This is an admittedly far less entertaining video than the last one, but it’s impressive nonetheless.
Oh, I was totally going to embed the video, but since it starts playing automatically, it sucks. Click here to watch (it’s worth a click, but seriously, who thinks it’s a good idea to have videos start playing automatically?!).
Paul Bass at the New Haven Independent (a new media news outfit: it’s all digital and all networked) reports on Yale sophomore Victor Wong’s new web business:
GPaper hopes to accomplish the first goal through “flyerboards,” a new technology that mimics kiosks or bulletin boards with flyers. A strip of low-cost, shrunken “posters” — for time-sensitive events, like store sales or public events — would appear on the side of a homepage, for instance. The reader could see one that looks interesting, click on it, and have it appear enlarged on the screen. (A larger version of this, not tailored to hyperlocal news sites, operates on the Yale campus. Click here to view it.)
Wong’s idea is one that makes you slap yourself on the forehead and ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?” The example linked above (and here) is just a digitally transcoded bulletin board. I have a regular board above my computer as I type this. We have bulletin boards all over the Tunxis campus. Supermarkets and restaurants have them too.
We walk by them all the time, but if a well designed flier catches our eye, we stop and take a look. Wong is taking the same concept and monetizing it. If I understand the concept correctly, thumbnail fliers will hang out in the sidebar of local media sites, and if one catches the reader’s eye he can click to enlarge it right there without leaving the site. That’s key.
If I see a good posting on the Tunxis bulletin boards, I can just walk up and read it, then get back to what I was doing. The way advertising on the web generally works now is that a small ad draws your attention, but to click it means to leave the site (or open it in a new window) to learn more. That’s kind of like seeing a posting on the Tunxis bulletin board, but having to go to the Library to actually read it.
So as I delve into the Futures project with my teammates, maybe we can hone our big idea by taking a step back and looking for something so obvious that it hasn’t yet occurred to anyone.
Either way, this commentary on MySpace is a compliment to Professor “ERSIGHAUS” whoever he is:
Steve is right, MySpace is overrated.
John G. Timmons (above right) and Steve “Lettucehead” Ersinghaus, gave us an exclusive interview about the new program they are designing for Tunxis called New Media.
View Movie (Windows Streaming Media Player Format)
OK, OK, what happened to the video?
In class, we’ve played a wide variety of video games over the last three weeks. One of the key things that we discussed regarding Interactive Fiction, Games, etc. is the trial and error learning that we do when we start playing a game. We learn its rules. We learn what works and what doesn’t work. We try again and we get better, improving based on our experiences.
So what happens when we play Super Mario Bros.? We’re all probably familiar with the game and its mechanics, and so we don’t expect anything like what the video below shows. Apparently this is a custom-designed level, and it’s looks to be painfully frustrating to play. And I admit that I haven’t watched all 24 minutes of this video, but if the remaining 19 are as entertaining as the first five, then I’m in for a treat.
The guy who is narrating the video isn’t actually playing. He added his commentary for comedic purposes. Don’t play this video at work–at least not with the sound on.
I feel that this post on tracking cookies is tangentially related to new media, so I’m cross-posting it here. Incidentally, I still use SiteMeter on this blog.
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SiteMeter seems to be the most widely used stat tracker in the blogosphere. MLN uses it. CT Local Politics uses it. ConnecticutBLOG, Drinking Liberally in New Milford, and CT Bob use it. Until recently, even I used it.
So why have I switched to StatCounter? Geek News Central explains:
Examination on my own has discovered, and I am able to confirm, on two of my sites, that Sitemeter was sending “specificclick cookies” to anyone visiting this site. Violating not only my policy but apparently not following their own terms of service.
I have removed the SiteMeter.com counter and now have all of my sites using Google Analytics only. I am going to contact my attorney as well on this mater to find out what recourse we have in this mater.
This is not the behavior one would expect from a company that you pay a annual fee to, for service. This is so over the top that I can hardly believe that the would betray the trust of their subscribers to such a high level.
I’m not a paying customer, thankfully. All I can do is use my blog to raise awareness that if you use SiteMeter on your website, you’re allowing them to install third party tracking cookies. If you visit sites that have SiteMeter installed, your clicks and browsing on those sites are being tracked by a third party.
And I can switch. I switched to StatCounter. I just took the latest numbers of unique visits and page views from SiteMeter and put them in as the “starting” numbers for StatCounter. The number you see in the footer of this website is the total number of visits since June 2006. My StatCounter stats can be viewed here.
Ed Bott has tips on how to block third-party cookies like the ones surreptitiously installed by SiteMeter. Alternatively, you could install the CookieSafe extension for Firefox. And if you don’t use Firefox for browsing, now is as good a time as any to give it a whirl.
Found this via BoingBoing.net. It does seem to be an homage to McCloud’s book.
Apparently there is a part four coming, but I enjoyed parts one, two, and three.
Also via BoingBoing (actually, from a link to a “related post” to the one where I found the Understanding Games links, which shows that automated recommendation engines can work very well), I find an e-book by Ralph Koster that may or may not be an excerpt from his real book, Theory of Fun.
Recently, a video made last summer by a friend of mine named CT Bob ended up on CNN.
CNN on CTBob
Uploaded by CTBob
How the hell does this happen?
Well, Bob doesn’t really blog anonymously, and he’s a prolific political video creator. This explains why his original 1984/Lieberman ad didn’t get much play last summer. It was good, but compared to some of CT Bob’s other work, it just didn’t command that much attention (especially when you add in that videos by myself and by CTBlogger were also garnering attention).
The 1984/Clinton clip was put together in a very professional way. It was distributed anonymously. It was basically an attack ad targeted at one high profile Democrat that championed another high profile Democrat. The media seems to love this kind of crap, and when they learned that the 1984 mash-up concept for a political ad wasn’t original, I think they were a little shocked.
And so when traditional media catches up with people-powered media, my friend CT Bob (who’s IMDB listing can be found here, right next to my IMDB listing) gets a mention on CNN.
I was just thinking about this. It seems that a lot of people equate realism in video games with immersion. This comes from talking to my brother who is hung up on games like The Godfather and Gears of War on XBOX 360.
I’m not really in to those kinds of games, and am quite a loyal customer of Nintendo products to the exclusion of all other systems. My brother spoke to me enthusiastically about Gears of War, trying to convince me of its greatness by virtue of its realism. I’ve never played the game, but it’s not something I can see myself getting into. It may be as close to “real” as games have come so far, but that’s still quite a ways off from reality. At risk of making a Bill Gates-ish statement (one that was falsely attributed to him anyway), I do not foresee any technology that will completely and totally blur the lines between reality and fantasy. There is no matrix in our future.
But an experience doesn’t have to be realistic to be immersive. Take the Nintendo Wii. I covet the Nintendo Wii–and I’m not the only one, because the damn thing is sold out everywhere–because it’s got a slew of games that don’t even pretend to look realistic, but are arguably more immersive than the Gears of War.
I think this is because the games leave a little room for projection. Even though you create an avatar that resembles you, it isn’t a high-resolution photograph. You have to make that leap, and put yourself onto that avatar and into that space. Having to get off your ass and move your body to play the game certainly helps.
I guess that the more realistic something pretends to be, the more disappointment with the experience is possible and likely. If something looks real, and you can’t interact with it the way you would interact with something real, then it’s immediately clear that it’s NOT real. In my opinion this ruins the experience.
If you’re in a game environment that doesn’t pretend to be realistic, you don’t bring in your real-world expectations.
