My office mate just introduced me to the PicLens web browser plug-in. It’s pretty incredible. This cross platform plug in can grab a collection of photos, like those in my flickr account above, and converts them into an interactive (Apple aesthetic) gallery. The resulting user experience is elegant and totally engaging. Give it a try!

As I’m not ready with the next part of my analysis of the YouTube/LiveVideo tempest-in-a-teapot, I’m sharing something completely different: my commute to RIT. Winter has come to Rochester. Today it was 11 degrees (Fahrenheit) out when I left the house. Over the last few days we’ve been getting a lot of snow. I’m not quite sure what possessed me, but I decided to (carefully) document my drive to work. So from time to time I would rest my digital camera on the steering wheel and take a photo.

As an experiment, I’ve taken all of these pictures, placed them on flickr and geotagged them. The result, you can track my commute. The location of the photos are pretty much dead on. In fact, the act of placing them was really interesting in and of itself. Doing so caused me to relate to my picture, my commute, and the locations I pass by in a very different way.

What’s your commute look like?

Here’s the first picture, 12 more follow after the jump.

(more…)

Vas is dis barcamp?
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

Vere and Ven is dis barcamp?
Big Auditorium on the First Floor
B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences
Rochester Institute of Technology
20 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, NY 14623

 July 14th 10:00 AM until LATE EVENING

More Info
https://barcamp.org/BarCampRochester

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I just found out about it and will be attending for a few hours. Should be pretty interesting. Anyone whose got time should stop by.

And yes, I did scale a .gif — we shall never talk of it again.

Grading is done. And so far I’ve only had a handful of students complain. So that’s a good thing. The weather, however, is atrocious — hot and sticky — and my office has no air conditioning. So research is progressing slowly. Today was spent tying up some loose ends and compiling my "academic" summer to-do list (which I share with you now — in no particular order):

• Finishing revising thesis for publication
• Finish Google Print & Scholar article for Conduit
• New Media curriculum review
• Faust research
• Translation proposal
• Learn Xienet
• CSS/XML conversion work
• Website redesign

I wish I could say more about a bunch of things, but I can’t… at least until I can.

This one’s long, but worth it. In one fell *swoop*, or rather *Wiki!*, Marvel Comics has dealt with a nagging editorial problem and created an amazing goodwill generator. Best of all, this was done at little-to-no editorial cost to Marvel, using resources who are not financially compensated (in fact, many whom have been writing about Marvel charaters for years, just elsewhere). All Marvel had to do is trust their fans. Allow me to explain:

Like any comic company, Marvel struggles with the daunting issue of continuity – the convoluted histories of its characters. While Peter Parker might not have aged much since his introduction in 1962, he’s had a heck of a lot of adventures. Since his story is told as an ongoing epic, each episode building on the past one, that means there’s a lot of history, filled with villains, allies, clones, and costumes, all of which have come and gone, died and come back from the dead (yes, even the costumes). Now, take all of those continuity issues and multiply them across the countless characters in Marvel’s comic “universe.”^[1] What you get, at least according to industry pundits, is a daunting barrier to entry that intimidates new comics readers.

Marvel’s original solution was annotation and cross referencing. When the Sandman lamented a previous defeat at the hands of Spider-man, it would be accompanied by a plucky editor’s note like, “* See ASM #140, True Believer!”^[2] Later, in the 1980’s, Marvel came up with the brilliant idea of doing an encyclopedia in comic form –  a 32 issue series called The Official Handbook of The Marvel Universe. Based on the style (genre) of Baseball cards, each issue was made up entries featuring an image of the character accompanied by their stats (Name, Age, Height, Group Affiliations, etc…) and a biographical sketch. The handbooks sold like gangbusters and were incredibly popular while I was in Junior Highschool. But, they were only a “snapshot” in time and continuity. As soon as they were published, they were out of date.

Today, the problem is just as bad, if not worse (as there is another decade plus of continuity to deal with). Trying to keep up with an ever expanding continuity is a full time task, let alone trying to come up with an easy method of keeping it all avaiable for new readers (epsecially given the fact that, according to recent stats, overall circulation numbers are down across the industry). And, most importantly, how could all of this happen with a minimal amount of time and investment?

The answer, turn to the people who would be doing it any way. In otherwords, *Wiki!* (note that *wiki!* has that nice Marvel sound like *snikt!* and *thwip!*) Some savvy person at Marvel realized that the folks who have the best handle on their continuity are their readers, who, like the Simpson’s Comic Book Guy,^[3] were already obsessively documenting and discussing it online. 

