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Media artist Jason Corace will play the part of Super Mario in Ctrl-shift, an online game he's developing for release this summer:
Ctrl-shift is a multi player online game that gives its players collaborative control over my freewill. The goal of the game is to fulfill a series of game missions that take place in the real world, in real time. Players attempt to collectively complete these missions by suggesting and voting for actions for me to perform, in response to live streaming video broadcast from wireless hotspots around New York City.
Players will control Jason through a Flash interface, voting on what actions he should take to achieve the game's objectives. Jason, roaming around New York City, will be equipped with a camera & mic to keep players informed of where he is (not sure if GPS is involved), and he'll send data and receive commands with a mobile device (like a laptop or handheld device) using wifi hotspots. According to the site, prototype games will be running this spring with a full-scale 5-day game to be initiated sometime this summer.
Games similar to Ctrl-shift are Noderunner (a race to collect and upload photographic proof of as many wifi hotspots as you can), The Big Urban Game (people vote online to move huge chess pieces around the Twin Cities), EA's Majestic (game sends you email, calls you on the phone, etc. as part of the gameplay; it flopped badly), Can You See Me Now?, and Uncle Roy All Around You (both from Blast Theory, with virtual and real players interacting on the same board).
Since no one has the time to read books anymore, I used the text version of Lessig's new book, Free Culture, and Word's AutoSummary feature (like I did with the Matrix thread) to produce a ~100 word summary of the 368 page book:
FREE CULTURE "PROPERTY" The copyright warriors are right: A copyright is a kind of property. First, about copyright. That copyright is their property. America copied English copyright law. Actually, we copied and improved English copyright law. In 1790, Congress enacted the first copyright law. "Copies." Obviously, however, some uses of a copyrighted book are regulated by copyright law. It is therefore regulated by copyright law. The law of copyright is extremely efficient. Obviously, copyright law is not the enemy. Copyright law is one such law. Extending copyright terms pays. The law extended the terms of copyright generally. Copyright is a brake. I believe in the law of copyright.
Sounds like Rain Man explaining copyright. Here are some other versions of Free Culture, made possible by its release under a Creative Commons license:
- PDF from the author himself
- Paul Bausch's random quote generator
- collaborative audiobook
- wiki
- HTML
Great post about what Google is up to by Rich Skrenta. He argues that Google is building a huge computer with a custom operating system that everyone on earth can have an account on. His last few paragraphs are so much more perceptive than anything that's been written about Google by anyone; Skrenta nails the company exactly:
Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?
I was thrilled reading this today because I had been thinking along the same lines as I wondered about Gmail (and the 1GB of storage in particular)...and that Skrenta had made the argument so well. This weekend, as I hacked through a bunch of XHTML and CSS for an upcoming site redesign, I jotted down a few notes for a follow-up on a post I made over a year ago called Google is not a search company. I was going to call it "GooOS, the Google Operating System".
My notes contained two of Skrenta's main points: the importance of the supercomputer and the scores of Ph.Ds being Google's main assets. A third key asset for Google is the data that they're storing on those 100,000 computers. As I said in that post:
Google's money won't be made with search...that's small peanuts compared to selling access to the world's biggest, best, and most cleverly-utilized map of the web.
So. They have this huge map of the Web and are aware of how people move around in the virtual space it represents. They have the perfect place to store this map (one of the world's largest computers that's all but incapable of crashing). And they are clever at reading this map. Google knows what people write about, what they search for, what they shop for, they know who wants to advertise and how effective those advertisements are, and they're about to know how we communicate with friends and loved ones. What can they do with all that? Just about anything that collection of Ph.Ds can dream up.
Tim O'Reilly has talked about various bits from the Web morphing into "the emergent Internet operating system"; the small pieces loosely joining, if you will. Google seems to be heading there already, all by themselves. By building and then joining a bunch of the small pieces by themselves, Google can take full advantage of the economies of scale and avoid the difficulties of interop.
Google isn't worried about Yahoo! or Microsoft's search efforts...although the media's focus on that is probably to their advantage. Their real target is Windows. Who needs Windows when anyone can have free unlimited access to the world's fastest computer running the smartest operating system? Mobile devices don't need big, bloated OSes...they'll be perfect platforms for accessing the GooOS. Using Gnome and Linux as a starting point, Google should design an OS for desktop computers that's modified to use the GooOS and sell it right alongside Windows ($200) at CompUSA for $10/apiece (available free online of course). Google Office (Goffice?) will be built in, with all your data stored locally, backed up remotely, and available to whomever it needs to be (SubEthaEdit-style collaboration on Word/Excel/PowerPoint-esque documents is only the beginning). Email, shopping, games, music, news, personal publishing, etc.; all the stuff that people use their computers for, it's all there.
