Category: Social Networking

iPodder 1.0 released

iPodder, the cross-platform Podcast receiver.
So the question is, what is a Podcast?. The answer: An audio bloggers wet dream.

Someone needs to make something like this for the video blogging community. I know, i know, people are working on it but we don’t have a dominant video device with the market share of the iPod yet (and that is a requirement).

Howard writes about how text messaging is changing the face of world politics

TheFeature :: Political Texting: SMS and Elections
From the article:
Texting and electoral politics are the strange bedfellows of the 21st century. The use of SMS for political action is only in its infancy, but has already enabled citizens to topple governments and tip elections from Manila to Madrid. The electoral power of texting could be an early indicator of future social upheaval: whenever people gain the power to organize collective action on new scales, in new places, at new tempos, with groups they had not been able to organize before, societies and civilizations change.

The CoDeck is featured on Rhizome!

Rhizome.org: Net Art News: Here’s Lookin’ at you, George!
Great news.. Good Job Ahmi and Ophra!

For readers that don’t know, the CoDeck is a collaborative project between myself, Ahmi Wolf, Dan Melinger and Mark Argo that allows a community of users to upload and share videos that they have created. It has a web interface for information about the works and for commenting on them. The most interesting part of it (IMHO) is that it takes the form of a vintage Betamax with a single board computer running linux and all the fixins. We utilized the controls on the deck to implement skipping to the next video (Fast Forward), watching the previous one (Rewind) and so on. You can also create a video response to any video that is currently playing by changing the channel and using the built in camera and microphone to create a response video right then and there.

Clay’s talk about games, rules, code and the real world

Shirky: Nomic World: By the players, for the players
In this talk (edited version online), Clay Shirky discusses code as the rules and structure of virtual worlds (online multiplayer games). Much is stated about the structure that these worlds might assume if control was given to the players and what the out-comes might be. In the end he states: “We should experiment with game-world models that dump a large and maybe even unpleasant amount of control into the hands of the players because it’s the best lab we have for experiments with real governance in the 21st century agora, the place where people gather when they want to be out in public. “