Some sketches I made a while ago to illustrate what I think a web-based twitter client could look like. I really like the Tweetdeck application, because it integrates lists in the most obvious way, showing all the posts like a dashboard. I think the basics of Tweetdeck could be very well made into a web-based dashboard.

What it would look like in your browser

Bigger image [+]

The entire page

Bigger image [+]

Photographs and other media links should be displayed inline. Like Twitstat does.

Reply and retweet should be inline as well.

Eclectro Last.fm Lovewall (interactive bluetooth installation) from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

Yesterday we had the first Eclectro party. As written in the last post I was working on a bluetooth/last.fm application. And it worked :)

The Eclectro Last.fm lovewall is an interactive installation that uses bluetooth to scan for mobile phones. Visitors are asked to change the bluetooth name of their phone into their Last.fm username.

A laptop scans the room using the open source Roomware software. It connects to random visitors and searches the Last.fm database for similarity. It then shows the similarity on a big screen by showing the profiles. A percentage and five artists both have in common.

Review
The installation worked well and I got a lot of very positive feedback by enthusiastic visitors. A few things I learned.

• It is possible to have a zero percent match but still have artists in common.
• Similar artists are often Gorillaz, U2, Muse, Air.
• It is very easy to join, people see something happen and they think it’s too difficult to join. If you tell them that all it takes is changing the bluetooth name of their mobile phone they are really surprised.
• Explain, explain, explain.
• People like seeing their avatars on a screen. Only showing avatars would probably make a successful application by itself.
• Make the screen dark. I used grey photographs and still the brightness of the beamer lightened up the entire place.
• The internet connection at public places is almost always difficult (unstable/low signal).

The interface with testdata (working demo)

Open in new window

And the photographs

on Flickr

on Flickr

on Flickr

on Flickr

on Flickr

on Flickr

on Flickr

This saturday we have the first Eclectro party in De Unie in Rotterdam (which itself is pretty amazing). It’s the first offline event for something (a group of people blogging) that until saturday does only exist online.

To Eclectrofy this evening we started thinking about doing something extra with the location. How can we make the place visually and interactive exciting as well. Without making it too difficult to use or showing computers.

This reminded me about the Roomware project

The Roomware Project is an open-source framework for interactive spaces. It allows developers of multiple origins to enhance any venue or event using technologies such as BlueTooth and RFID.

What I’m making for this saturday
Basically Roomware turns my Mac into a server that is able to read bluetooth names and convert this data into xml. We will ask people at the party to change the bluetooth name of their mobile phone into the username of their Last.fm account. With these Last.fm names an application searches the Last.fm API and extracts data about two random visitors and tell them how much Last.fm similarity they have and which artists they have in common.

Meet new people
The project autorepeats and makes new random matches with names of people that are actually in the room. The results are projected on a screen. Showing public information about people is a gimmick, but it might encourage visitors to meet new people.

Things to do before this saturday

All the technology works. What’s left is finding a beamer, finishing the design and the timing of the interface. The application doesn’t need much time to load, but I’m thinking about adding finctional timing to make it more exiting to watch.

For example first show one player. Show the second player a few seconds later. And finally show the bar (hearth) that indicates the percentages. And maybe add some hidden messages when people have 0 or 100% Last.fm similarity.

Eclectro presents Kettel (live)
The third man (live), Gastón Arévalo (live) & Starborough (dj-set)
November 15th, De Unie, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Entrance € 8,- (order tickets)

I will make a video of the system in action for hypernarrative. You can also visit the party this saturday to play with it youself. We can have a beer :)

More drafts

Based on Twitterpoll by Erik Borra I made this visualization. The animation is created form filtering tweets on content. If someone says he or she voted for Obama or McCain this information is stored and turned into numbers. This creates an election poll based on tweets.

You can say Twitter is pretty much in favor of Obama. To update the results refresh the page.

A point goes to Obama if the regular expression /vote.*?obama/i succeeds, it goes to McCain if the regular expression /vote.*mccain/i succeeds, else it is undecided / unrecognized.

