Danny‘s put together The Panopticon for the emerging tech conference.

It’s a kind of spatial wiki, where people at the conference can leave messages for each other or do what ever they want – they can use it ‘usefully’ or otherwise – Danny explains the philosophy behind it here. What’s going to be really interesting is what other services people will inveitably, in the spirit of the conference, develop off the back of the data-formats Danny is exporting from the Panopticon.

An IM/Jabber interface has been mooted by Ben, plus a number of other novel mutations. Fun.

Here at the O’Reilly emerging tech conference, even though they’ve set up a pretty amazing 802.11b wireless net, we’ve all sat in a little circle of wifi-wagons, blogging and chatting and fiddling with wierd little web-services that people are weaving to impress others or interpret the event.

As Mr. Doctorow quipped we appear to be both social and wifi-tropic beings…

It’s been mainly technical tutorials today – Matt Webb who’s here has been raving about some of the webservices conversations already. Tommorrow the real fun stuff begins…

Mike Figgis, Peter Molyneux and documentary maker Peter Armstrong on digital technology and Narrative.

This from Peter Molyneux:

“Traditionally games have been aimed predominantly at a fairly narrow market of dependable consumers (young men), while the stories they tell have had a similarly narrow thematic and emotional focus.

In addition, games plots are often created by the programmers and artists working on the project, rather than by professional writers with an understanding of drama and characterisation.

Molyneux believes that this will have to change before games can reach a wider audience and exert a greater cultural influence. He envisages a time when games scripts will be as professional and polished as film scripts, when games explore love as often as violence, and the contemporary world features as frequently as fantasy and sci-fi settings. For this to happen, it will probably be necessary for storytellers from other disciplines to contribute to games development.”

» 3D Storytelling: New Approaches to Narrative in Digital Media – Report

The Barbelith brains-trust have a great little discussion about Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” attempting to map it to previous work by other mavens of the memetic such as Dawkins and Rushkoff.

» Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > The Tipping Point

Dan posts a lengthy tract on harnessing and navigating the relationships between music and musicians.

On which subject – I just downloaded MoodLogic, which is a very nifty little facets-based music organising plug-in for WinAmp.

Here’s the presentation I gave at the last Advance for Design London, which summaries my trip up and down the east coast of the USA, taking in the ASIST IA Summit, The AIGA Voice conference, and a talk by Oliver Sacks.

There are lots of pictures in it, and not a lot of words so it might be a bit crappy without narration, and also it’s a 11.8mbPowerpoint presentation

Found this via Tomalak. Shneiderman says that visual interfaces will let us master complex information systems. I think being comfortable with a complex system is very different from ‘mastering’ it. More momentum moving us to Neal Stephenson’s oral/visual culture?

“Shneiderman thinks visual tools are what will let humans master computers. If he’s right, the next-generation Internet may have fewer software “robots” than most pundits predict. Or if software agents do catch on, visual tools may be how we control them.

Control, after all, is what Shneiderman thinks is still missing from the computing experience. Computers and the Internet are too darned frustrating, he says, and the only way to put people back in control is through new software designs that are more human-centered, chiefly by leveraging our powerful visual sense.”

» Washtech.com: A Visual Rather Than Verbal Future

You are Optimus Prime!

Vast, red and ready to turn into a lorry at the slightest provocation, you are a robot to be reckoned with. Although sickeningly noble, you just can’t resist a good interplanetary war, especially when Orson Welles is involved. You have friends who can shoot tapes from their chests. Tapes that turn into panthers. And other friends who are dinosaurs. Dinosaurs who jump out of planes. Will you have my children?

Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?

Following on from the Jon Udell article, Paul Hammond pointed me to this blog/biological crossover from Mark Bernstein.

“There’s still a lot nobody really knows about weblogs. How do you get, and keep, a great audience? Does the future hold a million small weblogs, or two really big ones?

I’m hoping to learn about weblogs from an alife simulator I’m building. In the simulated world, we have 600 little artificial writers (I call them weblets) with 600 artificial weblogs. If traffic is the currency of the Web, each of the weblets wants to get rich.

Some have big blogrolls (so lots of people will think well of them). Some have lots of daily links (so they can reward their friends quickly). Some hoard traffic, some spread it around. We’ll see who wins.”

Sorry about all these blog-related posts. I don’t want to become one of those boring sites that just bangs on about blogs the whole time, but there is a lot of stuff looking at the second-order effects of the blog ecology at the moment.

» Mark Bernstein: May0201

Some fascinating (and as the author points out, somewhat “fashionable”) analogies drawn in this article by Jon Udell, looking at the feedback loops being created by referrer “backlinks” displayed on weblog pages.

“The information trails written in backlinks are, of course, new grist for Google’s mill. They also enable an emerging breed of software, the social network analyzer, to visualize patterns of group formation.

The fact that groups are not readily identifiable seems at odds with the notion that blogging is a collaborative effort. In forums and newsgroups, well-defined groups interact directly in shared spaces. In blogspace, individuals control autonomous spaces. Groups are fluid coalitions. Interaction happens in more indirect ways. These are hard rules to play by. And that is why life took so long to achieve multicellularity.”

» O’Reilly Network: “Blogspace Under the Microscope” by Jon Udell 05/03/2002