if gadgets to play the content are replaced.

…

The report also called for the makers of DRM systems to be made aware of the consequences of using aggressive copy protection systems [e.g. the Sony-BMG nightmare].”

I wonder what the proposed labelling system will entail? Will it be very simple, or will it need to spell out to consumers the rights the law gives them in order to them point out how this particular DRM’d CD or download is restricting them?

In short, do we need a programme of educating consumers about their rights before a labelling system will be useful?

The Open Rights Group’s Suw Charman is quoted in the BBC story:

“”The technologies are extending beyond the law they are supposed to uphold.”

…

She said that DRM was less about protecting copyright and more about creating a system in which people rent rather than own the media they spend money on.

“We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought,” she said.”

APIG’s group secretary is the Earl of Erroll, an insightful quote of whose I blogged about a few months ago. It’s worth repeating in this context, as APIG’s work here goes some way to remedying the problem he highlights:

“If no members of either house know anything about IT, then bureaucrats will take control of our lives, or pretend they can do things they can’t.”

Hopefully APIG can continue their work in educating politicians, as well as the public, about the implications of restrictive technology.

*Not owning any DRM’d music, I used a recent CD purchase, the excellent Great Days of Sail (now Yo Zushi) album, for the mockup image. An alternative style of label might be those distributed by Downhill Battle and RIAA Radar:

Image from Downhill Battle.

FCC Chief: Doing Nothing is the New Black

"Consumers need to be able to access all the content that's available over the Internet without being impeded by the access provider," Martin said. "But at the same time, we recognized that the people that are deploying these networks may offer differentiated speeds and differentiated products to the consumer. And if you offer different tiers of speeds, a consumer chooses the lowest tier, and he wants to access content that would require higher speeds than he has purchased, he's not being blocked from access. He just hasn't purchased the speed that's necessary."

If Digg wore high-heels and lipstick

I had the scoop but couldn’t blab until now. But Jossip let the catty out of the bag, revealing the quiet launch of Lipstick.com as a Digg for the glamorous celebrity set instead of unglamorous geeks from Conde Nast.

First 10 headlines on Lipstick right now:

1. Brangelina’s sweet, sweet revenge on the tabloids (nypost.com)
2. Jen & Vince hang out in Sydney, acting more like friends than a couple (people.aol.com)
3. Lindsay, Scarlett, Jessica, Alicia Keys do serious couture at the 2006 CFDA Awards (style.com)
4. Is This For Real?! First Photo of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt! (dlisted.blogspot.com)
5. Brandon Davis’ grandma is a dirty liar (thesuperficial.com)
6. Aniston sees irony in her “Break-Up” role (montereyherald.com)
7. Lindsay Lohan Dating Everyone but Brandon Davis (jossip.com)
8. Keanu Reeves opens up: “I’m trying not to be alone so much, And man, it’s a struggle. I want to get married.” 9. Casey Affleck, Summer Phoenix Wed (people.aol.com)
10. A Diamond Binky For Shiloh Nouvel (shoppingblog.com)

First 10 headlines on Digg right now:

1. Dvorak: Our Modern World—Weirder by the Minute
2. Intel Core 2 Duo Blows Away AMD Athlon FX
3. AllofMp3.com Breaks Silence
4. Hack Attack: Turn your $60 router into a $600 router
5. Scientists resolve 60-year-old plutonium questions
6. It’s Hard Out Here For A Gamer
7. Cell-Phone Tracking Parents
8. 6Bone IPv6 Network Shutting Down
9. 24 Hours to stop new copyright law
10. RFID Gains Momentum In Pharmaceuticals

Hmmmmm. Worlds collide. Geeks v. glam. Rose v. Newhouse. This’ll be fun.

Has News Competition Outlived Its Usefulness?

Yesterday in E-Media Tidbits, Steffen Fjaervik wrote about the view that competition is endemic to the profession and business of journalism.

I'm going to push back on that. In my view, the strongly competitive culture of the news business is an adaptation that helped journalism mature and thrive over the last century. But times change.

It seems to me that media (all media, not just online) are evolving to become more integrated, collaborative, interactive, customized, and conversational. Given that -- plus overwhelming business pressures -- maybe our competitive culture is becoming an albatross around the neck of journalism.

Here's what I mean: Huge chunks of the traditional business model of news organizations are crumbling. Advertisers and consumers are shifting -- they can now reach each other directly and constructively, without our help, and they're busy creating their own media, too. Consolidation in the industry continues, drastically altering our competitive landscape.

And let's not forget: No one -- NO ONE -- can scoop the Internet. Ever.

Seems to me that under such circumstances, news organizations might do better to hone their unique strengths and collaborate more with other news organizations that offer complementary strengths -- similar to how weblogs support and enhance each other through cross-blog conversation. Imagine: someday a Pulitzer Prize might be awarded jointly to an enterprise reporting team spread across several news organizations. 

Maybe it's time to recognize and start dismantling the silos where we've unwittingly cornered ourselves in the name of "competition." Collaboration might be a way to create a more robust and distributed base of operations for traditional journalism. Fortunately, online media is an easy an inexpensive place to experiment, so it might be a good way to start.

Ultimately, what's more important -- the survival of quality journalism or the survival of the business structures that have supported professional journalists so far?

What are your thoughts on this? Please comment below.

The Crisis in Economics: The Post-Autistic Economics Movement: The first 600 days, Edward Fullbrook (editor)

Mainstream economics is mired in assumptions divorced from any real life practice, and builds model on those flawed assumptions. Luckily, there has been a growing movement to bring back realism into economics, and that includes attention for sharing behaviours. The Post-Autistic Economics movement is one of its expressions, so the following book is very importat to peer to peer theory.

The PAE Network started in France and has spread first to Cambridge and then other parts of the world. The name derives from the fact that mainstream economics has been accused of institutional autism; i.e., qualitative impairment of social interaction, failure to develop peer relationships and lack of emotional and social reciprocity. In short, economics has lost touch with reality and has become way too abstract.

From time to time, disciplines need to be, and in fact are, shaken up and virtually reconstituted. This seems to be especially true of the social sciences, where Economics lives in a kind of halfway house haunted by spectres of its venerable bearded ancestors, which the parents pretend never existed. However, like third generation immigrants, the new students want to know more about their roots, especially with regard to the deeply humanistic ethos which informed the discipline in its earliest days.

This provocative book charts the impact the PAE Network has had so far and constitutes a manifesto for a different kind of economics - it features key contributions from all the major voices in heterodox economics including Tony Lawson, Deirdre McCloskey, Geoff Hodgson, Sheila Dow and Warren Samuels.

Yahoo! Korea: Webzari

Yahoo! Korea presented to Yahoo! Research Berkeley yesterday and showed us some of their work. I was completely blown away, and the meeting left a strange taste in my mouth, something akin to "I wish I lived in Korea."

Yahoo! provides a service called Site Explorer that allows webmasters to do research on how their site is being linked from the rest of the web. As Jeongeun Lee of Y! Korea put it, "we wanted to make this experience more fun." They took the metaphor of exploration quite literally, imagining the web to be a universe, putting the user on an interstellar expedition. The result is a service called Webzari, essentially a different interface on the same data. It looks something like this:

Essentially, it goes something like this: web sites are planets whose size is determined by the number of links they have. Planets are attracted to each other based on the links between them, and you are a little space ship that flies around the universe. Check out Webzari in action:

Webzari for overstated.net

Webzari for kottke.org

Webzari for Yahoo! Korea

Yellow planets denote websites in Korean while purple ones are "foreign" (and you'll notice that the flag next to your spaceship changes depending on the planet you're next to). If you click on a planet you'll get details about the local flora and fauna and the ability to navigate to this part of the solar system. It may not be as useful for research as Site Explorer, but I have to hand it to them, it is definitely more fun.

By the end of next year I expect that they'll probably have replicated the entire Spore game system, wherein when you start a blog your posts are little organisms fighting for control of the site. After for a while your links start to appear and suddenly you zoom out to this interface. Eventually your blog will take over the universe and Yahoo! Search will become artificially intelligent, omnipresent, and omnipotent.

Collective Action is not Collectivism

I'm not going to get into a critique of Jaron Lanier's Digital Maoism -- indeed, I agree that new notions about collective intelligence and peer production should be viewed critically and not embraced in a spirit of magical thinking -- but I find it strange that someone as educated as Jaron should fall into the same simple fallacy the Cato Institute fell for: collective action is not the same as collectivism. Commons-based peer production in Wikipedia, open source software, open source biology, prediction markets is collective action, not collectivism. Collective action involves freely chosen self-election (which is almost always coincident with self-interest) and distributed coordination; collectivism involves coercion and centralized control; treating the Internet as a commons doesn't mean it is communist (tell that to Bezos, Yang, Filo, Brin or Page, to name just a few billionaires who managed to scrape together private property from the Internet commons). Hello? Can anybody spot the differences?

Brainstorm

Dr. Lillian Reynolds: Can you see better if I move it a little closer?
Dr. Michael Anthony Brace: I can see something. It's parts of the grid, but it's still rotating. It's not locking up.
Hal Abramson: Maybe we all need a little break, Lillian.
Dr. Lillian Reynolds: Hal, you take a break.

- Brainstorm

For the first time, scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry have coupled living brain tissue to a chip equivalent, reports the Science Blog.

Before informational input perceived by the mammalian brain is stored in the long-term memory, it is temporarily memorised in the hippocampus (left). Understanding the function of the hippocampus as an important player in the memory process is a major topic of current brain research.

Methods commonly used in neurophysiology are invasive, restricted to a small number of cells or suffer from low spatial resolution. The scientists in Martinsried developed a revolutionary noninvasive technique that enables them to record neural communication between thousands of nerve cells in the tissue of a brain slice with high spatial resolution.

This technique involves culturing razor-thin slices of the hippocampus region on semiconductor chips. These chips were developed in collaboration with Infineon Technologies AG to record neural activity in the brain.

Recording the activity patterns of the united cell structure of an intact mammalian brain tissue represents a significant technological breakthrough. Employing the new technique, the biophysicists working under the direction of Peter Fromherz were able to visualize the influence of pharmaceutical compounds on the neural network. This makes the “brain-chip” from Martinsried a novel test system for brain and drug research.

The world's first brain prosthesis - an artificial hippocampus - has been developed (right). Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this silicon chip implant will perform the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing.

A team of US researchers has shown that controlling devices with the brain is a step closer. A brain-computer interface (BCI) translates electrical signals detected from the scalp into a user's commands. Previous systems used electrodes surgically implanted in the brain.

