We’re into double figures…

Online population rises by 2m users in past year: Numbers boosted by over 50s, particularly men, and women of all age groups. http://www.nma.co.uk/news/online-population-rises-by-2m-users-in-past-year/3015239.article

PSL reveals the latest theory and practice in partnering in education: Discussion on the need for partnerships in education in a time of public sector cuts. http://www.trainingpressreleases.com/newsstory.asp?NewsID=5524

Research shows iPhone users download twice as many paid apps as Android users: article looks at why Android users are less willing to pay for apps. http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apps-iphone-ipod-android-2010-6

The Great Outdoors: article about using ICT and technology for schools outdoors. http://technostories.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/the-great-outdoors/

Google to challenge Facebook with new social networking service ‘Google Me’: rumours about Google Me came from a now-deleted tweet. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-to-challenge-facebook-with-new-social-networking-service-lsquogoogle-mersquo-2014621.html

apps, blog, blogs, Education, google, iphone. facebook, partnerships, web

More juicy titbits…

Amnesty uses social media to fund protest ad: Amnesty International to raise funds using social media platforms for a protest ad targeted at Shell. http://www.nma.co.uk/news/amnesty-uses-social-media-to-fund-protest-ad/3013243.article

Sibblingz launches multi-platform game: Social multi-device game released to the public.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/12/sibblingz-launches-multi-platform-social-game-engine-to-the-masses/

Hootcourse – Take your class conversation online: Classroom application uses social media to create a conversation channel for your courses.
http://hootcourse.com/

Channel 4 targets teens via games consoles: Channel 4 Education is to harness games consoles as a core channel to reach teenagers in the next phase of its multi-million-pound online education strategy.  http://www.nma.co.uk/news/channel-4-targets-teens-via-games-consoles/3013310.article

The 21st Century Classroom: An insight into modern teaching by Alfie Kohn.
http://www.openeducation.net/2010/05/03/the-21st-century-classroom-alfie-kohn/

blogs, Charities, cross-platform, Education, Gaming, social media

Creativity’s a funny thing. Not only is it often thought of as an intangible quality that is bestowed on a rare fortunate few , but we are somewhat used to thinking that those rare few work alone, or that they at the very least, call the shots. Creative agencies have people called ‘creatives’, whose job it is to be creative and direct other people who aren’t creative.

Now of course we have partnerships like Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, Morecambe and Wise, Adam and Joe, examples of people who were on the same wavelength to such an extent that they can produce things which are wonderfully more than the sum of their parts.

But lately I’ve got thinking that creativity itself is starting to take a different turn. Permit me to take you on a tangential dive into one of my pet loves.

Those who know me will know that I go on about gaming a lot. Too much, perhaps. And not in a l33t speak, last-weekend-I-played-CoDMW2-til-my-eyes-bled kind of way, but in a way which acknowledges that gaming’s move into mainstream is an event of real cultural significance, and that entertainment and art may never be the same again.

I have also been, for some time, fairly convinced of the analogy between a game having a designer and a novel having a writer – great novels can be crafted into works of art because often they are written by people with singular visions, who have control over every line, word and punctuation point (to a degree – I realise this is a somewhat naive conception of the contemporary publishing world, at least).

As gaming and the means by which to create games became popularised over the last, say, 20 years, it has become more and more possible for the creators of computer games to exhibit an analogous level of control over their creations. Picture lone programmer/designers, hunched over their machines in the late hours, just as the penniless artist might at their desk furiously scribbling / painting / typing when in the throes of an idea on a dark night, until everything is Just. Right. I believed that if the trend continued, you would eventually get games which were just as honed, just as artful, as great novels.

However, having worked at a digital agency for some time now, it hit me the other day that that vision is unlikely to be the future, for computer games. I’m not discounting the possibility that single individuals can produce captivating gaming experiences; people like Jason Rohrer and Daniel Benmergui. But the thing about games is that they can be so complex and so full of variables, and require so many different skills, that actually the creativity you need to produce a great game is of a very different kind. Some games like Aquaria are created by designer – programmer collaborations, so you get a kind of Lennon-McCartney partnership, more still are created by small teams, like a band jamming to thrash out a song, and others are created by vast studios, like an entire orchestra getting together and saying ‘hey guys, shall we write a concerto? Dave, you take violin.’

