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Organizing An International Festival: The Back Story At IJF Perugia

Robin Good — Tue, 10 May 2011 05:10:00 PDT

Though I am not a great fan of conferences and events (as I find them still utilizing old-fashioned delivery formats, which keep and increase the separation between audience and presenters) there are key factors that can make me become a most passionate event fan.

Photo credit: Mlenny Photography

Specifically:

Venue: The event is designed around a special location or place, where the "being there" is not just the same as sitting inside an anonymous auditorium chair. In the best cases, the event topic and interest extends gracefully in the locales, hotels and streets hosting the event.

Duration: The event spans a number of days offering the opportunity for getting to know the venue, having enough extra time to relax and enjoy the place, and to establish new connections without needing to rush from one session to the next.

Interaction-Networking: The space and the venue support easy meeting and exchange with other people. There are many break-out areas and the atmosphere feels cozy and welcoming. Logistics, tools and services are designed to facilitate to the max the meeting of new people, networking activities, groups discussions and open learning circles.

Program: The event program is rich in lectures, presentations and other types of sessions, allowing me ample choice of topics, locations and speakers to attend. It doesn't force me to follow any specific session or speaker.

Formats: The types of delivery formats utilized innovate and break new ground. The audience is as important as the presenters, and there are opportunities for discussion, brainstorming and exchange, rather than just for top-down information delivery.

People: The people participating are very diversified, in terms of expertise, competence, professional experience, age and origin. That makes for such a much more interesting environment and for a great possibility to learn from others.

Food and Lodging: The event venue offers opportunity to eat unique original foods and location specialties. There is a variety of restaurants and the event has partnered with many of these to offer special rates and discounts to the event attendees. Hotel and accommodation places offer themselves a unique experience as they are immersed in the culture of the place and offer services and amenities unique to them.

Learning: I like to learn. The more an event offers me the opportunity to go away with tangible advice, practical information, and tools that I can put to use right away, the happier I am. In fact, this is one of the two things that most people go to events for: learning something new, getting inspired, finding out new ways and solutions to solve their problems.

Organizers: The organizers are "accessible". Humble, friendly and always open to new suggestions and ideas. The organizers are the heart and soul of the festival and their personal attitude and availability broadcasts and represent the true spirit of the event.

Event Design: The event is made, conceived and realized by the participants themselves. Individual participants, as well as companies and public organizations are invited in large advance to submit and propose their ideas for the event contents, panels, workshops and sessions. Everyone has a voice and can contribute to the shaping of the next year program, lineup of speakers or topics covered.

In Italy, there is one yearly event that comes very close to having all these characteristics, while being completely free to attend. It is the International Journalism Festival, which is held in the beautiful city of Perugia during the month of April.

I have had the luck, thanks to Media140 and to Vittorio Pasteris of having been invited to this event for the last two years, and for many of the reasons I have listed above, I have become an instant fan of IJF.

In this light, this year, I decided to organize an interview with the festival organizers, Arianna Ciccone and Chris Potter, to find out directly from them, how they had first arrived at the idea of creating a festival and which were the key obstacles they had encountered in their journey.

Here's their passionate replies, vision, concerns and hopes for the future, as I have collected them in a series of very short video clips, I shot, right during this year festival, in Perugia.

If you are interested in improving the quality of your events, understanding what goes on behind the scenes during a festival, or what it takes to bring over 450 media and journalism speakers to one of the nicest corners of Italy, here is some interesting things Arianna and Chris shared with me.

1) How The IJF Was Born

Chris: How the Festival Was Born

Duration: 1’ 4’’

Full English Text Transcription

Chris Potter: Well, I'll tell you what, Robin.

First, if there is anything, any discrepancies between what I say and what Arianna says, of course I'm right and she's wrong.[laughs]

The story is that a few years ago - six years ago - we were in the garden and she said: "Well, Christopher, what do you think about a journalism festival?" And I said: "You're completely crazy. It's impossible."

The idea of hers was that there were many festivals in Italy: Music festivals, science festivals, philosophy festivals, every type of festival. There wasn't a journalism festival. And she, being an ex-journalist, passionate about journalism, said:

"Why is there no journalism festival where people who are interested in this subject can go and learn, meet other people and enjoy journalism for what it is?"

From that moment the idea was born to try and create in some way a journalism festival.

The first edition came about in 2007, as you know. It was a success because people came... Second edition, third, fourth and now we're at the fifth edition: It's grown enormously. It has a curious momentum of its own which carries it forward.

Arianna: How the Festival Got Started

Duration: 0' 37''

Arianna Ciccone: The International Journalism Festival was born out of a personal frustration, because I am a journalist myself. I stopped my journalism career early, as I knew I was not going to find a job I would have liked. This is why I started my own communication agency. I have then begun working for cultural events and for institutions... but as you may know, when you have a passion for journalism, it's a hard one to drop, and so I thought, why don't I create an event about journalism itself.

I have chosen Perugia because I live here. For me it was an obvious choice to match my living and work objectives: I have chosen to live in the countryside, in a small town with a very human dimension to it, and so it was absolutely a natural for me to make the festival here in Perugia.

2) What Makes IJF Unique

The Festival Atmosphere

Duration: 0’ 36’’

Chris Potter: It's amazing how many quality people with good will, good intentions and capacity to organize themselves make a festival.

We can't create an atmosphere, but the atmosphere which we notice around here and which other people noticed also, is refreshing. It's something new. It's something different. It's that spirit of collaboration and interaction, which - talking to other journalists - you rarely find in other media events.

Most media events you have professional journalists who are listening to other professional journalists who are speaking. Here it's a mix, which is very rich and very unique, and I think that's valuable.

Self-Organization

Duration 1’ 22’’

Chris Potter: It's impossible for two, four, even 10 people to organize all this. We put it in motion and, curiously, it carries on almost on its own.

There are 450 speakers here this year, 200 volunteers, 300 accredited journalists.

How can you organize all these people? You can't. You just have to set the structure, put it in motion, and trust the goodwill of the participants - and amazingly, it functions. If you say: "Why?" or "How?" frankly, I don't know.

There's a famous scene in the film Apocalypse Now, when Charlie Sheen's going up the river, and they arrive at this American military camp in the middle of nowhere. There's this drugged-up, black American soldier who meets Charlie Sheen. Charlie Sheen, being a correct guy, said to the black fellow: "Who's in charge?" And the black guy says: "Aren't you in charge?"

In other words, the impression is that there's someone in charge. In reality, there isn't, because it has its own way of controlling itself. Journalists are normally practical people. They're independent people. If there's a panel and there's no one to take it, journalists will turn up. They'll do it: They'll give their opinions and they'll go on from there.

The festival, despite its size, is coherent and in control, even though objectively it's impossible for just two people to deal with all of it.

Arianna: The Volunteers

Duration: 1' 20''

Arianna Ciccone: The idea of the volunteers came about the second year of the festival. I thought that this could have been a good strategy to involve students coming also from other parts of the world.

As a matter of fact, we have 200 volunteers that come literally from all over the world and to whom we offer hospitality during the festival week.

Since the volunteers arrive here in the week of the festival, they are not really part of the organization and logistic work that goes on before the event, and which takes the work of me and other seven people from September to February.

The volunteers come here and they literally give life to the event wit their passion, energy and enthusiasm for this profession. They are all aspiring reporters and journalists, this is what they want to do when they grow up, nonetheless many of them already have a very high academic profile. They speak at least two languages, most are already graduate students and have many professional competencies.

Here they experiment: They do web tv, online radio, they do journalism work. They learn and they grow their social network, their relevant contacts. Yes, here they do a lot of networking, and this, in my opinion, is the key to the beauty of this festival, because the journalists meet among themselves, the audience meets with important authors and writers, aspiring journalists get to know each other as well as being able to meet and talk with professionals.

3) How to Organize the Festival Content and Speakers

Release Control

Duration: 2’ 1’’

Chris Potter: Perhaps what we've discovered is that the more you delegate, the more you are prepared to relinquish control, the better is - particularly with young people.

If you look at the content of the festival, each individual event, panel by panel, workshop by workshop, most of them are not organized or structured by us of the festival at all.

We externalize 90% of the content. For example, if you run down the list you'll see the logo of AgoraVox, ,Columbia Journalism Review, Radio Radicale, whoever, which means they, or some person has suggested a topic, we say: "Yes, we like the idea." - this is maybe October, November in the year before the festival. They suggest the speakers, we say: "Yes, we like that", we pay for the speakers to come, we provide travel and accommodation - that's standard - and that panel or workshop then becomes part of the festival.

In a way, we're not experts. Nobody wants to listen to us. We just provide the platform for the real experts like you Robin, or others, to speak to the audience. The only way you can do that is to relinquish control.

If there is a magic ingredient, it means it is simply this - release control, give it to other people, even the young people. For example, this year there were a couple of panels which were organized by previous volunteers at the festival.

In other words, people who originally had their first contact with the festival as a volunteer, the subsequent year, they say: "I'd like to propose this idea for a panel." In some limited cases, we say: "Yes, we like that." These are complete nobodies - in Standard English: In the sense that they're not professional journalists, they're not well known, they're not celebrity people, we simply like the idea, not the name of the person who's proposing the idea. They do this, despite having very little experience as professional journalists. Even those who are not seasoned professionals can provide extraordinarily stimulating content and again, even there it's important to release control.

Arianna: "You" Make the Festival

Duration: 0' 31''

Arianna Ciccone: The message is this, because the International Journalism Festival has in fact no scientific committee. The festival is made by the people who participate in creating it via the Internet, by those who have a passion for this job and for these topics.

Who wants to, can submit proposals.

Every year in September we launch the Your festival campaign, to gather ideas for the next festival and generally the greater part of the contents and events inside the festival comes from external proposals. This is the beauty of working with the net, because the content and agenda proposals come literally from all over the world: From the Columbia Journalism Review to RIA Novosti the Russian news agency.

How to Get Important Guests to Participate

Duration: 0' 24''

Arianna Ciccone: Without the Internet we would have not been able to bring here major international journalists.

What has worked for us is to use people who are very familiar with social networks, the web and other platforms, who have helped us get in touch with these personalities abroad. They get in touch with them through a simple email, or via Facebook or Twitter. This is how we have gotten all of the great names to come.

I would like to underline though that for what concerns Italian journalists, in the first year not one newspaper chief has chosen to come to the Festival outside of Repubblica's Ezio Mauro.

4) Which Are The Greatest Obstacles In Organizing a FestIval Like This

Major Obstacles Encountered

Duration: 3' 3"

Chris Potter: There are two obstacles:

One is whether we - Arianna and myself - really want to spend five months of the year putting together something which is enormous, because there are lots of frustrations, and, frankly, organizing other people is not a very stimulating line of work: It's complex. It's tedious. It's repetitive.

Organizing a festival is not like 10 minutes ago, having a drink with 100 other journalists in a beautiful context in Umbria with this fantastic wine and fantastic food.

Most of the festival is sitting at a computer writing emails to people, saying: "Please tell me what flight you want... When will you arrive? ...Why haven't you replied? ...The panel is this day, not the other day." That's what organizing a festival is and it's not very interesting.

That's one obstacle: whether we really want to spend every year, five months of that year, doing this.

The second one is whether it's worthwhile financially, because... let's be honest: It's a festival, which is free entry. Nobody buys a ticket.

Everything, all the money for the festival comes from sponsors.

To maintain a festival of this size - 450 speakers, etc. - you need a significant budget. The budget only comes because sponsors are prepared to invest in the festival. The sponsors are either private companies or public institutions.

When people invest money, they want a return. A return can be interpreted in many different ways.

One sophisticated form of return is they put their logo on the festival, the festival is a success, and the success of the event is associated with the logo, and the logo gains greater credibility and greater value as a result.

The other form of return is that the sponsors want to participate actively in the festival. What does that mean? They say: "Christopher, what do you think if our CEO speaks on this panel?" My reply is: "Excuse me, your CEO knows nothing about journalism. Why should he or she speak on that panel? This is a journalism festival." Their reply is: "Well, they may not be journalists, but they're very important people and we are the sponsor. We pay X, ergo we should have space Y." Is that reasonable? In some cases, possibly, yes. In other cases, possibly, no.

You'll have to play the game of the balance between what you accept is a reasonable request by a sponsor, because without the sponsors there's no festival, and what you define as an unreasonable request by the sponsor and you say no.

We have to be prudent in managing the sponsors, but at the same time, the festival has credibility only and exclusively because the speakers are credible people as journalists, not because they work for Vodafone, UniCredit, and / or other companies - and that's a delicate balance. Because it's delicate and because it's important, it's stressful.

Arianna Ciccone: The Major Obstacle Encountered

Duration: 0' 38''

Arianna Ciccone: ...Maybe it has been the one of making the very journalists from the establishment understand how cool and important it was the idea of opening a discussion about journalism to a much wider audience, made up of outsiders and non-professionals. Making them understand that this was the right thing to do at the right time, as the festival started right when the Internet revolution affecting traditional media was at its height and when people were suggesting that the end of paper-based news was possibly nearing.

Today we are already in a re-evaluation phase of all this. But then, when we first started, it was a trauma.

5) Advanced Learning as a Business Model for the Future

Business Models for the Festival

Duration: 1’ 28’’

Chris Potter: One idea is to make people buy tickets.

I think if there was a ticket required to every event, it would be like in Mantova. At the Mantova Literature Festival you buy a ticket for each event. Even if the price is relatively low - that is €5, or €8, depending on the event - I think it changes the atmosphere of the festival.

