Fictional character creation is a useful tool in creating an intriguing narrative that captures attention, especially since the character can be easily adapted to fit different digital spaces, such as Video, Microblogging, and Image sharing sites. Media diversity  is also useful in building and unifying online communities that access with media in separate channels.

Creating a consistent brand all through many all social sites one of the best ways to maximize the value of a character or brand campaign.

Ryan Summers and I created a presentation on how to track users across various social media sites using mostly free tools. It was given at Web Analytics Wednesday in Portland, Oregon.

History

A few weeks before the MITX awards ceremony, ISITE Design created a short video called “El Consultador” as an introduction to other agencies.

The El Consultador campaign generated diverse social data. This created issues with tracking data from multiple social media sites across problems with social media is that these is no singular way to gather and rank all of the data over time. Tools like Radian6 and Trucast are in use by larger agencies and businesses, but there exist an increasing amount of free tools for data visualization and engagement reporting that are available online.

This Powerpoint was made for an audible presentation. I collaborated with Ryan Summers of ISITE design on it and presented it at Web Analytics Wednesday. I will attempt to explain the results/processes in a textual manner here.

Profiles Created for the El Consultador Campaign

We used analytic data from Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo and Twitter to determine the most successful aspects of the campaign.

On Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/2309025

On YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz6jt_aSFg0

On Flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/elconsultador/
(Workers at ISITE design superimposed the Consultador face onto a variety of characters in pop culture).

On Twitter:
http://twitter.com/elconsultador

——

Key Performance Indicators

We determined a number of Key Performance Indicators of the social media campaign.

-Direct awareness of ISITE design agency
-3rd part mentions
-Social media followers (number of Twitter followers, comments on YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr).
-Direct communication

YouTube Reports

We used YouTube reports to track the engagement with the video campaign.

Data tracked included:

-Age Demograpics
-Gender Demograpics
-Discovery Sources
-Timeline Trends

The campaign was viewed predominately by 26-45 year old males and mostly during and around the date of the MITX awards. This is the demographic it was aimed at.

Vimeo Stats

Vimeo is a high-quality Video sharing site with a limited but very engaged traffic demographic. We used Vimeo data to find more about who engaged with the campaign and compared it to YouTube data.

Flickr Reports

Flickr has a reporting tool for image views over time for every image. The data can be accessed with a premium Flickr account. We used this data to determine the most viewed (strongest/most impactful) pictures associated with El Consutador on the El Consultador account, and which images should be associated with the campaign on other sites (if future campaigns needed to be implemented).

Google Analytics

We used data from Google Analytics for the page on which El Consultador existed on the ISISTE Webpage. Data was tracked from the “El Consultator” and “MITX” keywords. New visitors and direct traffic were also analyzed.

Social Nodes

The campaign was picked up by three prominent bloggers, including Chris Brogan, Davaid Armano (VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass), and C.C. Chapman (Prominent figure in the community of podcasting, new media, cofounder of the Advanced Guard, a marketing company which focuses on utilizing social media and other emerging technologies).

Blogs linking to the campaigns were not found via inlink searches in Yahoo! Site Explorer, but with an intelligence feed created in Yahoo! Pipes (see below)

Tracking Overall Data

Custom intelligence feeds are useful for checking overall propagation of data. Yahoo! Pipes provides a free custom way to aggregate data across Google blog search, Google news, Technorati, Flickr, and Twitter.

———

Data Visualization and Tracking for Twitter

I presented an extended set of tools and data visualization methods for Twitter. Links for all of them are here:

Reports/Demographic Research:
Summize
http://tweetstats.com/

TweetVolume
http://tweetvolume.com/

Twitter Mobile (vs. Twitter in browser)
http://m.twitter.com/home

Neoformix Twitter Stream Graphs
http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterStreamGraphs/view.php (I provided a live demo of this).

Twitter Stream Graphs are a simple way to rsearch keyword volume associated with a brand or campaign. Neoformix also tracks keywords over time, meaning that one can see when a certain keyword became popular.
——–

Future Suggestions:
More Flickr photos could be linked to all of the other accounts, such as Flickr, Youtube, and Vimeo. Linking together social media campaigns in a more robust fashion will affect CTR’s by making the campaign spreadable across various demographic profiles and types of social media users.

——-

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who studies new media and the relationship between humans and computers. She enjoys data visualization (click for more info on conference tracking), search engine optimization (ask), and how marketing works in the online ecosystem.