The animations that led to this animation
1. http://www.hypernarrative.com/wordpress/2008/11/02/i-voted-storytelling-with-public-databases/
2. http://www.hypernarrative.com/wordpress/2008/11/03/we-say-twittertalk/

A second version of the first experiment. In this window you can sort Twitter messages on certain words. Try to work with two words or use the more obvious words like McCain / Obama if you want to use more words. Otherwise you won’t get any results.

Another great polling service
Erik Borra created a polling service based on what people say on Twitter. With the service you get results on what people say they voted on Twitter. I’m trying to make a bar graph for this.

I’m a big fan of public databases, the live web and storytelling. I think they all give new opportunities for interactive and online storytelling. Twitter itself a very interesting database. Because it tells you what is going on and the API is very good.

About “I voted”
The next days American citizens will vote for either McCain or Obama. My guess is a lot of Twitter users will say on Twitter when, and on who they voted. This Flash application uses Twitter Search to see who voted on who. The animation automatically updates with the most recent tweet.

Queries
For this animation I use search.twitter.com (used to be summize.com)
The query: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22i+voted%22+%2B+McCain+OR+Obama+-twitvote

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.

While waiting for Murcof at the airport we asked Jimmy Edgar if he would like to improvise something on an old Casio keyboard. Recorded on the roof (full recording) of Schiphol (Amsterdam airport / AMS)

The festival was a great success. Exhausting, but really great. During the festival we made around 400 posts on the special microblog.

What worked
Mobile services worked very well. Sending a photo through Mobypicture and directly sending an audio file through Gabcast give a really strong storytelling experience. Twitter messages are like SMS. Great to keep context in the timeline without actually having ‘to produce’ something.

I think our idea to connect everything you post to an avatar (like Twitter), and make the coverage as personal as possible really helped keeping it clear for our viewers. At least for how much this is possible given the enormous amount of information produced. Organizing it on time gives a very good overview of what was important or special during the festival.

Microblogs are really strong live applications. Afterwards they are less exciting to watch. You can use it as a collection of material where you can search items for articles elsewhere.

The Wordpress XMLRPC is wonderful. From the 400 posts we have published almost none of those was made on the website itself. The posts were created using other websites and automatically posted to Eclectro.nl/live. Making publishing really easy.

What didn’t work
Video is difficult. Or at least uploading video is difficult. if you record a video it is still difficult to upload. When we recorded a video in high quality using a mobile phone (N95) the files get easily close to 10 Megabytes. If you want to upload/e-mail these files using UMTS you’re not only giving your battery a hard time, you’re also making it impossible to upload anything else during this process. Wifi often wasn’t available and when it was it was too unstable to upload or e-mail video.

I think services like Qiktv or Seesmic Mobile are interesting because the web-server is recording instead of your camera. Unfortunately those services can’t directly post a recording to a blog, yet.

We used a photo camera for recording video as well. This worked very well, the quality is good and Flickr is a great service for distributing files shorter than 90 seconds. The files recorded with the 8 Megapixel Sony Camera are around a 100 Megabytes. Uploading a 100 Megabytes in size. This requires you (or your laptop) to spend at least a few hours on a restaurant Wifi. Missing out on the festival. In the end we uploaded most files at night or in the morning.

We recorded the interviews on DV camera. This worked perfect, since there is no urge in getting the longer interviews directly on the web.

Two blogs
My idea was to maintain two blogs. The Eclectro blog and the Eclectro Live blog. /Live would be about us, a personal story about how we experienced the festival. The main blog would present interviews and reviews. This was just too much. We simply couldn’t make all this in a weekend and have a good time.

Ideas for live blogging / micro blogging

zoom
You need a central spot with a computer and good internet connection. A central spot on the festival where you can empty a camera and upload a batch of files.

Think about what you want to do and if this is possible. Think about how you keep it clear to your audience what they are looking at. Most people don’t know what is happening and they have to understand what it is and why you are publishing. We explained it with a short introduction movie.

A few people asked me to add more structure to the website and make it easier to scan what happened over time. I think we need even more timeline based structure in a next version.

If you are telling a story make sure to tell everything. Tell what you expect and afterwards tell if your expectations were right or wrong. Make returning jokes / running gags. Keep it personal and keep your audience informed.

