I don’t care anymore when George Lucas abuses Star Wars. But when BioWare gets the licence? That’s exciting. Star Wars The Old Republic is no exception.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I mean, that’s only one of the many trailers I’ve watched and it alone gets me more excited to play the game than all the Brewmasters in Pandaria.

There are games I’ve gotten really excited about, but for an MMO to get my attention it has to do something special. Star Trek Online caught me for months because I love starship combat and the Star Trek universe (and Spock was in it).

Star Wars The Old Republic is so attractive for entirely different reasons, ones that have nothing to do with the Star Wars universe. BioWare games are well written and their implementations of Star Wars mythology into gameplay (most particularly in the Knights of The Old Republic series) tends towards novel and clever. It helps that it is almost always well-written.

On the well-written side of things, it seems like SWTOR is likely to be the most impressive yet. BioWare has reportedly written novels of content for the game. Then there is their fascinating implementation of companion characters.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Really interesting right?

I’ve already pre-ordered the game. Anyone else out there going to be online with me on 12/20/11?

Related articles

• BioWare Showcases New SW: The Old Republic Warzone: The Voidstar (pinkbananaworld.com)
• ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’ Collector’s Edition Gets Unboxed (gamerant.com)
• Is KOTOR 2 destined to be forgotten by Star Wars: The Old Republic? (biobreak.wordpress.com)
• Backstabbing galore: Daniel Erickson talks about the Sith Inquisitor’s story (massively.joystiq.com)

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1. Patriot Games Episode 3 – Halo Wars and Mirror’s Edge
2. Breaking News: P2 Out As Star Trek Online Developer

The header of a website is one of its most valuable areas, but it is often underused. How to fully use the top of your website.

Website headers (or the banner area) seems considered sacrosanct. It’s one of the most visible parts of a page, often the first thing participants see, and is valuable ad space. However, the area is often free of information and rarely contains links to content. There’s a better way to build your website.

Let’s look at a few high-profile websites with underused headers.

Or you can skip to the 6 simple rules for a better website header.

Author’s note: thumbnails generated dynamically. 

CNN.com‘s only prominent item is a search bar. There are a few understated links to TV content and a sign-in.

Then there’s the New York Times, who has left their header’s content entirely up to advertisers.

Next up is the LA Times, who at least have the date and time in their header, if not much else.

You’d think the more internet savvy The Daily What might have taken back the header space, but it seems not. At least it has links to other Cheezburger sites on top.

Who uses their header space well?

Let’s first look at Wonkette, which puts a great rotating featured story area in their header.

Smashing Magazine has shrunk the header and uses it to promote their own content in hard-cover format, which is half-way to an ad, but I’ll give it to them.

Gawker Media blogs like Kotaku have practically eliminated the header.

Seth Godin’s blog has gotten rid of the header entirely, you jump right into the content.

Creating a better header and why.

If you want to make money on your site, you should probably put an ad in the header. That doesn’t mean it has to take up the entire space. A good header can have room for both an ad and, at least, some pointers to content.

The best of the above options is actually Wonkette (surprising, I know). The idea is to put a dynamic graphic and text content into your header.

Why?

Eyetracking studies show that when people look at a webpage they often scan it in an “F” shape.

They don’t scan the entire page. The most significant concentrations come at your first few paragraphs of content and your header. The study shows that this is less likely to happen if the header is just a solid graphic. So break your header up into a set of elements. This is also a great argument against sliders that take up the entire width of a page.

As you can see in the image at the right, participants may also avoid areas of the header above a sidebar.

It’s useful have links to content, with accompanying graphic elements like post thumbnails, in the header. Better to have them towards the left than the right (unless your site is for an audience that reads right to left), especially if you can avoid putting them over a sidebar.

6 simple rules for a better website header.

