About to change to wordpress - will importing files work? It requires that I change from ftp-publishing to blogger-publishing, let's see what happens?!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:05 (0) comments

Malene Larsen is a Danish Ph.D. student doing an interesting Ph.d. on "Understanding Social Networking - On Young People’s Use of Social Networking Sites and Online Identity Construction", looking at, for instance, the hugely popular Danish website Arto.

Malene has been blogging (in English) since she started her project in January (thumbs up for that) and has just posted on the variety of perspectives on social networking (software?) and youth, she has come across. A good overview - also to present to students (I'm teaching a course in Digital Culture this fall, very suitable for that for instance).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 19:18 (1) comments

I discovered yesterday that a new book called Second Lives by writer Tim Guest has just hit the off - and online bookstores. It looks like it includes several stories about the "RL" author's adventures in various virtual worlds, incl. interviews with other inhabitants. It's difficult to get a grip of what it is "really" about, but it looks like it's more an essayistic piece of writing and not very academic. But as a piece of virtual gonzo journalism, it might be interesting in itself.

I havent been able to find a proper summary, but here is the review of the book in the Guardian.
And the review on the SecondLifeInsider Blog.

I'd like to note that it is not the first book of this kind: Katie Hafner has written an interesting piece of journalism/research on the life and development of the Well in The Well -A Story of Love, Death, and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community ; and Julian Dibbell has told us about his adventures in My Tiny Life (primarily about LambdaMOO). And there are probably more stories out there that I dont know of.

Update: heh, it turns out that the WoW-guild of which Im a currently passive member is also featured briefly in the Second Lives book. Esther, who has already read the book, notes that on page 329 Guest mentions a "cultural symposia" of academics in WoW: that's actually from a guild meeting which included a lecture by one of us - there is also a screenshot of it!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:58 (1) comments

- according to a survey made by the Danish media company PHD, and described in the Danish newspaper Børsen today. The survey (number of respondents unknown) showed that Danish youth (age 12-20) as of 2006 spends 108 minutes online a day and only 96 minutes in front of the tv. So the web "wins" marginally, but nevertheless an interesting finding. However, as the Head of Research at DR (the national broadcast company in Denmark) points out in the Børsten article, youth spends quite a lot of time online having "tv-experiences", such as watching fun videoclips on youtube (and on the DR website?). So, as I see it, if "tv" as a concept is about format and specific forms of content (visual, moving pictures, up close and personal), perhaps it is more a question of shifting transmission channels (to Joost for instance), not replacing the media experience itself?

Of course, I would have liked to link directly to further information about the survey (wouldnt it be great to known how many of the young people surveyed play WoW or maintain a Myspace or Arto profile?), but nothing is to be found on the website of the PHD company, at which the latest news item is from early February. And have you every tried googling the word "phd" in connection with the word "survey" (also in Danish)? And of all things, why have they chosen to call their "newsletter" "Wired" and hosting it on an extremely slow server?!!! Im not sure PHD's own webcommunication strategy works very well...

Labels: "PHD mediebureau", mediahabits, webuse, youth

# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:09 (4) comments

Interesting discussion going on at Terra Nova: Structuration, Synthetic Worlds-Style: LOTRO and Emotes, with good independent commentary by Esther at Glod'n Epix. Do you need pre-scripted social emotes to help social group behaviour? Are emotes (also as visual animations) necessary to create the experiece of presence in a world? What happens when you dont have emotes available as social handles? All spawned by the apparent lack of greeting emotes (???) in the Lord of the Rings MMOG, that I have yet to test out myself.