Jimmy Edgar performing on stage later that day

Hauschka is playing at the Urban Explorers festival 2008, Dordrecht, Netherlands from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.
Hauschka adds little things like bells, plastic and metal to the piano using tape. A piano mash-up :)

Inge talks to Greg Haines about why he moved to Berlin and about making a living as an artist.

We started with the Urban Explorers festival live coverage. We are using Wordpress as an aggregator for information we publish on several other websites like Flickr, Mobypicture, Seesmic, Vimeo, Ustream, YouTube, Twitter and more.

The next days we will be running around the city of Dordrecht. Everything we do can be followed on the special micro blog. This afternoon we will be picking up two artists at Amsterdam airport. Tonight we sleep in an old squatted villa in the centre of Dordrecht.

Hauschka talks about how he works

This weekend the Urban Explorers festival is organized in the city of Dordrecht, Netherlands. It’s a three day city-festival about art and electronic music. The main acts for this year are by Plaid and Murcof. It’s a small festival with a very good atmosphere and lovely people.

Eclectro is a festival partner and we (a few Eclectro bloggers) will be covering the event on the Eclectro blog by writing reviews, doing interviews, making photos and videos as the festival happens. And we have some other exiting plans.

This is great, but not something we haven’t done before. We report while we are there. This time we want to take it a step further and make the coverage more personal. Urban Explorers is a small, diverse and very distributed festival. This makes it difficult to ask or explain visitors to contribute to the live coverage by using a mobile phone. This year we will try to make visible how we experience the festival.

Making it personal
For me Twitter was the first service that made the web more interesting as a live medium. Blogs are good for a recap, but microblogs can really give you a better live experience and it’s a more social and more personal experience. There often isn’t much value in the individual messages it’s the collection that builds a story and a character.

So this is what we want to do for the festival as well. We will also be reporting about where we are, packing my bag, how we sleep, what we are doing, what we are eating and who we are talking to. Short talks, photos and video interviews. All the small pieces of information aggregated in one spot.

The problem with building aggregators is that it often ends up in something that is difficult to follow for outsiders or people unfamiliar with the technology. We (Inge, Renier and myself) try to make it personal. And this weekend I’ve been making a website that just does that. I used Wordpress Prologue, a theme that is based on Twitter and took out even more options like tags and feeds to make it look clean and simple.

The Eclectro Urban Explorers 2008 festival microblog: www.eclectro.nl/live

The secret is in the back-end
The power of Wordpress is that is has a xmlrpc back-end. This is a secure gate that makes it possible for other websites like YouTube or Flickr to talk directly to Wordpress, like you wrote the message on the blog. Ad some extra open source plug-ins to Wordpress and you have an incredible powerful system that is an aggregated channel centralizing information from distributed web-services.

Post from Flickr to a Wordpress blog

Or from YouTube to a Wordpress blog

Or record a Seesmic video in your Wordpress blog

Last weekend I first played with Seesmic and I really like what it does. The videoplayer could use some enhancement, but the Wordpress plug-in is a bless. You enter the Wordpress admin section, click on the Seesmic logo in a new post and can directly start recording a video using your webcam. When done, all you have to do is hit publish in Wordpress and you have just written a new blog post including a video.

Keep it simple
We can easily post to the website using mobile phones, laptops, webcams and websites like Flickr, YouTube, Mobypicture, Twitter, and Seesmic. Everything is automatically collected on the microblog and connected to our user accounts, connecting our names and avatars to the messages published.

Authors see an orange box on the front page, this makes it easy to directly write a message when visiting the website.

Will it work?
All these enhancements make it easy to read for visitors and easy to maintain for us while we are busy at the festival. We have a few more days to finish it, but I think we made a great tool. This weekend we will see if it works.

I’m very exited to play with this.

You can join the festival coverage as well. Use UE08 in your Twitter updates and they will show up in the stream, or post an image to Flickr with the tag UE08 and it will automatically show up in the header of the website.

Your ideas and thoughts are very welcome. How can we make it more personal or more clear? What would you like to see or what is difficult to understand? And do you know other great (web)services that could be integrated?

