Licence to Roam

Kevin Anderson was speaking on a panel the other day about The Future of Newspapers. Regardless of what else is happening in the industry, if they keep doing things like this, I’m not sure they deserve a future.

NML had a conversation with a Daily Mail reporter, which turned into an article about how she, and many other women, are turning to ‘e-venge’ to get their own back on men. From her perspective, that is not what she was interviewed about, furthermore, they proceeded to make a lot of mistakes in what they did write.

But Natalie does have her own blog and in this case, can correct the 26 inaccuracies she sees in the article. Zoe also wrote about the Daily Mail in a Guardian piece and their attitude to content on the web:

“We generally take the view that blogs published on the internet have already been placed in the public domain by their authors and, in case of amateur writers, most people are happy to have their work recognised and displayed to a wider audience.”

Jounalists need to understand copyright, when they can use stuff and how they can use it. They also need to realise that people can challenge what they are doing using the same tools they are misquoting.

Maryam has a list of books from Library Thing - the list of the most unread books on people’s shelves. It’s actually a dynamic list based on tags, so the current list is not necessarily what she has recorded - but here’s my take on the current list.

Bold are the ones I’ve read, italics the ones I’ve started. Asterisks are ones I really liked.

Looks like I have some reading to do. What about you?

Yesterday, the Guardian ran a GameCamp in London, helped a lot by Sony who provided the venue at their 3Rooms building in Shoreditch. By shear co-incidence, there was a Gamecamp in Toronto on the same day, the difference being that the London one was based on the BarCamp premise of a self organising day for sessions whereas the Toronto one was a more traditional planned conference. I helped organise this, insofar I input a lot of advice on running BarCamps and not so much the running around finding venues and sponsors which was all down to Bobbie Johnson.

After a few false starts, we ended up at the Sony 3Rooms as a venue. This is not an ideal place, being open plan so sessions could overpower each other, but even so, it provided a perfect backdrop to the day. Decorated with all sorts of stuff and full of Sony products, they provided the venue, the wifi and the food, often the most difficult things to organise for an event like this, so many thanks to them. We also got some consoles from Nintendo (I saw lots of bowling taking place) and Microsoft but the most popular by far was Rock Band, provided by fellow organisers Dan and Adrian from Six to Start, which kept people playing all day. I even had my first go on the drums.

About 100 people turned up and after a brief introduction the grid was opened and the sessions started to fill up. Even though many people had not been to a barcamp type event before, the format was embraced. Sessions ranged from how to kill someone (really) to religion in games. As with all such events, the sessions were of mixed quality and attendance but what made the day for many was just the chance to connect and interact in an informal environment. I never made any sessions on the morning, running around checking all was fine, but went to a few in the afternoon, such as ones on future of ARGS, hacking hardware, designing a game based on Jane Austen novels. Interestingly I never got my laptop out, but did take photos.

The feedback in the pub later seemed to indicate that the day was well enjoyed - now we need to arrange another one!

Do we praise Sony for their brave move in making 250000 songs available for free listening on the We7 music site or condemn for making you listen to a 10 second ad before every song? I’m not sure, my first instinct is annoyance and frustration that they still don’t get it. The ratio seems a lot, say 10 seconds every 3 minutes, (so at 5.5%) but it’s not as much of your time as commercial TV in the US, at 18 mins in every 60, at 30%. But I think the frequency will get annoying very quickly and will probably the variety, or lack of it when it comes to the types of ads. This is a broadcast mechanism only, so it’s commercial radio without the presenters and only one companies songs, but the ad frequency is far higher than radio - so why listen? You can only listen on your computer and not placeshift to your mobile device. I wonder how many listeners they will get?

Last weekend, a friend suggested a trip to Barcelona for a long weekend - some of his friends owned a boat in the harbour there so we could have somewhere to sleep.

The boats somewhere in the middle there. Easyjet flights were booked and so I set off for 4 days in Barcelona. I’d visited the city back in 2002, so knew a little about it. I basically spent time wandering around, on foot and on the Tourist buses, taking photos and taking it easy.

The weather was not brilliant - one really good day, 2 days with rain, but it was a great break; i got a little bit of a tan and a few mosquito bites. One thing that was fascinating was the marina culture - there’s a lot of British people with boats there, many living their on a long-term basis, others popping back and forth from the UK. They hang around together on the boats and in the bars, not with the locals.

I love this city and have only covered a small amount. Got a whole lot more to do the next time I go

I went to a blogger screening last night of Forgetting Sarah Marshall. This was arranged via Twitter by Sizemore, with about 30 people turning up for the show. The film is made by the same people who did The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, 2 films I’ve not seen nor really had the desire to see, so I was not sure what to expect.

What I did get was a fun film that had me and the rest of the watchers laughing from the start. The basic plot is that Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), a TV star of the hit show Crime Scene (which means some funny parodies of CSI), breaks up with Peter (Jason Segal). Peter goes off to Hawaii to try and get over he, only to end up at the same hotel as Sarah and her new boyfriend Aldous Snow (Russell Brand). The story was nothing new, but it was delivered in a great way - and I so want to see the Dracula Puppet Rock Opera I loved it and if you want a laugh, go see the film. There’s a far better review over at Going Underground

One other great aspect of the night was getting a chance to have a good chat with people I’d only briefly met before, primarily londonfilmgeek and Imajes. I also met a lot of new people, such as Mecca and LJ (well, those are the people I have cards from - there were a lot more than that!)

On the digital marketing perpective, compare the US and the UK sites. The front page is different, with the UK site pushing Russell Brand to the front, but once inside it’s the same. Down to the fact that to see the 18+ version of the trailer, they still expect you to have a US driving licence!!!!

