Cubicgarden.com…

A new game is starting and the puppet masters are based in London. I'm hoping they will build on a lot of the new and interesting technologies and cultural differences there is in europe. Its starting soon and you need to drop a email to curious@projectsyzygy.com address if you want to be involved.

First thing guys, what is up with this metadata? – < meta name="keywords" content="TE OE K MQD J JE IFUDT JXU HUIJ EV OE KH BY VU IU BBYDW IKWQ HUT M QJUH EH TE OEK MQDJ JE…" > and why is there a wrongly writen fibonacci sequence? More clues and thoughts can be found in the unfiction forum.

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A Puppetmaster flung back the alternative reality game universe today. I've always heard of it but not really looked into it. I am currently getting involved in the ilovebees.com game, which started with the Halo2 trailer. But I may have hit the ARG market too late because the big guns are starting to take notice. Yahoo, However the social aspects are kinda of being talked about at Smartmobs and blogged of course.

So what is this all about? Well for a histroy lesson its worth checking out unfictions introduction. It talks about the first major game which was AI's Beast. And Majestic by EA was ment to bring forward a new movement in the game industry but was closed down due to September 11th. Thinking back, nokiagame was my first contract with this genre of gaming. Its not the same, but drove my attention to unfiction games.

Ok so whats the big deal your thinking? Isnt this like Flashmobbing some of you may be thinking? Well I think this huge and untapped as of yet. Yes it can be used for marketing and advertising but I've already got a idea up my sleeve for education. And goodness think about the massive amount of stats one game could generate. I'm sure marketers would love a bit of that. Whats really odd is that it has not hit this side of the ocean hard yet. Most of the games have been played in America and centre around american culture. Only I love bees has made its way across the ocean, but I do hear that there is plans a foot to change the situation – not to start rumours of course.
From a gamers point of view the tools are there to be much more organised. I do believe the unfiction forums is one of the first I've seen with RSS per topic and per post. There using IRC, Wiki's, Email and Forums to get sorted on games, while the game rules are being bent in anyway possible. Number 8 is very interesting indeed, being a selfcailmed hacker of some sorts. The ability to reverse engineer files, turn over weak websites, cause transformation effects and ultimately peer around the curtain is too much of temptation. But the Unfiction community looks down on such underhand conduct, and weed out people who do so. I actually almost got involved in Project MU but I remember it being very american bias.

From a puppetmasters point of view, things are very interesting. They can use equal tools to the gamers to origanse themselves. But they need to use higher level security as the arms race for information is on. Also the presure to build bigger and better games must be huge. One of the things I thought about is relating the truth and the unreal. You could set a game in current times and use real permalinks with sites which are simular but unreal (i think there already doing this?) I also havent seen much in the way of Blogs being used? I can imagine teaming up with multiple bloggers to fill the blogsphere with unfiction news, forcing gamers to look inside rss feeds and special search engines like Feedster. I mean think about it, you could drop stuff into a picture and put it in Flickr and only the clued up would catch on. Talking of which, the internet has moved on and so could the games, why not use RESTful webservices where you have to fiddle with the urls to get what you want out?

I find the social aspect of the unfiction games very interesting and I love the way the gamers think out the box to outsmart the puzzles and puppetmasters. But equally the puppetmasters scour the internet to eves drop on IRC chats and follow threads on forums to see when puzzles are near to be finished and by who. They build up profiles and change the paths according to whos involved. Anyhow, tomorrow I will be joining the I love bees game tomorrow at 6pm to answer a call in Soho from our pupptmasters. I reckon it will be inside a cafe not in a phone box.

An account of the i love bee game I took place in today, from Flidget Jerome.

Today's axon hunters were Diandra, cubicgarden, Sarah, Rogue Element, bcriswell, Miles and myself. Cubicgarden should be along later with pictures.

Bcriswell had a GPS unit with him, and located the coordinate point on the triangular traffic island in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. There's no phones anywhere near there, so we're taking this to mean we're meant to go underground.

There's 14 phones in total in the row Rogue Element already reported about. Starting from the right, we're missing for sure the first, second and sixth in the row. We also lost control of the 4th and 13th for some of the time we were expecting Melissa's call.

So yes we failed, but the seven of us did a good job to cover the 14 phones which were public. Maybe next time…

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Got an invite to join wallop through Marc Smith who gave a presentation last week inside the BBC. And I have to say without going into much detail, its looks pretty amazing. And it actually works really well in Opera and Firefox. Except when uploading files it would seem. Anyway I will play with it more later…

This is my RSS feed of Wallop, which is basicly Cubicgarden running through Wallop then out again. For some reason it adds all this crazy styling stuff to it. Bad Microsoft, bad! I swear pictures are coming soon, just having problems uploading them at the moment.

