Jeff Winkworth’s IMM Blog

Tuesday’s Multimedia Pioneering class found Wayne MacPhail, a social media consultant, arrive to discuss Social Media and the DIY community. My first impression was “cool laptop case.” I didn’t get a full glimpse of it, so I’m not sure if there was bumper stickers, or just one image, but it looked neat. I also immediately noticed how this was an actual “presentation” and not just someone talking about their profession.

The first thing he did was define “web 2.0″ for he class as nothing more than a marketing term. Its about time an “industry insider” actually admitted this point. I’ve heard countless “professionals” toss this term around and lost of people I know who are less-computer savvy think of it as a new technology. Wayne defined web 2.0 as follows:

• encourage community & collabaration
• shared content creation
• focus on a single task
• clean, clear interface,
• supports tagging / bookmarking
• moves data and apps from desktop to web

The last point is one I found interesting; for years people were using desktop applications, and around 2002-2004 there began a shift to move desktop apps to web interfaces (currently I am writing this blog post in google docs, and once all my thoughts are organized I will paste the contents into wordpress). In the last year or so however there have been numerous attempts to bring web-based applications back to the desktop. In particular, Wayne seems very hyped about Adobe AIR, a technology that I like, but at the same time have noticed one or two pitfalls with (the lack of threading support that a language such as c++ or Java can utilize proved to be a major problem for my client project last semester). When I asked him his thoughts on this trend, he stated that “different tools can get used for different reasons” and that both technologies can co-exist. While I agree with this sentiment (I am currently not using my personal computer, hence the use of google docs and not Microsoft Word), I find this contradictory with Dan the Man’s “Mutlimedia Pioneering is more than just taking something that already exists and modifying it” stance.

Wayne then gave us a quick rundown of web 2.0 technologies such as tagging (he cited an example of how social norms dictate how things are labeled: Photos from the New Orleans Hurricane are easier to find when tagged as “Katrina”), del.icio.us, rss, and “embed code” (which allow less-savvy computer users easily update their websites with muliimedia. He also broke down some “social rules”:

you dont use a social network, you become a part of it

If you are a company trying to “cash in” on a social network, you will fail if you are not actually a part of the community and instead just try to force your product down people’s throats.

contribution is participation

This goes back to the first point; If you don’t contribute to the community, then you really aren’t a part of the community, regardless of you membership.

social media encourages engagement & evangelism

Wayne cited an example of a group of sheep eating grass; if one farmer is a douchebag then he can let his sheep destroy the entire field, whereas if everyone does their part for the “common good” then the community lives on.

social media:

• is local first
• is viral
• is granular
• is a conversation, not a broadcast
• is mobile
• wants to be free

He also discussed many 2.0 technologies. One that Wayne was very passionate about and kept returning to was Twitter, and kept telling us how wonderful and fascinating the twitter experience is for anyone not involved (for those not aware, the idea is that anyone can know what you are thinking at any time). Well, a quick search through Wayne’s archives found some gems from before and after he spoke to us. I would never want to get involved with something that ARCHIVES your thoughts for all to see. I also would think there would be a problem of professionalism when you rant and rave about this that and the other thing on a public forum. Additionally, didn’t we have a speaker last week in Andrew’s Project Management class who spent a good deal of time slamming the maturity level of most Twitter users?

Finaly, Wayne briefly touched upon some of the following technologies:

• iPhone SDK
• Flash on iPhone
• Android
• Sprout – WYSIWYG editor for flash
• ning, toolkit for “creating facebook”
• jaiku – “social life feed”
• Mogulus – a real time web based tv studio for creating live web tv shows.

He also touched upon the current Facebook Beacon controversy, something I have been following since about December. Its good to see that someone other than myself is concerned about Facebook’s pitfalls.

Wayne was a very engaging speaker, but I felt he left me very confused in the end. Wayne does not appear to even have his own website, and instead jumps on every social media bandwagon out there (a quick google only came up with his name attached to social media sites). While his argument is that in this day and age community is everything, personally and professionally I do not seen any forseeable future where an IT professional would not have a web site, if not even to just store links to all of his social media communities. We also mentioned “not becoming a slut to social media” which, to me, he very clearly is.

Additionally, I am curious when and if there will ever be any form of “social network convergence” where you can keep everything together in one place; right now I find alot of these social media places redundant, and full of redundant information. I assumed the world wide web and in particular “web 2.0″ was supposed to be about ease of use. Right now everyone puts all their photos on flickr, bookmarks on del.ico.us, video on youtube, and status on twitter, and then puts all that information AGAIN on their facebook or myspace anyways.

That’s one of the reasons I have never got much into the whole “social community” trend. I post on applicable message boards, I have a facebook account, and I rate films on IMDB. That’s about it. Perhaps its because I have always had a programming background; if I ever required somewhere to store my photos, I could just write a photo album script and place it on my server and tweak it to my own needs. If i needed a blog, I could install wordpress on to my own server, and not have to worry about Facebook or myspace slowing down to a crawl during peak hours.

