The Fifth Column

Lively: Google gets a Second Life

Wed, 09 Jul 08 14:30:11 GMT

Remember Second Life? It was a virtual world where users could create avatars, characters to represent themselves in this digital space, and walk around, explore and interact with other users. It's a popular site, like an open-ended video game with no real tasks set t you, but it never quite tipped over into a mainstream audience.

Well, fans of this kind of virtual reality just got a big new space to play in. Google has introduced Lively, a program where not only can you use this kind of program, you can design your own space.

So, say you're a company or a school, you can create your own virtual space and allow customers or students to create characters to interact with it. We'll see if this will push this sort program out to the masses. Second Life was enthusiastically received and people have a lot of fun with the concept, but it hasn't become ubiquitous the was something like Facebook has.

Take a look at Lively:

Blogetiquette: BoingBoing giveth and BoingBoing taketh away

Mon, 07 Jul 08 16:23:24 GMT

Hi internet: are you just burning up with outrage over the internet scandal of the summer over at BoingBoing? I've been reading about it all over you, and even in newsprint out in meatspace.

So what happened is, about a year ago, a BoingBoing contributer deleted all references to someone.

BoingBoing, which started as a fanzine in the 90s and calls itself the directory of wonderful things, is one of the most popular blogs in the world. If they link to you, expect your website's hits to pop the top off your tracking chart. However, it is a site that dedicates a lot of space to freedom of speech, copyright reform, trashing censorship and plugging the novel Little Brother by Corey Doctorow, which pits a bunch of culture-jamming kids against a censor-y authoritarian regime. So unpublishing all references to a person has seemed hypocritical to some. When the deletion recently came to light, it touched off a discussion page on the site that has well over 1,000 posts and drawn the attention of Times New York and LA.

The vanished references were to Violet Blue, a sex blogger and former-friend of Boinger Xeni Jardin. Jardin summarized the deletion this way in the LA Times Web Scout blog:

My biological father who died when I was a kid was a painter and a print maker. He went through different phases in his creative work. A lot of what he did was paint very beautiful photorealistic portraits of nude women. Sometimes he went off into experimental territory that he was embarrassed about... sometimes he would just grab batches of the stuff that was crappy as years went on, and go to the backyard and burn it. And it wasn’t that he was censoring himself, and God knows nobody else was censoring him. It was that this was his creative work. This was art. And he felt like some of it wasn’t representative of who he was anymore and he didn’t want it to be available to the world to see.

That’s how I felt with this situation. (I mean, there were other reasons for removing the posts.) But –- it was my work. And I felt like: This is my work, this is my blog. This is not the same thing as Wikipedia or the paper of record. It’s BoingBoing. And I have the right to take these things down while I think about whether I want them out there or not.

For me, that's perfectly acceptable. But in the weird world of blogs, where there's a kind of self-imposed rulebook that includes things like show edits and changes you've made by striking out the changed words with a line through them and adding the new ones after so people can see what changed (FYI - TVO's blogs don't have that function, or if they do through HTML code, I haven't figured it out). Because of this, BoingBoing is a crucible for Netiquette because they discuss how the web should be run through their constant criticism of laws governing the web (real legislation I'm talking about) and because they are so widely read.

So for them, a personal spat can become this big web sensation because anything that happens on their site becomes a big sensation. BoingBoing draws the eyes of the internet to all of its content. Pretty interesting blow-back, when you consider that if the unpublishing of all references and links to Violet Blue might have been a punitive act: you have crossed me, so say goodbye to all the web traffic I gave you, chump. This is why I have striven to keep my webhits out of the millions. I can't handle the pressure.

Here is BoingBoing's response to the mucky.

Another barrier busted: Video games for the blind

Thu, 03 Jul 08 00:38:14 GMT

MIT is working on a video game for the Nintendo Wii that is designed so that blind people can take part. It seems natural that it would be a music-based game.

Blind Lemon Jefferson, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles are just a few of the musicians who put aside blindness to achieve greatness. Well, it seems the blind are going to get their crack at the latest frontier of music: Guitar Hero. Well, sort of.