Last week I did an experiment with a linear story and loading photos from Flickr. This week I made a second experiment using the same code and adding a map. I will try to tell a second story.

About the story
This story is about how fast urban areas are growing. These growing areas aren’t in the west. Of the 100 fastest growing urban areas only two are located in what we call the western world.

In an era where our lives get globally connected through similar culture, mass production and consumption these emerging areas will play a very important role in the near feature.

I’ll try to tell this in a short linear story with the latest photos loaded from Flickr and a map that shows the lights of the world. I love that map.

Try it yourself http://www.wilbertbaan.nl/flickrcities/

“UN figures for urbanisation, published this week in the State of the World 2007 report, show that more than 60 million people – roughly the population of the UK – are added to the planet’s cities and suburbs each year, mostly in low-income urban settlements in developing countries. Unplanned urbanisation is taking a huge toll on human health and the quality of the environment, contributing to social, ecological, and economic instability in many countries.”

Guardian January 17th 2007

Difficult
The most difficult part in making this animation is to actually tell a complex story in slides. I want to make something that will make you think about things for a while. The previous Flickr project was easy because you didn’t have to pay much attention. It was a collection of things. This one is more a story making it more difficult to make an impression.

Storytelling tips
The most important thing in interactive storytelling is probably to kill your darlings and only use effects, technology and interactivity if you think it will benefit to the story you want to tell.

Make sure to write out what you want to say. It doesn’t have to be final, but it gives you an idea of what you want to do.

Focus on what you want to say. Focus on the impression your story will have.

All data used in the animation is from this list. Hypernarrative won’t be updated until the first week of March.

Share your best tips and tricks to tell an interactive story? How can I make this better?

Today I experimented with the Flicrk API. An API is an external programmable interface that connects to a database, it allows external developers to access the content in the database. In this case I can access the photos on Flickr by using a free license (API-key).

2.269.526.982 photos
Everyday millions of photos are uploaded to Flickr. While writing this post 4.871 pictures are uploaded every minute and the total of photos uploaded to Flickr is 2.269.526.982. Most of these photos are tagged with meta information, like a title, description, user generated tags and device generated (shutter speed, type of camera, coordinates). That’s a lot of information.

Slideshow experiment
For this first experiment I use thirteen slides to tell something general about myself. Every slide loads the most recent images from the Flickr database based on a tag that corresponds to the slide.

The slideshow plays by itself and has no interaction, it’s linear, but not static. Every time you play the slideshow the content can be different, the story won’t.

www.wilbertbaan.nl/flickrapi/

How would you combine live data feeds with storytelling?

Last week I made the Aphextwinalizer, a Flash gimmick that uses your webcam to show your photo on the cover of your favorite record. I made it as an experiment. It didn’t take long and I wanted to experiment with Flash, webcams and screenshots.

A colleague had seen the experiment and heard about an article that would be published in todays newspaper. The article would be about the suggested burqa-ban and what partial face covering does to open communication. The motivation behind the burqa-ban is that it obstructs open communication.

The colleague suggested if she could use the aphextwinalizer for this. We took the pictures from the article, photoshopped the journalists face out of it and turned it into an online test. “How does your face look when parts of it are covered?”

Just a gimmick, but since the source file was already there it only took a short amount of time to edit the photos and turn this into an interactive extension of the article. We would have never made this if there wasn’t the experiment in the first place.

Bruce Mau
From the incomplete manifesto for growth by Bruce Mau Design.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

I like how easy it is to control a webcam inside flash. A lot of people have a webcam and the flash plugin so you can easily use it for a project or website.

I already did a few experiments with webcams.

1. Fade in- fade out, when you stop moving you will fade out.
2. Time for time. Based on the first experiment this is an installation that will only give you time when you give it time. You have to stop moving.
3. The third experiment I did used motion detection and connected fading logos to motion.
4. For eclectro we started doing DJ-sets using webcams and the Ustream service, I was the first to play.
5. A few years ago I made a short video about war. I recorded television with my webcam and changed meaning.

