If you missed the short chat I gave about the Brooklyn Museum’s open source Mozilla Kiosk plugin then you can check out the project here – http://www.mozdevgroup.com/clients/bm.
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Month: May 2005
Categories
Broadband Reality
Broadband uptake is still woeful.
From Whirlpool –
“OptusNet announced today that its subscriber base has passed the 350,000 mark after adding 63,000 subscribers in the last three months. Optus Consumer MD Allen Lew attributed the growth to the bundling of Optus landline, mobile and ADSL products. The company’s success “stems from the increasing strength of the company’s bundling strategy which now sees more than 95 per cent of OptusNet DSL customers taking up multiple Optus products,” Lew said. He also noted the importance of broadband in future strategic planning. “With the trend across our industry for consumer fixed line voice revenue … flat to declining, broadband revenue is key to the future of integrated telcos like Optus,” he said. Despite this recent growth, OptusNet remains just under half BigPond’s size. Six months ago BigPond claimed 533,000 broadband subscribers and OptusNet 250,000. BigPond’s latest available figures, confirmed today, claim 718,000 broadband subscribers. ”
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digital natives digital immigrants
In my last blog comment I referred to marc prensky and his digital natives essay. Here’s the link.
Siva Viyahadyanathan wrote an excellent introductory book to US Copyright, the DMCA etc a few years back titled Copyrights & Copywrongs. Here he is again with an article on Open Source.
“Abstract: The Open Source model of peer production, sharing, revision, and peer review has distilled and labeled the most successful human creative habits into a techno- political movement. This distillation has had costs and benefits. It has been dif cult to court mainstream acceptance for such a tangle of seemingly technical ideas when its chief advocates have been hackers and academics. On the other hand, the brilliant success of overtly labeled Open Source experiments, coupled with the horror stories of attempts to protect the proprietary model of cultural production have served to popularize the ideas championed by the movement. In recent years, we have seen the Open Source model overtly mimicked within domains of culture quite distinct from computer software. Rather than being revolutionary, this movement is quite conservatively recapturing and revalorizing the basic human communicative and cultural processes that have generated many good things.”
from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=713044
This pdf reports on a pilot project and makes recommendations regarding the use of mobile phones, text messaging, etc in a learning program for disadvantaged youth. It includes numerous links to further research.
http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/projects/media/txt_me_recommendations.pdf
A little while back I was appalled whilst attending an Adobe product launch (for education priced premier elements and photoshop elements for schools) as the adobe education manager was going through the fabulous new features of pshop including the bundled image management system – photoalbum. The system has the feature to auto send images direct to mobile phones capable of receiving mms. The attitude of the presenter was that mobile phones were the scourge of the school yard and should be confiscated on sight.
Gara sent me this earlier in the week.
“From CNI – Project Briefing: Spring 2005 Task Force Meeting
Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility
Kenneth Hamma
Executive Director, Digital Policy & Initiatives J. Paul Getty Trust
Instead of asserting intellectual property rights in images of public domain works as nearly every art museum does now, it is argued here that publicly and pro-actively placing these images in the public domain and clearly removing all questions about their availability for use and reuse would likely cause no harm to the financial position or trustworthy reputation of any collecting institution and would demonstrably contribute to the public good. As those images have become digital assets and as the preferred delivery venue has become increasingly an electronic network, the ante has been raised to do so. The manner in which this might be done may require consultation with legal counsel. The fact of doing it, however, is not a legal decision but a business decision that can be evaluated by non-profits in measuring success against the mission.”
An open standard for the camera RAW format has just launched.
“We want camera manufacturers to publicly document their RAW image formats — past, present, and future. The goal of OpenRAW is to encourage image preservation and give creative choice of how images are processed to the creators of the images. To this end, we advocate open documentation of information about the how the raw data is stored and the camera settings selected by the photographer.
If the current practice of hiding data and dropping support for older models of cameras continue countless images will be unreadable with no software to decode them. Only openly documented RAW formats will make it possible to decode RAW files in the future.
Many have suggested (and Adobe has created) a common, open file format for RAW image files for all camera makers to use as a solution to the RAW problem. A common, openly documented RAW format used by all manufacturers could fulfill the goals of OpenRAW, but it is not the only way to reach them. Open documentation of all RAW files by manufacturer’s is the quickest way for OpenRAW’s goals to be reached. “
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Moovl
The latest creation from Sodaplay is Moovl. It is a very nifty basic animator tool – great for kids. YOu can attach a physics model to what you draw . . . .
The early versions were built with Processing. (see below)
Here’s a collection of stuff I’ve sent around recently.
Interesting future projection of media/
Processing – open source programming language for artists
This is very cool – check the exhibition section for a quick overview. There are full tutorials here. Maybe James Hancock and Tom Ellard could put together a course in it for the Vector Lab.
Relations between different artists and bands. Similar to visual thesaurus.
Rushkoff on Open Source & Democracy
“The emergence of the interactive mediaspace may offer a new model for cooperation. Although it may have disappointed many in the technology industry, the rise of interactive media, the birth of a new medium, the battle to control it and the downfall of the first victorious camp,taught us a lot about the relationship of ideas to the media through which they are disseminated.Those who witnessed or, better, have participated in the development of the interactive mediaspace have a very new understanding of the way that cultural narratives are developed, monopolised and challenged. And this knowledge extends, by allegory and experience, to areas far beyond digital culture,to the broader challenges of our time.” (Rushkoff)
Welcome to the first post of our new cross-departmental blog.
The purpose of this blog is to create a place where we can all centrally post articles and aggregate links, comments, discussions and other stuff.
The photo above was taken when Pete and I were in Berlin presenting at Transemdiale 2004. The location where we were drinking beer was an all-automated bar – no human staff. Beer vending machines which only took old Deutschmarks, a conveyor belt for empties, a series of audio servers generating music, and various spy cameras to toggle between.