Teen Content Creators

The latest report from the Pew Internet, which deals with 'teen content creators', is very insightful. It reports that more than half of online teens have created content for the internet; and most teen downloaders think that getting free music files is easy to do

Some 57% of online teens create content for the internet. (...) These Content Creators report having done one or more of the following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage; create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix content found online into a new creation. The most popular Content Creating activities are sharing self-authored content and working on webpages for others. (...) Bloggers and to a lesser extent teens who read blogs are a particularly tech-savvy group of internet users. They have more technological tools such as cell phones and PDAs and are more likely to use them to go online. Not only do they live in technologically rich households, but they are more likely to have their own computer at home and to be able to use it in a private space. They help adults do things online. Most strikingly, they have more experience with almost all online activities that we asked about. Bloggers are more likely than non-bloggers to engage in everyday online activities such as getting news, using IM or making online purchases, but content creating and sharing activities are the areas where bloggers are far ahead of non-bloggers.

The report is of great interest. In addition, people interested in sort of content creation might been interest in check this "I want to" webpage which summarizes the large number of web applications to manipulate content on the web (sharing pictures, do podcasts, share bookmarks...)

Expected generalist book about Ubicomp

I am looking forward to read Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield (released in february 2006). Judging from I've read on the author's blog/website, there seems to be compelling concepts like ubicomp as "information processing dissolving in behavior":

Some of what you'll find inside is a discussion of what we mean when we say "ubiquitous computing," including my definition of the field, at its most robust, as "information processing dissolving in behavior"; whether it's truly an immediate concern or a "hundred-year problem"; what different sorts of everyware might emerge in differing cultures; and, of course, an extended exploration of the social and ethical implications of this most insinuative of technologies.

Everyware is pitched to the smart generalist

I think the ubicomp field is still emerging and this book might be one of the first to be generalist and that will tackle this topic with the user focus. I hope it will address issues like people mental model about things (not only computers but artifacts) + the notion of affordance in context, the difference between mental model about things and computer, technical uncertainties and how people cope with them (which is an incredible issue in our research about location-based services), emergent usage of ubicomp technologies and so forth.

Weird drawing by Paul Cox

I cannot help posting this drawing by artist Paul Cox:

Here is what he meant by that:

Voici mes premières esquisses pour la couverture. C'est un peu trembloté car j'ai écrit et dessiné tout ceci en voiture (je vous rassure: ce n'est pas moi qui conduisais!). L'idée date de ce matin; ce soir je me couche très content, mais peut-être demain, au moment de mieux mettre l'idée en forme, ou simplement en revoyant ces notes, aurai-je un autre avis ou trouverai-je une autre idée? Nous verrons demain. En tout cas j'ai l'intention de faire un dessin assez neutre au cerne noir, puis de le colorier de manière plutôt désinvolte, un peu comme les pages de ce vieux livre pour enfants

Studying Technology Use in Hybrid in Hybrid and Undisciplined Place

There is currently an compelling event in Tokyo: FIELDWORK UNTETHERED: STUDYING TECHNOLOGY USE IN HYBRID AND UNDISCIPLINED PLACES (I put the emphasis on a sentence I like):

This two-day workshop will explore and document methdological frameworks and innovation in the study of portable ICTs outside of the home and workplace. A select international group of experts in the social study of mobile and portable information and communication technologies will be convened for two days of presentations, discussion and fieldwork experimentation. Researchers will be equipped with GPS enabled 3G videophones and a moblogging system in order to document their trial. Results will be published in the form of a collection of methodological essays, (...) In social research of mobility and portable technologies, we are transitioning from an experimental stage to a stage where we can develop robust methodological frameworks and standards.

Organizers are usual suspects in the field, very relevant people with regards to the topic of the workshop: Ken Anderson (Intel Research), Jan Chipchase (Nokia), Mizuko (Mimi) Ito (Keio University and University of Southern California), Steve Love (Brunel University), Daisuke Okabe (Keio University), Mark Perry (Brunel University.

