moblogging | consolidation

Manywhere Software (I need to get a new phone)
Newbay Moblogging Software - a website for every mobile phone. Intriguing idea, if you get beyond the marketing / PR sound of it. The idea with these is to make blogging as easy as sending an email to yourself that has multimedia attachments - the systems (the first is free, the second is a pay service) parse the data from the email, make the text of the email into the "post" and the other media elements are simply attached to the post. If moblogging is able to maintain it's velocity, not only will the "personal web page" be redefined and more content oriented, the proliferation of this information and media will force us to devise systems that filter out what we don't want, and easily access that which we do. This is where the idea of the semantic web comes into play. Being able to find information in a way that is mapped to a more semantic / schematic cognitive process.

How will these semantics be defined / controlled? How will these moblogs be controlled? The corporate world is certainly interested. What does corporate control of these systems and networks mean? Ask Lawrence Lessig. The consolidation of this information under major corporate umbrellas is certainly scary. The Future of Music Coalition has an interesting article about how FCC radio deregulation resulted in a consolidation of radio stations that ended up being highly detrimental to musicians. TV network consolidation has also been steadily occuring over the last decade. As this graph indicates, there may be 500+ channels, but they are still all controlled by the usual suspects.

Ronchamp

Fusing the Organic with the Modern, the technological. I just posted this building as an influence of mine in response to tripp's post. The fusion of traditional and modern / technological aesthetics is my thing, and there are few pieces that communicate this idea better than this building.

military swarm robots

From New Scientist:

A battalion of 120 military robots is to be fitted with swarm intelligence software to enable them to mimic the organised behaviour of insects. The project, which received funding this week from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is aimed at developing ways to perform missions such as minesweeping and search and rescue with minimum intervention from human operators...

Read More

The question is how these swarming robots would be used in a military situation; or much more interesting, how swarming robots could be useful in a more social or cultural capacity.

sonic collaboration_1

As Plato says, music is in itself a moral law and it is within the creation of sound as a group that many of the finer themes of an advanced culture can be recognised... listening...blending... sharing... respecting... each person holding an awareness of the overall sound, consequently the sum is greater than the individual components.  The creation of a beautiful, uplifting experience.  One mythic sound legend says there were sound temples in which chanting never ceased, and this had such a powerful energetic effect on the community that no law enforcement was needed.  The vibration created was so fine that people naturally respected life and property and each persons birthright to fulfil their own destiny.

sonic collaborations are timeless and transcend cultural difference. wireless communications move towards a global culture. let's make these things work for each other. the question is not a technical one, but a social one - how best can we use sound and music over wireless networks to create and foster positive social networks?

still thinking.

sonic annotation, audio digression

http://www.mpi.nl/ISLE/documents/papers/Vollmann_paper.pdf

The above is a paper dealing with some aspects of how we might create annotation systems that include sound. While text and image annotation have been rather thoroughly explored, sound annotation is a sparsely documented area, but something I think could be incredibly important and meaningful. Why is this? One reason is perhaps that sound information is less tangible, less explicit. However, I don't see this as necessarily true. couldn't be leveraged.

a) There are specific kinds of Sound information that are culturally signficant to us, music being the most obvious. How can this be used in an annotation system?

b) I think that the very ambiguity and beauty present in many sounds could really create some interesting, if not annotative, experiences when used across a wireless network. Back to my fishing-in-idaho example from a previous post, I capture the sound of the stream and send it to my friend in new york with or without any image / text support. Does my friend realize I'm on a stream in idaho? Does he just like the sound and not care where it came from? Does he care at all? Does he send me back a sound of the subway stopping? I like the idea of this type of auditory feedback. Sound is an important cultural tool, and can be used in more compelling ways than ringtones.

steps:
- check specs on phone adc (I'm not sure if they exist)
- decide probably not use phone adc
- hack the phone to include a better adc / dac
- build (server side) software that records audio to a server and enables the user to send that stream information to others
- hack the phone to support a stereo audio signal, thereby enabling the user to use their own set of stereo headphones / buds

So, yeah- time to get to work, I guess. If anyone has any suggestions, comments, please...

sound | moblogging

sound.