Researchers at NY's Department of Health believe it could eventually allow control of complex movements, such as operating a word processing program or a motorized wheelchair by thought alone.

Maybe brain interfaces will become a killer app for gigabit fiber networks. The OptIPuter as a game machine. Cell processor game machines are just around the corner.

Infineon is also a development partner with Microsoft for prepaid and subscription computing with their FlexGo technology. Microsoft's got the server (with a terabyte of ram). Buy Vista.

Plug a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) headset into your settop box from the Cable Health Network. Watch the "test". Zap. Eliminate drug addiction, alcoholism and pesky political dissidents in a flash.

Here are some links to Psychophysiology-Related Companies.

DailyWireless has more on Brainstorm Programs. Zack Lynch edits the Brain Waves blog on Corante.

Turbulence Commission:

"mobotag" by Marta Lwin

mobotag reveals the hidden layers of a city through an active exchange of location based media and text messages via the cellphone. It's collaborative phone tagging of the city. Part virtual graffiti, part walking tour, "mobotag" creates a spontaneous and easy way for tagging a neighborhood via the cellphone. Send and view messages, images, videos and sounds. See art, read stories, and watch a hidden layer of the city reveal itself. Respond with your media and participate in the creative expression and mapping of your neighborhood. By sending a text message to "mobotag", with your city location, you begin an interactive tour of a neighborhood. Using a unique geocoding feature, "mobotag" tells you what other messages exist in your local area. In the near future "mobotag" will also feature art projects including "flyHere," a mobile phone audio installation featuring native bird calls; "bugBytes," collectible graphical bugs originating at major telecoms around NYC; and "lookHere," a written work in short form by a native NY writer.

"mobotag" is a 2006 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY

Marta Lwin is an artist, technologist, and researcher who recently completed her masters at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. Her background is both in art and activism. In the early to late 90's she worked with Greenpeace, UNEP, and Women's Environmental Network and Reclaim the Streets (UK). After joining a loose network of artists at Backspace in London, Lwin became interested in the creative use of technology as it relates to biology. Currently, her work focuses on the intersection of art and technology and includes projects that critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of the relationship between nature and technology. Her work has been shown at galleries in Europe and New York. Publications covering her work including networked_performance, Engadget, Core77, Treehugger, Cool Hunting, MocoLoco, WorldChanging, Rhizome and We Make Money Not Art.

swarm browse behavior

a graphical visualization map of the websites people are visiting, updated every second with where people are going & coming from. as sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm & grow larger. conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center & grow smaller. website traffic is symbolized with thin lines: each line symbolizes a move from one site to the other.
see also google browser.
[swarmthe.com]

Joining the edgestream

Clayton Christensen, five years ago:

One of the litmus tests is that, in almost every case, a disruptive technology enables a larger population of less skilled people to do things that historically only an expert could do. And to do it in a more convenient setting.

Terry Heaton, today:

This is precisely the issue with the triumph of personal technology over mass technology, and it offers amazing opportunities for local media companies. If you're a local station, for example, pick a local information niche and go after it as if you weren't a TV station (or radio station or newspaper). What would you do and what would you build that would meet that need effectively and efficiently? I promise you it won't be an on-demand piece of content.

Because here's the deal. The tools available to everyday people that are turning the media world on its head are also available to professional organizations. You don't have to approach everything with a $100,000 solution when $10,000 will do just fine. If aggregation is where its at (and I believe that it is), then build aggregators. Let other people be the content creators and move yourself to the edge. Not only is it fun there, but that's where the profitability is going to be downstream.

Lots more at that last link. Dig it.

Telepresence and social implications

Yesterday marked the beginning of Institute for the Futures annual Tech Horizon conference. I have really been looking forward to this event since I got to meet so many visionary people at the last IFTF event.

Larry Smarr the Director of California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology was giving the first keynote tonight about telepresence and its social implications. And by telepresence he is talking about videoconferencing systems where the technology has intuitive interactions and the present difference between interactions face-to-face and a videoconferencing interaction will not be sensed – also called transparent telepresence.

He had some really interesting perspectives on processing power, storage capacity and bandwidth which will surpass human capabilities within the next 10-15 years and enable real time human level telepresence.

To give an example of his views of technology surpassing human capabilities is the eye-to-brain communication which is being done at about 1 gigabit/sec, a bandwidth speed introduced to the mass market some years ago but has yet to reach Internet Service Providers portfolio.

A possible social change with real time human perception level telepresence technology would be that humans have less real contact and would travel less. A scary forecast which I could see happen from a corporate point of view or the gaming room of teenagers chatting with friends, though studies has also concluded that the usage of current telepresence systems of remote interaction only encourages the drive to meet the people at the other end in real life.

If that study will reach the same conclusion when future telepresence systems gets similar abilities of real life human presence will be up for debate.

Originally from we make money not art, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 24, 2006 at 03:11 PM

Tim Berners-Lee warns of 'dark' net

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web was knighted in the UK for his invention. The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, Tim Berners-Lee said. Sir Tim was speaking at the start of the WWW2006 conference on the future of the web at the International Conference Centre in Edinburgh.

Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not "part of the internet model," he said in Edinburgh. He warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter "a dark period".

"What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web," he said. "Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."

read more on BBC News
www2006 Social Wiki

Not just for boys (of course not)

A couple of weeks ago, the Experimental Digital Arts (EDA) of UCLA hosted Girls ‘N’ Games conference. Panelists ranging from anthropologist Mimi Ito to Brenda Laurel from the gaming company Purple Moon gathered to discuss everything from the perils of playing up stereotypes in “girl game design” to the differences in girl gaming in Asia, North American and Europe. Gamasutra gives a good overview of the discussion, while over at Joystiq, Jennie Lees offers an interesting counterpoint. She notes that much of this discussion was covered at the Women’s Game conference in 2005, and wonders if the debate has become stagnant. A fascinating discussion follows Lees’ post with commentary from many gamers, both male and female.

Via: Gamasutra and Joystiq

http://www.popgadget.net/2006/05/not_just_for_bo.php">Originally from Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 23, 2006 at 12:25 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog at May 23, 2006, 13:25, published by Marisa S. Olson

Michael Cardenas

Deleuze's Ontology as Expressed in the Global Indymedia Network

Introduction: Delanda, Deleuze and Indymedia: In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel Delanda tries to explain Gilles Deleuze's ontology in straightforward language “for an audience of scientists and analytical philosophers of science” (Delanda, 7). He tries to untangle the language of Deleuze, a writer who allowed for much play in his language, jumping between various concepts and frequently renaming those concepts. Still, in his writing, Gilles Deleuze developed a rich ontological framework with which one can view the universe. This ontology is based on a rigorous mathematical approach which Delanda explains in great depth.

In this paper I will explain a few components of Deleuze's worldview, as explained by Delanda, using the example of Indymedia, the global Independent Media Center movement. The global Indymedia site, describes Indymedia as “a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth.” (Independent Media Center, About Indymedia.)

Within the network itself, each collective organizes itself autonomously, without a top-down leadership, while still acting within a framework created by the Global Indymedia Points of Unity. Throughout the paper I will refer to various texts written by different local collectives. My intention is not to create a complete, thorough representation of the network, which is global and very diverse, but to use a few samples which relate strongly to ideas expressed in Deleuze's ontology.

While I realize that Deleuze's ontology serves perfectly well to explain far more simple entities, such as a chair, it is my hope that this analysis will reveal some interesting dynamics because of the affinity between Delanda's motivations and those of the Indymedia network. Delanda states that one of the conclusions of his book is that “the very idea that there can be a set of true sentences which give us the facts once and for all, an idea of a closed and finished world, gives way to an open world full of divergent processes... the kind of world that would not sit still long enough for us to take a snapshot of it and present it as the final truth.” The Indymedia Network works to challenge the claim to objectivity, or truth, of corporate media outlets by providing a space where people can tell their own stories and comment on other's stories, in an ongoing process, in order to help create social change. The processes that create this space will be further illuminated throughout this paper.

Multiplicities not Things

Delanda explains Deleuze's how realist ontology replaces the concept of essences with “dynamical processes” and the “multiplicity”. (Delanda, 5) Where many realist traditions are based on the transcendental concept of essence, describing for example the ideological category of “a chair”, Deleuze replaces that simplistic idea with the multiplicity, “a nested set of vector fields related to each other by symmetry-breaking bifurcations, together with the distributions of attractors which define each of its embedded levels.” Delanda goes on to describe the relation of this concept to group theory and its difference from categories, which define individuals in a population a aberrations from the abstract instead of processes, which are defined by the set of individuals they describe.

The global Indymedia network can be seen as a result of a number of social, technological and economic processes itself: ubiquitous cheap internet access, a tradition of media activism including newspaper propagandists and pirate radio dj's, corporate globalization. At the same time, the Indymedia network is embodied by a number of processes.

Indymedia defines itself as a non-hierarchical network, not as a federation, coalition or collective. Networks are defined by communication among a disparate set of nodes. As a network, Indymedia can itself be seen as a population of collectives, or as a multiplicity described by the characteristics of the collectives in the network. The Global Indymedia Points of Unity, agreed to by all collectives in the network, state: “The Independent Media Center Network (IMCN) is based upon principles of equality, decentralization and local autonomy. The IMCN is not derived from a centralized bureaucratic process, but from the self-organization of autonomous collectives that recognize the importance in developing a union of networks.” (Independent Media Center, Global Indymedia Principles of Unity) As such, there is a wide degree of play across a number of variables such as number of participants, focus on various mediums, degree of cooperation with local communities, degree of transparency of process, openness to differing political viewpoints, amount of finances and more. Systems with many degrees of freedom can be seen as complex systems or dynamical processes. In addition, although there is an official collective that approves entry into the Indymedia network, over time some collectives fade away while others are closely integrated with projects outside of the network, making the strict definition of the network even harder.