Why do I blog this? the methodologies discussed there will be of interest for our work about studying the usage of location-based technologies in urban/field settings. I am looking forward to read the results. Jan Chipcase gives some hints about the workshop on this blogpost.

Fragmentation of attention in mobile interaction

An interesting paper I perused recently: The fragmentation of attention in mobile interaction, and what to do with it by Antti Oulasvirta, interactions, Volume 12 , Issue 6  November + December 2005, pp. 16 - 18. Some excerpts:

Our goal has been first to understand how serious this "multitasking craziness" , or fragmentation of attention as we see it, is, and also to explore some possibilities to counter this unwanted phenomenon. (...) we conducted a field experiment to investigate the seriousness and extent of fragmentation. (...) In mobile situations, continuous attention to the mobile device fragmented to bursts of just four to eight seconds (...), and attention to the mobile device had to be interrupted several attention shifts, by glancing the environment up to eight times during a page loading

What's interesting is this:

Interestingly, we observed several strategies that users adopted to compensate for this unwanted situation. In general, the simple strategies can be described as strategic withdrawals of resources from less important tasks (e.g., slowing down walking, or postponing and refusing tasks). More sophisticated strategies were enabled by users' preknowledge of the particular situation. For example, when a metro leaves from the station, travelers "preprogram" themselves to what is to be expected; in this case to the announcement of the destination station. After this calibration, only brief sampling is required to observe that the task is proceeding normally.

Then they came up with potential solutions:

Some design tactics to fight mobile multitasking craziness.(...) At the very least, our results should convince designers to put effort to: • shorten interaction units (down to less than five seconds). • automatize or eliminate tasks. • Offload tasks to unused resources, support execution of tasks in different modalities. • Provide modality-targeted feedback for long system response times. • Support brief monitoring of changes. • Support temporal control and orchestration. • Provide unsanctioned delaying of responses. • Provide cues for anticipation of upcoming events and schedules. • Support user's understanding of tasks' upcoming demands.

Why do I blog this? the paper is a clever summary of how a field experiment in the domain of mobile computing usage can be useful to set guidelines for mobile application designers.

Tiles that change colour depening on room temperature

Via Sensors Impact and proteinos, those amazing Chi Tiles by Eugene Low: tiles that change colour depending on the room temperature.

tiles are very static subjects. the only change it goes through is degradation through wear and tear. how often do you find yourself staring at boring tiles either in kitchens or bathrooms. whether there are motifs or plain coloured tiles, it still fails to gather a long second or third glance. i believe i can bring tiles to life by giving it a thermochromic treatment to it. Tiles that change colour in different temperature controlled environment. An air-conditioned will have different colours than a well heated room. it gives a 'chi' and 'aura' feel to the ambient and any other objects/person creating 'a colour transition'. tiles can also change colour due to interaction; touching/rubbing tiles or even by breathing on it would change its colour from say blue to orange/red. the thermochromic colours are pretty much instant and obvious. if a kettle goes off on the stove, the tiles behind it would start to change illustrating a red/orange/yellow steam pattern. '+' shaped tiles are made up of '5 perfect square' tiles to speed up installation and also ease up on storage space.

...just find it nice...

Weblogs, data collection and tools I use

Yesterday I attended a presentation about dangers and opportunities fostered by weblogs (of course 'danger' is where the emphasis where). One of the most interesting presenter was certainly David Sadigh from IC Agency (internet marketing firm in Geneva) in the sense that his presentation achieved to show how weblog and their corollary tools (e.g. search engine a la technorati/blogpulse) could be used for marketing/data collection/competitive intelligence issues. His pragmatic view of how using such tool was very refreshing among those talks who more focused on conservative topics. This made me think about my own practices about intelligence gathering; which are certainly close to what to do, except that the focus is less business-oriented but rather purposely aimed at being part of a research community, finding new information about specific topics and in the end discussing about innovation. But the approach is the same.

