Over the past few months we have been harvesting geospatial data from Twitter with the aim of creating a series of new city maps based on Twitter data. Via a radius of 30km around New York, London, Paris, Munich we have collated the number of Tweets and created our New City Landscape Maps.
I heard a radio interview yesterday between a human & a sentient robot - eerie prefiguring of the future - Robot kept returning to idea that 'once no humans lived on Manhattan' - seriously strange foreshadowing?
deets:
Upload biographical pictures, videos, and documents to a digital archive that will be preserved for generations.
Organize through geo mapping, timelines, and tagging, a rich portrait of information about you. The places you've been and the people you've met can be stored.
Create a computer-based avatar to interact and respond with your attitudes, values, mannerisms and beliefs.
Connect with other people who are interested in exploring the future of technology and how it can enhance the quality of our lives.
Emily the Strange meets the Italian cultural jammers of the be yourself movement bringing their activity online. Browse the city, select one of the billboards that you will find in your way, personalize it with your message and send it across our websites network.
In roughly 24 hours, nearly 6,000 people have registered to participate in an experiment we started called The Influence Project. It's been written about by TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, The New York Times and a score of personal blogs. While it hasn’t taken off the way as quickly as the David After Dentist or Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Rainbow videos, it’s off to a good enough start to bust our servers (briefly). But like anything that gains traction on the web, the reactions have been mixed, ranging from the vitriolic to the pretty damn amusing.
One side effect of instant popularity is that most people are unaware of the evolution of this idea, and how the thing actually works. The Influence Project is a byproduct of a story I wrote in the May issue of Fast Company about the ad and marketing shop Mekanism. Mekanism told me they could make just about anything go viral. So I asked them to create a viral marketing campaign for Fast Company (they were not paid for this, but did it because it sounded like fun). In return, I would document the process and see if they could deliver. Mekanism came back with pitches ranging from a Twittering Business Jesus who responds to prayers from companies in distress, to a jingoistic campaign titled Fuck China (we passed on both, but you can still see the full brief). Instead, we settled on an idea called The Cover Project—so named because everyone who participates would get their photo in a story that might hit the cover of a fall Fast Company issue. We’ve changed the name since then, because the editorial story I wanted to pursue, the story that is constantly evolving and morphing, is the story of influence and influencers and how they are employed to both spread or kill ideas on the Internet. And voila—The Influence Project.
We’ve created a platform where anyone can see what happens to his or her social network when people are asked to take an action. The scoring is based partly on how many people click on the link to your profile, and partly on a bonus awarded to people who get others inside their network to sign up and take part. (Someone with 100,000 followers who only gets 100 people to join the project is less influential than someone with 150 followers who gets 100 people to join.) We didn’t give guidance on how people should pursue their influence goals. Some people may engage in deception to get others to click on their link (hello 4Chan), some may use tactics that feel like spam to boost their results (hello, SEO consultants). Some may want to use charity as a lever to push engagement--go ahead, we won't stop you. Is that inappropriate? Is that unfair? Is that a popularity contest? Maybe. But it’s also reflective of behavior that happens on the internet everyday.
The project is an experiment, one that should inform us and be enjoyable for participants. It is not being paid for by a sponsor--although we'd be thrilled to have one. Your email address will not be sold to anyone. It is an editorial investigation.
Yes, we hope to be able to name the most influential person online in our November issue. But that issue will do much more, looking at influence from all kinds of different perspectives. And along the way, I’ll be writing daily on the subject of influence--occasionally focusing on the project, but mostly writing about interesting people I learn about along the way, and how they create and wield their own online influence. Which brings me back to the main point of our project: It’s a wild, unwieldy, imperfect, and hopefully fun way to take a look at the wild, unwieldy, imperfect and certainly fun world of social media.
Indie Game: The Movie is a feature documentary about video games, their creators and the craft. It examines independent game developers as a way to understand the medium and the theory behind video games. Throughout, the film focuses on the human side of the creative process, and the connections between game and game-maker.
Indie Game: The Movie will be released Spring 2011.
We were inspired to make this documentary by our experience covering the Game Developers Conference in Spring 2009 and by this short film we made on Alec Holowka of Infinite Ammo in Fall 2009.
In producing the short film and attending the conference, we found the individual stories and entire culture of independent developers exceptionally fascinating and compelling. From the perspective of storytelling, gameplay and development process, it seems that some of the most interesting things going on in video games are happening in the indie space.
That initial fascination stuck with us, and in early 2010, we explored the idea of a feature length documentary with an initial wave of shooting. We gathered footage at GDC 2010 in San Francisco as well as in Phoenix, AZ, in Santa Cruz, CA and in Winnipeg, MB, Canada (with the indie teams from Flashbang Studios, Enemy Airship, Polytron, Team Meat and Infinite Ammo).
The results have been extremely encouraging and validating; and has set the stage for the feature documentary.
Lots more detail on site but here's a teaser:
"Maureen McHugh to Keynote ARGFest
We are extremely pleased to announce that Maureen McHugh will be delivering the keynote this year. Maureen is an award winning science fiction writer who, for almost a decade now, has been exploring what it means to write in a transmedia environment. She has been a writer and/or managing editor behind some of the most popular and critically claimed experiences to date including I Love Bees (Halo 2), Why So Serious (The Dark Knight), and Year Zero (the Nine Inch Nails album of the same name).
Credits aside, Maureen has an incredible grasp how to write and deliver a story across mediums in a way that draws people in. She understands how to work with designers, producers, and technology in a way that brings a story to life for the audience without the technology or complexity becoming a barrier. It’s a tricky balancing act and one that few can do as well.
We hope that you will join us on Friday, July 16 for what is sure to be an evening filled with insights & fun stories from the trenches.
Connecting the dots
Have you heard of a dotmocracy? It’s a pretty cool concept… you write an issue or idea on a piece of paper and folks can fill in a little bubble indicating how much they agree or disagree with the statement. It’s not only a great way to get a feel for how a group is thinking about things, but it starts conversations. And it’s something that we’re going to be doing at ARGFest this year.
We’ll have posters up throughout the conference where you can add your thoughts and even elaborate on them if you want. Friday, right before the last session of the day, we’ll quickly flip through the posters and let everyone know some of the results, talk about some of the controversies (or lack thereof), and see how we compare with the folks participating online. After the Fest, we’ll post the results for all to see.
The thing is… we need ideas & issues to put on the posters. That’s where you come in! Tweet your ideas, using the #argfest hashtag, and we’ll put the best dozen or so up for the dotmocracy. Don’t tweet? Then leave a comment!
Here are a couple examples to get you started:
There will never be a mainstream ARG.
All media will become transmedia.
Puzzles are pointless!"
more deets on site!