Web 2.0 for the gambling community

My new summer game: the backgammon

Web 2.0 keeps surprising me: we share information, create content, collaborate through communities, social networking sites, wikis and blogs. This production of content, for the most part decentralized, strongly impact our economy. Each area of the web is growing, borrowing open-source tools and peer production of content.

One area that keeps massively imposing itself but misses the point and annoys internet users, is the online casino and game communities. Not only these sites do usually not offer anything interesting, except low quality games, but they do not make use of existing tools that could truly enhanced the “casino player” experience.

Yet, I found a complete platform for the online game and gamblers community. It works as an online gambling guide. It makes use of web 2.0 technologies and provides, for instance, weekly news and tips in rich video format along with interviews of specialists. The site uses algorithms that scan the web to find the highest jackpots. They offer a community based website that includes personal blogs of players, discussions, and sharing options. Not only the design is clean and inviting (you will not find banners with glitters that pops up every two seconds), but also the site is useful for anyone who wants to learn about games: it will lead the future (or current) players from the beginner to the pro difficulty level. It is a self contained environment for the gambler and the player. Even though I am not a gambler, I am a dedicated game player and my current summer game is the super fun Backgammon and the tips I read about it are really exciting!

Online platform to trade concert tickets!

Finally a site that works as a ticket hub between buyers and sellers of concert tickets, sports tickets and theater tickets. How convenient to have the info gather into one site, especially when the platform invites seller and buyer of tickets to trade with one another. I have not tried to get some tickets there yet, but I wonder how hard it is to get some tickets for Wimbledon.

This online exchange is for Europe only, so this site can be especially useful for the ones of you who live in Europe, and I wonder if there is a similar service for the United States. I still find difficult in Boston to know what's going on and an online system to trade tickets for shows, concerts, art events is a fantastic approach.



The viagogo web site sponsors the following weekly UK events list:

Rock and Pop Concert Tickets:
· Celine Dion Tickets · Boyzone Tickets · Bruce Springsteen Tickets · Foo Fighters Tickets · Nickelback Tickets · Madonna Tickets · James Tickets · Queen tickets · Paul Rodgers Tickets · Van Halen Tickets · Oasis Tickets · Michael Jackson Tickets . Alternative and Indie Concert Tickets · Coldplay Tickets · Radiohead Tickets

Festival Tickets:
· T in the Park Tickets · Leeds Festival Tickets · O2 Wireless Festival Tickets

Sport Tickets: Wimbledon Tickets
Buy Concert Tickets and Tennis Tickets.

So lucky you UK ones, not only you have pretty cool events coming up, but you know how to get there. The platform goes beyond the sponsored list of events above and proposes comedy, opera, ballet and dance, flowers shows ... and even Avenue Q!!!

Get back in time with West End musical Avenue Q. Experience the fun you had with Sesame Street as a child from a more grown up perspective today. All but three of the characters in the musical are puppets who parody the famous Muppets of Sesame Street. Princeton, a young graduate with a "useless" major in English, arrives in New York with big hopes and a very small bank account which leaves him no choice but to move into the not so fine but friendly Avenue Q. He soon discovers life and love in the Big Apple with his new neighbours.

Helvetica has gone wild

Can Helvetica drop? Someone had to imagine it. Dropclock does it via a motion clock screensaver. Every minute of real time is numerically expressed with heavy helvetica dropping into water in slow motion. Thank you fat-man-collective!

Video



Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
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Blog Jouons Blog Maison Blog Passion

Zone of emergency - Networks, Tactics, Breakdown

Amber Frid-Jimenez is teaching a class at the MIT Visual Arts Department this spring on Introduction to Online Participatory Media: Zone of emergency - Networks, Tactics, Breakdown (4.366/4.381). The course is equal parts theory, art, technology and play, exploring the wild archive of the web. The class combines an overview of the historical "art for all" approach of early net-art and tactical media with an experimental take on the popular social web today.

Time Mondays 7 – 10pm and Wednesdays 9:30am – 12:30pm
Location N51-315 IEL

The course introduces an overview of web-based platforms as means through which to explore the cultural, social, political, and economic impact of mediated communication. Hands-on design exercises and experiments are continually framed and examined by critical reflection and discussions. An overview of historical "art for all" and participatory art practices, of early net-art and current public art practices will show how digital communication and culture have altered the way in which collaboration occurs, changing conventional notions of authorship and giving rise to the collective elaboration of meaning.

This seminar/workshop is taught in two parts. The Monday Night@VAP lecture series entitled Zones of Emergency co-organized by VAP Director Ute Meta Bauer and Lecturer Jae Rhim Lee will be open to the public, but will be considered a lab for the course. Lectures and panel discussions will serve to contextualize the theory of participatory design practices in times of emergency. This course is being co-organized with Jae Rhim Lee (4.391: Understanding the Problem: Research as Artistic Practice - FEMA Trailer Project).

Students from various disciplines and backgrounds are welcome. Please
contact Amber at amber [at] media [dot] mit [dot] edu for more information.

Prerequisites: permission of the instructor. Limited enrollment of 12
students. 4.381 Graduate Level H (12 units), 4.366 Undergraduate HASS-E
(2-4-6 units).

