Once a month we organize a webcast at Eclectro. We use the website Ustream to broadcast a DJ-set or concert live from the DJ his living-room. All the DJ needs is a computer, webcam and internet connection.

Last friday the RGBoy-chiptune-heroes performed in front of the webcam. They performed a live gameboy concert including visuals. The entire performance was broadcasted live from Myslowice, Poland.

A chiptune, or chip music, is music written in sound formats where all the sounds are synthesized in realtime by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of using sample-based synthesis. (Wikipedia)

The video above is a compilation from fridays performance. The tracks RGBoy plays are; my new PT82, super muter, secret level, 1980.

During these performances we invite viewers to use the Ustream chat-box. This increases the ‘live experience’ and enables contact between viewers and performers. The talks are often about technical problems, quality, track titles, personal matters or just to tell how great the artist is.

Utrecht meets Chicago
The next Eclectro Directo live performance will be friday the 30th of May. This time we will use the Mogulus website. Since this will be a live performance broadcasted simultaneous from two locations. Maurice Dohmen [moos] based in Utrecht, Netherlands takes care of the sound and visual artist Jorrit Poelen based in Chicago, USA takes care of the visuals.

Eclectro Directo Live: May 30th, 20:00 (Amsterdam time) / 1 PM Chicago Time

Eclectro Directo promo from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

Are you an electronic artist / producer / DJ and would like to perform live for the Eclectro webcam, let us know.

Romain Gavras made this amazing new clip for the track Stress by French band Justice. The clip is about youth in the French suburbs and how violence has become a way of life. The video is shot documentary style and shocking realistic (high quality Quicktime file). I hadn’t seen something like this for a while, interesting to see how Gavras and Justice use the video clip to spread a message.

Earlier Romain Gavras made the wonderful Signatune clip for DJ Medhi

We have always collected things. Somehow making collections is valuable to us. Most of the media we are collecting is moving or has moved to a virtual representation. Music is moving to the web, video and games will. And I’m sure books will move to the web as well. Encyclopedia and dictionaries already did.

In the end it will probably be a mix of economics and access that make things move to the cloud of information. Why buy a more expensive cd in the store if you can listen to the song right now?

For now we create virtual representations of our physical collections. For example the books you own on LibraryThing or Amazon or your music on Last.fm.

My ‘real-life’ public profile
We use the collections to express who we are. My books and my collected music tell me something about myself. Your collection of books is like a public profile that your real-life friends see when they visit your house.

I don’t know why we collect. For some people it is an obsession, see the movie in the end of this post.

When collections move virtual we get a new type of collectors. The librarians already unite at wikipedia to collect all the information that is valuable. We see creative artists playing with public sets of information through API’s and feeds. Making interactive installations or retrieve emotions and relations from large sets of data.

For journalists the information age is like a golden age. There is so much data public available that if you know how to make valuable collections you can generate news. A good collection of information can act like a news machine. Database journalism enables people to see patterns that answer or create questions.

Video
I’m researching some things about collections for the EN.nl website. Here are some videos I found that are really interesting.

The interactive installation “I Want You To Want Me”, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, for their “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition.

I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating. It chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, using real data collected from Internet dating sites every few hours.

The piece is presented on a 56″ high-resolution touch-screen, hanging vertically on the wall, and was installed at MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day.

My Map from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

Email became an integral part of my life in 1998. Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past. I am interested in revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family. This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one.

Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait. My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining the TO:, FROM:, and CC: fields of every email in my email archive. The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line.

My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships. In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself.

More info: christopherbaker.net/projects/mymap/

POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

‘POSSESSED’ enters the complicated worlds of four hoarders; people whose lives are dominated by their relationship to possessions. The film questions whether hoarding is a symptom of mental illness or a revolt against the material recklessness of consumerism. When does collecting become hoarding and why do possessions exert such an influence on our lives?

Todays popular websites use smart algorithms to determine what we want or might like. Google is famous for its mix and so is the Amazon recommendation system. Your actions tell these systems about your behavior. And your actions make these services better in recommending you information. For example Google tracks what results people click. If most users click the second search result they make this the first result.