I think if it was necessary for people even to pay a modest price, it would significantly transform the festival as we have known it. I don't think we really want to do that. The success of it is the fact it's accessible.

The whole origin of the festival was to make journalism accessible to others. If you put a price, even a limited price, it doesn't.

Secondly, you could have a system of inviting people to contribute what they think is a reasonable figure to help the festival. I don't think you would get in enough money that way. If it's a voluntary donation by people interested in the festival, it won't have a critical mass to make any significant difference.

The other possibility is to bring in other sponsors. The one feature of the festival at the moment is that there are no international sponsors.

In other words, there are Italian companies which are international companies like Vodafone and Nestlé which are international companies - but, it's the Italian part of Vodafone and Nestlé which are the sponsors.

The future would be, possibly, that a significant international media organization decides that they would be interested in supporting the festival, because they think from a journalistic point of view it's a valid event, that would resolve the money problems. We'll see.

Arianna Ciccone: The Future Is in the Workshops

Duration: 0' 34''

Arianna Ciccone: I think that the festival needs to grow more.

What I want to empower more, just like we did this year, is the area of the workshops, because this is an interesting area for which many of the young guys come here to the festival.

Beyond the many "panel discussions" that are good for our souls, these guys are really asking for some practical training... it is them asking it... I noticed it even from their own questions during the events.

For now we have improved the workshops: They are free and they are done by highly qualified people. But this is the area which I believe needs the most improvement still. We must do more of them, because the young people who come here, must be able to go away with something they can put to use right away.

6) Logistics and Behind the Scenes

The Festival Backstage and Hospitality: Francesca Cimmino

Duration: 1' 43''

Francesca Cimmino: I am Francesca Cimmino and I am the person responsible for hospitality here at the Festival.

It's because of Arianna that I am here, as she was the one to call me in. It was the first of January and she called me saying: "Fra, we need you." Since Arianna is my cousin, I said yes, but since then I have been running like hell.

For example, I remember that the other night... frequently Festival guests arrive very late at night. We are always in contact with them, but as you can imagine at 2am, you may be missing if someone is looking for you on your cell phone.

The driver had taken this guest to the wrong hotel, and the people at the hotel, being such a late hour at night, were having a hard time knowing what to do. For a moment it was total panic. The people and the driver at the hotel were thinking of sending the guest back to a nearby town (Foligno) to spend the night there, as all of the hotels in Perugia were full. It was chaos.

As I got in my bedroom after washing my teeth, I found six calls on my cell phone and I jumped: "Oh my God, what has happened now?" I asked myself.

I called the hotel and they were already sending away the unfortunate guest. I caught them for a split second. The driver had gotten the wrong hotel name, and I directed them to it, since it was very close by.

I didn't think that there could have been so many volunteers, so much participation and involvement and so many young people.

The Festival is the first time that I live it from here.

It is incredible to see the desire these young people have to become journalists, especially when you consider that we live in a country where journalists are caught between two fires:Tto attend to those in power that give you the work, and to the personal drive to ethically report and communicate the news.

It is also amazing to see these young persons avidly seeking direct contact and exchanges with those individuals that are their models and myths. This has impressed me a lot and I found it beautiful.

To see the generous availability of important journalists and VIPs also has impressed me. They are all individuals that come to the festival for free and who are happy to give their contributions, especially to young people. These important people, make themselves available to the many requests for interviews, opinions and souvenir photographs which the festival participants request, without any hesitation. They are always available. This has really impressed me.

Video clips originally recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia. First published on May 10th, 2011 as "Organizing An International Festival: The Back Story At IJF Perugia".

About Arianna Ciccone

Arianna Ciccone is the founder and director of the International Journalism Festival.

Arianna Ciccone was born in Naples in 1970. She grew up there and graduated with a first class degree in philosophy from the University of Naples in 1994. After attending the Graduate Journalism School in Urbino, she started working as a news reporter at a local radio station in 1996 and then as a print media journalist as a local correspondent to the daily newspaper Il Messaggero. She then left active journalism to co-found the communications agency Il Filo di Arianna (Arianna’s Thread) in 2000.

She started IJF in 2007 and the objective of the festival is to bring the best of world journalism to the widest possible audience. Entry to all festival events is free.

In 2010 Arianna set up the citizen activism website Valigia Blu (Blue Suitcase) to campaign on issues of importance in the Italian media.

About Chris Potter

Chris Potter is the director of the International Journalism Festival and he is also partner of Il Filo di Arianna (Arianna's Thread). He previously studied computing science at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Live Events Strategy: Mashing Up Physical Conferences With Online Extended Events - Live Events Become X-Events

Robin Good — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:20:00 PDT

A new class of powerful, inclusive, popular and engaging events liberated from the straitjacket of space-time by the convergence of usable new media technologies is ushering at your door: X-events are next.

Photo credit: XLucas

But let me explain myself better: Online (and offline) events should not be confined anymore by physical the space-time boundaries of when and where the event actually occurs.

The convergence of new media communication and collaboration technologies like RSS, wikis, blogs, podcasts, discussion forums, as well as social media outlets with more traditional information delivery channels like newsletters or mailing lists offers an opportunity for extremely rich, engaged and dynamic communities to be built around the core track topics and themes of any conference or event.

The best way to explain X-events is to start simple.

Consider for example a physical conference for which a community site is built beforehand and in which participants, lecturers and sponsors start interacting and actively engaging with each other way before the physical event starts.

Think also of an event that while takes place in physical space it is also re-broadcast and made accessible in multiple ways, providing access and different levels of interaction to those attending live as well as to those at a distance.

Imagine the breadth and richness of content options that can be skillfully created out of the many interactions the virtual event communities have been able to generate.

Or the many possible compilations, playlists, and collections of user filtered and edited multimedia content that could be created after the event was over.

It is in the ability to merge and synergize the tremendous potential of new media communication, collaboration and community creation technologies with the attraction and interest generated by a live event guests and key issues that revolutionary communication and marketing potential of X-events really lies.

X-Events Overview

Live events are a great opportunity to market, showcase, demo, present and introduce new ideas, as well as products. But, if you have ever been behind one, you will have realized how complex is the organization of the logistics, and how swift, skilled and prompt the team running the show must be.

Given all this investment in organization, and stuff, how significant would be the additional cost of extending the event fully into virtual space by leveraging, in a synergistic, organic and well planned out fashion all of the most relevant new media technologies to enable a community and an extended conversation to form online around the event.

Consider the infinite number of revenue options that can be born out of commoditizing the conference and creating a hot passionate and lively community that generates all kinds of relevant content around any given theme.

Imagine how fantastic it would be if you could engage your favorite speakers before the actual conference and with your questions and contributions shape the topic and discussions for the live event.

I have played with this idea for the first time back in January 2005, when I wrote this article, "Events Break Out Of The Physical Space-Time Prison. Time-Extended Conversations Are Coming: X-Events".

Some years have passed but my feelings have not changed.

Actually, I am much more convinced now than I was then of the tremendous benefits and advantages that extended-events could bring to all parties involved.

What are X-Events?

X-events or "extended events" are a yet-to-be-realized form of conference that extends well beyond the physical event boundaries, into time (before, during and after the event) and through multiple media formats.

X-Events are events which are planned and carried out in a continuous experience that merges offline physical events and online conversations.

In other words: X-Events are typical conferences, social events or physical gatherings of some kind that extend their lifetime, reach and value by extending their active engagement potential with their participants by intelligently integrating community tools, content delivery and distribution channels, social media marketing, live and asynchronous collaboration tools much before, during and long after the actual event has taken place.

Say you have an international event focusing on "web publishing" taking place a few months from now. Say you have a large international audience of interested participants that will come to the event and a good selected group of speakers who will showcase their know-how at the event.

How could you transform your traditional 2-day conference in an "extended-event" that provides greater engagement and value to participants and presenters as well as providing you with broader and longer visibility, extra opportunities for sponsorship and sales as well as greater opportunities for quality business networking among all stakeholders?

How can a physical conference take best advantage of all the new media communication, collaboration and social media tools to extend its lifespan and engagement reach well beyond the physical event itself while generating an engaged and passionate community around itself?

Here some starting ideas to consider :

1) Before the Event

Open a blog and a RSS feed for the event and start providing, value-rich information about the event in a periodic, consistent and systematic way.

Create a story around the preparation for the event and around the people involved in this. Find a key character to narrate the story and keep audience on top the latest happenings.

Open a forum or a Ning-style interactive community where discussion and relevant issues for the event can take off right now.

Complement forum topics with a distribute video commenting platform like Seesmic which can allow a forum like experience which is not text-based but video based. Video commenting can be very good for engaging in lively, passionate discussions as well as in brainstorming sessions or analysis/focus groups.

Inject some social media components allowing the community to contaminate and cross-fertilize itself. Let people discover each other profiles and interests, provide feedback on the most followed discussion items and provide ways for users to contribute relevant pointers and links.

Integrate a presentation publishing platform like Slideshare for all participants to use, and promote relevant and related presentations to the topics of the event.

Create a set of manually edited newsradars (topic specific hand-edited news channels gathering best news and stories from all sources out there), generated by moderators or community members and focusing on the very specific themes of the conference itself.

Market the event by using a mailing list and by developing a meaningful story that builds up momentum up to the X-event launch.

2) During the Event

Enable a live reporting platform for any qualified participant or media representative who wants to use to report about specific sessions. Tools like CoverItLive provide all of the features an in-session reporter may ever need. Consider opening up a limited number of seats for voluntary official reporters for each session and monetize the sponsorship opportunity they create.

Support and make it easy for all participants to access live audio and video streaming tools to enable as wide and comprehensive real-time capture of all of the event happenings from as many different viewpoints as possible. From the live sessions to the informal networking in the allies.

Let participants engage among themselves and with presenters and among themselves during live sessions by creating dedicated Twitter channels and groups for real-time discussion and feedback.

Utilize also more traditional and well established real-time communication tools like like text chat and IRC channels. These technologies can still go a long way in providing effective real-time conversation back channels for each live presentation in the event.

Offer the opportunity to premium (paying) participants and/or to the press to sit down and video interview, alongside other prominent news reporters and bloggers the key personalities presenting at the conference.

Leverage Friendfeed social aggregation capabilities to provide a parallel information distribution channel for key event related personalities and events.

Create thematic newsradars (topic specific news channels) on the specific topics the conference covers. Newsradars can provide immediate value to an extended event by providing a comprehensive digest of the most relevant news and issues on any topic.

Provide conferencing spaces for live events to have a parallel venues available to presenters and participants before and after the live session. Also consider modelling live event sessions around the opportunity to be both live and at a distance by engaging and responding appropriately to both audiences. Allow participants to promote and deliver complementary keynotes, panels and sessions in a barcamp-like spirit on a set of virtual stages dedicated to them.

Hire editors and moderators to create and maintain key wiki guides on every key session / track taking place at the event. Parallel events, other contributions and related sessions, live discussions, related resources and user contributed materials should all be easily reached by maintaining a well organized and always up-to-date set of wiki pages.

3) After the Event

Keep the conversation going. Maintain open the key most active forums, discussion and conversational areas and aggregate all of the related content into highly focused content channels. Look at it this way: any event, when transformed to an X-event is an opportunity to put in movement a series of mechanisms that can create / generate a number of highly valuable content channels. These shouldn't be seen as useless and expensive-to-maintain content marketing channels but as ultimate revenue-generating community-driven dynamic communities bonded together by one of the themes / personalities / issues the event has brought forward.

Develop and design with your most loyal community participants your next year event, starting from the very discussions you have kept open. Let your newly developed communities design your next conference by participating in identifying topics, speakers, events and formats improvements that they want to see happen. What a great way to bond more with an event audience and to crowdsource its insight and desires to improve your offering.

Showcase all of the event videos and key presentations. Make it easy and simple to access all of this content in a variety of formats: Streaming video, downloadable clip, MP3 audio, text transcription, premium option on DVD with special selected content. Consider utilizing more advanced presentation delivery tools like Instant Vcasmo to allow participants to create synched mashups of live video recordings with the actual slideshow presentations delivered.

Integrate social conversational components to each content item. Make it easy for people to add comments, tags and to start new discussion threads under each show / presentation. Allow each one performance to become a smaller pivot point for social aggregation, communication and networking.

Create visual navigable spaces by using tools like Google Maps or Microsoft Photosynth allowing the participants to enhance the discovery of the physical event physical surroundings, hotels, bar, cafes, nearby social venues.

Facilitate the user-generated creation of image photo-albums about the event. Beyond the typical tag reference, used in these situations, allowing everyone uploading to public image sharing sites to make his pics associated with the event, reward individual participants to create multimedia photo-albums on specific themes and topics by using some of the many great visual story-telling tools like Scrapblog, Smilebox, VMix, OneTrueMedia, Mixercast, Vuvox, Flektor.

Create user-generated video compilations of the most interesting sessions and topics by making it easy for participants to edit playlists of their video clips. From YouTube playlists to Magnify or Splashcast powerful features, there are a growing number of tools that do just this.

X-Events Key Benefits

If my vision for X-events is correct, these are going to be outstandingly capable marketing, branding and advertising channels, giving extended life to any physical event while hugely increasing its potential audience interaction and profit potential.