Finally, here is a video of Wayne’s more or less talking about the same sorts of things to another group of people I am sure he talked about on Twitter afterwards.

Friday morning kicked off around 8am when myself and Kaleena (or as ROM security referred to her, “friend of Jeff”) headed to the Clarkson Go Station. We were planning to catch the 8:38 train and meet up with the class whom mostly got onboard at the previous stop. However, we arrived early and got on the 8:30 super-fast-express to union train, which made us super-early at Union station, where we stood around in the subway station for about 20 minutes. We were afraid that somehow we missed the group, so we got aboard the subway and rushed to the Royal Ontario Museum.

Of course, it turns out we didn’t miss them, and once again were super-early. So we waited with some of the class, until the big group all arrived.

We were lead into the ROM Digital Gallery by Brian Porter, the sr. Director of New Media. He oversees everything from catalog publishing to 2D/3D imaging. The digital gallery is a classroom-sized room with touch screen kiosks at every desk and a giant projector unit at the front. The idea is that for a premium fee, class trips to the ROM can include a multimedia experience. Currently they have two programs: Ancient Egypt & Canadian Heritage, but they plan to add more over time. The kiosks allow visitors to get a “virtual hands on experience” by manipulation 3D representations of Museum artifacts that users would never be allowed to touch in real life. Meanwhile, a video experience plays on the projector, developed in Final Cut Pro and Watchout.

The ROM is also working with the Virtual Museum of Canada to allow groups from far away destinations who cannot afford or make it to the ROM to connect to the Digital Gallery. Over the internet, groups can watch and experience the presentations and virtual kiosks.

Part of Brian’s job is to find funding for all of these projecs, as the Royal Ontario Museum is a non-profit group. Due to this, alot of the new media utilized by the ROM are proven technologies such as touch-screens. While not quite the coolest and advanced touch screens ever, they get the job done. Apparently they are nothing more than a touch screen laptop running Internet Explorer Web plugins. Somewhere down the line, they intend to expand by utilizing broadcast media of current events to allow speakers to link Museum exhibits with stories ripped from the headlines. I find this goal exciting, because it is the convergence of new media, current events, and museum history.

Brian then told us about their newest goal: to digitally archive all 6 million specimens in the ROM. This includes 3D photographing every article, and linking it to their database of information. They plan to eventually put all these high resolution photographs online. Their business model is to allow licensing of these photographs and videos, similar to a Stock Photography company.

A brief tour was involved, where we witnessed a ROM touch screen from Gesturetek, and a practical application of touch screen kiosks at the Dinosaur exhibit. The kiosks appeared to be built in flash, and worked similarly to youtube. We were then given some time to “view the kiosks” ie look at the Dinosaurs.

When the tour was over, we were given some time for lunch. Originally, we were to disperse to find somewhere to eat, and then meet up across the street to visit Steve Mann at U of T. Turns out, it was a good half-hour walk through downtown Slush and Snow. Luckily, Heather had brought along a GPS device. Barbara and Dwight chose to drive. They were smarter than us.

When we arrived, we discovered there was a Subway station just down the street. It would have been a 2 minute hop on the train. Oh well, it was good to get some air.

We were hoping to get some insight on Steve’s cyborgism, however it appears that for the most part he is no longer as interested in it. He wishes to “return to the womb” and visit more primordial concepts such as water and the inner child. Thus, he created Nesse. Nesse is what he calls his hydraulophone, which is a flute-like instrument that blows water out of a pump instead of air through your lungs. It is played like a piano. Currently the largest one is outside of the Ontario Science Centre. One thing I found interesting was his creation of a new form of MIDI, to allow hydraulophones to communicate to one another. He cited the example of having a water fight between two people over the internet; where you would push down on one key and water would shoot out of the same key on the other side of the planet. That blows my mind.

Dwight then drove Heather, Kaleena and I to union station, after a quick visit to the comic book store so Heather could stock up on some new toys for her collection. We then heard about the Sheridan lockdown, and were relieved that Dan the Man had “rescued” us due to his well planned field trip that day. Eventually we met up with Dan the Man and headed home on the busy Go Train, where Kaleena bumped into the father of some children that she baby-sits for. Small talk ensued.

While in class today we discussed Functions and Methods in AS3. I was taken aback when i saw this:


public class myClass {
    public function Programming() {
        function myFunction():void {
        }
        myFunction();
    }
}

That blew my mind! How is this object-oriented? I thought AS3 was supposed to be a step forward in OOP-based standards. Instead, Adobe is enabling spaghetti code. If you need to reuse a block of code, why not make it private? That way you can re-use that piece of code anywhere whenever you need it.