1. 010811
    The information demanded by the DOJ is sweeping in scope. It includes all mailing addresses and billing information known for the user, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, all known email accounts, as well as the “means and source of payment,” including banking records and credit cards. It seeks all of that information for the period beginning November 1, 2009, through the present. […] On January 5, the same judge directed that the Order be unsealed at Twitter’s request in order to inform the users and give them 10 days to object; had Twitter not so requested, it would have been compelled to turn over this information without the knowledge of its users. […] Suffice to say, this is a serious escalation of the DOJ’s efforts to probe, harass and intimidate anyone having to do with WikiLeaks.
    — 

    DOJ subpoenas Twitter records of several WikiLeaks volunteers

     

     twitter  social media  internet  information  prosecution  wikileaks  private  public  law 

  2. 111110

    Games for Social Networks: Viral is innovation, with or without brands to back it up

    games4networks:

    “The growth a year ago came from games like FarmVille,” he said, outlining its power to propagate through viral marketing. “But viral growth is over. Future growth is in meaning. What we thought before as social is actually viral. To grow you need real meaning - real-world connection with…

     

     viral  phenomenons  internet  marketing  brands  culture 

  3. 102310
    Current TV and Will Wright set up Bar Karma, a sci-fi / fantasy collaborative show ARGNet wrote a piece on this experimental show set to start in 2011. Earlier this month, Current TV announced its new tv series, Bar Karma, scheduled to debut in the first quarter of 2011. Created by game designer Will Wright, known for his popular video games including The Sims and SimCity,  Bar Karma’s production model promises to provide a high level of audience involvement with the show, giving viewers direct control of the plot as the story evolves in 30-minute episodes. Wright has designed interactive technology for Current TV’s audience-produced material that will be adapted to the production of Bar Karma. Current TV’s press release for the show lists four steps in the episode development process: Step 1: Joining – viewers register and log on to the Bar Karma website. Step 2: Creating – participants submit their own storyboards based on a basic outline provided by the producers, which all participants can then comment on, discuss, merge ideas, and hammer out a final plot. Step 3: Voting – participants will vote on the finalized story proposals. Step 4: Producing – Once voting is closed, the studio will produce the winning storyline, and the episode will then air. Episodes will be 30 minutes in length.

    Current TV and Will Wright set up Bar Karma, a sci-fi / fantasy collaborative show

    ARGNet wrote a piece on this experimental show set to start in 2011.

    Earlier this month, Current TV announced its new tv series, Bar Karma, scheduled to debut in the first quarter of 2011. Created by game designer Will Wright, known for his popular video games including The Sims and SimCity,  Bar Karma’s production model promises to provide a high level of audience involvement with the show, giving viewers direct control of the plot as the story evolves in 30-minute episodes.

    Wright has designed interactive technology for Current TV’s audience-produced material that will be adapted to the production of Bar Karma. Current TV’s press release for the show lists four steps in the episode development process:

    • Step 1: Joining – viewers register and log on to the Bar Karma website.
    • Step 2: Creating – participants submit their own storyboards based on a basic outline provided by the producers, which all participants can then comment on, discuss, merge ideas, and hammer out a final plot.
    • Step 3: Voting – participants will vote on the finalized story proposals.
    • Step 4: Producing – Once voting is closed, the studio will produce the winning storyline, and the episode will then air. Episodes will be 30 minutes in length.
     

     tv series  internet  collaborative  writing  community  game experience 

  4. 101510

    Mom pays daughter $300 to stay off Facebook

    infoneer-pulse:

    Like many parents, Melynda Rushing just wanted to help her college-age daughter improve her grades.

    Whereas parents of a previous generation worried about their teen children spending too much time talking on the telephone, watching television or playing video games, Rushing, a mother of six in Rock Hill, N.C., was worried about her daughter, Alyssa, spending three to four hours a day on Facebook.

    So she offered Alyssa, a student at the University of South Carolina, a deal: She’d give her $300 to stay off Facebook for a month while devoting the extra time to her studies.

    » via MSNBC

     

     social networks  facebook  society  sociology  internet  generations 

  5. 101110

    Wookie Links #2

    • Because it’s Monday: a game about being in the head of a man who’s stood up at a dinner date.

    Dinner Date puts you in the shoes of Julian Luxemburg, a man who has been stood up on a date. You must now sit and watch as he gathers his thoughts.

    Developer Jeroen Stout compares the game to Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard, stating that “You are not merely witnessing - by interacting with Julian and his world you gain a clear vantage point on his life.” In other words, you can be certain that the game will divide opinions and attract a fair amount of trolling when it appears on November 17th.

    @IndieGames.com

    • I have never played a HALO game, but I am positively enthralled by the narrative and fictional universe of the franchise (especially because of the I LOVE BEES ARG). Gaming Viral has written a couple of posts about the recent release and campaign for HALO REACH. This one about the REACH “Legendary” Edition is pretty interesting, especially all the pictures showing the different artefacts present in the box.