I love news selection
I really like how news websites, blogs and other person driven websites make a selection. Most often this works best if there is a sharp focus. A popular blog can’t be about everything. It has to be about a person or a subject to keep the blog interesting.

In the future this fragmentation might be happening to news websites as well. The traditional newspaper told you everything. It was your primary source of information. With websites we see a different pattern. People don’t just read one news website, they read many. They might have a favorite, but it is no such thing as exclusive readership. Will we see focus in newspaper websites as well? Although media operates independent it is almost always marked as ‘left’ or ‘right’ by the type of stories they focus on.

The news algorithm
Why wouldn’t news sorting be captured in algorithms? There is nothing that makes this impossible. Stories are written as closed interchangeable containers. News websites might make a selection on the frontpage, they also provide lists and rss-feeds where they sort the same information on time or popularity.

Journalists have multiple tasks, they create stories and they sort them on relevance. Maybe with this sorting we can experiment and create a more personal version as well?

Sorting news by machines
Sorting news is not just making a selection on popularity. Sorting news by systems is difficult. The presentation of what you like consists out a complex set of variables.

• What do you like (personal interest)
• What you might like (if you like a subject you might like to read about)
• What do you need to know (because it is important to you, and it will dominate the media landscape for a while)
• What everyone needs to know (breaking news)
• What do you officially don’t like, but occasionally read (the stories everyone says they don’t read but always seem to get the highest click-through rates)
• What do your friends (colleagues) read (news creates conversation and small-talk)
• What do your friends recommend (you trust your network)
• What you don’t want to know (things that really bore you and are irrelevant in any way)
• Where do you like to know more about (if you are an expert in something you don’t want another article that explains it all again. You would prefer analysis and background articles)
• What is your (current) location (for large groups of people location based information has extra value)
• Surprises (they change your interests and habbits)

* If I forgot something please ad your thoughts in the comments

These are the variables that construct personal relevance of a news website. It’s a complex set, but if you can manage a good balance you are able to create a website that sorts news by personal relevance on another level than we are used to.

I don’t know if an algorithm can create a better news experience and what it should look like. I do think there is value in tracking and learning form your users behavior and return new or additional value to the reader.

Update: Concept Design

| View | Upload your own

What this could look like and how you can keep this simple for the reader. The text is in Dutch. The screens ask for your location, favorite topics, company you work or would like to work and friends.

Why?
This is inherent to how these new web applications work. The webservices that are doing something new are often ‘connected‘ applications. Websites and widgets connect information and people resulting in a new collections and new relevancy. This relevancy will only show itself when using the service for a while. Which is - of course - difficult to explain to a user when he or she signs up.

This is a user experience problem, but not one we will not find a solution for. The friendfinder button in most new web services enables you to import your Gmail contacts or another social network. Most applications are doing something similar to a service that already exists, with the open web (API’s and feeds) technology should be able to suggest a personal social profile before you start.

When information gets fragmented
What’s more interesting about this is what this search for relevancy really means. The web was always used similar to previous media. We made pages and domains on the web. Information was reserved for one place and relevancy was made by the website editor. This can be a news website or a blog.

Now the web is evolving in something that goes beyond what we are used to. Everything gets fragmented, distributed and aggregated. Information (text, photos and video) transfer from one online place to another. Information gets distributed and duplicated. The collection made by the creator is getting less relevant.

The distributed future of this blog post
For example this blog post is distributed through RSS and it will be picked up by a dozen of spam blog that will all duplicate the entire text and distribute it again. All these blogs are indexed over and over by aggregators like Google or any other. This blog post is written in the context of my blog, but most people will probably read it in another context. Specialized companies trace discussions about brands on the web and redistribute relevant articles. Social networks are crawling the web to show articles that are personal relevant to your profile (LinkedIn).

Data is made to be duplicated
The incredible amount of fragmented information is what makes the web interesting. New social recommendation tools, networks, online friends, aggregators, feeds and widgets are breaking the web apart. This is what makes the web really exiting and work like a network.