Have to think more about it, but I believe emotes was initially invented to make up for the total lack of visual and corporeal clues in the first text-based virtual worlds. Present virtual worlds are explicitly graphic and all avatars have bodies others can see, so perhaps emotes are not as necessary as they once were, as long as players are provided with methods to express themselves with their bodies or to convey emotions. However, if you want to role-play in virtual worlds, I guess some form of emote system is still necessary to convey subtle nuances of thoughts and behaviours, that cannot be expressed in direct speak, prescripted animations, or player-performed visual behaviour? (fyi, by the latter I mean that you can use ordinary movements like running and jumping to also express emotional states by using them in a particular way, combination or context)
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:12 (2) comments

Today, I went to Hillerød to see the exhibition of the works selected for viewing out of the several hundred portraits submitted to the First Nordic Portrait Competition that ran last year. It was engaging to experience the variety of suggestions of what a moderne (self) portrait can look like. One of the works that also by virtue of its digital format really captivated me, was the little piece: Synne which is also available online [just click the link and you go straight to it, it's in Norwegian though]. "Synne" consists of an interactive Flash-piece, small snippets of conversations through digital media (messenger, sms, email) between two people, Synne and Jone, that you click through. "What's so interesting about that?", you think in the beginning, but it turns out towards the end (sorry bout the spoiler) that Synne died shortly after the last message. So suddenly it is also snippets of the last months of someone's life, you've been looking at. It's oddly moving, and thought-provoking, that we are now also able to store so many pieces of the people we love and care about, through digital media. If we want to - and if we think about it in due time...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:41 (1) comments

My Australian colleagues have always been pretty much on the forefront of digital media and I know that at least at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), they have had practising in-house digital artists affiliated. Now the Australian Council for the Arts is offering a collaborative artist residency in Second Life! (as seen on the DIGRA mailinglist). I think it is the first strictly artist-in-residency-in-a-virtual-world I have come across: SECOND LIFE ARTIST RESIDENCY.

There is one precedent I know of though, thinking back: digital artist and writer Judy Malloy many years back (1993-1994!) as part of her artist-in-residency at Xerox PARC did three story-telling projects in Lambda-MOO [the first MOO - Mud Object-Oriented], and you can still read about them in her article: Narrative Structures in LambdaMOO. In the conclusion of the article, she writes:
The record of my tenure in this virtual space is not so different as the record of an out of town artist placing a work in a community, that to the community involved seems alien because either the artist has not adequately familiarized herself with the community that will endure this work for ever, or she has, but does not share the values of the community involved..
To her, then, it was difficult to integrate her work in the community and space of the world - which had much less inhabitants than SL. Will it be easier in SL? Or will the artist's work drown amidst professional art galleries in-world and a lot of other "hot" activities? I'll definitely be looking forward to reading about the Australian artists' experiences.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:59 (2) comments

I've been meaning to write-up a brief summary of some of the interesting names, stats and comments I jotted down in my programme of the Nordic Game Conference 2007. It was held in Malmø on May 15-16th and I came there to give a talk there on death as part of the academic track (fyi, I've started to refer to myself as "travelling in death" - I do hope I'll be talking about something more lively soon ;)).

Anyway, here's what I noted:
Paulina Bozek: Singstar will launch online community, with sharing of lipsynced karaoke-videos and download of songs on the fly come this summer. Slides for show presented via the PS3 console, very slick. She talked about the web as "MyEverything". There are 2500 Singstar videos on Youtube. Lipsync videos very popular: example Numa Numa (discovered yesterday, Nik & Jay lipsync videos very popular amongst Danish youth). Flick users: 10% actively upload content, 90% of browsers, online communities need to appeal to both. Other EA community endeavours: Home, LittleBigPlanet, Virtual Me, Spore. Forrester Research: 84% of European youth owns a mobile. "Mass customisation". "Unbundling of content"

Nexon: Biggest Online Game provider. "Kart Rider" MOG: #1 in China. And "Maple Story" more than 50 mill users worldwide, 14 mill alone in South Korea (cf Gamasutra feature). They were actually the first who launched a modern graphic MMOG, 1996: Kingdom of the Winds. 68% of people under 15 years play "Kart Rider" in Korea. 6 of 10 people in Korea play online games more than 1 hour a week. Kart Rider in a year: 20 million virtual cars sold - in comparison Hyundai only sold 4 million "real" cars...

Aki Järvinen: games as "microworlds". Need to check out: Ortony et al: "The Cognitive Structure of Emotions" (1990). Darfur is Dying game. Games where players have to nurture and care for something a design space not yet fully explored.

