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!

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

This week AP urged/forced bloggers to use ‘guidelines‘ set by AP when quoting articles. As you might expect this instantly burned all AP’s credits in the blogosphere.

Why?
Why? Why would AP be afraid about people copying parts of their articles and linking back? Haven’t we passed this station with newspapers before?

I think there might be a more structural problem for press agencies. Their customers are changing. Most of these agencies are created by newspapers. Combine journalism efforts and save money. But the web is famous for taking out the middle man. In this case the news websites.

Agencies like AP, Reuters and AFP are they source of news. The speed of publishing and access to information that we as consumers demand can do perfectly without a middle man. Press agency news is no longer an article that gives a journalist information to start writing his or her version. What a press agency publishes is the definite version.

Just take an AP headline and Google it.

What’s the problem?
What’s the real problem? Is AP afraid paying customers (news media) will start complaining because they (the agencies) are taking over the online conversation.

Press agencies are the source. And in a web where information is free to move and to be duplicated the source is the most important place.

What’s the future for press agencies? This question is equally important as the question about what the future of newspapers is. In todays news landscape press agencies are leading. Is their future (partly) in serving customers directly? Press agencies are facing changes, but what will be their new business model?

Image found on this forum by Jonny Crossbones

Everyday I commute to work. I can choose to go by car which gives me freedom, loud music, open windows, traffic jams and parking problems. Or I can go by train which gives me time to read books, make this blog post, do some work, have my neighbor sit annoyingly on my lap and hate the smell of my fellow commuters in the morning.

I like both :)

Two ideas
I’m not a traffic expert by any means, I’m just an end-user. Driving to work this week made me think about a few things. Just some ideas that may be already out there (I think so), and maybe they are not. I don’t know about them, since I’m not an expert in this field. Please let me know in the comments if this is.

First I passed a police car doing speed control using the latest laser equipment. I think speed control can be good and is necessary to maintain safety in some places.

In the Netherlands we are kind of overdoing it since it is a pretty solid cash flow. The police checks day and night on the most obscures highways. It doesn’t matter if you’re the only car driving there and the weather is perfect. The system is not flexible in any way. If you’re driving too fast you get ticketed.

Photo Creative Commons, TomTom by Argosnet Photoshopped by me.

This made me think about the TomTom navigator. These devices are very popular. It would be nice if I could tap the screen when I spot a speed control. If more drivers would do this the information would be more reliable. Or drivers could also tap the screen if speed control has moved. Because it knows where the car is it can directly distribute this information to other cars around.

This would not only be great service to the users of a navigator, it would also make them use the navigator more frequently, since people probably aren’t using it driving to work.

In the image above
1) A speed control point is visible
2) Tap the screen and direction the speed control is checking. This information is automatically distributed to other cars and can warn a driver if he or she drives too fast.

Then driving along I ended up in a traffic jam. Every time there is the same traffic jam at the same spot. Most of the time it gets worse because people are changing lanes at the wrong time.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could use LED lights to lighten up the stripes on the road and turn these into a solid line when necessary. LED lights are relatively cheap (at least cheaper for an economy than daily traffic jams) and a strong visual barrier should stop people from changing lanes.

Photo Creative Commons, German Highway by Elmada Photoshopped by me.

Go! and connect to your users
These are just some thoughts. I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking about these things. There are so many people using services every day and they have good ideas, but do not share these ideas.

Not all of these ideas are good, possible to implement or original. But the tools are around to easily connect to the people using your service and use the knowledge your users have.

The ideas are out there, the tools are out there. Just find your way to connect.