participation

Aug 7 2008   4:31PM GMT

How you can watch the Olympics live online (and what sysadmins can do about it)

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, Microsoft, media, Technology, Web services, video, YouTube, Internet, multimedia, useful, cool, free, feeds, event, resource, participation, wiki, IPTV, interactive media, streaming, howto, Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, hacking, communications, Web applications, government

After years of buildup, the Olympics are about to kick off tomorrow in Beijing. As Shamus McGillicuddy reports, streaming Olympics video will drain corporate bandwidth. This year’s games are going to put substantial, perhaps even unprecedented, strain upon the Internet backbone. NBC plans to to stream more than 2,200 hours of live video coverage online.

CBS took a similar approach to “March Madness” this spring, streaming all 64 games of the NCAA mens’ basketball tournament.  Network administrators have similar challenges now in deciding where and whether to block users from accessing NBC.com, capping bandwidth use or engaging in a little proactive traffic shaping.

Personally, I like the suggestion made in Shamus’s story by Eileen Haggerty, director of product marketing with NetScout:

“An IT organization could set up a PC with a large-screen monitor in the office cafeteria that would run streaming video of the games. Instead of having 15 people sitting at their desks sucking up bandwidth individually, a savvy network administrator could bring all those people together to watch the Olympics during their break.”

Let’s assume for a moment, however, that you aren’t a bandwidth-conscious CTO and would like to be able to keep current on the standings in your favorite events or athletes. (Or that you believe setting up a few televisions is a handy low-tech hack.)

Thanks to Gina’s post on Lifehacker,Watch the Olympics Online, I found Wired’s excellent How-To Wiki for Watching the Olympics Online. (As you might expect, this link has been climbing the charts on the most popular page at delicious).

As the wiki notes, you can catch up to four different livestreams and more than 3,000 hours of on-demand at NBCOlympics.com.

World-wide, there also many other websites streaming Games footage:  CCTVOlympics.com in mainland China, BBC Sports in the U.K., Yahoo7 in Australia or CBC Olympics in Canada.

There’s a catch, however, to the livestreaming, on-demand video goodness: In most cases, users in the United States will be blocked from viewing the footage on any site but NBC.

If you’re savvy enough to follow the advice at Metafilter by setting up a proxy server or using Anonymizer, you should be able to get around location restrictions.

It’s a cinch that the millions of broadcast viewers will be recording and uploading events to YouTube on their own, of course.  NBC has tried to get out in front of the inevitable wave by partnering with Google, with plans to provide 3 hours of highlights and wrap-ups to a dedicated channel onYouTube.

As the authors of the Wired wiki note (nice work, applian, apardoe, mosesofmason and snackfight!), BitTorrent is also an option for watching events after the fact, though P2P files sharing on your corporate network may land you in more hot water than simply streaming the video, given the various serious security risks involved.

What the wiki doesn’t note is what is lying under the hood over at NBCOlympics.com. NBC has partnered with MSN to stream the Olympics using Silverlight, in what will be far and away the biggest test for Microsoft’s alternative to Flash to date.

Anyone that wants to watch the Olympics will have to download and install the Silverlight plug-in, a process that certain to test out exactly how ready for “prime time” the technology is for streaming rich media online. Of special note is the fact that Silverlight encrypts a videostream, which will make recording the events considerably harder (if not impossible).

As a result, tech pundits, geeks and network executives will no doubt be watching the race to crack the streams and distribute unauthorized video nearly as closely as the games themselves.

Enjoy the Olympics!

Jun 27 2008   8:42AM GMT

Have you got your avatar yet? Gartner says you will.

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
business, Web 2.0, new media, multimedia, culture, futurism, participation, interactive media, social networking, virtual reality, gaming, immersive 3D worlds, virtual worlds, predictions

It’s 2008. Do you know where your avatar is?

Only three years to get your avatar unless you want to be lumped in with the bottom 20% — by 2011, Gartner says that the vast majority of Internet users will have avatars to represent them online in various gaming and non-game virtual environments. Which, I guess, are expected to proliferate. The clock’s ticking — Gartner predicted that last year at their Symposium/ITxpo 2007 Emerging Trends.

And they aren’t talking about the 2D image that pops up beside your posts in forums. I mean, even I have one of those. And she’s cute, if a little on the flat side. But she’s no Lara Croft — her ass-kicking ability is extremely limited. And I can’t see the world from her perspective, in a 3-D immersive world.

