terça-feira, setembro 26, 2006

Convergence Culture

Convergence Culture: "That’s the title of Henry Jenkins‘ new book. It’s one of the most important volumes in this space in a long time. Don’t miss it. "

Study shows modern families grappling with technology overload

Study shows modern families grappling with technology overload: "Modern families worldwide are striving for equilibrium in lives overloaded with technology, according to a study released by Internet search titan Yahoo and OMD media firm. The AFP reports. ... The online survey was conducted during the summer and involved 4,783 respondents in 16 countries in Asia, Europe, Australia and the Americas. Computing and communications devices had people cramming an average of 43 hours' worth of activity into a typical 24-hour day by 'multi-tasking,' the survey, released Tuesday, concluded. 'Family 2.0 isn't the Cleavers of the 1950s or the futuristic Jetsons,' Yahoo vice president Michele Madansky. said. 'Father doesn't always know best. He may not have a clue about what MP3 player is the best value, but daughter can be the expert because she spent time comparison shopping prices and features online.' Division of expertise in houses has resulted in family decisions regarding purchases and other matters becoming more democratic, the survey indicated. People credited e-mail, instant messaging and mobile devices with bringing fami"

US: Spokane “transparent newsroom” wins prize

US: Spokane “transparent newsroom” wins prize: "The Spokane Spokesman-Review has instituted a pioneering “transparent newsroom” that strives for a seamless integration between the newspaper and its community.  The paper won an award for its efforts on September 18 from the Institute for Interactive Journalism of the University of Maryland."

segunda-feira, setembro 25, 2006

Define your collaborative project

Define your collaborative project: "(reblogged from Lifesized) A UK group called Involve do some great work on collaboration, the highlight being their publication of 'People and Participation'. This publically funded UK think-tank and research center, is another wonderful example of some of the good work coming out of Europe in this area. I used a lot of the concepts from within their document for a project i have been working on. It translated easily from a government focus to other sectors. Of particular strength was the unification of concepts with case studies in the field of participatory practise/ collaboration. 'People & Participation is the first publication of Involve, a new organisation focused on the practical issues of making public participation work. There have been many books and pamphlets about democratic reform. What is unusual about this publication is that it provides much needed practical detail, drawing on the experiences of over a hundred practitioners who have used new methods to involve the public in issues ranging from local planning to nanotechnology. Its starting point is that deepening and strengthenin"

Onto play

Onto play: "By nikolaj Justin Hall's Passively Multiplayer Online Game concept is an interesting spin on some of the issues with data ownership and the transparent society that we have been blogging about recently. Hall's point is that one of the reasons the web experience is not nearly as absorbing or fulfilling as playing games, is that the web is in fact not paying attention to what you do when you surf. It does not adapt to your experience of the web or your surfing habits. It's an interesting thought, even if there are some obvious counterquestions: If we always live in a world adapted to us, when will we ever meet other people in a meaningful way? Is game-like immersion really a good global goal? We all know that flow is a pleasing and important experience, but is it really the only experience we need? Some concrete ideas that touch on some of the same notions can be found in presentations by Matt Webb on ideas for a sensory web browser at reboot8 and 'a zoology for web applications' at EuroFoo. "

Wired News on future body hackers

Wired News on future body hackers: "David Pescovitz: Chris Oakes wrote an interesting feature for Wired News about state-of-the-art bionics and individuals who are itching to upgrade their own bodies whether they 'need' it or not. The article, titled 'What if Bionics Were Better' is the final part in Wired News's excellent series on artificial limbs and neuroprosthetics. From Oakes's article: Phillipa Garner is a self-described 'gender-hacker.' In 1993 at the age of 51, she underwent sex reassignment surgery. That was just the beginning of her quest for self-improvement. She followed the sex change with more modification: vaginoplasty, brow reduction, cheek implants, breast implants, lip augmentation and a face-lift. And she'd happily sign up for more, she says. 'I would be inclined to go through with some pretty radical conceptual self-improvement procedures,' Garner said. 'I think of cosmetic surgery as collaborative art.... And when I next have disposable income, I'll be back in the O.R...' To Garner, surgical enhancements fall right in line with her vocation. A freelance i"

Pluggd to make podcasts chunkier, searchable

Pluggd to make podcasts chunkier, searchable: "Seattle based podcast discovery and management service Pluggd is unveiling a major new feature at DEMO this weekend that combines speech recognition and semantic analysis to let users search for and skip to parts of an audio file that are related to topics of interest to them. It’s more than just speech recognition."

sexta-feira, setembro 22, 2006

Sony Finally Announces PlayStation 3's Online Features!

