Is the Internet Watching Us?http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/fashion/28truman.html?_r=1&oref=slogins

Here’s a link to the NY TImes article by Sarah Kershaw.

And here’s some stuff about the Panopticon.

The SXSW 2009 Interactive Panel Picker closes Friday (8/29) at midnight.

Reuben is putting together a panel discussion - The Inevitable Future of Virtual Worlds, description: Virtual worlds and 3D interfaces are changing the flat web into an expressive experience. Copyrighted material of celebrities and real world talent are shaping the online experience through the distribution of virtual goods and likenesses. Google Lively continues to push the envelope as it introduces 3D socializing to mainstream Internet audiences. This panel will explore how virtual worlds are making the immersive web a reality for Internet consumers.

I proposed two how to demonstrations. Machinima Kung Fu - Sure machinima looks easy - record a game, drop it into iMovie and do some voices - but there’s actually a little more to it than that. This session will cover all the tech of making machinima - from hardware and software to in-game strategies to post production issues.

And Custom Video Players For Your Show - You’ve got a unique video show, why not have a player that matches? This session will take you through detailed examples using two popular Flash video players. We’ll show you how to create custom skins and get them set up on your site.

See you in Austin!

What is your Favorite Piece of Media on the Net?Cut and paste links in Description box in reply.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Ubiquity is another release from Mozilla Labs that, along with Aurora has me thinking about the future of not just how we’ll use the web but also everything on our computers.

Over the last few years web apps have really transformed the way I use a computer. Every day I have less and less need for actual desktop applications. If it weren’t for all the video production I do on a daily basis I could just grab most any computer with wifi and be instantly connected to just about all of my stuff. And now that the iPhone has a mostly usable web browser, most of the time I don’t even need to take my laptop with we me anywhere. I love that.

So in the middle of watching this demo I started thinking it would be great if all the applications on your computer, not just web apps, could play together like that or maybe all your apps would be web apps (more likely) and your operating system would be the “browser.” Then you could just invoke a new view, document, video, website, virtual world or whatever and combine information in whatever way you needed to right then instead of in whatever way a particular application lets you do it. I can’t wait.

My friend Rupert pointed me to this video of Keven Kelly. It’s a really great 20 minute summary of a lot of ideas that have been floating around for awhile. The basic thing that I get from it is that we’re all becoming part of one global machine and what really makes it powerful is us being open or transparent to it.

Being open to the network is an idea that I personally find inspiring and liberating. I have a few blogs, I participate in a number of social networks and virtual worlds and I post lots of videos and photos of myself, my friends and my family online. Some people find that kind of behavior somewhat alarming - especially where my kids are concerned. But I’m looking at it from a little farther down the road. A cell phone used to mean you were on call 24/7 but now it means you have access to everyone and everything 24/7 and that’s powerful. I think for many people, putting yourself out there on the web feels like an invasion of privacy. If you were only one, I’d agree it might feel like being the only naked person in the room. But if everyone were naked, then maybe it’s not such a big deal.

I’m not saying there aren’t issues with everyone putting everything online but I’m optimistic that we’ll figure it out as we go without turning the world into some version of Gattica or 1984. Either that or the cyborgs will be showing up soon and they’ll start making their way through the list of TED speakers.

BusinessWeek’s Kenji Hall recently sought Reuben’s input on Joi Ito’s still-relatively-new role as head of Creative Commons. Reuben has known Joi personally and professionally for some time, and we’re especially happy to participate in conversations about online IP given the July launch of our IP-protected celebrity virtual goods business, Virtual Greats.

How? I would love to hear, because there are so many super powerful applications available for free, often without the 5 key features, uptime and security needed for an enterprise sale.

Hey All — Let’s Try This for WorkI was talking this morning about how I want our company to become ever more obsessed with all forms of social media. I also pointed to this great video done by Michael Verdi about Bart Cheever at MoU with Skype and SL http://millionsofus.com/blog/2008/08/24/inside-millions-of-us-bart-cheever/

• Flash
• iPod

Bart Cheever, our VP of Production also happens to be Bart Blackstone the DJ. I beamed him into my virtual studio the other day and we talked about his Kill Bill mashups (download Hanzo Steel Vol. 1), The Postmarks, Yo Gabba Gabba and more.

