Recently in Participatory Media Category
I'll be going to a few interesting events in the next two months:
April 26 GoRuCo (Gotham Ruby Conference)
from the site: "A technical conference aimed at highly motivated programmers interested in all things Ruby."
April 30 Visualization Day at CUNY
This looks really interesting, with presentations by Ben Schneiderman and other HCI & Visualization notables. The conference is free, which is always a plus.
May 12 - 14 Where2.0 in Burlingame, CA
I've been wanting to go to this conference for a couple years. Always a great line-up of speakers and lots of interesting people and projects. This year's Where2.0 should be excellent - with all the LBS apps and platforms that are launching.
May 17 Smart/Models (AIGA/NY Biz Conf)
AIGA/NY has put together a great looking conf featuring a diverse group of designers and producers discussing... the biz. I'm especially looking forward to Jason Fried's talk on 37signals' approach. There has been a lot of talk about new business models in the creative space, and this looks to be a great round-up of some super intelligent people with highly innovative ideas and methods.
I rarely visit YouTube.com. My YouTube experience exists mainly in exposure to embedded content - the use of YouTube as a media storage platform. And I'm fairly certain most internet media consumers are like me.
The social components of YouTube just don't do it for me. This might be partly due to the interface, which in my humble opinion doesn't encourage social behavior. YouTube's design is too clean, too empty of feeling. Groups, Channels, Categories... I feel a certain forced redundancy.
To me, the power of YouTube is in the platform. This aint no MySpace for video.
Tacking on commenting, channels, and messages doesn't make something social.
I'm even curious as to how effective a platform YouTube is. The blogosphere was recently in a tizzy about some prominent YouTube posting Athiest getting his account wiped. For a service with the slogan 'Broadcast Yourself', this just seems a little shifty.
Jane Oh, Chris Kairalla, and I are developing a location-based system documenting and displaying emotional response and stimulus. The project is multi-faceted, involving a cell-phone application, wearable input and display, screen-based display, and server-side locating software. Currently, we are focusing on one emotion—gratitude, as determined by facial flush response, or temperature changes in the face. Location will be determined by cell-tower ID and signal strength, as gleaned by the mobile app and server-side logic. We are developing the client app in Series60 Python, implementing the Location api. The tower info will be correlated to both user-inputed geo-data and the FCC supplied database (link). Data will be transfered to the cell-phone via bluetooth, and uploaded to the server. Subjects will also be encouraged to take relevant pictures, and hopefully video for the screen-based informatics display.
Pertinent online resources are archived here.
Two articles on the blogging phenomenon today—one in the Washington Post, the other in the NY Times. Both offer a statistical view of those who make up the content propogators of the blogosphere and attempt to get a handle on the meat of it all. Shouts.
Mog is a web-based social app for sharing musical tastes. Think Last.FM, MySpace, community blog, blah blah blah. Honestly, I don't like it at all. Why? Stupid name, Bad user interface, lackluster and unintuitive profiling, and really, not a robust or substantial enough concept.
After registering, the first thing a new user sees is a god-aweful group of blocks. Like the old New York Times, but poorly designed, with no reason behind the placement I could see. A good many of the blocks seemed like filler, and the entire concept hedges on the downloaded player. The attempt at transparent interfaces (hollar at you AJAX) is crap, not at all what it could be.
Registering was as far as I got. Is as far as I will ever go. The greatest thing about Mog, for my intents and purposes, is that the whole mess provides a bad example... A positive negative. WRNYC will not be like this. I promise.
John Battelle's article that spits on ex cable-player Leo Hindrey's statement has been making much deserved rounds today. Hindrey's drivel is full of holes that Battelle had no choice but to attack.
But, in all seriousness, content is only useful if it is both interesting and accessible. This is where the internet companies [yahoo, google...] come into play. More, Battelle brings up the issues of participatory media, community, and search.
It's only natural that a man who made it in cable throws the cable-tv paradigm on the web. Sorry, buddy - square peg, octogonal hole.
Wish there was something close to this at the UMD HCIL Conference...
Good read by Robert Young at GigaOm. He makes the usual good points about the paradigm shift from internet 1.0. He brings up the commodification of social creativity, given rise, or at least a better vehicle by first the digital publishing revolution, and further accelerated by recent technical innovation and social consideration as we adapt to the binary world.