This is difficult to understand and use by publishers, copyright lawyers and designers but more relevant for the user. The reader doesn’t care what blog or website presents a good article or where they read it, as long as they can read it. The most important value is the relevancy of the presenter, this can be a system or your friend.

Today I visited the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. This conference is a two day event about the near future of the web.

Unfortunately I won’t be there tomorrow, but with these conferences this isn’t really a problem. There is a very good live coverage of the event. The organization took care of a live video stream, a backchannel, a great event blog and a bloggers corner (cable internet and wifi, power supplies) resulting in serious online coverage.

My highlights today (quotes aren’t the exact words used, this is how I interpreted them and wrote them down)
In the introduction there was a really interesting sentence by I think Erick Schonfeld that triggered me.

How to make money if the web explodes?

When I make something I don’t think much about business models, I like to think about a concept and how something can be valuable for a user. I don’t really see the web as a business. Although it is serious business.

For most people making a serious business defines the success of a concept. A web that is breaking apart (widgets, feeds) creates a serious problem for people who think this way.

The guy Bryan Thatcher from Empressr said about the future of the web:

“The cloud: information (content) becomes more important websites don’t”

Store your information online and access and transfer your information online. The computer or website becomes a terminal that allows you to access and alter your information. Open systems will eventually allow you to take (or distribute) your information to other services.

Kevin Rose talked about the future of Digg.com and how to make it more relevant.

Expose the right content to the right people

This quote is not just about Digg.com, it can be used for the web in general. We will see better and more personal filters. All these social applications and social profiles enable a better and more personal selection. We are getting used to this and expecting more relevant results on other websites as well.

Nova Spivack talked about his love for the semantic web

The web is the database

This is a concept that regards the semantic web as a database. Store all your information in ‘the cloud’ in the form of metadata. Every set of information will have a complete set of metadata in it, theoretically you wouldn’t need a database because everything is in the front-end.

A smart and great concept, but somehow I’m worried about who will make the meta information? User don’t like to enter a lot of meta information, they just want to upload and share photos.

Tomorrow another day, don’t miss it in Amsterdam or online.

In this post I’m just thinking out loud and writing down some thoughts. Please share your ideas or fallacies you see in my thoughts.

In News presentation we see the article as an article. It’s a finished story. On a news website, newspaper or television broadcasts we present a collection articles and items. These articles are also objects. Finished stories presenting a near live experience, but not live.

For the presentation and sorting of these objects news media are using a few options.
1. We show it by editorial selection (the far most popular by newspapers, television and news websites).
2. We show it sorted on time (often combined with the first)
3. We show the article list sorted on popularity (often somewhere on an extra page or column)

This works very well. We are used to see a pre-selection made from all the information and from this selection we choose the things we like. News reading is scanning through a pre-selection made by editors.

But the object (article) itself has a very interesting set of meta-information. This is what we potentially know about, and can extract from an article on EN.nl.

Tags, time published, pageviews, updates, incoming links, comments, votes (1-4), urgency levels (1-3), edits, editors, editors popularity, dateline (geocoordinates), related articles, favorites, pictures, videos, hyperlinks

This is information we know about each article. It is metadata connected to the object. What can we do with this information? Obviously presenting the news is critical for a news website, but the added value is in the selection made by editors. Why do these selections work so well? A selection by editors is based on the values of the presenter (newspaper) and often focus extra on certain aspects of the news. Left, right, popular, politics, celebrity, sports, art…

Most news media present the same facts. Is it the hierarchy and presentation that really counts? Is it what you show or don’t show that adds value? Is it what you’re friends read and what you can talk about with them? Do you go to certain websites for coverage about certain items? Are it the extra stories that add value? Are it writing skills? Is it the fast coverage?

Adding relevancy and new value
How can we make the selection and the sorting of objects (articles) more relevant to your needs? Should we ask you what you like? Should we track what you read? Should we ask you social profile? Should we ask your social network? Should we do things with your location? Should we read the tagging you did on your blog, del.ico.us, flickr and youtube and use this to determine what you like? Should we make your music taste count, the weather or how you feel today?

