Clicknoise

Mobile Monday Vancouver [May 5, 2008]

May 9, 2008 – 3:16 pm

I had the opportunity to speak to local wireless industry folks at the most recent Mobile Monday Vancouver (presented by WinBC) this week. It’s been a while since the last MoMoVan, so I was glad to see a good turnout and to receive an enthusiastic response to my presentation about Mobile Muse. I first introduced myself and my research-informed approach to the MM3 program. Then I discussed our current Projects - Fearless City, Whistler True Local Muse, and our Prototype Development Program.

Here’s a PDF - a slightly modified version of the presentation. Note that it’s been modified because I’ve been too too busy this week to prioritize version control with my Keynote files, and I’ve had to make more than one presentation this week on the same topic. It’s close to the original, but this version is slightly better than what I presented on Monday. Jes looking on the bright - albeit historically imprecise - side of things.

Credit is due to Irwin and Public Dreams Society for a few of the images. (& P.S., if you’re reading this - if you request so, I will remove them from this file & repost it, cognizant that I haven’t explicitly requested your permission to use them…)

Bookmark this post:

Hide Sites

Posted in culture & society | No Comments »

I Have Been Here A Long Time

May 7, 2008 – 3:19 am

I had another dream about my lost cassettes from 20 years ago (remember? I dreamed about this previously). This time, I was not in a pawn shop. This time, beleaguered campus radio station CiTR (which in this world has had to resort to fundraising in the face of UBC budget reallocations and spiraling costs) was caught up in the mix. In the dream I happened by the station only to encounter a number of harried young volunteers pushing piles of boxes out of the station, and awkwardly tumbling down the stairs with them, piling them on the grass outside the SUB. Breathless half-reports was I able to glean from these frantic vollies, about the station closing down, could I help please? I decided that the decent thing to do would be to roll up my sleeves and help salvage the music library.

Upon entering the station I looked around for where help was needed most. It seems nobody was saving the cassette room, which had long been considered an eyesore at the station anyway. A half dozen volunteers desperately crammed collectable (though well-worn) rare vinyl into crates, along with CDs and oddball PSA carts, but none got their hands dirty with the tapes. Alarmed, I dove straight into the tape room, remembering too well (& far better than this group of apparently vintage-vinyl-obsessed 20-somethings) the time when a homemade cassette was the only affordable way to disseminate yr basement squawks.

Lo & behold, after about 10 minutes of packing, sorting through cassettes that were long out of their cases, barely identified, garnished with hopelessly faded scrawl over top of Maxell, TDK, Sony HR-90, and the like sticky label branding, there it was, on a bottom shelf, buried under a pile of Dayglo Abortions mixtapes - a small 3 by 8 by 12 brown suitcase, packed to overfull with home recorded cassettes, emblazoned with, in mine own hand, obscure titles that could only trigger distant, uncertain memories in two or three heads in the entire universe, mine being one of them. My lost tapes.

I’ve been neglecting the archiving project I committed myself to back in December. I suppose time is really of the essence here, and somehow those half-sorted piles of semiconductive 1/8 inch tape reels fashioned decades ago are sending me their last psychic plea, o’er piles of baby toys and documentation about the MIDI specification, which for some reason, I’ve never spent any time figuring out systematically until now…

Bookmark this post:

Hide Sites

Posted in archiving, music, personal life, tapes | 3 Comments »

Real time GPS tracking on the Nokia N95

May 2, 2008 – 3:26 pm

I exercise 5 days a week, and much of this is running. While I can be found in local gyms on occasion, I try to do as much of this running as possible for free. For in using a treadmill, with its diligent, brainless constancy, I subjugate my running activity to the Gestell of its designers and the networks of people and things that maintain that thing as a predictable machine, and me as its consumer. I become some totally useless, galloping form of what Heidegger calls Bestand in the process.

Enter GPS and Google Maps, which together offer tangible, and ludicrous alternatives to the regimentation of gym apparati. With these marvels of our age I can, in theory, monitor and regulate my own running, and in doing so keep costs down, like the careful consumer I am. And what the hey, biofeedback loops are funnest when they involve sending data approximately 20,000 kilometres into space and back again, then across 2000 kilometres of Internet and back again to my Macbook Pro so I can enjoy a bunch of flashing lights and icons. In short, could I use my phone to log my jog?

Well, work colludes with life this week as Scott and I explore various GPS trackers for the Nokia N95. We are looking specifically for something we can deploy for a rally between a smart car and a bicycle as part of Mobile Muse’s platform demonstration at Car Free Vancouver Day this year (Sunday June 15th).

I’m sorry to report that I’ve tried out two of them, and both failed.

Nokia Sportstracker beta didn’t work for me at all. It’s basically a heavyweight stopwatch. A stopwatch that works just fine, but that doesn’t do anything else.

