Scribd.com is offering a rather interesting online publishing service that lets users upload portions of their blogs, podcast transcripts, documents and other material using a proprietary system. They claim over 17 million people a month view documents on Scribd.

What is Scribd?

(skribb’d) is a free, web-based self-publishing platform and document exchange community that enables anyone to easily publish, distribute, share, and discover electronic books, documents, presentations, newsletters, photo albums, and more.

Scribd provides:

1. A simple yet powerful method of publishing and distributing your own electronic books and documents in a variety of formats - for free.

2. A vibrant, global community of eager publishers, readers and collaborators that offer great content and constructive feedback.

3. A massive, perpetually growing library of open, community-generated and -published content.

4. A secure, flexible private document managment system.

Scribd for Professionals

http://www.scribd.com/platform/home

iPaper is a document viewer built for the modern web. It’s the first full-featured viewer that runs in a web page with no additional software. Using iPaper on your website offers the following fundamental benefits:

• Increased traffic to documents
• Enhanced security
• Monetization of your documents with contextual ads.

The Scribd Platform

This provides a set of tools and documentation that allows you to easily integrate iPaper and other Scribd features with your own website. There are three ways to integrate iPaper with your website:

• QuickSwitch - Convert all of the documents on your website to iPaper in minutes
• Scribd API - Everything you could ever want to do with iPaper, document management and searching
• Embed - Upload to Scribd and then copy and paste the embed code

The Scribd Platform is a broad set of tools and services designed to help you customize, integrate, deploy, and monetize fully-formatted documents on your website without extra software. The platform’s components - the Scribd API, the iPaper JavaScript API, and QuickSwitch - vary greatly in their complexity and specific features, so be sure to review the online documentation so that you can determine which one is best for you.

Tools

Scribd Uploader (12.8meg)

Category Feeds

Caveat

However some have complained their content has been “lifted” e.g. “screwed by Scribd”. Scribd has posted their side of the story…and I tend to believe these instances are unscrupulous people who snag content and “make it their own”. At any rate this is another interesting venue to publish your documents for both exposure and possibly contextual advertising revenue.

iPhone Compatible

You can click on a document on Scribd, and iPhone will open the document in iPhone’s native viewer. iPhone supports PDF, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and text files…yet another way to get your content out there.

Tell me what you think.

ADDENDUM: Confirmed it supports the following formats:

Adobe PDF (.pdf)
Adobe PostScript (.ps)
Microsoft Word (.doc)
Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps)
Microsoft Excel (.xls)
OpenOffice Text Document (.odt, .sxw)
OpenOffice Presentation Document (.odp, .sxi)
OpenOffice Spreadsheet (.ods, .sxc)
All OpenDocument formats
StarOffice Documents
Plain text (.txt)
Rich text format (.rtf)

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I was introduced to this video piece via Steve Rosenbaum. If you have not seen it, or even if you have- read before watching.

Since viewing the piece and mapping the various social chain reactions just from ‘viewing the piece’ and ’sharing’ I can get a better grip on the potency of the message- Each time we forge a link we teach it an idea.. Intrigued I went hunting to see what else turned up in the ‘machine’ and I was not disappointed. I give you a version of the video sort of like Metallica’s Garage Days Re-Revisited cut. This would put it into a Master of Puppets era if you are into heavy metal trivia, if not- no matter…(Frankly I am a KMFDM fan myself…)

I discover there exists a poetic transcript of the video text at mediatedcultures.net…perhaps someone will put it into a formal song (Lars? Wait this is creative commons- scratch that)… Until then we can settle for some cadence and deconstruction courtesy of Tanya Witherspoon from Wichita State University or if you prefer another version courtesy of Jesper Rønn-Jensen, front-end web developer, usability specialist at Capgemini Denmark. Actually I’ll quote his version and add my refrain.

Pay attention to how the transcription of the text in a video can change the tenor of the message…and why do it anyway? I am sure scholars of media theory have this down…I was sort of surprised…(Bonus move- Mess around with the capitals and meter and you can have your very own E.E. Cummings, avant-garde, Web 2.0 is using you version.)

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

[time codes in square brackets]
[0:00]
Text is linear
Text is unilinear
Text is often said to be unilinear

Text is unilinear
when written on paper

Digital text is is different
Digital text is is more flexible
Digital text is is moveable
Digital text is is above all … hyper.

Digital hypertext is above all ….
hypertext is above all ….

hypertext can link
here
here
or here …

virtually anywhere
anywhere virtually
anywhere virtual

http://yahoo.com
Take me Back

Oct 17, 1996

View source

Most early websites were written in HTML

HTML was designed to define the structure of a web document

is a structural element referring to “paragraph”

[1:00]
< LI > is also a structural element referring to “List Item”

As HTML expanded, more elements were added.

Including sylistic elements like < b > for bold and < i > for italics

Such elements definded how content would be formatted.

In other words, form and content became inseparable in HTML

Digital Text can do better.

Form and content can be separated.

RSS

View source

XML was designed to do just that.

< title > does not define the form. It defines the content.

Same with < link >

and < description >

and virtually all other elements in this document.

They describe the content, not the form.

So the data can be exported,

free of formatting constraints.

[2:00]

With form seperated from content, users did not need to know complicated code to upload content to the web
(I’m feeling Lucky)

Create a blog
Blog title: Beyond etext
URL: beyondetext.blogspot.com

Hello World!
Posted by Professor Wesch at 8:14

There’s a blog born every half second

and it’s not just text …

YouTube
Flickr

Anthropology Club
Created by you

XML facilitates automated data exchange
two sites can “mash” data together

flickr maps

Who will organize all of this data?

