Jeff Jarvis on a shared Google pressroom

Another interesting article from today's Guardian, again this was something that I mentioned on the Graphics blog. One of the problems with this idea of death of print or death of newspapers is that online media doesn't alter the content(well it can do if you read Charlie Brookers article), the content isn't dying- the medium is. The journalistic quality of The Guardian is still there and online media can allow newspapers to expand in new ways. Links, blogs feeds, comments, videos and so on.

The Host with the Most

Newspapers are in the wrong businesses. They should no longer be in manufacturing and distribution, which have become cost-heavy yokes. And they should no longer try to be in the technology business - because they're bad at it. When I said this on my blog, Bob Wyman, a technology entrepreneur now at Google, commented that technology infrastructure "is a cost of doing business. It is not a thing of value." So I asked him whether Google should fulfil Roussel's vision as a paper's new pressroom.

A shared platform for news organisations wouldn't be anticompetitive: it would be pro-efficiency. If any paper, station or site could pluck software from the cloud and freely use and adapt it to perform essential functions then it could concentrate its resources on what matters - journalism.

Online POKER marketing could spell the NAKED end of VIAGRA journalism as we LOHAN know it

Charlie Brooker article in todays Guardian

It's a funny article but raises some interesting points. There's a relevance to the discussion we had on the Graphics site the other week about the death of print. If publishers are generating revenue through advertising, is this a knock on effect and how does it effect content?

And wait, it gets worse. These phrases don't just get lobbed in willy-nilly. No. A lot of care and attention goes into their placement. Apparently the average reader quickly scans each page in an "F-pattern": reading along the top first, then glancing halfway along the line below, before skimming their eye downward along the left-hand side. If there's nothing of interest within that golden "F" zone, he or she will quickly clear off elsewhere.

Which means your modern journalist is expected not only to shoehorn all manner of hot phraseology into their copy, but to try and position it all in precisely the right place. That's an alarming quantity of unnecessary shit to hold in your head while trying to write a piece about the unions. Sorry, SEXUAL unions. Mainly, though, it's just plain undignified: turning the journalist into the equivalent of a reality TV wannabe who turns up to the auditions in a gaudy fluorescent thong in a desperate bid to be noticed.

The F Pattern idea is interesting
Link

* Users won't read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won't.
* The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There's some hope that users will actually read this material, though they'll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
* Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior.
* They'll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

Blended distribution :)

Awesome, NOISE Peter Saville video being used to back up an argument on this forum

This stands as a sketch for the future.

This stands as a sketch for the future.
MURIEL COOPER and the VISIBLE LANGUAGE
WORKSHOP
By David Reinfurt

"Muriel Cooper always sought more responsive systems
of design and production, emphasizing quicker feedback
loops between thinking and making, often blurring
the distinction between the two. As a result, she always
left room for the reader. This text is an attempt to do
the same."

link

Muriel Cooper

This is really amazing stuff, Mark posted a quote about her Bahaus movie on the Graphics blog. Whenever I find things like this I think a couple of things, one I'm not alone, two am I really stupid and why haven't I read this before.

"she was beginning to grapple with the converse: how to translate an interactive experience with a computer onto paper, "without just dumping"—an area known technically as "transcoding." In other words: how to turn time into space.

"Electronic is malleable. Print is rigid," she told me, then backtracked in characteristic fashion. "I guess I'm never sure that print is truly linear: it's more a simultaneous medium. Designers know a lot about how to control perception, how to present information in some way that helps you find what you need, or what it is they think you nee. Information is only useful when it can be understood."

http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalist-murielcooper

http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/2004/?id=5

Another great quote from her

“What is this new medium? In general its outstanding characteristics are dynamic in real time, interactive, incredibly malleable, some capability of learning and adapting to the user, or to information, or to some other set of relationships. Our goal is to make information into some form of communication… Information by itself does not have the level of ‘filtering’ that design brings to it.”

I wish I had a date for that quote, it's at least 15 years ago.

Learning Agreement new draft

Neil Owen
Draft Learning Agreement

“Most often, when people are asked to describe the current media landscape, they respond by making an inventory of tools and technologies. Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices.”
Henry Jenkins
Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/11/eight_traits_of_the_new_media.html

“There is a misconception that all the changes we are experiencing as a society are the result of new technologies, but the real changes are profoundly cultural. As we shift to a DIY culture that runs on creativity, the implications could be as profound as when society went from farming to manufacturing”
Matt Mason
The Pirates Dilemma

“Web1.0: get Noise.
Web2.0: make Noise
Web3.0: filter Noise
Web4.0: Deaf - or SmartNoise?”
Gerd Leonhard
http://www.mediafuturist.com/2008/05/web10-to-web40.html

I work in an emerging area of design and media, which could be described as Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. I see these new forms of design and media radically altering the way in which society creates, experiences and consumes all forms of media; from print to TV to web to mobile to live events. This will redefine the role of a traditional graphic designer.

These new forms of media allow users to consume content across so many platforms and in so many different ways that role of graphic designer as decorator is no longer enough. I see the role of the graphic designer as a problem solver, architect, communication designer, consumer, viewer, curator and mapper. This is not that far removed from many current areas of graphic design but what these new forms of media do is give the viewer just any many choices as the designer as how they view, consume and use the finished work.

Some definitions

Web 1.0 allowed designers to create websites with limited user interaction, it was a one way conversation. Here the designer had control over how the user consumed the design. The designer could dictate which pages a user viewed, how they navigated through the site and how they would interact with a site. New techniques and tools but not that far removed from traditional graphic design.

Web 2.0 starts to redefine the roles of designer, maker and critic. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe a range of websites, software and design on the Internet.
The O ’ R e i l l y R a d a r report Web 2.0: Principles and Best Practices describes Web 2.0 as “ a variety of guises, names, and technologies: social computing, user-generated content, software as a service, podcasting, blogs, and the read–write web. Taken together, they are Web 2.0, the next-generation, userdriven, intelligent web.” Web 2.0 allows far more interaction by the user. The user can be the person uploading a video to Youtube, someone viewing the video, someone commenting on the video or someone posting a video response to a comment.

The idea of Web 3.0 goes further, expanding a users role and blurring further the role of maker and consumer. The role of a designer will be increasingly that of curator or mapper, designing ways of filtering content, helping users to find what is most relevant to them. The graphic designers role will be less about the way work is consumed, as the audience will decide how they want to consume it.
Web 3.0 involves issues of copyright, distribution, making and publishing work. It involves issues of control, and ownership. It involves blended distribution; working across media, web, mobile, TV, print and live events. Where each media platform has equal relevance; there is no destination site. Content is tailored for the platform and the end user. It means being prepared to give up control of how and where your work might be used.
Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor for Education and New Media Channel 4, says “Channel 4 hasn't bothered with designing a dedicated teen site, like BBC Switch. We only use existing sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo to deliver and promote content. Outside of Skins, Hollyoaks and Big Brother Channel 4 doesn't exist for teenagers. A dedicated teen site wouldn't reach an audience in the same way as these existing social networking sites do.”
As a designer, filmmaker or musician how do you alter your approach to making work to adapt and fit with these new media?

