Compare how many Tweets are posted by Sydney-siders versus New Yorkers in real-time with the Tweet-o-Meter.  An online monitoring tool created by the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis that measures the amount of tweets (in Tweets per Minute or TPM) received from various locations around the world.

Currently in beta mode the Tweet-O-Meter updates every 10 seconds displaying the city with the highest number of Tweets. While innovative, this tool may be somewhat inaccurate, with the Tweet-o-Meter only registering Tweets by people that have there geolocation turned on in there Twitter preferences.

Awesome! The wonderfully low-fi app previously know as MousePath has been relaunched as OIGraphica with brand new features… not really… just the same great simple functionality. It just follows your mouse around all day and generates these beautiful visuals. TRY IT now!
+ If you’re into art based apps try this site for size…Creative Applications, it’s a winner.

A testament to how effective this interactive piece is from Intel is whether you feel like touching your computer screen when you’re watching it…

http://www.contagiousmagazine.com/2010/01/intel_1.php

Direct You Tube link:

Intel InfoScape Double HD Touchscreen Internet Experience

a message from ‘dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity’ 

http://dorkbot.org

I want to invite you all to an exciting event taking place at the Powerhouse Museum at the end of this month. Over the weekend of Jan 29-31 forty game designers, developers and artists will volunteer to be locked away in the basement of the PHM and not allowed out until they have made a game! 

That’s right: its Game Jam Sydney, part of the Global Game Jam that is
taking place simultaneously in over 100 locations around the world. It’s 48 hours of intensive game development with an aim to produce innovative and exciting new games. It’s also part of the Powerhouse’s “80’s Gamer Weekend”so there will also be talks and presentations by some veterans of the Australian game industry, and some up-and-coming indy designers.

To find out more, visit http://www.gamejamsydney.com/

Spread the word!

 

 

SPECIAL REQUEST: We will need some tech-savvy people to volunteer as network administration for the event. Do you have familiarity with running a LAN of 40-50 computers? We’d like to hear from you. Even if you can’t make the whole 48 hours, having you to help with setting/packing up or being on call for some of the time would be really valuable.

Contact: dorkbotsyd-blabber@dorkbot.org

Google and Apple both unveiled key mobile initiatives yesterday, underscoring the collision path the two companies are on, and how long-term, video is poised to benefit from their battle.

First, as you no doubt already know, Google introduced the Nexus One, an Android-powered smartphone that it is selling directly to consumers. It is Google’s first foray into consumer devices and many more products sure to follow. Meanwhile, Apple, in a rare significantly-sized deal, acquired Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising company, for around $300 million. Quattro represents Apple’s first real push into advertising, an important shift from its traditional iTunes-driven paid media model.

With its own device, Google is primarily looking to compete against Apple’s iPhone, which has practically owned the U.S. smartphone market since its introduction 2 years ago. And Apple, with a toehold in the exploding mobile advertising market, is positioning itself to disrupt Google’s planned dominance of mobile advertising through its pending $750 million AdMob acquisition. If Apple were to make additional acquisitions, particularly in the online video advertising space, that would further strengthen its position.

Mobile video is poised to be a real winner in the Google vs. Apple face-off. At a minimum, the two companies’ considerable marketing spending (plus those of competitors Palm, RIM, Nokia and others) will mean smartphones in millions more consumers’ hands, dramatically expanding the video-ready universe. In addition, the experience of watching mobile video will just keep getting better. For example, the Nexus One’s screen resolution (480×800) surpasses the iPhone’s (320×480), which only means Apple will need to up the ante even further with its next generation. The range of video applications is sure to surge as more and more players stake out their ground.

Importantly, because there are no powerful incumbent distributors in mobile video – as there are in the living room, with cable/satellite/telco – I believe there is more flexibility in how premium video can be distributed to smartphones. Until recently mobile was an “on-deck” world where everything had to be approved and carried by the wireless carrier. But mobile is quickly evolving to take on open Internet-like characteristics, where applications and services are not gatekeeped by a distributor. In short, mobile looks to be more like online distribution than traditional video distribution. As power in mobile shifts to players like Apple and Google, it should also be a wake-up call to the FCC, whose planned wireless carrier-focused net neutrality paradigm already looks out of date.

