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!

 
Flick Radio is a Dutch (English subtitled) Radio drama about storytelling and about Flickr. Flick Radio is about a lot of things, but mostly it’s about Flickr. How we perceive identities on Flickr or in virtual worlds in general, we think to know people by the photos or items they post. And we fill in what we don’t know.

It’s a very interesting experiment and visual documentary made with ‘found footage’. It deserves your attention if you like documentaries, storytelling or photography.

Watch it in full screen DivX or in lower quality on YouTube.

Social websites are getting better, more used, more open and more complete. Why should you start a website or blog if you can also write on your Facebook. Or why wouldn’t you transfer or duplicate all your data from your Facebook to any other social network or widget.

Do we need custom coded websites?
We need interfaces that show the information, but do we still need custom coded websites? We’re transfering data via xml, rss and api’s from one website to another. We import contacts from one service into another. We’re trying to work to a universal/sigle sign-on and to standards in open social techniques. Technology (widgets) and design (templates) are available to everyone, you just take what you need.

The field is rapidly shifting, we are clustering information around people not around services anymore. Information gets easily transportable and because of this, free of the website it is presented on. There are already many communities and I’m sure the amount of smaller communities will grow fast within the next years.

Why start a website, if you actually would like to start a community? Communities are about engagement and engagement is the ultimate goal for most websites and the base for a long term relationship between provider and user.

I’m writing these articles on my hypernarrative blog, but why should I? It’s a closed environment (except full article RSS). I could as well start writing this on my Facebook, Flickr or Ning. As long as you all move with me :)

I don’t need a special website to express myself. I need an outlet to publish my thoughts, a community and readers that sometimes give me valuable feedback, ispire or correct me. And the funny thing is that my chances finding these readers in social networks are growing.

My options are changing. First I made a blog because it gave me freedom of publishing. I could stop using Dreamweaver for updates, change the lay-out or control the information anytime I wanted.

We’re getting into a situation where I don’t need to run my own blogsoftware or website to be in full control of my information. With the direction social networks are moving I can easily move my information everywhere I want, when I want.

The barrier of technology had its peak, for now. Everyone can make what he or she likes. We just need to find the tools we need. The real challenge in launching a successful website is in building a great community.

This is me, these are words extracted from every 850+ post ever published on hypernarrative. This is meta data; data about data. It tells you what hypernarrative is about, and since it’s kind of a personal blog it also tells you something about me. These words are related to the things I care about.

The size emphasizes its frequency and thus importance. Sure, most of these tags are general words. The value is not in the individual tag but in the collection of tags.

The last years semantic classification in the form of tags got really big. Not mainstream, but big. Why? Because it is a raw classification, you don’t need to know classification structures to order data the same way scientists used to know to order species (how many legs does this creature have?). Tags are free and easy, I can tag objects the way I like, there are no rules and you don’t need any knowledge.

In the last years we have created a new layer to information on the web, we tagged hyperlinks, photos, video’s, presentations and articles. Almost every new website gives us the option to tag. Tags are the new categories. Categories are closed, tags are open and infinite.

My semantic profile
But what if we trace tags back? Tags tell you something about the tagger. What if you would trace back all my web accounts and the tags I have used. If you collect this information in a database you have a semantic layer about me. I have a semantic profile, and this is valuable.

It shouldn’t be difficult the come up with an application that can use this. For example you could make a social network that automatically connects you to other people that have similar interests through the tags they have used on Flickr (what they have seen for real) on YouTube (what they made) on Delicious (what they like) on blogs (what they care about) and more.

It would create a cross websites social network that doesn’t need an invitation system. It just connects you to minds alike based on what you have done already. Maybe it’s already out there.

Link to the picture on Flickr

Privacy is gone. We lost it online a while ago. And the funny thing is since the rise of communities and social networks we’re giving it away faster than ever before. While a few activists are still fighting Google, most of us just fill up the Facebooks of this world.

Is privacy gone? Is it related to online identity. Should we store everything? Even the things we want to forget? This years theme for Ars Electronica 2007 (Linz, Austria) is ‘Goodbye Privacy’.

Artivi.com has video interviews with speakers and artists. Victor Mazer-Schonberger, Associate Professor at Harvard University thinks that we should be more careful in what we share.

In this months Wired there is an article about Hasan Elahi, he uses his website trackingtransience.net to document what is he doing at any given moment of the day. And he has a reason for doing this, his name ended mistakenly on a FBI terrorist suspect list. He decided the only way out of this is by giving up all the privacy he has by creating a continuous alibi.

The rise of blogs and social networks redefines online privacy. New applications that focus on streaming your life like Twitter and Kyte TV are opening up more and more information about a character.

A character (identity) can be fictional or not. It doesn’t matter. The combined information of one person across many different platforms generate a - often public - profile.

Young generations think different about privacy. Parents try to warn them about all the hazards of exposing too much information, but they often don’t care.

Is a big brother controlled by yourself still a big brother?

Isn’t claiming your identity by expressing it in the real or virtual world the best way to protect your identity?

The power of identity is checking. We check identities all the time, when you go to a bank, the first day at your new job, when you travel abroad. We don’t care about the identity itself, we care about the records connected to an identity. Online identity isn’t anything different. If your identity is public and everyone can check it or contact you your identity is probably better protected than the identity of a John Doe. If you’re not visible on the web I can act in your name and nobody will ever know about it.

You think your parents are always wrong when you are young, somehow the were right most of the times when you look at it a few years later. Maybe on this topic the parents are wrong, you should create your identity online! Creating an online identity is the only way to protect it. Parents should still warn about the fact that you will build up a record (google) that will be connected to this identity.

To quote Adam Curry: There are no secrets, only information you don’t yet have.