The BBC reports from Liverpool St station, where there was a live Rick Mob yesterday. For those who have not seen it, a Rick Roll is where you send someone a link and it goes to Rick Astley’s Never Going to Give You Up. It hit the peak (and maybe jumped the shark) with You Tube’s appropriation of the meme, where every video link on their home page went to the video.

It was only a matter of time before this was done live and yesterday it happened on a mass scale. Around 400 people turned up all bursting into song at 6pm. But the BBC report is too simplistic, not able to grasp that these are not ‘fans’ of Rick Astley, they are fans of the meme, of the collective action, of coming together with no organisation beyond public websites, performing and going away. The Station Freeze falls into the same bracket. It’s about doing stuff not about being fans of some artist. The BBC article completely fails to grasp that.

Bad video:

I’m getting really frustrated with Twitter at the moment and it has nothing to do with the service itself but to the explosion in use. Since the start of the month I’ve received 50 new followers, very few of whom I’ve followed back. Some of it, I’m sure, is because I’ve been on the service a long time and am often on the front page of the followers list due to my ‘membership number’. I’m pretty much on my limit of people I’m following, the limit of how useful the tool is. For me, it is not a broadcast tool, it’s not a popularity tool, it’s a way to connect with friends and ‘friends’ (those online acquaintances who I know virtually, or want to know or find interesting). So here’s some of the reasons I will and won’t follow you. Everyone has different reasons - which is why I don’t feel aggrieved if someone does not follow me, if I don’t fit into their reasons for use, why would they?

• I follow you if I know you personally - and know you have a Twitter account. Recently I’ve not gone out and tried to discover accounts of everyone I know; I’ll come across them eventually
• I follow you if I know you virtually, having had interactions online with you
• I follow you if I’m met you and you mentioned Twitter, or your twittering about an event we’re both at. (for example, I started following a few new people after Over the Air.) I tend to review these after a while to see if we still have shared interests
• I follow you if someone I already follow starts to refer to to you and your tweets look interesting. Again reviewed after a while
• If you start following me, I rarely return the favour if I look at your numbers and seeing you are following 100’s or 1000’s and very few following you. You’re either promoting yourself or just started on the service and think that is the way to do it. If I don’t know you, I won’t follow.
• However, of you start following me, it looks like you are trying to learn how to use the system and you are following connected people, then I’ll see what you have to say
• I have blocked 2 kinds of accounts. Obvious promotion accounts for things I don’t like and people who I feel are creepy (that’s usually men who are folling nothing but loads of women - they write in a certain way)
• I won’t follow promotion accounts in general, nor politicians, etc

There’s my list, that’s the sort of thinking I go through when I look at an account. It has to fit with what I can cope with and what I am interested in. If I don’t follow you after you connect with me, it’s not necessarily you, it’s probably me

Yesterday and today I’m at Over the Air, a mobile camp/conference. At some point it seemed a good idea for some friends to make this - Torchwood Sweded. From idea to on the screen in 9 hours.

Click To Play

Well, I’ve updated the blog to WP2.5 and I think it’s all working; if you see anything let me know!

Aleks Krotoski talking about the social graph.

• [missed the start] A social psychologist, trying to examine connections
• Pathways can be mapped across friends and people.
• Mass friending…impact the data and how the network connects.
• there are certain relationships and strengths of relationships. You can technological measure strength but difficult as you get to semantics.
• Adding arrows to the graph starts adding information. You can add lots of information, but then it all gets mushy in the middle.  Fuzzy and gooey and technologiest don’t like that. Then I come into the mix and go oooh psychology.
• So how do you measure strength…
  • I asked the social psy questions. list friends and rating of them..
• Based study on actual connection on a virtual world, on the qualitative assessment of relationships
  • Second half of study was looking at getting behavioural shortcuts for this
  • some evidence about how interactions acorss various channels indicates trust.  ie talking in public, IM in SL, outside of SL via email.
• Once you have all the information, all the messy stuff. I was looking at interconnected, closely related groups of people.  I’m interested in them…as they know each other. In the mess, many people, but don’t know others, they identify as something.  Look at a self-decared group to see if they are differently connected.  I did an island analysis, pulled out 4 groups of people who are extremely closely connected to each other.  There’s a lot of trust between each other.
• The point: There are social relationships which have psychologies that can;t ey be articualted through technolgy.  There are social flocking/network effects in these spaces - people move to where their friends are.   Whatever is happening…they’re capturing a lot of data about us.
• The data they are capturing is going to be a key discussion coming up

Tags: aleks krotoski, second life, barcampbrighton, social graph

Jeff Barr, from Amazon, was at BarcampBrighton as part of a long European tour, talking up cloud computing.

