Following Bob’s foray into game space, experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh takes the plunge in the second interview on “This Spartan Life,” a new talk show filmed in the world of the “Halo” video game series. In 2001, Ahwesh made a Machinima film of her own called “She Puppet” (Machinima is cinema made inside a game engine) using footage culled from months playing the “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” game. So it doesn’t take long for her to feel right at home. This latest interview takes us through some truly spectacular landscapes and “fantasy architecture,” and, of course, features the customary random bursts of violence (not to mention teleportation and a little skull-dribbling).
I think the Spartan Life folks have a good concept here. The conversations are interesting, but what makes them even more compelling is the fact that an exploration is taking place. It’s like walking around in an abandoned film set. Much of it is tongue-in-cheek. “Sometimes you really feel like you’re running through this insane maze, and somebody’s always scoping in on you,” says host Damian Lacedaemion, his helmeted head framed in someone’s crosshairs. “There’s this constant threat of violence hanging in the air around here.” But there’s an element of genuine wonder as well. Two strangers explore a bizarre new world, a world normally governed by rules and a quest. But they are simply rovers, and there is no quest. There is only curiosity and play. As Damian says: “sometimes I think it feels like being in a movie that’s waiting for you to set it in motion.”
Monthly Archives: July 2005
web pubs will become more like cable
In Wired, “Web Publishers Eye Your Wallet,” Adam L. Penenberg chats with Pat Kenealy, CEO of International Data Group (IDG), which publishes over 300 computer, game, and info tech-related magazines. Kenealy thinks it’s only a matter of time before premium web publications start raising their gates and asking for money. The conventional wisdom is that charging for content, or even asking readers to register, is suicide. But Kenealy points to cable television for evidence that people can get used to paying for something they really want:
“In 1955, TV was free,” Kenealy said, “and two generations later most people pay for it. There was a built-in reluctance to pay for TV until it got so much better than broadcast. That’s what I think will happen with the internet.”
With cable, one monthly fee gets you access to hundreds of channels. You don’t have to fill out dozens of subscriptions to dozens of different stations. Except for premium channels, everything is more or less set. Web publishers need to figure out a similar system. KeepMedia is a site that is experimenting with this. I would bet that eventually cable will merge with the web into one standard service: basic cable/web over broadband. Your premium channels (sites?) – in addition to HBO and Showtime – might be The New York Times, The Economist and The Atlantic, while basic cable/web would include Discovery, Comedy Central, MTV, ESPN etc., along with Forbes, Wired, Knight Ridder and Tribune newspapers, Reuters and hundreds, even thousands, more. A few of the more popular blogs might be thrown in there too. There will always be the free web too, just as there’s free television and radio, but I agree with Kenealy that we’re going to see a migration of many web publications toward a cable-style model.
See also, “web news as gated community” on this blog.
the paperless high school
According to a recent article in the Arizona Daily Star, Empire High School in Vail, Arizona will soon become the state’s first all-wireless, all-laptop public school. The laptops will entirely replace paper textbooks. Traditional lesson plans will be built around online articles and electronic reference material. Adminstrators are betting that this flexible teacher-driven curriculum will inspire both students and teachers.
Calvin Baker, superintendent of Vail Unified School District, said the move to electronic materials gets teachers away from the habit of simply marching through a textbook each year.
Educators also believe the initiative will improve learning, engage tech-saavy students, and better prepare them for future careers.
the librarian in the techno-spa
The uncritical embrace of technology plagues American universities and consumers alike, whose credo is “adopt first, ask questions later.” An assistant professor of english from an unnamed Midwestern liberal arts college, writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education of his dismay at the changes underway in American university libraries, where traditional stacks are left to deteriorate while money is lavished on fancy “techno-spas,” transforming research sanctuaries into digital rec centers. The article is written in response to a very a real trend, brought to wider public attention in a NY Times article in May about an initiative at the University of Texas, Austin library in which approximately 90,000 books are to be relocated from the Flawn Academic Center to other libraries around campus to make way for a “24-hour information commons.”
Benton’s rhapsodizing on the pleasures of the stacks can be trying:
I once had a useful, relevant book fall on my head like Newton’s apple. Perhaps it was pushed there by some ghostly scholar, one of my forebears whom I might consider myself privileged to join in the posthumous academy of spectral stack walkers.
But his overall criticism is correct. Many universities have adopted a servile stance, catering to what they perceive to be a new breed of restless, multi-tasking student. But the “customer is always right” philosophy probably isn’t doing the students any favors in the long run. A generation is coming of age lost somewhere between the old print-based hierarchies of knowledge and the new Googlesque. And they aren’t receiving much in the way of guidance. A university president needs shiny groves of sleek new computers to wow the funders and alumnae, just as he needs a winning football team. The business of universities and the business of technology march ahead together without much thought for what kind of citizen they might be producing.
