One of the most rewarding gaming experience I’ve had in quite some time, Shadow of the Colossus is an exercise in restraint (something rarely found with game designers). Large parts of the game are spent riding a horse through a lavishly rich landscape, looking for a giant monster to battle. Felling one of the title colossi always involves solving a logical puzzle (real-world logic, as opposed to the so often found in-game logic) and is very satisfying. One of the best looking games I’ve ever seen on the PS2, riding, fighting and climbing cliff-faces are always esthetically pleasing and quite cinematic. Highly recommended!
Month: June 2006
Broken Flowers mini-review
This film provided what I expected of it: a typical apathetic looking Bill Murray who finds himself in various bizarre situations. The film seems to be about nothing, and lead nowhere, but in the end you find it under your skin, some of its images lingering. I particularly like the way in which the setup (Murray as Johnston receives a letter from an unknown ex-partner) has you constantly looking for clues as to who of the four women is the mother of Johnston’s alleged son. It plays on and portrays the way the human brain desperately looks for patterns in random phenomena — anything pink is loaded with significance, just because the initial letter is pink. Recommended.
(Also, the jazzy, “Ethiopian” music is very nice as well.)
Reboot 8.0 photos are up
I spend the morning going through my photos of Reboot 8.0. I had near 800 of them, so that was quite the exercise. Now there’s 147 in a set over at my Flickr account. It was nice to relive the whole experience while going through the shots, made me realize I saw and did a hell of a lot in two days. No wonder I was so tired when I got home.
Here’s my favorite shot of the set, aptly summarizing the theme of this year’s event, “renaissance?” with Ben Hammersley dancing around the stage flanked by Mona Lisa and a battered PowerBook.
Reboot 8.0 post mortem
I’m back in Utrecht after a few great days in Copenhagen. Reboot 8.0 was surprisingly good this year. I was afraid it wouldn’t measure up to the awesome quality of last year, but I was wrong. Perhaps this year was even better. I’ll have to digest everything a little more before I can say for sure.
I’ll get back later with some thoughts on important issues that were brought up during the event. But first I’m off to Italy for two weeks of vacation and some much needed rest.
So photos and in depth analysis will have to wait a little longer. Back in a few weeks!
Rough notes from Euan Semple — There’s something going on here that is bigger than any of us
What does it all mean?
Printing press analogy. Press changed the way we saw the world. We’ll have similar shift in the future (long term). But: they used to burn heretics as well. Not everyone will want to adopt this.
7 years since Cluetrain: lots of stuff is still the same
Change will not happen thanks to tech.
Three myths
- Hierarchy is the only way to organize stuff, from church through military, etc. but: hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Once people start employing them it has a disruptive effect, breaking though hierarchies.
- If we take certain steps we’ll be successful. But success got scrambled.
- Cartesian anxiety: stress due to separation of individual and rest of the world (perspective). Misunderstanding of evolution, it should be about passing around what works (faster), not killing off the weak.
“It’s easier to do good than to do bad” — Jimmy Wales
LOVE: that’s what makes the internet hang together (and it’s not about the huge amounts of porn). Tolerance, the need to connect. Reboot is very much about this.
Internet creates opportunities for better understanding of shared meaning.
Everything is motivated by love or fear and fear is just absence of love.
He didn’t get where he was today… by using fear.
Collusion: people don’t want to admit to what they’re doing is wrong.
Anarchy actually means the ultimate in democracy. Is it so bad to fragment huge institutions.
Every society has people that see themselves as maintainers of order (although they don’t know what that order is).
The web cuts out the middle men (maintainers of order).
The idea that the online world is immature and dangerous is wrong. Google never forgets. Think about the stuff you say.
Don’t complain, don’t say no.
Do the right thing.
Stating the obvious, say the way you think the world should be and it’ll turn out that way.
Seeing something interesting, then judging yourself if it’s valuable enough and publishing it. Other people doing the same as an effect and on and on.
It’s not about tech. but it isn’t utopia either. You should take responsibility for what you do.
Dalai Lama quote: it’s about relationships and being social.
http://reboot.dk/wiki/There%27ssomethinggoingonherethatisbiggerthananyof_us
Rough notes for Chris Heathcote — A mobile Internet manifesto
It isn’t Nokia policy, he’s trying to be provocative.
