Twit Dah Twit Dah Twit Dah

Twitter Data Portraits from alex dragulescu on Vimeo.

When twitter hit the scene I was very intrigued. I heard a lot of skepticism on the street but the idea of a pure and simple text based application will always be near and dear to my heart. The economy of a 140 character post is genius and lends itself to poetics. We're now in the age of micro - blogging, customer service, life observation, political reporting, activism, comedy, philosophy, weather reports, it goes on and on. Follow and be followed. Through the window of a page of collective steams there's a wonderful sense of now.

Twitter Tools

TwitThis
TinyURL has been around a long time and proved invaluable in wrangling unruly easily broken link that string on for miles. Thanks to TwitterThis, the marriage between TinyURL and Twitter, it's now easier than ever to post URLs to your twitter stream.

The FAVRD Lens on Twitter
FAVRD lists interesting things that show up on Twitter, based on the number of times an item has been declared a ‘favorite’.

TweetDeck
Organize and manage twitter feeds. TweetDeck, "aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces. Tweet Deck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets."

The We Feel Fine of Twitter
Twistori Enjoy!

Add an i-phone and a sprinkle of GPS
You get Twinkle

Connect your IM with Twitter
Excla.im is a nice app by developer and master of web presence, Harper Reed.

Voice to Twit
Jott transcribes voice messages into twitters.

The Whitney - Contributing to Community Discourse on Art by Sharing

I've been looking for new books on live art and sound this morning. An odd inclination considering the fairly intangible and the dynamic nature of these forms. Definitely challenging forms to find well documented in books.

To get started I looked up a Paul McCarthy show I saw this past summer at the Whitney in NYC hoping to find a nice monograph of his work or possibly a DVD. Instead, I was delighted to discover that the Whitney has begun to create editorial content of their past shows with commentary from the curators. The truly delightful part-- the video pieces are enabled for pass along, hence this post. Now I have a high-quality video document that I can share.

This find on the Whitney site also touches on an important discussion I've been participating in of over the years as a faculty member at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago about how the distributed content model can be utilized in the curriculum. Without taking a deep dive into facets of that discussion I'd just like to say that the world's collective, virtual library is in need of quality content on art and culture and it's a huge plus that it's enabled for distribution. There's plenty of teaser content promoting shows but this is the good stuff.

I hope art institutions and galleries will follow and enable their archives of documentation to be integrated into online community discourse. It will definitely help me in my job as an educator to inspire and inform students of contemporary work.

Check out Whitney Focus where they push content to the space where the masses are searching:

Whitney Focus on blip.tv

Whitney Focus on YouTube


'Whitney Focus features interviews with artists and curators, as well as other video-based content, offering a unique and up-close view of Whitney exhibitions and programs.'

Care for a stroll on the beach?

Cramer Krasselt & Big Spaceship launched thecoronabeach.com this evening. It's a beautiful and immersive experience. Check it out.

YouTube on the BoobTube

TiVo, the maker of popular digital video recorders, announced a partnership with YouTube that will deliver Web video directly to users’ televisions. Read on.

Google To Rollout QR Codes in Newspaper Ads

Google has found a way to bring newspaper advertising into the Google Analytics fold through the use of Quick Response Codes. The QR Codes are used in Japan and are taking hold in Europe but is the US ready for the technology? Can the wireless carriers, google and the newpapers agree on a platform and revenue model?

Using the codes has some important benefits:

Users don't have to type URLs into their phones to redeem coupons, read more about a product, or buy a product at an advertisers online store.

Most importantly for Google it ties into their analytics tools so newspaper advertisers can finally get detailed information on what ads work and which don't, when people are viewing them, where they're standing (GPS), etc.

Data Portability-- Trading Convenience for Privacy?

I've been reading up at the dataportability.org and the plan looks great. I can attest to suffering from data fatigue but I can't help but wonder about how privacy is managed as sensitive data and content is passed and accessed among a number of "other people's servers." Reading their FAQs it looks like they are somewhat open ended about privacy concerns:

Are there any disadvantages of Data Portability?

It would be foolish to say ‘no’. But very tempting. People are going to voice concerns about privacy, but soon enough the actuaries will insure our personal privacy much like they do every other aspect of our lives.

In the end, however, a sort of data banking system will emerge where truster 3rd parties will earn credibility and trust with data - and others will not.

