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)

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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

The last year has seen social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn updating the design of the homepage to turn it more into a notification page: the homepage as a place where you can see what your friends are doing. Your virtual center of the network.

These updates let you know what your friends are up to, but they also let you know what your friends like or share. The social networks often work as recommendation networks as well.

New technology, new business
Google added relevancy and order to hyperlinks and is very useful for the active searcher: someone who’s looking for something. Social networks add relevancy to hyperlinks you’re not searching for. The networks provide you with new information and new articles recommended by virtual friends.

Both are in a business that was traditionally the business of a news provider. Google gives you insight and background information. Social Networks keep you up-to-date and recommend information.

Does this design shift also affect the future design of news websites?
The average news website probably publishes around a hundred articles every 24 hours. We can’t and don’t want to read all the articles a news website publishes. We need filtering mechanisms.

News websites add hierarchy to the news by presenting the most important things first. But this is a mass hierarchy. It’s not personal. The sorting is based on what the news website thinks will interest most people. And this works very well for the most important news.

The news website is a large pile of stories. Is this still in the best interest for a reader? His or her most valuable asset is time. Sure there is some news you need to know about, but you get to know about the important facts through your social networks as well.

And if you know the facts you can learn more by hitting the search button. The news website is still a database with a single entry, the frontpage. This makes it vulnerable in a distributed environment.

Distributed environment
The future of information presentation (at least for the long tail of information) will probably be user-centered. Mobile devices are extremely user-centered. Successful access points like interfaces and devices provide readers with the most relevant information.

Time is our most valuable asset and the reduction of noise is a serious proposition for any new service. News itself is relevant, there is no question about this, but how do you deliver your content in a distributed environment?

Type of environments
There are different environments.

1. Get your content on other platforms through syndication or API’s. The problem is monetization, although you could distribute the news and link back to your website with hyperlinks in the text that link to more in-depth coverage.

2. Your content on your platform with a personalized presentation based on your own network or an external (social) network.

3. The current form of presentation where your content is on your platform presented in your hierarchy.

What can you do as a news website to be more relevant? Should news websites learn from the design of social networks and move to a more user centered approach? The New York Times is already doing this with Times People and with EN.nl (the project I work on) we created a personal selection based on your reading habbits.

Your Thoughts
What design elements that originated in social networks do you think could very well be applied to the basics or every major news homepage? Or what are the arguments not to implement this kind of functionality?

- Share articles with your friends
- See on what articles your friends commented
- See what your friends are reading
- See what news is happening close to your friends
- See news topics your friends subscribed to
- Discuss an article only with your friends

Two major financial losses have we seen in the last two months. Not because of the credit crunch, but because everything in this digital world is connected.

On the web new information is true until proven false. This is something you might like, or not. It is not a choice, it’s the fact of a connected medium that gives everyone a voice. We have to find ways to work with it. And we are just starting to find out the effects of this dense and very well connected network that is continues searching for the next big thing… And the network is trigger happy.

About those losses
Ten billion dollar in total. Last month an old article about United Airlines re-appeared in Google News because of a date failure. News spread across the web in no time. Traders started selling shares, loss $1 billion.

Last week a wrong story about Steve Jobs having a hearth attack made it to CNN iReport. News spread across the web very fast and Apple stock plunged. Instant decrease in value: $9 billion.

Both stories started an online fire that could only be stopped by checking the story. But, when there is smoke in the air, the whole town is already alerted. You can’t hide it. All you can do is report facts as soon as possible.

In a dense societies, like the web, and cities in the seventeenth century. The high speed spreading of information is crucial. If there was a fire in your neighborhood. It didn’t really matter that much if it small or big, you would wanted to know about it. Since all houses were close to each other and stopping a fire was difficult. Alert first, check later.

