Amsterdam 17 January 2007 – On Friday 26 January 2007 at 20.00 the exhibition ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ by Martin Butler will open at Mediamatic in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Martin Butler presents four human avatars to play with. Using Skype you can log in at home with your character of choice. Direct the avatar, explore the space and challenge him or her. The avatars of The Girlfriend Experience will be available every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 20:00- 23:00. They can also be observed live in the Analog Villa, the Mediamatic Exhibition space, at the ground floor of the Post CS building in Amsterdam.

The rampant growth of online avatar communities such as Second Life and World of Warcraft has enabled the creation of a personal online social and economic existence. Simultaneously this triggers inherent questions about this existence, as it questions what the consequences will be for first life, or reality.

When you use virtual avatars you can do as you please. In The Girlfriend Experience you will have to get to know each other first. Player and avatar explore what they can do for each other and how far the avatar wants to go to execute specific desires. It is ambiguous who is really controlling the situation. You have ten minutes to figure out what you can do with your avatar. After that, your time is up and another player can take your place.

More here. (Thanks to Hylton Joliffe for the link.) [Tags: avatars art games everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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On Feb. 24, The Berkman Center, MIT Comparative Media Studies and the Information society Project at Yale Law are holding a one-day conference called Beyond Broadcast: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy. The keynote will be by the estimable Henry Jenkins. Registration is $50, which includes lunch and an evening “reception” (which usually means the beer is free). There’s a $50 discount for students… [Tags: broadcast media conferences berkman]

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WGBH (89.7 in Boston) is broadcasting two of Jenny Attiyeh’s ThoughtCast interviews back to back on Jan. 21. At 10 pm , it’s Alan Dershowitz and at 10:30 she’s got Amartya Sen.

Just a couple of years ago, it’d be just about beyond belief that someone could start up an interview series with not much more than a smart brain and a recording device, and not only would come up with a terrific series of interviews, but radio stations would air them as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Yay for blurring borders! [Tags: jenny_attiyeh podcasts media]

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WikiLeaks is a Wikipedia-style wiki for people to place leaked documents, untraceably. According to the FAQ, “It combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies with the transparency and simplicity of a wiki interface.” “Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to a much more exacting scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency could provide: the scrutiny of a worldwide community of informed wiki editors.”

It’s ambitious. The FAQ says:

Wikileaks may become the most powerful “intelligence agency” on earth — an intelligence agency of the people. It will be an open source, democratic intelligence agency. But it will be far more principled, and far less parochial than any governmental intelligence agency; consequently, it will be more accurate, and more relevant. It will have no commercial or national interests at heart; its only interests will be truth and freedom of information. Unlike the covert activities of state intelligence agencies, Wikileaks will rely upon the power of overt fact to inform citizens about the truths of their world.

It’s got a million leaked docs already and expects to surpass Wikipedia in number of entries. But it’s hard to see how it becomes anything like an intelligence agency if it only consists of leaks; if a citizen wants information about a topic, seeing only the leaked material is going to give quite a skewed and incomplete view. On the other hand, if you’re researching a topic, I can see the value of checking in with Wikileaks to see if there’s anything you’re not supposed to know about it.

Here’s another bit from the FAQ:

Couldn’t leaking involve invasions of privacy? Couldn’t mass leaking of documents be irresponsible? Aren’t some leaks deliberately false and misleading?

Providing a forum for freely posting information involves the potential for abuse, but measures can be taken to minimize any potential harm. The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents.

It’ll be fascinating to see how this works out in the edge cases. Does posting the names of covert agents count as a leak? [Tags: wikileaks wikis wikipedia intelligence politics media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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When I posted yesterday about my problem with Thunderbird and its possible solution, I did so in part because I wanted to make it findable by others with the same problem. So, I did the most basic search-engine optimization stuff of making sure I used some words and tags people are likely to search for. Then, yesterday afternoon I was part of a brief conversation with Andy Oram in which he talked about his interest in the phenomenon of bottom-up tech support. Googling for solutions to problems works but only sort of, says Andy. And that got me thinking that it’d be useful if we started tagging such posts with some standard tags, such as (perhaps): troubleshooting, operating system, application name, error message, problem area, solved/unsolved. So, my post on Thunderbird would be tagged: troubleshooting, xp, thunderbird, “rebuilding index”, folders, solved. Something like that.

