When you think of an Internet pirate, what image forms in your head? A surly, hooded yoof (slumped over his keyboard), downloading the latest rave toons and sci-fi shows?

Well it’s probably not a million miles off is it? Which is why the current top of the top 10 most pirated tv shows seems so odd to me …

As of June 22nd, 2008 (according to TorrentFreak) the top most pirated TV show was … ‘Top Gear’!

Now don’t get me wrong it’s a good show I just don’t see ‘the kids’ going for that. So with my suspicions already raised let’s examine the rest of the top ten.

‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ (both topical news, satirical shows) … ‘So you think you can dance’!

The more I look at this list the more my preconceptions fall apart. Is my pirate slowly morphing into a middle aged bloke.

Surely no self respecting geek would be watching this stuff? Maybe I’m off with my perception of the demographic here, can someone please clear this up?

Anne Hopkins (though she probably wouldn’t admit it), is special in at least two ways.

One, she’s our first Knitware ‘Guest’ blogger and two, she knows a lot about the world of Social Gaming.

Here are her notes from the recent London, Hide & Seek Festival Of Play.

“Why ARGs Don’t Work,” was the somewhat cheeky panel discussion topic for the industry education bit of this years festival.

It was a poignant topic at a time when the hype around ARGs is spreading like wildfire amongst the marketing and media industries. Partly reinforced by the fact that the discussion audience was mostly made up of people from ad agencies and various factions of the BBC.

A panel of experts including the creators of ARGs such as ‘I Love Bees’ and ‘World Without Oil’, grappled with how and when ARGs work and the real challenges of making one.

Interestingly, the discussion also covered what today’s ARG developers really want to be making.

Notes from that discussion.

1. Collective Intelligence - World Without Oil” was an ARG where players pretended there was an oil crisis and had to live their lives without using oil. The conclusions that these players came to and the way they lived their lives, is being replicated by the US Government.

2. Social Buzz - 80% of the players won’t do a thing. They’ll just watch. 1% of the players will do 90% of the work. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At a football game there might be 22 players and 80,000 stadium watchers but then a further million people will hear about it via TV and press so it can be good for advertisers.

To this point, we should think of ARGs as a form of social media that can be used to deliver entertainment or information to people rather than an experiential tool…. The usage behavior is more like YouTube (1-10% upload films / 90+% watch).

3. Bringing together small groups (especially small existing social network groups) - There’s hundreds of indie ARGs done just for fun.

While small groups on their own aren’t particularly useful to brands, the ability to get a lot of small groups taking part in the same activity under one brand banner is.

Snap-Shot-City is a good example of this - small groups of friends play independently in their home city but do so in the knowledge that they are part of a bigger event that is happening all over the world on the same day.

Some possible rules for designing ARGs -

1. Design an experience that is uncomplicated and that will be brilliant to play and the rest will take care of itself.
2. Make games that can be played anywhere by existing social groups.
3. Avoid complicated story lines and puzzles that will intimidate players who are ‘normal people’ as opposed to ARG geeks.
4.Do things that have a positive social affect in the real world so people will play e.g. the influence of World Without Oil on US Govt policy.
5. Design things expecting that the technology will fail and make that failure part of the experience i.e. if you do a GPS game include a scenario for when GPS doesn’t work.
6. Design the game to take account of cultural differences, where people can play different and still achieve a better outcome. Americans play ARGs very differently to UK.

WHO’S LOOKING AT USING ARGs? - Everyone from Guinness to Warner Bros to P&G and the Olympics are getting involved but no-one’s really cracked it yet.

Experts suspect that it will be entertainment content publishers like Scholastic, Disney, Warner Bros, Universal etc who will crack ARGs as they have the power to monetise games as they are already selling something tangible that people want (ARGs become additional content to books, movies and TV series).

MEMORABLE QUOTES -

“I wanted to be a superhero, my dad wanted me to be an accountant” … “a play starts not at the theatre when the curtain opens but when you first hear about it, way before you even buy your ticket and it finishes well after the curtain falls and only when people stop talking about it.”

