rodcorp

Publish, then pass along

The next big thing in mobile land says that published (often paid-for) content catalyses person-to-person use, which viral marketeers will be happy about.

Picture messaging is catching on. Person-to-person messaging across networks is flourishing and nearly all new phones come with a camera and a hot button directly to the internet. The next big thing will be personalised multimedia content delivered directly to these phones, and first indications in the market are positive.

Since T-Mobile introduced viral-style alerts (pictures, sound and stuff you get automatically once you've signed up) we've seen a 15% rise in person-to-person usage, which suggests folks who subscribe to these new services like the idea of it and are replicating that viral instinct of sending on pictures of hamsters breakdancing, plate-spinning, etc.

This means the networks are a bit happier, but Mr Content still can't see the leverage needed to maximise the time and money it takes to produce or repurpose content for the mobile space. It's early days yet but help is at hand with the vibes from the networks looking promising.

What's wrong with the new Trafalgar Square

Hugh Pearman tells us that Foster's alterations to Trafalgar Square have badly unbalanced it. And maybe pedestrians too are unnerved by the new configuration. Or perhaps they're avoiding the ghosts of buses, cars, taxis and bikes still heading eastwards across the upper piazza:

Note: on returning to take the photos in September (and seeing what looked like remedial work under way in two places on the new upper piazza) it was interesting to see how people responded to the new space. While they still naturally congregate in the original square and on the steps of the National Gallery - and on the new steps down to the lower square - they tend to shun the new upper piazza where the road used to run, preferring to cross it quickly rather than linger

Prickly and entertaining opinion piece on micro payments

Suggests the real reason people don't charge online:

Shirky argued that most content will stay free because artists want fame more than they want fortune. I'd take it a step further. The Web-wide reticence among independent artists to actually hunker down and charge for material is because we know that if we did so, we wouldn't get fame or fortune. We'd get, at best, beer money and a clique.

[via boingboing]

Bruce Sterling: Ten technologies that deserve to die

DVDs are on his list.

Update, 4 Feb 2004:
Hello and welcome Slashdotters. Sorry there's not much to read about Bruce Sterling here - this page feels like the host who forgot they were having visitors and has nothing to offer for tea. So, er... here's some drawings done on a train that you can look at instead, and here's an adjusted tube map with walklines between the stations. Ah, and here's some new and old Bruce Sterling we found recently: Newer York, New York: After the Great Blaze of 2015, Manhattan went green - thanks to Bill Gates and bambootekture (Wired, Jan 2000), and, paraphrasing Orwell, "think of a Mickey Mouse boot stamping on a human face forever".

JG Ballard: I'd love to write like Francis Bacon painted

JG Ballard, Millennium People, Foyles event at the Congress Centre, London, 18 Sep 2003

The audience: an unsurprising mix of students, London mediakids, older lit-fans. As JGB later points out, it’s like a Nuremberg rally for the middle class.

We, the Guardian-reading audience, stack up downstairs in the heat, waiting to get access to the hall in which JGB is mic-testing. Clearly this is designed to put us on edge. Eventually he goes, and the doors open. There's a politely frenzied rush for seats at the front. The seats fill up, the temperature rises. We wait. We thirstily eye the bottles of still and lightly sparkling water on the table in front of the chairs on the halogened stage. And the crown becomes unsettled as everyone starts thinking, at the same time more or less, about how long a wait it would take to trigger a change, to tip us from civilised behaviour to sociopathic violence.

But at last he's back and we start: 10 minutes reading from the new novel, 15 minutes discussion with Alex Clark, then questions from the audience.

He saw the first supermarkets and motorways as concrete (irreversible) progressions psychologically (no stop signs, no traffic lights, freedom from authority (see also Will Self of course)). Real London is in the burbs and near the airports, between the Ms 25, 3 and 4. Muswell Hill and the rest of zones 1-3: heritage London.

And now: the era of television is over, now we're in the era of pure consumerism.

Invisible Literature: manuals, reports, instructions, handouts, corporate and bureaucratic memos and notices. The internet makes all that stuff come alive, though you need to spend so much time to keep up with it...

JGB likes: Magritte, Ernst, Dali, Bacon ("I'd love to be able to write like Francis Bacon painted"), the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, William Burroughs. All of whom get a thumbs up. On the other hand, he doesn't like Joyce:

Joyce's incomprehensible novel, which has provided a living for generations of English Literature professors, represents a lamentable tendency in 20th-century fiction: the quest for total obscurity. Finnegans Wake is the best example of modernism disappearing up its own fundament.