Like Howard Rheingold.  We met in Seesmic (though it could just as easily could have been at Peets in downtown Mill Valley).  Now we’re going walking on Mt. Tam.   I’ll let you know what we discuss.

Re:Title Pedagogy of the Oppressed

It Makes Me Wonder if Virtual Worlds Will Be More Reflective of Real Ones

Four weeks ago my wife and kids were out of town, starting their summer vacation in Cape Cod. This left me with more time on my hands than I’m used to and, in typical fashion, I stumbled into something that has now captured my imagination.

It’s called Seesmic. I found it while looking at the investment portfolio of Y-Combinator, the venture capital fund run by the guys who started Kazaa, Skype and Joost. Founded by French super-entrepreneur and social-media maven Loic LeMeur, Seesmic is essentially a public bulletin board with one major difference — instead of text it has live video.

The first-time user experience is really quite elegant and well-done. You see a central screen, always another person, somewhere in the real world, talking to their webcam, talking to the world, talking to someone in particular, talking to you. Surrounding the central video is a complex yet elegant piece of user interface work. The page displays a “Public” thread (all videos), a “Following” page of people you find interesting enough to track, and your “Inbox,” containing private video messages.

But the Eureka moment for me came when I decided to stop lurking and watching and to record a video. I have low patience for all things technical, but the Flash application simply asked me a quick question: “Can I take over your camera?” I answered yes and the rest was smooth as butter.

Already I’ve met cool people and formed friendships. It’s weird, compelling and addictive. It reminds me in many ways of a virtual world, with several key differences: There is no simulated environment — just the people and their real world backgrounds; there is almost perfect fidelity of appearance; it is slightly asynchronous (virtual worlds are synchronous real time and simultaneous, like the phone); and there is no currency, other than the ephemeral “social currency” of all human social groups.

Well, over this weekend I finally succumbed and bought the new iPhone 3G, and I did so because I heard of an application that can send video live to the web. It’s called Qik .

And then it struck me — the meaning of “sticky” has changed. It used to refer to a site’s ability to keep viewers “stuck” interacting with content. But now the trend that began with Flickr for photos and YouTube for video is accelerating as software and systems evolve to make it easier for us to leave behind digital breadcrumbs of our real lives on the internet.

Perhaps the virtual world will simply be a somewhat altered reflection of our existing one. What do you think?

Ok, so I just got back from a week’s vacation in Cape Cod with my wife, kids, and extended family.  One of the upsides (and downsides) of having a father who’s a mathematician is that we tend to pass the time on the beach waiting for the ice-cream truck, thinking about weird things, some of which become hard problems that obsess us and spawn heated debate.

Here is the current one.  My father mentioned that a friend of his, a Hungarian mathematician, had performed a public “feat of mental strength” by reciting 1000 sequential digits of Pi.  Since Pi’s digits are probably random (read this classic Richard Preston piece about renegade mathematican brothers, the Chudnofsky’s for more), this represents a truly staggering feat.

So, I ask, imagine the following scenario:  You have 1 year to prepare to recite the digits of Pi.  At the time of your recital, an explosive device is wired to your head (we need some drama for motivation) which will detonate if you halt or make a mistake.  Can you devise a method that makes the task acheivable?  Please describe.  I will weight in with my (and my Dad’s) thoughts, as the process unfolds.  Please help — this is a really hard one.  If we really come up with a good idea, I might just commit to doing it (without the detonation device, of course )

Mockumentaries are, in their own way, a genre of the virtual worlds and alternate reality games that we specialize in. For North American audiences, I suppose that Christopher Guest’s work or “This is Spinal Tap” are among the best-known examples.

