Multi-touch interaction experiement.
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Author: Seb Chan
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Social networking obsessions
On my non-work blog I’ve been posting quite a bit about a very very cool social networking-meets-music web application called Last.fm.
In a nutshell what Last.fm and its music player plugins do is track every bit of music that you listen to on your computer or iPod. It uploads the track name and artist name to its central server. Then it links you up with other people who listen to similar things.
One of the benefits of Last.fm is the ability to track what you and others listen to, and of course the ability to browse fellow users playlists. Not what they say they are playing but what they are playing. (If you want to see what I am listening to . . . you can)
You also get ‘recommendations’ on other artists, tracks and users that you might like to check out. A bit like Amazon’s book recommendations – but based entirely on what you are doing not just what you are buying. (Amazon’s recommendations are always screwed up when you buy a gift for someone for example)
Individuals also get a ‘radio’ station link that lets them listen to streaming music related to what they like and already play.
But it starts getting really exciting when people join together and share tastes. Users can form ‘groups’ around shared interests.
Groups also have an automatically generated ‘radio’ station that plays licensed tracks based on the collective musical tastes of the group. Its in its early days but my group is already starting to build a collection of pretty relevant stuff – and as more small labels join the specialist radio will only improve. (Already I have heard a track from an artist on the Fonal label on it!)
The possibilities here are only just being explored.
This is really hot because it is so seamless and its addictive.
Be warned.
Giv and I have been thinking about how we could apply the same principles of ‘taste’ and ‘action’ to cultural institutions and hopefully you’ll be seeing something along these lines developed as a key part of how the upcoming Design Hub project we are creating works.
Stay tuned.
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Electronic Swatchbook Tagging
If you have an hour of spare time that you’d like to donate to us then drop me an email – sebc [at] phm [dot] gov [dot] au.
I’m looking for a few people to help us complete the tagging of the Electronic Swatchbook swatches.
The main thing we’re trying to get done is the COLOUR search. Obviously the swatches are made up of a lot of different colours and real time image analysis tools just don’t cut it. So we implemented a tagging feature where users can ‘describe’ the swatches. And a lot of people have done so.
But its not enough.
We need your help to finish them off. And we’ve built a quick and dirty bulk tagging interface so volunteers can zip through the swatches in order tagging the ones that are currently untagged.
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New blog categories
Regular contributors and readers . . . . we have two new categories for posts –
Web2.0
Digital storytelling
If there are other categories you’d like me to create for posts then please add them in the comments.
Remember that in Web 2.0 world, tagging is everything.
Very interesting piece on the ACMIpark installation / virtual environment by ACMI games curator Helen Stuckey.
In placing such corporate constraint on the design of acmipark, lost too was the opportunity to identify with a community. Due to ACMI’s stipulations it was closed to the electronic music, stencil art and open source communities to which its creators, selectparks, belonged. By requiring a high–end PC, broadband and technical sophistication to access, it was also beyond the reach of most causal visitors. Further complicating access was the fact that due to budget constraints it was not rigorously tested across a range of hardware or as user friendly as commercial game releases. In addition the work was understood and supported by ACMI in terms of more traditional non–networked installation artwork and an audience of online users was never specifically sought.
Pete and I should really go back and do a similar evaluation of Soundbyte (2001-2004). Soundbyte was a site where the music and video created in youth centres and in secondary schools could be hosted and shared. We had a great team working on its development in 2001/2. Kenny Sabir authored a new version of his online jamming tool DASE specifically for us, incorporating a whole host of new features at our request based on our experience with users at SoundHouse lab at the Powerhouse Museum. The site then pushed this tool for use within schools and ended up trialling it with Musica Viva. In the end we had created a much celebrated resource that never really reached its potential.
The main problem was that users had no real reason to return to the site. If they had produced music or video as part of a project at school a drop in centre, or at the Museum, then they would look at it once or twice, show their family and that was it. There was no incentive for them to browse other people’s works – as we had expected they might. I remember that MP3.com had a similar problem.
If we’d done the project a few years later we could have built it with a social networking engine under the hood which would have made it a lot more ‘sticky’ for users. Now, I’d add an auto podcast creator that would go through related productions and build a subscribable radio module, and a way of tagging uploaded content so users could browse ‘clouds’ of related uploads. Also, we would have insisted a little more insistently that DASE be developed as a open source project.
I did look at the ccMixter engine early last year, and there are plenty of other options these days. If we can organise some funding we’ll revive the ideas of Soundbyte project again.
Day Two highlights included the comprehensive presentation by the capture wales crew in the first session and the truly wonderful local work being carried out in regional australia by Malcolm McKinnon.
Capture Wales www.bbc.co.uk/capturewales
The BBC supported capture wales project is now quite mature, having recently passed the milestone point at which more content comes in unsolicited than is produced through the project workshops. This represents a significant statement in terms of demand and sustainability. I believe it would be difficult to reproduce this success without the weight and resources of BBC Wales delivering expertise, production and distribution power, however, it remains at its core, a community centred practise. It’s clearly stated purpose is encouraging and acknowledging diverse voices. It provides a fascinating model aiming to change the balance of power between ther broadcaster and the broadcasted.
