The New York Times reports on the increasingly frequent–but still very controversial–practice of incorporating Twitter and other “backchannel” communication networks into the classroom. Do such conversations make classes more inclusive or more distracting?
Why buy your own car/CDs/power tools, when your neighbors already have loads of them?
Rachel Botsman makes the case:
http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_case_for_collaborative_consumption.html
NeighborGoods is already up to 2.0:
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/03/neighborgoods-kickstarter/ (Via Bruce Sterling).http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mickipedia/neighbors-helping-neighborgoods
Thanks to you, NeighborGoods has quickly become the leading online community for local resource sharing. Now, we’re reaching out directly to our members to help us take NeighborGoods to the next level.
We’re gearing up to launch NeighborGoods 2.0, which focuses on creating sharing communities for organizations, companies and and groups of all sizes.
Smartphones help:
People will ditch their cars and embrace mass transit if they have the tools to manage their commutes. Enter the smartphone … http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/iPSyBkh6X_g/ Xatori unveils a free iPhone app that enables drivers to punch in their destinations and locate outlet owners who are willing to share. http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=fa66fe847e6ccd56e61dde5770c4ffbfNow, to Find a Parking Spot, Drivers Look on Their Phones http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d9838be80c3361a169de04e52c21ba99
And Zipcar’s IPO is meteoric:
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/vQEd37Mmv0A/ via BylineZipcar raises $174 million and sees its stock price soar a whopping 60 percent in its first day as a public company. The decade-old car sharing company, maybe the most disruptive entrant in the automobile rental space since Rent-A-Wreck, is now a billion-dollar operation.
The raid is liveblogged when one of Bin Laden’s neighbors complains about the noisy helicopters on Twitter, while Bin Laden’s compound gets 3 of 5 stars on Google Maps. Also in the news: weaponized dogs and a tale of two seals.
The Pirate Party of Canada has threatened to unleash its anti-surveillance software on its own government, promising to let Canadian citizens browse safely under a Virtual Private Network.
“The Pirate Party of Canada has announced that it will extend a VPN originally set up to allow people in Tunisia to browse freely while internet censorship was imposed there. Canada may soon be added to that list since the ruling Conservative Party has vowed to introduce a bill that would provide unprecedented systematic interception and monitoring of Canadians’ personal communications. So the Pirate Party of Canada has announced it will extend that service to Canadians.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meanwhile, back in north Africa…
“A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s cellphone network and re-establish their own communications. The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago.”
Apr 232011
An “ohm” may be a measure of resistance, but I can’t see musicians resisting this latest stab at online music production. According to the promo video, anyway, Ohm helps you sharing tracks, find collaborators, and, ehem, sync asynchronously.
Did some bungler lay down bogus vocals on your killer bassline while you were asleep? No problem! Thanks to my favorite Ohm feature, you can roll back your song to a previous version stored in Ohm’s cloud.
If you try it, let us know if it delivers. Ohm Studio real time collaborative music workstation
Privacy advocates Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden have released a free visualization tool to demonstrate how the iPhone stores your movements in a file easily accessible by anyone with access to your phone or computer. (Shown here, my January 19th presence in the Philadelphia International Airport.)
Nothing like a good visualization of your own movements to give you the creeps.
NEW YORK CITY, 19 Nov 2010 —
MYFOXNY.COM – Some might say there is a ‘war on cars’ going on in New York City.
Continue reading »
US security consultants may have been conspiring in secret to bring WikiLeaks down, but Britain’s former intelligence chief links WikiLeaks with the downfall of oppressive regimes in the Middle East. And then there’s WikiLeak’s staunchest supporter, Anonymous, which caught said security consultants with their pants down (and may have even erased their CEO’s iPad).
The downside: no pay. The upside: save the Internet. Apply by 22 April.
How do photojournalists get paid if their traditional business model is drying up? A story from the front lines of crowdfunding, plus a photographer applies a technique from a New Media capstone to traverse the Appalachian Trail in four minutes.
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/89mLw4IOQdY/ via Byline
A month after the launch of the new crowd-funding platform for photojournalism, Emphas.is, one of its users reports from the road. Belgian photographer and Emphas.is fundraiser Tomas van Houtryve tells us about the good, the bad and the future of a work in progress….
The pressure of time has been the hardest challenge for van Houtryve, “I would not recommend tight schedules where one has to juggle shooting, fundraising and a withering travel schedule. It’s been very intense keeping all the elements on track.”
Despite travails, van Houtryve sees a lot of promise. “It’s an intuitive model,” he says. “Backers have started to pose relevant questions. As my project proposal has made its way through social networks and attracted support from strangers, I’ve made some really fruitful new connections. In addition to generous funding contributions, several individuals have stepped forward with key contacts and very precise and helpful advice. I have already managed to make stronger photos due to their input. This is a pleasant shift over the lone-wolf existence.”