I love this stuff. Mockumentaries count among my favorite “practical jokes” because of their delicate blend of absurdity and plausibility. As a kid, I used to torture my long-suffering mom with stories involving a special mix of ridiculous bullsh*t (i.e., a neighboring county being colonized by menacing Druids) and detailed, realistic elements that would leave her very unsure as to whether or not my stories were true. Making the little details boringly believable - dropping the name of local city councilperson or mixing in some mundane real-life issue with the story - made it hard for her to separate the narrative wheat from the chaff. My mother saves a very unique kind of exasperation for these moments (confession: I still do it, albeit rarely). Oh how I savor her all-too-visible temptation to believe me, along with her knowledge of my mendacious ways…

So I was pretty thrilled to stumble upon the work of Australia’s Chris Lilley, and I apologize if I’m behind your surely very steep pop cultural curves, dear readers. He has been rocking Australia - and global premium cable audiences - since 2005 with two great mockumentary TV series, We Can Be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year and Summer Heights High. Lilley does all the main characters in both shows.

It’s the kind of humor that has us laughing at our own ostentatious self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and petty mean-spiritedness, but does it all with a huge and very sympathetic heart. It’s also a really interesting snapshot of contemporary Australian pop culture. It’s all great, but my favorite character by far is “Ja’mie King” - she is in both series. She’s summed up by Wikipedia as a girl who “lives in the North Shore of Sydney, New South Wales, but was born in South Africa. Ja’mie is a 16-year-old girl and has sponsored 85 Sudanese children for Global Vision (a fictional organization parodying World Vision), which gave her the National Record. Due to her work of raising money Global Vision decided to make her the ‘face’ of their organization. Ja’mie also does the 40 Hour Famine twice a week which she says not only helps raise money but ‘keeps me looking hot.’”

Ja’mie’s not a bad person, she’s just really, uh, confident and/or self-absorbed. You can find her all over YouTube, but if you have very delicate sensibilities about, well, all the things people get sensitive about, consider yourself warned.

Several current MoU employees and alumni had the good fortune to study under Randy Pausch at Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. Pausch has become widely known over the last year for his “final lecture” delivered on Sept. 18, 2007. This was a very affecting - to say the least - presentation in which he urged his students to treasure and protect their sense of childlike wonder. He also spoke of his love for his wife and kids and the curiosity that essentially drove him forward in life. Dr. Pausch gave the presentation because he had recently been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He died this past Friday.

We became familiar with Randy before there was a book or a segment on Oprah. A couple of our colleagues, former students both, had heard of his final lecture through the CMU community and encouraged us to watch it streamed live from Pittsburgh. We had no idea it would become such a sensation - credited with helping people move on from divorce, choose life over suicide, or escape from abusive relationships - but it’s hardly surprising.

It so happens that Randy was one of the world’s pre-eminent experts on what The New York Times called in his obituary “computer worlds that students could use to create games. [His students] were learning sophisticated computer skills. His annual virtual reality contest was highly anticipated, and work on virtual reality by some of his students won them the chance to experience weightlessness on an aircraft. They then used virtual reality techniques to mimic weightlessness.”

The technical and creative skills that Randy taught are at the heart of our virtual worlds industry. What a pleasure it is to work in a business defined by thinkers motivated by wonder, curiosity, whimsy, and imagination. I personally treasure my sense of childlike wonder and think that losing it to cynicism, emotional exhaustion, “sophistication,” or anything along those lines would almost be worse than death itself.

But let’s not take ourselves too seriously, because life is short. After learning that his lecture was being compared to “Tuesdays with Morrie,” a popular book about wisdom its author gleaned from a dying college professor, Randy told USA Today he “didn’t know there was a dying-professor section at the bookstore.”

So, I must apologize for not posting this sooner… things have been a bit crazier for me than I’ve anticipated over the past couple of weeks!

I wanted to post a BIG thank you to Phaylen Fairchild, Evie Fairchild, Kit Maitland, Stampshady Grimm & all the other hard-working folks at New Media Cinema for their participation in the first of what I hope will be many mini machinima festivals - MMFs? Need to come up with a better name than that! But back from that little digression, we had a really nice turn out on and audience participation was so fun… I really appreciated it when they would give me a hard time for starting the wrong segment!