1b internet 2b mobile user 5b unconnected
many networks, you’ll be connected to the internet
100% voice, 50% java, 10% native apps
these are not barriers:
display device speed text entry network speed
1000 bln. text messages in 2005
we might be the last gen. that uses querty
fixed 1000M wireless 100M fixed internet 10M wireless internet 1M
people want terabyte speed, we need to think what’s good enough now
we’re there already
barriers: data cost, battery life, 2 hour problem, smart networks
a picture used to cost 15 euros to upload
fixed price is really important in data
battery hasn’t seen innovation like the rest of mobile tech.
in the west we’re always less than 2 hours away from a “real” computer
David S. Isenberg: fat pipe, always on, get out of the way
assumption is that mobile phones can’t work in a dumb network, rich client sutuation
they are
mobile internet does not exist!
good mobile browsers, they’re here
other important stuff: smart clients — easy to develop: Flash Lite, Python
browser is like swiss army knife
E.g.: Backpack. Nice web app. He’s been trying to make a mobile version of Backpack.
Why is that different?
He can’t release it publicly yet, but he will soon.
PC + mobile: home + away
They’re far more useful together than seperate
What’s useful? 10 x easier 10 x cheaper 10 x a day
Mind like water (GTD) mobile is excellent for this, you can action them
Mobile is social
Timekilling? Competition: books, iPods, etc.
Social is more interesting, you want to take those elements from web apps to mobile
Internet is push + pull
Demo time!
Mobile web browser: access to all kinds of phone stuff.
He loves it, he wants to see people build stuff with it.
Out of sight message: because he wanted a domain he’s going through a proxy.
Not being online all the time is interesting from a presence point of view.
no need for separate mobile sites
basic accessibility and web standards still rule
lots of websites are assuming users have lots of bandwidth — that’s bad on both the web and mobile
data is very important (useful data)
APIs are great, XML is great, as long as they work
we’re not special: Google tries to be helpful by forcing you into the mobile version
Don’t repurpose content for mobile.
People are people… they’re the same. They have the same needs. Make sure they have access.
Create mobile sites. Aim at the 2b, not the 1b.
Mobile is going to be the main way to access the internet in the future.
Voice is interesting as well.
Q One thing you mentioned is flat rates. We can’t solve it as devs. Any ideas to force carriers to do it? A Carriers aren’t as uncanny as you think. They realize that money can be made from flat rate.
Sites can be built for mobile using web standards easily. That’s key.
Q What do you need for the mobile Backpack? A The series 60 phones running Python. We want to open source it so people can port it.
Rough notes from Robert Willim — I’m taking a ride — curve surfing and speed mania
Hard to start after Doc’s talk.
Ph.D. on Framfab. And on new economy and dot com boom and bust.
What happened back then? To see if there are any similarities…
Open question
How do we predict twists of history?
How do we make sense in heated times?
Framfab:
Started 5, at top it was 2000.
He made a ethnographic study of their office and looked at the software called Bricks.
Envisioning / claiming / creating the future — the future factory
CEO is good visionary
Communicate vision through spatial metaphors
Ex. virtual land grab, idea of pioneers and movers
Other: curve surfing — s‑curve often used to graph innovation.
Web 2.0: how can you tell where you are on the curve? Mentally you can surf the curve.
It’s like traveling on a train track. Technological determinism. It’s not that easy, society is much more complex, tech isn’t the only driving force. It has to do with what we use it for.
What are visions?
Conjuring, making a future tangible.
One way is to extrapolate trends through curve surfing. This is quite simplistic.
E.g. thinking about bridge between Denmark and Sweden in 1930ies.
Other ex.: thinking on computers in 1980ies — people will become robots.
Vaporware: locking a consumer’s mind. E.g. MacBook vs. PowerBook.
Speed mania, when speed is seen as inherently positive
First mover advantage, escape velocity
The supremacy of speed was idea behind Framfab
…conceptual congruity?
Flow / reflexivity
Go with the flow… but where are we going? (Good one!)
People during dotcom boom were reflexive, but still they didn’t see it coming?
Back to the two questions…
How to find twists of history?
Book on 404 — lack of memory on internet. SS19 missiles in USSR: after cold war they’re still made but now to launch satellites. Nice example of reappropriation of existing tech.
Making sense in heated times?
When do collectives become intelligent and when do they go stupid?
Recommendations: keep ties loose, have a diverse collective
Ending…
Q Do you see a bubble 2.0? How does it compare to the first one? A It’s much harder to get that amount of money. Financial market is different now. Focus is on product itself. Older companies aren’t easily cheated by web people.