Maps: counterfactual, imaginary, in art

• Counterfactual map of a post-WW2 Neu York
• Gravity Lens has links to many maps of imaginary worlds (no permalink so look for 10 Sep 2003). See also Manguel and Gaudalupi's Dictionary of Imaginary Places, which has many maps.
• Anna Oliver's The Use of Maps in Contemporary Art

[via the Maproom]

Group mapping: Mindworld

Douwe Osinga's Mindworld is an experiment in group mapping.

I have always liked maps and drawn them when bored. It is very noticeable that maps drawn by people from different locations look rather different. This project tries to visualize these differences. The map above should look as much possible like a map of the world. Please check the red pixel above and use the form below to decide whether it should be water of land.

Not surprising that the group-think orients the map with the Americas on the left; interesting though how vaguely Australia and Asia are mapped. Its slightly vertically-squashed projection seems to be a subtle comment on the inaccuracies in the familiar Mercator projection. And clearly the Buckminster Fullerites haven't visited in force yet. But, as Coherence Engine points out, this is software that enables a group to find consensus pretty quickly, but that once the majority consensus is set, it's hard to shift.
[via Coherence Engine]

Illustrated Invisible Cities

An occasionally-updated list of illustrations of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, newest first.

• Mikhail Viesel has illustrated every city in IC (text in Russian, though the explanation is in English)
• Roman Ondak's work (and workshops) cite Invisible Cities (and remind us of Paul Noble's work); Sergio Bonelli Editore illustrators made 11 drawings for the Milano Triennale; and here's one more city. Christine Boyer's Cybercities is an interesting read.
• Our own illustrations: We're starting to post some current art projects: illustrations for Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, etc. Some of this was discussed on an Edward Tufte thread on the London Underground map, where Jeffrey Berg pointed us on to these maps of internet and p2p networks.
• Wayne Thiebaud illustrated a limited-run edition by Arion Press, see a great set of images here. "The artist Wayne Thiebaud contributed 12 drawings, with the idea that the images of cities and objects remain invisible until the reader takes action. To realize this concept, Andrew Hoyem designed the book with the drawings printed on clear plastic in different colors of inks, each matching the color of the following sheet. The images are revealed only when the transparent sheet is turned back onto the preceding page, a white sheet with printed text." Also: the related Souvenirs of Cities print. (His Hill City (Day City), 1981 is slightly ICish, and reminiscent of the urban canyons of Brazil.)
• The Illuminated Italo Calvino project (tantalising, because there aren't any pictures. Nor here.)
• Not an illustration, but an interesting project by Medialab's Rich Streitmatter-Tran on Impossible/Invisible Forms, which planned to render visually four narrative strands/accounts - those of Calvino, Polo, Khan, the reader. A project that might work better for IC's If On A Winter's Night a Traveller. (And R.S-T wrote to say the project hasn't made huge leaps forward yet, and suggests Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World as another interesting target)
• Other things: Binary Bonsai's concepts and renderings for Baucis; Lynne Devine, Glasgow School of Art; Catherine Rive (slightly ambiguous as to whether it's an illustration of IC or not); possible illustration in an essay called Utility and Uselessness; something by Martin Lee

(previously updated in in June 2003)

Mobile games: slides and papers from GDC2003

Here's the full list.

• David Collier's Mobile Games: Trends from Japan (PDF)
• Ashley Smith's Cross Media Mobile Games – SMS TV & Gaming (zipped Powerpoint)

Coupland calls the singing voice of the human soul

Douglas Coupland tells The Morning News how he goes all Golan Levin on his audiences:

So without telling anyone in the audience why, I said 'Okay, who's got a phone' and called them up. 'Now go to your neighbor and find out their number and phone them and they’ll phone you back or whatever. House, could you dim down the lights?' Everybody thought it was 'hee hee, really funny.' Or whatever, David Byrne-postmodern. And then it went on for a minute and it had its own texture. And then the lights came up and the phones turned off and I told them what I was basing this on. And there was this reaction like everyone had been kicked in the gut. Then in Paris, at the Parisian Literary Festival, I did the same thing except I told people in advance why I am doing it and they did it and then the lights came up and everybody was in tears. There was this gasp of astonishment. Like how often do you hear the singing voice of the human soul? That's one of the few instances where visual stuff and written work have dovetailed so neatly.