She graduated from Lewis & Clark College in May 2008 with a degree in Sociology/Anthropology and wrote her thesis on cell phones and the effect of technology on cultural constructions of space and privacy.

You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic, or drop her an E-mail at caseorganic[at]gmai[dot]com. She’s spoken at various conferences including MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3, Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conferece, Ignite Portland, and Ignite Boulder.

She also blogs at Nerdabout.com and http://www.blog.makerlab.org, a Portland new media incubator. She founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and technology. She is also involved with building and studying electronics with DorkbotPDX.

The Internet Age

There are strong indications that the Internet has already become the most pervasive factor in human life. By doing so, the first part of the 21st Century deserves to be named The Internet Age so it can be compared with other periods that have radically transformed human life such as the Agrarian Age and the Industrial Age.

The Internet has been called the Information Super Highway because it transmits billions of documents daily. It is the Internet as a super highway and how it competes with other forms of transportation that will be discussed in this article.

The Internet as Transportation

To get a better understanding of why the Internet is a form of transportation, consider the history of the Pony Express. It started in April 1860 to provide a fast mail service between the east and west coasts of the United States. It took about ten days to deliver its mail. The Pony Express announced its closure 18 months later in October 1861 just two days after the new Transcontinental Telegraph reached Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Pony Express came to an end because the telegraph was a new form of transportation that could deliver messages much faster (in just few minutes) and much cheaper.

Since the Pony Express and the telegraph both delivered messages, even though they did it in very different ways, both of them can be seen as competing forms of transportation.

Once it’s recognized that the telegraph is a form of transportation, it’s easy to see that the Internet is also a form of transportation. It delivers billions of messages, mail, documents, music, pictures and videos worldwide as fast as lightning wherever there are Internet connections, and it does it much cheaper than its slow moving competition—trucks, trains and planes. The Internet moves only digital information, but the problem is that this used to be non-digital information, which was moved by trucks, trains and planes. The Internet is in direct competition with them. The more digital media the Internet transports, the less non-digital media the others transport.

Print Media

eBooks

The promise of digital books, e Books as they are called, is that they can be delivered faster and cheaper and sold for significantly lower prices because they aren’t printed on expensive paper, stored in expensive warehouses and transported by gas guzzling trucks. Millions of acres of trees no longer have to be cut down to make paper. Millions of gallons of toxic ink no longer have to be manufactured to make printed documents. Millions of gallons of gas no longer have to be consumed to transport logs, paper and printed documents. Millions of tons of acid paper no longer need be dumped in landfills. Besides being much cheaper to produce and ship, eBooks are environmentally friendly.

The challenge of eBooks is that the industries that rely on the printed book will have to close their doors. Tens of thousands of print workers—booksellers, printers and truck drivers will lose their jobs and have to switch to other professions.

Some industry analysts believe that most bookstores will be out of business within five years.

Newspapers

Printed newspapers have all of the problems printed books have except they can go to press faster than books. Newspapers, however, have a big problem that books don’t have. Newspapers depend on getting a large part of their revenue from the advertising they print. As newspapers receive competition from TV, radio, blogs, twitters and online news, their advertising sales have declined but their costs have increased. Income from classified ads, once a major source of income for newspapers, has continued to decline as online companies take them over such as monster.com for jobs and eBay for products. Apartment rentals and real estate listings are increasingly be taking over by online companies that also have no newspaper affiliations. In the face of mounting print advertising costs, advertisers are taking advantage of the new online ad opportunities, an option they didn’t have before. They are finding that online advertising is not only cheaper but more successful.

The future of print newspapers is bleak. If newspapers are to survive, their only option is to develop a successful online operation as soon as possible so they can dump everything that involves printing newspapers—paper, ink, printing presses, employees who work with print media, delivery trucks, warehouses, etc. To survive online, newspapers must find a way to obtain enough ad revenues or they won’t be able to survive. The chance of finding enough online ad revenue is not encouraging. Those who hold out and try to make a go of it as a print operation will not survive. Most newspapers will be gone within five years.

Magazines and Journals

Magazines and Journals have all of the problems newspapers have except their article lead times are longer. They will continue to lose advertising revenue. Their choice is the same: switch to an online operation or go out of business. Unless they can carry over their print advertising in a downsized online publishing operation, they too are unlikely to survive.

