The conversation thing

Just seen on Euronews a documentary on Second Life and its leagal issues. Apparently, there are some lawsuits regarding the ownership of land and property in Second Life.

In May 2006, Marc Bragg has filed suit against Linden Lab for “a virtual land deal gone sour.” According to the press-release issued by Bragg, “The suit seeks financial damages in the thousands, in part for a breach of a virtual land auction contract and for violation of the Pennsylvania Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law. This suit is unique because the land doesn’t actually exist.” Technically, the land does exist–both as data, and as a user experience–but not as terra firma and he argues that when you mention the term “own” by no means can it be made to signify “licenced” or “rent”.

Property is an interesting concept if we relate it to virtuality. ownership is by no means related to physicality, that’s something we all agree (copyright on an idea is one very good example) and exchange is what gives value to the owned property.

I’ve tried Second Life just today and it seems addictive, but honestly, I would not spend a dollar on things that are a simulacrum of reality. I would most definitely spend money on new inventions, objects, be they as weird as they might be… It’s a brilliant idea for the Linden Lab, I cannot argue, but my take on this is a no.

And then again, in love and science, never say never

The succes of Second life (haven’t tried it yet - Ruxi, you should be ashamed of yourself) has taken industry leaders into creating avatars that can access all virtual worlds and use universal tools. Yesterday and today at Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo the top of this industry discuss the future of media and communication/

The challenge IBM and Linden Lab has put themselves to is to how to make avatars transcende from one world to another. Am I talking kantian phylosophy already ?

While I think virtual worlds are one very powerfull trend right now, I, personally, am not that interested. I mean, I would be very interested if I started to play a little, buuut knowing that I would give up my personal life just to play the virtual one, I have to say pass from the beginning.

I have experienced this while playing sims ™ about 6 or 7 years ago when I realized that my own character behaves exactly like me: always tired, needing to sleep, over stressed, with little time to do anything for himself …. so I said … why take (more…)

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.

I’ve just read the iht.com article on Muriel Cooper and have discovered a great mind. Never knew where the MIT logo came from and that it was her idea.

She was one of the visionaries that forseen design as interactive and driven by simplicity. In the 60s when tehnology was only in its infancy, people tended to see it as a big monster capable of changing social realities but unflexible.

Cooper has reinforced the idea that on-screen design can be better than just linecodes …. Almost 40 years after we’ve come to Microsoft surface and Apple’s iPhone. Muriel Cooper sure was right!

Rhizome curates an online exhibition of projects that reffer to Google way of life :).

“The selection of projects in Google Art, or How to Hack Google illuminate and critique the influence of this expanding online institution. The projects include ad hacks that attempt to foil Google’s seemingly unstoppable business machinery, playful re-interpretations of search results and alterations of its geographical worldview. Together, they elevate and critique Google’s logic, while recognizing its own deepening relationship with our culture, behavior and lives.”

Curated by Ana Otero for Rhizome.

I liked the simplicity (Maeda, again) of the concept for the GoogleHouses project. It is a website that searches houses images on google by different keywords (you can build interior image collections - bedrooms, bathrooms etc) and exhibits them in a 3D model of walls and interiors.

Such a nice robot, reminds me of when I was working
on a project of artificial intelligence… pattern recognition (first project in university) and I thought that determining an object by its contour was such a simple thing …. yeeaaah right! discovered only a few hours later that humans are quite marvelous beings … and the most simple things we do, take such vast computation in computer realm ..

I remember before actually starting to work on this assignment (its purpose was to learn the neural network the alphabet and then test the neural network what it has actually learned.. kinda like how we were taught the alphabet in the first grade, remember? ) Anyways, my imagination started to go places and I thought what is the big deal about recognizing letters … such simple shapes … we can always recognize cars for instance … and concepts come from bringing the learned shapes seen the most to conscience, or at least that was what I was thinking….

