Category: design-and-ideas

I forgot to mention the Cass Creatives event I went to last week. Paul at work gave me the heads up on this series of events/talks which are also free and full of interesting creative people just like the AIGA London ones. Anyway, after finally finding the place in the city near London wall, there were a small selection of drinks to wet your mouth before heading into the nicely cooled (it was about 27 degrees outside) lecture theatre. I wont go into much detail about what people said as its much better covered here at interactive knowhow. My own thoughts on the discussion was first why didnt they show the Epic 2005 version which is much better and realistic. I was quite amazed when a huge percentage of the audience said they had never seen Epic 2004. Anyhow if you seen these pieces and look at the Panel, you will know roughtly how the night went. Nico Macdonald wrote a very good piece in net imperative titled Media replies to the bloggers while on the other side Sunday's Observer has a piece. Yes generally the Death of the Journalist was debated but no conclusion was ever met, as expected. Interestingly enough Jemima Kiss from journlism.co.uk wrote a piece titled Yahoo! editor slams mainstream news. I would quite call it that but it would have been really nice to have had someone from google or even digg there to back up some of the points Yahoo's Simon Hinde made.

The talks went on for about 90mins and seemed to fly by. There was about the right amount of discussion and questions from the floor as well talking from the panel. And although we went around the forrest a bit in the discussions it was enjoyable and well worth it. After the talks, there was nibbles and drinks to further discuss the death of journalism with the panel and others. So generally the night was very enjoyable and I look forward to the next one in November sometime.

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Channel4 have launched a competition titled The play's the thing. Its an opportunity to write a play which may be performed in London's West end if its good enough. Now I like theatre but love cinema because I find theatre quite stuffy and out of touch (my thoughts). But I do like the idea of live theatre. So this strikes me as a chance to do something about my thoughts.

Me and Sarah have come up with a cracker of idea for a play which brings it right up to date and sends a message out about the society were in today and tomorrow. Yep you bet your bottom dollar its got something for the net generation but its also got something for people who just read about the internet in papers. Obviously once me and Sarah thrash through ideas and develop something concerete which we will submit. I'll open up the idea and development on my blog. Maybe if its a little too riskque for Channel4 someone else may be interested in the idea. Submission has to be done by 1st July 2005 which is the same deadline for the Microsoft IP video thing, hence I only got time to do one or the other.

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Thought Thieves is about people stealing and profiting from your creation or innovation. Think about it: how would you feel if you saw your hard work being passed off as the property of someone else? What would you do?

As I said to Dave and Miles over email a while ago, I swear, I am so tempted to enter this competition just so I can make a film which expresses the advantages of the opening your ideas to the world. IP is not a black and white issue, I very much douht many of the videos will speak in favour of opening thoughts. I could be wrong though… Honestly if I won, I would get myself a decent DV camera and then give away the rest to my previous college.
Were not the only one who noticed the thought thieves competition, NTK.net are running there own competition off the back off thought police, umm I mean thieves.

The 1400-word terms and conditions for MSN.CO.UK's strong-IP “Thought Thieves” film competition are quite the read, even if you're not the 14-17 year-old they're intended to be read and understood by and complied with in their therein bywhich entirety. Entries must be the “sole work and creation of the person submitting the film” (no sharing your precious intellectual property fluids with your cameraman, Mr Auteur); must not “use third party intellectual property rights” (no furniture, no architecture, only clouds as background); the entry form additionally specifies “Should I be selected as a finalist […] I will formally licence on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so”. But what we made us wonder was: where exactly did Microsoft get this “Thought Thieves” idea from?
The idea that people can “steal your thoughts” is surely not original. We're hoping for a class-action by paranoid schizophrenics, who we think came up with the idea that others are stealing the very THOUGHTS FROM YOUR MIND a good few years before Microsoft started losing theirs.

http://www.msn.co.uk/thoughtthieves/
– send us a copy of your entry. We'll do prizes.
http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/excerpts/index.shtm
– Lessig's book starts at the exact point the T&C gets ridiculous

Are you shitting me? Indeed, I love the category Copyfight put the competition under, yep IP Abuse. P2P weblog suggests the winner will end up on Bit torrent, which would be poetic justice in some odd way. There was or is some discussion on Channel 9 but its not exactly saying much we didnt know. It also seems it was slashdotted along with boingboing'ed (is that the right name for it?) at some point in the past according to Loren.
I'm sure this will not be the end of the thought police thievies.