I think news is social by itself. We want to be able to talk about it with friends. Serious news, but also weird or funny news, sports and celebrities. Every real-life social network connects to certain news media. Your friends are often reading the same newspaper or same websites.

Would you be interested in what news your social network reads? Or your favorite bloggers? If you look at articles as if they are objects with metadata you can think up a lot of new ideas and possibilities. But what does really add extra and new value to presenting the news?

Last night I made my first iPhone website. The iPhone has a full Safari browser, but you can also use some iPhone specific styling to make a website better accessible on an iPhone. Today we connected the stylesheet to the EN database making the EN newssite available on the iPhone platform.

en.nl/iphone

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I have said it before, but I really think that the future of information is in databases, meta information and API’s (public or not). Making this website was done really fast (20 minutes CSS & 20 minutes coding by a programmer) because all the information was easily accessible.

If you want to make an iPhone website make sure to check the User Interface Library for Safari development on the iPhone. For mobile phones we also made en.nl/mobiel

The online news industry really changed over the last years. I think we’re at a point where every self respecting news organization takes the web as a serious medium that requires a different approach then previous media (newspaper, television, radio).

Some see these new possibilities as a threat and try to protect what they have. Which is I think the worst possible strategy (looking backwards into the future). Others see chances, new competitors, new technology, new journalism, new markets and new ideas.

I love a quote I heard in an interview with someone at the Washington Post. He said his ambition is to be the new CNN. With new media and technology this ambition is realistic. A company like the Washington Post (newspaper) can see CNN (television) as its competitor.

Google / AP
Google can be a news service. Why wouldn’t they? They have the database of intentions, Google knows what people are searching for and they can - like any other company - subscribe to press services. The value of press agency news is devaluating in a way that it often ends up in duplicate copies with a different lay-out. Try to search for an AP article headline. I’m sure you will find a dozen versions of it, all exactly the same.

Online news is moving to something where added value counts. What can you add to the news (omnipresent). Is it a personal or political view? Is it the selection you make? Is it a community? Are it your reporters or journalists? What is your added value?

In technology communities, collaboration tools and social networks are redefining most services and institutions. Why shouldn’t services and technology like this redefine how we consume news?

This is what EN.nl is about. We want to experiment with everything around news from a practical point of view, let’s make things.

Wisdom of Crowds
The Wisdom of Crowds believes a group is smarter than the individual. The Wisdom of a crowd can be very valuable for news. In the public opinion the idea of a wiki collides with news. I think a wiki-based system can work for news if you make sure the process is transparent and everyone can join the discussion.

Sure you will have to deal with vandalism, this a technical problem to solve. A reader doesn’t have to be an expert on everything, the valuable wisdom of an individual can be something he has read or seen somewhere else. The Wisdom of a crowd is about all the knowledge, not just the expert knowledge. The biggest challenge is get the knowledge and use it as a contribution.

Traditional media floats on the wisdom of a few wise people who create value by the choices they make. Social media uses the wisdom of your network en wiki media taps into the wisdom of a crowd. All have advantages and disadvantages.

The design
For the design of this new website we also experiment. The most important object is the database, we designed the database from a view that almost everything is possible with the data. We store a lot of information that might be valuable in the future. This allows us to experiment freely with the design and think up new features. The database is the most valuable asset of a news organization.

The newsriver navigation

The newsriver is a principle that regards news as a continues flow of information, where you can hook in whenever you want (An RSS feed). For the first version of EN we are experimenting with this idea in the navigation. I don’t know if this is it, it’s different from the navigation we are used to.

What we can do?
Almost everything. We can make mash-ups, feeds, aggregated pages (screenshot draft design below). Hook in to social networks, extend the wiki functionality, and more. Technically everything is possible.

What does the news site of the future look like? Join the debate and discussion here or in Dutch at http://ontwikkelen.ning.com.

Infosthetics writes about the game audio-surf a racing game where the song you pick decides the course and speed of the game. This game uses rhythm as an extra navigation layer. Music is build from small loops and these loops are easy to learn and predictable, making it possible to navigate faster because you are using more than just your eyes. You know what will happen before you see it.