Then I made a quick list of the tools I used on a daily basis for various purposes connected to my research activities (be it for my phd funded by public fundings or for my R&D projects for private copmanies):

Scientific database/search engines: web of science, scopus, citeseer (+ less professional but useful: google scholar)
• Web search engine: google, ask keeves, jux, A9, alexa
• Blog tracker/search engine (to see who talk about what + who talk about certain things I blogged): technorati, icerocket, blogpulse, pubsub, google blog search, daypop, g-metrics
• Social Bookmark Managers (to share my bookmarks, I also use them as search engine): del.icio.us, blogmarks, citeUlike
• News aggregator: my offline aggregator is NetNewsWire and my online is rss4you, My opml is there for people who wants to see what I read.
• txt file still rocks: I then have a list of all the books I've read + movies I've watched here
• Bibliographical references are managed through a bibtex file with bibdesk; there is also a RSS version but it's down

I should make the same list for statistical sources.

Control your car with your cell phone

Via strange new products, this crazy application: a wireless access protocol (WAP) version of Guidepoint™ that: allows subscribers to track their vehicle, unlock doors, start the engine and honk the horn with a wireless device or cell phone. (...) The vehicle tracking service displays a map pinpointing the vehicle location, as well as a text readout of the street address where the vehicle is located.

Here is what says the website:

“The addition of WAP and our recent move to digital reflect our drive to deliver value innovation to customers. Our goal is not to create bleeding edge technology. Instead, we are focused aligning innovation with utility, price and costs to deliver a unique experience,”

"Aligning innovation with utility?", " deliver a unique experience"... mmmh are those the promises of location-based services people expressed in the last 5 years?

Architecture and information visulization and Bloomberg's new building

Two good articles about architecture and information visulization and Bloomberg's new building in Metropolis: Brand Central Station (by Alexandra Lange) and By The Numbers (by Peter Hall). Bloomberg's new offices indeed weave information, technology, and space into a seamless display of interior urban planning as the first article reports. The building architecture is meant to support the omnipresent flow of information (goods, people, and data)

I really like this phenomenon:

Employees rising on the escalator from the fifth floor even appear to move at exactly the same speed as the news and information graphics speeding about the screens. (...) "It wasn't just the video on the screen, it was the numbering system of the wayfinding--it's all tied in,"

The article By The Numbers (by Peter Hall) is a compelling account of how designers worked on this information art project.

Finally, the conclusion is relevant:

beyond the well-seized opportunity to make large graphic and architectural gestures, the treatment of information in the Bloomberg headquarters signals a shift in the way we perceive information. The data on ceiling-mounted screens caters to each department (sales figures for sales staff, network operations for the research and development people), and even the big-bellied numbers that fly across the larger screens are not abstracted but graphically contextualized and explained with accompanying text. The design conceit is that the flying data is actually useful. If the dawning of the Internet and the network society were greeted by design fetishizing information and reveling in that very 1990s trope of information overload, the 2000s have been marked by a desire to filter, parse, and deliver data in accessible form.

Mizuko Ito on cell phone applications

I think I missed this interview of Mizuko Ito in Red Herring released on October 10th. Dr. Ito is a cultural anthropologist from University of Southern California/Keio University (Tokyo) who studies how the next generation uses new media (her publication can be downloaded on here blog). Here is her point:

Ms. Ito says older generations have a lot to learn from how the rising generation is taking up these new technologies—sometimes adults don’t recognize that young people are developing innovative uses for technologies. “I see my work as an anthropologist as identifying and describing what these natives of the digital world are doing, in ways which are informative to people who may not have grown up in that environment, as well as to people trying to develop those kinds of technologies,” she says.

