Media Sauce’s Web 2.0 presentation by Sarah Robbins
Here are my notes on Media Sauce’s presentation on Web 2.0, in case anyone is interested:
Web 2.0 for Business: Revealing the Best Kept Secret
The CEO of Media Sauce talked about the power of story-telling
to connect people and to make sense of the world around us. The company is
using this strategy to offer client-based solutions for businesses.
What is Web 2.0?
- Web
2.0 applications are those that reside in the space between devices, that
is, they don’t live on your desktop, they live on the internet at a
server. This is convenient as you don’t have access to your programs and
data on your desktop all the time. - Web
2.0 applications get better with more people using it. - Opens
data and services to be re-used by others. - Spans
all connected devices. Any device can interface with Web 2.0 applications,
can access them from anywhere.
This implies the death of the personal computer. These
applications take the data out of your hard drive and make it accessible from anywhere.
They offer a rich user experiences. Users have some input
and a voice through the use of these applications.
These applications are continually updated effortlessly. Users
don’t need to worry about updating the software anymore. They automatically update
without requiring any conscious effort from you.
Their characteristics:
- Remote
data storage - API
Application program interface - Prosumer-participation
(user not only consumes, but also produces) - Connectedness
(users interact with one another, leave a comment on each other’s blogs,
pictures, and what not)
API: bookmark (delicious) export out to other services.
Connectedness: LinkedIn: just for business for business
contacts.
Prosumer-participation: Flickr, friends can comment on the
photo album on Flickr.
Remote data storage: gmail, online, free. Your data is
stored elsewhere.
Examples of web 2.0ness
User-generated content. Selling content produced by other
users.
Social: Jaicu, Twitter useful for meetings and such.
Data storage: Slide share
Mashup, take different web 2.0 applications and combine them
to create yet another. (Didn’t catch the name of the mashup on display): This
one had a list of attendees list in a conference. Aggregates information.
Technorati: aggregator of blogs
Immersive: SL, strong on data storage. Have an API
(integrates other application interfaces), prosumer (users create content). Linden
Lab just provides the real estate, users create the world. Social network is
the critical part of the experience.
Web 2.0 is changing the world: YouTube produces 3250 hours
of content every day.
The real question is: What is your company doing to leverage
user participation? 91% is new content in YouTube. How does this affect the way
we do business?
A lot of information to wade through, some are important
some are trivial.
For example: Information hits Wikipedia, before the police
gets uncovers it.
Changing Models of Communication: The old way of doing
business: When we talk to our consumers we treat them like sheep, we just send
them messages and accept them to receive them. With Web 2.0 consumers talk
back, and more importantly, they talk to each other too. Consumers talk through
you. If someone doesn’t like your product, they let you know and they let each
other know/
A great example of how Web 2.0 applications work (viral
story telling): keyboard example… How one information travels: Blogs, twitter,
skpe, NPR, SL, movies, product reviews, CBS Sales go through the roof. It
didn’t just happen in the company, He outsourced the idea and everyone
benefits. Project gets accomplished through self-motivation.
Web 2.0 sites are making a lot of money. They have service,
not a product. Facebook sells for 2 billion. Yahoo buys Delicious for 30
million. Not for the bookmarks, but for the idea.
Homework: Applications you can start using today: gmail,
docs, notebook reader. See the edits in real time, independent of the platform.
Notebook: include the links with notes. Reader delivers important content to
you. RSS feeds. Reader will export a
file that you can share. Export the RSS feeds to share with your customers or
employees.
Friefox: google search, zotero (endbook), notebook, music
controls, plug ins, custom sidebar add-ons (wikipedia)
How can Media Sauce help you?
Media Sauce sells business strategy rather than a product.
Real time applications easy to create for Media Sauce.
Facebook let us create useful tools that we can implement.
You can leverage your company according to the data you get
from Facebook demographics for instance.
Custom mashup (tender). Mologogo GPS enabled phone. Posts
your location on the google map (delivery company, see your employees on the
map).
Go2web2.0: website that lists thousands of Web 2.0
applications.
Second Life: It is a massive virtual world that has a steep
learning curve.. Excellent for businesses because it is social, and user creates
content. Users can hold meetings without paying for hotels and airfare. People
who log on for the first start communicating with others.
Brand building is huge in SL. IBM for example has big
servers which are hard to understand. IBM built an interactive space
introducing these complicated machines, you click on any item, and a short
explanation pops up, way more fun than reading a manual. There is always
someone to answer your questions. Customers interact around a product.
Sony BMG: Lacks being updated, build brilliantly, but no
updates. So people visit it only once and never return.
Question asked: How does Linden Lab earn money?
They make their money off of selling server space. When you
buy land you pay an initial cash up front and pay for monthly maintenance.
People selling their skills and time.
Multi-application networks. Example: Hot box pizza: Myspace
page, similar content but reaches different audience. You can repurpose the available
tools for your intentions and address different audiences.