Even though everyone's down on Google these days, they remain the most interesting company in the world and I'm optimistic about their potential and success (while also apprehensive about the prospect of using Google for absolutely everything someday...I'll be cursing the Google monopoly in 5 years time). If they stay on target with their plans to leverage their three core assets (which, if Gmail is any indication, they will), I predict Google will be the biggest and most important company in the world in 5-8 years.
Sunday dawned windy and cold, a good day to spend a couple of hours at the Natural History Museum. As I walked through the Hall of Advanced Mammals, navigating through crowds of presumably more advanced mammals, two women leading a gaggle of uninterested children passed by me. One of the women started chastising the children in that ridiculous singsong voice that parents use with kids to induce guilt (which seldom works):
"Kids, you're not paying attention. Why aren't you paying attention?"
[absolutely no response from the kids]
"See, the mommies are looking, but the kids aren't looking. Come on, you're missing the dinosaurs."
Just for fun, I've (temporarily) added a small link after those sites on my "not recommended" list in the sidebar whose editors have Kinja public digests. Just look for the (k) after the site names. That way, visitors to kottke.org who like what I have to say can read sites I recommend and then check out what those recommended people are reading. That's right, all that mumbo jumbo means I've created Friendster for weblogs! Genius! Where's my $30 million in VC money?
(Oh and let me know if you're on the "not recommended" list and you'd like me to add/remove your public digest.)
Kinja, the Web app for reading weblogs that Meg and Nick have been working on for the past year +, has launched as a beta. It's still a bit rough around the edges (especially design-wise) and a little schizophrenic as to who/what it's targetted at, but it's neat to play around with. I like that it reads like a weblog...which is not the case with RSS readers...something I never liked about them. A downside is that there's not a whole lot to play around with. One public digest per person? I want more than that, just like my playlists in iTunes.
One neat feature is that I can make my digest public, so you can read all the sites I'm reading. Here's my current digest...I'm still working on it, so all my favorites aren't there, but you get the idea.
Update: NYTimes article about Kinja written by David Gallagher, Nick's post announcing Kinja, some conversation over at Gothamist.
Update #2: Meg posts about leaving Kinja at the end of April and points to her public digest. (I love these public digests...it's like you're DJing with weblog posts. Imagine when you can have multiple public digests.)
I used to be an Expedia user and think their site is still excellent (travel sites on the Web have good user experience compared to, say, car rental sites), but the Orbitz matrix won me over. Orbitz's attention to detail in visual design is superior to Expedia's as well. Compare their respective flight search results pages. Both have good IA going on, but Orbitz articulates their IA better through visual design. The same applies on the front page. Expedia may have their search box placed in the middle of the page, but Orbitz's is much more visually prominent. That's gotta count for something, yes?
On the way home from work this evening, I stopped by Times Square and played a video game on one of the jumbo videotrons:
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Yahoo! partnered with interactive agency R/GA to produce the car racing game to promote their automotive site. The game play is pretty simple...you call an 800 number (1-800-660-4402), listen for your race, and when the starting flag goes down, you press 2 to speed up and 8 to slow down (like slot cars). I crashed twice, once into a cab and once while going too fast around a corner, but I still beat the stuffing out of the other car.
A brand new doormat appeared at the front door of our apartment building a short time ago. In the winter, the stairs get extremely dirty due to snow/rain and the super's negligence in mopping them, so the mat was a welcome addition. But now the mat has been there so long that it too is extremely dirty; it's gone from being a solution to a problem to part of the problem itself.
There are too many clocks in my life. And each one is showing a different time, so I don't know when I am anymore.
This reminds me of the Turk, a chess-playing automaton and the subject of Tom Standage's book of the same name. Its creator toured this magical machine around Europe, giving demonstration after demonstration, always showing the audience the clockwork guts of the machine before it beat any and all comers. The whole thing was a hoax, of course, with elaborate partitions concealing a human player amongst the gears. As for the similarity between Nanniebot's prose and that of Mr. Wightman, it sounds like a job for Don Foster.
You'll find more in the archives or you may peruse the books, movies, remaindered links, or further afield separately.
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