Archive for the ‘Trends’ Category
Stortingsvalget 2009 – slik dekkes valg-kvelden på nett
Oppdatering: Du finner nå en litt strammere versjon av denne artikkelen på NRKbeta.
For webdesignere og utviklere er Stortingsvalget bestandig en spesiell kveld. Det er da de store mediehusene pleier å vise seg fra sin beste side. Forsidene er nystrigla, serverne nyboota, og man har brukt sine beste folk til å planlegge og laget nye fine tjenester for å vise info-porn (aka valgresultater som Geir Heljesen liker å kalle det) til sitt publikum. Valgkvelden er på mange måter selve ild-dåpen for en nett-redaksjon og det er bestandig spennende å se hva folk leverer.
Jeg var også spent på å se hvordan sosiale medier ble brukt rundt omkring. Var det noen som fikk til noe like stilig som det CNN leverte i forbindelse med USA-valget?
Målet mitt med kvelden var å fange så mange skjermbilder som mulig, og skrive litt om hver tjeneste, til bruk som referanse ved neste valg, og til allmenn glede for alle web- og valg-interesserte.
Good augmented reality examples
I wrote about Augmented reality back in 2005, but little seem to have happened in this field until this year, when good demos and sturdy real life applications started to pop up everywhere. Here is a collection of my favorite examples.
Get you popcorn ready! Voddler screenshots and details
Voddler is an eagerly awaited video-on-demand service with a business model quite like the popular Spotify. Here are some screenshots and gathered facts to tie you over until the real thing is released.
Buzztracker – World News, Mapped
Ad some realtime buzz to your site. The images are updated along with buzztracker.org. They’re always fresh.
For instance, what’s up in Mexico City? Oh that’s right, a pandemic.
“It’s friday and I’m in love”, a Spotify collaborative playlist
I am a huge fan of Spotify, it is basically running 24/7 at work and at home, but yesterday I wanted to test the collaborative playlist feature. I made a Spotify playlist called “It’s friday and I’m in love” and inviting people on Twitter to join in. The result was really interesting. We created a very strange soundtrack indeed, but I feel like people respected the theme set by the playlist name and first song, and without being explicitly asked to do so. The list even got Rick-rolled by someone adding “Never gonna give you up” on every other line (and then regretted and removed them again), which in my opinion is the ultimate honor.
Cute and social experiment, it almost feels like magic when you see the list growing by the minute.
Spotify is still very barren when it comes to social features, the collab lists is basically the only way you can interact with people at this point, but I am sure this will be expanded upon with new releases of the software, or with plugins. It sucks to not be able to see who adds a particular song, or to be able to comment and talk to people, so hopefully it won’t take too long before such features are added.
The list, as of March 21 2009:
Ps: All links open directly in the Spotify application. I you don’t have it installed you are out of luck. Read more about how I put it online at the bottom of this post.
Open the whole playlist: It’s friday and I’m in love
Or click on each track to listen to it:
Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up
The Levellers – What A Beautiful Day
Katrina and the Waves – Walking On Sunshine
Michael Jackson & The Jackson 5 – The Love You Save
Bo Kaspers Orkester – Dansa på min grav
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Date With the Night
The Lionheart Brothers – 50 Souls And A Discobowl
La Bionda – I Wanna Be Your Lover
Walter Wanderley – O Samba Brasileiro
The Thrills – Whatever Happened to Corey Haim?
Neil Young – Out on the Weekend
Stan Getz – Samba De Uma Nota So
Death Cab for Cutie – Marching Bands of Manhattan
A Tribe Called Quest – Can I Kick It?
Belle and Sebastian – The Boy Done Wrong Again
Daryl Hall & John Oates – Rich Girl
Cab Calloway – Minnie The Moocher (The Ho-De-Ho Song)
Gerard Joling – Somewhere Over The Rainbow (Reggae Version)
The Doobie Brothers – What a Fool Believes
Waylon Jennings – I’m A Ramblin’ Man
Mott The Hoople – All the Young Dudes
Todd Rundgren – Can We Still Be Friends
The Highwaymen (Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson) – Highwayman
Catherine Feeny – Hurricane Glass
Gösta Jonsson – Samling vid pumpen
Åge Aleksandersen – Dains me dæ
Åge Aleksandersen – Ljus och värme
Åge Aleksandersen – Langt igjæn til Royal Albert Hall
Tom Waits – Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis
Pet Shop Boys – I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing
Eagles Of Death Metal – I Want You So Hard (Boy’s Bad News)
The Smiths – William It Was Really Nothing
Jackie Davis – Manana (Is Soon Enough For Me)
Poor Rich Ones – I Was Made For Loving You
Wall Of Voodoo – Mexican Radio
Bryan Ferry – The Way You Look Tonight
The Magnetic Fields – Too Drunk to Dream
Vømmøl Spellmannslag – Auksjonsvisa
Flight Of The Conchords – Business Time
The Be Good Tanyas – When Doves Cry
Flight Of The Conchords – The Prince of Parties
Terence Trent D’Arby – Sign Your Name
Paul Simon – How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns
The Cardigans – And Then You Kissed Me
Wyclef Jean featuring Mary J. Blige – 911
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart
Queens Of The Stone Age – Feel Good Hit of the Summer
MC Hammer – U Can’t Touch This
Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t've)
Jojje Wadenius – Kalles Klätterträd
Queens Of The Stone Age – In My Head
Mojinos Escozios – Mi Barrí de Servesa
Prince & The Revolution – Raspberry Beret
Elvis Costello & The Attractions – The Other Side of Summer
The Magnetic Fields – The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side
Pixies – Where Is My Mind? (Remastered)
New Kids On The Block – Hangin’ Tough
Jahn Teigen – Det Vakreste Som Fins
Jahn Teigen – Min Første Kjærlighet
Crowded House – Chocolate Cake
Tori Amos – My Favorite Things
I Was a Teenage Satan Worshipper – OMG, Techno Chicks!!!
