Networked Publics Conference and Media Festival at the Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California (April 28-29, 2006).

This two-day event will bring together new media scholars and practitioners to exhibit and discuss the roles of audiences, activists, and producers in maturing networked media ecologies. The event is organized by the Networked Publics fellowship program (netpublics.annenberg.edu) at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication.

The conference includes a media festival and an academic program.

• “Do-It-Yourself: Emergent Networked Culture,” is an experimental news and entertainment media festival featuring new kinds of viral, remixed, and amateur media works enabled by current networked ecologies. Categories of curated work include: political remix videos, the digital handmade, anime music videos, machinima, alternative news, and infrastucture hacks.
• The academic program is dedicated to three topics: Politics, Infrastructure and Place. For each of these topics, netpublics fellows will convene a session to interrogate current issues and controversies related to emergent networked ecologies.

The format of the event is designed to promote interaction and dialog across a diverse set of participants. Our goal is to facilitate conversation on topics of shared concern and a mixture of formats that include screenings, debates, and interaction around computer kiosks.

Why do I blog this? I’ll be there (thanks Julian!), the event seems great and very pertinent to my interests.

One of my favorite movie:“Polyester” (John Waters). Almost set here, with the odorama add-on:

According to Wikipedia, All Your Base Are Belong To Us:

“All your base are belong to us” (sometimes referred to as “All Your Base” and often abbreviated AYBABTU, AYBAB2U, or simply AYB) is a phrase that sparked an Internet phenomenon in 2001 and 2002. The text is taken from the opening found in the English version of the Japanese video game Zero Wing, the translation of which was terrible to the point of hilarity. The game was originally produced by Toaplan in 1989. Groups of game enthusiasts began digitally altering various images to include the phrase. Eventually, these images were collected together onto one site, Tribalwar, and a Flash animation produced from them, which was widely downloaded.

Another good meme is also the “Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle!“

Why do I blog this? even though it’s 5 years old, the meme is still there, showing how the Internet’s can spread specific messages (uncovered by the traditional mass media as said in the Wikipedia definition) and then “install” it in the network’s memory.

Read in the IHT:

A bill under debate in the French National Assembly may require iPods to be able to play music purchased from competing Internet services, not just Apple Computer’s own iTunes Music Store, and force changes in the business model that sparked the revolution in legal digital music downloads.
(…)
“Just ask my 14-year-old, who bought music from another system and cannot play it on his iPod,” said Bartholomew, who added that operators would benefit if more people exchanged music over their networks.
(…)
“From a technical perspective, it is extremely complex to get these devices and services to speak with one another,” MacGann said [director general of the European Information and Communications Technology Industry Association, a trade group in Brussels].
(…)
“The only format that currently works on all these players is the MP3 format and that is 100 percent unprotected.”

It so reflects the tensions between openness (reading every format on my ipod) and copyright…

Mapping Switzerland was an interesting exhibition by Hosoya Schaefer Architects, Zürich:

This exhibition curated by Pius Freiburghaus and organized by the Perforum at the Kulturzentrum Seedamm looks at maps, art and myths. It attempts at finding new ways to describe the identity of Switzerland ranging from the scientific to the artistic. Participants in the exhibition include the ETH Studio Basel, the ETH Institute of Cartography, Büro Destruct und Ursula Palla.

Hosoya Schaefer is showing eleven maps of Switzerland and its global context on 2m x 2m panels. With the panels leaning against the wall or propped up on wooden blocks, the installation alludes to the provisional and impermanent nature of the information on which these maps are based. Not an apodictic new ‘truth’ is searched for, but new ways of thinking.
(…)
Visualizations can help to propose new ways of thinking. They can help to see oneself not only in the historically grown context but also in the flux of globalization. We looked at a series of such factors. The graphic language of the maps, based on the density of information used in an atlas, is meant to go beyond the straightforward transfer of information and to evoke associations and open up space for fantasy.

There was also a nice article about it in the Weltwoche (pdf, 6.3Mb).

Why do I blog this? I like these visualizations that try to show things in a spatial way.

A conference in Zürich where I might go on November 9-10th. It’s roughly a festival for media culture & digital lifestyle and there are relevant people in the program as mentioned here:

Zum Beispiel darüber, wie Science-Fiction-Szenarien plötzlich Wirklichkeit werden: in «the hacker crackdown» des legendären US Science Fiction Buchautors Bruce Sterling. Wie technologische Innovationen die Kultur verändern, ist das Thema von «a researcher’s outlook on life with computers in 10 years time» mit Dr. Walter Hehl vom IBM Forschungslabor in Rüschlikon. Aus Japan angereist, wird Fuminori Yamasaki, der Chef der japanischen Roboter-Entwicklers iXs Research Cooperation, im Speech «robots are better dancers» seine Visionen darlegen, wie unser tägliches Leben mit Robotern aussehen wird. Wer in Zukunft Informationen und Wissen kontrollieren wird, beschäftigt in «who owns the information society?» den Europa-Präsidenten Georg C.F. Greve der Free Software Foundation. Und wie Kunst als systematische Urheberrechtsverletzung verstanden werden kann, legt in «the Net Art Generation» die in Berlin und Hamburg lebenden Medienkünstlerin Cornelia Sollfrank dar.