Question asked: What will Web 3.0 be? All these applications
that are mashed into SL. Technology that understands the individual user’s
needs. More immediate, mobile, more customized.
SL requirements: Harware requirements are too demanding, so
not a whole lot of regular users.
Exit Strategy
OK, here is what I’m going to write about Rushkoff’s Exit Strategy in comparison to Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Interestingly enough, Pale Fire, as a novel that was exclusively intended to be published in print, tries its damnest to subvert the rules of print publishing. Nabokov is a genius when it comes to that. However, Rushkoff’s novel was first published online and the readers were invited to insert comments to the main text, then it was published in print. You’d think that a novel like this would be more subversive or even hypertextual. Unfortunately, the sense that I got from the printed copy is that it really settled into the paradigms established in print. Not sure but comments were expunged by the author, so there is an authorial intervention, the primary text is definitely at the center of attention, and some discourses are privileged. Like there are extended sections about Jewishness that don’t get commented. Also I contacted the author, but he no longer has the original files. That seems awfully odd.
Anyway, I have to make do with what I find. If the print text is all I have, that’s what I’ll have to stick with.
Ludium (II)
Edward Castonova’s Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University convened the second Ludium Conference
this past weekend in Bloomington. Ludium is a conference designed as a game. What was the game this time around? Hammering
out a well-considered platform to guide virtual world policy. Here is the result: A Declaration of Virtual World Policy. Looking at it, I realize that Second Life is far far away from it. Enjoy…
Seeking Grimmy, again…
Seeking Grimmy Moonflower, yet again. AIM: PaleFireR…
Parody video of Second Life
ZOMG!!! This parody video is pretty funny for those who have been in Second Life. Watch it here.
Wilf
Here’s a fun jargon watch in this months Wired: Wilf. An imperfect acronym for "What was I looking for?" Apparently, Wilfers spend up to a third of their online time drifting from news to shopping to porn sites.
Well, I guess that characterizes most of us. Except the porn part, I guess…
The Attack of the Clones
As I have more work to do on my dissertation, I end up doing more irrelevant stuff like twittering, e-mailing, IMing, and watching all the movies and their commentaries… Well today, I end up sending whatever I wrote for my first chapter to my dissertation group and decided to take the night off. So I opened up a bottle of champaign and finished the Web updates on the Tri-State SAR Web site, and finished the commentaries for The Attack of the Clones. It is funny that all the deleted scenes began with either producer or the editor saying "Well it was an exceptionally good scene, but in the end we realized that we didn’t have a use for it." And most of these scenes for the sappy love story between Padma and Annakin. Big surprise! What was more surprising for me was that when I watched the movie for the first time, I already thought it was too long as is. When I watched the commentary, I realized that that story was going to be even longer! Urgh…
And then I watched the actual movie, yet again. Man what sloppy script writing. If it weren’t for the brilliant CGI and visual effects, the movie would be worthless. Lucas at one point admits at one point in the commentary that he doesn’t think that the script has too much importance and that it is the visual aspect of the movie that is more important. Well, I have to respectfully say, bull shit!
And I wondered, why did he have to insist on writing the script then? Let people who are better at it do it. They are, after all, sinking in inordinate amounts on money. I mean some of the dialogs in the love scene are so exaggerated, so sappy, that you would think that Lucas never fell in love, ever. Annakin’s evil side is so grossly exaggerated in the dialogs that it is surreal. Audience does not like to have its hand held every step of the way, otherwise it is a big turn off. Story-telling is an art form. Lucas is great in visual story-telling, but the verbal one, he needs to leave it to better people.
He reminded me of some of our clients at work, who are determined to do everything about the course, including the script writing, not realizing that they are butchering the entire course.
06/21/07: Funny as I was reading Wired online, I came across the commentary of The Luddite: The Last Guy to See Star Wars. He is saying similar things, accept for the original trilogy. Bad script, bad acting… Not sure if I can whole-heartedly agree that the original serious sucked as back as the prequels.
Performativity
Been banging heads on how to get my dissertation framed around performativity for awhile now. Now that I went back and started rewriting my print chapter, this task is all the more urgent. As it turns out,
performativity (along with materiality) is the key to combine my Second Life chapters with my print chapter. So here is what I came up with (mind you, this is not your usual bed time reading and, more importantly, it is not edited yet):
***
The locus of query of this chapter, then, is to investigate
the performativity of works and their relationship to the performances of their
readers. Taking Anna Gunder’s model of text
and work as my starting point, in
which she argues that performing the work allows the formation of its texts, I
will investigate the performativity of metafictional narratives and relate how
their readers (whether they are real or fictional) participate in the forming
of the text. I
will argue, (not just in this chapter, but rather throughout the entire dissertation)
that the performativity of a work is contingent upon the materiality of that
particular work which arises from its physical characteristics and how they are
mobilized.