Sony Finally Announces PlayStation 3's Online Features!: "At the opening press conference of Tokyo Game Show, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Ken Kutagari finally revealed the unique features of the PlayStation 3's online functionality, including personalized shopping, networking, and something called a Global Mapping System. More details inside!"

Don't just play it, create it!

Don't just play it, create it!: "The McMaster University in Canada has designed an innovative program to train students who think their future is in game design. It has deployed a spaceship-like interactive motion simulator to teach them how to develop software for simulated flight or real-time game design. As the university explains in 'Virtual reality lands at McMaster,' the simulator technology is similar to the one used by the industry for product development. And you can earn a Bachelor Degree by spending some time in this space-ship-pod fiberglass simulator. But read more..."

The University of the Smart Mob

The University of the Smart Mob: "Earlier this week, spiked was invited to the Institute of Creative Technologies (IoCT), to write an exclusive report on its opening and to listen to the inaugural lecture by visiting professor, Howard Rheingold. Radical is not the keynote to Rheingold’s speech today; instead it’s cooperation. There is only a thin sprinkling of the ‘Smart Mob’ theory buzzwords on which Rheingold’s reputation has been built (see here for more on Smart Mobs). Rather, Rheingold’s attention is focused not on spontaneous social upswell, but on how to foster cohesion within established academic systems. It is centred on a ‘revival of the commons’: creating a fertile web territory in which scholars from a variety of different disciplines can read and respond to each other’s papers. It is hoped that encountering new ideas and perspectives will trigger new thoughts and further progress. Source: Emily Hill, spiked, London, September 21, 2006 Link: spiked"

P2P Governance for Sustainability

P2P Governance for Sustainability: "From commons-management scholar Elinor Ostrom: Policies That Crowd out Reciprocity and Collective Action “Thus, instead of proposing highly centralized governance systems, the best empirical evidence we can bring to bear on the question of building sustainable democratic systems for sustainable resource use is to design polycentric systems…. The essential elements of polycentric systems are mechanisms for generating information about patterns of interactions and outcomes and mechanisms for oversight and self-correction.” from her essay in Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life edited by Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr (MIT Press). "

quinta-feira, setembro 21, 2006

Do Public Media Believe in the Public?

Do Public Media Believe in the Public?: "I spent part of yesterday at a small conference organized by WGBH, the huge Boston-based public broadcasting operation. The topic under discussion was “open media,” which means different things to different people. The ground rules were no blogging, which presumably meant not covering what other people said. A few thoughts, however, about what I told the group that consisted mainly of public broadcasting folks. I gave them my usual observations — that digital media are having a profoundly democratizing impact on both production and access. I also observed that access is not the same thing as distribution; we are not talking, or shouldn’t be, about “content providers’” ability to deliver media but about other folks being able to get what they want and need. It’s a crucial distinction, and not one that I think most traditional media people, much less the cable and phone duopolists, understand. In a world where consumers are producers, and vice versa, the traditional producers should be anxio"

User-generated content sites

User-generated content sites: "This MediaPost article reports 'a recent analysis, by comScore World Metrix, of UK Internet users' activity at user-generated content sites (UGC) showed significant traffic growth. Wikipedia was up 253 percent versus year ago, MySpace.com, up 467 percent, and Piczo.com, up 393 percent'.Further,'collectively, the leading UGC sites draw more frequent visits than non-UGC sites (4.2 vs. 3.5 average usage days per month), longer periods of engagement (79.9 vs. 33.2 average minutes per visitor), and more pages viewed (217 vs. 52 average pages per visitor). Users of the top social networking sites demonstrate particularly high levels of engagement, with visitors to MySpace.com and Bebo.com averaging at least 5 usage days, 2 hours of use, and 300 pages viewed per visitor during July'. UK User Generated Content Sites Growing Fast, Engaging More"

