tools
Brief: The New Media Embed Program Manual + Ubicomp
We will now embark on the last assignment of the semester:
During the next two weeks we will gather our knowledge and compose a collective manual for the New Media traveler. It will include some lessons you gathered both about your own travelogues and about others, browse your author pages to recap the semester and the three travelogues for that matter. Other notes and tips will be about your own ideas of how to publish, when to publish, how to compose a post, what will users read? what would they comment on? Does or how do rating works? How does chat works? How does it fail? The importance of context, image vs. video, on participation vs. authorship… Moreover, each one of you presented a reading in class, try to contribute your takes from that reading into the NMEP manual. We will try together to finish the class with the essence of what should an embedded reporter consider while exploring new media environments.
Reference: military journalism, travel guides, tutorials, cooking recipes…
Like many other things in this class, this is an experiment… It will become what you make of it, and it starts right now. Please point your browsers at http://www.mushon.com/spr08/nmrs/wiki/
Before you do anything, please log in and provide your real name (or something we can cross reference with the blog). Now you are welcomed to start editing.
You are welcomed to propose some structure on the wiki discussion pages, here on our blog, or on Max’s weird chat thingie…
Please make sure to each make at least 4 edits this week (from creation of full pages to typo corrections
Recommended Reading:
Required Reading:
Brian Holmes - Drifting Through the Grid: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure
Required Viewing:
- Bruce Sterling’s presentation in the Innovation Forum:
Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.
For Patty & a volunteer:
- Read the two articles and watch the presentation
- Summarize it for us in a nicely accessible post to be published by Sunday (the 20th), ideally running some threads between them.
- Be prepared to present the article and lead the discussion in class
- Post to del.icio.us some links that expand the discussion either about the text or about key themes in it.
Rating System
With all the lolcats I’ve been looking at and with the discussion of rating systems during class. I saw this rating system on the tv carnage website. Pretty cute, if you ask me. It’s not too late for the kitten ratings, you guys. I’m only half-kidding.
http://www.streetbonersandtvcarnage.com/
Feed Me!
Today we talk in class about feeds.
A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Such web feeds include formats like RSS, Atom and Json. An RSS feed looks something like this (select view>view source to see the code). When you see this icon 
you should expect to find a link to some sort of a feed.
Obviously a feed is no fun unless there’s a convenient way to read it. One way we are already reading feeds is here on our blog, where we’re using a built in RSS reader to present a feed from del.icio.us/tags/vivaparsons. The big deal about feeds though is not only the fact you can present them across sites, but the fact you can arrange and customize your own feed aggregator. Feed aggregators can come in different shapes and colors, some are built in to your email software, others are standalone apps, and others can be totally web-based. My favorite is Netvibes - a very flexible and customizable web-based aggregator. Safari & Firefox have built in feed aggregators, other popular ones are FeedDemon, Bloglines, Thunderbird e-mail client, Newsvine, Reddit, You can get some more recommendations everywhere around the web like here, here and here.
Basically iTunes is a feed aggregator for feeds in the format of a podcast where the items include a link to an MP3 file. iTunes can use this feed to sync your iPod and download podcasts into it.
Feeds are also used to create mash-ups - take information from different sources and mash them together. The classic example for a mash-up is HousingMaps - a mashup that takes a feed from Craigslist’s apartment search
and mashes it into Google Maps - which allows to display rss data as information on the map.
The use of web feeds is a revolution, as we should understand that information on the web does not necessarily stay on our page, it can travel a long way and be used in different contexts.