Here are some of the immediately apparent benefits that X-events can bring to any company managing, organizing or designing the delivery of live events like typical conferences and seminars:

a) Larger audiences: As participants don't need to attend on a specific date/time, potential for participation is tremendously increased. Interested parties can access event recordings after the event at their leisure. For physical events this provides a significant extension of the reach and the possibility of scaling the number of participants to at least an order of magnitude.

b) Extension of communication and marketing reach. As a very significantly larger number people can attend, participate, subscribe, listen and attend asynchronously to extended events so does the reach for your message, brand, sponsorship, or product(s). All of the extended channels offer huge opportunities for highly targeted, contextual, non-intrusive marketing opportunities.

c) Greater opportunity for engagement and individual interaction: Participants both in the live event as well as in the extended post-event conversations have more opportunities to engage panelists, experts, speakers and companies/products being mentioned or showcased. Through the use of RSS newsfeeds, wikis, blogs and discussion forums, event tracks can be kept alive for an indefinite time before the event starts and long after the actual event is over. Multiple "vertical-communities" are created offering valuable high profile demographic with specific interests and characteristics.

d) Participatory design and delivery. Yes, grassroots X-event design is here. Who's going to grab it first? Participants can now become co-creators, contributors, editors, individual re-sellers and publishing houses for any event. If only we allowed them to! Who is to say that events need to designed by a non-transparently elected group of vested-interests representatives? Couldn't emancipated participants do a better job of it? Sure they could. Who better then them knows what they will want to buy, listen and attend to? Why take the risk of discovering all this at event time?

e) Great ROI, expanded profit, extended sales marketplace. X-events offer great opportunities to hugely increase event profit-margins by extending marketing and sales opportunities, without a need for expensive physical space and hugely expensive event-related logistical costs. The new X-event is grounded on an extended communication framework not on additional costs for physical infrastructures. The X-event enables major cost-savings matched by the potential for much higher quality output when the organizing team is able to fully realize the direct involvement of participants in the design and delivery of the X-event.

f) Greater opportunities for monetization: X-events generate lots of valuable participants attention on specific topics and issues. X-events can also generate huge quantities of valuable content which can be edited, compiled, annotated and packaged for digital delivery in an infinite number of formats. Such content can be monetized in multiple and overlapping ways by, for example:

Selling web-based conferencing and presentation space to small companies and individuals who want to run parallel extended sessions within the conference framework and official activities

Providing paid access to private video conferencing rooms a-la OoVoo for media and premium customers wanting to video interview your event key guests

Providing paid access to high quality (HD) recorded / downloadable sections.

Selling sponsorship space on all distributed content formats (RSS, wiki, social community, etc.) . This per se encompasses a wide variety of options (see list of channels available to go x after an event, here below).

Offering paid subscription access to very-narrow content channels including user created topic-specific RSS feeds tapping on all content generated by X-event.

Creating premium content offerings including case studies, analysis and report data by selecting, aggregating and editing most valuable content extracted from live event.

Paid access to higher quality, full screen video of live events as well as to individual downloads and video compilations created according to key themes and topics.

Resources Required

X-events are as great an opportunity for engagement, interaction, social and business networking, user-generated content and more as they are challenging and very complex to plan, organize and maintain.

The key issue with X-events is that traditional event organizer are not too familiar with the new conversational marketing philosophy and do not have at their disposal the human resources and skills required to manage such an event.

X-events require many talented individuals with real experience in managing user-generated content, in moderating forums and in motivating communities of interest to engage with the selected issues, and in particular:

1. Having a talented X-event communication strategist. Someone who can aptly envision, plan and coordinate the unfolding of the X-event as an integrated whole.

2. Employing a skilled and experienced editorial team. Creating ongoing discussion topics, news radars, webcasts, interviews and podcasts, blogs, wikis and live chats requires skilled individuals who live and breathe the online world.

3. Selecting tools and technologies that are accessible to everyone. Having communication, presentation and collaboration tools that are both easy-to-use and accessible by all types of Internet users is a critical, essential requirement.

Yes, you read it right. A typical X-event setup is likely going to require a fully dedicated newsroom working to support this many, diverse tasks.

Also for X-events, planning from the very beginning where to go as well as defining well ahead of time they key objectives is, as in most other fields, a safe recipe for probable success.

Editor's Comments - Conclusion

Traditional events are going to transform themselves into ongoing conversations streams, as popular and successful as the topics and people participating and moderating them, and as credible and authoritative as the depth and value of the conversations they are able to generate.

X-events are a natural, spontaneous evolution of traditional physical events and they are characterized by the effective integration of communication and collaboration media with social community technologies to create an extended and ongoing multiplicity of news as well as lively conversation channels, which can start long before the actual physical event takes place and which can go on indefinitely after it.

X-events offer great benefits in terms of community creation, content generation, engagement and interaction, social and business networking, online visibility, marketing and monetization opportunities, by extending the topics and focus of the physical event into virtual space-time with the use of social, conversational and information-distribution technologies (RSS).

X-events represent the new "engagement marketing" frontier and those who will first master how to design, manage and deliver such rich multimedia experiences will likely be the remembered as the pioneers of a whole new of creating and delivering live events.

Even though most of the tools that would be needed to set-up an effective X-event have been out there for a while now, the true challenge is not only in integrating these into a coherent whole but having individuals who can see this vision and bring it to a plan that is certainly more challenging and complex than bringing together the typical tech conference. But so would be the success and rewards, I believe.

What it takes to make x-events happen, is greater appreciation of such an approach by those who organize and finance events. X-events require organizers to first understand what it takes to start and maintain multiple conversation channels open and alive. They must appreciate the value of creating topic-focused communities that are highly engaged. These are not easy tasks but this is what I set out here for myself to do.

Whether X-events will become more of a reality in 2009 it is hard to say, but given the visibility, engagement and opportunities for monetization that this new extended conferences can bring, it should not be long before we start seeing one we are interested in.

In my next article about X-Events I will look at all of the technologies needed to enable an effective extended event.

Photo credit: Originally re-written, edited, updated and mashed up from previous writings by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on September 16th 2008 as "Live Events Strategy: Mashing Up Physical Conferences With Online Extended Events - Live Events Become X-Events"

New Media Predictions 2008: What Online Independent Publishers Should Expect From The Future - Part 2

Robin Good — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 06:35:51 PST

As 2008 will bring greater focus on professional online publishing for Master New Media, here is the second part of my anticipations and predictions for this new year that has just started.

In this second part:

Online Collaboration Tools

Mobile

Mobile Live Video

Online Marketing

Conversational Tools - Microblogging

Widgets

OpenID

Off-line Web-based Applications

X-Events

2008 Media Predictions - Part 2

If you haven't seen Part 1 yet, check it out here:
New Media Predictions 2008: What Online Independent Publishers Should Expect From The Future - Part 1

Online Collaboration Tools

2007 has been in many ways a record year for online collaboration tools with literally dozens of new tools having joined these fast growing group. Screen-sharing, video-conferencing solutions based on Flash as well as new innovative solutions have been all over the news thrughout 2007. Will it stop? Absolutely not.

You are going to see more real-time and asynchronous collaboration tools entering the space as well as notable innovation from many of the existing players. Screen-sharing will become a standard integrated OS or application integrated feature in an increasing number of cases.

Adobe is one of the key companies now setting the benchmarks in this space nonetheless the broad installation base of WebEx and other enterprise conferencing systems still own the numbers. But Adobe has set a long term strategy for the development of its next line of collaboration tools and characterized by a light footprint, cross-platform compatibility, easy to use and feature-rich approach. Connect and Brio are two brilliant examples of this successful strategy. Adobe is not my sponsor, but when a company does well over and over again, one should have no shame of saying it.

What to expect? I think that if Brio and the last iterations of Connect are any indication, you are in for some serious good surprises from these guys which means easier to use and more effective collaboration tools at your disposal.

Mobile

For online independent publishers, mobile is the next frontier, as more and more people log, search and read news while on the move on their mobile phones and PDAs.

Better integration of monetization and advertising opportunities, as well as more sophisticated tools to easily convert your standard web site in one that can be accessed by any mobile device will show up during 2008.

Cooler than cool a new mobile application will allow you to post to your site or blog using your voice and the images / video you capture on the move. The great thing is that your voice is converted into text and published as written content along your mp3 downloadable podcast.

In 2008 you will also be able to access remotely all of your tools, music, data and multimedia content, while being able to play it back on any television set or computer you will find available. Thanks to tools like Mojopac, Orb, Slingbox and TakeTV you will be able to access all of your tools and music / video content from just about anyhwere.

Mobile Live Video

Yes, I have already written about web tv yesterday in my first part of new media predictions, but live video will be a technological innovation that will affect not only web television channels but a much broader set of application and uses.

While accessible and cost-free live video streaming has been here for a good year now, the ability to stream live video from anywhere you may be without having to open your whole notebook is the new video-casting frontier. Two companies (Wwigo and QIK) have already introduced tools and services that allow anyone to broadcast real-time video from their Nokia cellular phones and in 2008 you should see a breakthrough announcements in this field from some top international brand names.

Online Marketing

SEO and SEM are not enough anymore to do a good, comprehensive job of promoting your content or specific products online. The online marketing mix now requires a great deal more understanding of how Google expects you to publish and architect your content, plus it helps a great deal if you are fully active in using social media destinations and in leveraging the power of social networks.

In 2008, I expect a new wave of services and tools that can help you simplify and manage more efficiently all of these chores. From pushing your new content to the best most relevant social media destinations for your target audience (Digg, Reddit, Sphinxx, Delicious, etc.), to creating your own mini network of supporters and fans that will proactively help you give visibility to it.

It is likely that you may see also the expansion and diversification of borderline services like Subvert and Profit which have aggregated a large team of individuals to push, for a price, selected content on major social media destinations like Digg and YouTube. As you may have learned recently from Techcrunch, getting video clips to get viral is not really a matter of having a particular talent at shooting video but rather the consequence of a very well orchestrated operation borderline marketing in which ethics and rules get easily subverted to achieve phenomenal popularity in the arc of a few days.

APML is coming and with it a possible wonderful and pretty scary innovations. As advertising is here to stay on the web, wouldn't be better if the ads you saw were tailor-made to your interests?

Think of this as the next step forward from the AdSense contextual advertising you can see appearing in this article. Contextual advertising services such as Google Adsense attempt to serve relevant advertising based on the content of the article that they appear in. As such, you have a greater chance of seeing ads that will appeal to your tastes than you might through mainstream, mass media advertising, which simply sends out the same message almost regardless of context, and hopes that some small percentage of viewers will be interested.

If the APML standard takes hold, however, content providers and advertisers will have a much better chance to serve you with relevant information, so that ads become useful rather than something that interrupts what you came to see in the first place.

P2P

2008 is going to be the year for P2P to take the front stage for publishing and sharing contents in ways that need not be underground or illegal in any way. Radio, film and video distribution, and to a large degree live television can so greatly benefit from P2P distribution approaches that further delaying the understanding of the key benefits P2P can bring must the highest priority for any commercial television.

Beyond Joost, Babelgum and Hulu there is a yet uncovered world of classic mainstream television channels which haven't seen yet the light of the day on the Internet. Why? There is no good reason for this. Only ignorance.

Zattoo and Livestation seem among the few ones so far to have sniffed the meal asvia what should be called P2PTV major broadcasters and TV networks can not only reach a much broader public without needing extra expensive broadcasting hardware and without needing to give up any of their advertising or sponsorship components, but they can also track and monitor with much greater accuracy what viewers are really watching.

P2P has many things going in its favour, but more than other innovative new media technologies it may best represent the tip of iceberg of a deep paradigm change we are not ready to dive into just yet. I invite you to look at the fascinating ideas of P2P as a way of living that Michel Bauwens and his network have been bringing forward. This is the stuff we should be looking into, and if you want to be really innovative while helping others tangibly to create a vision for the future Michel Bauwens may be the best lecturer to invite at your next media related conference.

Conversational Tools - Microblogging

If you haven't yet given yourself the treat of using a microblogging tool, now is the time. Tumblr, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and many others offers the simplest interface and command set for any online publishing tool you may have encountered so far, while providing you with a truly effective way of shooting out rapid fire news, information, call for action, updates and even personal stuff for your friends, if that's all you care about communicating.

In 2008, some microblogging tools will start to integrate audio and video functionalities using an approach similar to Seesmic, the new still in Beta service which allows individuals to shoot out short video messages while forming their own personalized social network.

On this front there is still a lot to go, but it appears evident to me that these tools are absolutely powerful and hugely powerful radars to allow you to stay in touch with hundreds of unique sources at once as well as providing a great publishing assets for any serious online blogger, trainer or independent reporter.

Microblogging tools have moved the online conversation paradigm a step further beyond blog comments. They are still a bit rough around the corners, offering little control over "grading" the incoming sources and news in different ways, while being able to better categorize and group them according to your needs. The conversational aspect will also need to be refined a lot more before we can gain a true conversational experience even when using these asynchronous tools.

But the above should likely be the innovative areas in which these tools will be making their next steps during 2008.

Widgets

This is the dream of any online publisher. Write once and publish your content to multiple media outlets at once. And thanks to RSS, the steady growth of widget use, the recent introduction of Open Social and of cross-media publishing tools the original dream has been actually surpassed by the reality we have been able to create so far.

Publishing all of your content via one or multiple RSS feeds is one of the strategic keys that allows you to get highly enhanced distribution. But widgets, who are built on RSS, are increasingly a more effective strategy to get extra exposure, visibility and traction while possibly being able also to extract some monetization opportunities from them.

In 2008, look for further innovation and new content publishing tools that allow you and your readers to package and distribute your content in multiple ways. If you want then to make the best of such opportunities, follow these great recommendations from Fred Wilson:

"1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it.

3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it.

4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.

Widgets are a syndication tool and a tracking tool. And hopefully they’ll become a monetization tool as well."

