The conversation thing

Actually, not just in the RISD team, but leading the Rhode Island School of Design. Even though I never was to MIT, all those years of constantly following his work with the Media Arts and Sciences Department leave me now with a feeling of nostalgia cute! what can digital information do to a very sane person

I hope, and I know, his work will continue to be inspirational and I sure hope one day I get to meet the idea generator man in person.

Well, after announcing the instant messaging service for Facebook users a few days ago, now this worldwide community website makes a new move on globalizing its messages into all possible languages on Earth by involving its users into translating the interface …

Aren’t we transforming ourselves into a folklore society … where everything has no particular author, just vast groups of people making the final message in a process of collective work? Yes, I think a new middle ages awaits us ..

This is an old thought of mine, that we are now like the Romans were back in 200 BC … having all resources at hand, properly using all information to gain societal, economical and cultural outcomes. But in a slow motion development, after 500 years, all of a sudden, the individual voice was no longer important, collective works became the most relevant for further development… and I can see this trend of collective (read “community”) based information and outcomes going to the new middle ages era. What do you think of that?

While we’re at Channel 4 let’s take a look. It’s a gorgeously simple website. British like hell : perfectly balanced, colorfull, yet stylish and easy to read. Kinda old fashioned as I compare it to the new bbc beta face, but then again, channel 4 is more about entertainment than news, and even if it weren’t so, I would’ve still liked it.

Speaking of BBC, this personalised type of interface is going to mark a huge step for the mass-media. The news will no longer be delivered, but channeled while end-users will have different perspectives on the same amount of events the site provides. Normally, there will be a gaussian distribution in the users preferences, but still, 2 different users will access two different bbc homepages. This will bring a shift in media sociology: the provider of the news will no longer controll the way information is received. Maybe online ads will reflect your preferences, but a puzzling question is how will the user choices influence the posted information? TV works on ratings, but internet provides a more specific way of quantification… so will the change be major, what is your take?

Here’s a very cute idea on how to track your long lost glove… well, this site would have been very useful to me like ten years ago when I had a long series of lost gloves… now I learnt to track them with global positioning system .. lol

CNN has decided to open an I-Report hub in Second Life, encouraging residents of Second Life to share their own “SL I-Reports” about events occurring within the virtual world.

This I-Report hub includes a news desk where CNN producers will hold weekly editorial discussions, and an amphitheater for larger in-world events, such as training sessions and appearances by CNN anchors and correspondents.

CNN’s first in-world training session will be held Tuesday, November 13, at 5 p.m. ET at the I-Report Hub , that is, if I’m guessing correcly, on the 14th around 1 o’clock in the afternoon.

On this site, you can tell every little nasty thing about your neighbors… and of course, you still have the advantage of anonymity. That’s nice. Bucharest isn’t yet covered, but trust me, once the word is spread, it will be full of red houses … Don’t they make huge apartment blocks icons as well I mean, for multiple sets of “good neighbors” ?

So, as we’ve seen earlier this month, I have been baaged ;;) Today I’ve received the invitation to join and have a look at this tool.

Well, I like it . So far it is in the beta version, so I expect many improvements and tools to be developed until the final release. I like the fact that it is all modular and interactivity is taken to its extreme. I checked the source, it’s all JavaScript or so it seems… niiice job, guys.

Can hardly wait to see the release. I would add a more sense of the community, right now it’s a little hard to see what is happening in the community, unless you type search terms and find other people’s baagz.

Way to go! Nice job!

The first European Machinima Festival took place this weekend in Leicester, UK.

Not very sure what you know about this form of animation films, I encountered the term machinima in 2005 at Linz Ars Electronica where there was a full seminar on this subject alone. Machinima, pronounced ma-shin-i-ma means making movies using videogames, the word being an amalgamation of machine and cinema and it is a fusion of film-making and gaming.

Although its history goes back on 1996, for me it was like discovering that someone invented the wheel. The idea behind these animated films is so simple, yet it brings such a shift in perception. Until finding out what machinima means, I thought animation and films can only be made by a script and by animating scene by scene all using the design of an illustrator/animator. Yet, it had never occured to me that entire scenes from videogames can be captured and rendered as a film of its own with a true script.

My favourite is still the “red vs blue” series, by roster teeth. The first episode is a true classic.

Developed by exalead.com team, baagz.com [currently in its beta form] aims to become a new form of social networking. Sharing multiple forms of content, not just a mere profile of oneself is the target for the baagz team.

Short dictionary - extract from the baagz brochure

baagz is the name of the service
a baag (plural baagz) is a shared interest
baagboyz and baaggirlz is what you expect, and they are all baagerz
to baag an information is to put the information into a baag
let’s bag it! is what a user say when finding a cool site

I am waiting to be accepted as an user (so far registration is only by means of invitation, so I have to wait for now) and dive into this new social networking ubercool site

Take a look at this Swiss tool for keeping track of user comments on different collaborative tools such as blogs, flickr, digg etc. -> www.cocomment.com

“coComment keeps track of all the online conversations you’re following in one convenient place, and informs you whenever something is added to a conversation.

With the browser extension, comments are automatically collected, no need to remember where you commented, coComment does it for you. “

I’ve tried it out and really is an usefull tool. I’ll definitely use it for my comments .
For tracking back on blogs and social sites this tool works wonderfully. Investigating now on how to use it on other not so mainstream communities. I’ll come back with details if finding out more.