I have friends in virtual worlds, have had invitations extended — but so far, I haven’t wandered into one. I completely understand the appeal. Wow — talk about a rich fantasy life! My stock response, though, is that I don’t have time for my first life, let alone a second one.

I guess I’m going to have to make time. According to Gartner and near-futurists such as Gerri Sinclair, more and more of our online activities will move to virtual environments and our interactions will be conducted by 3D representatives with all the capabilities we and others possess in the real world — and then some. Sinclair is executive director of the master’s degree program for digital media at the Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver and her students are creating a parallel virtual university.

Here’s an interview on MSDN’s Channel 10.

Apparently, the future of online interaction is going to be pretty much conducted by avatars, in 3-D surround everything. I was thinking about that — my worklife avatar would be plunked in front of a computer looking at a computer screen and my online leisure time avatar would best represent me by sitting around chatting in book store cafes. But then, I guess, “I” could wander over to the shelves and find something to read or go get some sprinkles on my latte…

Maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part. In a 3-D immersive world I can be and do — virtually — anything… Hmmm… Well, it looks like I’m going to get sprinkles on my latte. Then… on the way to the counter I feel inspired to… do a triple backflip. Hey! Perfectly executed — and not a drop spilled! Now I’m going to drink my coffee. For real.

~ Ivy Wigmore

Jun 10 2008   12:16PM GMT

What is enterprise 2.0? Cloud computing proponents mix with social software vendors in Boston.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, Microsoft, Networking, business, interoperability, news, Web 2.0, enterprise, software, Technology, Web services, video, new media, Internet, innovation, useful, social bookmarking, social publishing, interesting, invention, event, entrepeneurship, startup, collaboration, participation, Development, wiki, conversation, streaming, productivity, spreadsheet, trend, social networking, buzz, communications, Web applications, interface, buzzword, software development, cloud computing, the cloud, word meanings, conference, demonstration, enterprise 2.0

The question of creating an agreed upon definition for enterprise 2.0 continues to come up here on the Boston waterfront, as hundreds of software executives, CIOs, software vendors, media and curious technologists mix and explore the latest in enterprise collaboration technologies at Enterprise 2.0. Zack Church and I collaborated last month to formulate this:

Enterprise 2.0 is the strategic integration of Web 2.0 technologies into an enterprise’s intranet, extranet and business processes. Enterprise 2.0 implementations generally use a combination of social software and collaborative technologies like blogs, RSS, social bookmarking, social networking and wikis. Most enterprise 2.0 technologies, whether homegrown, free or purchased, emphasize employee, partner and consumer collaboration. Such technologies may be in-house or Web-based. Companies using YouTube for vlogging or a private Facebook group as a modified intranet, for instance, are implementing a form of enterprise 2.0.

The conference organizers have formulated the following definition, loosely based upon Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAffee’s definition for enterprise 2.0:

Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.

So what’s the story? Buzzword akin to Web 2.0 or something “real?”

In a session exploring the state of Enterprise 2.0, however, Dion Hinchliffe offered up one of the best, most succinct definitions to date that moves beyond the specifics to a more overarching purpose:

Enterprise/Web 2.0 is made up of “networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects.” — Tim O’Reilly.

In this case, a network effect is “When a good or service has more value the more that other people have it too.” (Wikipedia)

Here at the conference, over 60 different vendors are demonstrated different kinds of communication and productivity software that creates such network effects by helping workers to collaborate more easily, efficiently and socially. We’ll be posting videos, articles, interviews and other content over the next two days, as long as the wifi allows. Livestreaming has been balky, due to heavy network use, but you can check in on WhatIs.com’s live conference coverage of Enterprise 2.0 at uStream.com to see if we’re online. Check back here for more coverage on cloud computing, Dan Bricklin on SocialText’s new social spreadsheet or demonstrations of new social software like Newsgator’s Social Sites 2.0, a plugin that turns MSFT Sharepoint Server into a Facebook-like environment.

If you’re at the conference floor and would like to demonstrate your software or talk about enterprise 2.0 and social software, feel free to email me at ahoward@techtarget.com or send me a tweet at @digiphile on Twitter.