Music producers are connecting with the game industry for a while now. Producing game music is a genre by itself. The music gives that extra boost of adrenaline when it’s changing along with the gameplay. The music goes faster or louder. Audio design makes the game more exciting.

The last years we have seen the rise of a new genre of audio games. Where the audio in a game is used as navigation. Guitar Hero became very popular with this. Based on the everybody-can-be-a-popstar culture the game makes it possible for everyone to be a guitar virtuosi. You control the game by learning rhythms and loops using your eyes, ears and fingers.

The follow-up on Guitar Hero is Rock Band, making it possible to play with friends and more instruments. At the same time the developers of one of the most interesting games released for the Playstation Portable; Loco Roco come with a new game titled Patapon. In Patapon you are a tribe navigating and fighting based on the music you make.

Do we need more complex stories?
All these games use audio not primarily to emphasize emotion but to navigate. In Everything Bad is Good for You, Steve Berlin Johnson talks about how movies and television series changed plotlines to keep it interesting for the viewer. He compares old movies (cinematic milestones) with the Sopranos. No matter how good Gilda or Rear Window are. Compared to todays movies and series the are kind of slow and simple.

We need ever more complex stories to be entertained. We are getting used to media. As an example Steve Berlin Johnson uses the Sopranos, the television series combines a story throughout all the seasons, a story through a season, a story through multiple episodes, a story through one episode and all this for different characters as well. This is a story we simply wouldn’t have understand or liked in the fifties or sixties.

Is the same thing happening with games?
We are speeding up games for years. Ask your mother or grandma to watch you playing a game, it’s just too much information for them. They block it and see it as an unorganized chaos and can’t understand what you like about it. At the same time these games aren’t challenging players enough. We need to play faster, use other input devices and gestures for navigating. Our eyes, mind and culture is getting used to the speed. We need more complex games, more stories, elements, control options and speed. We need a bigger challenge.

Is the auditive component helping in this? Is the loop based structure used in music making our games more challenging? Does it allow us to play games at a higher speed? I don’t know this is all just a wild guess, but based on history we know stories and games will only get faster and more complex.

Last week I went snowboarding in the popular Val Thorens, France (2300/3300m) and took my camera.

This rock holds a glacier (on Flickr)

The Street
During the week I photographed the street several times from our apartment on the 6th floor. I don’t know why, I just liked the top shot and how it changes every day.

The set on Flickr

And I took one of the valley (on Flickr)

And the clouds (on Flickr)

This is me and my EOS (on Flickr)

And this is the map (on Flickr)

The last day I made and off piste jump and broke my board :(

A great Flickr mash-up by Erik Borra
While I was playing with snow Erik Borra was inspired by my second Flickr experiment and made a great piece of code mashing up Flickr and Google News into a wonderful combination.

Anne Helmond was inspired by both projects and asks MTV to be MADE into a killer PHP programmer.

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.

In July 2007 Edward Mischaud (at that time student Politics and Communication) asked me - and other random selected users - a few questions about how we use Twitter. His goal was to find out if Twitter users actually answer to one thing Twitter asks ‘What are you doing?‘.

65% of his focus group didn’t answer this question. What they did write about is in the graphic below.

These findings correlate with the theoretical foundation presented which is based on the understanding that technologies are not neutral objects that operate apart from society’s influence. Technologies are flexible devices. People often extract different meanings and uses out of a technology – applications that are not always factored into its design. In some instances, however, inventors, or shapers, of technology can themselves determine how a technology is to be used and therefore limit and restrict its ‘interpretative flexibility’.

Download the MSc dissertation by Edward Mischaud *.pdf

What are you doing?
I think the question itself is very important for Twitter. It’s the step that makes it easy to join the conversation. You don’t know what to do, just answer what you’re doing.

With this you start the storytelling. Eventually you start connecting with friends or try to start a discussion. You see people talk about other people and start following them or they start following you. This is how your network grows.