We will.
You will.
[3:00]

XML + U & Me create a database-backed web
a database-backed web is different
the web is different

the web
we are the web (I’m Feeling Lucky)

We are the web

When we post and then tag pictures

we are teaching the Machine

Each time we forge a link
we teach it an idea.

Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a web page

teaching the Machine

the Machine

The machine is us

Digital text is no longer just linking information …
Hypertext is no longer just linking information …

The Web is no longer just linking information …

The Web is linking people …

Web 2.0 is linking people …

… people sharing, trading, and collaborating…

Web 2.0

Edit this page…

You can edit this page

[4:00]
We’ll need to rethink a few things …
We’ll need to rethink copyright
We’ll need to rethink authorship
We’ll need to rethink identity
We’ll need to rethink ethics
We’ll need to rethink aesthetics
We’ll need to rethink rhetorics
We’ll need to rethink governance
We’ll need to rethink privacy
We’ll need to rethink commerce
We’ll need to rethink love
We’ll need to rethink family
We’ll need to rethink ourselves.

by
Michael Wesch
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Kansas State University

Music by D E U S
There’s Nothing impossible
[4:31]

I could chime in with a refrain!

We’ll need to rethink a few things …
We’ll need to rethink copyright
We’ll need to rethink authorship
We’ll need to rethink identity
We’ll need to rethink ethics
We’ll need to rethink aesthetics
We’ll need to rethink rhetorics
We’ll need to rethink governance
We’ll need to rethink privacy
We’ll need to rethink commerce
We’ll need to rethink love
We’ll need to rethink family
We’ll need to rethink ourselves.

Probably more than a few things…and rethinking is just the starting point…we may not get a do-over.

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I am not saying educators do not! The system does not get it and when I see this

The Immersive Education Initiative is an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems.

Immersive Education combines 3D and virtual reality (VR) technology with digital media to bring distance learning and self-directed learning to a new level. Unlike traditional distance learning, Immersive Education is designed to immerse and engage students in the same way that today’s best video games grab and keep the attention of players. Immersive Education combines interactive virtual reality and sophisticated digital media (voice chat, game-based learning modules, audio/video, and so forth) with collaborative online course environments and classrooms. Immersive Education gives students a sense of “being there” even when attending class in person isn’t possible, practical, or desirable, which in turn provides faculty and remote students with the ability to connect and communicate in a way that greatly enhances the learning experience.

Immersive Education and the Media Grid public compute utility on which it is built were recently recognized with a national award by Computerworld as “…innovative, promising technologies which hold the potential to significantly affect society in the near future.”

A) No kidding. Second Lifers have known this for a long time.

B) I do not need pixels to get immersion…(they are fun though)

SOME LOWER TECH EXAMPLES:

LISTENING TO STORIES AROUND A CAMP FIRE

Which is why I try not to ever get to immersed in some mechanical “college marketing books”.

Why? FORWARD THINKING FICTION or ADVENTURE IS GREAT FOR IMMERSION and EDUCATION….and where I get my blue prints.

Phillip Jose Farmer
The World of Tiers: Volume One (World of Tiers)

In the World of Tiers we meet earthlings Robert Wolff and Paul Janus Finnigan (alias Kickaha) who through strange circumstances are “gated” into a parallel pocket universe. These pocket universes are maintained by mostly insane “Lords” who are paranoid and spend most of their time trying to kill each other to stave off ennui. The World of Tiers is just that, a multi-tiered world that spans a virtual garden of Eden and changes each level until we come to a deadly palace at the top. I won’t spoil it, but the first three are really good, old-fashioned rip roaring reads.

Farmer’s books went on to inspire the late Roger Zelazny who wrote The Chronicles of Amber. He was so inspired by The World of Tiers Zelanzy actually dedicated one of the books in the series to the main characters Jadawin and Kickaha. I have found Amber to be an incredibly accurate metaphor for Second Life. (Matter of fact you might find the quixotic Chevaliers names and behavior to be quite similar to those of Amberites at times.). In the Amber stories, Amber and the Courts of Chaos are the only two “true” worlds. Everything else, even Earth, are called or simply the byproducts of “shadows”. The royal family of Amber that negotiates the Pattern, and the equivalent Chaos nobility who have walked the Logrus, can freely travel through the shadows and alter them at will. The obvious metaphor for Second Life being that of some arbitrary static reality and the existence of an infinite number of “negotiated realities”. Furthermore we have the metaphor of a scripter or builder who can literally “create” whatever they choose- it is nothing but Shadow and really quite malleable- even the physics.

The books are narrated by Corwin who suffers from amnesia, escapes, tracks down his sister Florimel, and discovers that he is a prince of Amber. He is taken by his brother Random to walk the Pattern. The Pattern is the construct which gives the multiverse its order. Walking the Pattern restores Corwin’s memory and his powers to travel through shadow…I won’t spoil the rest and since it is late I will let the Wikipedia hammer at the metaverse concepts within.

Amber and Second Life Parallels

The series is based on the concept of parallel worlds, domination over them being fought between the kingdoms at the extreme ends of Shadow—Amber, the one true world of Order, and the Courts of Chaos. Amberites of royal blood—those descended from Oberon (and ultimately his parents, Dworkin, formerly of the Courts of Chaos, and the Unicorn of Order herself) —are able to “walk in Shadow”, mentally willing changes to occur around them. These changes are, in effect, representative of the Shadow-walker passing through different realities. There are apparently infinite realities, either found by the Shadow-walker locating such worlds or by creating them (we the readers are never sure; neither are the characters).