Within the network, different collectives can also be seen as multiplicities, some more so than others. In particular, Portland Indymedia defines itself as “not a membership organization; it is a tactic, a concept, and a movement that can be effectively utilized in many different ways.” While some other Indymedia centers do have official membership, many do not and are based on loose affinities and degrees of individual participation. Unlike traditional unions or other forms of political organization with rosters of dues paying members, Indymedia is defined by a process of communication, affinity and participation. Delanda sums up Deleuze's view of things as processes saying “the alternative offered by Deleuze is to avoid taking as given fully formed individuals, or what amounts to the same thing, to always account for the genesis of individuals”. Further blurring the definition of membership in Indymedia is its Open Publishing policy where anyone can post to Indymedia websites, many people do and consider themselves part of Indymedia. As many Indymedia sites say “you ARE Indymedia.” (San Diego Indymedia)

Asking The Right Questions

Open Publishing was a founding concept of Indymedia in 1999, before blogs and myspace were commonplace. Open Publishing has been defined by people within the Indymedia network as “mean[ing] that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available.” (Arnison) The actual implementations of this vary widely and opinions on how open Open Publishing should be very widely even within local collectives. Delanda presents Deleuze's “problematic approach”, saying that “a solution always has the truth it deserves according to how well specified the corresponding problem” and goes on to say that “problems can replace fundamental law statements.” (Delanda 163) While Delanda's approach contains a high degree of rigor and describes specific mathematical models resulting in specific physical entities and populations, one can still see a high degree of correlation in Indymedia's approach of asking questions instead of promoting a party line. Unlike organizations that choose a linguistic statement of truth and promote that statement, Indymedia seeks to create a space for open publishing, diffusion of a variety of varying ideas and debate. The network does engage in editorial work on their sites, based on the Points of Unity which reject hate speech, but within that framework, they seek to ask questions, not provide answers.

The problematic approach is further exemplified by Indymedia's non-hierarchical structure. Since the Indymedia network “is not derived from a centralized bureaucratic process” (Independent Media Center, Global Indymedia Principles of Unity), there is no single set of statements that define the truth of what Indymedia is. There are principles that collectives in the network have agreed to, but those principles are subject to local interpretation and to change at any time by a network wide consensus. Indymedia is defined by a set of problems it is trying to address simply stated as corporate controlled media, not by the theories of any individual or the policies of any bureaucracy. As Richard Day states in Gramsci is Dead, there is “a shift away from hegemonically-oriented 'movements', and towards non-branded strategies and tactics such as Independent Media Center”. (Day 9) The Indymedia network is an example of a tactic for creating change which does not strive to promote a simple set of truths but a set of questions, an invitation.

Time and Communication in Delanda

Moving onto Deleuze's conception of time, Delanda delves into communication theory. While multiplicities can define populations, they still must have invariant properties within those populations that bind them, and “whenever we speak of the invariant properties of an entity we also need to describe an operator, or group of operators, capable of performing rotations, translations, projections, foldings and a variety of other transformations on that entity.. The quasi-cause is, indeed, this operator and it is defined not by its giving rise to multiplicities but by its capacity to affect them.”

The quasi-cause affects multiplicities and links them together. To explain the quasi-causal operator, Deleuze and Delanda use the example of an information channel. (Delanda 84) If one imagines the individual Indymedia collectives as multiplicities, then the information channel between them, the broader network, can be seen as this kind of operator linking them together. When Deleuze says “once communication between heterogeneous series is established, all sorts of consequences follow within the system. Something passes the borders, events explode, phenomena flash, like thunder and lightning,” (Delanda 150) one can see a clear parallel to the global information sharing within the network where the stories of burning tires from the streets of Argentina or of mass border crossings in Morocco are passed from country to country, city to city, through Indymedia.

Attractors and the Virtual

Delanda's book, in Describing Deleuze's ontology, is largely about the virtual and its effect on the actual world. Deleuze says “it is correct to represent a double series of events which develop in two planes, echoing without resembling each other: real events on the level of engendered solutions, and ideal events embedded in the conditions of the problem”. One critical example of a virtual entity is an attractor. “Attractors... may be defined as special subsets of state space, that is, as limit states” (Delanda 80) Later, in his definition of multiplicities, Delanda states that the attractors are “never actualized”. (Delanda 30) For example, the policy of having Open Publishing and the Global Indymedia Principles of Unity can be seen as being two attractors, or as being the virtual corresponding to the actual Indymedia network. While they are stated goals, varying collectives follow them to varying degrees, representing different states in the system at varying distances from the stated goal or the attractor. Deleuze states that “The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual... Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object”. The attractors that influence the trajectories of multiplicities are no less real because they are not actualized. They are observable.

Conclusion

Any attempt at a mathematically rigorous description of a thing so large, complex and nebulous as a social movement is bound to fail, or at best be inexact. This difficulty is compounded by a the fluidity of a network such as Indymedia. This paper is an attempt to describe the global Indymedia network as an entity within a Deleuzian ontology, while showing affinity between Deleuze's approach and that of Indymedia. Manuel Delanda's book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy is an attempt to construct a clear picture of Deleuze's ontology and to provide a detailed alternative to Deleuze's explanation of the mathematical foundations of dynamical processes. (Delanda 5) In bringing Delanda's text, which attempts to described specific physical processes, together with the study of social movements and media culture, there is a bit of inexactness. Nevertheless, as Delanda states, “we philosophers must invent devices to allow us to become 'the quasi-cause of what is produced within us, the Operator'”, and in that tradition this paper is an attempt to explain some of the connections I saw while reading Delanda. As the Zapatistas said in the Second Declaration of La Realidad “We are the network, all of us who resist.” (Graeber)

Works Cited

Arnison, Matthew. "Open publishing is the same as free software" March 2001. May 1, 2006. http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.html.

Day, Richard J.F. Gramsci is Dead. London: Pluto Press, 2005.

Delanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2002.

Graeber, David. "The New Anarchists". The New Left Review. Jan-Feb 2002. May 1, 2006. http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24704.shtml.

Independent Media Center. "About Indymeda". Independent Media Center. May 1, 2006. http://www.indymedia.org/en/static/about.shtml

Independent Media Center. "Global Indymedia Principles of Unity". Indymedia Documentation Project. May 2006. May 1, 2006. http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/PrinciplesOfUnity

Independent Media Center. "Indymedia FAQ". Indymedia Documentation Project. Jan 2005. May 1, 2006. http://www.indymedia.org/en/static/about.shtml

San Diego Indymedia. "About Us". San Diego Indymedia. Feb 2005. May 1, 2006. http://sandiego.indymedia.org/en/static/aboutus.shtml

[via nettime]

Call for Participation:

Summer of MySpace

Call for Participation: The Summer of MySpace - an online exhibition; Curated by Patrick Lichty - The Curator of MySpace; myspace[at]voyd.com; Friend Request Dates - 5/21/06 - 8/31/06.

MySpace is a cultural phenomenon. Millions of people have poured their lives into this online community, making it the most successful to date, surpassing Friendster, Xuqa, and Facebook. Millions of hours of creative time by its users, aspiring bands, models, and magazines have been placed into this online agora. But is MySpace a creative space? "Summer of MySpace" asks a number of questions about this burgeoning hang-out haven:

Has MySpace become a new art medium or New Media/Net artform, or can it be used as one? Can the selection of 'friends' and their spaces be called a form of curation? In making profiles, do we make ourselves into art objects? What does it mean to ask to be a 'friend'? Is a form of curation?

Is MySpace merely a space for the colonization of youth culture by corporations and consumer culture? Is MySpace's success representative of a truly new form of community? What other questions about relationships, society, art, and culture does MySpace present? Is MySpace limited by the way it's made, or can we subvert the profile for our own desires?

"Summer of MySpace" fires a probe into this unknown territory, asking all these questions, and setting up a stage for the Internet Summer of Love of the 00's.

Come, be my friend. Let me show you as a shiny new piece of art. Let us curate and be curated, befriend and be befriended in this brave new land of joy and irony.

Let's see what happens. Get on the magic bus.

Submission Procedure:

All you need to do is to set up a profile, make it into an 'artwork', make yourself into an 'artwork', make a place for your 'artwork', and ask me to be your friend. That's what curation is all about, isn't it? The rest is up to us!

Peace, all!
-Patrick Lichty
(The Curator of MySpace)

Monkey Business

Keeping Distributed Groups Connected

Monkey Business is a system that attempts to keep distributed group members more connected and aware of each other's activities; the system aims to facilitate informal and spontaneous communication, while minimizing interruption at inopportune times. The system consists of a network of animatronic agents, one of which will reside in the office of each member of a distributed group. We have chosen the embodiment of a monkey for the form of these agents; hence Monkey Business as the title of this project.

The agent uses a combination of microphones and sensors to recognize the activity in the office that it occupies. If there is a change in the state of the office activity, the agent broadcasts the information out to the network of other agents. The other agents, through subtle gestures, movements, and sounds, indicate the changes of state of the broadcasting office. Thus all members of the group, through their respective agents, are made aware of each other's activities in an ambient manner. more...

Also see Monkey Business: Creating social awareness among distributed group members, using a network of animatronic agents by Rachel Kern and Toward Lighthearted Mobile Non-verbal Expression by Rachel Kern, Chris Schmandt, and Paulina Modlitba. [via Jim Downing on Smart Mobs]

The On-Demand Trap

Here is the latest in my ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. I consider this to be among the most important I've written, because it raises issues relative to the current on-demand frenzy that many broadcasters see as a way out of the untenable position of shrinking audiences. Since I essentially coined the phrase "unbundled media," I'm clearly not "against" on-demand as a strategy. However, I think it's extremely dangerous to bet the ranch on it alone. Moreover, I think the greater downstream opportunities are in aggregating other people's content, and this essay offers arguments as to why.

The On-Demand Trap

An Open Data Can of Worms

“So everyone in our tech bubble thinks open data is a good idea but hardly anyone is doing it.” This and other very spot-on observations about the issues surrounding open APIs and the data they provide from Paul Hammond’s excellent presentation last week at XTech as very nicely summarized here by Suw Charman. Paul’s slides are here and his blog here.

In one slide he took ProgrammableWeb data and did a useful summary by API provider showing that a quarter of the 200+ APIs come from 7 providers:

Also noted: “There are millions of RSS feeds, but these highlight the problems even more. You can now get RSS feeds for almost anything you want, but try getting in depth sports statistics, or updated stock market data, or flight times. You can’t get it. RSS is intended to be read in an aggregator, and most of it can’t be reused or republished. So you can get any data you want from the net, so long as it’s the last 10 items on an RSS feed, and you don’t what to do anything with it.”

He then outlines a series of non-technical issues that are the real obstacles to API growth:

• Most companies don’t know what an API is
• They make money from data, so ask “Why give it away?”
• If you give it away, perceived value decreases
• It’s risky, including losing money already coming-in

On top of that, many companies couldn’t open up if they wanted to

• No rights for the data they use
• Exclusivity issues with partners and providers

In the end, it’s a perceived “nice to have”. Paul’s recommendations include:

• Don’t send an email demanding an API. That just makes you sound like a moron
• Be aware of the problems, including the fact that most are non-technical
• Have patience. Change takes time

The Unbearable Lightness of 2.0 Business Strategy

Umair Haque and Jeff Jarvis are engaged in an ontological debate about what constitutes “the edge” and what will ultimately be the winning business strategy at the edge. What struck me about their debate is how little clarity there is on how money will actually be made at the edge — and this despite Umair and Jeff working at the absolute bleeding edge of current strategic thinking (pun intended).