From Benton:
Library administrators have had to make hard choices as costs have risen, their missions have expanded, and their budgets have failed to keep pace. But I am not so sure that the techno-spa model should be adopted so uncritically. Who will profit most from the transformation now and in the future, as fees and updates for new technologies continue indefinitely? Is that transformation really about the demands of students? If so, should we conform to their expectations, or make an effort to reshape them against the grain of the culture?
Alas, at many institutions, there is no longer much room for books on our central campuses. But we do have room for coffee bars, sports facilities, and a collection of other expensive, space-consuming amenities.
For that reason, I find it hard to accept that digitization is motivated primarily by constrained budgets and limited space. The money is there, and so is the space. It’s just that colleges want to spend the money and use the space for something else that, presumably, will make them more competitive among students who are, perhaps, more interested in amenities than education.
One purpose of universities is to provide insulation from the world at large for the cultivation of sensitive minds. Universities might consider extending this principle to technology, applying the brakes on what could be a runaway train. The Amish, who, to say the least, are loathe to adopt new technologies, ask first, when confronted with a new invention, how it might change them. We could learn something from that. The answer isn’t to hold candlelight vigils for the death of the card catalogue or the scribbled margin note, but rather to ask at each step how this is changing us, and whether we think it is a good thing.
(image by kendrak, via Flickr)
if you love your book, set it free
A piece in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago explores how some publishers and authors are trying to use the web to promote books. One way is to offer free electronic copies – of a whole book, in the case of sci-fi writer and Boing Boingian Cory Doctorow, or sometimes just a chunk to the get the reader hooked, as was the case with Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore,” the first five chapters of which Knopf put online for free. Some publishers are courting bloggers, sending free copies, seeking endorsements, facilitating author interviews. Some are setting up blogs of their own (see the Freakonomics blog). There are currently two fan sites devoted to a fictional actress appearing in Bret Easton Ellis’s forthcoming novel “Lunar Park.”
publishers fire another volley at google library
Last week, the Association for Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) joined the escalating chorus of concern over the legality of Google’s library project, echoing a letter from the Association of American University Presses in May warning that by digitizing library collections without the consent of publishers, Google was about to perpetrate a massive violation of copyright law. The library project has been a troublesome issue for the search king ever since it was announced last December. Resistance first came from across the Atlantic where French outrage led a unified European response to Google’s perceived anglo-imperialism, resulting in plans to establish a European digital library. More recently, it has come from the anglos themselves, namely publishers, who, in the case of the ALPSP, “absolutely dispute” Google’s claim that the project falls within the “fair use” section of the US Copyright Act. From the ALPSP statement (download PDF):
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers calls on Google to cease unlicensed digitisation of copyright materials with immediate effect, and to enter into urgent discussions with representatives of the publishing industry in order to arrive at an appropriate licensing solution for ‘Google Print for Libraries’. We cannot believe that a business which prides itself on its cooperation with publishers could seriously wish to build part of its business on a basis of copyright infringement.
In the relatively brief history of intellectual property, libraries have functioned as a fair use zone – a haven for the cultivation of minds, insulated from the marketplace of ideas. As the web breaks down boundaries separating readers from remote collections, with Google stepping in as chief wrecking ball, the idea of fair use is being severely tested.
infinite canvas comics
A while back, I posted on this demo (Flash, 8.4Mb) of Jef Raskin‘s proposed zooming interface for his Archy system. There’s more than an echo of that work in these infinite canvas comics made using the Tarquin Engine, a template for Macromedia Flash that lets authors easily create scrolling, zoomable comics. While I can’t say I’m enthralled by the content of any of the comics on display, there’s something exciting about the possibilities of the form. I do wish the format was free & open, enabling more dabbling by amateurs: there are clearly any number of directions that this could take.
television merging with the web
With faster and faster broadband connections, it’s getting easier to deliver video content over the internet, blurring the lines between television and the web. More and more, we’re living in that blur, and a few recent changes suggest that the trend toward convergence is inevitable. CBS News, though lagging behind its competitors today, seems to get the message that tightly scheduled, broadcast media will soon be a relic of the past. In a bid to stay ahead of the curve (and perhaps, in time, of the competition), CBS News has totally revamped its website into what it calls a “24-hour, on-demand news service, available across many platforms.” There you will find a variety of interactive features, text news from the wires, live radio, RSS feeds, and a podcasting service. You will also find dozens upon dozens of free video segments – the usual television programming, only broken up into bight-sized chunks. From these clips, visitors are invited to “build a newscast,” assembling video segments into a personal playlist. Sooner or later, when other news outlets go the same way, we’ll begin to see RSS video aggregators that automatically pull clips from around the web, the same way feed readers assemble text news today. This is already beginning to happen for video blogs.
