Category: Interactive Media

Categories
Interactive Media Mobile MW2007 Young people & museums

Museums & the Web 2007 papers online / Fantoni on museum ‘bookmarking’

The first batch of papers for Museums & the Web have gone online.

Picking the first one to read at random, I chose Silvia Fillipini Fantoni’s paper on “Bookmarking in museums”.

I am interested in this area as we developed a prototype mobile phone object bookmarking application just over two years ago but never rolled it out. There were many reasons and in the end the greatest barrier to implementation was the resistance from teachers to allowing students to carry and use mobile phones during a museum visit. Another reason was the difficulty in finding a ‘free call’ SMS service number – without which users would have needed to pay for each ‘bookmark’ through their mobile plan (and unlike America, all you can eat SMS plans are not that common or cheap).

Fantoni’s paper is an excellent reality check for those building personalisation tools for their museum website with the expectation that users will surely want to bookmark things to come back to later. She argues that the usage of bookmarking tools is small, generally much lower than initially expected. Bookmarking is an activity not done by the ‘general public, possibly because of lack of awareness, promotion, and an understanding of what ‘bookmarking’ actually offers or means. Despite this, such tools may be useful for specific dedicated audiences – especially teachers.

Categories
Digital storytelling Interactive Media Social networking Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Gordon Luk on avatars in games and social media sites / stickiness and museums

Gordon Luk has, post-SXsW posted some well illustrated examples of avatars and the types of available customisation that can be done in various MMORPGs and social media sites.

Luk is looking at the differences between ‘explicitly controlled’ and ‘implicitly controlled’ customisations. The former being those that are created by the user/player (initial picture, autobiography) and the latter being those that are generated or altered by the game engine itself. What he is interested in is how social media applications can learn from game environments,

avatars can play a large role in improving participation in games and social media, and can arguably go a long way into transforming one into the other. Building these layers into a community system can definitely result in game dynamics, and I’d bet that it would improve network engagement.

From using Last.fm a lot there it becomes apparent that part of the pleasure and stickiness of the site lies in the ‘implicitly controlled’ customisations. In Last.fm these are the automatically logged track and album charts that generate as you play and ‘scrobble’ music into their system (game), and the ‘neighbours’, ‘radio stations’ and ‘recommendations’ the system generates as a result. Through pleasure and stickiness comes an investment from the user in continuing to maintain their (in this case musical) identity on the site.

One of the things I am looking forward to in San Francisco at Museums and the Web this year is hearing how museums are encouraging stickiness and user investment in their proposed and in some cases, already developed, post 2.0 era websites. I expect it isn’t always going to be a ‘build it and they will come’ situation unless museums can get the ‘stickiness’ factor right with their target audiences. This is where I can see great merit in Jim Spadaccini and others work with smaller museums and non-profits, choosing to harness already existing, and already ‘sticky’ social media rather than try to develop their own (competing) ones.

Fundamentally the question is “why does someone spend so much time in a game world customising their avatar?”. And, “how can we get them to do that on our site as well?”

Categories
Interactive Media Web 2.0

SxSW podcasts

The SxSW podcasts have started going up and for those who couldn’t be there because they are on the other side of the world then the podcasts offer a great way of listening to, but not participating in, the major panels and sessions from the festival.

I started with the Bruce Sterling keynote, mainly because Will Wright wasn’t up yet (only very short clips are online now and focus on the game demo rather than the storytelling intro section). True to form, Sterling is provocative and probing. Sterling looks at the ideas of Henry Jenkins, Lev Manovich and Yochai Benkler, all three of whom should be reasonably familiar names to Fresh + New readers. Sterling picks up on Benkler’s ‘common space peer production’ and breaks it down into a series of key points and guidelines.

Slightly less interesting, at least until the audience questions begin was Emerging Social and Technology Trends. The questions around emerging technology trends in the developing world/global South are particularly fascinating.

These are well recorded and eminently listenable podcasts for public transport. More should be appearing on the SxSW podcast archive soon.

Categories
Digital storytelling Interactive Media Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Jenkins on ‘crud’ in participatory culture

There is an excellent recent post by Henry Jenkins titled ‘In Defense of Crud‘ in which he examines some of the recent debates around fan fiction, YouTube etc. Jenkins’ response to some of the criticisms of ‘participatory culture’ is wonderfully distilled into seven precepts which can be broadly applied.

1. We should not reduce the value of participatory culture to its products rather than its process.

2. All forms of art require a place where beginning artists can be bad, learn from their mistakes, and get better.

3. A world where there is a lot of bad art in circulation lowers the risks of experimentation and innovation.

4. Bad art inspires responses which push the culture to improve upon it over time.

5. Good and Bad, as artistic standards, are context specific.

6. Standards of good and bad are hard to define when the forms of expression being discussed are new and still evolving.

7. This is not a zero-sum game. It is not clear that the growth of participatory culture does, in fact, damage to professional media making.

What is the opportunity cost for museums of not engaging with participatory culture? I’d wager that the issues we face when we do engage are significantly less problematic than if we do not engage. Our audience are already engaging in a participatory culture – its very hard not to do so in a mainstream life – even our television shows are forcing us to vote or their outcomes.

Categories
Interactive Media Web 2.0

Brief report on Yahoo Pipes and RSS

Yahoo launched their Pipes application a few days ago. Traffic seems to have almost overwhelmed the site, but if you can get on to it you will find a very nice, and well featured visual tool for combining, manipulating and presenting different data sources.

This effectively allows you to build your own data mashup in a matter of minutes. Yahoo provides a range of data sources already but you can add your own RSS feeds, for example, or scrape data from web pages and then combine them with image searches, maps, and internet searches. As Stutzman has pointed out, Yahoo has realised the importance and potential of RSS and Pipes should reinforce this in the minds of other developers.

