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{ Tag archives }

remediation

Pac Attack [1]

Cupcakes — processing time-lapse — words. You can thank me later.

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2008-01-23

Links for “Facebook: putting the social network to work” [4]

Back from a presentation for SEM Group at SPARK; here’s the linkdump.

People

News

Groups

Events

Applications

Advertising

Income

Taking action

Q&A

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2007-08-23

cowsay — cowmonologue [1]

 _________________________________________ 
/ On a clear disk, you can seek forever.  \
| Man, I could use another cup of coffee, |
\ black as midnight on a moonless night.  /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 _________________________________________ 
/ Also: Ypsilanti links in sidebar, whose \
\ vital microcorrespondence is missing?   /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 __________________________ 
< Fall Out -- goodnight... >
 -------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (--)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

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2007-08-19

My Second Life moment

I habitually miss out on meetings in Second Life because I don’t have the client installed, etc. — so this afternoon I took that bold step, and ended up spending a solid few hours exploring.

Liana took me to some cheerfully Victorian environment; I figured out that you could create and shape objects, so I made a donut.

Making a donut.

Later on, after I’d acquired some menswear, Liana showed me the way to the Black Lodge. (There’s always a Black Lodge. Seems to be a real White Lodge shortage — but, that’s life, first or second or otherwise.)

The black lodge.

In a moment of nostalgic weakness, I honored the Ministry of Information by visiting the Michigan Library Consortium in Second Life and picking up a free MLC t-shirt. It’s about as crappy as it sounds: a set of empty buildings where you can use laggy computer objects to search the catalogs.

The nicest area I found was ZERO POINT, a sculpture park which cheerfully remediates a generation’s worth of Radio Shack attract mode VHS crap, early nineties computer animation meatloaf c/o dead-ender Silicon Graphics overspill, except that instead of blurry rotating goblet composites and morphing quicksilver faces and sharp-jointed glassy bugs, you have a truly awesome mouselook trudge through tunnels that approximate Tranquility levels being sucked into toothless black holes. The pictures don’t do it justice, since everything is moving, or at least palette-shifting.

I played around with the object building kit, fantastic chunky 3D modeling fun, but you have to get involved with the game economy to do anything serious (i.e. huge, persistent, or using your own textures and media).

The key fact about Second Life is this: most places are empty, and the places that aren’t are running some scammy popularity-contest almighty one-eyed Linden dollar angle. In Second Life, the streets find their own uses for things, but it’s an attention economy, and there aren’t that many streets — why walk when you can fly or teleport? So the choice is, for the most part, between half-baked, mostly-empty built environments, or hugely overcrowded XXX nudie fashion beaches, where bulked-up or slimmed-down avatars brandish their anatomically correct, hilariously outsized prostheses and/or mega sparkling lens-flaring silver and gold, tops low-cut or not at all. You can buy clothing and you can buy junk trinket objects. You can make boring objects really easily, but — but. In my case, I had a lovely little roughshod statue garden going, singing Adam West Batman cubes and all, but then a litter of cigarette-smoking furries walked through and that was that. Why would I build my stuff in a desolate sandbox where nobody would see it? Why build it there, where it’d disappear after I was gone (much, presumably, to the relief of the narcotic-puffing mammal pride). So, I picked up my objects and went home: ⌘Q.

All the above to note that (1) my handle in Second Life is ExoMicroBioUnitAlpha Raymaker and please say hello if you see me, although (2) today was probably the greatest amount of time I’m going to spend with this hollow thing.

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2007-06-18

Weblogs as display windows for social software [3]

Thinking about the relationship between

  1. sites or services that don’t generate easily digested text content and
  2. strategies their proprietors use to squeeze a weblog or similar attention stream out of whatever does get generated.

Sometimes [1] is because there’s not enough text — maybe a video site — and sometimes it’s because there’s too much text — like a wiki. Any wiki weirdo can glaze over at RecentChanges, but it’s data, not narrative.

Ideally, there’s a weblog or proto-weblog that serves as a single, high-level summary of what’s going on: if you’re going to watch just one thing, that’s the thing; or if you’re trying to understand the service and take the community’s pulse, it’s what you load up and skim over.

So here’s what I got, relevant examples culled from my personal web haunts.

If there are any bird’s-eye blogs you think are particularly effective or ineffective I’d enjoy hearing about them.

AboutUs

AboutUs has a daily stream of featured wiki pages on its front page, and a separate log of conversation and cool stuff called the DailyBuzz. There’s a separate AboutUsWeblog.org, which is a Wordpress blog that republishes some of the featured pages — but not all of them, or at least not on a regular schedule — along with random clippings from the DailyBuzz and the occasional free-form blog post. Blog posts are typically written in the hasty, careless tone that pervades the AboutUs house organs — if you listen, you can hear the copywriting sausage grinder whining away.

CommunityWiki

The CommunityWiki used to have a cool front-page faux weblog as described here, but apparently it didn’t get exported to the future.

Hiveminder

Two prongs for Hiveminder: a Best Practical weblog which has announcements about all of the company’s products and some human interest stuff, and Hiveminder News for product-specific notices. Both blogs are written in a fun and sometimes digressive “friendly programmer” voice. The Hiveminder News is baked into the product, and the updates are usually nice and terse, with the occasional longer introduction for a new feature. Awesome!

Plazes

The Plazes crew keeps blog.plazes.com, which is the usual jumble of product announcements plus publicity and corporate updates. The thing I appreciate about the Plazes blog is that is showcases the mashups, integrations, and art projects people have done using the Plazes API and feeds. These community_indicators are signs of life for the service, but they also do a better job of demonstrating what Plazes is all about than the Plazes site itself can. For a service which you need to have an active network and client software in order to really enjoy, seeing some of these projects gives a hint of what the experience might be like.

Revver

Revver (aka Commie Youtube) has a very active blog that streams a mix of service status crap and surfaced videos. Seems like a few missed information interior decoration opportunities, though: the blog is buried in footer navigation on the main Revver site, its branding is way off — the header is a video thumbnail montage which fundamentally looks like crap, and you have to work your way beneath the fold in order to find the new Transformers-esque Revver logo (which appears only in the little tiny video rolls in the sidebar).

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2007-06-08