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!

Photo by Marco Derksen, click to zoom.

Today was the second Picnic day. Together we published an incredible amount of information. Ad to this my personal notes and I could write a pretty long essay about the last two days.

Somehow I don’t feel that writing down what happened the last two days will contribute to whatever there is made already. So this is just a small take of todays main event. Maybe I have some time to sort out more of the information this weekend.

The most anticipated keynote for today was the keynote by David Weinberger and the response by Andrew Keen. This discussion was moderated by Walt Mossberg. David Weinberger is a very good keynote speaker. Andrew Keen doesn’t give up, and that’s about it. A heavy discussion without an ending.

Erwin Blom reviews Weinberger vs. Keen (dutch)
[audio:http://www.gabcast.com/casts/13478/episodes/1190881076.mp3]

David Weinberger, Andrew Keen and other speakers talked about giving meaning to data. David gives meaning by meta-data or co-creation. Someone talked about extracting meaning with software and Andrew believes in editorial reviewed content.

I think giving meaning to data was the theme for day #2 @ Picnic 2007

Slideshow by Jim Stolze

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The illustration I made for a contest a while ago made the ‘Onze Wereld‘ (our world) magazine. Onze Wereld is a monthly magazine about globalization, cultural, social and economic trends. It’s used in an ad to promote the magazine’s fifty years celebration party.

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Maybe I have some more good news to report the next weeks.

The aggregator is ready, the conference is ready and we are ready. This afternoon the Picnic conference starts officially and we will try to catch the live coverage using a mash-up of different web-technologies.

The aggregator is an interesting experiment in using the web for live event coverage/journalism. The filtering is based on the theme (picnic 2007). Everyone can join using e-mail, mobile, webcam, blogs, sms, phone calls or anything else you can think of.

This is a multimedia experiment with collective journalism or collective event registration, it doesn’t really matter how you call it. It’s live and time-shifted at the same time. Some people will write whatever they hear or think of, others will think it over and recap at the end of the day.

If you’re not at the picnic conference you can virtually join the conference through picnic07.vpro.nl.

Let me know what you think of the aggregator and what you like or don’t like about it. If you are a Picnic visitor share your stories! This friday we will review the tools. You’re invited to join this session.

For as long the web exists we are looking for virtual representations of ourselves. It started with alternative names based on novel characters, geek names and combinations of letters and numbers. Over the years it has gotten more common to use your real name for online activities.

Another thing that has gotten more common is the avatar. Author Neal Stephenson is thought to be the first who used the word avatar for digital representation in his science fiction book Snow Crash. Snow Crash is about a virtual reality that measures you facial expression and transmits this to your avatar (it’s a great book, too weird to explain).

The avatar is best known from games, where it is a representation of you - the player - in the virtual world of the game. Mario was your avatar, Zelda was. Even the little bar in pong was your avatar. Didn’t you feel the identification with the bar when playing pong :)

Fora and instant messaging services added meaning to the word by uploading your pictures and drawings to represent yourself in an instant messaging world. Social networks rely on the avatar as well. It’s more personal than text and easier to recognize. Even if the avatar is not more reliable compared to text, it gives you a stronger impression that it is real. We believe what we see first.

iChat stores a recent history of your images on your harddrive and about two years ago I started collecting them. I don’t know why, I just did. The image in this post show some of these images found on my computer over the last two years.

The avatar aggregator
Wouldn’t it be great if there was an avatar aggregator? A website that manages your avatars on different domains?

You upload your new image to one location and it changes it on all your websites like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, etc.? It should also store you images and tag them with a date so you can see how you have changed over the last years or months.

Tomorrow is Momo in Amsterdam. It’s the second Mobile Monday organized in the Netherlands. I really liked the first momo, especially the mobile social networking part.

The event is not officially connected to the Picnic week, but it could easily be a (pre)picnic conference (same week, same city).

Tomorrow the momo-guys will try something new; the 90 seconds pitch (I don’t think this needs explanation). I build a small countdown for the background channel.

If you ever need a 90 second countdown clock feel free to use this one: http://lab.hypernarrative.com/momo_90sec.swf. Click to activate and click again to reset.

Jeff Jarvis wrote a very thoughtful analysis of the New York Times decision to close the subscription based service Times Select. Content is now and forever free. I think Jeff is right. Although Times Select had payed subscribers the revenues on an online subscription based model are meager compared to the revenues of the same content on an advertisers base.

…Thus they made the good college try to prove whether or not a pay news service could work without harming the ad revenue of the business. Even so, TimesSelect hurt the larger brand and its position in the marketplace, in the conversation, and in Google. It was a short-sighted strategy…

And this has all to do with time we can spend on content and the presence of content in general. When content was expensive to distribute and not within infinite reach we had more content than we had time to spend. We could read a newspaper and take an hour to finish it. Focus on content - and thus available time to spend on not directly relevant information - has diverged in the last ten years. That’s why online search is such a major market, we want relevance.

Right now your attention, or some of your valuable time is worth more for an advertiser than you would be willing to pay for the content itself. And I agree with Jarvis, I don’t think this will ever change again. Time is money, personal or business.

Listen to, Andy Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, and his colleagues discuss the end of TimesSelect. Hosted by David Shipley, deputy editorial page editor and Op-Ed editor.
[audio:http://graphics8.nytimes.com/podcasts/2007/09/18/19oped-01.mp3]

What are your ideas about this?