• apologised for going to be a little more commercial than others….but taken out the prices so it’s not a sales pitch!
• been at Amazon for 6 years.   Saw real potential, the first catalog service.  they started sending me out to conferences, I was good at it so they made me the evangelist and that’s what we do, me and 3 others. we have a wiki that people can request us.
• FOr the last 5 years we have been opening up the infrastructure - the product catalog, alexa and now infrastructure services. putting APIs out there, charging models around them. we try and make it really simple to get started. Sign up and away you go
• we offer access in a number of ways. a lot of what we have had to do over the years has to do with scale, have the infrastructures.  we offer that out to developers.   The developers can focus on the innovative and creativity part..we do the hardware.
• we rely a lot of input and feedback from developers. let me know what you like and don’t like. we write a trip report everyday to get the feedback to the company.
• Cloud computing- emerging trend. you look to the cloud to do stuff for you. You can treat it as infinite capacity, scale on demand.  With cloud computing, what were fixed costs turn into variable costs, where you pay for what you need.  You get possibly better staff to keep it up, get economies of scale.
• It can reduce your time to get things up and running,
• We have 6 different services - Queue, storage, elastic compute cloud, flexible payments,
• S3: object based storage…1b-5GB. private or public, redundant and dispersed. storage. US and Eu locations. (Ireland). EU added due to latency and data legal issues. We dynamically manage the copies of the data.   We are redundant enough. 99.99% availability goal. Can organise in buckets/ each bucket is a flat storage model. Can use it as a bit torrent seed. Complete API around it.  We have libraries for a number of different languages, that we have built or other developers.
• Elastic Compute Cloud: (not the ZX81): use Xen, take lots of machines, slice into small components, using a indi OS. when you have an instance it is yours while you pay. you get root level, elastic capacity,. There’s a lot of apps built on top as well for you to use. you get to scale in minutes.  Up and down control. We have 3 different instance types - small, Large and XL.  You have an Amazon Machine Image - which is your’s.  You put this in S3, then roll it out to the servers you need as you scale.  Full API into the cloud, you can start machines with one call.  Used in lots of scientific research. MapReduce and Hadoop, for engineering and science calculations.   For Fortune 500 companies, often for high impact, short term projects, as a dev host.  One example is the NYT archive, When it was a closed service, they re-rendered PDF from TIFF every time. They decided to use EC2 with Hadoop to pre-render everything.  They tested it..then ran it over 24 hours over 100 instances. Far better than having to do internally.  Some one has built EC2 Firefox UI - a browser addon that allows you to control the instances

Tags: jeff barr, amazon, s3, ec2

Adrian Hon from Six to Start talks about Games and Stories

• Creative Director at Six to Start, make ARGs, but not what I’m going to talk about it
• ARGs are games that use multiple media or media in interesting ways to tell a story. Email, twitter, newspapers, IM, GPS etc.
•  What I want to talk about is stories. A lot of the work I have been doing recently has been about telling stories in different ways.
• Interactive stories, a few ways of doing it.
  • story as reward. Told through cut scenes, no way to influence. no resemblance to actual gameplay. It’s the last thing you do as a game developer.   A lot of people play the game to get to the fun video. They are trying to hire writers to make these better, put still not brilliant. These are stories on rails. Like a book, completely linear.
  • story as experience. The story is told by gameplay, eg half-life. No cut-scenes..or rather cut-scenes integrated into game.   Story has to be written right from the start - mission design and level design are all tied in. Still on rails.
  • branching narrative. Choose Your Own Adventure. Gives an illusion of choice - often 2 choices, story line joins later.   Involves creating wasted content. Sometimes not subtle..really annoying.
  • PseudoAI. you can completely influence the story within certain parameters. Only example is Facade at the moment.   It got a lot of buzz. Natural language processing and AI, or an enormous amount of scripting (which Facade actually does). It 3-4 years and only lasts 15 minutes. Still a maze just more complex.   Don’t see it happening for a long while, until get really good AI.
  •  make your own story. No set narrative, but maybe a setting. eg Civilisation, the Sims. Sort of cheating.   Civ has a huge community, A lot of players write stories about their game.  A lot of people talk that this is the ultimate way of doing stories in games, The stories can be better than anything pre-written, in a book etc but normally they are not. The design may not be that good or oyu may not be that imaginative.   Requires great games design and not for everyone.
  • DM/PM - somewhat set narrative. D&D, ARGS. you know you are going to hit certain plot points.  There’s a human controlling the story in real time.  You have a group of players, people are guiding the story according to the actions of the players.  An issue is that it requires real-time response. Not really re-playable or scalable for personal experience.  It is sort of on rails.  Somewhere in between writing a game and improv. A different sort of skill set.
• With Penguin Books, they wanted to do a ARG, but not right for them - budget etc. I as looking at how you could design stories that aren’t games or CYOA, still on rails. But still interactive. We tell Stories. A different way of telling stories.  New ways of tellign stories that are only possible using the internet.  Six different authors and stories and 6 different ways of telling them, Some people have already started doing this…email mysteries.   It is not enough to have a really good idea or even to have a really good story, the writing has to be be really great. You need a story, good design and very well designed interaction and presentation. A graphic novel or a book have had years to be designed.   Working out a way to tell stories online that are still linear, with the authors is something that we are excited it.  One of the first one we are doing is based around Google Maps.  Follow the movements around the places.  I was worried it may be really gimmicky. We worked really hard with Charles Cumming, about where is he, what can he see, what is he thinking about. We animate the map.   Don’t think we have it perfect but we have some cool things.  The last story we are doing with Mohsin Hamid is another I’m really excited.  We are playing around with improvisation on writing.
• Q: how did the authors react?  One of them found them difficult to deal with, another was really easy, the first thing written was wrong and would not work…we had to rewrite but it was cool. Another was really receptive to feedback.  We’ll just have to see. In general they have been very good to work with. We know how to do the design, they know how to do the writing.

Tags: adrian hon, six to start, we tell stories, args

Jane McGonigal Keynote.

