Nokia Maps London In Three Dimensions | Londonist

Ovi Maps from Nokia recently released a three-dimensional option, allowing you to zoom around town in unprecedented detail. That’s right, the image above isn’t a static photo. You can zoom in, rotate, move off into the distance, sit on the roof of 1 Canada Square, or on top of the O2. It’s pretty damn jaw-dropping, so long as you’ve got a good graphics card.

While Google Earth has long offered 3-D layers, they’re not as photo-realistic as this. In addition, London’s coverage has always been patchy in Google Earth, although a recent update has improved matters.

The 6 Most Innovative Interactive Web Documentaries | via The Creators Project

Digital platforms are expanding the field of the traditional documentary, not only in terms of the distribution of linear stories, but especially in the production of content created specifically for the web. As seen in interactive web-based films like Highrise: Out My Window and Collapsus, different degrees of interactivity are now possible and are changing the way documentary storytelling relates to reality. As interactive media professor at the London College of Media Sandra Gaudenzi suggests, the differentiating levels of interactivity are a good way to classify these new forms of documentaries.

According to Gaudenzi, there are three different levels of interactivity that determine the type of documentary. The interactivity is either semi-closed (the user can browse but not change the content), semi-open (the user can participate but not change the structure of the interactive documentary), or completely open (the user and the interactive documentary constantly change and adapt to each other).

An example of a semi-closed project is Welcome to Pine Point (2010) by Canadian media group The Goggles. The story of Pine Point mostly unfolds through the written word, as it was originally written as a book, but the documentary is a creative collage of material from and about Pine Point—a Canadian mining town that disappeared in the 1980s. This documentary revolves around memories and the objects that keep the town’s spirit alive.

Streaming! - Silverdocs Film Festival And Tribeca Film Institute Team Up For The “silverdocs Transmedia Lab”

via Film Threat

The Silverdocs Documentary Film Festival and Tribeca Film Institute have teamed up to present the first “Silverdocs Transmedia Lab” this Friday, June 24, 2011 in Silver Spring, Maryland. From the official press release:

AFI Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival and the Tribeca Film Institute announced today the co-presentation of “The Silverdocs Transmedia Lab,” a unique one-day event open to observers that will give six filmmakers the chance to develop the cross-platform, interactive elements of their projects with experienced mentors.

A private morning session will give filmmakers a chance to work closely with the mentors with a focus on taking their interactive projects to the next level and ready to pitch. The public afternoon sessions will consist of presentations from all the mentors followed by pitches from the filmmakers. The audience and the mentors will choose a winning pitch to be awarded $5,000. The presentations and pitches will also be streamed live at and the online audience will be included in the vote for the winning pitch.

The presentations and pitches will be streamed live, Friday, June 24, 2011, on TribecaFilmInstitute.org from 2-6pm EST, and the online audience will be able to vote for the winning pitch....

Simon Pulman on The Content Kingdom | Transmythology

The Content Kingdom

It’s been another intriguing couple of weeks in the realm of content creation and distribution. The National Cable Show saw cable companies wrangle with emerging distribution models and the role of Netflix; two major comic book companies - DC and Valiant - announced fresh starts for their respective universes; transmedia and social sharing were omnipresent at the Electronic Arts Expo; while JK Rowling announced a mysterious new website - Pottermore - which seems to extend the Harry Potter brand (although it remains to be seen how, precisely).

In the midst of all this, one article in particular caught my eye: “Why Content Isn’t King”by Jonathan A. Knee in the Atlantic. Beginning by focusing on Netflix’s (currently) enduring growth as an aggregator, it suggests that the old adage “content is king” is incorrect and that the content aggregation – not creation – constitutes “the overwhelming source of value creation.” I’d like to explore the options facing content creators in the context of this suggestion.

There are a couple of things to note as a preface to any discuss of Knee’s thesis. The first is that Knee, as a banker and director of the media program at Columbia Business School, approaches issues from the perspective of the investor. I’ve read The Curse of the Mogul, the book he co-authored, and he suggests several reasons why content creators may constitute poor investments: a tendency to let egos overwhelm rational decision making, little customer loyalty (especially outside Disney and Pixar), low barriers to entry, and the highly liquid nature of talent. Of course, none of those factors preclude the individuals creating content from making vast quantities of money....

read the full post on Simon's blog

£500,000 research fund to stimulate digital innovation in arts and culture in UK | via Arts Council

Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) have announced a new £500,000 Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture.

Arts and cultural organisations are being asked to work with those with digital expertise to help them understand the potential offered by new technologies and together develop innovative project proposals for submission to this new research fund, which is for projects that will harness digital technologies to connect with wider audiences and explore new ways of working.

The call for applications follows a scoping exercise with the sector to determine the areas and themes of most importance. This exercise revealed several themes that the sector is keen to explore and proposals are sought in the following six areas: user-generated content and social media; distribution; mobile, location and games; data; resources and education and learning. 