What I do as a designer

Currently I am the project manager and designer for NOISE Festival, a cross-media showcase for creative talent, aged 25 years and under. Users can upload work and create an online portfolio of work which is judged by a panel of curators, selected work is showcased during the October festival. I can design the static content on the front page but this has to be constantly updated and redesigned to encourage viewers to return to the site after they have initially uploaded work. I can design the recent submissions and public rating tools but I can't decide on the content that is uploaded by users or which work is rated by viewers. I can design the portfolio pages and collaboration tools but ultimately I can't decide how or if these tools will be used. I can try to anticipate how people may use a site but I have to be prepared to give up some control and ownership.
Matt Jones co-founder of Dopplr, an online tool for frequent travellers, says this about current website design “easy use is a bug, make the site difficult, make people aware of what they are doings, add clues. Think speed bumps to slow a user down or DDA floor patterns to indicate a change in space. But ultimately people decide how to use technology, people don't use the manual”

As web 3.0 develops the role of the designer will develop further into that of curator, capturing meta data and using that data to develop the design experience for a user. This form of design will increasingly become a two way interaction between designer and user. Feedback between designer and user will become seamless.

I'm not a content creator. I don't make my own films and upload them to Youtube. I don't write articles, publish them online and consider myself a journalist. This concept of content creator takes a limited view of what it means to be involved in web 2.0 and contribute to "making Noise".
I blog, I comment and read other blogs from design to music to football, I upload images to Flickr, I listen to streamed radio through the BBC and Last FM, subscribe to podcasts, I download music from the HypeMachine, iTunes and BitTorrent, I watch videos on iPlayer/Youtube/BlipTV and on blogs as embedded content, I subscribe to RSS Feeds, post links to De.li.cous and Digg, I post on Facebook. I'm not looking for and don't expect a response to what I publish online but all this is noise. There are millions of other people doing the same.

The idea of what is good and bad becomes almost irrelevant with web 2.0 and web 3.0, as Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing argues “Most things created online are shit. YouTube videos, the blog page abandoned after three posts. But this is positive because it means technology and software is becoming so cheap and easy to use anyone can do it. Lowering the cost of experimentation is good. Does your idea suck? Doesn't matter, do it/make it find out.”

So how do you as a consumer or viewer start to filter all this stuff into what is relevant to you? How do you start to filter and find your niche interests, removing the useless stuff along the way? The filtering process and making sense of this information is where the concept of web 3.0 becomes crucial. The designers role within this is to develop ways in which this content can be found, discovered, curated, recommended and rated.
This curation and filtering process work can work in a number of ways. Recommendation and reviews by friends and other users, tagging of work, online profiles, RSS feeds, comments left, listening to free streamed music or video, downloading an MP3 from a blog or forum. Again this is not just the design of a single website. This curation and filtering process happens across different websites, platforms and media, as a designer you must be aware of this process.

Example, my iPod is synced with my iTunes, my LastFM account scrobbles what I've played on my iTunes. This information can be viewed by anyone, I can get music recommendations through neighbors and friends on Last FM. I can listen to my similar artist station on Last FM and find new music. I can embed a widget to Facebook to tell everyone what I've listened too, I can click on favourite artists in my Facebook profile and find out who else listens to the same music and which artists they are listening too. I can fill in my LastFM user name to www.soundamus.net, subscribe to the RSS Feed and get daily recommendations of new album releases on Amazon based on what I'm listening to. I only need to visit Soundamus once to fill in my username and I never need to see the site again. It will constantly update itself on what I am playing through iTunes/Last FM. My RSS feed from Pitchfork gives me the latest reviews from my favourite artists, I can pick and choose simply by looking at the first line whether they are of interest, if so I can read more. I no longer need to search for this information, someone or something will feed me this information.

In that example there are dozens of ways that a designers role can be redefined. Painstakingly designed sites, with beautiful interaction design can be stripped back to text, meta data and a database/spreadsheet. An RSS feed means the user may choose to never even see the beautifully designed site. The API and meta data from companies such as Last FM and Amazon, is freely available allowing anyone to design and develop their own applications.

What becomes crucial with design as curation or mapping is the concept of fuzzy data.
Chris Heathcote from Nokia Design describes fuzzy data as “the information around the edges of a search. This has more relevance to a user than a narrow pinpointed search. Fuzzy data, that is less accurate but is of more use to someone”
Matt Jones from Dopplr, discussing the building of Dopplr “Something we’ve heard a lot from Dopplr users is: “make my trips more ‘fuzzy’”.
What they mean is that they would like to see coincidences in the surrounding area of ‘social spacetime’ “
As a designer how can you develop ways of incorporating fuzzy data into design avoiding boxing a user into their likes and dislikes. Making sure that users find what is relevant but allow for the unexpected, random, coincidence and surprise. This isn't easy and requires the careful design of tools that capture the initial meta data from user and the planning of how this data could be used later on.

Artists should be looking at ways of exploiting these new media. How do you reach an audience? How do you narrow it down so the relevant audience sees your work? This is hard for many designers, artists and musicians to do but a younger generation of artists are happy to do this. The web is just something that is there in the same way they might watch TV or or use the phone. The idea of creating and distributing work becomes equally as straightforward.
In a band? Post your tracks on Last FM and MySpace. Make films or animations? Create your own YouTube channel and post them there. Take photographs? Upload them to Flickr, add them to a group. Make illustrations? Create a Deviant Art portfolio. and upload there
Again this is not about making the best work, making money or becoming famous. It is the simple act of doing because you can.

Over the course of the next twenty proposals I will illustrate the key themes and emerging developments of Wb 2.0 and Web 3.0 and how this will alter the role of the graphic designer over the coming years.

bTween 2008

Attended bTween 2008 on Thursday. Really good, more industry focused than Futuresonic. Interesting to see how companies and corporations such as Orange, BBC, Channel 4 etc are adapting to these new forms of media. Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing was very good ,a lot of exciting ideas about the future of all forms of creative media, issues of copyright and distribution. I liked his argument that good or bad doesn't really matter. The majority of stuff published online is shit but this is a positive thing. It means the technology and means of production are cheap enough for people to experiment, test and make things without worrying.

It's always good to be in a room interested in similar themes and ideas. Makes arguing my case in the learning agreement web.2.0/web.3.0 as a design form a bit easier when you see how others are using it.

One thing I liked was the live streaming they had on stage. At the same time they had the speaker, the webcast behind, the presenters slides and a Twitter/chat feed. What was interesting was how the chat feed started to shape some of the presentations. These weren't scripted questions and they hadn't planned to use it. It was an interesting example of author and viewer and the blurring of those roles.

bTween 2008 Notes

bTween 2008 Notes

Cory Doctorow
DRM
Net/Computer perfect tool
George Lucas Encrypt Tool
Being able to view content on your own terms
Own device
Fusilier
Teen hackers
Blue ray- code breakers
Intimidation from big companies doesn't work
Doesn't stop piracy
Is this progress?
Working piracy tool would be the same as a working spam filter. Doesn't exist!!
“Internet will never forget”
Universe ll access is not a bug
(access to content, tech- means of production)
Undermine the cost of production
New forms of media make us superhuman
Able to do more than one thing at a time
1937 Nobel Prize
Cheap collaboration
Firefox
Flckr- Tagging
Example, Abstract terms
“Decay” watching this tag on a daily basis. Creates a photo essay of the word.
Collaboration between people who've never met and have no idea they are working together.
“We built Google” we add the links, we've created the scematic underpinning of the web.
Most thing created online are shit. YouTube, blogger with three posts.
This is good because it means anyone can do it.
Lowering the cost of experimentation
Does your idea suck? Doesn't matter, do it/make it find out.
Three strikes rule for the entertainment industry
“Information economy” buying and selling
Exclusion information becoming harder.
Low cost collaboration, cheap equipment.
Fan engagement
Boing Boing $2,500 per month running costs
Publishers role-identify an audience with a writer
The internet takes over this role
Trivial material, such as blogs, explains our society.
Entertainment over friends.
Scribe (text flickr)
Pirates become admirals
1909 sound recording hearings
“Obscurity not piracy” Tim O'reily