Music, Pictures, Videos and Software—the Other Digital Media

Everything that applies to digital books applies to digital music, pictures and videos. Recorded music on CDs is coming to an end. Digital pictures have already replaced film prints. Videos can be downloaded from the Internet, and this trend will continue. Eventually Internet videos will replace video DVDs.

Software will become primarily available as Internet downloads.

The Internet as Teleportation

Just as the Internet is a form of transportation that threatens traditional transport companies, it’s also a form of teleportation that threatens many other traditional businesses.

The Internet has not yet reached the “Beam me up, Scottie” type of teleportation where humans are digitized, transported through space and reconstituted. Instead, live images of people are digitized and transported to some Internet cloud where they can transact in real time with other people’s digitized images. This is called videoconferencing. Cisco’s WebEx is one of many software packages that make online sales presentations and conferences possible.

The promise of Internet “teleportation” is that it means the millions of outside sales reps will be taken off the road so they can make online sales calls from offices and home. As online reps they will be able to make extra calls each day because they won’t have to spend time traveling between accounts. The geographical location of their accounts no longer matters because it’s just as easy to make sales calls in New York in the morning and San Francisco in the afternoon as it is to make several calls in the same city the same day.

This will take a million cars off the road and reduce gas consumption by millions of gallons a year. Companies will be able to reduce their sales expenses by tens of thousands of dollars per sales rep. Expensive weeklong semiannual conferences in major cities will be canceled because they can be replaced by inexpensive online video conferences where reps can attend from their offices and their homes.

The challenge of converting outside reps to online reps is that it will have a huge impact on world economies. These sales reps will no longer need company cars, airline tickets and car rentals. They will no longer stay in hotels and motels and eat at restaurants. All of these industries will be forced to downsize and lay off hundreds of thousands of workers as reps are taken off the road.

Virtual Visits

Free Internet phone calls such as those offered by SKYPE allow individuals to visit each other using VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) no matter where they may be. This is just the beginning. As video conferencing systems come down in price, instead of getting in the family car to visit relatives and friends, many of these visits will take place over the Internet because they will be easier to make, cheaper and save time.

Virtual Vacations

If you want to see lions in Africa or Kodiak bears in Alaska, you can spend thousands of dollars to go there in person with the hope of encountering them, but if you choose to call up a video on the Internet, chances are you’ll see more animals and learn more about them because the photographers who prepare these videos often spend months and even years taking their pictures. It’s still more exciting to see these animals in person, but it’s likely that more and more people will see them over the Internet because it’s so much less expensive. You can expect to see a reduction in vacation travel because of this.

Telecommuting

As more people work at home by telecommuting, more two car families will become one car families as telecommuting families find they can get by with just one car. There will be less traffic on the road, and less office space will be required. People who work as telecommuters can live anyplace where they can get an Internet connection. Many of those who can afford it will leave the congested, expensive cities to live in cleaner, less crime ridden smaller communities.

Online Education

As education costs skyrocket, there is no choice but to develop an inexpensive system of online education to grant degrees and offer retraining to the millions of people who will find themselves unemployed as the Internet eliminates jobs in competitive industries.

Schools such as MIT and Stanford have already put most of their classes online where anyone can read the lectures and study materials. Online schools such as the University of Phoenix have offered online degrees for several years. Now, Stanford and several other universities are offering online master’s degree programs that they claim match the quality of education found on their campuses. It’s only a matter of time before more universities offer similar online degrees.

With technology changing our world so rapidly, most people will have to receive constant Internet training to update their skills so they can keep their current jobs or switch to new professions. From now on, continuing education will be a lifelong activity. Our current campus based educational system simply cannot handle this increased volume of educational traffic.

The Age of the Automobile Is No More

Even though cars, trucks and planes will continue to be an important part of our lives for the foreseeable future, their role will be diminished as billions of digital products are shipped via the Internet instead of by FedEx, UPS and USPS and as millions of workers no longer need cars for their jobs. To survive, the auto industry will have to downsize. There is simply no way that the auto industry can regain the sales of yesterday. The Age of the Automobile is over.

We Ain’t Seen Nuthin’ Yet

Artificial Intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil suggests that towards the end of the 21st Century it will be possible to create digital copies of human beings and upload them onto a computer. Once this happens, people will be able to live virtual lives that they will not be able to distinguish from life in the physical world. After people are converted to digital entities, it will eventually be possible to create android and “blank” human bodies that can receive the digital copies so that people can move between virtual and real life existences indefinitely.

