Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

MySpace are blazingly fast to delete the accounts of alleged serial killers.

There seem to be more and more applications which use the API of Flickr (which I also used for Blinks and Buttons) for commercial ends. I first noticed that two days ago when clicking on an ad for the new Nikon D80 on WMMNA. The link took me to a Flash-based site which very much resembles many of the more artistic applications – a cloud of images etc, and it’s actually very well executed. When you click on an indivual image, it will tell you who made it, including a link to their Flickr-account where the image is supposedly also being referenced from.

I was very excited about that for a few minutes until it occurred to me that all the user’s accounts are not older than a few weeks and probably have been set up as part of the campaign. There’s also a suspiciously big amount of mirror-shots where you see the Nikon, including comments like “great cam, where did you get it” and such. It still looks like they gave the cameras to photograpers to document their daily activities, very few shots actually seem posed. It is a bit fake-ish, but I still like it. The more interesting part though, is that most apparently the creative mash-ups which for some time have been the exclusive domain of the media-art community are being discovered by the marketing crowd. Today, I also found on Lifehacker that Flickr runs their own permanent research about their customer’s cameras. If this data is correct (certain accounts for some reason don’t seem to properly show EXIF-data about the type of camera), there’s a surprising amount of pretty good hardware being used. This might just be advertising better cameras as well, though.

Of course – and it’s so obvious – all the metadata that people leave on the social websites are a true goldmine, and there are certainly more interesting things that favorite bands on MySpace. With using the shared metadata from devices (again referring to Blinks & Buttons or to Julian’s Blogject) and other metainformation very finely grained profiles of both usage and users can be constructed and employed. We knew that, and this might be one of the first examples.

While watching Formula 1 for the first time in ages (just had to see if he could still pull something off), I found myself pretty stunned by how the telemetric information of the cars is being presented to the audience. The racing cars seem to be almost as much of networked objects as planes traditionally are, which makes sense, since the team can tweak their strategy according to the health of the car and other parameters. But, in the meantime they apparently have opened up this channel to make it part of the show.

Interestingly, the way it is presented as an overlay on the screen when seeing the driver’s perspective, is exactly the way it looks like in a computer game, which leads to a rather bizarre overall experience – watching a real event which tries to emulate the experience (and participatory aspects) of its own simulation.

While flipping through a copy of Blogga, a German mobile imaging culture-magazine published by Nokia, i stumbled across an article about our work Fixr. Neat!

This magazine, while actually being a promotional thing for cameraphones, features only user-generated photography and has been around for quite some time. Pretty much pioneering the notion of reader-reporters as put forward by giant tabloid-paper BILD – printed media trying to hook into the schemes of the web.

Cheers to my friends from PLATOON who happened to be at Pecha Kucha and wrote a very friendly post about Blinks & Buttons on their blog.

According to this article, 2,6 billon people own a mobile phone - 40% of the total population. 80% potentially could, since this is the present global coverage of the network, which will increase by a further 10% until 2010.

Looks like Second Life got currently some problems from outer space:

“Hello everyone, earlier today, we experienced multiple griefer attacks on the main grid, which were caused by self-replicating particle objects.”

The funny thing is that the so-called griefers (Spielverderber) are introducing paradigms that have been deliberately taken from Sci-Fi and science. Grey goo is what happens when nanotechnology goes wrong in a worst-case scenario. So now the pranksters use the freedom of SL to introduce exactly this scenario.

PS. I take back some of the harsh judgements which I have made the other day. Firstly because today I noticed that I was looking like the ultimate mashup myself, wearing two different European countries’ army items, a used sweater and fake-used American sneakers - and I quite enjoyed it. Secondly, because last.fm made me discover a new “The”-band I really love: The Clientele.

I love Google alerts. Just because it helps to track what ends up where. Today I found the documentation video of Eavesdripping on Google Video. 7,147 views, that’s kinda nice. But what’s really funny about it is that the person who put it there has also equipped it with a soundtrack: She Blinded Me With Science by Thomas Dolby.

And what about the license? Does Google own it now? It was released under a Creative Commons license that allows re-distribution under the same license. I doubt that Google follows that.

I don’t know whether Speck is real or not.

The claim they make about the power-source had me feeling a bit suspicious of it. But if so, physical computering is here to stay and some futures would be feasible sooner than I had imagined. Parts like that would really fusion the object with its informational component to a point where the latter becomes absolutely invisible and thus much more part of a thing than an attachment. Unneccessary to mention all the other implications of something invisible.

If it’s fake, we still got be-dazzling Leslie Hall, who’s here to stay for sure. And she has brought all her gem sweaters, OMG.

(Achtung Germans: there was absolutely no pun intended with “Speck”)