1. Break up your header into elements separated with white space. Nothing but your navigation should the entire width of the page.
2. People are more likely to look at the entire length of your header than your third paragraph, so take advantage of their attention by using the whole space.
3. Feature content in your header with a graphic element, like a post thumbnail, but keep it simple.
4. Don’t place header content you want people to use over a sidebar.
5. The further left you can place elements without violating rule 4, the better.
6. Don’t waste space above the fold by making the header too tall.

No related posts.

Image by laihiu via Flickr

Amazon’s $80 Kindle could close the gap in access to information technology and provide the good experience without the bad.

When I’m involved in discussions about using new media and technology in education the inevitable rejoinder is ‘What about the digital divide?” It’s great if you make the ultimate teaching tool for the iPad, but what about the 50% of the class without iPads? This problem is even more significant outside of the classroom and the solutions are no easier to discover.

Technologists like to talk about the uniting power of technology, how it brings free speech, frees society and solves problems through communication. Unfortunately this is all for naught if people can’t access digital technology or the internet.

If we want to get the revolution started we need to get technology in the hands of those least likely to have it. The technology we should get into their hands is the new Kindle.

To put this in context: From 1997 to 2007 internet users averaged out to 62 per 100 inhabitants in the developed world and 22 per 100 in the developing world. Globally it averaged to 17 internet users per 100 people.  If new technology is how we are going to remake the world, that’s a lot of people without access. Especially considering the significant gap between developed and developing countries.

I can think of two significant attempts to combat the digital divide. The Grameen Bank is one, though microloans are a sort of oblique way to come at it and combating digital divide is more after-effect than purpose. More relevant is the One Laptop Per Child project (1LPC). The 1LPC project focuses on empowering those with money to donate a rugged $100 laptop to those who would otherwise not have any access. Both are great projects and both have found some success.

Though both have reached out to the US, neither of these projects are really targeted at the issue of the digital divide that exists in developed countries (like ours). Nor have either made a truly significant dent in the divide.

What’s needed to make a real bridge across the digital divide? Why profit motive of course.

It’s nice to think about successful charity, but the cold reality of the situation is that money really does make the world go round.

Which is why Amazon is the solution. The company already takes losses on the sale of each Kindle model which they make up in book sales and, more recently, on-device advertising. Larger losses in exchange for significant audience growth is clearly something that would sell to their C-suite.

Looking at the $79 version, cheaper than a $100 laptop, the Kindle itself  is a pretty remarkable digital device and has everything that’s needed to bridge the divide.

• Wi-fi enabled basic internet access
• A long battery life (one month!) useful to those without constant easy access to power
• Access to over a million books, many of which are free or educational.
• The new software even allows Kindle users to take books out of a library for free.
• The books that are for sale are often (over 800,000 of them) less expensive than your average ring-tone.
• It is readable and works well outside.
• It’s very portable and simple to use.

On top of that, Amazon could have serious incentive to ship out to non-US countries or even to provide free or discounted devices to the poor here in the US, as they would be able to make a profit off the Kindles’ advertisement sales and book purchases. Even more useful is the Kindle Keyboard 3G, which has free access to 3G internet all over the world.

Imagine an Amazon donation effort or even an Amazon-backed organization along the lines of One Laptop per Child. We could bring corporate interests together with humanitarian needs and find a real, sustainable, solution to the digital divide.

The gap between those who can easily access the future and those who cannot is significant and is a weighty problem. The Kindle is the solution.

Related articles

• The digital divide is costing America 32 billion dollars a year via the Digital Exclusion infographic (socialwayne.com)
• Digital Inequality (fionaspringer.wordpress.com)
• India unveils cheapest tablet computer (ft.com)
• Digital Citizenship and Digital Divide (daniellehall02.wordpress.com)
• E-books pose problem for the underside of the digital divide (teleread.com)
• Who’s Responsible for the Digital Divide? The Answer May Surprise You! | TechSoup for Libraries (techsoupforlibraries.org)
• Carnival of Journalism: Hack your life with the Kindle, After the Deadline and more (hacktext.com)
• Announcing P2 for Kindle! A WordPress theme for notes and collaboration (hacktext.com)
• eBooks’ greatest obstacle is that they function like books (hacktext.com)
• Why the Kindle is my Swiss Army knife (hacktext.com)