Within this multiverse, Zelazny deals with some interesting philosophical concepts about the nature of existence, compares and contrasts the ideas of Order and Chaos, and plays with the laws of physics—they can differ from Shadow to Shadow; for instance, gunpowder does not ignite in Amber, which is why the characters all carry swords. Other Shadows have green skies and blue suns, cities of glass and Kentucki Fried Lizzard Partes, and worlds out of our own fiction can come to life.

In short, as I have maintained, reality is what we mutually negotiate- like modems we will find a common protocol. A game is what we choose to make out of it and if left idle humans will create their own rules and games to satisfy their needs.

Pixels, Mud, Time and Collaboration…oh yeah and Permission to break the pattern. Oh yes and teaching us how to think…

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I have made some posts on science fiction, how the masters of science fiction can inspire us, and some great comments have popped up on the blog and via e-mail…to recap just a few…

From John Hunter

Ender’s Game is great. Another point, Valentine and Peter engage dueling mock personas. They don’t just impersonate one person they impersonate both and then debate with each other (and if I remember right at some point one debates the mock personas against each other by themselves). Though maybe this stuff takes place in Speaker for the Dead.

And that effort is not to have the mock personas win or lose directly but rather through the public debate shape the way real people think and view issues in a way that Val and especially Peter want.

Adam Metz

Wayne, you may also like the interview I did with Noam Cohen on the relationship between sci-fi and Web 2.0; it’s posted here.

Andrew Wee

Wayne,
Given your preference for alternate realities, i’m surprised you didnt add philip k dick’s do android’s dream of electronic sheep, starship troopers in there too…

Piers Anthony’s Xanth and Incarnations of Immortality and Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series are good for a mindset/paradigm shift too.

Kadigan Says in response to Paying Attention, Earning Attention:

They noticed the patterns of networking effectiveness across several technologies/industries at a focused point in time.

Mastermind groups (Napoleon Hill) need a common distraction to allow for the psychological need of individuals necessary for sub-conscious involvement leading to advanced creativity.

Fiction is creativity. Bound by the need for scientific premise. The group of authors have a pre-determined motivation to develop theoretically probable solutions to commonly perceived issues of the times. Both - the one of and the one in.

Angel Djambazov

Along with your three examples I would through in Tad Williams’s Otherland series. When I first “stepped into” SL I immediately thought of that particular novel and it feels more appropriate the more time I spend in SL. Particularly in regard to the concept of “citizens”.

Ron says

Kurt’s avatar in Second Life also continues to exist, although without a pilot. It’s kind of a fascinating topic - similar to MySpace pages of deceased individuals.

What will happen to these phantom digital identities? In Second Life, Linden Lab doesn’t delete accounts just because someone dies.

Also, side-note, the broadcast center itself was built by Infinite Vision Media for LCMedia, and the broadcast of the four-part special was a joint project between the two.

…and let’s not forget this post on a podcast with Jeff Doak talking Ambient Findability and William Gibson from another writer making connections.

Thank you all.

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Viral Video and Memetic Deconstruction

This video, ZEITGEIST (see www.zeitgeistmovie.com) is making heavy rounds on You Tube, blogs, and twitter.

I listened to this video while catching up on e-mail after being down and out for two days with the flu….from background I picked up this as the general tone of the film which goes back into history to try to tie 9/11 to government malfeasance. I would add it is important to deconstruct this video to determine what is the “viral shell” and what is the actual “memes” the creators are trying to release. Good question.

Half Historical Musings

From the audio I gathered there are a number of references, or parrallels with Christ (Christian), Horus (Egyptian), Dionysus (Greek), Mithra (Persian), etc, etc, and in short seems to make the conclusion that all of these dieties are tied together astrologically…old news or the video advances the concept of Armageddon as nothing more than the misinterpretation of an astrological metaphor and as part of an act of ongoing “transference”- and that Christ a product of Roman politics. None really shocking given much of the Greek books were written in koine Greek…let’s call it “lost in translation”. We really don’t know.

It also chalks up a certain cross (which looks like an extended Crux Ansata) to paganism. Again no shocker since the Sun God Tau could be seen as a fore runner of the cross- represented by a T.

Why not Throw in the Masons?

Personally I was wondering if they were going to sling in the “All Seeing Eye” (as on the US Dollar), a.k.a. The Eye of Providence, part of the symbolism Great Seal of the United States…also the words “annuit coeptis” which roughly means “it is favorable to our undertakings”.

It is positioned atop an unfinished pyramid where there are 13 steps representing the 13 states. It would be easy to chalk this all up to Masonic influence if one used Thomas Smith Webb’s, The Freemasons Monitor, published in 1797 where he wrote “although our thoughts, words and actions may be hidden from the eyes of man, yet the All-Seeing Eye, whom the Sun, Moon and Stars obey, and under whose watchful care even Comets perform their their stupendous revolutions, pervades the innermost recesses of the human hear and will reward us according to our merits.” It is never that simple and that is unlikely since there was active and strong anti-Masonic propoganda circulating at the time. The Masons did not appear to design the seal either (many of their symbols are borrowed from Christianity), more than likely it was a mistranslation from 1884’s Harvard scholar, Eliot Charles Norton who commented it was merely “a dull emblem of a Masonic fraternity”.