Instructor
Amber Frid-Jimenez,(617) 869-9840, Office: N52-342, Hours: W 1–3pm and by appointment

Teaching Assistants
Kate Hollenbach, Course
Cati Vaucelle, Lecture Series
Lauren McCarthy

About the Instructor
Amber Frid-Jimenez is an artist, designer, and recent graduate of the MIT
Media Lab, where she studied with John Maeda in the Physical Language
Workshop. Her work confronts issues ranging from politics and surveillance
to representations of women in media. Her recent work includes interactive
video installations, performance-based participation from large-scale online
audiences, and painting. She has presented her work internationally at
institutions including Banff New Media Institute, Rhode Island School of
Design, Cornell University, Harvard University, School of the Museum of Fine
Arts (Boston, MA), Smithsonian Institution, American Institute of Graphic
Arts, and at independent venues such as Art Interactive (Cambridge, MA),
Upgrade! International (online), WMMNA (online), and DFN Gallery (New York)

More resources
Amber's MS Media Lab thesis
Course

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
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Participation Art Online

Amber Frid-Jimenez, member of the Open Studio team, focused on the emergence of online art communities for her master thesis.



She designed WikiPhone, a system in which multiple participants collaborate on soundtracks in real-time, modifying existing online videos; OpenBrand, a system that allows participants to rewrite advertisements; Emma On Relationships, a video blog inviting participants to call in for love advice; and several other projects, exploring aspects of creativity and collaboration.

For her thesis she examined the commonalities within these systems to define design principles governing the creation of participatory media, and to explore the potential of these systems to effect social and political change.

You can download her thesis!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle
♥ Architectradure
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The Dumpster

The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has "dumped" another. The project's graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain.

Web site

Meta Market

Created by genius Burak Arikan, Meta Markets is super fun.

It is a continuous stock market, up and running 24/7, like a living organism. It has many markets each composed of different values generated by people's products in networked public spaces. Current markets are open to all members for trading and for offering their own products to public (IPO). We select markets based on their popularity and accessibility through APIs. More markets will be added in the future.

If you want to join, let me know I am selling invitations (private message me in "comments").

Elisabeth Sylvan: the Sharing of Wonderful Ideas

Dr Elisabeth Sylvan

Today I attended the thesis defense of my friend Elisabeth Sylvan, now Dr Elisabeth Sylvan, from the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Laboratory. Her dissertation is entitled the Sharing of Wonderful Ideas: Influence and Interaction in Online Communities of Creators.

At her dissertation committee: Mitchel Resnick, Alex P. Pentland and Peter Gloor

Abstract
This thesis presents a new framework for understanding how communities of creators share work, influence one another's creative processes, and learn from one another. I introduce the concept of Online Communities of Creators (OCOCs), which are online communities where the core activity is sharing personal creations. Using a mixed-methods approach of ethnography and social network analysis, I study two specific OCOCs: the Computer Clubhouse Village and the Scratch online community.

I analyze how ideas spread through OCOCs using the framework for diffusion of innovation developed by Everett Rogers. I map specific behaviors in OCOCs to Roger's five stages of adoption of innovation: awareness, interest, evaluation, trial and adoption. Within OCOCs each of these stages represent deepening understanding of other community members' work. The last two stages can be seen as members learning from each other. I report on how different social and project-related activities support the communities. I analyze which community members and which projects are most commonly in the trial and adoption stages. Finally I describe what creator and project factors predict influence in OCOCs.

Even though developed for two specific communities, her framework could be re-applied to the understanding of the sharing of creations within another community. It would be interesting to research on the mechanism of creation through blogs, or social communities.

Throughout her research, she analyzes the forms of participation, the mechanism of adoption of ideas and how ideas spread within the community, and finds ways to predict influence. For instance, prediction for download of user's projects happens:
1st- when the project is featured by administrator of the community
2nd- when the creator of the project has many projects already
3rd- when the creator of the project comments on projects
4th- when the creator of the project has uploaded projects recently
5th- when the creator of the project has friends, etc...

By observing a specific community, she studies how the learning happens socially.
Community members spontaneously filled in surveys that her software uses as data to generate a network visualization. She noticed that community members were developing popularity and skills that went beyond the community itself and could motivate users to later do something on the internet.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the first producer of free electronic books (ebooks). Project Gutenberg reached the following milestones as per dates:

1 eBook in 1971
10 eBooks in 1991
100 eBooks in 1994
1,000 eBooks in 1997
10,000 eBooks in 2003
100,000 eBooks in 2006


Don't miss the science-fiction bookshelf!


Illustration from Ullr Uprising by H. Beam Piper

What's next with social networks?

I recently thought of creating a social network for dead people. Everyone could provide their digital representations, biometry information, simulation of personal touch that would only be revealed when dead. However, Mission Eternity is a similar concept that Regine Debatty noticed at ISEA.

The M∞ ARCANUM CAPSULES contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem: as infinite data particles they forever circulate the global info sphere – hosted in the shared memory of thousands of networked computers and mobile devices of M∞ ANGELS, people who contribute a part of their digital storage capacity to the mission.

Video




Arcanum Capsules contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem.

Cool online social stuff

Bumplist

During Chi, I had a few gatherings with my old school friends from Media Lab Europe. This reminded me how fun it was to be beta tester for each other's project. Back in Dublin, I tried out Jonah and Mike's Bumplist.

BumpList only allows for a minimum amount of subscribers so that when a new person subscribes, the first person to subscribe is "bumped", or unsubscribed from the list.

Via Jonah again, I tested the super fun myfrienenemies social community. Basically, on this site, anyone can post anonymously about their enemies and connect to others through their enemies.