The web is not paper
Reporting fragments of information is what the web is good at. We still use it as if it is a piece of paper. We publish hypertext, but we won’t alter it, like paper. We give web pages unique addresses, like paper. After all these years we still treat hypertext like paper.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia doesn’t. This is what makes Wikipedia more an internet product instead of a print product. Wikipedia is alive, it uses fixed urls and the content changes all the time. Everything can be altered and deleted. Hypertext is alive. Wikipedia is - like the web - a continues and endless process.

Open Source Journalism
The live web poses not directly new problems for journalism, but it requires more speed and a different way of working. It will eventually require a different approach. Journalists will have to be live reporters. They don’t decide if it will be news or not. They will decide if something will stay news or not.

As a reporter you can’t ignore the smoke in your town. Everyone wants to know what’s going on and it’s the job of the journalist to figure this out, as fast as possible. And the best way to do this is by using the collective wisdom and make his or her knowledge and process public. The open source journalist will be a better informed journalist.

And about the truth?
We will see many more of these short-time information failures in the future and those will probably also lead to large financial losses. We have to find a way to live with it. The journalist that works on the web will be more active as a firefighter instead of a fire starter.

The value of the transition
For a designer there is nothing to gain in the transition period. It’s pretty frustrating to design the same old things on a new platform. We love using the new challenges a new medium gives us. And early adopters love designs and applications made for new media too.

And despite this there is incredible value in the transition. All thanks to the mental model. People are used in using something. And especially with digital media they have a mental model that tells them where they can find whatever they want. This is important when there is a new medium. They don’t understand the new medium, yet. But they do know how to navigate through your information as long it is structured the way it was on the old medium. And a large group of users will like it. See it as a beacon.

Examples

From paper to web
The newspaper where I work has this online image (pdf) based version. That looks exactly like the printed version, only online. From a web design perspective the interaction design is horrible. But it works for most users, since they have the mental model of the paper version. They know where to find what they are looking for. And this makes it easy to produce, and valuable for a large group of customers.

From television to web to iPhone
Dutch teletext is a very popular news service on television. TheY transported it to the web into an interface that doesn’t really make sense for the medium. And it was also transported to widgets and the iPhone. Creating a large group of very satisfied users.

From web to iPhone
The popular Dutch newswebsite Nu.nl is transporting the news website to the mobile sphere. Their readers except a similar experience on the iPhone as on the website.

From books to the Kindle
The Amazon Kindle and other eReader-devices are bringing the experience of reading books to the digital world. With a strong focus on recreating the same reading experience on this new device. In first instance they are neglecting (in communicating) the possibilities of these new devices that range from using hypernarrative structures, non-linear storytelling to importing the friends from your social network as characters in a book.

Why transporting the mental model to a new medium?
You slowly convert the mass from one medium to the other. It is often cheap to do and you will create a very popular service. It also gives you extra time and freedom to make something that is tailored to the medium. You earn some extra money and you are still connected with your users on the new medium.

Just some thoughts
How long can you stretch this? And would it for example make sense to convert the newspaper (paper version) to a pdf and make it viewable on your iPhone? Most readers will have the mental model of the paper version in mind and reading and browsing pdf-files on the iPhone gives a pretty good user experience.

Does it also work the other way around? For example the news website Nu.nl started on the web, can they transport the mental model used on the website to paper as well?

Do you have examples of successful companies that transported their content from one medium to another without altering the interface or way it works too much?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the podcast
Download audio file (355.mp3)

open in player

The Giant Pool of Money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memes and broken windows
In books about memes there is often referred to the broken window theory. The theory is pretty simple, if you leave a window broken in the street, it will lower the barrier for others to break windows as well.

I don’t want to argue if this theory is right or wrong. New York major Rudolph Giuliani was a fan of the theory and applied it to the city. It seem to work really well, although some smart people claim there were other factors influencing the effect.

Graffiti grew up with the broken window theory. In New York teenagers wrote their names all over the subway. And while the government was busy finding out how to fight it. Art critics at the same time discovered the artistic value of some of the work.

Style Wars
The documentary Style Wars embedded above this post is very interesting to watch. It shows how Graffiti transformed, but also how ego-centered it is (a perfect recipe for artists).