• The Lost Ring Video played. A call for help. Being going a week - are you in?
• going to talk yo you about alternate realities. instead of trying to make games more realistic, trying to make the real world more like games.  we need more alt. realities and the real world needs to be changed to function more like a game. it will start on a game designers perspective on the future of happiness. I work at the Institute for the Future. we look at interesting things that are happening today and imagine what the future will be like.
• Happiness - the last year has seen a lot of growth and attention to happiness. there has been the launch of a new field - positive psychology, to look at brains working well, the good stuff. what makes us happy, what is the best case scenario.  good books, one thing that really interests me, is the parallel between what makes us happy and the core tenants of game design.
• Last month, book Against Happiness came out. this is not about warm fuzzy feelings, it is about the trying to capture the best experience possible and using research to define it, how to make lives more worth living
• there are many metrics for measuring, to implement and insert happiness making things in your life. 
• what i wanted to ask if you think you re in the happiness business.?  I don’t think we are quite yet imaging product as happiness, but you will be in the business very soon.
• It’s coming faster than we think.
• Predictions - quality of life becomes a primary metric,. Positive psychology will be used to design tools; communities will form around different visions of a real life worth living.  Value will be defined as a measurable increase in real happiness or well being - the new capital.
• Happiness is the new capital. you need to be explicitly generating some positive well being for them. happiness does not mean what it used to..the internets has changed. Happiness is not a warm puppy. 
• researching for a while..so will distill the 4 key principles
  • satisfying work to do
  • the experience of being good at something
  • time spent with people we like
  • the chance to be a part of something bigger.
• nothing in the world gives you these things better than games,
• Multi-player games are the ultimate happiness engine.  as the rest of the community starts to catch up, then more of us will be in the business of this happiness venture/
• Signals for things changing? Some graffiti in my town…’I'm not good at life’. for a lot of gamers their experience of life is that it is not sufficiently designed for them to be good at. we can be really good at them, at games. In real life there is not the collaboration as there is in the games. you get visualisation in WOW of all the data, help that you use ingame.  you don’t gain speaking points for presentations in life. you gain points in game.
  •  So you have better instructions in games.
  •  Games are giving us better feedback all the time. we know how we are doing.
  • games have better community. shared rules and story give you better time.
• there is a global mass exodus..started in asia…towards virtual worlds and game worlds. I’m not critical of the mass exodus as I understand it. it is a rational decision to spend time and money in virtual worlds as those environments are set up better for them to succeed. there is a better chance for them to learn.  An MMO players spends 16 hours a week and that is average.
• we could make better and better online and console games to take what we have learnt from  there and do something in the real world.  for many people, quality of life, virtuality is beating reality.
• us here are lucky compared to many who play the games we do, real life is not as exciting as virtuality, it does not make them as happy. if I was as good at life as I was in my games, what would it be like.
• I think games are awesome..it is like we invented the writen word and we only write books. why are the games not in the real world, to use the games to navigate, meet people…
• ChoreWars  -experience points for housework.  you get to claim XP for chores.
• zyked - in alpha. exercise is the  target, give points and skills for working out
• Seriosity - for games at work. an overlay of virtual currency for work. you have to pay people to do things at work.  you can set priorities. it creates flows of virtual currency, you can watch it. you can see who is important, connections.
• Citizen Logistics - missions to help other people. knows where you are because of GPS etc, people can tell you what to do. mobile co-ordinations.,
• Good news as some people are trying to make the world into a game.
• What do they mean? to imagine the future it is important to look backwards at least twice as far as you are looking forward.  the best analogy is soap, in 1931. ‘Soap kills germs’ was a headline. games are like soap..we should install them in every building, in our pockets we are killing boredome….games Kill boredom, alienation, anxiety, depression,
• AR designers are trying to embed these happiness engines in everyday life.
• So, AR comes from Science fiction.  the community names it. it is not an alternative, it is an alternate way of experiences this reality, these are immersice experiences in this reality. one of the earliest OED entries for AR is 1978 - another way of experiencing existence.  they sit and exist in your real world, the game is there at the street corner.
• World Without Oil - won an award at SXSW. we told the players that we had run out of oil and they players had to run real life as this was true. we would give you updates in your area about the gas and process and impact on food etc. levels of chaos, misery etc.  you would know what the fictional parameters and you would document what it was like.  we had a soldier in iraq on LJ about what it would be like it would be like without oil.  people changed trucks, people were interviewing non players. it’s all archived. it lasted 32 weeks, it got really dark at times,  then the players got it together and kind of fixed things.  there;s a lot of info all still there. worldwithoutoil.org. still have people doing it.
• so how do args amplify happiness., they deliver 10 superhero capabilities to people who play.  10 kinds of happiness that match up with research.
  • mobbability. the ability to collaborate and co-ord really large scales. 
  • cooperation radar - the ability to detect who would make the best collaborator for any given mission.
  • Ping quotient measures ability to reach out and respond to other people in your networks
  • influency - the ability to adapt your persuasive strategies to individuals and media and environments….understand communities require a different motivation.
  • multi-capitalism - understand that people are trading in different capital systems.  so how do you get the different capitals trading?
  • Protovation - big companies get scared of this. rapid innovation, that failing is fun and that is when you are learning the most. fail rapidly and often…
  • Open Authorship - naturally to blogger age. comfort with giving content away and knowing it will be changed. it’s a design skill about creating something that won’t be broke by others changes
  • signal/noise management. he ability to handle noise and know which clue is relevant.
  • longbrading - the ability to think in much bigger systems - the zoom out.
  • emergensight - this is the trickiest. the idea that you can spot patterns as they come up, comfortable with messy complexity.
  • lost ring game is in 8 languages…a lot of content, players will create more. it gets really big, so how do you spot opportunitiy etc.
• they amplify our tendency towards the optimal human experience doing lots of research.
• so how can interactive systems amplify happiness?
• so where to next?
  • twitter is a good place to start, a natural interface.
  • the nike ipod. I love it. want to make a game.
  • planes - comms sytems. would love to play a game on a plane.
  • dogs..need a game to fix it….i feel guilty for playing. how about an MMO when you avatar is your dog. you have to get them all working together.
  • a friedd said - ‘my car is a video game’..a Prius using games
  • trackstick - records GPS every 5 secs and follows you. 
  • neuro detector, hook up to games. an idea for a game about people I don’t like and using my brain to destroy them
• the Lost Ring is for the Olympics. we are going to give people the opp to have an AR at the Olympics. a game that no one has played for 2000 years. thelostring.com. learn a lost sport and be an olympic champions.
• The important stuff  -
  • I believe that most of us will be in the happiness business, study it and be ready for when the public demand it
  • game designers have a huge head start. we have been trying to optimise human experience. 
  • AR signal the desire, need and opp for all of us who design interactive systems to redesign reality for real quality of life.
  • jane    at avantgame   com

