shawn rider dot com

These are the bookmarks I created between February 7th, 2008 and February 10th, 2008:

• Annals of Crime: Friend Game: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - A terribly sad article about hoaxes and suicides on social networking sites. This touches on several other sad stories I’ve read over the years (Miss Norway, A Rape in Cyberspace, etc.) To me, this represents just how signifcant the virtual life can be.
• etc3 Source - The source code for Erica T Carter’s digital poetry engine.
• A Companion to Digital Humanities - The entire anthology is available for free online. I haven’t read this yet, but it seems like it could be very interesting.
• Machinima from Second Life KLRU Event - This post features a video of the PBS event in Second Life at the virtual Austin City Limits. It was a well-attended event with a high quality audio stream sponsored by KLRU.
• About the Series | Situated Technologies - The About page for what sounds like an interesting series of pamphlets.
• Social Design Best Practices - OpenSocial - Google Code - An interesting list of things that social applications should do. This seems reasonable and useful.
• EPIC-FU - art+tech+music for geeks - A videoblog KThread recommended to me.

The Phone

The Phone is a sequence of interactive vignettes. It reminds me a few other things that are very similar, such as 99 Rooms and Not Pr0n. All of these things will suck you in for an hour, and I like them because they occupy a territory between artful decoration, interactive game/puzzle, and narrative. One one hand, all three of the mentioned works are collections of mostly disconnected vignettes. They are not overtly narrative, which is why I use the term vignettes to describe the individual elements of these interactive objects. In a way, they operate very much like a painting — they draw the viewer in to look, and look closely. They reward scrutiny. The interaction is very low-impact, generally involving a poking, prodding, or tracing rather than simulated actions and movements. It would be really interesting to have a frame on the wall that could display different beautiful riddles for you to figure out, using your finger to interact. I think there will be a future for those kinds of decorative/engaging pieces.

So at the bottom of the front page on my site you can see the latest post from my Xbox 360 on its personal blog. The blog is powered by 360Voice.com, which is pretty much really great. I have been enjoying it a lot so far, and I look forward to seeing what they are able to do with the service. I also love the idea of having my blog feature the post on my Xbox’s blog. How meta is that?

So what does my 360 say so far? Well, it’s only had a couple day to post, but here’s an example:

GamesFirst’s Xbox - 05/04/06

GamesFirst hit the switch and fired me up yesterday. His total gamer score is 3940. He played Perfect Dark Zero, EA SPORTS FN 3, Feeding Frenzy, Oblivion, Geometry Wars Evolved, and after that, called it a day.

GamesFirst’s Xbox - 05/03/06

Where is GamesFirst at? I want to disown him. I am putting myself up on eBay ASAP.

I was impressed enough with the site to write up an article for GamesFirst, in which I detail more of the origin of the concept. I think this is a quite brilliant implementation of Julian Bleeker’s concepts, and the creators (Trapper Markelz and Stephen Sopp) were admittedly influenced by Bruce Sterling’s keynote address at the 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. Beeker and Sterling both discuss “blogjects,” things that emit a steady stream of data about their use and status in the world.

The concept is very intriguing, and it’s not difficult to see many interesting applications for networked items. In fact it seems a lot like notions of the Personal Area Network, extrapolated and automated to the larger world of commercial goods.

I see 360Voice.com as an artistic piece, and a literary piece. The postings are not yet reaching the level of being truly compelling, or adding anything significant to the information, but I do believe in the potential. I would love to see the service integrate notions of friends lists and/or even comments and messaging to make the 360’s blog more “real.” I think the point of this service has to push the envelope into the uncanny valley to show us what can be done. Development continues, so hopes are high.

I also think that the initial realization that the Xbox 360 is one of these blogjects is a really cool revelation, and I wish I had thought of it. So kudos to you Mssrs. Markelz and Sopp.