Dj Culture in game at long last

DjHero

I don't get Guitar Hero or Rockband, it makes no sense to me, I was watching Coop and there was a segment about some guy called Tim Schafer and a game called Brutal Legend.

I've never wanted to play a guitar and honestly don't really find them at all interesting. So I've never really to play Guitar hero, actually I've wondered whats happened to Dj Hero? Well it seems its actually being actively developed by EA and its actually called Dj Hero. I look forward to seeing it and seeing how well it does. Dj Culture/Turntablism needs a good game.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Add micro-structure to those tweets/microblogs

Stowe Boyd calls it deep structure for twitter, Chris Messina terms it baking in meta into twitter and somewhat jokely picoformats. Call it what ever you like but Microsyntax.org is aiming to deliver structure to our short messages. I say short messages because I think the thing they miss is the fact thats its not just about Twitter. We use short messages in loads of places including Text messages (sms/mms) and other microblogging platforms.

From Microsyntax.org,

Over the last several months, I have written a great deal about new types of ‘microsyntax’ for Twitter at my Message blog. By microsyntax I mean various ways to embed structured information right into the text of Twitter messages. The most well-known sort of microsyntax are the retweet convention (or ‘RT’) and hashtags (or twitter tags). (I have also referred to this as microstructure, but I believe that microsyntax is perhaps more self-explanatory.)

These microsyntax conventions arose from the user community, and are variably and differently supported by Twitter and the many clients that are in use. Many people don’t remember that the use of ‘@’ to indicate that a message was to be sent to a specific user’s attention (a reply or a mention) is a convention that grew up with the service’s earliest days.

We have some relatively mature conventions — like hashtags (‘#twitter’ or ‘#ruby’, for example) — that have spread into wide use but are not directly supported by Twitter itself, and where different applications may support them in very different ways.

At the other extreme, we have new conventions appearing — like CoTweet’s use of ‘^’ preceding initial of authors in group twitter accounts, my recent suggestion for ‘/’ as syntax to precede or enclose locations (as in ‘/Germany’ or ‘/156 South Park, San Francisco CA/’), or my proposal for subtags (like ‘#sxsw.kathysierra’ or ‘#w2e.PR’) — and these could lead to confusion or conflicts between contending approaches to the same purpose.

As a result of all this activity, and the potential for collective action in these efforts, we are launching a new non-profit, Microsyntax.org, with the purpose of investigating the various ways that individuals and tool vendors are trying to innovate around this sort of microsyntax, trying to define reference use cases that illuminate the ways they may be used or interpreted, and to create a forum where alternative approaches can be discussed and evaluated. We may even get involved in the development of proof-of-concept implementations that can act as reference architectures for microsyntactic extensions to the Twitter grammar emerging in the real time stream.

In the upcoming weeks, I and other contributors will be enumerating all the known microsyntax for Twitter, and exploring the interaction of those which each other and with other, external applications.

This is great but Stowe and Chris are under illusion that publishing a pico format is the end of the game. From Chris's blog post,

If I’ve learned anything from the microformats process, it’s that anyone can invent a schema or a format, but getting adoption is the hard part (and also the most valuable). So, in order to promote adoption, you should always try to model behavior that already exists in the wild, and then work to make the intensions of the behavior more clear, repeatable and memorable.

Most microsyntax efforts fail to follow this process, and as a result, fail in the wild. Efforts that employ the scientific method tend to see more success: hashtags modeled the convention started by IRC channels and Jaiku (Joshua Schachter also used the hash to denote tags in the early days of Delicious); the $ticker convention (from StockTwits) follows how many financial trade publications denote stock symbols. And so on.

So when it comes to proposing new behaviors that don’t yet exist in the wild, I think that the Microsyntax.org project will be an excellent place to convene and host conversations and experiments, many of which will admittedly fail. But at minimum, there will be a record of what’s been tried, what the thinking and goals were, and where, hopefully, some modest successes have been achieved.

Good on these guys for trying to focus efforts, I think there is a tall hill in front of them but even if they can convince some of the applications/service makers to use some of the microsyntaxes that would be great. Of course its got to come from both sides. Look at the L: syntax which came and went, even though twittervision.com was using it.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Palm Pre: The web gets its first native phone

Never been a fan of Palms, I've always opted for the Microsoft PocketPC/Windows Mobile options but thats about to change with the launch of the Palm Pre. Some people are saying this is Palm's last stab at the market which they let trickle from there hands and going by the reaction in my aggregator, it seems like a good one. Us europeans are having to wait for ages because Palm went for a CDMA phone to kick things off instead of GSM, which I think is frankly silly but I understand the reasoning behind it. I really want to get my hands on one but not as much as this lady, who turned a shop into a drive-thru in her rush to get one, it would seem.

As usual there's tons of information about the phone including deconstruction photos and some good reviews. Will this make a impact? I think so. When I first heard about the WebOS, I was sceptical but it seems to be there and according to themselves, is not a second class citizen. Chris Mesina said to me a while ago while at the Next 09 conference that anything which leverage the web like this is on to a sure winner. This is the way things will be built in the near future. After the GoogleWave and now the launch of the Palm Pre, I'm in no doubt that Chris is right.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Mike Arrington doing what he does best, trolling people

Found via Rain Ashford and My aggregator.

Leo Laporte calls out Mike Arrington of TechCrunch after Leo got mad at him for implying that his opinion of the Pre was effected by the fact he had a free review unit

Although Leo's a little extreme in his action, I can totally understand why, does anyone remember this? Yes once again Mick Arrington cant think of anything to say except troll. Its boring and tiresome but causes a reaction which gets him further publicity. You can tell he totally gets off on this stuff, you only have to look at the smile at the of the BBC video or listen to him say to Leo “what are you going to do about it?”

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]