Month: January 2005

Centre for Global Dialogue: Virtual Themeworld

VIRTUAL THEMEWORLD is a shards and space interface to themes about global governance and risk. I think this is meant to be the neat showcase interface for the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue. (Swiss Re is a reinsurance company.) The Themeworld is a Shockwave based interface for exploring linked themes that when you first enter feels like Asteroids in colour.
Jan. 28 Update – I got an e-mail from the creator of Themeworld, Matt Bindoff of .bindoff. He justifiably corrected me that it is Shockwave based not Flash. If, like me, you are fuzzy on the difference see, Macromedia – What’s the difference between Shockwave and Flash?

Pac-Manhattan: City Games

Wired News: Manhattan Gets Pac-Man Fever describes a game Pac Manhattan where people run through Manhattan wearing coloured ponchos playing Pac-Man characters. They get instructions from generals over cell-phone who have some sort of control panel. Now this is an idea for a wired city! This urban game was an experiment by New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications graduate program. Pac-Manhattan is the NYU site on the game.
For some reason I thought I had blogged this before … obviously I am having a blog identity crisis.

TV Searching: Google, Yahoo and others

According to Information Week, Google Search > Google, Yahoo Jump Into Video Search Arena > January 25, 2005″ href=”http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=57703718″>Google, Yahoo Jump Into Video Search Arena, Antone Gonsalves, January 25, 2005. They are not the first to provide video search. Blinkx lets you search a variety of TV sources and then displays results with close caption text that matches your search and a small thumbnail video clip from the source.
It is amazing how powerful the text search engine paradigm is and how such engines can be applied to other media ñ in fact across media.

LoveStage Professional: QuickTime Authoring

Totally Hip Technologies Inc. has a QuickTime authoring environment that you can use to author video interactives. I came across this reading about David Wolf’s Vidget 1: an interactive networked VJ application for Quicktime (he is now up to version 3.5.) Other uses include streaming lecture interfaces. Uniquely able to work with video to create interactive interfaces in a way that Flash doesn’t really.

Project Honey Pot: How to munge your address

A great set of pages on how to make your e-mail address hard for a spambot to harvest is, Project Honey Pot: How to Avoid Spambots. Project Honey Pot is also interesting at a higher level. They are encouraging website administrators to work with them to mount pages with fake addresses that let them track spambots.

Anti-spam efforts to this point have generally focused on the tail end of the spam cycle. In order to send out their messages, spammers must gather addresses, procure contracts, send emails, and collect money. Unfortunately, whether through filtering, authentication or enforcement, nearly every solution to this point has tried to stop spammers at virtually the last step: sending messages. Project Honey Pot is an attempt to move earlier in the spam cycle and identify the “King Pin” spammers who sit at the top of the food chain and spend their time harvesting our addresses.

The company behind this initiative, unspam.com has a great spam news ticker.