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Rather than reading student synopsis, I've been put off track by looking at the future of peer 2 peer networking. Then I looked at Slakinski log which talks about the release of Nucleus which is a RSS aggregator that focuses on Bittorrent files embedded in them. Very cool, even Harvard Law is following this area with enclosures. I'm interested if anyone has brought Enclosure to RSS 1.0 and ATOM? If not I think I may do it myself, as one of the great reasons for RSS 1.0 is its modules which could include a whole number of things, or so I was led to believe. I mean even the ability to use namespaces is an advantage surely?

Anyhow this is all really interesting stuff, and it seriously reminds me that I need to fix my apache cocoon to take advantage of this great idea. I mean for example it wouldnt be that difficult to search through a load of torrents and make rss files with enclosures to then syndicate onwards. This would be great because then you could do mass filtering and even create a webservice. Think of it as Suprnova but with no front end. Tell the trust some must have done this already? Oh and heres a good article explain it all.

I was also reading Steve Mallett's blog about the future of the semantic web, specially in the light of RSS and Torrents.

Now, would you rather publish your book review using Amazon's form or the weblog you use many times a week? Would you like to write your book review on Amazon and then write again on your weblog that you wrote a review – possibly writing the review twice? How about your local bookstore? Are you going to write one for them as well?

It got me thinking about this DIY model. Steve makes many valid points but the one which strikes home is the one about Social software. I signed up to Orkut and got pretty sick of filling in information which I didnt really want to give in the first place. I tend not like to commit to different services now, I mean flickr was the last one I signed up to, and even then I'm not using it alot. I put myself in the bloggers and geek girls are sexy groups, for all of 1 day, I thought it would be good idea to contrbute pictures in a group fashion, but i got bored – quickly…
Steve ends with Own your data. This future is here and is evenly distributed. I have to agree up to a point, I find it hard to believe I'm still hosting cubicgarden.com on my 512k broadband connection. Hows that for owning your own data?

By the way a google one query return

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I'm currently making changes to cubicgarden.com. First thing you will notice is the added Anyone else [ blogging it? ] and related pictures? links underneath each post. I've also extended this out to the bookmarks which has related links to http://del.icio.us instead of http://www.flickr.com. By the way for those people asking why I'm using feedster over daypop, technorati and blogdex? Well feedster seems to be much more configurable and exposes more rss than the others, plus it loves cubicgarden.com. Does a much better job than even google. Oh yeah plus its the only one which realises that 80.177.x.x and adrenalin-online.demon.x.x is all part of cubicgarden.com. By the way you may be interested to see how cubicgarden is doing on the blogshare market

So whats it all about? Well I'm still fighting with myself about using external web services for my personal data. Even my personal bookmarks which I dont mind sharing with the world, I cant help but get worried about trusting to a beta service like del.icio.us. Flickr I cant trust all my photos with anyway because I got so many and there huge in size (1.5 gig of space used so far) and I'm not paying for flickr to store that. I think the RESTful nature of these services are good enough and passing the title around is a good start. I may start using the metadata feature in Blojsom soon because I want to pass more semantic information than a title around to these services. Ideally I really need to get XSL in between or into VM templates.

The other thing which is changing is, I'm removing myself from the XFN sphere – soon. I never used it and using decent metadata and FOAF I can do a much better job, oh and theres been some debate about XFN's effectiveness. I think if there was a blog (xmlrpc) client which came with XFN built in I would use it much more. I keep looking out for wbloggar 4.0 but its always in beta, I keep thinking I should really 1. find something else which at least supports xhtml 2. runs on the pocketpc2003 os.

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I cant remember where I first heard about this first but I've been meaning to try it out for a while now. Usually I tend to use mailinator.com or now dodgeit.com to create a temporary account which I tend to use again and again as I make the username and password easy to remember. For example today I was trying to get into the guardian.co.uk site and so I tried to setup an account with the email address – guardian@dodgeit.com with the password of password (hehe). But someone had already done it before. So I simply requested the password again, and waited till the guardian sent the email. Easy

But even that can be a hassle, so bugmenot is ideal. Its basicly a huge database of username and passwords which people donate for others to use on registration sites. Good idea, well thought out with plugins and bookmarklets.

The bugmenot official response to the fact there webhost also hosts the neonazi group combat 18.
I've decided that its better to go through the little hassle of using dodgeit or mailinator than to promote the clinical response of freespeech from bugmenot.

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