MEDEA Collaborative Media Initiative

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By Jonas Löwgren

Google Wave has been hyped, debated and backlashed for a good three months, and it may be time for a little stock-taking. From my experience and what I read, it seems designed for work-related collaboration and it claims its own spot in the online-communication space.

It does a good job of combining synchronous in-place editing with asynchronous, persistent messaging. Primary use cases seem to be collaborative remote brainstorming, document drafting and document editing. Apart from the technical hiccups coming with the preview status of the software and the less-than-perfect integration with existing social networks and notification services, the general impression seems to be favorable.

So far, a rational assessment. Fitness for purpose, usefulness and usability would be the underlying design goals to expect. But as always happens, as soon as the product comes into the hands of users, it turns out that it can be used for many things other than work-related collaboration.

The re-appropriation of Google Wave has taken quite a few forms so far, including pastiche recreations of famous documents, realtime chats, and public clue solicitation in a police manhunt. The example that stands out for me, however, is Joe Sabia’s work on re-enacting scenes from two famous movies using Google Wave. Here is the Pulp Fiction scene:

Is this an hommage remake? A mashup? An interpretation? I have no idea what to call it. But what I know is that is strangely gripping, and that it was not one of the use cases on the whiteboards of the Google Wave development team.

by Jonas Löwgren

Within the funding programme for ICT use, the national funding agency Vinnova is supporting demonstrator-oriented projects where companies work with academia and “problem owners” to create new concepts and stimulate economic growth.

The fall 2009 deadline was intended for demonstrators oriented towards leisure, entertainment and pleasure. Over 50 full applications were received, and today it was announced that 11 were granted.

Two of the projects are Medea co-productions.

One is Emues, a platform for connecting music fans with artists and venues in new ways by crowdspawning and crowdfunding live music events. Malmö University participates together with Emues Group, The Swedish Model and Tyst Booking & Management.

The other is URBLOVE where the aim is to develop a mobile service combining urban exploration, gameplay and user-generated content. The partners here are Malmö University, Ozma Speldesign, Föreningen Bryggeriet i Malmö, Rörelsen Gatans Röst och Ansikte, Malmö Living Labs and Wireless Internet Provider.

Another one of the eleven granted proposals involves Medea partner Do-Fi together with a range of partners on the subject of urban navigation aids for the visually impaired.

Each proposal is supported with up to 1.5 MSEK for a period of between 6 and 24 months to develop compelling demonstrators and useful knowledge to advance our field.

In early 2008, Jonas Löwgren of Medea worked with IKEA IT to design the Pinpoint visualization. Briefly, it was intended to help knowledge workers in large organizations find answers to specific questions and to grow their professional networks, by presenting possibly unknown colleagues with interests and competencies similar to your own.

(Click image for a version at readable size.)

The key idea behind Pinpoint was to create the visualization by mining existing data within the corporate firewall, without requiring users to provide Pinpoint-specific profiles or extraneous data. More about the project, including a testable demo, a movie and an academic publication reference, is found here.

Now it seems that the business world is starting to look closely into the invisible structures of the corporate organism. In an article in CIO Sweden (in Swedish, unfortunately), Henrik Rådmark refers to a recent Gartner report emphasizing what they call pattern-based strategies where companies need to be sensitive to trends and small variations in the markets and the business landscapes. These trends are most clearly visible in the social networks.

And this is where the connection to Pinpoint comes in. According to the CIO Sweden article, a key element of such strategies is to grasp the informal networks within companies and the professional knowledge-in-use that lives in low-level collaborative action rather than in general policy documents. This is more or less exactly what Pinpoint makes visible, for the individual employee as well as for strategists on management levels.

From this perspective, the Pinpoint visualization can be understood as a collaborative medium that supports sociality and joint action.

by Jonas Löwgren

The story has been all over the media: Rupert Murdoch, founder and CEO of the international publisher News Corp, criticized Google for stealing traffic from News Corp newspapers (since people use Google to find the material from, e.g., New York Times, Wall Street Journal and a host of other sources — and Google abstracts the sources, places ads next to them, and keeps a good part of the revenue). Social media advocates have commented that this position is like chastising the paper boy for delivering the news paper at your door, and then demanding that he should pay for the privilege.

