Christine

Burning Man Gets its Own Mashup

Beatmaps, an event listings mashup, just posted a neat Burning Man mashup. This tool combines Google satellite maps with Burning Man's schedule of events, a user-generated tagcloud, etc. Registered beatmaps users can add themselves, their camp/artwork/events, etc. and tag everything as they like. (Compare this to the official burning man calendar.) Ideally, this mashup is also sucking in data from existing sources, but it's hard to tell from the limited info at the beatmaps site, which is in beta.

Flaming Art at the Crucible

The Crucible exploded this weekend with the annual Fire Arts Festival - twisting, 200' tall tornados of flame; booming fire cannons; sinuous fire dancers; and fiery metal sculpture. One of my favorites was the giant metal t-rex with flaming fangs.

Tools and Tech for Interactive Video Blogging

The broadcast-only aspect of video blogging has been a hurdle to virality and scale. Some smart folks at Vloggercon took note, and worked up both test hacks and structural concepts that enable interactive videoblogging.

What Rights Do You Have With Your Media?

When you post information, do you realize who else you are giving rights to? Patrick Reilly from the Intellectual Property Society spoke to this question at today's Vloggercon. The session ultimately devolved into frustrated questions and conflicting answers, leading the moderator to pull a steaming  Creative Commons attendee out from the audience and onto the stage. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is a funder of Creative Commons.)

...Also Heard at Vloggercon

Other interesting tidbits from Vloggercon:

ClickTV Makes Flash Bloggable

ClickTV was one of the cooler platforms demonstated at Vloggercon. In the last year or so, Flash has become a more compelling option for video bloggers. ClickTV CEO Mike Lanza showed the audience  how Flash streaming enables blogging within videos, as versus about them.

How Video Blogs are Driving Social Change

Instead of a lazy Saturday slurping down chai, my weekend kicked off with a panel on political blogging and social change at Vloggercon in San Francisco.

A Video Glimpse of LINES (and Videoegg-Typepad Note)

As a PS to my previous post seeking LINES General Manager candidates, here's a short video (3:13) providing a glimpse of Alonzo King's LINES Ballet, including a voiceover from internationally renowned choreographer Alonzo King on his philosophy of creation.

(UPDATE 6/08: Since VideoEgg has ceased hosting videos, here's a replacement from YouTube.)

Hiring Geeks and Arts-Lovers

Two organizations that I'm personally involved with need to make important hires...so here's a quick shoutout to that effect:

Lighting My Hair on Fire with a Flaming Sunflower

We met one of the Flaming Lotus Girls - makers of cool fiery objects both large and small - at this weekend's Maker Faire. Pouneh let us light things on fire (almost including my hair), and told us a little bit about this art.

See the fire flower video (1:50)

Crafts and Quirks at the Maker's Faire

Since life is about more than technology, we made sure to check out some of the highly skilled craftmakers at the Maker's Faire. Here's a few videos of the people that we met on Day One, along with some of the more "interesting" sights.

• Reflections on Day One of the Maker's Faire (2:02)
• Succumbing to Peer Pressure Near the Cool Army Truck (0:47)
• Bizarre Costumed Dancing Interlude (0:27)
• Glassblowing from a Trailer Furnace with Doug Brown of colquhoun glass works (1:01)
  

Dale Dougherty Shares the Joy of Making

This weekend marked the inaugural Maker's Faire from O'Reilly Media's MAKE. The Maker's Faire is a wonderland of creativity for the builder within all of us. Dale Dougherty, MAKE publisher, shared his inspirational perspective on "Makers," and why bringing together the Faire community is so vital. I think Dale's happy mug is on the Wikipedia entry for "infectious enthusiasm."

Interview with Dale Dougherty at the Maker's Faire (6:02, 28MB)

Collective Wisdom on the Backfence-Bayosphere Acquisition

There's been a lot of interesting press today about the acquisition of Bayosphere by Backfence. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is a co-investor in both firms, and I serve on the board of Backfence.) It's been amazing to watch the landscape for participatory media evolve, and I've enjoyed the ground-floor access to communities trying out different models for interaction. Citizen's media, bottom-up content, user-generated content, participatory media...whatever you choose to label it, it's exciting and transformative.

Black Rock Arts Funds Conexus Cathedral

The Conexus team was elated to announce yesterday that the Black Rock Arts Foundation made a substantial award to the Conexus Cathedral project. This extremely generous grant will provide for about 75% of the project's anticipated needs:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of 2005 Products

Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software shared his views on what makes a great product at O'Reilly Etech this morning. Here's some of his picks and pans:

Hacking the Physical World

Michael Kuniavsky from Adaptive Path is interested in the expressive, physical aspects of technology. Matt Cottam of Tellart teaches classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and teaches methods for rapid prototyping. At O'Reilly Etech, they shared their practices for hacking the physical world:

How Do You Know It When You See It?

Eric Bonabeau from Icosystem explored the concept of a hunch engine at O'Reilly Etech. How do you "know it when you see it?" Where is the line between sorting information and discovery?

Linda Stone on Life, People, and Attention

Linda Stone hypothesized at O'Reilly Etech today around the phenomenon of continuous partial attention. It's a way of life for many (especially those who may read this blog post), and it means that we give the same priority to multiple things at once. We get as many things done as we can, at one time. Continuous partial attention means keeping a top-level item in focus, and always being aware of what else might come up as something more important in that specific moment. We're motivated to be a part of many things, an essential node on the network. We allow ourselves to be interrupt-driven.  This fits into a larger set of patterns:

Bruce Sterling (Swooon!) Visits Etech

Who says that sf writers can't predict the future? Science fiction icon Bruce Sterling dropped his rich, twisted eloquence on both the star-struck and the skeptical at O'Reilly Etech:

Who am I? An Independent Creator, Says PersonalDNA.com

In the course of tonight's clicky evening, I found my way to personalDNA.com, a project of ATTAP. After what was an exhaustive-but-fun-to-click-through interview, I was identified as an "independent creator." Which, after reading, was actually a pretty accurate description - better than most of the other online psychographics I've clicked on:

Random Burner Request

This isn't my usual post, BUT....I like to help out Blyss Abyss where I can, and I haven't had much time to make hands-on contributions to this year's art installation:

Digital Media Madness

This session was a bottom-up media, user-generated content (pick your semantic) wonderland. Here are some of the technologies shown at DEMO 2006 for the creation, management, publishing, and consumption of digital media:

iGuitar: New Hope for the DEMO Jam Sessions

Tonight's jam session at DEMO 2006 will renew a wacky and wonderful tradition, the amateur jam. Producer Chris Shipley is clearly seeding future jams with the presentation of iGuitar's innovative guitar products:

Original Online Content Re-emerges

What was fascinating about this DEMXPO session - ostensibly about how online content has re-emerged after the Internet bubble of a few years ago - was that each of the speakers kept coming back to user-generated content...

Open Source Primer

Omidyar Network has an ongoing interest in open source - the investments we make, the internal code we share, and our support for the community. David Hayes from Fenwick & West stopped by our office today to explore the licensing issues of open source. I thought it might be useful to share elements of our discussion.