If you want to get all conspiracy theorish you could make a stretch and say Google emerged from the “G” often seen over the All Seeing Eye in Masonic literature (From Darkness to Light) where it is the “Great Architect”, and the The Eye of Providence, if any symbol, is a Christian one and one perhaps borrowed from the Egyptian Eye of Horus.*

No matter what your belief, and I am tolerant and respect all, I leave it to each individual to take their own meanings and find their own way into life- this is an important aspect of libery. Ruminating over it will not change it, and I am certainly not out to change people’s beliefs and refuse to chase shadows because I simply do not have enough information.

Video Shifts and Overtakes HTTP

Here is what I do find important:

According to a recent report VIDEO (e.g. P2PTV, IPTV, etc) has now taken over HTTP traffic, even P2P traffic as the most prevalent form of traffic online. History aside this is the shift we need to think about it. Source of media consumption really is shifting or has shifted, where we get our information is changing and it changes as it enters into our sphere…this is an important and critical paradigm shift. Web 2.0, User Generated Content, ability to give feedback, etc are having an effect..

Meme as Gene

It brings new thoughts about memetics (or revives older ones), meme fecundity, meme replication, etc. If anything I think our government, any government for that matter, should adopt micro-chunking as a way to get information into the organization. Twitter or micro-chunk among yourselves folks- information and ideas flow flaster. Response is quicker and more ideas can be chewed over. Intelligence is only as good as action though.

ADDENDUM

* Eye of Horus- I believe it was known as “indjat” or “wedjet” and this symbol represented the falcon-headed god Horus and the Sun God- Re. I also believe the eyes may have had some root in duality (moon/sun) representing balance between reason and intuition or light/dark. If you want to take it a step further you might read Thomas Mann’s, Death in Venice, and apply the Greek concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian which could be a parrallel. Not quite the same…but interesting at any rate.

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Recently deceased, and one of my famous authors, Kurt Vonnegut lives on- at least for me- and damn is he funny! Odd to think of his recent death happening while i was unaware and pondering Asimov, Robotics, Nanontechnology and Engines of Creation. They were both humanists too- he and Isaac Asimov.

It is a bit surreal in the world of Second Life- he is hysterical- the quotes and quips are fantastic. Slaughterhouse Five is a must read…among others. This makes me so sad….he is gone, but he is so alive (verbally) and expressive in the metaverse.

So now I have to ask- what will be the effect on humanity if we interact in “avatar form” for long periods? After we die we leave “almost spectral” after images of ourselves? Think about that…for a moment…and reflect.

Back to Kurt Vonnegut. He even graded his own books…(Kwisatz Haderach Award)

In Chapter 18 of his book Palm Sunday “The Sexual Revolution,” Vonnegut states that the grades “do not place me in literary history” and that he is comparing “myself with myself.” The grades:

Player Piano: B
The Sirens of Titan: A
Mother Night: A
Cat’s Cradle: A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
Slaughterhouse-Five: A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House: B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
Breakfast of Champions: C
Slapstick: D
Jailbird: A
Palm Sunday: C

About Clip: the national, weekly public radio program The Infinite Mind made broadcast history as it aired a four-part special taped inside the three-dimensional virtual on-line community Second Life. Among those interviewed in front of a live virtual audience were author Kurt Vonnegut. This is a machinema video of Vonnegut’s interview taped inside Second Life, on the 16-acre virtual broadcast center built by Lichtenstein Creative Media, which produces the program. The host is John Hockenberry.

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Extremely ironic since I cut my first “Vlog” and it checked in at 39 minutes and the lighting sucks. I have dedcided to simply kill it.

Long time collaborator Brian Flemming writes in response to my open source media find. (And hello to Brett for checking in and clarifying a bit of that fuzziness… )

Wayne Porter on open-source cinema. (Once in a blue moon Wayne writes something I can comprehend instead of stuff like this. WTF? I don’t understand the value of Twitter. I hate being left out, but I’m too lazy to figure out why it’s the greatest thing since the last greatest thing I didn’t understand.)

Just to make it clear in the example above- I was talking about virtual gateways- a project a colleague and I had put together to let someone make a note in say the metaverse of Second Life and send that note as far as a cell phone from inside the virtual world using a heads up device. Neat huh?. It it full duplex too. In the long term I hope to see it mixed with scripts to simulate disabilities and the HUD as a research device.

So Brian to make it easy- Twitter is to Blogging as your argument, based on this piece, here about the temporal aspects / challenges of vlogging to blogging (see below). It is a function of attention and how much of our finite time we want to give up before we are dead.

Brian said…

The challenges of a temporal medium

I agree with this critique of video blogging. A major flaw in the vast majority of vlogs is that they take, say, 10 minutes of rambling to say the same thing that would probably take me 2 minutes to read…
April 01, 2007

Think of twitter as “micro-blogging” or even “nano-blogging” (here is a sample of one of my twitter accounts in RSS format)- think of our usual blogs changing in the future and becoming “canons” for these micro-streams and other “micro-chunks”. Actually if you think about it our “blogs” will probably contain a number of different type of media sources from RSS to Photos, to video chunks to graphics, to text, to tweets, widgets, to our friends stuff, etc, so forth and so on. A good read would be colleague Sam Harrelson’s take on the Tumblr and Twitter as disruptors…also note Google’s move into CPA and the rise of the attention economy and “new metrics”.

