webponce rants

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

to

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/05/11/shoot-an-iraqi-artist-with-paintballs-over-the-web/

to

http://www.shootthebanker.com/

to

http://dodgeball.doritos.co.uk/game/

Our Child’s i Foundation first meetup will be held at the Old Bank of England on Feb 4th. The main plan of action (so far) is to discuss our current todo lists, and hopefully peddle off tasks to people who are keen to give some time and effort to the cause. We’ll be posting more about what we’re able to divvy out on the main blog in due course, but if you’re interested in giving some time, please RSVP, and come along.

http://www.meetup.com/childsifoundation/calendar/9485663/

Kirsty, Lucy and Julia were at the sicamp last night, collecting business cards and speaking to a whole range of lovely developer and just interesting types, many of who are keen to help out, across quite a wide range of technologies. It provides an interesting challenge, in that we’re eager to receive help regardless of what platforms things are built on. We already have interest from Drupal, Rails and PHP people. Our current site is built on Wordpress and will soon enough be moved to its own box so we’re a bit more able to hack the code – but if we have lots of activity using different platforms, it will be a great opportunity to show how open standards and interoperability technology such as webservices can be used to great a coherant whole. Increasingly, I think the main site will become a portal to aggregate the network activity – which quite neatly reflects our meatspace activity.

Don’t forget to follow us on twitter: @childsi

I’ve not been allowed to talk about this before, but it has just been nominated for an award, so I guess it’s all pretty public now. This was one of the last projects I was involved in at de-construct – a filtered art experience for Amstel.

Visitors would arrive at the gallery space, and be given a personal identity card – which they would take around the exhibit. The first port of call is to a booth where you are asked a series of questions, following the pattern of a multiple choice quiz. The aim of the quiz is to get an idea of your psychological makeup, and see where you sit in one of the three Hans Eysnick scales of neuroticism, psychoticism and extrovertism.

Once profiled, you would enter the gallery where we had about eight different spaces for watching short films and video art. You would arrive at once of the viewing areas (a mix of large cinema spaces, tiny shower like audio showers or plasmas screens with headphones), swipe your identity card, and you would be presented with content to sort your temperament (or to get your N, E or P juices really flowing).

We originally built a three screen prototype for demoing to our clients Amstel and 180 (their advertising agency) and then the project culminated in a 200 person event in Amsterdam in the basement of the old Post Office building. The private party was a resounding success, and many of the artists who were also invited found the experience extremely enjoyable. The viewers/interactors in the space found themselves discussing with the person next to them why they’d been shown a particular piece of content, swap cards to see other people’s content, generally discuss and chat over the art – which for any gallery experience is a huge measure of success.

Technically, the system was completely bespoke. Based upon RFID and wireless technology, we created a local network which allowed each unit to communicate to a central database server. Upon profiling, each user was stored and could be referenced upon demand. The swipe at each unit would check the person’s ‘profile’, and display relevant content as required. I was involved from the outset, helping to expand upon the original idea, taking it from a concept to delivery – developing the underlying code for the system itself, as well as the hardware, working with the curator to ensure the experience felt right from a content perspective, and installed and setup the space alongside the production team. It was a solid three days of work once we arrived in Amsterdam to setup the machines (most of which were completely smashed up in transit from London) install the software/hardware, test and the deploy in the live space, not to mention the inevitable problems which plagued us right up until the 11th hour.

I was really proud of this project, especially how deeply involved I was from the outset to completion. It was great working with a very talented team on a unique concept. I’m in the video somewhere, turning on a computer. A prize for spotting me.

I also took a range of photographs for the project which are available at Flickr.

Forrester’s Social Technographics surveys show that when it comes to social content 21% of online US consumers are Creators, 37% are Critics (those who react to content created by others), and 69% are Spectators.

The 90-9-1 principle, recently publicized by Community Guy Jake McKee at 90-9-1.com, says that in a community, the rule of thumb is that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and 1% create it.

I’m always involved in conversations where whipping out backed up stats like these would be useful, but I never remember where I can find evidence for my generally anecdotal sounding opinions. I keep meaning to write up some sort of cheatsheet where I pour in recent facts, figures and insights from various sources, such as the excellent Groundswell blog, but it would be a full time job – and often, anecdotes seem to do the job. Even if i did store them somewhere, i’d probably not remember where i’d put them.

In any case, all things seems to relate back to either a “power law distribution” or “kittens on skateboards”. Maybe i should get a tattoo of a kitten on a power law curve.

This post is from my blog over at Turn Off, Tune On, which discusses innovation in the online video space, as part of my work for Endemol.