User-generated content sites

User-generated content sites: "This MediaPost article reports 'a recent analysis, by comScore World Metrix, of UK Internet users' activity at user-generated content sites (UGC) showed significant traffic growth. Wikipedia was up 253 percent versus year ago, MySpace.com, up 467 percent, and Piczo.com, up 393 percent'.Further,'collectively, the leading UGC sites draw more frequent visits than non-UGC sites (4.2 vs. 3.5 average usage days per month), longer periods of engagement (79.9 vs. 33.2 average minutes per visitor), and more pages viewed (217 vs. 52 average pages per visitor). Users of the top social networking sites demonstrate particularly high levels of engagement, with visitors to MySpace.com and Bebo.com averaging at least 5 usage days, 2 hours of use, and 300 pages viewed per visitor during July'. UK User Generated Content Sites Growing Fast, Engaging More"

Bruce Sterling story: How kids' lives will be ruined by Internet control

Bruce Sterling story: How kids' lives will be ruined by Internet control: "Cory Doctorow: Bruce Sterling's uproariously funny story 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google' has just been published in the New Scientists -- it's a short short story about the life of a teenager when today's tools of ubiquitous computer control and surveillance are perfected. Like all great science fiction, this doesn't so much predict the future as it predicts the present: I tried hard to buy us another spray can. I'm a street poet, so really, I tried. I walked up to the mall-store register, disguised in my Dad's business jacket, with cash in hand. They're cheap, aerosol spray cans. Beautiful colours of paint, just screaming to get sprayed someplace public where everybody has to see what's on our minds. The store wouldn't sell me the can. The e-commerce system simply would not allow that transaction. The screen just went gray and stayed gray. That creepy 'differential permissioning' sure saves a lot of trouble for grown-ups. Increasing chunks of the world are just... magically off lim"

terça-feira, setembro 19, 2006

Entrevista com um videojornalista

Entrevista com um videojornalista: "INTERSSANTE entrevista na Online Journalism Review: Q&A with Travis Fox, video journalist for washingtonpost.com."
-- via Ponto Media

Barking Up the Right Tree

Barking Up the Right Tree: "I’m just back from The Future of Web Apps, an inspirational conference in San Francisco about the technology that’s the backbone of what many refer to as Web 2.0 — shorthand for community rich, user-driven, and, one hopes, more economically grounded than the last boom (Flickr is a great, oft-cited example). For folks like us trying to create a new kind of magazine — one that’s community driven yet still guided by professional editors — it was pure manna. A personal highlight was seeing my old friend Ted Rheingold deliver a presentation on building passion-centric communities, like the one he founded, Dogster.com (which was followed by Catster.com), as well as places like Deviant Art, Craftster and Cats That Look Like Hitler (always a crowd pleaser). People who know me know that I believe in my friends. When their projects are smart, fun and heartfelt there’s no chance you can get me to shut up about them. This means, for one, I wear my Dogster shirt all the time. As such, people are pron"

YouTube, And A Lack Of Common Sense

YouTube, And A Lack Of Common Sense: "Seems everyone’s getting into the act — from Newsvine comes a report that the government plans to upload anti-drug advertisements to YouTube. The decision to distribute anti-drug, public service announcements and other videos over YouTube represents the first concerted effort by the U.S. government to influence customers of the popular service, which shows more than 100 million videos per day. The administration was expected to announce the decision formally on Tuesday. It said it was not paying any money to load its previously produced videos onto YouTube’s service, so the program is effectively free. “If just one teen sees this and decides illegal drug use is not the path for them, it will be a success,” said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the drug office. Just one problem — it’s already been proven that these ads, when they appeared on television, didn’t work, and were in fact counterproductive. Oops. Tags: smithmag, YouTube, viral, video, anti-drug, government, harmless, idiot Read"

FOX Providing Shows for Multiple Web Sites

FOX Providing Shows for Multiple Web Sites: "While NBC boldly promotes its new programs through avenues like Netflix and AOL Video and streams shows through its own site, CBS enters in deals with Comcast to air episodes for a month after their initial shows through VOD, and ABC provides many of its top episodes through its site and free iPod downloads, Fox is trying a pervasive multi-platform release campaign of its own to try and garner as many new viewers as they can for programs early in the season. Just a few weeks ago, Fox tried an initial campaign like this, making the first three episodes of its popular show Prison Break, as well as the first three episodes of Vanished, available across several Web platforms. Based on the initial success of that campaign, the network has now decided to extend this promotion to an extensive distribution campaign for the first three episodes of new series Happy Hour, Justice, and 'Til Death. One episode of Justice will be provided and two episodes of the other two shows. These will be made available through more than 40 different onlin"

Germany: A newspaper for the people, by the people.