Now, using the base Wiki engine (and some great .css work), those folks can go to Marvel.com and compose and edit character profiles. Over 800 character profiles have already been added. And that’s not counting other fan created entries on various topics like Marvel places, things, and storyline summaries.

This plan is a win for everyone. Built into the structure of the system is validation for the fan qua contributor. If your work is approved by a Marvel editor you get “Hero Points:” accumulatable tokens of social capital. Acquire enough points and you can approve and edit other fan submissions. Also, points can be used to access yet to be specified “super-cool and exclusive stuff” on the website.

From Marvel’s perspective they get good will and, more importantly, free content creation. Instead of maintaining a writing staff, all they have to do is edit the work generated by these fan "freelancers.” Further, they being to establish more control of properties in the online space. For years, fans have undertaken similar projects on personal webpages. Google “Amazing-Spiderman” and what comes first is not Marvel.com but:

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Amazing Spider-Man .Info
The Definitive Spider-Man Reference & Image Web Presence featuring News, Covers, Rogues Gallery of Villains, Heroes & Allies, History, Entertainment, …
www.samruby.com/ - 37k - Cached - Similar pages

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While these fansite might have generated good will and some publicity, Marvel couldn’t capitalize (or rather monetize) on the content they contained. With the Wiki, Marvel owns everything. While I haven’t dug into the legal agreements, I’m sure that they’ve sewn up all of the distribution rights for anything that is created for Marvel.com. In otherwords, they’re building a vast database of information (at low cost) that can quickly and easily be converted for publishing in other media, including future print updates of  The Handbook to the Marvel Universe.

Now, will there be background squabbles between hero editors? Of course. But, judging from the success of similiar projects like the Homestar Runner Wiki, what they’ll gain in content will be worth far more than any related headaches this creates (provided the legal side has been handled correctly). In fact, the argument can be made that this would be far more successful than any internally created project as they’ll get an “unbiased” (at least internally speaking) perspective on their own properties. Chances are that the fans will document things that Marvel never even considered.^[4]

Now, the next question is: what other media providers will get it and jump on this bandwagon? How soon until we see ABC hosting a Wiki for Lost? Or perhaps General Hospital is a better choice. After all, aren’t comic books and wrasslin’ just soap operas for boys^[5]?

For more information see:

• Marvel’s Press Release on the Wiki
• The Marvel Universe Wiki

If you tuned in for a few moments, you would have caught the old blog index up for a moment or two. I’m switching around my .RSS feed and have had a couple issues. It’s all resolved now… I think.

Part of my goal for this blog is to begin to get more and more of my research work up here as an early review system. So while I still will be writing about my daily goings on (and including the occaisional photo or two), there will be a bit of a shift towards longer, more scholarly posts. My hope is to take advantage of the categories feature and present different views of the blog based on the content that you are interested in.

In the meantime, let me tell you that trying to import word documents into Wordpress sucks. It took me more than an hour yesterday to get the post rendering correctly. That’s mainly due to Microsoft’s wonky specialized HTML tags. Bleh. Any suggestions on streamlining that process are greatly appreciated.

I thought the following was too funny to not be blogged about — while visiting the RIT library to pick up a couple XML books for the previously mentioned XML project, I came across the following:

OK folks, Sesame Street time. Hum along with me — “Which one of these things is not like the other….” I didn’t know that Jamie Oliver, the famed Naked Chef, was an XML expert and that Happy Days with the Naked Chef was a seminal work in the field. What makes the entire thing more funny is that the somewhat blurry, lower picture demonstrates, this book wasn’t misfiled. According to its ID information, it’s in exactly the right spot.

I leave it up to you, gentle reader, to decide what this might say about the RIT Library’s filing system.

Today I took my first steps towards cross-media publishing. During my last years at kodak.com, I was constantly discussing XML and how it could be used to facilitate the production of websites. But I never actually worked with the nitty gritty: tagging content and creating XLS files. Now however, I’m taking my tentative first steps towards the intimidating and immensely powerful world of XML.

Part of my interest is the cross-media (and by media I mean distribution media) possibilities that XML holds. Done properly you can generate printed collateral, web content, cell phone content, PSP content, etc. — all from the same core file. It holds a lot of interesting possibilities that have some terrific applications for extending the written word.

Anyway, today I sat down with Adobe InDesign and tagged up a school of printing publication. The next step will be to build the conversion files (XLS and DTD) for it and see if it can be churned into HTML. Once that???s set then it???s a matter of cranking out the right CSS and pulling the entire thing together. (Hmmm??? I know that last paragraph just lost about half of my readers??? sorry mom).

Suggestions on good XML resources are always welcome! And now it’s back to researching material for my classes and perhaps getting a little writing on GooglePrint done.