To give an example: Bioshock contains innumerable imperceptible touches contributing to the feel of the game as a whole – the way that desks are left open when they’re searched; the way that Houdini splicers teleport in a plume of blood red mist; the way that lone enemies talk to themselves in wrecked corridors as a manifestation of their insanity.

Now, although it’s entirely possible that the same person came up with all of these little ideas, is it really likely? Is it likely that all of these were dictated by the same person who came up with the Ayn-Rand inspired dystopia that is Bioshock’s setting? Is it even likely that whoever decided to set the game in a decrepit, dripping art deco labyrinthine city under the sea, is an individual, rather than a group of writers?

Or is it more plausible that all of these things fell out of when a group of people threw everything they had into a Magimix and pressed ‘On’? For the record, I don’t know who came up with those ideas. Perhaps not even the people who came up with them know. Or maybe it was in fact all one person with a savant-like ability to describe the minutiae of a nightmare they had after finishing Atlas Shrugged in a single sitting.

To bring it back here, the point I’m making is that digital experiences are now so complex, so involved, that to rely on one person to call all of the creative shots would be a nightmare. I’ve produced websites with little touches which I couldn’t have foreseen and told a developer to implement – these decisions come out of discussions and collaboration, and that’s where creativity lies now. We’ve all heard about megalomaniacal directors or musicians dictating absolutely everything on the projects in which they’re involved – but that’s a very difficult thing to do with a digital experience, more so than anything else, I would venture.

And as digital experiences become increasingly common, and increasingly admired, perhaps that will change our conception of creativity. I’m not for a moment suggesting that there’s no room for an individual’s vision, or for the leadership of a creative team, but perhaps there will be less of an emphasis on “genius” as applied to an individual – perhaps what will be most important will be people’s capacity to interact with one another. If games (and digital experiences in general) will become significant contributions to culture, and many of those games are produced by teams, perhaps some of the most valuable contributions to culture in times to come will be put forth by groups, rather than lonely artists. Your thoughts, ladies and gents?

Creative, crowdsourcing, games, Gaming, social media

Even the most casual visitor to the blogosphere will by now have read about Chatroulette, the website which indiscriminately matches strangers with each other and allows them to conduct webcam-assisted conversations. Disconcertingly for anyone writing about Chatroulette, there is no consensus on its relationship with capitalisation and spacing (Chat Roulette? ChatRoulette? Chatroulette? I’ve gone with the latter (obviously)). Created and run by Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old Russian student from Moscow, the site was estimated to have had 30 million unique users worldwide in February.

Most of the media coverage of Chatroulette – and there has been a lot of media coverage – seems to have focused on what one blogger calls “the masturbatory aspect of Internet expressiveness”. And, sure enough, a cursory visit to the site can be an unsettling experience for those among us whose idea of entertainment is anything other than watching the graphic onanism of a faceless 19-year-old from Wisconsin.

But others have been using the site more creatively. A number of Chatroulette-based games have become popular – while Merton the improv pianist has become, in his own slightly arrogant words, “a cultural phenomenon”. Meanwhile the imaginatively-named Cat Man has used augmented reality to good effect (as one chat partner says, “IT’S VERY NICE”), and one mischievous user has been taking her partner’s video stream, mirroring it back to them and then recording their reaction. Head bopping is the most common response, apparently. Make of that what you will.

The word “random” is bandied around these days with a regularity that if not alarming is certainly irritating, but Chatroulette is a rare worthy recipient of the adjective. And this randomness is the site’s greatest asset and its greatest flaw. The ease with which users can switch from partner to partner and instantly connect to people on the other side of the world is what makes the site appealing. But it also makes it unsafe for children and faintly pointless for adults.

As Larry Magid has pointed out, Chatroulette – or the idea behind it – has great educational potential. Children can speak to people in Afghanistan about their experiences of the War on Terror – or to women in Iran about life there. Israelis can speak to Palestinians. Creatives experimenting with QR codes or iPad software can learn from people in Japan or the US about these technologies. All these things were possible on the web already, of course, but the introduction of a video element brings people closer together – and this is a powerful thing. The draconian authorities in China have yet to ban Chatroulette, so it is providing a rare opportunity for the inhabitants of the world’s most populous nation to speak openly with Westerners directly and in confidence from the comfort of their homes. But as long as the user has no control over their chat partner, such edifying Chatroulette encounters are the exception rather than the rule.