I did this on my desktop. Nothing groundbreaking involved.

There need to be better applications for moblogging that incorporate sound - which could give life to really fascinating audio blogs. Audblog, as posted below, is an intriguing idea, but it seems to me that by using this software it is somehow the sound is becoming a controlled resource - you have to record it using the phone, which I think is a little regressive. I guess I think we need to make tools that are open and free. I want to be able to record a nice quality digital audio file, then send it to my blog automatically. The voice thing doesn't interest me that much because of the quality - it's more about voice than sound. The audblog is certainly an easy and relatively cheap system, but I think it could be done better.

Here are some examples of sites that employ the technology:
http://wackywacky.blogspot.com
http://www.kevinsites.net
http://www.thenewjazzthing.com/audblog

For more information: http://www.audblog.com/faq/
Also, PhoneBlogger is a free tool that does the same thing but for free (but less out-of-the-box)

audblog

LISTENLAB unveils audblog™. audblog™ is a new service which offers audio-posting capability to the blogging community. audblog™ enables the blogging community to easily post audio blogs from any phone at any time using their current blogging tool. Using this new audblog™ service, the blogger can immediately post to the internet his or her fleeting ideas and real-time experiences as they happen. Or alternatively, posts can be created in the comfort of the blogger’s home or office and posted to the internet at any time.

This is an interesting idea. I think that there are some problems with it, but I was interested by the possibilty for creating "sound" posts. I'm imagining posting the sound of a busy intersection in nyc or a river in idaho.

dynamics for designers

GDC 2003 Video: Will Wright's 'Dynamics for Designers'
"Somewhere between high-level game concepts and low-level coding lies a region of design that's really at the core of the interactive medium. It's here that causal relationships, feedback cycles, information propagation and emergence mechanisms reign supreme. This is what Wright calls "dynamics"; the rules and principles that govern the way in which structures change through time. The design and use of early prototypes is covered as a means to explore and sculpt a variety of dynamic systems."

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030403/wright_01.shtml

free registration required. Video is about an hour.

calculating my interests

http://www.synapseai.com/
http://www.tivo.com/
http://www.amazon.com/

The idea of tracking user interests has been around forever - it is the fundamental principle behind the idea of the demographic. I was reading the first link above, synapse, a plugin that tracks your mp3 playlists and then generates music that you want to hear. There are very interesting technologies at work behind this that deal with concepts of machine learning. But what it really did was get me thinking about what these machine selection / recommendation processes do to the control structures of information. My friend has TiVo. He set up his system, went through the "setup wizard" that tracks what kind of movies you like, a few sports you enjoy, etc. He tuned his tiVo to be smart, left for work, came back and was left with a hard disk filled with Martin Lawrence movies and high school field hockey or something. Obviously you can erase these things - but with TiVo, you can't go back and reset the machine's memory, as far as I know. This means that the machine keeps imposing this crap on him - he is thusly never in complete control of the machine. Amazon recommendations work a similar way, but it allows you to go back and edit your purchasing history so that the recs can be adjusted. For example, I can go back and erase the Puff Daddy cd I bought for my sister's birthday so amazon doesn't flood me with recommendations that come straight from the Bad Boy catalog. Thank god for that. So I have a little control over that system - and as a result, it works better for me- I like the idea of recalibration.

I think that such mechanisms are important, and can be linked back to the idea of who is in control of these systems, and what their motives are. For instance, amazon can make recommendations without thinking about which recommendations will pad their wallets, because it doesn't really matter if you buy an indie cd or britney - amazon is going to end up with the same profit. This type of system is therefore a type of cornucopia of the commons - amazon benefits, and the user benefits, and there is no strain on either side. However, when huge corporations get involved in this equation, then the commons is abused - the corporation pushes their own interests at the expensive of the user. There is a clear control / power mechanism at play in this equation. This is payola - if Amazon was bought out by, let's say, Time Warner - then I'm sure the "coincidences" of Warner Bros. artists bubbling to the top of my recommendations list would be funny indeed. And of course, by funny, I mean really sad.