• Questions. DOD/war…using gaming language. do games help prevent wars
  •    i would want to differentiate the types. games make soldiers easier to fight. that’s not the best direction for blurring the line between reality and games. it is extremely powerful ..do we design games to draw people to benevolent action.,  i think game devs should be trying to win noble prize by 2032. if we are playing games together than much harder to hate each other.
• to what extent that gaming etc are substitutes to things that are missing..
  • for some things..blogs can work better than conversation for many people. games work better for some people. not everyone who plays games has a life that needs fixing. I do worry that some gamers do replace, and it is something we should talk about. we need a real conversation
• interested in the idea we have more forms but a lot less social. ARGS narrative story and not necessarily with people.
  • a lot of the press for args are online…but they have a real history of real life stuff. ie SF0. all mission in real world. a lot of stuff going that way
• args..successful ones are productions, narratively intense. they are temp and they go away how do you…when do have continues things
  • business model needs to get fixed. it was seen as marketing and budgets fixed. tried as pay to play, lots of people trying to figure out new models.  it has to happen, i want my nike+ to run for my life
• I’m interested in the whole business model things….Macdonalds is one of the sponsor for lost ring..how do you reconcile that with the game considering the relationship with mcdonalds
  • we don’t actually have a sponsor, we had a group of people who wanted to get involved..IOC, McD, AKQA. it’s a different model, it’s like P&G when they invented soap. I’m thrilled to be working with orgs that are big enough to get the game in may places. it’s going to be tricky to walk the line…where do you get the money,.it is moving more to TV…it is the ecosystem…
• i played the game to reclassify books.and when i go to bookshops I do the same things. is it changing how people look at the world (ministry of reshelving)
  • its one of the most powerful things…we had 40k people doing this.  I love Tombstone Holdem, we designed games that allowed people to play serious with tombstones…
• SF0 does a geat job of balancing creativity and real life..how do you script vs openness
  • it’s a combination. if you are trying to solve world problems, you need a bit of a harder top down approach at the beginning
  • The x2 project, with scientists, playing games about future of research and science. we use real world science scenarios. our players inhabit the AR. we guide it with a story, we are interested in a particular reality. do research first, get people to solve the problem, then let them figure out of you are right or wrong.
• The Game - pick up artists…evolutionary pyschology…people are gaming each other in life…
  • it is important to define the game you are playing. any game is collaborative as you are playing the same rules. in real life is they do not know there is a game playing then a problem. AR announce them selves as a game, it is better. rules are explicit.

Jane’s post on the speech, also Slides on Slideshare

Tags: jane mcgonigal, args

This is about Slorpedo - a mixed reality game in Second Life

• based on an Icehouse game Torpedo. Difficult to play in real world, due to complex rules. so fits well with a virtual world
• built at HackDay London, uses reacTIVision
• How it used to work - runs on laptop (server), interacts with SL, via some kind of HTTP, something inbetween - which as written in Processing.
• Source code lost….URL was hard coded, they did not know the magic numbers.  Tried to re-write it Python yesterday. Approx 60 linrd, in Amazon S3 data,
• Now - webcam : reactivision : PythonScript : Amazon : SL scrip : game in SL
• Interesting intersection of technologies.
• You put your pieces on the board in real life.  Using one hand. aim the subs at the other subs. First one on with all on board, yells stop. Then it switches to SL, where the subs fire all their torpedoes to see who wins, the one with the most subs left wins.
• Q?; could you play across countries?   Yes, but you’d have to have projector…and how do you say stop?

A rally fun session with people slapping down fake submarines in real life to have them translated into fake submarines in Second Life

Tags: secondlife, slorpedo

A group panel about portable data and information

• Jeremy Keith
• Microformats - semantic web
• hCard is probably the most popular. there is an existing format called vCard. hCard is a 1:2:1 mapping of vCard. Use of vCard info on a web page. same details as in your address book/phone.
• the idea behind microformats is not that you publish new data, but you have existing stuff in a format that adds semantic fidelity.
• there are converters out there, eg that take hCard and change to VCard for desktop stuff
• xfn is another one - a proto-microformat. Tantek Celik/Matt Mullenweg etc. they looked at what was existing and made aformat around it. It was about links and blog rolls. to add more data to that list. It used the ‘rel’ attribute. There are about 14 different values defined. It’s always current relationship.
• It’s simple to publish. A chicken/egg cycle - to get tools to use/parse you need to get people publishing it, to publish it you need tools to use. So making it really simple gets over the problem as there’s no hardship in publishing.
• The most important Rel value may be rel="me" to link to all your own bits across the web and back to your bits.

