June 14, 2005
LA Times "Wikitorials"
Nice to see the LA TIMES trying out some new approaches to journalism:
This week, the newspaper, will introduce an online feature called "wikitorials," as a way for readers to engage in an online dialogue with the paper. The model is based on "Wikipedia," the Web's free-content encyclopedia that is edited by online contributors."We'll have some editorials where you can go online and edit an editorial to your satisfaction," Mr. Martinez said. "We are going to do that with selected editorials initially. We don't know how this is going to turn out. It's all about finding new ways to allow readers to interact with us in the age of the Web."
Mr. Kinsley said that he was just trying something new with the wikitorials.
"It may be a complete mess but it's going to be interesting to try," he said. "Wikitorials may be one of those things that within six months will be standard. It's the ultimate in reader participation."
Upheaval on Los Angeles Times Editorial Pages - New York Times
May 18, 2005
"50 People See..."
From Technology Review:
I wrote a program to blend Flickr images which share the same tags. No human is involved in choosing, positioning, or blending the images.
Suggestions are welcome for new tags to try. The best tags imply a certain composition, like "sunset", although I've gotten some interesting results with abstract words too.
This is partially inspired by the work of Jason Salavon.
April 21, 2005
Look what I dug up...
I found this logo I made for the division a while back. Just thought I'd post it. Kinda effective dontcha tink?
March 28, 2005
Blog help...
1. I'm a hack
2. I moded my blog
3. My blog commenting is not working
4. My hack skills hit a wall
5. Who know's how to fix it?
6. Any ideas?
February 15, 2005
First Amendment Protection for Bloggers
NY Times Article about the Valerie Plame case:
Jailing of Reporters in C.I.A. Leak Case Is Upheld by Judges By ADAM LIPTAK February 16, 2005
Two reporters who have refused to name their sources to a grand jury investigating the disclosure of the identity of a covert C.I.A. officer should be jailed for contempt, a unanimous three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington ruled yesterday....
....In the decision, the judges debated whether some sort of legal protection of reporters is even feasible in the Internet era.
"Does the privilege also protect the proprietor of a Web log: the stereotypical 'blogger' sitting his pajamas at his personal computer posting on the World Wide Web his best product to inform whoever happens to browse his way?" Judge Sentelle asked.
Judge Tatel responded that resolving the "definitional conundrums" that "unconventional forms of journalism" raise could wait for cases actually involving those issues.
February 11, 2005
LokiTorrent
A Dallas court agreed that Hollywood lawyers would be allowed access to LokiTorrent's server records which could let them single out those who were sharing files illegally.In October 2004, the site had provided links to more than 30,000 files.
The action came after the operators of LokiTorrent agreed a settlement with the MPAA. A stark message has appeared on the site from the MPAA warning...
February 3, 2005
EPIC
You've probably all seen this already, but just got home to find this video in my mbox(~8 min.):
"In the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline..."
http://www.broom.org/epic/
thanks jacki
January 26, 2005
Justin Hall mentioned in Greek Press!
One of our very own students and a prolific blogger, Mr. Justin Hall is mentioned in the Saturday issue of the web version of 'Eleftherotipia" (Free Press), one of the most prominent papers in Greece. Journalist Katerina Shina writes about the blogging phenomenon...
Below is my rough translation from the Greek text but keep in mind that Greek is very hard to translate into English.
"In an explosion of untamed curiosity, I visited the place of an internet old-timer, the Californian Justin Hall (Justin's Links) - an autobiographical saga that would make Proust blush - and Paul Ford's Ftrain, something between a personal diary and experimental writing. I was taken away for hours even though it is hard for me to get used to hypertext, this non-linear writing style of our digital civilization. Through passing by, tracing back and peeling away, one can sometimes reach the heart of genuine need, and the core of a borderline communication naivété that manages to transmutate itself into an art, maybe even under the pressure of urgency."
Read Article in Greek (if you can...)
The text below precedes the above quote:
STOP
"One would easily characterize them as the 'Gates of Self-Exposure': websites replacing futons, confessionals and 'strictly private' diaries. Open Diary, diarist.net and Diaryland are the most well known and most visited web 'rings' (interconnected diaries in a contiguous circle) and 'burbs' (stemming maybe from 'burble', 'babble', 'twitter') where lonesome visitors with specific obsessions connect themselves at their own will with other 'diarywriters' they recognize as 'one of their own'.
I encountered such a burb recently: Breasts of Doom (thank god for humor) where women of every age share their thoughts about the 'breasts that rule their lives', their giant breasts (wow - what a problem that must be). Later, I counted 64 (!) sites dedicated to knitting, 19 to smokers and even one purely dedicated to women worldwide named 'Katherine' (which naturally peaked my interest...) Web chains, burbs and rings manage to connect anyone with everyone: dog lovers, soccer fans, sex workers, collectors and hobbyists of all sorts in neighborhoods of remarkable familiarity and confessed honesty."
January 23, 2005
backchannel tool?