Talks will be both in english and german/hochdeutsch.

This is the Ampex VRX-1000 (aka the Mark IV), the first videotape recorder. The cedmagic website has a good introduction about it (picture taken from there):

Research on recording video on tape was begun in the early 1950’s, and Bing Crosby Enterprises demonstrated a prototype system in 1951 that ran at 100 inches/second and had 16 minutes per reel. But the quality was poor. RCA demonstrated a better system in 1953, but it ran at 30 feet/second and only had 4 minutes per reel. The small Ampex Corporation came up with the ideas of using rotating heads, transverse scanning, and FM encoding which allowed broadcast quality recording at 15 inches/second and 90 minutes per reel.
The VRX-1000 set off a storm when it was demonstrated on April 14, 1956 at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters Convention

50,000 bucks at that time! There seems to be a Buddy Holly look-alike in the background.

Read in the french press today: for Guy Debord and situationists fans, the DVD box with Debord’s movie is goind to be released on November 12th (french edition), there is also a cinema release (october 8th).
More about it on the french wesbite http://www.guydebordcineaste.com.

Could be bought on Amazon France (Zone 2 unfortunately).

• Hurlements En Faveur De Sade - 1952
• Sur Le Passage De Quelques Personnes À Travers Une Assez Courte Unité De Temps - 1959
• Critique De La Séparation - 1961
• La Société Du Spectacle - 1973
• Réfutation De Tous Les Jugements, Tant élogieux Qu’hostiles Qui Ont été Jeté Sur le Fil « LA SOCIÉTÉ DU SPECTACLE » -1975
• In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni - 1978

I am really looking forward to watch this!

I was not aware of this buzzword: nethnography (which I found in this article: The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities by Robert V. Kozinets):

Netnography is ethnography adapted to the study of online communities. As a method, netnography is faster, simpler, and less expensive than traditional ethnography and more naturalistic and unobtrusive than focus groups or interviews. It provides information on the symbolism, meanings, and consumption patterns of online consumer groups. The author provides guidelines that acknowledge the online environment, respect the inherent flexibility and openness of ethnography, and provide rigor and ethics in the conduct of marketing research. As an illustrative example, the author provides a netnography of an online coffee newsgroup and discusses its marketing implications

Why do I blog this? mmh why using this new buzzword?

Don’t know whether there are still some people around using MUDs and MOO (I still do) but I am still interested in MUD/MOO (a MUD is a a multi-player computer game where everything is described with text) as a platform to investigate various concepts. Spatiality for instance is a very interesting topic to address with MUDS (see for instance in this paper some reference about it). Now that there is a map/space visualization frenziness, it’s funny to find MUD maps like this one:

It’s basically a model of a MOO called BayMOO. It’s:

one of the most notable efforts to map the topology of MUDs was undertaken by architect, Peters Anders and his students at New Jersey Institute of Technology [3]. Anders, in an email interview, said his motivation to map MUDs was because they are designed by the players rather than professional architects, and they offered “…a source of great opportunity for architects since MUD spaces aren’t subject to the consequences of material construction - and could possibly supplant built spaces in the future.”

The methodology to do this quite crazy:

Mapping MUDs using field surveying and handcrafted maps obviously does not scale well to cope with many hundreds of rooms. What is needed is some means of automatically surveying the MUD as you go, recording your movement room by room and drawing the map from the results. This can be done in a simple fashion with the zMUD client from Zugg Software which includes an automapping tool

What is very smart is what they get from the analysis of this map:

Anders says his work reveals the distinct structure of a MUD from the topology of its rooms, much like a fingerprint provides unique identification of a person. The fingerprint of a particular MUD, is determined to a large degree by the political structure of the MUD, and Anders says that: “MUDs whose maps resemble an orthogonal grid of cubic rooms reflect a strong administration of wizards - a top-down control of construction in the domain. On the other hand, in democratic, bottom-up managed MUDs, users are free to build spaces without constraint. LAMs of these MUDs tend to be shaggy clusters of spheres, as the directional grid is not followed rigorously.“

Why do i blog this? I like these old-school maps which I find very relevant even nowadays. Of course it’s simple, but I still consider MUD/MOO and their virtual space as a good metaphor.

More about this here: “Envisioning Cyberspace: The Design of Online Communities” by Peter Anders.

Interesting article in the NYT/IHT about computer scientists now moving forward by including other fields in their domain.