Open ID

How do you love having a tens of different usernames and credentials to log into the different services you have signed up to? OpenID comes to the rescue and in 2008 you should see larger adoption of this new identification standard which is free, non-proprietary and which can be integrated in most any web-based service out there.

While OpenID is largely still in the adoption phase it is becoming increasingly more popular, as big organizations like Microsoft, AOL, Sun and Novell are starting to adopt and support the use of OpenIDs on their web-based services.

This is why if you are an online publisher looking to expand your membership-only services you may want to consider learning more about OpenID and the unique benefits it may bring to your customers and readers

"For businesses, this means a lower cost of password and account management, while drawing new web traffic. OpenID lowers user frustration by letting users have control of their login.
OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

As Brad Fitzpatrick (the father of OpenID) said, “Nobody should own this. Nobody’s planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there’s no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we’re all a part of the community.”

(Source: OpenID)

Off-line Web-based Applications

Offline web-based applications were in my new media predictions for 2007 as well, but nonetheless the interesting progress made by Socialtext, Zoho and Google Gears on this front, major advances that would allow mainstream adoption of this functionality are yet to come.

Offline web apps represent a new capability for traditional online-only web services which now allow you to go offline and be able keep working until you re-connect next.

In 2008 you will see off-line web apps going mainstream and leveraging this unique feature as a critical competitive selling point to significantly increase their user base.

X-Events

This is an idea whose time may not have come yet but it remains firmly on my radar for what you should start preparing for.

X-Events are events which are planned and carried out in a continuous experience that merges offline physical events and online activities.

The best way to explain this is a physical conference for which a community site is built before hand and in which participants, lecturers and sponsors start interacting and actively engaging with each other way before the physical event starts. Nonetheless the core event takes place in physical space it is also re-broadcast and made accessible in multiple ways, while numerous forums and post event showcases are set-up after the physical event is over.

A truly eXtended event in these terms would guarantee much greater success to the physical venue, extended exposure and visibility for all commercial partners, much greater opportunities for engagement and social networking for participants as well as an infinitely more capable platform for including presentations and shows from a greater number of people.

Even though most of the tools that would be needed to set-up an effective X-event have been out there for a while now, the true challenge is not only in integrating these into a coherent whole but having individuals who can see this vision and bring it to a plan that is certainly more challenging and complex than the typical tech conference. But so would be the success and rewards, I believe.

Whether X-events will become more of a reality in 2008 it is hard to say, but given the popularity and revenue streams that these conferences can carry I think it is only a matter of time before we see someone starting to properly ride this valuable horse.

end of Part 2

Part 1 : New Media Predictions 2008: What Online Independent Publishers Should Expect From The Future - Part 1

Originally written by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published on January 1st 2008 as New Media Predictions 2008: What Online Independent Publishers Should Expect From The Future - Part 1

Crowdsourcing Italy's Tourism Portal: Italian Independents Get Together To Rethink Italy's Institutional Web Site - RItalia

Robin Good — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 03:14:26 PDT

""Crowdsourcing" is a neologism for a business model in which a company or institution takes a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsources it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call over the Internet. ...In almost every case crowdsourcing relies on amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time to create content, solve problems, or even do corporate R&D."

The scoop: One month ago tomorrow, Italy's government launched a new tourism web portal for which huge resources and a budget of 45 million euros had been allocated. The site came online under a barrage of heavy fire from many technologists, independents, bloggers and professionals as the site failed to meet some of the most fundamental accessibility and usability principles, while leaving lots to be desired in terms of its overall communication strategy.

In a matter of days a fast-moving and highly vocal community of passionate individuals aggregated online and decided to give life to a counter-initiative called RItalia.

In essence, the RItalia group is made up of all those people who, following the announcement of the new Italia.it tourism portal and not feeling satisfied and represented from a project that should be our country online business card - have decided to spontaneously aggregate with the will to understand and discuss how such a tourism web portal should have been architected and designed.

RItalia is made up of professionals, students, university professors, tourism and marketing experts, IT people and geeks from Italy an from other countries as well. More than 200 people have already signed up to join in this unique live event taking place next week in Milan.

The initiative, unique in his genre, showcases how effective the power of aggregation and free sharing of ideas can actually be. Whether or not the RItalia initiative will be able to design and create an alternative solution to the newly launched Italian tourism portal is all to be seen, but the sudden wave of interest and ideas that this spontaneous group of individuals is already giving life to is a living proof of the new opportunities that such spontaneous self-organizing action-oriented communities can generate.

As RItalia supporters include some of the best independent thinkers, writers, designers and technologists that we have around, it would not be to arduous to imagine that the project could indeed give life to a web tourism portal that is highly innovative, user-centered, standards-compliant, usable, fast, engaging and very cost-effective.

www.Italia.it and the RItalia movement - The Story

In the Italian blogosphere it seems there is no better to talk about right now: the new tourism web portal Italia.it.

With a Hollywood-like budget of 45 million euros (almost 60 million dollars) the new institutional web site announced over a year ago launched less than 30-days ago among an ocean of negative reactions.

Italia.it, whose logo has been designed by the historical international communication agency Landor Associates, delivered at launch a web site that wasn't accessible with Firefox, had navigation and accessibility issues, utilized old-fashioned tables to format the content in place of DIV layers, showcased an exaggeration of very glamorous Flash-based content and video, and had a number of technical issues including being very slow to access and remaining off-line for an unusual number of hours during his rather short existence.

Other problems include lack of content, sections that are navigable only with German language menus, pages awaiting a final layout, and an overall sense of slowness.

For now, accessibility compliance is guaranteed by using a parallel web site and dedicated sections that serve as reference for access by handicapped users.

The overall architecture of Italia.it is quite interesting: an attempt to provide a multi-faceted access to the most interesting places, events and things to do for a person wanting to visit Italy. But as you can imagine, events, places, exhibitions... the list is huge and only with a tight and efficient virtual collaboration with all the regional tourism offices Italia.it can hope to pull off a service that is both timely and informative.

For now, the new Italia.it tourism portal cab be seen as being divided in five main sections:

Visit Italy

This is an interactive map of the Italian peninsula from which the visitor can access specific predefined locations and obtain more information about them as well as road information to create her own tourist itinerary.

What To Do

Art, culture, culinary arts, wines, religion, sport, and more are the signpost driving visitors of this section to find selected events, places and activities across the whole country.

Itineraries

Multiple itineraries are proposed based on specific themes. The Palladian Villas in the Veneto region rather than the primitive Nuraghi in the Sardinia island, and so on. The site visitor can actually build her own customised itinerary over an interactive map which automatically suggests relevant events not to be missed.

Events

This section is reserved to Italian events large and small happening anywhere from the big cities to the small ones. Fairs, local markets, religious and folkloristic events are all part of this strategic section.

Plan Your Trip

How to arrive in Italy and how to travel inside our country whether you are want to go by car, train, or airplane.

Criticism

As you can imagine, the Italian blogosphere reaction at the sight of this new, tax-paid monster was both immediate and fierce. Tens of posts on small and large blogs as well as articles on mainstream media gave the stage to an open discussion that is growing and ongoing to this very day.

Even the Italian Congress complained in his session n. 121 by saying: ''The web portal, for which are forecasted investments which total 45 million euros, is characterized by many technical problems which defeat all general usability principles. ...The portal does not abide to the requirements set out by the Legge Stanca which favours facilitated access to those less-than-able users by requiring full compliance with the international accessibility standards set out by the W3C international consortium."

Italian techno-geek blogger Marco Pugliese went as far as rebuilding the whole Italia.it site while using all of the standards and technical approaches that the official web portal shoukd have utilized.

Marco Pugliese wrote in his blog:

"...I have realized a layout version of the Italia.it site done completely in XHTML and CSS, to demonstrate to the world, and especially to the content architects and programmers of the present official site, that doing this was not only well within their reach but it could have been done in just half a day of work without spending 45 million euros and without relying on big names such as
IBM Italia S.P.A, ITS S.p.A and Tiscover AG to achieve some good results. ..."

On the historical and political fronts it is to be noted that the Italia.it site had been planned and budgeted for during the previous Italian government headed by Silvio Berlusconi and had been closely followed by former ministries Giuliano Urbani-Lucio Stanca.

Of the planned 45 million euros only seven millions have already been spent so far. We also know that 25 millions had been planned for the development of the contents of Italia.it alone. Of these 21 would go to the Italian regions tourism offices and four to a supposed national newsroom. But there is no data about who is part of this national newsroom and who will manage it. Some Italian bloggers even wonder whether this money has already been spent. But nobody apparently knows.

Spontaneous Aggregation

But the heavy critiques, complemented by hundreds of comments from Italian readers, have not acted so much as a detractor to the just announced web portal but rather as an aggregation thread for all those involved in communication, online marketing and new media technologies, who had felt having been robbed of their tax-payer money for the creation of a monster they saw with no intrinsic value.

What better opportunity for these angered individuals to take up the very tools they evangelize, market and make a living off every day, to communicate, get together, brainstorm and re-design a new vision for the Italian tourism portal?

And so it is that a group of communication and marketing professionals that connects back to the Milano-Bicocca University has chosen to jump on the opportunity and to self-organize to build an alternative, cost- and communication-effective grassroots version of the official Italian tourism portal Italia.it.

Under the initial creative spark and logistic coordination of Maurizio Goetz, and a few other passionate marketing guerrilleros, RItalia was born.

RItalia

RItalia is a spontaneous grassroots initiative that came together to define a new proposal for developing (if not altogether building) a better alternative to the recently launched official tourism web portal Italia.it. It is also the aggregation point for all those individuals interested in defining, discussing and reviewing what could be a new set of guidelines to significantly improve www.Italia.it.

RItalia unique strength is in the fact that the great number of people supporting and contributing to it acts out of pure, non-compensated, genuine, voluntary desire to participate and contribute..

In fact, our goal (I am indeed one of them) is not to carve a piece of the Italia.it yet unspent budget but
rather one of showing the tremendous creative power that the many individuals who are joining RItalia.it can bring in without needing any form of upfront material reward.

Those joining the RItalia ranks are a small army of passionate communicators, marketers and web technologists, who perceives Italy's tourism portal to be a communication project they all own in part. They paid for it with their taxes and their skills and know-how gives them the right to feel entitled to contribute into helping their country market itself more (cost-)effectively.

Although hard for many to believe, many people like me are deeply convinced that the vision and "intelligence" of this spontaneous grassroots crowd can absolutely do wonders when placed to compete with the expensive skills and know-how of supposed highly paid "industry experts".

What may come as a challenge to our spontaneous group is a strong need to coordinate, filter and support the creative brainstorming and discussion that will ensue from this initiative. Though I am confident that we may be able to pull this off, just as effectively as we were able to launch it., I expect the upcoming work of distilling and compiling our future direction to be likely the highest challenge we may have had to face so far.

The RItalia Barcamp

To do this, the RItalia initiative organizers have set a BarCamp-style event March 31st in Milan, Italy, that will bring together more than a few hundred individuals from all parts of the peninsula. BarCamps are grassroots events in which all participants play an active role by either presenting information and ideas or supporting the logistics of the event.

"A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants." (Source: Barcamp.org)

The RItaliaCamp participants will in fact work in an uncoordinated way to bring new ideas, tools and proposals on how to rebuild the Italian tourism web portal from the ground up.

The idea is the one that see the outcomes of the event utilized to define the new guidelines for a tourism web portal that is truly representative of our country and which fully leverages the communication, interaction, social and cost-saving opportunities offered to us by the intelligent use of new media technologies.

This unique community of supporters will meet physically in Milan on Saturday the 31st of March at the Bicocca University.

The plan is to create a briefing and specifications document that will be published on the web right after the event. The actual decision of whether to go ahead and actually build an alternative web tourism portal will be taken later on. The key goal for now it is therefore the one of producing a strategic document that well defines the key tech specifications and the defining characteristics for the information architecture and the editorial and content strategies required to build such possible alternative.

The live barcamp-style event of next week will in fact the perfect venue for all this information and ideas to come together through a series of presentations and openly-shared specification documents and proposals now being submitted by the many who wish to participate.

More information:

For more information about RItalia, RItaliaCamp and the www.Italia.it project please see the following resources:

http://www.ritalia.eu

email contact: info@ritalia.eu

RItalia press contacts:
* David Orban, david.orban[at]ritalia.eu, +39 035 6666399
* Elena Casalini, elena.casalini[at]ritalia.eu, +39 335 6262985

References and Other Sources utilized:
Mario Adinolfi
La Repubblica
HTML.it
Informatica Applicata
Last Tuesday - Marco Ottolini
Pugia Blog
Fuoritema.net
Scandalo Italiano

Support the project
http://ritaliacamp.chipin.com/ritaliacamp

Originally written by Robin Good for Master New Media and first published as:
"Crowdsourcing Italy's Tourism Portal: Italian Independents Get Together To Rethink Italy's Institutional Web Site: RItalia"

Alternate Reality Games: A Mini-Guide

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:37:45 PST

The expression "alternate reality games" refers to a type of game that overlaps the game world with reality, by utilizing real world media, in order to deliver an interactive narrative experience to the players. Over the past years, alternate reality games have captured the imagination of millions of people by getting them to play within worlds that are as fantastic as they are real.

Photo credit: James Thew

The birth of new forms of communication which characterizes this digital age has driven story tellers and game designers to explore new ways in which their audience can participate with the interaction between fictional and real worlds.

What started as experiments with two of the biggest companies in the game industry, Microsoft with "The Beast" and EA with "Majestic", have moved on and combined efforts between advertising agencies, movie studios, television networks. This resulted in promotional campaigns and games that extended the story universe beyond the big or small screen and into the hands of the audience.

