2013: 10 Minute TV

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[What is this about?]

“Christina runs ChannelZero. One of the girls in another school tried to start a channel in the summer, but pretty soon they all started watching Christina’s, so she ended up looking pretty stupid. She’s still flaming ‘Stina which is pretty pathetic.

‘Stina lets me do some of the scheduling sometimes when I’m round at hers, and some of the other girls help out – looking after the boards and kicking ppl who don’t share, or share something for everyone to watch at same time, which is like the most childish thing you can do. It takes ages to get something if lots of people aren’t sharing.

‘Stina got a token last year, which means she gets fresh stuff from Australia and America before anyone we know. One of the older boys in school has a token too, but his lot just get geeky stuff. All spaceships and aliens – long boring stuff with episodes that are hours long. My Dad has the token for our family, and he’s got mostly his football mates running his channel, he gives me some megs for videos sometimes.

ChannelZero is pretty standard I guess – it’s videos with the latest 10 minute episodes of East, Lovebomb and Vamps in between, but we stick our own stuff in there – like a lot of kids I suppose. Remixes and shoutouts and stuff. There’s usually about half-an-hour of ppl’s camblogs and stuff after each episode cos we want to talk about the clothes and stunts in Vamps or something. We get enough from the ads to buy more vids and clothes and stuff, if we do really well we split it with the group.

It’s exams next year so we probably won’t be able to keep it going, but ‘Stina said shes had a couple of bids for it already, and says she could probably get enough for a holiday or a new moby, so I reckon she’ll sell it.”

Social pressures to watch the latest seasons of Charmed, Buffy and Angel combine with file-sharing apps such as Kazaa to mean that many 15-24 year olds have watched entire seasons from the US on their PCs or Burned VCDs before they are shown on satellite pay TV or the much later free-to-air.

Music request stations such as The Box, Kerrang TV etc are dominated by fanmobs dictating programming via SMS and webvotes.

Microsoft’s 3degrees application aims to combine shared media context – mp3 jukebox shared between 10 friends and chat.

A “Social Scheduling” scenario as shown above could see p2p filesharing apps such as Bittorrent (which increases in efficiency with each concurrent user) thrive in the creation of ultralocal, and/or ultratribal media channels.

2013: introduction

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Okay… I got asked by someone in the BBC to write some stories, storylets actually – about digital technology and our lives in 2013. I’ve dashed off eight over the weekend, and had ideas for four more.

And as an outboard-thought-experiment, I’m going to publish four here; in the hope that anyone who reads them can improve on them, spin off some interesting tangents on them, or just fact-check my posterior as I wasn’t particularly rigourous or scientific about the trends or tech they build on.

So comments, or trackbacked extensions on the storylets most, most welcome.

After all, if the four storylets here end up more valuable to the BBC as a result of putting them up here, then that’s a valuable storylet in itself…

Glancing

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MattW‘s just gone public with a project he’s working on called “Glancing”. From his project notes:

“The analogy I’m thinking of here is a group of people sitting working at their computers. Every so often, you look up and look around you, sometimes to rest your eyes, and other times to check people are still there. Sometimes you catch an eye, sometimes not. Sometimes it triggers a conversation. But it bonds you into a group experience, without speaking.

Would it be possible to build software like this? That’s what Glancing is intended to do (there are more implicit assumptions in this): To model a group of people online who occassionally glance at each other, which is a small social transaction. This is done using a group model which stores the glance state: High if people have been glancing recently, low otherwise.”

It’s an interesting way to look at what some social software could be. Not a system that encompasses of facilitates all interactions of a group, but something that builds the necessary starting conditions for those interactions. The fertile substrate or “loam” as we matt(s) are fond of calling it.

MMORPGs seem to be advancing this ‘ecological’ model of social interactions through quite different, connected apps/systems: The GameNeverEnding particularly. Something like Glancing would fit right in with persistent worlds – maintaining loose, low-effort connections to the people in those other places while you are working on your desktop…

Anyway – take a look at MattW’s Glancing Notes at see what you think:

» Interconnected: Glancing Notes

GSV Eloquent Bayesian Corollary

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Spam lives.

It’s become a versatile, adaptive network-scale beast.

Bayesian filtering – the most effective tool I have to stop spam getting through is mostly working, but the Spam Demiurge is feeling it’s way around, in blind-but-rapid evolutionary cycles, to find the gaps. I’m starting to think, once you get beyond the inconvenience, The Blind Spammaker is starting to create beauty*.

I got a spam tonight, for ‘gentlemanly enhancements’ (what else?) with the subject line:

“Subject: canon eigenspace polaris”

I think that there’s going to be a growing convergence between spam subject lines and the names of Culture Ships…

The thrill…

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…of finding out that someone you really like the thoughts of has a blog – which after all is just a way to know their thought and perhaps have a conversation around them at a difference.

John Harris has a blog called VirtualTravelog. John was/is an ex-mining engineer, ex-pat Yorkshireman who was a director of technology at Sapient in San Francisco when I worked for them. When I was in SF we’d go for a warm beer and have a really excellent wide-ranging talk about tech, society, ecology, engineering and whatever else the beer or surroundings inspired.