Q Does he see any rhetoric trends? A Idea of tech determinism is still there. In a way tech is the start, but it doesn’t happen automatically.
Q It seems that bubbles are necessary for evolution. Revolution has already happened. We’re at the forefront. Which is nice. A Back then the rhetoric had bad timing.
http://reboot.dk/wiki/I%27mtakingaride-curvesurfingandspeed_maniaThe
Rough notes for Doc Searls — Keynote
He’s in business drag (kinda like Ben). Dropped it into puddle.
Markets 2.0
Beyond a whole bunch of isms.
Markets are conversations: they’re not just (a whole bunch of things). Stuff that reduces is to transactions.
Wanted change it.
Markets used to be real places, where culture was produced.
Feedback on Cluetrain from the real marketplace:
Markets are also relationships.
Also transactions, and conversations.
Killer app is relationships. We’re just beginning to see it.
Search for Reboot 8 on Google. Relatively static stuff, not live.
Yahoo! and Google actually do search the live web.
They make a distinction between blogs and the web.
Shows Google Blog search results, pretty live.
Technorati — pretty live. (I’m there too!)
Why is Technorati innovating where Google is just performing?
It depends on where we come from.
Google comes from the static web.
Why make a distinction between blogs and the web?
They could mix them in…
There’s branching off going on.
Branching between time and space.
Static: looks for billions Live: listening to millions
time-to-index of under one minute
Respond only to signs of life.
Live web is time and people, those that have relationships…
Static web is a haystack, here’s one virtual straw… [url]
Everything after domain name is chaos, that’s why we need search.
Live web is organized chronologically. Isn’t a haystack, it has structure. It has a history.
“we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp, deal with it”
live web, demand supplies itself
on static web too but slower
Live web is a lot more than blogging
Best blogging is provisional not finished or final
industrial publishers create finished products
best of blogging is about rolling snowballs, not pushing rocks up the hill
you roll out an idea, if it grows and gets somewhere it’s not yours
podcasting as example of snowballing
The great unbundling: e.g. YouTube, Tivo (video)…
More content: horrible world, sounds like packaging, you can’t snowball it, it’s fixed.
It’s about consumers becoming producers.
Value chain is replaced with value constellation.
Live web will help drive the intention economy. ETech: attention economy, eyeballs — crap. Move to intention.
attention > decision > intention
This is virgin theory, mostly because we’ve been focussed on marketing.
Why are sales & marketing VPs from sales and not marketing?
Sales is real, marketing is strategic… Marketing is bullshit.
Searls law #14: it doesn’t matter what car you want to rent you’ll get a Chevy Cavalier.
His car sucks… so he rents cars.
Car rental is good study for independent identity. They’re all bad.
On the web they’re all marketing silos.
Renting from Budget: he might get a Ford Focus. Good handling, MP3’s. But he gets a Chevy Cavalier.
Less focus on capturing costumers and trying to meet demand and improve service and enlarge marketplace.
Users have lots of relationships that are useful, they have needs that aren’t in CRM.
Intention economy has inadequate infrastructure. Free market is still choice of silos.
We need to know how civilization grows, pace layering, Long Now, Stuart Brand.
Markets rely on infrastructure. Grow a market? Create infrastructure.
Commerce contributes infrastructure, infrastructure supports commerce.
Earth to computer industry: commodities are good!
Hollywood wants a silo.
Commerce governs infrastructure and the natives can go to hell.
Will the net route around Hollywood and the carriers?
Enormous power of because-effect.
Fight for new civilization. Net wants to be as fast and open as your hard drive.
Carriers will fight that knowledge. Workarounds: enterprising customers.
People are already fighting. Bet on the people.
E.g. Lafayette Pro Fibre, Municipal Wireless.
Let’s talk…
Rough notes for Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova — Networked objects and the new ecology of things
Anything can have meaning.
Sources
- Internet of things report by ITU
- Shaping things — Sterling, “spimes”
- Thinglink
- Manifesto of networked objects
Number of conversations. ITU report: philosophy related to biz efficiency, what about social dimension?
Blogjects Does the thing itself participate in content circulation? E.g.: AIBO blog platform, indicator of how an instrument can engage in social web.
Geospatial traces E.g.: Flight aware, see airplane trajectories. Interesting thing is how bodies become digital manifestations, the other way around is exciting too. Occupying the world in a more sustainable way.
Showing where objects are. Currently this stuff comes from military or art world. They also know where they’ve been.