And this leads to the other significant characteristic of Chatroulette conversation: anonymity. If randomness is one pillar of the site, anonymity is the other. There are no logins, no registration process, no name display – and people love it. Nick Bilton believed the success of the site “signals a nascent desire for anonymity online”. I’m not sure Bilton is right to describe this desire for anonymity as nascent – the anonymity provided by online chat rooms has been attracting many users since their 1990s heyday. In this sense, Chatroulette is not the future of the internet, but its past.

Either way, as with its randomness, Chatroulette’s anonymity is a blessing and a curse. The site is unsafe for children and its anonymity means that users tend to behave in ways they might otherwise not – hence the unsavoury scenes from Wisconsin. As Sarita Yardi, a doctoral candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology who studies the role of technology in teenagers’ lives, puts it, “Right now it’s kind of like an online Lord of the Flies.”

Magid suggests the introduction of channels so users can filter chat partners by things like subject matter, language and region. If these changes were implemented, it would no longer be Chatroulette, of course. If each participant in a game of Russian roulette knew which chamber contained the bullet, and chose whether to load that one or not, it would slightly defy the point. And in some ways, allowing users control over their partners would defy the point of Chatroulette. But the idea and the technology could certainly be used for educational purposes. With logins, channels, moderation and supervision, a video chat site could be a great resource to afford people an insight into the lives of others whom they would never encounter otherwise.

Some safeguards have already been put in place by Chatroulette spin-offs like Chatroulette Map, which ties users to their location. RandomDorm is Chatroulette for US college students, and requires them to log in using a verified college email address. But neither harnesses the educational potential of the medium. Until a site can get the security right and the user numbers up, Chatroulette and its various spin-offs will be like so many things on the web: nothing more than a fun way of wasting time. In the words of Cat Man’s chat buddy, it’s very nice – but that’s about it.

Courtesy of blogefl on flickr.com

boredom, Chatroulette, Culture, Debate, Education, online chat, social media, video

The real-time environment of the internet has evolved a concerning dichotomy for fact and fiction. When Michael Jackson died in June, word spread too fast for Google to cope, and the site began blocking any search for “Michael Jackson”. But the lust for up-to-the-minute news could not be kept at bay – word spread through tweets and other micro-blogs regardless. Real time reporting had the edge.

Or did it? On the very same day, Jeff Goldblum was also reported dead, provoking a similar unstoppable surge of rumours and gossip

Real-time internet may be powerful in keeping up-to-date with news, but it most certainly lacks reliability – Jeff Goldblum, as it turns out, is not dead after all. Therein lies the problem. In the explosion of information surrounding extremely recent events, how can we distinguish fact from fiction when we don’t know how the fuse was lit?

Real time is the talk of the internet search town at the moment. Twitter, the biggest contributor to real-time data, continues to grow in popularity and Twitter Search, the only real-time search engine with access to all tweets, is in a powerful position. But a wave of search engines which pull together data from across the web have sprung up recently. Sites like Collecta, OneRiot, and Scoopler broaden real-time search to include blogs, articles, photos, and videos as well as tweets. And in recent months the big players have shown that they want a piece of the action too: Google, Bing and Facebook have all taken steps to keep up with the real-time crowd.

But what exactly is real-time search and why is everyone so excited about it? Traditionally, search engines like Google have organised their results based on authority. Sites have authority if they have grown slowly and organically over time. Real-time search engines, on the other hand, sort their results by how recent they are. Through these search engines, users can access a river of the latest information on whatever topic they choose.

Increasingly people are turning to the web to find out what is happening right now – the recent protests in Iran are a perfect example (and a frequently mentioned one). But when you search for a term in a traditional search engine the results look very similar day after day. If a volcano is erupting, followers on the web do not want to read an old article about the properties of lava, however authoritative it may be. With the real-time web your results will be different every time, and often refresh before your eyes. So no out-of-date articles, and no need to wait for news; users have access to up-to-the-minute comments and images. They can find out what is happening at the heart of a demonstration or at the site of a volcanic eruption as the event is taking place.