This is experiment 6. The Aphextwinalizer. With this webcam application you can make a screenshot with your face on your favorite record cover. Right now there is just one cover by Aphex Twin. I will post this also on the Eclectro blog and ask readers for other great covers, so I can extend the application.

A screenshot of the application, make your own cover at www.wilbertbaan.nl/aphextwinalizer/, have fun.

Help me to make it better
I’m looking for more great covers, if you know a great one, please let me know by leaving a comment with a hyperlink to the image. The minimal resolution should be 500 pixels width/height. And it should be possible to cut out the face.

The original album cover

Eclectro is a website about music. Having a calendar is a great service for such a website. It is often a popular service, but unfortunately also a very labour intensive one. When searching the web to find an easy way to solve this problem I noticed the solution could be found connecting different webservices.

from Last.fm
For promoters and venues Last.fm is the place to reach the right audience. It’s a music marketing sweetspot. Most websavvy promoters know they have to add their schedule to Last.fm, because here is where the fans are.

Unfortunately it would take a lot of time to collect all the data and copy it into an Eclectro agenda. Last.fm uses Audio Scrobbler to control all feeds in and out Last.fm. A lot of Last.fm data is public available.

to Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes is an online data-aggragator that enables drag and drop programming. You can add feeds from other services, group and remodel the data from the feeds into a new feed. It is a web-based visual programming interface.

Everything you make on Yahoo Pipes is open source. This means everyone can clone your code en learn from it or build upon it. I found some Last.fm examples and adapted it for 15 Dutch venues. The Yahoo Pipe I build scans those venues on Last.fm for events and combines the data into one large iCal (calendar format) feed.

Now we have a feed with a lot of information, interesting but it has a lot of events in it that are irrelevant to the Eclectro audience. They want to know about electronic music.

to Google
Next stop; Google. Google has a calendar function that let’s you share calendars in public or assign multiple owners to the same calendar. The Yahoo Pipes feed with Last.fm information is loaded into Google Calendar. There I’ve created a second calendar called Eclectro.

And here is where the ‘human’ selection and thus the added value comes in. An Eclectro editor filters Eclectro related events and we end up with a simple calendar with very good information. We will add other events to the calendar as well, but the information from Last.fm is a perfect base.

You can even subscribe to this ‘human’ filtered calendar with Google, Apple’s iCal or XML/RSS. Or use this information as a buildingblock for a better calendar.

Wwwww, dddddjjjjjjj duh?
I hope you’re still with me, it is a kind of geeky description for a simple solution. What it actually does is transferring information from one system to another. Making use of several open web applications. It shows what can happen when we use open standards and systems that can easily export and import data. You don’t need to have access to a web server or be a programmer to build something like this. This is the future of information. Free to move and easy to alter.

The last two years Inge and I have organized lists to present the best dance record of the year.

In 2005 we asked experts about their favorite dance record. In 2006 we upgraded the concept, asked experts about their favorite songs and added a second part where everyone could vote on the records.

This year we will ask everyone about their favorite records of 2007 and let everyone vote.

The voting system
Last year I had been reading Critical Mass, how one thing leads to another (a great book if you like statistics). Somewhere in this book there was the notion that the best scientific choice is one out of two. I love simplicity and wanted to do something with this. The dance election looked like the best opportunity to experiment with it. How can you create an advanced voting system that relies on the simplest choice. Right or left, yes or no?

What we build was a voting machine that had over 70 items in its database. Every time you open the website it generates a random playlist of random pairs. Every time you click one item it will update both items in the database in views and give a point to the winning item. The result is a list generated on percentages (views/votes) and as far I know even reasonably scientific correct.

You can listen to previews of the songs and once you make a choice it will show two new songs to make a new choice. To continue, you always have to choose your favorite song out of a random pair.

It sounds really simple, and it is. So far I have found no other system that beats this way of measuring what people like. The list of songs can be indefinite and the number of contributers can be indefinite. Lobby parties are more than welcome, but they should know that every other vote they make counts. You can vote on four records or 600.

Last year we’ve got over 70.000 votes, great media coverage, heavy use of bandwidth and a final list that is a very good representation of what was interesting in electronic music in 2006.