Random thoughts - To become an expert at something you’ve really got to get stuck into it - these people live and breath ARGs and as a result will probably have better ARG ideas than us.

Some examples -
Perplex City
Penguin interactive stories - We tell Stories
I Love Bees
World Without Oil
39 Steps
The Lost Ring

read this … http://avantgame.blogspot.com/

watch this …

Wikipedia:Mashup - Web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool.

Unless you attended ‘Mashed 08‘ you might be left thinking … ‘what’s all the fuss about’ … so I’m here to introduce the miracles of the modern Mashup.

DJ’s were probably the originators of the Mashup (the concept at least) … mixing two tracks and creating something new and cool (or possibly worse). I think it would be fair to say not all Mashups are successful.

Before we go any further here’s an example of a musical Mashup … listen while you read and make your own mind up if it’s a good or bad mash.

Strokes Vs Christina - A Stroke of Genie us.

For my money the Mashup really came of age when people started combining data and applications from the world wide web. And that’s really what ‘Mashed 08′ is all about … only they add one extra challenge. Come up with a winner in less than 24 hours.

So how did they do? Well, I think the results were pretty impressive. They may not have all achieved their goal, but the ideas were all great.

Twitter on TV - Combines a live feed from social networking site Twitter with the interactive TV stream of Freeview. Viewers can monitor live “tweets” whilst watching TV.

BBC Audio accessible for blind users -Takes the meta-data from old radio programmes and reformats the information, making it friendly for screen readers.

Carbon Goggles - Mash together a heads-up display in Second Life with the AMEE carbon database to create virtual ‘carbon goggles’. Objects in the virtual world are surrounded by clouds of pollution based on their average energy consumption in the real world.

Energy saving & social gaming - Mash together real-time data from a home electricity meter with social gaming. Home owners become participants in a competition to use less energy than their neighbours.

Real-time Video translation - Take the live subtitles from a TV show and translate them into a different language. The result is then put through a speech synthesizer and dubbed other the show.

Some of my own ‘live’ favourites …

Musicmesh - find music, videos and links to other bands

Seer0 - drive along with Steve McQueen and Google maps

TwitterVision - mesmerizing, live ‘tweets’ on a world map

NewsGlobe - news around the globe, literally.

The video of Matt dancing around the globe hit the Internet a couple of years ago.  However, he has released a new and final video which is inspiring - not just because of what he achieved, but because a brand sponsored him and they didn’t change a thing.  No, seriously, it sounds crazy but it’s true and it worked…  

In 2003, an Australian guy called Matt left his job and went travelling. He registered wherethehellismatt.com so his friends could see videos of, well, where he was. He did a dance at each location and edited them together. Two years later he was back home and word on his video had spread. Stride chewing gum in the US contacted him and said they would fund him to keep doing what he’d started. No advertising, no product placement and no changes apart from a Stride gum logo and acknowledgement at the end of the video.  So, he did.

He travelled for 6 more months and put together an incredible video when he returned. During this time, he received many emails saying people would love to dance with him if he was ever in their area. He contacted Stride and proposed to go back on the road to hook up with these people and get video of them dancing with him too. Stride said yes and his final video says it all - it’s amazing.

Matt’s achievement was to travel to many places and meet many people (dancing in zero-g and with native tribes to name just two).  However, Stride’s achievement is equally remarkable - they found someone already doing something very popular at an international level and didn’t interfere.  Stride understood that nurturing and assisting something already popular can get just as much attention (if not more) and greater repsect than altering it or enforcing obvious branding on it.

Matt’s final video is something to behold (as is his 2005 video) - it’s brilliantly simple and brilliantly powerful. Stride saw a great opportunity to piggyback someone else and made it happen. Both of these aspects inspire me.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Just thought this site was pretty cool and empowering in an art kinda way:

http://www.blockposters.com/

Upload an image, have it saved as a multi-page pdf, and print yourself off a massive poster. Check out the gallery for ideas.

That’s all.

Have you noticed those people who talk about stuff they’ve found on the web … there’s often a sort of subtle one-upmanship thing going on?

