Before the Picnic conference was finished we left for The Hague where the music blog Eclectro & TodaysArt will cover the TodaysArt festival online. A two day festival about art, performance and music (live stream).

On of the things from yesterday that I really love is a projection at het Spui. The projection is made in perfect perspective and project shadows on a white building. It completely distorts your idea of reality. You know it’s an illusion, but it doesn’t look like one. I can’t get enough of this.

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I don’t know who the artist is who made this, but will ask around tonight and write his or her name in the comments.

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!

Until friday there is the Picnic conference in Amsterdam. A three day event about creativity, media and technology.

With Roeland from Slandr and Mathijs from Mobypicture we created the Live Report for this event. It is a website that aggregates tagged content on services like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Blogs, Mobypicture and Qik. And streams this information live next to a videostream from the main conference hall with the keynote speakers. You can follow the keynotes, but also see what is going on and what people are thinking or talking about.

The Live Report: live.picnicnetwork.org

If you want to join the Live Report, make sure to tag your content with PICNIC08 and use the service you like.

Last year I also worked for the Picnic Live Report 2007 hosted by the VPRO. This friday-afternoon Eclectro will be live reporting from the TodaysArt festival in The Hague, a festival about Art, Music and Technology in the Netherlands. Here we will also use the Live Report

A while ago we lost all the stylesheets at the Dutch electronic music blog Eclectro. So we rebuild it.

Eclectro tries to be a blog with a positive vibe about electronic music. By using the tools the web offers we try to connect producers and listeners in a way that everyone benefits and has a great time. For me the most exciting experiences with the blog are those where an artist we follow (and who follows the blog) get to do new great things.

I think for what Eclectro is doing in the music scene there is also some space for a Dutch blog about (electronic) art, clothes, architecture, photography DIY, and more with a focus on Dutch upcoming artists. We have enough blogs about internet and marketing ;) we could use some positive and easy to read blogs about art.

Just do It, think later

So I started it. Just to try out the idea. It’s a beta version, not in any technical way, since I can use the Eclectro templates.

It is a beta from content perspective. I started posting short articles to see if I there are enough interesting things to write about. And if the collection makes something that is adding something to the Dutch blogosphere.

I also started reaching out to some people with different interests and background to ask them if they are interested in sharing things, thoughts and knowledge.

For me right now the only reason not to continue the adventure is time, everything new costs time. And starting a group blog is incredible time consuming. But it is for the greater good!

You can find the blog at www.medialandschap.nl. If you want to share something, or a link. Let me know.

This is an update about the EN website. In my holiday developer Ayco released a new version with a frontpage and some other special features.

Frontpage
EN.nl now has a frontpage. In the right column we are personalizing news based on your reading behavior. EN takes the tags from the articles you have read and uses these to scan incoming articles.

The order of the frontpage is created by how the site is used by its readers and the impact of the news given by the press agency. It’s a dynamic presentation created out of a mix of variables from discussion, to pageviews, to urgency, to incoming links and a few more.

The frontpage also shows you two lists and a picture that are personal to you. In the right column it shows you a short list containing articles that might interest you. You see a second list with articles that are read in your network and you see a third picture that is a photograph from the news that might interest you.

The other thing we created are related articles based on the distance between tags, using a tag-relation table. This distance can create clusters of information that might be interesting in the future to create groups, but it also generates related articles in a much more refined way. Two articles don’t need tags in common to be related to each other.

Where is this heading
For the last weeks we have been using the partly personalized frontpage and we are noticing that is works pretty good. You don’t miss the big news, but you do get a more personalized presentation and you see what your friends are reading. It works this well that it might deserve a more prominent presentation on the frontpage.

For example I don’t read much about soccer and instead of a soccer picture at the bottom of the page (which a colleague had) I did see a picture of a Dutch politician at that moment more relevant to me.

Personalization is good, but of equal importance is the social aspect. News is always about sharing and talking about it with your friends and colleagues. At this moment we have created so much different parameters that it gives us more options to sort information than we could have ever expected.

How to build a community?
So how should we build a community or create interaction with your friends or like minded?

Facebook is switching its homepage to a notification page. It shows you what your friends are doing (screenshot). The most exciting pages of social web services are the pages that show you what is going on in your network. This makes the service less a service you go to, but more a circle around you. Flickr does this with recent uploads from your friends, LinkedIn with your contacts switching jobs all the time, and Twitter is all about it.

Survival of the fittest
Why shouldn’t a news website be user centered? I was kind of sceptic about this idea at first. Since we claim news isn’t something that is personal. But it is. A newspaper is becoming more and more something that is personal. With less time to read we scan the headlines and only pick the articles we like. First you read the things that interested you. If you have time left you start to read articles that are second choice. This isn’t something new, only with less time to spend on the medium we stopped reading our second choices.

Make it small
The most interesting social websites that create a social experience are user centered. Can this be done with news as well? And more important does it add extra value to the news? Why would someone use a certain news website, when news is omnipresent? What can you add to something that has ‘no value’ based on content and originality? Besides usability, the only thing you can add is choice. What is the focus of a news website? Will it report left news more prominent? Is it more about gossip? Will it present news as it evolves and before the facts are all clear or will it wait until the guessing is over?

Ideas
Here are just some thoughts about how a more social and personal experience could be designed. These are small steps towards a user-centered news website.