While there have been recent rumbles about Apple doing something with subscription video for the living room, instead the company likely has more latitude in mobile to go well beyond the pay-per-use iTunes model, especially if it can also bring in advertising. Meanwhile, by having its own device and operating system, Google is optimizing the YouTube mobile experience. As this YouTube blog post points out, the Nexus One is an improved way to search, view and upload YouTube videos. With YouTube enjoying such benefits not just on Nexus One, but on all Android phones, YouTube becomes an even more valuable partner for premium content providers looking to generate mobile usage.

Google and Apple will be jousting for years to come in the mobile space. The opportunities for growth for both companies are sizable. I fully expect that video is a going to be an increasingly important part of the battle.

Credits: Everybody @ White + Andrew M for the name

So you thought search had all but been wrapped up by the folks @ 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California. Right? Well think again. The thinkers @ One Microsoft Way, Redmond thought they might reinvent the “I’m trying to find something on the internet” wheel. Those crazy Microsoft tinkerers felt that the internet has well… evolved (overloaded). So why shouldn’t search? The result is badda boom, badda bing. Mmmm many have tried so let’s wait and see on this one… anyone remember cuil?

And in other search news (not really in the same space… and released a little while ago) is the nerdtastic Wolfram Alpha. As they say “Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone” Go on give it a tickle.

A search engine with a sense of humour… what?

PS: More Easter Eggs here…

PSS: Wonder if Google has anything up their long sleeves?

While investigating dull coding standards, guidelines and best practices on building mobile websites, I came across a great article titled “Effective design for mobile screen sizes”.

There are many guides and “expert tips” out there, however this one is particularly useful as it uses the new BBC Mobile site as a case study, whilst providing facts/stats on mobile screen sizes that exist in today’s market. A must read for designers/developers and those interested in understanding the methodologies put in place when designing a website for a mobile phone.

Read more here

It’s a really nice example of a quick to produce/cost effective solution that leverages different social media sites, all linked together through a really simple primary navigation/promo space box that floats in the top left corner of each section/site you navigate to.

Their ‘homepage’ and ‘products’ pages are actually their www.wikipedia.org page, their ‘chatter’ section of the site is the brand’s twitter page, the ‘friends’ section of the site links through to their Facebook fan-page, and their ‘media’ section links through to their YouTube & Flickr pages.

This is a fantastic approach that intelligently leverages existing consumer and brand generated content, bringing together communities of brand advocates.

_

It’s another great example of brands needing to be increasingly brave and letting go of some control, as true brand ownership shifts to sit with consumers. Skittles recognises that they can only participate in these conversations.

It’s a huge step for a brand – nice one Team Skittles!

Hungry? How hungry? Would you sacrifice 10 of your Facebook friends for a Whopper?
If this neat little campaign was running here in Australia I would have a smaller number of friends…
without hesitation. Most likely the work of those damn CP+B’ers.

Social Media Today has compiled this list of the current Top 25 free ebooks on Social Media:

1. Belonging Networks Corporate Social Networking
2. Social Web Basics
3. The 2009-2014 World Outlook for Advertising for Social Media Web Sites
4. Social Media and Customer Service
5. Center For Social Media – Youth As E-Citizens
6. How Blogs and Social Media are Changing Public Relations
7. Social media and the banking industry
8. Social Media: 40 Places to Find Web 2.0 for Your Web Site
9. Social Media Marketing Strategies Guide
10. Nielsen – Pharma & Social Media
11. The Need for Speed – Using Social Media to Speed Innovation
12. What is Social Media?
13. ComplexDiscovery – User Generated Content, Social Media, and Advertising
14. Social Media Guide Release
15. Social Media & Marketing – Online Networking & Advertising February 2008
16. ebook: The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations
17. What is Social Media? – Book 2
18. Social Media Maps
19. Social Media Manifesto by Brian Solis
20. New Media Case Studies 2008
21. The Impact of Social Media on Innovation – Josh Bernoff
22. The Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organisations
23. Customer Service: The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
24. The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008
25. The Essential Guide to Social Media

British Social Media Case Studies from the IAB:

BBC Learning G.I. Jonny (334k)
British Heart Foundations ‘Food 4 Thought’ (754k)
P&G Being Girl website (754k)
Brands in social media (734k)
Burnout series, Burnout Dominator (782k)
BBC, Doctor Who (248k)
Nickelodeon, H2O (767k)
Hotel Chocolat (556k)
Sony BRAVIA Paint (750k)

Peter Kim’s fabulous list of companies using social media. Last count (November 23) was 324.