MoonEdit: multi-platform collaborative text editor.
Cooperative multi-user text editing over the internet. Every co-author can edit the shared document at any time, from any place, and at the same time! There's no need to send files via FTP or to compare documents when multiple users need to make changes to it independently.
January 22, 2005
January 14, 2005
January 12, 2005
December 19, 2004
Dept Mention
NY Times Sunday Magazine Feature Article: YOUR BLOG OR MINE by Jeffery Rosen
"The founding father of personal bloggers may be Justin Hall, who started his Web site, Links.net, 10 years ago when he was a student at Swarthmore. ''When I first started doing it, they called it a personal home page; then they said I'm one of the first Web diarists, and now I'm one of the first Web bloggers,'' he said. Hall's short biography says that he is enrolled as a graduate student in interactive media at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. But if you follow the links to his unofficial biography, you will learn much, much more about him...."
December 16, 2004
blog redesign
So, I understand that there will ultimately be private/exec design decisions made for the blog redesign, but with that in mind, can we discuss / create some suggestions?
I for one would like to see the banner at the very least change soon. It's just old and tired. As well as a much more professional look, while at the same time preserving some of the indie feel. I like pictures on top of text, as well as some color beyond blue!
One example that has some nice aspects, but isn't necessarily what I'd envision: http://www.interaction-ivrea.it/en/index.asp
anyone have points of inspiration or design ideas?
December 15, 2004
November 29, 2004
comment code
can/could anyone post some links or code for fixing the 8 day+ issue with not being able to comment on certain people's blogs?
November 23, 2004
Comments Registration
Can't comment on my blog or others easily because (presumably) we don't have code on our individual blog comment windows that says to register or login to Typekey? This is really annoying (is there an echo?) and I hope can be resolved quickly by informing your users of the procedures AHEAD of time.
November 21, 2004
Registration for comment posting
Who has a clue? I can't post a thing.
How does this happen without notification?
October 23, 2004
social video editing
From: Many-to-Many
October 19, 2004
Could we have social video editing? (posted by Kevin Marks)
Mark Cuban has some ideas for improving TiVos. However, only one of them is slightly social.
Last week I did a little experiment - I took David Weinberger's presidential debate irc chat heckling and combined it with an mp3, giving a recorded social interaction.
This reminded me of an idea I had while watching the Olympics on TiVo. TiVo collects data on which programs have been watched, which bits were fast-forwarded, and which were played more than once or in slow motion.
Imagine if it took the Olympics, or a baseball or football game, or presidential debate, and collated everyone's replay speeds, and then offered up various highlights packages- the most viewed 5 minutes; most viewed hour and so on. This would naturally edit out all commercials, and the commentators padding, and show which parts people as a whole found interesting.
Posted at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) & TrackBacks (0) | Email this entry
October 9, 2004
IMD Media Sharing
I have a huge appetite for media, and, I imagine, most of my fellow students and faculty members do too! DVDs, games - for research, for stimulation, for play, for reference. I have a large library myself, but I've had my breath taken away by some of my peers, and the media relics they collect.
Individually, we may have ancient Nintendo 64 cartridges that preceeded modern masterpieces, books that give inside information on Flash programming, and DVDs of obscure Malaysian films where gameplayers pass into virtual realms. But how do we get access to all we might have between us?
Media Chest is a free web site that allows folks to list their individual media collections, and coordinate searching and loaning DVDs, CDs, games and books between friends. Here's some examples: some of my DVDs, some of my games.
I've been encouraging people in the Interactive Media Division to join, so we can have an online library. If you need to get a copy of a certain film, someone might have it and they can bring it to school on short notice! Even better for obscure games - I hope the Media Chest database can keep up with the esoterica we might seek to share between us.
[If you visit Media Chest, let me know - my user name is Justino - I've got a USC IMD group there and I can invite you in].
September 21, 2004
Blog Politics
An article from Sunday's LA Times Op/Ed Page
On MEDIA
Sept 19,2004
Bloggers' 'Moment' Doesn't Make for a Revolution
It's an Internet win, but far from traditional journalism's death knell.
by Ben Wasserstein
"...there is little doubt that a few people using their computers certainly gave CBS News and anchor Dan Rather a beating. Right-wing blogs — "blog" is short for web log — and forums such as Power Line, Little Green Footballs and Free Republic were the first to question the authenticity of four memos released by CBS News, purportedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who supervised George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard unit in the early 1970s. The memos were part of a "60 Minutes" story reported by Rather, questioning President Bush's fulfillment of his Guard service. The buzz created by the blogs became deafening and the story moved like lightning onto the Drudge Report, and from there to talk radio, cable news and newspapers' front pages — and it's not over yet.
Bloggers cheered that the new-media David had slain the old-media Goliath...."
The URL for the entire article is here: The LA Times site requires registration.
