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.
What is a Wired City?
Big cities, small ones rushing to get wired is an article the more or less sums up the rush by cities to call themselves “wired”. What is next? What is beyond a wireless bubble?
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.
Dispense with your horse: The Watley Review
Just discovered! Humour for history of computing geeks, Watley Classified Advertorial: Babbage Machine. And they also sell “Difference Engine Manipulator Pads” (mouse-pads).
The Home Computer, Back Then
Scientists from RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.
I noticed this intriguing image and caption up in a display in our labs and thanks to St?©fan Sinclair traced it to Matt Kirschenbaum’s blog where a comment then took me to Urban Legends Reference Pages: Inboxer Rebellion (Does Not Compute). Pity it’s a hoax – why wasn’t Rand thinking about the home computer back then? If you look closely the teleprinter is distorted and the suit is too short for the display, but the caption is so good it should be true.
Bloggers meet at the MLA
Thanks to a blog entry by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum I was led to an article in Inside Higher Ed :: MLA about “Bloggers in the Flesh” by Scott Jaschik that speculates on academic blogging and whether it should count to tenure.
An interesting point Matt makes is that you have to write assuming that your wife, chair or students might read your blog. Holding ideas in plain view can both make one cautious and lead to embarassment. I have, on at least one occaision, had someone tell me they scanned my blog to figure out what I am like as a person. So … just to warn you all … the author of this site is just a character and doesn’t resemble any living being, least of all me.
You No Touch It: Atwood’s Book Signing Device
Margaret Atwood has come up with a device for remotely signing books to save her the trouble of early flights and mini-bar food according to stories like, Online answer to writer’s angst, (The Guardian, Charlotte Higgins, Jan. 8, 2005.)
The company she has founded to develop this device is called Unotchit (U No Tch It – get it?) While having a video conference with an author followed by some personal message (spell checked, of course) faxed to me might be OK, I don’t see how this will substitute for book-signing which is about presence – being close to the authority. Hell, a book is mediated authority, why would I want more of the same instead of a moment of real presence?
What’s interesting is how gentle bloggers and journalists are being with Atwood. It’s a stupid idea that says a lot about Atwood that none of us want to consider because we like her writing so much.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is an interesting social web tool where you get a tool bar that lets you rate sites for friends or stumble to a site that others think you might like. It encourages serindipitous stumbling across things – something people have felt was missing from the IT world. Of course, there is commercial side to StumbleUpon – for a fee people can promote their sites, see the “Sponsors” page,
2. Purchase Promotion
StumbleUpon can deliver your site directly to interested stumblers. If you have a high quality site and would like to increase your traffic and get community feedback, you may Request Promotion of your content.