They casually drop in a … ‘have you seen …  insert-stupid-name-here.com‘ and anyone who hasn’t … seen it, logged in and uploaded a picture … is somehow marked down a digital point.

Of course you can claw back a little respec’ buy countering an … equally-stupid-name.com … but the damage has been done.

So how do you keep ahead of the curve and increase your internet knowledge …?

Ok, I never said it was going to be easy … it may require several bottles of coke (cola), one large bag of cheesy poofs and time away from loved ones … but there are no shortcuts to internet knowledge!

doc rogers

First up and certainly my weapon of choice, is the excellent … www.Stumbleupon.com

It takes a few minutes to download/install and then you’re off … click on your Stumble button and you’re whisked away to random interesting websites. Anything you see or like can be saved to your account and you can rate sites too (thumbs up or down). Warning can cause insomnia!

Similar sites that aim to bring you the best of the web (and still high on my list), would be digg and reddit … you can just view the results of existing members, but these sites work best if you sign up and join in too.

If all that logging in and clicking is still too much for you … then you could try Movers 2.0 … it will keep you in touch with the most popular sites … but scores low on the obscure stuff, for obvious reasons.

oh yea and that band thing  … it was all just a bluff …this is what’s on my iPod, right now …

A. Name of the band = Wiki article title …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

B. Album title = Last four words of the last quote …

http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

C. Album cover = third picture …

http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/

So that’s …

Sim Shi with their new album, Chaos is an impossibility …

Recently I posted about Hyper Island an amazing school for technology and digital discovery. It wasn’t until a few days later that I realised one of the founders of Hyper was now working for Vodafone and I had a contact there.

So could I speak to the man himself? The answer was yes. So here’s my interview with David Erixon, Director of Brand Strategy & Manifestation, Vodafone Global Marketing. Oh yes … and co founder of Hyper Island.

So what about Hyper Island …
 

doc

Apple, Google and Microsoft moved into Nokia’s crosshairs yesterday as the Finnish company bought Symbian, the major threat to the iPhone and Android SDK’s and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS.

Installed in more than 200m smartphones (over 60% of the smartphone market), Symbian is a direct challenger to Google’s growing Android community. Apple are targeted to a lesser degree as the iPhone SDK applies to the iPhone alone, making it a much smaller competitor than Android which will come to the gPhone and other handsets too later this year. Meanwhile Microsoft’s Windows Mobile will come under pressure as it aims to get developers on board its small OS (13% of the market).

Within 2 years, Nokia & Symbian aim to make the open source OS available to members of The Symbian Foundation (currently including Vodafone, Orange, Nokia, Samsung and LG). Members will be entitled to use the OS and develop applications for it free of charge.

Meanwhile a flurry of reports earlier this week claimed that the Android platform would be delayed to 2009. If anyone is going to shake up the mobile phone market as much Apple’s iPhone has, it will be Google’s gPhone which will run Android - “the first complete, open, and free mobile platform.” However Eric Schmidt (CEO) responded assuring handset manufacturers and shareholders that the platform will feature on handsets in the second half of 2008. Whereas the iPhone has created direct competition with phone manufacturers, Google’s android platform encourage partnerships with manufacturers.

How will this affect a manufacturer’s competitive edge if phone platforms become uniform?

What sort of opportunity will this present for brands who can now easily plug themselves into the open source SDK to create engaging phone applications for consumers? A big opportunity is all we can say for now. We’ll keep you up to speed on brands getting involved here.

Sometimes when you see a wave you just have to dive in. If you’re even close to being cool you would have made your Spore creature weeks ago.

Here’s my creation … ok, so it’s got a little sheep DNA in there somewhere. What did you expect from a blog called Knitware?

Releasing the creation software now was a stroke of genius by Spore HQ and it’s sent the internet into a Spore frenzy.

I have to admit to being pretty impressed with the software too. What could have been a clumsy and complicated interface is actually a delight to use.

Simple drag and drop tools and a library of options makes it childs play  and importantly … fun.

It feels like a pretty good omen to me … for once the game might actually live up to the hype!