The real-time web also tells you what topics everyone’s talking about.  Most real-time search engines display trending topics, the most popular at that moment, and many can sort results by categories such as sport or entertainment. Want to know what your colleagues will be talking about at work tomorrow? A real-time search will probably tell you.

But a real-time search will probably also tell you all the information you didn’t want to know, or didn’t care about. Aside from rumours becoming gospel faster than you think possible, the current main disadvantage of real-time search engines is their inability to filter unwanted messages or irrelevant noise from results. The river just keeps on flowing regardless of what it has picked up along the way.

Collecta have openly stated they are currently paying no regard to relevancy in their results. Oneriot, however, have begun to experiment with reliability by introducing Pulserank, a toolbar which not only takes into account the freshness of the information, but also the authority of the website and person posting the information, alongside the velocity of the information passing around the whole web. The potential for the tool is huge, but although this seems like a reasonable approach, it may not catch something important as fast as simply watching the unadulterated stream.

Although far from fully effective, the Pulserank toolbar does pave the way for the necessary filters which real-time searching will require as the phenomenon grows. More users will undoubtedly lead to more spam and more noise being generated, increasing the need for an effective filter barrier. The challenge for real-time search engines is to combine recency, relevancy and reliability in their results without becoming elitist and losing the organic chatter of the online crowd.

Problems aside, the current animation surrounding the technology should lead to exciting developments. One such possibility being the use of real-time internet searching as an alert system – by signaling variations in the stream of mentions for a particular query, any abnormal rise in the quantity of chatter would trigger a notification. So the future of real-time search is bright, if hazy. Entrepreneur Edo Segal believes that old-school search will never vanish, but real-time news will create a society where we have an omnipresent sense of the moment.

Culture, future, google, news, real-time, search, technology

2009 has been a truly dark year for the public image of piracy.

And I’m not talking about Somalian pirates, but the issue of digital rights, specifically in entertainment. It’s estimated that piracy and illegal filesharing costs the television, music and film industries £500m a year in lost revenues.

The issue has of course been around since at least 2000 when Metallica took on Napster in one of the more bizarre judicial confrontations in media history.

But whereas that story and the more recent imprisonment of Pirate Bay’s founders were knee-jerk events that had us all wildly jabbering / twittering, I feel that we’re now in the midst of a more subtle undercurrent of significant change in the distribution of online music and television, sustained by almost daily reports of possible mergers and deals, new technologies and services, alleged crackdowns and constant shifts of responsibility for monitoring and controlling internet usage.

In 2000 the issue of digital rights was the almost exclusive concern of emancipated geeks interacting and sharing in a space seemingly designed both by and for them; apoplectic heavy metal fans; and a not insignificant number of terribly confused people sat awkwardly in between.

Jump to 2009, and the internet has become for many the first port of call when looking for entertainment. Mobile devices such as the iPhone plug directly into online music stores, and almost everyone has an iPod or other portable media device. Similarly, network improvements and the penetration of broadband has helped BBC’s iPlayer and its competitors to become almost as popular as “traditional” TV.

In other words, the developments in online media distribution have become mainstream concerns.

However, there remains a fundamental conflict between monetising these distribution services and a historic perception of the internet as user controlled, open-source, a community network without restriction. People don’t like paying for stuff online. Although digital platforms account for about 20 per cent of recorded music sales, 95% of all file downloads are estimated to be illegal. If we want to hear a song once, we might YouTube it or call it up on Last FM or Spotify – if we want it on our iPods, the stats say we are most likely to download it illegally.

Similar issues exist for television and film, where downloads and particularly streaming have been giving producers headaches. The most recent example would be the furore over online leaked scenes from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which appeared several weeks before release.

(Why anyone would want to see this, for free or otherwise, is beyond me, but apparently it was an issue…) The problem is worsened by advertising – films and shows are heavily advertised on the web (i.e. globally) but release dates are staggered around the world and vary hugely. Inevitably fans are going to get impatient, and at present it’s just too easy to access content illegally.

However, things are changing. Responses to infringements are getting ever more serious and, as we have seen this year, it’s no longer empty rhetoric. The French are being typically Gallic about filesharing, just two weeks ago approving the “three strikes” bill.