1. To create the feeling you are in a network you need a feed with updates of your network. What are the people you know doing on this website. This could be updates from your friends (design screenshot) about what articles they favorite, read, commented on or edited.

2. There could be a shoutbox that enables you to talk about the news (design screenshot). Just share thoughts. You could say that you don’t think the stock market will recover soon. Just thoughts so other people in the network can get to know you and see what topics are hot. Or those thoughts can also be relevant to a cluster of news instead of a single article. Like the talks you have in a bar of café.

3. Create the website only around you and your friends. For example it could be possible to look at the website and only see the comments your friends made on articles. You could choose to discuss the news only with your friends (making it more personal) or to switch your friends off and discuss it with the world.

4. Use your reading behavior to help you find other interesting things. EN could use your profile to aggregate all different kind of sites and recommend articles. For example if you are reading a lot about the stock market. EN could go to a service like Technorati get the blogs that write about topics you like and use the Technorati relevancy to sort and recommend you blogs or further readings.

5. Use article meta information to connect to other websites and automatically enrich articles on EN with this information. For example find pictures about a news event made by people witnessing it.

6. These are all options easy to create in EN from a technical point of view. Help me out. What is it you think that is interesting and makes online news reading a more social experience?

Photo taken a few years ago zoom it [+]

The news is all about he financial crisis we are in. Maybe you don’t have a financial crisis, I seriously hope you don’t. The financial world is already for a year searching for ways to get some grip on the credit crisis. So far without much success.

Difficult subjects
For a lot of people the financial crisis subject is kind of difficult. How could something simple like the loan for a house result in the collapse of some of the biggest financial institutions.

Masters of Storytelling
The voice is an incredible tool in storytelling, we (or I) often forget how good radio (or audio) can work in making a complex story simple. Ira Glass is a master in telling stories and it is great how an episode of the American Life series is devoted to the problem of the Giant Pool of Money.

No matter how difficult the problem is, if you can make a good story about it and know how to use your favorite tools, you can explain it.

Listen to the podcast

open in player

The Giant Pool of Money

Host Ira Glass talks with an NPR business and economics correspondent about two gatherings he attended—one at the Ritz Carlton and one at a community college in Brooklyn. The first was an awards dinner for finance professionals who created the mortgage-based financial instruments that nearly brought down the global economic system. The other was a non-profit conference for people facing foreclosure. Ira explains that today’s show lays out how the finance guys and the people facing foreclosure are connected by a chain of middlemen, and that together, they all brought about the current housing and credit crisis. [more]

Lessons from Ira Glass
Ira Glass talks in a series of videos giving tips on storytelling

This beautiful picture of an Old Man is made by *hiro008 [+]

Peers are important for development. It’s their reflection that makes us act, (re-)think and it are the peers around us that make us move forward faster.

This blog is a peer. I write thoughts and ideas. By reading comments, e-mail, incoming links and sometimes talking to people about certain posts I look at it differently and it changes or develops my view. It helps me go further.

The peer for my blog (and my thoughts) is the reach it has. Not so much in the number, but the knowledge and expertise of the people reading it and expressing it.

Get in contact
Meeting your peers every day is what I miss most about Art School. The most important thing was just being there. Talking to people and more important being open about your ideas and thoughts. Sharing your thoughts about great work made by others. If you are working it can be very difficult to find peers around you in the workplace.

Peers challenge you to go further, peers challenge you to seek your limits. For example athletes. If you would be the only guy or girl running in the world. You would try to break your personal record. But you would probably perform better if a second runner came around and broke your personal record.

The guys on Wikipedia are editing the stories because they like the fact that they know it better. They have skills and using those skills is what makes them shift upwards in the network of peers.

Engage as a news consumer
What’s the peer system for the news reader? And does it exist? Or can it be created? The peers for a journalist are clear. Someone will always write better articles or the article you would like to have written. I see co-production and an open process (involve readers in your research) as the only way journalism can work under the time pressure created by new media. And this creates enormous opportunities for journalists. Who seem to be pretty pessimistic about the future, I don’t see why.

Making news is (or will be partly) a peer review process. It has always been. Someone writes about a subject and the next day all media will write about it.

Peers vs. Sharing
Is the news consumer a peer? For me important since I’m looking for new directions and experiments on EN.nl. If we see peers as producers most of the news readers will not be producers. They have certain knowledge and skills that are valuable at some point. But this will only be 1% of the readers or less. And this is good. With 1% of your readers being part-time active a website of reasonable size will have more editors than any other news website.

Engage the other 99%
How can you engage the other 99%. The other part of a social network who are instead of peers (talking about what you have made) more into sharing (talking about what you have seen).

I myself share a lot through e-mail, websites like Delicious, this blog and Google Reader. But if I look at what I share there is almost never a news story. I share stories from newspapers, but almost never the news.

The fun thing is that when you are talking to someone you don’t know that well at the coffee machine, your conversation is often about the news.

Topics
What is the social umfeld of a newsarticle? Are it the comments? And how should these comments be structured? Within an anonymous group ‘all the readers’ or divided into smaller groups with the people you know, like or admire. Should news be structured into topics to create a social atmosphere?

I would like to involve people online the same way as they engage offline, talking about the news. And I have some ideas and experience on the subject.

What is it you think that truly engages the other 99%?

An update on EN.nl will follow, lots of new things have happened, creating endless new possibilities