The next development of the story connects News Corp with Microsoft. Apparently, Microsoft is offering to pay News Corp sources to make their content invisible to Google. According to Dan Lyons of Newsweek, the idea is to drive people from Google to Microsoft’s Bing search engine for the news content they want.

It seems clear to me that there has to be a short-term as well as a long-term perspective in the analysis of these developments.

In the short term, the business agreement supposedly being constructed makes some sort of sense in the larger context of a Google-Microsoft battle. There are probably many other aspects at stake as well, including an upcoming operating-system war between Windows and Chrome OS. (And there are also other business interpretations to consider. Analysts like Paul Carr at TechCrunch see the whole thing as a tactical move mainly aimed at increasing the content owners’ control over how their material is indexed by playing the access providers off against each other to gain support for the Advanced Content Access Protocol.)

From a birds-eye point of view, however, it is rather a question of the most appropriate market position for the professionals who used to be news producers. With production and distribution capacity more evenly distributed in the new media, (at least) two things are bound to happen.

One is that the volume of available news and news-related information on the Internet is going to continue to grow, and grow rapidly.

The other is that the professional competency of assessing, selecting, validating and presenting news information is going to be increasingly demanded when people start resigning to the sheer volume of what is available and potentially interesting out there.

It follows from this argument that the future business models of the news industry will be built on editorial or curatorial services. In current online practices, search engines represent the entry-level editorial service for many users: Search for a word and then read the first couple of search hits. The interesting question from a strategical point of view is how general search engines can evolve into more comprehensive and powerful editorial services along with the information-acquisition strategies of the general public.

by Jonas Löwgren

It has been clear for quite some time that social mechanisms need to be leveraged to help people find relevant and useful online information. The sheer volume of available information, the inadequacy of creation-time metadata annotation in a collaborative media setting, and the intractability of automated content processing are the main arguments here.

Examples of work in this direction includes our own concept studies around tribal navigation in future television. Meta-communities such as Delicious and Digg can also be seen as attempts in the same direction. Mainstream services and media, however, seem to have stuck somewhat on the idea that recommender systems (”people who bought book X also bought book Y”) are good enough for most purposes.

A few weeks ago, however, Google launched Social Search in their Labs department. The idea is basically to construct the user’s “social circle” from services such as Flickr and Twitter (assuming that the user’s friends have connected their accounts to their Google profiles) and then to present search results within that subset under a separate heading. Here is a demo on Youtube:

This may not be rocket science but it is super-timely and, given Google’s position on the search market, has the potential to be a game-changer moving the mainstream notion of socially enhanced information access beyond the anonymous recommender approach once and for all. This is a very welcome development, in my opinion.

Medea presents:

Five Talks by World-Class Authorities on Innovation, Media, and Transformation

from November 3 through November 17.

Three talks have passed, but the two final ones are still to come.

GK VanPatter speaks about SenseMaking for ChangeMaking on Thursday, November 12, 16:00–18:00 at old K3 (Beiijerskajen 8).

Robert Jacobson wraps up the series by addressing National Innovation Leadership and National and Local Cultural Styles. Tuesday, November 17, 16:00–18:00 at MINC (Ankargripsgatan 3).

The talks are free and followed by Q&A and conversation. Limited availability, sign up by email to medea@mah.se.

Full invitation available online.

Welcome!

by Jonas Löwgren

The second “24 hour business camp” event was concluded last week and the results have been moderately publicized. More specifically, the tangible results consist of some 60 business ideas, presented in one-minute pitches.

The form of the event is a college-style challenge where teams work for 24 hours straight to develop a proof-of-concept web service that could be the core of a new startup. According to the organizers, the purpose of the event is to prove that “all you need to start a company today is a computer and the Internet.” Here is a quote on the philosophy behind the event:

…the 24 Hour Business Camp provides an excellent opportunity for young entrepreneurial minds to explore their abilities in an inspirational environment. The event is open to anyone with a great idea, but is mainly targeted towards the developers’ community and student entrepreneurs from the SSES partner schools, allowing for a good mix of people and competences.

Watching the webcast of the final pitches is somewhat arduous, but I have done it. What strikes me is, first of all, the high levels of energy and commitment exhibited by the participants.

