Hypernarrative.com is the personal weblog of Wilbert Baan. I'm co-founder of SOMEHOW. On my personal blog I write about art, media, technology and things I do, think or make.
I don’t own an iPad, actually I have never seen one in real life. I’m not even sure if I will ever buy one (I probably will).
What I know is that I really would like to design a news application for the device.
Why?
The iPad envisions something that computers or mobile phones don’t. It show us a new platform of interaction.
1. The device is made for consuming instead of producing. Personal computers were never designed for entertainment. The computer was designed for work, it was never designed for fun. People my age will remember how desktop computers invaded our houses. Your dad probably brought one home, because he used it at work.
If you wanted to relax and have fun, game consoles are designed for just that.
The iPad is all about consuming and relaxing. How you hold the device, the weight, the wireless network, the size, everything. It’s the perfect device to enjoy what a connected world has to offer on the couch.
2. No history. This device has no past, the only mistake you can make designing for the iPad is to design for a media carrier from the past, like a magazine or personal computer.
3. Newspapers and magazines love it. They probably do love it for the wrong reasons. I don’t think magazines or books will re-live on the iPad. It’s a new medium and like every new medium this one also comes with its own set of rules.
Why would you want a magazine? It’s a connected device. It’s fully interactive, social and connected. You might like the content, but you probably don’t want the form.
The fact that newspapers and magazines love the device is great though. They are spending money on innovation again and this is a good thing, it will help the platform to develop. Eventually we will find out how to tell or sell a story on the platform.
The device symbolizes hope, revenues and new opportunities. The success of the iPhone makes expectations for the iPad even higher.
This is why I want to design something for the iPad.
Content as Software
I learned about the term content as softwarefrom Gerd Leonard. Not only does it sound very interesting, it’s also a very exiting development that follows from a series of events. A move from RSS, followed by widgets, API’s and standardization in platforms.
These new platforms like Adobe Air or the iPhone development platform make developing applications easier and accessible to a new and broader groups of developers.
On the other side software is being replaced by the – todays very powerful – browsers. Google is working hard to replace Microsoft Office functionality with Google Docs, and adding even more (web) functionality like working remotely together on documents.
A computer without internet connection is half the fun, or to most people useless. The computer as a communication device needs the web as much as it needs power. Todays software needs the web.
Should a media company make software?
Content as Software. Should media companies deliver content as software? We decided to with the Volkskrant iPhone application because we think an application gives a better user experience and is more effective on the iPhone platform compared to a mobile website. The New York Times released a desktop application based on Adobe Air. The content in the application isn’t unique, the presentation is.
A great advantage of distributing software for publishers is that it gives control to some extend. For example the Times Reader has free and subscription only articles in the same application. The “free” user experience is good, but they will try to persuade you to become a subscriber.
So, should a media company make software?
I don’t know. Just because we now can as easily develop software as we can develop websites doesn’t mean we should. From a pure logic perspective it doesn’t add much value to the content. It’s still the same content. From an emotional perspective it does add extra value to the experience, it’s a nice package. And that’s something you shouldn’t underestimate. An application is also more persistent, it’s always there on your startup screen, desktop or in your dock.
The best thing with content as software is to just try it. Like you would try with a website. Release soon and often. Todays software is like the web.
Screenshots of the Volkskrant iPhone news application
For the music and art festival Urban Explorers festival I made a special video interface. During the festival reporters uploaded video with their mobile phones. The video was categorized on artists, venues and makers based on the video title. The project used the Blip API.
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.
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 :)
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
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.
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.
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 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?