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Image via Wikipedia

For the fifth time at Mason, I have delivered a D’var Torah, an interpretation of the Torah, to the High Holidays congregation at the university Hillel service. This year I spoke on the eve of Rosh Hashanah and my topic, relevantly enough to this blog, was the power of storytelling and why it is important that we all do it. You can read the entire piece at my Nodality and I am excerpting a chunk here.

Tonight is the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, which literally translates to ‘head of the year.’ It’s the first day, One Tishrei, of the new Jewish Year 5772. The Rabbis teach us that Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of the creation of man and woman.

Isn’t that sort of odd?

There were six days of creation (and one day of rest) in the first week of the world. We are not starting at the beginning of this biblical week, nor really at the end. Instead we start our calendar, and every new year, at the anniversary of day 6, the creation of man. Why day six? Is it because humanity might, perhaps, be a bit egotistical?

I think there is more to it then that.

Is there something else that makes day 6 special? In Genesis, chapter two, we receive the second version of the creation story. God has created Adam but, before creating Eve, Adonai has a task for the first man. God brings forth every beast and bird He has created and presents them to Adam. The Torah states that God “brought them to the man to see what he would call each one and whatever the man called each living creature, that remained its name.” (Verse 19).

 

Read the rest at: The power in our stories. Rosh Hashanah D’var Torah for 5772.

Related posts:

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2. Decompressed Storytelling and Sandbox Games

Facebook’s new feature will change the way we think about social media content because it introduces permanence to our digital lives.

Since the beginning of the social media revolution, the structure of the sites we use inspires a fire-and-forget philosophy towards creating content. This is especially true on Twitter, where you can’t even reach past a week into your personal archive without direct links to each update. Facebook had the same issue. Though the content we create on social media platforms exists forever, our inability to reach it led to a certain way of thought. One that is pretty detrimental to users. Facebook’s new Timeline feature, set to go live across all accounts in a week, will change that forever.

Facebook's new Timeline feature.

You won’t understand until you use Timeline just how transparent it is. It shows you every element of your social media life on Facebook from the day you began. All data that was there before, but not easy to get to. People are going to freak out. Not because of the new design, but because they will suddenly realize that everything they’ve said, done, joined or otherwise broadcast on Facebook is there, clear as day, available for anyone with a few minutes of curiosity to see.

People update their profiles and accounts without a real thought towards the long-term consequences of what they put up on the public internet. They figure that because they couldn’t find the content, no one else will. As a result they post things that, perhaps, they shouldn’t.

This is a problem.

Just because services like Twitter and Foursquare lack the functionality for the average user to access and see their lifetime of content doesn’t mean it isn’t accessible. It doesn’t mean that others can’t access it, perhaps the very people you wouldn’t want accessing your social updates. The fact that others can access our information while we can’t, the lack of transparency with these services, is a very bad thing.

By opening access of your information to you (and anyone else) Facebook is going to upset a lot of people because suddenly everyone will easily be able to find everything you’ve done online. That’s good. They should freak out. It’s always been like this (and not just on Facebook) and the average user didn’t realize it.

Facebook revolutionized the way we use the internet when they convinced people to use their real names and pictures to represent themselves online. Now they are confronting people with just how it always worked. I suspect that we’ll see a similar enormous shift in people’s behavior online as a result.

This is the internet you signed up for. It’s not creepy, it’s how social media has always been. Only, no one told you until now.

Welcome to reality.