Well, I was sooo good in theory (I might have been a very good psychologist) but when finding ways to implement it …. the tough part came. And that’s when I realized that for an artificial being just to come to the concept of a car is not a simple matter of seeing many car shapes, you have to have the concept of velocity, of objects that can move, but are artificial, not nature based … and this simple thing such as what is natural and what is made by humans is sooooo hard to even consider not to mention to encode.

When I read the critics about this robot at first I joined the amusement “Even if this cyclist goes at the speed of a snail under sedatives, it is quite amazing to watch it ….”

Guys… just the fact that it can control its moves through a rough path, it’s mooore than enough… not to mention it is soooo cute! Way to go, MuRata!

Panorama festival in Karlsruhe starts on Saturday and is for the next 6 months. A lot of interesting experiments are to be seen there. You might be fooled that it is a simple display of photographic panoramas collections, but you would be soo wrong: The festival gathers interactive artists that make use of panoramas display in their work.

The Wooster Group come with an interesting experiment on an interactive 360 degrees war film. Now how about that? How about choosing your own point of view, and not the director’s?Other artists, such as Bernd Lintermann and Joachim Böttger with Globorama 2005 explore inedite visualization of the Earth.

Interactivity is the key.. I want to go there. Program here… take a look.

How would you feel about a movie that lets you control not the plot, but the place you observe the action… You could listen to the two main characters or just slip away on the corridor and see what is happening in the garden… Do you think this shift in visualizing the film is possible in the next 5 years?

Four grad researchers Kyle Buza, Luis Blackaller, Takashi Okamoto, and Kate Hollenbach from MIT have presented at FlashForward conference, a new graphics environment called E15. As Maeda says on his blog, E15 attempts to bring together the best of the power intrinsic to the Web, full-performance graphics processing, and a fully interpreted environment with dynamic class loading.

There’s a video on this site, looks amazing if I am imagining the right things. Anybody knows more about this E15 or has some more documentation on it?

A project from 2002 of the same Lev Manovich, with a daring(for its time) approach on browsing video content. Tagging visual information such as: contrast, automated velocity computing, while having means to navigate through a vast database of videos and audio files enables the spectator to choose themes and switch perspectives while enjoying this new type of eclectic cinema movie.

I am not actually convinced by this project, now seeing it at over 4 years distance, even though the idea has seen implementation - google video e.g. has done something relevant in this regard. The idea is truly valuable as the amount of video content exceeds at this point the possibility of indexing it in a normal fashion, but the visuals for the project are not that impressive.

I am begining to love BBC they’ve got the most interesting news about this industry… Nokia has launched today the new music and games download service, challenging both rival handset makers and mobile phone network providers. Most importantly, the iPhone. It was about time. BBC reads the store will charge 1 euro ($1.40; 70p) per single track and from 10 euros for an album, while games will cost between 6 and 10 euros.

It is interesting to observe the competition in this area. Nokia is one of the best mobile producers (proud 2ys owner of a 6680 ) still, I’ve noted that while their mobiles are good and reliable and always with the latest technology, they lack some features in usability. For instance, Nokia’s good-to-everything button needs clicking on it, while Sony Ericsson’s small joystick is sooo flexible and silent and interaction friendly. Same tool, lack in usability. I cannot argue though … Nokia is one hell of a resistent mobile so maybe some features need to be adjusted so as the poor mobile will not to crush into pieces at the first big encounter with the floor

I love Nokia, and my next mobile will most probably be a Nokia, but I’d like them to improve in this “cool” interaction area. Not to misunderstood me, it’s not that they don’t have the features, but usability for interaction features is still a little behind competition.

For this launch, they’ve thrown a big event NokiaGoLive . Liveblog for it can be read here 5 mobiles are released: N95 8GB / 5610 Xpress Music / 5310 Xpress Music / N81 / N81 8GB

Another Go Play event is held today and on the 30th in Singapore

Haven’t got an invitation, nor a ticket to Singapore or London… promise at their next 5 mobile launch to be among the ones invited