Apr 23 2008   8:46AM GMT

Video: Exploring presence technology with tele-immersive dance in cyberspace

Posted by: Alexander Howard
applications, virtual, media, Technology, fun, video, YouTube, new media, Internet, innovation, cool, culture, college, learning, academics, interesting, invention, event, creativity, collaboration, participation, interactive media, music, mashup, science, virtual reality, geek, demonstration

Often the title of a video alone raises an eyebrow. Today’s video selection certainly does — it’s a presentation from two tele-immersion labs, one at UC Berkeley’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the other within the University of Urbana-Champaign Computer Science Department. According to the IEEE Computer Society, tele-immersion is when “collaborators at remote sites share the details of a virtual world that can autonomously control computation, query databases, and gather results.” It might be a stretch but I see tele-immersion used in that was as an advanced version of presence technology, in which an application make it possible to locate and identify a computing device wherever it might be, as soon as the user connects to the network.

As it’s a dance performance, both labs worked in close collaboration with the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Dance Department and Intermedia Program at Mills College. The video quality admittedly isn’t great — and you may want to skip ahead to 11:30, when the actual performance begins, or to 20:00, when the dancing starts — but the concept itself is noteworthy for its aspiration to bridge the gap between real and virtual environments.

From the show notes on YouTube:

The Resonance Project Dance Group performed for a very large crowd in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at UC Berkeley. The performance was a blend of live, modern dance with live tele-immersed dancers from University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Using a large network of cameras and computers the dancers were able to span the geographic distance and mingle in cyberspace. The computers merged three-dimensional video images of the dancers onto a single projection, which was broadcast alongside live dancers.

The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a “performance as research” model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.

The nature of the performance has a close conceptual relationship with CAVE, a tele-immersive environment used for learning in a wide variety of disciplines, and the CAVEman, the first 4-D human atlas.

Mar 6 2008   2:35PM GMT

Video: Twitter in Plain English

Posted by: Alexander Howard
messaging, Mobile, Web 2.0, media, video, YouTube, new media, Internet, multimedia, commentary, cool, culture, education, learning, interesting, resource, participation, wiki, screencast, conversation, community, interactive media, widgets, tool, mashup, howto, trend, social networking, blogging, buzz, fundamentals, communications, word meanings, geek

CommonCraft.com is already well known in the blogosphere and social media world for creating brilliant, lucid short videos that explain tricky concepts.

The two-person team that make up CommonCraft (Sachi and Lee LeFever) put it simply: they solve explanation problems.

I love that tagline. It’s rather similar sort of thing we try to do here at WhatIs.com. To that point, I’ve embedded three of CommonCraft’s previously released videos on our site, each of which explore and explain a different social media technology:

• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English

The newest addition to the mix is a video explaining what Twitter is and how it works.

As you may know, Twitter is a popular microblogging service that launched almost exactly one year ago at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. While we’ve blogged about it right afterwards. Due in no small part to the high percentage of geeks and “digerati” at the festival who had the opportunity to try it out and start networking with each other, Twitter really took off. Twitter is now a leader in the “social messaging” category that includes Pownce and Jaiku, spanning the gap between our online and offline worlds. Each allows users to update a microblogging service using SMS messages, a Web interface or a desktop application. (Twitter relies on third party apps for the last based upon its APIs. Try Snitter if you have Adobe Air installed.)

CommonCraft’s video sheds worthwhile additional insight. Watch it below:

There’s plenty of interesting activity going on out there, too. Just check out this mashup of Twitter, Google Maps and live election results for intriguing insights into the 2008 presidential primary season.

And if you’d like to find/follow me on Twitter, head over to http://twitter.com/digiphile.

Sep 12 2007   10:21AM GMT

A-Space and Intellipedia: Spy agencies go all Web 2.0

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
applications, news, Web 2.0, AJAX, new media, participation, wiki, social networking, Web applications

Birds do it, bees do it… Well, ok — that wasn’t true. Birds and bees aren’t getting into wikis and social networking yet but almost everyone else is.

Even spies are all over it. Last year the feds launched a wiki for the 16 US intelligence agencies (Did you know there were that many? I didn’t.) Based on the Wikipedia model, Intellipedia has three separate components based on clearance levels.

Unlike Wikipedia, Intellipedia is not open to public access. Here’s an unofficial blog dedicated to Intellipedia news, though. This FCW article explains how Young feds bring intell changes.

In this screencast on FCW.com, Chris Rasmussen (Knowledge Management Officer, Intellipedia, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense) discusses “what it’s like to work as an Intellipedian, the rules they live by, and how the new tools are helping transform the ways of the intelligence-processing for good.”