Meanwhile, on the Appalachian Trail photographers are documenting their trek using a technique that sounds a lot like NMD alumnus Sam Lynch’s iGlasses:
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/uhDLuMVI0AM/ via Byline
Kevin Gallagher spent six months hiking the 2,200 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Then he compiled his 4,000 still photos taken along the way and turned them into an amazing 4-minute video travelog.
If Big Brother comes for you, you’ve got seven minutes to make yourself scarce after tossing your cell phone in a nearby dumpster. That’s what a German politician learned when he took his telephone carrier to court to find out how often they tracked his position–and learned Deutsche Telekom tracked him 35,000 times in 6 months, even though he never explicitly chose to share his location.
The results make for a compelling interactive graphic, but also seem to vindicate free software guru Richard Stallman’s choice never to carry a cell phone.
If the founder of console powerhouse Electronic Arts is right when he says “the browser is the platform of the future,” then here are some inventive takes on what that future might look like–from rolling up your favorite Web page Katamari Damacy-style to playing a game entirely in the URL bar.
This is a “bookmarklet” that turns any page into Katamari Damacy. Try clicking the Katamari! link above.
This was the winner of the 2011 Yahoo HackU contest at University of Washington.
How does it work?
Short version: css transforms (for things stuck to the katamari), canvas (drawing the katamari), and z-index (illusion of depth).
This minimalist gem crams an entire game into a single URL.
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/11/03/13/1537230/A-Game-Played-In-the-URL-Bar?from=rss via Byline“Whether you think it is useful or useless, you can’t ignored the sheer cool geekiness of a game played entirely in the URL bar. From the article: ‘… While getting lost in a three dimensional virtual world amongst increasingly thoughtful plot and character development may be an adequate pastime for some, the only new title the gaming world should be talking about is URL Hunter, an experimental keyboard-character based game played entirely in your browser’s URL bar.’”
Trip breaks it down for us.
Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, spoke at the recent Game Developers Conference about how he expects game platforms to evolve in the future. Hawkins thinks the role of web browsers as a platform will greatly increase as the explosion of mobile device adoption continues. “For all of the big media companies, this phase of disruption is dramatic and happening fast. Where it’s really going to lead is where the function of the browser is going. … The browser has taken over 2 billion PCs — it’s going to be taking over a billion tablets over the next few years, billions of mobile devices. It will end up in my opinion very strong on the television. The browser is the platform of the future.”
Over the past month, new media scholars have spilled a lot of digital ink arguing whether the Internet actually fostered the 2011 revolution in Egypt, Tunisia, and other Middle East countries–or whether it simply created a dependency that governments can shut down to stymie protesters. Here’s a “Middle East Internet Scorecard” showing where and when governments have cut off their citizens’ access to the net.
How hard would it be for, say, President Beck to shut down Google, Facebook, and the like in the US of A? Read this Middle East censorship roundup to find out what Egyptians, Libyans, and the rest of us can do to safeguard access to a global electronic network.
Italian net artists Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico scrape 250,000 Facebook profiles to create a social network you can search by looks.
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/HxiiTzDPpSQ/ via Byline A new online dating site debuted this week, with ready-made profiles for an unwitting quarter million Facebook users. Facebook’s not amused with the scraping, but the site’s founders say it’s just art intended to expose data usage in the age of social networking…. Moreover, it’s a bit funny hearing Facebook complain about scraping of personal data that is quasi-public….
[Ironically,] Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, made his name at Harvard in 2003 by scraping the names and photos of fellow classmates off school servers to feed a system called FaceMash. With the photos, Zuckerberg created a controversial system that pitted one co-ed against another, by allowing others to vote on which one was better looking.
Invasion of privacy? Maybe for net artists, but evidently not for lawyers trying to pin something on you in court.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/02/02/1525203/Facebook-Private-Info-Increasingly-Used-In-Court?from=rss “Making the content of your Facebook account private can thwart the social network’s plan to share as much information possible with advertisers, but may not keep out lawyers looking for material that will contradict your statements in a court of law. US lawyers have been trying to gain the permission to access the private parts of social network accounts for a while now, but it seems that only lately they have begun to be successful in their attempts. And this turn of events is another perfectly good reason to think twice about what you post online.”
In January Facebook staff realized that the Tunisian government had installed software that tracked its citizens in unconscionable ways. Fortunately Facebook has now repaired that glaring security hole, and returned to its usual routine of tracking its own users in unconscionable ways. Like putting your face on Starbucks ads without your permission.
This would be a lot cooler if Dustin O’Conner hadn’t already done it in my Creative Networks class.
Is there anywhere JavaScript can’t go?
http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/01/kinect-javascript-handwaving-browser/ (Via Bruce Sterling)
*Another lash-up. They’re coming thick and fast. I’ve never seen a tech-development scene work like this before — so virally. This is not “Augmented Reality,” it’s more of a gestural interface… but c’mon, it’s 2011 and they’re websurfing by waving their hands.
DepthJS from Fluid Interfaces on Vimeo.
Just when you thought slime molds, which alternate between individual and collective organisms, couldn’t get any weirder.
If amoebas can grow their own food, you have even less of an excuse for not doing so yourself. And no, Farmville doesn’t count.