As an aside- another neat use of twittering and blogs are plugins for Word Press (notably Alex King’s) that allow you to “twitter” to your stream the second a new blog post is made. I would not be surprised to see a search engine acquire twitter, because it makes perfect sense to search for things, and twitter about what we find in real time. WE WILL RELY ON SEARCH LESS and MORE ON SOCIAL INTERACTION.

What Would Help the Revolution…

To Brian: I have no doubt that you would be able to whip out very cohesive, and poignant vlogs- perhaps a post on how to do that for the rest of us? A crash course in micro-film production. I mean do you story board it? After having just cut a long piece on the history of Revenews, I realized that I meandered around- which ilong beta podcasts ok- it was a beta cut. Sam and I actually did a that went almost two hours and to our surprise it had quite a few downloads- not sure how many (I’ll ping him on that) but we went in with no real agenda except to talk and let it go until we felt “done”.

To Brett: I liked your collaborative project, even more so I am curious if you would “open source” the platform in which we used to assemble it? I have been looking at ways to collaborate with other filmmakers in such a manner and it would seem what you have cobbled together a neat technological platform to do this. Are you willing to not only “open source” the media, but open source your collaboration platform?

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UgoTrade covers some earlier thoughts I had about SL and disabilities.

Now, virtual reality plays a big role for people with disabilities, not just because in a virtual world many disabilities are not the factor they are in RL. Mitch Wagner reports, “one woman whose cancer was quite severe, for whom Second Life had become her first life.” And, on Second Life there is a community using SL to aid in the recovery of stroke victims. But, also, Wayne Porter notes that HUDS that simulate disabilities in Second Life can offer a way to educate people from a new perspective (also see Wayne’s review of the groovy and free SLtweets HUD (Heads UP Display) available at SLTweets.com).

With a little bit of luck, inspiration and support the next suave lady and gentlemen you meet on SL, gliding and twirling on the dance floor in “tails” and “bling heels,” may really be 95!

I am sure Bleys will like the feedback on SLTweets! and thanks Ugo for keeping my thoughts focused…I think the 2nd disability scripting is really interesting, by Fez Rutherford, and shifts thoughts for me. It has me so intrigued I am going to bother Bleys and probably Fez about it- if I can track him down. I listened to Sam Harrelson’s video last night about the upcoming iteration of Planet Beta. (BTW Sam Harrelson brings to the table the real brilliance behind the entire fusion- an open mind.) and it reminded me to keep my thoughts in beta.

Virtual Worlds What You See is not What You Get

Recently I was interviewed for an article by Marketing Sherpa on marketing in virtual worlds. As with any interview you send in a lot of points, but it some of it, sometimes none of it, makes the final cut, but let me rehash a point or two here.

It is very important for marketers to understand the fabric of the metaverse before they jump in and setup shop. This means they should spend significant time in avatar form, participating in real world events, exploration, and talking with other Avatars. It is preferable you try different shapes, looks and feels to see what type of reactions this will bring. One will discover that people, functioning as avatars, do not always respond to situations the same as you might expect in Real Life. Knowing this one can expect they may not react to one’s brand as might be expected in Second Life.

More importantly with the avatar form, language and communication will be different. The typical non-verbal body language is missing, although this is can be augmented with gestures or scripts. Meaningful communication can take time and real effort. What we see on-screen does not always represent what is behind the screen. Because we “see” or perceive a 3D avatar in (hopefully) very fluid motion, this does not mean that person feels or is even able to do these things in real life. Second Life is not really a game, although one can certainly game in the Second Life metaverse. There are no preset goals, predermined monsters to slay, or chests of gold to find. It is really a lush social platform. For many people it exists as an alternate reality that is very real and potent.

What we Take for Granted

Based on lengthy travels and discussions I have found many people who have debilitating diseases that make travel or functioning in real life difficult. Second Life allows them a form of theraputic escapism, but more importantly, a fulfilling outlet that allows them to socialize, travel and take part in many activities healthy people often take for granted. Just because an avatar “looks” healthy doesn’t mean the person behind the avatar is healthy. Unfortunately we don’t have statistics on this theraputic use yet, but I believe, anecdotally, there are a large number of ill or disabled individuals. Perhaps far more than we suspect.

So based on that the 2nd Disability Scripting concept really got me thinking. If it can be theraputic for some individuals who are ill could it not be used in reverse, as Fez Rutherford has done, to sensitize people to the realities of life with a disability or even the final stages of cancer? An Avatar, to a certain degree, could “simulate” or experience blindness, or a grand mal seizure- an experience I have had that is truly terrifying or something as mundane as stuttering- another battle from my youth that I spent years overcoming. Furthermore, if meshed with say Bley’s SLTweets HUD (using some automated scanning ability to record public conversation while say one was “unconscious”) one could “experience” a simulated seizure and then later go back and see how people reacted…in real life they usually do not react well- I have no idea how they might react in a virtual world. Sometimes I cannot tell if we are hyenas or human beings…

Who do I think could benefit from these HUDS or scripts?

Probably every damn one of us.

As I go out across the datasphere, and I think the Kathy Sierra case comes to mind, and people’s justified outrage- I have to wonder if society has become so interconnected, so plugged in, so wired up that we can’t step back a few paces and look at things with a more sensitive heart? We forget to walk a mile in another’s shoes.