Secondly, my experience as an interaction design teacher kicks in, and I notice how strongly the presented ideas are shaped by implementation technologies. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, though; in order to go from a vague idea to an implemented service in 24 hours, it is certainly advisable to go for a mashup of existing components.

Finally, and related to the second point, the degree of innovation exhibited by the participants is mundane at best. There are numerous proposals for special interest communities, a fair selection of location-based information services, some pledge sites and, of course, a number of proposed tools for Internet entrepreneurs. Only a couple of proposals catch my interest for being innovative and ingenious, most notably smsgrupp.se which amounts to a LISTSERV service for text messages. Simple, elegant, and clearly pointing to a latent need — qualities that I personally would have liked to see more of in the presented proposals.

It is instructive to reflect about what kinds of views on innovation, design quality and entrepreneurship that 24hbc and similar events promote. Going from scratch to proof-of-concept in 24 hours seems to encourage repurposing of existing ideas and recombination of existing components. Perhaps this is the right level of “innovation” for commercialization. Or perhaps it is simply a case of the organizers getting what they are asking for.

Hur ser förutsättningarna ut för grävande journalistik när “allt” är sökbart på nätet, och när nyhetsförmedlingen börjar gå andra vägar än via de etablerade massmedierna?

Och hur ska det gå för offentlighetsprincipen?

Nicklas Lundblad från Stockholms Handelskammare har precis släppt rapporten Tre reformer för offentlighetsprincipen i informationssamhället. På fredag den 20 november kommer han till Malmö för att diskutera den med en påläst och kunnig panel. Och med dig.

Tid: 8:00-9:00 den 20 november. (Frukost serveras från 7:30.)
Plats: Restaurang Matrisen, Sydsvenskan, Krusegatan 19, Malmö.

Först presenterar Nicklas huvuddragen i sin rapport och sedan släpper vi fram fyra panelmedlemmar som läst rapporten och funderat över intressanta frågor och kommentarer:

Bo Reimer, professor i medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap vid Malmö högskola
Anders Mildner, frilansjournalist och medarbetare vid MMSS
Dan Ivarsson, journalist på Sydsvenskan
Johanna Nylander, frilansskribent

Samtalet leds av Jonas Löwgren, Malmö högskola, och avslutas med en allmän diskussion.

Vi bjuder på frukost från 07:30.

Hör av dig senast 17 november till yasemin.arhan@timbro.se om du vill komma, så att vi kan beställa frukost till dig.

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Ett arrangemang av MEDEA Collaborative Media Initiative, Moving Media Southern Sweden (MMSS), och Timbro. Nicklas rapport är initierad och utgiven av Timbro Media Institute.

By Jonas Löwgren

The current “online sensation” (see footnote, below) seems to be Auto-Tune the News, a series of video collages from New York-based Gregory Brothers. The basic idea is to mash up news clips fed through an auto-tuner to make it sound as if the talking heads are singing. This material is integrated into custom-written songs and the video is a mix of the original news clips and chromakeyed band members in various costumes (including an Angry Gorilla).

More about Gregory Brothers and their work in this in-depth interview. There are currently nine episodes of Auto-Tune the News in Youtube; my personal favorite is #6.

What strikes me about this work is how skillfully it is executed. First, to find and refine the idea — there was an earlier series called Debate in Song and Dance with original music juxtaposed with debate clips, but when the speakers were auto-tuned into “singing” in the new series, then the audio and the video really started working together. Secondly, the level of musical talent needed to make catchy songs out of the diverse material. And finally, the whimsical video collage and the weird characters throwing the utter seriousness of newcasters and congress members into beautiful contrast. The technical quality of the chromakeying is terrible, of course, which is not a fault in this context but rather serves to emphasize the timeliness and grassroots feel that always benefits a piece of political satire.

It is clear that mashup is a craft, and that it has levels of mastery. Always rewarding to see when the large audiences (and the attention of the mainstream media) are drawn to quality work.

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Footnote: It is remarkable how the mainstream media seem to approach digital culture. Perhaps it could be called the Eldorado approach. There is an urge to focus on exactly one act or performer that can be dubbed the new “online sensation” and reported in terms of how it comes from nowhere and sweeps the “online world.” (For reference, recall how the career story of Lily Allen was retold to fit this pattern, even though she was more or less born an artist and had her first record contract four years before Myspace.)