Today, not only the big industries, but also small independent companies are willing to create successful financial models around this new genre of entertainment. Looking at the games that have appeared in the past five years shows trends such as playing with funding possibilities, exploring the relationships between fictional and real world spaces, and investigating new ways to interact with stories shown on the small screen.

Television has been exploring the possibility of extending the story beyond the small screen and onto the internet since Fox first aired Freaky Links in 1999. They were not the only ones seeing the potential of the new media and were quickly followed by ABC, which experimented with several extended realities prior to last year’s The LOST Experience.

As broadband internet becomes more widespread and digital video recorders more common, networks will continue to experiment with ways in which they can engage viewers both on and off the small screen.

With all of this activity, it is an exciting time to talk about alternate reality gaming.

In this mini-guide I have collected for you the most popular and recent alternate reality games. Characterizing traits that helped me analyzing them are:

Running dates: the total duration of the game, specifying whether it is still ongoing
Prizes/earnings for participants: the possibility for players to earn prizes and rewards
Means of interaction: the means of communication used to perform the game, such as message boards, phone calls, emails, etc.
Online/offline gaming: the possibility for participants to play online and offline
Special requirements for participants: specific requirements that players need to have or necessary actions to do (such as purchasing items in order to play)
Design teams: information on the developing team
Funding model: the way the game is supported economically (through sponsors, players, etc.)
Description of their goals: the story of the game and its objectives

You can also check out the four articles we have previously published about alternate reality gaming to have a deeper understanding of the subject (read part one, part two, part three and part four).

Please note that this mini-guide is an overview of alternate reality games and in no ways intends to represent a complete resource. You are very welcome to suggest new inclusions or corrections anytime by using the Comments section to be found at the end of this mini-guide.

Catching the Wish

Running dates: May, 2006 – September 2006
Prizes/earnings for participants: none
Means of interaction: conference calls, email, meetings in the person
Online/offline gaming: online
Special requirements for participants: none
Design Team: Dave Szulborski
Funding Model: Supported through sales of a graphic novel
Website: http://www.chasingthewish.net/

Description:

Catching the Wish took players to the fictional Aglaura, NJ where mysterious forces seemed to follow residents wherever they went. Dale Sprague, community activist and web designer, was plagued by dreams that seemed so familiar and real that he was driven to document them in a series of graphic novels. The events actually occurred three years earlier and were explored by players in Chasing the Wish, a previous alternate reality game by Dave Szulborski.

The game was designed to support a series of three graphic novels which refer to previous events as well as direct players to websites and characters in the current alternate reality game. Following in the footsteps of the previous alternate reality game, which was praised and criticized for its great reliance on personal email interaction, Catching the Wish was a character-driven narrative where personal communication with the characters that populated the fictional world was rewarded in kind.

Players participated in conference calls, communicated via email, and even met characters in person. The game was designed to appeal to players who placed an emphasis on character interactions and realism. Events occurred in real time and as naturally as they do in our everyday experiences.

EDOC Laundry

Running dates: March, 2006 – (anticipate run through 2008)
Prizes/earnings for participants: none
Means of interaction: the website
Online/offline gaming: both online and offline
Special requirements for participants: paticipants do need to purchase products by EDOC laundry to play
Design Team: EDOC Laundry
Funding Model: Supported through clothing sales
Websites: http://www.edoclaundry.com/

Description:

Founded by Dawne Weisman, EDOC Laundry is a clothing label that specializes in apparel for smart and stylish people while also delivering a large interactive story that develop online. While the interactive story is accessed through codes discovered on the apparel, the clothing and the online elements can stand apart.

Not only are the clothes so stylish that people have purchased them with little or no knowledge at all of the online elements, but players are encouraged to share the information that they have discovered forming an active community that does not require people to purchase every article in order to uncover the story. On the inside of each article of clothing the phrase "nothing to hide" is printed in code.

That code is used as a key to reveal a secret phrase hidden within the bold graphic design. Players take the secret phrase to the EDOC Laundry website where they can then input the code which will provide them with a video, audio, image, or text based clip that reveals a part of the story.

On the surface, the story is a classic mystery plot that revolves around the murder of the band manager for Poor Richard, a very popular yet fictional band. On a deeper level, the story mirrors that of the American Revolution. While most of the story can be revealed through those assets, it is backed up by several other websites.

Last Call Poker

Running dates: September, 2005 – November, 2005
Prizes/earnings for participants: none
Means of interaction: the website
Online/offline gaming: online and offline
Special requirements for participants: none
Design Team: 42 Entertainment
Funding Model: Promotional
Websites: http://www.lastcallpoker.com/

Description:

At first glance, the Last Call Poker website provides free flash-based online poker. However, hidden not too deeply under the surface was a complex alternate reality game that included a wide array of story and play opportunities for casual and devoted players. Launched in the fall of 2005 as a promotion for Activision’s Gun, the website and story took players through a span of 150 years as they traced the history of a cursed Navy Colt.

With casual or competitive online poker games, deeply immersive narratives, and ample opportunities for real world creative play, players could engage with the game in a variety of ways. Through episodic storytelling that provided a game long story arc occurring in present time as well as weekly stories that took players back in time to trace the gun’s history with both fictional and historical figures, Last Call Poker was one of the first alternate reality games to effectively consider various levels of engagement.

Players that could only devote a short time in a single week and players that were heavily involved for then entire eight weeks were both rewarded with a complete story. While dozens of other players were searching for the same character, the excitement over discovering new pieces of the story encouraged players to cheer on their competitors helping to solidify the community surrounding the game. While the alternate reality game is no longer being played, the story and game play is detailed on the website which still exists and continues to provide free online poker games.

The LOST Experience

Running dates: April, 2006 – September, 2006
Prizes/earnings for participants: none
Means of interaction: websites, video clips, and voice mail messages
Online/offline gaming: online and offline
Special requirements for participants: none
Design Team: ABC
Funding Model: advertising supported/promotional
Websites: http://www.insidetheexperience.com/

Description:

The popular television show LOST has always had a loyal online following intent on discovering the secrets behind the mysterious program. Produced by the networks that carry LOST in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, the online experience provided players with a storyline that runs parallel to the television program while also hinting at and even revealing some of the shows deeper mysteries.

While the experience contained the alternate reality game standards of cryptic websites, video clips, and intriguing voice mail messages, it took it a step or two further with a character appearing on a late night talk show, a massive chocolate giveaway, and even a book available on Amazon and written by a fictional author who died in the plane crash that started the television series. The game also experimented with new advertising methods.

Since the advent of digital video recorders, such as TiVo, that allow viewers to easily skip commercials, networks have been struggling with ways in which they can appeal to advertisers. During several episodes of the television program, ABC aired commercials relating to The LOST Experience. Players, not wanting to miss clues to the Experience, sat through the commercial breaks.

Ocular Effect

Running dates: July, 2006 – (currently running as of August, 2006)
Prizes/earnings for participants: none
Means of interaction: message boards, videos
Online/offline gaming: online
Special requirements for participants: none
Design Team: Xenophile Media, Matt Wolf
Funding Model: promotional
Websites: http://www.oculareffect.com

Description:

Ocular Effect was created as an interactive tie-in for the ABC Family television movie “Fallen” which premiered on July 23rd, 2006. The game began with a mysterious countdown that tempted players until “Fallen” aired, at which point the website changed and delivered interested players to a message board which was monitored and maintained by the creative team as a means to help to facilitate discussion and deliver content.

By utilizing complex Flash content and on-location videos featuring the main characters, the game took players on a virtual journey around the world as they followed the characters to six cities in three different countries. While the game did not feature characters from the TV movie, or the books upon which it was based on, it was set in the same story reality where nephilim (mythical/biblical offspring of angels and humans) exist in our world.

The story of Ocular Effect was complex and simple at the same time: help Faith, an orphaned teenage tattoo artist who has always been obsessed with specific rune-like symbols, on her voyage of discovery, learning more about herself and the meaning behind the mysterious symbols.

Omnifam

Running dates: May, 2005 – December, 2005
Prizes/earnings for participants: none
Means of interaction: message boards, emails.
Online/offline gaming: online
Special requirements for participants: none
Design Team: not available
Funding Model: none - grassroots
Websites: http://www.omnifam.org/

Description:

Omnifam was designed and executed by several genre enthusiasts as a fan-fiction piece revolving around the story universe of ABC’s Alias. While not the first alternate reality game to be written independently by fans for an existing media property, it was the first to do so for a television property and, more importantly, for a television property that had played with ARG-like aspects in the past.

It went much deeper than the previous official efforts and included stronger interactivity and a richer narrative experience. As a piece of fan art, the creators did not have access to the current and future story lines. As such, they built off existing back story creating their own separate storyline with new characters and events. This allowed them a certain amount of freedom while not conflicting with the show or upsetting fan expectations and understandings.

The initial vision was that players would be faced with a series of missions that would take a week to complete. The first mission was a set up as a qualifying test to allow the player access to the future missions. That initial mission was available to players no matter how far along in the experience they happened to join the game and, after completing it, players would join in with the existing game audience as new missions were made available. Each additional mission would provide a specific goal that would advance the overall story arc.

Orbital Colony

Running dates: November, 2005 – January, 2006
Prizes/earnings for participants: none
Means of interaction: message boards, chat
Online/offline gaming: online and offline
Special requirements for participants: none
Design Team: not available
Funding Model: none - grassroots
Websites: http://www.orbitalcolony.com/

Description:

Orbital Colony was initially conceived as a way in which active players in the non-fiction community could learn how to design and produce an alternate reality game. The goal was to maintain an open development group that received aid from experienced developers. However, they quickly realized the inability to keep the group visible while still allowing for a unaware player base that could become steeped in the mystery.

Once the group closed itself to wandering eyes, the volunteer team struggled to stay together and it took almost two years before the game would launch. As they had played dozens of games between them, they had a strong idea of what worked from a player’s perspective and this helped them tremendously.

Despite a non-existent budget, they utilized their various interests, skills, experience, and locations to build a dynamic experience that included a variety of online communications as well as hidden cache locations in four different countries creating a truly global experience. To supplement their knowledge and create a game based in factual fantasy, they contacted a number of people in the space industry, gaining access to official images and information that would only add to the realism of the experience.

Perplex City

Running dates: March, 2005 – (currently running as of November, 2006)
Prizes/earnings for participants: a £100,000 reward is offered for the retrieval of the cube.
Means of interaction: conference calls, email, meetings in the person
Online/offline gaming: online
Special requirements for participants: participants don't need to purchase the special cards that are used in the game in order to play
Design Team: Mind Candy
Funding Model: Supported through collectable trading cards and merchandise
Websites: http://www.perplexcity.com

Description:

Perplex City, created by London-based Mind Candy, is one of the first successful self-supported alternate reality games. The game finances itself through the sale of collectable puzzle cards that provide insight into the Perplex City universe. The cards also direct players to the massive online world where the story of Perplex City unfolds. But the story isn’t just told online, there have been a number of live events, primarily in the form of city wide scavenger hunts, that have provided some of the most talked about story events.

The fictional Perplex City is a large city in an unknown universe that has recently connected to Earth. Perplex City’s priceless artifact, the Receda Cube, has been stolen and is hidden somewhere on Earth. In order to recover the cube, one of the city’s residents enlisted the help of Mind Candy to spread the word on Earth.

As the Perplex City culture revolves around puzzles, where they compete in puzzle contests much as we on Earth compete in sport, he proposed the puzzle cards as a way to familiarize the citizens of Earth with the world of Perplex City and offered a £100,000 (approx. $200,000 or €150,000) reward for the safe retrieval of the cube.

Despite some initial controversy over whether players would need to purchase the cards in order to participate with the alternate reality game or discover the location of the cube, neither is true. The cards support the game both monetarily and story-wise, but the game is free to any who wish to participate. Though, it is undeniable that the cards have become a source of community building with players meeting both on and offline to trade the cards, solve puzzles, and discuss the game.

ReGenesis

Running dates: March, 2006 – June, 2006
Prizes/earnings for participants: none
Means of interaction: websites, email, video-on-demand, voicemail, and real world events
Online/offline gaming: online and offline
Special requirements for participants: website access is blocked to visitors that have not registered to the site
Design Team: Xenophile Media
Funding Model: Promotional
Websites: http://www.regenesistv.com/

Description:

The ReGenesis Extended Reality is an alternate reality game that runs along with the popular Canadian television show, ReGenesis. Extending the one-hour bio-threat drama over multiple platforms, including websites, email, video-on-demand, voicemail, and real world events, the game allows players to explore the world as agents aiding NorBAC, the North American Biotechnology Advisory Commission.

When the television program was picked up for another year, they made the experience more accessible to wider range of player types. Through video on demand, viewers interested in the extended reality story but without access to the internet or the time to commit to the experience were able to receive story updates. As the websites are designed to change throughout the experience and in sync with the television episodes, they need to be displayed on a user by user basis.

Additionally, website access is blocked to visitors that have not registered to the site to both minimize discussion and avoid search engines and archival websites from copying, or caching, the websites at various stages of the game play. The unfortunate side effect is that casual browsers and information seekers often include people that would tell others about the game or that would register once they were sufficiently intrigued by the experience. Because the game environment is so controlled and all of the players understand they are interacting with a fictional world, the typical confusion found on in-game message boards is drastically reduced.