Twittering to Humanity

Perhaps that is why twitter has been such a hit- because we aren’t allowed to go beyond the confines of 140 characters of text, and our life is reduced to very simple and very human actions. I know it was an epiphany for me- my job forces me into attack mode. Yet while we twitter, we are just simple human beings, stripped of our “post human” digital trappings, flashy graphics, hand crafted avatars, rolling text, need to defend or the ridiculous bars we have set for people- who are just that- just people.

So back to VR scripting surely everyone could benefit to some degree, but I am not so naive to believe that Second Life can replace Real life, the ones open-minded enough to try such experiments are not sympathetic but already empathetic. I often get teased over my enthusiasm for the nascent platform- in a society where we say we value creative thinking, lofty ideas, and breaking new ground, we seem to spend alot of time tearing apart people who try to embrace these qualities.

I accept that. I still like the thought that there is a place where anything or any situation can be created- although I have to wonder why we keep creating the same damn trainwrecks in a virtual world? Given a “do-over” we seem to have learned nothing. Our priorities still seem out of whack. I have been as guilty as everyone else.

I think the best uses might be with our youngsters- not yet jaded, where life is magical and much like a “game”. Perhaps more importantly teachers, doctors, nurses, and health care professionals. Maybe a politician? These people are often empathetic, but due to the nature of the job or the litigious nature of our society they are forced to become muted and less sensitive to whom they serve- people. Second Life…a second chance?

As a wired society I really think we need it…and I think we would still probably blow it- but I have hope.

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Open Source Cinema…ok perhaps we were before our times (the first actually) with Nothing So Strange…I know Flemming has been pushing for Open Source Film for some time and know he ponders what everyone is pondering- how will film makers make money this go around? Will they still go searching for someone to fund their film, or perhaps cultivate the fan base on the Net (ala Blair Witch Style) and prove it out? If they did, if they could, they might retain rights to some lucrative aspects of the film like merchandising, or comics, etc. Film makers, like many web marketers, really haven’t mastered marketing online yet- I know Hollywood surely misses the mark.

The Manifesto (From the OSC site):

1) Copyright Is Theft!

Every time we copyright a work, we are robbing from the Public Domain. We are denying others the freedom to share the ideas we have given life to. We are denying others the freedom to build on our ideas.

Yes, Copyright in some sense is necessary. It is an incentive to create, to encourage “the progress of science and useful arts” . But when it is the life of the author, plus 75 years? That’s a theft of our collective heritage.

My Response: OK so is it theft or not? Again I liked NSS’s model where we owned the original copyright to the film, but others can get raw footage and make their own original works. Amazing how it took YouTube/Google for that to gel…

2) Music Wants To Be Free!

On the advice of my lawyer, I must qualify the above statement. Of course artists need to profit from their work. But as my lawyer explains, over the years copyright has mutated from something that was supposed to encourage art by guaranteeing a limited profit for artists, into something that corporations use to control the supply of art, music and ideas—long after the artists have passed away. It used to be that art would fall into the public domain after its creators had made money from it for a few years - but nowadays, the public domain is an antique concept.
Corporations have much longer life spans than individuals, so from their point of view, their copyrights should never expire. As Sonny Bono put it (congressman Sonny Bono, that is), “copyright should last forever minus a day.”

As a result, artists are having a harder time building on art from the past. Culture—which needs to live and breathe and evolve—is being stored in vaults, released at the discretion of corporate interests. So this film project is about more than just music, it’s about the future of all creativity. As John Oswald once said: “If creativity is a field, then copyright is a fence.”

My Response: Music wants to be free? Music i I suppose that is possible, software wantes to be free too- and while we have many worthy free software (note free software and open source are different). It is all about the distribution, that “Long Tail” thing, and realizing we are moving away from a hit-driven culture to a niche, choice-driven culture.

3) Film is Fascism!

The traditional approach to creating films, especially documentary films, is flawed. A single perspective cannot hope to capture the nuance of an evolving cultural debate. Sure, Point of View is important. But “The Ecstasy of Influence”, the participatory nature of digital creativity, begs us to create media that invites input from its audience.

My Response: I hardly think that makes it fascism or even flawed. If you apply that thinking, a hundred different POVs is still fascism- fascism ad infinitum. I am all for mixing it up- within the limits of the creator’s permission- that is courtesy. Afterall- they did the work. They may not want input from the audience, a shame really, but I will respect their wishes. Of course we are moving into the “attention economy” and the easiest way to “strike back” is not to give it your attention- ignore the market long enough and it will, it must- react.

4) Film is Pollution!

Travelling the globe, running hours of tape, wasting resources - these are a fact of life for documentary filmmakers. This no longer needs to be the case - with digital tools and transmission, we can crowd-source our ideas with silicon instead of carbon.

My Response: Just by existing we pollute. Digital tools and transmission- heat is released, energy is used, I mean something has to power those boxes!

5) Open Source Cinema!
I am hereby opening this film to the masses. My entire plan, warts and all, can be viewed at the WikiFilm.

Your contributions can be made at the Create section of the site. I invite your participation.

I’m using an innovative open-source filmmaking technique because I believe that this film can’t be a closed argument, it has to be opened up to the community at large. The argument will continue to grow with our culture. This is not dogma. This is evolution.

My Response: Great. I like it. Yes. It is a start. Feels kind of fuzzy…and looks like a new generation doesn’t like the RIAA…and I think eventually it will crumble as we move along. But hey kids- stop going to see lousy films, and listening to lousy bands…oh I guess they have started to do that already. Hey grown-ups stop listening to lousy music and going to see lousy films…

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As a fan- I am doing my part of spreading the word Sarah.