Her work also involves interesting ideas about some questions I already tackled here: mobile devices and their potential uses (playing games, watching videos), as well as the doubts I raised:

the question is portable media devices, and to what degree people want them integrated. The camera’s been integrated, and video is on its way, but slower. But the big issue is content delivery beyond ring tones and wallpaper, like television, short films, novels, and music. It’s the ‘Will it replace the iPod?’ question. I’m not sure yet. We’re not even at the point where we can easily download television or video, and people are not used to television and video outside of homes, for the most part. (...) I see the content side mainly supported by devices like Game Boys, trading card games, and other kinds of portable media kids carry around with them. That may change. But when you see things like the PSP, you can imagine that device turning easily into a video device as well as a gaming device, and some sort of communications device. The mobile phone is not really in the space yet. It’s been mostly small-screen games rather than networked location-based gaming that is taking advantage of the fact that the game has left the desktop

Why do I blog this?I agree with her: mobile phone games are small-screen applications, and the location-based/pervasive games are still R&D or art performance project. But as she says "it's not in the spacer yet".

French book about innovation

"Objectif Innovation : Stratégies pour construire l'entreprise innovante" (Jean-Yves Prax, Bernard Buisson, Philippe Silberzahn)

A great book (in french) about the concept of 'innovation' which summarizes the most important (and recent) theories about it (Christensen, Moore...). It's very well presented and the approach is very pragmatic; I appreciated the part about the paths to innovation, with plenty of insighful questions to think about.

I just missed two dimensions:

• Even though there is a part about the networked economy, I think it's too limited, the authors do not tackle that much the issues like the new way to collaborate, the open innovation model or the co-creation. For instance I miss what's in this IFTF report: Towards a literacy of cooperation
• The forecasting + R&D dimension which is not really addressed here but the authors mentions this drawback in the introduction

Besides, the authors have a good blog here.

We will deal with these issues at our Lift conference.

Tech Conference in Geneva!

Tonight, we unveil a new project: Lift, a conference about technology usage that will happen in Geneva on february 2-3nd, 2006. It's organized by Laurent plus others like myself.

In two words:

Lift is about sharing and expanding the ideas of technologies, how they impact our lives and organizations. What changes are ahead? We will try to answer this question via presentations of some of the most influential thinkers and observers of the moment. The goal of the event is to give the opportunity to Europeans and Swiss people to network and raise awareness on some important ideas we will have to cope with in the near future (copyright-less economy, blogs, emergence of asia, technology overload, mass customization,direct marketing, social software, etc...)

Some of the most talented observers, explorers, and builders of the moment will gather in Geneva to share their passion for technology. You are invited to hear the likes of Cory Doctorow, Robert Scoble, Euan Semple, Jeffrey Huang, Xavier Comtesse, and a lot of other amazing speakers talk about the important topics of our changing world. The Internet, emerging technologies, global solidarity, design, and big ideas, be prepared for two days of intense ideas sharing and networking.

Feel free to visit the lift06.org website, check the speakers roster, the program, and sign up! It is only 295CHF (195 for students) for both days.

I hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: lift, lift06, geneva, puppy

Artist Paul Cox Blog

I am a great fan of Paul Cox artistic work. His last project at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is very intriguing. What is great is that there is a blog about it, which summarizes the different steps of the project. The author's inspiration is then reflected into tons of posts with amazing pictures, thoughts and ideas. It would be great to do the same for research projects (should do that one day, or maybe this blog follows the same process). Of particular interest is the last post that shows the project badly drawn on a piece of paper and the outcome:

Why do I blog this? First because I like Paul Cox work very much. Second because this blog, which summarizes all the thoughts/ideas/examples/picture of the creative process that led to his work is really compelling; perhaps it's even more interesting than the art project itself (and it is, it might be one of the reason the author put this on the web).