Is graffiti in our western culture the most public form of self expression, is it the thing that transforms our public spaces into more interesting and colorful places. Or is it the start of a criminal society.

How would a city look if the authorities would instead of fighting, encourage people to start painting public spaces? Saturday, paintday ;)

What is art? A discussion in São Paulo
I didn’t know, but it seems that São Paulo has some great graffiti in the city. And ironically, the same time Tate Modern invites Latin American artists/graffiti-painters to paint the walls of the museum, the São Paulo major is starting projects to remove the works at home.

017.jpg, originally uploaded by Tony de Marco

graffiti in sao paulo, originally uploaded by Bastien!.

graffiti in sao paulo, originally uploaded by Bastien!.

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No updates for a month, although I’m not a really consistent blogger, a month must be a new record. I was on a holiday. Driving, surfing, camping, diving, sleeping, eating, drinking and a lot of reading.

Not a lot of internet and blogs, only some e-mail contact with friends and family using the wifi on my mobile phone. Wifi and laptops are getting more common on campsites. Too bad roaming prices for data are still ridiculous.

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On our way back we picked up a friend. Her parents started a new adventure a couple of years ago. They moved to France to start a bed and breakfast in the wonderful chateau La Villaine (picture above) in the Loire valley. We stayed there for one night and it was great. Her parents are really nice people and make you feel very comfortable. Her mothers cooking alone is worth visiting it.

The web at its best; enabling small business and niche communities
It is great to see how the web changes markets. For ‘the Bed & Breakfast industry’, and more businesses ratings and reviews are the things that create business. Often getting more important than the website of the destination itself.

The chateau advertises using Google Adwords aiming at people who are looking to stay in a chateau in the Loire Valley. Although the prices of Google Ads are rising, for a small and very focussed business it is still the most comparative way of advertising compared to booking with agencies.

Community ratings and reviews are very important. People are looking for the best place to stay and are searching the web for information about it. La Villaine has a great rating on sites like Tripadvisor. And for a reason, guests really enjoyed it.

The vegetarian meme

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On one of the community websites two guests wrote about how the vegetarian dinner at the chateau was the best they ever had. The hosts didn’t know about the review and suddenly a lot of guests turning up told them they are vegetarian. They didn’t understand why suddenly so many guests had become vegetarian, until they told them about the positive online review.

This is what I really like about the web. How it connects people and enables them to exchange experiences and create better real life experiences and sustainable business relations based on quality.

Just an idea

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During the holiday I use my Canon EOS a lot for photographing. I can’t share the pictures until I’m back home, because I need a computer for it.

It would be nice if I could use an USB-cable that connects the camera to my iPhone and uses software on the iPhone that turns the iPhone (wifi/gprs/3g) into an upload-dongle to publish the photos on the web (Flickr).

This can’t be that hard to make I guess, since Apple already has a connector to upload photos from your camera to your iPod.

It would also be great software for professional photographers at concerts, sports games and events, because it connects every type of professional camera directly to the web everywhere in the world. Without any hassles.

Any readers with great iPhone-SDK-skills ;)? I think software like this would be worth at least $25,- and can be easily sold through the Apple Appstore. I think there is a serious market for it.

Personalized Podcast
I’m not sure if the personalized podcast page was already available on the website before the redesign. I have never seen it before. What is great about this option is that you can subscribe to a stream of free MP3s that will be automatically delivered to your computer through the podcast-distribution-model (xml with enclosures).

A Long Tail with free things and high quality service
Last.fm delivers you the music you might like based on your personal profile, and it delivers the files for free. The music delivered might be from your favorite artists or from artists you have never heard of. This is how you are able to get to know new music that is very likely to be interesting to you.

For artists the group their music is send to is a smaller group, but this group is more likely to like or love the music, and thus distributing free content this way is more cost effective.

For me this podcast is an example how you can add more value to the content through smart distribution. You discover something new, and there is less noise in discovering it.

