Truth in World of Warcraft

Allied Weapons Of Truth
Aura of Truth
Avatars of Truth
Champions of Truth
Chaotic Truth
Citadel of Truth
Dawn of Truth
Defenders of Truth
DemiGodsOfTruth
Followers of Truth
Forgotten Truth
Glaive of Truth		 Heros of Truth And Might
Illusion of Truth
Keepers of Truth
Perversion Of Truth
Prevailing Truth
Prophets of Truth
Rangers of Truth
Savage Truth
SavageTruth
Saviors of Truth
Seekers of Truth
Sentinels of Truth		 Sovereignty of Truth
The Brutal Truth
The Convictors of Truth
The Guardians of Truth
The Savage Truth
The Seekers Of Truth
TornTruth
Truth Divine
Truth and Justice
Truth and Law
Truth or Consequences

So who says gamers are not interested in the truth? This list from Thottbot World of Warcraft (a Google for WOW) is of guilds with “truth” in their name. I rather like “Truth or Consequences”.

SSHRC Knowledge Project: Trip Report

Lynn Hughes and I spent three days at the Knowledge Project, an event put together by the Social Science and Research Council of Canada. Wednesday was devoted to reporting back about the Transformation (more in another post.)
Thursday was an all day poster session (or, as Marc Renaud called it, a trade-show) for Strategic Research Clusters, MCRIs, CURAs, and INEs – in other words many of the large SSHRC-funded projects were there. Lynn and I are PIs on iMatter or Interactive Matter, a Strategic Cluster on digital media creation and interpretation in the arts and humanities.
What is interesting is that SSHRC, despite having impressive handouts for the “Knowledge Project”, does not have a web site for it.

ni9e: Grafitti Analysis

Geoffrey Tressider sent me a link to ni9e, a site by two designers with a number of text visualization and design projects including a “Graffiti Analysis” project where they track the gestures of creating grafitti and then use the gestures to create new works. An interesting take on visualizing text – here they visualize the graphic gestures.

Check out how they paint with letters in “typo graphic illus tration” and similar projects.

Digital Medievalist

Digitalmedievalist.org is a new site for medievalists working with new media. It has news, a wiki, forums and a journal that will be coming on stream soon. Daniel O’Donnell at Lethbridge is one of the people behind it. I particularly like the clean design of the site. Daniel tells me they have not had luck getting people to edit wiki pages which doesn’t bode well for academic wikis.

Digital Badges

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of wearable digital badges that could be programmed with messages. There are some affordable packages like the MessageTag or Mtag. The question (before I buy one) is … just what would I program it to display?

A related, but more sophisticated, product is nTAG which is essentially a small screen others can read off your chest. It has RFID and infrared so nTAGs can communicate with each other (“Hi, I like vanilla ice cream too!”) or with a central server. The nTAG web site is coy about privacy and costs. I think they rent you the service and don’t sell the technology, which is a pity, as it would be interesting to imagine some playful uses. For a story about nTAG, see Breaking the Ice 2.0.

lavalife: Where Canadian singles go

The Globe and Mail has a story by Dr. Jean Marmoreo, “You can speed up love” (Saturday, Feb. 12, 2005, page F7) about older newly single women who are “slicing time” and using lavalife.com to meet other singles. The article and the web site claims that 8 million Canadians have accounts on lavalife, an extraordinary number. Dr. Marmoreo talks about slicing time – not having the time to mess around when you are a professional with children and therefore using web dating services.