Hi, hypernarrative is a blog by Wilbert Baan about Art, Media and Technology with a focus on interactive storytelling. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Google or Netvibes. I'll post a few messages a week. Thanks for visiting!

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No updates for a month, although I’m not a really consistent blogger, a month must be a new record. I was on a holiday. Driving, surfing, camping, diving, sleeping, eating, drinking and a lot of reading.

Not a lot of internet and blogs, only some e-mail contact with friends and family using the wifi on my mobile phone. Wifi and laptops are getting more common on campsites. Too bad roaming prices for data are still ridiculous.

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On our way back we picked up a friend. Her parents started a new adventure a couple of years ago. They moved to France to start a bed and breakfast in the wonderful chateau La Villaine (picture above) in the Loire valley. We stayed there for one night and it was great. Her parents are really nice people and make you feel very comfortable. Her mothers cooking alone is worth visiting it.

The web at its best; enabling small business and niche communities
It is great to see how the web changes markets. For ‘the Bed & Breakfast industry’, and more businesses ratings and reviews are the things that create business. Often getting more important than the website of the destination itself.

The chateau advertises using Google Adwords aiming at people who are looking to stay in a chateau in the Loire Valley. Although the prices of Google Ads are rising, for a small and very focussed business it is still the most comparative way of advertising compared to booking with agencies.

Community ratings and reviews are very important. People are looking for the best place to stay and are searching the web for information about it. La Villaine has a great rating on sites like Tripadvisor. And for a reason, guests really enjoyed it.

The vegetarian meme

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On one of the community websites two guests wrote about how the vegetarian dinner at the chateau was the best they ever had. The hosts didn’t know about the review and suddenly a lot of guests turning up told them they are vegetarian. They didn’t understand why suddenly so many guests had become vegetarian, until they told them about the positive online review.

This is what I really like about the web. How it connects people and enables them to exchange experiences and create better real life experiences and sustainable business relations based on quality.

Just an idea

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During the holiday I use my Canon EOS a lot for photographing. I can’t share the pictures until I’m back home, because I need a computer for it.

It would be nice if I could use an USB-cable that connects the camera to my iPhone and uses software on the iPhone that turns the iPhone (wifi/gprs/3g) into an upload-dongle to publish the photos on the web (Flickr).

This can’t be that hard to make I guess, since Apple already has a connector to upload photos from your camera to your iPod.

It would also be great software for professional photographers at concerts, sports games and events, because it connects every type of professional camera directly to the web everywhere in the world. Without any hassles.

Any readers with great iPhone-SDK-skills ;)? I think software like this would be worth at least $25,- and can be easily sold through the Apple Appstore. I think there is a serious market for it.

Recently the Last.fm website had a redesign. With video and images more prominent presented they made the website look more visual appealing to first time visitors. More focus on music and a little less focus on people.

Personalized Podcast
I’m not sure if the personalized podcast page was already available on the website before the redesign. I have never seen it before. What is great about this option is that you can subscribe to a stream of free MP3s that will be automatically delivered to your computer through the podcast-distribution-model (xml with enclosures).

A Long Tail with free things and high quality service
Last.fm delivers you the music you might like based on your personal profile, and it delivers the files for free. The music delivered might be from your favorite artists or from artists you have never heard of. This is how you are able to get to know new music that is very likely to be interesting to you.

For artists the group their music is send to is a smaller group, but this group is more likely to like or love the music, and thus distributing free content this way is more cost effective.

For me this podcast is an example how you can add more value to the content through smart distribution. You discover something new, and there is less noise in discovering it.

Mujuice, electronic music from Russia
In my recommended downloads there are a few tracks by Mujuice. I don’t know Mujuice, but if I like the tracks (I probably do, since it is a recommendation) I might search for more, buy MP3s or visit their next, or first performance in the Netherlands.

For the band there probably isn’t any direct business or value, there is only the start of something new by giving something away for free, a new connection or customer relation. And as you might know, all you need are a thousand true fans.

This image shows the most popular tags connected to the articles I have read today

The coming weeks we will be further updating the EN.nl news website. The last weeks we have added interesting things on the database level and back-end of the system. Now it is time to bring some of those ideas to the front-end.

One of the things we have done is making tags more important. After using and testing with it we noticed the combined tagging methods we use give a very interesting and relevant database with tags. The tags have more value and semantic relations than I thought they would have. EN.nl has over 35.000 articles in its database with over a 100.000 tags, 10.000 of those tags are unique.