August 23, 2004
comments: solution?
don't know what typekey is, but found this while trying to figure out the problem:
I have complained about the comment moderation problem a couple of days ago. With the options "Accept Comments from Unregistered Visitors" checked and "Enable Unregistered Comment Moderation" unchecked, a comment added by an unregistered user still can't be approved automatically. Since upgrading to MT 3.0D I have to approve comments by hand. It bugs me a lot.Thanks to missblackajo!!! You saved me!!! I read through a thread in MT support forum and finally figured out why my comment configuration about comment moderation couldn't work. It's due to the Jay Allen's MT Blacklist which is incompatible with MT 3.0D. After getting rid of it from plugin directory, every thing works perfectly!!! I don't mean to blame Jay. Actually Blacklist is such a cool plugin if you decide to stay with MT 2.XX. However, if you are MT 3.0D's user and run into the same problem as mine, you'd better leave blacklist temporally and wait for a compatible new version to strengthen the comment moderation function.
July 20, 2004
Interactive Tele-Journalism
Interesting reseach project from NYU's ITP program on interactive journalism:
"Interactive Tele-Journalism is a means with which to empower a community with the ability to act in aggregate as the director of a television news program. In a sense it is a merging of concepts relating to online communities, tele-presence, television news and interactive TV. It allows members of community to push discussion and questions in what is otherwise a passive medium (television news) in a direction that interests them. Specifically it allows individuals viewing a television program to engage in discussion with each other as well as individually and in aggregate determine specific elements of the news programming. For example, an individual viewer of a live interview (as an example program) is able to log on to the program website and chat with other viewers as well as send comments and questions to the interviewer (tele-journalist) who may subsequently pose that question the interviewee."
[Via Dan Gillmor's We the Media]
July 13, 2004
Social Lives of a Cell Phone
Good overview of a couple of the more interesting social apps for mobile phones.
New wireless services will maximize your connections to others and minimize your need to plan ahead
MIT Technology Review
July 5, 2004
comment tracking
for some reason, I felt inspired (ok, maybe compelled is a better word) to write a simple graphical comment tracker for our blog. I was perhaps noting that maybe something like this could be turned into some sort of competition w/ prizes (self-congratulation would be a good prize), or use the data to do a simple game. Ok, maybe I'm pushing the *fun* merits of all this, but maybe it would inspire more people to read and comment on our page. For example, Erin is a comment machine lately, but it would be nice to have his recent level of commenting matched by others. I suppose the next step would be to composite comments + posts into a OBA level (overall blog activity). I admit, between baseball and the tour de france, I've become a little over obsessed with statistics, but take this how you will.
Oh, the other thing: comments are tracked by author name -- in an open system like this it's really the only way (or, the best way I could think of in 1 second). So in order to track everyone's comments fairly, I need to make sure I have the name that everyone here is posting under. the current list of these commenting names is reflected in the current tracker, linked to below. But clearly, there is inconsistency with these names, although I think what I've got is relatively decent. Basically, if everyone could pls. comment on this post with the name they have been consistently using for making comments, or a name they wish to use consistently in the future, that would be excellent.
link [flash]
disclaimer: this is in no way meant to point out who comment stragglers are, nor is it meant to reveal my personal commenting prolificness (although high comment counts, yeah, huge ego boost...)
June 25, 2004
1000 Journals Project
The 1000 Journals Project is and ongoing, collaborative experiment attempting to follow 1000 journals throughout their travels.
The project consists of 1000 journals (the real, physical kind). The first 700 or so were sent to folks who asked, to travel at random throughout the world. More recently, a sign up function was added, to allow more people to participate. These last journals are more controlled, and are sent from person to person on the sign up list. People are allowed to add whatever they like to the journals, writing, painting, scraps of food. (food might actually be a bad idea... due to international customs regulations).
The goal is to provide a method for interation and shared creativity. If you ask a kindergarten class how many of them are artists, they'll all raise their hands. Ask the same question of 6th graders, and maybe one third will respond. Ask high school grads, and few will admit to it. (explained in Orbiting the Giant Hairball)
What happends to us growing up? We begin to fear criticism, and tend to keep our creativity to ourselves. Many people keep journals, of writing or sketching, but not many share them with people. (when was the last time a friend invited you to read their diary?) You will not be judged here. And you will have company. This is for you. For everyone.
March 18, 2004
Nokia Lifeblog
BBC NEWS | Technology | Log your life via your phone
Nokia is developing software that will help turn its phones into life loggers.
The Lifeblog software automatically arranges all the messages, images, videos and sound clips people capture with their phones.
Update: And another article today in Wired. the official Nokia press release. and a teaser about linking this all to typepad in the Guardian Blog.
March 9, 2004
ego blogging
Backward link:
USC Interactive Media Weblog
I found this blog to be a valuable resource about people who are studying interactive media at the University of Southern California. In this weblog, students from USC talk about assignments, technology reviews, internships, course work, and gossip all realated to interactive media. Professors, students, alumni, and ordinary citizens all talk about the industry and how its changing modern society. The weblog also has journal entries about history, philosophy, the psychology of video games as well as other subjects, news, and even weird and obscure events happening in the world. If I were to create a blog, I want my blog to have as many people on it just like the USC Interactive media weblog. From this site you can gain real knowledge about the industry, internships and job offers, and also communicate to people who have similar interests.