A day in the life of a teens
Jellyellie/BBC Switch
Perception
Game tech
Overview tech/teen
Voice of MSN
Diary of tech/ what happens
Insight into a geneartion
Switch 12-17 year olds
BBC- role telling stories, the quality of the content
Grindstore, Bebo
Vox pops
How many things can a teen do at once? 16
Web net is not just one thing
Mobile tech even the difference between 12/13 and 16/17
Games, music
Consoles games design
Big Brother (Charlie Brookers Screenwipe)
Britains got talent
Bluejack.com
Jellieteens
BBC Switch
Boxed in teenage life
Experience of teens
“Gamechanger”(?)
audience participation
Live streaming 5-6pm

Media City (BBC 10%)

Muchsomedia
Orange “Making money via content”
BBC 10-20 pitches

Angel Gambino Bebo
Couple of hundred pitches
Make it clear in the first page(MA, ONE PAGERS)
Don't use bespoke tech, use existing tech where poss
Graffiti database

BBC
Sales funding

Matt Hanson
One Dot Zero
Remixing the traditional media
A Swarm of Angels
Wisdom of crowds
Open source
“The audience is obselete”

Ron Edwards
Virtual MTV.com
(Second Life esque)
Mixing virtual with physical

Draft learning agreement

Neil Owen
Draft Learning Agreement

“Most often, when people are asked to describe the current media landscape, they respond by making an inventory of tools and technologies. Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices.”
Henry Jenkins
Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/11/eight_traits_of_the_new_media.html

“There is a misconception that all the changes we are experiencing as a society are the result of new technologies, but the real changes are profoundly cultural. As we shift to a DIY culture that runs on creativity, the implications could be as profound as when society from farming to manufacturing”
Matt Mason
The Pirates Dilemma

“Web1.0: get Noise.
Web2.0: make Noise
Web3.0: filter Noise
Web4.0: Deaf - or SmartNoise?”
Gerd Leonhard
http://www.mediafuturist.com/2008/05/web10-to-web40.html

I work in an emerging area of design and media, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.
Web 2.0 a loose term used to describe a range of websites, software and design on the Internet.
The O ’ R e i l l y R a d a r report Web 2.0: Principles and Best Practices describes Web 2.0 as “ a variety of guises, names, and technologies: social computing, user-generated content, software as a service, podcasting, blogs, and the read–write web. Taken together, they are Web 2.0, the next-generation, userdriven, intelligent web.”
Web 3.0 is the mapping, curating and filtering of all the “noise” being created not only online but across all forms of media.

These new and emerging areas of media throw up numerous challenges for traditional forms of design. Web 1.0 allowed designers to create websites with limited user interaction, it was a one way conversation. New techniques and tools but not that far removed from traditional print or graphic design. Web 2.0 allows interaction by the user. The user can be the person uploading a video to Youtube, someone viewing the video, someone commenting on the video or someone posting a video response to a comment. Web 2.0 starts to redefine the roles of designer, maker and critic. Web 3.0 goes further, expanding a users role as a critic or curator and blurring even further the role of maker and consumer..

I'm not a content creator, this is to say I don't make my own films and upload them to Youtube. But is this a limited view of what it means to be involved in web 2.0 and contribute to "making Noise"?
I blog, I comment and read other blogs from design to music to football, I upload images to Flickr, I listen to streamed radio through the BBC and Last FM, subscribe to podcasts, I download music from the HypeMachine and BitTorrent, I watch videos on iPlayer/Youtube/BlipTV and on blogs as embedded content, I subscribe to RSS Feeds, post links to De.li.cous and Digg, I post on Facebook. I'm not looking for and don't expect a response to what I publish online but all this is noise. There are millions of other people doing the same.

So how do you start to filter. all this stuff into what is relevant to you. The idea of good and bad becomes almost irrelevant with web 2.0 and web 3.0, as you start to filter and find your niche interests, removing t;he useless stuff along the way. The filtering process and making sense of this information is where web 3.0 comes crucial.

A broad definition of what web 3.0 is or might be.
It involve issues of copyright, distribution, making and publishing work. It involves issues of control, and ownership. It involves blended distribution; working across media, web, mobile tv, print and live events. Each platform has equal relevance; there is no destination site. Content is tailored for the platform and the end user. It means being prepared to give up control of how and where your work might be used.

Not at all these are negative problems and should not be seen as such. Rather artists should be looking at ways of exploiting these new media. How do you reach an audience? How do you narrow it down so the relevant audience sees your work? This is hard for many designers, artists and musicians to do but a younger generation of artists are happy to do this. The web is just something that is there in the same way they might watch TV or or use the phone. The idea of creating and distributing work becomes equally as straightforward.
In a band? Post your tracks on Last FM and MySpace. Make films or animations? Create your own YouTube channel and post them there. Take photographs? Upload them to Flickr, add them to a group. Make illustrations? Create a Deviant Art portfolio. and upload there
Again this is not about making the best work, making money or becoming famous. It is the simple act of doing because you can.

Web 3.0 design will involve developing ways of filtering and finding content. This doesn't mean building another video uploading site to add to the hundreds already out there or trying to build a new Flickr. These sites are already out there, the content is there so how do you start to curate and filter what is relevant to you.

Some definitions of what I do as a designer.
I work with existing tools and software wherever possible. My role is not coder or developer, though I have an understanding of how these areas of web design works. I work as an architect I design, mock up, plan and specify. I don't build!!!

I see the role of the web 2.0/3.0 designer working within these existing spaces and sites, refining and improving them. Using existing code, tools and API. At a simple level this involves designing functionality, interface design and how people use a site. As web 3.0 develops the role of the designer will develop further into that of curator, capturing meta data and using that data to develop the design experience for a user. This form of design will increasingly become a two way interaction between designer and user. Feedback between designer and user will become seamless.

Web is a limiting term.
This is cross media from an RSS Feed on a laptop of a printed newspaper to the BBC iPlayer rebroadcasting TV programmes online. It is about the stream of information, the platforms this stuff is being distributed across and most of importantly how you start to filter all this stuff. This is about not only filtering the stuff you are interested in but how you choose to consume this stuff.

Example, my iPod is synced with my iTunes, my LastFM account scrobbles what I've played on my iTunes. This information can be viewed by anyone, I can embed a widget to Facebook to tell everyone what I've listened too. I can fill in my LastFM user name to www.soundamus.net, subscribe to the RSS Feed and get daily recommendations of new album releases on Amazon based on what I'm listening to. I no longer need to search for this information, someone or something will feed this information. I only need to visit Soundamus once to fill in my username. It will constantly update itself on what I am playing through iTunes/Last FM.

In that example there dozens of ways that a designers role can be redefined. Painstakingly designed sites, with beautiful interaction design can be stripped back to text and a database/spreadsheet. An RSS feed means you may never even see the beautifully designed site. The code and data from companies worth millions of pounds, such as Last FM and Amazon, and whole business is capturing data is given away for free. Allowing anyone to design and develop their own applications.

Over the course of the next twenty proposals I will illustrate the key themes and emerging developments of Wb 2.0 and Web 3.0 and how this will alter the role of the graphic designer over the coming years.

