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Samstag, 19. März 2005 |
Digital Play: Reloaded. Digital Play: Reloaded opens on March 18 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. The exhibit will festure Pac-Mondrian , Katamari Damacy and eight other innovative digital games.
Other new installations include Arcadia, an arcade-style PC game from Gamelab, which challenges audiences to play four retro-inspired video games at one time.
Stepmania, an
independently created, open-source version of the arcade dance game
Dance Dance Revolution. Unlike its commercial counterpart, Stepmania
incorporates audiences[base '] music collections and dance patterns, which are
shared online.
Music-, dance-, and movement-oriented video games originating in
Japan constitute a shift from traditional, often violent game
scenarios. Classic arcade games from the 1980s are paired with current
home-based games to contrast their approaches to such action-related
topics as driving and waging battle on land and in space. Though the
graphics have changed significantly, patterns of play remain similar.
In the lobby of the museum, Paul Johnson's video game sculpture, Maiden Flight,
shows how the habits of a "snacking couch potato" determine the fate of
a far-away space station under construction. Each scenario plays out in
real time without the possibility of human intervention. The work uses
techniques of automation that reflect the latest innovations in
commercial computer-game and simulation software.
One of Johnson's other works, Trauma (was at the Museum last year,
picture above) displays the sophistication and automation of commercial
computer-game software, such as "persistent world" games, which
continue to evolve when nobody is playing them, and NPCs (non-player
characters), which are driven by artificial rather than human
intelligence.
Two screens show self-playing video games: military combat and
household simulation. Each is affected by the amount of "trauma"
generated by the other. In the military game, trauma is determined by a
mission[base ']s success or failure, or by a character[base ']s proximity to violent
events. In the household simulation, trauma is determined by the need
for maintenance and cleaning. The third screen is a composite of the
two games; it displays the aggregate amount of trauma [~]the trauma
index[~] as a red, gaseous cloud.
Via Rhizome. [we make money not art]
10:05:32 AM 
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Lifehacker. Lifehacker: I'm not real quick to add things to my aggregator. I only have about 20 feeds in Bloglines. But this new addition to the Gawker family of blogs is really top-notch. If you like Gadgetopia, you'll love Lifehacker.
Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker
recommends the downloads, web sites and shortcuts that actually save
time. Don't live to geek; geek to live
I knew that I had to post about it when I found five separate things
out there yesterday that I felt you all needed to know about:
I'll post further about some of these today, as they relate to stuff we've talked about here quite a bit. [Gadgetopia]
10:02:02 AM
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Ektron WebImageFX. Ektron.com :: Web Image Editor : Ektron WebImageFX:
I haven't seen an embedded, Web-based image editor before. Have I just
not been looking hard enough? Are there others I'm not aware of?
If not for the IE-only problem, this seems like a good one. There are some Flash demos here. There's an online demo here, but you'll need to install the whole client-side Ektron system (it rides on top of their flagship product: eWebEditPro).
Whenever I come across Ektron, I get a little nostalgic as I think
we were one of their very first customers. Seriously [~] we used it on
the a project in 2000, and whenever we called for tech support, I think
the guy's Mom answered the phone. We used to joke that we were calling
some 16-year-old in his parents' basement.
Speaking of that project, here's an old Internet Week article that talks about how Ektron was used:
But the Vikings still needed outside help, so the sports
team turned to BankFirst e-Business, the South Dakota Web development
and consulting division of BankFirst Corp. The firm integrated Ektron
Inc.'s eWebEditPro into a new Vikings.com administrative interface. The
new software lets the team update its content quickly, without any
intervention from a Web developer and without any knowledge of HTML.
Gosh, those developers must have been amazingly good. I bet
they're all rich now, living on some island in the Pacific. (Especially
the lead developer. I bet he was pretty good-looking too.) [Gadgetopia]
10:00:45 AM
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MSN AdCenter. MSN to offer search ads through AdCenter: Microsoft is going to add contextual pay-per-click ads to MSN Search. Who didn't see that coming?
Internet search giants Google and Yahoo no longer have the red-hot search advertising market all to themselves.
Microsoft's MSN on Wednesday will unveil its answer to Google and Yahoo's pay-per-click text ad programs, called MSN AdCenter.
[Gadgetopia]
10:00:06 AM
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User Agent Index. List of User-Agents (Spiders, Robots, Browser): I posted about this site two years ago,
and it's been actively maintained all this time. I've been checking it
for the last couple days, and there are new additions every day.
I assert that this is the largest and most accurate index of User
Agent strings on the Net right now (note that the front page is merely
letters A through F). Does anyone know of anything better? [Gadgetopia]
9:59:26 AM
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Google Rips Off OS X Dock. Those
guys in Google Labs have great taste, but they must have a bit too much
time on their hands. The latest of their brainchildren to be cut loose
is Google X, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Dock in Apple's Mac OS X.
"Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you."
Not nearly as smooth or as customizable as the Dock, but just give them time. [Gadgetopia]
9:56:49 AM
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Bloggies winners announced
Congratulations to all the winners of the
2005 Bloggies
! While I'm sure
BoingBoing
was nervous, they managed to pull it off and win the category popgadget
was nominated in, Best Group Blog. Just kidding, it was absolutely an
honor and quite surprising, frankly, to even be a finalist. BoingBoing
also won Best Blog of the year. Regine
was twice robbed, as best European blog and Best Technology Blog, but all the nominees are good and worth checking out.
Thank you so much, everyone, for reading and supporting popgadget. This was exciting!
- Mia [Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women]
9:55:34 AM
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Flickr and the Ransom Notes. As
you know, I've put out a call for guest bloggers to help out during my
skiing holiday next week. One will be Dennis Hettema, from Sweden's OP3.
OP3 are particularly into bar code scanning, with camera phones,
which I believe will be incredibly important, as it's a way of joining
the real world with the digital. Check out this article I wrote for Net Imperative about this area.
Dennis' first post is really cool!
Most people are probably familiar with flickr. It's an awesome
service and a great testimony to the growth of digital photography.
Flickr has got a lot of hardcore/die-hard fans and they've started developing their own applications based on flickr. Meta Atem
allows you to spell words using images from the flickr database. It's
amazing to see the amount of different variations you can create. This
application, that only seems to be useful to professional ransom note
writers, is probably one of the best forms of free advertising the
flickr service could get. It shows of the enormity of their database,
the speed of their service and the love its users have for flickr.
Mobile phone photography will make services like flickr and
fun/useless/useful applications such as spelling with flickr more and
more commonplace. Yes MMS still isn't much of a success - I seriously
wonder if it ever will be a success - but that's food for another post.
Yet making pictures using mobile phones is rapidly becoming mainstream.
The other side to this is, just like webcam's, our most intimate
moments can be observed and recorded by others. Privacy is dead, get
over it.
Russell adds: and here's a message using the service - you can have hours of fun with this:
[The Mobile Technology Weblog]
9:49:18 AM
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Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 7-13 Mar 2005. This week: Microsoft's RSS Aggregator, mobile web 2.0, open source web 2.0 (stats,
adverts, topics), Structured Blogging, ETech.
Well this week has been a blur of activity for me and my server. First off I launched
an RSS statistics project
with Jon Udell and Feedburner, then later in the week I had fun riffing on what
Microsoft was up to with start.com, their sandbox development of a web-based RSS
Aggregator.
Microsoft Makes A Start On RSS
When I read the short SiliconBeat
post about Microsoft's sandbox development of a
web-based RSS Aggregator, I immediately blogged it and
took screenshots (which became a popular attraction when Microsoft briefly pulled the site). I
thought it was big news, and still do, because of what the prototype revealed - Microsoft
intends to integrate an RSS Aggregator with its MSN Search product. That's important
because their main rivals, Google and Yahoo, are primarily search companies.
We
all knew Microsoft would eventually come out with an RSS Aggregator product, but most of
us thought it would be integrated into Outlook. Well it seems that search is instead
going to be the platform from which Microsoft will challenge its main rivals in the RSS
war.
I updated my post about
start.com 5 times during the week, so my other thoughts are there if you're
interested.
Mobile Web 2.0
Scott Gatz, senior director of personalization products for Yahoo, emailed me (and others)
during the week to break the news about Yahoo's new mobile RSS service. This is an
extension of the My Yahoo! re-design which was launched in November. Scott said:
"Basically we redesigned My Yahoo around RSS and now we brought it to the mobile world
(and we have a desktop ticker too). Really all about getting whatever you want wherever
you want." Interesting stuff and Russ Beattie has more details
about how to actually use the mobile service.
Who else is doing mobile RSS? I've been aware of Bloglines mobile service for a while now and I've
even tried to use it on my mobile phone. And I
read in Susan Mernit's blog today that Google has a new mobile service. Susan says: "the deal is that
Google's put up a new mobile start page with links to all their current mobile
services--SMS, web and image search, imode interface."
No mention of RSS, but it wouldn't
surprise me to see it introduced soon (ditto Google
News).
Open Source Web 2.0
Bit of talk about open source things in the Web 2.0 world this week. Most importantly
of course, there is my open
source RSS statistics effort :-) But also Jeff Jarvis has a great idea for an open source ad
network. And Marc Canter has been writing inspiring stuff about Open Topics. Plus for
the geekier amongst us, there are now a heap of resources for
Ajax web development (how GMail and other great web apps like it were developed). My
favourite resource, for its claim to handle 99% of the development work for you, is SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit.