MMOG communities study

Cyril pointed me on this research project: Project Massive carried out at Carnegie Mellon University:

Previously, Project Massive has investigated player communication and organization in PC based, Massively Multiplayer games. While this work continues, the inquiry has been expanded to address the impact of online play on the players' real life activities, perceptions, and experiences. No longer is the study limited to PC based MMOs. A number of online genres including first-person shooters and real-time strategy games have been added. Further, both console and PC player populations are included in the sample. Below are just a few of the topics that Project Massive is currently concerned with:

• Role of Player Motivation in Usage Outcomes
• Genre and Platform Differences
• Engagement, Commitment, and Habit Formation
• Displacement of Real Life Activities

With the help of our thousands of respondents, this research will support the future design of better, more rewarding games for all of us. This research is not commercially sponsored in any way. Results and analysis of the continuing survey are published at ProjectMassive.com and are freely available for public use.

There is a pertinent research paper about it, presented at CHI 2004: Project massive:Â a study of online gaming communities by A. Fleming Seay, William J. Jerome, Kevin Sang Lee and Robert E. Kraut:

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) continue to be a popular and lucrative sector of the gaming market. Project Massive was created to assess MMOG players' social experiences both inside and outside of their gaming environments and the impact of these activities on their everyday lives. The focus of Project Massive has been on the persistent player groups or "guilds" that form in MMOGs. The survey has been completed online by 1836 players, who reported on their play patterns, commitment to their player organizations, and personality traits like sociability, extraversion and depression. Here we report our cross-sectional findings and describe our future longitudinal work as we track players and their guilds across the evolving landscape of the MMOG product space.

Why do I blog this? I need this kind of material/studies for a project about online communities creation and evolution.

Nokia Game Summit

Thanks to Gamasutra, there is a good wrap up of the Nokia Game Summit. It's interesting to see what are their research avenue and what they think is relevant

one of the event's key themes: the march towards a more ‘immersive' visual experience on the mobile platform. “People live in a 3D world in their everyday life. They will want that same 3D world in their handsets", predicted Epting, and “…we want to bring the visual experience of the real world into a mobile device.”

uuh a bad start already, I don't get it: given the screen size, 3d on a mobile phone is a very weird idea. Of course there might be some niche but I could not help thinking that it won't be the next big thing.

There are others elements in the wrap-up, but overall it seems that their discussion was lively and leading to deate about marketing in which the user (uh the consumer sorry) is not really taken into account apart from being a "cash cow" who buys 2D games (the point would be to replicate this with 3D games...)

Besides Tom Hume has also a good rant about this, I like his comment:

most of the problems Greg [Costikyan: see here, the notes from Carlo Longino] has highlighted aren't problems with the mobile games industry, but problems with the mobile games industry if they want to sell the kinds of things the console games industry sells

Here we are: "if they want to sell the kinds of things the console games industry sells", I think the mistake is to undervalue the mobile phones as gaming platform and to develop games as lower quality version of console games. Which is wrong since lots of application can take advantage of mobile devices specific features (even though it's difficult as explained by Greg Costikyan).

SUN and MMORPG

An article about how SUN's work with MMOG in Business Week. It tackles the versatile and scalable MMOG middleware they are working on. What's interesting is that it presents SUN's vision:

Sun's chief gaming officer, Chris Melissinos explains, "I argue that we've been the principle architect of the largest massively multiplayer online game in the world. It's Wall Street. If you took a look at all of the mechanics that go in to building an online trading system, they're almost one-for-one, the same functions needed to build an MMOG. Except we've done it with more redundancy, reliability and scalability than pretty much anyone else" (...) "The difference you see between a lot of the technologies today (say, for example, Big World) and ours is that not only do we offer the scalability that they do, but I can take multiple games of different types, running across different hardware clients and run them simultaneously on the same stack of hardware." (...) "So what you can do is rather than building an infrastructure to handle a particular game, I can go to an operator that has built an infrastructure to handle 5 million concurrent players. I don't care if it is one game running 5 million players or it's a 100 games handling 50,000 players each or 1,000 games running 5,000 players each. It's the first solution that's able to do this.

