More listing: thirty trends in digital music, also nutritious food for thought. Cross media strategies are present in many ways:
interactive radio, the example is Cliq; mobile music, both in the sense of mobile as a player and mobile as music store to download music from;
user generated content-meets-karaoke productions, such as The Sims On Stage, kSolo, Rap Battle Contest, Dance Jam;
Joost and Online TV, featuring “videos, tour diaries, live gigs, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage”;
social networks, like Bruce Springsteen on MySpacemusic search engines
console games with music downloads, like Guitar Hero III, Rock Band and SingStar
- all very inspiring. I think Christy already posted about music distribution as an inspiration for cross media productions, specifically about Radiohead.

This blog is still a bit confused about what is “cross media and games”.While waiting for a soon-to-come definition, here is a useful link from the Second Life Insider about twenty trends in new virtual worlds from the Virtual Worlds Forum Europe

Gladly I found out other rants about the italian situation in Matteo Bittanti’s blog. The star of Italian game studies (who actually works at Stanford, Berkeley and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco) has a lot of interesting (and terrible) links to explain to the world why is Italy going down; here, here (in italian), and from the New York times here.

A book to be printed out from contributions of MySpace users is already something completely new, but what is best about it is that the topic is, again, environment (could it be that we are all, finally, getting rightfully scared about it?). On MySpace/OurPlanet you can write your thoughts about environment, learn a lot about ecology, meet other ecologists, feel like an activist without actually being one, AND you can have your reflections, from a sentence to a paragraph, published in a book, credited to your username and geographic location.I wonder how many other books are going to be prepared this way. The pivotal “First Person”, edited by Noah Waldrup-Fruin and Pat Carrigan, I remember was born on the website of the Electronic Book, and benefitted from online comments that were included at the bottom of the pages in the printed books.In a previous post I mentioned how one of the models for future journalism is collective writing organized by a “moderator”, who will take the place of the traditional journalist; many essays and scientific writings already feature several different authors.Social networks are making young people used to express themselves in a social context, although this seems contradictory with the blog (solitary writing) being the main expression form on the internet.In this scenario, what are the odds for collective writing to become an official form of writing?/news courtesy of Angela Thomas

A couple of interesting books about democracy in digital times both published by the ECREA organization, (European Communication Research and Education Association) they (ECREA) also have an upcoming conference in Barcelona, here is the call for papersThe broad theme of this major international congress, Communication policies and culture in Europe, refers to the confluence that can be established between the media and the different interpretations of culture in Europe nowadays. This confluence refers to the globalisation effects on a diversity of spaces (multinational, national, local) with all its political implications. It moreover refers to the different mediations and interactions that configure the current European society with respect to migrations, new forms of political participation, the dialectics of identity and diversity, new cultural consumptions, etc. The broad title aims to emphasize the importance of politics and culture, but also refers to new ways of regulation and de-regulation, the technology and the management of convergence within the cultural industries the new public service remit, and the variety of communication policies that aim to guarantee cultural diversity and development in Europe.This invitation for proposals is both for individual papers and posters and for pre-organised panels, from established academics, young scholars, practitioners and postgraduate research students. Apart from the programme of panels, papers and posters established on the basis of the conference call, the conference will also include a series of plenary panels and semi-plenary sessions on topics addressing the main conference theme, such as local communication, the cooperation between Europe and Latin America, etc.I wonder if cross media usage, a main feature in all media activism and citizen participation in general, is going to appear as a topic among the final presentations..

The video and audio podcasts from Future of Entertainment 2 (MIT Comparative Media Studies and Convergence Culture Consortium) are available.Scheduled speakers include: Jesse Alexander (Heroes), Danny Bilson (The Rocketeer), Marc Davis (Yahoo!), Mark Deuze (Indiana U), Raph Koster (Areae), and Tina Wells (Buzz Marketing Group).

I reckon I have been missing in action, fact is, I had to prepare my contribution to the Cross Media Storytelling Conference in lovely Mechelen, and yes, I did go to Mechelen, endless thanks to Annet Daems who organized the event (and invited me, thank you again) and Lieven and Sandra and Stijn and a lot of really nice people from the Katholieke Hogeschool.

A brief overview of the conference: much more online journalism and “citizen’s media” than I would have expected; my personal highlights:

Nico Carpentier, who spoke in depth about the different notions of participation, and how they all depend ultimately on power relationships, and the difference between participation and interaction (very compelling, although I didn’t really see the connection with cross media);

Greg Hayes,who pointed out how cross media users are not “users”, just audience anymore, they are participants, and how the future of cross media lies in collaborative storytelling and “live”, real-time, storytelling;

Erwin Jansen of These Days, highlighting the invasion of content in the advertising domain and presenting a number of very entertaining case studies, like the nonstopfernando campaign for AE airlines and the Coca Cola - Sue a Friend campaign;

Stef Wouters, talking about cross media storytelling - it was the first (well, the second, as Greg was on the first day) that I heard a coherent discourse about it;

Stan Van Engelen, presenting In Europa, a cross media documentary extending as a TV series, radio broadcasts, website and a lot of user generated content.

and of course my presentation “Marketing Cross Media: Towards a Narrative Interpretation of Experience(s)” - not sure it was my best performance ever as it was a bit of a last minute call, but it was the first unveiling of one of my academic topics, experience theory, something I will explore further on in future papers in the hope one day they will earn me a scholarship or some kind of job.

I was sorry to miss all the “journalism” presentations, it isn’t completely my topic but from personal conversations they seemed very stimulating, talking about the figure of the online mediator as the future of journalism and

The conference offered the service (is it a service? I am still not sure) of a blog with a lot of pictures, also working as a social network, made by the students, good work.

I am adding a new link, real wealth of information, about grassroots media productions, often bordering with media activism. It is not by chance that many of these productions or actions involve the use of different media, employ cross media storytelling or cross media distribution strategies.Their name is Produzioni Dal Basso (bottom-up productions), unfortunately only in Italian, I will try and translate all their posts regarding cross media productions.

Technorati Tags: media activism

Arden, the world of William Shakespeare, and also of Edward Castronova who conceived the online experience, has been released last week, together with Castronova’s book “Exodus to the Virtual World”.You can play it here.Various press releases highlight in turn its educational potential, the power of virtual worlds as “theme” social networks, the power of interaction and play in learning and so on. The question on how much can virtual worlds fall into the category of “gaming” is still open.At first sight Arden might fall under “adaptation” rather than transmedial storytelling, but in fact the player is engaged in creating new subplots within the storyworld, so the whole experience is truly cross media. I just started playing, will update later.A post on Terranova by Castronova says that as an experience “it’s rather boring” (it’s just a quote!) and that several of the playtesters said “Where are the monsters?”Apparently the lack of monsters were badly affecting the game experience. The answer to that was to take back Arden I and release Arden II: London’s Burning, which was initially conceived as a game.(This would answer somehow the question if virtual worlds experience can be considered as “gaming”, and the answer would be a sound “no” - more debate to follow)So, what you can see now online is Arden I, boring, apparently (I didn’t say that), but of immense interest for the academic community.