For this years election we connect the election to the Eclectro blog. A Dutch weblog that has a substantial, growing and very smart group of visitors interested in electronic music.

How to improve
This week I am building the system for this years election, how do you think we can make this better? Is there something we forgot? Or do you know a dance song that should be on the list? Let me know.

Supersize aggregator flyer

Every serious project needs an evaluation and so does the Picnic aggregator. The VPRO-crew interviewed everyone who had something to do with the aggregator about what the liked or didn’t like about it. The ‘review of the tools‘ is a collection of video and related discussion (see the videos below, sorry it’s all in Dutch).

What I personally liked about the aggregator was the enormous amount of information that was created over the last days. The most difficult thing – from the start – was to sort all this information. I build a simple interface to make it accessible. The aggregator proved this interface wasn’t enough to sort signal from noise.

In an aggregated environment information is fragmented. The strong idea behind the aggregator is to give everyone the freedom to use the service they feel most comfortable with. API’s and feeds make it technically possible to aggregate. The problem is how do you design an interface that keeps the flow of information structured and connected. A machine doesn’t know how to do this unless all the information is labeled.

And aggregating it did
I think you could compare the aggregator to a news wire service. The reporter out there only knows what he or she sees on sight plus his or her personal knowledge. The reporter sends fragments to the news-desk(aggregator), the place where all the information comes together. There are also other reporters(users or systems) who collect information, sort it on relevance and give meaning. If there is a black spot in the story the news-desk(aggregator) informs the reporter what is missing.

The aggregator covered most of this cycle, except one thing. It collected all the information and gave partial feedback about missing information (mostly through Twitter). What it didn’t do was organizing, sorting and giving meaning to information collected.

This should be done the next time, how isn’t important. There is this giant pool of everything. You can make your story in the end of the day searching the archives for quotes or media. Or viewers can sort using voting and bookmark systems. You could even appoint a human editor.

The aggregator was a great success. It aggregated, distributed and made people create and communicate. It transfered the conference vibe to the web. Which should be a goal for every conference, this is how you make people sign up for the next event. If only the aggregator could give meaning to information.

Vincent Everts (PCZapper/Interimic) about Twitter and Gabcast.

Jaap den Dulk (Daadpracht) about Twitter

Mathijs van Abbe (Van Abbe IT) about Mobypicture

Leonieke Verhoog (VPRO) about Netvibes and Tumblr

Gertjan Kuiper (VPRO) about VPRO’s Picnic Aggregator: picnic07.vpro.nl

Roeland P. Landegent (TodaysArt) about de Twitter Abroacatr

Wilbert Baan (Volkskrant) about de Picnic Aggregator (interface)

Yme Bosma (Hyves) about VPRO’s Picnic Aggregator and onderdelen als Flickr, Tumblr and Splashcast.

Erwin Blom (VPRO) about Gabcast: gabcast.com

Nicolette Nol (VPRO) about iMovie.

Eef Grob (VPRO) about YouTube.

Maarten Terpstra about Operator11: operator11.com

This month the Picnic Conference/Festival is in Amsterdam. The VPRO decided to start a wiki and build an aggregator to collect all the data created during the even.

Building an aggregator isn’t that hard, you just scan for updates on feeds and tags and combine the messages. The big problem is the interface, how do you design an interface that is capable of showing different types of information without creating a long list without context?

There is a certain urge to design an uniform template for all different types of data. I’m playing with this for a while and have build aggregators in the past. I haven’t figured out what is the best way to do it. Nonetheless I have given it a try again and build a Picnic aggregator.

How it works
The idea is simple. I have build a bar similar to the twitterticker. The top layer reads an RSS file from twitter and scans for a certain word. Right now it is the word ‘:’ for testing purposes. I think it will change to PICNIC or something similar. So you can just use the word ‘PICNIC’ in your twitter messages.

The second layer is a row with buttons linking to searches or webpages that will have PICNIC coverage during the days of the event.

