Wikipedia Talk Video (Edited Version)
There is a short version of the talk in Bristol by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales:
Six minute edited version of Jimmy Wales’ public lecture to celebrate the tenth birthday of Wikipedia.
Embedded media — click here to see it.
Event hosted by, and with the co-operation of, Wikimedia UK, University of Bristol, Bristol Festival of Ideas, BBC Anchor Project, Connecting Bristol, Bristol City Council, The Watershed and Bristol Cathedral Choir School.
Filmed at the Victoria Rooms, Bristol on the 13th January 2011.
Edited at the Digital Village, BBC Broadcasting House, Bristol.
Cthulhu Thursday – Mashup Cthulhu
One of the great things about the Cthulhu Mythos is that there is so much score for experimentation within what Lovecraft and others created. I think this is a big part of the reason why it is still going strong today. It is fun and interesting to take the concepts of the Mythos and merge them with other areas…. and people do! From Tintin to Sherlock Holmes, Cthulhu gets mashed up. And here are a couple more…
THE EERIE ADVENTURES OF THE LYCANTHROPE ROBINSON CRUSOE now available
The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe, Peter Clines’ twisted new take on the classic tale featuring werewolves and Lovecraftian monsters, is now available for purchase from many offline and online stores including:
Robinson Crusoe is one of the most enduring adventures of the past four centuries and one of the most well-known works in the English language. Or is it?
Recently discovered amidst the papers of the 20th century writer and historian H. P. Lovecraft is what claims to be the true story of Robinson Crusoe. Taken from the castaway’s own journals and memoirs, and fact-checked by Lovecraft himself, it is free from many of Defoe’s edits and alterations. From Lovecraft’s work a much smoother, simpler tale emerges–but also a far more disturbing one…
There are also some fun mashups of the The Family Circus, a US comic strip about family life… here the cosy life meets the darkness… the eviiiillll…
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Enjoy!)
The Rise of Maptivism: Cairo
Following on from yesterdays post about Maptivism, we’re looking at another post on the iRevolution blog, this time looking at Check Ins. If you are a programmer then Check In means one thing (putting code into a repository) but most other people encounter ‘Checking In’ when travelling. However location-based social media systems have adapted the term to refer to confirming your location at a location. However this idea can have a use beyond a bit of fun – it can be used for protest:
Services like Foursquare provide a location-based mobile social networking platform that allows users to check-in at different venues to earn points and connect with friends. CI will work in a similar way but will allow users to create their very own “Foursquares”. This means that CI’s can be project- or group-specific, i.e., bounded to certain networks. Users will decide themselves where and what kind of points and badges to award to members of their CI network.
This quick check-in service has obvious applications for students coordinating nonviolent protests, especially when they need to rapidly adapt to a changing situation. I this saw again recently in Egypt when pro-Mubarak thugs were swarming certain avenues of downtown Cairo. I recall seeing a picture shared on Twitter with tactical drawings suggesting where anti-Mubarak protestors should position themselves as a result. This was drawn on a screenshot taken from satellite imagery of an area in the center of Cairo….
But the author goes further – talking about how the system could be even better adapted for this purpose:
With Internet and cell phone networks back up, protesters could use a check-in service to let others know where the thugs are being sighted and to recommend different locations to retreat or advance to. This would be a like a geo-tagged status update that could also be shared on your Facebook page or Twitter feed (minding the security implications). In addition, one could have pre-designated tags like “Thugs here”, “Don’t go here”, “Evacuate” etc., to avoid having to type when checking in. Call it the Q-CI feature, quick check-in’s.
These alerts or status updates could then be embedded geographically, something like geo-caching. So if I happen to check in within a hundred meters of someone who just recently updated their CI status as “evacuate”, I would get an immediate pop-up message showing me these nearby updates. Someone helping to coordinate the protests remotely from a laptop could quickly embedareas (rather than points) as no-go zones if one or more updates show up with the tag “evacuate” at a given venue. Integrating Ushahidi’s new geometry mapping feature would make this possible. …
(Also posted on the p2p foundation blog.)