MapMyTracks has an excellent website, where one can replay one’s movement on a detailed map with ease. But unfortunately, the phone app seems to go haywire at unpredictable intervals. The stop watch and distance meter ran fine until 2.56 km on my run today, then all the numbers froze. Plus, it was constantly looking for a new wi-fi hookup, which was most irritating. I came home and checked out my My Tracks page and found that the site only recorded two truncated runs : one that crashes the java applet that shows you the movie of your run, and a second one that is only 0.5 kilometres long (my daily run is about 7K).

Back to the drawing board…

Bookmark this post:

Hide Sites

Posted in Actor network theory, Car Free Vancouver, Fearless City, GPS, LBS, Mobile Muse, SCOT, culture & society, mobile, technology, theory, wi-fi, work | 6 Comments »

Mobile video and myths about participatory culture

April 30, 2008 – 2:04 pm

Richard Smith has posted an interesting reply to Igor Faletski’s declaration that mobile TV is dead over at new blog Mobscure (duly added to the cknz blogroll). The debate between them is about whether or not mobile video will be a platform more for creation than for consumption.

I could interject into this debate that the biggest driver of mobile video content is not amateur videography à la Youtube, but sports and entertainment news, and Juniper Research is in agreement with me on this. So I’m falling generally on the side of the argument where Fox, CBS, NBC, and so forth stand to gain the most in the realm of mobile video/broadcasting. True enough, it’s not the same as historical precedents (television, cinema, etc.), and true enough these media can likely thrive concurrently with all the new forms. But what of the amateur, or the marginal? Surely this is an important person in any discussion about media creation and consumption…

As with the evolution of the web-based social media sphere, a participatory culture (which I’m defining here loosely as, relatively, evenly distributed exposure for lots of amateurs) grows on the back of the nonparticipatory media beast (Fox et al), at its fringes, and feeding on its leftovers. In the case of web-based participatory culture, amateur media communities are sustained by the infrastructure provided by Big Media, where bandwidth is so ludicrously abundant that it seems shocking when an ISP shuts down a website. The reason why the Web 2.0 sphere seems to be so much of a bigger deal than it actually is, in my view, is that so many of its most high profile participants are well versed or day-jobbed in Search Marketing or online community design. It seems to be one of those historical moments where everyone in advertising is also in art, and the squares haven’t yet fully taken over the control booths or podcast stations.

Which means: this is a moment of opportunity -to articulate what a more equitable media ecosystem can be, and to secure public access footholds in the next generation of mediating technologies. Are we up to this challenge? Can we have fearless media? (with apologies to Irwin and Scott - I think I’m just trying to contribute to the definition of what this phrase means in some backhanded way) If so, what are the vital next moves of the artistic and activist communities in unlocking emerging media devices/networks now? Political? Technical? Aesthetic? All of the above?

Bookmark this post:

Hide Sites

Posted in culture & society | No Comments »

Chill out

April 30, 2008 – 12:47 pm

Bitnotic created this program called Chill that generates ambient music ‘randomly’ (that would be impossible). It’s not bad - but if I could port this to whatever soft synths I wanted it’d be ideal (e.g., the voicing built in to the app appears to be merely Quicktime Instruments). At any rate, I’ll try and export what it generates to MIDI files and drop those into Reason, on some voices I’ve designed.

Via Podcasting News.

Bookmark this post:

Hide Sites

Posted in cyborgs, music, technology | No Comments »

MUSE3 BCNET presentation

April 28, 2008 – 2:53 pm

I had the opportunity last week to present my ongoing research into user-centered technology design (which is what is evolving out of my ethnographic research in the lives of mobile handset users) as part of a panel all about Mobile Muse (where I’m the Program Manager, for those who aren’t aware of this).

A webcast of the proceedings is available here. Here are slides for the full presentation, and here (more for my own concept archiving sanity than for anything else, really) are my slides extracted from that set.

Some of the same ideas from prior talks I’ve given about the mobile divide are revisited here, but in the context of a more proactive problem orientation. Here I’m asking: how is technology developed in ways that are directly informed and influenced by the communities of users most affected by them, and how is this tech disseminated in ways that are socially beneficial?.

MUSE3 is an excellent opportunity, I’m finding, for looking at the processes of intermediation that go on in the building of new things. At the intersection of network engineers, open source and other sorts of coders, mobile handset companies, government agencies, artist-run centres and a cavalcade of people and organizations with an interest in the potential of mobile technology, many complex interactions are going on that contribute, bit by bit, to whatever technological assemblage is going to emerge. Fascinating stuff, really. Here’s hoping my notes are as meticulous as they need to be…

Bookmark this post:

Hide Sites

Posted in Actor network theory, Mobile Muse, PhD studies, SCOT, STS, conferences, critical constructivism, ethnography, mobile, work | No Comments »

Unsnapped

April 8, 2008 – 10:58 am

I’ve dumped snap.com from this blog. Snap.com offers this little script that you stick in your header. The script offers readers pop-up screenshots of webpages linked to on your page when users hover over the link text, which sounds fun and harmless. However, recently, the company altered their script to also spider pages for common keywords and overlay their own links on them - essentially inserting advertisements into subscriber pages without notifying users and without offering payment. Some crap called “Snap Shots Engage”. OK guys, enough messing with the readability of this blog. I don’t have any reason to trust your script, or you. Goodbye.