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang and David Armano:

Video clips at Ustream

With all the weird and wonderful information out on the web, its a wonder how we get anything done.
As Mitchell Kapor writes:

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

Giants like Google and Yahoo have spent a lot of time helping us find what we’re after,
and services like Tumblr and Delicious can help us find similar content. But what happens
to your own little nuggets that you want to track?

Storing and indexing your own content is, for me at least, the next great frontier on the web.
Steppping into the ring with an excellent service is Evernote.

You can clip content in the traditional way with broswer add-ins, run a desktop application with drag and drop functionailty, and even take voice and image notes with the iPhone application. It’s got the standard features like tagging and grouping content for later but you can then retrieve the information from any of the three platforms.

One of the coolest features, beyond its portability, is the text recognition. Written a page of notes and don’t have the time to type them up? Snap a quick shot and they’re permanently saved. It’ll even pick up text within documents, including handwriting.

Solves so many issues for me with notepads, clippings and ramblings all over the place.

Whilst we’re on the indexing trip, a recent article on Marketin Pilgrim talks about recent advancements in video searching. New services are not only searching out tags and external data attached to the clips, but digging into the video to pull out dialouge and even characters within the clip.

So it’s not only the way we access information that’s changing, but they way its stored and shared. Makes it such an exciting time, can you think of where we will be in another 12 months time?

Let me google that for you.

Great quote from a Paul Buchheit presentation.

Gmail now with themes, like this wonderfully retro “terminal”. Eyes hurt now.

And a great little “digital in the wild” observation from Iain.

Gizmodo has been doing a great weekly wrap up of the latest and greatest iPhone apps released that week.
Like Bryan Enos Bloom or the trippy RJDJ, or how could you go past the instant rimshot/cricket soundbite generator. Seriously, people are buying this stuff. Except maybe the last one… it’s free.

Boom-tish.

Tin Eye, an interesting “visual” search engine. As in you upload an image and it’ll will return searches of similar images. It has some interesting uses, such as say you have an image of a cityscape somewhere in the world but have no idea where it is. You could then upload it to Tin Eye and it will either find that same image with details or a similar one. Or… if you were an image creator you could upload your work and see if anyone has ripped it off. The company who makes it ideeinc have a whole bunch of other “visual” search engines as well. Neat.

The iTunes App store where you can download/buy new apps for your iPhone has turned into a boonaza for small time developers who armed with good idea now have platform that can propel them in supedevstardom . And along with the fame comes the money, small time success stories are talking about profits of $250, 000 in two months. The full story from Wired.

Introducing Ubiquity for Firefox, and experiment in connecting the Web with language. labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Ubiquity’s goals are to:

Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)

Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone (not just Web developers) to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

Extend the browser functionality easily

This is Part 1 of Aurora, a concept video created by Adaptive Path in partnership with Mozilla Labs. It sets out to define a plausible vision of how technology, the browser, and the Web might evolve in the future by depicting that experience in a variety of real-world contexts.

The release of Aurora is part of the launch of Mozilla Labs’ browser concept series, an ongoing initiative to encourage designers and developers to contribute their own visions of the future of the browser and the Web. Over the next couple of weeks, they’ll be releasing more video segments, as well as background material showing just what went into imagining the future of the Web and translating that into a video.

Awarded Best Film at Cutting Edge at the British Animation Awards 2008.
Awarded Best Experimental Film at Tirana International Film Festival 2007

A simple story that illustrates the forces shaping social media.

The extremely entertaining Mark Pesce presenting at the Next Wave festival.

More of his thinking on the 3.4 billionth phone, his MAD twitter army and a social experience of the China earthquake.

The google killer? Mmm maybe not, but could be interesting. Powerset searches wikipedia and can bring the information to you instead of you to the information… if that makes sense. Watch the demovid.

So Google is giving all homeless people in San Francisco a permanent phone number and voice mail.
Good for giving people a contact number when looking for work.

Maybe it won’t just be all QR codes, these guys (daeminteractive) seem to be going past using barcodes and instead are using MMS and image recognition to create the all important link between the static ad and interactive content… all via the mobile device. THX: PSFK

I read recently that we seem to be increasingly outsourcing parts of our brain. So here is a little digital helper in that process. See a little detail online and think hey I’d like to remember later… offline. Well step back from that post-it-note. Instead, just click on that little beamme.info icon, enter your mob number and voom  that recipe (insert small detail) has just been sent to your phone. No one keeps the number and it’s free for the user. Neat huh? beamme.info