Here’s a point from Umair:

Fox’s acquisition thesis is a bit more complicated - but predicated on a much deeper understanding of the new media value chain. Fox invests in domains which are hypersocial (discontinuous shifts in social connectivity) or hypercultural (discontinuous shifts in cultural specificity): sports, karaoke, music.

Further, Fox invests at the edge of the new value chain: at the interface with consumers.

Here’s a counterpoint from Jeff:

Now I’m not denying the incredible power of MySpace. But I am wondering whether it is really fully at the edge — yet. In fact, I questioned here whether there is a disadvantage in trying to own a community — because then you become responsible for the community’s actions and its worst (i.e., the molester’s home page). And so I wonder, in turn, whether the real relationship play in the future is not to try to own community but to enable it. And enabling is sometimes known as infrastructure. That’s the point I want to probe. If they’re still “consumers,” is this really the edge? I say the edge is all about control by creators: That is, I control my own space, this space at the edge, Buzzmachine; I am subject to no one’s rules; I hold responsibility; I reap the benefits, if any; I have relationships as a result of having this presence online; this is mine, all mine; thus I can also relinquish control and, for example, put out full text on RSS and I can realize that the real conversation is not just the one in the comments but the one distributed across others’ sites. That is qualitatively different from a community destination: You go there, you benefit from their infrastructure but you are subject to their rules, you live in someone else’s space.

And now Umair again:

The bigger point I wanted to make was that it’s not technology, but the social and cultural that counts. And being social/cultural is vastly different in, say, cosmetics, than it is in sports. So I think generic infrastructure plays are the wrong approach.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I enjoy this kind of intellectual debate, for the same reason, I suspect, that I enjoyed critical theory in school. But what I find absent from this an all other 2.0 discourses (including my own) is a clear explanation of WHO is going to pay WHOM how many DOLLARS for WHAT. How does the money change hands here?

There are two sources of revenue — companies and consumers. You can sell them content, services, advertising — the list is not that long.

Maybe people like Umair and Jeff operate on a different plane where they can see the dollars even though they don’t reference them explicitly. But if you read News Corp’s quarterly report, MySpace’s ostensible success at the edge is still not reportable in dollars and cents.

Maybe I’m just slow. But I still worry that the sea change that is upon us will lead to fewer dollars in the market and Google-like monopolization of the dollars that do remain. I worry that there’s no way to monetize either “owning” or “enabling” the community — both assume a 1.0-like role for a middleman. It still assumes control of something. AdWords is fully distributed, but it is an intermediary — Google OWNS the system, they control it, and they can make it do whatever they want — unless, of course, it’s being exploited by botnets. Maybe cybercrime is the real edge.

Oh man.

Maybe I just worry too much.

UPDATE:

If this post depressed you, read Jeff’s follow-up post on networks. You’ll be suicidal by the time you’re done:

My point, in the end, is only that we are entering uncertain and uncharted waters in fluid networks. It’s not clear where the value will be captured and how it will be shared.

I responded in the comments to Jeff’s post:

What if media isn’t a business anymore? What if it becomes like poetry — lot’s of people do it, but nobody ever expects to make any money from it.

I know, just because there aren’t obvious answers yet, doesn’t mean somebody won’t figure it out, but for the moment we all sound like the horse and carriage industry 100 years ago. Or the US manufacturing industry 20 years ago. There isn’t always a solution to structural decline.

Coming to terms with Web 2.0

You know when Gartner and IBM pontificate on Web 2.0, that we've reached a point where the term has become generally acceptable - mainstream even. Well-known research firm Gartner has drunk the kool aid:

"While Web 2.0 offers many new opportunities for companies to grow their business, few enterprises realize how to implement the full range of capabilities to succeed. By 2008, the majority of Global 1000 companies will quickly adopt several technology-related aspects of Web 2.0, but will be slow to adopt the aspects of Web 2.0 that have a social dimension, and the result will be a slow impact on business, according to Gartner, Inc."

...and David Boloker, CTO of IBM’s emerging internet technology software group, is also bullish on Web 2.0:

“Web 2.0 is a new class of affordable apps [that] are becoming do-able, delivering instantaneous value such as mash-ups and programmable web,” says Boloker. “Web 2.0 is comprised of everything from Ajax to social software, for example blogs and wikis; to a focus on simplicity, to microformats.”

I even have a personal example of how Web 2.0 has gone mainstream. I was at a New Zealand government strategy workgroup today and the term 'Web 2.0' was used profusely (and appropriately, I might add).

Now -- I've had an interesting and also bumpy ride with the term. I was the first blogger to focus on Web 2.0, starting back in 2004 soon after O'Reilly Media coined it. Indeed you could say that my blog has always been about Web 2.0 (read/write web, two-way web, etc). During 2005 my blog became very popular because of its focus on Web 2.0. My blog was the resource for Web 2.0, because I was one of the only blogs at that time writing about it. This was back in the days when Mike Arrington of Techcrunch fame kidded me about how many RSS subscribers I had - and that he'd some day overtake me. Which of course he did, I think starting from the moment I stepped into the Techcrunch ranch in Atherton in October 2005 :-) Now of course Techcrunch is number 1 amongst not only web 2.0 blogs, but arguably tech blogs in general - and deservedly so IMO. Techcrunch has simply become a must-read resource. Susan Mernit accurately described Techcrunch recently as the leading daily covering web 2.0 and startup land.

So what has happened to Read/WriteWeb? Well I've still been growing at a decent clip and I've gotten a lot of work via my blog. I've nothing to complain about reputation-wise. But in terms of Web 2.0, quite simply I got engulfed by the hype. You know that popular tech cliche: let a thousand flowers bloom? Well that describes Web 2.0 definitions by the end of 2005 - thousands of definitions "bloomed" in the second half of 2005, with the help of a lot of fertilizer from hypesters and naysayers alike.

Then on 18 December 2005 I made the infamous declaration that "Web 2.0 is dead. R.I.P.". Ever wish you hadn't pressed the 'publish' button? Well that was one of those times for me. Boy did that post cause some ructions. I tried to explain myself more coherently in a follow-up post - that defining Web 2.0 had become too distracting and I just wanted to focus on the the technologies and products. But no amount of explanation could get around that sensationalistic header I used.

So what's 2006 brought? Believe it or not, I think it's brought acceptance of the term 'Web 2.0'. That's actually caught me by surprise - I got it wrong. Web 2.0 hasn't died, it's actually morphed into a mainstream term that Gartner and IBM use. I still think it means everything -- and nothing -- at the same time. But in a weird way this has meant Web 2.0 has become the kind of umbrella term and catch-phrase that people identify with. From the 100 or so new and varied definitions of Web 2.0 you read every week (increasingly from mainstream media), to Dion Hinchcliffe's relentless pursuit of defining Web 2.0 for the enterprise, to VCs using the term to connote 'the period after dot com', to TechCrunch profiling the products of Web 2.0 and itself becoming a Web 2.0 success story, to Microsoft adopting Web 2.0 but re-naming it to The Live Web, to Yahoo continuing to put theory into practice and not naming it anything, to Google just doing it's own thing and being damn successful, to Valleywag rising up and creating a hilarious snark blog about the current boom (well, it'll be hilarious up to the point I get linked to), to 'old school' techs like Marc Canter and Dave Winer thriving in this new era, to Gen Y kids creating multi-million dollar businesses like YouTube and Facebook, yada yada.   

And now Gartner and IBM 'get it'. Get what? Web 2.0 of course. But what does it mean? Everything and anything you want. You mean the architecture of participation? Sure I do. What about Ajax? Yeh, why not. What about Flash then? I guess... Does Web 2.0 mean social networking? You betcha. APIs? Dude... Collective intelligence? Of course. Perpetual betas? Now you're talking...

Look: Web 2.0 is made of people (heh).

So I've come to terms with Web 2.0. Well I had to, because I sure as heck am not going to let Gartner and IBM get all the credit! :-)

Everybody’s a network, continued

Proving the point that the future of media is not distribution, it’s aggregation, TiVo announced today that it had recruited critics, magazine editors, and such to recommend TV shows — to create ad hoc networks, in other words. This cuts across and devalues the old networks; it unbundles and then rebundles them. The magazines are doing it for free because it promotes them and, they hope, their ability to find the good stuff for you: to aggregate. The next step for TiVo should be to have the people become guru guides for each other. Then I could subscribe not just to your blog and blogroll but also to your TV network.

GAM3R 7H30RY, the networked book, goes live

Filed under: Culture, Online

We're not sure what impresses us more, the content or the presentation. GAM3R 7H30RY "is a fascinating look at video games as allegories of the world we live in." We dig the alternate perspective, and even if you are not into the philosophical nature of the book, do check it out for references to your favorite games (Rez, Katamari Damacy, The Sims, etc.). We enjoyed what we've read through so far.

What interests us almost as much is the outlet by which the book has been published. GAM3R 7H30RY is a networked book -- it exists as a website, with each chapter and paragraph given its own forum where people can post comments and discuss the words at hand (not a novel concept, but definitely a novel approach to book publishing). Each of the 9 chapters consists of 25 paragraphs, meaning you have 225 different areas to leave your mark. We're interested to see what, if any, community comes up around the concept.

Back to the Future… for Broadcast TV

By Robert Young

Back in the 1970’s, the television industry began a long period of market realignment that was caused by the introduction of a disruptive innovation called cable TV. After decades of market incursion, cable’s impact on the TV landscape is now complete and its disruptive effect has reached its peak. The result is the emergence of hundreds of cable channels that now account for more than half of our total viewing time.

This realignment of viewer attention has been at the expense of the major broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX), whose own collective share has declined from total domination of the TV screen to about 45% of viewership. Now, as the foundation of the television industry begins to tremble and crack again, this time from the disruptive forces of the Internet, the TV landscape is about to experience another tectonic shift. But in an ironic twist, a significant share of the TV industry is likely to unwind itself almost back to the days before cable, for reasons that will seem counterintuitive.