Germany: A newspaper for the people, by the people.: "Netzeitung, Germany’s revolutionary “paperless newspaper,” has taken yet another step toward the future. Their ‘Readers-Edition.de’ is a unique example of citizen journalism: an online publication written entirely by non-professional journalists."

domingo, setembro 17, 2006

Barenaked Ladies go remix crazy

Barenaked Ladies go remix crazy: "Cory Doctorow: Toronto copyfightin' band Barenaked Ladies have gone remix crazy, inviting fans to remix their music, make their own t-shirts, and generally be as creative as they want with BNL's stuff. They call this 'shifting the focus to the fan and letting them decide how they want to consume the music,' which is such a radically sensible idea. I loved these guys when they were performing at the Scarborough Town Centre, up the street from my parents' place -- I love them even more now. The band will re-package five of the best remixes in one CD, with proceeds going to charity. The band has a new 13-song CD out, but had too many tracks for it and didn't want to toss the ones that didn't make the CD. The 16 songs that didn't make it will be sold online. Consumers can download the songs, buy a deluxe CD package or get a USB stick containing all 29 songs. 'People will not often even listen to a record anymore. They might download the songs and just listen to it on shuffle with all your other music or "

Why You Should Delete Your MySpace Page

Why You Should Delete Your MySpace Page: "Here are a few simple reasons why you should reconsider having a MySpace page. Although geared towards young professionals, the tips apply to anyone who might apply for a new job in the future."

segunda-feira, setembro 11, 2006

Illicit Drug Use Up Among 50-59 Year-Olds, Mostly Weed

Illicit Drug Use Up Among 50-59 Year-Olds, Mostly Weed: "While drug use among teens is slightly down, drug use among older adults is definitely up. This is defiantly a sign of the times."

domingo, setembro 10, 2006

Television Goes Multiplatform

Television Goes Multiplatform: "I originally posted this on my blog, but I thought it would also be of interest to C3 readers because of the heavy focus here on multiplatform television extensions: It's hard to believe that it was less than a year ago that Apple launched the video Ipod and the ABC television group was the first to announce a serious commitment to make its top rated television shows accessible to consumers via legal downloads. Within a few weeks time, the other networks were forced to cut their own deals with Apple paving the way of a new era of rerun on demand. A document shared with me recently from one of our corporate research partners gave me a glimpse into just how dramatically the landscape of American television has changed, providing a breakdown network by network of the various platforms through which one could access their content."

quinta-feira, setembro 07, 2006

Expert tips for journalists working in a visual, multi-media world

Expert tips for journalists working in a visual, multi-media world: "Bloggers posted a great deal of expertise on visual journalism this week directed at helping prepare journalists for dealing with new media, in summaries of presentations they attended at the Society of News Design's annual workshop in Orlando, Florida.  Topics covered in the blogs include: changing media priorities, news story packaging, working with Flash, Photoshop do’s and don’ts, and the future of infographics.  "

Gaming Generation Have Different Approach to Learning

Gaming Generation Have Different Approach to Learning: "There’s an old anthropologist’s quote that goes along the lines of “show me how the children played and I’ll tell you how the society worked”. The point being that play is a form of learning and the forms that play takes are intertwined closely with the way society/culture functions."

terça-feira, setembro 05, 2006

America to US gov't: kill the Broadcast Treaty!