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More learning agreement

Learning agreement

MIT Jenkins quote

Pirates dilemma quote p27

Gerd Lernd describes the web as
Web1.0: get Noise.
Web2.0: make Noise
Web3.0: filter Noise
Web4.0: Deaf - or SmartNoise?

I work in an emerging area of design and media, crossing over from web 2.0(definition oreily)), the making of stuff/noise and into what is becoming web 3.0; the mapping, curating and filtering of all the noise being created not only online but across all forms of media.

This throws up numerous challenges for traditional forms of design. Web 1.0 allowed designers to create websites with limited user interaction, it was a one way conversation. New techniques and tools but not that far removed from traditional print or graphic design. Web 2.0 allows interaction by the user. The user could be the person uploading a video to Youtube, someone viewing the video, someone commenting on the video or someone posting a video response to a comment. Web 2.0 starts to redefine the roles of designer, maker and critic. Web 3.0 goes further., expanding a users role as a critic or curtator.

I'm not a content creator, this is to say I don't make my own films and upload them to Youtube. But this is a limited view of what it means to be involved in web 2.0 and contribute to "making Noise". I blog, I comment and read other blogs from design to music to football, I upload images to Flickr, I listen to streamed radio through the BBC and Last FM, subscribe to podcasts, I download music from the HypeMachine and BitTorrent, I watch videos on iPlayer/Youtube/BlipTV and on blogs as embedded content, I subscribe to RSS Feeds, post links to De.li.cous and Digg, I post on Facebook. I'm not looking for and don't expect a response to what I publish online but all this is noise. There are millions of other people doing the same.

So how do you start to filter. all this stuff into what is relevant to you. The idea of good and bad becomes almost irrelevant with web 2.0 and web 3.0, as you start to filter and find your niche interests, removing t;he useless stuff along the way. The filtering process and making sense of this information is where web 3.0 comes crucial.

A broad definition of what web 3.0 is or might be. It involve issues of copyright, distribution, making and publishing work. It involves issues of control, and ownership. It involves blended distribution; working across media, web, mobile tv, print and live events. Each platform has equal relivance; there is no destination site. Content is tailored for the platform and the end user. It means being prepared to give up control of how and where your work might be used.

Not at all these are negative problems and should not be seen as such. Rather artists should be looking at ways of exploiting these new media. How do you reach an audience? How do you narrow it down so the relevant audience sees your work? This is hard for many designers, artists and musicians to do but a younger generation of artists are happy to do this. The web is just something that is there in the same way they might watch TV or or use the phone. The idea of creating and distributing work becomes equally as straightforward.
In a band? Post your tracks on Last FM and MySpace. Make films or animations? Create your own YouTube channel and post them there. Take photographs? Upload them to Flickr, add them to a group. Make illustrations? Create a Deviant Art portfolio. and upload there
Again this is not about making the best work, making money or becoming famous. It is the simple act of doing because you can.

Web 3.0 design will involve developing ways of filtering and finding content. This doesn't mean building another video uploading site to add to the hundreds already out there or trying to rebuild Flickr. These sites are already out there, the content is there so how do you start to curate and filter what is relevant to you.

Some definitions of what I do. I work with existing tools and software wherever possible. My role is not coder or developer, though I have an understanding of how these areas of web design works. I work as an architect I design, mock up, plan and specify. I don't build!!!

Web 3.0 design will involve developing ways of filtering and finding content. This doesn't mean building another video uploading site to add to the hundreds already out there or trying to rebuild Flickr. These sites are already out there, the content is there so how do you start to curate and filter what is relevant to you.

What I see myself doing is working within these existing spaces and sites, refining and improving them. Using existing code, tools and API. This involves designing functionality, interface design and how people use a site.

Across different media. Web is a limiting term this is cross media from an RSS Feed on a laptop of a printed newspaper to the BBC iPlayer rebroadcasting TV programmes online. It is about the stream of information, the platforms this stuff is being distributed across and most of importantly how you start to filter all this stuff. This is about not only filtering the stuff you are interested in but how you choose to consume this stuff. Again RSS feeds, websites, blogs, video channels, streamed content.

Example, my iPod is synced with my iTunes, my LastFM account scrobbles what I've played on my iTunes. This information can be viewed by anyone, I can embed a widget to Facebook(screengrab) to tell everyone what I've listened too. I can fill in my LastFM user name to www.soundamus.net, subscribe to the RSS Feed and get daily recommendations of new album releases on Amazon based on what I'm listening to. I no longer need to search for this information, someone or something will feed this information. I only need to visit Soundamus once to fill in my username. It will constantly update itself on what I am playing through iTunes/Last FM

Nick Bucher on the Apprentice and live event blogging

Following on from the discussions this afternoon about documenting what we we are doing as we do it. This is an article from Nick Bucher. It's talking mainly about blogging as the Apprentice is going out live, allowing people to respond and feedback as events take place.

Some quotes, talking about TV in this case but could be applied to other events and media.

The Apprentice - 'Social TV' demonstrating how viewers are consuming TV and internet at the same time
"In the same way that Guardian journalists blog live around sports events / technology launches, Guardian journalist Anna Pickard live blogs during each episode of the Apprentice. A devoted following have been leaving hundreds of comments as the show progresses and these are a visible manifestation of the trend to watch TV at the same time as using the internet - though it would be great to get more statistics on this!

The role of the internet in TV viewing is therefore not just based around catch-up TV and video on demand. Blogs and social media can be used to expand programme reach and audience interaction, with event TV like the Apprentice proving particularly popular - we are heading to a point where all TV be 'social' with viewers being able to feed back throughout every programme. Social media offers some interesting opportunities for two-way dialogue between programme and viewers, and as technology gets more sophisticated this level of this interaction will surely increase?"

http://www.nickburcher.com/2008/06/apprentice-social-tv-demonstrating-how.html

Draft learning agreement

Some initial thoughts for this. Well my initial thought is I wish I just designed nice little websites or posters then I wouldn't have to spend most of my time justifying or defining roles.

Web1.0: get Noise.
Web2.0: make Noise
Web3.0: filter Noise
Web4.0: Deaf - or SmartNoise?

Gerd Leonhard: Media Futurist

Most often, when people are asked to describe the current media landscape, they respond by making an inventory of tools and technologies. Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices. Rather than listing tools, we need to understand the underlying logic shaping our current moment of media in transition. These properties cut across different media platforms and different cultural communities: they suggest something of the way we live in relation to media today.

Henry Jenkins, MIT Comparative Media Studies Program
November 6, 2006
Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/11/eight_traits_of_the_new_media.html

Learning agreement

Some initial plans for this.
So it will be in book form of sorts, using the 20 proposals I'm preparing. These will be one page A4(?) proposals no more no less.

As discussed with Aidan and Graham there needs to be intro text and conclusion. Something similar to the one page summary from last year. Another thing mentioned by Aidan at the presentations was how the book relates to current interactive technology
It brought me back to an article Mark posted on the Dialouge site

These booklets are not intended as ‘documents’ that present a past event. These booklets will be like an exhibition space, a framework which is offered to each participant, culminating in a book as a publicly distributed exhibition in Los Angeles.
‘In a ‘normal’ situation a commissioner gives you the content and asks you to make something ‘nice’. Here the designer starts a capsulated, isolated monologue with their screen.

We want to avoid the split situation between the author and the designer followed by a pdf traffic.