Bookmark this post:

Hide Sites

Posted in culture & society | No Comments »

A Tale of Two Cities

April 7, 2008 – 3:04 pm

In my role at MUSE3 I’m coordinating a couple of related mobile technology projects in Whistler and Vancouver’s Downtown East Side that lend themselves well to the “Tale of Two Cities” theme. While there are some interesting parallels between the Dickens novel of the same name and these two contemporary communities, my invocation of Dickens is not a wholehearted grafting of his story about class, revolution, and bureaucracy onto the present.

Rather, the title is a convenient placeholder for the following observations. There are many similar characteristics of Whistler and the DTES, despite their obvious differences in terms of relative affluence, their position in terms of the likely impact of the 2010 Olympics, and their wildly distinct public-facing reputations. What unites them reads roughly as follows (though I’m open to suggestions): the need to express a story about a place under rapid transformation, a place undergoing tremendous public attention, and a place that has not had an adequate opportunity as yet to proclaim its true identity properly to the world.

Both communities are ripe for the showcasing of how these communications goals might be achieved utilizing new media. And the transience of populations both homeless and under-housed (to varying degrees in both communities) resonates strongly with the fact that these new media are mobile.

Here’s my first satellite imagery mashup of the two communities:

Downtown East Whistler

While I’m not entirely happy with it (because Whistler occludes the poorest sections of the DTES, which the aesthetics of the two landscapes screamed for, even though in the end this simply will not do), I will be doing further Photoshop remixes of the two communities as we go along. Hopefully Nokia Maps will offer some really kludgy visual artifacts that I can screenshot and bring into the dialogue.

Bookmark this post:

Hide Sites

Posted in DTES, Fearless City, Mobile Muse, Whistler, art, culture & society, mobile | No Comments »

Simulacre.ca Aggregation Poll

March 7, 2008 – 1:25 pm

Not one to miss an opportunity to shamelessly promote my own nascent aggregation site (nor to miss demoing out-of-the-box modules of Drupal simultaneously), I bring you a poll in which you can vote to help determine the balance of content for said aggregation site. So if you’re curious about bands, then vote for bands. If you want info about tech and mobile news, then vote for that, etc. It’s totally unscientific, but I promise I’ll take the votes into consideration (though I must, in the interest of dispassionate judgment, triangulate this voter data with hard stats like Pageviews and visits as against keywords, as against categories, and so forth. & if there’s an uproar I might be inclined to add things to the ballot (”more pictures”, “more video”, yada yada yada…).

Bookmark this post:

Hide Sites

Posted in blogs, content aggregation, drupal, statistics | 1 Comment »

Up In Ur Transient Droopal. With Announcements.

March 5, 2008 – 9:28 pm

I’ve finally taken the plunge into Drupal on the label/company page. I haven’t had much need for a main company URL or site, so I’m going to use it as a ’social media’ (is there such thing as an ‘antisocial’ medium?) sandbox - essentially an experiment in multiple feed aggregation and integration of mobile generated media. I’ll be adding modules over time, and also likely changing the design on a regular basis, when the mood strikes me.

Bookmark this post:

Hide Sites

Posted in blogs, content aggregation, design, drupal, mobile, music, open source, social web | No Comments »

Clicknoise

Mobile Monday Vancouver [May 5, 2008]

I Have Been Here A Long Time

Real time GPS tracking on the Nokia N95

Mobile video and myths about participatory culture

Chill out

MUSE3 BCNET presentation

Unsnapped

A Tale of Two Cities

Simulacre.ca Aggregation Poll

Up In Ur Transient Droopal. With Announcements.

flickrnoise

Del.icio.us

Jean.fm

Bring the Noise

MobNoise

Trazes

academia

activism

audio tech

copyright

creative commons

design

fandom

heritage

humour

media criticism

misc

misc tech

mobile

music

music (biz)

photography

policy

social networks

wikia

Dead Letter Office

flickrnoise

Jean.fm

Bring the Noise

MobNoise

Trazes

academia

activism

audio tech

copyright

creative commons

design

fandom

heritage

humour

media criticism

misc

misc tech

mobile

music

music (biz)

photography

policy

social networks

wikia

Dead Letter Office

Ad-a-roni