Five years from now, the TV market will no longer be segmented solely by major broadcast network vs. cable network viewership. Instead, the market will be further subdivided among viewers of linear broadcast programming vs. that of non-linear on-demand formats. Moreover, the on-demand segment will account for a steadily increasing share of total viewership. On the flip side, it’s equally important to note that the segment with traditional linear/broadcast programming (while declining) will continue to remain alive with its own significant share for quite some time. That said, within this linear/broadcast segment there will be a mini-disruption in the near term. To be specific, it is likely that most of the hundreds of channels we get today via our cable & satellite subscriptions will disappear and there will be only 10 to 20 “broadcast channels” left standing. Here’s why…

As just mentioned, overall viewership of linear/ broadcast programming will steadily decline. Such shifts in viewing patterns will cause collateral damage… that’s obvious, but here’s what may not be so obvious. The players that will get hit first and hardest will be the weakest of the cable channels. In other words, as on-demand programming takes share away from linear broadcast, it will be at the expense of all those niche-oriented channels that came into existence over the past few decades with the advent of cable… not the major broadcast & cable networks. These niche cable networks, many of which are barely treading water now, cannot afford to lose viewers for their linear/broadcast channels. If and when they do, it is highly likely that they will not be able to continue/renew their carriage on cable & satellite systems. The result: a steady procession of cable channels will start to disappear over time, at a rate that will be directly correlated to the increasing share of on-demand viewership. And the cycle will be self-fulfilling… as more and more channels go off-the-air, the lack of programming choice on broadcast will drive even more viewers to on-demand venues. And going back to my reference earlier of an “ironic twist”, the major broadcast networks will once again come to dominate the share of the linear programming schedule.

Now, this does not necessarily mean that all these cable networks will go completely out of business. Rather, many of them will be able to restructure and/or downsize, transitioning to a purely on-demand format, mostly via the Internet. The ones that already have relatively strong brands catering to specific niche audiences are the most likely to survive the transition. Even so, the shift will be painful and somewhat equivalent to a newspaper or a magazine having to give up its print distribution.

The disappearance of a large swath of cable channels will also have the secondary effect of disrupting the underlying business model of the cable & satellite providers. As cable channels are forced to shift away from linear programming, the only way cablecos will be able to preserve their content offerings will be through video-on-demand relationships. Without attractive VOD solutions, the cablecos will lose their content partnerships to the highly cost-effective and open Internet (which will be their major competitor regardless). This explains why companies like Comcast have been so aggressively pushing and deploying their VOD systems in the past year. Also noteworthy is that the changing landscape will also make the cablecos totally dependent on the major broadcast networks for their linear programming channels. Given all that, the business models of the cable/satellite providers will be subject to some very significant changes as their subscription model based on bundling channels comes under attack.

If the scenario outlined above proves to be a reasonable forecast of the future, the other set of players who are ideally positioned to win are the Internet TV ventures like Veoh and Brightcove. Unlike cable/satellite, they are not burdened with any market cannibalization or legacy programming issues. So with the freedom and ability to focus exclusively on the rapidly emerging on-demand segment of the market, particularly for branded programmers who cater to niche audiences, these startups can quickly become the lifeboats for sinking ships.

Robert Young is a serial entrepreneur who played a major role in the invention & commercialization of the world’s first consumer ISP, Internet advertising (pay-per-click ads), free email, and digital media superdistribution.

Using origami to augment displays

Some design studio are envisionning the use of origami displays: as attested by this Origami Cell Phone and this Origami DVD player

This is a future cell phone concept developed at Inventables. The concept was inspired by the e-paper developed by Mag-Ink and the Popout Map. The map uses origami paper folding technique to expand and collapse automatically as it is opened and closed. This concept addresses the need for larger displays on cell phones without sacrificing a small form factor.

The Origami DVD Player is a portable DVD player concept that could be manufactured with a new e-paper (a full-color flexible display technology) being developed by Mag-Ink in Israel. As a product, it would target the business traveler who wants a convenient way to watch DVD movies. For this user, portability is a key requirement, but they are not interested in sacrificing their viewing experience and are willing to invest extra money for a higher quality product.

Why do I blog this? this is an intriguing way of taking advantage of a small device to expand the display through e-paper…

Another origami-related tech: it may help cellphone cameras to focus. (via emily)

Bloggers are the New Plagiarism

Originally posted by CmdrTaco from Slashdot, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 22, 2006 at 01:32 PM

The importance of the “body” (the why of tangible computing?)

I am sure this paper is interested for Adam Greenfield’s next book (”The city is here for you to use”):
How Bodies Matter: Five Themes for Interaction Design by Scott R. Klemmer, Bjoern Hartmann, and Leila Takayama For DIS2006:

It discusses how “our physical bodies play a central role in shaping human experience in the world, understanding of the world, and interactions in the world”, drawing on various theories of embodiment in the field of psychology, sociology and philosophy.

What is interesting is that articles presents some relevant arguments and examples that shows the importance of the body. It put the emphasis on the embodiment for (among others), I picked up those I was interested in:

• Learning through doin: physical interaction in the world facilitates cognitive development (Piaget, Montessori)
• Gesture is important in terms of cognition and fully linguistic communication for adults (to conceptually plan speech production and to
  communicate thoughts that are not easily verbalized)
• Epistermic actions: manipulating artifacts to better understand the task’s
  context
• Thinking through prototyping
• Tangibility of representations: The representation of a task can radically affect our reasoning abilities and performance.
• The tacit knowledge that many physical situations afford play an important role in expert behavior.
• hands, as they are simultaneously a means for complex expression and sensation: they allow for complicated movement
• kinesthetic memory is important to know how to interact with objects (ride a bicycle, how to swim)
• Reflective reasoning is too slow to stay in the loop
• Learning is situated in space
• Visibility Facilitates Coordination
• Physical Action is characterized by Risk: bodies can suffer harm if one chooses the wrong course of action
• Personal responsibility: Making the consequences of decisions more directly visible to people alters the outcome of the decision-making process.

Why do I blog this? This echoes with the literature review I did about how space/place affords socio-cognitive interactions. Embodiment is certainly one of the most interesting component of this relationship.

I also think one of the most important dimension is the inherent risk of physical actions, nobody gets physically hurt in virtual worlds but what happened while playing augmented reality quake?

Of course this is meant to support the “why” question of tangible computing?

Your Take Roundup::YouTube Just the Start for Video Sharing

It’s easy to lose yourself in all the video at YouTube. You watch one music video, which leads to a spoof video, which leads to a stupid pet trick, which leads…who knows where. Before you know it, it’s time to leave work.

Free time just evaporates when you’re immersed in a viral video site like YouTube or iFilm, where people can upload and share their videos with friends or the entire world. So I wondered what you all thought about YouTube and other video sharing sites, and asked you to share your opinions.

Outside of concerns about YouTube’s business model (or lack thereof), most of you had positive things to say about the site and its competitors. Many of you correctly pointed out that online video is really in its early days, so other services might well eclipse YouTube in the future.

But let’s start with the praise for video-sharing sites, and how you use them. A blogger with the pseudonym Dolor Ipsum (at least I’m guessing it’s a pseudonym), noted that emailing video or making people download video would take too long — that’s why these sites have succeeded. Ipsum prefers iFilm for “the look and feel of the interface.”

Brian Goslow, who runs the Worcester, Mass., music site wormtown.org, celebrates the classic musical performances he’s found on YouTube, copyrights be damned.

“While fully understanding it totally disregards copyrights, YouTube has allowed me to see many music videos and moments — The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset; Abba’s Eurovision performance of ‘Waterloo’ that turned them into international superstars; the Beatles’ complete Rain and Paperback Writer videos; Sparks playing ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough’ for the first time on Top of the Pops — all musical moments I had only read about but never got to see,” Goslow wrote.

Editor/photographer Marcy, who runs the Root Magazine blog, says YouTube has been a great research tool for her to find examples of global dance styles.

“I’ve been able to post examples of ethnic dance and music on my site that readers never would’ve found on their own,” Marcy wrote. “It is addictive but once you figure out how to search without wasting time on adolescent party vids, YouTube is a wonderful thing!”

Nathan Schoenfeld, who’s a trained actor, decided to upload short 15-second clips of himself to YouTube and MySpace and was amazed at how many people watched them. Schoenfeld says it’s difficult for YouTube to stop people from uploading copyrighted material, but he prefers many of the home-grown videos anyway.

“These type of sites have allowed me to see some little movies that have been more satifying than your average sitcom,” he wrote. “I believe this will just compound the ever-growing list of things to do in front of a screen. Is it the wave of the future? It won’t take over TV but it’s not going away either. At least that’s what one guy from Middle America thinks.”

As for YouTube’s dominance, Brent Oesterblad, who runs the competing vSocial video-sharing site, had to admit YouTube was clearly leading the market.

“As a competitor within the video clip sharing space to YouTube let me clearly state — YouTube is kicking our ass,” Oesterblad wrote. “Sincere deserved kudos. YouTube has only validated the vastness the online video space represents — it is HUGE. Thank you. However, it is still only in the first quarter of the game. There is much to be decided in the coming months and years.”

Some of you noted a preference for alternative video-sharing sites to YouTube. Yael liked Metacafe because it “eliminates garbage,” while Cynthia thought ClipShack was catching on among Baby Boomers.

A couple of you included nice predictions of where the online video market is headed. Todd Zeigler, who writes the Bivings Report, said that YouTube works as both a place for people to show viral videos, and a place for folks to share videos with family and friends. Zeigler thinks that latter function might be usurped by other services over time.

“As the space grows, features like video downloading, editing, mass storage, higher quality, etc. will become more important to people and competitors will gain market share by focusing on these features,” he wrote. “YouTube’s sheer size will prevent these sort of innovations from being fiscally possible. Being smaller (and potentially charging a small fee) will be an advantage for the upstarts.”

Ged Carroll, who blogs at Renaissance Chambara, says that YouTube and others are just the first version of what’s to come in the future. Carroll lays out a whole lot of challenges for YouTube — including the fact that the startup is currently burning through $1 million per month in bandwidth costs.

“If we lose network neutrality, port blocking and throttling by telecom companies will seriously damage these businesses, especially as telecom companies are under the illusion that they are anything more than ultility companies and are looking to be content providers or purveyors of ‘value-added’ services again,” Carroll wrote.

And just in case we were living in our always-on broadband bubble, blogger Trudy Schuett pointed out the reality for many Americans who are not joining in on the online video revolution.

“There is still a large number of people (like me) that can’t access this stuff as there is no broadband available. (sigh) I’d love to be able to see this stuff!” she wrote.

Place Shifting on Mobile Devices

PDAStreet: News: Placeshifting: Carrier Friend or Foe?
Will things like this convince the carriers that they should be just that, carriers and let people do what they will with the networks (oh my god, let people do what they want on OUR network, that's crazy..! wait a minute, isn't that how the internet became so useful?)