The Rise of Maptivism: London Protests
The rise of web 2.0 and it’s associated technologies such as mobiles, web access, Google maps and Twitter have brought with it a host of new ideas and developments around our sense of place. We can learn and share much more about our immediate physical environment. While until recently this was mainly confined to personal navigation, ARG games and the like, it has also started to be adapted as a tool for protest – Maptivism. We’ve seen this used in the student protests in London, from the iRevolution blog, who wrote some interesting stuff on mapping the protests:
My colleague Adeel Khamisa from GeoTime kindly shared this news story on how student protesters created a live tactical map to outwit police in London during yesterday’s demonstrations.
The blog then goes on to discuss some of the limits of this approach and how it can be improved (and how gamic it looks!):
As I looked closer at the map, it occurred to me how much this resembles a computer game with moving characters. The strategy employed by the police can be discerned by the pattern below.
But I doubt that students were able to update their Google map in real-time directly from their mobile phones, let alone via SMS, Twitter, Smartphone App, camera phone or Facebook. Nor can they subscribe to alerts and receive them directly via an automated email or SMS. Indeed, it appears they were using Google Forms to “crowdsource” information and this Twitter account to disseminate important updates. … This is why I got in touch with the group and recommended that they think of using Crowdmap (free and open source):
(Also posted on the p2p foundation blog.)
Monday Morning Gamification: The Didget
Here is a great example of gamifcation in action; the Didget:
DIDGET™ blood glucose meter from Bayer is the only meter that plugs into a Nintendo DS or DS™ Lite gaming system to reward kids for consistent testing.
The Didget
Simple and elegant application of gaming ideas – reward the child for performing the essential (non gaming) blood tests that they need to do to stay healthy. By doing the right tests at the right time, the child gets points added to the Didget – and by plugging it into their Nintendo DS, they can unlock special rewards in a game.
Filth Fair on Pocket Gamer
In addition to an article on Gamezebo, there is also a preview over on Pocket Gamer:
Filth Fair is a hidden words and meanings game set inside a huge painting by Mike Wilks, an artist famous for his best-selling 1986 book The Ultimate Alphabet.
Your task is to find and identify over 300 words buried inside numerous objects. Cryptic, descriptive, and word-substitution clues are on hand to aid you, with prizes, awards, and acclaim awaiting the best players.
According to Wellcome, Filth Fair has been created with the highest craftsmanship and without, “digital-virtual hocus-pocus.”
Filth Fair will be available to play for free on iPhone, iPad, and online some time in March.
There is also a Facbook group for the game you can join: http://bit.ly/filthfair
Filth Fair Main Menu
Poor Guitar Hero!?!
It is sad to hear that Guitar Hero is coming to an end. It’s a great game and I’ve had a lot of fun playing it. Given that at one point it generated $1,700 million in retail revenue – what happened? Games Brief has a great analysis of an answer – from which these reasons caught my eye…
– The music labels were difficult: My guess is that music labels asked for minimum guarantees and onerous terms, the same issues that have stopped Spotify from launching a US service and killed endless music download and streaming services before they launched.
…
– Activision viewed Guitar Hero as a product franchise, not a service: The mechanism Activision chose to exploit the franchise was a series of retail releases for high profile bands. These were working-capital intensive, involving console royalties, inventory, distribution, retail margin, marketing and (probably) music advances. If a product didn’t do well, that left Activision losing a lot of money. A service-based approach, driven by downloads, would have cut out many of these costs, enabling Activision to use many different artists, with smaller followings, and still be profitable.
The music industry does seem to want to make life hard for itself as it struggles to get digital… As for the other point; the whole article is worth reading – but this point of games as a service – to me is key – and if that is where it went wrong, well it’s triple sad. Its sad to see the end of a great game, sad for the developers losing thier jobs and sad such an obvious candidate for ‘games as a service‘ could not be made to work.