How can these systems be used best? How can we alert people to things they might like, yet exist outside mainstream culture or Total Request Live?

I'm beginning to realize that everything is related.

digital watermarking

Lawrence Lessig has a nice post containing a number of links to the various positions concerning this debate, including his own and how it might affect DRM control of content.

All this is very related to Lessig's own involvement with the Creative Commons project. These ideas of watermarking and protecting digital copyrights are very important as our culture becomes more and more wired, and will extend well beyond the current record / movie industry whining about p2p copyright infringements.

As Rheingold and others have noted, Orwell's "Big Brother" is on the verge of becoming a reality, yet the nature of that menancing, ubiqutous figure has been changed. No longer is the state itself responsible for the enfringement upon privacy, but rather, consumers now sacrifice their own privacy in exchange for convenience. As the mobile web becomes more all-encompassing, these issues of privacy need to be addressed and looked at along the same lines as copyright protection. How can we protect our digital selves? How can we leverage the systems of reflexive commons and existing technologies (such as reputation systems, semantic locations) to ensure that we don't want people seeing what we don't want them to see?

self-organization_1

A Flash Experiment that demonstrates emergent, self-organizational behavior. Throw some balls into a space, apply a few rules, and see what happens - the result it pretty cool. I'm looking forward to expand this experiments into something more - see if I can't tweak some instructions a little more to see if they'll organize in a different manner. A lot of this relates to stuff we were talking about in 564 earlier today - I'm very interested by the role of authorship in these systems - or more precisely, how linear forms (I'm calling linear anything that is centrally controlled) can be merged with non-linear (I'm calling non-linear a system that is made up of collective actions of individual actors) in an engaging way that makes use of the strengths of both.

collaborative_networks_1

I've been getting really excited about the mobile web as a collaborative space.

The entire concept of social interaction is based on the idea of cooperation, and how individuals learn- or gravitate towards- publically beneficial cooperative actions in spite of their own private interests. In other words, in order to for cooperation to occur, there must be some resolution between the public good and the private good. The prisioner's dilemma is a good example of such a concept.

In Smart Mobs Howard Rheingold makes the argument that the internet created an even higher cooperative potential because it allowed for what Dan Bricklin calls the "cornucopia of the commons," the ability for a network to allow people to contribute to the public good (the commons) without sacrificing their own private interests. Many p2p systems operate in such a manner - think of napster, for example - as someone uses a system for their own benefit, they are also contributing to the commons. So Rheingold has written about all this stuff, so for more info read the book.

What really is cool to me, is the collaborative potential that is built into (eventually all) mobile devices - gps, infrared, high-speed, text, multimedia potential. But most of all, these devices are all connected to a profoundly large network, which can be leveraged to develop engaging collaborative applications. How can we use WiFi to create situations where people need to collaborate in order to accompish tasks? One interesting idea would be to have specialized services that would send out messages to subscribers based on their locations, having them perform simple individual functions, that on a larger scale, creates something bigger - i.e. the sum is bigger than the whole of it's parts. This concept can be applied to global art projects, television, gaming in both virtual and physical space, etc. The possibilties are really limitless, and I'm itching to see how these ideas grow- and even more so - be a contributor to this development.

postscript: brooks

As I just posted in a comment - I hope that nobody gets the impression that in my recent entry, I was somehow lauding the work of David Brooks, and especially the Weekly Standard (for those of you who don't know, this is a highly conservative publication). His work is filled with contradictions - read "bobos" and you'll see it immediately. What I was commenting on was a couple of issues he raised that I see as applicable to technological culture building. As I said, I glimpse at his stuff every once and a while not because I agree with him most of the time, but rather, that I disagree with him most of the time. However, I find reading this stuff that exists outside of my leftist tendencies can actually be more challenging than reading, say, Al Franken, who I read with the words "He's so right" oozing out of my mouth after reading every sentence. After all, Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot.