Yahoo: Content is not king

Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel says that while great media companies have great content, "content alone will fail. Content and distribution will fail. You have to have technology."

Xtech 2006: Tristan Ferne - Chopping Up Radio

Finding things when your content is audio is hard, and BBC has a lot of audio content. So need to use metadata, so have info about whole programmes. Don't have data about how these programmes can be chopped up, e.g.

- news stories
- magazine programmes
- interviews
- music tracks

Acquiring metadata about programmes:
- in production process, either people or software, pre-broadcast
- media analysis of what is broadcast
- user annotation

Focusing on user annotation, which is the Annotatable Audio project. Aim is to get listeners to divide programmes into segments and to annotate and tag each bit. Demonstrated a pilot internally, and preparing for a live deployment.

Can annotate the audio by selecting segments (like 'notes' in Flickr) and add factual notes. Are thinking about adding comments about whether or not people like stuff. Wiki-like.

Intending to launch around a low-profile programme, probably factual so they promote the annotation angle, not the discussion angle. Users will need to log in to annotate, but any user can see the canonical version.

Will be able to then search within the programme, to generate chapterised podcasts, and also want to support chapterised MP3s.

Looking at using it as an internal tool for production staff, e.g. tracklisting for specialist music shows or live sessions where the tracklisting can't be pulled off of a CD.

Can add in tags and then pull out related Flickr photos, which can work nicely but sometimes doesn't.

Could be used for syndication, so people could more easily use a section or segment of a programme using a 'blog this' button on the interface which creates a Flash interface you can put on your site. Problems with editorial policy on that, but it's an aspiration for their department.

Regarding licensing, will initially be doing it with audio that there are not licensing issues for, which is either rights-free or for which the BBC has the rights.

Xtech Xtech2006

Also check out Strange Attractor posts Tom Loosemore - Treating Digital Broadcast As Just Another API, and other such ruminations and Roland Alton-Scheidl - StreamOnTheFly network.

The Future of the BBC, the Future of Media

One hears a lot of sniggering in new media circles about how old media leaders just don't get it. Well, reading this speech from BBC head Mark Thompson will disabuse you of that notion. It's a smart, thoughtful, completely with-it analysis of the Beeb's "Creative Future" explorations and what they've taught the company about its changing place on the media landscape. Given the BBC's history, it's a pretty radical departure, and full of interesting lessons about broadcasting today:

There are two reasons why we need a new creative strategy. Audiences are changing. And technology is changing. In a way, everyone knows this of course. What's surprising - shocking even - is the sheer pace of that change. In both cases it's faster and more radical than anything we've seen before. ... Technology which empowers those audiences, transfers control from us to them, lets them consume what they want, when they want, lets them create content, lets them participate.

(thanks, Bruno!)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 09:20 AM)

YouTube Founders Interview

Fortune interviews Steve Chen and Chad Hurley:

The important question: How are you going to make money?

ng to sell sponsorships and direct advertisements. But we are building a community, and we don't want to bombard people with advertising.

Chen: If we wanted to, we could instantly turn this into $10 million in revenue per month by running pre-rolls [short video ads] on the videos. But at the same time, we're going to make sure that whatever revenue model we've built is going to be something that's accepted by the users.

Hurley: We're building relationships with studios, networks, and labels because they're looking for ways to reach new audiences, and we have a great platform and a great stage to make that happen.

Getting to Version 3.0

It's that fun time again when we start contemplating versioning up the licenses. An outline of why we're thinking about doing this and how CC proposes to do this has just been posted to the cc-licenses list. Please participate in the discussions on the cc-licenses list - you can sign up here.

Doc

Doc Searls is giving the closer at Syndicate.

He says the problem with search is that it isn’t live. He says that search engines see the web as a static thing. But he says they do search the live web, they just hide it.

Yahoo has a news search with a blog search under beta but, he complains, it’s on the right side of the page where we’re trained not to look because that’s where ads go. Google’s blog search is there but hidden and he asks why it’s not included in the main search. He emphasizes that the live web is more than RSS and blogging; you know the list.

Repeating a wonderful line from his blog, he says that “the best blogging is about rolling snowballs.”

: UPDATE: See Doc in the comments clarifying what I mucked up. And see this post with a much, much better blogging of the talk. I got interrupted with a phone call and didn’t do it justice.

Death of video games and the renaissance of “play”

Cyril has an interesting post about the “death of video-games”. IMO video games creativity is not dead. What is dead is the video game development model which suck and is so publisher-driven that it kills innovation. Garage studios are no longer viable, in-house studios are following the headquarters order and cut innovation; and even when it comes to outsourcing, there is nothing good out of it. Of course there are still some good and innovative studios (blizzard) but they’re less and less. I think Water Cooler also addresses that issue.

To me, what is interesting is that the most important innovation with regards to video games are

• not games but rather platforms, environment to do something together: I am thinking about WoW (even though has of course a RPG component) or Habbo Hotel (or even Flickr which started as a game platform).
• not classical platforms such as consoles but rather on the Web, which is the most open innovation platform for developing things.
• not game content but DYI game platforms (DYI MMORPG or at least 3D environment tools), artifacts (like game controllers as for the Nintendo Wii or the Sony augmented reality card game), machinimas or tools like Xfire (a very relevant tool to when your friends are online, what game they’re playing, and what server they’re on, join in on their games with one click and see what the friends of your friends are playing).

And this is interesting because video/computer games are now starting not only a tiny platforms but they’re is now an ecology of artifacts connected to them which eventually are targeted at engaging people in playful activities such as developing DYI games, creating or watching machinimas, playing games with tangible interactions…

Why do I blog this? I am interested in foresight issues related to this sort of activities and how games is evolving from a very precise activity to a culture with fuzzier boundaries.

Citizen Photographers and the Da Vinci Code

Here's an interesting idea: Online photo sharing site Webshots.com has compiled a special album pegged to the May 19 release of the Da Vinci Code movie. The site's photo editors have sifted through users' photos and compiled an album of more than 300 photos that cover 50 locations and artifacts that are part of the movie, such as the Louvre and the Vatican Stairs.

This should give you some ideas for similarly sifting and compiling the submissions of "citizen photographers" on your news site. Obviously, many news sites do this sort of thing when disaster strikes, taking the best citizen submissions and putting them in a gallery. This Webshots.com feature reminds us that there are events and stories of less gravitas that could benefit from this treatment.

And, you may be able to use online photo services like Webshots.com and Flickr.com to incorporate photo albums like this into your own site, since both those services have APIs that support this.

Do You Trust Blogs? Then Ask Do You Trust Books

No matter how unappealing it may sound, the blogosphere is duty-bound to adopt the basic tenets of journalism-- identifying your sources, checking facts and never sacrificing accuracy and fairness for the sake of a "good" story. The role of watchdog demands you be fully identifiable and accountable. (Full disclosure: we journalists need you.

But earlier in his piece he writes:

According to the same poll, bloggers suffer the biggest credibility gap of all with just one in four surveyed regarding them as a trusted source of information. Bloggers bellow that it is illogical and unfair to lump all bloggers into a single category, but, I respond, you could say the same about media and government and business.

That's the very problem with journalists. They accurately write what they are fed, even when it is unfair and illogical -- and I might add stupid. Try this question: Do you trust books? It depends on which books you are talking about doesn't it. Since blogs are basically blank pieces of paper that then are used in a million different ways, to ask if you trust them is asinine. You could say the same thing about most polls concerning media and government.

Even when credible sources produce these over reaching polls, they tell us nothing about particulars; however, that does not stop professional journalists from using them over and over again as proof to make their points -- even when the point they want to make is how reliable and trustworthy they are.

Kevin Kelly on Symmetrical Technology and Symmetrical Accountability

Asymmetrical technologies have a lopsided power structure; symmetrical technologies create a balance.

In the following blog entry, which I’m almost quoting in full, Kevin Kelly applies the concept to the world of privacy and control. An enlightening contribution.

Kevin Kelly:

“When communication technologies become ubiquitous and employed by powerful institutions they can scare us because they appear to be technologies of control – of us. Global positioning information is very handy but might also be used to follow us at all times. Web cams are cool, but also permit constant eyes turned on us. Digital rights technology can prevent illegal rip-offs, but it can also capture everything we do.

What scares us is that the communication in these examples is asymmetrical. Each technology moves information about us to some entity that we have no knowledge of. They watch us; we can’t watch them. They know us, but we don’t know them. It makes it hard to ensure the knowledge is accurate and appropriate. And of course we gain little either economically or informational from it.

Asymmetry of knowledge is what drives hedge fund operators, real estate brokers, and intermediates of all kinds. They have more knowledge about what we want they we do. From this disequilibrium, they derive their profit, which we normally will pay as worth the cost.

But sometimes the asymmetry is baked not into an occupation, but into technology itself. Very large computers that can mine trivial everyday data for patterns is one example. Here the inherent imbalance between the level of knowledge available creates uncertainty, fear, and resentment. If asymmetrical technologies advance and spread, those less in-the-know will rebel, avoid it, sabotage, or subvert them. But symmetry can be restored with better technologies that embrace reciprocal information. We can watch the watchers and as we watch, others watch us.

To put it personally, I am comfortable with having my movements tracked, my habits databased in aggregate, and my tastes networked IF — BIG IF:

1) I know what information is being collected, where and why, and by whom

2) I assent to it either implicitly or explicitly, and I am aware of it

3) I have access to correct it, and can use the data myself

4) I get some benefit for doing so (recommendations, collaborative filtering, or economic payment)

Right now, I go along with a technology if I can get 3 out of 4 of these demands. If these four conditions are met I am happy to have my everything monitored. Throw in some payments, or freebies and you can watch my boring life all you want. But remove those conditions and I am outraged. I find governmental surveillance particularly wicked because it meets none of those conditions.

David Brin, who explored this theme much deeper than I have in his book Transparent Society, suggests that the symmetry I propose can also be thought of as ‘'’reciprocal accountability”’ (RA). We could even call it symmetrical accountability.

Potential surveillance technology is not the only place reciprocal knowledge is important. As more of the technium is dominated by the intangibles of communication and information, symmetrical knowledge will become essential. The uncertainty and fear of new technology can be relieved, in part, but restoring symmetrical knowledge between creators, makers and users.