At this writing, Intellipedia has about 30,000 articles online, undergoing 4,800 edits on a daily basis.

And with Intellipedia established, a social networking site similar to MySpace is under development. It sounds as if A-Space will incorporate the wiki site:

From an InformationWeek article:

A-Space will begin life as a portal that includes a Web-based word processing tool akin to Google Docs, a wiki-based intelligence community encyclopedia known as Intellipedia and access to three “huge, terabyte databases” of current raw intel for analysts to sift through. It’ll be scaled for 10,000 users at day one. By the end of 2008, the DNI hopes to bring in other resources like intelligence blogs, social networking capabilities akin to a Facebook for spooks, secure Web-based e-mail, better search functionality, and much more.

A-Space is expected to be online in December of this year.

What’s up next? Maybe a Second Life-like virtual world (If you ask me, this stuff is ALL a bit other-worldly). Here’s what Sean Dennehy, the CIA’s Chief of Intellipedia development, had to say (quoted in this FCW article): “I think it is a no-brainer. We could use it for training and other things.”

Other things might involve the ongoing “war on terror.” According to this article in The Australian: “…jihadists are turning to artificial online worlds such as Second Life to train and recruit members.”

Who knows what those guys will be up to next? Who knows what they’re up to right now, for that matter?

I’d tell you more but, you know, then I’d have to kill ya.

~ Ivy Wigmore

Aug 15 2007   2:13PM GMT

Got a minute? Create (or edit) a solar system at Galaxiki.

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
applications, Web 2.0, AJAX, fun, Internet, blog, cool, free, interesting, creativity, participation, wiki, community, visual, science

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. ~ Carl Sagan

(Public domain image created by NASA and the European Space Agency. Hubble material is copyright-free and may be freely used on the condition that NASA and ESA are credited as the source of the material.)

Oh, I love Carl Sagan! And I think Sagan might have really liked Galaxiki, a wiki site created by Jos Kirps where users collaborate to edit a fictional galaxy. You can edit for free or — if you want to play God — you can lay down a little local currency ($12 USD) and become Creator of your own solar system.

Here’s part of Kirps’ description of Galaxiki:

Millions of stars, planets, moons, pulsars and black holes can be explored using an intuitive 2D map. The site software manages most of the physical properties and behaviours of the solar systems, from orbits to the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres. Some planets offer conditions that may allow life - the idea behind Galaxiki is that community members can create fictional life forms and write about their histories on their planets. The ease of use attracts all kinds of users, so that the target audience is not limited to science fiction and astronomy addicts.

The Galaxiki physics allow taveling faster than light, and journeys between solar systems become possible within a reasonable timeframe for advanced fictive civilisations. This also means that different civilisations may meet each other at different time points, the challenge for advanced users will be to keep the global history of all civilisations in the galaxy consistent. Galaxiki is both fun and challenging, for individuals and for the community. It’s like dreams becoming true, and you’re part of it - I think that’s what makes it so attractive.

Meanwhile, back in this world, I’m not likely to be baking an apple pie any time soon. But I just might invent at least a tiny part of a universe…

~ Ivy Wigmore

May 10 2007   10:29AM GMT

The Encyclopedia Of Life: An individual Web page for every species of life on Earth

Posted by: Alexander Howard
innovation, cool, education, learning, free, academics, crowdsourcing, interesting, resource, participation, wiki, visual, mashup, information, science

Can you imagine a comprehensive, illustrated encyclopedia that documented and described every living species known to humankind?

If scientists succeed in a new, boldly conceived project, such a dream might become reality. Meet the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). [Press release]

A steering committee of senior officers from Harvard University, Smithsonian Institution, Field Museum, Marine Biological Laboratory, Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, Missouri Botanical Garden, and the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations has proposed that “an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet, as well as all those later discovered and described. Encyclopedia of Life will be used as both a teaching and a learning tool, helping scientists, educators, students, and the community at large gain a better understanding of this planet and all who inhabit it.”

The EOL project has its roots in the writing of biologists Dan Jenzen and E.O. Wilson. Wilson’s 2003 essay on the topic and then a speech 2007 speech (read his wish on TED.com) at the influential TED Conference have brought the concept to wider attention.

Essentially, the EOL hopes to combine collaborative editing using wikis and mashups of a number of other sources of scientific materials. Crucially, entries will edited and approved by scientists to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of the information.