There are quite a few advantages in having a system like this.

Space Exploration Instead of the huge cost of transporting human bodies through space and keeping them alive in some form of stasis for hundreds, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years, it will be much cheaper and more efficient to put copies of people onto a computer, turn off the power for the length of the trip and turn it on when the spaceship lands on a planet suitable for human habitation. Once landed, robots can reconstitute the people in physical bodies, perhaps android bodies to start with, so they can populate it. Since space travel is very dangerous, only copies of living people need be sent into space. The originals can remain at home where they can live normal lives—whatever “normal” might be one hundred years from now.

Once people are copied onto a computer, their digital folders can be sent over the Internet to places on earth as well as to locations in near space such as the moon’s spacecraft launching station. When this happens, it will be a real form of teleportation. Once a new planet has been colonized by the first spaceship, the fastest way to transport more colonists to that planet will, of course, be over the Internet.

Prison Reform Rather than maintain prisons where it costs five to ten times as much to house a prisoner as it does to send a child to public school, governments can use tax dollars more effectively by sentencing people who are convicted of crimes to virtual lives where they can serve out their sentences in inexpensive-to-maintain virtual worlds. For those whose sentences are not for life, they can be reconstituted in physical bodies at the end of their sentences and allowed to live in the real world again. Some prisoners, however, may prefer to remain in their new virtual world where they will have freedom to do things they could never do in the real world.

War and Other Dangerous Occupations Rather than send people to war as soldiers or put them in a dangerous environment, it will be easier to make physical copies of each person loaded into androids so that if the physical copy is destroyed, the original person will remain unharmed. Since the experience gained performing dangerous occupations can provide people with valuable professional experience, at the end of these assignments, these experiences can be merged electronically with their originals so the originals can continue to advance in their careers.

No Turning Back

There is no turning back. If we choose to return to the “good old days” by getting rid of the Internet, we shall simply empower other countries to develop superior technologies that they will use to compete against us. A refusal to utilize new technologies can only lead to greater unemployment and economic hardship.

The Internet is in some ways like Pandora’s Box. Even though it brings wonderful gifts to the human race, it does so at the cost by depriving millions of people of the old jobs that were created during the Industrial and Post-Industrial Ages. This will create poverty and major economic problems unless nations prepare proactively to provide top quality, inexpensive education so the unemployed can begin new careers. To solve the problems created by technology and to reap the benefits it brings, we have no choice but to use technology to facilitate our transition to a new, more environmentally friendly world.

The Internet is already making revolutionary changes in our lives. It is dominant technology of our time. In recognition of these changes, this era should be called the Internet Age.

—–

About

This article was written by Russell Dauterman. His career has covered teaching (philosophy with a specialty in logic), publishing (working for bookstores, book wholesalers and publishers) and computers (retailing and database design). He is also Caseorganic’s Uncle.

Russell Dauterman can be reached at dbtrees at gmail dot com.

A lot of times we wait around for technology to just “appear” like we see in films. But if we continue to do that, nothing will get built. Thankfully, people are out there filling in the gaps.

There’s a set of a new sign language for controlling movement from a distance. Very intuitive and simple to learn. Especially with the rewards of being able to move things across the room without touching them.

The rest of this post is over at the CyborgCamp.com Blog, as it relates directly to the event.

Gesture Recognition Demo at the MIT Media Lab with Jamie Zigelbaum.

—————

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who also posts over at the Makerlab Blog, which is something you might enjoy reading if you enjoyed reading the post above. It’s about more experimental tech and activities related to pushing the limits of art and technology. If not, you can always follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

During my last semester of college, I became obsessed with the idea that I would be able to somehow put my degree in sociology/anthropology to work in the real world. When I stumbled upon search engine optimization, I was elated. When I learned that Cyborg Anthropology applied there as well, I was even more excited. And when Todd Mintz encouraged me to write my first blog post ever on the SEM PDX blog, I was so nervous that I didn’t leave my friends house for 4 hours while I composed it.

Perfectionism was a difficult thing to get over. I gradually realized that I had to allow myself to suck in order to get anywhere. At Weiden+Kennedy, there’s a massive art piece on the wall that says “Fail Harder”. I knew I had to fail harder than ever before. Oakhazelnut.com was the silliest name for a website I could think of, and the early WordPress template I used was ugly, heavy and clunky. But I kept on it.