The added value is then:

"Because you don't have to invest in any of that [hardware], we now providing a viable business model for a small developer and allowing him to take advantage of economies of scale that a utility model can provide. Because I can now build a single infrastructure to handle millions of people, I can now leverage a utility model, exactly like power companies or water companies can.

Paper about MMORPG decline: Lineage versus WoW

What’s Wrong With the Mighty Lord?: Empirical Study on the Decline of Lineage 2 by JunSok, Huhh is an interesting paper about the decline of a specific MMORPG: Lineage (versus others).

The purpose of this article is to take empirical tests for presumed causes of Linege 2 ’s declining trend. Using time usage data of Lineage 2(L2), Kart Riders(Kart) and World of Worldcraft(WoW) collected from PC-bangs, we take statistical tests on the rivalry hypothesis among games. Results show that there is no consistent evidence that L2 ’s falling down is caused by the success of Kart or WoW. Instead, it is clearly identified that the trend of RMT had a respectable impacts on L2 in comparison to L1. All the test result implies that in-game factors such as RMT played a more decisive role in L2 ’s decline than external factors like tougher competition.

Why do I blog this? this is an important dimension: how MMORPG will do in the long run, what would be the features game designers will work out to sustain the enthusiasm? The paper brings some elements but there are still left issues (for instance how do you make people from different levels playing altogether?).

A machine to become a millionaire

With this machine, you'll be a millionaire (at least, it's what written on the text): Spotted in Geneva last week.

From MUDs to MMORPG

A lively debate has emerged in gameblog terra nova this week about the reinvention of the online game community research from MUD/MOO to current MMORPG. The article in Terra Nova offers a very clever summary of what has changed from MUD to MMORPG, here are some excerpts extracted from the post by Timothy Burke and the commenters):

Some old issues have become completely new in their implications:

• simply for reasons of scale: secondary markets are obviously something radically different in current virtual worlds than they might have been
• there are genuinely new issues--if nothing else, the perceptual and psychological issues posed by 3-D graphical engines in virtual worlds as compared to text-based or isomorphic designs.
• one of the biggest things to have changed is [internet] penetration. (...) Adoption of whatever phenomenon by many millions of people has got to change the characteristics and nature of that space. It certainly did in the case of both the Web and the stock market. (stated by Mark Wallace)
• Instancing is a major new trend that was never really explored in the text mud days. There has always been talk about "embedded experiences" but the idea of literally replicating single-player to limited multiplayer games wasn't one that had currency (stated by Raph)
• What happened to intermud protocol? (stated by Raph)
• computers now are more than 100x faster than they were in the mid-90s when I started on this; that has had significant impact on the kinds of things that virtual worlds can represent. (stated by Mike Sellers)

Why do I blog this? To me this topic is strikingly interesting since I am currently working on a research project about the creation and evolution of online games communities (for an R&D privately funded). Last week, I collected plenty of research about this topic in MUDs/MOO (which I use to play with few years ago) and I took for granted the fact that the studies made into the MUD field already tackled elements that would be of interests in MMORPG. I am actually in the process of selecting what would be new to study, drawing on these elements.

Nokia and MIT to establish a common research lab

Nokia and MIT are establishing a common research lab according to this press news:

"By carrying out long-term research in these fields, including novel uses of hand-held devices, MIT and Nokia will make new communication opportunities and services available for people around the globe." (...) The collaborative work of the Nokia Research Center Cambridge will center on a view of the future where small handheld devices such as mobile phones will become parts of an "ecosystem" of information, services, peripherals, sensors and other devices. Research will address new user interfaces that incorporate speech and other modalities, new mobile computing platforms - including low power hardware platforms and wireless communication, as well as new software architectures. Researchers will also address new ways of managing information: The use of Semantic Web technologies - an extension of the current Web developed in part at CSAIL and at the Nokia Research Center - will enable devices to more intuitively and automatically understand interconnected terms, information and services.

Time will tell.