Mujuice, electronic music from Russia
In my recommended downloads there are a few tracks by Mujuice. I don’t know Mujuice, but if I like the tracks (I probably do, since it is a recommendation) I might search for more, buy MP3s or visit their next, or first performance in the Netherlands.

For the band there probably isn’t any direct business or value, there is only the start of something new by giving something away for free, a new connection or customer relation. And as you might know, all you need are a thousand true fans.

The coming weeks we will be further updating the EN.nl news website. The last weeks we have added interesting things on the database level and back-end of the system. Now it is time to bring some of those ideas to the front-end.

One of the things we have done is making tags more important. After using and testing with it we noticed the combined tagging methods we use give a very interesting and relevant database with tags. The tags have more value and semantic relations than I thought they would have. EN.nl has over 35.000 articles in its database with over a 100.000 tags, 10.000 of those tags are unique.

What we have added is a system that tracks the tags of the articles you read. With this information a metadata profile is created. New articles that enter the site will be matched to your ‘profile’ and if there is a match this will be a recommended article. There is also a tag relation mechanism to create a more semantic relation.

We will do the same for your friends, since news is part of a social experience. We are adding groups as well. If you have online friends using the website, you and your group of friends creates a semantic profile as well. New articles will be recommended that fit to your group of friends.

Your profile
What about this tag based profile based on what your read? The profile could be private or hidden. It could also be open or even exportable. For example EN.nl could connect to web services and get the highest rated and most recent blog posts about subjects you like and recommend these to you. Or you could connect the information to other profiles to create a more rich or enhanced experience on other platforms as well.

Would you like to take this profile? And can you think of a service that could serve you better when it has a collection of news themes and subjects you like?

The concept design for the EN.nl frontpage. The page automatically orders the information based on what is most relevant in general and for you.

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.

I met Raquel Diniz through a hypernarrative project I did two years ago called slowshutter. The idea was to present a great picture every day and to present it nice.

The project did not continue fluidly (I probably should have been a more active photographer), but through the website I met some nice people and great photographers. One of the photographers on the website is Raquel Diniz. Recently she did a MA image and communication and is having a graduation exposition in London. Below parts from her graduation work.

The portrait of Barbie

‘Barbie is a character who has been photographed in scenarios of personal significance to the photographer. The locations to which she travels vary from interesting places in London to tourist scenarios abroad. Once she is in the place the photographer registers the doll representing different meanings.’

Things I would like to see forever

‘Things I would like to see forever’ is a project where I am registering the routine of three girls living in London. … The base for the project is the use of still photographs transformed into movie images.

GOLDSMITHS MA IMAGE & COMMUNICATIONS DEGREE SHOW
10-13 July 2008
11am-6pm daily
Private view 10th from 6 to 8:30pm

Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, South Bank, London SE1 9PH
Admission FREE
Nearest train/tube: Blackfriars, Southwark, Waterloo
Information: www.icshow.co.uk

Note: this post ended up in my drafts and should have been posted during the European Championship, sorry :)

Statistics are wonderful and the web as a central mechanism to connect databases creates a great mechanism to share and interact with data.

One great example of statistics is the Castrol Performance Index. For this European Championship the Castrol Index distributes all the games data live on the web. You can immediately see which player played where and how they are doing.

You can compare players, ball possession, shots on goals and more. All this information is live during the game. The exciting part of these kind of websites is that they add something to television that only the web can add. It doesn’t make it more interactive, but it does give it more information depth.

Suddenly the game that looks so simple gets a new layer of data and statistics. I didn’t know that for example the Dutch goalkeeper van der Sar already ran over 1300 meters in the first 34 minutes. Did you know that most of the players run around 10 kilometers during a game.

I can see that players that should be attacking spend most of their time on the wrong part of the field. This information adds context to the video footage, and it is context only interactive media can add. I don’t have to see this data all the time, I can just open it when I’m interested in how the players are doing.

I don’t know if this is what interactive television should be, but I really like how this is adding an extra dimension to live footage.