This is an interesting quote
"These booklets will be like an exhibition space, a framework which is offered to each participant, culminating in a book as a publicly distributed exhibition"
There's a lot of parallels between web design and architecture but I've not heard of it being applied to book design. I really like that idea, the book as an exhibition space something you navigate through.

So how to create a "Wiki" book that allows jumping off points? Even just looking at the DIALOGUES main page is there a way of recreating the that menu system acrooss the top?


Do you recreate the linking system? How do you allow users to give feedback? Do you want to, is a book a more definitive record?
Hmmmm.....

Programming is destroying my capacity for reflective thought

This article in the Guardian on Thursday really struck a chord, especially after spending a day and a half!!! on a newsletter template that simply refused to allow me to insert an image.

The worst of it is that even this kind of programming has a corrupting fascination, like a videogame you can't give up: there is always the hope that one more round of changes will take you through to the next level. This pleasure seems to me not merely uncreative but anticreative. Solving these small dull problems of syntax and memorisation is essentially a very large multiple-choice exam.

There may be a creative element in deciding what colours should go to make up a website, but there is none whatsoever in trying to discover whether the command to make this happen uses curly brackets inside quotation marks, outside them, or not at all.

Vaporware

Sounds like everything I'm working on.

Vaporware

Vaporware is a software or hardware product which is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge, either with or without a protracted development cycle. The term implies unwarranted optimism, or sometimes even deception; that is, it may imply that the announcer knows that product development is in too early a stage to support responsible statements about its completion date, feature set, or even feasibility.

Snackr

Now this is a bit more like it, an RSS feed built using Adobe AIR.
So it's basically a ticker tape of your RSS Feeds but what I like is the portential for doing something more visual with a feed.
I'm thinking this is the way to go with the design of the research section of th CAGD site

Too many feed things....

Just signed up for FriendFeed, this means I have a Google Reader, a Delicous account, a Digsby account, a Twitter account, a Tumblr account, a Ning account. As well as the usual Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, GMail, AOL, Hotmail and so on. After signing up for FriendFeeder I suddenly felt swampped. And I really don't see the point of FriendFeeder

Out of all these my favourite is Digsby, for this reason. It acts like an instant messenger, the information comes to you. If some one updates Facebook or you receive an email it tells you, you don't have to navigate away from the page. You can choose which stories you want follow up. Simply removing that step of having to go to another page makes all the difference. You only have to sign up once. It's not revolutionary but I really wish say, Google had a similar toolbar option. So you can see updated news feeds, emails, news and so on. They probably do, I know they have iGoogle but that still requires the step of visting the page.





See this from Google sounds interesting but still requires the extra navigation step
Socialstream
Social Stream project

Socialstream is the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master's program at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. This project was guided by three goals that built upon each other:

Initial Task: Rethink and reinvent online social networking

Refined Focus: Discover the user needs related to social networking and explore how a unified social network service can enhance their experience.

Prototype Goal: Create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.

NOISE Showcase

A couple of NOISE related October showcase things

Everything must go

Friday May 16, 2008
The Guardian
Last week, free music site Last.fm made its first foray into original content, with the launch of Last.fm Presents (last.fm/presents), a new series of video interviews with artists including Moby, Santogold, Neon Neon and Spoon. The short chats aim to discover what inspired these acts to make music, rather than have them wax lyrical about their latest product. It's a laudable notion, but it falls a little flat as you quickly remember that most musicians are much more interesting when playing music than they are when talking about it (the exception being Neon Neon's Gruff Rhys, who'd sound fascinating reading a phone book). Further video content ideas are expected from Last.fm soon. But, for now, the site's terrific core business - allowing you to stream millions of tracks for free and receive recommendations based on your current listening habits - remains its main attraction.

Although it's the kind of high-fashion company that sells T-shirts for £70, Diesel has long been involved in the scuzzy world of indie music. Its Diesel:U:Music campaign began life in 2000 as an unsigned bands competition and has since morphed into a slightly clunky website (dum.diesel.com) where new acts can upload their tracks to gain exposure. Now, for the month of May, they've taken things a step further with the launch of Diesel:U:Music Radio, which is broadcasting from the indie hotbed that is New Cross's Amersham Arms. South-east London residents can hear it on 87.7FM, while the rest of us can listen online. It's a pleasingly amateurish affair, positioned somewhere between a pirate and a student station, with mics turned too low and records frequently skipping. But with guest DJs including Late of the Pier, Kieran Hebden, Noah and the Whale, Mystery Jets and Erol Alkan spinning their favourite tunes, the music is certainly worth tuning in for.

More Dopplr

Quote from Matt Jones

One of the aspects of creating social tools that fascinates me is the ability to make the invisible visible, and what effect surfacing these patterns then has on us as individuals and groups.

For a while there have been carbon calculators on airline websites and environmentalist websites, but generally they have been about directly showing the impact of an individual action, rather than the patterns and trends influencing the actions in the first place.

That’s why I thought it was an essential component of from the start of Dopplr as a social tool for intelligent travellers to optimise their path through the world - and I’m delighted the beginnings of this are here now. Particular props to Boris and Tom for pulling off the design, which I’m pleased as punch with.

It’s a first step, and as with everything we do part of the bigger, beautiful jigsaw of the web. As MattB’s said it’s plugged into AMEE, and you might be already be subscribed to things like WorldChanging or EdenBee that can help you decide what to do about it.

It’s not enforcing any particular course of action - it’s the weighing scales, not the diet.

What we all do with this information is up to us.

Cluster Cities

Building Dopplr

We’re sitting on the grass in the sunshine with a bunch of early Dopplr users, including Stowe Boyd and Stephanie Booth - when Stephanie is the first to voice something we’ve heard a lot from Dopplr users since: “make my trips more ‘fuzzy’”.

By which, she and others meant that they would like to see coincidences in the surrounding area of ‘social spacetime’ to their trip - i.e. “show me if there are going to be people I know nearby the stated destination of my trip when I’m going to be there, as I’d probably like to change my plans a little to see them.”

This is a cornerstone of our goal to help optimise travel for Dopplr users - surfacing information about such near coincidences to let them judge whether to alter their plans to make their trip more worthwhile.

We’re going to be releasing a lot of functionality to exploit fuzzy, social spacetime through the early part of 2008, but the first part of it has leaked out into the journal.

Cluster Cities are the way we’ve made this happen. To explain them, here’s Matt B. with the science bit!

To make the database queries perform well enough to implement this feature, we needed to classify cities in densely populated areas into groups. By considering groups of cities as one, we cut down the work the database has to do when calculating who is affected by someone arriving in their area. We decided that these groups should be small enough that a traveller could reasonably expect to travel between any two cities in a group within a day.

Algorithms to cluster a spatial dataset are well known and not hard to implement. Unfortunately, they take a bit of tuning and experimentation to achieve satisfying results. Intuitively we expect cities like London, Tokyo and San Francisco to be at the centres of their clusters. In reality it’s rather hard to teach the cultural/social/economic conditions that cause this to an algorithm that’s only looking at latitude and longitude.

After some initially disappointing results, I stopped looking solely at the geographical data and considered what I could do if I incorporated the historical trip data that Dopplr has built up over our first year. I quickly came to the obvious conclusion: weight the clustering by the popularity of trip destination and let our travellers decide whether San Francisco or San Jose is the gravitational centre of Silicon Valley.

In analysing the top 2000 destinations I discovered that many of the top cities are very close together — for example, Glasgow and Edinburgh are only 40 miles apart. Again I used our trip data to eliminate overlaps. Within any 50 miles radius, only the most popular of two popular cities gets to be the cluster centre. This decision is one reason for the beauty of our central Raumzeitgeist visualisation. The layout has an appealing rhythm to it because the points in popular areas are a natural and fairly efficient circle packing.

