One giant step for home entertainment

Someone over at Toshiba was watching too much of David Cronenberg's "Videodrome", or how else could you possibly explain this photo.

The case for object-centered sociality

Jyri Engeström addresses a very valid issue regarding ExtelligenceDesign or Object Centred Sociality, how he calls it. Talking about LinkedIn.com, but I guess Orkut.com would be just as good as an example, he points out how, if one only focusses on the growth of the network and the mere collecting of friends as a goal or product of value, the network will not likely succeed in staying alive for long.
I can only agree on that based on my experience with orkut.com. When it started there was this hype about inviting all your friends and making and reconfirming existing connections by checking on your friend's closest connections, if you would find someone you haven't been emailing for ages.
There really wasn't much else going on for a few weeks and in the end apart from accepting "friendship" requests, noone really got into conversation about anything or basically there was nothing else to do with orkut. I eventually stopped using it not only because the uncomfortable aspect of calling anyone on the network "friend". Or how heavy.com's American Suck Countdown puts it, "if it's over 100 friends you can start calling them imaginary friends".
Just because we are on the internet doesn't mean we are back in the 60s or in the fashion business where every one is your Mamas and Pappas and god knows what.
What really is worth looking at is, that we seem to have crossed this threshold that we had with mobile phones years ago. Everyone could suddenly talk to anyone and that was the time when people started to turn their phones off when they were at work or in the gym or even left it at home for the day. Of course it lead to many discussions with girlfriends who called three times and couldn't reach you at work, which was obviously unforgivable, based on the mere fact that you owned a mobile. It's the same with community networks, blogs, etc. right now. Everyone can do it and a lot of people have blogs and myspace.com accounts, but what are we gonna do with all that connectedness and publishing opportunity.
There is a lovely video at YouTube.com that someone put together, giving a nice view into how and why some video bloggers blog(sort of).

ExtelligenceDesign, consists of two main elements: the framework, which in a digital sense is the network and the the tool, which in most cases is some form of publishing tool containing text, imagery or audio. It is the tool that, in it's design has to inherit the potential for a higher value or aim that feeds back to each individual participant, lurker or active. It's the fact that it's your own video at youtube.com and the response you get, it's the physical feedback in the form of events at meetup.com, it's the 50th level characters and magic weapons in Ultima Online.

read Jyri's article

Howard Rheingold talks Web 2.0

If you liked SmartMobs, you should check out some comments of Howard Rheingold regarding Web 2.0, even though I generously hate the term, check out the interview.
It gives a very detailed look into the not so new trend of Extelligence Design, social networking, etc, etc.
Especially the accompanying videos are worth having a look at.
Anyone who wants to follow his work more closely should check out his website

TagLoops

“TagLoops is an alpha stage Flash “movie” creation tool built by Greek IT consultant Harry Vikatos. Movies are built by pointing to images, audio or RSS feeds hosted elsewhere. Those items are tagged inside TagLoop where they can be reordered and layered over each other. The end result is a multi layered multimedia Flash movie. Those movies can also be remixed by other TagLoop users. It’s really interesting to me that TagLoops works with things as ephemeral as tags, feeds and URLs and ends up letting users create a tangible multimedia presentation.

(via unmediated)

CUWiN + Meraki Client

Wanna extend your Wifi network cheap and easy?


The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) has announced that their free, open-source community mesh software has been successfully ported to the Meraki Mini, the WiFi hardware/software package (about $50), developed at MIT.
(more)


(via unmediated.org)

"We are what we do" - Talk at Conway Hall in London this Tuesday

"Change the World for a Fiver" has been on my list for a few weeks now and David Robinson's talk will surely bring more light into the idea of community participation. From a ResonanceDesign point of view, projects and movements like this seemingly are getting more and more momentum through the existence of freely available publishing and network tools. Books like "Join Me" by Danny Wallace show that many of these phenomena can be seen in the physical space nevertheless.
Self-organising maps, external content creation, it's all there for the participating...

The talk is £3 at the door.

Flash memory instead of HDD

Fujitsu will soon join two other major PC makers in putting on sale a portable computer that uses flash memory in place of the traditional hard-disk drive. ... The flash disk has several advantages over a conventional hard-disk drive. These include longer battery life ... (and) faster start-ups ...

more...
via Digital World Tokyo