Event, Digital Bristol – Imagine a City where…
I’m speaking at an event in Bristol next week – if in town, come along!
Innovation Academy : Digital Bristol – Imagine a City where…
Thursday 24 February 2011
Panel Session chaired by Paul Appleby
Imagine a city where you could tap into the gigs, films, events, games, traffic jams, skate options. There is a welter of knowledge, experiences and fun within the city, but how can digital media transform the experience of living here? What role do open data and open standards play? Who facilitates, who moderates, who benefits?Digital opportunities
Benefits of single information centre
Potential for Mediashare – all stories, to be delivered through partner outlets
Metadata aspects – how the tags work for any contentTomas Rawlings, Peer-to-Peer Foundation
Stephen Hilton, Connecting Bristol
Mark Cosgrove, Watershed
Bristol Wireless – Ben GreenFor more information and to book your place please visit: http://digitalbristol.eventbrite.com/
(It’s also the first time I’ve done a public event with my P2P Foundation member hat on…)
Cthulhu Thursday: Re-Animator the Musical
One of the few good adaptations of a Lovecraft story is Re-animator; which was made into three cult horror films. I’m a huge fan of 1 and 2 but sad to say I’ve not seen 3. I’m also a fan of the original story, though Lovecraft himself was not that happy with it. I see his point, it is not his best. But the original story has a section the film does not do – reanimating the dead during WWI! (I will return to this in due course…) Anyway I digress. I am very happy to see Re-Animator the Musical has arrived and I hope it tours so I can see it!
Well this was a freaking shock for me this morning, I heard that Stuart Gordon was planning on making Re-Animator a musical for the stage last year. But to find out it is ready to go is just insane.
Thanks to the guys over at STYD for the info, Re-Animator: The Musical is being directed by Stuart Gordon and has the same guys from the 1985 film, Tony Doublin, John Naulin and John Beuchler helming the special effects. So the blood will flow oh so freely and not only that, the first row is designated as the “splash zone”.
Previews for the musical will run from February 18th through till March 4th and the musical will open on March 5th through to March 27th at the Steve Allen Theatre in Hollywood, CA.
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of Mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Also for more Cthulhu news, sign up to the cthulhuHQ twitter feed. Enjoy!)
Music Industry Starts to (Finally) Get Digital
It’s been a long time coming, and for about a decade or more the music industry has been trying to pretend that digital is the same as physical – it’s not. This article suggests that they are finally getting it.. but it appears to be still too little, too late:
In a keynote speech Jean-Bernard Lévy, the head of the media giant Vivendi which owns Universal Music Group, said the company was working to “reinvent the music industry”, with 30% of its revenues coming from new business models, but admitted “the music business is still only part of the way to reinventing itself”. Indeed.
Yet that reinvention is taking far too long, according to Forrester Research analyst Mark Mulligan, who gave an explosive presentation at Midem. “Unless the labels and publishers change the way they license services we are going to see the trend of dying CD sales and stalling digital downloads continue,” he said. “Labels are going to have to feel the long-term pain before they start licensing as aggressively and liberally as they need to.”
Mulligan said the music industry had to come to terms with the fact that its raison d’être – songs – was no longer the product it had to sell. “Content is no longer king. Its throne has been taken by experience. Yet how many music services really focus on experience?” he asked. Certainly the digital experience could improve. Digital startups complain that getting publishers and labels to license new services, such as streaming sites, is fiendishly complicated. Rights holders – the music majors – insist they are making the deals, but say they are being held to ransom, asked to make cut-price arrangements with hundreds of unproven services that only offer nominal revenue.
The result is that new investment money is no longer chasing startups focusing on serving up songs online. Fed up that licensing music content is such a byzantine process, many startups and investors are beginning to focus on services around the edges of music, such as Songkick, which lets fans know when bands are coming to town, or MXP4, a social music gaming service.
A Great Becoming... 