Twitter probably wouldn’t be equally successful without this question. With a simple and personal question that everyone in the world can answer Twitter really lowered the barrier to join the application.

Twitter is more a network than an application. If you ask around you will notice that most people are using different interfaces on different platforms and clients. Because of the API connecting to the network adapts to your preferred way of working.

Twitter

• Is easy accessible
• Is live
• Forces you to focus
• Is broken conversation
• Is open conversation
• Is spam free, like RSS (subscription based)
• Is a network
• Is synchronous / asynchronous
• Is a black hole
• Is a time capsule
• Is a centralized network
• Changes public / privacy
• Is a knowledge base
• Is very unstable
• Is making it very difficult for search engines
• Is platform independent

The best part of twitter to me is the live/buzz effect. What is happening right now. You just turn it on like you turn on television. There’s always something going on, and if it isn’t you can always start it by saying what you’re doing. The two graphs below show how twitter is being used during live events. The same thing happens in the Netherlands during live sport events, news or television shows.

Twitter during the Superbowl

Twitter during Super Tuesday

Examples

Some conferences have used Twitter for a so called backchannel. A live (sometimes moderated) screen behind the speaker that allows the audience to discuss and ask live questions via Twitter and SMS.

Every morning @gvenk presents the Gvenk Daily. Gerard is a programmer and knows what’s going on in the tech scene. Every morning around 7.30 he scans his RSS feeds and drops the highlights in the Gvenk Daily, a series of tweets about tech news.

Last year I wrote a post about @BreakingNewsOn, it’s a newsservice that posts rumors to Twitter and confirms them live. Building the story as it happens.

The Twitgeist is a hourly updated cloud of the most popular words used within a group of twitterazi. It tells you what’s going on.

These examples are just a few spin-offs. Like the conclusion from the dissertation. Twitter has just one rule, a maximum of 140 characters. The people using it are experimenting what they can do with this network.

Jonathan Harris has a very impressive portfolio with interactive projects. He’s an interactive storyteller and great visualizer. Last year I visited his talk at Picnic where he talked about his new project ‘The Whale Hunt‘. Today I discovered the project is public.

In May 2007 Jonathan lived for nine days with the Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow Alaska. Het went out hunting wales and documented his story in a wonderful interactive story.

“I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.”

Video: Jonathan Harris at TED 2007 about the Web’s secret Stories.

It doesn’t matter if the artist himself put his material online for embedding and sharing, since he doesn’t control the rights. Obviously BUMA doesn’t care about the fan. They don’t even specify what information is placed ‘illegal’, which artists are connected and which aren’t. They just want to sell licenses to small groups of fans and non-profit blogs.

After some buzz was generated around it in Dutch online media BUMA responded by saying it was a ‘premature response’. Case closed, for now.

Are we all broadcasters in a distributed environment?
It’s an interesting way of thinking, since the near future of the web will mostly be about sending/broadcasting, aggregating and social networks. Our presence online often exists by re-distrubuting content. Today’s website is more often a collection of data from other places. A manually aggregated hub of information.

Are you a broadcaster when you write something on your Facebook, collect links in a public del.icio.us and share your Netvibes as a public universe? Are you as a blogger a broadcaster? Everyone sharing something (photos, text, thoughts) online is broadcasting in the traditional meaning of the word. Semantics and laws never worked out very well.

Should we regard this as traditional broadcasting? I don’t think so. It’s freedom of expression. It’s sharing the things we like. We’re not uploading or adding illegal material we’re just creating our online identity by embedding and linking. Media represents us.

When are you a broadcaster on the web? Once you make money? Or when your audience reaches a substantial level. Is this blog a broadcasting? Or is it a personal outlet.

I think there is no such thing as an online broadcaster, since everyone is broadcasting and publishing. You can’t ask people to pay for this, like you don’t ask people to pay when they whistle your song in the street. Be happy with the publicity.

If you are an artist and connected to these kind of companies. I’m sure you need or like the money they collect and you deserve it all. At the same time they are taking away bits of your freedom. Think about what the effect is when you give up certain rights and alert those companies about the effect. Technology and culture often change much faster than the people looking backwards to decide what the future should look like.

