Pause for reflection. An interview with Chuck D & Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy talks about how hip-hop artists re-wrote the rules of the music industry and made the most of a very small window of opportunity from the mid-to-late 1980s to run wild with sampling.
The guy behind Mosaic, you know the one, is behind Ning - "playground for building and using social applications". Here's a question - does the explosion in social applications make people any more social? I think the jury is out on that one. What's certain though is that generations of folk who never quite learnt how to program are now getting the chance to clone the apps they like. Creativity of sorts in a cute wrapper.
MOD your way into the Independent Games Festival and score a free pass to the Game Developers Conference to boot.
A new monthly movie-themed club night opens in Kennington in London Oct 27 "dedicated to bringing the essence of the movies into a 3-D environment. Promising short films, live music, soundtracks, theatre, djs, comedies and prizes. Excuse them the horribly inaccessible website which is the essence of bad web design (all key info in a flash movie) but looks intriguing otherwise.
Useful aid for web API developers, the Programmable Web folks have put up a tool for tracking what APIs are being used in tandem across the Web. I still can't bring myself to say "web 2.0", one buzzword too many (and wasn't 1.0 the Web pre-Mosaic?), but that's the label they're using.
CNET gives furtehr insight into how XBOX 360 will act as a bridge to home cinema libraries via Media Center PCs.
Buzzword alert - AJAX, or asynchronous Javascript and XML is creeping towards the web mainstream as more sites explore how to update information onscreen without refreshing the whole page. With a new-look Hotmail interface in private beta and flagship sites like Flickr gathering steam, the future of the Web is sounding more like a multi-surface cleaning product every day.
The Korsakow-System is billed as "an easy-to-use computer program for the creation of interactive films, or better: interactive database narratives. "
In practice, this is a Macromedia Director application which acts as a pseudo-random media file viewer.
First Adobe buys Macromedia, now Autodesk buys Alias. It will be interesting to see how the traditional split between 3DS Max for games and Maya for films will play out now that both titles will be developed by the one company. Hopefully the transition will be handled a little more gracefully than Apple, who quickly dropped Windows support after acquiring both Logic and Shake.
The Tate Britain, London is hosting an event this weekend on how open-source inspired methods can transform art and its institutions.
'Create your own Manga online' is the tag line of this re-mix toy advertising JP Gaultier perfume. A Flash re-mix interface lets you sequence together the most abstract scene of a short film in which a decidely fashion-friendly cyber-feral concocts a new perfume. It's a wise move to limit audience participation to the most non-narrative element of the film. One of the biggest hurdles with making non-linear storytelling concepts work is the niggling truth that the same old rules apply. It's not that easy to tell a good story without care and attention - attributes lacking in web experiences decided to capture your imagination... for a minute or two.
Did you know that Flickr began life as a massively multi-player game called "Game Neverending"? This and other interesting factoids in this interview with Eric Costello, lead client-side developer, on the evolution from game to Yahoo service.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000519.php
I started participating in the BBC's iMP trial today. Powered by Windows Media Player's DRM and Kontiki's P2P network, iMP is a revolutionary media on-demand service that will let UK Internet viewers download and view programmes across all BBC TV and radio channels for up to seven days (after which the files are rendered unplayable by DRM). All I can say is that it does what it says on the tin and this is going to shake up the media industry when it's released. Bring it on!
BBC - iMP