Reflecting on last week’s Metaverse event at Eyebeam, it seems to me that one aspect that was barely touched upon was the idea of the metaverse as a new form of civic space. The virtual agora, if you will. Prokofy Neva got closest, talking about the need for gathering places and a common rule of…
Category: Information Society
Send in those machinima flicks to the 2006 Festival in Queens!
My buddy Paul Marino, president of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, sends out the news that the 2006 Machinima Festival has opened up for submissions. The Machinima Festival is the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences’ annual event showcasing Machinima works, producers and technologies. It takes place this year from November 4-6 in…
Harold Rheingold talks about web culture, smart mobs and community
Harold Rheingold, internet guru and author of Smart Mobs, gave a wide-ranging and fascinating talk on the linkages between "real" community and online community, the democratization of media production, the reaction from the traditional media giants, and his IM relationship with his wife. Thanks to The Infinite Mind for making this stimulating event happen. More…
Commerce-driven search in Second Life
I recently read John Battelle’s account of the rise of Google in his book Search. Battelle tells the story of how the confluence of search technology and commerce have led to a restructuring of how we conceive and navigate through the web and increasingly physical space. If we have a question, we assume the answer…
Vega vs. Vega: Is is live or is it Second Life?
Last night’s virtual concert by folk artist Suzanne Vega has made me think more deeply about the potential of internet-mediated and virtual music performance. I have been to my share of live concerts and attended a number of in-world Second Life concerts and open mics. The last time I saw Suzanne Vega live was in…
Internet Celebrities united to defend Net Neutrality
We Are the Web is a delightfully wacky site that brings together a number of "internet celebrities" united to defend the principle of Net Neutrality. Starring "the Tron Guy" (my personal favorite), the somewhat alarming Peter Pan, and trashy diva Leslie Hall of Gemsweater.com, the site features a surprisingly slick and silly music video promoting…
Pamphlets: the Blogs of the 17th Century
Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker has a neat piece on the challenge of blogging and other new media to traditional journalism called "Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists." One of the most interesting bits compares the rise of blogs to the growth of pamphleteering and periodicals in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Based…
The future of tour guide technology, Part IV
This is the last in a four-part (I, II, III) exploration of guided tour tech. In Part One, I mused about the potential for using ICTs to connect experts in particular disciplines with tourists visiting a particular site on an ad hoc basis. Apparently this coordination problem has been somewhat solved by combining iPods and…
New site provides online tools for human rights defenders
I received in my in-box news about a new online resource for human rights activists called Human Rights Tools created by Daniel D’Esposito , formerly of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The site is basically a set of links and RSS feeds to information useful to human rights professionals in an easy-to-navigate format. …
The future of tour guide technology, Part III
As I was posting the previous entry on guided tour technology, I was thinking that it was more than likely that someone had already developed this. I was right. Not only has someone created a prototype of the kind of 3D-imaging, GPS-enabled, context-relevant goggles I wrote about, but they built it specifically for the city…