The capture walse crew have developed their own approaches based on the Berkeley model which is made quite explicit at www.storycenter.org/book.html
Malcolm is really a community artist who spends significant time in rural and regional communities esp Vic and Sth Aus and has also worked with numerous cultural institutions including many museums. He also works with communities including indigenous to produce beautiful films – again, first person narratives.
Malcolm’s presentation explored notions of places that talk, charting unsignposted local knowledge, artefacts as powerful triggers for untapping residues of memory, and opening up the many narratives which define the history of any place. Through his community filmmaking he seeks to bring forward ‘authentic, idiosyncratic stories’, to acknowledge and celebrate the past in a truthful and useful way. Very excellent.
Check out the MP3 audio files. The best bits (IMHO) of the conference only made available in this place.
Pete has kindly uploaded his audio recordings of some of the sessions.
Feb 3 – 600pm Joe Lambert
Feb 4 – 1115 am John Hartley
Feb 4 – 1115am Ana Serrano
Feb 5 – 900am Capture Wales (fixed)
Feb 5 – 1115am Malcolm McKinnon
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Sampling 101
A very simple and easy introduction to the issues around sampling in music/art. Some great comments by Matmos and Lessig, QBert etc.
Very watchable.
Emily Chang, once again, delivers an excellent article on designing for Web2.0.
She has interviewed over 60 of the new Web 2.0 startups about their design philosophies.
In reading the current sixty interview responses, there’s a clear trend towards several key words that continue to appear in people’s answers:
simple
fast
intuitive
social
minimal
choice
useful
funThere’s also the echo of key actions:
listen
iterate
release early
experience
discoverWhile some of these would have been considered in early generations of web, it’s significant that we’re hearing these repeated with such frequency. It’s taken a while to free web and UI design from the bonds of graphic design emulation (early 1990’s) or the web as self-contained animation (late 1990’s flash). Blogs, CSS, web standards, content management systems, and the cry of “usability!” finally put a stake in these paradigms (early 2000’s), but they also introduced something else that could have been just as blasé – the template. Luckily, user experience, long accepted in other industries, came into the web scene and gave design decisions a social and anthropological basis for understanding how subtle shifts could help or hinder a user. Both designers, developers, and decision makers could break away from a generic view of the amorphous “user” with mental mapping, personas, and frequent user testing. This gave us live results and clues into how our users think so that we could provide alternate design solutions. But, the challenge still remained. Making these changes a technical reality could mean more customization to a proprietary system, or hacking an open source solution, or purchasing additional software, or bringing in more programming resources. Development or user testing costs often prevented a truly iterative design process.
ACMI’s Digital Storytelling conference was a bit hit and miss. Pete will need to give you the run down on day two but here’s some thoughts on day one.
The opening plenary from civil rights activist John O’Neal was no doubt honourable but seemed quite tangential to a conference on ‘digital storytelling’ – especially when John told us, 10 minutes from the end, that he’d only recently made ONE digital story himself, and that was as a participant. There was also an audience singalong that was so 60s and repulsive. It reminded me why I liked punk (although strangely now I listen to will happily listen to free folk – a good selection of Finnish free folk was obtained on the journey from my favourite Australian record store Synaesthesia). If it wasn’t the 60s I was reminded of, it was Hillsong. I had really been hoping that O’Neal, having worked a lot in New Orleans might have actually had something to say about the Smithsonian’s Katrina Maps project . . . but alas.
Ok maybe that’s a bit harsh, but digital storytelling HAS to be something more than 70s style community cultural development (CCD) + video + ‘the internet’.
Fortunately things improved – the next session was fantastic. Opening with an excellent run down of old and new models for TV, the speakers engaged with theory, and demonstrated some amazing projects with more than just CCD outcomes.
Daniel Meadows from the BBC’s Capture Wales project introduced the best session of the conference on ‘broadcast convergence – new forms of storytelling’.
John Hartley from QUT offered an insightful look back at the last 50 years of TV and then projected 50 years forwards, exploring the issues and opportunities created by new media, interactivity, and pro-sumer audiences.
Ana Serrano from Canada’s fantastic Habitat labs took us through some amazing interactive media work produced by her Habitat teams.
Some of those she talked about were –
Paul Vincent from SBS TV was up next talking about the online projects related to their broadcast output. These included –
SBS revealed their site gets 500,000 unique visits per month although it was hard to work out whether this was overall or for specific projects. Either way it seems either very low or high . . . . anyone? Also, they are bedding down Flash Video as a standard for video delivery.
In the next session was spoilt by the very annoying Chris Crawford (who admits to not playing computer games in the last 15 years – you would think this would disqualify him from answering questions about MMORPGs and The Sims . . but no!).
But in amongst the guff there was a fantasic presentation by David Vadvideloo who developed the UsMob project with the ABC. UsMob is an amazing interactive storytelling project a little bit like a Choose Your Own Adventure. Developed specificially with indigenous communities in Central Australia and in response to the communities’ own requests for culturally relevant online content for indigenous children and community problems around substance abuse and the long term impact of particular ‘choices’.
UsMob is a great example of a meaningful storytelling project that is similar in some way to the work of Enda Murray and others in Redfern in terms of collaborative story telling and film creation, but then extended to another level by involving the audience in the project as well through the online elements.
Pete has some sessions recorded and we will link them through . . . .