Code Creating Culture
I hate self-indulgent posts as much as anyone but new news may be slow in coming this week. While there’s lot of note worthy stuff taking place I’ve got multiple deadlines making me miserable. Where’s that lotto ticket?
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What is User Generated Media? That’s just a fancy phrase the business suit folks use to describe remix culture (apparently our moniker has the troublesome connotations of young adults with Pokemon backpacks going nuts to repetitive music). David Teten, from the Virtual Handshake blog has his notes of where the opportunies are with ‘user generated media’:
* Hardware – someone has to make the cellphones with video logging, iPods to serve as portable recording studios, and hard drives to store it all
* Advertising Platforms – Google Adsense wouldn’t be much if it weren’t for all the blogs, bulletin boards, and vanity sites out there. With more content comes more places to advertise
* Personal Services – with the explosion of content new sherpas are needed to guide people to the good stuff. These people are the filters for their communities. They also serve as personal consultants because their domain expertise, while narrow, is second to none because they are the domain.
* Software but not like you’d think. Hosted CRM, billing, blogging, podcasting… etc. Just as there is a long tail of content there will also be a long tail of small software providers tailor made to each niche producer’s needs.
Where do you fit?
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Factory Joe[/ur] is just the latest to sing the praises of [url=http://www.openid.net/]Open ID; a completely open, distributed ID management system. Given the proliferation of account logins on the web a standard ID system is well past due. The goals are straight forward:
Why?
* A lot of other distributed identity systems aren’t actually distributed, having one or more parts centrally controlled.
* Logging in to a dozen websites every day is lame.
* Sites that let you enter your name/URL/email/etc and show it without verifying you’re you are lame.
* You should be able to keep one (or more) identities over time that stay fixed, regardless of what services are still in existence and you still use a few years down the road.
It seems very cool – I’m still not exactly sure how the seperation of trust from identity will work (check out the OpenID site for more details) but I look forward to playing with it.
Anyone else have experience with online identification systems? How does this compare?
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Elizabeth Stark has penned a brilliant essay regarding the changing face of the creative-consumer relationship.
The very heart of this revolution rests on a simple concept: semiotic democracy, or the ability of users to produce and disseminate new creations and to take part in public cultural discourse. You’ve all probably seen a YouTube video where someone is lip synching to a song or heard a mashup of two popular tracks, yet this new form of cultural creation goes far beyond faddish remixes or home videos. Users are by and large developing and posting their own “original” creations as well. (Original may be a misnomer, but let’s suffice it to say that examples such as blog posts, photographs, and songs written by a band are not blatant remixes.)
Anyone can now become a creator, a publisher, an author via this new form of cultural discourse, a platform to publish to the world at large that grants near instant publication and access. While the concept of, say, being able to post or comment on one’s blog may seem mundane at this point, if I had told you fifty years ago that you’d be able to publish something so that almost anyone, anywhere could read it instantly, it would have sounded like something out of a science fiction model.
A refresher for some or a nice concise introduction to the remix culture movement for others.
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Microsoft and Creative Commons… They go together like pickles and peanut butter… or so I thought. The friendliness between the two, first seen during the Creative Commons fundraising drive continues. Today Microsoft announced a new tool for Office users which lets them apply Creative Commons licenses from within the applications themselves.
From the press release:
“The goal of Creative Commons is to provide authors and artists with simple tools to mark their creative work with the freedom they intend it to carry,” said Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of Creative Commons. “We’re incredibly excited to work with Microsoft to make that ability easily available to the hundreds of millions of users of Microsoft Office.”
“It’s thrilling to see big companies like Microsoft working with nonprofits to make it easier for artists and creators to distribute their works,” said Gilberto Gil, cultural minister of Brazil, host nation for the Creative Commons iSummit in Rio de Janeiro June 23 through 25, where the copyright licensing tool will be featured. Gil, who will keynote at the iSummit, has released one of the first documents using the Creative Commons add-in for Microsoft Office.
Bravo to Microsoft! I haven’t been able to find the plugin yet but I’m guessing it will be available after iSummit. Bizairrely enough, there doesn’t seem to be the equivalent plugin for Open Office. Huh?
There have been a couple of newsworthy items in the realm of IM communications this week. First off, Yahoo has opened its Yahoo Messenger network to developers. As reported by Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch, plugins can be created in widely used languages like javascript and/or flash.
While pulling flickr pictures into chat via a custom plugin is neat I’m more excited about the Second Life/AIM bridge created by the Electric Sheep Company. What makes Second Life valuable is not the number of baubles in-world. Rather, its the connections with existing technologies and communications workflows which enable productivity. Said another way I should have not have to be a Second Life account holder to communicate with the Second Life audience (and vice versa). It’s just bits – let people use whatever app they’re comfortable with and allow technology to invisibly do the translating. The value is in seemless communication where before there were technology barriers (both intentional and accidental).
Bravo to the Sheep!
