Amazing!

Amazing showcase created by students from Wroclaw Institute of Technology

Web 2.0 Highlighter

Markkit is a web2.0 text highlighter.

Twitter Just Landed

Just Landed - 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

I found this nice visualisation of tweets containing phrase: "Just landed in..." by Jer Thorp.

Horizontless Map of Manhattan

"Here & There is a project by S&W exploring speculative projections of dense cities. These maps of Manhattan look uptown from 3rd and 7th, and downtown from 3rd and 35th. They're intended to be seen at those same places, putting the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking forward.

The projection seen here is a combination of city manipulations in modelling software, and choosing the best lens for the simulated camera. The nearby buildings obstruct the view if you get that wrong, or the distant ones stop working as a conventional map. There's fine tuning and instinct. Let's not demo the power of 3D applications, but make a map which is both useful and optically awesome to look at."

Twitter Magnets

A cool and interesting website called Twitter Magnets where you can create your own short poems and post them on twitter.

Amazing 3D projection

An amazing showreel of 3D projection from Easyweb

Copyrights in the digital age

People have always copied things. In the past, most items of value were physical objects. Patent law and economies of scale meant that small scale copying of physical objects was usually uneconomic, and large-scale copying (if it infringed) was stoppable using policemen and courts.

P. Biddle et al.

However, the popularisation of Internet and digital media removed those boundaries. We live now in copy and paste world. Internet became synonymous of ‘no rights reserved’. 1000s of files are shared every day. Music and movie industries were affected the most by this phenomenon. But with the growing popularisation of Web 2.0 everyone is affected now. The piracy is no longer affecting giant industry moguls but all internet participants like me and you. Some of us, don’t care about copyrights, whether their creation is modified or copied some would like to be credited and some would like to have some sort of royalties paid. We have to be aware that nothing is entirely free. As Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman said: "There is no such thing as a free lunch." We can refer this quote to the copyrights as well. Someone had to spend an x amount of time and resources to create a blog entry, take a picture or write a computer program. These authors may not seek always financial advantages; nevertheless their work should be protected against unlawful use.
The Creative Commons licence fills the gap between ‘All Rights Reserved’ and ‘No Rights Reserved’ concepts. It allows authors to state under what conditions and in what way their work may be used.. We should be all aware of the risk and boundaries of living in today’s information society but the copyright law ought to promote and foster creativity rather than strangling it.




Sources:
Copyright Infringement - The Dark Side of Web 2.0
P.Biddle, P. England, M. Peinado, and B. Willman, The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution
L. Lessig, Free Culture

If we are all amateurs, there are no experts.

Peter Steiner 1993

Before the internet it seemed like a joke: if you provide an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters one of them will eventually come up with a masterpiece. But with the web now firmly established in its second evolutionary phase – in which users create the content on blogs, podcasts and streamed video – the infinite monkey theory doesn’t seem so funny anymore.

John-Paul Flintoff

The expansion of the Internet and the rise of user generated content websites gave people almost unlimited possibilities to express and share their opinions and thoughts with others. Wikipedia became one of the most popular websites, although the value of its content is often questioned. Everyone can create a new entry or contribute to it. In comparison, encyclopaedia Britannica was ranked 5,128 in 2007 in the list of most visited sites. It is creating an information noise, and is getting more and more difficult to select and even find information we are interested in. This huge stream is not necessarily a bad thing however it is not controlled in any way and it just getting bigger and bigger. And as Flintoff points out instead of creating masterpieces, the millions of exuberant monkeys are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels. It is creating an information noise, and is getting more and more difficult to select and even find information we are interested in. This huge stream is not necessarily a bad thing however it is not controlled in any way and it just getting bigger and bigger.

Not everyone is talented or posses required level of expertise yet in the Internet there are no restriction. This is its beauty and its curse. Let assume you need a surgical treatment and you live in the world where everyone can be a surgeon. There are well qualified surgeons that graduated medical schools and have x years of experience and we have wannabe surgeons, who have no experience or relevant knowledge. Who would be your choice? However, you can find many good artists who, if not the Internet, they would not be able to attract any audience. The Internet allowed them to become independent from media moguls and their power. Unfortunately, this massive amount of wannabe stars makes finding those gems a real challenge in today’s Web 2.0 world.

Chris Anderson defined the concept of Long Tail that states that our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches. It chronicles the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail. Andrew Keen in his book “The Cult of the Amateur” states that the more self-created content that gets dumped onto the Internet, the harder it becomes to distinguish the good from the bad – and to make money from any of it.

You don’t have to be expert to produce a valuable or interesting post or piece of music. The Internet sometimes is the only chance to some talented amateurs to present their skills and talents. Sites like YouTube and MySpace provided a great platform to people and artists to gain popularity. There will always be amateurs and experts, although the latter are slowly being suppressed by the former.

Source:Techcrunch.com


Sources:
Amateur Internet
Web 2.0 The second generation of the Internet has arrived. It's worse than you think.
Thinking is so over
The Long Tail
The Cult of the Amateur by A. Keen

Effing Hail - a cool and addictive game

I've recently found this cool looking game called Effing Hail.

Your task is simple: control an updraft of air to keep falling hail in the upper levels of the bee-, sea-, dee- and effing-spheres so that it has time to grow into massive stones, which you then let fall free to crush an increasingly complex ecosystem of houses, skyscrapers, planes, satellites and civilians themselves below.

Via Offworld