I also realized that I wasn’t going to have a community anymore when I graduated from college, so I searched hard for one in Portland. I attended meetups relating to pretty much everything until I found Legion of Tech and Beer and Blog. Some of the first people I ever met were Reid Beals, Bram Pitoyo, Dawn Foster and Rick Turoczy. It was the beginning of an exciting and busy journey into the heart of the tech scene. But it didn’t take long to get oriented. Everyone was filled with zest for their ideas, and it spread quickly to me. I began to take small risks and write more.

Up until now, I’ve been putting in 110 hour weeks trying to do anthropological studies, blogging (which as anyone who blogs knows — is much more difficult than it looks), attending events, and learning more about seo and Yahoo! Pipes. My learning curve is strange, so it has been a long process. I’ve been given great support from people who really know what they are doing. Focused, brilliant, fascinating people.

Now that I am blogging, writing and consulting full-time, I feel like I’ve been thrown directly into the open arms of the tech community. There’s more time for coffeeshops, events, and research now. I’m excited to be able to see more faces.

It was great to be able to walk into the local Backspace coffeeshop and get high fives from all of the great people there. Bram Pitoyo said, “welcome to the life of a Freelancer”. I wholeheartedly embrace it.

My last job was excellent, and I took it after graduating from college in May so that I would be able to learn a bunch of new skills. I learned so many new things I was ready to explode. Drupal was fun, E-mail marketing was great, and new seo tools were awesome. I look forward to how that company does in the future. It’s doing very well and has an excellent business model I was excited to learn more about.

Now I have time for CyborgCamp, MIT’s Futures of Entertainment Conference, Makerlab, Ignite Portland, Refresh Portland, blogging for the Discovery Channel at Nerdabout, AboutUs.org, Dorkbot, search engine optimization, Beer and Blog and of course, Cyborg Anthropology.

Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick for the Discovery Channel write-up on Read Write Web. Marshall has been a tremendous help to me. In addition to showing me things like Skitch, he’s lent advice and support to me on numerous occasions.

I want to thank everyone in the Portland Tech community, but there are infinite people to thank. Perhaps I can thank an entire directory of great Tweeple at once (via AboutUs.org Portland Tech Twitter).

I think that’s about it. I am a little speechless at the support I’ve been given, and I can’t wait to share it with a wider audience.

Sincerely,

@caseorganic

This is the PowerPoint of a lightning talk given by Amber Case (@caseorganic) at Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conference in Portland, Oregon on Sept 4+5th. NOTE: This was a 10-minute compressed presentation. From Telephone to Tweetup: an Abbreviated History of Technology and Social Exchange.

Some Theory Behind the Subject

The invention of the telephone ushered in an era of ‘on-demand’ social connection. These conversations were freeing, but were still limited to location and time. As communication technology matured, telephones became detached from their cords and were allowed to travel with their users.This detachment from location allowed conversation to happen in more times and more places. As the amount of time and space between nodes of connection decreased, the intersection of rapid news methods such as blogging, mobile technology, and chatrooms begin to merge. This convergence allowed dramatic increases in the ability to rapidly convey information to others. Instead of engaging with one person at a time, many are now capable of talking at once. No where is this more prevalent than on Twitter. It has found ways to connect communities, stave off suburban isolation, and warn of earthquakes before medical help can access them. The distance between individual and community will continue to decrease, and those products and services which decrease the amount of time and space it takes to create an action will be the most successful. Actions and devices will become lighter and lighter, and the social will continue to become more and more mobile. The convergence of various technologies will result in rapid learning and communication never imagined before. For details on the original event, look at the SlideShare Link.

Slideshow transcript

Slide 1: Every bullet point in this presentation is less than 140 characters.

Slide 2: This is because the text of these slides will also be broadcasted on Twitter at the time of this speech.

Slide 3: In this way, the speech can live in two places at once.

Slide 4: To one audience here at Inverge.

Slide 5: And also to 600+ followers on Twitter. [@Inverge] [#Inverge]

Slide 6: You can follow @caseorganic to see it in action.

Slide 7: [this is a waiting period because the Internet connection here is probably slow] @caseorganic

Slide 8: Hello.

Slide 9: My Name is Amber Case.