We hope that the research and development projects supported by the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture will have the potential to produce new data and research insights that can be shared with and benefit other organisations in the arts, museums and galleries and libraries sectors.

Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications, and the Creative Industries, said: 'I'm delighted to see NESTA, AHRC and the Arts Council collaborating in such a vital area. Our lives are increasingly defined by how we engage and interact with the world digitally and cultural organisations can't afford to be left behind. Too often finances, structures or traditions can constrain the arts from making best use of the technology which now sits at the heart of many people's everyday lives. This programme seeks to show how digital technology can revolutionise our cultural engagement, helping people to derive greater value from cultural activities and to find new ways to generate income. I look forward to seeing the innovative and exciting ideas put forward.'

Alan Davey, Chief Executive, Arts Council England, said: 'Through projects like the National Theatre's NT Live and the RSC's 'Such Tweet Sorrow' we've already seen the massive potential art and technology partnerships have to transform the way people connect with the arts. 

'How the cultural sectors engage with emerging and existing digital technologies in the next few years will have far reaching effects on our creative, social and economic lives, as artists and audience members. 

'This fund is a golden opportunity for cultural organisations to partner with technical experts, get to grips with the detail, and reap rich rewards. I'm excited to see the ideas they come up with.'

The deadline for applications to the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture is 2 September 2011. Following interviews with shortlisted applicants, successful applications will be announced in October 2011 . Find out more about the Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture.

 

 

 

Intel Inside...You? "The Escape" Interactive YouTube Thriller Tries Too Hard to Get Into Our Heads 06/20/2011

Excerpt

....Late last week, Intel and its agencies Tribal DDB and DDB Hong Kong released an elaborate interactive video adventure on YouTube that is aimed at promoting the feature sets of the newest Intel Core processors. You are the hero in this fast-paced first-person thriller. You meet up with a striking young female agent and help her elude two badasses who are in hot pursuit. There are interactive fighting and shooting sequences as well as puzzles that need to be solved to advance the action.

There is an attempt here to blend social networking in with the interactive video. You log in via Facebook so that achievements in the game get posted and you can even pull in friends' profile pictures to put on some of the robots in the fighting scene. There are even QR codes planted in the video.

For a video with so much technical sophistication the product messaging included in the package is remarkably leaden....

Acafandom and Beyond: Week 2, Part 1 with Henry Jenkins, Erica Rand, and Karen Hellekson

Acafandom and Beyond: Week Two, Part One (Henry Jenkins, Erica Rand, and Karen Hellekson)

The Origins of "Acafan" -- Henry Jenkins

I have been "credited" (or "blamed," depending on your perspective) with coining the term, "Acafan." Unfortunately, I don't remember when or how this occurred. Like many rich concepts, the term took shape over time, refined through conversations with students, colleagues, and fans. By the time Textual Poachers was published in 1992, I was moderating a short-lived discussion list called Acafan-L, involving mostly fans working on graduate degrees exchanging what we would today call "metafan" comments. "Acafan," however, does not appear in Textual Poachers which starts with my personal declaration as someone who is both a fan and an academic. I had been a fan for well over a decade, I was newly minted as an academic.

While built on the foundations of the Birmingham School, fan studies emerged in 1992, with the publication of Poachers and Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women, of Constance Penley's key essays on slash, and Lisa Lewis's The Adoring Audience (which included Jolie Jensen, John Fiske, Larry Grossberg, and others). Bacon-Smith may have been the most immersed of all of us into the fan community, yet for methodological and temperamental reasons, she presented herself as "The Ethnographer" who observes but participants only through formal experiments to see how the community practices work. The fan community itself embraced those more willing to signal affiliation, the relationship the term, aca-fan, was intended to capture, and many found Bacon-Smith's self presentation off-putting.

I've always thought some bright graduate student should systematically compare Enterprising Women and Textual Poachers: two ethnographies of more or less the same community, published only a few months apart, but so fundamentally different in approach and attitude, accessing different voices, reaching different conclusions, both capturing (but not adequately predicting) a moment of transition when digital media was reshaping what had long been a print and postal focused subculture. Some of the differences reflect the move from second to third wave feminism and some, shifts in our understanding of the relationship between personal and scholarly experiences.

I do not remember when or under what circumstances we first used the term, "acafan", but I do recall why we felt such a word was necessary.

A small but significant body of pre-existing scholarship about fandom pathologized the enthusiasms and participations so central to our work. Often, fans were depicted as inarticulate, incapable of explaining their motives or actions. This claim of inarticulateness was typically coupled by the scholar's refusal to engage with the community (and thus a rejection of the value of ethnographic methods). Instead, there was a focus on textual or ideological analysis of cult television, often framed around episodes not significant and often despised within the fan canons formed around these same series. Part of what allowed this pathologization of fandom was that the researchers were not implicated in their own analysis and were not accountable to a fan community. Many researchers treated fans less as collaborators than as bugs under a microscope. At the time, many fans and fan practices were behind closed doors, especially in a pre-digital era. For example, one of the first online communities focused on slash specifically prohibited academics and men (so I was doubly out of the picture).