Rubbing Shoulders

I guess what interests me about this for the publication, is setting up a network, members and non-members. How do you identify members of the group? How do people join the group/network? What are the rules once you join? How do you interact with members/non-members? How do memebers of a group communicate?

I also like the promotion of the event, just using stickers, flyers and some info on a website. Just the way that something that has a lot references, a lot of depth about social networks, social interaction, communication and so on. Can be done very simply with a lot of humour.
I also laughed at the Marshall McLuhan massage reference but nearly two years on the MA has made me a bit sad like that.

Rubbing Shoulders

 
"Everyone is invited to join the Rubbing Shoulders social network,
promoted on billboards in the city by Grennan and Sperandio's cartoons
and identified by specially designed stickers that every member of the
network will wear. When meeting people across the city: strangers in
the network overcome social barriers with a secret handshake; those
that know each other already give/receive back rubs; when meeting
non-members, they play with keeping them out of their 'personal space
bubble.' A truly citywide art project that aims to, "bring the people
of Manchester closer together."



Rubbing Shoulders is a project on safe hands-on social networking. On
joining the Rubbing Shoulders social network, people are given a set of
instructions on how to interact with people known and unknown:

• When meeting people NOT in the Rubbing Shoulders social network,
  participants are instructed not to let them enter their 'personal space
  bubble.' This causes playful scenes as people in queues and in crowds
  try to maintain a distance of 50cm between themselves and others around
  them.


• When meeting other people who ARE in the Rubbing Shoulders social
  network, people are able to greet each other with a secret handshake.
  This highly formal social interaction can be a discussion point on how
  different people usually greet each other.


• On meeting someone else in the social network they know very well,
  members ask each other if they have a stiff neck. If the answer is yes,
  and if they are invited, they give/receive back rubs as an antidote to
  online social networking and the back problems caused by hours hunching
  over the computer.
  

The medium is the massage."

Friendsnetwork "online"! Aram Bartholl Performance

Original post

"Friends

The project Friends is a workshop which translates the so-called social web
- online services such as Facebook, Myspace, etc. - into a paper-based
form in physical space.All workshop participants contribute a profile
page to the big Friends Book and make their own personal friends
booklet in which to collect as many friends as possible. With their own
hand-made profile photo stamp and a large amount of prefabricated web
2.0 service stamps, users trade among each other information about
their favorite online services and web activities. In order to be
recognized as Friends workshop participants, users can wear a button
with their own profile photo or display their Web 2.0 preferences on
Friends Tattoos.

Social
networks in the internet, which have become hugely popular over the
last few years, have given the term "friend" a completely new meaning.
In contrast to the usually restricted and time-consuming circle of
friends in everyday life, in the internet it is possible to find a
large number of friends quickly with just a few clicks.And only a few
of these friends are actually personally known by the user. Without a
great deal of effort it is possible to have hundreds, thousands or even
hundreds of thousands of friends in the Internet. Who has the most
friends? Who is the best-known and the most often to be seen? The
development of the internet in recent years enables the individual to
gratify his/her desire for recognition and attention in quite a new
way.

With reference
to the classic German poetry album or the friendship book in the USA,
the Friends workshop takes this development as the central theme and
opens a debate over the many-layered types from friendship. The
time-honored paper-based technology and tools used in the workshop as
well as the handicraft skills of its participants contrast with the
screen-limited but highly efficient online world of the social
networks. In contrast to the obvious open contact with private
information in the social web, the classic paper document conceals a
high degree of obligation and protects privacy.The data from the web
services documented on paper during the Friends workshop pose anew the
question of the private and public nature of web identities.

Who is my friend? How well do we know each other? Where do we meet?
How does the Social Web effect inter-personal relationships?

Aram Bartholl 2008"

Simon Yuill FSF - 'the free social foundations project'

Link

FSF maps current use of spaces of free and open assembly in Manchester. A map will be created in collaboration with local people through workshops and interviews. The map will provide an index of how 'the social' is afforded and sustained by the physical environments in which we live - in other words, to what extent are the physical foundations of our social lives 'free'?. These will identify areas in the city where people are able to gather and grade each area in terms of how 'free' and 'open' it is, ie what kind of costs are there in using a given space, what kind of restrictions apply to its use? The mappings will be linked with local oral histories of places which have specific significance, such as being sites of important public debate and protest, or places where an important local subculture has developed. The spaces may range from public parks, and street corners, to shopping centres, cafes, clubs and community halls.

A version of the map will be produced through an online mapping tool where spaces can be identified and either rated or tagged according to the criteria described above and linked to local history accounts. The history accounts will be gathered through recorded interviews. Public participants will have access to enter and edit their own map and historical information. In addition to the online map, physical versions will be available in a free printed format that will be distributed across each city in libraries and shops, etc. A gallery version of the project will present a large blown up version of the map filling a wall in the gallery space. This will be accompanied by a display of the project on a computer and a pile of maps from which visitors can take a copy. The free printed maps take the project back into the physical areas that it documents and enables it to reach audiences who might not have internet access, or who would not normally visit a gallery.

Archigram

During Mark Shepards discussion, there was a mention of Warren Chalk and a quote about how external influences which you can't effect alters how a city/ space is used. For example rain on Oxford Road, London means less people on the streets, less activity in the city. Something simple like this has a far greater impact on the use of a space.

The whole discussion was very interesting looking at cities as social networks, the links between architecture and current web design. Anyway the Warren Chalk quote led me to looking at some of the work by the Archigram architectural group.

"In late 1960, in various flats in Hampstead, a loose group of people started to meet: to criticize projects, to concoct letters to the press, to combine to make competition projects, and generally prop one another up against the boredom of working in a London architectural office. It became obvious that some publication would help. The main British magazines did not at that time publish student work, so that Archigram was reacting to this as well as the general sterility of the scene. The title came from a notion of a more urgent and simple item than a journal, like a 'telegram' or 'aerogramme,' hence 'archi(tecture)-gram.'...By this time Peter Cook, David Greene, and Mike Webb, in making a broadsheet, had started a new Group."?

Thus begins Archigram, a chronicle of the work of a group of young British architects that became the most influential architecture movement of the 1960s, as told by the members themselves. It includes material published in early issues of their journal, as well as numerous texts, poems, comics, photocollages, drawings, and fantastical architecture projects. Work presented includes Instant City, pod living, the Features Monte Carlo entertainment center, Blow-out Village, and the Cushicle personalized enclosure. Archigram's influence continues unabated: direct descendants of the group's work include Lebbeus Woods, Neil Denari, Takasaki Masaharu, ?and Morphosis.?

Walking City - a self-contained mobile pod of urban elements.
The Suitaloon - a garment which converts into a dwelling.
Living Pod - an add-on domicile with all modern conveniences.
Blow-out Village - an entire temporary city which inflates from a hovercraft.
Cushicle - a vehicle which becomes a private cubicle/chaise longue.
Bathamatic - automatic bathing and relaxation device.

Other far-out innovations by Archigram include: The Electronic Tomato, Tuned Suburb, Plug-in City (after which the local gallery is named), Instant City, Free Time Node Trailer Park, and more! Due to its size, the exhibition will take place in two locations, 286 McDermot and 2nd floor 290 McDermot. Models, plans and concepts by this amazing group will be augmented with a multimedia display and projects from the Archigram Archives. Tours of the Archigram exhibition will be available beginning Friday, June 7 and continue until the end of the summer. After, take a break in the Inflatable Lounge, where visitors can relax with reading materials and refreshments.