Slide 10: I am a Cyborg Anthropologist.

Slide 11: I study the symbiotic relationship between humans and computers…

Slide 12: And the psychology of space that is created by online environments.

Slide 13: Or, how the online experience is “ experienced” .

Slide 14: In Anthropology, one could call this a Digital Phenomenology

Slide 15: …

Slide 16: We live in a community that increasingly transcends time and space.

Slide 17: It is our relationship with technology that allows us extended capabilities.

Slide 18: Right now, search engines and people are interacting with your social profiles and websites.

Slide 19: While you aren’ t there.

Slide 20: And with social networking sites like Twitter, you can watch many conversations at once.

Slide 21: …

Slide 22: Consider Letter Writing, the first Internet.

Slide 23: The message to response ratio was very slow, but it was social.

Slide 24: Enter the Telephone.

Slide 25: Thus began the era of ‘ On Demand’ social communication.

Slide 26: This made the world very small.

Slide 27: You could stand on one side of the world, whisper something, and be heard on the other.

Slide 28: But to those who had never experienced a telephone, the device was as foreign as the Internet once was in 1993.

Slide 29: The fact that a human could speak into a machine and hear a voice on the other side gave the appearance of schizophrenia.

Slide 30: Over time, the strangeness of the new dissolved into formal society and the landline telephone started to get along with humans.

Slide 31: Those living in suburban communities were less capable of reaching actual members of society on a daily basis.

Slide 32: …and the telephone allowed them an escape from the isolation of industrial modernity.

Slide 33: But the telephone was limited by the length of its cord and its proximity to a phone jack.

Slide 34: So along came the cordless phone.

Slide 35: It was free! {yay!}

Slide 36: …to run around the house…

Slide 37: So then the Cell Phone arrived on the scene. {take that!}

Slide 38: While it was the least rooted to place,

Slide 39: The Cell Phone did not offer information transparency.

Slide 40: It only allowed one conversation at a time (excluding 3-way).

Slide 41: Cell Phone + Text allowed decentralized message access and multiple recipients, but limited message transparency.

Slide 42: Then Twitter happened.

Slide 43: It was not rooted to place and time.

Slide 44: It allowed multiple communication channels and recipients.

Slide 45: Users were praised for contribution and helpfulness to those in their network.

Slide 46: Why does it work?

Slide 47: Twitter is a centralized technosocial hybrid that asks a single question that can never be fully answered.

Slide 48: …

Slide 49: What

Slide 50: Are

Slide 51: You

Slide 52: Doing?

Slide 53: The question is asked by all, to all. Socialization is aided by machine.

Slide 54: The time and space it takes to absorb and disperse information is compressed.

Slide 55: Twitter takes advantage of the 4th Dimensionality of the Internet.

Slide 56: [Analog] [Demonstration]

Slide 57: Lets look at some Architectural Theory

Slide 58: “ Our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them.\”

Slide 59: “ It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them.\”

Slide 60: “ Interference interchanges must be fast, convenient, comfortable, without undue effort in a controlled environment.”

Slide 61: The General Theory of Relativity

Slide 62: The shape of space makes people more, and people create the shape of space.

Slide 63: The Analog World is full of Friction

Slide 64: The level of Friction in the Digital world has far less.

Slide 65: Online, we are capable of innovating in a frictionless atmosphere.

Slide 66: There are dangers to this.

Slide 67: Frictionless development becomes cancerous if not restrained.

Slide 68: Too many features/innovations reduce overall value.

Slide 69: LIKE FACEBOOK.

Slide 70: Now, lets talk about highways.

Slide 71: Highways are giant projects requiring high levels of funding and cooperation.

Slide 72: To dig up a highway and move it costs millions of dollars.

Slide 73: But rerouting a path online takes a few minutes with a 301 redirect.

Slide 74: People, when compressed, can do more in less time and less space.

Slide 75: Actions flow to spaces with reduced activation energy and barriers to entry.

Slide 76: Humans and Technology Co-create each other through an Actor/Network of technosocial interaction.

Slide 77: “ In the search for itself and an affectionate sociality, it easily gets lost in the jungle of the self…”

Slide 78: “ Someone who is poking around in the fog of his of his or her own self is no longer capable of noticing that this isolation,

Slide 79: “ This ’solitary-confinement of the ego’ is a mass sentence. [Ulrich Beck, 40 in Bauman’ s Liquid Modernity 2000:37]”

Slide 80: [So Technosocial Interaction is about Transcending the silos of Mental Isolation]

Slide 81: Hello

Slide 82: The key to the semantic web is to always reduce the steps in user action.