In fact, perhaps we could use a microformat for technical problems and solutions. [Tags: microformats troubleshooting andy_oram everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Kevin Killian’s 1,525 reviews have earned him a ranking of 119th as an Amazon reviewer. He reviews books, movies, cookware, clothing…just about anything. But Killian is also a poet. Hooke Press has published a small edition—200 copies—of his Selected Amazon Reviews, edited by Brent Cunningham. The blurb for the book describes it as “Subversive and delightful modifiations to a pervasive online art form.” (Killian is prone to typos.)

The delightful meta-trail ends here, though: The book is not listed in Amazon.

(Thanks to Trebor Scholz for the link.) [Tags: kevin_killian amazon genre meta reviews everything_is_miscellaneous -berkman]

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Disney is launching a social network for kids. My knee-jerk reaction: Yech.

Gavin O’Malley at Online Media Daily has a more considered reaction. He points to the apparent failure of Wal-Mart’s social network for kids (“The Hub”—an awfully grown-up name), and worries that having parental controls will kill the Disney effort as well. I agree with Gartner’s Andrew Frank that it’s likely to be all product placement all the time…and, if so, I hope kids reject it.

But, of course, I haven’t seen it and don’t know what it’ll be like. Maybe Disney is smarter than that. [Tags: disney social_networks gavin_omalley ]

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Lisa Williams’ PlaceBlogger launched today. It aggregates blogs that are about the places where the bloggers live. Unlike Steve Johnson’s Outside.in, it is hand-assembled and it focuses on bloggers writing about where they live; Outside.in maintains a list of placebloggers but it also aggregates posts about places no matter the location of the people who wrote them. That gives PlaceBlogger a certain intimacy and the potential to seed local communities of bloggers, while Outside.in is better site if you’re trying to find everything said about a location. It also means that, especially at the outset, Outside.in has more stuff, while PlaceBlogger feels a bit sparsely populated…so pitch in and add to PlaceBlogger the placeblogs you rely on.

I love the idea both these sites pursue, knitting the virtual with the real, words with dirt.

Quintura is copyrighted 2006 but Hanan Cohen just pointed it out to me this morning, so I’m counting it as new in my 2007. Type in a search term and it creates a cloud of related topics (using the Yahoo search engine), which you can use to refine your search by adding them or excluding them. Unfortunately, the site was timing out for me this morning, but you can see a screen video demo here. [Tags: placeblogs blogs placeblogger outside.in quintara everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy lisa_williams steve_johnson]

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The WGBH Lab lets anyone download and mash video clips from their archive. And they’ll air and post some of the results. The clips whose rights have been cleared (now licensed via Creative Commons) are here. Click on the categories and you’ll find some pretty cool videos, including of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, scientifical animations, and ants eating a caterpillar.

[Tags: wgbh mashups everything_is_miscellaneous web2.0 creative_commons ]

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Daniel Berninger has produced a paper calling for an “Internet Renaissance” by 2010. The idea is that while the printing press brought about the Renaissance (maybe it’d be closer to say it enabled the Enlightenment), the Internet, which is as transformative, has not brought about the equivalent flowering. Dan attributes this to a clash of imperatives: To communicate or to coerce. The old power structure is all about coercion. We need to put our backs behind the communication imperative, says Dan, expanding the Internet’s reach (getting to the next billion means reaching those who make $2 a day, he says) and preserving its openness.

The paper will be a red flag for the Internet pessimists (who view themselves as realists, but I refuse to concede reality to them), but I like its overall framing: We should be working towards something as important as the Renaissance, because the Net gives us that opportunity. And I agree with Dan that it doesn’t mean we can just sit back and enjoy the great art, economic boom and global peace that’s sure to come. There’s lots of work to do. We’re just at the beginning. In fact, as I’ve said before, we’re at a crossroads where we can choose the Enlightenment or a new Dark Ages… [Tags: daniel_berninger ]

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