February 10, 2004
reBlog - Distilling Art and Technology
Eyebeam is pleased to announce the launch of reBlog, a web site republishing the best blog posts from around the web.
http://www.eyebeam.org/reblog/index.html
Created by Eyebeam's R&D Department, reBlog is a new system that aggregates RSS feeds from all over the web, with a simple interface for selecting our favorite posts and a hack that uses Movable Type to republish the content. The site will feature a series of guest reBloggers who will continually pick their favorite posts and links on art, technology and culture. Please check out the selections from our first reBlogger Jonah Peretti, Eyebeam's Director of R&D.
wwmx and ms searches
im sure most of you have seen it before, but it got a nice review/slashdotting the other day: the world-wide media exchange project from microsoft.
January 15, 2004
Hmm, is there a meta category?
So, I've committed to undertaking a couple CNTV-IMD web related projects during the upcoming year and would be interested in getting some feedback on what types of site improvement/collaborative tools would be useful...
The three main things I'm planning on working on this semester is:
- Improving the IM blog
- Calendar sharing
- Knowledge Base tool
I'm open, however to spending time working on other things if anyone thinks there's a big need. Would be interested in hearing what kind of collaboration tools would be most useful to the CNTV-IMD community.
Hmm, so I'll just hit each of these points separately. Since the IMblog has been pretty neglected, now that I have some time I'm just going to start working on improvements (unless anyone has any objections).
Most of these changes can be seen in a comp that Scott asked me to do last summer:
- 'Last Updated' blogroll - I just implemented a preliminary version on the left column of my IMblog. Basically, allowing one to see at a glance when a blog has been recently updated. Good for those who aren't using feed-readers/notification services; Hopefully, this will make it easier to keep up with what everyone's writing.
- Multi-blog aggregation - the idea here is instead of posting multiple posts into say class blogs, the front page blog, etc., everyone can just post into their own blog, and then select (my feeling is that this can simply be done by category mapping) which other blogs they wish their posts to go to. What's fun about this is that in theory, all kinds of groupings could be done, like say a '1st year' or '2nd year' blog, and of course that changes will propagate and everything's all well normalized.
- Various MT plugins. Say, better text entry via MT-Textile or Smarty Pants, and something like MTThreadComments for better commenting.
- Blogs are good for entering into, not as good for reading en-masse, keeping up on comments, etc within a community. If there's time/motivation, I may try dinking on some ideas I have on improving those aspects.
I've been giving a lot of thought to the pubsub calendaring problem. The main problem is that there's no industry standard for calendar synchronization (the closest is SyncML/Jabber w/ xCal, but it's all pretty much dead in the water). Without a real way of things to talk to each other, we're left with some almost-there solutions. But, something is probably better than nothing.
- pub/sub iCalendars - thanks primarily to Apple, uni-directional calendar publishing and subscription (WebDAV, HTTP) has made some headway. Besides iCal, both Mozilla Calendar and Evolution support this now, so in theory every platform is covered. Sync everything up to phpMyCal, write some custom handlers with separate 'entry' and 'subscription' calendars, and you have an 80% solution
- thoughts? can continue discussion offline if anyone has anything substantive to add. there are certain tricky issues with all of this, especially with handling event editing, clearing the entry calendars, etc
Umm, my fingers are tired... I'm probably not going to get around to working on the KB tool until the summer or later anyway, but the basic idea is to create segmentable, multi-faceted, semi-self-organizing graph structures. Oh, that will be as easy if not easier to enter data into than blogging.
November 14, 2003
huminity
i hadnt heard about this, has anyone played with it?
from slashdot:
"Here's a story about a new start-up Huminity, referred to as the technology of the year. The software they produce combines instant messaging, chat, and social networking. After burning through over $30k of personal funds, the team has now raised millions for their company. We've heard about Friendster recently, but somehow this seems more interesting."
October 27, 2003
Fire photoblog
nice images. More personal than those seen on the news. It's amazing how much this stuff seems to be catching on...at least for certain major events (ok, this, and the Strike moblog. Both are run by textforamerica, although I thought I saw a link to one on buzznet site. No specific link for that one, though.
via Smart Mobs
October 22, 2003
the future of blogs
saw this interesting little list about predictions of where blogs might go and how they might evolve in the next few years. some interesting ideas (some we are already doing).
my favorite?
blogrolls and buddlylists converging somehow.
October 18, 2003
Connected LA
I don’t normally read the LA Times, due to the few remains of East Coast snobbery circulating in my blood. However, October 16ths Calendar sections featured an article that caught my attention. “Desperately Seeking Connection” addressed the success of LA based e-communities in a city filled with transplants.
Unfortunately the online version of the article is fee based. If you’re interested in joining, you should go to Latimes.com and have at it. For the rest of you, I’ve listed the links mentioned in the article for your browsing pleasure (see extended entry). If you have an extra few hours to kill, lord knows how, check them out.