Here’s a release by NEST, you can download this album for free because it is released into the public domain. It’s also beautiful and needs as much attention as it can get, because I really would like to see them performing live someday.

Nest is the collaborative project of Otto Totland (Deaf Center / Type Records) and Huw Roberts (Serein). The two started working together after forging a strong friendship as former members of the Miasmah label. This self-titled EP is their first work publicly released, so it is a great honour that we are able to offer it to you here.

Both pianists, there is little wonder that after exploring a plethora of musical styles, the two find themselves most at home writing traditionally structured pieces, with the ivories a major element throughout. The EP demonstrates clearly the innate ability the two have for song writing, borrowing from the world of film soundtracks and contemporary classical composers to craft delicate instrumental compositions.

Alongside their favoured instrument can be variously heard the plucked strings of the Welsh harp, violins, woodwind instruments, field recordings, percussion and a heady dose of mind wobbling effects. From the time Nest began writing together, one purpose was clear; to produce beautiful music free of pretense, and they do it exceptionally well.

Photo: spring is early on Flickr All my photos on Flickr are under a Creative Commons license, this means that some rights are reserved instead of all. You are free to use my photos for anything you like, although if you would like to use it for a commercial project you just have to ask me.

In Polling Places the New York Times asks readers to send photos from places where they vote. It makes exciting photo journalism. Not just the individual photos, but the collection is very interesting.

Digital cameras are almost omnipresent. If you - as the provider - make the goals of a project simple, clear and easy everybody can join and help you to create very exciting collection. Resulting in a set of pictures that can only be made if you are able to ask the collective of readers and contributers the right question.

Citizen Journalism starts by asking the right question at the right time and is not always about being at the right place at the right time.

Photo: The polling place in Mongtomery Township, NJ. submitted by M. Prendergast.

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

Hypernarrative has a catagory about interactive storytelling. Well the send.a.message project couldn’t be more about interactive storytelling. You send a message through the website, for €30,- a Palestinian sprays your tag on the West Bank Barrier and sends you in return the photos of your text on the wall.

I don’t like walls, they never really solved problems. We build a wall when the difference between two places or cultures seems too complex to be solved.

We lock up criminals, because they clash with society. We build walls around our belongings because we want to control the climate and protect our belongings. We build closed compounds in rural areas to ‘protect’ ourselves and our belongings. And sometimes we build walls around or through countries.

A wall will never solve a problem, it will make things controllable for a certain time by limiting freedom.

The web is not just a network connecting computers anymore. The web is a virtual layer of information accessible almost everywhere, anytime via broadband, UMTS, wifi and cable. The availability of this network and its role as real-time meta information network will only grow.

The web is already changing how we consume music. The availability is like radio, but the tunes you can listen to are personal. Technically you could listen to any song you like at any time you like from any place you like.

The only thing we need is a library of music and a business model. This is where Google comes in. When a website grows as exponential as Google did you need a serious hardware model to support the demand. You need servers and broadband connections around the globe. The hardware structure and back-end Google has (in combination with YouTube) is probably one of the most advanced in the world. The amount of data they send up and down the lines of our network connections makes them a very import player in data exchange.

Amazon build a new model on top of their original business. With S3 and Ec2 Amazon started to sell hosting and computing, a smart move since they already developed an enormous infrastructure for amazon.com. This infrastructure equals a value that makes it a serious hosting competitor in price and service.

Why Google for music? Google has experience with indexing large amounts of information and they know how to retrieve meaning from information. Google has experience with web-players, mobile platforms, plug-ins, widgets, trust and a payment model. They sit on all the required knowledge. All they have to do is mixing the components together.

The future of music won’t be about files or discs, it will be about listening your favorites, your friends favorites or songs recommended by websites and smart collectives. Music still has value, it doesn’t have to be free. I think a subscription model could work. You pay $20,- to $50,- a month to a company (Google in this example) and you are allowed to listen any music you like. With this money Google pays artists based on listened percentages. It’s all about micro payments and since everyone is an artist nowadays, everyone should be able to upload its files to the Google Music directory.