Book: Flash Math Creativity

A great book for those of you who are interested in flash programming and design: http://www.friendsofed.com/books/flash_math_creativity/index.html

unrelated note:
"It's not all beer and skittles" - Dodgers Broadcaster Vin Scully

bobos, superiority complexes, and the commons

I was thinking today about this book I read a couple years ago called Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks - an editor at The Weekly Standard and a frequent contributor to Atlanic Monthly Anyway, it's a good book - a look at the fall of the old, entrenched elites (think the Vanderbilts, the big_family_name) - old money families - and the rise of a new elite who he dubs a "Bourgeois Bohemian." Bobos are educated elites - their spouses are chosen by similarly extraordinary academic backgrounds rather than sterling bloodlines. "They want an oven capacity of 8 cubic feet minimum, just to show they are the sort of people who could roast a bison if necessary." Ok, so how is this topical, or even relevant to interactive media? Let me take a brief stab, with a highly underdeveloped arguement:

I was talking with a friend today about this book, and they were saying that the bobos have helped, in a sense, change the public perception of technology into something less elite and more a part of pop culture. And I would say I totally agree with that. Technological culture has transitioned from an exclusive group to the public sphere, and I think that while the internet was largely responsible for that shift, I think that this "new upper class" was moving in parallel with it - coming up with solutions that made this amorphous network concept marketable - and therefore transferring it to the public sphere. Think of the "dot-com millionaires," and their belief in the perpetual casual friday - stinks of bobo-ism. So what does this mean for this new culture and the future of emerging technolgical spaces like those that Howard Rheingold calls "Wireless Quilts?"

The saturation of technology has serious implications for how the wireless internet will develop. Lawrence Lessig has written that the internet exploded because it "was held in commons-- an innovation commons--instead of auctioned off." Lessig fears that the sale of the radio spectrum to huge corporations will circumscribe this commons, and therefore drastically limit the potential for the wireless web to develop in the productive, unencumbered manner of the internet - as he says, "we need a radical decentralized opportunity to innovate and create using this medium." Which side of Lessig's argument will this new ruling class fall, and how will their influence affect the way that the wireless internet develops? The problem is, that while bobos probably represent the most educated class of elites this country has seen since 1789, and while they have some of the social attributes of the 1960s, they still have the economic attitudes of Reagan era capatilism. Under this style of economics, the idea of the commons more than likely doesn't hold much water with folks who need to sustain specific (high) levels of consumption.

Prompting cause for further concern is the growth of societal passivity that parallels the rise of the bobos. Brooks has a piece in Atlantic Monthly about the development of a Superiority Complex in this bobo elite society - a democratization of elitism in America. He writes "Communications technology has expanded the cultural space. We now have thousands of specialized magazines, newsletters, and Web sites catering to every social, ethnic, religious, and professional clique. You can construct your own multimedia community, in which every magazine you read, every cable show you watch, every radio station you listen to, reaffirms your values and reinforces the sense of your own rightness. It is possible, maybe even inevitable, that you will slide into a solipsism that allows you precious little contact with people totally unlike yourself. But in your enclosed sphere you will feel very important." Such localized spheres of expertise lead to elistist attitudes, regardless of your socio-economic position in society. Even though Bill Gates is smarter and infinitely more wealthy than I am, I still feel superior to him, because I have entrenched myself in a smaller community that finds his company to be morally reprehensible and his products to be full of security holes (among other things). So there, Bill Gates. So a byproduct of this democratic elitism is that people become very passive very quickly, locked in the spheres they occupy where they are at the top. I don't want to engage in the Iraq debate because it might take me out of my little world where I'm always right. Or, more scary from Lessig's perspective: I may resent the fact that AT&T is buying up all the radio spectrum for their wireless operations, but I know that my morals and standards are higher than theirs, so I won't really worry about it. These all are attitudes that are brought about by the rise of bobos and their inherent paradox - consume, yet refute consumerism. We have finally found a way to be apathetic and justify that apathy with this elitist rhetoric we all possess in our little group, and this is a cause for concern in a number of areas, including the way that wireless technology will be developed.