What is the best news about the article? Ah, the fact that “interactive media” is now mainstream media in the “City of Angels".
www.craigslist.org
www.upcoming.org
www.lapeopleconneciton.com
www.lablogs.com
www.friendster.com
www.searchforsanity.com
www.tonypierce.com
www.talkingpointsmemo.com
www.dailycandy.com
www.poynter.org/medianews
www.kausfiles.com
www.volokh.com
www.match.com
www.laobserved.com
www.calendarlive.com/connected
!Alerting Infrastructure! - 2003
Website Hit Counter that Destroys a Building.
Project by Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Link: Visit CityArtsCentre.ie to register a hit and contribute to the building's destruction.
Description
Alerting Infrastructure is a physical hit counter that translates hits to the website of the City Arts Centre in Dublin, Ireland into interior damage of the physical building. The focus of the piece is to amplify the concern that physical spaces are slowly losing ground to their virtual counterparts. The amount of structural damage to the building directly correlates to the amount of exposure and attention the website gets, thus exposing the physical structure's temporal existence.
October 17, 2003
Strike Moblog
pretty interesting:
Moblog for Vons, Albertsons, and Ralph's striking workers. From the site:
Workers of Albertsons, Vons & Ralphs go on strike due to unfair labor practices. Post your images of the strike direct to this site by emailing them to ufcw.ufcw@tamw.com
via Smart Mobs.
October 4, 2003
Two-way Web for the Mainstream?
Seb keeps a blog with pointers and thoughts on the evolution of knowledge sharing and scholarly communication
. Here's a recent followup to a Richard MacManus piece asking: why would normal people want to publish to the Web?
While I agree wholeheartily with the sentiments expressed by John and others like Phil Wolff, I wonder how practical it is to expect business people to write k-logs. It's all very well having tools like k-collector to aggregate Intranet content, but the real issue is how do we get people to create the content in the first place? Interestingly, this is the exact same problem the Semantic Web has getting off the ground, people currently aren't writing enough metadata to make the Semantic Web happen.
Accurate observations in there. I honestly believe blogging as we currently know it will never become mainstream. The reason is that it is a poor fit for anyone who isn't the (hyper)text-driven, infovore kind of person.
However, that doesn't mean that the more general practice of broadcasting information of personal relevance will not become mainstream. My vision of the future in this respect is closest to what Marc Canter’s been pushing under the moniker of “digital lifestyle aggregator”; this also seems to be where Meg Hourihan is heading with the Lafayette project.
Think about restaurant/show reviews, recipes, pictures. The Web is already full of user-contributed stuff like that; most of it currently resides on centralized sites like Amazon. The individuals who help build those sites do so most of the time with no reward other than a high local profile that is generally non-transferable (how many Amazon reviewers are on your blogroll?). I’m willing to bet that many of them would prefer keeping control over their contributions and putting themselves at the center of their content if systems were available that made that easy.
September 29, 2003
Open Source Group Software
Found this from Howard Dean's site, via Joi's page. The Dean campaign just released 3 Internet Initiatives. For all three, click here. The last two are pretty impressive:
2) The Net Advisory Net
"The Net Advisory Net will present to the Governor and his team diverse and highly-informed opinions concerning the Internet and its potential impact upon society. While many of the members support Dean, he is seeking advice, not endorsements, and the advisors do not necessary support the campaign. Learn more at http://www.deanforamerica.com/NAN."
members of the initial group include joi ito and lawrence lessig.
3) Open Source Group Software
Dean's site provides Web Community Kits with which "a group can create a Web site with features that enable it to work and grow including: weblogs, a picture gallery, discussion forums, mailing list management, polls, group task lists, a shared calendar (including events from the Dean Get Local registry of events), and the ability to invite users, register them and give them each a home page..
This endorsement of grassroots political behavior in the context of the web is great to see.
Mob Spots
Over the weekend, Steven Johnson tossed out the idea of Mob Spots: using the web and blogs for campaigns "message" brainstorming. This afternoon, Jason Kottke tossed in the idea of creating a b3ta-like forum (community ranking) for these, which is a great idea.
Now, imaginge an ad percolator/rating system linked to a digital archive for source material, all hooked up to a licensing engine (CC or otherwise) and you'd have yourself a pretty powerful tool...
Should be interesting to keep a watch on and seeing how this develops.
September 28, 2003
Blogging meets Reality TV
From an interview in Wired with Larry Namer, cofounder of E! Entertainment Television, on plans for 24/7 RealityTV :
Personal weblogs feel a lot like low-budget reality TV. Are you planning to explore anything new combining reality TV and blogs?
We may team up with film schools to do some experimental stuff - for instance, where a blogger works with digital equipment and we make the footage available online, allow the audience to react, then move the best to TV.