While performativity and the performance the work elicits
may be medium-specific, as print texts embody a different type of
performativity than their electronic counterparts, works that are created
within the same platform may require their readers/users to perform a wide
array of different activities to form its texts. The nature of these acts
depends on how the materiality of the medium in which the work is produced emerges
as its physical characteristics are mobilized in quest of a meaning. While the
materiality of the work indeed affects its performativity and the
performativity of the electronic work is nothing like its print counterpart
(due to the fundamental differences between platforms), in this chapter, I trace
continuity between the performative ways in which we form these two very different
types of textualities. As W. B. Worthen states in Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, “Neither the
ideologies—of print culture, of digital culture—nor the practices are immanent
in the technology: they arise in the ways we understand and use them” (23).
Having stated this, he contends that these ideologies and practices arise in
the sphere of the performative.
My goal in focusing on the continuity between the two types
of textualities in this chapter is not to argue that their materiality, and
thus, performativity are similar in kind and force, but, once again, to
overcome the misleading duality set forth by early new media critics who
defined electronic textualities as a brand new revolutionary way of reading and
writing. The secondary goal in this chapter, then, is to demonstrate that some
of the tendencies that are attributed primarily to electronic texts as defining
characteristics, such as blurring the lines between author and reader, production
and consumption, the malleability that enables the presentation of text in
different forms, including in the form of linguistic and bibliographical codes,
and the ability to respond to reader input, is not completely alien to print
culture and has been in existence for the last five centuries in one form or
another. In this respect, the ideologies and the practices that emerged within
print culture anticipate those that came about through digital technologies. Starting
a study which primarily focuses on electronic textualities by partially demystifying
the aura created around electronic media, is most appropriate for the
convergence era in which media are in a state of transition. While new media
provide different perspectives through which to view older media, critical
approaches that emerge within older media inform our assessment and appropriation
of newer technologies. I would like to position my discussion of materiality
and performativity of the printed work within this framework.
In order to explore the issues stated above, this chapter
comprises four sections. The first section will provide a theoretical framework
for the entire chapter by defining key terms such as work and text, and foreground
the importance of distinguishing between physicality
and materiality, and how different
types of materiality embodies different performativity. In the next section, I
will use early examples of the novel, in particular Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to demonstrate the
print work as an embodied entity and investigate the different types of
performative activities that each novel elicits. The third section will analyze
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Douglas
Rushkoff’s Exit Strategy within the
context of hypertext theory. Nabokov’s novel subverts the idea of converging on
an authoritative text by undermining the editorial processes that are inherent
in print culture. Pale Fire is the
story of a madman who produces a critical edition to a poem, “Pale Fire,” by
introducing editorial comments that relate incredible storylines unrelated to
the primary text. Rushkoff’s novel, on the other hand, actualizes the reader
participation in the production process by publishing the text online and
allowing the readers to add comments on the text. Calling it an open-source
novel, Rushkoff’s published work comprises two narratives: one written by the
author himself; the other, a hilarious metanarrative formulated around the main
text. As such, the writing of Exit
Strategy becomes a collaborative process that includes its readers, very
much like the one fictionalized in Don
Quixote.
Pale Fire and Exit Strategy
I had long since gave up on the idea of including Pale Fire. I really wanted to stick it somewhere, but I had too many works to discuss and that one was the first to go. What do you know? After a year, I (again) came back full circle in my decision and decided to include this novel. YAY! And it works out pretty cool too. I am going to discuss it with Exit Strategy. After all, they are doing the same thing. The better news is that I already have a conference paper on the topic that I can use. It needs to be tweaked, but it is written well. Add ten more pages to the chapter…
Though, the idea behind Exit Strategy (publishing it online and having readers add comments to it) is an interesting twist, Nabokov’s novel is far more richer, funnier. Think about it, an insane man decides to write a critical edition to a poem and totally reads into it a plot to murder himself. Can’t get any better than that. Though Rushkoff’s novel talks about hackers (a topic dear to my heart) and is published first online, my first love is still Nabokov (as apparent from my online identity –PaleFire). All in all, progress is being made.
A break
It has been a while since I last posted here. It seems I needed a break from SL and the blog. I should try to remedy that. Hmmm, let’s see. What am I doing? Well I started my print chapter and am trying to get that done before I leave for Turkey next month. I am a bit tangled in theory, tying to sort out how to formulate things. The more I think about it, the less I know what I am doing. Isn’t that great. Here is the line-up for this chapter: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Pale Fire (my online name), and Exit Strategy. Sounds easy, but I am entangled with working out the theory atm. I had moments like this in my SL chapter too. I still have to go back and rewrite some of it. Write now, I am close to finishing Tristram Shandy. Gosh this is a thankless job!
I also have my technology workshops that I have to teach within the next week or so. My chair also wants me to do a class presentation about SL next week. And my projects at work kinda got busy. I am anxiously waiting vacation.