Papermint - a cool german chatworld, where the world and avatars are all "paperdolls", small embedded games. Very complex way of showing avatar's emotions to each other, something with showing most used recent mood states above their head. "Games to dont have to look realistic to feel real". You can print and cut-out your avatar?!! Mint plants, the currency only lasts for 24 hours, players need to nurture if they want them to proliferate. Black and white mainly, colours for clothes only if they can get them off plants in the world. "We need games with more beautiful boys". Looked very cool, still in testing version.

Mark Olilla: 850 million Nokia Users worldwide. Currently only 5% download mobile games. Trying to boost buying of games, by introducing "try before buy" option, establish community, profile reviews etc etc.

Eve Online Keynote: now introducing human avatars. "Girls dont want to be spaceship" (we could have told you that long time ago...). 200.000 current subscribers, but 3 million people have tried the game. Their goal: to surpass the amount of citizens of Island, where game originates and is produced. So far 121.753 man years spent in Eve. They plan to launch weekly TV channel where users will provide content, telling about various events in the world, this is also one way for developers to keep updated when universe is as big as EVE's.

The Mustard Corporation is a UK-based gamescript writing company that surprisingly lives of creating storylines, NPC-dialogue and other "story" aspects for various games. The speaker had discovered WoW and LOTR online but had nothing intelligent to say about them, one good example of someone that would in fact have given a much better talk, if he had taken a little time to study the research in the field.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:45 (0) comments

Im going to the annual Reboot conference later this week, for the first time in my case. Earlier today I made a profile on the conference website and started marking the talks I'd like to go to, for other delegates to see on my profile and to appear as "attending the talk" on the page for the talk (nifty feature, btw). One of the talks I marked was the one about The web everywhere: $10 paperbacks, $50 phones, $100 laptops and $250 game consoles, because it sounded fun.

Later today I checked out Torill's weblog. The most recent post was about the death of a well-known Norwegian Blogger and personality Tron Øgrim. I went to the memorial site for him and the top post was from someone called Håkon who cant attend the funeral because he's talking at Reboot. Checking out Håkon on Wikipedia, I discover he's the chief technology officer at Opera and was the guy who proposed the CSS format (excuse me my ignorance..(. I'd better go to his talk at Reboot then, I thought. Checked out the name at Reboot and discovered I had already marked the talk, namely that of "The web everywhere:" etc.

Meanwhile, many of the people I discovered were going to Reboot too, have said yes to be my "contact" in the social software system of the conference. It is incidentally the same people that I met last year at Blogforum, that showed up at the reception for Trine-Maria's and Thomas' (the instigator of Reboot) book...on blogs, and whom I link with and to on Kommunikationsforum, Linkedin and whom I socialise with in the context of the DONA organisation. They are all brilliant people but sometimes I get the impression that the Danish - yes perhaps even Scandinavian - social software/blogger/online communication in theory and practice cluster is a somewhat densely linked network...

Anyway, I look forward to seing people (again) at Reboot, listing to Mr. Lie and hopefully meeting a lot of new people too at the venue - which should be possible since more than 400 have registrered!
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:36 (0) comments

I wanted to book an Eurobonus trip for a trip within Europe this fall.
I tried online several times before but was told I needed to book on the phone. Today, online booking worked, but no trips were available unless I fly Business class, which I cant understand because it's a fairly popular city Im flying to and there are almost 4 months left to my departure.

So I decided to try booking my trip via the phone:
4 calls to the Eurobonus service, each time I was disconnected after the initial automated response.
2 calls to the SAS general customer service, through which I the second time got through to the Eurobonus service and then were guided through an automated voice response system which was supposed to lead to a living person I could talk to. Once I got so far, the line gave me the busy signal and I had to hang up.
One more call to the Eurobonus service number. This time I got through to the point where I were supposed to be able to talk to someone. Then I was told the waiting time to get through to this person was 17 minutes.
"You are now number 50 in the queue".
Then I hung up, voluntarily.

Thank you for your brilliant service SAS.
Time spent NOT booking a trip - roughly 40 minutes.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 09:56 (6) comments