Jamika Burge is heading back to Virginia Tech this fall to pursue a doctorate in computer science, but her research is spiced with anthropology, sociology, psychology, psycholinguistics - as well as observing cranky couples trade barbs in computer instant messages.
(…)

“If you have only technical knowledge, you are vulnerable,” said Thomas Malone, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. “But if you can combine business or scientific knowledge with technical savvy, there are a lot of opportunities. And it’s a lot harder to move that kind of work offshore.”
�
Burge’s research, for example, is in a hot niche called computer-supported cooperative work, which studies the ways people use technology to communicate and collaborate in work groups and social networks. She spent the summer as a research intern for IBM, and her job prospects seem bright.
�
On university campuses, the newest technologists have to become renaissance geeks. They have to understand computing, but they also typically need deep knowledge of some other field, from biology to business, Wall Street to Hollywood. And they tend to focus less on the tools of technology than on how technology is used in the search for scientific breakthroughs, the development of new products and services, or the way work is done.

Why do I blog this well I feel I am part of this trend.
It’s funny to see that this does not go without problems:

Of course, such multidisciplinary shifts are still predicated on a solid grounding in computing. And there are worries that too few students are getting a technical education. While the need for technical expertise is growing, the number of students choosing computer science as a major is 39 percent lower than in the autumn of 2000, the last of the dot-com bubble years, according to the Computing Research Association.
�
This trend has troubled Bill Gates, the co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, who traveled to several elite universities in a campaign-style tour in the spring of 2004 to stir up enthusiasm for computer science.

Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Venkman: Why?
Spengler: It would be bad.
Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean “bad”?
Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every
molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Stantz: Total protonic reversal!
Venkman: That’s bad. Okay. Alright, important safety tip, thanks Egon.

Ghostbusters, 1984

Thanks Fab for pointing me on this NYT article: Loosing Google’s lock on the past. It’s about the huge fingerprint people leave on the web: everything can be found on google:

Marissa Mayer, director of consumer Web products for Google, said that people call and e-mail the company regularly to request that links to their names be removed, though she would not estimate how many. Web masters who want to remove their own content from cyberspace are directed to Google, where they can learn how. But people like me, who do not own the offending material, must contact a Web master directly.

I like this statement:

RATHER than trying to have uncharitable comments and images removed from the Web, Mr. Weber said, people should go with the flow of the Internet. “Go in and be part of the community,” he said, “and share and be transparent and be open.”
(…)
The most effective way to define and control your digital persona is to start a blog or put up a home page.

“Web logs come up very high in a Google search,” Mr. Palfrey of Harvard said. “By creating a personal Web page, particularly one that has lots of links to lots of sources, you can create a gateway to your online identity.”
(…)
“The Internet is a very good analogy to a company,” Mr. Dash said. “There is always going to be somebody complaining. At least the first voice they hear is yours.
(…)
THEREFORE, the secret to burying unflattering Web details about yourself is to create a preferred version of the facts on a home page or a blog of your own, then devise a strategy to get high-ranking Web sites to link to you. Many people assume that a Google ranking has something to do with Web traffic, but that is incorrect, as is the notion that the more links a site has, the higher its PageRank.

After reading anne’s post about the fact that a local Seattle coffeehouse has shut down its free wi-fi on Saturdays and Sundays because “it seems that nobody talks to each other any more”, I stumbled across another paper in the Financial Times about it: Wake up and smell the coffee, wi-fi users By Simon London.

Coffee shops across the US are finding that offering free wireless internet access to customers is leaving a bitter taste. “There are times when 90 per cent of the people in here are surfing the internet,” says Jen Strongin, co-owner of the Victrola Coffee &
Art cafe in Seattle. “It has really changed the atmosphere.”

Students of coffee-house culture call it the “zombie effect” people staring silently into their computers, oblivious to those around them.

Zombies are not only anti-social but also bad business. A single laptop user can take up a whole table. It is not unusual for web surfers to eke out a single cup of coffee for hours.
(…)
Her solution is simple: from now on the wi-fi network will be turned off at weekends, the Victrola’s busiest days.
(…)
Armando, manger of the Konditorei café in Portola Valley, advises: “Wi-fi etiquette? Keep using it until we kick you out.”

That’s how life goes…

The IHT has a funny piece about tgis new fact: people have more and more gadgets but they are losing them more and more by “misplacing them in airplanes and airports, hotel rooms, restaurants, cabs and rented cars.”

A study conducted by Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a mobile-data protection software company in Chicago, found that the number of laptops abandoned in one London cab company’s taxis rose 71 percent in the second half of last year from the same period in 2001, while the number of personal digital assistants left behind shot up 350 percent.
(…)
The plague of forgetfulness has given rise to several services that locate vanished goods. Trackitback, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and at www.trackitback.com, uses coded identification labels and a reward system to encourage people to call a toll-free number when they find a lost item with the affixed label. A lifetime fee of $9.99 covers standard shipping costs.

How can designers create stuff with a “presence” reminder so that the object is not left aside on the sidewalk after you made a break and alsmot forget your powerbook?