Fun, play and pleasure were the rationale for Archigrams projects, not as recreation, the pause that refreshes, between stretches of productive labour, but as an epistemology and an end in itself.

Dopplr Raumzeitgeist

Shown by Matt Jones at FutureSoinc
Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007: Where we went last year

Nine Inch Nails/ Futuresonic

Forum post that pretty much sums up Scott Cohens discussion at FutureSonic about buliding a fan base and distributing to that audience

Quote from SHOUP:

What has happened to Trent? I remember it used to take 5 years on average to put out a new album. Now he's putting out new music every year. Did he get the Jack White creative fever?

I am a big NIN fan and probably biased...and although i have liked whatever...I would imagine he is just trying to be cutting edge and now that he is 100% free of labels he is releasing whatever he feels like...online...to his fanbase.

At this point (besides interesting junk) I think he is trying to work out the best approach to "new age" distribution.. Testing what works and what doesnt as he already has a loyal base, but feels he has somthing to prove given the hostile market he has worked in for years

FutureSonic Notes

Lots of notes from FutureSonic will edit these over the next few days, really excellent conference. Very inspiring and made me more confident about the work I'm doing.

FutureSonic

Matt Jones
2001 Gov Stats=ONS
Cost of tech

People/kids using (online) Space to hang out- not do things
User need
Friends offline
Technology as enabler
Anonymity -Group space
Online/ offline cross over
“Friending” not just friends, hierarchies of friends
Replace relationships with the word transactions
What can you give me, how do people interact
familiar/ strangers
Strong bonds
Patterns
Library book example, used well, thumbed dog eared. Thats the one you go for.

Living patterns
Rural/ urban
Outside/In

Crumb-art org

Nature networks
Peer review
Friends as trophies/ social capital
Find another way to describe these interactions

James wallbank
Facebook/social networking is crap
updating status, not engaging with real life
14-19 year olds social skills
online vs offline
Anti communication
age? of speaker :0
surprise finding new stuff
Google “known unknowns”
serendipity
the unknown unexpected
Audience laughter
Helping it along
Active member of a community
Familiarity of a space neg notice board
Discussion with Graham Hibbert
“Autistic terms”
Money


Citizen participation
Physical space/ real space
community online
social offline
migration benefit this has for real people and commnites
community ownership
self manged
all real projects
visualize online/ offline
closer interaction

Ravi
Social from history
real/physical
blogging collective
blogging group
using these tools to reclaim from the masses
blogging as documentation
proving identity
lang
social knowledge
bloggers questioning
reclaim/ redesign
public space

Gerd
end of control
net as printing press, television,phone
It's there, can't go back
no online /offline
ultimate connectivity
web 1 receive
web 2 make
web 3 filter
web 4 smart filter
turning off. can't be done
learning to learn
din of “stuff”
Google
copyright from a western perspective
everyone is a “criminal”
them creating for us. we receive
now it is us creating
s networks as broadcasters
good/ bad?
Chris Heathco (Nokia)
Social etiquette
One sided
Information relationshiops
Technology happens!!
Good/ bad

Dopplr
How people use a site
can't force people how to use a site
people choose how they are going to use a site
easy use is a bug
make the site difficult, make people aware of what they are doings
add clues
speed bumps
dda pattern floors
people to decide how to use tech
people don't use the manual

Matt Jones
Helisinki image visuliztion (bat sign)
Same designer as Pixiltae
Dopplr viaulize of Earth
Models
, we like to make to models
Building information
World lines-possibiltes
Wiki quote for parqua/ free running
Tracer
New map openstreet.org
game noise/ gps
Shaping things Bruce Sterling

Small ideas things for further interaction
Theo (?) Arnall
Readable grids
recreating-movement.com
the invisibles (comic)
Cities are slow computers
“The Ghost Map” Johnson
Trulia Hindsight(site)
Invisible/ visible
Justin Stewart
Nike +
Matt Ward
Personal Data/ GPS
Map current
Sensors – Blogs, cctv, things within the city
Personal/ berocurta
cityofsound.com
The Street as a platform
“Everyware” Adam Greenfield
London Oyster Card
“Seeshell” Johanna Brewer

Chris Heathcote
Data and Metadaa
Automatic communication

Who what where
(meta)
Last FM collects meta data, no one else does this. Why?
Time- Designing for the future
What are you going to do ?
what have you done?
Rare to find sites that map what you intend to do
flickr maps records what you have done, when you did it
Real calendars vs virtual calendars,
How people interact, time slots, chunks, blocks of time

Flickr
Tagging people, only tagging places
Personal data
Facebook Apps- meta data
Small groups/ networks
Dunbar(?) 150 people to make a network
Navigation, place meta data
Data trail
Unreliablity of GPS/ tech in general
Geotag Flickr, lack of data,
More relevance
Fuzzy data, that is less accurate but is of more use
Tieing things together
Privacy issues
Social ettiquete
Losing meta data
Issues with corporation stroing thiis data
How it is used

Mark Shepard
andinc.org
propagative urbanism
Adam Greenfield lulu.com
Situations technologies (New York competiton)
“Space is a social product” Lefevbre
The Naked City
Situationist
Living City (book) Archigram 1963
Warren Chalk – Oxford Street, how rain effects the city/ urban
Simple level of tech
Wireless wifi hotspots cafes
Plugin City Archigram Ron Heron 1970

New spatial practices
Product
New spatial conditions
Skateboarding
Re-apprproiating space
Georg Simmel
'Staring for hours' on the tube, never happenede before trains, trams etc
Ipod cutting of social situations
Wifi access hotspots wifimaps.com
geocasting gps

Aleks Krotoski
Superstar Tokyo
Sticers photos upload images to the site (NOISE)
Rider spoke (GPS)
Penguin We Tell Stories

Social Music
Jonas Last FM
Free indierect payment
Consumption
Owned by CBS now
Data pereception

Scott
Orchard
Not a mussican? Why here?
Narrowed taste
Feed or find
Finding an audince
netaududiolondon.cc

Last FM
Extra features, cosmetic minor cost 1.50
1,000 pays for the 10,000 free users

Mathew Fuller
Software in education
GPL Licence
seed platform for the social
free- redistribution
information flow
17th century onwards
web2.0 relationship, art, software
access to code source
access to redesign
access to reinvent
software not as tools but where we live
software as culture
not just a functional tool act first think later
reflect as you make
softaware as art

Aleks Krotoski
Nintnedo DS
Engaging with others
Second life, WoW
Replacement for real spaces
Matt Jones- getting rid of friends
A Rape In Cyberspace
emmotional connection
Mapping friends facebook, twitter becomes meaninless
Connection type Robert Scoble
Information about relationships
Inffluence amount
Things in common
Connections
Social networks can be more real
Learn, adapt, collaberate
subtle relationships
nuance through play performance
mutual experience
Achsyninicity learning (turned based) scrabble
vs real time
MA Publication

bbc.backstage.co.uk
BBC online but not part of the net(see software not as tech community, spaces to be
alternatives to our content
audience
more importnt things to do
splitting time
telling their own story
expect particiaption
expect time shift
everything
expect sharing
taking note
explore beyond
have great distribution methods
content is never finished (perepetual beta)
you (audience are in control)
BBC backstage is a license similar to Creative Commons
Backstage cahnging the BBC
Ian Forrester BBC Backstage

BBC Radio Labs
Collin Murray Black Hole
Audienece participitation
ten hour take over
listener six mix
sms visualize- they need more, ambition.
Trying to visualize what is happening- sound index
MMS
Networks visulization
ownership
personal relationship
community
visualises
showing off sharing
Radio Pop
Last FM Competiton role of Radio Pop
Radio Pop API

Olinda Radio, combining web and physical
information labs
Visulaizing radio
Whats being turned up turned off
Whos listening to what
Volume
Mapping, linking, aesthetic etc

Planning for learning agreement

Following on from this post and work I've started to do on this blog I've finally got a idea for what I want to produce for the learning agreement and assessed work.