Jerry Reed – East Bound & Down (Jerry Reed)
Billie Holiday – That Ole Devil Called Love
The White Stripes – I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself
Dusty Springfield – I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself
The Stooges – I Wanna Be Your Dog
The Stooges – Down On The Street
The Killers – When You Were Young
The Stone Roses – I Wanna Be Adored
Joy Division – Love Will Tear Us Apart
The Jesus and Mary Chain – Just Like Honey
Stealers Wheel – Stuck In The Middle With You
George Baker Selection – Little Green Bag
Liam Lynch – Electrician’s Day
The Verve – Bitter Sweet Symphony
Jimi Hendrix Experience – All Along the Watchtower
They Might Be Giants – Infinity
The Specials – Our Lips Are Sealed
Depeche Mode – Never Let Me Down Again
Morrissey – The More You Ignore Me The Closer I Get
MC Júnior E MC Leonardo – Rap Das Armas
Kylie Minogue – The Loco-Motion
Tricky – Hell Is Round the Corner
Tommy Tokyo & Starving For My Gravy – Derail And Demise
Mitch Hedberg – Mitch in the S’th
Mikael Wiehe och Ebba Forsberg – Allra minst en morgon
Fred Åkerström – Jag ger dig min morgon
Sex Pistols – God Save The Queen
Simian – We Are Your Friends (Radio Edit)
Jay-Z – Brooklyn Go Hard [feat. Santogold]
Lupe Fiasco – Daydreamin’ Featuring Jill Scott
Arctic Monkeys – Dancing Shoes
Known collaborators (based on conversations on Twitter):
MrChrister, Eterg, lastninja1980, _Rolf_, mariusgenser, johanhal, Barstein, degarden, paljoakim, nielsw64, Markussss, nech
How to publish a Spotify playlist on the web the easy way
You might be wondering how I was able to put all the songs from the playlist in the post? Spotify still hasn’t got an API, so my plan was to actually build it by hand. I first tried to mark all the songs in the playlist and CTRL-C/APPLE-C them, but instead of a lovely list of artist and song names I got the http links to all the tracks, so there went that idea. But to my amasement something magic happened when I posted all the urls into Textedit on my macbook! All the urls got transformed into clickable links automatically! All I had to do was save the Textedit document as html and open it in my browser to test it, and it worked like a charm! Just a view source and a copy paste away from this blog post! (I believe the Spotify software needs to be running when you do this).
If you want to copy the nice Spotify URI direct links instead of the HTTP links you have to select all the songs in your list, the right click and choose “Copy Spotify URI”.
There are alread plenty of sites where you can share your Spotify playlists, and when those can access a proper API I believe great things will happen. Spotify is already a fantastic product. When people can start adding cool stuff it will explode!
My week in a Virtual Sweatshop
I am disappointed!
I have been toiling away ALL WEEK over at Amazons Mechanical Turk, but what do I have to show for it? Not much, I can tell you that!
Here is my weekly pay check statement:
Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk,
The following is a summary of activity for your Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Mar 29, 2008.
Your HIT activity for this week:
- Number of HITs accepted: 27
- Number of HITs returned: 5
- Number of HITs abandoned: 0
- Number of HITs submitted: 22Approvals and payments that occurred this week:
- Number of HITs approved: 15
- Number of HITs rejected: 0
- HIT reward earned: $0.15
- Total Amount earned this week: $0.15For more information about your account status and activity, sign in to
http://www.mturk.com/, then view your “Dashboard”.Sincerely,
Amazon Mechanical Turk
http://www.mturk.com/
1200 12TH AVE South, SUITE 1200
SEATTLE, WA 98144-2734 USA
How do you like them apples? $0.15! What can you buy for $0.15! Nothing at all! That’s what!
But seriously: I actually love Mechanical Turk, it is a great and cheap platform for solving problems where machine code can’t help (yet), like describing the content of an image or transcribing audio content. The best use of it that I’ve seen so far is a PHD student who uses mturk workers to transcribe audio interviews she has done for her thesis. The audio is pretty clear, but the subject she interviews talks pretty slurred and fast, it is sometimes difficult to make out what he says. Transscribing a five minute audio segment actually pays pretty “well”, at least compared to a smaller task like tagging images, but you need to be super consentrated and prefferably experienced to complete the task with high enough quality to be approwed.