I built a quick Flickr results display based on an Opensearch feed from our collection search in 30 minutes by pulling apart and looking at the way in which others had built Pipes to display Flickr results from other RSS feed data such as the New York Times headlines. The Opensearch feed is not clean enough to get a ‘good’ Flickr result, but with a bit more time Pipes could clean up and improve the results.

Categories
Interactive Media Young people & museums

Internet-connected plush toys

First, Snarkmarket reports on a wonderful dialogue on Metafilter about a prototype from the late 90s – an internet connected teddy bear that would tell children stories from a central server, contributed by parents.

I came up with the (again, patented, but the patent dropped) idea of an internet-connected teddy bear that contacts a web site to tell stories. People would tell stories to the web site, and in return for these stories, they would be paid per listener. Bear purchasers would pay a monthly subscription fee. The child would get access to every single story ever told via the breadth of the lazyweb, and the parents could configure the bear to tell only certain kinds of stories (e.g. nonviolent, child age 4-6, Jewish, with a moral message, etc. Stories would be reviewed and tagged.)

Then it is on to the Washington Post reporting on Webkinz. Semi-internet connected plush toys that have unique IDs activated via the Webkinz site.

“Play always reflects the adult world,” said Christopher Byrne, an independent toy analyst who goes by the Toy Guy. “It’s kids aspiring to have a MySpace page, but cognitively and developmentally, they’re not ready for that. This gives them the experience of sharing and connecting with friends.”

Except that the life of your real world Webkinz is revealed in the virtual world. Nothing happens to the toys in the real world – that would make them too expensive and put them out of the price range of their target market. But like the proposed Teddy Bear 2.0, it is only a matter of time.

Difficultly in achieving the right price point is probably the main reason why the Chumby is not here yet.

These activities all remind me a lot of two things.

The first is that these are like a children’s version of the quintessentially Australian, and very successful, Talking Boony toys that a beer company has been using during the last two summers of cricket down here. The Talking Boony picks up a frequencies in the live TV broadcast via a microphone. Those frequencies trigger pre-recorded patterns in its memory, which are meant to synchronise with the action on screen, or are time sensitive.

The second is the ever growing trend towards real-world/online interactivity.

Categories
Interactive Media Web 2.0 Young people & museums

Concepts of Web2.0 presented as a video

Michael Wesch from the Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University, has made a rather nice and succinct summary of Web 2.0 as a video. Rather than being technical, it gives good coverage of the nature and effect of technological change on the production and consumption of meaning, identity and text.

Categories
Interactive Media Web 2.0 Web metrics

Jenkins & Shirky discuss Second Life, virtual worlds, social media

Some quite fantastic dialogue between Clay Shirky at Corante and Henry Jenkins.

The discussion goes well beyond Second Life and moves across the sphere of virtual worlds, games and the social communications that are emerging from these environments.

Jenkins –

I do not even think that Second Life represents the future of multiplayer games — it represents one end of a spectrum of player experiences which maximizes player generated content and minimizes the prestructured experiences we associate with most computer games. World of Warcraft represents the other end of that spectrum and so far, that model draws more customers. My own ideal lays perhaps some place in the middle. As such, this becomes a debate not about affordances but about the desirability of professional entertainment versus the pleasures of participatory culture. It also becomes an exercise in mapping what some have described as the pyramid of participation in which the harder it is to create content, the higher the percentage of participants who will chose to consume content someone else has produced. What’s striking to me is not that so many people still prefer to consume professionally generated content (it has always been thus) but what a growing percent of people are willing to consume amateur content and what a smaller but still significant percentage of people are willing to generate and share content they produced themselves. Second Life interests me as a particular model of participatory culture.

Shirky –

Games have at least three advantages other virtual worlds don’t. First, many games, and most social games, involve an entrance into what theorists call the magic circle, an environment whose characteristics include simplified and knowable rules. The magic circle saves the game from having to live up to expectations carried over from the real world.

Second, games are intentionally difficult. If all you knew about golf was that you had to get this ball in that hole, your first thought would be to hop in your cart and drive it over there. But no, you have to knock the ball in, with special sticks. This is just about the stupidest possible way to complete the task, and also the only thing that makes golf interesting. Games create an environment conducive to the acceptance of artificial difficulties.

Finally, and most relevant to visual environments, our ability to ignore information from the visual field when in pursuit of an immediate goal is nothing short of astonishing (viz. the gorilla experiment.) The fact that we could clearly understand spatial layout even in early and poorly rendered 3D environments like Quake has much to do with our willingness to switch from an observational Architectural Digest mode of seeing (Why has this hallway been accessorized with lava?) to a task-oriented Guns and Ammo mode (Ogre! Quad rocket for you!)

In this telling, games are not just special, they are special in a way that relieves designers of the pursuit of maximal realism. There is still a premium on good design and playability, but the magic circle, acceptance of arbitrary difficulties, and goal-directed visual filtering give designers ways to contextualize or bury at least some platform limitations. These are not options available to designers of non-game environments; asking users to accept such worlds as even passable simulacra subjects those environments to withering scrutiny.

Categories
Collection databases Interactive Media Web 2.0

Kathy Sierra on serendipity

I’ve just spent the last while finishing off my papers for Museums & The Web 2007. One of them on the OPAC2.0 collection database talks alot about the idea of ‘serendiptity’ and its importance in creating new ways for users to not only navigate but to find and create meaning in a database.

Kathy Sierra has a nice post introducing the very idea and calls for more randomness to be added to products, software and experiences.

Categories
Imaging Interactive Media

World visualisation – Worldmapper

Some interesting global statistical visualisations on Worldmapper.