America to US gov't: kill the Broadcast Treaty!: "Cory Doctorow: An incredibly diverse coalition of high-powered public interest groups, industry associations, and corporations have signed an open letter to the US Patent and Trademark Office rejecting the 'Broadcast Treaty,' a US-led UN initiative that could do untold harm to artists, tech and telecoms companies, scholars, and people with disabilities. Under the Broadcast Treaty, fair use, Creative Commons and the public domain would be trumped by the 'broadcast right,' which would be owned by the broadcaster of works. If you got a copy of a work over the air or over the Web that copyright would let you use (because it was in the public domain, because it was factual, or even because the creator had granted you permission), you'd still need to seek permission from the 'caster,' who would get a 50-year monopoly over the re-use of copies of the works it transmitted. The proposal to extend this to the Web could put YouTube, Google Video, and innovative podcaster services out of business, by banning or restricting"

MySpace users tell marketers get out!

MySpace users tell marketers get out!: "You cannot disrupt social network spaces where the large majority of people share as authentic users with corporate profiles only wanting to sell. This is the clash between dolphins and sharks again. It must hard for MySpace to regulate what goes on with so many users, while keeping things open. “Yes, it’s happening as we said it would from the start. MySpace users are complaining about the proliferation of corporate profiles created by marketers eager to tap into the 100 million people on MySpace. Of corporate profiles on MySpace, one person tells MediaPost, “Frankly, I think that’s going too far.” Frankly, we agree. While for a marketer, it’s impossible to ignore the allure of 100 million people, the proliferation of advertising on MySpace is akin to Coke placing it’s logo behind the cross in churches across the country. The two just don’t go together.” via Adrants "

domingo, setembro 03, 2006

Odd Wiki SocialSynergy: WiredNewsWiki

Odd Wiki SocialSynergy: WiredNewsWiki: "Link: Odd Wiki SocialSynergy: WiredNewsWiki. Wired News has teamed up with Social Text to create WikiNews site. Quoted from Wired Wiki: In an experiment in collaborative journalism, Wired News is putting reporter Ryan Singel at your service. This wiki began as an unedited 1,059 word article on the wiki phenomenon, exactly as Ryan filed it. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to do the job of a Wired News editor and whip it into shape. Don’t change the quotations, but feel free to reorganize it, make cuts, smooth the prose, or add links – whatever it takes to make it a lively, engaging news piece.
-- hum, a glipse of things to come?

Odd Wiki SocialSynergy: WiredNewsWiki

Odd Wiki SocialSynergy: WiredNewsWiki: "Link: Odd Wiki SocialSynergy: WiredNewsWiki. Wired News has teamed up with Social Text to create WikiNews site. Quoted from Wired Wiki: In an experiment in collaborative journalism, Wired News is putting reporter Ryan Singel at your service. This wiki began as an unedited 1,059 word article on the wiki phenomenon, exactly as Ryan filed it. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to do the job of a Wired News editor and whip it into shape. Don’t change the quotations, but feel free to reorganize it, make cuts, smooth the prose, or add links – whatever it takes to make it a lively, engaging news piece.
-- hum, a glipse of things to come?

Google Image Labeler, the ESP Game, and Human-Computer Symbiosis

Google Image Labeler, the ESP Game, and Human-Computer Symbiosis: "By tim In comments on my previous entry, Stephen Rondeau pointed out that Google Image Labeler appears to be based on the ESP Game developed by Professor Luis von Ahn of CMU. An anonymous commenter pointed to the video of Luis von Ahn's tech talk at Google on July 26, 2006. The tech talk was fascinating, both because there was no hint in it that Google was about to announce something based on von Ahn's work -- the talk is all about his previously published games -- and for the actual thought-provoking content, which gives a lot of background on the design of this kind of game, and in general, the idea of harnessing humans to work as program components via games. Luis started out his talk by looking at Captchas. Most of this was familiar material, although he has a great definition of a Captcha: 'A program that can generate and grade tests that most humans can pass, but that current computer programs cannot pass.' (This is an interesting variation on the Turing test, in which humans g"

sexta-feira, setembro 01, 2006

MySpace driving more retail traffic than MSN search

MySpace driving more retail traffic than MSN search: "New Hitwise findings indicate that MySpace drove more US traffic to online retail sites last week than MSN search, the third largest search engine on the web. That's big news, as it's tangible evidence that youth oriented online social networking is a market driver of serious proportions."
-- hum???

New phones run Skype without PC

New phones run Skype without PC: "Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV has announced a new phone that allows users of Skype Ltd.'s Internet telephony service to make calls without having to boot up their PCs."
-- another nail in the cofin...