Draft species pages that demonstrate some of the possibilities of a fully implemented system are already available at http://www.eol.org.

The project’s creators hope to have actual, authenticated species pages available by mid 2008. You can learn more by reading the EOL FAQ or watching this video on YouTube.

Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing has also posted about EOL , noting that while the project has received a $50 million dollar funding commitment led by the MacArthur Foundation, the EOL “reminds [him] a lot of Kevin Kelly’s All Species Foundation, which ran out of funding around 2003. It was a TED-borne idea.”

Apr 23 2007   4:13PM GMT

AssignmentZero: Wired applies crowdsourcing to journalism

Posted by: Alexander Howard
business, news, Web 2.0, Internet, commentary, culture, crowdsourcing, volunteer, social publishing, interesting, collaboration, participation, forum, conversation, community, information, trend, buzz

Welcome to “pro-am journalism,” “an attempt to bring together professional writers and editors with citizen journalists to collaborate on reporting and writing about the rise of crowdsourcing on the Web. Inspired by the open source movement, the goal of Assignment Zero is to develop a working model of an open newsroom.” [Full Press Release]
AssigmentZero is bankrolled by Wired and led by Executive Director Jay Rosen, founder of NewAssignment.net and NYU journalism professor. If reporting in this proposed “open style” works, according to Rosen, it could “change journalism and expand what’s humanly possible with the instrument of a free press.” You can read Jay’s full essay on the subject here. The project has also partnered with citizen journalism site Newsvine with an eye to engaging that site’s users and involve them in selected assignments. “Essentially, we’re building a software platform for journalism 2.0 — open source and extensible – which we believe will bring new dimensions of creativity to news gathering.” said Evan Hansen, Editor in Chief, Wired News.

Jeff Howe, who we interviewed about crowdsourcing earlier this year, will be drawing from the project for his upcoming book on the subject. Make sure you check out our crowdsourcing podcast if you missed it the first time around.

Apr 23 2007   3:45PM GMT

Twitter: Microblogging mashed-up with moblogging and presence technology

Posted by: Alexander Howard
messaging, wireless, Web 2.0, fun, cool, culture, free, feeds, interesting, startup, participation, forum, conversation, community, social, discussion board, mashup, Google Maps, trend, social networking, blogging

A new messaging service has gained some real traction in the blogosphere and offline among the “digerati,” though to be fair most of those coders, writers and futurists are rarely truly offline anymore. Just look at how often they are creating “tweets” with Twitter.
While Twitter was born as a side project within the offices of Odeo in March of 2006, it’s taken adoption by A-list bloggers like Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel to raise the profile — and usage — of the tool. Twitter allows members to effectively “lifestream,” constantly providing details, mundane and trivial as they may be, of their daily lives. One user, David Troy, created an extraordinary mashup Google Maps and Twitter, Twittervision, which tracks “tweets” in real-time on a global scale, moving from one post to the next.

Twitter, along with its founders, was recently profiled in the New York Times’ Business section, along with the service, in “From Many Tweets, One Loud Voice on the Internet.” Jason Pontin, the author of the article, described Twitter as :

“…a heady mixture of messaging; social networking of the sort associated with Web sites like MySpace; the terse, jittery personal revelations of “microblogging” found on services like Jaiku; and something called “presence,” shorthand for the idea that people should enjoy an “always on” virtual omnipresence. “

As Jason points out, Twitter is currently one of the fastest growing trends on the Internet. Adoption really took off after the 2007 South by Southwest Music, Film and Interactive Conference (SXSW) which was absolutely saturated with Twittering. And it’s not just bloggers and new media mavens — U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards is using Twitter as he moves around the country.

What is Twitter? It’s a simple service with an Ajax-y Web presence that allows users to share where they are, what they’re doing and how they can be contacted. You can post to Twitter using SMS, much like Blogger or other tools. The difference is that the platform then sends those posts to a group of subscribers (friends, clients, family) by phone alerts and to your channel on Twitter. Users can turn off mobile alerts if they like — an important feature, judging from the feedback that, for some, Twitter is rather addictive. The service is currently free, though interested parties should check with their mobile telephony providers regarding SMS charges, which are certain to rise with greater use.

Twitter is part of Obvious Corporation in San Francisco, California. For up-to-date info about Twitter, make sure to visit the Twitter blog.

Tweet, tweet!