Nothing fancy, but I think this will do the trick for organizing all the information during Picnic. See the ticker in live action: www.wilbertbaan.nl/picnicker/

Picnic has a wiki about the live coverage and data aggregation during the festival. Join it to share your ideas. If you would like to improve my tickerbar, please do. You can find all the source files you need on my server: download the source files

The recently launched website we made for giving away free tickets, Voornopnaarpop.nl ain’t dry yet and whoops there’s another website about music.

This time it is a groupblog called Eclectro. If the name rings a bell you probably know it from last year. We used the domain for organizing a contest to vote the best dance record of 2006. With 73.209 votes this was an enormous and unexpected succes.

Inge is the evil genius behind Eclectro. He build the website and is motivating a group of bloggers to post everything that has anything to do with electronic music on Eclectro. The website is in Dutch, but you know what they say. Music unites :) And music is what this is all about. I’m sure you know how to find some great mixes without reading a word.

Tonight we had a few beers and launched a quiz called mpwho/mpwie. You have to guess the song that is playing, out of a 10 second loop. I’m not sure if this is too difficult, let me know.

Inge recently reminded me about Last.tv. This Dutch project is around for a while. The website mashes your Last.fm playlist with YouTube videoclips.

This reminded me about something I tried a few months ago but never put online. A mashup between the map I build for Medialandschap (my graduation project) and YouTube RSS.

You can click on a place and it will search YouTube for files with this place tag. You can also add a second tag for searching. For example the latest video about dance in Rotterdam.

have fun: www.medialandschap.nl/mediatube

Today we had the first – much anticipated (national weatheralarm) – snow of the year. I made a short time-lapse video.

Link to the *.swf: http://www.wilbertbaan.nl/files/snowlapse.swf

The G-Econ research project is devoted to developing a geophysically based data set on economic activity for the world.

I just love these wonderful animating multiple dimensional informative graphics.

Link to the *.swf: http://www.wilbertbaan.nl/files/economic_activity.swf

I am still amazed by fridays message that 1 billion mobile phones were sold in 2006.

To get a better grip on how much this actually is I have build a small 2007-1-billion-mobile-phones-countdown-clock. It counts down from January first 2007. Although it uses your system clock and some dirty code I think it comes close to actual results.

You can find the *.swf over here: http://lab.hypernarrative.com/mobile_phones.swf

This weekend I started working on a portfolio. I think it is nice to make a place where things can be combined and showed in another way than a blogcatagorie on this blog.

I like to organize and catagorize data, this will come back in the portfolio. I have build a prototype that makes it possible to organize all projects by two axes (left, bottom). You – as a user – can fill the axes by making a selection from the lists on the top left and bottom right. For example the selection time (x) and video (y) will order all projects in time from left to right and the projects that are most related to video higher.

In the end the system will enable everyone to sort the projects on progress in time, change in technique, my personal interests, etc.

Take a look: http://www.wilbertbaan.nl/client/ (Don’t be distracted by the background video, this is random and can be changed by refreshing. In the end I want to replace this by some slow moving abstract images.)

If you have any comments, suggestions or ideas, please let me know in the comments.

P.s. If you have the right version of Flash you can use the rightmouse menu to go to fullscreen mode.

Last week I started experimenting with the full screen functionality in the new flash player. I build a simple player that plays YouTube and Google videos full screen.

The Flash full screen is real full sreen. Use the [esc]-button to leave full screen modus. The right mouse button gives a menu.

Note: You need Flashplayer 9,0,18,60 to run Full Screen. Download it here. The latest version of Flash 9 will do.

Not the right version of Flash, see how it looks.

Permanent link video

More about implementing full screen Flash in Adobe Labs.

December 2 Update:
Right now I’m building a videoplayer for the Volkskrant, a Dutch newspaper and website. It allows everyone with a website to embed Vk.tv videoreports and reviews made by editors.

This videoplayer has the option to jump to full screen by right-clicking the screen or by clicking the fullscreen icon in the lowerright corner. You only see the button if you have the appropriate version of Flash installed. If you click [deze video op je weblog] (this video on your blog) you can set your own size for embedding the video on your website.

Link: Video: Recensie: Brad Pitt in Babel

More Volkskrant videos

December 7 update:
Download the *.fla source of the YouTube Fullscreen Flash file.