Via Torill, who posted about the Death Clock, I came across this site:
Find A Death, with a lot of entries on how a number of famous people (primarily American) died. Linked to this site, is a form of companion site: Find a Grave, where you can look for pictures of the grave sites of even more famous people. 41 graves listed for Denmark, including H.C. Andersen, Kierkegaard, Bohr etc.

Find a Death is almost scary in its meticously detailing of everything, down to pictures of the inside of the house where Sharon Tate was killed. What kind of fasciniation is it that leads us to pursue the death of others to the point where people travel around the world to photograph graveyards and murder sites?

The culture of death and the way it is mediated online in western culture is indeed something which calls for study.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:55 (0) comments

Via Tommy (on Messenger): The Neverending Tale - I've never come across this before. Perhaps mostly for a younger audience, but there seems to be lots of paths in there, so it works!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:19 (0) comments

...and now down with a cold. Cannot recommend large campus conferences - you can get really wet, when it takes you 15-20 min. to walk from the residence hall to the presentation site and you have no umbrella. Cold and damp and freezing my way through the first track-session; personal experience tells me that added to a stressed schedule, this is all it takes to bring me down. On top of this, it is _really_ annoying when you then have to walk another 5-10 minutes from the presentation room to the place where the hot tea is. - Believe me, social networking will not happen when you have 200+ researchers constantly running around campus like disturbed ants in an anthill.

Don't have the energy to write much about the conference, which were on average fine, with many OK papers, only a few bad ones, and one session which was amazing: a group of Japanese and Korean doing a really interesting panel-session on the social psychology of Lineage II gamers - impressively well-coordinated and with people and papers really talking to each others. The only time it really happened in the sessions, I were in.

There are some photo impressions & brief comments in my photoblog.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:00 (0) comments

Oh, my, I really made a fool of myself by believing in this post over at Dalager's. I defintely should learn to pay attention to post-categories!

And now off to the A.o.I.R. 5.0 conference - will be in Brighton until wednesday.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:07 (1) comments

The nominees for the first price in the annual VideoMarathon 2004 has been announced online. The competitors had 48 hours to record and edit a movie on the pre-decided theme, this year "Terror". More than 200 people submitted a video. Watch the nominated movies here and vote. Fyi, most films are 3-4 min. long (and seem to be in English).

I like the idea of giving people a chance to be known as directors, even if they dont get a price. And btw, a friend of a friend made film no. A041, so I recommend that (it is actually ok!).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 23:03 (0) comments

Via Jill's notes somewhere on the web:Message Quests: "allowing you to send personalized interactive adventures to any number of web users".

I'm quite sure that Alex Mayhew, who is behind the site, is also the Alex Mayhew involved in the Ceremony of Innocence game/narrative production.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 23:51 (1) comments

Procrastinating - and I think that I finally got the atom feed to work for this blog.
There is a site feed link on the right side menu.

Turns out(as I have experienced before) that the "old" Blogger templates made before the big Blogger rehaul earlier this year missed some of what I think is the basic code that needs to be in the template to make the new functions (like feeds and comments) to work. The thing to do is to copy-paste the code from one of the "new" templates, made after the great change. Until I did that, Blogger insisted on syndicating my photoblog, not this one ;).

[Update. The blogfeed tool and the explanation on this page seems to be the most useful pointer/tool for producing a rss-feed document with blogger-tags included]
# posted by Lisbeth at: 17:01 (2) comments

In the midst of the fury of tasks overwhelming me as temp head currently, the last three days have provided some very interesting experiences and meetings with journalists and bloggers.

Wednesday evening, I actually meet up with 15 male bloggers and Dan Gillmor - and at least most of these 15 Danish bloggers were famous to me :) - many of them I have been reading, or appearing with in the media, but it was the first time I saw them in real life. It also turned out that several people were involved with the ITU - or were considering some form of involvement. Small world.

At my end of the table, we had some interesting discussions about blogs and blogreading, RSS feeds, corporate blogging (or not). I had great fun - a bunch of very nice guys. And - I should add- it is not particularly representative of the Danish blogosphere, that I was the only women present - there is quite a few female bloggers around (such as Tinka of Distant Sun, Tantologi, Emme, Many, Randises, Hende, Frk. Andersen and Yin).

See Morten's pictures from the event. And Knut's. Pollas' moblog entry. Dalager also blogged it briefly. Thomas's (the initiator) list of the partipants.
And via Gøtzespace (also a ITU lecturer!), the corporate weblog manifesto.

Tuesday, Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media who also spoke at the Fagfestival, gave a speak at the IT University which I had organised in collaboration with DONA. He started by presenting - via his blog - a little video from the ITU and the auditorium in which he was speaking - a shrewd example of how instant instant webpublishing can be. Thomas Madsen-Mygdal liveblogged his talk - and people also have some discussions in the comment-list to the video-post on Gillmor's own blog, E-Journal. One of Gillmors more interesting points (which I think was a quote from someone else) was that "in the (web?)future people will not be famous in 15 seconds, but to 15 people".
[update: Jonas of Verture net has blogged him taking a photo of Gillmore who is videofilming Jonas - oh, we are indeed living in a world of simulacra. He also took a snapshot of Gillmor and me (desperately trying to fix the projector). Thanks, Jonas...]

Monday, with Christian Badse from the Skum-community on DR, I spoke on the Danish Journalists annual fair Fagfestival 2004, about mediaforms where the "audience" take action.

About 50 journalists showed up and we had a good discussion after our presentations. Not a lot of Danish journalists have bought into weblogs yet, and I'm not sure I convinced them that they should do it. However, I hope that a few more of them at least now knows more about the opportunities for direct dialogue with readers that the weblog provides.
Here are the slides from my speak.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:09 (0) comments

ELSPA's white paper on women and gaming Chicks & Joysticks has just been launched - in connection with the Austin conference on Women in Gaming. TL has been at the conference, undoubtedly as always a very good representativ for the game center.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:54 (0) comments

I'm happy to present: www.death-stories.org!
Finally, the death-stories project I have been working on for a long time, has gone online in betaversion 2 (almost a-version). The website death-stories.org is a site where players can submit stories about their character's death experiences in massive multiplayer online gameworlds (MMOGS)- and additional provide me with a bit of information on their playing habits and their point of view on death in MMOGs in general. The site is part of a bigger project, which examines how players think about online gameworlds and on how we can use their thoughts for creating more interesting player-driven worlds. See the ODDPAW project site.

If you know of any good places to announce this site/survey/submission point, let me know!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:26 (0) comments

Read Part I first.

Actually, the first thing the royal prince asked me about when I was introduced to him as the Head of the Department of Digital Aesthetics & Communication, was: "I understand what digital communication means, but what does digital aesthetics mean?". Not a bad question, so we talked a bit about that, and I said that it could also mean the aesthetics of computer games (because he had mentioned games in his opening speech), and then we talked a lot about computer games and the SMMOG project (Students Massive Multiplayer Game)which he was really impressed by and which was also pitched by Mads Tofte, our dean who was an interested bystander to the entire conversation.

Somehow we just never got around to the weblog question, but next time...if there is any....I'll be ready to give this long talk about the relation between digital aesthetics, digital communication, weblogs and...basically everything else. Lesson learned: it requires a quick-thinking woman to keep up with a professional conversation-maker.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 17:59 (4) comments