But it’s not just the crusty old news networks that are changing. With AOL’s webcast of the the Live 8 concerts, and Amazon’s upcoming 10th Anniversary shindig, where it will be streaming live on its site a concert featuring Bob Dylan and Norah Jones, it seems the TV-web merger is being driven from both sides.
Article: “TV Moves to the Internet”
vimeo open to the public – new constellations in the sky
In February, I stumbled upon a wonderful new site for storing and sharing video clips, which, until recently, was being tested on closed beta. Now fully open to the public, Vimeo aims to do for short form video what Flickr does for photos, openly citing the photo-sharing phenom as inspiration. Right now, it’s pretty basic. Create a free account and you can start uploading compressed clips (8MB weekly limit), adding tags, and browsing what other users have put up. Over time, I expect they’ll start adding some Flickr-esque features (like in-house email, groups, video sets, calendar, favorites and who knows what else). When Vimeo first came onto my radar, they had an interesting feature that allowed you to string several clips together within a single tag, creating an ad hoc montage. They still say on their “about” page that “several clips can be played together to create a movie,” but I could no longer figure out how to do that.
All in all, given how troublesome it can be to get video working on the web, Vimeo seems to be off to a very smooth start. Something I hope they figure out is how to make it easy for users to post video to blogs. If they could rig up a basic form that automatically embeds a clip into a blog post, it would be a tremendous boon to the incipient video blogging community. And if they could provide basic video editing tools, then they might have something really big on their hands. (I’ve posted here my inaugural upload to Vimeo – a column from the ruins at Caesaria, from my recent trip to Israel.)
Though just barely off the ground, I have a feeling that Vimeo could evolve into something serious. Another exciting launch is Odeo, the podcast hub. Taken together as a constellation, these three ventures – Flickr, Vimeo, and Odeo – are constructing the beginnings of a vast media commons, tiny when compared with the giant 20th century media industries, but maybe not for long (see post on the London bombings). Another recently launched site, ourmedia, seeks to create a similar kind of homebrew media repository, offering (through a partnership with the Internet Archive) to “host your media forever — for free.” But so far, I’ve been much more impressed with the the afore-mentioned image/video/sound trio. Different media present different challenges, and there’s something to be said for doing one thing really well rather than trying to do everything sort of well. I’ve found ourmedia’s interface frustrating. It’s difficult to browse for media, and sometimes hard to open an item once you’ve found it. Flickr, Vimeo and Odeo all provide a dynamic tagging system, making it much easier for users to dig and explore. ourmedia has no such system. What ourmedia is exploring more intensively (and Odeo too) is the need for an editorial voice, maintaining a rotating roster of volunteer editors, whose duties, among other things, include constructing the site’s homepage. Odeo, on the other hand, is more clearly descended from traditional broadcast media, namely radio. The site is organized into channels, each with its own signature mix of programming. But unlike a radio station, an Odeo channel has fluid boundaries. Listener’s can pick and choose programs, constructing their own broadcast.
But ultimately, we can’t leave it up to these sites to make selections for us. Flickr has its own blog where the site’s creators draw attention to noteworthy material. But more interesting is Flickrzen, a blog posting regular “reportages” of the most compelling photos turning up on Flickr. Flickr Pix Photo Magazine is on a similar mission. Of course, with millions of photographs already on Flickr, and thousands pouring in as I write, it would be impossible for any single editorial body to exhaustively survey the whole repository. So there’s definitely room for more of these curatorial ventures. They are the next step.
curvaceous electronic paper, with color
Fujitsu has developed a flexible, light-weight electronic display capable of retaining stable, full-color images even when bent. About as thick as a plastic transparency (like an x-ray), the paper consists of three substrate layers (red, green and blue) and requires “only one one-hundredth to one ten-thousandth the energy of conventional display technologies.” The paper’s memory system enables continuous image display with zero energy required, while changing images consumes only a negligible amount of power. And because displays won’t require continuous updates, Fujitsu boasts, the screen will not flicker. The paper should be available to consumers by Spring, 2006. It will be pushed for use in the office, home and for signs and advertisements in public spaces. It’s not clear, however, if it will be able to handle film or sophisticated animation (I would guess not very well). If anyone reading this happens to be in Tokyo today or tomorrow, the prototype is currently being exhibited at the Fujitsu Forum.