Blast Theory

The Real Story in the Google – Encyclopedia Dramatica Censorship Seems to be a bit of hype growing about the recent Google unlinking to pages on US-based Encyclopedia Dramatica(ED), a satirical version of Wikipedia. The gist of the story is that a particular ED entry contained racist comments about Aboriginal Australians. An Aboriginal man took his complaint with the page to the Australian Human Rights Commission asking for the page to be blocked. Google Australia responded by removing the allegedly discriminatory content from their search engine. At first there were stories on the SMH saying the site had been banned. There were other posts that covered the topic and now there’s a post on Google Blogoscoped that has made it onto the front page of Techmeme . @PSFK This article titled “The Seed: where theatre, gaming and botany collide” was written by Keith Stuart, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 27th February 2012 11.31 UTC Theatre is and always has been interactive, from the city-wide mystery plays of the middle ages, to the modern era’s improvised comedy nights and experimental promenade performances. And though it may seem strange to draw parallels between this ancient artform and the world of video games, it’s the sense of interplay between audience and spectacle that can unite them. This summer, the young theatre company Goat and Monkey is running a performance and alternate reality gaming (ARG) project named, The Seed. Based around the stories of Victorian botanists who would travel the world seeking rare seeds, the project starts on 28 May at a dedicated website, where viewers will read the blog of a fictitious researcher at the Millennium Seed Bank who is on a quest to find a ‘missing’ seed. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

The Mega Super Awesome Visuals Company Memo Akten enquiries: info@memo.tv Subscribe to my low-traffic newsletter Statement www.goatandmonkey.co.uk/seed/ Lost for a hundred years a precious seed lies undiscovered... Part immersive theatre and part online mystery, The Seed is a real-world treasure hunt of the grandest proportions. Inspired by true stories of the intrepid Victorian plant hunters, The Seed asks a new breed of hunter to follow clues and claim the lost treasure. Help our heroine in her quest online as she struggles to find the seed and prevent her world from falling apart.

With New Client, ICQ (Finally) Enters The Realtime Era I had just turned sixteen when instant messaging client ICQ was first released in November 1996. I started using the program a couple of months later, and will never be able to erase that annoying ‘uh oh’ sound from my memory. Like many others, I moved on from ICQ to other, more feature-packed communication services at the dawn of the new millennium and never really looked back. After a decade of barely remembering it exists, I reinstalled the ICQ client on my computer this morning. The reason isn’t nostalgia: more than 13 years after its first release, and nearly 12 years after Aol bought the company behind ICQ (Mirabilis) for a whopping $407 million, there is an updated client available for download that finally brings the product into the era of the realtime web and social networking craze. The question is: is it too little, too late?

Motivating Everyday Green Behavior With Real Rewards [Future Of Gaming] The PSFK consulting team has noticed that gaming systems are tapping into people’s inherent desire to be rewarded for their positive behaviors, developing creative ways to connect real world actions with earning points or currency. One company operating in this space is Recyclebank–an online platform that rewards individuals with points and cash rebates for making environmentally conscious decisions both on and offline. Users register with the site and can commit to a number of pledges that include using less energy, increasing their at home recycling, or learning how they can be more environmentally friendly in their neighborhood.

Balthazar Auger - Work on Play, Play at Work Note: As you can see, this page has fallen into disarray due to a botched blog migration. Mind the gaps. Poesysteme is a game I developed as a student project. It is an attempt to mix poetry with Darwinian evolution, and to illustrate the changing lives of words and languages. The player is asked to add words into the game world, where they will live under natural rather than linguistic rules (reproduction, nourishment and predation). Once added, a word can no longer be controlled directly by the player; he can only modify the environment where this word evolves.

Julian Oliver: Critical Engineering I am a New Zealander, Critical Engineer and artist based in Berlin. My projects and the occassional paper have been presented at many museums, international electronic-art events and conferences, including the Tate Modern, Transmediale, Ars Electronica and the Japan Media Arts Festival. My work has received several awards, ranging from technical excellence to artistic invention and interaction design. I've given numerous workshops and master classes in software art, augmented reality, creative hacking, data forensics, computer networking, object-oriented programming for artists, virtual architecture, artistic game-development, information visualisation, UNIX/Linux and open source development practices worldwide.

The Co-Sharing Trend [Need To Know: SXSWi] As we all begin to look forward to the Interactive section of South By South West in March, PSFK has identified five key trends that readers should be monitoring during the festival. One of these trends, we have coined ‘Co-Sharing.’ Today, a growing number of people are trading items and favors between each other. Digital technology allows anyone to find an object or service they need, when they want it, where they want it. Rather than finding these products and services at retailers or from large corporations, these items are often found in the hands of other people—sometimes neighbors, sometimes like minds a great distance away. Everything and anything is being lent and traded.

ICQ Launches ICQ 7 – Introduces Social Messaging Across Networks If we look back at history , we find that long before Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, there was ICQ. For anyone who doesn’t know, ICQ was created in 1996 and is now wholly owned by AOL. ICQ was THE pioneer of social media and real time updates. It introduced us to instant messaging and a revolutionary new way to communicate with people instantly in real time. ICQ could have been Facebook or Twitter a long time ago. It’s taken ICQ quite a long time to get back to its status as a social pioneer but now with it’s new client, ICQ is getting back to what it was about all the way from the beginning – a place to interact with your friends everywhere.

Location Aware App ‘Gamifies’ Hyperlocal News Reporting [Future Of Gaming] In our research for the Future Of Gaming report, our consulting team noticed a growing tendency towards games being used To Leverage Collective Manpower. One example of this trend is MePorter-a location-based, mobile news app that enables anyone to write, photograph, and record their own videos of local news as it happens, instantly sharing the stories with the MePorter community and on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Much like a local newspaper, MePorter offers a searchable list of categories, like crime, events and entertainment, offering a robust news experience that lets readers see other users’ locations, comment on stories and check-in as eyewitnesses. In order to ensure accuracy, the service only lets reporters and commenters post if they are at or near the location where the news is happening. MePorter To learn more about what’s going on in the gaming space today, order a copy of PSFK’s Future of Gaming report

Moment Factory These levels define the degree to which a multimedia environment involves itself directly in a spectator's experience. Each level aims at a higher enhancement of reality. 1. The Social-Pairing Trend [Need To Know: SXSWi] As we all begin to look forward to the interactive section of South By South West in March, PSFK has identified five key trends that readers should be monitoring during the festival. One of these trends, we have coined ‘Social-Pairing.’ People with similar interests, hobbies and needs have the opportunity to meet today through smart services that use a mix of social, location and demographic data to match profiles. Networks are looking at their member’s profiles on their site and across the social graph and linking people up based on interests, needs and location.

The right to link « BuzzMachine My column in the Guardian argues that we have a right to link and that the link is the basis of freedom of speech online. The issues are important and so I’m posting the entire column here: Linking is more than merely a function and feature of the internet. Linking is a right. The link enables fair comment.