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By way of Jerry at Electric Sheep comes word of an ingenious way of co-authoring space within a virtual world.
http://mutednoise.com/pics_site/collaborativeauthoring.jpg
The box with the green arrows can be incrimentally moved around the park (a Google Map of Landing Lights Park in Queens, NY, paved over with pixels in Second Life) and used to place pre-made park items like trees, swingsets, and pathways. Arrangements of objects can be saved, shared, reloaded, and edited.
Up until this point I have never seen easy and intuitive ways of collaboratively building within Second Life. Scripting within the world has a learning curve and been a solitary endevour. Using a tool as pictured opens up a lot of neat possibilities.
As an aside I upgraded my video card over the weekend (64MB NVidia card to a 256MB ATI Radeon). I can’t believe the difference it made while tooling around Second Life. On one hand I’m happy – a number of the rendering speed issues aren’t deficiencies in the game world but can be solved with beefier hardware. On the other hand that means that Second Life can’t ’scale down’ to the majority of computer users (mothers that play solitaire, businessmen with laptops… anyone who is not a power gamer with a fancy card).
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I’ve been a fan of Bono’s One Campaign. It’s a group that is attempting to address some of the world’s largest problems: debt, aids, and poverty. Rather than take a ‘think of the children’ approach they’ve wisely built a goal-orientated campaign based on facts. There’s also a neat viral aspect to it all (hey, I’ve been there and bought the T-Shirt).
Last week, however, One.org unveiled a new site with updated Web 2.0 jazz, powered by Yahoo.
As part of Yahoo for Good Scrum, a company program that lets its employees spend up to three months away from their regular responsibilities to support a charitable cause, Yahoo also integrated One.org with a One group on its Flickr site, where organization supporters can add their photo.
If you’ve never checked out One.org there has never been a better (or easier) time to do so. Check it out!
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I’m pleased as punch to announce the posting of mutednoise’s first official podcast. In it I interviewed Jerry Paffendorf, a member of the Electric Sheep Company and frequent contributor to Second Life. As readers know I had cooled considerably on the game world. In the interview I take Jerry to task on some of these issues – his responses are good ones and worth a listen:
James Joyce, love him or hate him, wrote some interesting (and long) works. His death in 1941 left behind a number of works – among them ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ – regarded as some of the finest of the 20th century. However, because of their ‘recent’ nature and a particularly stubborn grandson, Stephen, scholars are loosing access to the literary master. From author D. T. MAX writing for the New Yorker:
Stephen has made his presence felt on a much broader front. Most prickly literary estates are interested in suppressing unflattering or intrusive information, but no one combines tolltaker, brand enforcer, and arbiter of taste as relentlessly as Stephen does, and certainly not in such a personal way. In 2003, Eloise Knowlton, a Joycean and a novelist, asked permission to publish a fictional version of “Sweets of Sin,” the risqué novel that Bloom picks up for his wife, Molly. (“Ulysses” offers only a glimpse of its contents.) Stephen wrote back, “Neither I nor the others who manage this Estate will touch your hare-brained scheme with a barge pole in any manner, shape or form.” When turning down a request for permission from an academic whose work was going to be published by Purdue, he said that he objected to the name for the university’s sports teams: the Boilermakers. (He considered it vulgar.) Michael Groden, a scholar at the University of Western Ontario, spent seven years creating a multimedia version of “Ulysses,” only to have Stephen block the project, in 2003, with a demand for a permissions fee of one and a half million dollars. (Before Stephen controlled the Joyce estate, such fees were nominal.) Groden’s sin was to have praised Danis Rose’s edition of “Ulysses” as “confident and controversial,” in a reader’s report for Rose’s publisher; he had also helped the National Library of Ireland to evaluate some Joyce drafts prior to acquiring them. “You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you’ll never quote a Joyce text again,” Stephen told Groden.
Joyce’s works won’t enter the public domain until 2012, at which time the mysteries and puzzles that are in them will be free for remixing into a whole new slew of works. However, given that much of the very precious unseen material is in Stephen’s hands there is grave cause for concern.
at a Bloomsday symposium in Venice, Stephen announced that he had destroyed all the letters that his aunt Lucia had written to him and his wife. He added that he had done the same with postcards and a telegram sent to Lucia by Samuel Beckett, with whom she had pursued a relationship in the late nineteen-twenties.
“I have not destroyed any papers or letters in my grandfather’s hand, yet,” Stephen wrote at the time. But in the early nineties he persuaded the National Library of Ireland to give him some Joyce family correspondence that was scheduled to be unsealed. Scholars worry that these documents, too, have been destroyed.
What Stephen seems to label as ‘intrusions into family privacy’ are really excuses to white wash critical thought on a man’s work. What is happening here is the opposite of remix culture – this is making a work untouchable and absolute, immune for reinterpretation. Long time readers recogonize a parallel with the Martin Luther King, Jr. estate and their money grubbing over a national treasure they happened to inherit (King’s speeches). This is an example of how a culture dies. Dramatic? Perhaps. True? Absolutely.
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