• Chris Heilman
• Google Social Graph API allows you to track the relationships. Yahoo is also starting to analyse the hCards etc
• With companies starting to index microformats, other companies, enterprise systems etc, will start to add things.
• On the publishing side, if you have a database, contacts etc, put this stuff in and get ready. This is what we have done in Yahoo for the last 2 years.
• one challenge is if you write lots of things with microformats, is that the data is ‘proprietary’ and publishing in microformats inpacts the commercial viability as the data can easily be scraped. It reduces buy in from the management, so you have to think aobut how you do it.
• Anything that helps search engines mans people will try and game it to get better results. So use of microformats by mainstream search engines have to consider this, the problems of spammer etc. It’s nice to publish but there are a lot of problems in consuming that need to be fixed.
• JK challenged that it is a problem of microformats that you can’t establish trust - that it is a problem of the web as a whole, not the format. It’s the problem for any publishing format. There are secure protocols…saying the format is a problem is wrong. If you want to establish truth and trust..then the techs you need to look at are OpenID and SSL etc.

• Aral xfn - expresses relations in present tense but we publish it. so it may go out of date. There is a temporal dimension to relations. how do we takle dynamic relationships?
• JK: it is publishing in general - what you wrote a year ago you may not believe it anymore.
• Aral - xfn and microformats are one aspect of the social network. other things are OpenID, OAuth etc

• Tom Morris - FOAF
• FOAF is an RDF vocabulary. built back in 2000.
• Allows you to describe relationships between people, sites, documents, orgs etc
• Available on lots of networks, such as LiveJournal
• There is one relationship property -’knows’. it used to be knows, knows well and friend, but it caused problems. got rid of the other 2
• It can be parsed as XML and reuse. You can parse it as RDF as well.
• But most people don’t write in that sysntax, they can do html. But GRDDL allows you to describe in RDF things that you are already doing on a web page. It automates the process of reading what you have published.
• Quite widely implemented, and getting easier to parse. Most programming languages have a way to to this and there are tools being built on top of it.
• Trying to make it easy…a mesh up..getting data and putting it together in one place and ask questions of it.
• ARal so whe do I use XFN and when use FOAF?
• TM: use XFN as much as you can. Why use FOAF, if you were representing some data was unique, which no one else uses it. Use html as well.

• Aral - so why are people here? Why are you interested in portable social network?
• OpenID: a way of identifying people. Passwords that have to change every week are a weak link. OpenID means that you are an URL.
• One of the issues - usability is a problem. We’re probably OK entering an URL but it is not very intuitive for the general user. You enter the ID, it redirects to the OpenID server, you add usename and password (which you have to remember). And that is the problem.
• ClickPass is something from Peter Nixey that hopes to make it simple. You create an account and you can log into the web.
• It creates a page to let you login into all your places - eg a homeplace to go to first. It uses Open ID to manage it. It happens in the background - you don’t get a change of context, which as a user is important. There is no jarring change of context if logged in clickpass.
• JK: all of these things are solving small problems, they add to each other and don’t ness tread on each others toes.
• But what about situations where you want to import a SN, or want to see which of your friends are on a SN. A lot of people do this, others freak. If you do this, part of the reason is you are teaching people to be fished….the other reason is you give something to your accounts as you. That is far more dangerous - allow themselves to be logged in by someone else is bad. It is better to reduce access. So OAuth is a technology that aims to reduce this.
• There are a lot of SN that do not expose your information on a public site but you need to be logged in, eg email contacts. There are a few solutions to the problem..every big web company came up with their own solution. Google has their option, as does Yahoo etc etc.
• OAuth is the way to try and standardise the way this is done. Any new website should be doing this standard API that can talk to most of the SN without asking for your password. (showed FireEagle example)
• Aral - so how nimble is it, how does it impact user?
• At the moment it is ridiculously complicated to implement APIS for every network, I have to do the main ones. So if we can agree on the standard it makes it a lot easier for developers
• Alex - my interest is from a social networking POV. people connecting is pretty important for every one. the context and others brings people to a space and keeps them there. So why is portability important? I have a theory that online games, those are forms of networks.
• In some of the situated social networks, like WOW, then there is a move to look at these things, looking at OpenID, etc, where there is no straightforward way of stating relationships, people want to take skills and bling and relationships to the next space etc.

I decided last night to come down to BarCamp Brighton, when I saw there were some tickets made available.  A friend was travelling down so I got a lift straight to the campus and arrived just as it was kicking off.  The usual introductions were made and everyone did the traditional standup and give three tags - it seemed about 40% of the attendees had never been to a barcamp before.

My intention here is to attend stuff I know nothing about, avoiding any marketing or social media sessions.  So far, I’ve suceeded.

• Session 1: Flash and Particles  A badly prepared session that started off poorly, with ramblings about the company website.  It got better as it went through, with some interesting details abut the maths behind the particles and how to apply them which I could have heard a lot more about if time had not run out.
• Session 2: RDF for beginners Tom Morris gave a revised presentaiton from his original from Semantic Camp.  I enjoyed this as it was clear about how to use RDF, with some concrete examples of the code.  I’m still unsure about the why though, later Tom admitted that use cases still need to be developed.  A list of resources are available at http://icanhaz/swtutorial

Tags: barcampbrighton, barcampbrighton2, flash, rdf, tom morris

The final part of the excellent keynote at SXSW today was a dance…

Click To Play

Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Tara Hunt, Hugh MacLeod, David Parmet