The necessity of symmetry applies not only to easily-monitored technologies such as computer networks, cameras, and digital rights, but to all technologies. Technology in general benefits by being transparent. Every technology would be improved by these three guidelines:

1) Users should know as much about the technology as the creators do. It takes an enormous amount of knowledge to create a new innovation. Some of this know-how includes information about what does not work. In medical studies this is called negative results. Both negative results, known bugs, expected side-effects, and possible dangers should all be disclosed to users as soon as possible. In addition the mechanics and logic of how an innovation works should also be transparent. To our great benefit patents encourage this disclosure, but many technologies are hidden behind proprietary veils. This is one reason open-source technologies are in ascendancy – because they are transparent and symmetrical. Users have as much information about the technology as the creators do.
2) The knowledge about a technology should travel with the technology. This meta information includes the transparent information about its mechanics, and its negative results, but also should include such things as its origin, the sources of its parts, the supply line of its vendors, the environmental impact of its materials, and the necessary work needed to dispose or archive of it properly. This should always be accessible, either by embedded tags, or in such a way (like wireless bar codes) that the knowledge is fully present to anyone using even a portion of the technology. Anything more than one click away is too far.
3) Other technology should know everything about it too. More and more, technology interfaces with other technology and not humans. Inter-operability with other technological systems is essential. The meta-information must be machine readable, and the technology should adopt as many standard protocols as possible. This is not only good citizenship for technology, but it permits large complex systems to retain symmetrical knowledge. Any node can, in theory, know what other nodes do.

Transparency does not solve all the problems with new technologies, nor prohibit them from being abused, but it lessens this potential. Restoring symmetry to our creations can help us better evaluate and manage them.”

Social networks via your TV

Next week I'll be staying at Lake Como in northern Italy for a couple of days with Deirdré Straughan, a videoblogger as well as Director of Customer Experience for TVBlob.

They're onto something pretty cool and just announced a beta program that I thought would be worth sharing, especially with my friends in Italy:

We are about to launch a service that will be the first of its kind in the world! In short, this service enables people to video communicate through televisions when they connect our powerful set-top box to a broadband network. Just imagine...you will be able to turn on your television and make video calls to your family, friends, or colleagues, and even "make your own TV", be for it for live birthday parties, community events, or business meetings. The quality will be just as good as watching TV, and the convenience will be just as easy as using a TV remote control.

We are seeking people to participate in our first public beta test, scheduled roughly from late May to late June. Of course, we will provide our set-top box to you for free during the testing period, but before you say "yes", there are a few requirements in order to qualify.

Archiving Phone Calls? Why Not; It's Cheap

So, in theory, recording calls -- either by the government or corporations that want to keep tabs on employee activities -- would come at a trivial cost.

As an increasing number of phone calls are being routed via the Web, through Web-calling services, they are becoming easier to record than traditional phone calls, as they are in a digital format. Considering voice archiving's low cost, I think it's a real possibility that corporations -- and, potentially, the government -- could start to record phone calls.

reBlogged from The Tech Blog (Business Week)

Virtual Darfur: Civic Engagement or Fake Activism?

There has been an interesting debate going on between Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices and Hamlet at New World Notes. It’s a discussion centered around the Second Life virtual Darfur Camp built by several activists to highlight the plight of refugees from the conflict in the Sudan.

Ethan’s contention is essentially that while it might geeky and cool to build a virtual refugee camp in a 3D “metaverse” environment, this should not be confused with actual activism that will make an impact on the horrible tragedy over there. His experience with real refugee camps make it difficult for him to stomach a sanitized, empty simulcrum of a refugee camp. He was particularly bothered by the pristine campfire in the center of the virtual camp. He contrasted this with the reality of cooking fires in Darfur’s camps

(Continued at Rickomatic.com)

Free Spectrum: Communist Plot

Tech Dirt has a funny post about the The Progress and Freedom Foundation, a Washington DC-based think tank. One of PFF pet causes is spectrum allocation.

Earlier this year, they came out with a report saying that unlicensed spectrum stunted innovation -- despite a variety of counter-examples of products (WiFi, cordless phones, etc.) that make use of unlicensed spectrum.

The folks at PFF are back beating this drum again, focusing on how the FCC shouldn't turn "white space" spectrum into open spectrum, but instead auction it off to the highest bidder. White space spectrum is (more or less) spectrum the TV broadcasters have been granted, but don't use, which the FCC is looking to get into the hands of those who might actually use it.

PFF supporters include big telcos, of course. But it's hard to imagine the world would be better off if cordless phones, WiFi and Bluetooth were replaced with a "licensed" operator (for a modest monthly fee). Let's not forget that broadcasters get their (licensed) spectrum free.

Copyright Radical

Check out this just-posted interview with Negativland's Mark Hosler on MNstories.

He says "You don't get total control" when you put a creative work out into the world. If you want total control, keep it in your bedroom.

I tend to agree. That's not to say you shouldn't get paid for your creative work. But if you put something out into the public consciousness, you've already surrendered how that work will be perceived, contextualized, and interpreted. Or even mentally remixed, you might say.

Our lives are mashups. The whole fucking world is a mashup.

For this reason I'm increasingly against the "No Derivatives" clause of Creative Commons licenses. Let me give you an example. A couple weeks ago I was feeling a bit dispirited about staying up all night doing web production. A piece of art by Hugh Macleod *almost* represented how I felt. It was a purple scribble that said "We can't go on like this." I made it red and changed it to say "I can't go on like this" and posted it on my blog.

While Hugh kindly says I can do whatever I want with his art for personal use, his CC license says "No derivatives." Those conflict. That license says I can look at his work, and remix it in my head, and create a personalized version of it, but I can't show anybody. I can't recreate or regurgitate my experience of Hugh's art - according to that CC license. Well, I say I can and I do.

This is particularly true in the digital age. Hugh is not losing anything (especially monetarily) by my personal remix of his art. You can say the same of using commercial music and images in your videos. If you're not trying to redistribute or profit from another's copyrighted work, why NOT include it in your creative palette?

The world around us is our creative palette. We have the right to express the world around us, as artists and human beings.

(END RANT)

When mobile phones become commodities and people prefer to use them over their PCs

While mobile telecommunications providers worldwide are spurring on content providers to target the mobile space, Nokia is expecting that half of web content accessible to mobile phones would be user-generated.

[...] "It’s personal empowerment, especially when mobile phones become commodities and people prefer to use them over their PCs. With their phones, they could share photos, videos and post these on their blogs. The more the devices and services are available, the more user content can be generated," Nokia Asia Pacific Multimedia Experiences director Jawahar Kanjilal said.

A Nokia-sponsored research conducted last year, which covered 5,500 respondents in 11 countries, showed that 44 percent want to replace their standalone digital cameras with phones that have integrated cameras.

Another 67 percent want to use their phones to download music and browse the Internet.

Cybersonica: Open Source Fijuu Makes Music in 3D, Navigating with a PS2 Controller

The 3D cards that power games are increasingly enabling new interfaces for music, merging the visual and aural realms. One of the most stunning experiments yet is the Fijuu, which just premiered in its second-generation form as a commission for Cybersonica sound art show in London. (Earlier versions have been seen around since 2004.) Fijuu lets visitors sculpt sound, then record the results on tracks, leaving sonic “footprints” as the sound creator describes them. The interface is entirely controlled by a standard PlayStation 2 controller, as shown in this screen grab.

It could be an isolated wonder, were it not for the entirely open source nature of the project. The code for Fijuu itself is open (though primarily as a model, as it’s built for this specific installation), and everything in it was creating with open source software, from Debian Linux to the phenomenal OGRE 3D engine that handles the 3D magic. Figuring out how music should translate to three dimensions, both in terms of visuals and interface, is no small problem. Open sourcing the results is essential if other artists are to take this idea and develop it further. In the meantime, Fijuu is incredibly gorgeous, which is why I’ve officially dubbed it “the hotness” on behalf of the CDM staff.

For more on Fijuu, see the official project page (with source), an interview with the creator in the Cybersonica video, and further discussion from Cybersonica’s curator, Chris O’Shea, at his blog, Pixelsumo.

p://feeds.feedburner.com/~a/createdigitalmusic?a=kfFmXs">

Iterative Media

Can we create a world where content is commonly created like software - with roadmaps, feature feedback, and versioning? We see parts of this emerging in officially sanctioned fansub contests and open source documentary projects. What comes next?

(Ryan or I should have a more explicit blog post in a few days or so. In the meantime, check out the Iterative Media entry on the Beyond Broadcast wiki as well as Jon Garfunkel's notes on 'Constructive Media'. -kc.)

Atlas Gloves: A DIY Hand Gesture Interface for Google Earth

Originally posted by deusx from del.icio.us/tag/future, ReBlogged by George Hotelling on May 14, 2006 at 10:10 AM

MSN Originals - Web's version of a TV network?

I just noticed that MSN has a new project called MSN Originals, in which MSN will partner with content creators to deliver a "new generation of storytelling online". It's described as:

"MSN Originals will expand the ways that top brands can tell their stories beyond standard media through in-content integration, and even have a seat at the table in the early stages of content creation and production."

Together with the media industry, we can create unique, made-for-broadband experiences that use video, interactive editorial, online community, and more to take storytelling to the next level."

Advertising is one of the main pitches for this, as it is with anything Yahoo does these days (Y! CEO Terry Semel said recently: "Our fundamental business is selling advertising..."). So that disturbs me a little - is MSN Originals just going to be another vehicle for media to assail us with their adverts? Or is it really about creating new forms of storytelling for the Web?

MSN Originals has already struck up partnerships with Hollywood production studio and distribution company Reveille (which has produced tv shows like NBC's The Office and The Biggest Loser, FX's 30 Days, MTV's Date My Mom) and with Be Jane Inc., a multimedia content producer and web community for women's home improvement.

But is anyone else disturbed by this statement?

"We're excited to team up with the media industry to drive new innovation in online advertising and branded content integration. Together we will push the boundaries of what interactive means for consumers and marketers by bringing together the best of Hollywood, Madison Avenue and Redmond," said Microsoft senior director of the MSN Branded Entertainment and Experiences Team Gayle Troberman.

Call me artsy-fartsy, but MSN Originals seems to be more focused on advertising and marketing -- than on storytelling. Indeed it seems very much like a Web version of a television network - the network (MSN) gets original programming from content producers, wraps it up in advertising and then broadcasts it to consumers.

Vocational vs. Avocational Media

Marc Cuban’s rant about blogging vs. traditional media doesn’t really break any new ground, but this observation did get me thinking:

99pct of blogs are about what someone has to say. 99 pct of traditional media is about making money. Which is exactly what leads to the resentment between bloggers and traditional media and why blogging on traditional media websites will find it tough to be successful.

There is almost no one who makes a living at blogging — blogging is fundamentally an avocation (and nothing suggests this will change any time soon). In fact, most “user-generated content” is created as an avocation.