Take a look:

There are already games for people with disabilities, including about 200 for the visually impaired. What puts this game, AudiOdyssey, apart is that blind people and sighted people can both take part.

From a story on the MIT website:

Eitan Glinert, a graduate student in computer science at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, says that the introduction of the Wii controller attracted many women and older players for the first time to the world of videogames. "Lots of people who had never played video games were now playing them all the time," he says. "I started to think, who's been left out? What groups are left behind even with all the new technology, these new systems?"

Then it hit him. "People with disabilities had been left behind. I began to speculate, how could you bring these people into the fold and have them be able to play these games?" He started by looking up everything that was available in terms of computer games for the visually impaired, and found there were already about 200 titles.

"I thought, oh well, it was a good idea. But then I noticed something: As a sighted player, I was unable to play any of these." The games had been so specifically adapted for sound and tactile play that they gave the visually impaired too much of an advantage, making it impractical for them to play with sighted friends. "There were games for sighted people, games for blind people, and never the twain shall meet," he says. "I thought, maybe I could build a game that could be played by both, equally well."

Beach reading: Mark MacKinnon commits journalism in Zimbabwe

Mon, 30 Jun 08 21:34:37 GMT

Hi Internet, happy summer. Mark MacKinnon, a foreign correspondent for the Globe and Mail and author of The New Cold War and friend friend of the show. Spent the last week hiding in Zimbabwe, trying to do what reporting he could while doing as little to imperil the lives of those who helped him.

He has an account of his time there in today's Gobe. Make sure you give it a read.

One night, we tried to visit a local hospital to interview two MDC supporters who were recent victims of violence. They had been beaten and forced to swallow pesticides, a poison that killed one other member of their family. Along with a friendly retired doctor, we entered the hospital and walked briskly toward the trauma ward, me carrying a box of chocolates to present to the injured activist, whom we planned to tell anyone who asked was formerly the gardener of a friend of ours in Johannesburg. We agreed that if either of us sensed we're being watched, we'd use a code word to express that it was time to go.

However, the man we wanted to interview was in surgery when we got there and his mother's room had a police guard posted at the door who immediately asked what our business was. Sensing that we were pushing our luck, my colleague and I turned to each other and said “macaroni,” almost in unison. Looking over our shoulders the entire way, we retreated back to the safe house.

Another ad from MoveOn.org

Tue, 17 Jun 08 19:38:05 GMT

Offered without comment:

Now comment requested. What are your thoughts about this ad?

The future of music

Tue, 17 Jun 08 18:48:00 GMT

There is a lot of discussion around the future of the music industry. With production and distribution tools being handed out to the masses, it is a time of great changes. For music, just what does the future look like?

My guess is, the next hitmakers will look something like the Trons, this four-piece from New Zealand. I, for one, welcome our robotic musical overlords.

Obama vs. McCain: what's in a meme?

Mon, 16 Jun 08 20:45:08 GMT

Show of hands: who here can define internet meme? It's increasingly important you know this ugly bit of jargon.

So before we go any further, check out what a meme is. The American Heritage Dictionary lists it as:

A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted

verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

TechPresident had an interesting post about memes in the Democratic primaries. Liza Sabater, who wrote the post, said the Hillary 1984 video was the defining meme of the primaries. Sabater said the video captured all of the reasons that people were ready to take someone other than Clinton Redux, as well as a certain mood about politics in general. Having said that, she picked "I Am Voting Republican" as possibly the first truly viral video of the presidential campaign:

Sabater goes on:

So why is "I Am Voting Republican", the defining meme of the 2008 general elections?

1. It clearly defines the candidate to beat
2. It clearly states the reasons to vote against the candidate.
3. It uses the cognitive power of satire to deliver the "bad news" in a positive way.
4. It has burned through the "first-adopter-sphere" like wild fire.