Other notes / thoughts: It is impossible to create a social commons when everyone is in a closed area...These closed nodes are unable to leverage Metcalfe's law. So there. So much to be said about this - so much more I need to think about and write down. Other thoughts: I am better than you all. I am better than you all because I am eating s'mores without putting them in a microwave or toasting them. Microwaves are for losers, and I don't think I need to be bothered with those of you who insist on spreading that low level radiation throughout the immediate vicinity of the microwave. Campfires cause forest fires, and I'm vastly a better person than those of you who would consider destroying our natural resrouces.

FACT: I have work do to that is...gasp...related to classes. Perhaps I should be doing that. Hmmm.

24 bit recording...on a PDA

Core Audio has just released a piece of software and hardware components for PDA units that run Windows CE/PocketPC 2002 or, best of all - Linux. The recording hardware can also be used on Windows or Linux boxes, but that seems completely besides the point. The adc seems to be pretty nice, with a relatively consistent frequency response, so this could actually be pretty useful- a viable alternative to clunky dat or minidisc recorders. Unfortunately, it for some reason uses an S/PDIF interface (AES/EBU would be nicer). Records WAV files, and transfers data on solid-state memory cards. Why not firewire? I have no idea. Optical and Coaxial inputs.

More info here

watch those robots dance!

Sony has done it again, believe it or not.

http://www.tokyodv.com/news/index.html

Ok, this is probably one of the coolest things I've seen in approx. 1 or 2 million years (not to exaggerate or anything). Or maybe it's just the really bad techno music that has me in "shock and awe" (sorry for the inappropriate reference).

The first three movies are from the Robodex conference, which apparently is a "Robot Dream" Exposition, which as far as I can tell, envisions a world in which Robots rule the world and force awful 10 second techno loops on the entire sentient human population. Actually, the exposition is probably more than that but my ignorance diallows the comprehension of japanese, so I can't really give an accurate picture of what the expo was about- other than Sony and Honda showing off their vision of a robot utopia. For my money, though, it doesn't get any better than seeing 3 or 4 robots attempt to operate on a 6 ft. tall plastic cartoon character wearing 3 ft. high red boots and black and green underwear.

The control of robots with mobile phones? Also an interesting idea, albeit a less funny one. Actually, now that I think about it, among other things, that mobile capability would be great for april fools day jokes. And I'm envisioning this world where kids have their robots go to school for them (think: telepresence!) and then you have these groups of popular jock kids having their robots gang up on smaller robots, and breaking their glasses or giving them robot wedgies or something. Which brings up the question - when robots become avatars for us all, will nerds still have thick-rimmed glasses? Or will those be relegated to those robots whose owners are indie-rockers and thift-store dwellers?

Ok, enough of this.

vector audio

Koan is a relatively new technology that makes use of "Vector Audio"* designed primarily for use with mobile phones and web pages. I find it most interesting as a mobile technology, as it has a number of possibilities: ring tones, and mobile music creation being the most intriguing to me. The ringtone thing has become huge in Japan (or so I read), Europe, and is growing in the US - mostly because I think that people link having an individual ring tone to some aspect of who they think they are - in other words, like all consumer products, the ring tone becomes, or purports to become, a extension of your personality / individuality. I actually think this is a fascinating area - there have been many studies linking advertising to this sort of capitalist impulse of defining yourself and your social group by the products you buy (think coke person vs. pepsi person), and I'd imagine that similar currents run through the world of ringtones. So back to the point - I think that with the authoring tools provided by koan, people can actually create their own ring tones, and therefore I think, assert their own creativity and individuality better than simply being subject to a piece of music or sound that someone else has created. In addition, I'm excited by the possibilties of koan in respect to cooperative / collaborative mobile music creation. Think of being able to build a set of sounds / intstruments (i.e. turn your phone into your own personailzed instrument), and then play with a friend across the world, or a group of people, all who have built their own phone-instruments. Very cool possibilties.