Studio Cyphers

Running dates: May, 2006 – ongoing
Prizes/earnings for participants: none
Means of interaction: videos
Online/offline gaming: online and offline
Special requirements for participants: users need to purchase the episodes of the game.
Design Team: Studio Cyphers
Funding Model: Pay to play
Websites: http://www.studiocyphers.com/

Description:

Studio Cyphers is a serial based game with game episodes lasting about a month long each. It utilizes an interesting subscription based model that allows those who subscribe to an episode access to additional content and interaction while anyone may follow along with the story and work through the puzzles for free.

The story universe revolves around the Cyphers, a team of paranormal investigators who have operated independently with no problem for years. However, things have changed and psychic forces being what they are, they need help and created the Wakefield Agent program in order to get it. Against this backdrop, the series lays down episodes which contain individual mysteries for players to solve while also delivering clues to the larger game story.

Although the episodes are part of a larger series, players must subscribe to each one individually. The US based company charges $9.99 to players within the United States and $13.99 for those outside of the country, presumably to cover the additional communication and shipping costs. Players who subscribe are given the title of “Wakefield Agent” and, in addition to the interaction, are granted access to game and story updates prior to those who do not subscribe.

Who Is Benjamin Stove?

Running dates: January, 2006 – April, 2006
Prizes/earnings for participants: none
Means of interaction: forums, websites
Online/offline gaming: online
Special requirements for participants: none
Design Team: Campbell-Ewald and GMD Studios
Funding Model: Promotional
Website: http://www.whoisbenjaminstove.com/

Description:

As a promotional campaign, “Who Is Benjamin Stove?” was unusual. It was not designed to promote a specific product and nor was the client revealed until several months into the campaign when they suddenly found themselves in the campaign. It’s confusing, but it worked. Designed by Campbell-Ewald and executed by GMD Studios, Who Is Benjamin Stove? launched in early January 2006 with a character who had discovered an odd painting while was visiting his parents for the holidays.

The painting was of a crop circle in a corn field that had the shape of an ethanol molecule; a shape that would reappear a number of times throughout the campaign. The game’s mystery revolved around the original owner of the painting, Benjamin Stove, with players and characters trying to discover who he was, where he might be, and, eventually, what led to his interest in ethanol.

The big event of the game took place in late April when Benjamin Stove published an open letter to General Motors with General Motors responding in ads in the USA Today as well as a number of popular websites directing people to their Live Green, Go Yellow campaign website for more information. The community for the game gathered on forums hosted on WhoIsBenjaminStove.com, a website created and maintained by one of the central characters. While this is nothing new to alternate reality games, the control that the game gave to players was unique.

Troy

Running dates: May 2006 - August 2006
Prizes/earnings for participants: none
Means of interaction: website
Online/offline gaming: online
Special requirements for participants: none
Design Team: Experimental Gameplay Project
Funding Model: none - grassroots
Website: http://tinyurl.com/fdag4

Description:

Troy is a meta-game that deals with the privacy violation on the net, stimulating the player digital voyeurism. As visitors try to download a game made by a fictional character, they are lead to a 404 site. The average visitor would probably not bother clicking on the link to the parent directory. But visitors who are inquisitive and prying enough will click on the link and be lead to files and information they weren't supposed to see

In the parent directory there is a couple random files and pictures; it appears to be just some filedump that someone has uploaded, including some early prototypes of games and design docs, but no "Troy." There is a folder called "EvansStuff" that the player may be drawn to open and view its contents, as Evan Vincent was the creator of the missing game, maybe he placed it in there.

The idea was to give the player a sense that they were looking at stuff that the Experimental Gameplay team might not have been trying to make public. Nothing too personal at this point, and gives people also a chance to see a couple pictures of the team around the office. Visitors should also be tempted to look through Evan's Stuff folder, which sounds a little bit more personal and private. It's a tough game, indeed, and it has also a distinct geek taste because of the riddles complexity. The solution for the game can be found here.

Learn more about Alternate Reality Games

Alternate Reality Games: Daily Narratives Turn Into Interactive Cross-Media Games

Alternate Reality Games: Genres And Categories

Alternate Reality Games: Design, Development And Implementation

Alternate Reality Games: Business Models

International Game Developers Association (IGDA)

Alternate reality game: definition by Wikipedia

Alternate Reality Gaming Network

Originally written by Livia Iacolare for Master New Media and first published as:
Alternate Reality Games: A Mini-Guide

Alternate Reality Games: Daily Narratives Turn Into Interactive Cross-Media Games (Part I)

The IGDA Alternate Reality Games SIG — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 23:10:30 PST

What is an ARG?

What if reality were different? What if you suddenly discovered not just different customs but different rules, different rewards, wholly different aspirations - a reality in which everyday occurences were not exactly what you thought, in which certain activities suddenly took on a rich and newly meaningful sense of possibility?

From reading this paper, we hope you'll see that Alternate Reality Games (ARG) are many things to many people, from the latest innovation in interactive storytelling to a new form of ultra-realistic video game.

The common ground shared by each of these is that they are some form of game, in that they are not an entirely passive experience (although many people enjoy them passively, there always has to be at least one active player, usually thousands), and that they use the world around you - advertising hoardings, telephone lines, websites, fake companies, actors and actresses you can meet in real life - to deliver the game experience.

Alternate Reality Games take the substance of everyday life and weave it into narratives that layer additional meaning, depth, and interaction upon the real world. The contents of these narratives constantly intersect with actuality, but play fast and loose with fact, sometimes departing entirely from the actual or grossly warping it - yet remain inescapably interwoven.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, everyone in the country can access these narratives through every available medium - at home, in the office, on the phones; in words, in images, in sound. Modern society contains many managed narratives relating to everything from celebrity marriages to brands to political parties, which are constantly disseminated through all media for our perusal, but ARGs turn these into interactive games.

Generally, the enabling condition to is technology, with the internet and modern cheap communication making such interactivity affordable for the game developers. It’s the kind of thing that societies have been doing for thousands of years, but more so. Much more so.

We take the start of the ARG genre as known today to be the release in 2001 of The Beast, the unofficial title for the game interwoven with Steven Spielberg's film AI, and of Majestic,a commercial game from EA. That summer saw the identification by players of this whole new genre, and the coining of terms for it. It saw the formation of large communities of players (such as Cloudmakers and Unforums) dedicated to the discussion, dissection, creation, and above all the playing of these new games.

The genre is not just a new direction in gaming but part of the more general evolution of media and creative narrative, and a reaction to our increasing ability and willingness as consumers to accept and explore many media in parallel, simultaneously.

ARGs and MMOGs

Technically speaking, ARGs are a form of Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), with individual games attracting playerbases numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and with a heavy slant towards online media. However, ARGs use “online” merely as a convenient, cheap, mass communication medium, rather than as a narrow straightjacket to deliver a tightly defined gaming experience.

Where the typical MMOG uses a custom client, an application running on the player's home computer, which delivers and controls all content and interaction, ARGs use any-and every-application available on the internet, and potentially every single website, as just small parts of the wider game.

Looking at the games themselves, ARG and MMOG/MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Games) also tend to diverge wildly in core gameplay. On 5 September 2006, the New York Times announced that World of Warcraft was on track to bring in more than one billion dollars of revenue in the year 2006 from its approximately seven million players, making it "one of the most lucrative entertainment properties of any kind" in the world.

It is an income and a participation that most games would kill for, and it has been won through a number of well-established gaming virtues: good marketing and company reputation, well established player community, good design, good attention to detail, and perhaps above all, exhaustive testing, which in practice has meant literally millions of hours logged within the evolving game world. Oh yes, and you can play with lots of other people.

But World of Warcraft doesn’t claim to be real. You sign in, and there your avatar is, safely locked up inside the server. He, or she, is the ultimate object of your game - your mission is to make this creature as potent as possible. There’s plenty to enjoy along the way, and you won’t get far without cooperating, but it is this essentially solitary triumph that will keep you coming back.

Photo credit: World Of Warcraft

Most of the shortcomings of MMORPGs are well-documented. Leaving aside the huge demands their upkeep can put on servers and customer service, perhaps the greatest gripe among players tends to be the difficulty of releasing new material and patches at anything like the rate the community would like (Smugglers in Star Wars Galaxies are a classic example - the implementation of an in-game smuggling system has now been promised by developers for over two years, with the overwhelming backing of the player community, but has yet to be achieved).

Inevitably, also, the fine balance necessary for long-term playability becomes exponentially harder to maintain as more content is added; and new content has the disconcerting ability to make yesterday’s amazing equipment, won at the cost of a thousand hours’ play, into today’s vender trash. But there is also a more structural, and related, problem with all conventional MMORPGs, and one that even the mighty WoW isn’t immune to.

Eventually, casual gaming ceases to be an option. You’ve hit top level on one or two characters, you’ve played around with all the classes - now you’d better either clear your diary three evenings a week for the next month to try and make an elite guild’s raid calendar, or you can sell (sorry, discontinue) your account and move on to a new product.

Photo credit: Characters of World Of Warcraft

ARGs do not require there be an avatar to build up, grow bored of and cast aside, or that there be a sandbox world for this creature to inhabit. There is, rather, the insertion of additional slices of reality into our own, and the only demand is that you interact with these as yourself. Moreover, the satisfactions of ARGs are as much aesthetic as they are egotistical, in that the pleasures they offer are as much those of contemplating characters, situations and narratives as of acting within these narratives.

This has been true of aspects of many games before, but never to such a degree, or with such potential for mass involvement. The truly immersive narrative games of the past were largely limited experiences designed for single players (the old LucasArts point-and-clicks), or cases of a ‘mythos’ grafted onto essentially stationary game worlds (Ultima Online). ARGs are something quite different, fusing religion’s TINAG principle with both the active pleasures of gaming and the more passive pleasures of art; a combination which potentially calibrates them for pleasure, participation, and thus for profits, at a level even WoW might envy.

For these reasons, for the purposes of this paper we consider ARGs and MMOGs to be distinct genres - in practice, there is only superficial similarity between the current MMOG market and the ARG market.

Antecedents to Alternate Reality Games

As with any cultural development, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) depend in part on previous practices, texts, and traditions. While the outlines of any given ARG may seem strange or alien fictional characters calling real life players, distributed detective teams, cryptograms and steganographically hidden items advancing plots - their appearance evokes a previously hidden history of mysterious, gamelike texts and plots. Indeed, we can view the ARG as a revisionary project, recasting narrative in a mix of old and new lights.

The antecedents to ARGs cross media, nations, genre, and canonical status, and seem too disparate to cohere. Alongside the podcasted novel, books read as RSS, and ghost stories told by images posted to a discussion board (e.g. Las Gafas de Platon, Pulse, ongoing; I found a digital camera in the woods, Tell a story in five frames Flickr group) the ARG represents an emergent narrative form, deeply based on the affordances and possibilities of new media.

In her influential Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), Janet Murray offers a powerful theoretical approach to ARGs. Every new technology-based medium, she argues, evolves in two early stages. The first sees the porting over of forms from other media, as when early movies relied upon theatrical conventions.

During the second stage creators pick up on the intrinsic elements of a new medium, and create new forms. In cinematic history, we can consider Griffith’s innovation of moving the camera while filming, or Dziga Vertov’s use of editing to break up filmic time and space (see also Manovich, 2001). A similar process is visible across the history of digital media. The first decade of Web design, for example, built HTML documents with the trappings of print (pages, bookmarks). As we see the proliferation of newer technologies, some dubbed Web 2.0, new storytelling forms emerge.

The full set of antecedents is fairly large, drawing on a wide range of games, documents, practices, and grows even if we include the literature of hoaxes and publishing stunts. This describes, for example, the eighteenth-century practice of pseudonymous authorship, extending into the eighteenth century with writers like Jane Austen, and as far into our time as Primary Colors (1996).

The roman a clef appears under this rubric, based on the game of mapping a fiction’s characters onto their nonfictional targets, as in the Romantic-era satirical works of Thomas Love Peacock. Part of the pleasure in reading Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946) lies in unraveling the details connecting fictional Willie Stark and his unnamed state to Huey Long of Louisiana.

The thin but important tradition of play-based, or “ludic”, texts play a key role in preARG history. These are books or other documents whose very form is gamelike. The most famous example is the Choose Your Own Adventure series (Edward Packard et al, 1979ff), which are both played and read at the same time. Published for a children’s audience, and beloved by ARG designers and players alike, these books reared two generations on both hypertext and the practice of reading a story as game / game as story.

A similar group of books is the Fighting Fantasy series (1980ff), which let readers jump from page to page by dice rolls as well as choices. Espen Aarseth describes these influential texts as “ergodic”, requiring work (“erg”) to read. Like ARGs, “playing” ludic texts is essential to reading them. Unlike a traditionally linear text, like a Shakespearean history play, with a one-way track through events, the reader must choose a path through alternatives.

Unlike flashbacks, flashforwards, or other time-based narrative strategies which ultimately resolve into a unitary timeline, the ludic text’s reader is required to select from choices, actively constructing a single narrative path, which won’t necessarily be the same on rereading (or replaying). Henry V, in contrast, retains the same plot each time (setting aside what the reader might learn between readings).

Examples of ludic texts are well known in the established field of hypertext scholarship, as hypertext stories must also be operated to read: Maya Deren’s Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946), the OuLiPo group's activated poetry (1960ff), or the puzzles within the conclusion of Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). The performance-oriented school of dramatic criticism leans to the ergodic, in this sense, as does performance art: radically, these texts require performance to be comprehended.

Hoaxes surely fall into this history, texts pretending to be authored by or for something other than they are, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), which purports to be a true story of fantastic adventure and survival, or The Blair Witch Project (1999), with its swarm of documentary evidence and staged discussion.