Crossmedia-Storytelling - Prison Valley Documentary 2.0 - Case Study - Author???

Research question
How is the interactive web documentary different compared to the TV documentary, and what are the consequences for storytelling?

2. Interactive web documentary

What constitutes a documentary? Nichols provides a thorough definition of this concept:

“Documentary films speak about situations and events involving real people (social actors) who present themselves to us as themselves in stories that convey a plausible proposal, or perspective on, the lives, situations, and events portrayed. The distinct point of view of the filmmaker shapes this story into a way of seeing the historical world directly rather than into a fictional allegory.”[1]

Documentaries have existed for many decades, yet the interactive web documentary (IW-doc) is a relatively new phenomenon. In the past couple of years more and more documentary makers turn to the internet to broadcast their story about the historical world. The internet is more attractive than television for a number of reasons, these reasons will be mentioned below.
First, an IW-doc can be viewed 24 hours per day, so a potentially higher number of people will be reached. If a certain person would miss a documentary on television, he or she will have to look up the time of rerun and wait for it to be aired on television for the second time. It is very likely this same person will miss the documentary again. The internet offers unrestricted broadcasting at a time suitable for the viewer.
Second, television cannot offer the same amount of interactivity the internet can offer. The possibilities for interaction online have existed as long as the internet itself. In the past two decades interactivity on the internet has been highly developed, though interactivity on television has only just begun. Indeed, interactivity on television does exist, for instance throughout the use of social media. It is not uncommon for talk show hosts to ask their guests questions that were sent by viewers at home through Twitter. Another example is voting for a specific candidate in television shows like The X Factor. Though the degree of interactivity on television is very low compared to the possibilities of the internet.
Third, traditional documentaries offer only linear storylines. Of course digital television can offer new options such as rewind, fast forward and pause while a program is being broadcasted, but again these options are very limited compared to those of the internet. The whole concept of hypertext is non-linearity and therefore the possibilities for authors to shape a narrative are endless. Viewers construct a narrative on their own in the hypertext. “The participatory mode has come to embrace the spectator as participant as well. Interactive websites and installations allow the viewer to chart a path through the spectrum of possibilities made possible by the filmmaker.”[2]
Fourth, the internet can facilitate as an attractive alternative medium due to the “massive convergence process in course on a battle for “the screen” between TV broadcasters, online newspapers and media distribution companies.”[3]
The IW-doc is a new genre and its possibilities are just starting to be explored, therefore not much research has been done about it. “No one knows exactly what skills are needed for an interactive documentary or how to build up a team; even more challenging, no one knows for sure if some of the skills exist yet.”[4]

3. Prison Valley narrative

“Welcome to Cañon City, Colorado. A town in the middle of nowhere with 36,000 souls and 13 prisons, one of which is Supermax, the new 'Alcatraz' of America. A prison town where even those living on the outside live on the inside. A journey into what the future might hold.”[4]

Prison Valley is a documentary, a report of a road trip two French journalists made through Fremont County, Colorado (United States of America) of which Cañon City is the county seat. This area is known for its high number of prisons and has the nickname Prison Valley. There are 7,735 persons incarcerated in thirteen prisons, of which are nine state prisons and four federal prisons. Among those prisons is the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, also known as a Supermax or Alcatraz of the Rockies. This maximum security prison incarcerates convicts who are considered extremely dangerous and a flight risk. Within the prison they have very little freedom compared to inmates in less secured prisons. It is the only federal Supermax in the US. The United States have the largest incarcerated population in the world, more than one in 100 adults is now locked up in this country.[6]

Marketing Specific Primer: Gamification. Advergaming. Transmedia. The GAMESbrief guide to marketing and games. - Games Brief

by Nicholas Lovell

"What is gamification?

Gamification is about using game-like mechanics to improve a business process, or customer experience, or profits.

It is not about making games. It is not about brand extension. It is about encouraging and rewarding users for doing the things that you want them to do.

A loyalty scheme where you “level up” for taking more flights is an example of “gamification”. An answers website which gives users badges and achievements for providing helpful responses is an example of gamification. Games purists sometimes refer to gamification as pointsification, deriding it as not being about making games. They are right.

But that doesn’t matter. Gamifiers are not trying to make a game. They are not trying to take the best bits of games and apply them to your website or product. They are trying to take many of the lessons that game-makers have learned – about showing users what to do, about offering rewards, about using psychology to encourage behaviours you want – and applying them to other fields.

The #1 rule of gamification is that you are not making a game. (Read The 10 rules of gamification if you want to know the other nine.)

I’m not sure that there are any gamification experts out there: the discipline is too new, and there have been too few good examples. You could do worse than hire a game maker, and tell them that you are not gamifying, you are pointsifying. At least that way you avoid the dull-but-worthy conversations about how much more games have to offer than the gamifying trend allows...."