I hope a viable privacy strategy surfaces from Data Portability members rather than expecting the actuaries to sort out the details after the fact.

I love the convenience and mobility that web-based services provide and I'm lured by the efficiency that data portability promises but in the back of my head I hear the words echoing, "It's not 'your space' at MySpace." This mantra applies to all web-based services.

With the web-services and application game growing so rapidly, new players entering the space everyday and the Goliath, Google, continuing to expand its reach offering more and more services for free (wink) it's becoming harder and harder to know which direction is up when it comes to privacy in the data cloud.

The connect-the-dots data game is becoming easier and easier for users and particularly service providers. One bit of news I find disconcerting in this area is that Experian, one of the 3 credit bureaus, recently purchased HitWise, a company that collects traffic data directly from ISPs. Yikes.

Collaborative Video Editing

I came across a very interesting partnership last night-- Kaltura and the New York Public Library. Kaltura takes posting video and creating playlists to another level by integrating fair use images from the NYPL digital collection that can be used in user generated collaborative video projects. This is an exciting step forward in the world of user generated content. I'd like to see Kaltura integrate with the open source database project, Freebase.


New York, NY, November 20, 2007– The New York Public Library and Kaltura, Inc., a pioneer in Collaborative Media, announced today that the organizations have joined forces to further enhance online rich-media collaboration. The New York Public Library’s treasure trove of 600,000 digital images can now be incorporated easily into Kaltura’s group video projects. The library’s digital collection includes a wide range of rare and unique images drawn from its research collections. These range from Civil War photographs and illuminated Medieval manuscripts to historic views of New York City, Yiddish theatre placards and 19th Century restaurant menus. Users can search, preview and add these library images directly from the Kaltura web site.

Interactive Video - Arcade Fire's Neon Bible

The Neon Bible from Arcade Fire is a beautiful example of what can be done with interactive video. The effect is mesmerizing. Enjoy!

Mobile Marketing Opportunities Utilizing Camera Phones, Quick Response Codes & Kameraflage

There are some relatively new technologies that are extending the communication possibilities available to camera phone users . Kameraflage is one which takes advantage of digital camera's ability to detect color information that our eyes cannot. Creating an opportunity to embed messages in clothing, video, billboards, whatever and wherever that can only be seen when viewing through a camera phone or other digital camera. The second is the use of Kaywa Quick Response Codes, like bar codes, but are used in conjunction with a camera phone enabled with a software reader which can decode the QR Code to reveal, text, URL, phone number, SMS. In the case of an encoded URL, once read it can then be launched in your phone's browser. Both technologies very interesting new ways of interacting and communicating and the possible applications seem limitless.

The Petshop Boys have just released a video called Integral which uses the Quick Response Codes as a way to engage and communicate with their audience. The lyrics of the song are concerned with civil liberties, privacy and surveillance in contemporary culture and they use the codes to extend the message by linking to information on the web. They also encourage people to download a PDF of Integral video frames in order to add their own QR Codes to share with others on youtube. How the Petshop Integral Video Works


When a digital picture of the QR Code to the left is decoded by the Kaywa reader it will reveal a link to this blog.

Make your own QR Code at Kaway QR Code Generator.

The internet is not flat.

I recently visited the new, very beautiful and video rich Stella Artois experience. The above screen grab is from Le Courage. Around the same time I had been thinking about the future of the virtual islands advertisers tend to create for brands and whether or not it makes sense to continue positioning a brand's communications in this way. Then I came across this image which intended to make fun of the danger of falling off the edge of the earth when Stella's brewers were first gathering hops in the 14th century. Despite Stella's new site being a technological achievement for a video rich branded experience I still couldn't help but wonder why Stella had spent millions of dollars to build an island on the Internet. In that moment the site itself seemed as equally anachronistic as the belief that the earth is flat.

There was a period of time in the near past when the Internet, for all intents and purposes, was flat. Websites functioned more as islands of isolated activity and interests. Portals pushed preferred content. Surfers bookmarked favorite virtual discoveries for a return visit. Search was quickly dominated by one engine and the act itself took on the engine's name.