Of course I was so frizzy frazzied that I didn’t get any screenshots, but I snagged the gorgeous picture from Evie and defaced it horribly, just to celebrate our Divathon. Phaylen made me do it! Thanks to everyone that showed up, as well! I really had a blast and I hope you all did too. I know I’m very much looking forward to their next project, Ctr-Alt-Delete. From their blog, “This hyper-tech new series from the team that brought you DiVAS follows the high octane adventures of Jonas Darcy, a man whose consciousness was exiled to virtual reality and his code wizard sidekick, Noir.” Can’t come soon enough!

I’m also looking forward to our next MMF installment - I’ll announce what it will be before too long, and I swear I’ll come up with a better name for these things! Hoping that all of you are enjoying your lovely summer, winter or whatever it is where you are!

This article from io9 is an interesting discussion of the pros and cons of Alternate Reality Gaming campaigns and how they work (or don’t). Many of the points they make are things I think I agree with, specifically about relying too much on puzzles and schwag and not enough on compelling storytelling.

Here’s some key quotes:

Lost is running an ARG at Comic-Con this week where the fictional Dharma corporation tries to recruit new employees, and the Sarah Connor Chronicles had a tie-in ARG that was quite artful in which employees of the Enitech Corporation discover a camera that takes pictures of the future and predicts the rise of the machines.

One reason I liked the Sarah Connor Chronicles ARG so much was that it actually functioned as its own, compelling story. It was almost like the Heroes webisodes – stories set in the same universe as their parent story, but shorter and with a lower budget. The Dark Knight ARG, on the other hand, felt like it really was just advertising with a few perfunctory interactive bits thrown in.

Well I’m glad the author dug our work and I can’t complain about having our project called “artful.” He makes some good points and I’m glad this discussion is going on now. ARGs are walking the fine line between art, entertainment, and advertising, so it’s important to start pushing these questions out there.

Read more HERE.

Join the conversation here .  I’m with Tim Kring, creator of Heroes today and Thomas Tull, CEO of Legendary Pictures who made Batman the Dark Knight.  I’ll have them weigh in .

I started a tradition back then, when we were 6 months old.  I used to record a call with someone interesting for the length of my drive to work.  This one with Mark Wallace, which dove into Taxation of Virtual Transactions and Second Life’s population and economics, was awesome. BTW, back then Mark was writing the blog 3Pointd.com .  He’s now the CEO of a very ambitious and cool company releasing something revolutionary soon.

I ended up only doing 7 of these Roadcasts.  Here they are.

This is close to my heart because my son Theo turned 4 this week. His grandpa bought him a Playmobil Castle, which only took me 4 hours to build.

Anyway, with all the interest in kid’s virtual worlds recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what a kid imagines as they’re playing with toys and dioramas. Maybe something like this if they’re lucky. It’s such an epic that there’s also a “The Making of Barbarian”, which is also done in stop motion animation with Playmobil figures. Genius.

If you haven’t heard of the obscenely popular machinima short series called “Divas“, then you my friend have been missing out. Now, you could rush over to the site to check out all the episodes, or you could join us on Friday night for a 3 hour marathon at the New Globe Theater! We plan to stream all six episodes back to back and have a Q&A session for all machinimaists (is that a word? help me out!) out there. Best of all? Phaylen, Kit & Evie have agreed to allow an exclusive to this event: a preview of their latest project! There will be schwag, hot ladies and lots of laughs. While I’m all for going out on a Friday night, I highly urge you to stay in this weekend, dress to the nines and join us - it’s sure to be divalightful!

Friday, July 18th @ 6pm SLT – Millions of Us, New Globe Theater! IM Lyra Millionsofus if you are having difficulties finding the place!

As reported by Virtual Worlds News in March, we’ve been working to create spaces for Playstation Home the last several months. Today, we got a little shot of excitement, as SCEA CEO Jack Tretton gave a sneak peak of HOME and our work. Nice job all. I think I heard applause at 1:57. . . . .

[Edit 7/16] Here’s a better copy of the video from gametrailers.com.