Midnight Syndicate, (Edward Douglas & Gavin Goszka) have been producing classical gothic nightmare soundtracks for the last nine years. They happen to live a few miles away from my Ohio place- as a local act I have followed them for about nine years. Every Halloween it never fails I hear their stuff all over.

“With a catalog of horror music CDs that blend dark, orchestral horror movie score-style music with sound effects, the band consisting of Edward Douglas and Gavin Goszka has had it’s soundtracks to imaginary films featured in everything from Barbara Walters TV specials and Monday Night Football to X-Box games and King Diamond concerts. Every October Midnight Syndicate’s music is featured in thousands of haunted attractions, amusement parks, stores, and neighborhoods worldwide to provide atmosphere for the Halloween season.”

I believe they used to call it something like “CineFusion”- writing scores to imaginary films. I am not sure, that was years ago, but it appears they are doing a film and getting their chance. I have no idea how good it will be, but I love their very creative and truly unique sounding music and firmly support their work.

The placeholder film site.

The band’s site or to listen to some tracks at the Midnight Syndicate MySpace Page…

News on the movie…

Midnight Syndicate to make The Dead Matter movie, Edward Douglas to direct. Multiple CDs planned for release with film.

Midnight Syndicate will be teaming up with Hollywood FX legend Robert Kurtzman (Dusk till Dawn producer, co-founder of the KNB EFX Group) and his production company, Precinct 13 Entertainment to produce the horror-suspense film, The Dead Matter. Development has been underway for several months and pre-production will officially begin March 1st. Principal photography is scheduled to begin in Northeastern Ohio this August with a projected release date sometime in 2008. Edward Douglas will be directing the film and producing it through the newly-formed Midnight Syndicate Films division of Entity Productions, Inc. The company is currently in talks with Doug Bradley (Pinhead from the Hellraiser series) and Andrew Divoff (Wishmaster, Air Force One, Lost) to star.

“This is a really exciting time for us. One of our main goals over the past ten years has been to get into a position to remake The Dead Matter with an actual budget” said Edward Douglas who produced and directed an earlier version of the film for $2000 in 1996 before forming Midnight Syndicate. “Horror movies are at the core of what Gavin and I do in Midnight Syndicate. It’s what we love and that’s why we believe in remaking this particular film. Co-writer Tony Demci and I have had a lot of time to take what we felt was a good story in the original version and develop it into something very special that we know is really going to deliver for both our fans and other fans of the horror genre.”

The Dead Matter tells the story of a vampire relic with occult powers that falls into the hands of a grief-stricken young woman who will do anything to contact her dead brother.

The Next Midnight Syndicate CD - Entity Productions plans to release multiple discs of new Midnight Syndicate material in coordination with the film. “As far as the next Midnight Syndicate CD goes, fans are really going to like what we have planned for the soundtrack,” said Gavin Goszka, who will serve as Music Supervisor for the film. “The Dead Matter soundtrack CD will be in the style of our other Midnight Syndicate releases. Our plan is to integrate music from the movie with new material and atmospherics which will allow listeners to further explore the dark and supernatural world created in the The Dead Matter film.”

Neat. Congrats MS- I will spread the word beyond N.E. Ohio and look foward to it!

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It is the silliness of the names that catch me.

Scrobbling: (Audioscrobbler and Last.fm fused together to form one service) A Last.fm user can build up a musical profile using two methods: by listening to their personal music collection on a music player application with an Audioscrobbler plugin, or by listening to the Last.fm internet radio service, usually with the Last.fm client. The songs played are added to a log from which personal top artists and top tracks, bar charts and musical recommendations are calculated.

The user’s page also displays Recently Played tracks, made available via web services, so you can display them on blogs or as forum signatures or “quilts”.

Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and also added to your music profile. Scrobbling allows one to rapidly fill a user’s last.fm profile. It will send the name of songs you play in the media player of choice (e.g. iTunes, Winamp, etc) to Last.fm.

One advantage to scrobbling is you can what artists you really listen to the most. Songs you listen to will also appear on your Last.fm profile page for others to see in a type of limited social networking.

The “Scrobbled” songs also create the data set that assists Last.fm on organizing and recommending music to other users and to create personalized radio stations, among other uses. These recommendations are picked using a collaborative filtering algorithm. Neat way to find NEW but related musical tastes.

Open Source (GPL)

The Last.fm software is Open Source (GPL)

Programmers can download the source code to the latest client version from last.fm’s Subversion repository here:
svn://svn.audioscrobbler.net/client

Plugin Developers

The Win32 ScrobSub library can be found here:
svn://svn.audioscrobbler.net/ScrobSub

Notes on Subversion

Subversion Project Location: Tigris.org Server

Goal: The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. The software is released under an Apache/BSD-style open source license.

Packages: Subversion packages for various Operating Systems. You can compile its source code release directly, or you can install one of the prepackaged binaries for your own operating system. The Subversion project does not officially endorse or maintain any binary packages of the Subversion software.

Release status: Unless the source is noted as “alpha”, “beta”, or “rc” in its name, it is tested and considered stable for production use.

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I simply love the new words that continue to issue into our language often ushered in as we wrangle with new technology or the side effects of this technology.

Three simple ones for today…

pod slurping : Data theft, usually corporate, caused by installing specialized software on an iPod or a similar device and then connecting that device to a computer or network and downloading the information.

neuromyth : A popular yet completely false belief about the human brain.