Tail number is like thinglink for planes. CIA terror planes — plane-spotters — unmarked planes.
If objects start blogging we might get new insights in how the world works.
Blogjects know their origin. E.g.: “How is stufff made”
Blogjects have agency, they can trigger actions and shape social practice. E.g.: TripSense. Tracking driving habits. Provides access to how he moved about SF. Impact he had on environment. How many trips he made. Insight on how he could be more eco-friendly.
Blogjects provide for new logistics.
So what?
It’s not just about technical communication and interfacing of objects. It’s about the social dimension.
This is part of a global trend, things being part of a larger ecology.
Creating legibility and transparency
Blogging pigeon. GSM backpack. Nice because it elevates the pigeon and is very low-tech.
Sending purchased objects to MySpace.
Establishing relationships between physical and virtual worlds. Barcodes, tags, stickers, etc. Nabaztag. Weak signals > blogjects.
Moving ahead
- series of workshops to design blogjects
- online and offline discourse
- cataloguing and track blogjects
Their questions
- how to go from biz efficiency to social sustainability?
- are blogjects up to the challenge?
- are social beings prepared to interact with blogjects?
Our questions Q Maybe it’s like objects turning them more into nature in the sense that bthey talkj back and are not part of us. A We’re cohabiting with our artefacts.
Q Are objects now doing ethnography of us? A Companies are interested in that idea, even beyond ethnography, usage tracking. Is that s’thing we want?
http://reboot.dk/wiki/Networkedobjectsandthenewecologyof_things
Rough notes for Jyri Engeström — Blind Men’s Baseball
Part 2 of three-part track. Last one’s Chris Heathcote’s one.
Why baseball?
Not beer, hotdogs, hat etc.
It takes a long time… Lot of it is pretending to pitch etc. Pitchers are glancing all the time. That’s the aspect that’s interesting to him.
Important social consequences.
1 Spatial
Seeing surrounding space in the present. Focussing, seeing the whole at once while you’re in it yourself. (Reminds me of Japanese martial concept op zanshin.) Concept of thee whole: when you lack it — example of the three blind men and elephant. What if they decided to go play baseball? They’ll only be able to communicate about their position by shouting.
No peripheral vision = navigating in the dark
Link with tech:
Phone: assumption is that you know who you’ll call.
Except: before dialing you make a lot of other choices about timing etc: where are they, what are they doing?
Phones don’t tell you much currently…
“Oy! Where u at?”
IM: state indicators, place indicators, etc. (Plazes plugin).
Cross pollinate mobile with IM interfaces.
Analogy to driving in traffic, constantly paying attention to what other drivers are doing and adjusting.
When info is out there, people will start being more polite.
This is all about spatial aspect, which is about present tense.
Other aspect: time.
Hockey: great players play where the puck will be. Anticipation.
Seeing each other as vectors, spatial and temporal at the same time.
Spaceballs clip.
Organizing life: calendar designed with assumption that only your won calendar matters…
Mobile 2.0 isn’t about multimedia. It’s about social interactions. Better social peripheral vision.
Where will this lead?
Looking to WoW for examples of ways to enhance peripheral vision.
Question: what will this look like in mobile device?
His social science background isn’t always helpful, but it allows him to look at the other side of the coin — those that are left behind.
People who are left out will seem more and more out of it socially.
Example from Abbott and Costello.
Questions Q Why don’t operators innovate more? A He thinks it’ll come from 3rd party devs that get the web. He doesn’t have much confidence in operators. Technically more and more is becoming possible (Python, Flash, WiFi).
Q Other people’s calendars: Intimacy, are we using tools to replace our innate abilities to track things. A Outsourcing mental activity to devices. You forget how to do it yourself. Phone numbers, you can’t remember them anymore. Technological innovations are built as bleeding edge as long tech chains. If stuff breaks they become useless. E.g. Katrina, boxing day tsunami. Electricity goes out, the rest is useless.
Q Examples shown are only for closely tied people. What are applications for larger groups, filtering, etc.? A Absolutely, third aspect missing is past: recommendations, comments on places visited. Flickr is about the past. Web is good at organizing that stuff. That’s why multimedia won’t take off on mobile.
Q On technological replacement: scale of things is increasing. How do you manage that? Reminds him of Wildfire. Programming devices on reach-ability. A Privacy settings will limit our range. It’ll keep increasing (possible range) become more and more ad-hoc. Instead of networking, notworking.