The Association of Internet Researchers is finally having its conference in Europe, specifically in Copenhagen, next October. Deadline for abstract submissions is February 7, call for papers here

Parking Wars: the game is an advergaming for the upcoming A&E television series Parking Wars about metermaids and parking reinforcements (!) ; the game is a Facebook application to promote the show, in which you have to put cars in your friends’ streets and if the cars stay long enough they start earning money - as Ian Bogost points out, this structure really takes advantage of the social network structure, and, I might add, it adds a whole new dimension to the cross media product. When are we going to see content creation through Facebook applications? I mean, micro-content adding up to some story universe? Has it been done already?/news courtesy of Water Cooler Games

What is a “twittory”? Apparently it is a story developed by a large number of persons (in this case 140) using Twitter, each person being allowed one tweet (a maximum of 140 characters).While the concept it is all but new (did you ever play that game, “Exquisite Corpse”, literary pastime of noble origins invented by the Surrealist, where you each had to write one line of a story?) the idea of using Twitter, a social network with particular (aesthetic?) restrictions, is engaging.With regards to the “publishing” phase, The Darkness Inside will be podcast at The Podcast Network, and later turned into a machinima.Angela Thomas underscores the educational potential of such a proceeding, encouraging tutors to employ it in classes.I wonder instead about the “political” (a hundred brackets around the word) implications, if the theme of the collaborative storytelling were something real that we would like to change. It would be only a literary exercise on paper, while on social networks everything would acquire the status of a statement. Or would it?uhmmm…/news courtesy of Angela Thomas

Technorati Tags: cross media, participatory, social networks, Web 2.0

After the success of World Without Oil, a new website is addressing collective intelligence to help with environment and sustainability, thanks to the WWF together with the World Conservation Union (IUCN), and Nokia.The website is Connect2Earth, we could call it a “theme” social network, focusing on user generated content from young activists (what about the old?!) - active from February. Connect and enjoy.

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

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

While googling for inspiration about children and new technologies, I found this intriguing post and a website:“This is Sophia Berglund - Right now she is 25 months old and growing so fast in her capabilities in communication - already she can muster small sentences in English, Korean, Japanese and some German! She can even translate! Sophia can create lines, shapes and forms by way of painting her communication…”“Part of her 1st and 2nd years were spent in S.Korea where she was born into one of the most advanced mobile “handphone” cultures in the world - literally 5minutes after birth her first ever picture (and video) taken by a mobile/handphone and sent to our friends and relatives, she made her first mobile location based phone call at 5months and at 6months she was surfing mobile internet and watching mobileTV! She had her first “co-location” experience in 2006 when friends “broadcast” the ? / Bi (Rain)**concert live over their handphone to my handphone - Seoul - to - Jeju…Sophia is growing up into a digital world. Already she has a real-demo phone given to her by a friend at LGe - which she mimmicks her immediate social circle in making calls and surfing data.”My apologies to Andrew Berglund (the father) for thinking at first this was a hoax I must have been reading too much SF novels. He said the child is now , hope he will post more.My question about technology usage in toddlers is first: how do we avoid sedentary attitudes and postural problems, not to talk about the over-developed thumb, a urban legend regarding mobile use among japanese teenagers, recurrent in Sunday magazines.Another question would be: although communication tools encourage enhanced sociability, how does the lack of face-to-face interaction affects learning of emotions, empathy, and all the other skills that Daniel Goleman calls “emotional intelligence”.

Still at the Cross Media Week, interesting talk today to about social networks and open ID. While waiting for the ideal open ID to use everywhere without worrying about your personal data being stolen by terrorists etc., they were proposing to connect all social networks, so that it would be possible to : federate - have a friend on another network follow my content like it was on his;
synch - make the content visible in the same way from platform to platform;
move - move from one platform to the other very easily;
after this, the talk became too technical for me and I stopped understanding.
What I got, is that : social networks, like cross media, are fighting too to find common standards for more fluid communication. Technical convergence, personalization, and transferability are the main issues. The idea of an open ID, or digital identity, was fascinating, as was the concept of “shared secret”, that reminded me of secret societies where hundreds of thousands could mix with the crowd and still be connected although not personally acquainted (I think free masons and similar), an uncanny thought when related to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
By the way, here you can see Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (who looks exactly like my friend Alvise, ciao Alvise )

Technorati Tags: conference, cross media, social networks, Web 2.0