Related articles

• You realize Timelines are COMPLETELY replacing Facebook profiles? (thenextweb.com)
• Facebook Announces Timelines and Improvements to Open Graph (hubspot.com)
• First Look: Facebook’s New Timeline Design (readwriteweb.com)
• Facebook Timeline: Here’s What It Looks Like [VIDEO] (mashable.com)
• Twitter is buzzing about Timelines and Zuckerberg after Facebook’s F8 conference (thenextweb.com)
• @ F8: Facebook Unveils New Class Of Social Apps And Redesigned ‘Timeline’ (paidcontent.org)
• How to Get and Activate Timeline on Facebook (netwidz.com)
• Facebook: Timeline is coming – whether you like it or not (gigaom.com)
• Facebook’s Timeline: Cool or Creepy? (onemanandhisblog.com)
• Facebook’s New ‘Timeline’: Your Life Story (techland.time.com)

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Image via Wikipedia

When you get right down to it, Privacy is a poor hack.

Right now, the privacy controls are out of our hands. Though we may think that editing our Facebook feed and hiding behind fake e-mails protect us, the truth is anything but. A few years ago, I was able to find my grandmother’s social security number online; she has never owned an Internet-enabled computer. On a bet, using only his first name and a cursory knowledge of his life, I was able to find a random stranger’s home address, his phone number, the phone number of his parents, and all their past residences–in 30 minutes. Our unique identifiers are spread all over the web, we can’t help it.

There is a metaphor many security experts use when dealing with the concept of privacy in the digital age. The Panopticon is a prison designed to allow a single observer to see all the prisoners, without the prisoners knowing that they are being watched.

Many professionals live in fear of the digital Panopticon, a situation in which our own information imprisons us in an Orwellian trap of monstrous proportions. With our every move tracked, we loose that sacred American right to privacy. These experts invent security codes, hashed passwords, privacy keys, and the little delete buttons next to Facebook mini-feed items. They are all subject to a shared delusion. That they are staving off the end of privacy as we know it.

The Panopticon is here. We are trapped in its prison cells. We can’t protect our information. The unending attempts to do so are distracting us from the real question, an old one.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The Latin question has even more relevance now then it did for the Romans who read Juvenal’s poems. It translates to “Who will guard the guardians?” and it is one of the most important queries of the digital age. It is second only to the question: Who are the guardians?

Right now, we have deluded ourselves into thinking we are safe. But we couldn’t be more wrong. Our lives are open books to our world’s elite.

A $100 background check will reveal plenty about me, from my tendency to visit Taco Bell at two a.m. to any time I’ve been called in court. The monetary elite, both personal and corporate, can pay far more for invasive background checks that will track me to my favorite deodorant and last sent e-mail.

Our national agencies, the bureaucratic elite, have access to the machines that process my movements through the information world. The government can track my phone calls, library renewals and, with only a little bit of effort, find out more about my communications than I could possibly remember. Before I start sounding like a conspiracy theorist, here’s a number to consider: 399 billion dollars. That’s how much of your taxes went to the US Department of Defense in 2007. Almost 34 billion of that amount went to various groups marked on their budget as “Other.” In 2008, the president requested 45 billion dollars for classified intelligence operations and agencies. If our government needs to know something about you or me, it will.

Finally, the intellectual elite can also easily find the information behind identities. I’m not talking about the ivory tower, I mean black-hat hackers. Bruce Sterling, in his documentation of the hacker movement from the 60s to the 90s, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, documents numerous digital intruders, including one citizen who found Bill Clinton’s credit card. Unfortunately, anything digital can be broken into with effort, time, and a big enough computer. All these years later, an ever increasing number of identity theft crimes mean that against a smart criminal, there is no real protection.

It’s time for a paradigm shift. Our information’s security is irrelevant, we need to ask how to be secure in our digital selves. We need to be able to stand in the center of our personal Panopticon and see every aspect of our many identities in complete exposure and detail. It is time to take the tools away from the elite, opt-in, and watch our watchers.

Right now we are in a weird between state, where we are forced through complicated security practices because we want to protect ourselves from the non-elite who seek to steal our identities. But this provides a false sense of security, the waitress can still steal your credit card number and your workplace can discover court settlements.