On top of this Google could include its adwords system related to what you are listening. A system that has a proven effect in giving advertising power to the niche.

There is already a Google Music player. Just find someone to connect the dots.

In the book Massive Change, Bruce Mau and Jennifer Leonard focus on Urban sprawl and a so called tipping point. The year 2006 was the tipping point in how we live. From 2006 on half of the world population will live in cities. Cities grow together creating so called urban cores. This is a very interesting movement and will have effect on how we live and work.

The website 192021.org - a platform for research into the subject - tries to explain this phenomena by using a simple and beautiful animation. The makers have divided the information into small fragments. The story is still linear and doesn’t have a lot of interaction, but how they have cut up the information for digital storytelling is very good.

I love this subject. If you know media that explore this, please recommend me websites, movies, books or any other media.

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.

Make Gmail better
The unexpected thing happened that with my move to Gmail I also stopped using Mac Mail, the default mail application on Macintosh and one of my favorite applications. The Gmail web client just works very well.

The Gmail interface doesn’t look so great. It is clear, easy to use, the service is great, the mobile phone version is great, the spam filter is fantastic and it just does e-mail better.

Can Gmail be better? I think so, let me explain how after this example.

Wordpress
I love Wordpress. I’m sure it is one of the best blog publishing platforms in the world, if not the best. I don’t know all the other platforms, I have tried a few. What makes Wordpress unique is the back-end. The back-end of this platform is gone through a great evolution. The Wordpress back-end fits the needs of most users, is extendible and it can connect with an API to other applications.

A classic thing to forget when developing a content management system is to design a usable back-end. Often a system evolves around functionality and a (often narrow) view of what the users should be allowed to do, instead of freedom to experiment and usability. I think how Wordpress developed was very good for the back-end interface. Anyone can use it, advanced user or not.

Can Wordpress be better? I think so.

Custom interfaces
We are getting used to customizing web interfaces. We drag rearrange widgets and choose personal themes. For example I’m using Veerle’s theme to brighten my Netvibes and since this week I can change the lay-out of iGoogle as well.

Wouldn’t it be great if Wordpress and Gmail had easy to style interfaces?

There are hacks like Grease Monkey for Gmail and a plug-in for the Wordpress admin. The problem with these hacks is they are hacks. They’re not supported by the provider. They don’t return value to the application, for mail your hacks are bound to a computer and as soon as something changes your hack needs to be updated.

Learn from design
Think about what would change if you could use simple CSS to build themes for Gmail or the Wordpress admin. Designers would start playing with it because it is easy accessible and their design can reach a large group of users. Gmail and Wordpress can keep directories in order to see what’s the most popular interface, the highest rated and the newest.

If a service provider wants to learn from their users they should enable them to use stylesheets and templates that make it possible rearrange all the objects and buttons in the interface. Maybe Gmail just works better when the navigation is at the top, split up or in the middle. Who knows?

We are getting used to choosing templates for our blogs and rss readers. It would be wonderful if we could start using templates for admin screens and e-mail interfaces.

The most popular interfaces tell you a lot about what your users want from your interface, with this free knowledge a provider can adapt the default interface and make it even better.

The care for earth as our only habitat, source of food and storage for waste did get our attention over the last years. And as with every major cultural or political movement it had effect on visual culture as well. We look at the earth as a magic, fragile object. And when it comes to global warming we face universal problems.

Todays most widespread and popular outlet of visual culture is the user interface. I’m not a cultural expert, but I do think it’s rather funny we see representations of the earth and galaxy returning in todays most popular interfaces. Those images are carefully selected and could as well been renderings of little fish or exotic plants.

Below are popular interface examples. New media is making the world a smaller place ;)

1. The music-player in the Sony Playstation 3 shows moving images of the earth (video)
2. The new background-set in Apple Mac OSX Leopard has Earth images
3. And Earth is the Apple iPhone default screen
4. Google Earth turned around 180 degrees and now looks up the sky

Do you know other examples? Please share.