The controversial bill proposes the creation of a new government agency, which translates rather grandly as “the High Authority of Diffusion of the Art Works and Protection of Rights on the Internet”, which could have the power to disconnect copyright offenders without legal recourse.

In the UK, creative industry groups such as the BPI, the Publisher’s Association and Equity and broadcasters Channel 4, BSkyB and Virgin Media, are all lobbying the government to force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to police their users. Of course, this is the last thing the ISPs want to hear, and so they in turn are saying it’s the job of the content providers, leading to what John Woodward of the UK Film Council has reportedly described as a damaging “Mexican stand-off”.

To some extent this apparent impasse has already been breached by evolving the distribution channels and therefore providing more choice. Last year a raft of music subscription services, social networking partnerships like MySpace Music and new licensing channels emerged. Each day sees new reports of mergers, integration and innovation – so watch this space.

When it comes to TV, we’re also getting used to on demand programming. At the moment, broadcasters are giving us content for free, over the internet, and it’s brilliant. The BBC are the front-runners, though 4OD also provides a free catch up service on most of its programmes, (and recently, thankfully, opened its doors for Mac users). And if you’re the kind of person that enjoys pouring absinthe in your eyes, there’s the unforgivably awful ITV Player. But here, too, there are revenue-generating changes afoot. Both 4OD and ITV Player have “forced” adverts, and if the troubled broadband platform Project Kangaroo ever gets a buyer (Orange dropped out of talks just yesterday), on demand TV will almost certainly be delivered on a subscription basis.

The BBC are now behind Project Canvas, which plans to allow viewers to watch on demand services and other internet content via traditional TV – i.e. bring on demand away from the PC in the bedroom and back into the living room (although there must be more to it than that, as cable services such as Virgin Media are already offering on demand services including the iPlayer?)

These suspiciously named “projects” are controversial, in a way partly because of their ambition; the aim seems to be to partner with other broadcasters, channels and media companies to develop an apparently essential media platform, which is an inevitably fiddly business. BSkyB have already thrown an anti-competiveness strop over Kangaroo (which has all but killed it), and last week they accused the BBC Trust of “deficient” consultation over its more recent plans for Canvas.

There’s a more obvious complication for the BBC to grapple with: just where the licence fee fits into the various projects, (iPlayer / Kangaroo / Canvas) is, frankly, anyone’s business.

At this point, It wouldn’t be right to ignore what Bob Geldof thinks about digital TV, so here is what Bob Geldof thinks about digital TV:

“In the age of the internet, the notion of television itself is as archaic as the word wireless – even if that has been reinvented for the digital age.” (Bob Geldof)

To conclude a somewhat wayward post: it seems to me inevitable that our perception of the internet as a distribution channel is set to change over the next couple of years. There will always be infringers pushing their luck, and there will also always be a lot of good stuff available for free.

But we will, I think, also have to get used to the idea of paying money, or suffering adverts, to enjoy premium content on the internet.

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Are bank bonuses and MP expenses just sensationalist news fodder or genuinely a sign of our times? Do we live in a time without morals?

These and other questions will be debated at the UK’s first philosophy and music festival which takes place in Hay on Wye on 22nd-31st May (at the same time as the Hay Literary Festival). It is organised by our sister organisation, the Institute of Art and Ideas. OCC has designed the festival website.

With the overall theme: ‘Crunch. Values and Belief in a new era’ the Philosophy Sessions examine where we are and where we might go from here.  The festival brings together a celebrated cast of speakers including philosophers Simon Blackburn, Susan Neiman, AC Grayling, sociologists Steve Fuller, Zygmunt Bauman, and political theorists Will Hutton, Phillip Blond, Geoff Mulgan.  Evenings are host to musical sets from performers including Michael Nyman, Baka Beyond, Stephen Fretwell and many more; as well as daily comedy sketches come from the likes of Ed Aczel and Robin Ince. For more information or to book tickets visit www.howthelightgetsin.org.

You can become a fan of the festival on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/hay-on-wye/How-the-light-gets-in-festival-at-hay-2009/ and for those who tweet, you can follow us on Twitter on http://twitter.com/howthelightgets.

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