However, we can exclude many such works for the time, partly for reasons of space, but also being based on a single factor: most are evidently games or call attention to themselves as puzzles. They do not demonstrate a sense of the TINAG principle (This Is Not A Game), which David Szulborski (among others) sees as central to ARGs. They remain clearly identifiable as fictions, even though the structure of those fictions purports to be different than their publication history.

They often appear in media or genres mature enough to allow this sort of play. They lack the boundary-crossing of ARGs, which clearly challenge the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, or at least open up the possibility of a different, mysterious platform for stories beneath the evident one. This crucial aspect of ARGs distinguishes them from other digital narratives and games, and can be viewed as a horizon or boundary around the field.

Even accepting that limitation, we can detect several antecedent threads leading up to the ARG. We will consider four such strands in the present discussion: fictional representations of ARG-like enterprises, games using ARG strategies, art using ARG strategies, and hoaxes relying on the TINAG principle.

ARGs in Fiction

ARGs and ARG-like projects have appeared in fiction for some time. We can begin with the past century, and one of the most widely-read, John Fowles’ The Magus (1965, revised 1977). Its protagonist, Nicholas Urfe, plays an elaborate, multi-leveled game, at one pointed dubbed a “godgame,” with ever-shifting characters, levels of fictive identity, and a deepening intrusion into his life.

The game’s focal character and likely puppet master, Maurice Conchis, is the titular magician, but the precise nature of his role shifts as the game progresses, burying rather than revealing his intentions for most of the novel. As with any ARG, Urfe must investigate mysteries in order for the plot to advance. He interrogates visitors, trespasses on Colchis’ property, and attempts to influence the outcome of subplots. At the same time, as with EA’s ill-fated Majestic, “the game plays [him].”

The game staff read his mail, mentally and physically torment Urfe, invade his personal life, and gradually draw him into a series of existential crises culminating in a romantic confrontation. The boundaries of the godgame are never clear, as with a good ARG, with part of the action consisting of Urfe trying to determine what is game and what is not.

G. K. Chesterton offers another ARG story in The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown (1905, in the Club of Queer Trades collection). During his retirement, the main character stumbles into a game being staged for him, and finds his faculties revived. The puppet masters, the Adventure and Romance Agency, Limited, use planted characters in Brown’s neighborhood, “chance” encounters, mysterious messages, hidden locations to simulate an invigorating adventure.

The plot only unravels when Brown discovers the Agency, who then asks him to pay the game’s bill. This game is perhaps too deeply embedded in the player’s life to be the sort of ARG we recognize, but we can certainly appreciate the mix of distributed game content pieces and the delight in play: the man who feels this desire for a varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround him with startling and weird events.

As a man is leaving his front door, an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against his life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately in a vortex of incidents. A very picturesque and moving story is first written by one of the staff of distinguished novelists who are at present hard at work in the adjoining room. Yours, Major Brown (designed by our Mr. Grigsby), I consider peculiarly forcible and pointed; it is almost a pity you did not see the end of it.

One of the best-known fictional representations of ARG-like games is The Game (David Fincher, 1997). As with our previous examples, the main character, Nicholas Van Orton, plays and is played by a game embedded within his life and environment. The many puzzles and plot elements are mixed with out-of-game details, and distributed across reality itself, undermining the possibility of defining anything as “out of game”.

As with any ludic text, Van Orton must play the game for its plot to advance, questioning strangers, investigating mysteries, and traveling to new locations. If he had ceased to play, the rest of the narrative would have been suspended (and the film ended quite early, or transformed into a truly strange, other story). Also consonant with our other antecedent texts is the ethical drive of the game, since the film is in many ways about Van Orton’s improvement as a human being. He begins as a cold, isolated, wealth-obsessed shell of a man, and grows out of that state as the game intensifies.

William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) is arguably the most significant description in fiction of an internet-age ARG. While the previous examples mentioned used costumes, actors, paint, and
even a CNN hack as content, Pattern Recognition's ARG-like entity is built on digital video, distributed through the internet, and discussed in classic ARG fashion on discussion boards.

The plot concerns The Footage, a fragmentary series of film clips apparently produced by the same source, but whose interrelationships are unclear. The distributed communities obsessed with The Footage research its components, closely analyzing them, extrapolating, testing, and revising assessments which coalesce into a sense of the films’ plot. TINAG appears once more, as The Footage is published secretively, in no single location, and is discovered in a distributed, uneven way. Debates occur around ruling content in-Footage and out-.

Even the name, The Footage, is provisional and unofficial. Newcomers to ARGs who gradually realize that these games lack clearly defined boundaries around who is and who isn't a player would recognize Cayce’s interaction with Footage players. Some of these players suddently appear in face-to-face meetings, even though they are are strangers to the protagonist, such as a restaurant worker who recognizes Cayce as a fellow player: “You follow the footage.” His eyes narrowing within their brackets of black Italian plastic.

ARGs teach us to heighten our ability to winnow patterns out of the otherwise seemingly random and meaningless data in the wider world. Gibson’s novel stretches between these two poles, as Cayce investigates The Footage (among other things), while seeking to avoid her mother’s obsession with electronic voice phenomena.

Beyond ARG-like games themselves, key elements of ARG design have appeared in fiction for some time. For example, Jorge Luis Borges’ Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) concerns the insertion of fictive content into nonfiction. A group of academics, puppet-master equivalents, create an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, then sneak small pieces of it into conventional encyclopedias.

Then that fictive world, Tlon, starts intruding its descriptions into our world on its own -the content escapes its creators. Beyond proving a delightful example for Wikipedia critics, this story brings to mind the tensions and thrills of seeing reality and fiction discovered alongside each other.

Readers of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction experience something similar when they realize that the Necronomicon is a fictional book cited in Lovecraft’s stories, whereas The Witch-Cult in Modern Europe (1921), which also appears in those tales, is so real that it can be purchased from Amazon.com (the HPLA site has a nice list of real books placed alongside the fictional)

Fans, hoaxers, and the ingenious have created print editions of the Necronomicon, winning the right to claim that Alhazred’s book is real, blurring the fact-fiction line still further. Similarly, in the ARG-world, most games have player-built documentary sites describing game content. To an enterprising outsider, a secondary game of discerning reality from fiction may be played.

ARG-like Games

Moving beyond texts about games to games themselves, a series of games before and after The Beast launched used major ARG elements. Most evident here is the insertion of game content into everyday life and structuring a quest-like search using non-game content. For example, Assassin consists of players trying to “kill” other players, but while living lives in a non-game-playing society.

College students stalk each other through residence halls and cafeterias, brandishing toy weapons at targets selected by a game system. The game exists all around nonplayers, operating silently or erupting suddenly into a classroom or quad. While Assassin, which dates reliably back to the 1980s, does have game boundaries in space and time, they are not apparent to nonplayers; moreover, the point is to intertwine life and game.

Live Action Role Playing games, or LARPs, operate in a similar fashion by embedding players and game content into a larger social world, such as a convention or campus. LARPs greatly expand game content over Assassin, adding character background, rules for physical interaction, and so on. The How to Host a Murder game offers a smaller but still useful example of this embedding strategy, as players take on roles within an unrelated social setting. Role-playing here blends elements of the fictional character with perceptions of actual players.

Performance Art

Beyond games and texts about games, performative art has sometimes used ARG strategies to break Brecht's "fourth wall." The traditions of performance art and guerrilla theater have, in retrospect, resembled ARGs in this way. This historical connection suggests a possible ideology for ARGs, in terms of performance art’s political and psychological activism. One may detect a trace of this in Jane McGonical’s account of ARG players wanting to participate in the war on terror:

"We can solve the puzzle of who the terrorists are," one member wrote [3]. Another agreed: "We have the means, resources, and experience to put a picture together from a vast wealth of knowledge and personal intuition"[43]. One Cloudmaker suggested: "Let's become a resource. Utilize your computer & analytical talents to generate leads" [7]. Someone else implored: "We like to flout [sic] our 7,000 members and our voracious appetite for difficult problems, but when the chips are down can we really make a difference?" (Source: “'This Is Not a Game': Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play”, 2003)

Ray Johnson’s Zen-like practice of sending his art to galleries and correspondents is relevant here. As depicted in the biographical documentary How to Draw a Bunny (2002), Johnson’s mail art struck recipients as puzzles to be solved. The boundaries of each piece, like a good ARG puzzle, had to be determined in the course of exploration - what was a pun, what a bagatelle, what connected to which external referent?

Performative art can also intertwine an artist’s content with everyday life beyond either street theater or the gallery. For examples, Janet Cardiff has developed her Walks series since 1991. The audience experiences sounds through portable recorders as they walk through locations, the contents of which are largely or entirely native, rather than created as part of the project. As the description of a 2005 instance reads, Cardiff creates augmented realities:

"interactive works where visitors are asked to touch, listen and move through environments layered with visual and aural narratives" (Source: DeltaAxis)

At a less avant-garde level, historical reenactments resemble both ARGs and performance art. Their encampments, fairs, spectacles are not as intrusive to outsiders as performance art can be, since they are formally and clearly demarcated. But the plunging down a rabbit hole of ARG play, the sense of immersion into a world extending very far beyond one’s ability to encompass, is a key part of the reenactor experience. Summoning up a historical moment, be it the seventh century, the American Civil War, or Jane Austen’s time, literally creates an alternate reality within our own.

Literary Hoaxes

Having touched on performative art, gaming, and stories about ARGs, let us briefly return to our earlier discussion of hoaxes. While literary fakes have a long tradition, some instances are remarkably ARG like. These are not works which seek to disguise authorship, such as the Donation of Constantine (eighth century) or the first edition of The Castle of Otranto (attributed to one “Onuphrio Muralto”, 1765), but attempts to pass off fictional work as nonfiction.

The most spectacular bibliophilic example is the Codex Seraphinianus, an illustrated book describing what seems to be an alien world. All of the text is written in an alphabet not used by any human civilization.

The illustrations are strange, unnerving, macabre, funny, and surreal. It appears without authorship or secondary material in its earliest printings (1981), like a found document from a lost culture. It became the subject of discussion for some time, like Gibson’s Footage, but was revealed to be the work of Luigi Serafini, an Italian designer. Like Borges’ Tlonish encyclopedia, the Codex appears on bookshelves as if snuck into our world from an alternative reality.

The Sokal hoax took this theme and reversed it as a statement of public critique and obloquy. Alan Sokal (physics, New York University), appalled by the rise of science studies, placed a paper in a leading journal addressing that field. The paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was accepted by Social Text in 1996. It fulfills many requirements for a scholarly paper, including detailed citation and a steady flow of specialists’ discourse.

But it was deliberately riddled with fantasies, gaffes, errors, and flights from reality. Once it was accepted and published in Social Text, Sokal strode out from behind the curtain in the pages of another journal, Lingua Franca, to explain his game. A related public academic hoax from a previous generation, The Report from Iron Mountain (1967), outlined a prowar domestic policy, and was published as a serious argument.

Such texts should bring to mind earlier satires, not always understood as such, including Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents...” (1729) and Daniel Defoe’s “Shortest Way With Dissenters” (1703). Each of these texts purports to have serious intent, and appeals to two audiences: those who get the joke, and those who do not.

ARGs are predicated upon such bimodal reception of game content. ARG players alone “got” the numbers added to an A.I. poster, or tried to get into the Metacortechs company's directory. Indeed, we can infer that ARG play is predicated on players grasping a secret not appreciated by their peers.

We can locate a similar interpretive dynamic in the long tradition of “decoding” cultural texts. This includes putatively discovering numerological significance in documents, like The Bible Code (a best-seller in the United States), as well as applying such discoveries to everyday life, as when Russian priests determine that Napoleon Bonaparte’s name, suitably decoded via the French alphabet, yields “666” in War and Peace. Conspiracy theories in general partake of this interpretive approach. Such “analyses” separate the audience into the illuminated and the un-clued, which claiming some authority for the speaker.

ARGs and Politics

The creation of two levels of readers is a very political act, especially as ARGs win larger audiences. But the politics may in fact be very personal, despite the practice of collaborative play. Consider: one benefit of playing a game is, as with most fiction, the enjoyment of a character. Many ARG plots, like mysteries, turn on the death or disappearance of a single person, whom we get to know through play.

In fact, the number of characters in an ARG is quite limited, resembling again the cast of a mystery novel, in contrast to, say, the teeming social strata of an epic or historical novel. Although we play ARGs collectively, we thrive on and give applause for our individual achievements. We each bring our unique perspectives and skill sets to bear on puzzles.

The thrill of discovering a cryptogram, the joy in solving it, the sheer kick of having a game respond to you - these are ultimately deeply individual experiences. The process of playing this sort of collaborative game is also a celebration of the individual player.

ARG antecedents similarly celebrate the individual. John Fowles’ Magus is ultimately about the transformation of a single mind, focused on one point. The Game concerns the redemption of its main character, turning him into more of a human being. The Codex Seraphinianus was the work of one designer.

Gibson’s Footage is played as, and ultimately revealed to be, the inspired work of one creator. Although it goes against the grain of the “collective detective” concept, the ARG ancestry teaches us that this field may be more deeply individualistic than we thought. Such individualism, if this hypothesis is right, makes the politics of ARG play richer, or perhaps more contradictory, than the rhetoric of collective action which is usually applied to it.

A collective problem remains. The preservation of ARG content and play remains an open, unsolved, and tragic problem. Game content web sites lose their hosting, player-created resources vanish, forums disappear, phone numbers cease to work, email addresses die quietly. ARGs are at worst as evanescent as early film, or dance performance.