The debate over avocational media has generally focused on the quality and “validity” of avocational media relative to that of vocational media. Regardless of the actual differences (real or perceived) on those scales, there is an inherent difference between activities we pursue to pay the bills and activities we pursue for other reasons.

Media has traditionally been vocational because most people could not afford the time or resources necessary to create media on any meaningful scale in their spare time. Now that technology has made avocational media possible, we see the emergence of entirely new motivations for and approaches to content creation.

Marc Cuban bemoans the limitations place on traditional media companies that are accountable to shareholders and the limitations on individual media producers who are accountable to their employers. Of course, that’s easy for someone who’s independently wealthy to say.

While avocational media is “liberating” and absent any such limitations, it is also largely absent any accountability. One might argue that the blogosphere is its own ombudsman, but that’s a bit of a stretch.

I think the tension between blogging and traditional media that Marc Cuban points to is driven largely by the vocational/avocational divide.

But there are vocational media companies like BusinessWeek that have successful blogs, and there are a handful of bloggers, like Darren Rowse, who make a living at blogging.

What’s interesting is that when you look closely at these vocational blogs, they occupy a constructive middle ground that holds many lessons for “rigid” vocational media and “unfettered” avocational media, e.g. with freedom comes responsibility.

Heaven forfend we might actually find some middle ground, where vocational media “loosens up” and begins embracing the new forms of media pioneered by avocational bloggers and avocational media “grows up” and starts behaving more accountably — as if their livelihoods depended on it.

Echo Chamber Project Overview

"This video provides explains how the media fits into political and social change and specifically addresses the following questions:

* How is the Press supposed to Work?
* How and why does the Press act like an Echo Chamber?
* How is media changing?
* What does it mean that the 'news is becoming a conversation'?
* Will these new media changes affect the nature of politics?
* How does The Echo Chamber Project fit into all of this?"

Ezio Manzini on Multi-localism and Cosmopolitan Localism

Michel Bauwens: I would like to introduce two important concepts that I have found in a document by Ezio Manzini

Multi-local Societies = a network of interconnected communities and places, at the same time, open and localised

Cosmopolitan localism =  the balance between being localised (rooted in a place and in the community related to that place), and open to global flows of ideas, information, people, things and money

Here’s a relevant quote explaining them in more detail:

“Cosmopolitan localism, intended as the result of a particular condition characterised by the balance between being localised (rooted in a place and in the community related to that place), and open to global flows of ideas, information, people, things and money. This is quite a delicate balance as, at any time, one of the two sides can prevail over the other leading to an anti-historical closure or, on the opposite side, it can lead to a destructive openness of the local social fabric and of its peculiar features.

‘'’Creative communities, cooperative networks and cosmopolitan localism are, as it has been said, the building blocks for a new vision: the vision of a sustainable society that can be defined as a multi-local society. I.e. a network of interconnected communities and places, at the same time, open and localised.”’

Small is not small and local is not local

In the framework of the multi-local society the dominant ideas of “global” and “local”, and the ones of “large” and “small” are challenged. In fact, for its nature the multi-local society is an highly connected world. And, in this kind of world, the small is not small: it is instead (or it can be instead) a knot in a network (the real dimension of which is given by the number of links with other elements of the system). Similarly, and for the same reasons, the local is not local, but it is (or it can be) a locally based, cosmopolitan community.
In this conceptual and practical framework, the multi-local society appears as a society based on communities and places  that are, at the same time, strong in their own identity, embedded in a physical place and open and connected to other places/communities .

In other words: in the multi-local society, communities and places are junctions of a network, points of connection among short networks, which generate and regenerate the local social and production fabric and long networks, which connect that place and that community with the rest of the world. Junctions that connect  “long global networks” with “short local networks” and that, doing so, provide support to organizational forms and production and service systems based on the subsidiary principle (that is: to do on a larger scale only what cannot be done on a smaller scale, i.e. at a local level).

Today, the vision of the multi-local society is still far form the mainstream, but it indicates a direction that, for several reasons, can be successfully undertaken.  In fact, not only it is locally practicable, given that, as it has been said,  it is based on real cases of social innovation (the creative communities and the collaborative networks), but also it is coherent with (another) strong driver of change: the rise of the distributed economies as a potentially successful option.”

Sensecam, Collaborative Reflection and Passive Image Capture

This afternoon at COOP2006, I enjoyed a short paper by “Supporting Collaborative Reflection with Passive Image Capture” by Rowanne Flec and Geraldine Fitzpatrick.

Her PhD research is about how the a technology such as Microsoft’s Sensecam can support reflective thoughts in different situations (teacher’s practices, everyday reflections… learning from experience).

The SenseCam is a digital camera that has a light sensor and a temperature sensor (allows to trigger images to be taken)… a passive images capture tool. Then you can get a storyboard of the pictures taken.

She ran an expriment in which students when to an arcade to play games with the SenseCam. They played the game and then went back to their HCI class in which they had to discuss some HCI questions. Some groups had the images, some others not (two experimental conditions). She looked at the “goodness” of answers and the number of issues raised in discussion.

Results:
- discussion-led use of images: to ground the conversation (referential communication), as an objective record, to talk about something missed by partner or “just in case”
- image-led discussion: trigger memory, confirm/disconfirm memory, reveal something missed at time (”it’s quite useful for getting a look at what you’re actually because we did not use those buttons in the game”.

Why do I blog this? I am actually interested both by the study and the tool. I would be super happy to have this sort of tool for my research project about location-based applications and about video games. It would be a nice way to get some traces of the activity that I’d be able to use to get back to the users and discuss them.
Here is how it’s described by MS:

SenseCam is a badge-sized wearable camera that captures up to 2000 VGA images per day into 128Mbyte FLASH memory. In addition, sensor data such as movement, light level and temperature is recorded every second.

trigger a new recording. For example, each time the person walks into a new room, this light change transition is detected and the room image is captured with an ultra wide angle or fish-eye lens.
(…)
The sensor data (motion, light, temperature, and near infrared images) is recorded for later correlation with other user data, for example in the MyLifeBits system. (…)MyLifeBits will allow the large number of images generated daily to be easily searched and accessed. Future SenseCams will also capture audio and possibly heart rate or other physiological data.

Mobile Web

Paul Golding writes:

In the mobile setting the user is frequently motivated by an intent to find something out fast because they want to do something else there and then, like make a phone call, book a flight, catch a train etc. This "saving time" objective is distinct from the "killing time" one. In the "saving time" frame of mind, there's almost zero tolerance to anything remotely like surfing (i.e. faffing) around. In that setting, the whole web paradigm falls apart very quickly, especially if it's actually the standard mega-screen web experience shoe-horned into a mobile nano-screen.
...
Therefore, it seems perfectly obvious that any self-respecting site that wants to extend its wares to the billion mobile windows in the world should contain metadata to answer these simple questions and this is all that gets dished up to a mobile device, most likely ranked in order of most actionable data first, like phone number (one click to dial it), then address (one link to map it) and so on. After all, the world of going to sites via search engines is a rather uncluttered affair of visually uninteresting, but apparently useful, text-only descriptions and links - albeit presumably relevant ones. Once at the destination site we are looking for answers to those questions, not fluffy flash movies and the like.

Directing Through Instant Message

Deborah Scranton described making The War Tapes as "directing through instant message" in her talk at beyondbroadcast. "We will tell your story," was what she told the soldiers. She got five volunteers. She trained them on mini-dv cameras, tripods, blank tapes, and her IM screename. The solidiers came up with ways to rig the cameras to their helmets, tanks, etc... They shot 800 hours. Tape took 2 weeks to get home. Soldiers were on IM with her all the time. She'd watch the tapes and then talk about them on IM. Deborah never went to Iraq. It interfered with the goal of the film. The soldiers were participants. Deborah and the crew at home were doing their jobs. It's a participatory production indeed. I haven't seen the film. But I'm looking forward to it. And I'm sure the success of The War Tapes is going to stimulate interest in more participatory cinema. It was the web and IM that helped make this happen. And it will be interesting to see how network-connected cameras change this. However, there's still the problem of producing a traditional linear film. There needs to be a better way to achieve the goal of sharing the lives of the participants, yet still providing directorial control. Interesting dilemma.

The Death and Life of Great Media.

Just listened to the 'What the Broadcasters are doing' panel at Beyond Broadcast. I'm always surprised at the number of audience members who choose to spend their mic time poo-pooing 'broadcast' for being inaccessible and not being inclusive. But all of that's a given.

Broadcast grew up in an era of two World Wars, the mass industrialization and institutionalization of society, and the invention of the Superblock. Broadcast works for institutions and the State while failing to represent the diverse perspectives of the individual. While cablecast is limited by definition (closed-circuit), Broadcast is limited by good old fashioned physics and geography. Broadcast doesn't scale down. So what does?

If you're reading this post, you've answered the question.

Technology designed to serve others

Bruce Schneier, in a Wired story, ‘Everyone Wants to ‘Own’ Your PC’, classifies DRM along with worms and viruses as all being specifically intended to remove control of a computer from the user/owner.

This is a particularly succinct quote:

“When technology serves its owners, it is liberating. When it is designed to serve others, over the owner’s objection, it is oppressive.”

I think that pretty much sums up what ‘architectures of control’ are: products, technology and environments designed to serve someone other than the user.

Now that ’someone else’ might be ‘the good of society’, but in more cases than not, the someone else is a company wanting to enforce a business model on the user, or a government wishing to enforce an ideology or mode of behaviour.

(original story via Boing Boing)

Contesting Images of Political Conflict

Whitney Independent Study Program is setting up Image War, an exhibition of artistic works that remix, transform, or mimic images from the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans, hijackings, popular uprisings, recent American military interventions, and other violent political events.

Among the works featured in the show:

In his Afghan Dialogs series, Rainer Ganahl took taglines from the bottom of cable news channels during the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan. He embroidered them into silk banners, and sent then to Afghanistan, where residents were given the opportunity to stitch their own responses to these taglines.

Joy Garnett’s painting Kill Box (part of the Night Vision series) appropriates a night-vision image of a tank from the First Gulf War as made iconic by TV news coverage.

In Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1995-7), Johan Grimonprez mines archives of televised
airplane hijackings, remixing the material into a disco-driven video narrative that rethinks depictions of air terror and that, some say, eerily foreshadowed 9-11 (video excerpt and trailer).

Beyond Manzanar: An American Internment Camp: Between Fears and Realities, by Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand, uses navigable 3-D game technology to immerse viewers in an historical and cultural space and engage them as participants in history.