Web meets world
I really enjoyed this talk by Tim O’Reilly at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, it has that great mix of tech and social responsibility that is so important to achieve. I’m currently a bit sick and tired of the myriad of new social media websites that pop up all the time, all doing basicly the same things, trying to connect people that are already connected up to their eyeballs. But connected to what, and to whom?
Take Dopplr. I registered there as I do on almost all new sites, just to check it out, and hooked up with the two other people I could find in my contacts, and after that I haven’t checked in. Why should I? I have no urgent need to know where ANYONE is. As a matter of fact, I would preffer if people STOPPED travelling, and instead stayed home and planted some apple trees. And I know that they added some CO2 calculator thingy to show how much you have killed the planet, but everyone knows that this is just an attempt to be politically correct, while the underlying business idea is to get people to travel more. And perhaps buying a clean conscience while you’re at it.
So it is refreshing when Tim O’Reilly talks about focusing on making websites that does “something that matters”, like Witness or Prosper.com and many others, who are trying to use the web to connect people over something important.
I’ve noticed that I have started to be more conservative about what kind of sites I spend time on or join, not because I no longer like procrastinating, but because there is so little there to feed the soul.
I keep ending up on a few favorite sites, like TED and This American Life (or at least downloading their podcasts). TED because it gives me the whole experience of the TED conference without polluting the crap out of the earth flying there, and This American Life just for making me smile and cry and feeling human. And I’m consuming gigabytes of information on gardening!
And I keep wondering what this means. Is it just me, or is there perhaps a more general feeling of “internet fatigue” going on, or “internet flu”?
Is facebook dying?
Are you tired of Facebook?
photo credit: borrowed time | demi-brooke
The Facebook apps, like the infamous “Funwall” are a real pain, and I have started to remove, block or turn off email alerts on all of them.
I do believe that Facebook needs to do something drastic about the third party apps though, like turning off email alerts for all of them (and letting whomever wants it to turn it back on manually) to avoid users tuning out because of Facebook fatique, but I also pray that my contacts will find it in their harts to turn down the spam volume just a tiny bit, and perhaps not forward quite that many personality tests and quizzes to me, it is starting to get a little old (and frankly, most of these apps has been designed by retards.
But even though my feelings towards Facebook is fairly cold right now, I still love Facebook for the fact that it puts me in touch of all the people I know/knew in my home town. I actually feel some … comfort … in knowing that if I wanted to, I could easily reach people I went to school with, or simply log on to see what they are doing. We are even using Facebook to organise a highschool reunion right now!
Now compare Facebook to the supposedly next “new thing”, Twitter. The people I connect to on Facebook are people who are not necessarily supernerds and “early adopters”, and is far from even creating an account on Twitter. The last time I checked Facebook had over 1 million Norwegian users, and Twitter had just over 500, so I guess Twitter has some SERIOUS catching up to do, if it can (or want to).
Twitter lacks the tools for connecting people in groups or events, so I doubt that Twitter will be anything close to have the user mass of Facebook (in Norway) any time soon, if ever.
I love microblogging myself, but it seems like 90% of what people write about are 140 character ads for their own stuff (or undisclosed endorsement for products, I have even seen several examples of weird product placements, and I’ll take cute kitten video spam on my Funwall any day over that.
(This post is a reply to recent post to “Are you fed up with Facebook?” from Mashable.)
The Pirate Bay – The first state sponsored tracker!
The winner of The Top Candidates, a swedish television show aired on SVT, decides to donate his winnings to Pirate Bay.
The Pirate Bay – The worlds largest BitTorrent tracker:
The First State Financed TrackerSo, finally SVT payed up, and the money from Petter’s win at The Top Candidates has found it’s way home.
Obviously SVT didn’t like it that the winner decided to donate his money to two pretty controversial organizations.
One of them The Pirate Bay and, especially, the other “The Invicible Party”, which you’ve probably heard about in the news if you’re a swede.
So they decided to give the money to Petter himself instead, which also makes him have to pay taxes for it, leaving us with only $4 656 USD (35 000 SEK).
As we’ve written earlier, the money went to a new database and search server. We’re also trying to cut down on the advertisements.
Oh, by the way, SVT is Sweden’s public service tv station, so I guess this makes us the first state financed tracker. Pretty cool, huh?
My2cents.ca – review
Luckily I seldom get calls from people who want me to answer silly questions about what potatochips I like, but when I do I usually wonder why THEY should get paid for my information. That seems a little unfair, doesn’t it?
I recently stumbled upon the canadian site my2cents.ca where teens age 12-17 can register (!?) to participate in surveys, and the payment is gift sertificates from amazon.ca (so participants don’t need to provide a credit card etc).
I have no idea if this is legit or not, the frontpage seems a little amateur-ish, but still, it’s great concept, and I hope I can find one for people 33-> :)
Leave a comment if you know of something similar.