Thanks to a resurgence of visionary thinking about what the Internet could be and perseverance through a stretch of post .bomb malaise interesting new web-based models began to emerge. Programmers and developers were rethinking the underlying protocols of the Internet and architectures of websites so that community could be fostered through revealing shared interests. Alongside this social networking evolution of the Internet a virtual arms race ensued fueled by google's unrelenting drive to shift computing to a web-based model giving way to a growing collection of interconnected gadgets, widgets, aggregators and web-based applications. Collectively these modular tools and services aim to free people from being tethered to any one computer. Program preferences, social networks, email, RSS feeds, dapper apps, bookmarks, blogs, music, maps, news, etc., are all virtually persistent and accessible through a variety of devices. Not just a desktop. Intrinsically, the web is a decentralized network. Along with the advances in how data, media and communication interchanges online there have been parallel advances in wireless, cellphones, GPS, PDAs and data storage that are enabling further physical decentralization. The obvious examples of this are working from home or remotely, getting directions from a WAP application on your cellphone, OnStar remotely unlocking your car door, using Twitter to broadcast to your friends up to the minute as to what you are doing.

Increasingly, users are creating dashboards of personal expression by configuring, tuning and arranging their FineTune player, weather.com gadget, mashable news feed and youtube play list widgets. This demand to be able to freely aggregate content has created a growing market for mash-up tools that enable anyone to grab and combine bits of code to create their own delivery "windows" for their blogs, myspace pages, youtube channels, whatever. Meanwhile, the networks a user participates in takes on a "knowing" of that user's interests and desires tirelessly spinning a web of meaningful connections to data, people, retailers and services. This is all made possible by the network members posting personal information, tags about themselves, their interests; posting media and streaming play lists that tap the world's archives of media and it's their continuous grooming, organizing and defining of these blocks of data with descriptive meta data that makes it possible to find whatever they may be looking for whether in their own collection or in the collections of others. Through the searchable ease of semantically organized pools of data and media we find relevance. People find one another following the clues provided to others in the profiles of our many affiliations. These networks facilitate discovery of commonality among others, a unique kind of comfort made possible through the visualization of easter eggs found in vast amounts of interconnected data. Individuals coalesce into micro networks and naturally proliferate into ever-refining communities. There's even a community for virtual personas and avatars created in Second Life, World of Warcraft and Sims at Koinup.

None of this is breaking news but it is worth taking a moment to note that the Internet has reached a certain level or critical mass of interconnectedness, of agency. The methods of communication are numerous and the number of platforms and frameworks are multiplying. It's a medium forever in flux teeming with possibility. Content distribution is non-linear and the masses rule by tagging, rating, posting and passing along the relevant content and disregarding the rest--tending the data garden in massively parallel. Individuals pull, filter and push content. It's an amazing time. If a brand can position a message or provide a relevant offering in this dynamic system of interconnected networks it will quickly spread and the message will have resonance because it is relevant.

Brands can no longer sit back waiting to see if their highly produced and locked-down bits of interactive communication living on an island are going to be discovered and blow-up into a viral hit. There are more interesting possibilities available to marketers now to leverage the viral potential of the web that offer consistent, and if deployed smartly, persistent returns. By enabling consumers to borrow and share bits of embed code (widgets, gadgets, photo loops, video players, custom tools, desktop apps, etc. that are integrated with existing networks and databases) to use wherever they choose the brand is then acting as a facilitator of culture and community that the consumers integrate with their browsing behavior.

Recently there have been some interesting branded applications that follow a decentralized model launched in Facebook—Gimme Love aims to extend 1-800 Flowers existing loyalty program and Lemondade Stand puts a new spin on e-commerce. It will be interesting to see how these applications fair. I imagine that they will find their way to the right people like capillary action through the Facebook networks.

Challa! 2.0 Embeddable IM, chat rooms and voicemail

Meebo





Say Now

SayNow is free, but your cell phone carrier may charge you for receiving text messages.

Rock You

Custom Lenses on Data and Social Networks

Stunning Nikon promotes Nikon's new D80. To seed the website they gave out 16 cameras to enthusiast photographers and thenfrom there they gave the public the opportunity to tag their Flikr posted photos with "nikonstunninggallery" so that their photos could be considered for the project.






We Feel Fine provides an emotional filter on the blogging world and takes it a step further by creating beautiful visualizations of the data. We Feel Fine Applet reveals its findings in 6 visualization movements: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

Developers are welcome to tap into the Weel Feel Fine API to create their own applications and visualizations of the emotive database.




Finetune Once upon a time ago mix tapes were limited to the contents of personal music collections. Now finetune.com users can tap into a large online archive to create and share custom playlists. The playlists can then be embedded into blogs, personal websites, mySpace, etc.