We are in desperate need of an archiving system so that we can in some way preserve game contents, and also record the experience of play. The fact that so much of the ARG antecedent world remains accessible signals the importance of working to preserve this rising field, before too much of it disappears, and the games become too mysterious.

There are antecedents to this problem, which the ARG community may draw upon. Libraries and archives have fought to preserve the written record for millennia, and remain at the forefront of concerns about preserving digital documents. Film historians increasingly work to maintain and expand our access to older movies, transferring content into other storage devices, reprinting obscure titles, editing improved versions of important works.

Director Martin Scorcese has been a leader in this field for decades. Preserving live performance has been partly the responsibility of recording technologies, as film and video recorded music, dance, and theater productions.

The field of ARG antecedents offers a mixed record in terms of preservation. The books and movies we’ve discussed are fairly widely available, and ultimately appear in copies at key sites (Library of Congress). Performance art is less well recorded, especially when we consider how difficult it is to record performers and audience simultaneously. Dance ultimately developed notation systems to record dance designs, when readers had no access to their performance (Benesh Movement, Kinetography Laban).

Some ARG antecedents are partially preserved – we can find many Choose Your Own Adventure books, but how do we access the experience of playing/reading those? Live-action role-playing games face a similar problem, with game documents preserved (not always), but play hard to find in archival forms. How many people have watched a full LARP in video? Computer games in general face a difficult preservation road, between hardware and software succession and the problem of archiving game play.

Imagine trying to present World of Warcraft to an audience fifty years from now. Consider the variety of ARG content: should we attempt to save every scrap of interaction, each forum post, IRC chat transcript? What about the interactions between players? This may be a good time to start thinking about an ARG archiving selection protocol.

This is not a new problem, and partial solutions have been implemented. The ARG community has preserved a variety of game pieces over time. The Internet Archive contains a growing set of game web pages. Individual players no doubt possess a large number of game content items. Perhaps the ARG ethos of collaborative action, and a growing awareness of the genre’s historical depth and importance, can combine to form a larger ARG preservation movement.

End of Part I

Suggested readings

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT,
1997.

David Szulborski, This is Not A Game. Lulu: 2006.

Originally published on 2006 by the IGDA Alternate Reality Games SIG as "2006 Alternate Reality Games White Paper" on the IGDA website.

About the authors

This paper from the Adam Martin, Tom Chatfield (Editorial Assistant) and Bryan Alexander.

Photo credits: Wikipedia

New Media Picks Of The Week: Sharewood Picnic 46

Livia Iacolare and Robin Good — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 03:08:29 PDT

New media tools and services are blooming like never before. Here is a new basket full of new media gems for another great technology-rich Sharewood Picnic.

The Sharewood Picnic is my weekly collection of the best, most interesting new media tools, resources and pointers I have run into during my daily research and online explorations. These are new media tools and technologies that can facilitate more effective communication, promotion, marketing, networking and your ability to discover like-minded individuals and organizations around the world.

Photo credit: Delphine Mayeur

And here is what I have colected for you this week:

Reputation management service applicable to any web site

Access online applications via your mobile phone

Browser-based toolbar to download rich-media from any web page

Online events manager helps track, find, share and promote favourite events

Contextual chat service allows interaction with people visiting the same web page

Mobile-based event and people finder

Contextual advertising service that pays high commissions to web publishers

Independent filmmakers resource allows to search festivals and competitions worldwide

Directory of selected web sites

Upload, read, promote and market your comics strips to iPods

Add navigation, images, ads and external links to your video clips and track users selections

Zero footprint projectable portable keyboard

Telephone interfaceable automatic recording devices

EasyUtil Recommendation Service

EasyUtil Recommendation web service is for people who want to provide a reputation management and recommendation service (a-la Amazon) to their users, but don't want to spend resources developing it or can't offer it due to limitation on their hosting plans. The service's engine generates recommendations based on the data a client site provides to the engine. The data is fed into the engine using a "this user likes this item" type of request. The items liked by the same user are considered to be related to each other. This information can be retrieved by using a "people who liked this item also liked which items" kind of request. It is currently free to use, but users must expect to be charged of it when it will emerge out of beta.
http://www.easyutil.com

MobileGlu

mobileGlu is a service that allows users to access their online favorite applications through their mobile and enables developers to mobilise their existing web services. Basically, mobileGlu pulls the data from your life online and automatically optimises it for your mobile device. This service currently supports del.icio.us, Flickr, moblogUK, upcoming.org, Blogger and RSS feeds with more being added as time goes on. If there are services you wish to see mobilised, you can get in touch with mobileGlu developers and tell them. Check it out. It's free to use.
http://www.mobileglu.com

PimpFish

PimpFish is a powerful browser toolbar that enables you to save pics, movies and more in your computer, from any webpage. PimpFish provides an advanced download manager that offers several features such as a mini thumbnail viewer, live statistics, gallery shortcuts and SLAPfiles integration. SLAPfiles is a shared collection of URLs, all gathered in one place, that you can also comment. PimpFish is able to save Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media and other embedded videos; moreover, it offers password management when grabbing file from protected websites and bulletin boards. Free download. For Windows/Internet Explorer (Firefox beta version available).
http://www.pimpfish.com/

Eventful

Eventful is a tool that allows users to find events that they care about, share their discoveries with friends and also receive alerts about events that haven't even been announced yet. Events come from the community, as well as EVDB's partners and web crawling. Users can create calendars and then publish them anywhere online using pre-built designs or their own styles. For every event posted, Eventful offers a set of iCalendar and RSS feeds that anyone can subscribe to. Free to use.
http://eventful.com

Gabbly

Gabbly is a platform that enables to instantly connect and collaborate around any content, topic or interest by allowing people that are on the same page to chat together via a web-based floating chat window. You can embed the Gabbly chat window into any web page, either by generating a code and pasting it in the HTML of the desired web page or simply by typing " http://gabbly.com/" before the web page's URL. Gabbly is free to use both on personal and commercial web pages. There is no need to download or install anything. You must have a compatible browser in order to chat: Gabbly currently supports all major browsers.
http://www.gabbly.com

BuddyPing

buddyPing is a way to find your friends, events, venues and pretty much anything in your local area with your mobile. You can also post location aware images and chat with local friends and users. You just have to send a text message or use the buddyPing client to specify your location and the service will automatically find any local things and tell you their location. Worth checking out. Free to use.
http://www.buddyping.com/

Premierad

Premierad is a contextual advertising technology that maximizes your advertising costs by displaying your advertisement only on relevant web pages. By matching your targeted keywords to content-rich affiliate sites, Premierad can deliver highly targeted contextual ads that go well beyond search engine results. Premierad pays webmasters up to 75% of the advertising revenues to place contextual ads on their websites or bogs. Payments are sent 15 in 15 days bi-weekly schedule (minimum payout is $25) Paypal, check (bank wire for bigger amounts). Webmasters can select from a wide range of advertisements such as text banners, graphic banners, pop-ups, and XML feed to host on websites or blogs.
http://www.premierad.com/

Withoutabox

Withoutabox is a resource for independent filmmakers, festivalmakers, writers and audiences. It provides a network that enables users to search festivals and competitions worldwide and submit their own works. Through this service, it's also possible to find festival films, buy tickets or DVDs and rate them. Withoutabox helps organizing submission process, streamline costs and market to the world. Users can upgrade any project from the free "Basic Silver" to a professional "Premium Gold" or "Premium Platinum" level. The complete list of pricing and package variations is also available.
http://www.withoutabox.com

Best of Web Blog Directory

Founded in 1994 at the University of Buffalo, Best of the Web is a directory of websites whose aim is to maintain a high standard of listings. Periodical editorial reviews ensure that all sites are appropriately listed in their most relevant category. All sites included must contain substantive unique content,
navigate in a user-friendly manner, contain no broken links or pictures, be up and running 24/7, and conform to universally accepted web standards. Best of the Web Directory provides a submission service for webmasters, site owners, and marketing organizations who want to have their site reviewed for inclusion in the BOTW Directory. Pricing options range from $49.95 for the annually recurring review to $149.95 for a one-time review.
http://blogs.botw.org/

Clickwheel

Clickwheel promotes an innovative way of using your iPod, and a whole new way of reading comics. It is a service that enables iPod users to upload comics on their device by easily adapting them to the iPod format. People who draw comics can take advantage of Clickwheel by submitting their works, which will be automatically converted to the iPod format and made available for download. Files with any of the following extensions are supported by Clickwheel: .gif, .jpg, .png, .tif, .tiff, .pdf. Ideally, you should save each comics at 640x480 pixels, naming them in the order you want them to appear (for
example 01.png, 02.png etc). You can't charge for your comics, but this service plans to add special “premium” content later for a subscription fee. By the way, Clickwheel will pay a monthly rate for its top 50 most-downloaded features, with bonuses for the top 10. The service is free and you retain all rights to your material.
http://www.clickwheel.net

Syncrocast

Syncrocast allows you to add chapter marks to your videos in order to let your viewers jump to their favorite sections. Trough Syncrocast's interface you can modify your video file and create pages that will display banners, images and also add links to them. Playback is monitored from Syncrocast's servers, which also provide reporting features. Through reports, you will be able to track how many times a video was loaded and played. Thus, you will easily get to know which were the most watched segments or chapters and get click through ratio from your banner ads. Take a look at the demo. Free trial sign up.
http://www.syncrocast.com/

Laser Projection Keyboard CL800BT

By means of a laser, the Laserkey CL800BT projects a full-scale keyboard (layout measuring approx. 241 x 106 mm) equipped with a mouse feature onto any opaque, flat surface. Keystrokes are recognized and then relayed via an invisible infrared layer combined with an optical sensor. This keyboard is the perfect solution for PDAs, cell phones, smart phones, web-pads and tablet PC'.This keyboard is Wireless (Bluetooth Interface), small and easy to carry around. It is compatible with Palm OS, Windows Mobile 2003/SE and Windows 2000/XP. Price: $199,99
http://www.projection-keyboard.com/store/...

DynaMetric

DynaMetric Inc. is a leader in telephone accessories and telephone interfacing technology. Among its products there are two in particular: the first is Call Saver Pro, which allows users record their calls on their PC or any network drive, automatically or on demand; the second one is DynaMetric's NEW Digital Audio Recording Kit, a tool that features up to 48 hours of recording time and up to 512MB of file storage. Call Saver Pro price ranges from $144.95 to $185.95 (depending on the adapter) and it is designed to run on Windows 98/ME/2000/XP; DynaMetric's new Digital Audio Recording Kit comes with 128MB data storage (256MB & 512MB also available) and supports both PCs and Macs.
http://www.dynametric.com

From Live Conferences To X-Events: Key Benefits

Robin Good — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 03:13:04 PST

X-events, physical events that leverage the potential of new media communication technologies to extend their communication potential over time, remain one of the hottest topics relevant to conferencing and collaboration providers.

Photo credit: Nelson Syozi

The convergence of RSS, wikis, blogs, podcasts, discussion forums, newsletters and mailing lists with real-time communication and collaboration technologies is a certainty.

Traditional events are going to transform themselves into ongoing conversations streams, as popular and successful as the topics and people participating and moderating them, and as credible and authoritative as the time they are able to thrive online.

X-events are going to be outstandingly capable marketing, branding, sponsorship and premium advertising channels, giving extended life to any physical event while hugely increasing its potential audience and profit potential.

Here are some of the very apparent benefits that X-events can bring to any company managing, organizing or designing the delivery of live events like conferences and seminars:

a) Extension of communication reach. As a very significantly larger number people can attend, participate, subscribe, listen and attend asynchronously to extended events so does the reach for your message, brand, sponsorship, or product.

b) Expansion of marketing, awareness and promotional channels. All of the extended channels utilized to transform traditional events into ongoing parallel conversation channels offer huge opportunities for highly targeted, contextual, non-intrusive marketing opportunities, especially in the form of sponsorships and sell-side advertising options.

c) Creation of "vertical-communities" by leveraging extended events natural aggregation components and delivering them to X-events participants in a personalized, easy-to-use, self-contained branded media aggregation application.

d) Participatory design and delivery. Yes, grassroots X-event design is here. Who's going to grab it first? Participants can now become co-creators, contributors, editors, individual re-sellers and publishing houses for any event. If only we allowed them to! Who is to say that events need to designed by a non-transparently elected group of vested-interests representatives? Couldn't emancipated participants do a better job of it? Sure they could. Who better then them knows what they will want to buy, listen and attend to? Why take the risk of discovering all this at event time?

e) Great ROI, expanded profit, extended sales marketplace. X-events offer great opportunities to hugely increase event profit-margins by extending marketing and sales opportunities, without a need for expensive physical space and hugely expensive event-related logistical costs. The new X-event is grounded on an extended communication framework not on additional costs for physical infrastructures. The X-event enables major cost-savings matched by the potential for much higher quality output when the organizing team is able to fully realize the direct involvement of participants in the design and delivery of the X-event.

What instead needs to be watched out for when thinking about stepping into the fascinating X-event arena is:

1. Having a talented X-event communication strategist. Someone who can aptly envision, plan and coordinate the unfolding of the X-event as an integrated whole.

2. Employing a skilled and well staffed editorial team. Creating ongoing discussion topics, news radars, webcasts, interviews and podcasts, blogs, wikis and live chats requires skilled individuals who live and breathe the online world.

3. Selecting tools and technologies that are accessible to everyone. Having communication, presentation and collaboration tools that are both easy-to-use and accessible by all types of Internet users is a critical, essential requirement.

4. A million other things you can start suggesting here below.

Food for thought....ehm, sorry... for conversation!