* Vector audio is defined as:
A powerful new ultra-compact approach matched to minimum bandwidth utilisation, and generating an infinite variety of sounds, non-looping music and total interactivity, as required. A Koan audio vector contains note information like MIDI, but also information on how to create the sounds, which drives Koan's powerful inbuilt software synthesiser. No audio samples or audio sample set is required. As "open" text, it is easily added to a webpage, Flash movie or email and starts playing immediately. Koan audio vectors can be as small as 10 bytes.

en-gaurde

Scott totally got me with the post from armegeddon.com. I have to give him credit - I was totally smoked by that one. Although, I'm not quite sure if he realizes what he has started...

past | current projects

so I've been doing a little research on generative music, particularly with simple synthesized tones being instantiated in interesting ways. so I created some sounds using this additive synth engine I built with MSP and popped them into a flash script I was writing that uses really basic sine and cosine waves to scale, tint, and rotate a series of rectangles moving along a fixed horizontal (2d, soon to be 3d hopefully) plane. Anyway, the sounds a pulled from an array based upon frame rate, and a few simple rules which the user can alter using [sndVar]. Other changable aspects are the xscale_max variable and the rotate boolean. That project lives [here], or click on the thumbnail below.

I've done a bunch of other stuff that lives on the web, including my thesis project from last year [Main Travelled Roads], other flash experiments, and video clips from some selected installations I've done.

All of these media files have descriptions of the piece, and can be seen [here]. I also put [music] I've written up on the site, if any of you are interested, you can download mp3s there.

I hope that some of you will be interested in this stuff, and I hope that people will post examples of their previous work. I'd hate it if all this lip-service people are giving to *wanting to see previous work* will prove to be more than that, because while I know most of our backgrounds to some extent, I'd like to see some work.

more links

Some more interesting emergence links on the web:

Emergence author Stephen Johnson has a pretty interesting blog talking about a lot of these issues.

This is a pretty cool "Prototype for an Emergent Behavior Visualization Tool, based on the principles presented in the reading 'Design of Cities', by Edmund N. Bacon."

Also I would really recommend everyone, if you don't bother with the above, check out levitated.net which is run by Jared Tarbell, who is a researcher who uses actionscript to create both highly appealing and emergent peices. Very compelling stuff.

complexity | narrative

I've been trying to write a proposal for a directed research project next semester - ctin 590. The major thing that is interesting me right now is the idea of emergence, and especially the applicabilty of these ideas to a really diverse range of interactivity. So in 564, we always talk about interactivity in a pretty circumscribed way - that is, we always talk about it with reference to the idea of the database narrative. Fundamental to this strand of thinking is navigation; the user makes their way around the world, exploring things. Based on what they are investigating / fiddling with, they are presented with some piece of information, be it textual (maybe some bit of a poem), auditory (a voiceover or a particular soundscape) or visual (an animation), that has been randomly, or in some prescribed way, pulled from a database. Then, as we've been talking about, the user assigns cause and effect relationships between these database elements, and therefore creates their own little narrative.

While I think this method can be rather successful for specific works (I haven't loved all of the Labyrinth Project stuff, but Tracing the Decay of Fiction is a pretty good implementation of a successful db narrative, I think), I've really been thinking that the database narrative is a bad way to go about achieving complexity in interactive projects.

After Kurt and I saw Will Wright at GDC, the more I've been thinking that emergent systems are the best way to feasibly achieve the level of complexity that many of us are working towards in our research. These systems give us information that evolves rather than information that some poor writer has plugged into a vast database. Since these systems are typically based on the idea of simple nodes interacting with each other and deciding how to behave based on a simple set of rules that have been applied to them (e.g. a sim), narrative elements could easy be integrated into an emergent system that gets closer to achieving the kind of complex behavior that simply cannot be bourne from database systems.

Anyway, I think that these ideas are something that we all should be thinking about when we are struggling with our research.

Smart Mobs deals with these issues on a societal / anthropological level, and is a pretty good place to start. The book certainly has been a good place for me to further my research, as it connects emergent structures with issues of networked collaboration. yes!