25 proposals for work, these will cover all aspects of research I've done. They should range from practical considerations for producing online work to more experimental ideas.

At this stage I think the final piece should paper based, possibly a book. With the blog documenting the research and development of the work.

Some constraints: each proposal should fit onto one A4 sheet.

The Futuresonic brouche is really good format, and interesting starting point to start working from
http://www.futuresonic.com/08/schedule/

I also like the proposal papers from MIT.

Notes from tutorial with Graham

Outcomes
Roles
Confusion
Unclear
The best online gallery
Smaller pieces
Uplaod tools
Algorithms
YouTube Flickr case studies, redesign of smaller sections
Curation
Illusion of users making choices
Forcing users to make decisions
Upload one image at a time
Upload one image at a day
Meta data
Tagging
Preparing, cataloguing, archiving work for later
How does this differ from what a gallery curator does anyway
How does this differ from what a web designer does anyway
How does this differ from what a graphic designer does anyway
Final outcomes
Paper, screen, code, text
Big box of stuff
Mapping users
Narrowing down
Unexpected
Making my life easier
"I'm trying to avoid the obvious idea of creating a website, my role should be broader than that" key question ?

teacakedesign

This was submitted to NOISE a couple of weeks ago
EATeacake
I don't know why but I really like it, it's pretty straightforward site design (portfolio and blog) I think it was submitted to the graphics section but I just love the whole Factory(both Saville/Wilson and manufacturing)/northwest/ concept/ collective idea.

It's also giving me some ideas for presenting the learning agreement

Work space

Ressurected this old blog to use as somewhere to start putting work ideas, visual stuff. I'm thinking of putting together 25(?) rough ideas/ proposals for website designs, interactive pieces and ideas.

I'll continuing using this blog for reserach and learning agreement.

BBC Sound Index

Sound index

Below is some info about the BBCs Sound Index, there's some interesting ideas about searching for new music and new work. How do you profile users and what people are searching for and listening to but it still comes down to the most popular, most viewed, most downloaded. After a while does it become narrowed down to music and genres you know you like without finding something unexpected?

The Sound Index is a massive index of the hottest bands and tracks that are being talked about on the internet right now.

Every six hours the Sound Index crawls some of the biggest music sites on the internet - Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube - to find out what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web. The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are. So, the Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public.

As we know which artists are being enjoyed by which people, not only can you can filter the Sound Index to reflect the sites you use the most, or your favourite music styles, you can also tailor it to represent the views of people of different ages and locations.

All the demographic data we collect and use is entirely anonymous, so we can never attribute any age or location data to any specific person. So, if you are a user of any of these sites, you don't need to worry that the Sound Index has any information about you. However, if you are concerned, or want more details, please contact us at soundindex@bbc.co.uk.

You can also watch some of the newest bands hottest new tracks on Sound, the music show on BBC every Saturday.

The Sound Index is currently in a public service beta phase, with data sources being finalised. During this beta phase we shall also be implementing and tweaking the data currently in the Index, and investigating a weighting system, to allow the more active forms of interaction to contribute more heavily to the Index.

Futuresonic festival Manchester

The Futuresonic festival in Manchester in a couple of weeks, looks really interesting and relevant to my current reserach and work. I'm trying to book tickets for the two day technology conference
Futuresonic
Below is the theme for this year festival

Computers have become social interfaces for sharing digital media and collaborating to build online communities and folksonomies. Some technologies are more social than others. Social technologies are bottom up and many-to-many instead of one-to-one or one-to-many. They can include technologies created and maintained by social networks, such as communities of developers and users working collaboratively with open source tools.

At the same time we see how electronic communication can isolate us, as more and more people drown in a deluge of email that generates stress, even reducing IQ. Additionally, 'online communities' are based upon an artificial equivalence between 'users' which obscures power relationships and issues of ownership.

This runs much deeper than online social networking websites alone. When you use your credit card, you are using a social technology. Each time we buy something we let the company know where we are and what we are buying. An electronic profile is created for each one of us and the aggregated information is used to shape services and select the products on the shelves. This in turn shapes the choices available to us, and the society we live in.

The city is also being transformed. In one moment we can be sat on a bench, logged on to a wireless node in the park, and roaming through the virtual space of the internet, chatting intimately to people many thousands of miles away. The nature of the public sphere, as a place where people can congregate and meet, is changing. We need to conceive of new kinds of architecture, where a fleeting experience of city space is entangled with the folksonomies of the web.

Futuresonic plans to pull out the plug in order to take the new social spaces apart, see how they work, and put them together in new ways. It will explore the seam between open source culture and the public sphere in the city, and in a return to the pioneering early days of the internet, people will be able to build their own spaces to meet, hang out and chat.

MA space

Returning to old ideas from over the last 18 months.
I'm looking at ways of people searching and finding work on the MA space. I want a sort of anti "Amazon reccomends", so you find unexpected work but has some relevance to work you've done or looked at in the past. Not just a random selection.
For example on Amazon reccomends if you skipped the first few links of what they reccomend to you and are given the a list of things five links down the chain.

This is pretty rough idea what I need to do is start to visaulize this in some way.

Professional Practice 2.0

I'm really thinking/ (struggling?) with what to produce in terms of "graphic design" for the MA. I'm also trying to figure out what I want to do in October once the MA is over...

Is what Jeff Jarvis does at www.buzzmachine.com media, communication, new media, design, consultancy?

Giving up the day job can pay off
# Jeff Jarvis
# The Guardian,
# Monday April 14 2008

I wouldn't even argue if there is a job in this area of media/design clearly there is. I do similar things at NOISE developing social networks, trying to engage users. So it's not the lack of work. It's defining it, selling it to people. The more I think about it and work on ideas I'm starting to think whatever I do is based in communication design. Social networks, user generated content, conectting people, mapping. This is what my work should show.

Current reading: Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music

Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music

Whats most interesting is reading about something that happened less then a decade a go but seems a life time ago in terms of technology but with little change in attitude from the record industry. Or am I being cynical and obvious.

Digital music: The genie's out of the bottle
Labels take note: unless changes are made, the day the music sales died might not be very far off.

There seems to have been a massive shift in terms of technology yet the recording industry still seems to be to taking the same approach as 10 years ago, in terms of stopping file sharing. There's some interesting comparisons to how a large media organisation, such as the BBC for example, has approached distributing it's content across multiple platforms. There has been a shift in terms of downloadable content but the recent news stories about Internet providers having to supply details of file sharers, all seems a bit like de ja vu whilst reading this book.

Carphone Warehouse rejects music police

“It’s between the user and them, it’s not to do with us. My lawyer explained it to me: it is like trying to prosecute the bus company that takes a shoplifter to the shops,” Mr Dunstone said

Next up is:

The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution

When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century

Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning

Ideas for presenting concepts and designs