Enter the society of consensual monitoring, where the masses of information are under our control and we see what we output. Imagine a life-feed. A website where you can go to see every transaction made with your credit card as a news item, your credit rating is a widget in the corner of your screen, the government’s servers send you an alert every time your social security card is checked in the system, and you can track when people search for you in the same way that you can see a report on who is visiting a website.

What we need is permission, the same corporate and government groups that can track your identity with ease are the ones who have control over whether or not you can access it. You need to pay them to be able to see what is happening with your own identity. We have lost the ability to see our own identities.

Practically, It wouldn’t take that much to accomplish. Once we had permission, to opt-in to your identity you wouldn’t need new technology, everything we need is out there, RSS, XML, and more.

As an example, there is an increasing number of free websites that allow you to track your own identity and name as it travels through the Internet. Many of these allow you to plug in to social networks such as Facebook, which tracks friends as they go to events and take pictures, Last.fm, which tallies up what music you listen to, or Digg, which lets you mark the news stories that you read. The Spock service combines the ability to see when your name pops up on the web with feeds from other services. Friendfeed lets you track activity in your own identities while seeing what your friends are doing.

On the more professional side there are services likeLinkedIn, which allow you to put up all your professional information for potential employers and see exactly who has been looking at your profile. Annualcreditreport.com lets you get your credit report once every 12 months–for free–from the top agencies and CreditKarma.com gives you yourTransUnion credit score for free, through advertiser sponsorship. In an extremely useful move, an increasing number of banks allow access to account information via mobile phone.

The ability to opt-in to your identity could be here tomorrow, but we need to go to our government representatives and our corporate bosses and argue for it to happen. This is an all or nothing proposal, either we can all join in consensual monitoring of our identities and be truly safe or we can live in a constant scramble to try and protect the unprotectable.

No related posts.

Image via CrunchBase

There are a lot of tools on the internet, some are great, some not so much. Diigo is a tools you should stay away from. It seems like whatever you create on the service may disappear.

A while back, everyone thought that Yahoo was going to shut down Delicious and went out to find alternative web-bookmarking services. There were a number that stood out from the pack and received a lot of new users. Diigo, another social bookmarking service, came out as one of the leading competitors.

It turned out that Delicious was staying around after all and a lot of people went back. However, Diigo definitely increased their user base and is still going strong. I used the site for a little while, way back before the Yahoo drama, right after they gobbled up my favorite bookmarking services Furl. I’ve occasionally tried to use it in between now and then as well.

I more than don’t like it, I want to recommend you to stay away.

There are a lot of clever ideas in Diigo, the web-highlighting and sharing bar has most of them. However, I don’t like it when a site inserts a bunch of code into my rendered page. It’s one of the main reasons I don’t use StumbleUpon more. The lists and sticky notes are also good ideas and I want to acknowledge that as well. Annotation is clearly a big focus for Diigo as a service and that’s all in there.

The site itself is not very well designed. The left sidebar doesn’t make sense for most use cases. The whole thing just doesn’t look very good.

These are mostly side complaints however. My biggest problem is with how Diigo has implemented its Premium model in the past and how they might in the future.

Back when Furl disappeared and I had to move to Diigo I was using it for two things: collecting links in packages for research for blog posts to share with readers and archiving my work, so I could show it to potential employers, even if it disappeared off the web. Furl and Diigo both stood out then because they allowed you to archive the page you were looking at when you bookmarked it. This was great for saving clips or keeping track of constantly changing political campaign or party websites (which was part of what I was covering at the time).

Diigo took over Furl, transferred my bookmarks erased my cached pages. It was irritating, but not totally unexpected. I went through all the pages I needed to keep archived and re-cached them using Diigo’s system. I continued to save and cache stuff to Diigo for a while after that.

Then Diigo went Freemium.