Slime Molds Are Earth’s Smallest, Oldest Farmers http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/7UzmakhSZzY/ via Byline Colonies of a bizarre microbial goo have been found practicing agriculture at a scale tinier than any seen before….
When food is short, hundreds of thousands of amoebas come together, fusing into a single entity. It may crawl off as a slug in search of richer pastures, then form a stalk topped by a “fruiting body” that bursts to disperse a few lucky amoebas-turned-spores. Or it may form the stalk right away, without crawling.
It’s been thought that slime molds simply scavenge, eating bacteria they like and oozing out the rest. In laboratories, researchers “cure” slime molds of their bacteria by allowing them to purge themselves on Petri dishes. But Brock, who studies how slime-mold cells communicate and self-organize, kept finding bacteria in the fruiting bodies of some slime molds and not others….
They found that some strains didn’t gorge themselves and “lick the plate clean” of bacteria, but instead saved some inside of the colony. They were farmers, and fared better in some soils than their nonfarming counterparts.
From the original article:
“The behavior falls short of the kind of ‘farming’ that more advanced animals do; ants, for example, nurture a single fungus species that no longer exists in the wild. But the idea that an amoeba that spends much of its life as a single-celled organism could hold short of consuming a food supply before decamping is an astonishing one. More than just a snack for the journey of dispersal, the idea is that the bacteria that travel with the spores can ‘seed’ a new bacterial colony, and thus a food source in case the new locale should be lacking in bacteria.”
Just when you thought it was safe to use a Mac. Well, I guess it’s still pretty safe if you don’t click on that suspicious Facebook link.
Java: write once, spam everywhere.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/19/mac_linux_bot_vulnerabilities/(via Bruce Sterling)
“The bot was discovered spreading over Facebook posts that planted the following message on infected users’ Facebook pages: “As you are on my friends list I thought I would let you know I have decided to end my life.” An included link leads recipients to a cross-platform JAR, or Java Archive file that can run on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Once the recipient is infected, his Facebook page carries the same dire warning.”
“Known as Trojan.Jnanabot, or alternately as OSX/Koobface.A or trojan.osx.boonana.a, the bot made waves in October when researchers discovered its Java-based makeup allowed it to attack Mac and Linux machines, not just Windows PCs as is the case with most malware. Once installed, the trojan components are stored in an invisible folder and use strong encryption to keep communications private.
“The bot can force its host to take instructions through internet relay chat, perform DDoS attacks, and post fraudulent messages to the victim’s Facebook account, among other things….”
Record labels agree to settle a class-action lawsuit by paying songwriters $47.5 million for tracks the labels themselves pirated. Oh, and Sony et al. didn’t make the 300,000 copyrighted songs (which they didn’t own) freely available on a filesharing network–they *sold* them.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/11/0615258/Record-Labels-To-Pay-For-Copyright-Infringement?from=rss via Byline “Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., EMI Music Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. have agreed to pay songwriters and music publishers $47.5 million in damages for copyright infringement and overdue royalties to settle a class action lawsuit. ‘The 2008 class action alleges that the record companies “exploited” music owners by reproducing and selling in excess of 300,000 song titles without securing licenses from the copyright owners and/or without paying the associated royalty payments. The record companies knowingly did so and kept a so-called “pending list” of unlicensed reproductions, setting aside $50 million for the issue, if it ever arose, court filings suggest.’”
Not to be outdone, Microsoft is trying to patent the idea of a “fan.”
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/07/2130218/Microsoft-Lays-Claim-To-Patent-On-Fans?from=rss via Byline theodp writes “A USPTO filing made public Thursday reveals that Microsoft is seeking a patent for something it calls ‘One-Way Public Relationships’ in social networks and other online properties, lawyer-speak for what’s more commonly known as being a ‘fan’ of something online. It’s unclear whether it’s a goof on Apple, but Microsoft curiously used the example of a U2 fan named Steve to explain its ‘invention’ to the USPTO. Purported patent reformer Microsoft, which has called for the US to change from a first-to-invent patent system to a first-to-file system, filed the patent application in July 2009. Microsoft is a partner with and investor in Facebook, which first established its fan pages back in November 2007.”
Maybe these old media companies should be looking at newer, “free-to-play” business models.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/01/07/2220228/emLotR-Onlinesem-Free-To-Play-Switch-Tripled-Revenue?from=rss via Byline Last June, Turbine made the decision to switch Lord of the Rings Online from a subscription-based business model to a free-to-play model supported by microtransactions. In a podcast interview with Ten Ton Hammer, Turbine executives revealed that the switch has gone well for the company, with game revenues roughly tripling. The active player base has also grown significantly in that time. Executive Producer Kate Paiz said, “This really echoes a lot of what we’ve seen throughout the entertainment industry in general. It’s really about letting players make their choices about how they play.”
Your parents probably are more likely to talk nice about family, while you’re probably more likely to cuss about music or sex. And that’s why you’re more likely to be popular on Facebook, according to one read of Facebook’s recent statistical correlation of user comments and number of friends.