Also of interest, it counters arguments from some in the Clinton camp who said they will vote Republican rather than vote for the party that rejected their potential leader. (Someone should remind the sourgrapes brigade that there will be future runs for president to consider - Reagan lost in 1976, and came back in 1980.)

It's the conventional wisdom that the Dems are the party to beat this go-round. But for me, I just can't escape the idea that the Democrats are really good at losing elections. It seemed like they should have been able to win the last time out, and heck, they might actually have won in 2000. And this springs to mind when I consider point 3 in Sabater's argument: delivers bad news in a positive way.

I could not agree less. I think one of the areas where the Democrats are consistently alienating potential voters is through their constant negativity and a certain implication that voting for the Republicans shows some form of mental weakness. Maybe you're not stupid, but probably a little ignorant.

The positive message in that video is a bunch of mean, deluded, dumb, or self-serving people listing things that are wrong with America. If this is theme the election is going to run with, I think it's an advantage to McCain. His campaign is about being willing to face the tough situations and deal with them. Obama's brand is wholesale change. I think the electorate is going to respond more positively to someone who says the USA is still okay, and we can deal with our problems than someone who is laying blame on others, and will do better because he knows better. If that's the theme, I see Obama viewed as an elitist and McCain in the White House.

BONUS CONTENT!

Here's my favorite video from McCain's last run for the Republican nomination, when he lost to the Governor of Texas whose name I forget:

GINA - BMW's flexible, fabric car

Mon, 16 Jun 08 20:04:49 GMT

Hi Internet,

While the meat-and-potato cars are taking a lashing as their sales drop while fuel prices soar, innovation continues. Take a look at BMW's GINA. It is a concept car they have put in their museum. Instead of the typical metal or plastic skin on a car, they have used a fabric pulled taut across a frame. Watch the video and see what the eggheads are coming up with for the look of a car (I picture a bold new tomorrow where people pull to the side of the road, throw open the trunk and haul out the needle and thread for some quick road-side repairs):

Tim Russert (1950-2008)

Fri, 13 Jun 08 20:27:34 GMT

According to an alert on the New York Times website, Meet the Press host Tim Russert has died of a heart attack.

Amazingly, the alert is already up on wikipedia.

Free music and downloading is not a new model

Tue, 10 Jun 08 17:10:47 GMT

Hi internet. I never had much time for David Usher's music (he used to be in a band called Moist, and these days he's a solo act), but he makes an interesting point on his blog. Usher points out that for all the talk that bands like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead get for giving their music away, or setting up a pay-what-you-want download, none of this replaces the previous system of music production companies that would nurture talent and distribute their work.

On his blog CloudiD, he writes:

They are both doing interesting online experiments. Free music, pay what you want, remix my song, make my video for me. Yes we get it, they both have a truck load of money and are experimenting. I think thats great but… Both those bands grew up in the old model and their recent stunts dont have any implications for new artists looking for a new model. All they tell us is that the old music business is so f*%ked that established artists with hardcore tech savvy fan bases don’t need an old school label anymore. That is not a model that is going to carry new artists forward.

That's true. Although, some smaller labels are using the cheaper distribution channels the internet provides to their advantage - their music can be found anywhere in the world through the internet, instead of relying on getting physical recordings to a music store.

Usher continues:

There is a money gap in the incubation stage in an artists life. What is going to take those brand new artists with promise and invest in them enough to take them to the next level? It doesn’t happen by “magic”. Now that the money has moved from music business to the isp’s, social networks and mobile companies. Who is going to reinvest in new artists to help them grow? When all the big trees are gone and you haven’t spent anytime replanting, then what? So enough about NIN and Radiohead please. Thats just rich kids rolling around in their money and having fun online. I love to watch but lets not mistake it for a new model for the music business.

Here, I wonder what that "next level" is (by the way, if you poke around his "blog" you'd find "that" Usher has that habit of using "quotation marks" where they aren't needed). If it's a career making music, I think people paying for recorded music just isn't as valuable as it once was. I wonder if the free market will step up and develop a system to nurture and advance artists. Any thoughts? Any examples?