September 24, 2003
Annotated books
Neal Stephenson's Metaweb Wiki is a unique attempt to develop an online annotation of his new book on one level but could end up being a clever way to anchor a more general/broader explanatory information system. (via Joi's blog)
September 8, 2003
Personal Indices
From Doors of Perception:
Lucy Kimbell imagines a world in which people, not just corporations and governments, collate and publish their own data and performance indices. In her Personal Indices (Pindices) research project, she has designed a web-based tool for people to invent and publish their own personal indices and create an Open Source data set. She asks us to "measure what matters to you." Feedback and suggestions to Lucy please. http://www.lucykimbell.com/pindices/
Microsoft's NetGen SW
Intel Research Berkeley Seminar Announcements:
3°: Designing Social Experiences for the Net Generation<
Melora Zaner, User Experience Architect
NetGen, MicrosoftABSTRACT:
I will present how we applied our understanding of the Net Generation’s social behavior and trend adoption to the design and implementation of the 3° application. 3° is a codename for software that connects a small group of close friends and family, people who know and trust one another, so they can extend real-world social interactions and do fun things together in a whole new way. 3° is a beta test of an innovative application based on new networking technology developed by Microsoft.
The 3° user experience was inspired by our research on the computing habits of the “Net Generation”, people under the age of 24 who have grown up using the Internet. This is the first generation to which the Internet is commonplace, so ubiquitous as to be incorporated into their daily lives. As a result, their attitudes and behaviors are radically different compared to previous generations. They have internalized technology and will be doing new things in new ways. “NetGenners” are important early adopters of technology, and understanding their needs is critical for understanding future technology directions.Monday, 8 September, 2003
15:30 - 17:00 Pacific Time
Intel Research Berkeley, 2150 Shattuck Ave., Suite 1300
August 29, 2003
New Campaign Strategies
It's worth noting here, although it is has been discussed at length elsewhere, that Howard Dean has created quite a stir in the race for the democratic nomination. Sure, sure -- but what I find really cool about all of this is the rather innovative use of the internet, namely the current trends of blogging, social software, in order to get the campaign message out, draw support, and raise funds (which Dean is doing amazingly well at). The most recent example I was pointed to from Lessig's Blog, which is a new tool on the Dean website which allows like-minded Dean-For-America-ers to make connections with each other. The site boasts: "You'll be able to get in touch with people in the Deanroots, reach out to your contacts, and make plans for getting involved with other local supporters. Other Dean supporters will be able to find you. If you have a special interest, like flyering or tabling, you can let people know. You can even upload your own picture."
This reflects Dean's other net-based tactics, including Meetups, which tracks national gatherings held to discuss the Dean campaign. Dean was also a guest blogger for Lawrence Lessig this summer. His "meetups" have been so successful in generating support, hype, and money for Gov. Dean that other. more entrenched Dems like Kerry have put themselves on the meetup site as well.
Clearly the time is nigh for new campaign strategies, and Dean is demonstrating how the net can be used to articulate political messages, evoke support, and raise funds. This is all very reminiscent of the rise of Television advertising in politics that is well documented by the great book The Spot: The Rise of Political Advertising in Television by Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates. A very good read.
August 25, 2003
blogging on yahoo
from Sven Latham (yet another blog) via slashdot: yahoo has activated blogs.yahoo.com and blog.yahoo.com, although they are both just redirects to yahoo groups. Something seems to be in the works here -- I wonder if yahoo is going to fly solo on this one or hook up with someone like blogger, etc. etc. This would be a really interesting step towards making personal publishing (even) more ubiqutous amongst general web users.
http://www.yetanotherblog.com/?post=507
August 16, 2003
Friendster Fun
This week has brought up quite a lot of discussion, spurred on by a deletion of 'fake accounts' on Friendster (business-model driven, no doubt):
- SF Weekly: Attack of the Smartasses
"Mr. Asshole proves why" was one headline, another appropriate statement would be "Battle erupts, not friendly at all". For a service which portends to be a place to meet people, Jonathan is literally telling people to get lost.
Pretty fucking absurd, if you invented a wildly successful product would then wage war on your users and try and destroy everything they like about your product?
The weirdest bit is that friendster is still growing rapidly despite a management that is completely hostile to the actual users. And on the flip, Tribe.net, listens closely and talks to its users, but is pretty much still born so far. None of the dynamism of friendster there, despite the fact that they welcome it. Could it be that friendsters antagonistic relationship to its users actually helps drive some of its success. Action is more fun if its illegal after all...
- Gawker: Friendster Exiles
- Friendsterious, Part 4: Spittin Craze - the 'Fakester Manifesto'
- Salon: Faking out Friendster
- Friendster Power Games
- Social networks got game - insight on social networks and gaming the system
Danah Boyd, a Berkeley researcher studying digital social networks, writes Connected Selves, a blog focused on discussion on social network tools. Definitely put it on your blogroll if you're intertested in this topic area.
August 12, 2003
Degrees of Separation
Today's NYTimes Science section cites a Columbia study hoping to replicate Milgram's famous 1967 "Six Degrees of Separation Study" with email.