When I received the notice, I didn’t think much of it. I noticed that they were now going to make people pay to use the page caching feature and didn’t connect it with my pre-existing cached pages. I simply assumed that my cached pages would continue to exist somewhere I could reach them.

Only later did I discover that the pages I had meticulously cached were no longer archived. This was especially depressing because the organization I had worked for had disappeared the posts off the internet, the very problem I had thought myself hedged against.

They had deleted their users’ content off the site without warning to increase the attractiveness of their premium product. This has to be the worst thing a service like Diigo can do. The action worried me so much that I stopped using the site all together.

It wasn’t because I was angry at Diigo for erasing my important content, though I definitely was that. The real concern is: if content disappeared without warning due to the premium version of the service, couldn’t anything you create using Diigo be held hostage to a premium fee?

All those extra features, highlighting, sticky notes, lists, etc… are interesting ideas and might be useful but are not exportable. If Diigo decides to make them premium functions the content you’ve put time into making on that service will be lost.

That’s why I’m recommending you should avoid Diigo.

Related articles

• How to Use Diigo or Del.icio.us in the POTCERT11 Online Course (onlinesapiens.wordpress.com)
• I’m Diggin’ Diigo! (sharonpslibrary.wordpress.com)
• Social Bookmarking For Enterprise Knowledge Management | Intelligent Agent (ia-blog.com)
• Cool Tool: iPad with Diigo & GoodReader Application (med523summer11.wordpress.com)
• Delicious not to close but time to consider alternates (itjano.wordpress.com)

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Every media platform has its own language. For video part of that is the art of editing. Jim Emerson is breaking down editing technique and theory in exquisite detail in his series on Press Play. It’s well worth the watch.

When working to tell stories over multiple mediums, it’s important to create content to keep the strengths, traditions and techniques of each format in mind. Emerson does a great job of explaining what is going own, from a technical standpoint, in each of the sequences he examines.

If you want a better understanding of video editing, than this is something you have to watch.

Emerson’s video essays have broken down three action sequences over four movies. He started with a critique of the big chase scene in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Night.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The second piece shows off the spatial awareness in Philip Noyce’s film Salt.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part three compares current techniques with older approaches in The Lineup and The French Connection.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is great commentary in each of the articles (as well as some unedited versions of the scenes in the first two) so if you like what you see, you should click through.

No related posts.

Image via Wikipedia

On the web everything is in the present, but that doesn’t mean it is presently relevant or even accurate. Timestamps are an essential component of any online content you create.

Timestamps are enormously important to participants with online content. While the content you are authoring may not always have relevance, it will always be on the web, sometimes even after you think you’ve removed it from the web. Numerous sites run archives, others simply scrape content and some folks may even print things out.

Your work may live on after you are gone. However, it will become a useless mess if you fail to provide the proper context. That context is the exact date. 

You may think this is a non-issue, but think back for a moment. If you work and play on the internet you’ve probably re-shared, commented on or been surprised by something you thought was new content but was, in fact, years old. Think about how you felt when it happened. Even if you never re-shared stuff from this date last year by accident, just reading it and briefly thinking it was something new probably made you feel a little silly.

Why alienate possible participants like that?

Any content management system worth its salt has to timestamp its content internally. It isn’t difficult to make that meta-information show up on your site. Some organizations get it, like the Guardian, who removed words like today and tomorrow from web reports. There are many others that don’t however.

I have frequently stumbled upon sites that don’t list the date at all or, just as useless, only list the month and day. Just as bad are the sites which publish multiple posts a day and don’t timestamp them with the date and time of publication. I can’t trust content that comes from these sites, and neither can you, because it is impossible to tell if it is current or relevant.

If you run your own blog, work with a news organization or are just occasionally posting content online do everyone a favor and put the month, day and year right there under the title and author. You’ll be helping to build a better internet.

Related posts:

1. Friday synthesis post: Are comments part of your narrative?
2. Site upgrade