    The amount of detail and design in this particular package is stunning. Labels, stickers and myriad extras are loaded with details from the entire expanded Halo universe. References to S-051 (Kurt), Elite armor markings, hand-drawn sketches, and notes from other Halo universe personae leave you with an amazing sense of value.

    • Words of caution on gamification:

    A presentation by Dan Hon from Wieden + Kennedy about “Our Grim Dark Future of Games” against the Double Rainbow Effect. @PSFK London Conference. If you want to learn more about the “gamification” double-edged discourse, there’s a couple of interesting links on the topic @Hide&Seek.

    There’s been an awful lot of talk about gamification lately – the process of adding points and badges and game-like systems to different parts of everyday life. Some of the talk is about how it’s extremely exciting and incredibly powerful and is going to be, perhaps already is, the best thing ever. Some of the talk is about how it’s endearingly misguided or arrant nonsense or is going to, perhaps already has, ruin everything.

    Augmented reality bridges the Internet with the real world as a functional reality. It takes the information you can find on the Internet—from directions and prices to history—and superimposes it onto reality.

    Current TV has tapped famed game designer Will Wright (“The Sims”) to help create a futuristic new TV series scheduled for Q1 2011 that will encourage viewers from around the world to join an online network to aid in the creation and plotting of the show. Tentatively titled Bar Karma, the social network will provide a communication platform developed by Wright that will allow producers to ping the crowd for input regarding the storyline and set designs, offering the ability to vote on prospective storyboards and plot twists. Worldwide Biggies’ Albie Hecht, a former top executive at MTV Networks, will executive produce (excellent Albie!!).

     

     wookielinks  games  entertainment  arg  alternate reality games  augmented reality  technology  media  internet  digital  storytelling 

  6. 090910

    Social Media Blackout

    infoneer-pulse:

    Eric Darr recently had a moment that a lot of modern parents can relate to. He was watching his 16-year-old daughter click around frenetically on Facebook while juggling several conversations on her iPhone.

    “I was frankly amazed,” says Darr, the provost at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. “I thought, ‘How do you live like this?’ It struck me to think, ‘What if all this wasn’t there?’ ”

    So Darr conceived an experiment designed to parse how one lives with social media — precisely by examining how one lives without it. He decided to pull the plug on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and AOL Instant Messenger for one week. But rather than conduct the experiment within his own home, Darr decided to take advantage of his position as Harrisburg’s provost to tap a much larger sample: his institution’s entire student body, faculty, and staff.

    On Monday, information technology officials at Harrisburg will block access to those popular social media tools from computers using the campus network. They will also disable the wiki and chat features in the university’s Moodle-based learning management system. The barriers will remain in place for one week.

    Students, who will be asked to write essays reflecting on their time in social-media exile, will not be the only ones affected. Faculty and staff will also be unable to visit the sites — at least not through the campus network.

    » via Inside Higher Ed

     

     social  digital  media  internet  interaction 

  7. In a world obsessed with “facts”, a more nuanced comprehension of historical process would enable us to better weigh truth, whether it concerns the evidence for going to war, the proliferation of damaging conspiracy theories, the polarisation of debate on climate change, or so many other issues. This sounds utopian, and it is. But I do believe that we’re building systems that allow us to do this better, and one of our responsibilities should be to design and architect those systems to make this explicit, and to educate. One of the ways to do this might be to talk more not only about history, but about historiography. History not as a set of facts, but as a process, and one in which, whether we agree or not with the writers, our own opinions and biases are always to be challenged
    — On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony and Historiography @booktwo.org
     

     digital anthropology  memory  past  knowledge  history  systems  internet  libraries  space  time 

  8. somethingchanged: This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages. It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”. (via On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography, via buyhercandy)

    somethingchanged:

    This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

    It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

    (via On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography, via buyhercandy)

     

     wikipedia  encyclopedia  edition  editing  war  social representations  war  internet  collaborative 

  9. 081010
    oldfilmsflicker: therivanqueen: thedailywhat: Of Course This Exists of the Day: So I’m giving this girl the Inception-themed rim job of her life, when all of a sudden BRAAAAAAAAHMM. [videogum.] Batshit crazy (awesome) creep of the day? Checked.

    oldfilmsflicker:

    therivanqueen:

    thedailywhat:

    Of Course This Exists of the Day: So I’m giving this girl the Inception-themed rim job of her life, when all of a sudden BRAAAAAAAAHMM.

    [videogum.]

    Batshit crazy (awesome) creep of the day? Checked.

     

     culture  relations  web  internet  movies  inception  themes  craigslist 

  10. 080610

    Greyglers @ Google: Future of the Internet, by Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf

    Click on the video to see the full-length talk (80 min) or click here to see 10 min video excerpts edited by ReadWriteWeb France.

     

     prospective  talk  vint cerf  google  future  internet  web  objects  technology  interface