Wii elbow : Elbow pain or numbness caused by excessive use of the Wii gaming console’s remote control.

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As a long time book fiend and collector of all things in paper the cascade of Amazon’s latest features intrigued me enough to dig into it and explore what it was all about- I’ll start with the whole SIPs thing, but it doesn’t end there as Amazon goes for the grand slam on social media optimization…

From Amazon:

Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

Click on a SIP to view a list of books in which the phrase occurs. You can also view a list of references to the phrase in each book

Contrast that with the Wikipedi SIP entry just for fun:

Sips (Structural Insulating Panels) are a composite material used in building. They consist of a sandwich of two layers of structural board with an insulating layer of foam in between. The board is usually OSB (Oriented Strand Board) and the foam either polystyrene foam or polyurethane foam.

If you click on a SIP, you see all other works that also contain those phrases. Remember they are not just restricted to the book itself, but to other related books- ranked by their improbability score. This is not to be confused with the Adam’s Infinite Improbability Drive- we are not approaching normalcy–not even close. Let’s take a leap for fans…and neophytes:

For non Adam’s readers The Infinite Improbability Drive is a fictional faster-than-light drive in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books (get the ultimate guide with the books) which I highly recommend- you can watch the movie, but it really would be cheating, and you would miss great lines like :

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

I don’t want to spoil the plot so let’s get back to the drive (hijacked by Zaphod)- the most prominent usage of the drive is in the starship Heart of Gold. It is based on a particular perception of quantum theory: a subatomic particle is most likely to be in a particular place, such as near the nucleus of an atom, but there is a fantastically small probability of it being found a long way away, for example close to a distant star. Thus, a body could travel from place to place without passing through the intervening space (or hyperspace), if you had sufficient control of probability.

So you can note how it could work as a semi-spoiler in fiction (perhaps not in Adams’ books), especially since Amazon is also integrated in CAPS or capitalized phrases that occur frequently in the text. I note I am not sure what kind of testing they are running e.g. bivariate or multivariate, etc. But I assume that is what is going on. On to CAPs

Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): Capitalized Phrases, or “CAPs”, are people, places, events, or important topics mentioned frequently in a book. Along with our Statistically Improbable Phrases, Capitalized Phrases give you a quick glimpse into a book’s contents.

Click on a Capitalized Phrase to view a list of books in which the phrase occurs. You can also view a list of references to the Capitalized Phrase in each book.

For an example, assuming it hasn’t changed check out Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, by Douglas Rushkoff. (I also highly recommend reading Media Virus! by Rushkoff too…which you can pick up cheap in the after market. Don’t get turned off by the negative reviews. The text was written in the mid-90’s and remarkably visionary- to put it into context BoingBoing was just a zine back then- and after reviewing refreshing myself from the history depths I found an interesting aside on stats among aggregators.)

Amazon is also providing a concordance based on “heatmapped tag clouds” on some of their books. This is an interesting use of a concordance because, themes and keywords visually pop-out as a result. I see a number of applications for clouds as meta-data becomes more and more in demand. Meta-data- it will be everything in a couple of years- start collecting yours now.

They are also using readability and complexity analysis and sometimes citations- citations simply being other books a particular book cites. To step back here is an example on the Text Stats.

The Text Stats feature calculates a variety of statistics for each book in the Search Inside!™ program. The Complexity calculations indicate the complexity of the words and sentence structure in the text of a book. A word is considered “complex” if it has three or more syllables.

Neat. Reminds me of work we did on the Spware / Adware EULA Analyzer.

I will add that for some complex might qualify as anything over two syllables…

Are we done yet? No. Plogs. Amazon now offers Plogs for folks. Like your rifle your plog is your own. It does follow along systems theory providing a feedback loop within a feedback loop although one has to wonder if Amazon’s system could be getting too complex?

Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

Think personalized blog- although most blogs are personal anyway. The play is pretty obvious- authors comment and it gives readersa a great opportunity to learn more about their author of choice and Amazon becomes a more interactive place to visit and manage. Either way Amazon has really innovated this time. Truly grasping SOM- social media optimization - as it applies to books and putting it to practical use.

Did I mention SOM- social media optimization? Yes I did, some will call it a “buzz word”, but having put it in practice I know it works. It won’t become a buzzword until some calls it “Hyper-Social Media Optimization”.

If it is SOM and all Web 2.0′ish Porter where are the damn tags?
Forgive me…after some exploring I did indeed turn up tags, or bookmarklets, so Amazon didn’t forget the tags…and I will load up on a few at the end just for finesse or overkill depending on your viewpoint- and eventually get a tag cloud generator installed.

Sample tags for Rushkoff’s text:

business (2)
rushkoff (2)
books - business (1)
business web (1)
innovation (1)
open source (1)
opensource (1)
to_read (1)

Some Tags for this Post:

Technorati Tags:
SIPs, Amazon, Rushkoff, business, web2.0, socialbookmarks, tags, tag clouds, tagging, som, social media optimization, wayneporter.com,

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During some light reading I found this interesting paper on the Dialects of American English.

For those friends who also speak Appalachian English I have quoted the relevant material below, however I recommend you read the entire paper too. I swan! Itsa good read.

 One island of early Scotch-Irish English speech was left behind and preserved during the push west.  This special, archaic variety of English is known as Appalachian English.  It preserves many archaic features that date back to earlier stages in the developmen