Slide 83: Twitter engages the user in ways that do not decay.

Slide 86: See SlideShare for image

Slide 87: See Slideshare for image

Slide 88: Husband on Google Street View

Slide 89: Old map

Slide 90: See Slideshare for image.

Slide 92: @caseorganic On Social Sites Everywhere Thesis: “Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement” Available @:oakhazelnut.com

———-
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthopologist and Social Media Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can contact her by E-mail at caseorganic at gmail.com, or on Twitter @caseorganic.

Convergence culture has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape.

The speakers and audience will be a mixed industry and academic crowd, and the diverse topics grouped together will give the conference both broad coverage of the new media and entertainment space and deep engagement across industries and disciplinary boundaries. This year’s conference will work to bring together the themes from last year - media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution - with the consortium’s new projects in moving towards an increasingly global view of media convergence and flow.

Topics for this year’s panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia properties, franchising and world building, comics and commerce, social and spreadable media, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.

The conference is on the 21th and 22nd of November at MIT. It works around a talk-show style model with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. Over the last two years this produced great, thorough treatments of the subject matter, getting industry and academic speakers together but avoiding product pitches. For a sense of what to expect, you can check out the site from last year’s event.

This will be the third conference of this kind.

Confirmed speakers for this year’s conference include: Javier Grillo-Marxuach (The Middleman), Alex McDowell (Production Designer, The Watchmen), Kevin Slavin (Area/Code), Donald K Ranvaud (Buena Onda Films), Amber Case (Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant), Mauricio Mota (New Content [Brazil]), Alisa Perren (George State University), Amanda Lotz (University of Michigan), Sharon Ross (Columbia College Chicago), Nancy Baym (University of Kansas), Alice Marwick (New York University), Vu Nguyen (VP of Business Development, crunchyroll.com) with more to come.

Thanks to Joshua Green of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium for hooking me up with this excellent opportunity!

[display_podcast]

Click to Subscribe

Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

This episode features Mario Landau-Holdsworth, an economics major and entrepreneur from Lewis & Clark College. He’s originally from San Francisco, California, and has helped his cousin Valerie Landau with her binary glove project. The project has brought him into contact with Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, and many other movers and shakers in Silicon Valley.

We talked about what makes an application addictive, designing tactile devices to interface digitally, using typewriters in Starbucks, Animorphs, blogging in an ape costume, Arduino-powered character recognition, the Russian Space program, Shiloh-Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, and a house that survived three major fires.

Link to Mario’s new project: Digital to Analog Ape

He’s also on twitter at @thelinguini.

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds?

Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.

Past submissions include:

• How To Run A Startup And Not Lose Your Mind
• A Short Course On How to Ride Freight Trains
• Boiling Water in Five Easy Steps
• A History of the Stick Figure
• Open Source Rockets
• How Keeping Chickens Will Save Your Life
• The Complete and Utter History of the Numa Numa Dance

Submissions will be accepted until Oct. 14, at midnight.
Click here to submit a talk.

Already submitted a proposal? Selected IP4 Talks Announced on October 20 at the Ignite Portland Website.

When and Where

Ignite Portland 4 will be happening on November 13th, 2008 at the Bagdad Theatre. This is confirmed.

3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd
Portland, OR 97214
(503) 236-9234

What next?

RSVP for Ignite Portland 4 on Upcoming.org

Follow @igniteportland on Twitter

Looking for More?

See the Ignite Portland Constitution for some of the values and criteria that we follow, and this post for some of the background and ideas that inspired Ignite Portland to begin with.

[display_podcast]

Click to Subscribe

Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

This episode features Troy Harlan, wherein we talked about information gathering, filtering and consuming (naturally,) human factors, trilobites, reading at 2,000 words per minute, INTP’s, striving for objectivity, The Black Swan, hunches, and why it’s better to “have no map at all than have the wrong map”—all recorded on the road from St. Johns to downtown Portland.