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Via Ben Metcalfe's blog, I hear Microsoft are opening interaction/deign Competition to design and share a vision for the next Windows. I assume they mean Longhorn? Anyhow I agree this is a good move for Microsoft, even I will enter. This is also a interaction design students dream competition (hint hint). There is a entry kit which is quite a few word files, pdf's and a jpeg. Although, the site's design is a little touchy when it comes to accessability, at least RSS updates is a good move. Maybe Microsoft are really starting to get it? This is quite funny when you read Kevin Rose's entry titled Microsoft, please copy Apple. I douht Microsoft will fully take these ideas submitted on, but would the white castle walls of Apple make such a move? Maybe, maybe not?

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The Dragons' Den was a six part series where entrepreneurs pitched their ideas to secure investment finance from the Dragons… elite business experts.

I missed most of this series and only caught bits here and there on TV. It also seems very few people were interested in seeding a torrent of the Dragons' Den, but I'm slowly getting them down. Anyhow I have to say its one of those programmes that the BBC do so well. Yes its reality TV but actually its got all the elements of ideas and thoughts which I expect from the BBC. Great programming, well shot, well thought-out… I may even considering checking out the Apprentice which starts next week on BBC2.

Some of the ideas for businesses are sometimes laughable like in the pitch when a couple of guys suggested turning old tyres into wheelchair ramps. But there have been some gems like Paul Thomas' Truffles – plantation system. The pitches can make one hell of a difference (as we all know too well) and honestly the winning entrepreneurs tend to have a good pitch and the business figures to back themselves up. Best example has to be Huw Gwyther who pitched for a high quality magazine called Wonderland (shame about the nasty flash website, hardly says quality or good taste in anyway!). I know just the person Huw should speak to about this…

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Its back again, freaky Epic future. Just in case you missed it before, its about the future of news media and is a look back from 2014 where the New York Times has gone offline and Google is the number one news provider. All presented in a Museum kiosk style.

But in addition to my post last time. This weeks show web talk show has a detailed discussion around the ideas in the flash movie, as well as the audio of the movie. Well worth the 43mins of listening. Links to the Windows and Real Streams as well as Mp3 download.

Even though the movie is a work of fiction, its actually very freaky and not that far fetched. I mean a place where every participates is something the internet community has been pushing for quite a while. However the devil is in the detail, participating should always be something you choose to do, not just automaticly pushed into. Some interesting points in the movie, which I wanted to talk about more.

Googlezon finally checkmates Microsoft with features the software giant cannot match. Using a new algorithm, Googlezon�s computers construct news stories dynamically, stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them. The computer writes a news story for every user.

Even though this is very hard to imagine in practice, I can see how this is possible if were expecting even more structure news content. The set of technologies which help make this ver possible is XPointer, Xlink and Xbase. With Xpointer for example, it would be easy to pull paragraphs of a certain criteria out of a xml stream and recombine them into something more interesting, with a different slant or even out of context. Talk about disruptive technology?

2006 � Google combines all of its services – TiVo, Blogger, GMail, GoogleNews and all of its searches into the Google Grid, a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds. Always online, accessible from anywhere. Each user selects her own level of privacy. She can store her content securely on the Google Grid, or publish it for all to see. It has never been easier for anyone, everyone to create as well as consume media.

Dont even need to go into depth with this one, just look at what Gmail has done to webmail. There were lots of concerns for privicy but it seems google have got away with it. Blogger is another stratagic placeholder for the googlegrid. Microsoft are really playing catchup just launching msnspaces recently.

The �Evolving Personalized Information Construct� is the system by which our sprawling, chaotic mediascape is filtered, ordered and delivered. Everyone contributes now � from blog entries, to phone-cam images, to video reports, to full investigations. Many people get paid too � a tiny cut of Googlezon�s immense advertising revenue, proportional to the popularity of their contributions.

Amazon and Google have been in the micro advertising game for so long now, people actually make a ok amount of money off google and amazon advertising. Honestly they may have saved the online advertising world back in 2001 with there simple and effective adsense and amazon associates thing.

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Just incase your one of the 50% who read cubicgarden.com through RSS only, you might have missed the style and layout change of cubicgarden.com. I've adopted the popular Asual theme and tweaked it into something more tasty for myself. As I write this, I am not finished yet. I need change the fonts and the sizes to fit with the cheq background. I'm also planning print and presentation stylesheets for myself, so I can easily do a presentation of an idea from my own blog entries. I'm hoping to push out a stylesheet switcher for those who do not use Firefox or Opera browser. So at least you can change the background to something more readable (sorry I have excellent 20/20 vision and can read off the cheq without a problem). This also gives me a chance to get much more creative with CSS and maybe play with Aural stylesheets which should work in Opera 8? Talking of which, its interesting Opera is following Apple by trying to win over the education market first.

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