•  DP: Brian Oberkirch put this together - he asked 2 questions. How to market into community without being too marketer like. And how do you build a community around what you are doing?  What does ‘no marketing’ look like? How can we use social media?
• DS: None of this is about tools or technology, but is about the customers.  Here to talk about some of the subtleties, not about the tactics. It’s about marketing, customer service, product development. the marketing silo needs to be changed, why are they afraid of the opps. This is not telling or selling, this is being in the trenches.
• CH: what is really bugging me right now is the number of people who are saying to me ‘build me a community’ but this does make a community, it is the interpersonal connections that make it. Social media is not new media, it changes how we relate to each other. You have to shift the way you think about participation. have to change mindset from stop trying to sell me to help make me buy.
• JO: I do a lot of research on this, such as online community best practices.  it was clear that the ones that let go and let their customers take charge have the thriving communities.
• TH: "marketing is the price you pay for creating mediocre products". this was a big part of the reason for this panel. [history of her and move and Citizen agency] Looking at social capital - relationships and reputation.   It’s all about whuffie in these communities, what you can give away.
• CH: you need a patronage model, where there is money, in corps, it needs room to do it in there. there has to be a genuine spirit of giving in there .
• TH: we talk about doing things that are good for the world alongside the product that will sell.
• HM: [wine, blogging stormhoek story.] Social objects help drive conversation. when we talk about community, when a corporation talks about it, it’s liek a lever they think they can pull, which is not there. you have a bunch of people who use and talk about the product. they are not the company community.
• DP: the concept of giving it away for free is a powerful one, that scares the companies away.  Have used Stormhoek as an example, suggesting that companies do this.
• DS: there are lots of companies for 100s of years…this is a new skillset that is an art rather than a science.  if you are at a small company, where you have a certain amount of control, then you have to get out of the ivory tower. get out to conferences, find the edges.  Larger companies have the problem that they only listen to the complainers, how about listening to the people who love you.   Why do small companies put up an FAQ? why not bring in people who can answer the questions? this is marketing and customer support. get out and flatten it.
• JO: you can give away things for free, I give a lot of my knowledge for free, make people nervous.
• HM: James Governer, gives away 90% of ideas, sells 10%. he can only execute on 10% and it works/
• TH: you can tell people you have knowledge and they will see what they are talking about.  It’s a smart calling code.
• CH: it’s the because effect. Will It blend gives away entertainment.
• HM: there has been a paradigm shift from message to social gesture and that cannot be faked.
• TH: a lot of traditional marketing aims to do a generic spread of message. you throw the net out wide and hope to catch as many. with stormhoek HM saw a great opportunity, of people who were doing a lot of events - its niche, opportunities,
• CH: it’s not the message, it’s not the brand logo, it’s what it represents. We have to think about the human connections, about being of service to fellow human.

Audience Questions

• Q: JO - when selecting brand evangelists, how?  And HM - what about Cooler?  A: JO: tools to find them, who is talking online, goign into communities, finding out who is talking the most, customer support forums. go to brand monitoring companies, who do good job of mining the whole place. the main point is that you can find the people, great people to start with.   HM: Kula is South Sea shells that had a story. Talking about the iphone with Tara, what matters is that tara is a friend, we talk about shared stuff. stories are key. tech is still about socialising around objects.  DS: this is about a cultural shift - getting out. Traditional marketing..is not a relationship. in a relationship you can’t ignore until you have something to say. giving away things for free, the whuffie payback comes back way later. this impacts all lines of your business.
• Q: I understand giving away the small things. what about the big stuff?
  • A: CH: audi are doing a great things. doing a lot of things around the experience, the educational classes, spa treatments.
  •  TH: some people give amazing support and service. 
  • DS: you have to break it down to smaller segments, go local. 
  •  HM: great brands have lots of little small brands, like starbucks. it’s not just about the big thing, it’s all the small things. 
• Q: how do you actually get some money in the short term? (ref a movie, document)
  • A: HM: put half out there, and if people want to learn more they will buy it. 
  • TH: start telling the story, getting people to start telling his story.  
• Q: giving away for free reduces perceived value?  what’s the rebuttal. 
  • A: DP..when selling things, I had a client for selling to teenage girls. they wanted to ‘go viral’. I had to remind them they can’t the product can only go viral.  I suggested we find people to talk about it.  My response is not to go to an intermediary. go to the customers.  put it to the people who would actually use it. 
  • TH: it’s not giving products away for free only. It can be the things around it, the experience.
  • DP: audi, free wifi, breakfast, things to do
  • DS: now everyone has a different perspective on audi. it’s nuanced. 
• Q: can you distill this into a takeaway?
  • HM - social objects ate
  • TH: turn it around, be part of the community, listen, embrace the chaos, find your higher purpose
  • CH: passion for people and product
  • DS: technology changes, human behaviour doesn’t. nothing replaces listening, get out of tower.
• Q: I work for PETA and what we give away for free is our message? is that annoying?
  • CH: saying the only thing you have is a message is wrong. you are connecting to a higher purpose, to a felling.
  • TH: I don’t remember the emails, shows that you have not connecting.
  • DS: are you giving them something they be interested in or just what you want to sell. Think about you are only talking to these people when you need them - cultivate the connections you have.
• Q: I work for Kaboom. A lot of the things you have suggested we have done and it has not taken off as we hoped. now I have all these goals I need to reach. What can I take back to explain that this takes time.  The vision is to make a great place to play for every child in america.
  •    HM: they don’t get it…
  • CH : it’s not campaigns, it’s programmes, you have to change the mentality. get qualitative results, people who have heard online and show the stories.
• Q: Why are you doing this - because you believe or is it a fad?
  • JO: marketing does not exist to hide shitty products, there is a reason.
  • CH: marketing has become associated with sales as opposed to matching product with user.
  • DP: it’s about stories and relationships, helping them work out what they are doing. it’s been a fun ride.
  • DS: it’s a personal mission, not a fad. I’m not a marketer, but a customer advocate. I love that everyone has a voice,
  • CH: it’s about what is your intention.