Web 2.0 documentary: is it a bubble?

Web 2.0 documentary: is it a bubble?: "Web 2.0. CEO’s in a 24 documentary on whether Web 2.0. is a deep trend or a bubble? Worth watching. For a written exploration see here. "
-- is it a bubble? perhaps, but boy what a bubble it is...

Star Trek 40th anniversary: Wired News wants your photos

Star Trek 40th anniversary: Wired News wants your photos: "Xeni Jardin: Next week marks four decades since the birth of Star Trek, and Wired News wants evidence of Trekkie life in our galaxy: Any homemade homage to the Star Trek universe, any snapshots of you with the stars, anything that shows your devotion to this one of a kind phenomenon: if we like it, we'll post it in a front page photo gallery on Thursday, Sept. 8. We've set up a group on Flickr called Wired News: Star Trek Submissions. All you have to do is join the group and add appropriate photos. Please include a description of the photo and the name you want us to use when crediting the images. Alternatively, you can simply tag your photos with 'wirednewsstartrek' and we'll be able to find your submission(s) that way. Link. (Thanks, Leander Kahney) Image: a still from one my favorite Star Trek episodes, 'The Way to Eden.' Here, Spock approaches some dirty hippies on their way to Burning Man, and asks them if their cupcake artcars are powered by bad trance music. "
-- check Henry Jenkins

Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water house in Half Life 2

Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water house in Half Life 2: "Cory Doctorow: Here's a YouTube walk-through of an incredibly detailed model of Frank Lloyd Wright's legendary Kaufmann/Falling Water house built in Half Life 2. Kasperg, the creator, is a gamer with an interest in using game engines for architectural visualization, and has published his Half Life 2 maps for you to play with. Apropos of this, Alice notes 'I've had the security permissions to map the BBC's Television Centre for a while, but I haven't ever found anyone local to do it. If you're near London and a dab hand with the HL2 engine, plus you fancy mapping out the Blue Peter garden and other such luminous landmarks, drop me a line...' Link (via Wonderland) "

Virgin Mary in a tree

Virgin Mary in a tree: "David Pescovitz: Antonia 'Toni' Filipertis, 84, of Lockport, NY, discovered images of the Virgin Mary in a maple tree outside her house. From the Niagara Gazette: “The voice, she told me to look on your tree,” she related in a Polish accent. “I come out and parked the car in the front and I look on the tree and I don’t see nothing.” Filipertis said that Mary’s voice was very soft. “She said, ‘Look at your tree. I’m in three places,’ and she was in three places .... And I look in this branch and she was very clear.” Three stubs of three branches had pictures on them... It is the second time members of the family have seen a vision. Twins James Filipertis and Dorothy (Filipertis) Fitzgerald saw the Holy Family — Mary, Joseph and Jesus — in the sky on a clear night in 1960 when they were 7 years old. Link (via Fark) "
-- say what??? olha este a pensar que é um pastorinho...

New from Google: Google Image Labeler

New from Google: Google Image Labeler: "'Welcome to Google Image Labeler, a new feature of Google Image Search that allows you to label random images to help improve the quality of Google's image search results.' This is the new tagger that they had in mind!"
-- yeeeeeeeessssssssss!!!!

Wikipedia founder Wales responds to BBC story about changes

Wikipedia founder Wales responds to BBC story about changes: "Xeni Jardin: The BBC ran an item last week about changes planned for Wikipedia's German-language Wikipedia site, and much discussion followed, including follow-up comments by the BBC article's author, tech critic Bill Thompson. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales argues that Thompson's analysis for the BBC was less than clear, and Wales shared a rebuttal with Slashdot. Snip: * PROTECTION - NO ONE can edit, NO ONE can affect the public version * SEMI-PROTECTION - all except new users and anons can edit, all except new users and anons can affect the public versions * VERSION FLAGGING - ANYONE can edit, all except new users and anons can affect the public versions As you can see, each step of this chain allows MORE people to do MORE things, rather than less. Each step of this chain is becoming MORE wiki, not LESS wiki. The news media has an unfortunate temptation to follow a story arc that goes something like this. 'Open editing is impossible. It worked for a little while at Wikipedia, but now even Wikipedia"