"In this global study, more than 60,000 people tried to get in touch with one of 18 people in 13 countries. The targets included a professor at Cornell University, a veterinarian in the Norwegian army and a police officer in Australia. Despite the ease of sending e-mail, the failure rate turned out much higher than what Dr. Milgram had found, possibly because many of the recipients ignored the messages as drips in a daily deluge of spam. Of the 24,613 e-mail chains that were started, a mere 384, or fewer than 2 percent, reached their targets. The successful chains arrived quickly, requiring only four steps to get there. The rest foundered when someone in the middle did not forward the e-mail. As in most social networks, it is not just a question of who knows whom, but who is willing to help."
I should note that I participated in the program and the chain I initiated, to a technician in Punjab, was successfully completed in 5 steps.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/12/science/12MAIL.html
July 29, 2003
July 9, 2003
Viral Communications Program at Medialab
The communication industry is in an upheaval equivalent to that caused by the advent of personal computers in the early 1980's. In that earlier revolution, traditional giants who held to mainframe technologies and centralized services were outpaced by newcomers with new ideas about individual ownership, incremental adoption and instant turnover. This will now happen with communications.
July 6, 2003
1IMC
Funny images (and comments)from the 1st International Conference on Moblogging that Tatsu and I presented at this weekend in Tokyo:
Pete's Eats
1IMC live moblog
Marginwalker(Gen Kanai)
The Feature by Justin Hall
June 25, 2003
Terms of use for IMBlog
In anticipation of opening the IM BLOG, there's a very useful set of templates developed at Harvard Law that we should review and possibly implement. Please check it out.
From Scripting News:
Last semester, Diane Cabell, a director at Berkman, and a group of law school students, drafted a terms of use and privacy policy for weblog hosting at Harvard Law. It was our intention to create a template that other universities, schools and libraries could use, and a user-friendly agreement that non-technical people (like me!) could understand. Here's a place for comments and questions.
June 11, 2003
Waste: new p2p network sw
Waste is basically a program for setting up relatively small, private, encrypted networks, where chatting is the main method of communication. Although Waste's interface and initial applications are straightforward, the program’s promise has many coders excited. Currently, all major chat programs, such as Yahoo Messenger, AOL’s AIM, and Microsoft’s MSN Messenger, are centralized. Using these companies’ products means you understand and accept that all your instant messaging is running through a central server and can be monitored if need be. Waste, on the other hand, is completely decentralized. This architecture, coupled with its use of encryption, means users can feel completely confident that what they’re chatting about won’t be monitored by the likes of AOL or Microsoft. “That freedom is addictive,” says Lucas Gonze, a programmer who runs a Waste mirror site. “You wouldn’t accept someone in your living room checking out your conversation with your wife, and there’s no reason you should have to accept that with IM.”
May 29, 2003
PhotoBlogs
From NY Times, Sunday May 25th
Prospecting for Gold Among the Photo Blogs
By SARAH BOXER
Imagine Walker Evans and Nan Goldin rolled together on your computer screen. In the 1930's and 40's Evans secretly photographed anonymous people on the New York City subways. The result was a book titled "Many Are Called." In the 1980's Nan Goldin turned her camera on herself and her friends, spilling the intimate details of her life to complete strangers. She described the resulting book, "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," as "a diary I let people read." Now thousands of people get onto the Internet everyday to post their photographs, hoping that total strangers will come look at them and comment. They are photo bloggers.Photo blogs are the colorful offspring of blogs, or Web logs, written diaries posted and updated regularly on the Internet. For a half-dozen years people have been posting text blogs to rant and to ponder the events of the day and the dust beneath their feet. Then, sometime in 2000, people started posting photographs to go with the text. The photo blog was born. Now photo blogs often are posted with no text at all. And there are thousands of them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/arts/design/25BOXE.html
May 20, 2003
Project Aura (barcode blogging)
From Microsoft Watch
Could autoblogging, a k a automatic weblogging, be the next big thing?
Marc Smith seems to think so. The Microsoft researcher and his team have developed a tool called Aura that is designed to help users automatically blog anything with a barcode label. Microsoft's Aura technology is currently in prototype phase. Smith says he is planning to release the code base via the Microsoft Research download page in another two months or so.
and also
We are interested to study emergent individual and group behaviors associated with the ability to digital tag objects and places. In our system, a user can associate text, threaded conversations, audio, images, video or other data with a specific tag. Users can review the tags they have encountered and annotated in a custom web portal. Optionally, they can opt to have their comments be posted onto newsgroups. This allows search engines to index and essentially publish the association to other users. Physical annotations can be shared with other users and be rated by the users’ reputation statistics.
May 19, 2003
Semantic Blogging at HP
The central idea is to apply ideas, techniques and tools from the semantic web and apply them to blogging. Our intuition is that semantic principles can be applied to enrich and extend the blogging metaphor. We use the bibliography management domain to focus our efforts and to provide grounding for our demonstrator. However, we envisage that our efforts will be (or should be) applicable to more than just the bibliography domain. In addition, if we can show how the semantic web can add value, within the context of a pre-existing, popular and powerful metaphor, then it will make a convincing showcase for the semantic web.
http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/steve_cayzer/semblog.htm
The Art of Blogging
Blogging... is a format constant (archives, links, time stamps, chronological listing of thoughts and links), personalized, community-linked, social, interactive, democratic, new model innovation built on the unique attributes of the Internet.