You can’t have failed to miss the Youtube Live event which is taking place today. If you read even one single tech blog, or use Youtube, you’ll have seen the chatter everywhere.

Celebrities, Web celebs and major artists, including the mad scientists from the Mythbusters crew, will.i.am, Lisa Nova, Michael Buckley, and Joe Satriani will be joining the celebrations, and YouTube will be offering three live streams direct from its Live channel.

Why blog this? Youtube moving into live streaming is an additional string to the monetisation bow, something they’ve yet struggled to really find models beyond simple adserving and partnership deals. It also puts Youtube into the broadcaster space, allowing them to compete with a wider range of other services. It will be interesting to see the next steps they take to push this service with commercial partners.

We’re quite mainstream really.

1. The Beatles
2. Various Artists
3. Red Hot Chili Peppers
4. Massive Attack
5. Jay-Z
6. Groove Armada
7. Air
8. The Killers
9. David Bowie
10. Zero 7

See more at our last.fm account

I’ve mentioned on this blog before about barriers to entry for innovations like opensocial or openid – and how some things are just too technical to become interesting to the mainstream. here is something which is lowering that barrier – and possibly (until tonight) the most anticipated 404 page i’ve ever bookmarked – http://www.google.com/friendconnect.

FriendConnect promises to offer social tools through basic embeds and snippets of codes, allowing content developers who aren’t necessarily the most technically savvy, to still enable their site with the power of social networking.

David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, explains “Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”

Watch this, and many other spaces.

Occasionally I remember how much of a geek i am, and worry myself. This is one of those times, normal people don’t/shouldn’t get so excited about web analytics tools. However, i’m not normal, so http://piwik.org/ has made me sit up and say ‘oooh’. I’ve long wished i could do something more with the data *inside* google analytics, and piwik seems to solve that problem, not to mention using open source and non-prop software. I’d worry a little about constant hits to a db, and its scalability (as i’ve seen with slim’s implementation of mint) – but its certainly worth a punt on a smaller site, and the API is worth looking at. Watch this tiny space.

A new product from the innovation masters, Schulze and Webb, supported ably by my good friend Amy T. and her team at BBC Audio & Music Interactive R&D.

Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. It’s customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the home.

http://schulzeandwebb.com/2008/olinda/

Awesome! (I know how it feels)

http://leavemealonebox.com

Yes, i’ve checked the date, no it is not an april fool:

Publisher plans printed version of Wikipedia

As twitter increases in users and awareness in the mainstream, more and more people are asking ‘yeah, but why?‘, more so than many other arguably less useful services. I’m not sure why so many people need a definitive answer to use what is such a simple service to join. The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss sums it up best I think:

There are so many possible uses for Twitter. It’s a very functional group messaging service – if your ten closest mates were signed up you could say ‘I’m in the pub’ and would only have to send one message instead of paying for ten. And you could also use it for more creative projects, something I’d like to explore when I clone myself and have some time to do ‘art’ outside of all-consuming work time.

The real point, though, is that we should all be a little more willing to explore these tools without feeling the need to classify it or nail it down to some definite function when it is still so young. So many inventions were born out of a completely different idea; vinyl records were a spin-off (no pun intended) from a project for talking dolls or some such… It’s far easier to dismiss something out of hand than to be open-minded, creative and playful.

Whilst i’m not surprised to see it happen, its great to actually see quantative reports that giving away free music does have a commercial benefit. last.fm, since launching their full length tracks service, have influenced an almost 120% increase in real sales throught their partnership with amazon. Last.fm, who have over five million full length tracks available on their service, reckon existing users are purchasing 66% more music as a result of the free tracks being available via the site.

I’m personally one of those people. I used to discover new music on Pandora and immediately go and buy the albums via amazon – but since its UK closure, I’ve had to rely on last.fm to find new artists, and probably buy two or three albums a month of artists i’ve never heard on the radio – far more music than i ever used to buy before making use of sites such as last.fm and imeem. I just hope the record labels take these figures to heart and realise not all digital consumers are out to ’steal music’.

via [mashable]

Amazon have started producing word clouds for books in their catalogue, based upon the most commonly used word within the book.

Take this for example:

Does anything eat wasps?

Hover over the word for an occurance count, click on the word for a list of excerpts containing that word. Very very neat. They’re doing all of the things you’d want to / would do in a book store by allowing you to flick through the index and contents pages, and providing you a level of inspection of the content which you’d never be able to grasp by simply flicking through.

When they’re able to let me feel the stock of the paper, then maybe i’m sold.

There’s also a review of Does Anything Eat Wasps over at Books in the Bog.