HM - a story without love is not worth telling

Tags: hughmacleod, darvidparmet, chrisheuer, tarahunt, jermiahowyang, deborahschulz

discussing the aspects of Sexual Privacy online.   Violet Blue, Jonathan Moore, John d’Alderio, Zoe Margulis, Jason Schultz

• VB: fetishes…online allows you to seek this even if you did not seek in real life, but could cause issues. online can be a healthy way to let people express their fetish. Sexuality and sexuality online calls into question our awareness of the outside world and privacy. if people knew how unprivate it was, they may think differently. It’s personal information in a public space, but they may not be aware of it.  Example - Craigslist Experiment, (Justin Fortuny) putting an ad for hard core dom. Response to ads were posted online.  There have been copycats…griefers gaming online sexual identity.  The language used in the ad was very extreme, it was clear to the educators that the original user was not aware of the terms of the scene, that they were playing with their gender identity.   Other examples are a police officer who was a swinger who got fired for having a site with his wife.
• Moore - has built and worked with SN, thinks about privacy and security of sites. d’Alderio - editor of Fleshbot. Margolis - girlwithaonetrackmind, Schultz - at EFF. to talk about law and how it handles it.
• JS: Privacy Rights. (in US)
  • Sexual Activity, 14th Amendment -due process, autonomy, liberty.  Griswold vs Connecticut 1965 (contraception), Roe vs Wade  1973 Abortion;Lawrence vs Texas 2003 (home sodomy)
  • to Speak/Associate, 1st amendment. The Chilling effect. Watchtower bible 2002 - registration requirements.  Doe vs Cahill 2005 Subpoenas and disclosure of person; NAACP vs Alabama 1958 membership lists.
  • Right to Search/Read. Sweezy vs New Hampshire, 1957. about being private about research and reading.
  • Right to info privacy, 4th and 5th amendment. Katz vs US 1967 wiretapping; Smith vs Maryland 1979 third-party phone records. when third party has the info then there is no need to protect you.
  • right to be left alone. Sipple V Chronicle 1984. lots of state laws,
  • law has been built up based on fear of government.
  • so who owns info, is it provate/public, when are you newsworthy, can you ever go back if your info is out there?
• VB: John, what do you think is the most common mistake?
  • JD: my take is that there is no sexual privacy.  privacy is an illusion. we are at the beginning of exploring this medium, in the flush of expressing ourselves is the risk of being found out. Sooner or later it will come out. but we still deserve the right to be left alone. we find ourselves negotiate this daily. A few weeks ago, there was a sexual ‘celebretant’, had uploaded videos to X-tube, was building up a reputation, we got a tip that was posted on Fleshbot, he had made no effort to conceal his identity, he had 3-4 clips, but had the same account details on YouTube, same username. Some blogger had sent a tip. But then he got emails from ‘him’ asking for the post to be taken down as there were lots of people watching his videos and it was causing him problems. Someone had contacted his parents. So, does he have aright for us to take the material down? We decided he did not - he was not polite about it.  There are ways to cloak your id to make it more difficult for people to find out who you are but he did not take any of these steps. 
  • JS: what if it had not made the rounds and had minimum views?
  • JD: if you are making that step and making no attempt to hide who you are..you should expect it.  The case of the Walmart masturbator, videos on X-Tube. It was on Fleshbot and Consumerist, then on Digg., then CNN and local news. it blew up. he wa wearing a university cap and said where he was doing it, he made it easy for people to find him. He started to receive death threats,
• VB: now I want to bring in the personal perspective that Zoe brings. You simplywrote stories, you did not put photos up, so how did it leak out?
  • ZM: I don’t think I’ll ever know. I got a bunch of lowers, congratulating me on the book with my name.  I freaked out, as I was anonymous. They made me lean out as they had a photographer.   Then I started getting phonecalls on all my phones, I’m ex-directory, not on electoral role, no idea how they got the information. Then the tabloids descended, my neighbours and family were harrassed. My life feel apart, I lost my job, I was told I was not wanted. My IMDB entry has been defaced, my name was removed from the film, All I did was write about sex.
  • VB: what has changed for you, now people know who you are?
  • ZM: The blog is not what it used to be. I was 100% honest, but tried to hide identities of people I wrote about.  I felt violated, I had my finger over the delete button all the times. I could not continue to write the same way as before I had the freedom of anonymity. People ask me to not write about them. I don’t want their lives to be exposed. It is about what I’m up to. I miss blogging so much.
  • JS: would you do it again?
  • ZM: I would lie to all, not tell anyone I was a blogger, I would not trust publishers, I would hide.
• JM: it is hard. there are technologies like Tor but they are really hard to use. There are 2 ways of screwing up. You can do something stupid (and you have to know what stupid is) or someone you know can do something stupid.  Security is hard - I know of many holes in social networks.  Social Engineering can get the information. You can’t trust other people. Services will hand over information. You can’t even trust yourself.  Everytime you send an email from hotmail (or other webmails) then the IP address gets sent.  It’s like a postal address. You are exposing inforamtion you don’t know you are exposing. As soon as you make one mistake, you tie yourself to that information. It is so difficult.
• VB: so I want to know, what you think the greatest challenge is, or provides the greatest risk?
  • JA: if you take it as a given there is no such thing as privacy then you can plan your actions accordingly.  We don’t use adult performers real names. It’s down to establishing the boundaries of the right to be left alone.  The internet is mob rule, look at average YT comments.
• VB: Zoe, what kind of advice?
  • ZM: expect to lose your anonymity, be cautious.