Scott Fisher

Saw some interesting ideas and discussion on the IMD wiki about our use of Backchannel in various ZML events and classes and reminded me of a recent publication on this topic by UCLA professor Kate Hayles. She references IMD's backchannel efforts. The paper is called "Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes" and is online here.
Also just discovered some related (but kind of dense) notes on a "conversation" that Kate and I gave for HASTAC a while ago that Cathy Davidson has posted here.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Netflix Offers $1 Million Prize for Improved Recommendation System | Digital Media Wire

Los Gatos, Calif. - Online DVD rental service Netflix on Monday launched a contest that will award $1 million to whomever can make its personalized movie recommendations 10% more accurate. The company offers a library of 65,000 DVD titles to its more than 5 million members, and provides movie recommendations to subscribers based on their past preferences. "Recommendation systems covering a wide variety of categories will play an increasingly significant commercial role in the future," said Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. "Right now, we're driving the Model T version of what is possible. We want to build a Ferrari and establishing the Netflix Prize is a first step." The company made available 100 million anonymous movie ratings submitted by its subscribers for use in the contest. If no one is able to achieve a 10% improvement in accuracy over the current Netflix recommendation system this year, the company said it will award $50,000 to whoever comes closest annually until someone wins the grand prize.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061002/sfm014.html?.v=70
http://www.netflixprize.com

Posted by Scott Fisher at 6:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaker’s Series/Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Media
at USC Annenberg Center for Communication

As part of the USC Annenberg Center Speaker’s Series, once a month speakers will discuss issues and practices associated with Do-It-Yourself (DIY) media. These DIY Media seminars will focus on the shifting relations between cultural producers and consumers and the rise of participatory media cultures across various industry sectors due to the growing prevalence of digital tools and networks.

In line with the participatory ethos, the seminars are meant to be highly interactive. Short presentations will be followed by discussion, and throughout the session there will be a backchannel for text-based chat. If you would like to participate in the backchannel, please attend with your laptop and be sure to have an IRC client that you can use. Our backchannel will be #diymedia on irc.freenode.net.

During the week following the seminar USC Annenberg Center Fellow Howard Rheingold will post blog entries and invite other participants to join in an asynchronous discussion at http://weblogs.annenberg.edu/diy/, and to post photos with the Flickr tag "diymedia." This online space will serve as a resource and networking site for the key players in this emergent area.

Both the seminars and the online forum are a prelude to the Fall 2007 DIY Media Festival, organized by Mimi Ito, Adrienne Russell, and a committee of USC Annenberg Center staff members and researchers.

Continue reading after the jump for the Fall semester schedule for the USC Annenberg Center Speaker’s Series/DIY Media seminars:

Continue reading "Speaker’s Series/Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Media" »

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A position paper co-authored by Justin Hall and me was accepted to a workshop on "Information Visualization and Interaction Techniques for Collaboration Across Multiple Displays" at CHI 2006, the international conference for human-computer interaction to be held in Montreal, Canada in April. The paper describes IMD research over the past year on "Experiments in Backchannel: Collaborative Presentations Using Social Software, Google Jockeys, and Immersive Environments" . Looks like there'll be a wide variety of very interesting topics covered in the workshop and the papers are all posted here.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Notice anything new here ?

Boris finally figured out an elegant way to recover some IMD blog history, and has implemented a "recent entries" feature that points to previous posts in monthly clumps all the way back to April '03 (!). The hair-raising technical details of how he pulled it off are on his blog here.

Probably not going to be able to put those posts under the original author's site given the current structure. But still talking about how to implement tags and tag cloud in the near future. Any other critical features we should be thinking about?

Posted by Scott Fisher at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Speaker: Joi Ito
Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)
3131 South Figueroa Blvd./2nd Floor

Joichi Ito is General Manager of International Operations for Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) which indexes and monitors blogs and the Chairman of Six Apart Japan (http://www.sixapart.jp) the weblog software company. He is on the board of Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org), a non-profit organization which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights. He is a board member of Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time Magazine ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the "50 Stars of Asia" by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 "Global Leaders of Tomorrow" for 2002. He has served and continues to serve on numerous Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues. He is currently researching "The Sharing Economy" as a Doctor of Business Administration candidate at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. He maintains a weblog (http://joi.ito.com/) where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community.

The wikipedia article gives a good summary of his many interests.

Joi is also the promulgator of the Hecklebot school of backchannel with various versions of the device now in use: View image. Another image. Also see a prescient article by by JHall.

[Definitely can't take credit for the excellent Joi mash-up image and embarassed to say it's true author is currently unkown to us. But indicators appear to lead back to Fred's House - Gene, is this your masterpiece? ]
UPDATE: Mystery Solved - the mashup author is indeed Gene Becker.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 9:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (21)

First podcasting, now asynchronous "yacking":

YackPack is a new way to stay connected with a group of friends, family or work colleagues. YackPack conveys the nuances of spoken language, leading to better communication, stronger friendships, and more group unity. In a nutshell, YackPack is simple voice messaging for groups.

YackPack (via Technology Review)

Posted by Scott Fisher at 6:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From a recent DIgital Mediawire newsletter:

Separately, the AOL's RED service for teenagers announced the launch of a new online reality TV show, which will feature six college freshmen documenting their experiences, using a camcorder and daily blog. "Project Freshman," produced by 2C Media, will offer new episodes every Thursday.

Posted by Scott Fisher at 12:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)