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_1.htm
(as featured on the CFP for "Blogtalk - A European Weblog Conference" )
April 17, 2003
interactivity?
I have been puzzled all week over a question that has continued to pop up in discussions. Here goes ... What constitutes interactivity? While the question is simple (it's only three words), I can't say the same for the answer. The reason I pose this question is because no one, including me, seems to be able to answer it.
This all relates back to our discussion in writing about what medium Sam's game would prove most successful? He designed a board game, which much like any other game - be that computer or on your phone - possesses the same pleasures and goals that gamers love.
Since conceiving the idea, he is exploring ways in which to make it into an electronic version. While I am certainly a fan of exploring new ways to present old ideas, I am confused as to why a board game was not automatically put in the "interactive" category. For whatever reason, there seemed to be a question of whether or not designing a board game was legitimate. The concept of the game is exciting .... I just wonder what making it "interactive" via a computer will do the pleasures associated with playing board games?
Perhaps this is begging the question of what other mediums, other than the obvious, will we accept for interactivity?
April 8, 2003
Persistent digital identity
from http://www.headmap.com/blog/
3 years ago, [when the headmap books were written] most individuals didnt really have a persistent stable identity point on the internet. They had email, but that doesnt persist and doesnt have an address independent of the mailbox its in. There were web pages, but most were linked to themes or projects or companies or schools and their identity tended to be sprawling and impersonal. Now with blogs there is a sense of an individuals time and location stamped presence on the web, blogs are for the most part inherently personal, subjective, locatable, extensions of individuals.
Blogs resurrect the concept of persistent identity. [I blog therefore I am].
Individuals have instant access and control over that identity.
http://www.headmap.com/blog/
December 28, 2002
Persistent digital identity thoughts
3 years ago, [when the headmap books were written] most individuals didnt really have a persistent stable identity point on the internet. They had email, but that doesnt persist and doesnt have an address independent of the mailbox its in. There were web pages, but most were linked to themes or projects or companies or schools and their identity tended to be sprawling and impersonal. Now with blogs there is a sense of an individuals time and location stamped presence on the web, blogs are for the most part inherently personal, subjective, locatable, extensions of individuals.
Blogs resurrect the concept of persistent identity. [I blog therefore I am].
Individuals have instant access and control over that identity.
A blog makes location more interesting. The individual is presumed to be moving, and to be having a subjective view of the space through which they are moving - whether virtual space (websites or whatever) or physical places.
A blog is not the same as a website, its an extension of an individual, it has an address
the individual has a physical location and is linked to the blog, a virtual location
the blog subjectively references addresses (physical and virtual)
A blog is potentially the vital conceptual bridge between email and a website, the one being private and the other often being too sprawling or collective to function as a simple personal identity.
It used to be that everyone who used the internet had something called a .fingerfile; which was a text file entirely written by and related to you, the user. You could put anything you liked into your .finger file and it served as your public identity to other users on the UNIX system you were using. You would type finger username and the person with that usernames finger file would come up.
The way internet use has evolved means that most people use email without having to deal directly or at all with unix and consequently most people dont use finger files. Subsequently the main expressions of their personal identity online were email (for the majority) and web pages (for the few).
An email address is an identity, but you can only send email to it or receive email from it. It lacks the functionality of a finger file, it carries no identity information independent of the status conferred by the address and whatever email is sent or not sent in reply.
Web pages largely evolved linked to themes or projects or companies or schools and their identity tended to be impersonal, or personal but sprawling and not functioning like a simple finger file (which in some sense is just a status message telling you something about the user and whether they are logged in)
The blog, which is sub-species of web page, finally resurrects the finger functionality. It is independent of whatever webpages may belong to the author and owner of the blog, it functions as a status message which can be referenced whether the user is on the internet or not, it is subjective and owned primarily by individuals.
[&]
Blogs resurrect the concept of persistent identity. [I blog therefore I am].
A blog makes location more interesting. The individual is presumed to be moving, and to be having a subjective view of the space through which they are moving - whether virtual space (websites or whatever) or physical places.
[&]
..identity is a *vital* concept for the future of mobile computing.
Blogging may well be the basis for an open source equivalent of microsofts .net passport intiative. You log into your blogserver (whether running on your personal server or on a public service like blogger.com) you upload personal data (including your physical location) and your entire internet identity is mediated by your blogserver.
Some of this information will be public (your blogface)
But if a company or an individual wants to negotiate with you, or you with them, it will all happen through your blogserver. You log into your blogserver and it handles passwords etc as you move through physical and virtual space
Blogs are models for future persistent identity. [forget hotmail ..read the business plans of the blogservers]