Look like his blog is going to be much the same. His latest post at time of writing is on “Economics and the Internet’s Large-Scale Topology” which seems to build on some of the work I was involved with in a very small way with him at Sapient.

Top stuff and one to subscribe to.

Link spume

moleitau

Outboard brainfood:

The forbidden zone

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Architecture has, throughout history, encoded manners, customs and law into physical space. Now it extends its influence into the digital.

“Icebergs Systems is beta-testing Safe Haven, a combination of hardware transmitters and a small piece of control software that is loaded into a camera phone handset. When the handset is taken into a room or building containing the Safe Haven hardware, the phone is instructed to deactivate the imaging systems. The systems are reactivated as soon as the handset is out of range.”

&#187 Picturephoning.com: ‘Safe’ zones blocks picture phones

And you will know us by the trail of the breadcrumbs.

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Interesting, honest and dogma-free discussion of breadcrumb trails in website design at Asterisk [via guyweb].

Upsum seems to be “as a designer I always put them in, but as a user I never use them”. Research and testing of breadcrumb-style solutions I’ve done supports this – they tend to reassure users rather than be a crucial part of the interface. It is a crumb: a tiny part of the picture people form of where their are in the structure of a site, and where it’s possible to go next.

IMHO, If you don’t have a highly-structured service, or screen-space is at a premium, there may be better ways to spend your effort and pixels in the service of users.

Had interesting comments in user tests along the lines of “Well, it’s something that all proper websites have, but I don’t really know what it’s for”. On iCan we’re tryng to give people lots of these crumbs with which to make their own way with what best suits them.

There’s a primary ‘location’ cue: a fairly traditional ‘vertical-slice’ hierarchical breadcrumb trail, prominent “see also” links which display a ‘horizontal-slice’ across the service, and at the bottom of each page, a ‘last things you looked at’ pot of links. This aims to support “The Cycle” hypertext pattern, allowing people to flip back and forth through a self-reinforcing trail of oft-visited links.

Jump London

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388M0173.jpg

Jump London on Channel 4 tonight was full of spectacular moments, but not the spectacular moments the filmmakers had hoped, I thought.

The format was – introduce “Le Parkour” or freerunning, with a brief history, then buildup to a set of freerunning pieces across major London monuments.

The potted history of Le Parkour was good – best I’ve seen in a mainstream programme, starting from the schooldays of one of the originators of the sport, Sebastien Foucan. The buildup was pretty drawn-out with mock tension over whether or not stuffy old London building managers would let maniac Frenchmen run all over their Grade-One listed heaps.

Then the runs were shown. The more classical ‘monuments’ like The Royal Albert Hall, County Hall and The Mall were actually pretty dull. Not to knock les superheroics francais, but freerunning just doesn’t work on buildings of classical scale it seems – not enough nooks and crannies, ramps, and articulation of form to waltz with it seems.

The trio of parkouristes were at their best in the close quarters, dense backalleys of Bankside and fractal flatroofs of Wardour St, Soho. And at their most spectacular on the gun turrets and gunwales of HMS Belfast and the brutalist concrete crevices of The National Theatre.

A number of pundits were put up to speculate briefly on the potential phenomenon, including Wills Alsop and Hutton, Skateboarding & The City academic Iain Borden and, weirdly, The Pet Shop Boys.

The best bit for me was a little 2 minute sequence in the buildup to the run, where you saw the guys fresh from France, having to familiarise themselves with the feel of a new city.

They had to handle it, touch and examine it. Jack Hawksmoor for real. You saw them adjusting to the slightly different rhythms and gaits of London – brick courses just a little different, past layers of Imperial measure intersposed with more modern metric, bollards at slightly different spacings and heights.

The careful, deliberate and delicate sizing up of a new lover. Fantastic.

Here’s a link to the UK’s own UrbanFreeflow – a good place to start if you want to get into Le Parkour/Freerunning

More screengrabs below in the extended entry…
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Between Ourselves: Kenneth Grange and Tom Dixon

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Made my way into work listening to BBC Radio4’s Between Ourselves programme today. It was a informal interview/chat between Tom Dixon, inventor of the Jack lamp, creative director of affordable stylish furniture store Habitat [here is their site, un-navigable without Flash] and Kenneth Grange, founding partner of Pentagram [their site again un-navigable without Flash… couldn’t even get a phone number for them if I was a really important client, etc, etc… sigh], venerable uberdesigner of the London taxi, the Intercity train, the Kenwood Chef – amongst other things.

The thing that struck me listening to Grange was the same thing that I saw when seeing photos of Robin and Lucienne Day, or Charles and Ray Eames late in their lives/careers. They had, and were still having so much bloody fun designing things.

Listening to Grange speak made vow to carve myself some of that fun from now on – starting entering with my first architectural competition since CarFreeLondon: a competition to design a kiosk on the Thames near Cleopatra’s Needle.

Be quick to listen to the programme. It will only be there for seven days before being replace by the next programme unfortunately(roll on the Creative Archive!!!!) please do, it’s only 30 minutes and while it’s not a particularly theoretical or deep grilling of either man, it’s a smashing fillip if you’re a designer.