Doug Fieldhouse of Vesta, ClearEdge Power, ID Experts, nLIGHT and BRING Recycling Are Selected as this Year’s Award Winners

Sept. 18, 2008, Portland, Ore. — The Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) announced the winners of the 2008 OEN Tom Holce Awards for Entrepreneurship during its 15^th annual awards ceremony on September 18, 2008. The ceremony, held at the Oregon Convention Center, honored finalists in four categories: Entrepreneurship Award for Individual Achievement; Development Stage Company of the year; Working capital Stage Company of the year; and the Growth Stage Company of the year.

Doug Fieldhouse of Vesta received the 2008 Entrepreneurship Award for Individual Achievement. “Doug exemplifies the entrepreneurial spirit that we celebrate with these awards,” said Bob Sternberg, judging chair for this year’s awards. “He thinks big and looks for ways to make a tremendous impact, and he has the ability to execute on those ideas in ways that scale up effectively. His success with Vesta is just one example of his ability to change and jump into new opportunities and persistently grow the business over time.” In addition, he has a long history of mentoring and coaching young entrepreneurs.

In the Development category, ClearEdge Power of Portland, Oregon is this year’s winner. ClearEdge Power is a pioneer and provider of ultra-clean and efficient on-site energy generation systems. They have a substantial market opportunity and are professionally managed, well funded and are making substantial progress with product development and early adoption customers.

ID Experts of Beaverton is the winner in the Working Capital Category. ID Experts provides identity theft protection services for individuals, corporations and the public sector. They have successfully adapted to the changing needs of the market when required. Their painstaking and labor intensive process to restore customers’ identities will make it difficult for other companies to compete successfully against them in this marketplace. Due to these efforts, they have a 100 percent success rate restoring identities.

The winner of the Growth Category is nLIGHT Corporation of Vancouver, Washington.

nLIGHT develops and manufactures photonics modules for industrial, defense, and medical applications. The company had the vision to intelligently re-invent itself in the early stages of the collapse of the telecom bubble and the temerity to implement that new strategy under extremely difficult circumstances. It applied its skills and ingenuity in the marketplace to create, shepherd and grow a novel mentoring program (MAPS—Mentoring for Advanced Program for Students) that is having a real impact on local education and the future of this community.

BRING Recycling is this year’s winner of the Non-profit Award. BRING Recycling collects and resells low-cost used building materials as well as provides deconstruction and recycling services. Revenues generated fund conservation and education programs about the best way to reuse and recycle. BRING Recycling was selected for its organizational and entrepreneurial strengths overall, and how the organization was able to change course to meet changing demands in the community. BRING Recycling received a $5,000 award from the Meyer Memorial Trust at the Awards Ceremony.

“The recipients of this year’s awards have been successful because of their determination, independent thinking, and their ability to change direction and chart their own course.” said Linda Weston, executive director and president of OEN. “From clean power to identity protection, these Oregon and Southwest Washington companies are making innovative contributions that make a difference in our communities and beyond.”

The winners were chosen from 14 finalists by the OEN award judging committee, chaired by Bob Sternberg. Companies from throughout Oregon and Southwest Washington were nominated for the Awards, and were narrowed to the 14 finalists after hundreds of hours of due diligence, including site visits and face-to-face interviews. A comprehensive list of winners and finalists follows this release.

Individual Category

Doug Fieldhouse, Vesta - Winner
Ray King, AboutUs.org
Susan Sokol Blosser, Sokol Blosser

Working Capital Category

ID Experts- Winner
Beaverton, OR

Pop Art, Inc.
Portland, Oregon

PV Powered
Bend, Oregon

Growth Category

nLIGHT Corporation- Winner
Vancouver, WA

HemCon Medical Technologies, Inc.
Portland, Oregon

Timbercon
Lake Oswego, WA

Development Category

ClearEdge Power- Winner
Portland, Oregon

AboutUs, Inc.
Portland, Oregon

Jama Software
Portland, Oregon

Plas2Fuel Corporation
Chris Ulum
Kelso, WA

About OEN

Founded in 1991, the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network is a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to providing opportunities for Oregon entrepreneurs and improving the business climate for emerging, growth-oriented companies statewide. The organization has members throughout Oregon and southwest Washington. For more information about the OEN, visit its website at www.oen.org.

For more information, press only:
Jessica Foote
OnPR
503-802-4406
jessicaf@onpr.com

—-

Congratulations to all of the winners! Thanks for helping to put Oregon’s Entrepreneurs on the map!

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant based in Portland, Oregon. You can contact her by E-mail or @caseorganic on Twitter.