Structured Blogging
A couple of weeks ago I
wrote about Bob Wyman's (of PubSub) post on what he calls "structured
blogging". As he described it then: "The basic idea is to go beyond "mere" text in
blogs and include structured XML that describes job-openings, events, new prices, press
releases, updates to phone numbers and contact info, requests for proposals, etc."
Now PubSub has come up with a new weblog called structuredblogging.org. It currently offers a
WordPress plug-in to carry out structured blogging. It also has some XML schemas and
further technical
resources. Looks pretty interesting and I'll be following its progress. Would be
great to get a Movable Type plug-in for this.
Etech
Finally, the coming week promises to be a good one for Web 2.0. The O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference is being held March 14-17 and the sessions sound like Web 2.0 Geek Nirvana
to me :-) What a pity I can't be there... sob! However I look forward to lots of reports
from the bloggers who do attend and I sure hope Heath Row (or someone as thorough as him) will be
there to transcribe the sessions. Better yet, I hope IT Conversations records them and publishes
them soon after. C'mon, I'm relying on the blogosphere to be my ears and eyes for ETech -
don't let me down people! [Read/Write Web]
9:16:09 AM
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How not to crash a plane with your mobile phone.  Like Toby Ziegler of The West Wing, the ban on mobile phones on airplanes has never made sense to me:
Flight Attendant: You can't use your phone until we land, sir.
Toby: We're flying in a Lockheed eagle series
L-1011. It came off the line 20 months ago and carries a Sim-5
Transponder tracking system. Are you telling me I can still flummox
this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack?
Shoe checks and bans on knitting needles don't make a lot of sense if a passenger can bring down a plane with 3G, so it's nice to know it's not the plane in the sky that's at risk; rather, it's mobile phones on the ground:
Contrary to popular belief, the main impediment to the use
of mobile phones on planes is not interference with the aircraft's
avionics systems. On a typical long-haul flight, 20 mobile phones are
left switched on. Instead, the problem is that airborne mobile phones
disrupt mobile networks on the ground. An airliner with 500 phones on
board, whizzing across a city, would befuddle the network as the phones
busily hopped from one base-station to the next.
Since one of those 20 mobiles left on is normally mine, it's good to
know my absent-mindedness hasn't brought me and my fellow passengers
perilously close to a disaster of which we were unaware.
In any case, new on-board base stations called picocells have now
been developed, and are expected to be approved in 2005 for a 2006
service launch. Which means that ET can phone home while on the way,
though the matter of in-flight telephone etiquette will still need to
be sorted out. [Wanda Lust: First Class UK Travel Blog]
9:02:20 AM
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And the Winner for Most Luxurious Brand Goes to.
 When you are at the top of the luxury food chain, you must be doing something right. The
Luxury Institute (yes, something like this actually exists),
in their latest Luxury Brand Status Index (LBSI) , determined that Ritz Carlton ranked first among 52 luxury brands
by wealthy consumers across four categories. To get to this conclusion, more than 200 households, each with a minimum
of $200,000 in gross annual income and a net worth of at least $750,000, were surveyed. (Did anybody get a call[sigma]I
don[base ']t remember my phone ringing.)
Runner ups to the Ritz included Porsche, Mercedes, Armani and Four Seasons.
[Luxist]
8:40:42 AM
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Dog LED tail light broadcasting. 
If elephants can send SMS, we may as well outfit our
dogs with some airtexting equipment, right? This ultra-bright LED that attaches to Fido[base ']s tail and uses that whole
persistence of vision thing to display programmed messages is still on the fanciful tip, but clearly some technophile
dog owner noticed the gaping void that remains in the growing
dog electronics market (there are already doggie
cellphones and
digital cameras).
[Via Protein Feed]
[Engadget]
8:32:32 AM
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Apple wants a 10% cut of all Made for iPod accessories. 
There was nothing too nefarious about Apple coming out with their new [base "]Made for iPod[per thou] seal of approval program a few
months ago[~]it was pitched as a convenient way for consumers to know for sure that the accessories they[base ']re buying will
work with their iPod[~]but according to CNET there is a dark side to the program: Apple is now demanding a tithe of 10%
of the wholesale price of any Made for iPod accessory. No one is forcing anyone to participate in the program (it[base ']s not
like you need Apple[base ']s permission to make an iPod accessory), and it[base ']s completely normal (and expected) for
manufacturers to drop a little coin for the licensing rights for a logo or to pay for the certification process, but a
10% cut? Sounds less like Apple is trying to look out for consumers (who may end up paying a little more for Made for
iPod accessories unless manufacturers decide to take a hit on their margins) and more like they[base ']re just looking for a
way to get a nice chunk of the rapidly-growing market for third-party accessories without actually having to sell
anything extra themselves.
[Thanks, Mazo]
[Engadget]
8:31:48 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Joerg Rheinboldt.
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