What we have added is a system that tracks the tags of the articles you read. With this information a metadata profile is created. New articles that enter the site will be matched to your ‘profile’ and if there is a match this will be a recommended article. There is also a tag relation mechanism to create a more semantic relation.

We will do the same for your friends, since news is part of a social experience. We are adding groups as well. If you have online friends using the website, you and your group of friends creates a semantic profile as well. New articles will be recommended that fit to your group of friends.

Your profile
What about this tag based profile based on what your read? The profile could be private or hidden. It could also be open or even exportable. For example EN.nl could connect to web services and get the highest rated and most recent blog posts about subjects you like and recommend these to you. Or you could connect the information to other profiles to create a more rich or enhanced experience on other platforms as well.

Would you like to take this profile? And can you think of a service that could serve you better when it has a collection of news themes and subjects you like?

The concept design for the EN.nl frontpage. The page automatically orders the information based on what is most relevant in general and for you.

I like location based services. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I’m sure it will invade/expose our privacy more than social websites already do and I think it will add something new and more to mobile devices that computers can’t.

The problem with LBS is that the technology is distributed. Every device and phone has its own interface, protocols, software and more. In the end the application that is used to transfer the location isn’t relevant. Relevant is what you can do with the coordinates.

Yahoo Fire Eagle
Yahoo Fire Eagle jumps into this hole. The service acts as a bridge between applications. Fire Eagle makes sure all applications can talk to Fire Eagle and they distribute the information trough an API. This makes it possible for me to develop a location based service without having to wonder about how to get the location information from the actual devices.

For example if I want to make a mobile website that displays news articles based on your location all I have to do is to connect a database with news (and coordinates) to the Fire Eagle API and render this on a page.

You - as a user - should take an extra step and install a client that is able to give your whereabouts to Fire Eagle. For instance I use Brightkite, Plazes, Dopplr and Navizon on my iPhone and desktop to tell Fire Eagle where I am. I don’t use it frequent, but they all work.

Go and build great things
This information about my location is open when I wish it to be open. Now we need developers that can create great applications that return some of the Location Based value back to me as a user.

The Portrait of Barbie by Raquel Diniz

I met Raquel Diniz through a hypernarrative project I did two years ago called slowshutter. The idea was to present a great picture every day and to present it nice.

The project did not continue fluidly (I probably should have been a more active photographer), but through the website I met some nice people and great photographers. One of the photographers on the website is Raquel Diniz. Recently she did a MA image and communication and is having a graduation exposition in London. Below parts from her graduation work.

The portrait of Barbie

‘Barbie is a character who has been photographed in scenarios of personal significance to the photographer. The locations to which she travels vary from interesting places in London to tourist scenarios abroad. Once she is in the place the photographer registers the doll representing different meanings.’

Things I would like to see forever

‘Things I would like to see forever’ is a project where I am registering the routine of three girls living in London. … The base for the project is the use of still photographs transformed into movie images.

GOLDSMITHS MA IMAGE & COMMUNICATIONS DEGREE SHOW
10-13 July 2008
11am-6pm daily
Private view 10th from 6 to 8:30pm

Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, South Bank, London SE1 9PH
Admission FREE
Nearest train/tube: Blackfriars, Southwark, Waterloo
Information: www.icshow.co.uk

Note: this post ended up in my drafts and should have been posted during the European Championship, sorry :)

Statistics are wonderful and the web as a central mechanism to connect databases creates a great mechanism to share and interact with data.

One great example of statistics is the Castrol Performance Index. For this European Championship the Castrol Index distributes all the games data live on the web. You can immediately see which player played where and how they are doing.

You can compare players, ball possession, shots on goals and more. All this information is live during the game. The exciting part of these kind of websites is that they add something to television that only the web can add. It doesn’t make it more interactive, but it does give it more information depth.

Suddenly the game that looks so simple gets a new layer of data and statistics. I didn’t know that for example the Dutch goalkeeper van der Sar already ran over 1300 meters in the first 34 minutes. Did you know that most of the players run around 10 kilometers during a game.

I can see that players that should be attacking spend most of their time on the wrong part of the field. This information adds context to the video footage, and it is context only interactive media can add. I don’t have to see this data all the time, I can just open it when I’m interested in how the players are doing.

I don’t know if this is what interactive television should be, but I really like how this is adding an extra dimension to live footage.

See also this earlier example by the Dutch Broadcaster NOS