SHARE

http://share.media.mit.edu/


Share is an experiment in designing a networked programming tool for distributed communities of practice.
It is an IDE that automatically shares all the code you write with everyone else that is using Share, and keeps track of how that code is used. Thus allowing you to see the network that grows around code you contribute to, borrow from, or just happen to be interested in.
Share is built upon processing!

Transparency and Sustainability

Image Source:http://graphico.free.fr/hfr/pollution.jpg

Last class we briefly mentioned the issue of responsibility as designers, and I asked about the carbon footprint of an avatar (which you can see here) as an example of the kind of issues which designers/engineers of this New Millenium must be aware of.

Leonardo Bonnani who teaches Future Craft: Radical Sustainability in Product Design at MIT Media Lab has created Sourcemap, an open source project that is a model of transformative Design.

Where do things come from and what are they made of?

The Maps of Our Time

In 1748, Giambattista Nolli, made one of the most accurate ichnographic (ground plan) maps of Rome, the Pianta Grande di Roma commonly known as the Nolli Map.

Pope Benedict XIV commissioned the map in order to survey Rome, and ever since then this map has been used for government planning as recently as 1970!

You can see an "interactive" Nolli map here.

“…And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I inquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well…”

— Lewis Carroll. The complete Sylvie and Bruno. 1893. San Francisco: Mercury House, c1991. pg. 265

In 2006, the SENSEable city lab at MIT created many Real-Time Rome maps as its contribution to the Venice Biennale

The map below shows the movement and concentration of mobile phone users during important events in the city of Rome. In this case the events happen to be the controversial Madonna concert and the World Cup final between Italy and France.

See a big version of this movie here where you can actually see the timeline.

Meta Markets

How will information gatherers and hunters survive in the digital age? Some signs are already apparent. As blogs matured they became a real force in the economy by consolidating opinions , analysis and gossip that sways, shapes and creates public opinion.

Witness Tila Tequila's (The Baddest Bitch in the Block) MySpace site where her profile has been seen a mere 123,875,022 times and you can see how clicks do turn into big bucks. Of course we have known that for a few years already although it has taken the entertainment industry quite a while to catch up, at that.

But there are more interesting things happening which are just (barely) outside of the mainstream and that I expect will become the next big thing (remember you saw it here first!).

Take a look at Meta-Markets for example. Their opening blurb says:

Meta-Markets is an online stock market for trading socially networked creative products such as YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, blogs, or social network profiles.
In NYSE or NASDAQ people trade shares of companies. In Meta-Markets people trade shares of bookmarks, profiles, videos, or blogs. Just like companies, socially networked products have ever growing values. When product owners issue their shares in Meta-Markets, they raise capital – today play capital, but tomorrow real capital. With Meta-Markets we aim to help people to retain the value of their immaterial labor in social web services.

Meta-Markets evolved from work done at the Physical Language Workshop in MIT as a research project in online economies and "sustainable life forms". Projects like OPENSTUDIO from PLW is another example of an emerging market community that allows artists, curators, buyers, dealers and viewers to create an economy that "breaks free of the shackles of the tired gallery/patron model representative of the classic schmism between the creative and the lucrative."

Even though today, as Meta-Markets says, you are dealing with "play-money", it will become tomorrow's real capital.

Tulum I, by Arturo Sinclair

And, hey! I just sold my first art work today for a whooping 2β Buraks!

VR vs. RL forum

You are not isolated in your concerns or simple curiosity about VR and the concept of "reality" as a whole. The global importance of the issue is evident when it becomes the subject of a forum at Davos (Davos is famous as the host to the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum (WEF), an annual meeting of global political and business elites, which is often referred to as simply Davos.)
The picture above gives you a clue about the level of this Forum.
Here is what will be happening as we study pretty much the same subject in our class:
Note the participants...
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Open Forum Davos 2008
24. - 26. January 2008

The Open Forum Davos will include a section on "Virtual Worlds - Fiction or Reality?", which will take place on Saturday 26 January at the Swiss Alpine High School (SAMD). The section will include:
- Rafael Capurro, Professor, Information management and information ethics, Stuttgart Media University, Germany
- Florence Develey, Pastor, Switzerland
- Reid Hoffman, Chairman and President, LinkedIn Corporation, USA
- Philip Rosedale, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Linden Lab, USA
- Joseph Weizenbaum, Former Professor of Computer Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

More information on the Open Forum which is organized by the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches (FSPC) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) can be found at:

http://www.openforumdavos.ch/en/home/home.html

More Information of the section is provided at:

http://www.openforumdavos.ch/en/programm/virtual-worlds.html